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Christopher de Bellaigue's important report on Turkey in the current New York Review of Books has a deceptively prosaic title, not least because it means exactly what it says: "Turkey at the Turning Point?" It begins, with refreshing straightforwardness, with its topic sentence, an expository practice that has woefully fallen out of fashion.
It is now clear that Turkey, a country to which Western visitors have often applied adjectives such as "timeless" and "slothful," is changing profoundly, and with un-Oriental speed. To the many Turks who welcome this transformation, it holds out the promise of a free public culture, equally open to devout Muslims, secularists, and critics of Turkey's past politicssomething the country has never known. A smaller but nonetheless considerable number see the changes as a Trojan horse for Islamism as severe as one finds in Iran or Saudi Arabia. These two views come into sharp conflict on the subject of Abdullah Gül, whom the Turkish parliament recently elected president.
In Turkey, a nation that lies between the Middle East and Europe without really straddling either, many of the associations that Arabs and Persians and Europeans alike make between Islam and the state either break down or are fully inverted. The conservatives in Turkey are the Kemalists, somewhat ossified devotees of Atatürk's strident secularism. These elites, concentrated in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir (Smyrna), find themselves in increasing contention with a new class of Turk: the moderately observant Muslim who is also commercially successful. It is as though a line of atheistical rulers, determined to uphold the teachings of Voltaire, were suppressing the pious but unfanatical observances of urban merchants - the nation's principal taxpayers. Unlike the disadvantaged and, without Islam, disaffected young men throughout the Middle East who have nothing to lose, religious Turks have, for the most part, no interest in upsetting apple carts. The formerly radical Islamists who are now their leaders - Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoĝan and President Abdullah Gül - have come round to some astonishing compromises. They push for the right of women to wear head scarves - the issue, that, it's worth remembering, prompted Orhan Pamuk's most recent novel, Snow - but not too hard, while dramatically liberalizing the laws that protect women.
Although it came to power promising satisfaction to those who chafe at the head-scarf ban, a highly controversial symbol of the secularIslamist divide, it did not, in its first term, try to reverse this ban, and the sixty-two women it put up for election in July were all bare-headed. Moreover, over the past few years, the government has brought about what a recent report on women's rights from the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based think tank, called "the most radical changes to the legal status of Turkish women in 80 years." Under these reforms, rape in marriage and sexual harassment in the workplace were made criminal offenses, and sexual crimes in general were classified as violations of the rights of the individual. They had formerly been defined as crimes against society, the family, or public morality.
The government is also preparing, "behind closed doors," a new constitution that will grant Turkish Kurds unprecedented rights to cultural autonomy. Can this be as canny as it looks? Might Ankara really have hit on a solution to the problem of Kurdish independence - sure to be a bombshell in the event that Iraq is partitioned - that makes Turkey itself, of all places, the most desirable spot in which to live a Kurdish life. Kurdish political parties, after all, are marked by fratricidally internecine strife; maybe a majority of Kurds would be happy to trade leaving law and order to the Turks in exchange for the right to a Catalonian-style autonomy. And, as I noted yesterday, President Gül has publically questioned the utility of Article 103, the law that punishes "insults to Turkish identity." Article 301 is, essentially, legislation of a secular, Kemalist stamp; it would be wrong to see it, as I suspect most Western passing-glancers do, as a flare-up of wounded Islamic self-respect. Mr Erdoĝan and Mr Gül have little interest in promoting it.
The rosiness of this picture is blighted to a great extent by the prematurity of Turkey's bid to join the European Union. This amazing development has prompted profound resistance from Europeans and Turks alike, and made the governing elites on both sides of the table look naively out of touch with popular sentiment. Nikolas Sarkozy has exploited the indigestible proposition in his mercurial way; to listen to him at times, you would think that the Turks are at the gates of Vienna, as they were in 1683, and from which, as it would appear that the the French president has forgotten - they were permanently and diminishingly repulsed. M Sarkozy has many Turkish counterparts. Ironically, they are not all observant Muslims. Yaşar Büyükanıt, the military chief who obstructed Mr Gül's first bid for the presidency, last spring, "has hinted that the EU is trying to dismember Turkey by supporting Kurdish nationalists and other minorities, and by demanding a formal recognition of the 1915 Aremian massacres." But there you have Kemalism in a nutshell: exploiting the best of the West while remaining resolutely independent of it.
What I have not seen very much of in recent reportage about Turkey - Mr Bellaigue's essay included - is the fallout of the end of the Cold War. Nobody remembers - nobody, perhaps, but Vladimir Putin - the designs harbored by Czars and Russian Metropolitans alike upon the reconquest of Constantinople, all the way through the Nineteenth Century. This was one of the reasons for Turkey's disastrous alliance with Germany and Austria in the First World War, and it also explains Turkey's ultra-staunch alliance with the United States and NATO. The political considerations that determined postwar Turkish foreign policy, however, have either withered away or, as in the case of the Kurdish question, metamorphosed into something difficult both to imagine and to accommodate.
European diplomats used to pay Turkey the back-handed compliment of calling it "the sick man of Europe." Today, Turkey is the prosperous straddler of the Bosporus, with a toe in Europe and a vast Anatolian peninsula that is only nominally "Asian." It may not be a coming giant, like India or China, any more than it is the superpower that it was in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. But Mr Bellaigue is right to talk of turning points. Turkey is an important country that is pivoting on axes that are as of yet only partially visible. Everything that we think we know about Turkey (and I think I can include Turks themselves among us) is likely to be wrong, or at least badly misleading. Every scrap of sense that we can lay claim to is precious, and Christopher de Bellaigue's report will at least tell us how difficult those scraps are to come by. (October 2007)
Copyright (c) 2007 Pourover Press