Where Islam and Democracy Meet, Uneasily
As the Obama administration effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan sputtered, the Arab Spring inspired and then alarmed Americans.
In an astonishing nine-month period in 2010 and 2011, street protests in Tunisia and Egypt and an armed rebellion in Libya forced the overthrow of three longtime Middle Eastern autocrats. Formerly all-powerful rulers in Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan, Oman, and Morocco made political concessions to the opposition as well.
In 2012, hard-line regimes fought back. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s violent suppression of peaceful protests sparked a brutal civil war. The Sunni rulers of Bahrain crushed protests by the country’s disenfranchised Shiite majority. And Saudi Arabia’s ruling family tried to placate opponents with a multibillion-dollar increase in government benefits.
Finally, in the fall of 2012, instability spread to Turkey, a close American ally and a nation Obama administration officials viewed as a model for the region. After Turkey backed Syria’s opposition, the two countries exchanged fire. As tensions mounted, Turkish observers complained about American passivity.
“We are now at a very critical juncture,” Melih Asik, a columnist for the centrist newspaper Milliyet wrote in October 2012. “We are not only facing Syria, but Iran, Iraq, Russia, and China are behind it as well. Behind us, we have nothing but the provocative stance and empty promises of the U.S.”
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After decades of being dismissed as “the sick man of Europe,” Turkey’s economy, political system, and ambitions soared in the 2000s. By 2012, Turkey boasted a faster-growing economy than any European nation and a 40-million-strong middle class, roughly 60 percent of its population. For Obama administration officials, Turkey seemingly represented an alternative to the Middle East’s three failed models of government: secular Arab dictatorship, authoritarian Islam, and American invasion. But Turkey’s leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, displayed two contradictory sides.
Since taking office in 2002, Erdogan had overseen a near tripling of per capita income in Turkey; broken the Turkish military’s decades-long grip on power; and declared that Islam, democracy, and capitalism were compatible. As part of Turkey’s effort to join the European Union (EU), the conservative Islamist politician opened up the country’s economy, overhauled its judiciary, and granted rights to women and minorities. He also completed a harsh International Monetary Fund loan and reform program and attracted massive investments from European and American corporations.
Erdogan also displayed a growing authoritarian streak. Over the past five years, Turkish prosecutors have jailed more than seven hundred people and accused them of plotting coups that would restore the military to power. Generals, members of parliament, owners of television stations, university officials, and journalists have all been arrested in what appears to be a campaign to silence dissent.
Critics of Erdogan—who was imprisoned for four months in 1999—say he is exacting revenge on those who oppressed him and his party in the past. In recent years, the Turkish leader has publicly assailed his critics and appeared increasingly intolerant of dissent. There are rising fears that Turkey will follow the examples of Russia and China: free-market growth combined with political repression.
Desperate for an ally—and a model—in the region, the Obama administration stayed largely silent about Erdogan’s excesses. On one level, Turkey shows how free-market reforms, consumerism, and technological change can help transform a Middle Eastern country. On another, it shows how slow moving political reform in the region can be.
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Culturally, Turkey has an impact in the region that the United States and other Western nations can never equal. One example is Turkish soap operas. Broadcast across the Middle East, they have taken the region by storm, empowering moderates and enraging conservatives.
Each week, in a state-of-the art Istanbul television studio, the Islamic world’s version of America’s culture war plays out in a television series called Magnificent Century. A dashing Turkish actor plays Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman ruler who conquered vast swaths of the Middle East and Europe, granted basic rights to Christians and Jews, and promoted education, science, and art. Early episodes of the program portrayed a young Suleiman cavorting with scantily clad women in the palace harem and drinking wine. The sex was frequent.
After the show’s January 2011 debut, Erdogan, along with a number of other Turkish conservatives, complained that it maligned a revered ruler known as “the lawgiver” whose military prowess and legal reforms placed the Ottomans at the zenith of their power. Erdogan called the series “an attempt to insult our past, to treat our history with disrespect and an effort to show our history in a negative light to the younger generations.”
Critics hurled eggs at billboards advertising the program, protested outside the television station airing the show, and filed more than seventy thousand complaints with the Turkish government television agency. In response, the show’s producers shortened kissing scenes and toned down other prurient elements.
In interviews, the show’s producers defended the soap opera, saying it contained other themes. Its dominant character was a woman, the Ukrainian slave-turned-concubine who eventually became Suleiman’s queen. And the story line showed members of different faiths coexisting.
Halit Ergenc, the actor who plays Suleiman, boasted in an interview in the spring of 2012 about the show’s religious tolerance. “This is the most important thing of the Ottoman Empire that allowed one family to rule for centuries,” he said. “Sharing the same land with different cultures and different religions and respecting their rights.”
