ANKARA: When the Kocatepe mosque first opened in 1987, it came as a shock to Turkey’s political system. Above ground, the cement neo-Ottoman structure reared its domes and minarets on a hill, defiantly facing the mausoleum where lies Turkey’s secular founder, Kemal Ataturk. Underground, snuggled a two-level shopping mall. Not only was it one of the biggest religious complexes in the Muslim world, it was a direct economic challenge to the commercial status quo where Kemalist elites controlled the majority of capital.
Until then, shopping centers had only existed in solidly upper crust Republican neighborhoods. Now, Turkey’s religious majority had combined mosque and mall and was finally facing down the dominant class. In the next decade, the Nineties, Turkey’s conservative industrialists came in from the religious hinterland to claim for themselves the moniker “Anatolian tigers.” Sleepy backwaters such as Kayseri and Gazyantepe turned into boomtowns.
The ruling AK Party’s (AKP) new assertive Middle Eastern policy draws confidence from these humble commercial beginnings. Equally, when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan very publicly chastises Israel, he has one eye not so much on the Arab street as Arab markets. A popular theory doing the rounds in Turkey is that the AKP could afford to turn away the IMF last year because of billions of dollars of direct Arab investments in Turkey.
The AKP’s strong rhetoric during June’s Gaza flotilla incident is part of a trend that has been described since 2007 as neo-Ottomanism. Just as the House of Osman’s expansionism was driven by profit, so the new Turkish political-bazaari class is motivated both by Islamic traditionalism and the thirst for new markets.
Direct flights to Kabul are packed with businessmen. Kabul’s sandbag-shielded bars buzz with the sound of Turkish and so do its Sufi séances. Turkish restaurateurs feed Libya’s oil-fuelled boom, and its construction magnates sign contracts to shape Tripoli’s steel-and-glass skyline. Brazilian-style soap operas featuring amorous escapades set against glamorous lifestyles hold Syrian, Egyptian and Emirati TV audiences spellbound with an alternative vision of how Muslims could live. Arab tourists increasingly visit Istanbul, not to sample its Ottoman cuisine and architecture but to walk around the districts where favorite soap operas were filmed. Politically, Erdogan has usurped Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the world stage as the Muslim leader who dares tell it as it is.
Over the past two years, Erdogan spun NATO member Turkey away from its traditionally pro-Western foreign policy. He famously walked out of a debate with Shimon Peres at the Davos Forum in 2009 after publicly accusing Israel of mendacity for continuing to negotiate on Syria even while it planned to invade Gaza in 2008. This June, even urbane foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu lost his calm during a closed-door security conference in Istanbul and issued a red-faced ultimatum to the Israeli ambassador that his state could no longer continue behaving unilaterally, one of the diplomats present reported.
“On the one hand they’re pushing away Israel, on the other they’re coming closer to the Arab and Muslim world, as if one step is a consequence of the other,” said Dogan Tilic, a leftist and author of Utaniyorum ama gazeteciyim (I’m Ashamed to Admit I Am a Journalist). “Israel has no commercial significance for Turkey while the Arab Middle East is a huge market for Turkey so these frictions are not just because of Erdogan’s ideological background but there are also commercial and political reasons.”
As Asia’s westernmost country, Turkey engaged with the West just after its founding upon the ashes of an Ottoman Empire whose territories once stretched to the walls of Vienna. Mustafa Kemal, a westernizing leader from the Greek port city of Salonica, discarded the Arabic alphabet for the Latin one, imposed classical music over folk songs, banned Sufi brotherhoods, turbans and all other examples of what he considered superstitious folk religion.
During the Cold War, Turkey became a western bulwark. Currently, it has the ninth largest number of troops in Afghanistan. And despite the economic crisis roiling the European Union, Ankara still nourishes help of entering the western club.
Nevertheless, Turkish politics were and remain tinged by Ataturk’s distrust of the West. Despite embracing western culture, he could not forget how the Allies encouraged the Greeks to invade in 1919, hoping it would prompt the dismemberment of the tottering Ottoman edifice. He was similarly aware that, at the end of World War One, the British and French navies moved to within striking distance of the metropolis on the Bosporus. With this in mind, Ataturk created a new capital safe from seaborne intervention in the epicenter of the Anatolian landmass.
Now, Turkey has regained its confidence. Erdogan is refocusing Turkish foreign policy onto the Middle East and the Balkans, and he increasingly holds high-profile meetings in the old seat of Ottoman government, Istanbul. At the same time, he continues to modernize the country by presiding over the greatest expansion of government-funded, low-cost public accommodation through a government subsidiary known as TOKI. Battalions of high-rises have sprung up across Anatolia, forever changing the traditional way of life.
“It encourages individualism,” said Christos Teazis, a Turkey specialist who wrote his dissertation on the AK Party. “When urbanization started in the 1950s, entire villages were transplanted into the city as neighborhoods. These apartments destroyed this phenomenon by breaking the culture of living with family relatives and encouraging the atomization of the living unit.”
Turkish society is changing too. The very public struggle over wearing the hijab in official buildings was settled in favor of the government’s preference for lifting the ban. On breakfast TV shows, university professors have been replaced as experts by theology researchers who give opinions based on the Koran.
“Turkey is coming full circle after 150 years or so, and looking beyond even the confines of the Ottoman state,” argues Graham Fuller, a former CIA analyst and author of The New Turkish Republic and A World Without Islam who believes that Ottomanism is still relevant. “You still have the meaningful Turkish-Turanian past, one of the most widespread language groups in the world, distant links to universal cultures like the Mongol Empire, Turkish influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia and Turkish roots in China.”
When Fethullah Gulen, a religious icon for millions of Turks, broke his silence from his US exile to criticize the Gaza flotilla raid, it gave an insight into how the rise of Muslim influence in Turkish politics is splintering the Islamist front and bringing its infighting into the open. Erdogan was a one-time disciple of Gulen but, worried more than ever that Washington is looking to unseat him, he appears to have moved away from his mentor. Erdogan has recently publicly stated that “the Turkish nation knows very well on whose behalf the terrorist organization works as a subcontractor.”
“The sun no longer rises and falls on western preferences,” said Fuller. “The foreign policy vision of Davutoglu is sweeping and likely to persist in one form or another after the AK Party falls from power.”
At one of Ankara’s chic malls, Teazis is hanging out, watching the crowds pass. “It’s a sign of the times,” he says, “when the ones buying a lot are the covered ladies while the uncovered secular ones just window-shop.”
Iason Athanasiadis – Journalist based in Istanbul. He covers Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia. Since 1999, he has lived in Cairo, Damascus, Doha, Sana’a and Tehran.
