THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume X, Issue # 101, April 14, 2008
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
TURKEY'S TURNING POINT:
Could There Be an Islamic Revolution in Turkey?
By Dr. Michael Rubin
THE RULING REGIME & GULEN MOVEMENT IN TURKEY: THEIR USE OF FABIAN TACTICS TO UNDERMINE TURKISH
CONSTITUTIONALISM & SECULARISM & BRING ABOUT AN ISLAMIST REVOLUTION IN TURKEY -- THREAT TO U.S. FOREIGN
POLICY & NATIONAL SECURITY INTERESTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST -- INABILITY OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT TO EFFECTIVELY
PROTECT AMERICAN NATIONAL INTERESTS IN THE REGION, DUE TO THE INCOMPETENCE OF POLITICAL APPOINTEES &
CAREER BUREAUCRATS IN THE U.S. FOREIGN POLICY APPARATUS
FULL STORY:
Few U.S. policymakers have heard of Fethullah Gülen, perhaps Turkey's most prominent theologian and political thinker.
Self-exiled for more than a decade, Gülen lives a reclusive life outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Within months,
however, he may be as much a household a name in the United States as is Ayatollah Khomeini, a man who was as
obscure to most Americans, up until his triumphant return to Iran almost 30 years ago.
Many academics and journalists embrace Gülen and applaud his stated vision welding Islam with tolerance and a
pro-European outlook. Supporters describe him as progressive. In 2003, the University of Texas honored him as a
"peaceful hero," alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama. Last October, the British House
of Lords and several British diplomats celebrated Gülen at a high-profile London conference. Later this year, Georgetown
University scholar John Esposito will host a conference dedicated to the movement. As in 2001, Esposito will co-sponsor
with the Rumi Forum, an organization Gülen serves as Honorary President.
The Gülen Movement controls charities, real estate, companies, and more than a thousand schools internationally.
According to some estimates, the Gülen Movement controls several billion dollars. The movement claims its own
universities, unions, lobbies, student groups, radio and television stations, and the Zaman newspaper. Turkish
officials concede that Gülen's followers in Turkey number more than a million; Gülen's backers claim that number is just
the tip of the iceberg. Today, Gülen members dominate the Turkish police and divisions within the Interior Ministry.
Under the stewardship of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one of Gülen's most prominent sympathizers, tens of
thousands of other Gülen supporters have entered the Turkish bureaucracy.
While Gülen supporters jealously guard his image in the West, he remains a controversial figure in Turkey. According to
Cumhuriyet, a Left-of-Center establishment daily Turkey's New York Times in 1973, the Izmir State
Security Court convicted Gülen of "attempting to destroy the state system and to establish a state system based on
religion;" he received a pardon, though, and so never served time in prison. In 1986, the Turkish military the
constitutional guardians of the state's secularism purged a Gülen cell from the Military Academy; the Turkish military
has subsequently acted against a number of other alleged Gülen cells who they say infiltrated military ranks.
In 1998, according to Turkish court transcripts cited in the Turkish Daily News, Gülen urged followers in the
judiciary and state bureaucracy to "work patiently to take control of the state." The following year, the independent
Turkish television station ATV broadcast a secretly taped Gülen telling supporters, "If they . . . come out early,
the world will squash their heads. They will make Muslims relive events in Algeria," a reference to the Islamic Salvation
Front's overwhelming 1991 election victory in the North African state. After party leaders spoke of voiding the
constitution and implementing Islamic law, the Algerian military staged a coup leading to a civil conflict that killed tens
of thousands.
Because of his statements and veiled threats, the judiciary, in 1998, charged Gülen with trying to "undermine the secular
system," while "camouflag[ing] his methods with a democratic and moderate image." Convicted in absentia, but free to
run his organization from his U.S. exile, Gülen continues a rather inconsistent approach to tolerance and secularism. He
often equates the separation of religion and state with atheism, an assertion many of Turkey's most secular officials find
offensive, holding that believing that religion is best kept to the individual sphere, rather than state sphere, does not
equate with any lack of belief in God. In 2004, Gülen equated atheism with terrorism and said both atheists and
murderers would spend eternity in Hell.
Gülen has received a legal break, however. In 2002, Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kakinma Partisi,
AKP) won a plurality in parliamentary elections and, because of a fluke in Turkish election law, was able to amplify
one-third of the popular vote into a two-thirds parliamentary majority. Erdogan used this advantage to enact reforms
which had the net affect of stacking, not only the civil service, but also banking boards and the judiciary with his
political supporters and with religious fundamentalists. Erdogan's judges wasted no time. They placed liens against
political opponents' property, seized independent newspapers and television stations including, not by coincidence
ATV, and assigned sympathetic judges to hear appeals against earlier decisions levied against Islamists. On May 5,
2006, the Ankara Criminal Court overturned the verdict against Gülen. While a public prosecutor a secularist hold-out
appealed the Court's action, the process is now nearing conclusion. Gülen's supporters are ecstatic. His slate wiped
clean, Gülen has indicated he may soon return to Turkey.
If he does, Istanbul 2008 may very well look like Tehran 1979. Just as Gülen's supporters affirm his altruistic intentions
and see no inconsistency between a secretive, cell-based movement and transparent governance, too many Western
journalists also give Gülen a free pass.
If this sounds familiar, it should: Three decades ago, the same phenomenon marked coverage of Iran. "I don't want to be
the leader of the Islamic Republic; I don't want to have the government or power in my hands," Khomeini told a
credulous Austrian television reporter during the Ayatollah's brief sojourn in Paris. In November, 1978, Steven Erlanger,
the future New York Times foreign correspondent, penned a New Republic essay arguing that Khomeini's
vision for Iran was essentially a "Platonic Republic with a grand ayatollah as a philosopher-king," and predicting the
triumph of an independent Liberal Left worried more about labor conditions in Iran's oil fields than pursuing any
theological tendency.
