From Kemal to Caliph: Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan together with Deniz Baykal (pictured together in 2009).
Dr Can Eriman
21st Century Wire
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (aka the Prez) has been occupying the limelight in Turkey for many decades now – ever since his Justice and Development Party (or AKP) was founded in the early years of this century, this political organisation has all but replaced Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938)’s Republican People’s Party (or CHP).
The recent return of the CHP to İstanbul’s corridors of power has awakened feelings long suppressed amongst a great many people – at home as well as abroad. Some people have now started dreaming aloud that the return of Atatürk (or rather values supposedly espoused and advocated by the nation’s founder) is imminent. As if the chimera that was ‘Turkish Secularism’ is suddenly about to return to the nation’s largest and most important city. Alas, as I have outlined earlier, İstanbul’s new Mayor is far removed from espousing a secular value system, being personally steeped in the traditions of Islam and personally observant of the Prophet’s example. Whereas the 2017 testimony of the now-imprisoned rather prominent CHP member Canan Kaftancıoğlu seems to suggest that Atatürk’s party does clearly not shy away from employing the Islamic concept of “taqiyya in order to gain votes from the right.” The party leaders Kılıçdaroğlu (2010-) and Baykal (1995-2010) have after all actively commenced and continued recruiting members of the country’s pious population groups into the ranks of the Republican People’s Party. In fact, Deniz Baykal played an even far greater role in securing Tayyip Erdogan’s ascendancy to his current lofty position at the head of Turkey’s state and government. As a lawyer who then went on to complete his doctorate at the Ankara University Faculty of Political Science, Baykal went on to be an academic with a keen intererst in the country’s political fortunes. He joined the CHP in 1968 and was elected to public office five years later. For nearly twenty years, Baykal was part and parcel of Turkey’s volatile political establishment, having served as Finance Minister under Bülent Ecevit (1925-2006)’s coaltion government in 1974, and subsequently as Energy and Natural Resources Minister in Ecevit’s third government (1978). Baykal was thus a card-carrying member of the Kemalist camp, arguably espousing a modern and secular value system. But his role in aiding and abetting Erdogan’s meteoric rise to power casts a serious shadow on his legacy and reputation now that he is in hiw twilight years.
Baykal and Erdoğan’s Special Relationship
Kingmaker: Deniz Baykal
Though, quite advanced in age, severy ill and bound to a wheelchair, Baykal is at present an active member of the New Turkey’s all but powerless parliament (TBMM). On 21 February 2019, while sitting in his wheelchair, the erstwhile leader of the main opposition CHP, Deniz Baykal, took his oath as a newly-re-elected member of TBMM. Baykal had not been in parliament for the past sixteen months. This seemingly simple and mundane event really came as a shocking surprise, as Deniz Baykal, had been taken to hospital over a blood clot in a major artery going to his brain on 16 October 2017. Somewhat surprisingly, at that time, “President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reportedly visited the hospital” on the same day. Even “meeting Baykal’s son Ataç Baykal and his daughter Aslı Baykal Ataman,” as reported in the Turkish press. Baykal was subsequently in a critical condition, and following three operations was being kept in a medically induced coma. But why did the Prez himself visit the veteran politician, even instructing prominent brain surgeon Uğur Türe to personally look after the patient?!?? In fact, following his 51-day treatment in Turkey, Baykal was flown to Germany where he entered an Emergency Hospital in the vicinity of the Bavarian city of Munich (Unfallklinik Murnau). And, even more amazing, on 2 January 2018, the Prez made a telephone call to talk to the erstwhile opposition leader to convey his well-wishes. This telephonic interference was even reported on Turkish television. Is there a special link between these two men, between Tayyip Erdoğan and Baykal?!?? A special relationship the general public does not seem to know about?!??
Turkey’s political life has been dominated by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan throughout most of the 21st century . . . Before stepping on the national stage in 2003, his political career had been stopped short due to his imprisonment between 26 March and 24 June 1999. By law, this criminal record would have been the end of his public life . . . but as we know, from being Mayor of Istanbul (27 March 1994–6 November 1998), Erdoğan went on to found the Justice and Development Party (or AKP, on 14 August 2001) to subsequently lead the country first as Prime Minister (14 March 2003-28 August 2014) and then, as President (28 August 2014-) . . . and over the years, he has radically altered the country and its people in such a way that today’s Turkey hardly resembles the nation state founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923. The link between being a mayor and becoming prime minister and president was created by one man, and one man only, Deniz Baykal.
