Turkish nationalism wins in Turkey
LIKE MOST EUROPEAN and American pollsters and pundits, I was surprised by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory in both the first and second round of the Turkish presidential election. In fact in my last blog entry (“Erdogan: Secular Muslim icon”), I said Erdogan could be walking into the sunset of his political career in this election.
I hadn’t visited Turkey for years and was relying on the forecasts of Western pundits, who were saying that Turkey’s high inflation rates (45%-85%), skyrocketing prices of essential goods, and the Erdogan regime’s slow response to the disastrous Feb. 6 earthquake would inevitably hand the election to the staunchly secularist opposition candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu.
Since Erdogan was reelected president on Sunday, I’ve gone through explanations of his victory by various scholars and commentators. None seemed to spotlight the event as poignantly as a comment made by a taxi driver in Istanbul a quarter-century ago.
On a muggy August afternoon in 1999 I hailed a taxi near my apartment on Istanbul’s Aydede Caddesi, a bloc from the city’s historic Taksim Square.
“Boazici University,” I instructed the cabbie.
I had a 3:30 p.m. interview Professor Binnaz Toprak, a famed political scientist at the university. I was researching the outlook for Turkey’s accession to the European Union and, at that point, trying to learn how the country’s steaming Islamic resurgence might be affecting the issue.
Kerem was in his late 30s, from near the Anatolian city of Eskisehir, and had been a cabbie in Istanbul for six years. He communicated with me with a mixture of Turkish and English words and physical gestures.
What did he think of Mesut Yilmaz? I asked. Ultra-secularist Yilmaz was Turkiye’s prime minister.
“Hirsiz,” he said. The Turkish word meant thief.
“Is Tansu Ciller good?” I inquired. Ciller had preceded Yilmaz as prime minister.
“Not good,” he replied in English. “Not good.” He waved his right hand dismissively.
“Is Tayyip Erdogan any good?” I asked.
Erdogan had been known at that time as a gung-ho Islamist. (He would proclaim himself a “secular Muslim” later.) Just three weeks before, the second-ranking leader of Turkiye’s Islamist Virtue Party had come out of prison, having served a four-month term to which he had been sentenced by an ultra-secularist court. His crime: He had recited a provocative Islamic poem at a public meeting. Erdogan had also been fired from the post of mayor of Istanbul for the same offense. All this had made the former Istanbul mayor a rock star among, not just Islamists, but most everyday Muslim Turks who resented the radically secular system that banned Islamic symbols in the public sphere and discriminated against practicing Muslims.
“Good!” the cabbie replied enthusiastically. “Tayyip Erdogan good.”
“Erdogan, basbakan!” the man continued. Basbakan means prime minister. He obviously meant that he wanted to see Erdogan as prime minister of Turkiye.
“Erdogan!” he repeated excitedly, took both his hands off the wheel and began kissing his fingers.
The car swerved to the right, and then to the left.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Steady the car now and drive carefully.”
I wanted to get to the university alive and didn’t say another word until we arrived at the Boazici University parking area. Before getting off, I asked Kerem why he was so excited (heyecanlı) about Erdogan.
“Toorkish,” he said, with soft “t”. “No Avrupali,” meaning European.
I had some half an hour to the interview and was thinking of what the man was trying say about Erdogan as I strolled the bank of the adjacent Bosphorus Strait, which splits off the European part of Istanbul from its Asian segment and links the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean and eventually to the Atlantic Ocean via the Gibraltar. I got distracted from my thoughts about Kerem and Erdogan as I reminisced my previous visit to the iconic landscape, about which Henry Adams wrote, “The Judas tree will bloom for you on the Bosphorus if you get there in time.” I didn’t see any Judas tree greeting me; but the ripples of the Bosphorus, sparkling in the sun, seemed to be welcoming me.
I had known Toprak from an earlier interview. The political science professor handed me a folder with several clips of her writings. I began the conversation by narrating my cab driver’s excitement about Erdogan. What was he trying to say about Erdogan being “Turkish” and not “Avrupali”? I asked.
She said the man had “summed up” why many Turks supported Erdogan and “the so-called Islamist movement” in Turkey. The driver obviously was “Islamic-minded” because he admired Erdogan, she said. Erdogan and most other Turkish Islamists represented “the Turkish brand” of Islam. Turkish Muslims, she explained, didn’t care much about Arabs and “many of them aren’t fond of Europeans,” even though the founder of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and his followers, known as “Kemalists,” were. Toprak added that by saying he liked Erdogan because he wasn’t “Avrupali,” Kerem was “telling you that he resented the secularist Turkish establishment’s Europhilia.”
On the evening of May 13 – the day before the first round of Turkish elections – Kemal Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan’s rival from Ataturk’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), concluded his campaign with a visit to the mausoleum of the anti-Islamic founder of the nation. Erdogan, on the other hand, marked the end of his campaign with a prayer at Hagia Sophia Mosque. Hagia Sophia used to be the world’s most majestic Christian cathedral until the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II conquered Istanbul (then called Constantinople) in 1453 and converted the cathedral into a mosque. In 1934 Ataturk turned it into a museum. In 2020 Erdogan reconverted the museum into a mosque.
If Kerem was listening to his president’s victory speech Sunday night, he must have been pleased to hear him say that his triumph over Kilicdaroglu was a victory of Turkey and “all Turkic people,” emphasizing further his Turkish cultural identity.
It actually was a victory for Turkish nationalism and culture, as different from other Muslim national cultures. It certainly marked a rejection of European culture, favored by Kilicdaroglu and other Kemalists – and Ataturk.
- Mustafa Malik, who hosts the blog After the Clash, researched Turkish-European relations as a journalism fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
