Islamism by Tarek Osman

Author:Tarek Osman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300197723
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER EIGHT

Turkish Islamism as a Model for the Arab World

At least 15,000 Egyptians, mostly young, holding posters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and chanting slogans of an ‘Islamic caliphate’, welcomed the Turkish prime minister as he emerged from Cairo airport in September 2011, less than nine months after the removal of President Mubarak. Wherever Erdogan went in his three days in Cairo, scores of young Islamists surrounded his convoy and waited for him at his destination, hailing him as an Islamic hero.

For millions of Islamists across the Arab world, Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) had come to represent the ultimate political success they had dreamt of. In slightly over a decade, that party, led by that man, had come to dominate the politics of the one country in the Islamic world that, for three-quarters of a century, had been subject to a highly assertive programme of secularization and de-Islamization. So too, the fact that the AKP’s rise to power and consolidation of authority were far from easy further inspired Arab Islamists; many looked to the AKP’s experience as a model to emulate.

Modern Turkey was the creation of a group of Turkish nationalists (the vast majority of them from the Ottoman armed forces) who believed that the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in the First World War and its subsequent demise offered Turkey a chance to emerge from the ruins of empire as an independent country, looking forward to a Europe-inspired modernity rather than remaining shackled to an Islamic heritage. These nationalists’ ideas rested on those of various modernization movements that had begun in Istanbul in the mid-nineteenth century, when the empire was going through the various political, social and administrative reforms that came to be known as the Tanzimat (Organizing Concepts).1 The First World War not only crushed the empire; it humiliated the Turks. By the end of the war, not only had Turkey lost all its Ottoman possessions, but foreign troops (including those of historical arch-enemies, such as Greece) were on Turkish soil. The Ottoman leadership was conquered, the country’s political structure in meltdown. And yet, amid the military defeat, the political chaos and the collapse of the administrative bureaucracy, and despite the presence of foreign armies in various parts of the country, Turkey managed to bring together sections of its armed forces, civil service and civil society to resurrect the skeleton of a central command, which enabled it to fight the invaders, formulate a coherent message to the people who were watching the fall of everything they had known, and ultimately negotiate with the First World War’s victors – a political deal that was, by any standards, extremely favourable to a country that was on the losing side. This achievement came about thanks to the efforts of thousands of brave Turkish soldiers and peasants who had abandoned their farms to fight for their country, as well as to the tenacity and courage of at least two dozen military leaders. But at the core of that inspiring episode in Turkish history lay the genius of one man, a senior Ottoman general named Mustafa Kemal Pasha.

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