Post by Bozur on Sept 26, 2005 19:06:17 GMT -5
The East in the West
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Published: September 25, 2005
On a warm Saturday night, beneath the cable car that runs up into the mountains from a quiet neighborhood in the historic Ottoman city of Bursa, the Teleferik Family Tea Garden is mobbed. Whole families from the farthest reaches of Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey, are crowded around tables in front of glasses of tea, watching a pair of guys with a keyboard sing arabesques and rock songs in Kurdish. The families have arrived in the past few years, a cashier explains, from Tunceli, a town at the epicenter of the terrorist campaign against the Turkish state that Kurdish guerrillas waged from 1984 to 1999. Most of the young women wear the loose-fitting headscarves traditional in Turkey; others, the more elaborate and constraining ones that are a mark of newer currents in political Islam. Still others are on the dance floor, uncovered, bare-armed, dancing in an implausibly immodest way they have probably seen on videos. None of the boys are far enough removed from village mores to dare join them. Watching the dancers impassively, their mothers, in headscarves and long rain jackets despite the heat, smoke cigarettes and chatter on cellphones.
Lynsey Addario/Corbis, for The New York Times
Urban Tradition
An open-air market in the conservative Fatih neighborhood of Istanbul.
Lynsey Addario/Corbis, for The New York Times
Strong Rulers
Banners heralding Ataturk and Erdogan, legendary founder of the republic and current prime minister, respectively, at a political conference outside Ankara.
This jostling together of European fads, age-old rural folkways and Islamic fervor has been a fact of Turkish life for a long time, especially in big provincial cities like Bursa. Imitating Europe was already an Ottoman project when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic in 1923. But thereafter, the Europeanization of its citizens became the state's mission, its raison d'être even. This meant modernizing industry, mores and the Turkish language. Mostly it meant pushing Islam out of the public square. There were bans on headscarves in university classes and at state jobs. There were government-trained imams who gave government-issued sermons on Fridays. Elites tended to approve Ataturk's vision; when they didn't, a huge standing army could be summoned to defend it.
And yet even as Turkey prepares to open membership negotiations with the European Union next week, the country's Europeanizing mission has been challenged, both at home and abroad. Turkey started petitioning for admission to the European Union's precursor organizations nearly half a century ago. Until the late 1990's, Europe wasn't interested. But embarrassed by persistent Turkish accusations that they were running a "Christian club," Europe's bureaucrats softened their stance. If Turkey could democratize according to the so-called Copenhagen criteria - by getting the army out of politics, eliminating the death penalty and expanding freedom of speech and religion, among other things - it could seek full E.U. membership. Turkey has complied, mostly. At a summit meeting last winter, the E.U. agreed to start talks this Oct. 3. There was cause for satisfaction on both sides. Turkey would get a ratification of its European identity from Europe itself. Europe would get a closer partnership with an economically dynamic Muslim country that has a long track record of keeping religious enthusiasm under control.
It looked different to the European on the street. French and Dutch voters rejected the union's proposed constitution last spring, citing worries about immigrant labor. A poll by the E.U.'s Eurobarometer service showed only 35 percent of Europeans favoring Turkish accession. So now, on the eve of negotiations, European politicians are looking for a face-saving way to leave Turkey at the altar. The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, spoke out in favor of delaying talks unless Turkey recognized the Greek part of Cyprus, which Turkey sees as a new condition. Germany's Christian Democrat leader, Angela Merkel, asked Turkey to be content with a "privileged partnership" rather than member status. It is not likely that Turks will consider that prize worth the self-abasement. Earlier this month, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told The Economist: "Should they propose anything short of full membership or any new conditions, we will walk away. And this time it will be for good."
What is unclear is where Turkey would walk away to. Back to its American ally, from whom the Iraq war has estranged it? Into ad hoc pacts with its neighbors Iran, Iraq, Syria and Russia? Or into the embrace of the worldwide Muslim umma? Maybe the failure of Turkey's E.U. candidacy could even cause Turks to renounce altogether their century-old aspiration of making themselves ever more European.
