Middle East Forum
April 14, 2008
Turkey's Turning Point Could there be an Islamic Revolution in Turkey?
by Michael Rubin National Review Online April 14, 2008
http://www.meforum.org/article/1882
Few U.S. policymakers have heard of Fethullah Gülen, perhaps Turkey's most
prominent theologian and political thinker. Self-exiled for more than a
decade, Gülen lives a reclusive life outside Philadelphia, Pa. Within
months, however, he may be as much a household a name in the United
States as is Ayatollah Khomeini, a man who was as obscure to most
Americans up until his triumphant return to Iran almost 30 years ago.
Many academics and journalist embrace Gülen and applaud his stated vision
welding Islam with tolerance and a pro-European outlook. Supporters
describe him as progressive. In 2003, the University of Texas honored him
as a "peaceful hero," alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi,
and the Dalai Lama. Last October, the British House of Lords and several
British diplomats celebrated Gülen at a high-profile London conference.
Later this year, Georgetown University scholar John Esposito will host a
conference dedicated to the movement. As in 2001, Esposito will cosponsor
with the Rumi Forum, an organization Gülen serves as honorary president.
The Gülen movement controls charities, real estate, companies, and more
than a thousand schools internationally. According to some estimates, the
Gülen Movement controls several billion dollars. The movement claims its
own universities, unions, lobbies, student groups, radio and television
stations, and the Zaman newspaper. Turkish officials concede that Gülen's
followers in Turkey number more than a million; Gülen's backers claim that
number is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, Gülen members dominate the
Turkish police and divisions within the interior ministry. Under the
stewardship of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, one of Gülen's
most prominent sympathizers, tens of thousands of other Gülen supporters
have entered the Turkish bureaucracy.
While Gülen supporters jealously guard his image in the West, he remains a
controversial figure in Turkey. According to Cumhuriyet, a left-of-center
establishment daily — Turkey's New York Times — in 1973, the Izmir State
Security Court convicted Gülen of "attempting to destroy the state system
and to establish a state system based on religion;" he received a pardon,
though, and so never served time in prison. In 1986, the Turkish military
— the constitutional guardians of the state's secularism — purged a Gülen
cell from the military academy; the Turkish military has subsequently
acted against a number of other alleged Gülen cells who they say
infiltrated military ranks.
In 1998, according to Turkish court transcripts cited in the Turkish Daily
News, Gülen urged followers in the judiciary and state bureaucracy to
"work patiently to take control of the state." The following year, the
independent Turkish television station ATV broadcast a secretly taped
Gülen telling supporters, "If they . . . come out early, the world will
squash their heads. They will make Muslims relive events in Algeria," a
reference to the Islamic Salvation Front's overwhelming 1991 election
victory in the North African state. After party leaders spoke of voiding
the constitution and implementing Islamic law, the Algerian military
staged a coup leading to a civil conflict that killed tens of thousands.
Because of his statements and veiled threats, the judiciary in 1998
charged Gülen with trying to "undermine the secular system" while
"camouflag[ing] his methods with a democratic and moderate image."
Convicted in absentia, but free to run his organized from his U.S. exile,
Gülen continues a rather inconsistent approach to tolerance and
secularism. He often equates the separation of religion and state with
atheism, an assertion many of Turkey's most secular officials find
offensive: Believing that religion is best kept to the individual rather
than state sphere does not equate with any lack of belief in God. In
2004, Gülen equated atheism with terrorism and said both atheists and
murderers would spend eternity in Hell.
Gülen has received a legal break, however. In 2002, Erdoğan's Justice
and Development party (Adalet ve Kakınma Partisi, AKP) won a
plurality in parliamentary elections and, because of a fluke in Turkish
election law, was able to amplify one-third of the popular vote into a
two-thirds parliamentary majority. Erdoğan used this advantage to
enact reforms which had the net affect of stacking not only the civil
service, but also banking boards and the judiciary with his political
supporters and religious fundamentalists. Erdoğan's judges wasted no
time. They placed liens against political opponents' property, seized
independent newspapers and television stations including, not by
coincidence ATV, and assigned sympathetic judges to hear appeals against
earlier decisions levied against Islamists. On May 5, 2006, the Ankara
Criminal Court overturned the verdict against Gülen. While a public
prosecutor — a secularist hold-out — appealed the court's action, the
pro!
cess is now nearing conclusion. Gülen's supporters are ecstatic. His
slate wiped clean, Gülen has indicated he may soon return to Turkey.
If he does, Istanbul 2008 may very well look like Tehran 1979. Just as
Gülen's supporters affirm his altruistic intentions and see no
inconsistency between a secretive, cell-based movement and transparent
governance, too many Western journalists also give Gülen a free pass.
