The New Sultan

Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

Contents

Growing up Poor and Pious in Secular Turkey

The boy from the other side of the tracks

In his 2015 novel A Strangeness in My Mind, Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk introduces Mevlut, a poor, conservative immigrant from Anatolia (the Asian part of Turkey) who grew up in Istanbul in the 1960s and 1970s, only to come to hate the city's secular, Westernized elites. Recep Tayyip Erdogan could well be an earlier and real-life version of Mevlut. Erdogan, whose family migrated to Istanbul from a conservative town, grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Kasimpasa in the 1950s and 1960s when Turkey was a poor, "third-world" country. Located in the heart of the city, Kasimpasa sits at the bottom of a hill that ascends to Istanbul's bohemian Beyoglu district, and then to Nisantasi, the city's exclusive upper-crust and old-money enclave. During Erdogan's childhood, Nisantasi was a refuge for the privileged few, who would sip cocktails in high-end hotels and shop for expensive clothing on nearby leafy boulevards. The sights and sounds of Kasimpasa along the Golden Horn — a thin waterway that cleaves into the downtown European side of Istanbul — could not have been more different from those of Nisantasi. The Golden Horn was the hub of Turkey's industrial revolution. As early as the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire established factories along this inlet to take advantage of the waterway's central location and easy maritime access.

By the time Erdogan was a child growing up along the Golden Horn, this busy inlet had become the most polluted area in Turkey. Open sewers and industrial waste flew into it. During the summer, the breeze from the estuary would carry an overwhelming stench into the narrow alleyways of Kasimpasa, and with every rainstorm the rough cobbled streets would fill with mud. It was a decaying industrial neighborhood, populated mostly by recent arrivals to Istanbul from the Anatolian hinterland. Indeed, Erdogan himself is descended from a generation of Anatolian Turks fleeing the grinding poverty of rural Turkey in an attempt to make a better life in Istanbul.

Ever since the Ottoman period, when it was a popular area for sailors, Kasimpasa has been known for its culture of bravado. To this day, the expression Kasimpasali ("of Kasimpasa") is used in Turkey to describe local street toughs who abide by a distinctive code of honor that values unadorned bluntness. A Kasimpasali Turk will not shy away from humiliating his counterpart to undermine him — a characteristic Erdogan has displayed readily in his political career.

There is, though, a gentler side to growing up in Kasimpasa. Erdogan remembers fondly the richly woven social fabric of the local streets: "In my time, we were close with everyone in the neighborhood," he once mused in a televised interview, recounting how families would look after one another's children and share meals with each other. "We had solidarity. The bonds of the neighborhood were very strong" Erdogan has been known to boast of Turkey's technological and economic advancements in recent years, but he has also mourned the passing of this traditional social unit, a consequence of Turkey's rapid socio-economic transformation since the 1980s.

So much of the old Kasimpasa helps explain Erdogan. The experience of growing up in this rough-hewn, conservative area, "the bad zip code" part of Istanbul, would forever shape his view of the "other," that is, Turkey's elite, rich, Westernized communities and their secularist, Kemalist ideology. Even when Erdogan entered business in the 1990s and became wealthy, he maintained his contempt for this elite. In some ways, Erdogan eternally remains the guy from the other side of the tracks. Rising to power within Islamist parties, considered peripheral movements in Turkey until the 1990s, he has dominated Turkish politics after taking office as prime minister in March 2003. Gradually, he has amassed so much political power that he has become Turkey's most powerful leader since Ataturk. But still Erdogan carries a chip on his shoulder: a deep grudge against secular Turks, as if to remind them of how unkindly they treated him as a poor, conservative, and pious youth from Kasimpasa. Erdogan has rarely let his guard down against his secular opponents, whose power is waning next to his. This is a result of his persistent fear that one day those opponents could push him back to Kasimpasa. Erdogan's biggest strength as a politician and biggest weakness as a citizen is that despite being in tight control of the country, he feels as if he is still an outsider.

Summers on the Black Sea

In the summer, Erdogan would travel with his family to Rize, a province on the eastern Black Sea coast in northeast Anatolia populated by Georgians, Greek- and Armenian-speaking Muslims, Turks, and Lazes (an ethnic group related to Georgians). There they would stay with relatives for a few weeks, sometimes a month, joining them in the fields to harvest tea in the remote village of Dumankaya. His father would also arrange for him to take lessons with local religious teachers to supplement his education. The eastern Black Sea coast is one of Turkey's most conservative regions and was the last to convert from Christianity to Islam. It was governed by the Byzantine Empire of Trebizond until its capture in 1461 by the Ottomans, following which it was Islamicized. This late conversion has created a brand of Islam in the region that is especially fiery and pious. Located in its heart, Rize Province is notoriously one of the most conservative in all of Turkey.