The Cultural Contradictions of Kemalism
Since the end of the cold war, the lid has come off Turkish life. Turkey's population is growing by nearly a million people a year, even as emigration to Europe continues. Suat Kiniklioglu, who heads the Turkish office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, says, "Urban Turkey is being overrun by the countryside." Take Bursa. In the 1980's, the city had fewer than a million people. Now it is at 1.5 million and swelling daily with newcomers from both the surrounding villages and places like Tunceli. The western edge of Bursa is as modern and European as any place in Turkey, with malls, trimmed lawns, "Beware of Dog" signs and the Renault and Fiat plants that are the backbone of the country's auto industry. But some of the newer apartment blocks near the Teleferik Family Tea Garden are home to people who work for village-level wages, practice a village-level piety and give their votes to the three-year-old Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party.
Maybe "Islamist" is a simplistic way of putting it, but maybe not. What Erdogan has sought to do since his party came to power in 2002 is to resolve some of the cultural contradictions of Ataturk's republic. The Turkish state has always tried to imitate the ways of Western democracies, but without giving the country's Muslim middle and lower-middle classes much voice in the matter. Turkey's masses are pious even by the standards of the Islamic world, though their piety has mostly been a private one, bearing scant resemblance to the authoritarian fundamentalism of the Saudi Wahhabis or the Iranian Khomeneiites. For almost all of the last century, they were too distant, too poor and too disorganized to demand a hearing. Yet whenever society has reclaimed a bit of power or freedom from the Turkish state, it has done so in the name of Islam or, at the very least, of traditional Turkish values. In a Turkish context, more democracy generally means more Islam.
The lesson has never been lost on Erdogan. In 1994, the Welfare Party, founded by the hard-line Islamist Necmettin Erbakan, swept big-city mayoral races across the country. Erdogan, who as a young man led the youth wing of a precursor to the Welfare Party, became mayor of Istanbul. The key to his success was that there were 11 million people living in and around Istanbul, six times the population of three decades before. Empty lots and unclaimed fields had filled up with houses and apartments known as gece kondu - a Turkish expression that means, roughly, "thrown up overnight." The devout, dirt-poor and disoriented new arrivals found in Erdogan a mayor who was one of them. It was not just that he himself had grown up a poor provincial in Istanbul (his family were sailors from the Black Sea) or that he had sold simit (Turkey's ubiquitous singed sesame bread rings) on street corners to pay for his schoolbooks or that his mighty baritone had made him a sought-after muezzin or that he eschewed alcohol (and even tried as mayor to ban it from the touristy neighborhood of Beyoglu). The new arrivals also respected him because he was a formidable organizer. He had studied management and understood how a modern municipality worked. In an era of endemic official corruption, he was accessible and relatively transparent. He was a maestro at bringing electricity and running water into the gece kondus and garbage and sewage out.
That first round of Turkish Islamism flamed out. When the Iranian ambassador sang the praises of fundalmentalism at a public rally, the army sent tanks into the street. This "postmodern coup," as it is called, eventually resulted in Erbakan's resignation and the banning of his party. Erdogan, meanwhile, was arrested, jailed and stripped of his mayoralty in 1998 for publicly reciting a poem about bayonets and minarets.
But events cut in Erdogan's favor. The 1997 coup did not do what it was meant to. It brought a wave of corruption that discredited all the establishment political parties. As 2000 turned to 2001, Turkey underwent a banking collapse and then a currency crash. Erdogan broke with Erbakan and founded the Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., in 2001 with the help of secular centrist politicians. He won an overwhelming parliamentary majority in elections the following year. He entered office in 2003 (once a ban on his holding office had been lifted) in very good shape. An International Monetary Fund bailout package gave him a road map for economic revival that he followed punctiliously. His mix of market economics and social conservatism won the support of newly prosperous Muslim entrepreneurs in the Anatolian heartland. And the perennial problem faced by any conservative Turkish politician - wooing the Muslim base while not scaring the staunchly secular army - was simplified greatly by Turkey's E.U. candidacy, which has always been understood to stand or fall on society's ability to keep the military out of public life.
Freedom and the Headscarf
Since Sept. 11, the West's biggest question about Turkey has been whether it forms part of the problem of an increasingly militant Islam or part of the solution. The E.U.'s rationale for welcoming Turkey into its councils and its economic sphere used to be a matter of "strategic rent," compensation for its position at a crossroads of continents and military blocs. Today, says Soli Ozel, a political scientist at Bilgi University, what Europe sees in Turkey is "an example that a modern, secular democratic state and capitalist society is compatible with a Muslim population." Europe has come to value Turkey not just for where it is but for what it is.
