[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
“What collapsed in Tunisia is the Kemalist model.” So read the headline of Yeni Asya, a Muslim Turkish daily, last Tuesday. And it summed up the doomed fate of the modern Muslim Middle East, and its erratically unfolding future.
What just happened in Tunisia, the smallest of all North African states, is a popular uprising dubbed the “Jasmine Revolution.” The fallen dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled the county last week with one-and-a-half tons of gold, had been in power since 1987. Yet the country was no freer before: Ben Ali was just a sequel to Habib Bourguiba, another dictator, who had ruled the country single-handedly since its independence from French colonial rule in 1957.
Bourguiba’s juice
And that’s where the “Kemalist model” comes into the picture. Bourguiba was a great fan of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, and of his secularization agenda. So, Tunisia went through a radical era of reforms under his rule, in which a “modern way of life” was imposed by state powers. As in the Kemalist revolution, some of the reforms were undeniably helpful, such as the empowerment of women. But others were more controversial, such as Bourguiba’s famous campaign against fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, which he found incompatible with the needs of modern life. When Bourguiba appeared on TV sipping a glass of orange juice during the time of fasting and telling his people do the same, he was actually creating a deep fault line between modernity and Muslim piety.
For worse, the Bourguiba-Ben Ali regime grew increasingly brutal on political opposition. An important component of the latter was the Islamic-minded Tunisian Renaissance Party, or the Nahda. Led by the Sorbonne-educated Islamic thinker, Rashid al-Ghannushi, this was a more democratic and liberal-leaning Islamic party than any other in the Middle East. Yet this did not save it from persecution: In 1981, Ghannushi and his followers were arrested, tortured and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Since his release in 1988, Mr. Ghannushi has lived in Europe as a political exile.
This, indeed, was the “Kemalist model”: a dictatorship by a secular cadre that took its legitimacy from a particular form of “modernization” and that alienated conservative believers by both offending their values and repressing their freedoms. No wonder Kemalist Turks and secularist Tunisians admired each other. The late Ahmet Taner Kışlalı, a Turkish Kemalist, wrote a column titled “The Tunisian Kemalists” in 1998, and praised the achievements of the Ben Ali regime. “There are no bearded men on the streets,” Kışlalı wrote, “or veiled women.” That indeed was the case, for the “Tunisian Kemalists” had imposed bans on the headscarf as well.
Similar things had happened in Iran before, in which the subsequent shahs, again with a lot of inspiration from Atatürk, had banned Islamic practices. Under the first one, Reza Shah (1925-41), the police even attacked veiled women and tore off their scarves and chadors. The ayatollahs who protested the regime were flogged and killed. Soon, as a response, the first modern Islamist terror organization was born: Fadayan-e Islam, or “Devotees of Islam,” which wanted to resist and get revenge on the shah’s attack on Islam.
A somewhat similar pattern can be observed in Egypt, Syria and Iraq as well, in which independence from colonial rule led not to democracy but brutal autocracy. The secular dictators that dominated these countries promoted a combination of nationalism and socialism, while imprisoning, torturing and killing their political opponents, which included the Islamic groups. Factions among the latter grew radicalized, waging “jihads” against their oppressors, and, ultimately, their Western patrons.
The Turkish model
In other words, the Westerners who are understandably alarmed about “Islamic extremists” today should understand that there is a political context that helped create these people – a context to which their governments, knowingly or unknowingly, often contributed.
What makes Turkey unique in this whole story is not that it had gone through the secularist reforms of Atatürk, as it is often claimed. Several other countries of the region have had similar experiences. Turkey’s uniqueness is that it found its way to multi-party politics in 1950 – something unparalleled in the Muslim Middle East.
To put it differently, “the problem with Arabs” is not that they lack “their Atatürk,” as the popular saying goes. In fact, they did have their Atatürks – deified leaders who imposed authoritarian modernization. What they have rather lacked is their Menderes, their Özal, or their Erdoğan – popularly elected leaders who promoted modernization within liberty, democracy and respect to tradition.
Today, the key question for the region is what will follow the inevitable end of Arab dictatorships – or the failure of these “gods,” to borrow a term from Arthur Koestler. Iran – secular authoritarianism replaced with an “Islamic” one – is certainly a bad model. But the Jasmine Revolution might turn out to be more promising. And the success of the Turkish model – secular authoritarianism evolving into democracy – remains utterly crucial.