Necmettin Erbakan’s Protégé
The Prez: Tayyip Erdoğan
Tayyip Erdoğan entered Turkey’s national consciousness with a bang on 27 March 1994, when Necmettin Erbakan’s Refah Partisi (or RP, erroneously translated as Welfare Party) somewhat unexpectedly made major gains in nationwide local elections – even sweeping the mayoral seats of Ankara and Istanbul along. Erdoğan, as the Istanbul-born son of parents hailing from Turkey’s Black Sea town of Rize, became the incumbent of the latter as Erbakan’s chosen candidate. The RP was founded in 1983, and Tayyip Erdoğan had been a member of the party’s Istanbul establishment since 1984, when he became the chairman of the Beyoğlu district party organisation and in the following year, even rising to the chairmanship of the RP’s Istanbul provincial department. In order to strengthen his personal ties with the legendary figure of Erbakan, Erdoğan organised a meeting with the Afghani Mujahid and ‘politician’ Gulbuddin Hekmatyar on 30 November 1985. As such, Erbakan had been actively trying to revive the power of Islam in Turkey since 1969 when he penned a manifesto entitled Millî Görüş (or ‘The National Vision’). And he subsequently also set up a number of political parties, beginning with the MNP (National Order Party, founded on 26 January 1970) – numerous political vehicles of which the RP (1983-97) was to be the most successful incarnation (even allowing him to become PM in the period 28 June 1996-30 June 1997). Erbakan was known internationally as an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hekmatyar, then, had been an important warlord fighting against the Soviets in the 1980s, receiving liberal support from Pakistan, the UK and the United States. In the 1990s he even received the gruesome sobriquet “Butcher of Kabul,” on account of the widespread destruction and the many deaths he caused in Afghanistan’s capital. Ideologically, he is also known ot have been influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood and by Sayyid Qutub (1906-66)’s writings in particular. The meeting between these two Islamic champions (in Turkey, Erbakan’s followers used to refer to their leader as Mücahit or Mujahid) organised by Erdoğan was a great success and no doubt raised his standing in party circles as well as the eyes of the RP leader himself. In 1989, Erdoğan unsuccessfully participated in the mayoral contest for the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul. But, five years later, upon receiving Erbakan’s approval he ran for the position of metropolitan mayor of Istanbul. Erdoğan ran a savvy campaign, managed by Nabi Avcı, who was to serve as Education Minister (2013-6) and Culture Minister (2016-7) in two separate AKP governments, which ensured his victory with a handsome 25.1% share of the vote. In 2003, Deborah Sontag gave this assessment of his stint at the mayoral offices in Istanbul’s Saraçhane district: “[a]s mayor, Erdogan adopted modern management practices and proved singularly adept at delivering services, installing new water lines, cleaning up the streets, planting trees and improving transportation. He opened up City Hall to the people, gave out his e-mail address, established municipal hot lines. He was considered ethical and evenhanded,” as a devout Muslim who made no bones about publicly proclaiming his faith.
The Imam of Istanbul
Though his record might very well appear largely positive in hindsight, Sontag adds that an anonymous “building-trade professional, however, told [her] that the corruption endemic to Istanbul City Hall persisted under Erdogan and that donations of equipment and vehicles were still solicited in exchange for building permits.” After all, politics is a dirty business, but rather than deal with Erdoğan’s failings to keep his personal avarice in check, which is a most deserving topic in is own right, for present purposes it seems more at hand to deal with the then-mayor’s faith. Even though the period we are dealing with is not even 25 years removed, at that stage in Turkey’s history, Tayyip Erdoğan was a “pious man in a country where secularism [wa]s worshiped,” as worded by Sontag. As a result, at the time, many inhabitants of Istanbul were highly upset and visibly worried by the fact that a man hailing from the district of Kasımpaşa and visibly attached to his religion and at the same time, clearly opposed to the modernzing reforms introduced by Atatürk (known as İnkılap, in Turkish) headed the biggest city in the country that was and continues to be the cultural and economic heart of the nation. In fact, about eight months after his electoral victory, Erdoğan made this pronouncement: “I am the Imam of Istanbul” (reported in the daily Hürriyet, on 8 January 1995). Islam has no priesthood, as there is not supposed to be an intermediary between the Creator (or Allah) and his creature (or man). As a result, in Sunni Islam, the honorific Imam is given to prayer leaders of a mosque, a person that is morally outstanding and therefore able to lead fellow-believers in prayer. And by proclaiming himself to be the city’s prayer leader, Erdoğan at that stage attempted to transform his elected post into a quasi-religious office. At that stage, the notion of ‘Turkish Secularism’ was still very much alive, and “proponents of secularism in Turkey” attached a “lot of importance to certain symbolic issues [, such as] the availability of alcoholic beverages . . . as well as the thorny headscarf issue,” to quote an earlier piece of mine that has since been censored on the internet (but now still available here). And on both counts, Tayyip Erdoğan did not disappoint his detractors, for he “banned alcohol from municipal establishments,” but proved unable to expand that ban to either restaurants or bars. Two years into his term, he even made the pronouncement that “[a]lcoholic drinks must be banned” (reported in the daily Hürriyet, 1 May 1996). As for the then-still thorny and volatile headscarf issue (nowadays probably better known by the Arabic term hijab), following his inauguration as mayor, Erdoğan proclaimed that he would make the (Islamic) headscarf fashionable in years to come.