About a third of the Justice and Development Party's support comes from liberals who joined it in hopes that Erdogan's commitment to the European project would bring them visa-free travel, investment opportunities or equality for women. It is an open question which part of Erdogan's coalition is the dog and which the tail. He has shown signs of wanting to coax hard-line Islamists into the modernizing consensus. He has also shown signs of using Europe as a means to weaken the army to the point where he can pursue untrammeled an Islamist agenda of the sort he espoused a decade or two ago.
One of Erdogan's notorious pronouncements during his term as Istanbul mayor was that democracy was like a streetcar: "You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off." In the old days, he was one of those Islamist politicians who would not shake a woman's hand. Turkey's secular order still poses problems in his personal life - there have been state functions that his headscarf-wearing wife could not attend. And even as he has sought to Europeanize Turkey's political structures, he has lost few opportunities to Islamicize its social ones. Weeks before his visit to Brussels last December to make the final push for the start of Turkey's accession talks, he tried to change Turkish law to criminalize adultery. The A.K.P. has all but destroyed Turkey's fledgling wine industry with punitive taxes. And Erdogan has decriminalized "clandestine" Koran courses, even though they have been a meeting place for radicals of the Iran-backed Turkish Hezbollah movement.
Erdogan harps on the need for religious freedom - American-style religious freedom. Last year he explained to a German newspaper that secularism as the French understand it (i.e., as a state ideology) was not the Turkish way. "We Turks," he explained, "are closer to the Anglo-Saxon understanding of secularism" (i.e., as religious freedom). As regards the government, this assertion is preposterous: the Turkish system was not just inspired by, but copied from, the French. As regards the public, he is probably right. The increasing visibility of religion in Turkey has many of the same sources that it does in the United States. In a recent Pew poll that asked why Islam's role is increasing, the largest reason cited (by more than a third of Turks) was the "growing immorality in our society."
Erdogan opposes abortion and contraception, both of which are legal. But Turkey's hot-button issues of religion and state concern whether university women and civil servants should be permitted to wear the headscarf and whether young men who attend religious schools should be allowed to transfer their credentials to nonreligious programs. These pit the parliamentarians of Erdogan's party against the Higher Education Council, which appoints rectors who can veto laws that threaten universities' secular orientation. The council was established by the military government in 1980, when radical leftist and radical rightist students were murdering one another by the literal thousands. But over time, public patience with such supervision erodes. "Suppose the scarf is a political symbol against the secular republic," says Nazli Ilicak, a newspaper owner and columnist and an ally of Erdogan since before his A.K.P. days. "There is still no harm in their going to university. If you are against religion, let them go! They'll get more emancipated and have their own jobs."
More and more Turks share Ilicak's view that Islam and its symbols are compatible with modernity, are perhaps even a sign of modernity: a woman who aroused no comment on a goat path migrates to a city and stands out when she takes a computer class or sits in Starbucks. "It's not that people are more religious," says Can Paker, a businessman and analyst at Tesev, an Istanbul policy center. "It's that they are more free." And free, upwardly mobile women may choose to wear the veil for a variety of reasons. It can be a sign of solidarity with the family or small town left behind. It can be a marker of membership in a new rising elite. It can be simply chic. After all, the prime minister's wife wears one.
Sunni Rotarianism
Calls for veiling and more religious instruction are modern in another way. They reflect the increasing economic clout of provincial Muslims. Before the Ottoman Empire collapsed and its ethnic populations were reshuffled, most businessmen were Christians and Jews. It has taken a long time for the Muslims who took over their functions to build up father-and-son firms into big national and international ones. But now they have done it, aided by a kind of Sunni Rotarianism. Muslim obligations of zakat, or charitable tithing, inevitably turn the country's rural businessmen into important community leaders and lead them into clubby (and formal) fraternal arrangements. The challenge to political establishments posed by powerful entrepreneurs espousing traditional values is familiar from the American Sun Belt or the Canadian or Australian west.
A natural affinity is developing between Erdogan's party and the most innovative sectors of the economy. For years, the centralized Turkish state bought social peace by creating jobs in state-backed industries, which are now a drag on the economy. About a sixth of the work force is still in the public sector, and its interests are protected by aggressive unions. The A.K.P.'s voters, however, are almost by definition outsiders to this statist system and have no stake in defending it.
