Turkey's Loopy Liberal Set

The secularists in Turkey don't get it. They're trying to get rid of the conservative government (this time apparently, with a coup!) because Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his parliamentary majority tried to overturn a law barring women from wearing the hijab on campus.

The secularists see this as an affront to Turkey's constitutional mandate for separation of Church and State—and I get that they feel threatened by the conservatives—but Turkey's liberal set completely misunderstands the idea of separation of Church and State: It doesn't mean the state can prohibit individuals from following the rules of their religion. It means the state can't force people to follow the rules of someone else's religion (or any religion).

It's supposed to work like this: Public institutions like schools, banks, legislatures, the police, the army, and hospitals cannot endorse or promote a religion, nor discriminate based on religion. This means, for example, a public school cannot make women wear the hijab, but it also means it cannot stop a woman from wearing a hijab.

Take a current example of how Separation of Church and State works in the U.S. If my girlfriend needs Plan B, the state can't force her to go without Plan B because someone else's religious views frown on Plan B. They could, however, find a way to accommodate an Islamic pharmacist from personally filling the prescription by assuring another pharmacist is on duty who will fill the scrip.

The liberals in Turkey are being crazy.

The most important line in this morning's story about the securlarists' coup plot, though, is this: "Erdogan's party, formed in 2001 by politicians who once belonged to Turkey's Islamic movement, denies it has an Islamic agenda, noting that it has backed reforms to help Turkey start EU membership negotiations." (emphasis, mine.)

Economics is the bottom line. If Turkey joins the EU—and economic liberalism has always been a part of Erdogan's agenda—the secular class in Turkey has nothing to fear from the otherwise self-righteous Islamists.

The Republican People's Party (the liberal opposition) should focus on the ballot box instead of coups and convoluted court rulings. They should hone their message—bashing the conservatives as reactionaries and sexists all they want—and win an election.

Profile #2: Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan

Turkey's most powerful court ruled this week that female students cannot wear the hijab (the Islamic headscarf) on campus. The NYT reported yesterday:

The secular opposition Republican People’s Party, called the verdict a triumph of justice and said it showed that secularism and democracy were “constitutional principles that can’t be separated from one another.”

Mr. Erdogan calls the case a matter of individual rights, contending that all Turks should be able to attend universities no matter what they wear or believe.

All but lost in the debate have been the voices of the women whose futures are caught in the political cross hairs. Neslihan Akbulut, 26, a sociology graduate student, said she cried when she heard the verdict.

“There is no way for me in Turkey now,” she said.

I agree with Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamic conservative, on this one.

It seems to me that the secular Republican People's Party doesn't have a handle on secularism. Secularist governments shouldn't be in the paranoid business of banning religious expression, they should be in the business of protecting individual rights, including religious expression. Government's only role in regulating religion is to make sure that institutions charged with doing the people's business—legislatures, schools, the police, public hospitals, banks—don't endorse or promote a religion. Certainly, this involves preventing a school from making women wear the hijab, but that shouldn't be confused with stopping a woman from wearing a hijab.

Let's rewind.

On February 9, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's governing conservative party passed legislation, getting 441 yes votes in the 550-seat parliament, allowing female university students to wear the hijab. (Wearing the hijab had been banned in public buildings since 1980.)

"Tayyip, take your headscarf and stuff it," demonstrators chanted as an estimated 200,000 people gathered in a rally for "Secularism and Independence" to protest as parliament voted.

Erdogan addresses parliament

Yesterday, Turkey's highest court, The Constitutional Court, ruled that allowing women to wear the hijab on campus violated Turkey's secularist guidelines.

More from yesterday's NYT report:

Turkey’s highest court dealt a stinging slap to the governing party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday, ruling that a legal change allowing women attending universities to wear head scarves was unconstitutional.

Turkey's top court ruled today that Islamic head scarves violate secularism and cannot be allowed at universities. The Constitutional Court said in a brief statement that the change, proposed by Mr. Erdogan’s party and passed by Parliament in February, violated principles of secularism set in Turkey’s Constitution.

The ruling sets the stage for a showdown between Turkey’s secular elite — its military, judiciary and secular political party — and Mr. Erdogan, an observant Muslim with an Islamist past.

Prime Minister Erdogan, head of the Justice & Development Party (AKP) is in his second term. He was first elected in 2003 and again in 2007—the second time by an even wider margin.

He's definitely a social conservative. As mayor of Instanbul, he outlawed alcohol in cafes. And as PM he's fought to have Islamist justices appointed to Turkey's famously secularist courts. He can also be a firebrand. He was briefly jailed in 1998 after he emerged as the charismatic spokesperson for the outlawed religious conservative Welfare Party (the party he had represented as Mayor of Istanbul, which was declared unconstitutional by the state in 1997 for its apparent Islamic agenda.) Specifically, Erdogan was charged with "religious hatred" for invoking the Islamist poem, "Prayer of the Soldier" at a rally to protest the government's decision to ban his Welfare Party:

Mosques are our barracks,
domes our helmets,
minarets our bayonets,
believers our soldiers.
This holy army guards my religion.
Almighty our journey is our destiny,
the end is martyrdom.

