Tag: Erdogan

Turkish nationalism wins in Turkey

Mustafa Malik June 1, 2023

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.

Can Biden get a Muslim lad mad?

Mustafa Malik September 26, 2020

SEVERAL AMERICAN MUSLIM friends, spooked by President Trump’s “Muslim ban,” shift of America’s Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and other anti-Muslim acts, are getting excited about Joe Biden’s steady lead over him in the polls. I am trying to douse their enthusiasm for the Democratic presidential nominee for several reasons, especially because Islam and liberalism, the creed of the West, are evolving fast.

Electoral polls can be notoriously misleading. About this time four years ago Hillary Clinton was way ahead of Trump in the polls. Yet on the early evening of Election Day, Trump’s winning numbers on delegate count boards got Clinton’s victory parties to disperse quietly and had her slump into bed, crying. But as Trump now begins to lose white voters without a college education, his core support groups, I am inclined to think that he is facing a bigger hurdle against Biden than he did against Clinton.

The second reason I am advising Muslims to be cautious about Biden is the mixed signals he is sending on Muslim issues. In July he delighted American Muslims by becoming the first presidential nominee from either political party to address a large Muslim gathering directly, and moreover, express his desire to see Islam taught in American schools. In that online engagement he also told 3,000 or so members of Emgage Action, a Muslim advocacy organization, that he would abolish Trump’s Muslim ban “on Day One” of his presidency.

But a month later the Biden campaign publicly and loudly castigated Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian Muslim activist, as an “anti-Semite.” Sarsour has been an effective advocate of the global campaign to boycott Israel, citing its colonialist and apartheid policy toward the Palestinians. By denouncing Sarsour, the Biden campaign obviously was trying to appease American Jews, a key voting bloc and source of campaign donations.

Biden is, in fact, following the parameters of relations with Muslims created by his former boss, President Barack Obama. Obama fired up Muslims everywhere by going to Cairo and giving a soaring speech, calling for “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” That relationship, he said, would be based on America’s appreciation of the Islamic civilization and Islamic values. Obama also boldly criticized linking Islam to terrorism, as had been done by Republicans and a host of American media outlets.

And yet Obama escalated America’s thoughtless and pointless drone strikes on targets in Pakistan and other sovereign Muslim countries, blowing up countless innocent women, children and men; and maintained a “kill list” of mostly innocent Muslim “terrorists.” The Obama White House persistently turned down Muslim job applications. Obama’s election campaigns made sure Muslim activists didn’t show up on platforms with him. In Chicago, two of Obama campaign’s Muslim activists in hijab had managed to step on to a platform with Obama, only to be pushed out. President Obama, too, brushed aside Muslim invitations to visit a mosque until the last year of his presidency.

Moral desert

Biden and Obama remind me of the late Republican Senator Charles McC. Mathias Jr. of Maryland, a moral tower and one of two American politicians I admired most those days. The other was Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. During a November 1985 interview with Mathias in his Senate office in Washington I reminded him of his description of U.S. senators’ slavishness toward Israel in an article he had written in Foreign Affairs magazine (Summer 1981). He had narrated how the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had got President Gerald Ford to scrub his decision to “reassess” U.S. aid to Israel after Israel had backed out of its Sinai disengagement talks with Egypt. When AIPAC representatives hit the Senate with a letter to the president opposing his decision, 76 senators signed in on it “promptly,” Mathias had written, “although no hearings had been held, no debate conducted, nor had the Administration been invited to present its views.”

“Why?” I asked.

“We need the backbone to stand up for what is right, to do what is in America’s best interest,” he said. “We need moral courage.”

During the 35 years since that interview (my last with Mathias) Congress and the White House have become more of a moral desert. American politicians have become more dependent than ever on campaign contributions from big corporations and special interest groups. Moral stands often rub up some of these entities and groups the wrong way. Biden is spineless and wishy washy on many issues. How then would Islam and Muslims fare under a Biden presidency, if there is one?

To begin with, Biden would generally, but not always, follow the wind, and the anti-Muslim wind that roiled America in the wake of 9/11 has abated greatly. His comments to Emgage apparently reflects that. He will also be dealing with a more hospitable Islam. Muslim societies have all but moved past “Islamism,” the movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East, Jamaat-i-Islami in South Asia, and other organizations, which sought to pit Muslims and Islam directly against the West. Muslim societies are modernizing fast and becoming “secular,” in the sense in which “post-Islamist” Islamic activists use the word.

