Erdogan: Secular Muslim icon

POLLS SHOW TURKISH President Recep Tayyip Erdogan behind the opposition presidential nominee, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan has alienated a lot of Turks through his crackdowns on descent and media outlets critical of him. The Turkish economy is reeling from double-digit inflation and the lira has been decimated by his fixation with low interest rates. The Biden administration has been consistently supporting the anti-Turkish Kurdish militia in Syria, who have aggravated Turkey’s security problems.

Well, poll numbers could be see-sawing before the May 14 the election; we can’t predict now whom the Turkish voters will finally pick as their next president. But in case – just in case – Erdogan’s 20-year rule as president and prime minister of Turkey is coming to an end, I’m wondering what legacy he would be leaving behind.

In Western political circles and media, Erdogan has been virulently reviled since he came to power, mainly because of his Islamic roots and muscular foreign policy, which occasionally clashes with those of America and the West. On the other hand, he has continually espoused and defended Muslim causes and issues around the world as no other Muslim leader has, and a Pew Research poll has found him to be the most admired statesman in the Muslim world.

Some philosophers and sociologists (Jurgen Habermas, Gregor McLennan, et al) would call him a “post-secularist,” one retaining a secular political system while allowing religious values and symbols to infiltrate the public space.  Others (e.g. Asef Bayat, Vali Nasr) would label him a “post-Islamist,” as he came from an Islamist political party but has left it and set up a secular one and has been working through secular institutions.

I prefer calling the Turkish president a “Muslim democrat,” the phrase Erdogan used to describe himself to me. It identifies him, I think, more authentically. It took me years, though, to come to realize its authenticity.

On the hot, muggy afternoon of Nov. 2, 1998, my Turkish friend and interpreter, Cemal Usak, barged in with me to the office of the then Istanbul mayor, Erdogan. Usak was his classmate and boyhood friend and had set up my interview with him. Usak was general secretary to the Journalists and Writers Association in Istanbul and had been helping me with my research project.

Erdogan was putting things into cardboard boxes in the middle of the room, but he got up and led us to a coach behind a tea table blazoning a multicolor bouquet in the middle. A few weeks before, the mayor had been fired from his job after his conviction for reciting a provocative Islamic poem at a public meeting. Turkey was under the ultra-secularist government of Prime Minister Ahmet Mesut Yilmaz. The Islamist mayor had been given a 10-month prison sentence for reading out the so-called “jihadist poem.” It read:

“The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the domes our helmets and the faithful our soldiers….”

I had been to Turkey for nearly two months and found an Islamic resurgence roiling the country. Erdogan’s prison sentence (which would later be reduced to four months) had made him a hero of sorts among Islamists and many everyday Turks.

Having seated us on the coach, our host scampered to an assistant and was instructing him about what to put into which boxes, etc. I noticed bouquets and clusters of flowers filling the whole corner of the room to my right. I asked an attendant why there were so many flowers in the room.

“People started bringing them in since the day he returned from the court,” he said. Usak explained that he meant since the day the court gave Erdogan the prison sentence.

Erdogan rushed back and sat next to me on the coach and asked how long I had been working at the Washington Times.

I realized that Usak had briefed him about me.

I said I had left the Washington Times to take up my current assignment.  “I am doing fieldwork in Western Europe and here about the prospects for Turkey’s membership of the European Union,” I added.

Erdogan’s eyes lit up, indicting his interest in the subject. He asked a couple of questions about my findings on the issue in European countries. I kept my answers brief and told him that I didn’t find “Europeans very interested in having you in the European Union.”

“You think so?” he said. “We would like to join the European Union, though.”

I was surprised to hear that.

“But your leader, Mr. Erbakan, has been opposed to Turkey’s EU membership and NATO membership,” I said.

Necmettin Erbakan, president of the Islamist Welfare Party to which Erdogan belonged, had been denouncing Turkish governments’ attempt to join the EU and Turkey’s membership of NATO, and when he was prime minister, he tried, unsuccessfully, to form an “Islamic NATO” with eight Muslim countries. Erbakan was the founder of the Islamist movement in Turkey. He had been overthrown as prime minister the year before under the pressure of army generals, the traditional guardians of Turkey’s aggressively secular system. The generals had judged him a threat to the country’s secular system.

Erdogan didn’t respond to my comment about Erbakan’s opposition to Turkey’s accession to the EU.

Religious freedom

After asking him a couple of other questions, I said, “If the Welfare Party came to power today, would you try to introduce the Shari’a in Turkey?”

“No, the Sharia is for individual Muslims to observe,” he replied, beckoning me to a glass of soft drink and a plate of biscuits placed on the tea table. “The state should be secular.”

I was stunned again. A radical Islamist wants a secular Turkish state!”

“Isn’t the secular state sending you to prison for reading an Islamic poem?” I said, having had a sip of the drink.

He explained that “the Kemalists’ version” of secularism suppressed people’s  religious freedom and persecuted women who wore Islamic head covering in public, but that under his version of secularism “the state will guarantee religious freedom.”

