Minarets and Yuppie Bars : Muslim Turkey Looking to the West for Its Future

Hafize Ozal, a strong-willed matriarch in her 80s, believes that Turkish women should obey strict Islamic dress codes. Zeynep Ozal, a young, urban Turkish woman, owns a chic boutique and is married to a drummer in a rock band.

The two women embody the national debate that accompanies breathtaking change today in an East-West land of ancient minarets and latter-day yuppie bars.

Between them--the son of a traditionalist mother, the father of an avant-garde daughter--stands Turgut Ozal, the rotund and determined prime minister of Turkey. He is a bridge pointing west, the direction in which the United States and its NATO allies have been trying to pull Turkey. Their interest is strategic: Turkey lives in a tough neighborhood. Its neighbors are the Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Greece and Bulgaria.

Ozal, a 60-year-old economist who won reelection and a second term this month, believes that Turkey can become the only country in the world that is both Muslim and Western.

And he insists that a nation of 52 million, which straddles two continents, can be a full partner of Europe without sacrificing its distinct religious and cultural heritage. To a country at the refrigerator-and-TV stage of development, Ozal promises a house and a car for every family by century’s end. Progress must come, he says, with all the Western trimmings: pluralistic politics, an unfettered press, free market economics and religious freedom.

Most Turks seem to agree with him, but critics chafe at Ozal’s high-handed rule, while political liberalization and rapid economic modernization fuel national soul-searching.

“There is a general consensus that Turkey belongs to the West,” observed Hasan Cemal, editor of the Social Democratic newspaper Cumhuriyet. But, as for whether Turkey is a European or an Asian country, “I couldn’t say,” Cemal confided.

“After gerrymandering and modifying the electoral system eight times in four years, Ozal got 36% of the vote and two-thirds of the seats in Parliament,” he continued. “He has a monopoly of power for his second term, and that is always dangerous in Turkey.”

Istanbul Symbolizes Dilemma

The duality of a country with a European nose and an Asian trunk is manifest in linchpin Istanbul, which spans both continents across the Bosporus and is Turkey’s industrial, commercial and intellectual heart.

Istanbul was once known as Byzantium, then as Constantinople when it was the headquarters of the Roman Empire, then as the center of the 500-year Ottoman Empire. It took Istanbul 2,500 years to reach a population of 600,000, but since World War II, that population has multiplied 10 times, principally through internal migration. Today, Istanbul throbs with the thunder, verve and troubles of other new giants like Sao Paulo, Brazil and Mexico City.

In Istanbul, there are jobs--and disillusion--aplenty. The traffic is impossible, the water is polluted and the air, fouled by soft coal used for heating, is thick and smelly. Istanbul is a city where a Turkish exporter in a St. Laurent blazer negotiates in English over hotel coffee with a visiting Italian buyer dressed by Gucci. It is a place where nine riders in a stretch ’56 Chevy taxi barely glance at the jaywalking antics of a dancing bear.

Istanbul’s 502nd mayor since 1453 is a blue-eyed Muslim reformer named Bedrettin Dalan, a 46-year-old electrical engineer who turned politician four years ago and has since delighted many Istanbulis and outraged purists with a bulldozer rampage through slums and monuments choking the shores of the storied Golden Horn, an inlet of the Bosporus. He has replaced them with parks.

‘Wears Many Faces’

Dalan fingered polished black worry beads one recent winter afternoon as he boosted Istanbul while simultaneously quizzing a visitor about a strange American city called Las Vegas, where he was due to make a speech.

“Istanbul wears many faces,” he said. “Coming from Europe, it looks Middle Eastern. But people who come from the Middle East think it is 100% European. We are a mosaic, but we think our future lies with Europe.”

In the election that gave Ozal a new five-year mandate, parties supporting Turkey’s formal application to join the European Communities won 87% of the vote.

Europe is less enthusiastic. A number of the European Communities’ 12 current members note Turkey’s economic backwardness. Its per capita income of $1,100 per year is far below European levels. They note that Turkey’s roots seem most deeply embedded in Asia and the Middle East, and they blanch at Turkey’s history of political instability and bouts of authoritarian rule accompanied by serious human rights abuses.

With the help of an American public relations firm, the Turks battle against the prison-state image depicted in the movie “Midnight Express.” Left-right political violence claimed more than 5,000 lives in the late 1970s, and it was followed by free-swinging military intervention.

