Nepali Times

One interpretation of the anti-government demonstrations now roiling Turkish cities is that they are a massive protest against political Islam. What began as a rally against official plans to raze a small park in the centre of Istanbul to make way for a kitschy shopping mall quickly evolved into a conflict of values.

On the surface, the fight appears to represent two different visions of modern Turkey, secular versus religious, democratic versus authoritarian. Comparisons have been made with Occupy Wall Street. Some observers even speak of a ‘Turkish Spring’.

Clearly, many Turkish citizens, especially in the big cities, are sick of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian style, his steely grip on the press, his taste for grandiose new mosques, the restrictions on alcohol, the arrests of political dissidents, and now the violent response to the demonstrations. People fear that sharia law will replace secular legislation and that Islamism will spoil the fruits of Kemal Atatürk’s drive to modernise post-Ottoman Turkey.

Then there is the issue of the Alevis, a religious minority linked to Sufism and Shi’ism. The Alevis, who had been protected by the secular Kemalist state, deeply distrust Erdoğan, who further unsettled them by planning to name a new bridge over the Bosphorus after a sixteenth-century sultan who massacred their forebears. Religion, then, would seem to be at the heart of the Turkish problem. Political Islam’s opponents regard it as inherently anti-democratic.

But things are not so simple. The secular Kemalist state was no less authoritarian than Erdoğan’s populist Islamist regime; if anything, it was more so. And it is also significant that the first protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square concerned not a mosque, but a shopping mall. Fear of sharia law is matched by anger at the rapacious vulgarity of developers and entrepreneurs backed by Erdoğan’s government. There is a strong leftist bent to the Turkish Spring.

So, rather than dwell on the problems of contemporary political Islam, which are certainly considerable, it might be more fruitful to look at Turkey’s conflicts from another, now distinctly unfashionable, perspective: class. The protesters, whether they are liberal or leftist, tend to be from the urban elite – Westernised, sophisticated, and secular. Erdoğan, on the other hand, is still very popular in rural and provincial Turkey, among people who are less educated, poorer, more conservative, and more religious.

Despite Erdoğan’s personal authoritarian tendencies, which are obvious, it would be misleading to regard the current protests purely as a conflict between democracy and autocracy. After all, the success of Erdoğan’s populist Justice and Development Party, as well as the increasing presence of religious symbols and customs in public life, is a result of more democracy in Turkey, not less. Customs that the Kemalist secular state suppressed, such as women’s use of headscarves in public places, have reappeared, because rural Turks have more influence. Young religious women are turning up at urban universities. The votes of conservative provincial Turks now count.

Likewise, the alliance between businessmen and religious populists is hardly unique to Turkey. Many of the new entrepreneurs, like the women in headscarves, are from villages in Anatolia. These newly rich provincials resent the old Istanbul elite as much as businessmen from Texas or Kansas hate the East Coast elites of New York and Washington. But to say that Turkey has become more democratic is not to say that it has become more liberal. This is also one of the problems revealed by the Arab Spring. Giving all people a voice in government is essential to any democracy. But those voices, especially in revolutionary times, are rarely moderate.

The demonstrators are right to oppose Erdoğan’s haughty disregard of public opinion and his stifling of the press. But to see the conflict as a righteous struggle against religious expression would be equally mistaken. Higher visibility for Islam is the inevitable result of more democracy in Muslim-majority countries. How to stop this from killing liberalism is the most important question facing people in the Middle East. Turkey is still a democracy. It is to be hoped that the protests against Erdoğan will make it more liberal, too.

www.project-syndicate.org

Ian Buruma is Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College.