Stepchild of Secular Turkey

Nearly everyone in Istanbul, one of the world’s fastest-growing and most unruly cities, will tell you that Recep Tayyip Erdogan is doing a better job of managing the chaos than they ever thought possible.

Thanks to the 44-year-old mayor, they say, the city is cleaner and greener. Garbage is picked up regularly, trees are being planted, and hard coal has replaced the lignite that once fueled a choking smog. New dams and pipes channel more water to people’s homes. And there is no hint of the corruption that bled city hall under many of his predecessors.

If Erdogan exemplifies a new populist energy in Turkey’s urban politics, Erol Yarar, 38, is a poster boy for the rising class of self-made entrepreneurs from its booming Anatolian heartland.

A U.S.-schooled systems analyst whose firm makes powdered fruit juices, Yarar is founder and president of the country’s largest chamber of commerce. He leads missions to places as far-flung as Jakarta and Chicago promoting exports.

In most nations, achievers such as Erdogan and Yarar would go far. But Turkey’s military commanders are alarmed by their success and want to throw both men into prison because they are Islamists.

Criminal cases against the two--for impassioned words judged perilous to national security--are part of an army-led crackdown on the parties, businesses, charities, schools and dress code of an Islamist movement that seeks a bigger role for religion in public life. A year after engineering the demise of Turkey’s first elected Islamist-led government, the generals are striking deeper into society to enforce a rigid brand of secularism that limits religious expression in public life.

Turkey has been torn for decades between a modernizing, secular establishment that aspires to belong to Europe and the religious values of a population that is 99% Muslim. The conflict has sharpened in recent years with the election of Islamists to public office.

The outcome--and whether it’s decided peacefully or by force--has importance beyond Turkey’s borders.

A stable, democratic Turkey is a strategic priority for the West, which values it as a trading partner and a security buffer against radical Islamic regimes in the Middle East. Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and controls abundant westbound flows of oil and gas from the former Soviet Union.

‘Most Open Society in the Islamic World’

It’s more than location, however, that makes Turkey pivotal. “Turkey is the most open society in the Islamic world,” says a European official in Ankara, the capital. “That makes it the ideal laboratory to test whether Islam and democracy can be compatible.”

At first glance, there seems to be room for everything in Istanbul, a metropolis of 8 million people, and in other Turkish cities, where glass office towers and glitzy shopping malls spring up among mosques and minarets. What propels Islamists such as Erdogan and Yarar into the mainstream is a mix of religious piety, freewheeling politics and open markets.

But Turks are deeply divided over Islam’s proper place in society. Islamists object to a ban on women’s head scarves in public buildings and to mandatory secular education for children through eighth grade. Secularists fear an erosion of women’s rights in a more religious state. The rift is straining what passes here for democracy.

Early this year, Turkey’s highest court outlawed the country’s biggest political party, Welfare, ruling that the group had tried during a stormy year in government to replace the secular order with one based on radical Islam. The court, condemning their rhetoric more than their policies, barred seven Welfare leaders from politics for five years.

Two mayors who belonged to the party, including Istanbul’s Erdogan, have been put on trial. The Interior Ministry is investigating 37 other mayors for such “subversive” acts as awarding contracts to Islamist-led companies. Four have been removed from office.

In April, anti-terrorist police raided the homes of 16 investors in a coordinated predawn strike and arrested 15 on charges that their insurance company was financing Islamist politics. The 16th suspect was not home, so police held his wife until he surrendered.

Hundreds of presumed Islamists have been purged from the army and the civil service. Donors to Islamist charities are harassed by tax inspectors. Lists of Islamist merchants are circulated by the authorities with a warning: “Don’t shop here, or you will undermine Turkey.”

Gen. Cervik Bir, the deputy chief of staff of the armed forces, defended these steps in a recent speech, calling Turkey “a security-producing country” that shields Europe from Islamic fundamentalism and other threats.

But the crackdown disturbs civilians in the governing secularist coalition, which is divided over how far to push it.