In August 1998 when Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now president of Turkey, told me in an interview that he was a “secular Muslim,” I thought he was lying. I was conducting fieldwork in Turkey and several European countries to explore the prospects for Turkey’s accession to the European Union, and Erdogan, just sacked as mayor of Istanbul, was getting ready to serve a prison term for reading out an Islamic poem at a public meeting in what used to be ultra-secular Turkey. I thought that he was pretending to be secular because, having been stung by his recitation of an incendiary Islamic poem, he did not now want me to describe him as an “Islamic extremist” in American publications.

But from his subsequent words and deeds and those of his colleagues in the Justice and Development Party (AKP) I realized that he genuinely believes that Islam does not require a modern state to be “Islamic,” or curb the freedom of non-Muslims or discriminate against them.

The same policy is followed by the Ennahda party in Tunisia, Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Morocco and the Center Party in Egypt. These groups don’t associate Islam with the state of state policies, or favor Muslims over other faith groups in access to public institutions, as Islamist groups would. Secular Islamic activists do not disown Islamic traditions or ban Islamic values and symbols from the public sphere, which Western secularists do.

In the Muslim world “secular Islam” marks the faith’s evolution under the impact of the spread of education and modernization. On the eve of his December 10, 2002, meeting with then President George W. Bush at the White House, Erdogan explained his and the AKP’s secularity in a wide-ranging speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. “We are learning from experience,” said the soon-to-be prime minister of Turkey, and becoming “secular.”

What “experience” had been secularizing the AKP? I asked the visiting AKP leader during an interview following his CSIS talk.

“Experience of living in the world, modern world,” Erdogan replied.

Mass education

Islamists are also modernizing, but they view the West, the source of modernity, with hostility. Secular Islamic activists, in addition to being avid modernizers, have no qualms about engaging the West and doing business with it. This was a basic difference between Erdogan and his Islamist mentor Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of the Islamist movement in Turkey. Erbakan missed no opportunity to rail against the West, proposed to create an “Islamic NATO” and scorned the European Union as a “Christian club,” which he did not want Muslim Turkey to join. Erdogan tried hard to join the EU (He initially dismissed my suggestion that that was a futile exercise) and courted the United States at every opportunity.

Islamists view Islam as a faith and Muslim societies as its own home in which non-Muslims should be welcomed and tolerated, but not treated as equal citizens. Secular Islamic activists view Islam as a civilization and set of cultures in which all faiths and their adherents should have equal rights, but in countries where Muslims are the majority community, Islamic values would form the moral and cultural bedrock.

Muslim exposure to modernity, which has accelerated at a breathtaking pace, has been speeded by mass education. In the mid-1950s I was one of only four boys attending high school from Balaut “pargona,” or county, in what is now Bangladesh. Three years ago, I was taking a morning walk from my farmhouse in Mujahid Khani village in that county. My eyes were gripped by a fascinating scene of droves of pupils, male and female, scampering along a dirt road through rice fields to a high school that my brother, Abdul Mukit Tafader, helped to build. And there are other high schools in that county. Some of these students were also going to the nearby Harikandi Madrasa, which I had attended for two years, when its curriculum was confined to subjects relating to Islamic scripture and faith, excluding any secular subjects. Today math, social studies and other secular are taught in Harikandi Madrasa, along with, of course, Islamic subjects.

Lumbering back to my centuries-old ancestral home, surrounded by mango, jackfruit and betelnut trees that were buzzing with a bazaar of chirping birds, I remembered an essay written by Dale Eickelman of Dartmouth College in which the anthropologist depicted how mass education has catalyzed the rapid transformation of Muslim societies.

“Like the printing press in sixteenth-century Europe,” the article began, “the combination of mass education and mass communication is transforming the Muslim-majority world, a broad geographical crescent stretching from North Africa through Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Indonesian archipelago.” Modernization, he adds, is “dissolving prior barriers of space and distance and opening new grounds for interaction and mutual recognition” of Muslim and non-Muslim societies and cultures. “Quite simply, in country after country, government officials, traditional religious scholars, and officially sanctioned preachers are finding it very hard to monopolize the tools of literate culture. The days have gone when governments and religious authorities [in Muslim countries] can control what their people know and what they think.”