Reading a Poem: Going to Jail and Returning to Politics
In December 1997, the RP leadership dispatched the Mayor of Istanbul to a political rally in the southeastern city of Siirt, the hometown of his wife’s family (known as her memleket, in ordinary Turkish parlance). On that day, Tayyip Erdoğan, as he had done several times previously, recited a quatrain written by Ziya Gokalp (1876-1924), the primary ideologue of Turkish nationalism: “The minarets are our bayonets. The faithful are our soldiers. God is great. God is great.” In 2002, TIME magazine evaluated this so-called “flight of fancy” as tantamount to political suicide. The Atlantic‘s Uri Friedman states that the timing had been off, as Gokalp’s lines spoken by Erdoğan “provoked Turkey’s secular military leaders and civilian elite, who had just forced the country’s first Islamist prime minister from power and who viewed Istanbul’s popular, Islamist-leaning mayor as a threat.” Earlier that year, Turkey’s secular elite had namely belatedly undertaken a serious counter-measure against what they saw as the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalism, at that stage still known in Turkey as İrtica or ‘reactionary atavism’ or simply ‘religious reaction.’ The politcal scientist Şaban Tanıyıcı explains: “[i]n a regular monthly National Security Council (NSC) meeting on 28 February 1997, the military leadership demanded from the leader of the [RP] and prime minister at the time, [Necemetin] Erbakan, that his government implement a number of measures that would prevent [the] Islamization of Turkey. After that meeting, the military elite closely followed the implementation of these decisions and started a campaign that included some societal organizations, the media and the opposition parties, and led to the removal of the government. This process of de-Islamization continued after Erbakan was ousted from power. It became known as the ‘28 February Process’, which included . . [a total] ban on the party [RP] and a total campaign against religious social forces.” And in this climate, reciting Gokalp’s lines during an election rally had been a most imprudent thing to do, it had been nothing but a provocation really.
At that stage in Republican history, the Turkish Penal Code’s Article 312 was notorious and its original wording meant to stifle even the smallest hint of İrtica (or ‘religious reaction’): “Anyone who openly incites the public to hatred and enmity with regard to class, race, religion, religious sect or regional differences shall be punished” by means of a jail term between 1 and 3 years. With regard to the reciting of one of Gokalp’s poems by Istanbul’s Mayor, Human Rights Watch had this to say: “Turkish courts show an eccentric understanding of what constitutes ‘incitement’. The former mayor of Istanbul Recep Tayyip Erdogan was stripped of political rights and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for reading lines from a poem that not only contained no advocacy of violence or hatred, but was written by a celebrated republican poet and had actually been approved by the Ministry of Education for use in schools. In fact, in common with some other prosecutions under Article 312, the conviction of Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared to be no more than straightforward political manipulation.” On 6 February 2002 a so-called “mini-democracy package” altered the wording of the infamous article. At the time, the country was led by the veteran politician Bülent Ecevit (then leading the DSP or Democratic Left Party, founded by his wife Rahşan in 1985), whose coalition government was supported from the outside by Deniz Baykal’s CHP.
