A new history of modern Turkey, revealing its fifty-year retreat from Kemalist secularism.

 

This is the first account in English of how Islamic religious orders dating back to Ottoman times have risen to dominate and define the future of Turkey, Europe’s awkward neighbour and the major power in the Eastern Mediterranean.

 

Given its determined programme of secularization during the Atatürk period, Turkey is often projected as a model for the compatibility of Islam with parliamentary democracy. In this absorbing book, journalist and writer David S. Tonge reveals the limitations of that secularisation and its progressive reversal in what is a profoundly religious country where seven eighths of Turks describe themselves as religious or considerably religious.

 

As he shows, the Turks’ religious identity is being progressively dominated by branches of one of Islam’s great religious orders, the Naqshbandis, whose profoundly anti-Western ethos was honed by British and French colonial incursions into the heartland of their faith. His tale is thus a salutary alternative to the wishful narrative developed by Western chancelleries during the Cold War, one which projected Turkey as a westernising democracy.

 

This revival of Islam, leavened with the renewal of Turkish nationalism, fuelled President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rise to power, and will shape the regime that succeeds him. But, if the autocratic President is the new norm for a country long feted for balancing Islam with western concepts of modernisation, he emerges as both product and cause of the rise of Islamism in Turkey.  As nationalism takes on fresh vigor, will this change?

 

Past analysis has neglected this resurgence of the religious orders, but Erdoğan himself was nurtured by one of them, joined a second, cooperated hand-in-glove with a third (that of the infamous Fethullah Gülen), and now has the support of two others.

For those brought up in post-World War II Turkey, history largely started with the creation of the Republic in 1923. But such an approach failed to explain the changes which have taken place during the past two generations as religion and nationalism have moved to centre stage. To understand these one must remember that Islam originally came to Anatolia from the heart of Central Asia and spread to the walls of Vienna. And then faced a protracted and searching debate as the Ottoman sought to come to terms with the ravages of a rapacious Europe and local nationalisms.

 

Modern scholarship now presents Kemalism in less black-and-white terms than those used by its more ardent advocates. The reality is that secularizing policies lasted only one generation. Three-quarters of the prime ministers who ruled Turkey after 1950 took measures favouring Islam.  The secularisation of the early Republic – which was always more nuanced than its supporters would have us believe – has thus long been overtaken by the return of Islam to the central role it had in society through the six centuries of the Ottoman Empire.

 

Most analysis of the country tends to deny the recrudescence of nationalism and religion, instead adopting a teleological vision of an upward march from Islamic empire to secular republic.

 

But the power of these atavistic forces is the reality today as Turkey rises with arguably fewer regional competitors than at any time since the sixteenth century and with the orders feeding an aggressively anti-Western narrative, as do the perceived lessons of history.

 

The book starts and ends with the present. It traces the role of the religious orders as an integral component of Islam, helping mediate between the believer and an austere Almighty, and long acting as a key element of social stability. It explains, in a way which is often neglected, the scars left by the powers of Europe as they dismembered the ageing Empire and by the Great War.

 

For today’s Turks, Europe’s attempts to emasculate the defeated Ottoman Empire with the Treaty of Sèvres are a far more searing warning than, say, defeat in Vietnam is for most Americans. In this nostalgia for a Golden Age the anti-colonial teaching of the orders which have come to dominate modern Turkey shapes the country’s discourse.

 

After setting the background, the author paints the tensions of the early Republic as, proclaiming secularism, it sought to bring a deeply-engrained religion under state control. He next explores the growth of the Naqshbandis from their origins in Central Asia through Mughal Delhi to their international predominance today.

 

This is followed by a detailed description of the progressive undermining of this secularism and of the growth of the orders during Turkey’s wrenching transformation from peasant communities to industrial powerhouse. Inherent to this is Fethullah Gülen’s long march into the heart of the state and his eventual showdown with his long-term ally, the current President. This leads into an analysis of today’s Turkey as Erdoğan builds on the religious and nationalist foundations laid by earlier Islamist politicians. The book concludes by describing what the hold of Islam and of the orders means for the future.

 

The book draws on the experience of half a life lived in Turkey, part of this as a journalist for the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, International Herald Tribune, Observer and others, when the author came to know the country’s leaders such as Süleyman Demirel, Turgut Özal, and Bülent Ecevit. He thus lived the change as the breezy, self-confident heirs of the Republic were displaced by the current masters of the country. For those of his generation, brought up to believe that religion and nationalism had been displaced, here and elsewhere in the world, it has been a salutary lesson.

 

In writing the book, the author met and talked with some orders’ leaders, participated in dervish rituals, travelled with one Sufi sheikh through the Balkans, and learnt to read the messages of the dervishes’ tombs. He visited faculties of theology and talked to historians, sociologists and political scientists. And he delved deeply into recent scholarship, local and foreign, drawing also on contemporary Turkish newspapers and political reviews.

 

Turkey’s Islam has thus been influenced by the incursions of the west, leading both to changes in the emphasis of the religion and to the development of the nationalism which is resurgent in Turkey.  This linkage lies at the heart of Turkey today, enabling President Erdoğan’s rise to power and shaping the regime that succeeds him.

 

Illuminating and understanding Turkey’s realities of faith and religious politics have never been more important.