The prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who heads the moderately Islamic Justice and Development Party (the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP), is turning back the country’s clock.
In power since 2003, he has taken to glorifying the Ottoman imperial past, undoing the work of the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, who created the Republic of Turkey 90 years ago.
In the early 1990s, Erdogan was an Islamic politician in Istanbul, rising to become a successful mayor of the city. He was then a junior member of an earlier party, the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP) that had ruled briefly but was banned in 1998 after a secular, military-led coup. Erdogan himself was jailed for citing a militant Islamist poem.
Then, in 2001, he formed the AKP, which has won three successive parliamentary victories with ever-increasing margins.
Erdogan called the 2011 AKP election triumph a victory not
just for Turkey, but for its Ottoman heritage. Indeed, back in October 2009,
his foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu had explicitly invoked Turkey’s former
imperial grandeur.
“As in the sixteenth century,” he declared, “when the
Ottoman Balkans were rising, we will once again make the Balkans, the Caucasus,
and the Middle East, together with Turkey, the center of world politics in the
future. That is the goal of Turkish foreign policy and we will achieve it.”
The architect Ahmet Vefik recently presented his blueprint
for a large mosque and that would honour the country’s Muslim and Ottoman
heritage, to be located in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, a project that has met
with fierce opposition from secularists. As well, a new bridge over the
Bosphorus will be named after Sultan Selim I, the 16th-century Ottoman ruler.
The Turkish movie “Conquest 1453” (“Fetih 1453”), recounting
the conquest of the Byzantine capital by Sultan Mehmet II, has become the
highest-grossing film in Turkey’s history. A number of other new films portray
the battle of Gallipoli, the First World War clash between the Ottomans and
Allied forces over the straits of Dardanelles.
“The Ottoman revival is good for the national ego and has
captured the psyche of the country at this moment, when Turkey wants to be a
great power,” remarked Melis Behlil, a film studies professor at Kadir Has
University in Istanbul.
As a consequent of this tilt in domestic politics, Turkey
has been moving away from Europe and is less interested in joining the
economically troubled European Union. In any case, as long as the Cyprus issue
remains unresolved, Turkey knows that Greece will prevent it from entering the
EU.
As Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the
Council on Foreign Relations, observed, “It’s easy to argue that the E.U.,
with its sclerotic economies, has nothing to offer Turkey or that Turks,
disgusted at Europe’s prejudice against Muslims, are no longer interested in
joining a club that doesn’t want them anyway.”
“A great nation, a great power”
was the theme of the fourth General Congress of the AKP, held in the fall of
2012. Foreign aid has risen 27-fold in the past decade and a resurgent Turkish
state is making its voice heard in the Muslim regions of the Mideast and
central Asia.
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