The Welfare Party reinvented itself as the Justice and Development Party, AKP, and Erdogan was elected PM as the AKP's leader in 2003.

The Constitutional Court, a zealous enforcer of secularism, has a history of banning religious-leaning parties, and observers believe the Court is going to use the flap over the hijab to outlaw AKP and bar Erdogan from politics.

If the secularist arbiters in Turkey aren't careful, they're going to stir up a heated backlash.

Coming from a working class background, Erdogan, 54, (here's a BBC profile), emerged as a promising political figure in the 1970s when he joined the National Salvation Party (which was outlawed in 1980), a precursor party to the Welfare Party.

Recognizing Erdogan's political skill and charisma, National Salvation Party leader Nercmettin Erbakan—who himself would become Turkey's first Islamist prime minister in 1996 as the leader of the Welfare Party, promoted the young Erdogan, a former semi-pro football player who worked at Istanbul's transit authority. Erdogan became chairman of the Welfare Party in Istanbul in 1985.

Erdogan ran (and lost) for mayor in suburban Istanbul (the Beyoglu district) in 1985; ran repeatedly for parliament, finally winning in 1991—when, for the first time, the Welfare Party passed 10 percent threshold; and, tapped by Erbakan, was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994—a powerful and high-profile position that eventually turned him into the popular, dissident spokesman for the outlawed Welfare Party in the late 90s.

Erdogan softened his Islamist image to win election as prime minister in 2003, condemning the radical Turkish Islamist group, PKK, for example. (Although his opposition from the center-left Republican People's Party doesn't buy it).

Erdogan advocates a pro-Western economic platform (he's pushing to join the EU) and is admired—even by his secular foes—for his success running the economy.

In other news from Turkey this week: Turkey has joined forces with Iran to fight the Kurds in Northern Iraq. And as I posted (skeptically) earlier this week, religious scholars from secularist Turkey figure prominently in the news that the Islamic world has begun to reevaluate al Qaeda's orthodox ideology.

The Problem With a Turkish Revolution

Newsweek picked up on the hot Middle East storyline that's been in play all week ever since The New Yorker published Lawrence Wright 's article on Sayyid Imam al-Sharif's anti-al Qaeda hit.

Newsweek reports that this apparent revolution—this reevaluation of orthodox literalism, of 7th Century fetishism—is centered in Turkey:

Important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. As CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week, "Fundamentally, no one really liked Al Qaeda's vision of the future." At the same time, and potentially much more important over the long run, a new vision of Islam, neither bin Laden's nor that of the traditionalists who preceded him, is taking shape. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed immutable tenets of the faith, to challenge what had been taken as literal truths and to open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close centuries ago.


Intellectually and theologically, a lot of the most ambitious work is being done by a group of scholars based in Ankara, Turkey, who expect to publish new editions of the Hadith before the end of the year. They have collected all 170,000 known narrations of the Prophet's sayings. These are supposed to record Muhammad's words and deeds as a guide to daily life and a key to some of the mysteries of the Qur'an. But many of those anecdotes came out of a specific historical context, and those who told the stories or, much later, recorded them, were not always reliable. Sometimes they confused "universal values of Islam with geographical, cultural and religious values of their time and place," says Mehmet Gormez, a theology professor at the University of Ankara who's working on the project. "Every Hadith narration has ... a context. We want to give every narration a home again."

It's not surprising that this big push for reform is cooking in Turkey. Ever since Kamal Ataturk ended the Caliphate in 1924, Turkey has been a driving force for modernity in the Islamic world. ( I also hold Turkey responsible for rock and roll!)

However, there's a flip-side to this, that may jinx Turkey's current push for reform. Turkey is a suspect messenger among conservatives in the Muslim world. Ataturk's secular revolution in the 1920s forever branded Turkey as a bad guy.

Ataturk hismself sparked a reactionary-utopia backlash (starting with Hasan al-Bana and the Muslim Brotherhood) that ended up drowning the push for modernity (see: Sayyid Qutb, Zawahiri, veiled university students in cosmopolitan Cairo in the late 60s, the siege of Mecca, the Iranian revolution, the Sadat assassination, the GIA in Algeria, al-Qaeda), often in blood. This heavy right-wing backlash has defined the contemporary Middle East. Ataturk's reforms backfired on a massive scale.

Any new revolution coming from Turkey may fall flat. It's like the "Nixon in China" rule. It's better for conservatives to reform conservative ideology than it is for pushy Turkish liberals.