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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 15-Apr-07
In Turkey, May 16 election may bring Islamist President into power

Web Log - April, 2007

In Turkey, May 16 election may bring Islamist President into power

More than 200,000 secularist Turks protested on Saturday against Turkey's possible return to its old Ottoman empire days, when the Muslim Caliphate was located in Istanbul, and the entire country (and empire) followed strict Muslim Sharia law.

More than 200,000 secularist Turks on Saturday protested the possible candidacy of Recep Tayip Erdogan from the Islamist AKP party. (Source: BBC)

More than 200,000 secularist Turks on Saturday protested the possible candidacy of Recep Tayip Erdogan from the Islamist AKP party. (Source: BBC)

Turkey has been a secular state since 1924, when Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey, abolished the Caliphate and established secular rule.

Recep Tayip Erdogan and his wife, Emine. Emine is controversial because she always wears a headscarf, considered by secularists to be a sign of a hidden Islamist agenda. (Source: BBC)

Recep Tayip Erdogan and his wife, Emine. Emine is controversial because she always wears a headscarf, considered by secularists to be a sign of a hidden Islamist agenda. (Source: BBC)

However, in a March 2004 election, the Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party) made substantial gains in parliamentary elections. As a result, AKP's leader, Recep Tayip Erdogan, has become Prime Minister. Erdogan will announce next week whether he will run for President in the May 16 election, and if he does then he's favored to win, which would give AKP effective control of the entire government, except for the army.

Onur Oymen, leader of the secularist Republican People's Party (CHP), is also running for President. (Source: BBC)

Onur Oymen, leader of the secularist Republican People's Party (CHP), is also running for President. (Source: BBC)

According to some Turkish political analysts, AKP control will be a threat to the core principles of the modern Republic of Turkey, and may even permit AKP to change the constitution and make Turkey into a religious state. A further fear is that the strongly secularist Army will intervene.

One of Erdogan's opponents is Onur Oymen, leader of the secularist Republican People's Party (CHP). "If you make religion as the cement of our society, then you'll have no more democracy in Turkey," said Oymen to the BBC. "The single [greatest threat] to our society is the anti-secular movement, and the Prime Minister, unfortunately, has become a symbol of those who are attacking the secular principles of Turkey."

Brief history of Ottoman Empire

First off, the Turks didn't come from Turkey; Turkey was named after the Turks. The Turks came from central Asia in waves, especially after 1000 AD, and conquered Anatolia (the Asian portion of what is now Turkey). The historical surprise is that the Turks wholeheartedly adopted the Sunni Muslim religion from the Arabs whom they had conquered. The result was the Great Seljuk Empire.

Arrival of Seljuk Turks in 1100 AD: dark area was controlled by Muslim Arabs; medium dark area was controlled by Seljuk Turks; light crossed area were the remaining pieces of the (Orthodox Christian) Byzantine Empire, centered around Constantinople; dark crossed area was Slavic area, converting to Orthodox Christianity.

Arrival of Seljuk Turks in 1100 AD: dark area was controlled by Muslim Arabs; medium dark area was controlled by Seljuk Turks; light crossed area were the remaining pieces of the (Orthodox Christian) Byzantine Empire, centered around Constantinople; dark crossed area was Slavic area, converting to Orthodox Christianity.

What was the most important war of the last millennium? There are many candidates, including our own Revolutionary War. The conquests by Genghis Kahn and the Mfecane in Africa are on the list. But right near the top you'd have to put the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, a conquest that changed the world more than anything until the two World Wars.

The Ottoman tribe, led by its chieftain, Osman, began expanding around 1300. When it conquered Constantinople in 1453, and renamed the city Istanbul, it was the end of the Byzantine empire; and since the Byzantine empire had been the eastern portion of the Roman Empire, it was also the end of the Roman empire. By the 1600s, the Ottoman empire was the greatest empire in the world.

The effect on Russia was enormous. In 1472, the Catholic Pope offered Sophia, a Byzantine princess, to Russia's Ivan the Great, asking him to join the Roman Church. Ivan did marry Sophia, but also declared that Moscow was the third Rome (with Rome and Constantinople being the first two), the head of the "true" or "Orthodox" Christian Church. Ivan immediately took the title of Tsar, and thus became the first Tsar of the new Tsarist Russia. ("Tsar," or "Czar," was derived from the name of the Roman Emperor Caesar, as is the German word "Kaiser.") Thus, Ivan would be not only the head of Russia, he would also be head of the Orthodox Church -- and never part of the Roman Church.

War with the Holy League and Russia

The Ottomans won one battle after another, with few defeats, but the turning point came in 1683, when the (Christian) Holy League destroyed the (Muslim) Ottoman army as it was assaulting Vienna. This was a historic turning point when the balance of power shifted from the Muslims to the Christians. The Holy League joined with Russia and attacked the Ottomans on several fronts, inflicting unprecedented territorial losses.

In 1699, the Ottomans were forced to sign the Treaty at Karlowitz, a moment remembered by Muslim scholars today as a "calamitous defeat" of the greatest magnitude. The Ottomans and the Russians became bitter enemies and fought several wars.

In the 1850s, the Ottomans defeated the Russians in the Crimean War, but only with the help of the English and French. This was very significant because it was the first time that large numbers of European forces were present on Ottoman soil. This resulted in enormous changes in the decades to come, because of the Turkish people's reaction to European forces encroaching on Ottoman lands throughout the empire.

The Young Turks and Ataturk

After the Crimean War, the Ottomans continued to lose prestige and additional parts of their empire. In the generational Awakening era that followed, there was increasing discontent. In 1889, secret societies began to form with the intent of developing a Turkish culture -- as opposed to an Ottoman culture.