No political party in Turkey has ever found itself more often in the Thatcherite role. Erdogan fought the public-sector paper company SEKA, which used to dump tons of chlorine into the Bay of Izmit while losing tons of money. Despite a 51-day occupation of the factory by militant workers, he succeeded in closing down the plant. He is now fighting to privatize Erdemir, the public steel company - a fight that pits him not only against Erdemir's unions but also against supporters of the army, who have argued for its strategic importance. When Erdogan visited Diyarbakir, an impoverished eastern city, in August, a heckler called on him to build more factories. "Listen, my friend," Erdogan replied, according to a report in the English-language Turkish Daily News. "The A.K.P. government will not build any factories here." Instead he promoted a new enterprise-zone law his government had passed, which offered tax rebates and utility discounts to private companies. "What else do you want?" he asked. "Don't get used to freebies."
The provincial cities where Sunni Rotarianism flourishes - Denizli, Gaziantep, Urfa, Konya and others - are called the Anatolian Tigers. One of the more important is the 5,000-year-old Silk Road trading town Kayseri, which now makes furniture, beds, textiles, carpets and denim. Mehmet Ozhaseki, the mayor of Kayseri, is a direct fellow who wears a dapper gray suit and the regulation A.K.P. thick mustache. Close to Erdogan, he is one of the mayors who came to power in the Welfare Party's Islamist wave of 1994. Ozhaseki received 72 percent of the popular vote in the last election. He attributes his success locally to good government and the A.K.P.'s nationally to its perceived freedom from corruption. He says, "People never give their votes saying, 'They can be corrupted like other parties, but at least they're Islamic."' He notes that the headscarf ranks seventh or eighth when voters are asked what's on their minds; jobs generally top the list.
So what interests Ozhaseki is managing the monsoon of social change. Last year, 139 factories opened in Kayseri, and dozens of 15-story apartment blocks are under construction on Kayseri's outskirts. Kayseri had 100,000 people in the 1950's. It has 750,000 today and will have a million in five years. Traditionally, this growth came from agricultural villages nearby, but now Kayseri is one of many Turkish cities getting not just migrants but also immigrants. Local residents say thousands of Iranians live and work in Kayseri. In Turkey as a whole, estimates of the number of "irregular" immigrants - from Iran, Syria and elsewhere - run as high as a million.
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Published: September 25, 2005
On a warm Saturday night, beneath the cable car that runs up into the mountains from a quiet neighborhood in the historic Ottoman city of Bursa, the Teleferik Family Tea Garden is mobbed. Whole families from the farthest reaches of Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey, are crowded around tables in front of glasses of tea, watching a pair of guys with a keyboard sing arabesques and rock songs in Kurdish. The families have arrived in the past few years, a cashier explains, from Tunceli, a town at the epicenter of the terrorist campaign against the Turkish state that Kurdish guerrillas waged from 1984 to 1999. Most of the young women wear the loose-fitting headscarves traditional in Turkey; others, the more elaborate and constraining ones that are a mark of newer currents in political Islam. Still others are on the dance floor, uncovered, bare-armed, dancing in an implausibly immodest way they have probably seen on videos. None of the boys are far enough removed from village mores to dare join them. Watching the dancers impassively, their mothers, in headscarves and long rain jackets despite the heat, smoke cigarettes and chatter on cellphones.
Lynsey Addario/Corbis, for The New York Times
Urban Tradition
An open-air market in the conservative Fatih neighborhood of Istanbul.
Lynsey Addario/Corbis, for The New York Times
Strong Rulers
Banners heralding Ataturk and Erdogan, legendary founder of the republic and current prime minister, respectively, at a political conference outside Ankara.
This jostling together of European fads, age-old rural folkways and Islamic fervor has been a fact of Turkish life for a long time, especially in big provincial cities like Bursa. Imitating Europe was already an Ottoman project when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic in 1923. But thereafter, the Europeanization of its citizens became the state's mission, its raison d'être even. This meant modernizing industry, mores and the Turkish language. Mostly it meant pushing Islam out of the public square. There were bans on headscarves in university classes and at state jobs. There were government-trained imams who gave government-issued sermons on Fridays. Elites tended to approve Ataturk's vision; when they didn't, a huge standing army could be summoned to defend it.