Traveling to Rize each summer exposed the young Erdogan to this particularly ardent and observant brand of Islam. The province left an indelible mark on the future president, partly because Turkey has a traditional belief, going back to the Ottomans, that one's identity is shaped not necessarily by where one is born, but by where one's parents are from. For Erdogan, this is Rize. The province will always be his home. Similarly, the people there see Erdogan as one of their own. This goes some way to explaining his immense popularity in the region: in 2014, when he ran to become the country's first popularly elected president--following his passing of a constitutional amendment in 2007, before which Turkish presidents were elected by parliament--Erdogan received a whopping 80.6 percent of the vote in Rize. Whatever his legacy in Turkey at large, Erdogan will be lionized there for decades to come. Successive generations of this eastern Black Sea province will remember him as the local boy who changed Turkey.

Papa Erdogan

During the first decades of the Turkish republic, the government strictly controlled migration to Istanbul. When rural travelers arrived from Anatolia at the city's Haydarpasa railway station, a German-built, Prussian-looking edifice, wooden suitcases in hand, they were detained by military police and sent back whence they came. The 1950 transition to a multi-party system paved the way for rural groups to migrate to cities more easily. Anti-migration measures were relaxed and, particularly after 1960, large numbers of workers began pouring into Istanbul's slums in search of jobs. The population of the city nearly tripled between 1940 and 1980, as people like Erdogan's father left their conservative hometowns and moved their families there.

Immigrants from Rize and the Black Sea coast were among the first group to arrive in Istanbul when the city started to experience industrialization soon after World War II. At that time, Turkey had few roads or railways in its interior, and for the inhabitants along the coast the Black Sea offered a convenient maritime connection to Istanbul, which lies at its mouth. Only with the improvement of Turkey's road network after the 1950s would the Anatolian hinterland be gradually opened up to mass migration into Istanbul.

Though his family was not directly involved in Kasimpasa's naval tradition, Erdogan's father, Ahmet Erdogan, chose to relocate to the neighborhood, a short walk from the city's passenger port in Karakoy, where ships from Rize and other Black Sea cities docked. Ahmet had originally moved to Istanbul from Rize as a teenager and worked at the city's Ottoman-era ferry company, Sehir Hatlari. He later became a ferryboat captain on the Bosphorus for the same company. According to Erdogan, people in the Kasimpasa neighborhood knew his father as "Uncle Skipper" and respected him as an accomplished seaman. Nevertheless, Ahmet Erdogan could not save the family from the everyday poverty that consumed most Turks until the 1980s. Erdogan said that during these years he sold snacks on the street with his mother to supplement the family income and to save money for books. Even during hard times, he says, he never went hungry, thanks to his mother's resourcefulness in the kitchen. As for his father, befitting his profession as a ship's captain, Ahmet had a reputation for being strict and authoritative: "When you cursed, you paid a heavy price," Erdogan once explained. "My father made sure to hold us accountable"

Going to a religious school in a secular republic

Erdogan and his father grew up in Kemalist Turkey. According to Ataturk's secularist, Europeanizing, and nationalist principles, religion, local tradition, and ethno-national ideology were a volatile concoction that put the very survival of the new Turkish state at risk. National security demanded that the state extinguish these vestiges of the past. The Kemalist republic abolished the Caliphate, the ultimate representation of worldwide Sunni Islamic unity, in 1924, and Ataturk demoted Islam from its place as the state's official religion in 1928.

Against this cultural and political onslaught, religion retreated into the private sphere, within the walls of the home and the hushed conversations of the mosque. Ataturk also banned religious Sufi orders (Islamic brotherhoods, also known as tariqats) and shuttered their shrines (tekkes). Nevertheless, the religious managed to survive, and Islamic orders simply burrowed underground, later surfacing after Turkey became a multi-party democracy — but not completely, as they always feared persecution. Learning to maintain a semi-subterranean existence endowed their members with a strong sense of solidarity, and injected them with a desire to thrive. A code of secrecy has shrouded all but the most liberal of these orders, and to this day many Turks who affiliate with them shy away from making such connections public. For instance, Erdogan himself is rumored to be a member of the Naksibendi order, but he has neither confirmed nor denied such allegations.

For those with strong attachments to their faith, like Erdogan's family, most things were an uphill battle in secular Turkey until the twenty-first century. For the young Erdogan, the educational system served as a dramatic reminder of religion's estrangement from mainstream life. Erdogan grew up in a staunchly secular society in which the state relegated religion to the private sphere and kept it under strict control.

The roots of this phenomenon lie in the Ottoman Empire and Ataturk's reforms. Although the Ottoman state's legitimacy rested on Islamic authority, in practice the sultans sought to make Muslim clerics their servants. For political leaders, Sunni Islam was supposed to provide a transcendental framework that would bind the empire's many diverse communities together and encourage loyalty to the state. But this agenda collapsed when the empire finally crumbled in the crucible of World War I. Much to the chagrin of Ottoman stalwarts, the victors in the ensuing war for control of Turkey, led by Ataturk, did not seek to restore the Ottoman order (although they could not escape all of its accretions).