Historically, a main source of liberal Westerners’ antipathy for things Islamic has been their hostility to religion per se and the religiosity of Muslims in general. Since the last decades of the last century that antipathy has been diminishing in the West, especially among intellectuals. Most of the West’s major philosophers, sociologists and social anthropologists (Jurgen Habermas, Martha Nusbaum, Peter Berger, Grace Davie, Daniele Harvieu-Leger, Richard Martin, to name just a few) now appreciate the role of religions and religious values in lending people meaning and priorities of their lives, which liberals of earlier times refused to acknowledge. Liberals as they remain, these philosophers and sociologists are prone to harnessing the nourishing and humanizing values of religious traditions. This valuation of religions, and hence religious communities, has been seeping through to Western social mainstreams. America is fast shedding Islamophobia, spawned after 9/11 by neoconservatives, nativists and out-of-work Cold War jingoists.

The next U.S. administration faces a confident Muslim world, better informed than ever before, which is eager to engage, rather than fight, America and the West. A Muslim lad in my Mujahid Khani village in Bangladesh, or in the Turkish megacity of Istanbul, laughs, rather than gets mad, at Trump’s hysterical scream: “Islam hates us!” A President Biden, if there is one, would have to be a reckless rascal to incur his hostility.

Kurdish fiasco ‘America first’ cause

Mustafa Malik October 10, 2017

WHEN PATRICK HENRY vowed to “live free or die,” he couldn’t have known about today’s Kurdish dilemma in Iraq. Two weeks ago 92 percent of Kurdish voters in northern Iraq voted in a referendum to create an independent state, consisting of the three Iraqi provinces where they’re in a majority. Unfortunately for them, the outcome has been, not independence, but curbs on their freedom to travel, economic hardships, and political isolation in the region. Now very few Iraqi Kurds seem ready to risk further hardships pushing for independence, let alone die fighting for the cause.

Iraq already has banned air travel in and out of its semi-autonomous “Kurdistan.” No Iraqi government can expect to stay in power if it were to allow the dismemberment of the country. And the Turkish government has announced it’s going to shut off the oil pipeline of the Iraqi Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), which runs through Turkey, carrying 5.5 million barrels of crude oil daily and providing more than 90 percent of the KRG’s annual budget. Ankara fears that the secession of a Kurdish enclave in Iraq would embolden its own Kurdish militants, who have been carrying on a terrorist campaign since 1984 to create an independent Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, like the Baghdad government, had urged the KRG over and over not to hold the referendum.

Two days ago Baghdad announced that it’s now going to host a summit among Iran, Turkey and Iraq to decide on further measures to punish the KRG for its secessionist move.

Poor Iraqi Kurds! Their grievances remind me of a Mexican official’s response to President Trump’s demand that Mexico pay his proposed wall along its boundary with the United States. An aide to President Enrique Peña Nieto told the Trump administration, facetiously of course, that Mexico would be happy to pay for the wall provided it’s “built along the northern boundaries of New Mexico and Arizona.” He was obviously alluding to the fact that those American sates used to be part of Mexico until the United States grabbed them by force.

Kurds in Iraq – and in Turkey, Iran and Syria – have a similar grievance. In reality, their plight as minorities in those Middle Eastern countries originated in the imperialist machinations of a century ago. When France and Britain were gobbling up territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, they promised the Kurds an autonomous statelet, which they said could eventually become an independent nation-state. That commitment was mentioned in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres. Little did the Kurds know that oil under their soil would turn out to be the stumbling block to their independence, just as resources in many other developing countries had cost theirs. Lure of resources drove European powers into invading and colonizing most of the non-Western world.

In the 1920s as Britain was settling down in its Iraqi colony (bestowed on it under the League of Nations mandate), the British-owned Iraq Petroleum Company struck oil near Kirkuk, in the middle of the Kurds’ “promised land” of an autonomous state. Out the window went the British and French pledge for a “Kurdistan.” The two imperial powers now decided to split the more resourceful part of the centuries-old Kurdish homeland between the British colony of Iraq and neighboring French colony of Syria and dole out the remainder of the territory to Turkey and Iran.

