Although Washington and its western allies made frantic bids in ousting Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from power during the just-concluded election, Erdoğan supporters foiled such plots and gave a strong victory to him because of Erdoğan’s strong-man appeal to Islamic piety. Erdoğan’s key rival Kemal Kilicdargoglu with his promise of modern social democracy, which is endorsed by the United States and other western nations won only 44.9 percent of the vote in the first round, so stood little chance of overtaking Erdogan with 49.5 percent.
According to analysts, two highly charged mindsets define Turkey’s national identity. Kemal Atatürk, a revolutionary nationalist who, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War, founded the modern Turkish secular state in 1923. He was influenced by French laicite, an ideological commitment to keep religion out of the public domain, and achieve its complete separation from the state. For many, this is expressed as a passionate rejection of Islam in favor of Turkey’s 1928 secular constitution, traditionally supported by the military. For others there is a no less passionate religious commitment but to a moderate, pious Islamic conservatism.
The US Brookings Institution wrote glowingly in 2002 that the AKP, Erdogan’s Justice & Development Party which had just swept to power, “heralds democracy”. It seemed like a “new model” for the Islamic world. A year later, Erdogan became Prime Minister. His development of a modern transport system, political flair and skillful negotiation of deep nationalist tensions, while maintaining his espousal of Islamic values in the AKP, have enabled him to increase his power ever since.
Erdogan’s religious appeal owed much to the phenomenal success of the Fethullah Gülen Islamic revival movement that provided him with the cultural and religious credentials of Turkish Islamic piety and helped to attract pious voters. Inspired by Fetullah Gülen, a scholar and preacher, the movement prioritized modern education, understanding of science and a commitment to interfaith dialogue as well as traditional Islamic practice.
During the 1980s, starting with popular dershane, crammer schools, the Gülenists – calling themselves Hizmet, meaning service – gained ground in the medium-sized towns of Anatolia. Those with money, the “Anatolian tigers”, invested in media and business, forming the Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists. Nationwide, Gülenist-led universities and schools became a ladder into the civil service, judiciary, police and army. With a flat structure and a reputation for being secretive, Hizmet was accused both of “infiltration” of the state structures and of becoming too close to Erdogan, collaborating in his dismissals of secular opponents of the AKP.
At trials, beginning in 2008, Gülenist prosecutors brought charges, some falsified, against some 275 key secularists, high ranking military, government critics and opposition politicians. By 1999, Fethullah Gülen had withdrawn from the fray to a ranch in Pennsylvania after a new Turkish government which aimed to restore the constitution’s secular principles put him in danger of arrest for “anti-secular activity”.
