The rise and rise of a new sense of power

Dec 15th 2012 | from the print edition

Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. By Jenny White. Princeton University Press; 240 pages; $24.95 and £16.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk 

WHEN Kemal Ataturk built the Turkish republic on the ashes of the vanquished Ottoman empire, he invented along with it a new persona: the Turk, who would be cleansed of what he regarded as Arab and Byzantine “pollution”. The Turk spoke Turkish, was Muslim and strictly secular in a uniquely Turkish way. Overt expressions of piety, such as women veiling themselves or men wearing turbans, were banned because they contradicted the Western image on which the Turk was modelled. The omniscient daddy-state led by Ataturk and a string of successor generals dictated the boundaries of political, religious and cultural life and those who dared to contradict them suffered terribly.

Nearly a century on this Kemalist straitjacket is in tatters, and from it has erupted what Jenny White, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, calls the “new Turks”. Who are they? In a groundbreaking book that alternates anecdote with analysis, Ms White, a fluent Turkish speaker (and successful crime-fiction writer) draws on her years living among the Turks to provide answers. These matter as much for the Turks wrestling with their identity as they do for their Arab neighbours in the throes of revolution, for whom Turkey is held up as a role model.

Despite Ms White’s unabashed affection for the country, the picture she paints is troubling. The generals’ most recent hard coup in 1980 was followed by the opening up of Turkey’s moribund economy and the rise of Islamist parties and a pious Anatolian bourgeoisie built around communal and religious networks. The combination shattered the monopoly of a Kemalist elite whose vision of Turkishness came to be rooted in the sanctity of honour, racial purity and the unitary state. The new Turks, on the other hand, are pious and pragmatic Muslims for whom “moral values co-exist with affluence”. Turkey’s Ottoman past, which was so derided by the Kemalists, has become “a touchstone for these desires”. They see no contradiction in ordering crystal-encrusted squatting seats for their toilets and high-tech “prayer platforms” that can be elevated from their living rooms.

The mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) Party, which has been in power since late 2002, champions “cultural Turkism rather than blood-based Turkish ethnicity”. It sees the nation as “having more flexible Ottoman imperial boundaries” and it pursues economic interests “without concern for the ethnic identity of its interlocutors or the role they played in Republican history.”

Yet, as Ms White points out, the Kemalists and the new Turks have one thing in common: a deeply embedded nationalism. This makes them “Muslim nationalists”, the label under which Ms White lumps both the old guard and the new. Together they exalt “Turkish Islam” as being “better” than other forms of Islam, and they harbour a poisonous distrust of the country’s non-Muslim minorities or of “local foreigners”. One of the most poignant moments in Ms White’s book is an exchange with Ishak Alaton, Turkey’s best-known Jewish entrepreneur and a frequent target of anti-Semitic rants in the Islamist media. “Jenny, you can write this in your book,” he says, “that the man you interviewed today, who has reached his 82nd year, has never been given the feeling by this nation that I am part of it.”

Many of Turkey’s unhappy Kurds would share this sentiment. Ms White’s otherwise piercing and original analysis does not give them the attention they deserve. The power struggle between urban secularists and pious Anatolians has defined politics in Turkey for the past 60 years. But Turkey’s future now hinges more on the conflict between Muslim nationalists and the country’s 15m or so Kurds. Unless they are given equal treatment in the new constitution AK is promising, they will remain a huge problem for Turkey.