Thus 35 million Kurds have become the world’s largest ethnic community without a state of their own, languishing as minorities in four states and refugees in many others. During trips to Iraq and Turkey, the word I often heard Kurds mention as the source of their quandary was “betrayal” – betrayal by British and French colonial powers. Throughout the century that followed the fourfold partition of their land Kurds in one country or another have struggled off and on for a national homeland or homelands.

In Turkey bloody terrorist attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and bloodier government reprisals have cost nearly 40,000 lives in three decades. In Iraq separatist uprisings by the Kurdish Peshmerga militia led to equally brutal government crackdowns, including a chemical attack in the Halabja village by the Saddam Hussein government.

Thanks to America’s need for the Kurdish Peshmerga militia to fight its wars against the Saddam government and then against the Islamic State, the United States has helped set up Iraqi Kurdistan with wide local autonomy. But Washington never agreed to support Iraqi Kurds’ secessionist scheme. In northern Syria Kurds have taken advantage of the five-year-long Syrian civil war to carve out a territory they call Rojava, which they aspire to turn into an autonomous or independent Kurdish stare. The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad is also perturbed by the Rojava campaign and the adrenaline it could get from the KRG referendum in Iraq. Last week Damascus denounced the KRG for its referendum. In Iran Kurdish separatism is less assertive than in any of the three other countries. But Tehran, too, worries about a spillover of the Kurdish ferment in its neighborhood, and the Iranian government has decried the referendum in northern Iraq. The United States and several European countries have also been concerned that a Kurdish independence movement in Iraq could threaten the stability of the state system in that region. The Trump administration repeatedly warned KRG President Masoud Barzani not to stage the referendum.

Barzani couldn’t but have known that in the teeth of the strong regional and international opposition his referendum would open a Pandora’s box, instead of promoting Kurdish independence. True, the Kurds lost their territories to the four states against their will, just as Mexicans lost part of their land to America against theirs. But plenty of water has flowed down the Euphrates and Mississippi rivers since America and the four Middle Eastern countries took shape and evolved as nation-states. The aide to the Mexican president can’t expect to wrest Texas, New Mexico or Arizona back from America anymore than Kurds in Iraq – or Turkey, Syria or Iran – stand a reasonable chance of tearing up those nation-states to create one or more independent Kurdish states.

The Kurds could achieve their goal of national independence in one of two ways: by the force of their own arms or through the military or diplomatic intervention of a major power or powers. Bangladesh, South Sudan and East Timor gained their independence in one or the other of the two processes. But Kurds in none of the four countries have the armed capability to secede, and support for their cause in the international community is zero (Oops! I forgot the vociferous Israeli support for the KRG’s independence project).

You would wonder why, then, the KRG president went ahead with his ill-fated referendum. I think his fast dwindling support base among Iraqi Kurds has something to do with it. Barzani was elected KRG president by the regional legislature in 2005. Since then he has turned into an autocrat, ruling the territory without a mandate since his term of office expired in August 2015. His blatant nepotism, rampant corruption in his government and a sharp downturn in the region’s economy have heightened his people’s discontent against him. But the aspiration for an independent homeland still animates most Kurdish minds and hearts in Iraq. If he held the referendum to shore up his popularity among Kurds, their overwhelming yes vote shows that he made a good bet. But sadly, their euphoria was short-lived. Media reports show that it already has died down and most Kurds are worried, instead, about the onset of the economic and political crisis, spawned by the neighboring states’ virulent reactions to the referendum.

I think the international community should get to work to help resolve the Kurdish imbroglio. The United States, which has used Iraqi Kurds in two major wars, is morally obligated to step in to pull them out of the quagmire. The Kurdish predicament also offers the Trump administration an opportunity to get away from its own quagmire created by the president’s reckless stands on the climate change accord, Iran nuclear deal, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and other issues. He should get Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to take the lead in an international initiative to bring about a reconciliation between Iraqi Kurdistan and its neighbors. Because such an effort would bolster America’s standing in the world, it would be part of Trump’s “America first” agenda.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

Turks, EU: Never the twain meet?

Mustafa Malik May 17, 2017

IS TURKEY FINALLY waking up from its dream of joining the European Union?

