Adrian Hamilton: When wearing the veil is a progressive act
Over the past four, years, Erdogan's Islamist party has revolutionised Turkey's economy
Thursday, 26 April 2007
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Trust the Turks to pose an ever-pressing problem for Europe - and for themselves. Just as the French presidentials have thrown up the possibility of an occupant of the Elysée Palace, Nicolas Sarkozy, strongly opposed to Turkey's membership of the European Union, the Turks have produced a presidential crisis of their own which, on the face of it, would confirm all Europe's worst fears of an Islamist state besieging their secular portals.
It's a row that is peculiarly Turkish - whether an avowedly Islamic politician can head a fiercely secular state - but also has much wider implications as to whether Europe is right to regard Muslim movements as essentially regressive and whether, indeed, we should be hastening or stopping altogether Turkey's negotiations to join the EU.
The political crisis in Turkey has been over the job of president, which becomes vacant this May. The role of president is largely titular, but carries considerable influence in the appointment of judges and the right of veto over legislation. He (or she) stands as the guardian of Kemal Ataturk's legacy of a pro-Western, non-religious state.
Hence the outrage felt in conservative circles, and most ominously in the army (which has always regarded itself as the ultimate defender of the Ataturk tradition and has several times intervened to overthrow governments), when the leader of the ruling Islamist group, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Recep Tayyip Erdogan, indicated that he was considering standing for the job.
The thought of this immensely popular politician with open Muslim credentials moving to the heart of the country's strongly secularist establishment has been enough to bring demonstrators on to the street and open warnings from the military and judicial establishments that they would stop it happening.
Given that a lot of the debate centres on the wearing of a head scarf, you would think that it was a fairly straightforward issue. The constitution forbids the wearing of such scarves in public buildings, so how could an Islamist politician with a wife who insists on covering her head occupy the most important public building of all, the presidential palace?
In the end, Erdogan has taken some of the heat out of the crisis by withdrawing his candidature in favour of his more urbane Foreign Secretary, Abdullah Gul. Except that Gul has in his time been a member of two Islamic parties closed down by the courts for being in breach of the country's secular rule and, what is more, has a wife who insists on wearing a head covering and has taken her claim to the law.
The peculiarity of this battle of the head-dresses is that in this case it is the modernisers who want the traditional dress and the entrenched conservative forces who oppose it.
Over the past four years in power, Erdogan and his Islamist party have revolutionised the economy of the country and its attitudes. Partly because of his eagerness to join the European Union, he has opened markets, altered laws and modernised institutions. It has been the army and the judiciary that have resisted change and been responsible for the hounding of writers who would turn over the stones of the Armenian massacres, all in the name of preserving "Turkish" national pride and traditions.
The conservatives have a case. Ataturk was only able to move an imperial Ottoman power to become a 20th-century state by forcing the pace of westernisation. There are genuine concerns that faith schools and modest dress could presage an unrolling of what he achieved.
But it is also true that the Islamic party in Turkey has been a Western-looking and progressive force, and one that has parallels elsewhere in the region. If you were to launch an experiment in understanding the contemporary, middle-class Islamic revival you would find no better place than Turkey. Nearly 50 per cent of its population declare themselves observant Muslims. Less than 10 per cent would wish an Islamic state with Islamic law. It is a country that instinctively looks to the future and the wider world, not a retreat into the past.
The danger is that civil war in Iraq, with its threat of Kurdish nationalism on Turkey's border, and the EU, with its "now-we-want-you, now-we-don't" approach to Turkey's membership, will strengthen the nationalist, authoritarian forces in Turkey, making it more difficult for the modernisers and moderates.
Turkey offers Europe a unique chance to understand and come to terms with the new world to its east and south. And yet Sarkozy and his like would treat it as a threat, not an opportunity. Pace Mr Straw, on this occasion, we should be all for the headscarf wearers.
