- (february 2008)
Undoing Turkey's revolution.
Prime minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan may go down in history as the Turkish leader who
started the undoing of the Mustafa Kemal Ataturk revolution that turned
Turkey into a democratic and secular state. Ataturk's main enemy was Islam.
Under the constitution that he designed, Islam was explicitly forbidden
to influence politics. One aspect of daily life has represented that principle
more than anything else: the ban on women to wear headscarves at state
universities.
For decades Turkish society has been divided between the upper, educated,
wealthy class of secular, European-leaning Turks and the lower, uneducted,
poor class of religious, Arab-leaning Turks. The women of the higher class
did not wear headscarves and looked down on the women who did so.
Higher education was de facto reserved to the secular middle class and therefore
the ban on headscarves did not cause any sensation.
Times have changed. Turkey has experienced an economic boom whose unpredictable
consequence has been to empower the more religious lower class. Women who
wear headscarves are now seen in expensive shopping malls and in offices.
Religious Turks have become educated and wealthy. And powerful:
Erdogan used to be a religious fundamentalist, and the new
president, Abdullah Gul, speaks volumes about the changes (he got engaged to
his wife when she was 14 and he was 30).
Erdogan has managed to appease the fears of a return to Islamic rule.
He has passed laws that protect free speech, abolished the death penalty
and generally moved towards a system that compares favorably with the systems
of Europe.
Nonetheless it is difficult to deny that Turkey is a more unstable country
that it advertises to be. The Kurds are still a thorny issue (if Kosovo and
Palestine deserve independence, nobody can rationally explain why the Kurds
don't). Turkey still refuses to recognize the genocide of Armenians committed
during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, a fact that keeps the border
with Armenia one of the few impassable borders in the world.
Turkey protects the half of Cyprus that it invaded in 1974, a fact that has
effectively split the island in two for more than 30 years.
And the Turkish society is now increasingly divided over the role of religion.
Historically, Turkey is a paradox: a country that occupies the capital
of Orthodox Christianity (Byzanthium/Istanbul) and the homeland of the Greeks
(the Mediterranean coast).
There are solutions to all these problems. But the solutions would further
devastate the territorial integrity of Turkey that was already greatly
diminished after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. It would make sense for
Turkey to grant the Kurds independence and to split in a Western side (where
headscarves would probably still be banned) and an Eastern side (where Islam
would presumably be more prominent). The Western side would then join the
European Union. Cyprus would be unified again.
But this is unlikely to happen as long as nationalism prevails.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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