Fitzgerald: The duty of Turkish secularists

And then there are the coups in Arab and Muslim lands. Think of those Pakistani generals who have staged coups when they felt more Islam was necessary -- such as Zia ul-Haq. Anglophone sophisticated Pakistanis of the upper-class like to pretend that Zia is the one who caused all the trouble, who brought Islam to Pakistan -- as if it had not been there all along, in the lower depths, waiting for a chance to find the right representative who would seize power. Think of Colonels Nasser and Naguib and a few others (Nasser to elbow the others quickly out of the way), who seized power because of their disgust with the ancient regime of fat Farouk, with his yachts and his harem and, especially, his too-compliant attitude toward the West. Think of the coup of that Alawite Air Force Major, the quiet plotter Hafez al-Assad, who put the Alawites firmly in control of the officer corps, and hence of the military, and hence of all of Syria. Think of the succession of coups in Iraq -- the one of Colonel Qassem, during which the Prince Regent was killed, and so too, even more importantly, was the "strong man" of Iraq (that was the fixed epithet for him at the time) Nuri as-Said. Nuri as-Said had been a plotter ever since the days of Rashid Ali, and in turn found himself plotted against. Though he tried to escape from Baghdad dressed as a woman, he was found, killed, his body mutilated, and then the mutilated body dragged through the streets of Baghdad so that anyone who wanted to further mutilate it would get his chance. This is the country to which George Bush wanted to bring "freedom" for "ordinary moms and dads."

Now those who know history know that the Army has sometimes been a force for good in the larger society, and that includes the occasional coup. I hesitate to dilate upon this for one very good reason: years ago, possibly a decade or two ago, I read in some journal -- Revue international de sociologie, possibly, if such exists, in an issue devoted to the sociology of the military -- an essay by Raymond Aron. Aron as always was enlightening on the different and surprising roles of the military, which in some countries, at some times, had been a force not of black reaction, as we have been taught unthinkingly to believe, but as a force for enlightenment and progress. Those who remember, for example, what were called the Army-McCarthy hearings back in 1954, remember the celebrated Hale-and-Dorr bow-tied Boston Brahmin Joseph Welch, Esq., who sent McCarthy, that demagogue and drunk, back on his uppers with his famous "Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you no decency?" speech. But they forget that it was the American Army itself that was being attacked by McCarthy as a harborer of Communists, and that just wouldn't wash, and didn't.

But reliance on the military in Turkey, the certainty that it would always be there to rescue the situation, had a bad effect. For it allowed the secular class to think that Kemalism would always be there, was unassailable. Many in that secular class are downright charming because.... Well, because they are practically like us. They inhabit something like the same intellectual and moral universe as we in the non-Muslim West do, and such a phenomenon cannot be found among any other large group of Muslims, save those non-Muslim Muslims, Tatars and Kazakhs, and others who are generally secular thanks to 70 years of Soviet rule, and physical attacks on mosques and imams, and above all ideological attacks on Islam as part of a general attack on religion in Central Asia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Empire.

Such a secular class might actually develop in Iran after the Islamic Republic unravels, for the Iranians have available to them a pre-Islamic history, and a cultural heritage that includes a narrative in which Persian poets patriotically withstand the attempt at linguistic and cultural imperialism by the Arabs. The would-be secularists in Iran could be finally shaken to their senses by what the Islamic Republic has wrought ever since the fateful day that Khomeini came back in triumph (but to Teheran, not to Persepolis, and no Theridamas or Usumcasane accompanied him, the Ayatollah and Lonely Supreme Leader). The Turkish secular class has become less vigilant, not only less vigilant about the wiles and guiles of Erbakan, Erdogan, and Fethuleh Gulen (now allowed, from his center in Virginia, to conduct his sinister campaign that, of course, is misunderstood in the Western world, and regarded -- madly -- as the innocuous "moderate" Islam some even think we should encourage).

A coup here and a coup there, and a coup everywhere, might work, temporarily, but what really needs to be changed are the minds of men. And the journalists, the university rectors, the professors, the people who, thanks to their benefiting from the Kemalist reforms that tied political Islam in knots, underestimated the cunning of the erdogans and guls and gulens of this world, did not do what they should have done. They were insufficiently vigilant in further extending what Ataturk set out to do.

What might they have done? They might, for example, have used the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, nearby, to show how retrograde Iran had become. They might have used every nightmarish bit of information about Iran under Khomeini and his epigones, beginning with the wave of terror instituted by that hanging judge Khalkhali, and with the execution of leaders of the Baha'i and Jewish communities, and continuing with the turning on, and assassination of, the original leftists and secularists who, with such miscalculation, underestimated -- they wanted to underestimate -- the forces of black reactionary Islam. They joined forces with Khomeini against the Shah. The Pahlavi regime was admittedly corrupt, and was led by a vainglorious man who did not understand how unhinged the oil money had made Iran's ruling class. This was clear from the evident corruption at court, which was widely deplored, and the changes it brought, or threatened to bring, to rural, and deeply Muslim villagers, not to mention the opposition roused in Muslim bazaaris. The Shah was brought down not only by Khomeini, but by those who, on what might be called the secular left, the worshippers of weepy Mossadegh, refused to believe that Islam was as powerful as it proved to be.

