The Real Problem with Erdogan

Last night saw a coup attempt in Turkey. Seeking to overthrow the government of President Recip Erdogan, a military faction positioned tanks around the Istanbul airport, closed bridges, buzzed Ankara in airplanes, and attempted to take over TV stations. It was quickly quashed. As of now, nearly 3,000 soldiers are under arrest following fighting that killed some 200 people. Prime Minister Yildirim says the situation is “completely under control.” President Erdogan promises that the insurgents “will pay a heavy price.”

Not a lot is known yet about the insurgents. Conventional wisdom has it that their cause is one of secularism against Islamism. An analysis by the BBC's Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, is typical. In a sidebar titled "Why did coup happen?," Mr. Bowen writes that Erdogan “is a political Islamist who has rejected modern Turkey's secular heritage.” It’s a heritage that Turkey—and the Turkish military—take extremely seriously, dating back to the 1920s and Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic.

It’s true that Erdogan has Islamist roots. He came up through the ranks in the Welfare Party, which was banned by Turkey’s Constitutional Court in 1998 for its opposition to the nation’s secular charter. The following year, Erdogan was jailed for reciting an Islamist poem.

In spite of his early history, Erdogan has not been that much of an Islamist since he's been in power. The controversies that have characterized his eleven years as prime minister and two years as president have little to do with religion.

No, the real problem with Erdogan is not Islamism, but rather, in the words of Mr. Bowen, “Mr. Erdogan has become increasingly authoritarian and is trying to turn himself into a strong executive president.”

Examples abound of attacks on freedom of the press and separation of powers:

According to one report, over 1,800 journalists have lost their jobs under the AKP government.

In 2014, Twitter and YouTube were blocked in Turkey for two months.

This year, thirty “Academics for Peace,” who had signed a petition critical of military operations against the Kurds, were briefly jailed.

Traditionally, the President of Turkey is a figurehead, expected to be neutral in political matters. However, Erdogan has been actively involved in Parliamentary elections.

Most serious of all, there have been purges of the judiciary and subsequent packing of the bench with AKP supporters. The failure of the coup has given Erdogan an excuse to crack down on the independence of the judiciary even further. The BBC reports that 2,800 judges were fired today in the wake of the coup attempt.

I would be remiss if I didn't address some counter-examples, so here goes: Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish initials AKP) has twice been dragged in front of the Constitutional Court in attempts to shut it down for infringing on the separation of mosque and state. But both attempts failed. It's also been alleged that Erdogan provided support to Islamic State; that charge hasn't stuck either. In fact, one of his accusers, US Vice President Joe Biden, ended up having to apologize. If any support did occur, it was probably more about opposing Assad than supporting Islamism. And although there have been restrictions placed on the sale and advertising of alcohol, they aren't that different from what exists in the United States.

All-in-all, Erdogan more closely resembles a strongman in the mold of Vladimir Putin than an Islamist like Muhammad Morsi. Some of my anti-Islamist friends will no doubt say that he’s playing his cards close to his chest, and he plans to implement a theocracy just as soon as he has consolidated enough power to get away with it. They might be right. But Erdogan’s not really a close-to-his-chest type. He’s more a shoot-from-the-hip, Donald Trump type, with a history of outrageous statements comparing Israelis to Nazis or telling female journalists, “know your place.”

In any case, regardless of whether there's a master plan for theocracy, I hope, for the sake of the Turkish people, that Mr. Erdogan never becomes powerful enough to implement one. Unfortunately, the failure of last night's coup will make the continuing concentration of power in Mr. Erdogan's hands that much harder to prevent.

Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. For his take on the roots of Islamism, see his talk The Islamic in Islamic State on YouTube.

They don't hate us for our freedom

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
Book Review by Michael Isenberg

I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I opened the cover of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes. I was concerned it might be one of those rants, so common on the Left side of the political aisle, about how, from the Crusades to the invasion of Iraq, all the problems of the Middle East were the West’s fault. So I was pleasantly surprised to find something else instead.

In Destiny Disrupted, author Tamim Ansary provides the view through Islamic eyes in two senses. The first is geographical. In contrast to most histories of the “world,” which revolve around events in Europe, Destiny Disrupted revolves around events between the Indus and Nile rivers, a region which to Muslims was the world. He doesn’t say much about events in Europe prior to the eleventh century, when contact between Europe and the Muslim world became more common.