As of the fall of 2012, Magnificent Century was airing in forty-five countries and was one of the most popular shows in the Middle East. It was the latest of a series of Turkish television soap operas to find a huge audience there.
What may someday be known as the Islamic world’s cultural revolution began in 2006. A Saudi-owned Arabic-language satellite television channel, MBC, bought the rights to an obscure Turkish soap opera named after its heroine, Gumus—“silver” in Turkish. In a classic rags-to-riches story, the series recounted the struggles of an impoverished young woman who marries into a wealthy family. Dubbed into colloquial Arabic, censored of its raciest scenes, and renamed Noor—“moon” in Arabic—the series was a phenomenal hit across the Middle East.
Unlike Western soap operas, it focused on an extended family, a strong tradition in Turkey and the region. In 2008, the show’s final episode drew an estimated 85 million viewers over the age of fifteen, according to MBC. The audience included an estimated 50 million women, a figure that represented more than half the adult women in the Arab world.
Like Magnificent Century, Noor violated conservative cultural norms. Some Muslim characters drank wine with dinner and engaged in premarital sex. One character had an abortion. And in a subtle twist, the lead male character, Muhannad, was the show’s moderate and modern hero.
A loving, attentive, and loyal husband, he supported his wife’s career as a fashion designer and treated her as an equal. Their successful marriage—which combined traditional loyalty and modern independence—was both popular, particularly among women, and groundbreaking. Some Arabic-language newspapers reported that arguments and even divorces occurred in several countries as a result.
Turkish academics believe the programs have subtly changed cultural norms in the Middle East.
“Somehow, in those serials, you have a very balanced adjustment,” Aydin Ugur, a professor of sociology at Istanbul Bilgi University, told me in an interview. “Women are modern, but they are not degenerate.”
In Saudi Arabia, conservative Islamic clerics denounced Noor. They declared the show “wicked and evil” and a “secular Turkish assault on Saudi society.” They forbade people from watching the program or attending prayer services in T-shirts that depicted the show’s two stars. The head of a Saudi religious council said the owner of MBC should be tried and potentially executed for airing indecent material. Across the region, governments ignored him.
After Noor’s final episode, Turkish soap operas grew even more popular in the region and received glowing coverage from Arab and Western journalists. Beyond breaking cultural taboos, they displayed something else. In its soap operas, Turkey was modern, Muslim, and prosperous at the same time.
Premiering five years after Noor, Magnificent Century displays Turkey’s growing economic power, cultural sophistication, and wealth. It is the most expensive TV program in Turkish history. Producers spend roughly $500,000 per episode, twice the amount that is spent on other serials. The program’s launch party was held in Cannes, France. Its set is a lavish fifteen-room re-creation of Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace, with real marble floors, handcrafted woodwork, and mock Ottoman and European throne rooms. Actors wear exquisite silk and velvet gowns crafted by a leading Turkish costume designer. Two siblings, known as the Coen brothers of Turkey, Durul and Yagmur Taylan, direct it.
“It’s never been done before,” Durul Taylan told me during a tour of the studio. “Not in this way.”
In interviews, the directors and actors of Magnificent Century insisted the show was apolitical. “There is no political message or any other cultural message,” said Ergenc, the actor who plays Suleiman. “This is a TV series. It is a soap opera.”
Intentionally or not, the makers of Turkey’s soap operas are creating new roles, new heroes, and new cultural norms in a rapidly changing region. I applaud them.
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Turkey’s political and economic influence in the region is on the rise as well. Erdogan was an early and vocal supporter of the Arab Spring uprisings. And after the toppling of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, he took a September 2011 victory tour of the region.
First, Erdogan and 260 Turkish businessmen made a historic visit to post-Mubarak Egypt. In a single day, the businessmen announced $853 million in new contracts with Egyptian companies. One of them, Davut Dogan, promised to build a new $10 million furniture manufacturing center.
“The factory will employ two hundred people,” Dogan boasted in an interview several weeks later in Istanbul.
From the rapturous welcome Erdogan received to the economic power the Turkish businessmen displayed, the trip demonstrated Turkey’s rise as a regional power. After visiting Cairo, Erdogan continued to Tunis and Tripoli. In all three newly liberated post–Arab Spring capitals, Erdogan did something that no American can do. The Turkish leader told captivated audiences that Islam and democracy could coexist. The devout Muslim head of a conservative, Islamist political party said Muslims could be pious and democratic.
“Islam and democracy are not contradictory,” Erdogan declared in Tunis. “A Muslim can run a state very successfully.”