The officials and other supporters of the staunchly secular Turkish state, founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, are known as “Kemalists.”

“I’m a secular Muslim,” he added, “but I want religious freedom. For everybody.”

Now he’s a secular Muslim!

I was shocked.

The man who was going to prison for reciting a “jihadist poem” and has been known throughout Turkey as a diehard Islamist now says he’s a secular Muslim.  He must be lying through his teeth, I said to myself. I suspected that Usak had told him that I wrote in American newspapers and journals, and he just didn’t want Americans to think of him as an Islamist zealot.

On my way back I asked Usak what he made of Erdogan’s description of himself as a secular Muslim. My friend was a follower of Fethullah Gulen, a famous Turkish cleric who would be accused in 2016 of sponsoring a failed military coup against the Erdogan government.

“We are secular Muslims, too,” he said. Gulen and his followers were indeed secular. “You are,” I replied, “but the Welfare Party is an Islamist organization and your friend [Erdogan] is a leader of that party. An Islamist firebrand.”

I recalled my interviews with Abdullah Gul, then a member of the Turkish parliament (later president of Turkey) and Ahmet Davutoglu, a professor at Marmara University in Istanbul who was known as Erdogan’s mentor (later Turkish prime minister); both had ruled out introducing Islamic law in Turkey but neither of them had identified himself as secular. I hadn’t brought up the question, however.

I was getting ready to return to the United States and wished that I had the time to investigate why Erdogan had called himself as a “secular Muslim.”

The next day I dropped in at Istanbul’s Hurriyet newspaper office for a goodbye lunch with my friend Oktay Eksi, the paper’s chief columnist.

I told him about my interview with Erdogan and said, “Can you believe that Erdogan told me that he was a secular Muslim?”

Eksi used to be a politician belonging to the secularist Republican People’s Party.

“These Islamists are hypocrites,” he said, trying cut a piece of meat on his plate with his knife and fork. “But I heard that Erdogan, Abdullah Gul, Bulent Arinc and a few others are going to leave the Rafah [Welfare] Party.”

I stopped eating, anxious to hear more about it.

“Really?” I said. “Why?”

Eksi said he had learned from Welfare Party sources that “a number of younger party members” had decided that an Islamist party won’t have a future in Turkey, “especially after Erdogan’s jail sentence and the firing of Erbakan” as prime minister.

Those party members were “led by Erdogan and Gul to a meeting with Erbakan,”  he added, where they had “a fight with Rajai Kutan.” Kutan was an Erbakan’s closest associate.

I have since been following Turkish politics and have interviewed Erdogan twice more – in Turkey and Washington – and I understand that his and many other Turkish Islamists’ transition to the “secular” Justice and Development Party (AKP) was the result of serious soul searching. They have realized that an Islamist party won’t be tolerated by the Turkish army and Kemalist elites and would be ostracized by Europe and America.

During my visit to Turkey the following year Erbakan admitted to me the rift in his party. He said some of the dissidents had been “very dear to me, and they are pious Muslim brothers,” but that they thought they could serve Islam better from “outside politics.” They were “misguided” and needed “more courage” to pursue Islamist politics, Erbakan added.

Over the decades I have frequented Muslim countries in South and West Asia and Muslim communities in America and Europe.  I have seen an interesting trend among many Muslims almost everywhere. They pray and fast and are building mosques and madrasas. They agitate over the persecution of Muslims in India, Palestine and Myanmar. But they are leaving Islamist organizations.

In Bangladesh, where I live now, mosques and madrasahs are proliferating. And Friday congregations in some mosques extend to the yards. But the Bangladeshi Islamist party, the Jamaat-i-Islami, has all but become extinct.

The Bangladeshi population is more than 90 percent Muslim, but the Jamaat-i-Islami there has never received more than 6 percent of the vote. Pakistanis are 96 percent Muslim. There, too, the Jamaat never got more than 6 percent of the vote. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, the largest Islamist party, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), won 8 percent of the vote at the last election, and the second-largest, the United Development Party (PPP), got 4 percent.  In Morocco, the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) suffered the most devastating defeat at the 2021 elections, having lost 112 seats and winning only 13.  Yet in all these Muslim-majority countries, Islamic piety, values and symbols permeate social and cultural life.

To me, it all means that Muslims are modernizing fast and jettisoning Islamism because it doesn’t fit well with the public space where modernity reigns. Yet they continue to practice the Islamic faith and cherish Islamic values, which lend meaning to their lives.

The point I’m trying make is exemplified by Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s current prime minister.  I met him in Washington in the 1980s as a fire-breathing Islamist youth from Malaysia. He was the leader of Malaysia’s largest Islamic youth movement, known as ABIM (Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia) and a darling of the American Muslim leaders. Together with the Islamic scholar Ismail al-Faruqi, Anwar founded the Islamic think tank International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon, Virginia.

