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Turkey key to new accord with Islam

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  • Turkey key to new accord with Islam

    Gulf Times, Qatar
    May 27 2006

    Turkey key to new accord with IslamPublished: Saturday, 27 May, 2006,
    08:23 AM Doha Time

    By Madeleine Bunting

    LONDON: This week there was a ceremony in the south-eastern Turkish
    port of Ceyhan to mark the first tanker to be loaded with the oil
    piped over a thousand kilometres from Baku in Azerbaijan. One of the
    most ambitious and controversial energy schemes in the world is
    finally coming to completion. It will transport the oil wealth of
    central Asia to hungry world markets, bypassing the increasingly
    capricious Russia.

    And this huge pipeline, whose course runs through zones of chronic
    political and seismic instability across the Caucasus, is only the
    beginning of how Turkey is exploiting its old strategic and
    geographic advantages to develop a web of pipelines for oil and gas,
    stretching from Asia into the heart of Europe. Plans for a gas
    pipeline across Turkey, under the Aegean to Greece and eventually to
    Italy, are well advanced. The reserves of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan
    will soon be linked to energy-hungry Europe.

    Turkey is offering Europe a cornucopia of dazzling possibilities as
    the pipelines are laid and the economy booms. Not surprising then
    that the Turkish and western European political and economic elites
    feasting at last week's Forum Istanbul - the Turkish equivalent of
    the Davos World Economic Forum - are chorusing heartily from the same
    hymn sheet. It was a lovefest as participants got giddy on the dream
    of a utopian future in which Muslims and secularists happily
    co-exist, ancient enmities between Christian and Muslim are
    reconciled, and Turkey pioneers a way forward beyond `clash of
    civilisations' simplicities.

    Sound a bit far-fetched? Plenty of Kurds, Armenians and Greek
    Cypriots would snort with derision. But Istanbul has that kind of
    intoxicating impact on many. It is a city whose history is steeped in
    the exchange of civilisations as well as their clash. Istanbul sits
    on a cultural fault line as well as a geological fault line, yet that
    has been a source of cross-fertilisation as well as conflict.

    That cross-fertilisation is evident on the streets and the ferries
    criss-crossing the Bosporus. Women in headscarves walk arm in arm
    with peers sporting long flowing hair, tight T-shirts, jeans and
    trainers, and young women canoodle with their boyfriends or husbands.
    The promise held out in these commonplace Istanbul images are of an
    accommodation between Western individualistic modernity and religious
    traditionalism.

    This is now part of Turkey's sales pitch for its EU membership. `We
    can draw on our Ottoman past of a multi-ethnic empire which achieved
    a remarkable degree of religious tolerance, to help Europe reach an
    accommodation with its 15mn Muslim minorities,' runs the spiel. `We
    don't just offer to keep your lights on, heat your hot water and
    provide young labour to pay for your ageing populations' pensions. We
    also offer a thousand years of experience in bridging cultures, in
    hybrid civilisations. We hold out Istanbul as a model for the cities
    of western Europe with large Muslim populations such as Birmingham,
    Rotterdam and Marseilles.'

    But what slowly dawns is the shrill undertone of this sales pitch and
    how it is chorused by Turks to convince themselves as much as anyone
    else. For this is a country that spent much of the 20th century
    poised precariously between secularism and political Islam. As both
    become more globally aggressive, it risks being torn between them.

    That danger was brought sharply home last week when a gunman opened
    fire in a Turkish court, killing one judge and injuring four others.
    The assailant, a lawyer, subsequently explained his attack as revenge
    for the judge's ruling in a recent case that a teacher who wore a
    veil outside work should not be promoted to headteacher of a primary
    school. The ruling is in line with Turkey's strict interpretation of
    secularism. The state rules out veils in any public building (thus
    banning even the current prime minister's wife from public
    functions); yet it has always funded and closely regulated the
    country's Islamic worship.

    The murder was a brutal reminder of just how much of this conflict is
    mediated through what women do or don't wear. Eavesdrop on
    conversations about the veil among Turks, and the complex and
    contested symbolism of covering female head is mind-boggling. Is it a
    symbol of female oppression, political identity or puritanical piety
    - or a purely pragmatic response to the aggressive male sexuality of
    Turkey's burgeoning cities, fuelled by a steady supply of Western
    porn? Could it be all of these to different people at different
    times?

    Maintaining the ban, a sacred legacy of the revered father of Turkey,
    Ataturk, risks excluding a lot of girls from a university education
    and the labour market, while a relaxation of the ban risks alienating
    the powerful military, who regard themselves as the keepers of the
    Ataturk flame.

    This murder will only confirm the fears of the secular Europeanised
    elite that Turkey's delicate balance of faith and secularism is
    unravelling. They feel beleaguered as the ruling Justice and
    Development party promotes the religious into positions of power. A
    wife in a headscarf has become an essential attribute for the
    ambitious Turk.

    The secular elite is clinging to EU membership as the one hope of
    reversing this trend. If the process slows down - as it might well
    given such incidents as the fracas that has erupted between France
    and Turkey over a law proposed in the French legislature outlawing
    denial of the Armenian genocide - the reaction could prompt an
    intensification of Islamism.

    The application to the EU is characterised by two ironies, neither of
    which is lost on Turks. Firstly, although Turkey pioneered secularism
    in the Muslim world, discussion in the EU of Turkey's application to
    join has focused on its 97% Muslim population. Secondly, although
    Turkey has finally resolved its decades-old identity crisis as to
    whether it is European or Asian - the majorities in favour of EU
    accession are substantial - Europe has now plunged into an identity
    crisis.

    Much of the opposition to Turkish EU membership pivots on these
    ironies and the questions they prompt: is Europe a geographical or a
    cultural entity, and how do you define the boundaries of either?
    Nilufer Gole, a Turkish academic working in France, warns of the
    grave dangers of a narcissistic European Union obsessed by these
    questions of identity rather than motivated by the sense of project
    (initially, Franco-German peace) that gave birth to the EU and has
    sustained it. It's the project - of peace, of economic growth, of
    democracy and human rights - that appeals to Turkey, not
    indeterminate questions of identity.

    An EU project that carved out a distinctive European engagement with
    Islam in which Turkey was a key partner would trounce Samuel
    Huntingdon's specious and self-fulfilling theory of a `clash of
    civilisations'. Naked self-interest - those pipelines and pensions -
    will help drive this project forward. But I'm aware that many would
    attribute my enthusiasm to that intoxicating Istanbul effect of a
    city prickling with minarets above a sparkling blue sea.
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