In Tehran then, as in Ankara now, U.S. ambassadors preferred garden parties with the political elite and maintained
contacts with only a narrow segment of the population. They were blind. As the U.S. State Department and Central
Intelligence Agency remained clueless or belittled concerns about Khomeini's intentions, millions of Iranians turned out
to greet their Imam at Tehran's international airport. Turks now say that similar crowds might greet Gülen when his plane
touches down in Istanbul.
Gülen is careful. He will not order the dissolution of the Turkish Republic. But, ensconced in his Istanbul mansion, he
could simply begin to issue fatwas prying Turkey farther from the secularism to which Erdogan pays lip service. As
Khomeini consciously drew parallels between himself and Twelver Shiism's Hidden Imam, Gülen will remain quiet as his
supporters paint his return as evidence that the caliphate formally dissolved by Atatürk in 1924 has been restored.
The secular order and constitutionalism in Turkey have never been so shaky. The government now controls most
television and radio stations. Erdogan has gained the dubious distinction of launching more lawsuits against journalists
and commentators than any previous Turkish prime minister.
As Erdogan discourages dissent, his and Gülen's supporters among prominent Turkish columnists and commentators
equate Islamism with democracy, and secularism with Fascism, a line too many Western diplomats, eager to demonstrate
tolerance with an embrace of "moderate Islam," accept. Erdogan himself has argued that it was secularism which led to
Hitler; that Islamism would never produce such a result.
Last month, after one of the few independent judicial authorities filed a lawsuit against Erdogan and the AKP for
violating constitutional provisions separating religion from politics, the Prime Minister responded with a midnight
round-up of leading academics and journalists who had criticized him. Even Erdogan's supporters were shocked to wake
up on March 21 to learn that Ilhan Selçuk, the bed-ridden octogenarian Editor-in-Chief of Cumhuriyet, described
by Turks as their Walter Cronkite, had been arrested in a pre-dawn raid on charges of plotting to launch a military coup;
the police have yet to provide any evidence. Nor is Selçuk the only victim in the most recent intimidation campaign. A
Hürriyet columnist, Ahmet Hakan, has received threatening phone calls from lawyer Kemaletin Gülen, a relative
of Fethullah.
When Islamists pursue campaigns of hatred, Western officials, not only pretend nothing is amiss, but also, as in the
case of Palestinian leaders, often increase their support. This week, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will
address the judicial case against Erdogan and the AKP. Members of her staff suggest she will lend subtle support to
the Prime Minister. Indeed, it may be tempting to condemn the court action as a political stunt: The prosecutor's legal
brief is shoddily written and poorly argued. Despite its faults, however, the underlying legal issues are real.
Rice should be silent. Any interference will backfire: Turks, already upset that U.S. Ambassador Ross Wilson seldom
meets with opposition leaders, will interpret any criticism of the case as White House support for the AKP. Secularists
will ask why Turkey's liberal opposition should not have the right to all legal remedies. They already ask why the West
applauds legal action taken against Austrian populist Jörg Haider and French demagogue Jean Marie Le Pen, but the
same U.S. and European officials appear to bless Erdogan's legal exceptionalism. By undermining judicial recourse, Rice
may accelerate violence and lead support to those who argue wrongly that the government's disdain for the law
and constitution should be met with the same. On the off-chance, however, that Rice accepts that the court case should
run its course, Turkey's religious conservatives will accuse her of masterminding the approach.
Over the past seven years, the Bush administration has made many mistakes. Bush was correct to recognize the
importance of democratization; bungled implementation has turned a noble ideal into a dirty word. By equating
democracy only with elections, the State Department and National Security Council fumbled U.S. interests in Iraq, Gaza,
and Lebanon. One man, one vote, once; parties that enforce discipline at the point of a gun; and politicians who seek to
subvert the rule of law to an imam's conception of God do little for U.S. national security. Never again should the United
States abandon its ideological compatriots for the ephemeral promises of parties that use religion to subvert democracy
and seek mob rule, rather than constitutional rule.
Turkey is nearing the cliff. Please, Secretary Rice, do not push it over the edge.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Turkey, the Middle East, & the U.S.A.
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
International Politics & World Disorder:
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Michael Rubin, a Ph.D. in History (Yale University) and a specialist in Middle Eastern politics, Islamic culture and Islamist
ideology, is Editor of the Middle East Quarterly, a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a resident
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Dr Rubin is author of Into the Shadows: Radical
Vigilantes in Khatami's Iran (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001) and is co-author, with Dr. Patrick Clawson,
of Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Dr. Rubin served as political advisor to the Coalition
Provisional Authority in Baghdad (2003-2004); staff advisor on Iran and Iraq in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense
(2002-2004); visiting lecturer in the Departments of History and International Relations at Hebrew University of Jerusalem
(2001-2002); visiting lecturer at the Universities of Sulaymani, Salahuddin, and Duhok in Iraqi Kurdistan (2000-2001); Soref
Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (1999-2000); and visiting lecturer in the Department of History at Yale
University (1999-2000). He has been a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Leonard Davis Institute at Hebrew
University, and the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
The foregoing article by Dr. Rubin was originally published in National Review Online, April 14, 2008, and
can be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum, a foreign policy think tank which seeks to
define and promote American interests in the Middle East, defining U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam,
working for Palestinian Arab acceptance of the State of Israel, improving the management of U.S. efforts to promote
constitutional democracy in the Middle East, reducing America's energy dependence on the Middle East, more robustly
asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia, and countering the Iranian threat.
(Article URL: http://www.meforum.org/article/1882)
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
April 14, 2008
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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