Turkey, Secularism and the Need for Eternal Vigilance

by Hugh Fitzgerald (October 2009)

The many decades during which the systematic attempt, by Ataturk to remove Islam in Turkey from the political sphere and to limit its power to fashion society, over time managed to allow the formation of a class of Turks who, in their mental outlook are not as distant from Western man as are, say, Arabs or Pakistanis.

But so many people have come from the villages to Istanbul, and instead of finding their Islamic faith weakened or diluted in the face of what might otherwise unhinge them, suddenly encountering and being jostled by a different world, may seek mental and emotional relief in more, not less, Islam and they cling ever more closely to the stability and certainty that Islam provides. Islam never went away.

But if you were a historian, say an Ottomanist, doing research in the Archives in the 1960s, or writing a book on the history of Modern Turkey, or a general from a NATO country meeting with a Turkish counterpart in Ankara, you might reasonably assume that the people of the secular class you met, and many of whom were extremely friendly and kind in a way that to you seemed (and was) genuine, were representative and permanent.

But reliance on the military in Turkey, the certainty that it would always be there to rescue the situation, had a bad effect. For it allowed the secular class to think that Kemalism would always be there, was unassailable.

O.A.C. and a rushing-to-judgment Obama Administration. In fact, the

A coup here and a coup there, and a coup everywhere, might work, temporarily, but what really needs to be changed are the minds of men. And the journalists, the university rectors, the professors, the people who, thanks to their benefiting from the Kemalist reforms that tied political Islam in knots, underestimated the cunning of the erdogans and guls and gulens of this world, did not do what they should have done. They were insufficiently vigilant in further extending what Ataturk set out to do.

No, the Turkish secularists should have not let a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour go by, without pushing into the consciousness of the Turkish public the sheer awfulness of the mullahs and of the practice of Islam in Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran. They should have played upon the natural impulse of Turks to declare their dislike, or even hatred, of the Arabs, and started a line of public discussion centered on all the ways in which Islam has been a vehicle of Arab supremacism.

No, reliance on the army alone was never enough. There is still time for those who have most benefited from Kemalism to assume their own responsibility not merely for defending what Ataturk achieved, but in ruthlessly, and relentlessly, extending his reforms, so that the secular class of Turks will swell from one-quarter of the population to something like one-half. That should do it. But the rule must be to never let down your guard when it comes to the True Believers. For they never give up.

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