BY ISMET BERKAN
RADIKAL- Columnist Ismet Berkan comments on political Islamism in Turkey and the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) ideological roots. A summary of his column is as follows:
Political Islamism strives for the foundation of a state based on Islamic lines, rather than extending the scope of existing religious freedoms within a secular establishment. Its only goal is to form a state operating under the rules of a religion whose constitution is the Holy Koran. In a country like Turkey, which has always faced a political Islamist threat, advancing a democratic order demands that country’s constitution cite secularism as one of its basic, founding pillars. Other countries may not see such a vigorous safeguard of secularism as vitally important, but in Muslim countries like Turkey, a Western-type liberal democracy is impossible without making direct reference to the secularist principle (that’s the reason for the possible US failure establish a democratic order in Iraq), as secularism means the creation of the legal body by the people. Religious law cannot get along with democracy, for the former regulates everything under ‘divine revelation,’ whereas the latter requires a man-made constitution.
Since the day Turkey took to the multi-party system, the country has been governed by, in scholar Idris Kucukomer’s words, the resisting political parties of the periphery to the up-to-down modernizing center. And clearly there were always elements in these parties (Adnan Menderes’s Democratic Party – DP, Suleyman Demirel’s Justice Party – AP and Turgut Ozal’s Motherland Party – ANAP) massive electorates who would welcome political Islam. The political Islamist current, ‘National View (Milli Gorus)’ in Turkey came to the political scene with the 1969 general elections through what was called ‘the independents’ movement,’ led by Necmettin Erbakan. Yet it remained marginal and incapable of mobilizing its ‘affiliated circle’ into a mass movement until decades later. Then in the 1990s we witnessed a brand new development. The mainstream political parties who had traditionally represented the periphery began to move out of it in the name of differentiating themselves with the new political outlook pioneered by then President Ozal’s ANAP. Calling themselves ‘liberal centrist parties,’ Mesut Yilmaz’s (ANAP) and Tansu Ciller’s True Path Party (DYP) – the latter the successor of both the DP and AP – effectively committed a sort of political suicide by turning their backs to the periphery in favor of the backyard of two political parties which had been merely remained marginal up to then. Erbakan’s Welfare Party (RP) didn’t even need to hide its political Islamist tendencies. In the 1995 general elections, the RP won 22% of the vote. The party was closed down in 1997 by the Constitutional Court and its leader barred from politics. In 1998, the one-time marginal Nationalist Action Party (MHP) came to the forefront. But in 2002, the MHP suffered the worst defeat of its history, proving unable to even reach the 10% representation threshold.
The unquestionable victor of the 2002 general elections, the AKP, was a party born from an old political tradition. Its roots in the ‘National View’ are obvious and undeniable. But since the day the party was established, it preferred to keep the political Islamist discourse and symbols at bay. Moreover, in spite of its overwhelming majority in Parliament, so far it hasn’t attempted anything so radical as to politically challenge the secularist foundations of the regime. The bulk of the issue lies in whether the AKP wants to be a lasting actor in the political arena. If it chooses to play out the agenda of the marginal Islamist political school from which it sprang rather than that of the broad sectors of society which constituted peripheral opposition to the center, the AKP, too, is doomed to share the RP and MHP’s fate.

SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION