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Turkish Secularists Attempt a Judicial Coup

Ron Coody - 4/10/2008

Understanding the complexities of the current political clash in Turkey between secularists and the Islamic leaning AK party is very difficult due to the unique character of Turkishness that has evolved over several centuries since the Fatih Sultan Mehmet first breached the walls of Istanbul in 1453 (then Constantinople) and set up his headquarters in that powerful city which would eventually become the center of a sprawling empire encompassing the historically and strategically significant lands of the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeastern Europe. These lands continue to hold significant meaning on many levels as attested to by the fact that many of the international conflicts of the last twenty years have involved or occurred on these lands, such as the Kosovo conflict, the problem of a divided Cyprus, Israeli and Palestinian fighting, and unrest in Northern Iraq to name a few.

For his followers, modern Turkey ’s founder Ataturk represented the future. Ataturk had a daring, unbelievably audacious vision of doing just the opposite, transforming Anatolian Turks, with their one thousand year old association with Islamic religion and with it Arabic culture, into the image of the West. He changed the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to Latin. He pulled Europe’s sick man off its death bed, gave it a radical injection of his unique brand of democracy and resuscitated it so that now Turkey , with its 77 million, youthful population, proudly boasts of having the world’s 17th largest economy and has undertaken a serious bid to earn full membership in the European Union. Turkey’s secular elite, that is, the military generals, the judiciary, the academics, and certain members of the press and business, credit Turkey ’s success and movement toward full democracy completely and solely to Ataturk.

But then there are those folks that pre-date Ataturk. There is that five hundred year history of a different kind of government, a different way of developing, a different direction to face. This direction is not the West, it is the East. According to this way of drawing the lines, East meant Islam, West meant Christian. Islam meant Allah’s blessing, Christendom meant unbelief and divine judgment. For hundreds of years the West was simply considered the Dar Al-Harb, the World of War, a place that should be attacked, subdued, conquered, brought into “salim” that is, surrender to Islam.

Turks tend to be pragmatic, so the fact that Ataturk’s reforms and realignment with the West has lifted Turkey to a position of prominence enjoyed by no other Muslim-majority country has persuaded many people that maybe the Ottomans in fact didn’t have it altogether right in their distaste of anything from the “infidel” West. But somehow even the principle of pragmatism just doesn’t have quite the power to completely woo Turks away from the religious loyalties.

Nothing has brought this reality of virile Islam in Turkey into sharper focus than the cyclical resurgence of Islam in Turkey ’s political life. In the latest round, the secular military has made veiled threats of a coup and in the last weeks the secular Supreme Court has agreed to review a case requesting that Prime Minister Erdogan and dozens of other AK party leaders be prosecuted and for trying to undermine the secular order of the government with an agenda to establish an Islamic government in its place.

Appeals to human rights to allow real democratic debate find limited success in a Turkey where the philosophical and religious soil never brought such ideas to full maturity. Such ideas have roots in the worth of the individual, arguably a fruit of European and American conversations and debates that gradually brought together key values from both Greek and Roman thought and Judeo-Christian history. Unfortunately, freedoms of speech and thought seem a bit foreign to political movements of all persuasions in Turkey . In the current conflict they have become tools in the competition to overcome the other. For example, internally, when necessary, free speech is suppressed. But when submitting reports to EU and human rights observers, selected examples of free speech are recorded to garner favor. The question is whether anyone has a clear understanding of, much less a genuine commitment to the principles of a free society.

Marches and court cases so far have failed to oust the most popular Turkish government in memory. In response to the courts the AK party will attempt to rewrite the constitution making it legally impossible for the courts to ban a political party. If the AK party succeeds, they will further ingratiate themselves to their supporters and give more credence to the notion that the days of secularism are definitely over in Turkey . It will no longer be Ataturk’s experiment that Turkey is acting upon. It will be the walk of a realigned Turkey into a future that undoubtedly the AK party believes will be at least as bright as the best of the Ottoman era and probably better than ever, like their party’s symbol, a single clean, sunshiny light bulb.