Almost everything about the Turkish Republic is a lie or, at best, a half-truth, starting with its name. As the secular state is progressively dismantled the Islamic revivalism of the current regime is no mere nostalgia for the Ottoman heritage. It is something far more sinister.
The imminent demise of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s “caliphate” must be counted as a clear win in the Long War or the War of Freedom and yet, to borrow from Churchill, we are a long way from final victory: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Even that may be overly optimistic. Still incapable of identifying our mortal enemy, we remain stuck in 1938. This major peril confronting us is yet another incarnation of Islamic revivalism, one more manifestation of the hydra-like Global Jihad at war with Dar al-Garb (House of the West). The danger posed to the world by the burgeoning Islamic state of Turkey remains hidden in plain sight.
Almost everything about the Turkish Republic is a lie or, at the very best, a half-truth, starting with its name. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular Turkish Republic is being dismantled piecemeal by a modern-day demagogue, President Erdoğan. If the Tribune of Anatolia, who possesses the second-largest army in NATO, holds onto power until October 29, 2023—the centenary of the proclamation of the republic—his suzerainty is no doubt going to be reconstituted as the Islamic Republic of Turkey. This development will denote something more than modern-day Turks revisiting their Ottoman heritage. Ottoman-style Islam, as demanding and controlling as it was, might be counted as mild-mannered and easy-going compared with the fanatical millennialism of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The rise and rise of Erdoğan, whose Freedom and Justice Party (AKP) won the 2002 parliamentary elections and has stayed in power ever since, did not occur in a vacuum. Erdoğan, as Soner Cagaptay points out in The New Sultan: Erdoğan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey (2017), was an acolyte of Necmettin Erbakan, a Turkish version of historic members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. The reason Erbakan’s vision of Islamic revivalism began to resonate in Turkey during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century would probably require an investigation rooted in psychiatric anthropology. To make it brief, many Turks, especially in the Anatolian hinterland, were left feeling uncomfortable, dissatisfied and straight-out confused by Atatürk’s experiment in Western-style modernity.
Samuel P. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilisations?, encapsulated the problem as well as anyone. Turkey is a quintessential “torn country”, caught between the House of Freedom to its immediate north and Islamic rectitude to its south:
[Kemalists] allied Turkey with the West in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership in the European community. At the same time, however, elements in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern society.