Nation in Tug-of-War With Islamic Heritage : Turkey Resists Rise of Fundamentalism

Tuncay Gunc, who sells carpets at the Grand Bazaar here, is a thoroughly modern Turk. He is a businessman who looks west, and he is a Muslim.

“I pray,” Gunc said the other day, “but only on Fridays--if I don’t have a customer.”

Such religious pragmatism, more the rule than the exception in a Muslim nation that is also officially secular, is being challenged in Turkey today by small but growing numbers of Muslim fundamentalists, seemingly aided by Iran.

The result is that in major cities throughout the rapidly modernizing country, new bouts are being fought in an old tug-of-war between a Middle Eastern heritage and official aspirations for a European future.

For midday prayers Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, Gunc shuns the Beyazit Mosque, which is nearest his shop. Fundamentalist students from adjoining Istanbul University worship there, and of late they have clashed with the police following a court decision that forbade the use of traditional Muslim head scarfs by female students.

Warning to Iran

Last month, after small, countrywide demonstrations against the ban, Turkey formally warned Iran against meddling in Turkey’s internal affairs. The dispute escalated as Turkey recalled its ambassador “for consultations.” Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Nuzhet Kandemir charged “the state-controlled Iranian radio” and Iranian officials with “issuing provocative and inflammatory” statements against Turkey.

On a recent Friday, a mild and smoggy spring day, prayers at Beyazit were uneventful. Lounging riot police officers seemed more interested in the flowing tresses and well-cut pants of secularly minded co-eds than in the illegal scarfs worn by a dowdy handful of female students making both a religious and a political statement.

Indeed, although they excite great debate at home and no doubt undercut the modern face that Turkey likes to show its Western allies, fundamentalist inroads are modest in the republic founded as determinedly secular by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s.

Binnaz Toprak, an Islamic specialist at Bosporus University here, said: “Fundamentalism poses no overt threat to Turkey’s secular foundations today, but the intelligentsia and the military have always seen Islam as a danger. Sometimes it has been overstated, as perhaps it is again.”

Still, fundamentalist growth is manifest in Turkey today, and so are the alarmed shivers coursing through urban, Western-oriented Turks appalled by the results of a decade of religious extremism in next-door Iran.

President Kenan Evren, a former general, has proclaimed fundamentalism a greater threat than communism for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization country that has a long land frontier with the Soviet Union.

Oktay Eksi, a columnist at Hurriyet, one of Turkey’s largest newspapers, said: “The fundamentalists are dangerous. They are training their faithful to replace the secular system they oppose with sharia (Islamic law) without any separation of church and state.”

The current round of concern swirls in the aftermath of national municipal elections last month in which the fundamentalist Welfare Party, barred from local elections in 1984, won 10% of the vote, up from 7.5% in the general elections of 1987.

More telling, in the judgment of Turkish commentators, was the impact of the fundamentalist issue on the ruling Motherland Party of Prime Minister Turgut Ozal. Motherland, an uneasy coalition of free-market liberals and Muslim conservatives, plummeted from 36% of the vote in 1987 to 21.5%.

At the party’s head, the 61-year-old Ozal, rotund and dynamic, is the Janus of modern Turkey. Ozal is a devout Muslim whose supporters voted in Parliament to allow head scarfs at state schools, and who now promises to secure a reversal of the court ban against them.

He is also a reformer, who has overhauled a musty state-dominated economy in the name of liberal free enterprise, and who has formally applied for Turkish membership in the European Community.

“Ozal’s head is with the West but his heart is with the fundamentalists,” columnist Eksi said in a conversation in his office. He and other Turkish analysts say Ozal was abandoned at the polls by liberals who reject his links with conservative Islam.

Amid opposition calls for a prompt general election, the politically wounded Ozal recently named a new and generally more liberal Cabinet, though he retained Muslim conservatives in key ministries.

Fundamentalists in the Welfare Party want no part of NATO, and they flatly reject Ozal’s economic vision. They argue that even if a reluctant Europe could be persuaded to accept Turkey as a member of the Common Market, it would never be as a full partner.

“Better at the head of an Islamic Common Market than at the bottom of a European one,” said Bekir Sitki Albayrak, a bearded, 39-year-old architect who is deputy leader of the fundamentalist party in Istanbul. “We seek to recover the past glories of the days when Turkey was an imperial power.”

Creating a republic with a clear church-state separation from the shards of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, Ataturk warred on the symbols and the substance of state religion. Among other things, he banned the fez, Turkey’s traditional Muslim hat, and scrapped the Arabic alphabet

In addition, Ataturk, who remains Turkey’s paramount national hero, borrowed from the Swiss civil code, the Italian penal code and the German commercial code to build a new legal system. It is illegal in Turkey today to call for the establishment of sharia , but the fundamentalists make no secret of their displeasure with the present system.

“Turkey should be governed by a useful law,” Albayrak said in an interview at his print shop in Istanbul. “Current laws borrowed from other places are not useful.”

A poll by an academic in Ankara found that 7% of the respondents favored restoration of Islamic law, even though saying so is against the law.

What particularly alarms Turks wed to the West is the long-range potential of a dramatic increase in state-supported Islamic teacher training schools. In 740 schools around the country, about 250,000 junior high and high school students are being trained to become Muslim imams--religious leaders--in a country with just 60,000 mosques.

Critics note that only about a third of training school graduates actually become Islamic teachers. “In addition,” Eksi said, “there are 70,000 youngsters living in fundamentalist boarding schools who are being taught that the secular state is wrong. The government has failed to control the fundamentalist movement.”

Eksi’s concerns are common to commentators at all nine national secular newspapers in Turkey today. They are rebutted daily by three fundamentalist newspapers as part of a 60-year debate over the proper role of religion in Turkish society, a debate that shows no sign of abating.