Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (24 page)

In the Ottoman Empire, the Young Ottomans were the best example of the liberal tradition. They devised, as we saw in the previous chapter, an ideology that was both liberal and Islamic. But among the Young Turks, who emerged some three decades after the Young Ottomans, the other tendency to which Lewis refers started to emerge. It was both illiberal and anti-Islamic.

This was particularly evident in one strain of the Young Turk movement called Garpçılar (i.e., Westernists). Almost all late-Ottoman intellectuals were influenced by the West in one way or another, but the Garpçılar were distinct in that their sources of inspiration were the materialist and antireligious thinkers of France and Germany—such as Baron d’Holbach, the passionate eighteenth-century proponent of atheism, and Ludwig Büchner, the exponent of “scientific materialism.” These European secularists attacked Christianity, while their Young Turk admirers would argue that both Christianity and Islam were “the same nonsense.”
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Abdullah Cevdet, the leading figure of the Garpçılar, was convinced that religion was one of the greatest obstacles to human progress, and that it had to be replaced by science.

While the Garpçılar proved to be a marginal movement during the Ottoman Empire, its members had a golden opportunity to advance their philosophy with the establishment of the Turkish Republic. Mustafa Kemal, one of their disciples, was determined to shape the new regime based on their agenda. “Doctor, until now you have written about many things,” he said to Abdullah Cevdet in 1925, as the latter wrote in his memoirs. “Now we may bring them to realization.”
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T
HE
D
ICTATORSHIP OF THE
S
ECULATARIAT

Although Mustafa Kemal was determined to achieve his secularist goals, his vision was not the only alternative for the Turkish Republic during its genesis. The preceding War of Liberation (1919–22) was led by a democratic parliament, convened in Ankara, which included deputies with diverse views and backgrounds. Right after the war, the deputies who supported the views and the persona of Mustafa Kemal—the Kemalists—founded the Republican People’s Party (RPP). Other prominent names, including war heroes Kazım Karabekir and Ali Fuat Cebesoy and feminist writer Halide Edip, founded a competing party, the Progressive Republican Party (PRP).

The difference between the two parties was exactly what Bernard Lewis pointed to in the reform movements of the nineteenth century: One was liberal, the other was illiberal. The Kemalists believed in an all-encompassing and all-powerful state that knows what is best for society thanks to “science.” The PRP, in contrast, believed that government should be limited and society should be free to accommodate diverse views. Erik Jan Zürcher, the Dutch historian who wrote a book about the PRP, notes that “it was a party in the Western European liberal mould” that opposed the Kemalists’ “centralist and authoritarian tendencies.” Its program instead advocated “decentralization, separation of powers and evolutionary rather than revolutionary change . . . [and] a more liberal economic policy.”
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Since the PRP was liberal, it did not share the excessive secularism of the Kemalists. Hence, one of the articles in the party’s charter expressed “respect for religious beliefs and ideas.” Most members were also in favor of preserving the caliphate—not as a theocratic authority but as a symbol of unity—and they were hoping to achieve a liberal democracy similar to that of Great Britain.
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Had the party survived, it would have represented a modernization vision similar to that of the Ottomans.

But, alas, it lasted only six months. In June 1925, using a Kurdish rebellion in the East as a pretext, the Kemalist government closed down its liberal rival indefinitely. Its leaders were tried in the Independence Tribunal, the same arbitrary court that executed Atıf Hodja. The stated reason for closure was the PRP’s “respect for religious beliefs and ideas” clause in its charter. This statement could, the Kemalists argued, “encourage religious reactionaries.”

The leading figures of the PRP remained under police surveillance until the death of Mustafa Kemal in 1938. And no other party would be allowed to compete for power in Turkey until the aftermath of World War II. In official Turkish history, this era, 1925–46, is euphemistically called “the single-party period.” A witty motto used by the Kemalists of the time put their philosophy in a nutshell: “A government for the people, in spite of the people.”

The idea here was a bit reminiscent of Lenin’s famous “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The Bolshevik leader had promised both freedom and democracy as the ultimate goal of Communism, but he argued that first people had to be saved from the “false consciousness” into which they were driven by religion, tradition, and capitalism. So, to guide and educate the people until they attained the “true revolutionary class consciousness,” the proletariat, embodied in the Communist Party, had to rule.

Kemalism, too, had to guide and educate the nation until it attained a true revolutionary secular consciousness. This ideal was exposed in
La Turquie Kemaliste
(Kemalist Turkey), a monthly journal published in Ankara in French for a foreign audience. Its eye-catching covers often presented drawings of muscular Turkish workers managing huge industrial complexes, closely resembling the Socialist realism of the Soviet Union. Other scenes, which showed empty squares with huge monuments dedicated to Mustafa Kemal, were reminiscent of Italy’s Fascist art. Human photos in the journal, featuring scenes such as peasants happily looking at the sky, were all staged and posed. There was not a single spontaneous scene showing the real life of Turkish society and its traditional icons, such as mosques. Indeed, any reference to religion in
La Turquie Kemaliste
“was conspicuously absent.”
¹¹

In the decades to come, Kemalism would vary according to political circumstances, but its attitude toward religion would remain, as “distrust added to disgust, in a way similar to Voltaire’s hatred of the Church.”
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That’s why the unique form of secularism that Turkey established—
laiklik
, adopted from the French
laïcité
—was, and still is, quite different from the separation of church and state in the United States. Whereas freedom
of
religion has been a cornerstone of the American model, the Turkish one would focus on freedom
from
religion by the state’s authoritarian measures—such as closing religious institutions, banning religious symbols, and suppressing religious leaders. The official zeal against religion would soften, and would turn more manipulative than repressive, only at times when it was seen as a useful tool against other enemies of the state, such as the Marxist Left and Kurdish separatism.

