Leave It Up To Western Media To Embrace Islamists

Filed under: Erdogan, Media Criticism, Political Islam, Turkey — Michael van der Galien, Editor-in-Chief on May 12, 2007 @ 10:00 pm CEST

You can leave it up to Western media to embrace Islamists: Ruling Party Charms a Turkish City With New Take on Secular Heritage.

Six decades of work has arched his back, age has slowed his speech. But Ahmet Hamdi Gul was quick to praise the people running this city in the heart of Anatolia, awash in a transformation from backwater to bustling entrepot, from stronghold of Turkey’s ultranationalists to redoubt of the religiously rooted party that rules the country.

“They’ve done well for the city,” the 81-year-old Gul said simply, during a visit to a factory where he worked until last year.

The words were not unusual, but the speaker was. He is the father of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, whose nomination as Turkey’s president, eventually derailed, touched off a political crisis last month. The father’s modesty says something about Gul’s grass-roots appeal in Kayseri. And his words say something about the ruling Justice and Development Party’s draw here — as modernizers, populists and devout guardians of the poor.

Long the most secular and modern of Muslim nations, Turkey is in the throes of a social and political transformation that began nearly 60 years ago and crested with the Justice and Development Party’s surprising ascent to power in elections in 2002. It is sometimes cast as a simple contest between the secular orthodoxy of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and the ruling party’s origins in the country’s Islamic movement of the 1990s. But the party’s success in Kayseri shows how it has leveraged the rise of a new elite to create a broad, subtle, sometimes visceral appeal.

It is undoubtedly true that the AK Party has improved Turkey’s economy quite tremendously, but there are bigger issues at stake here. This is not just about the economy, this is also about Turkey’s secular system.

It is quite nice that the Washington Post decided to publish an advertisement for Erdogan / the AK Party, instead of truly giving space to the other side of the debate to make their case as well.

I am sure Erdogan et al. appreciate it.

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