Mustafa, many here are dismayed that the Egyptian government shut down the ‘Net, phone system, etc. to try to control rioting.
Why don’t they understand that that is exactly the wrong approach?
Surely, half or three quarters of the people yelling on the street would actually be at home shouting down the phone and pounding angry messages to everybody they know – if they could.
And so?
That’s one reason that stable democracies like my own country (Canada) don’t typically try to control media.
Security is only useful for deterring the few who are not content with just saying “The king is a fink.” For better or worse, most people are content to let off steam. Preventing them is disastrous, purely for engineering reasons.
Denyse, it’s a perfectly logical reason you put up for not seeking to regulate the media, but even there are elements stable democracies like my own (Australia) are seeking to do it to some degree anyways. In Australia, Stephen Conroy is looking to regulate/censor the internet against child pornography and even other related topics. And you have Joe Lieberman wanting to censor the internet for various other reasons as well. Hopefully these idiots won’t get their way, but we gotta remain vigilant about these things.
As for the main topic, i didn’t know about the relationship of the Kemalist Turks and secular Tunisians, nor should I since i am from neither country. I was born and lived in Pakistan for some time, and it is shown that the founder of that country Muhammad Ali Jinnah was an admirer of Ataturk for his modernising efforts and actually wanted Pakistan to be a secular,modern Muslim country in a similar fashion(The street i lived at in Lahore was Ataturk road back in the 90′s). This if course did not come to fruition, lamentably.
It’s a bit too early to celebrate this Jasmine Revolution. The new head of state of Tunisia was the “vice president”, so he could be simply maintaining the status quo for all we know.
I agree, ImadK, that people who seek to regulate the Internet often mean well but don’t understand how it works.
Egypt seems, to me at least, like a good example. Absent modern communications, rumours spread like wildfire, exacerbating suspicion and violence.
Thought experiment: Suppose someone told me, “Did you know that there is a huge riot in progress at Queen’s Park? (our provincial legislature).”
So I phone someone who lives near Queen’s Park. But the government has cut the phone lines.
Now, I am worried. So is my friend, because all communications have been cut. So she shows up unannounced at my house, well north of the alleged riot zone, on foot, carrying a suitcase. We make plans to move in with distant relatives.
We are both convinced that all Hull has broken loose and tell everyone we meet. But has it?
Suppose the lines were not cut. Then we might phone around and learn, “Aw, some picketers were mad because the government wouldn’t see them today, and started smashing a statue, and fought with police, but it’s all over now.” And we’d tell anyone who wanted to know.
From what I have seen so far, the power of unsubstantiated rumour is more dangerous than that of the Internet.
i found your last statement to be very profound in its own sense. It’s 100% true, but most people would agree that the Egyptian government did not shut down the internet for reasons other than to clamp down on dissent. After all, riots started because of the internet shutdown, meaning that the riots did not occur before it. As you said in your previous post, preventing them (from dissent) is disastrous.
I think everyone in the West needs to read this article. As a Ron Paul libertarian I may be biased in terms of agreeing with the writer’s point of view, but even if one doesn’t fully agree there are important glimpses of the pertinent basic history Westerners do not generally understand to put the last 10 years into context.
Claiming that Arabs had their own Ataturk is no different than claiming that Africans had their own American founding fathers.
None of the Arab countries had their own Ataturk. After defeating occupation forces (end of foreign rule), Ataturk not only formed a secular republic but also abolished the institution of the Caliphate (end of religious rule) and overthrow the Ottoman sultanate (end of monarchy). Arab countries have spent decades to accomplish any one of these achievements. And none of them have been able to achieve all of them.
The problem in Egypt or Tunusia was not that their rulers were non-Islamic. The problem was they were non-democratic. If the rulers of Egypt and Tunusia were Islamists they would be no different than Saudi Arabia or Iran (in other words they would be in much worse shape). If the rulers of Egypt and Tunusia had followed the secular Turkish path they would be in much better shape. Remember the ruling secular party in Turkey switched to multi-party system long before many European countries did.
The politicians Akyol praised here, while dismissing Ataturk, have all led religion-based movements. What Egypt and Tunusia need now are not populist Islamists like Menderes, Ozal nor Erdogan. They need visionary secular, honest and democratic politicians.