Friedman relates in 2016 that in “1999, thousands of supporters escorted him to jail, where his popularity only grew. Erdogan seemingly emerged from prison a changed man, committed more to Western-style democracy than Islamism.” But his prison sentence meant that he was barred from political office. “Erdoğan’s political career is over,” the Turkish press wrote at the time. Unperturbed, in the summer of 2001, though, he set up the AKP as his chosen political vehicle. In those very summer months, as related by the British Dr Haitham Al-Haddad, (variously described as a ‘Sunni Muslim scholar and television presenter of Palestinian origin,’) in true hadith stye: a “brother that I know, Dr Saleh al-Ayid, present in Istanbul “in the summer of the year 1421 AH, 2001 CE,“ paid a visit to the “great scholar Mohammed Ameen Siraaj at his home“ – a man otherwise known as Mehmet Emin Saraç, a graduate of Cairo’s Al-Azhar and renowned in Turkey as the last Ottoman âlim [scholar of Islam] who has been teaching Islamic sciences since 1958. At that time in 2001, the Turkish scholar was entertaining none other than the ambitious former mayor of Istanbul. In the course of the social call, it is reported that Saraç stated that “[i]t is neither our Ambition nor Recep Tayyip Erdogan‘s to succeed in leading a province even if it is the size of Istanbul, instead we are training him to be a successful President, and you will see him soon become the President of Turkey by the will of Allāh.”
Baykal or Turkey’s Von Papen
By the time the next election cycle came along in 2002, the newly-founded AKP literally swept to power, gaining “34.2 percent of the vote, winning 363 of the 550 seats in the Turkish parliament [or TBMM].” All together eighteen parties had participated in the electoral contest on 3 November, but only the AKP and the Republical People’s Party (or CHP) were able to breach the 10% threshold – the latter receiving 19.4%. As a result, the AKP was able to form a government on its own, but given that the party’s founder and leader was banned from political life, the post of Prime Minister went to Abdullah Gül, a close personal friend and ally of Erdoğan’s. Gül had also been active in the RP during the 1990s, even uttering quite shocking words at the time. In the run-up to the December 1995 elections, when he was acting as the RP’s deputy leader, he told the Guardian‘s Jonathan Rugman that “[t]his is the end of the Republican period.“ At this stage, the now-gravely ill Baykal made his intervention. In fact, even before the elections, the CHP leader had been vocal in his support for Tayyip Erdoğan. Both party leaders participated in a televised debate chaired by the well-known Turkish journalist Uğur Dündar. And right from the start, Baykal expressed his concern with the situation, saying that the ban imposed on his rival was proof that Turkish democracy had still not matured properly. As a long-time-and-particularly-ineffective chairman of the CHP (1995-200), Baykal’s erstwhile defense of democratic values appears virtuous and brave, albeit utterly counter-productive, in hindsight. According to politician (and musician) Zülfü Livaneli, Baykal was the one to have secured Erdoğan’s return to the political fold. About a month and a half following the election, a number of CHP MP’s (Livaneli included) held a meeting at fellow MP Mehmet Sevigen’s Ankara house (19 December 2002). At the meeting Baykal vehemently insisted that “Tayyip Erdoğan will become prime minister!“ In spite of serious objections, Livaneli adds, Baykal persisted, even saying “you will see, [Erdoğan] won’t even last two months.“ In response, Livaneli claims to have stated that “Erdoğan is not just anybody, he is the politician chosen to replace Erbakan by all [religious] brotherhoods [or tarikat, in Turkish] combined; he has America’s, Europe’s support behind him, his programme is to turn Turkey into a moderate Muslim republic. He won’t go in just two months, like you’ve said, quite to the contrary, he will end the political lives of everybody [gathered] in this room.“ In due time, then-President Ahmet Necdet Sezer (2000-7) eventually confirmed the lifting of the ban and approved Erdoğan’s election as MP, an election which enabled him to become PM on 14 March 2003. A few days later, on 17 March, then-CHP Chairman Deniz Baykal, while addressing a crowd in the central Anatolian town of Tokat, apparently proudly declared that “we made Erdoğan PM!“
And now, approximately fourteen and a half years later, Livaneli’s words appear to have come all but true, and, rather than improving Turkish democracy Baykal appears to have been the one who drove the decisive nail into its coffin: Deniz Baykal was “the key figure in steering the course of events toward the disastrous outcome, the person who more than anyone else caused what happened,” as written by the historian Henry Ashby Turner (1932-2008) in 1996. Turner’s words actually deal with the figure of Franz von Papen and his role in securing Adolf Hilter’s rise to power, but seem extraordinarily apt in characterising the part played by Baykal in Tayyip Erdoğan’s ascent to his current lofty spot in his palatial residence in Ankara.