And yet even as Turkey prepares to open membership negotiations with the European Union next week, the country's Europeanizing mission has been challenged, both at home and abroad. Turkey started petitioning for admission to the European Union's precursor organizations nearly half a century ago. Until the late 1990's, Europe wasn't interested. But embarrassed by persistent Turkish accusations that they were running a "Christian club," Europe's bureaucrats softened their stance. If Turkey could democratize according to the so-called Copenhagen criteria - by getting the army out of politics, eliminating the death penalty and expanding freedom of speech and religion, among other things - it could seek full E.U. membership. Turkey has complied, mostly. At a summit meeting last winter, the E.U. agreed to start talks this Oct. 3. There was cause for satisfaction on both sides. Turkey would get a ratification of its European identity from Europe itself. Europe would get a closer partnership with an economically dynamic Muslim country that has a long track record of keeping religious enthusiasm under control.
It looked different to the European on the street. French and Dutch voters rejected the union's proposed constitution last spring, citing worries about immigrant labor. A poll by the E.U.'s Eurobarometer service showed only 35 percent of Europeans favoring Turkish accession. So now, on the eve of negotiations, European politicians are looking for a face-saving way to leave Turkey at the altar. The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, spoke out in favor of delaying talks unless Turkey recognized the Greek part of Cyprus, which Turkey sees as a new condition. Germany's Christian Democrat leader, Angela Merkel, asked Turkey to be content with a "privileged partnership" rather than member status. It is not likely that Turks will consider that prize worth the self-abasement. Earlier this month, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told The Economist: "Should they propose anything short of full membership or any new conditions, we will walk away. And this time it will be for good."
What is unclear is where Turkey would walk away to. Back to its American ally, from whom the Iraq war has estranged it? Into ad hoc pacts with its neighbors Iran, Iraq, Syria and Russia? Or into the embrace of the worldwide Muslim umma? Maybe the failure of Turkey's E.U. candidacy could even cause Turks to renounce altogether their century-old aspiration of making themselves ever more European.
The Cultural Contradictions of Kemalism
Since the end of the cold war, the lid has come off Turkish life. Turkey's population is growing by nearly a million people a year, even as emigration to Europe continues. Suat Kiniklioglu, who heads the Turkish office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, says, "Urban Turkey is being overrun by the countryside." Take Bursa. In the 1980's, the city had fewer than a million people. Now it is at 1.5 million and swelling daily with newcomers from both the surrounding villages and places like Tunceli. The western edge of Bursa is as modern and European as any place in Turkey, with malls, trimmed lawns, "Beware of Dog" signs and the Renault and Fiat plants that are the backbone of the country's auto industry. But some of the newer apartment blocks near the Teleferik Family Tea Garden are home to people who work for village-level wages, practice a village-level piety and give their votes to the three-year-old Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party.
Maybe "Islamist" is a simplistic way of putting it, but maybe not. What Erdogan has sought to do since his party came to power in 2002 is to resolve some of the cultural contradictions of Ataturk's republic. The Turkish state has always tried to imitate the ways of Western democracies, but without giving the country's Muslim middle and lower-middle classes much voice in the matter. Turkey's masses are pious even by the standards of the Islamic world, though their piety has mostly been a private one, bearing scant resemblance to the authoritarian fundamentalism of the Saudi Wahhabis or the Iranian Khomeneiites. For almost all of the last century, they were too distant, too poor and too disorganized to demand a hearing. Yet whenever society has reclaimed a bit of power or freedom from the Turkish state, it has done so in the name of Islam or, at the very least, of traditional Turkish values. In a Turkish context, more democracy generally means more Islam.
The lesson has never been lost on Erdogan. In 1994, the Welfare Party, founded by the hard-line Islamist Necmettin Erbakan, swept big-city mayoral races across the country. Erdogan, who as a young man led the youth wing of a precursor to the Welfare Party, became mayor of Istanbul. The key to his success was that there were 11 million people living in and around Istanbul, six times the population of three decades before. Empty lots and unclaimed fields had filled up with houses and apartments known as gece kondu - a Turkish expression that means, roughly, "thrown up overnight." The devout, dirt-poor and disoriented new arrivals found in Erdogan a mayor who was one of them. It was not just that he himself had grown up a poor provincial in Istanbul (his family were sailors from the Black Sea) or that he had sold simit (Turkey's ubiquitous singed sesame bread rings) on street corners to pay for his schoolbooks or that his mighty baritone had made him a sought-after muezzin or that he eschewed alcohol (and even tried as mayor to ban it from the touristy neighborhood of Beyoglu). The new arrivals also respected him because he was a formidable organizer. He had studied management and understood how a modern municipality worked. In an era of endemic official corruption, he was accessible and relatively transparent. He was a maestro at bringing electricity and running water into the gece kondus and garbage and sewage out.