The second sense in which the book peers through Muslim eyes is narrative. If there were a narrative to Western Civilization, it would be something like the story of how freedom and science overcame tyranny and superstition. In contrast, to Muslims, “the underlying force of world history was the quest to perfect and universalize the Muslim community.” The key words here are universalize and community. Muslims believe that it is their destiny to be the world’s one, universal religion. The term jihad, for example, should be interpreted through this lens. It really was, through most of Muslim history, literal warfare against non-Muslims, to push out the borders of the House of Islam. The notion that it is some internal struggle to be a better person came later. And since Islam is a community, threats to its unity must be eradicated. Islamists don’t seek to separate the sexes in order to oppress women. Their concern is that sexual decadence will “disrupt social harmony.”

Obviously some caveats are in order here. Mr. Ansary can identify some recurring themes in mainstream Muslim thinking, but he cannot possibly speak for all Muslims. Still, it is easy to see that the early years of Islam, during which Muslims won battle after battle, can be understood in terms of this narrative. The subsequent destruction of large parts of the Muslim world by the Mongols, followed by centuries of falling behind the West technologically and militarily are more problematic for Muslim thinkers: hence, Muslim destiny is “disrupted.”

Understanding the competing narratives is crucial to understanding the motivation of jihadists, which in turn is essential to defeating them. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, it was common in the West to hear, “They hate us for our freedom.” Ansary argues that this fails to grasp the issue, because it fails to grasp the competing narrative. “One side charges, ‘You are decadent,’” he write. “The other side retorts, ‘We are free.’ These are not opposing contentions; they’re non-sequiturs.”

In describing conflicts between Muslim and non-Muslim peoples, Ansary is fair—mostly. He points out, quite rightly, that the Crusades had little impact on the Muslim world beyond Palestine and Syria. As for more modern conflagrations, the coverage of the Arab-Israeli wars is remarkably even-handed; the coverage of the Lebanese civil war and the fall of Mossadegh not so much. While Ansary is justifiably proud of the accomplishments of Muslim civilization, he does not sugarcoat or hold back when he feels criticism is warranted. For example, many have called the 11th century scholar Abu Hamid Ghazali, who wrote a devastating attack on science, the greatest Muslim after Muhammad. But Ansary doesn’t hesitate to say that he thinks Ghazali was wrong. His “argument against causality undermines the whole scientific enterprise.” Nor does Ansary have sympathy for those Islamists whose solution to Islam’s disrupted destiny is a return to the seventh century. “A trap,” he calls it.

The style of the book is breezy, with many informal phrases and anachronistic metaphors. For example, he tells us that Abbas, the brutal founder of the Abbasid dynasty, "went by a new title, al-Saffah, which means 'the slaughterer.' Apparently he took some pride in what he had done." The great Nizamiyyah university in Baghdad is described as "the Yale of the medieval Islamic world." You may find this approach jarring, or you may find it readable and enlightening, depending on your taste.

The one criticism I had was that the footnotes are a bit sketchy. This makes it impossible to further investigate discoveries that I had not encountered elsewhere in my reading about Islamic history.

There are many such discoveries in Destiny Disrupted to interest someone who already has a good grounding in Islam. Nevertheless, the book is an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to learn the basics, and at the same time, gain some insight into the way Muslims view the history of the world.

Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. For his own take on the themes of Muslim history, see his talk The Islamic in Islamic State on YouTube.

Hirsi Ali: "Islam is not a Religion of Peace"

Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Book Review by Michael Isenberg

From Brussels, to Paris, to San Bernardino, whenever Islamic terror strikes, our left-of-center friends hasten to remind us not to judge Islam by the acts of a few radicals. “Islam is a religion of peace,” they assure us. Terrorists act out, they say, not because of anything in the Quran, but because of poverty, or global warming, or because the CIA played a role in overthrowing a “democratically elected” Iranian communist—sixty years ago.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a reply to our left-of-center friends, and she states it in no uncertain terms on page two of her book Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now:

[I]t is foolish to insist, as our leaders habitually do, that the violent acts of radical Islamists can be divorced from the religious ideals that inspire them. Instead we must acknowledge that they are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in Islam itself, in the holy book of the Qur’an as well as the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad contained in the hadith. Let me make my point in the simplest possible terms: Islam is not a religion of peace.

Miss Hirsi Ali is well-qualified to offer insight into the minds of Islamists. She was once one of them—before she became their target.

She has told her story in detail in her earlier books, Infidel and Nomad, but it bears repeating and Heretic includes a brief summary. Born in Somalia and raised in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, she came, as a teenager, under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. She was never a terrorist; she didn’t engage in violence. But she sympathized with those who did:

When Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran called for the writer Salman Rushdie to die after he published The Satanic Verses, I didn't ask if this was right or what it had to do with me as an expatriate Somali in Kenya. I simply agreed. Everyone in my community believed that Rushdie had to die; after all, he had insulted the Prophet. My friends said it, my religious teachers said it, the Qur'an said it, and I said it and believed it...the appropriate punishment for his crime was death.