Military Coups

Military influence on national life is now minimal, politicians contend, but the large Turkish army, which defends the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastern flank, has staged three coups since 1960, abandoning power most recently in 1983. The European Communities’ application procedure is lengthy, and there is no realistic prospect for Ozal’s initiative to bear fruit before century’s end.

“Turkey’s dilemma is being a non-Christian country trying to participate in a political, social and economic union with the West,” said Erol Manisali, who heads the Center for European and Middle Eastern Studies at Istanbul University.

For the Turks, though, the timing seems less important than the concept. The European Communities application is seen as a promise of continued economic and political development--and an insurance policy guaranteeing it will continue.

“We Turks are learning to live with democracy. The opening to Europe is part of its growth,” said Sami Kohen, a columnist at the newspaper Milliyet.

Said political scientist Yasar Gurbuz: “For many Turks, particularly in the countryside, Europe is less a place than an idea meaning a better way of life, a goal to be achieved.”

The Turks like to argue that Europe is more uptight about full partnership with an Islamic country than the Turks are about their religious bent.

A fundamentalist party denouncing the Common Market as a “Club of Christians” and calling for Turkey to spearhead the formation of an Islamic common market failed to win enough votes for parliamentary representation. Traditional Islamic values run deeper than their expression at the polls, within the society at large and inside the Motherland Party that Ozal created four years ago as a vehicle to power. Still, they are proving no obstacle to Turkey’s push west.

Secular Nation

About 98% of Turks are Muslims, but since Kemal Ataturk founded the modern republic in 1923, Turkey has been a resolutely secular country. There is not even any religious instruction in schools. The muezzins’ call to prayer echoes from the minarets five times daily, as it does in Arab countries, but in urban Turkey it is muted by the patter of commerce and the snarl of traffic.

“We are the only Muslim country with a secular system, and the only one that has had a multiparty political system for the past 40 years,” editor Cemal said. “For 65 years, the politicians have been saying that religion is one thing and politics something else. Today, if you ask somebody if he is a believer and does he go to mosque on Friday, he will say yes, but if you ask him whether he believes in a secular state, he will also say yes.”

Ataturk gave his new republic Western dress, measurements and law, the Roman alphabet and the Monday to Friday workweek. Many Turks go to mosque on Friday, but few work on Sunday.

These days, pragmatic Turks recognize that their language does not invite browsing: It takes six syllables to say “Thank you.” English and German--1.4 million Turks work in West Germany--have replaced French as the languages of communication between Turkey and the rest of the world. English is the language of instruction for all subjects in all faculties at the two state-run universities.

Ozal is stoking modernization by economic reforms that dismantle historic statism. It is hard work, in Europe-oriented Istanbul, in the capital at Ankara on the Asian mainland, or anywhere else in Turkey. An association of businessmen complained recently that an entrepreneur hoping to start a new business has to endure red tape at 60 different public institutions.

Still, freeing the economy and foreign trade has drawn more than 20 new foreign banks to Istanbul. Lifting currency restrictions has created $5 billion in foreign currency accounts held by Turks inside Turkey. Deficit spending and $17 billion in foreign borrowing since 1983 have been directed at massive infrastructural development: airports, highways, dams, harbors, telecommunications and electrification. An Ozal bridge across the Bosporus, its soaring arches heavy with symbolism, is nearing completion.

With growth of about 7% this year, Turkey is growing faster than any European country. It also has become the region’s hottest tourist destination. Exotica and prices that are only a fraction of Western Europe’s drew more than 1 million visitors last year.

Rising Inflation

Ozal’s policies, liberally leavened by canny party-building politics and unabashed nepotism, have come at the cost of rising inflation--about 50% per year following large, post-election price increases. This has squeezed wage earners hardest, and Ozal is vulnerable to opposition charges that he is yanking Turkey forward at great social cost: The wealthiest 20% of Turks share 56% of the national income.

Ozal insists that free market economics will help Turkey catch up with Europe by the end of the century and will, in the process, solidify democracy. He is a compelling man, even to the two-thirds of Turks who didn’t vote for him.

“He is conservative on moral issues, liberal on democracy and a reformer in economic terms. He may not go to mosque every day, but he is also a believer,” columnist Kohen said.

Like the brawny country that he leads, Turgut Ozal believes in Islam and the West. He is a Muslim who holds hands in public with his wife Semra. She is a Muslim woman who likes nightclubs and smokes cigarillos.