“The generals want to reorder society by decree, reducing Islam to a ceremonial function,” said Cengiz Candar, a pro-secular columnist for Istanbul’s Sabah newspaper. “By not distinguishing between the merely pious and the truly fundamentalist, they are offending a majority of the people.”

Nation’s Struggle With Its Identity

Turkey’s struggle with its identity dates to the fall of the Ottoman Empire to Allied forces in World War I. Mustafa Kemal initially used Islam as a rallying cry to drive out the Western occupiers, then suppressed it to create the secular republic that is modern Turkey.

Assuming the name Ataturk--Father of the Turks--he moved to westernize the country by fiat: He closed religious courts and schools, banned Islamic veils and chadors, outlawed polygamy and replaced the Arabic alphabet with Roman letters. After his death, Islamic schools were reopened, but secularism remained the norm.

Most Turks today revere Ataturk and accept the army’s role as constitutional guardian of his ideology. The fundamentalist takeovers of Iran and Afghanistan, in their view, are reason enough to regard fiery Islamist expression at home as something more dangerous than free speech.

Mayor Erdogan was indicted for an address to supporters that included these lines of a poem:

The mosques are our barracks,

The domes are our helmets,

The minarets are our swords,

And the faithful are our army.

Never mind that the poem by Ziya Gokalp was written to inspire Ataturk’s freedom fighters and is taught today in Turkish schools; the mayor was accused of urging people to form “an army of jihad,” or holy war, and “inciting hatred.” Sentenced to 10 months in prison, he is free on appeal.

Yarar faces the same charge for a speech against new curbs on Islamic schools. “The minds of the people behind this should be changed; otherwise, their heads should be cut off,” a prosecutor quoted him as saying. Yarar, who awaits trial, says he does not remember his exact words.

The stakes are high. If he is convicted, his 3,000-member Independent Industrialists and Businessmen’s Assn. could be shut down--the same way the Welfare Party was banned for its leaders’ combative words.

In an interview, Yarar said the criminal cases have less to do with religion than with rivalry between a generation of upstarts and Turkey’s old political and financial elites.

The country’s embrace of free markets in the early 1980s triggered an economic boom that is still swelling the cities with religiously conservative rural migrants and opening business opportunities. But the growth, accompanied by wasteful public spending and high inflation, left many of Turkey’s 65 million people behind.

Islamists were the big winners. One group was the Welfare Party, whose rhetoric appealed to traditional religious values of the new urbanites.

The other was the “Anatolian lions,” who dominated new business in the country’s Asian interior. More so than their older, Istanbul-based rivals, the young “lions” grouped in Yarar’s association observe Islamic teaching, which bars paying interest on loans, and rely on a network of partners to raise cash.

With support from the “lions,” Erdogan and other Welfare candidates won city halls across Turkey in 1994, delivered efficient local services and rose to national power in 1996 at the helm of a coalition government. But Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan defied the old elites by trying to make friends with Libya and Iran and by refusing to curb the growth of Islamic schools. He resigned last June in the face of a threatened military coup.

Yarar’s beard tags him as an Islamist in Turkey, but he also favors three-piece suits. Although his movement is no longer in power, he exudes the confidence of an unstoppable force.

“Twenty years ago, there was virtually no industry in Anatolia, but now we have factories in every city there, and they produce 10% of the national wealth,” he said. “Naturally, the big Istanbul magnates feel threatened. They pin Ataturk’s bust in their lapels and use ideological terms, like Islamism, to manipulate other political parties and the army against us.

“But it’s really about economic rivalry. There are religious values in how we do business, of course. We’re pious people. Our success, though, comes mainly from hard work and Anatolia’s low costs compared to Istanbul’s. There’s nothing radical about it.”

The generals disagree. Yarar’s indictment in May followed a National Security Council ultimatum to step up the “fight against extremism” by putting thousands of Islamist enterprises under scrutiny and state regulation. The enterprises channel $250 million a year to Islamist political causes, says the army, which wants the flow stopped.

When the generals bark, Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz usually listens. Taking over from the Islamists, he pushed last summer to increase mandatory secular education by three years to a total of eight years; the law closed junior high sections of religious schools that the army had labeled as breeding grounds for fundamentalists.

