The end of secularism in Turkey

The historic weight of this is almost impossible to overstate: Ataturk (who was quite probably a full-blown atheist) could write his own secular ticket precisely because he had ignominiously defeated three Christian invaders. Yet for decades, Western statecraft has been searching feverishly for another Mustafa Kemal, someone who can jumpstart the modernization of a Muslim community under his own name. For a while, they thought Gamal Abdel Nasser might be the model. Then there was the Shah of Iran. They even briefly fancied the notions of Saddam Hussein, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and other characters who will live in infamy. But nobody ever came close to touching Ataturk for authority and authenticity. Under his power, the great caliphate was done away with, and the antique rule of the celestial and the sublime reduced to a dream in which only a few ascetic visionaries and sectarians showed any real interest. Until recently, modern Turkey showed every sign of evolving into a standard capitalist state on the European periphery…

In 1960, the Turkish army held the ring by intervening to execute two powerful political bosses—Adnan Menderes and Fatin Zorlu—who according to my best information had instigated vicious pogroms in Istanbul and Nicosia and even tried the provocation of bombing Kemal Ataturk’s birthplace in Salonika. (See, if interested, my little book Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger.) But this long, uneven symbiosis between state and nation and army and modernity has now run its course. In its time, it flung a challenge to the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles, revived regional combat on a scale to evoke the Crusades, and saw the American and Turkish flags raised together over blood-soaked hills in Korea in the first bellicose engagements of the Cold War. That epoch is now over. One wonders only whether to be surprised at how long it lasted or how swiftly it drew to a close and takes comfort from the number of different ways in which it is possible to be a Turk or a Muslim.