That first round of Turkish Islamism flamed out. When the Iranian ambassador sang the praises of fundalmentalism at a public rally, the army sent tanks into the street. This "postmodern coup," as it is called, eventually resulted in Erbakan's resignation and the banning of his party. Erdogan, meanwhile, was arrested, jailed and stripped of his mayoralty in 1998 for publicly reciting a poem about bayonets and minarets.
But events cut in Erdogan's favor. The 1997 coup did not do what it was meant to. It brought a wave of corruption that discredited all the establishment political parties. As 2000 turned to 2001, Turkey underwent a banking collapse and then a currency crash. Erdogan broke with Erbakan and founded the Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., in 2001 with the help of secular centrist politicians. He won an overwhelming parliamentary majority in elections the following year. He entered office in 2003 (once a ban on his holding office had been lifted) in very good shape. An International Monetary Fund bailout package gave him a road map for economic revival that he followed punctiliously. His mix of market economics and social conservatism won the support of newly prosperous Muslim entrepreneurs in the Anatolian heartland. And the perennial problem faced by any conservative Turkish politician - wooing the Muslim base while not scaring the staunchly secular army - was simplified greatly by Turkey's E.U. candidacy, which has always been understood to stand or fall on society's ability to keep the military out of public life.
Freedom and the Headscarf
Since Sept. 11, the West's biggest question about Turkey has been whether it forms part of the problem of an increasingly militant Islam or part of the solution. The E.U.'s rationale for welcoming Turkey into its councils and its economic sphere used to be a matter of "strategic rent," compensation for its position at a crossroads of continents and military blocs. Today, says Soli Ozel, a political scientist at Bilgi University, what Europe sees in Turkey is "an example that a modern, secular democratic state and capitalist society is compatible with a Muslim population." Europe has come to value Turkey not just for where it is but for what it is.
About a third of the Justice and Development Party's support comes from liberals who joined it in hopes that Erdogan's commitment to the European project would bring them visa-free travel, investment opportunities or equality for women. It is an open question which part of Erdogan's coalition is the dog and which the tail. He has shown signs of wanting to coax hard-line Islamists into the modernizing consensus. He has also shown signs of using Europe as a means to weaken the army to the point where he can pursue untrammeled an Islamist agenda of the sort he espoused a decade or two ago.
One of Erdogan's notorious pronouncements during his term as Istanbul mayor was that democracy was like a streetcar: "You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off." In the old days, he was one of those Islamist politicians who would not shake a woman's hand. Turkey's secular order still poses problems in his personal life - there have been state functions that his headscarf-wearing wife could not attend. And even as he has sought to Europeanize Turkey's political structures, he has lost few opportunities to Islamicize its social ones. Weeks before his visit to Brussels last December to make the final push for the start of Turkey's accession talks, he tried to change Turkish law to criminalize adultery. The A.K.P. has all but destroyed Turkey's fledgling wine industry with punitive taxes. And Erdogan has decriminalized "clandestine" Koran courses, even though they have been a meeting place for radicals of the Iran-backed Turkish Hezbollah movement.
Erdogan harps on the need for religious freedom - American-style religious freedom. Last year he explained to a German newspaper that secularism as the French understand it (i.e., as a state ideology) was not the Turkish way. "We Turks," he explained, "are closer to the Anglo-Saxon understanding of secularism" (i.e., as religious freedom). As regards the government, this assertion is preposterous: the Turkish system was not just inspired by, but copied from, the French. As regards the public, he is probably right. The increasing visibility of religion in Turkey has many of the same sources that it does in the United States. In a recent Pew poll that asked why Islam's role is increasing, the largest reason cited (by more than a third of Turks) was the "growing immorality in our society."
