Posted on 04/19/2009 12:26:26 AM PDT by forkinsocket
Over the past few months in Istanbul, the mahalles, or neighbourhoods, endured a ritual aesthetic assault of plastic flags. Every tree, lamppost and building was strung and flossed with ropes attached to the flags of political parties, dripping and flapping in the soppy late winter air.
It was local election time in Turkey. Most of the flags were red, the safe colour of Turkish nationalism; those of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) were blue, white and orange, and bore their nerdy light bulb insignia. As the flags proliferated, they criss-crossed the sky and blocked out the sun so that walking down the street felt like entering a giant car wash. In any case, it was an ugly sight, and more than once I heard Turks mutter that the flags were illegal. My neighbourhood looked like a country fair planned by drunks.
Even before the flags arrived, the neighbourhood was rehabilitated in preparation for the election: pavements and streets were suddenly improved after what might have been centuries of neglect. The broken cobblestones mutated into the smooth grey and pink-red stone of American office parks, making cab rides more pleasant and atmospheric tourism into the Old World less so. The bland public space outside of a mosque became a triple layer cake of new stone patios rimmed with flowers, where stray dogs now sniffed around, utterly confused. Streets long vulnerable to illegal parking and hazardous for pedestrians were neatly divided into precisely marked car and human zones, while cement stumps sprung from the concrete to prevent parking on the pavements.
Soon came the fleets of minivans blaring speeches and anthems and techno music. The AKP vans, which circled under my window at least once a day, were sleek and white and capped with massive speakers; a rival party gamely, and sadly, tried to compete by strapping some boom-boxes to the roof of an SUV and taping posters of its candidate to the windows. It was a neat reminder of the new realities of Turkish politics: the AKP has the money, and their rivals do not.
A week before the elections, an AKP van pulled over at the side of the road and blasted its music for well over an hour while another van circled around and around the neighbourhood like an ice cream truck. A crowd gathered and watched – with all the determination of bored people suddenly called upon to solve a maths problem – as the van shimmied its way into a tight parking space. Then, a very short man with generous hair and no moustache, who posed for his election posters with clasped hands in the posture of a beggar, jumped out of a car to the delight of an organised crowd that had lined up to greet him. They were holding carnations and magazines and wearing nice orange parkas. He later passed out flowers to the hipsters and actresses drinking tea outside a nearby cafe – who, bored and unlikely to vote for the religious party, threw them on the table and rolled their eyes.
The young and gentrified may not have supported the Islamic party, but when I asked the deli men, my landlord and the pide guy whether the AKP candidates were decent people, they all nodded gravely. Even in a deteriorating economy, some small shopowners still love the AKP – because the party has got things done in Istanbul, because they stabilised the country after decades of hapless coalition governments, because prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threw a valiant hissy fit at Davos and defended his country in the appropriately Turkish male way. According to one polling firm, Erdogan still enjoys sweeping popularity, even as the papers have taken to calling him “the Sultan”. Dr Özer Sencar, who directs the Metropoll Census Company, said that “an AKP without Erdogan is unthinkable”. Since the AKP has no viable opponents, that’s like saying a Turkey without Erdogan is unthinkable too.
On March 30, election day, the flags were taken down, outlawed for the day along with alcohol and firearms. Turks dutifully went to their neighbourhood schools and dropped slips of paper into wooden boxes to vote for a total of 90,000 positions: city and municipal mayors as well as neighbourhood muhtars – the guys who rule the tiny mahalles, several of whom died in election day turf brawls. The AKP won a plurality of all votes, which was no surprise, but their share of the vote declined dramatically, from 47 per cent two years ago to 39 per cent this time around – a slap in the face for the ruling party.
Voters, it would seem, wanted to send the AKP a message: we expected a lot from you, and you haven’t delivered on your promises. Though outside observers tend to view contemporary Turkish politics as a contest between religious and secular parties, the outcome of these elections had more to do with corruption and rising unemployment than with any kind of rejection of Islamic conservatism. After seven years in power, the AKP is a fixture in Turkish politics. Islamic conservatism has become normal as well. Even though the election results embarrassed Erdogan this year, it’s hard to imagine any of the other parties or leaders deposing the Sultan from his divan anytime soon.
******************************** In the West, telescopic conversations about Turkey usually boil down to one simple underlying anxiety: Is Turkey, the secular star of the Muslim world, becoming more religious? Are the Islamic capitalists of the AKP steering it away from Europe and toward the Middle East? Moments of tension in the Turkish-US alliance – the denial of basing rights for the Iraq war, Erdogan’s Davos donnybrook with Shimon Peres, Turkish coziness with Syria and Hamas – have led Turkey’s “western friends”, as Erdogan calls them, to nervous scrutiny of the shifting mores of Turkish society.