That seems to be a general fault of the so-called liberals and reformers, the ones best able to talk to Westerners, and to inveigle them, out of self-interest, into adventures that will promote the position of those "reformers." These "reformers" may, for all I know, rescue their own societies, at least as long as the Americans stay or keep lavishing largesse of every kind on those Muslim societies, thus rescuing them from the consequences of their own political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures and, what is still worse, delaying the day when Muslims have to begin to examine and realistically analyze those failures. They might even have conducted such an examination without the conspiracy-theorizing that comes so naturally to people raised up in a system that everywhere discourages free and skeptical inquiry, beginning with any questioning of any part of Islam, but not stopping there.

No, the Turkish secularists should have not let a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour go by, without pushing into the consciousness of the Turkish public the sheer awfulness of the mullahs and of the practice of Islam in Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran. They should have played upon the natural impulse of Turks to declare their dislike, or even hatred, of the Arabs, and started a line of public discussion centered on all the ways in which Islam has been a vehicle of Arab supremacism.

They should have engaged in massive translations -- for example, of such books as Ibn Warraq's Why I Am Not A Muslim and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel and Anwar Sheikh's Islam: the Arab National Religion and Bat Ye'or's The Dhimmi and The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam.

They might, furthermore, have begun to ask questions about the Armenian massacres, and insisted that -- in a kind of absolution of Turks qua Turks -- both the 1915-1918 massacres and the earlier ones from 1894-96 were not the result of Turks alone, but of other Muslims, impelled by Islam. Thus, in owning up to the Armenian massacres, these secular Turks would, deliberately and truthfully, put the blame not on all Turks, but on all the Muslims in the area who, impelled by Islam, had committed those crimes, and with especially fiendish glee, had attacked Armenian priests and their (often) pregnant wives. There is ample testimony, from American and German eyewitnesses (some of them missionaries) as to the Muslim nature of the statements made by the killers, and there is ample testimony, too, by the Armenians who survived and wrote their own testimonies, as to what impelled Turks (and Kurds) to kill Armenians in Anatolia, and what led the marauding Arabs, when they could, to grab Armenian women and girls, who often made the trek without their murdered husbands and sons.

And in the universities, there might have been much more vigilant attempts to undercut and discredit, if not Islam, then at least Arab Islam. There might have been a requirement that, for example, in Turkish law schools, students analyse the Shari'a and compare it to Western systems of law, especially in regard to the rights of women and non-Muslim minorities. There might be courses on the development in the West of the idea of democracy, and what, besides the ballot-box, was considered indispensable to an advanced Western democracy.

And if one remembers Alex Haley's Roots, and the fascination, all over the Western world, with discovering who one's ancestors were, and where they came from -- this is especially of interest in the United States -- why could not Turks be urged to find out about, wherever possible, their own pre-Islamic roots? How many of those who are convinced, in Turkey, that they are Muslims, and their families have always been Muslim, in fact are the descendents of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, who converted either forcibly or in order to escape the onerous condition of the dhimmi? We have all read stories about this or that Turk who, though he thought himself to be a Muslim, suddenly finds out that his grandparents or great-grandparents were Armenian, and this has the electrifying effect of causing some to shed Islam as promptly as a snake sheds its skin. Just as in India, were Hindus to begin to discuss openly the conditions that led millions of Hindus (and Jains, and Buddhists) to convert to Islam (hint: it was not the sheer wonderfulness of Islam that led them to do it), who knows how many of those who have come to suspect or think that perhaps, even for the mental and moral development of their own children, Islam might not be quite as wonderful as they had once thought, would welcome a way out, a way to "return" to being Jains, or Buddhists, or Hindus?

Oh, there's a lot that the secular class of Turks ought to have done. And now they are panicky. They are right to panic, for Erdogan is cunning and relentless, and the re-appearance of Islam as a powerful social and political force must deeply disturb those who, with their parents and grandparents, have assumed -- as did such well-respected foreign students of modern Turkey as Bernard Lewis -- that Kemalism was here to stay, and that in case of need, the army could always come in. The army cannot always be expected to do what needs to be done through education, and a slow undermining of those who want to bring back Islam by undoing the Kemalist ties that so cleverly bind. The army cannot control Fethuleh Gulen, for example, and the insidious effect of his schools and institutions of higher learning. But the rectors, the professors, the journalists, the writers, the scientists -- including those who go abroad for full mental freedom -- can keep up the assault, and not only in Turkey itself, but by warning the outside world of what the "Islamists" are about. They can possibly help, in Western Europe, to encourage not fellow Muslims but the imperiled non-Muslims to watch their step, and to be vigilant about the tariq-ramadans, those smylers with the knyf under the cloke, as Chaucer, well of English undefiled (or so I've heard) once memorably translated Boccaccio's allegorical "Il Tradimento."

No, reliance on the army alone was never enough. There is still time for those who have most benefited from Kemalism to assume their own responsibility not merely for defending what Ataturk achieved, but in ruthlessly, and relentlessly, extending his reforms, so that the secular class of Turks will swell from one-quarter of the population to something like one-half. That should do it. But the rule must be to never let down your guard when it comes to the True Believers. For they never give up.