A D
ISILLUSION WITH A
V
ENGEANCE

To be sure, the Kemalist Revolution also brought positive reform to Turkey. Turkish women gained full equality before the law and were granted suffrage in 1935, well before many European nations had it. Education was further modernized and new schools were opened throughout the country. The arts and sciences were promoted, and Turkey welcomed (and employed) two hundred German professors, mostly Jewish, who were deemed “unfit to teach” by the Nazis in 1933. Mustafa Kemal, to his credit, also followed a wise foreign policy that secured peace and stability for Turkey in a dangerous world.

The main trouble with the Kemalist Revolution was its excessive secularism, which alienated conservative Muslims and cut short the Ottoman modernization program. Moreover, while trying to sweep away the influence of traditional religion in society, to replace it with “science and reason,” the Kemalists in fact filled the void with a newly created ersatz religion: the cult of Turkishness.

The Turkish identity was at most a first-among-equals status in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. But it became the only acceptable identity in Republican Turkey. “The Turk fills every space,” Mustafa Kemal said in 1932, “his face enlightens everywhere.”
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He also promoted extravagant theories about “the origins of the Turkish race” rooted in a supposed “superior Turkish civilization” in prehistoric Central Asia.
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Meanwhile, a policy of Turkification was imposed on the non-Turkish groups, most notably the Kurds. Villagers, for example, were forced to pay a fine for each Kurdish word that they uttered.”
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Some Kurds reacted violently to these bans, and began to form a counter-nationalist movement, creating Turkey’s never-ending “Kurdish problem.”

The cult of Turkishness was accompanied by the cult of “the Father of the Turks,” or Atatürk, the venerable surname Mustafa Kemal was given by law in 1934.
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A prominent poet described him as “the god who landed on Samsun,” referring to the city where he started the War of Liberation.
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Another poet defined Atatürk’s residence (named Çankaya) as the nation’s new Ka’ba (Islam’s “House of God”).
¹⁸
This image of Atatürk as an omniscient demigod would continue to be kept alive through official propaganda and national education. Even today, every Turkish primary-school student starts each morning by publicly declaring loyalty to the persona of “Supreme Leader Atatürk, who has given us this day,” and then takes an oath to “sacrifice my existence to the Turkish existence.” (I, too, took those oaths, but quite halfheartedly, especially after seeing my father in a military prison filled with Atatürk portraits and sayings.)

But these are Turkey’s own problems. What was more important for the rest of the Muslim world was the implicit message delivered by the Kemalist Revolution: Islam and modernity were incompatible, and Muslims had to choose between them. The Ottoman style of modernization—which was not only respectful to but even justified by Islam—was swept aside. “We don’t take our inspirations from the heavens and the unknown,” Atatürk declared publicly. For those who still believed in “the heavens and the unknown,” this was blasphemy.

Hence, Kemalism came as a great shock to pious Muslims all around the world. At first, in fact, there was great admiration for Mustafa Kemal, a brave general who had defeated colonial powers and led the Turks to independence. This was true especially among the Muslims of India, who formed the Khilafat movement, which preached peaceful resistance to British rule and had supported the Ottoman caliphate since World War I. The leaders of the movement were close friends of Mahatma Gandhi, who joined some of their meetings during which the Qur’an was recited and solidarity with Turkish Muslims was proclaimed.
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The Khilafat supporters hoped that the Ottoman caliphate would survive the occupation of Turkey by the allied powers and would continue to defend the rights, and guide the agenda, of Muslims worldwide.

The caliphate indeed survived the occupation of Turkey, which ended in 1922, only to be abolished suddenly by Mustafa Kemal two years later. The disillusioned Khilafat movement soon dissolved, giving way to more radical voices among Indian Muslims. Sayyid Abu al-A‘la al-Mawdudi, one of the two main founding fathers of radical Islamism, emerged in the 1930s with a more strident tone. “The demise of the Khilafat movement,” notes historian Eran Lerman, “seems to have set Mawdudi apart from the romantic and vague Islamism held by many of its leaders.”
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Denouncing “this Turkish revolt from Islam,” Mawdudi proclaimed a totally opposite agenda: “The only state for Muslims . . . is the ‘Islamic theocracy.’ ”
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Islamic liberalism, the path between these two extremes, was blurred.

T
HE
N
OT-
S
O-
T
ERRIBLY-
H
ELPFUL
“T
URKISH
M
ODEL
”

Another impact of Kemalism on the Muslim world was to inspire other authoritarian secularists. Admiration for Mustafa Kemal among the emergent modern Arab elites contributed to the rise of an illiberal notion of modernization in which the society is controlled by the state, which itself is dominated by the military.

This influence was clear in the 1933 founding declaration of the National Action League, one of the most important forerunners of the ideological Arab nationalist organizations. Strongly impacting the development of the Arab nationalist discourse in greater Syria and Iraq, the league emphasized the role of “the state as the righteous embodiment of the national will and the military as the savior of the nation.”
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The age of uniformed dictators had begun.