If this sounds familiar, it should: Three decades ago, the same phenomenon
marked coverage of Iran. "I don't want to be the leader of the Islamic
Republic; I don't want to have the government or power in my hands,"
Khomeini told a credulous Austrian television reporter during the
ayatollah's brief sojourn in Paris. In November 1978, Steven Erlanger,
the future New York Times foreign correspondent, penned a New Republic
essay arguing that Khomeini's vision for Iran was essentially a "Platonic
Republic with a grand ayatollah as a philosopher-king," and predicting the
triumph of an independent liberal left worried more about labor conditions
in Iran's oil fields than pursuing any theological tendency.
In Tehran then as in Ankara now, U.S. ambassadors preferred garden parties
with the political elite and maintained contacts with only a narrow
segment of the population. They were blind. As the State Department and
Central Intelligence Agency remained clueless or belittled concerns about
Khomeini's intentions, millions of Iranians turned out to greet their Imam
at Tehran's international airport. Turks now say that similar crowds might
greet Gülen when his plane touches down in Istanbul.
Gülen is careful. He will not order the dissolution of the Turkish
Republic. But, ensconced in his Istanbul mansion, he could simply begin
to issue fatwas prying Turkey farther from the secularism to which
Erdoğan pays lip service. As Khomeini consciously drew parallels
between himself and Twelver Shiism's Hidden Imam, Gülen will remain quiet
as his supporters paint his return as evidence that the caliphate formally
dissolved by Atatürk in 1924 has been restored.
The secular order and constitutionalism in Turkey have never been so
shaky. The government now controls most television and radio stations.
Erdoğan has gained the dubious distinction of launching more
lawsuits against journalists and commentators than any previous Turkish
prime minister.
As Erdoğan discourages dissent, his and Gülen's supporters among
prominent Turkish columnists and commentators equate Islamism with
democracy, and secularism with fascism, a line too many Western diplomats
eager to demonstrate tolerance with an embrace of "moderate Islam" accept.
Erdoğan himself has argued that it was secularism which led to
Hitler; that Islamism would never produce such a result.
Last month, after one of the few independent judicial authorities filed a
lawsuit against Erdoğan and the AKP for violating constitutional
provisions separating religion from politics, the prime minister
responded with a midnight round-up of leading academics and journalists
who had criticized him. Even Erdoğan's supporters were shocked to
wake up on March 21 to learn that İlhan Selçuk, the bed-ridden
octogenarian editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet described by Turks as their
Walter Cronkite had been arrested in a pre-dawn raid on charges of
plotting to launch a military coup; the police have yet to provide any
evidence. Nor is Selçuk the only victim in the most recent intimidation
campaign. A Hürriyet columnist, Ahmet Hakan, has received threatening
phone calls from lawyer Kemaletin Gülen, a relative of Fethullah.
When Islamists pursue campaigns of hatred, Western officials not only
pretend nothing is amiss but also, as in the case of Palestinian leaders,
often increase their support. This week Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice will address the judicial case against Erdoğan and the AKP.
Members of her staff suggest she will lend subtle support to the prime
minister. Indeed, it may be tempting to condemn the court action as a
political stunt: The prosecutor's legal brief is shoddily written and
poorly argued. Despite its faults, however, the underlying legal issues
are real.
Rice should be silent. Any interference will backfire: Turks, already
upset that U.S. ambassador Ross Wilson seldom meets with opposition
leaders, will interpret any criticism of the case as White House support
for the AKP. Secularists will ask why Turkey's liberal opposition should
not have the right to all legal remedies. They already ask why the West
applauds legal action taken against Austrian populist Jörg Haider and
French demagogue Jean Marie Le Pen, but the same U.S. and European
officials appear to bless Erdoğan's legal exceptionalism. By
undermining judicial recourse, Rice may accelerate violence and lead
support to those who argue — wrongly — that the government's disdain for
the law and constitution should be met with the same. On the off-chance,
however, that Rice accepts that the court case should run its course,
Turkey's religious conservatives will accuse her of masterminding the
approach.
Over the past seven years, the Bush administration has made many mistakes.
Bush was correct to recognize the importance of democratization; bungled
implementation has turned a noble ideal into a dirty word. By equating
democracy only with elections, the State Department and National Security
Council fumbled U.S. interests in Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon. One man, one
vote, once; parties that enforce discipline at the point of a gun; and
politicians who seek to subvert the rule of law to an imam's conception
of God do little for U.S. national security. Never again should the
United States abandon its ideological compatriots for the ephemeral
promises of parties that use religion to subvert democracy and seek mob
rather than constitutional rule.
Turkey is nearing the cliff. Please, Secretary Rice, do not push it over
the edge.
Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is
editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
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