DAR AL ISLAM - TURKEY: SUNDAY'S VOTE FOR ALLAH

ELECTING ALLAH
TURKISH VOTE TURNS BACK THE CLOCK
by Ralph Peters

July 24, 2007 -- THE bad news is that democracy works. In free and fair elections, the Turkish peo ple voted overwhelmingly to deepen the majority status of a religion-based party that's modern on the outside and medieval within.

In Sunday's vote, 47 percent of the ballots went to the Justice And Development Party (AKP). In Turkey's multi-player parliamentary system, that's a landslide. The Islamist-in-a-necktie AKP still doesn't have enough votes to break the secular Constitution - which it intends to do - but it believes it has a mandate to hack away at the legacy of Kemal Ataturk.

A brilliant, if flawed, visionary, Ataturk insisted that Turkey could only compete on the world stage if it modernized and cast off the benighted forms of Islam that had kept Turks superstitious, ignorant and poor for centuries.

Ataturk outlawed the veil and the fez, abolished the Caliphate (a complaint of Osama bin Laden's), force-fed the people education and dragged Turkey out of the darkness. Unfortunately, those who came after were lesser men who failed to live up to his vision.

The secular political parties grew ever more corrupt. The military assumed the role of political arbiter. The economy remained feudal. And the average Turk stayed poor.

As the political system weakened over the past generation, the Islamists slowly began to make their move

Following the pattern Muslim parties had employed successfully elsewhere, the AKP played down its devotion to punitive Islam and delivered the services the people in Turkey's urban slums or in parched Anatolian villages had always been promised, but never got.

Many early supporters of the AKP weren't voting for a government of mullahs, but for a party that brought electricity, clean drinking-water and rudimentary sewage systems to their neighborhoods - while cracking down on crime.

To be fair, the AKP leadership really did clean up some aspects of government and has presided over the healthiest economic expansion in Turkey's post-Ottoman history - the party saw that businessmen could be turned into vital allies, so it opened the door to entrepreneurs shut out by the oligarchs tied to the corrupt, old parties.

Now Istanbul has been given a good scrub that reassures high-rolling tourists staying at The Four Seasons, and shops are full across the country. Euro-tourists are welcome to drink themselves sick and flaunt minimalist bikinis - as long as they remain quarantined in resorts.

But for all of the AKP's practical successes, the party is an Islamist party. It fully intends to destroy Turkey's secular laws.

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Turkey Votes
The AKP may not be the same as Hamas, but their ideology does kill innocent people.
by Stephen Schwartz (moslem convert)

TURKEY'S REELECTION OF incumbent prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP, or Justice and Development Party, has reenergized the low-level debate in Washington about foreign Islamic parties that claim to respect democracy and secularism. But for the AKP--no less than its rivals in the Turkish military and secular state structures--the positive element lacking in their outlook involves pluralism, more than either politics or prayers.

Turkey is now divided between two forms of intolerance: a secular element that only accepts Islam under strict state supervision, and a religious faction that similarly restricts its approval to Sunnism. Neither respects Turkey's minorities: the heterodox Alevi Muslims, who fear the AKP because it excludes them; the Kurds, whose situation is dangerous for Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition there as well as Turkey itself; the small Greek Orthodox population, which suffers curtailment of its most elementary religious functions, or the Armenians, who still clamor for truth about the deportation and massacres they suffered at the end of the First World War.

Many American commentators would like to see "Islamic democratic" parties emerge across the Muslim world--notably in Egypt, with a presumed option of American accommodation with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Both Erdogan's AKP and the Egyptian MB (the latter having been the godfather of Hamas among the Palestinians) talk the talk. They say they opt for ballots over bullets, and since voting and renouncing violence are the words Americans love to hear, the chance at supporting parties representing a "tame" Islamist ideology is attractive to many inside the Beltway.

In addition, the strident rhetoric and militaristic legacy of Turkish secularism seems to blame Islam as a faith for the problems of Turkish politics, which plays well with some sectors of Western opinion, but is a risky conception if the Western democracies intend to defeat radicals inside Muslim countries. Nobody serious on the side of freedom has suggested that the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq should make the eradication of Islam its strategic goal.

And finally, when they mark their ballots, many Turks vote for the AKP because after more than 75 years of enforced secularism, they are aggrieved at those who swore that driving religion from public life, and rooting out the old manners and morals of the Ottomans, would create a modern, efficient nation--but then failed to make good on their promises of accountability and prosperity. Turkey ended up with an army prone to violence, a police known for extreme corruption, and political bloodshed between leftist and rightist nationalists. Worst of all, the Turkish army holds on to its "right" to throw out governments of which it disapproves, which is hardly exemplary from the democratic viewpoint.

Having trusted secularists who delivered little, many Turks want to give religious believers a chance in government. And the AKP, in its electoral propaganda, asks for no more than an opportunity to administer the existing state in a more conscientious and clean manner. Its functionaries and apologists profusely deny any intent to introduce sharia law--a source of literal horror among many Turks--or otherwise expand the role of the mosque in Turkish life.

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Pertinent Links:

1) ELECTING ALLAH

2) Turkey Votes