Turkey Aims To Be In the Twenty-First Century What Saudi Arabia Was To the Rise of the Islamist Movement in the Twentieth Century
By Elan Journo
September
30, 2020
For years
Turkey was deservedly hailed as a modern, secular, pro-Western society — at
least, until the last decade.
Turkey lies
at the edge of Europe and the Middle East, not only geographically but also, in
a sense, politically. It’s a Muslim-majority country that for most of the
twentieth century was a “secular republic,” assuring freedom of religion and
having no official state-backed religion. Though straddling the Middle East,
Turkey is a member of NATO and has sought to join the European Union. But a lot
has changed in the last twenty years.
Since the
early 2000s, Turkey’s political system has steadily moved toward one shaped by
Islamist ideas. Turkey has funded and enabled jihadist groups, such as Hamas.
And it is jockeying with Saudi Arabia and Iran to style itself as leader of the
global community of Muslims.
How did
this happen? What lessons can we draw from the rise of Islamism in Turkey?
To understand
this transformation, I talked with Dr. Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon
official and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Rubin
specializes in Turkey, Iran and the broader Middle East, and he was among the
few voices early on raising the alarm about the ominous trends in Turkey.
The driving
force behind the reshaping of Turkey is the country’s leader, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan — a man Rubin has characterized as a jihadist in a business suit. Rubin
argues that what Saudi Arabia was to the rise of the Islamist movement in the
twentieth century (a financial sponsor of that ideology, opening religious
schools globally and backing jihadists), Turkey aims to be in the twenty-first
century.
From my
interview with Rubin — which you can catch below — a few takeaways stand out
regarding Turkey’s transformation. First, Erdoğan embarked on a calculated plan
to inject Islamist ideas into Turkish society. Second, Erdoğan’s campaign was
incrementalist, reshaping institutions and the legal system from within, but
also opportunistic, exploiting pretexts to silence dissent. Finally, it’s
crucial to recognize that Erdoğan’s authoritarianism is now moving toward
dictatorship, and that this seizure of ever more power is a means to the end of
creating an Islamist society.
Put another
way, Islamist regimes in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and elsewhere aspire
to, and sometimes attain, totalitarian power, but these recognizable variations
of Islamist rule are not the only ones. It can also look like Turkey, and
unless we recognize that, we overlook the influence of Islamist ideas.
----
Elan Journo is a director and senior fellow at
the Ayn Rand Institute. His latest book is titled What Justice Demands: America
and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Elan is a senior editor of New Ideal.
Original Headline: How Turkey Went from Secular
to Islamic Authoritarianism
Source: New Ideal
URL: https://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/turkey-aims-be-twenty-first/d/123015