One of the most popular leaders in the Middle East, Erdogan has vastly more credibility in the region than the United States does. Rightly or wrongly, he has turned himself into a folk hero by lambasting Israel in recent years. And his success at creating jobs is widely admired in countries desperate for economic growth.
Erdogan somehow thwarted two political dynamics that have haunted the region: ineffectual democracy and repressive military rule. To the amazement of many, he broke the grip of Turkey’s military, which overthrew three civilian governments between 1960 and 1980. And his party became such a dominant force in Turkey’s fractious political system that it ended a long series of weak coalition governments.
In 2011 elections, Erdogan’s party won a third term with 49 percent of the vote, a historically high vote total in Turkey’s multiparty political system. In 2012, a parliamentary committee began drafting a new constitution to replace the one that had been drafted after a 1980 military coup.
Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish newspaper columnist and frequent Erdogan defender, said the prime minister’s Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials, AKP, is a model for Islamist parties in post–Arab Spring countries. Akyol argued in his 2011 book, Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, that there can be liberalism within Islam and challenges the authoritarian interpretations of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and militant groups.
“We can speak of an AKP model for other Islamic parties—and that’s a good model,” Akyol said in an interview. “If more and more Islamists are inspired by the AKP model than by the totalitarian example of Iran, that will be good for the region.”
Davut Dogan, the Turkish furniture magnate who traveled to Egypt with Erdogan, embodies the AKP’s economic transformation of Turkey. The fifty-one-year-old’s family furniture company is one of the so-called Anatolian tigers—burgeoning firms that have risen from Turkey’s conservative heartland.
More religious, driven, and ruthless than the genteel Istanbul elite, Anatolian businessmen have helped fuel Turkey’s economic surge. Dogan’s company, Dogtas, has opened 108 stylish, IKEA-like stores across the country catering to upwardly mobile, smartphone-wielding middle-class Turks.
Dogtas has experienced extraordinary growth in the last five years, with sales revenues and employees doubling to $200 million and 1,000, respectively. The firm, launched thirty-nine years ago as a family business, now exports to sixty-five countries and plans to continue its aggressive expansion in the Middle East, where it already has twelve shops in Iran, seven in Libya, five in Syria, and two in Iraq.
“We want to be as big in Egypt,” said Dogan, “as we are in these other countries.”
Bulent Celebi represents another type of growth in Turkey: high tech. Celebi, like Monis Rahman, the founder of Pakistan’s first dating Web site, was profiled by American journalist Elmira Bayrasli in her magazine story on entrepreneurs in emerging market countries. Like Rahman, Celebi represents the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, and globalization.
Istanbul is one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It is also one of its most electronically impenetrable, Bayrasli wrote. The city’s oldest houses are made of dense concrete that blocks the signals emitted by wireless routers designed for American drywall.
Sensing an opportunity, Celebi founded AirTies in 2004, an Istanbul technology start-up that develops and markets wireless electronic devices for specialized environments. After growing up in Istanbul, Celebi had moved to the United States and founded the chip company Ubicom in San Francisco, but memories of Istanbul and a business idea brought him home.
Celebi set out to create WiFi for the rest of the world. A WiFi box, just like a radio, streams a standard WiFi signal worldwide. But a standard American WiFi doesn’t work everywhere, according to Bayrasli, a fact that wireless giants Linksys, D-Link, and Netgear had not yet realized. Focused on the American market, none of these companies were updating their devices for global markets. In San Francisco, Celebi encouraged these companies to adapt their devices for emerging markets, which he believed would boom. When the companies ignored his advice, he set out to do it himself.
Using contacts he had developed in San Francisco, Celebi raised $300,000 in seed capital from Silicon Valley investors and persuaded a handful of American-trained Turkish engineers to join him, Bayrasli wrote. First, Celebi concentrated on Istanbul, where the concrete floors and walls weakened a continuous wireless signal.
To solve the problem, he developed a mesh technology that sent out repeated pulses like a beating heart. Electronic devices were able to pick up the pulses without interruption, giving the user a better signal. That became Celebi’s trademark, according to Bayrasli.
At the same time, he focused on service and customization, an area where Linksys and others also lagged. Targeting Turkey, the Balkans, and the Middle East, a combined market of 465 million, he created routers with manuals and twenty-four-hour customer support in Turkish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Greek, Kazakh, and Romanian, Bayrasli wrote. Then he added Russian, which, together with Ukrainian, added another 187 million potential customers.
