Turkey’s ‘Secularism’ — Time to Shed the Myth
It is tempting to draw parallels between Ankara 2016 and Sarajevo 1914. On June 28, 1914, a half-sick (with tuberculosis) Gavrilo Princip, barely 24, a member of the Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) shot and assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie Chotek of Austria, setting off a chain of events that culminated in the conflagration we today know as World War I. Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov, an old-school diplomat, was shot at point blank a Turkish assassin Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş in a black suit and tie, an off-duty Turkish police officer in a suit and tie. The assassin, who according to some reports had even served on Turkish President Erdoğan’s security detail last year, calmly shot Karlov in the back several times; shouted “Allahu Akbar” in both Turkish and broken Arabic, a shout for revenge “for Aleppo” in Turkish, with his hand in the air, one finger pointed upward (a jihadi sign, symbolising ‘takbir’, the greatness and oneness of Allah); and then in accented Arabic, spoke a few sentences associated with Jabhat al-Nusra. (The shooting was captured on camera an Associated Press photographer.) Altıntaş, who was gunned down security forces who stormed the building, was a 22-year-old police academy graduate. He was suspended from the Turkish National Police (TNP) over suspected links to the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETO) after the failed July 15 putsch against Erdogan, but returned to duty in November.
Eerie narratives about Karlov’s assassination becoming an encore of the slaying of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand notwithstanding, the gruesome incident is not about to set off even a Turkish-Russian shooting war, much less World War II. Russia and Turkey, if anything, have been moving closer than any other time earlier in their history. Vladimir Putin is the target of unrelenting Western hostility for his assertiveness in Europe and West Asia, particularly, Syria, where Russian military intervention has delivered a military victory to beleaguered Syrian president Bashir Assad in Aleppo, enabling him to crush ISIS rebels. Turkey under its revanchist leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan looks to be veering away from Europe and seeking an increasingly medieval identity even as it grapples with the trappings of modernity. Andrey Karlov’s unfortunate killing will likely be sacrificed at the altar of the still-emerging Eurasian bonhomie and realpolitik.
The Gülen movement is an Islamic transnational religious and social movement led Turkish preacher Fethullah Gülen (living in the US since 1999), which plagues Turkey. Gulenist infiltration into the Turkish National Police is a reality. We are likely to see a more renewed Erdogan crackdown on the Gulen network, though there is no conclusive evidence as of now to link the assassin Altıntaş to either the Gulenists or the ISIS. These are details, though; what ought to engage our attention is the steady descent of Turkey into medievalism, a truth not acknowledged most commentators on the issue.
Bilaterally, Moscow and Ankara are now together working closely on counter-terrorism. Bilateral trade between the two is on the rise, including the creation of a joint investment fund. This is despite the downing of a Russian Sukhoi-24 a Turkish Air Force F-16 on November 24, 2015 near the Syria-Turkey border. The newfound Levant arc now comprises Russia, Turkey and Iran, currently engaged in trying to shape a post- Aleppo Syrian future, to the consternation of the West. Turkey’s willingness to cut out NATO — of which it is an important member — from this decision making is striking. So too, is Erdogan’s realpolitik. Ankara slowly but surely is going the Eurasianist way. Its long cherished dream to be part of the EU looks virtually over. Eventually, a sundering of ties with NATO could also be a matter of time, especially as the New Silk Roads, i.e., the China-driven One Belt, One Road (OBOR); the Russia-driven Eurasia Economic Union (EEU); the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Russia-China strategic partnership beckon. Turkey views itself as a key hub in Eurasian integration.
While that is so, Turkey itself is increasingly being drawn into uncertainty. Turkey today is already a highly polarized country. Erdoğan, in order to secure loyalty to himself has happily fanned Islamist sentiment and neo-Ottoman fantasies in both his police and armed forces. These sentiments have now cross-fertilized with the particular hatreds of the Syrian Civil War, and Erdoğan seems to be no longer in control of them.
Already spoken of as the most powerful person in Turkey in almost a century, rivaled only Ataturk — the secular founder of the republic — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is on a relentless drive to become all-powerful. First coming to power as prime minister in 2003, and in 2014, Erdogan has won elections to become president. After being at the helm of his country’s affairs for almost 14 years, the Turkish president now seeks to amend the Turkish constitution. The intent is to become the head of state, head of government and head of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). If he succeeds, Erdogan would have amassed as much power as Ataturk once held.
That is just about the similarity. Kemal Ataturk liberated Turkey at the end of World War I and then established a republic after consigning the nearly 800 year old Ottoman Empire to history, ran Turkey with an iron grip between 1923 and 1938. A Jacobin politician, Ataturk shaped Turkey in his image as a secular Western society. But for all his modernism, Ataturk did not do away with religion, creating instead a secularist organism that controlled religion and regulated Turkish social life. Ataturk’s secular Turkey did of course; marginalize those citizens who defined their identity first and foremost through religion.
The state that Ataturk bequeathed to his successors was known and accepted as a secular one. For decades, it was conventional wisdom to tout Turkey as the shining example of how a preponderantly Islamic nation could also be a liberal and secular one. It is often argued in some circles that Ataturk’s authoritarian secularism was a response to the loss of Ottoman greatness after Turkey’s defeat in World War I, but this is at best a fealty to conjured up political correctness. Ataturk himself was unambiguous when he declared in his Kastamonu speech on August 30, 1925: “In the face of knowledge, science, and of the whole extent of radiant civilization, I cannot accept the presence in Turkey’s civilized community of people primitive enough to seek material and spiritual benefits in the guidance of sheiks. The Turkish republic cannot be a country of sheiks, dervishes, and disciples. The best, the truest order is the order of civilization. To be a man it is enough to carry out the requirements of civilization. The leaders of dervish orders will understand the truth of my words, and will themselves close down their lodges and admit that their disciplines have grown up”. Ataturk was equally unrelenting in his abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. It is perhaps time to recognize Kemal Ataturk for what he really was — a pre-Islamic Anatolian Turk, who wanted to pull Turkey out of medieval obscurantism and plant it firmly on the path of modernity.