Ardent proponents of European thought and lifestyles, Ataturk and his followers set about realizing their vision of a modern republic built on a European template. For their new state, they adopted the Civil Code of Switzerland. They also adopted criminal laws from Italy and commercial laws from interwar Germany (thankfully for Turks, it was not the other way around). Finally, Ataturk turned to France for a centralized and nationalist model of territorial administration to replace the looser bonds that had tied the sultan to his far-flung provinces. France was also the model for a system of European-style secularism predicated on the political philosophy of laïcité — the assurance of no religion in state affairs. Accordingly, Ataturk established a strict firewall between religion and government, which would last until the AKP's rise after 2002. Turkey became one of the most ideologically secular Muslim-majority states in the twentieth century.

In organizing the relationship between religion and politics on the basis of laïcité, Kemalism confined religion to the private sphere and then mandated freedom from religion in government, education, and public policy. An exception to this secularization of education were the Imam Hatip schools — for imams and hatips (preachers) — founded to train Muslim men for state employment. This initial effort at establishing state-administered religious instruction, launched in 1924 under Ataturk, lasted only six years before being closed down due to an "apparent lack of students willing to enroll." After this closure, Turkey was left without a formal system of religious education, raising the prospect that uncertified local religious figures might take on these roles.

Nevertheless, recognizing the dominance of Islam in Turkish society, successive governments used educational institutions to mold a state-sanctioned version of the religion that would provide a religious outlet without threatening the secular tenets of the state. Erdogan grew up in these state-created Imam Hatip schools (discussed in Chapter 3). Erdogan's father made his son's education a priority, never tiring of the mantra "study and become a man." But the education system that young Erdogan entered as a child presented pious families with a frustrating dilemma: place their children in institutions that depicted religion as a backward mentality that stood in the way of progress and civilization, or enter them in religious institutions, a choice that risked subjecting them to long-lasting stigma in Kemalist society.

In 1965, going with his gut and heart, Ahmet Erdogan registered his son as a student at Istanbul Imam Hatip High School's middle-school section as an 11-year-old pupil. Because the young Erdogan's school lay across the Golden Horn in Istanbul's old city, his father enrolled him as a boarding student. Ahmet Erdogan likely sent his son to a boarding school away from home due to poverty (Imam Hatip schools were free of charge and boarding was largely subsidized), but also to remove distractions. Erdogan loved soccer, and as a teenager he wished one day to become a star player. His father didn't share his son's passion for sports, and sending the young Erdogan away ensured that he would not be sneaking out to play for his team. As Ahmet would learn years later, boarding school did not curb his passion for soccer: the young Erdogan continued playing secretly around the neighborhood until he was drafted onto Camialti Spor, one of Kasimpasa's amateur teams, at which point he confessed to his father his continued love of the sport.

Ultimately, though, Papa Erdogan decided to send his son to the Imam Hatip school because he believed his son needed to receive a proper and more formal religious upbringing. Erdogan would later explain that he began his religious education after a teacher at his primary school noticed his enthusiasm for religious instruction and proposed an Islamic education to his father. A pious man himself, Ahmet was pleased and encouraged his son to take the Imam Hatip entrance exams, which he passed. Living in a secular republic, young Erdogan would not have necessarily been introduced at a young age to a religious curriculum. It is thanks to his father, a willing teacher, and the Imam Hatip school system that he had access to such an education.

Turkey after Ataturk

Erdogan was born in 1954, four years after Turkey held its first free and fair elections, and his life story follows the history of democracy and rise of political Islam there. After Turkey switched to a multi-party democratic system in the second half of the twentieth century, a diverse array of Sunni religious and political groups gradually formed a close alliance--one that would eventually crumble, resulting in the July 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan — to counter the Kemalist state, which was trying to pigeonhole all Muslims in the country into a strictly controlled brand of Islam.

By the late 1940s, the Kemalists' ambitious agenda of social transformation had begun to sputter. The local cadres of the Republican People's Party (CHP) — Ataturk's political vanguard, which acts as the main secularist opposition party to the AKP today — found themselves battling the enduring patterns of authority in Anatolian rural life. Awakening to these realities — and responding to the impending expansion of the political system to electoral competition — the CHP, which dominated the Turkish parliament between 1923 and 1950, passed a spate of reforms that dulled the Jacobin edge of the Kemalist project, even as it continued to seek to maintain a firm hold over the dreaded forces of religion and regionalism. In 1946, the CHP ended the exile of more than 2,000 Kurdish tribal and sheikh-level leaders who had been forcibly relocated to western Turkey after the anti-Kemalist rebellions of previous decades.