I want to turn to three countries in the Muslim world that you have written about. In Turkey, the Erdogan experiment was initially viewed as something that offered this hopeful future for moderate Islamic politics. Not anymore. What happened?
The lesson there is we should never use the word model, because we don’t want to jinx things that are going well. We all used to talk about the Turkish model, and it didn’t turn out good. But it was promising, and no one should revise history and pretend that progress wasn’t really being made in the mid- to late-2000s. It just took a turn for the worse for a variety of reasons. I think one of those reasons is precisely because of Islam’s exceptionalism. Turks have not been able to resolve the problem of religion in public life; that’s a big part of the tension between Islamist and secularist. Even though that’s not what the coup was about, that’s still going to be the key dividing line in Turkish politics for quite some time to come.
Erdogan wants to transform Turkish society. He wants to undo the secularist legacy. He wants to use a very powerful centralized state to be the vehicle for that transformation.* That’s a recurring story throughout the Middle East: Everyone wants to capture the levers of state power, because states, at least some states, are very strong, bloated, and overbearing and they dominate every aspect of life. Once you capture that, then you can really do what you want to do.
We as Westerners are not innocent bystanders in this either. The EU’s essentially giving up hope on the idea of Turkey’s accession into the European Union was a major mistake because that was providing real incentives for Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party [AKP] to play well with others, and to promote expanded freedoms, and to undo some of the problematic aspects of Turkish politics. Once you got rid of that, then Erdogan was more empowered to follow through on his worst instincts.
Erdogan also seems like a run-of-the-mill power-hungry autocrat in some ways. Why is that not a more helpful prism than Islam through which to view him?
Of course we’re all tempted to power; that’s an obvious aspect of human nature. But I think what’s going on here isn’t just about that. Why does Erdogan want power? Presumably he wants power to do something that he cares about. I think that in the United States we often see power as something for its own sake, and we don’t really believe that politicians believe anything deeply enough. Maybe that’s changing with the rise of Trump. I think what’s really hard for people to understand is the bitterness that AKP members feel. I was interviewing a senior adviser to former Prime Minister [Ahmet] Davutoglu last year, and he was talking about how his wife wasn’t able to work at a Turkish hospital until just a couple of years ago. Why? She wears a headscarf. This is in a Muslim-majority country. Or the fact that while Erdogan was prime minister and the most powerful man in Turkey, his daughters couldn’t go to college in their own country. That kind of bitterness, this sense of not belonging in your own country where you had this secularist elite telling you that because you are religious or pious, you are not truly Turkish, that’s going to mess you up. That’s why I think understanding religion and identity is so important because people feel those things in a very raw, existential way.
erdi sollte Diaspora türken nicht mehr einreisen lassen.
haben schlechten einfluss auf die dort lebenden türken.
und wenn sie nicht mehr einreisen dürfen, könnte man sie gleich enteignen....
zum wohle der in der türkei lebenden türken.
ich sollte erdis Berater werden...
Die Schweinehasser werden sich aber als Erstes auf deine Thea richten......das ist nix gut für Bapjia ( Ente )
Dich werde ich adoptieren
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Die Frage ist doch ob das Land diese dauerhafte Spannung aushaelt.
Warum haben wir sowas nötig, muss das sein?
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