Secularists and outsiders used to fret over what it would mean if an Islamic party came to power. Would they ban alcohol, liberate the headscarf, reject their western allies? The place to gauge the transformation, however, is not in parliament but on the street – in the mahalle.
As in most nearly democratic societies, social transformation happens at the street level, and slowly. It’s not that national politics don’t matter – a giant win for the AKP could lead to the election of a conservative mayor in your neighbourhood, simply because his ties to the party will convince voters he has the access to get things done. In Turkey, and concerning questions of lifestyle, it’s important to fix attention at the local level rather than leaving everything at the feet of a prime minister who must answer to generals, EU officials and the United States. It’s not Erdogan, after all, but your mayor who might ban alcohol at your local municipality cafe.
And yet, after seven years of AKP domination, the question remains: what has the era of Islamic rule meant for everyday life in Turkey? Secularists have often harmed their own cause by trumpeting wildly exaggerated fears about the rise of sharia law – and yet anticipating real changes in Turkish society over almost a decade of AKP rule is hardly insane.
Pinpointing that evolution, however, is a task left to a media catering to an imagined ideological audience, and to a small elite class of liberal academics. The media, biased and slippery with the facts, typically sticks with the misleading conventional narrative that pits secular against religious forces. “Ninety-five per cent of what they say is rubbish,” said Ali Carkoglu, a political scientist at Sabanci University. Quite often, journalists will manipulate sociological studies and surveys for their own ideological ends.
The work of Turkish academics presents a more complicated picture, but it may be no less incomplete. According to Carkoglu, the first-ever study of piousness in Turkey was one he conducted examining data from 10 years ago. In 2006, Carkoglu, working with the political scientist Binnaz Toprak, found that headscarf-wearing had declined since 1999; the results made the two academics the darlings of the moderate Islamic media – who wielded the study to deflect secular accusations of creeping Islamicisation.
But that means that for all the speculation about religiousness in Turkey, according to Carkoglu, there are no comprehensive accounts or reliable data for the period before 1999; even records of mosque attendance are untrustworthy, because the figures were used in calculating funding from the religious ministry and imams may have inflated the numbers. If the divide between religion and secularism is the great fault line in Turkish society – and most of the world seems to see it that way – there is very little data with which to consider its historical evolution.
******************************** In the last decade – and especially since the AKP came to power – Turkish academics have made up for lost time with a flurry of studies on religious mores in the country; a select few have echoed in the mass media, which remains generally disinterested in the nuanced accounts of university researchers.
None, however, have landed with the explosive impact of Being Different in Turkey, a survey of the attitudes of secular Turks conducted by Binnaz Toprak that has sparked a firestorm of argument in nearly 1000 newspaper articles and television programmes since its release in December.
Toprak’s study essentially painted a picture of public life dominated by an assertive and oppressive piety that imposes considerable pressure on seculars to conform to religious mores. For the secular side, the study served as the long-awaited “proof” they were searching for, an unassailable confirmation of what they already believed: that Turkey was in the grips of religious hegemony, and secular people had no choice but to play along. The religious, on the other hand, saw faulty methods and unreliable data, cherry-picked to prove the point.
Toprak and her collaborators, three journalists, headed out to 12 cities in Anatolia – including Sivas, Erzurum and Kayseri – as well as two Istanbul neighbourhoods, and interviewed some 400 people. They specifically sought out leftist students, women, members of the secularist opposition Republican People’s Party, those who congregate at the Kemalist organisations like the Ataturkist Thought Association, or at Alevi centres like the Sultan Pir Abdal and Haci Bektas Veli Foundations. (Alevis, both Kurdish and Turkish and possibly accounting for as much as 20 per cent of the Turkish population, are a liberal Muslim sect close to Shiism; they have long been one of the most consistently oppressed and neglected communities in the country.)
Toprak solicited personal stories about the ways in which these people felt discriminated against for “being different” and compiled them into a 150-page document bursting with tales of pain and unease. When I visited a very busy Toprak in February at her office at Bahcesehir University, it was clear the last few months had been a whirlwind. But Toprak exuded confidence about her results; in fact, she seemed quite affected by the stories she’d heard. “What has changed is that definition of religiosity,” she said. “There’s more of it that’s displayed in public than there was before.”
Her study suggests that today flaunting piousness is the norm. “We are told some people, even though they don’t fast, appear as though they are fasting, or even though they don’t attend Friday prayers, they will nevertheless close their shutters and hide in the back of the store,” she explained. “Many people now who are in government service or in business will now make the haj. Many people give iftar dinners, for example, which have turned in recent years into a big show.”
