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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 November 1999 Issue No. 455 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 November 1999 Issue No. 455
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Books Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Turkish Islamists on US visit
By Gareth JenkinsThe visit by leading members of Turkey's Islamist Virtue Party (VP) to the United States marked the latest stage in a dramatic turnaround in Turkish Islamists' attitudes towards the West. The turning point was the January 1998 closure by the Turkish Constitutional Court of the VP's predecessor, the Welfare Party (WP), on the grounds that it had attempted to erode secularism in the country. Prior to the court ruling, the WP had campaigned on a platform of often strident hostility to NATO, the US and the EU and had argued that Turkey's future lay in closer ties with other Muslim countries.
"After the Constitutional Court decision we realised that applying Western freedoms would enable us to protect our own traditional values," said a leading VP official. "Western support for greater democracy in Turkey is also in our interests. After all, it was the West that protested the most when Welfare was closed, not other Muslim countries."
Although privately VP officials admit that some fringe elements in the party favour the introduction of Shari'a law in Turkey, they insist that the vast majority of the VP's supporters are committed to Western-style democracy.
"The VP consists of people with religious sensitivities, and, although it is often characterised as conservative, it really represents the ideological centre in Turkey," explained VP Chairman Recai Kutan in Washington last week. "Of course there are people in Turkey who want an Islamist regime like the one in Iran, but they do not exceed one to two per cent of the population," he added.
However, Turkey's secular establishment remains unconvinced. Hard-line secularists argue that the Islamists' recent shift in attitude towards the West is merely tactical, and a case brought by Chief Public Prosecutor Vural Savas for the closure of the VP, following that of the WP, is still before the country's Constitutional Court. Last week the court extended the deadline for the VP to present its written defence until 15 November, and concern over the possible outcome of the case has already persuaded the VP to postpone holding its annual national congress.
There are also indications that the VP is far from being united over the future direction of the Islamist movement. Under former Prime Minister and Welfare Party Chairman Necmettin Erbakan, who was barred from politics under the January 1998 court ruling that banned the party, rigorous discipline ensured that any internal divisions in the movement did not become public. But in recent months there have been increasing signs of tension between traditionalists and modernisers in the movement, the modernisers wanting to transform the VP into the Muslim equivalent of Europe's Christian Democrats.
Under Welfare Party arrangements, nearly all elections to party posts were decided before coming to the vote with only one candidate, usually hand-picked by Erbakan, standing for office. This pattern seems to have been changed under the successor party, since at last Sunday's congress to elect a new chairman for the Ankara branch of the VP, two candidates, one from the traditionalist and one from the modernising wings of the party, ran against each other. The election was won by Ersonmez Yarbay, the modernisers' candidate, by 305 votes to 173. In an indication that some principles remain inviolable even for modernisers, however, no one challenged the delegates' segregation into male and female sections in the congress hall.
The congress came a little over a week after the announcement of the wedding to Turkish businessman Bekir Yildirim of Merve Kavakci, the Turkish MP whose refusal to remove her head scarf to enable her to take up her parliamentary seat after the April 1999 elections triggered furious protests from secularists, but made her a heroine to many conservative Turkish women. Kavakci was stripped of her Turkish citizenship earlier this year when it emerged that she had taken US citizenship without first fulfilling the legal requirement to notify the Turkish authorities, and Kavakci's opponents have been quick to denounce her recent marriage as a ploy to regain Turkish citizenship.
Within days Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit had submitted a draft law to parliament stipulating a minimum period of three years before a foreign woman married to a Turk could apply for citizenship. However sources close to Kavakci are adamant that her marriage to Yildirim is the result of a love match which began when the two newly-weds started writing to each other using that most modern of all forms of communication -- e-mails over the Internet.