Be that as it may, Atturk’s Turkey needed the heavy hand of the military to hunker down on the country’s polity to keep a state-enforced secularism in harness and any lingering Islamist elements firmly in place. After Ataturk’s passing, Turkey has been governed for the better part political parties in a barely disguised authoritarian manner. The country’s military has toopled four elected governments in the course of four decades. While Ataturk might have set his country on the path of modernization, Turkey has been no haven for democracy or freedom of thought.
Turkey’s claim to being a secular state, made its government and unquestioningly seconded all mainstream Western media is at best a dubious one. In civilized, and truly democratic countries, secularism entails not only a clear separation between religion and state, but also freedom of religion. It is not difficult to demonstrate that Turkey has long been the antithesis of secularism.
The Turkish regime supports and funds Islam – specifically Sunni Islam – inside the country. Turkey simultaneously represses religions such as Alevism, and bullies and persecutes indigenous Christians, most of whom it liquidated in 20th century genocides. Moreover, it uses Islam to project Turkish political power into Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Turkey’s system is more properly termed State Islam. Under its current president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey increasingly demonstrates Ottomanesque tendencies, whether in its policies at home or behavior abroad. Its secularism myth, needs to be laid bare.
State Islam
Turkey has a Directorate of Religious Affairs – known as the Diyanet – a government body representing and directing all of Sunni Islam in Turkey. The Diyanet was created in 1924, a year after the Republic of Turkey was formed, and is enshrined in Article 136 of the Turkish Constitution. The Diyanet is huge and powerful. Operating under the Prime Minister, it employs about 100,000. All Sunni clergy are salaried civil servants of the Diyanet. It has an annual outlay of @2 billion, a sum that exceeds the combined budgets of Turkey’s Foreign, Energy, and Environmental Ministries. By law, a political party can be dissolved if it dares to advocate the Diyanet’s abolition. Would India be termed secular if funded a Hindu government body that employed Hindu priests and paid their salaries? Perish the thought. On the other hand, blatant anti-Hindu ‘secular’ regimes like Mulayam Yadav’s Samajwadi Party of Uttar Pradesh and Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress blatantly use taxpayers’ (mostly Hindu) money to fund their Islamic votebanks.
It is also not clear to most observers who owns Turkey’s 80,000 mosques. However, the Diyanet does control all of them. Two large mosques to be built on Istanbul’s Camcila Hill and Taksim Square are personal projects of President Erdogan. The bill is being footed the Turkish state. The Diyanet’s operations are not limited only to Turkey but extend worldwide. It also has a role in Turkish foreign policy.
Persecution of other religions is a fact of life in ‘secular’ Turkey, something its apologists in democratic and secular countries are loath to admit. Turkey ranks alongside China, Pakistan, and a dozen others in repressing minorities. It is known to significantly restrict the religious freedom of non-Muslim religious minority communities – including the Greek, Armenian, and Syriac Orthodox Churches, the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches, and the Jewish community. These restrictions deny non-Muslim communities the rights to train clergy, offer religious education, and own and maintain places of worship. The Turkish genocide of Armenians, Greeks and Syriacs from 1915 to 1923, particularly the ghastly Armenian genocide is a particularly under-reported tale.
The founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 brought no relief to non-Muslims. The infamous Capital Tax (Varlik Vergisi) programme during WW II deliberately taxed Christians and Jews at extortionate rates that often exceeded their income. Men were sent to labour camps in the interior when unable to pay. Families were bankrupted. Only an international outcry stopped the programme.
The current incumbent Erdogan has dismantled Ataturk’s secularism in just over a decade and has done so with little mercy for his opponents. He has flooded the country’s political and education systems with rigidly conservative Islam. Following changes to Turkey’s secular education system, a growing number of pupils have been forced to study in publicly funded Islamic high schools. Students’ placements in Islamic schools are no longer choice, but rather state mandate.
There is little doubt that Erdogan wants to transform Turkey, but as a deeply Muslim society. Turkey discriminates against citizens who do not affix their identity to the conservative Sunni Islam that Erdogan practices. The president of Turkey has intimidated the media and the business community through politically motivated tax audits and jailing dissidents, scholars and journalists. His police regularly crack down on peaceful opposition rallies. The ‘failed’ 15th July 2016 coup was in fact a successful one disguised as a botched attempt some zealots to overthrow Erdogan. In reality, it was a brilliant tactic to tighten his grip on the levers of power. In foreign policy, Turkey under Erdogan is not shy of baring its desire for a return to Ottomaesque glory. Its treatment of Kurds, Yazidis and other ethnic nationalities only underscore its yearning for the resuscitation of the long gone Islamic hegemony.
Turkey may look like a secular state on paper, but is actually a Sunni Islamic state. It is time to shed the myth of Turkish secularism.
Jaganniwas Iyer
A dreamer who understands the power of words and tries best to produce content with utmost responsibility and conviction, so that it serves its every purpose for everyone.