The confusing question, as usual, was whether any of this was new. In the study, Toprak emphasised that much of it was not, and that these shifts should not be attributed solely to the rise of the AKP. Yet many of the stories in Being Different in Turkey did address a burgeoning concern about piety and politics: that being religious has become a prerequisite for economic prosperity in Turkey today.
“Because AKP is in government and possibly because people feel more relaxed or feel they now have the power, as well as because of the activities of the Fethullah Gülen community,” Toprak said, referring to the large Islamic social movement that pops up frequently in her report, “the great majority of civil servants, merchants and businessmen try to give the impression that they’re more religious to seem like we’re part of this governmental coalition. It helps them – in their business, in getting government contracts, getting promotions within the bureaucracy, getting jobs within the bureaucracy.”
Toprak’s findings also appeared to give credence to a controversial concept: mahalle baskisi, or “neighbourhood pressure”. The idea, first introduced in 2007 by Serif Mardin, one of the country’s most esteemed sociologists, is usually taken to describe a kind of collective coercion exerted by the religious to make people act, think and behave like themselves. In other words, Erdogan won’t force you to wear the headscarf, but your neighbours might shame you into feeling like you have to.
But Mardin had intended “neighbourhood pressure” to mean something considerably more subtle. A sociologist-historian who has, among many other projects, traced the origins of the Turkish republic and the evolution of Islamic ideas back into the Ottoman era, Mardin flits effortlessly between various ideas and thinkers, and speaks well over most people’s heads.
“Originally my quotation for this comes from a man who was against the Orientalist elements in mahalle life – people with loose trousers lounging in coffeehouses with their hubble bubble,” he said when I met him at his home in Istanbul. “This man was speaking of the mahalle as a place where the ‘backward’ tendencies were being institutionalised.” But Mardin’s “neighbourhood pressure” implied a force that defied accurate measurement. “It’s the state of mind,” he continued, “of the people who, without being aware of it, promote a kind of life that is according to them an ‘Islamic’ kind of life. It’s very difficult to seize because it’s very evanescent. There is something there that is both very cloudlike and at the same time real about it. And the only thing you can do is speculate.”
********************************
When the issue is reduced to a contest between Erdogan and Turkey’s secularist elite, liberals and westerners alike have taken the side of the AKP, wary of the militant nationalism and anti-democratic attitudes of the Kemalist opposition. It has become customary, in fact, to dismiss most secularist Turks as hysterical – or worse, bigoted. In comparison, even to outsiders wary of Islamic conservative political parties, Erdogan and the AKP appear to be the sort of mild, moderate “good Muslims” that make westerners feel better about the possibility of peace in the world.
In 2007, when the pious former AKP prime minister Abdullah Gul was poised to become president, secularists across the country erupted in well-photographed protests: in the streets of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, a blaze of red flags were flaunted in the name of women’s rights and Ataturk. Then the army stepped in, and released a warning on its website – the so-called e-coup – in an attempt to intimidate the AKP. In response to this undemocratic salvo, many Turks, perhaps more wary of juntas than headscarves, helped the AKP take a whopping 47 per cent of the vote in that election.
The pendulum swung similarly in 2008, when the state judiciary came close to ousting the AKP for anti-secular activities. Support for the party had wavered since the elections a year earlier, thanks to a series of mistakes and glaring rumours of corruption – but once the judiciary opened its closure case, Turks again backed the AKP.
Turkey has bounced back and forth between these two forces – wariness about the AKP (over issues like the headscarf on university campuses) and distaste for the efforts of militant secularists and the army to undermine a democratically-elected government. The rest of the world, ostensibly in support of democracy, has cast its lot with the AKP, convinced that Erdogan and his allies will successfully bring Turkey into the EU.
Toprak’s study ventured into a zone beyond the politics of the AKP and the evanescent cloud of neighbourhood pressure to consider a more controversial matter: the rising influence of the Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen and his community of followers. Many of those who Toprak surveyed singled out the Gülen community as a particular source of pressure, which possessed significant power in their communities and utilised various coercive means to encourage contributions to, and membership in, their movement.
“Merchants told us that if you don’t have Zaman newspaper, which belongs to the Gülen community, in the store, if you’re not attending the gatherings they have for businessmen in homes to discuss Islamic stuff and then later collect money for the movement, you are immediately branded and start losing contracts and people won’t give you work and so on,” Toprak said. “One man who used to take care of the finances of various companies was invited to one of these meetings. At the end he was asked to donate money to send somebody to a Gülen school. He said ‘yes I will but I want to know who this young man is I am helping out.’ Their policy is that they keep this secret, and he said in that case I cannot donate the money. The next day all of these firms came and got their financial portfolios from him. So he was left jobless. We heard many stories like this. Boycotting.”