During the past six weeks EU politicians excoriated President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his victory in a Turkish constitutional referendum, which transforms the country’s parliamentary system into a presidential one, concentrating wide powers in the presidency. The constitutional changes go into effect after the 2019 Turkish general elections, and if Erdogan is re-elected, he’d become a powerful “executive president.” These Europeans, and many Turks, see that making him an “authoritarian” ruler. Some of them demanded and end to negotiations on Turkey’s accession to the EU. Others argued that Turkey would be unable to adopt “European values,” which EU members are required to observe. Those values include democracy, the rule of law, human rights and minority rights.

In response, Erdogan threatened to hold a new “Brexit-like referendum,” asking the Turks if they wanted to join the European bloc at all. Over the years many Turks have been turned off by what they consider a discriminatory stance of a “Christian club” toward their Muslim nation. A poll taken in 2014 found that only 28 percent of Turks viewed EU membership as “a good thing,” compared to more than two-thirds of them who did so in the 1990s and early 2000s.

At any rate, tempers have cooled lately among politicians on both sides. Never mind, says the EU foreign policy chief. Federica Mogherini has announced that the talks on the the 30-year-old Turkish membership application would continue. “It is not suspended,” she insisted. “It hasn’t ended.” And last week Omer Celik, Turkey’s EU affairs minister, confirmed her announcement. He said “there is no question” of breaking off those talks.

I have been predicting, though, that Turkey would never join the European bloc, not as a full member, anyway. I came to this conclusion nearly two decades ago, and nothing has happened since to change my opinion. During 1998-1999 I was conducting fieldwork in Europe and Turkey on how a Turkish Islamic surge would affect Ankara’s bid to join the European bloc. I had a fellowship with the German Marshall Fund of the United States to do the project.

On August 2, 1998, at the end of a long interview with Erdogan, then disgraced mayor of Istanbul, he asked what I had learned about Europeans’ attitudes toward Turkey’s EU membership. I told him that “I’d be surprised” if his country would ever become a “full member” of the bloc. The mayor didn’t seem to be convinced. Four months before, he had been convicted by a State Security Court for reciting an Islamic poem at a public meeting, which the judges said had incited “hatred based on religious difference.” Turkey was then a radically secular state and Erdogan had been known as a gung-ho activist of the Islamist Welfare Party. I interviewed him when he was packing to vacate the mayor’s office and await an anticipated jail sentence from the State Security Court. He told me that he would be working to have Turkey “join the [European] Union.”

Contrary to what I had heard about him, Erdogan disputed my characterization of him as an “Islamist” and asserted twice that he believed that the Turkish government should be “secular,” and that religion should be a “private matter.” He was no more an Islamist than Helmut Kohl was a Christian fundamentalist, he said. Kohl was then chancellor of Germany, belonging to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). I’d learn later that Erdogan, Parliament members Abdullah Gul (later president) and Bulent Arinc (later speaker of Parliament) and a number of other former Welfare Party activists were about to leave the Islamist movement and form a conservative Muslim party. Polls had shown that two out of three Turkish Muslims, religious as they were, had been leery about Islamism.

Soon after his newly formed Justice and Development Party, or AKP, won the 2002 parliamentary elections, Erdogan set out for a whirlwind trip through Europe, pushing the Turkish accession case to EU governments and elites. The Turkish leader reiterated to them that he was a “secular” politician who had no intention of setting up an Islamist government. And he began making continual visits to the United States (Yesterday was his 13^th visit to the White House), meeting government officials and intellectuals, including some neoconservatives, and trying to dispel the notion that he or the AKP had an Islamist agenda. He also talked about his pursuit of Turkey’s EU membership.

ACCESSION TALKS

On December 10, 2002, the day before his first visit to the White House to meet then President George W. Bush, Erdogan told me in Washington that he would be asking the U.S. president to “say a good word” to EU leaders about the Turkish case. Bush did just that, and in December 2005 the EU began Turkish accession talks. I read news reports about some Turkish politicians were optimistic about their finally joining the Europeans, which had been a consuming mission of the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

I still didn’t expect to see Muslim Turks showing up in Brussels to join discussions about the policies and priorities of the bloc. I didn’t think “democratic deficit” and “poor human rights record” were the real sources of the EU’s angst about Turkish accession, even though these shortcoming were routinely mentioned as Turkey’s disqualification for bloc membership.

