[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]

A very informative piece appeared on these pages last week under the title “Decision to abolish headscarf ban hurts Turkey internationally.” Its writer, Dutch commentator Michael van der Galiën, nicely summarized how Europeans like him see this country. “We often think that the majority of Turks are overly religious,” he wrote, “but that they are kept in check by a modern elite.” He added that his fellow Europeans worry that “this elite cannot control these masses much longer,” and fear that “Islamists will take over and the European Union will have a massive problem.”

It is striking to hear this comment especially these days, because “the Islamists” that have been “kept in check by a modern elite” for decades have just taken a few more bold steps to make Turkey a liberal democracy. The members of the “Islamist” AKP (Justice and Development Party) have just passed the Foundations law, which gives our non-Muslim minorities the rights that the Turkish state, in the heydays of its secular nationalism, took away from them. (On the other hand, the party that represents the “modern elite,” the CHP, was getting ready yesterday to appeal to the Constitutional Court in order to have the law cancelled.)
Decades of Story-Selling

In another occasion, a little less than a thousand ladies wearing the Islamic headscarf signed a petition that demands “freedom for everybody.” They said they wouldn’t be happy until every segment of the society – including Christians, Kurds, Alevis, artists, intellectuals, gays, lesbians, etc. – will be accepted and set free. Make no mistake: These are some of the “backward minded Islamic women” that are kept in check, and kicked out of the campus, by Turkey’s brilliant “modern elite.”

So, don’t you think that there might be a problem with the image of Turkey that Mr. van der Galiën and the likeminded Westerners have in mind?

I think there is, and also believe that this is a carefully manufactured deception by Turkey’s “modern elite.” The picture of uncivilized hordes kept at bay by a tiny group of enlightened masters is what the latter have systematically sold to the West for decades. “Hey, we are representing you in this sea of barbaric natives,” they implicitly said. “You need to support our enlightened despotism here.”

For most Westerners, this made sense. This “modern elite” spoke their language, wore their clothes, and shared their tastes. “These guys are wonderful,” these Westerners often said to each other when they met Ankara’s or Istanbul’s crème de la crème. “They look like us.”

The reality was less chic. While Turkey’s “modern elite” looked Western, quite many of them did not believe in the principles that the Western democracies uphold. Therefore they did not refrain from suppressing millions of their citizens, the “unenlightened” ones, to impose their ideology or to preserve their privileges.
Jacobinism At Work

You will see what I mean when you look at the history of Turkey and examine the impact of the grand project of forcefully creating a secular, nationalist and homogenous nation from the remnants of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Ottoman Empire. Turkish liberals disapprovingly refer to the project as “Jacobinism,” because it takes its inspiration from the original Jacobins — the radical French revolutionaries who made great use of the guillotine to deal with their political opponents.

In Turkey, it is the Jacobin-minded “modern elite” that is responsible for the suppression of the Kurdish identity or the limitations on Christian minorities. (In the Ottoman era, both groups had broader rights.) The same elite is also responsible for the impoverishing of the religious mind — as they destroyed all traditional institutions of religious learning, Islam remained only at the hands of the rural and unsophisticated figures. The urban-secular divide that underlies much of the secular-religious dichotomy in Turkey is an outcome of that “puncture” in the society.

All this doesn’t mean that the masses which were dominated by the elite were open-minded liberals. No, not really. But from the beginning, they have been closer to believing in democracy. Moreover, since the 1980’s, thanks to their engagement with globalization, they have become more broad-minded than the “modern elite,” which increasingly grew rigid, intolerant and reactionary.

In the recent years, especially with the rise of the AKP and its pro-EU politics, the clichés created about Turkey’s religious masses have been weakened a bit. Quite many Westerners who follow Turkey now realize that the real trouble makers here are the CHP folks and other nationalist forces. But decades of story-selling is hard to break – as evidenced by Mr. van der Galiën’s piece. Moreover, the Western world is experiencing its own problems with radical Islam – a phenomenon which gives the Turkish story-sellers yet another card to play with.
More Meaningful Questions

One of the standard tricks in this story-selling is putting the whole blame of the anti-Christian or anti-Jewish attitudes in Turkey on the Islamic side. Let me show you one example from the latest piece by fellow TDN columnist Mr. Burak Bekdil. In a series of rhetorical questions designed us to convince how “Islamist” the current government is, Mr. Bekdil questioned its composition. “Since Mr. Erdoğan’s government is at equal distance to all faiths and every Turkish citizen is equal,” he asked, “why does Turkey not have a Jewish-Turkish general, or a Greek-Turkish diplomat or an Armenian-Turkish undersecretary?”

This is not a meaningful question, because no government in the secular Turkish Republic ever appointed a Jewish, Greek or Armenian citizen to such influential posts. Such ecumenical cabinets used to exist in the Ottoman days, but things have changed with the emergence of our nation-state and the dramatic decline in the population of the non-Muslims.

Therefore a more meaningful question would be to ask why the secular Turkish Republic never had Jews, Greeks or Armenians in its high bureaucracy. And that would lead to other questions, which would, finally, lead us to deconstruct the greatest Turkish story ever sold. But, apparently, not all of us are willing to go that far.

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