New Turkey: Towards a “progressive Islam”

- For the first time within the Islamic movement, the islamist feminist movement appeared. For the first time Muslim women argued that Quran should not be interpreted only by the man but also from a female point of view in the name of gender equality.

- A few years ago, on May 1st for the first time the Anticapitalist Muslim group or the “leftists Muslim” group appeared. The most interesting thing was that for the first time in Turkey Muslim values interacted with leftist values. This group supports what a Marxist believes in. One of the slogan that they use is “Allah, Bread and Freedom”. One of their activities is to protest against rich Muslims who in the period of fasting would spend thousands of dollars breaking their fast in luxury hotels, to protest this, the anticapitalist Muslim group preferred breaking their fast eating on the ground. The “protest” culture started being developed within the Islamic practices, debates using the Marxism lexicon such as means of production or class of conflict shows that Islam in Turkey started to gain materialist worldview, while 15 years ago they believed that everything came from Allah.

- One of the tools to spread and deepen the capitalist spirit/protestant way of thinking is to make the consumer mentality accessible to social communities which were excluded from this mentality. In the Justice and Development Party era, this outsiders social groups and their Islamic mentality appeared into the public sphere and started interacting with capitalism through the consumerism, interacting with the western life style, clothes, brands such as Mc Donalds, Starbucks etc... we notice that on one hand, the spirit of capitalism was appropriated by the Islamic movement that spread its characteristics to the society, to do so, it used Islamic values. In other words the capitalist system was disguised behind Islamic values.

THE PARALLEL METHODOLOGY OF SHAPING OLD AND NEW TURKEY

The establishment of the “old” red lines during Ataturk era and the “new” ones under the reign of Erdogan is a process that make those two periods very interesting. The methods that Ataturk used for establishing the “new’ turkey in 1923 are the same methods used by Recep Tayyip Erdogan to establish the ‘’new’’ Turkey in 2023. Let’s mention some of them:

a. The personality of the leader. Turkey as an “oriental community” country is a type of country whose social transformation always reflects the international conjuncture whatever it is. The creation of Turkey in 1923 as a nation-state and the context that Ataturk created, the secularism as we mentioned above reflected the international mentality of that period and particularly the European one. The new context that Erdogan is creating and which will take its final form by 2023 reflects let’s say the New Liberalism spirit which started to be implemented in Turkey from the 1980s. One of the new liberalism point of view is the American secularism which has been deepening in Erdogan era. The personality of Ataturk and Erdogan, in the framework of social transformation, acted as a tool for the establishment and consolidation of it but was not or is not its creator. Because when we talk about social transformation we talk about the transformation of the society not the transformation of personality of the leader. It means that the “authoritarianism” or “dictatorship” of each leader was used and is used as a “legitimation tool”.

b. Both Ataturk or Erdogan as founding leader was/is Republican. Ataturk founded the Republican Peoples party on September 9th in 1919, a party which shaped the red lines of the Turkish Republic meaning that even if he was not in power, political parties on the political scene would act according and within the framework of this red lines created by the Republican Peoples Party. Recep Tayyip Erdogan after the July 15th started to become Republican, he gained the characteristic of the founding leader. In February 2018 Erdogan’s party united with the Nationalist Party thus representing the Republicans bloc.

c. The two parties, the Republicans Peoples Party of Ataturk (CHP) in the framework of the European multy-party system and the Republicans of Erdogan in the framework of the American presidential system have seen/see their political program shaping the constitutional mentality and of course the mentality of the state. For example the French secularism model (laicite) was taken into the program of the Republican’s People Party in 1931 and it became the essential factor of the state which included it into the constitution as an article in 1937. The Justice and Development Party did the same thing. On May 20th in 2017, Erdogan’s “Rabia” symbol which means “one nation, one flag, one home, one state” was taken into the party program. I believe that after the June 2018 elections, it will be added to the constitutional change as an article.

THE REPUBLIC OF THE SECONDS