On his return to Malaysia, Anwar plunged into radical Islamic politics and was having a hard time making progress. Along the way, he served jail terms in sodomy and corruption cases, apparently trumped up by his political rivals. While he was going through these, he began espousing ethnic pluralism and religious tolerance. He was reaching out to the Chinese minority and other non-Muslim ethnic communities and gaining their support.  Last November Anwar became prime minister as the head of a progressive alliance, while the hardline Malaysia Islamic Party (PAS) led the opposition.

Democratic institutions

In one of his first press interviews as prime minister, Anwar told Reuters that he would work hard to “rid the country of corruption, racism and religious bigotry,” the last phrase was apparently aimed at the Islamist PAS.

I see Anwar following Erdogan’s political trajectory.  Once a radical Islamist, Erdogan has emerged as a leading secularist among Muslim rulers in the world. He has retained Turkey’s secular constitution and democratized its laws. Turkey is about the only Muslim country where alcohol stores and bars are open. Erdogan has wrested democratic institutions from the clutches of the Kemalist army and judiciary. And he reined in the army and the courts, which were strangleholds of Kemalism.

As part of his agenda for religious freedom, Erdogan struggled for years to lift the ban on Muslim women’s headscarves in public institutions until he succeeded in doing so and got the Directorate of Religious Affairs to open new Islamic schools and mosques. In his view, that was part of his struggle for freedom, i.e. religious freedom, denied to Turkish Muslims by authoritarian Kemalist regimes. A Kemalist prosecutor made a failed attempt in a court to have Erdogan’s AKP banned for its alleged threat to the secular constitution. As prime minister, Erdogan tried hard, but unsuccessfully, to join the EU and he keeps Turkey firmly in NATO, long opposed by some of Turkish Islamists.

He not only established secular democracy in Turkey but propagated it in other Muslim countries as well. During his 2011 trip to Egypt, he enraged many of his hosts when he advised them: “I hope there will be a secular state in Egypt. One must not be afraid of secularism. Egypt will grow in democracy and those called upon to draw up the constitution must understand it must respect all religions.”

Oh yes, Erdogan is also zealously espousing Muslim causes in Palestine, Kashmir, and elsewhere. He has built more than 100 mosques in a host of foreign countries. Among them is the largest American mosque built in what used to be my neighborhood in the Washington suburbs. In 2020 he earned vociferous denunciation from the West when he re-converted Hagia Sophia (or Aya Sofia) from a museum back into a mosque. Once a Byzantine cathedral, the Turks, in 1453, had made it a mosque upon their conquest of Istanbul (then the Byzantine capital of Constantinople), but Ataturk, during his campaign to de-Islamize Turkey, had made it a museum.

All this fits into Erdogan’s version of secularism, or “post-secularism.” In contemporary philosophers’ and definition, “post-secularism” allows religious values and symbols in the public space, so long as it insured equality, freedom and pluralism.

Actually, the Western liberal brand of secularism, which quarantines religion into the private sphere, is a unique invention of the West. It was devised to rid society of Christian fanaticism, which had exploded in Europe during the “Wars of Religion.”

“’Secular’ itself is a Christian term,” the eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor explains, “that is a word that finds its meaning in a Christian context.” He adds that the Western concept of secularism “doesn’t travel well and should not be imposed on other cultures.”

In fact in almost none of the non-Western societies, including democratic ones, religion or religious values are completely rinsed out of the public space, as it’s done in Western and Northern Europe – and as Ataturk and his Kemalists struggled to do in Turkey for nearly eight decades. In Erdogan’s “Muslim secularist” Turkey, religious values and symbols are visible in the public space, but their adherents are not nearly as brutal and repressive as are today’s Hindu nationalists in India, known as “the world’s largest democracy,” or right-wing Jews in apartheid Israel, which the West calls “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Erdogan’s crackdowns on his political opponents – thousands of them – has negated many of the freedoms he recovered from the authoritarian Kemalist regimes and the coup-prone Turkish military.  I hear, too, that financial corruption has infected his family and party. Erdogan fatigue has crept into swathes of Turkish society.  I won’t be surprised if next month’s election marks the end of Erdogan’s tumultuous political career.

But the “Muslim secularism,” or “post-Islamism,” which he has established in Turkey, will, I believe, remain his enduring political and social legacy in Turkey. I was struck to note that Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan’s Kemalist rival in the presidential election, co-sponsored the bill in the parliament that allowed Muslim women to wear headscarves in public institutions. Kilicdaroglu, too, has an Islamist party in his six-party electoral alliance!

On his campaign trail, Kilicdaroglu has been trying to court the conservative Muslim vote. Many of these Muslims hate many Kemalists’ drinking habits. Ataturk died of cirrhosis of the liver due to heavy drinking, and his critics criticize him for partying around the “raki [alcohol] table.” The Kemalist presidential candidate has vowed to steer clear of those “at the raki table.”

Erdogan’s “Muslim secularism” has all but replaced Kemalism in much of Turkish society.

• Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, researched Turkish-European relations in Turkey and five Western European countries as a journalism fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States.