If you have European friends or observed Europeans’ attitudes toward the Turks closely, you’d know what dismays them most about having Turks in Europe. Julius Ray Behr, an architect in Berlin, was quite candid to me about it. During a 2000 trip I asked him about his take on the Turks’ efforts to join the EU. Were they trying achieve “in Brussels what they could not accomplish in Vienna”? he replied, laughing. He was referring to the Ottoman army’s 1683 attack on Vienna, which was repulsed by the city’s Austrian and Polish defenders, putting an end to the Ottoman Empire’s thrust toward Western Europe. A burly, graying man in his late 50s or early 60s, Behr suggested that if the Turks, then about 60 million, were allowed to join the bloc, they would mess up Europe’s “social and cultural life,” infusing Islam into it.

I heard the argument before and since. Since the Dark Ages, Continental Europe has been a white racial monochrome, and Europeans violently resisted the presence of other racial and cultural strains in their midst. Beginning in the late 15^th century, Jews and Muslims, who had lived in Europe for centuries, suffered waves after waves of slaughter, forced conversion to Christianity and expulsion from the Continent. Most of those Jewish and Muslim refugees were welcomed with open arms in Muslim Turkey and Levant. In pre-Enlightenment Europe, Jews were detested as “Christ killers” and Muslims as heathens. Post-Enlightenment, they were scorned as inferior races. The Holocaust was the final episode of whitening Europe’s social and cultural texture.

Erdogan, as I observed him, is a passionate, willful man, who isn’t quite acculturated to Western democratic institutions and practices. He’s not very tolerant of dissent as would be, for example, Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron. Erdogan and his government say, however, that the current political and social turmoil has been spawned by the old ultra-secular Kemalists establishment. Kemalists are follower of Kemal Ataturk’s laicist, anti-Islamic ideology, who have been campaigning for the secularization and Europeanization of Turkish society and culture. Having been roundly defeated in successive elections, many of them have made common cause with Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has been trying to topple the AKP government through undemocratic means. In 1999 Turkish intelligence found Gulen colluding with his associates to destabilize the then secular government in Ankara, and the cleric dashed into exile in the United States to evade arrest and prosecution.

Gulen has, or had, an extensive network of followers in Turkish police, judiciary and military. The military, the self-appointed “guardian” of Kemalism, continually overthrew democratically elected governments until the AKP came to power in 2002. The military brass, Kemalists and Gulenists have had a hard time accepting the AKP government, despite it being elected democratically. In 2007 the army high command issued a threatening memorandum opposing the election of Abdullah Gul as president, arguing that the headscarf worn by his wife, Heyrunnisa, would violate the secularist tradition of the presidential palace. The Kemalist opposition in the parliament, which used to elect presidents, also decided to boycott the vote. The AKP responded with a snap election, which it won handily, neutralizing military-Kemalist resistance to Gul’s election as president.

CRACKDOWN ON DISSENT

The next year Kemalist prosecutors sued the AKP in the Constitutional Court, demanding the party be banned because it had become a “center of anti-secular activities.” The Constitutional Court had, at the bidding of the army and Kemalist elites, outlawed five political parties one after another. This time, though, the AKP survived because only six judges, instead of the required seven, supported the motion to ban it. This was followed by other Kemalist and Gulenist court cases against Erdogan government. The abortive military coup last July, which the government says was masterminded by Gulen, was the latest attempt so far to overthrow the Erdogan government.

Reacting to these subversive actions, especially the failed coup, the AKP regime launched a widespread crackdown on Gulenist and Kemalist dissidents. It has jailed thousands of political dissidents and fired thousands of others from their jobs in the police, judiciary, bureaucracy and military. Several media outlets have been shut down, and scores of journalists thrown behind the bar. Many Kemalists and Gulenists obviously have supported or joined destabilizing activities or the abortive coup. But many innocent citizens appear also to have been caught up in the fray and lost their jobs or suffered detention or prison terms. Given the mounting opposition to Erdogan and his government, I won’t be surprised to see them defeated in the next or a subsequent election.