In 1908, the Young Turks, formed from these societies, launched a rebellion that engulfed the entire empire. In 1914, the Ottomans entered World War I on the side of Germany, resulting in enormous dislocations. Of the three million men drafted for the army, half of them deserted. Inflation was enormous, resulting in a 2500 percent increase in cost of living between 1914 and 1918. A famine in Syria and Lebanon (still part of the empire) in 1915-16 claimed 100,000 lives.

Turkish nationalism began to grow during World War I because it was becoming clear that only the Turkish people would remain from the Ottoman Empire, and furthermore, some Europeans wanted to even break off even pieces of Turkey. By 1919, there were so many Allied forces in Istanbul that the Ottomans feared that the Allies intended to keep Istanbul for themselves.

Actually, there were three separate Muslim identities within the Ottoman Empire that formed in the Mideast around this time: The Turkish identity (in what is now Turkey), the Arab identity (Saudi Arabia), and the Persian identity (Iran).

With the encouragement of the English, the Arab nationalists turned against the Ottomans.

Another group that turned against the Ottomans must be mentioned: The Armenians. This Orthodox Christian population lives in the midst of the Muslim population of what was the eastern portion of the Ottoman Empire. An Armenian uprising that occurred in Istanbul in 1894-96 was brutally put down, with a large-scale massacre of Armenians in Istanbul.

In 1914, Russia organized four large Armenian volunteer guerrilla units to support the war effort against the Ottomans. In reaction, the Ottomans began deporting the entire Armenian population -- millions of people -- resulting in deaths of over a million Armenians in what amounted to a death march. This event, known as the "Armenian genocide," is hotly disputed by Turkish politicians today, and is still a big part of the debate among EU politicians as whether Turkey should join the European Union.

Statues of Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey, are everywhere today. (Source: BBC)

Statues of Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey, are everywhere today. (Source: BBC)

Finally, in October, 1922, the Turkish Republic was declared, putting an official end to the Ottoman Empire after 600 years. The president of the new nation was Mustafa Kemal, an activist who had led the fight to keep Turkey from being split up among the Europeans.

Mustafa Kemal, who later took the name Ataturk (father of the Turks), led the new country in a distinctly Turkish direction. He did everything he could to sweep away the Ottoman past. He abandoned the Ottoman policy of territorial expansion, required Turks to wear Western-style clothing, abolished polygamy, adopted the Christian Gregorian calendar, and adopted the Latin alphabet for writing in the Turkish language, which had previously been done in Arabic script. He even sought to purge Arabic and Persian words from the Turkish language.

Perhaps most important is that he sought to secularize Turkish society. The caliphate, the office of the supreme spiritual leader for Sunni Muslims worldwide, was abolished. Religious schools were closed, and Islamic law courts were dismantled. A new constitution separated religion from the state, and gave all male Turkish citizens over 21 the right to vote,

As for the other pieces of the Ottoman Empire, they were turned into independent nations: Iraq in 1924, Saudi Arabia in 1932, Syria in 1945, Lebanon and Jordan in 1946.

The revival of Islam in Turkey

Turkey and Russia have been in each other's face every since the Turks conquered Constantinople, so it's important to mention one more parallel: The destruction of the Ottoman empire occurred at the same time as Russia's Bolshevik Revolution. The Turks abandoned Islam as a state religion, and the Russians abandoned Orthodox Christianity as a state religion. Both nations turned their backs on their own religions and on many centuries of their own history.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Orthodox Church has been making a strong comeback in Russia. And now we see that Islam may be making a comeback in Turkey.

That's why the May 16 election is potentially so significant. The AKP and Prime Minister Erdogan have been playing down the Islamist angle, pointing to a secularist agenda and their continued intention to join the European Union. And if you go to read analyses of the upcoming election, you'll find that they mostly treat the idea of an Islamist government as little more than a change in political party, based on popular dissatisfaction with the economy, and so forth.

But from the point of view of Generational Dynamics, this goes far deeper than "it's the economy, stupid." It's as if America had decided, in World War II, to throw away our Constitution and go to some other form of government, and now we were talking about re-adopting the old Constitution. This would be a debate of enormous historical importance.

The same is true of the Islamist revival in Turkey. It will run very deep and revive ancient feelings, loves and hatreds. There are very good reasons why the Asian Turks adopted Islam when they conquered Anatolia from the Arabs a millennium ago, and all of those reasons will come to the fore and be remembered once again.

We never know what minor events are going to trigger enormous changes. One example is the the Danish cartoon controversy. In this case, a tiny decision by a Danish magazine to publish cartoons depicting Mohammed exploded into worldwide confrontations between Muslims and Westerners.

Maybe the AKP candidate, whether it's Erdogan or someone else, will lose the May 16 election; or maybe he'll win, and the world will go on as if nothing special happened.

But with Islamist Sunni groups around the world linking up with al-Qaeda, it's hard to see how an Islamist victory in Turkey would be anything but very significant. It will stir Muslim passions in Chechnya and southern Russia, in southeast Asia, in the Mideast and in the Maghreb (northern Africa). It will stir fears among the Western Christians in Europe, the Orthodox Christians in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia, and the Shia Muslims in Iran and Pakistan.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, we're headed for a Clash of Civilizations world war with absolute certainty but, as usual, we don't know what will trigger that war or whether the trigger will occur next week, next month, next year, or later. For at least the next six weeks, it's well worthwhile to keep a close eye on Turkey, and an election that might not or might change the world. (15-Apr-07) Permanent Link
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