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Fitzgerald: The duty of Turkish secularists

Sep 16, 2009 5:19 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

“Why is it in the penultimate sentence [of this article]: a ‘tragedy’ that the beneficiaries of Kemalism ‘allowed’ the army to do what in the ultimate sentence is described as something those same beneficiaries ‘ought to have continued’? Something still seems to be missing.” — from a commenter’s query here.

It is a “tragedy” — I am using the word in its current, lazily loose sense — to have handed over to the upper officer corps of the army the sole responsibility for being the upholder of Kemalism. For when the army is given such a task, the army can easily become the object of widespread resentment on the part of civilians, and can more easily be painted as an oppressive force. And mere force — while sometimes useful — cannot in the end enlarge the numbers of those Turks who have the mental freedom to move away, in general attitudes, from the constraints of Islam, even if many of them still call themselves “cultural Muslims,” and even if they secretly or openly thank god every day for Ataturk. In the last few decades there have been several — four? — military coups by the Turkish army.

After all, the very phrase “military coup” is in bad odor in the West, and generally, that reaction is deserved. Think of all the ambitious colonels, the would-be caudillos of Latin America. For example, there was the unpleasant bully-boy Noriega. There was the unpleasant Pinochet. There have been coups in Guatemala, and Brazil, in Bolivia and Peru. In Honduras, the other day, there was a “military coup” which instantly, knee-jerkishly, was opposed by the O.A.C. and a rushing-to-judgment Obama Administration. In fact, the Honduras coup was one prompted by fears that Zelaya was another potential Chavez — Morales in Bolivia was a warning — and Micheletti, his replacement, was a civilian. But the fact of a “military coup” was enough to get things off to a bad start. Then there are all those “military coups” in Africa. Think of Qaddafy, who seized power in 1969, when King Idris went off for medical treatment in the West. And Qaddafy is now celebrating forty years of his daffy Qaddafy-ism. Think of Charles Taylor in Liberia, or Omar Bongo, or Jean-Bedel Bokassa with his peculiar cuisine, or the most infamous of them all, Idi Amin Dada (see “The King of Scotland”), who grew a little tired of rising through the ranks and simply seized murderous control, and as the dictator of Uganda killed hundreds of thousands before retiring to Saudi Arabia where, as a Muslim, he knew he would not be touched. But just think of how the Saudis would have dealt with him if, say, he had converted back to Christianity and, born-again, tearfully confessed his many sins.

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.

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