Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
08 June '10
As typical Islamist-leftist theater to delegitimize Israel, late May’s Turkish-sponsored “Free Gaza” flotilla was tediously repetitious. As an illustration that Israelis don’t understand the kind of war they now must fight, the outcome was drearily predictable. But as a statement of Turkey’s policies and an augury of the Islamist movement’s future, it bristled with novelty and significance.
Some background: After some 150 years of faltering efforts at modernization, the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed in 1923 and was replaced by the dynamic, Western-oriented Republic of Turkey, founded and dominated by former Ottoman general Kemal Ataturk. Over the next 15 years, until his death in 1938, Ataturk imposed a Westernization program so stringent that at one point he had rugs in mosques replaced by church-like pews. Although Turkey is nearly 100 percent Muslim, he insisted on a purely secular state.
Ataturk never won the entire Turkish population to his vision and, with time, his laic republic increasingly had to accommodate pious Muslim sentiments. Yet Ataturk’s order persisted into the 1990s, guarded over by the military officer corps, which made it a priority to keep his memory alive and secularism entrenched.
Islamists first acquired parliamentary representation in the early 1970s; their leader, Necmettin Erbakan, served three times as his country’s deputy prime minister. As mainstream Turkish political parties frittered away their legitimacy through a disgraceful mix of egoism and corruption, Erbakan went on to become prime minister for a year, 1996–97, until the military asserted itself and threw him out.
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