Erdogan opposes abortion and contraception, both of which are legal. But Turkey's hot-button issues of religion and state concern whether university women and civil servants should be permitted to wear the headscarf and whether young men who attend religious schools should be allowed to transfer their credentials to nonreligious programs. These pit the parliamentarians of Erdogan's party against the Higher Education Council, which appoints rectors who can veto laws that threaten universities' secular orientation. The council was established by the military government in 1980, when radical leftist and radical rightist students were murdering one another by the literal thousands. But over time, public patience with such supervision erodes. "Suppose the scarf is a political symbol against the secular republic," says Nazli Ilicak, a newspaper owner and columnist and an ally of Erdogan since before his A.K.P. days. "There is still no harm in their going to university. If you are against religion, let them go! They'll get more emancipated and have their own jobs."
More and more Turks share Ilicak's view that Islam and its symbols are compatible with modernity, are perhaps even a sign of modernity: a woman who aroused no comment on a goat path migrates to a city and stands out when she takes a computer class or sits in Starbucks. "It's not that people are more religious," says Can Paker, a businessman and analyst at Tesev, an Istanbul policy center. "It's that they are more free." And free, upwardly mobile women may choose to wear the veil for a variety of reasons. It can be a sign of solidarity with the family or small town left behind. It can be a marker of membership in a new rising elite. It can be simply chic. After all, the prime minister's wife wears one.
Sunni Rotarianism
Calls for veiling and more religious instruction are modern in another way. They reflect the increasing economic clout of provincial Muslims. Before the Ottoman Empire collapsed and its ethnic populations were reshuffled, most businessmen were Christians and Jews. It has taken a long time for the Muslims who took over their functions to build up father-and-son firms into big national and international ones. But now they have done it, aided by a kind of Sunni Rotarianism. Muslim obligations of zakat, or charitable tithing, inevitably turn the country's rural businessmen into important community leaders and lead them into clubby (and formal) fraternal arrangements. The challenge to political establishments posed by powerful entrepreneurs espousing traditional values is familiar from the American Sun Belt or the Canadian or Australian west.
A natural affinity is developing between Erdogan's party and the most innovative sectors of the economy. For years, the centralized Turkish state bought social peace by creating jobs in state-backed industries, which are now a drag on the economy. About a sixth of the work force is still in the public sector, and its interests are protected by aggressive unions. The A.K.P.'s voters, however, are almost by definition outsiders to this statist system and have no stake in defending it.
No political party in Turkey has ever found itself more often in the Thatcherite role. Erdogan fought the public-sector paper company SEKA, which used to dump tons of chlorine into the Bay of Izmit while losing tons of money. Despite a 51-day occupation of the factory by militant workers, he succeeded in closing down the plant. He is now fighting to privatize Erdemir, the public steel company - a fight that pits him not only against Erdemir's unions but also against supporters of the army, who have argued for its strategic importance. When Erdogan visited Diyarbakir, an impoverished eastern city, in August, a heckler called on him to build more factories. "Listen, my friend," Erdogan replied, according to a report in the English-language Turkish Daily News. "The A.K.P. government will not build any factories here." Instead he promoted a new enterprise-zone law his government had passed, which offered tax rebates and utility discounts to private companies. "What else do you want?" he asked. "Don't get used to freebies."
The provincial cities where Sunni Rotarianism flourishes - Denizli, Gaziantep, Urfa, Konya and others - are called the Anatolian Tigers. One of the more important is the 5,000-year-old Silk Road trading town Kayseri, which now makes furniture, beds, textiles, carpets and denim. Mehmet Ozhaseki, the mayor of Kayseri, is a direct fellow who wears a dapper gray suit and the regulation A.K.P. thick mustache. Close to Erdogan, he is one of the mayors who came to power in the Welfare Party's Islamist wave of 1994. Ozhaseki received 72 percent of the popular vote in the last election. He attributes his success locally to good government and the A.K.P.'s nationally to its perceived freedom from corruption. He says, "People never give their votes saying, 'They can be corrupted like other parties, but at least they're Islamic."' He notes that the headscarf ranks seventh or eighth when voters are asked what's on their minds; jobs generally top the list.
So what interests Ozhaseki is managing the monsoon of social change. Last year, 139 factories opened in Kayseri, and dozens of 15-story apartment blocks are under construction on Kayseri's outskirts. Kayseri had 100,000 people in the 1950's. It has 750,000 today and will have a million in five years. Traditionally, this growth came from agricultural villages nearby, but now Kayseri is one of many Turkish cities getting not just migrants but also immigrants. Local residents say thousands of Iranians live and work in Kayseri. In Turkey as a whole, estimates of the number of "irregular" immigrants - from Iran, Syria and elsewhere - run as high as a million.