Many secular Turks are certain they will never comprehend the full reach and depth of the Gülen phenomenon – precisely because they are convinced that its mysteriousness is the key to its genius. If they claimed to understand it, therefore, they would have to admit it lacks a sinister aspect beyond their grasp.
But to not understand it is to not understand Turkey. After living in Turkey for a while, it really does start to feel like everything is “Gülen” – media, business, intellectuals, schools. They are not explicitly connected to the AKP, but their newspapers and media outlets support the party, and invariably they do business with the government. The independent network, which is loosely defined and whose adherents vary widely in the intensity of their involvement, stretches from Kazakhstan to the Central African Republic (where kids learn Turkish).
Recently, the movement has turned its focus to eastern Turkey’s own Kurdish population, as well to Northern Iraq, where it is building schools and religious dormitories for often poor and disadvantaged kids. The Economist called them “one of the most powerful and best-connected of the networks that are competing to influence Muslims round the globe.” When two magazines, Foreign Policy and Prospect, held an internet poll to determine the world’s “Top Public Intellectual”, Gülen swept to first place, supposedly with 10 times the votes of the runner-up – demonstrating the movement’s extraordinary mobilisation capabilities.
This tidal wave dates back to the 1970s, when Gülen began preaching a vision of Islam based on the teachings of Sufi brotherhood leader, Said Nursi. Gülen is a proponent of both business and science and sought to educate and advance students through special schools and dormitories so they would then, in turn, grow up to donate time and money to the movement. Gülen first held meetings privately, so as not to incur the wrath of the staunchly secular Turkish state, and then distributed tapes of his teachings. In 1998, Gülen moved to the United States to obtain medical care, but remained in exile after a secular prosecutor accused him in 2000 of inciting his followers to overthrow the Turkish state.
Slowly, quite amazingly, the movement grew, with no central organisation or direction. Berna Turam, author of a wonderful book on Gülen, Between Islam and the State, said with caution that it would be “impossible” to get a clear read on the movement at this point just based on a few cities. “The movement is huge now,” she said by phone from her home in Massachusetts, where she teaches at Hampshire College. “It’s an international movement.”
But she doesn’t necessarily see the movement’s efforts as neighbourhood pressure. “What I would highlight here is that there is no obligation to enter this movement or exit,” she said. “It’s freedom of entrance and exit. If you want to live like that you have to have the individual choice. I met so many people who left the community because they needed more space, or because of gender politics.”
The anger of the secular crowd against the Gülen movement would suggest that they believe it to be dangerous in some way. Yet the promise of the Gülen community is the exact opposite; the principles of the movement are fundamentally nationalist, devoted to Turkish ideals as much as Islamic ones. It has evolved to exist peacefully with the state. To Serim Mardin, the Gülen movement appears to offer a kind of balm for a convulsive society. “One of the clues is that Turkey has been a very violent society in the last 50 or 60 years,” Mardin said, “but the ideal of Islam is non-violence. Fethullah Gülen is someone who in a way heals what has happened or promises to heal what has happened in Turkey in relation to violence in everyday life.”
“Gülen hates conflict,” Turam said. “I kept looking for resistance in the movement – there is no resistance! They transformed social reality without resisting. These people will not take issue with Kemalism in Turkey. To the extent that they’re non-confrontational, they are more and more powerful.”
With the Gülen movement, despite whatever might alarm their neighbours, there’s nothing really to fight against. It appeals and it spreads. The traditional push-pull between secularism and religion in Turkey does not function here, and what seems to unnerve some Turks so terribly – what Toprak heard from them during her study – was the apprehension of their own powerlessness. For secularists and leftists, the threat from a movement like Gülen’s is precisely that it is not threatening.
But what is everyone afraid of? This is the question that is rarely asked, and perhaps the secularists themselves don’t know the answer. This may be because no one in Turkey to date has managed to address the concept of individual freedom – a problem that suggests the limitations of Turkish nationalism more than those of Islam. The secularists, who strained for so many years to marginalise religious forces, may not be able to pinpoint what terrifies them because they are guilty of the very same sins: they don’t scorn the religious because they constitute a separate community, they scorn them because they belong to the wrong community.
Neither the AKP nor Gülen are going to disappear – so secular Turks may simply have to seek their own means of accommodation with the rising piety that surrounds them. “There are many other powerful community networks in the world like this,” Berna Turam told me. “These are social dynamics – so I say let’s come to terms with it. The secular crowd will have to find ways to negotiate with them.” Or, she added, to create new neighbourhood networks of their own.
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