WHY CAN'T TURKEY BE BACKWARDS TOO, HE SIGHED:

Bush’s Turkish delight: Historical, rather than contemporary, Turkey is still seen as a model by Muslims the world over. Yet it is precisely this past that is being erased and denied (Farish A Noor, Daily Times [Pakistan])

During a recent trip to Turkey for the NATO summit, President George Bush has endorsed the government of Turkey. This gives to ‘Turkish delight’ a new meaning! On the look out for friendly Muslim regimes that can be brought into the fold of the ‘coalition of the willing’, the American political elite has just adopted their long-term ally, Turkey. The president has even said it was time for the European Union to accept Turkey’s bid to join the EU. The reasoning behind this, we are told, is that Turkey is now seen as a ‘model Muslim state’ where everything is hunky-dory and civil rights and personal freedoms are overflowing.

The Turkish cup is runneth over with freedoms to be shared by the rest of the Muslim world!

Yet during my recent visit to Turkey, I was told that there were certain things I simply could not mention or speak about in public: Never discuss the relevance of Islam to politics; never suggest that the Ottoman epoch was anywhere close (or worse still, better) than the present state of affairs; never praise the policies of the Ottomans; never question the separation of religion and state; and never question the achievements of the great Kemal Ataturk. That left me with precious little to talk about, save my observations on Turkish coffee and tobacco. [...]

Following his recent visit to Istanbul for the NATO meeting there, President Bush praised Turkey’s record of development and recommended the country as a ‘model’ for the rest of the Muslim world. Yet Bush, like his Turkish counterparts, remained silent about Turkey’s Ottoman past. (He may also have been warned against making any feeble Ataturk jokes.) President Bush noted that Turkey, by virtue of its strategic location between the East and West, was in a position to play the role of a bridge-builder between the Occidental and Muslim worlds. He also claimed that Turkey was a model state by virtue of its respect for democracy and Constitutionalism.

Here lies the crux of the matter: Turkey’s modern republican constitution, which explicitly calls for the total separation of religion from state, is also one that favours the creation of a powerful centralised state with maximalist powers and the ability to police almost all aspects of public and private life. It is a country with a human rights record that few would want to emulate. It was Turkey that banned the use of the Kurdish language and expressions of Kurdish cultural identity. It was Turkey that forbade Muslim women entering the public sphere if they displayed their religious identity ‘ostensibly’. And it is the Turkish state that has defended its secular status via the routine persecution of Islamist organisations, parties and intellectuals. It is also the same Turkey, with its face turned perpetually to the West, that has supported the Americans in both their conflicts in the Gulf as well as their other foreign adventures. Is this the ‘model Muslim state’ that the rest of the Muslim world is meant to follow?

Turkey does indeed have a crucial place in Muslim history, but for the very reason the modern Turkish state wants to scrap from the memory: its past points to the inter-penetration and cross-cultivation of ideas between Asia and the Occident, Islam and Christendom. It remains, along with Moghul India and the Spanish Caliphate, an example of a time when Muslims could aspire to power and a global status without compromising their cultural and religious identity and not having to apologise for being Muslims.

As Fareed Zakaria has compellingly written, Turkey's reforms have left in a nearly unique position in the Islamic world: as a result of its Western democratic ideology and separation of Church and State, it's >per capita GDP is high enough that it is on the verge of being able to make the transition from illiberal to liberal democracy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 2, 2004 9:48 PM