The many decades during which the systematic attempt, through legislation, by Ataturk to remove Islam in Turkey from the political sphere and to limit its power to fashion society, over time managed to allow the formation of a class of Turks who, in their mental outlook are not as distant as from Western man as are, say, Arabs or Pakistanis.
They do, unsurprisingly, continue to identify themselves as Muslims, sometimes out of civilisational defensiveness or filial piety. To abandon Islam might seem like abandoning a pious grandmother, or viewing the islamization of the former Byzantine Empire as a historic mistake, and many cannot bring themselves to do that. This secular class consists, in the main, of businessmen who have dealings with the West (the Sabanci family comes to mind), writers (Orhan Pamuk, about to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard), journalists, professors, rectors of universities, art gallery owners, musicians who play Western music.
Some of these people inhabit the same mental universe as do non-Muslim Westerners — a phenomenon that cannot be detected among more than a handful of Arabs or Pakistanis, even among those who have lived and studied in the West. But they still live within a world of Islam, where their numbers are swamped by the primitive Muslim masses, who once could be thought of as a rural population that would, over time, change.
But so many people have come from the villages to Istanbul, and instead of finding their Islamic faith weakened or diluted in the face of what might otherwise unhinge them, they cling ever more closely to the stability and certainty that Islam provides. They live in a different world, a world where, if they are not careful, the true believers in Islam, many of whom are rural in their origins but have moved to the vast metropolis of Istanbul without shedding their previous devotion, and who, suddenly encountering and being jostled by a different world, may seek mental and emotional relief in more, not less, Islam.
Islam never went away.
But if you were a historian, say an Ottomanist, doing research in the Archives in the 1960s, or writing a book on the history of Modern Turkey, or a general from a NATO country meeting with a Turkish counterpart in Ankara, you might reasonably assume that the people of the secular class you met, and many of whom were extremely friendly and kind in a way that to you seemed (and was) genuine, were representative and permanent.
You might well believe that the Turkey you saw would always be the same, and the only thing that would change would be a constant expansion in the number of those belonging to the secularist class. And if you considered the cult that had been formed devoted to the worship of Ataturk, and were aware of some of the writings about “the Turks” of those who followed Ataturk — as Inonu — you might conceivably recognize this as a replacement theology for Islam, where Ataturk-worship replaced the Muhammad-worship of Islam, expressed in the need to emulate the words and deeds of Muhammad, al-insan al-kamil, the Perfect Man.
Ataturk instead of Muhammad, and “the Turks” (or, “the Sun people”) as the Best of Peoples, instead of Muslims. For a while, this replacement-theology has worked. But Erbakan, and now Erdogan, and others, including Fethuleh Gulen, have brought Islam back, and the secular class is threatened. It knows it may yet again have to rely on the army, because in the outside world, in the advanced countries of the West, there is as yet no deep sympathy for these embattled secularists.
The relentlessness of those we too easily call “the Islamists,” and the cunning ways they find to pursue unswervingly their immutable aims, is not understood. And why do we not understand the threat, and the means necessary to contain that threat? Oh, that is because — it’s so often because — most people in the Western world cannot grasp the nature and meaning and menace of Islam.
But the Turkish secularists can. We can’t help them out in one way. We can’t allow them to dilute the problem by making it a matter for all the Infidels in the E.U. Turkey cannot be admitted to the E.U., and that no doubt will disappoint Turkish secularists. But what they can and should be offered is understanding and support from the West, if those secularists have to undo those supposed “reforms” to Turkish law that weaken the army and judiciary, or even if the secularists find that they must welcome another army coup should Erdogan continue to behave as he did recently, with the attempt to destroy the Dogan media conglomerate that stood in his way. He thought he could get away with destroying it through the power to tax or levy fines. Perhaps he won’t get away with it this time, but he will, like determined Muslims promoting Islam everywhere, keep trying, until he does wear away the opposition.