But Erdogan and the AKP will be remembered for ending the 90-year-long military and Kemalist pseudo-autocracy in Turkey and ushering in full-fledged, or nearly so, democracy. In one bold move after another the Erdogan government purged the military of many of its coup-mongering officers; reformed the military-dominated National Security Council, bringing it under civilian control; stripped the Constitutional Court of its power to ban political parties; disbanded the clandestine West Study Group (BGG), a cell within the army, which collected intelligence on politicians and planned coups; expanded freedom of the press and expression; introduced a new Penal Code, abolishing torture by police and security personnel; guaranteed individual rights, which was subordinated to the demand of whatever law-enforcement agencies decided was the “security of the state”; restored the use of the Kurdish language and celebration of Kurdish symbols cultural events, banned since the founding of the state; and so on.

The government has rolled back many of the democratic reforms it carried out. I expect these lapses to be remedied by this regime or its successors. I don’t believe that the Turks, having tasted the blessings of freedom and democracy, will revert to the Kemalist era again. They demonstrated their new, indomitable spirit of freedom during the coup attempt last July when everyday Turks, responding to Erdogan’s televised call, poured into the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, braved military bombs and bullets, chased and assaulted rebel troops and crushed the uprising in hours. That was the first time in history the Turks challenged and quashed a military putsch.

DEMOCRACY’S BIRTH PANGS

Formative phases of most democracies – including the United States, Britain, France and Germany – have always been marked by similar and more dire mayhem: civil wars, ethnic and religious strife, and authoritarian governance. Some of the newer democracies within the EU are also going through their birth pangs. Look at the post-Communist democracies of Hungary and Poland. Freedom House has lamented a “spectacular breakdown of democracy” in the two countries, and human rights watchdogs and media pundits have denounced their “autocratic” governments. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban has all but silenced political dissent through continual crackdowns, suppressed press freedom, persecuted his opponents, and proudly declared Hungary an “illiberal state.” He says Western European “liberal values today incorporate corruption, sex and violence.” Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), has passed laws flouting parliamentary rules, weakened the country’s highest court, stifled the press, appointed loyalists to civil service and government-run media organizations. He has turned the public television broadcaster TVP into a PiS party station. (Critics call it TVPiS!). PiS has gerrymandered electoral districts to ensure the victory of its candidates. And so on.The problem is that both Orban and Kaczynski continue to win elections, the former has a two-thirds majority in the Hungarian parliament. European politicians and news media continue to criticize their autocratic rule. Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, met Orban at the EU’s Riga summit and greeted him: “Hello dictator!”

Yet few Europeans are calling for Hungary’s or Poland’s expulsion from the EU, just as few would like to have the Turks in the bloc. Ask a Turk why, and he or she would tell you that Poles and Hungarians have the right faith and skin tone, and more of less blend in the cultural monochrome that Europe has been for the past two millennia. Turkey, with its Muslim population of 90 million, would rupture that cultural harmony. Echoing the German architect Behr, Remy Leveau, a political science professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Institute of Political Studies of Paris), told me the “real problem” hindering Turkish membership of the EU. “We [Europeans] don’t have a history of cultural pluralism.” I was chatting with him at his office on Rue Michel-Ange in Paris on the gloomy afternoon of November 2, 2000. Even though Europeans were secular, he said, “we observed All Saints Day yesterday,” and “Christian values” underpinned “our moral standards and worldviews.” Having Muslim Turks in European neighborhoods wouldn’t “help social cohesion,” he added.

All the same, Turkey remains an asset to Europe and America, having the second-largest armed forces in NATO and serving as a bulwark against anti-Western guerrilla and terrorist forces in the Middle East. Turkey, too, is the EU’s fourth-largest export market and fifth-largest supplier of imports.

Today, under an agreement with the EU, Turkey hosts 3 million refugees from the Middle East and South Asia, who would otherwise be flooding Western Europe, creating a demographic and security nightmare there.

Hence Mogherini wouldn’t suspend, let alone end, Turkey’s “accession” talks, even though she knows the Turks wouldn’t be joining the family of European nations. I can foresee the eventual outcome of the negotiations: The Turks won’t become Europeans, but would maintain special economic and security relations with Europe.

The Erdogan government knows this. As a result, it’s already cultivating strategic and trade relations with Russia, China, India, Pakistan and a host of Middle Eastern countries.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs analyst in Washington, has researched EU-Turkish relations and U.S. foreign policy options in the Middle West and South Asia. He hosts the blog ‘Muslim Journey’: https://muslimjourney.com.

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.