In Turkey, Celebi’s business quickly expanded beyond Istanbul to Anatolia, where telephones had become widespread only in the mid-1980s and cable did not reach televisions until the 1990s. For decades, Turkey had been considered a creative, technological, and economic laggard, according to Bayrasli. Through centuries of Ottoman rule, Turks had relegated trade, commerce, and business to Armenians, Greeks, and Jews.
In modern Turkey, other problems emerged. Nepotism, red tape, weak rule of law, and a lack of investors and talent stifled Turkish markets, as they do in much of the developing world, Bayrasli wrote. Exhaustive bookkeeping to comply with Turkish tax laws and countless slips of paper that required business owners’ personal authorization did as well. Last, under Turkish law, AirTies was Celebi’s personal responsibility, according to Bayrasli. There was no limited liability or protection. If the company failed, he and his family lost everything.
Starting in the 1990s, in an effort to finally secure a spot in the European Union, Turkey’s rulers slashed the country’s bureaucracy and made it easier for Turks to register businesses, acquire licenses, build trade, and move capital freely in and out of the country. Turkish cotton traders struck deals with Levi’s and Tommy Hilfiger. Anatolian furniture manufacturers like Dogtas signed deals with European conglomerates. Investment poured in, and a middle class was born. In a virtuous circle, Turkey’s emerging middle class allowed Celebi to push entrepreneurship further.
Before becoming a senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke, Vali Nasr described the process in a 2009 book, Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World.
“Economic power shifted to small- and medium-sized businesses,” Nasr wrote, “and the Anatolian heartland overshadowed Istanbul as an engine of growth.”
Today AirTies dominates the wireless router market in the region, boasting 50 percent of the wireless market share in Turkey alone, Bayrasli wrote. It generates millions in revenues and is planning on an initial public offering in the next few years.
Today Turkey is the world’s seventeenth-largest economy—bigger than all but six of the twenty-seven actual EU nations that have kept Turkey waiting for accession for forty-nine years. To many Turks, EU membership is no longer important. They see their future in the global market.
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Critics of Erdogan warn that Turkey’s phenomenal growth could stall. The AKP and the Anatolian tigers are creating a corrupt and insular political and economic elite that will eventually slow growth, they say. Behind closed doors, the government is steering lucrative projects to companies with links to senior party officials and creating an enormous AKP patronage mill.
Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, suspects that Erdogan may move toward “electoral authoritarianism.” Elections will be held in Turkey, but the outcome will never be in doubt. Ozel warned that continued political and economic paralysis in the West could make the high growth and one-party rule of China increasingly appealing around the world.
“Unless the West gets out of its current economic malaise, it will be like the 1930s,” Ozel predicted. “Democracy will lose its allure. Authoritarianism is going to have a feast.”
Erdogan has suggested that Turkey’s new constitution adopt a presidential system of government. If it does, the Turkish leader, who has said he will not serve again as prime minister after his third term ends in 2015, could rule Turkey as an all-powerful, Putin-like president.
There is another path for Erdogan. The drafting of a new constitution is an opportunity for him to strengthen Turkey, not his own rule. Increasing rights for minorities could ease the Kurdish insurgency, which has claimed forty thousand lives since the 1980s. Constitutional checks and balances that disperse power—instead of concentrating it—could restore faith in Erdogan’s commitment to democracy. And the country’s burgeoning middle class could be a source of stability for Turkey and the region for years.
Two contradictory Turkeys are emerging. One is a prosperous, modern nation that is a model for the region. The other is a popular but paranoid elected government that jails its perceived enemies by the hundreds.
As the civil war in Syria intensified, tensions rose inside Turkey. In November 2012, the number of Syrian refugees accepted by Turkey topped 120,000. Businessmen complained of lost trade and growing refugee camps. And after Kurdish separatists launched a series of attacks, Erdogan jailed several thousand more people, including writers, academics, elected mayors, and students, on charges of association with Kurdish separatists.
Turkish observers warned that the Kurdish insurgency was the biggest danger to the country’s stability. If Erdogan failed to make a bold offer to begin a dialogue, the conflict could destabilize Turkey.
The United States should pressure Erdogan to abide by democratic norms and follow Europe’s example. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Europe followed a clear set of policies in Turkey for fifteen years. Offering incentives for the creation of free markets, modern judicial systems, and democratic institutions allowed Turkey to reform on its own terms.
The process was slow and involved repeated setbacks. As recently as 2002, Turkey was mired in recession and debt. In 2013, its economic growth is likely to slow. But Turkey represents the ability of Western technology, consumerism, entrepreneurship, and investment to transform a country. And, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, it is a potentially powerful example of a new interpretation of Islam fashioned by Muslims, not outsiders.