A Pseudo-Ottoman Sultanate of Kitsch: Executive Rule and Establishing an Islamic State
At this stage in Turkey’s history, it stands to reason that Baykal’s intervention was of historic and historical import and importance. Tayyip Erdoğan has dominated Turkish life and politics throughout the 21st century. He has changed the country and its people, from being the odd duckling in the Muslm world, Turkey has now become a land where Islamic piety and religious observance have become a matter of national pride and duty. The mere idea of ‘Turkish Secularism,’ once a very attracive and even seductive proposition, now seems totally outdated and completely out of step with society and history. The memory and example of Atatürk are quite dead and gone at the moment. On a purely political level, Erdoğan has also overseen a complete systemic overhaul, abolishing the parliamentary system (which could be seen as a relic of the last Ottoman days when the Empire was trying hard to become a slimmed-down nation-state along European lines, 1908-1918) only to replace it with a presidential one. As a result, he is now the Prez, ruling the land with an iron fist (like his Ottoman role-model Abdülhamid II, 1876-1909, who famously cut short the Ottomans’ first attempt at a parliamentary system, 1876-78) aided by more than willing accessories carrying ministerial portfolios – accessories who are quite literally at his beck and call. The idea of a presidential system was first floated in AKP-led Turkey in the course of the year 2010. And, early last month, the newspaper Millî Gazete, well-known for its links with the Islamist Saadet Partisi, the true successor of Erbakan’s erstwhile RP, came out with an amazing claim. Erbakan’s successors namely declared quite openly that the U.S. management consulting company McKinsey had “designed” Turkey’s presidential “system.” As a source, the paper cited an unnamed AKP official talking off the record and preferring to remain anonymous.
Though thes claims may very well be true, the real reason why Tayyip Erdoğan was so keen to do away with Turkey’s parliament arguably has a lot more to do with his desire of establishing a truly Islamic state in Anatolia. Surprisingly, none other than Iran’s Khomeini (1941-1980) seems to offer a plausible answer in this respect. While living in exile in the Iraqi city of Najaf during the year 1970, Khomeini gave a number of lectures in the months of January and February. These lectures have subsequently been published under the heading ‘The Islamic State.’ As such, Khomeini posits that a mere collection of laws (such as the Sharia) is not suficient to improve society, but that there has to be a strong executive in place to implement the rule of the law and function as society’s guiding light. As a result, though ideologically quite opposed to the Shi’a school of Islam, it seems that Erdoğan has been acting with this goal in mind, as apparently also underlined by Mehmet Emin Saraç’s statement made in the summer of 2001. Saraç after all did say that Erdoğan was being groomed “to be a successful President, and you will see him soon become the President of Turkey by the will of Allāh.” The current presidential system in Turkey is the prime example of a centralised executive authority, and, I would argue that his longterm goal for the New Turkey is to establish an Islamic state in Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, as I have pointed out al long ago as 2013.
It would seem to me that the Prez is now planning to “transform the nation state Turkey into an Anatolian federation of Muslim ethnicities, possibly linked to a revived caliphate” and beholden to the Sharia and the Prophet’s example. And the centenary of the Republic’s foundation in 2023 seems like the ideal symbolic date to undertake such a revolutionary act.
At the moment, the New Turkey is an Islamic state in all but name, and it remains to be seen whether Tayyip Erdoğan will succeed in his ultimate goal. Still, one should not forget that this veritable revolution is the outcome of a yearning for greater democracy and adherence to the rule of law. And in this context, the nefarious part played by the CHP politician Deniz Baykal should never be forgotten . . .
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21WIRE special contributor Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent historian and geo-political analyst who used to live in Istanbul. At present, he is in self-imposed exile from Turkey. He has a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans, the greater Middle East, and the world beyond. He attended the VUB in Brussels and did his graduate work at the universities of Essex and Oxford. In Oxford, Erimtan was a member of Lady Margaret Hall and he obtained his doctorate in Modern History in 2002. His publications include the revisionist monograph “Ottomans Looking West?” as well as numerous scholarly articles. In Istanbul, Erimtan started publishing in Today’s Zaman and in Hürriyet Daily News. In the next instance, he became the Turkey Editor of the İstanbul Gazette. Subsequently, he commenced writing for RT Op-Edge, NEO, and finally, the 21st Century Wire. You can find him on Twitter at @theerimtanangle
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