But Yilmaz has been slow to enact the army’s latest ultimatum. He is trying to woo religious Turks away from the still-powerful Islamist camp and does not want to offend them all.

Battles Over Skins of Sheep, Head Scarves

Two battles--over sheepskins and head scarves--are particularly sensitive because they touch large numbers of Turks.

Each spring, thousands of sheep die in the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice. For the past six years, state-appointed secular charities have had the exclusive right to gather and sell the valuable skins.

This spring, however, Yilmaz bowed to pressure from his religious supporters. In a decision that could be challenged by the army, he allowed private charities, including those run by Islamists, to market the sheepskins and use the money as they like.

No symbol of Islam is more ubiquitous or divisive in Turkey than the female head scarf, and nowhere has the head scarf been more beleaguered this year than at Istanbul University, the country’s oldest learning institution.

Fadime Oztoprak participated in big demonstrations there early this year that erupted after the government demanded enforcement of the often-ignored ban on head scarves in public offices and universities. The protesters, a sizable minority on campus, appeared to have won a reprieve until autumn.

But Oztoprak, 21, is disturbed by rumors that scarves will be banned during upcoming final exams. Torn between a Koranic mandate to cover her head in the presence of men and a hope to graduate this month, she says she is too upset to study.

The business major was leaving campus in an ankle-length skirt, a long-sleeved blouse and a black silk scarf patterned with tiny silver leaves. She paused to speak to a male reporter but refused to shake his hand; she avoids physical contact with the opposite sex.

“They portray me as an enemy of the state, then they violate my freedom by imposing this choice on me,” she said. “A choice between career and belief.”

There is a way out. Some students are wearing wigs--mostly garish blond ones--atop their scarf-covered heads in mocking evasion of the rule. Oztoprak smiled at the idea.

Turning serious again, she added: “When I look at women who don’t cover their heads, I feel bitter in my heart. Instead of unifying people, the state is dividing us.”

The bitterness cuts two ways. Ozge Ozer, a 24-year-old law student with uncovered reddish-brown hair, stopped on the same leafy walkway a minute later and, asked her opinion, denounced head scarves as “primitive.”

“If those women don’t want to be enlightened, why come to a university?” she wondered aloud. “If they ever become a majority, we’d all be forced to wear those scarves.”

Resilient Islamists Are Not Giving Up

Turkish Islamist leaders deny harboring an agenda to impose fundamentalist rule, but they are widely distrusted. At what point, asked political scientist Feride Acar, might Islamists stop defending “freedom of choice” and insist on “the dictates of religion”?

“It wouldn’t stop with the head scarf,” said Acar, who teaches at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University. “Religion also demands that a proper Muslim woman agree to polygamy, that men and women have differential shares of inheritance, that the woman’s role be to raise Muslim children--a reversal of everything Turkey has achieved in the last 70-some years.”

Seeking another chance, the resilient Islamists have regrouped as the Virtue Party. Where Turkey goes from here depends on how the new party’s leaders speak and act and whether the army would allow them to regain power by the ballot.

Virtue is well organized at the grass roots and backed by 20% to 25% of the electorate in opinion polls. If given a fair chance, the party would probably finish first in the election that must be held by 2000, most analysts agree. If the party is blocked, they warn, Turkey could slide toward violence as Algeria did when Islamists there were denied victory at the polls.

For now, Turkey’s Islamists sound chastened--not radicalized--by their setbacks and eager to shed their militant, anti-Western image.

The all-male crowd that ran Welfare has admitted three women to the new party’s 30-member leadership. Although men and women were segregated at its founding rally, not all the women wore head scarves. The new party line stresses human rights and conciliation. Its leaders even laid a wreath at Ataturk’s mausoleum.

Without a pretext to ban Virtue, the generals seem intent on attacking its financial sources and its most popular figures.

“Turkey is accustomed to these winds of repression,” the mayor told foreign journalists last month, recalling the military coups of recent decades. “We breathed this air in the 1960s, again in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and we are breathing it now. But Turkey is not Algeria. Our people will show their feelings in the next election, and this air will blow away.”