But Miss Hirsi Ali didn't remain an Islamist. The watershed event was an arranged marriage to a Somali expat living in Canada. Her family put her on a plane to take her to her new life, but, since she did not want to marry the man, instead of changing planes in Germany as planned, she bolted. She made her way to the Netherlands where, exposed for the first time to Western values, she became a vocal critic of Islam in general and the Muslim treatment of women in particular. She collaborated with director Theo van Gogh (great grandnephew of Vincent van Gogh) on the short film Submission, which superimposed images of abused women with Quranic verses that justified the abuse. This earned the ire of Islamists for both Hirsi Ali and van Gogh; Muhammad Bouyeri, a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, gunned van Gogh down in the street, slit his throat, and left a note pinned to his chest with a knife. In it, Bouyeri explained why van Gogh deserved to die—based on verses from the Quran. The note went on to include implied threats of death against “Mrs. Hirshi Ali” as well. In Heretic, Miss Hirsi Ali writes,

I can certainly remember Dutch academics claiming that, behind his religious language, Bouyeri’s real motivation in wanting to kill me was socioeconomic deprivation or postmodern alienation. To me, however, when a murderer quotes the Qur’an in justification of his crime, we should at least discuss the possibility that he means what he says.

Discuss it she does, and the conclusion she comes to is that Islam needs nothing less than a reformation on the scale of the one that shook Christianity five hundred years ago. Unlike Martin Luther, who nailed ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church, Miss Hirsi Ali has just five:

Only when these five things are recognized as inherently harmful and when they are repudiated and nullified will a true Muslim Reformation be achieved. The five things to be reformed are: Muhammad’s semi-divine and infallible status along with the literalist reading of the Qur’an, particularly those parts that were revealed in Medina; The investment in life after death instead of life before death; Sharia, the body of legislation derived from the Qur’an, the hadith, and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence; The practice of empowering individuals to enforce Islamic law by commanding right and forbidding wrong; The imperative to wage jihad, or holy war.

These five theses form the core of the book; there is a chapter dedicated to each. For me, the most interesting is the fourth; the chapter is called “Social Control Begins at Home.” Part of what interested me is that this topic, unlike the others, has received little attention elsewhere. The injunction to “enjoin good and forbid evil” appears numerous times in the Quran and it always struck me as a harmless platitude. But the reality is far more insidious. Miss Hirsi Ali shows from her own experience how it works in practice:

When I was a teenage girl growing up in Nairobi, I wondered aloud in our house why the ritual prayers had to be said five times a day. Why not cut the number down to once a day? My half sister overheard me talking and almost immediately launched into hours of lectures, not just on that day but on many subsequent days, about my failures to perform my sacred duty as a Muslim. Nor did she confine herself to lecturing me. She also went about lobbying my extended family to have me “sent away” to be treated for “madness” because I had dared to ask a question about our faith and its practice.

Miss Hirsi Ali finds this pattern of pious bullying repeated in many locales—in the Harvard classroom where Muslim students tried to shut her down during her seminars, in neighborhoods from Raqqa to London where vigilante Sharia police patrol the streets, and, most tragically, in the thousands of Muslim communities rocked by “honor killings” every year. She documents numerous cases, including the Arizona man who ran over his daughter with a Jeep—for wearing makeup and liking boys—and the Brooklyn man who beat his wife to death—for serving lentils instead of goat meat. Miss Hirsi Ali fills a dozen pages with such horrors; her conclusion:

Taken together, commanding right and forbidding wrong are very effective means of silencing dissent. They act as a grassroots system of religious vigilantism. And their most zealous enforcers find in these words an excuse not just to command and to forbid but also to threaten, to beat, and to kill. I think of it as the totalitarianism of the hearth.

The prospects of a Muslim Reformation don’t seem bright when we see these crimes daily on our TV and computer screens. Nevertheless, Miss Hirsi Ali is optimistic. “The best evidence that a Muslim Reformation is actually under way,” she writes, “is the growing number of active dissidents and reformers around the world.” In an Appendix, she cites dozens of such people, and thereby answers the oft-asked question, “Where are the moderate Muslims?” She concludes by urging her readers to open their eyes to the true nature of Islam, and to support those brave souls who have dedicated their lives to changing it, so that some day, in the not-too-distant future, Islam might join Christianity and Judaism as a religion of peace.

Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. For his own take on the relationship between Jihadis and Islam, see his talk The Islamic in Islamic State on YouTube.