Turkish Delight
Why the Middle East needs Ataturks and not Ayatollahs.

By James Morrow, a writer based in New York City and Sydney, Australial
October 25, 2001 1:20 p.m.

ll of a sudden, it's not impolite to suggest that there's something special about Western-style liberal democracy, or that Islamic culture has a real problem relating to the modern world — a problem that is entirely of its own making and that keeps a vast swath of the globe under the sway of both religious and secular monarchs and dictators. While this realization is surely a good thing (bin Laden cosmically miscalculated if he thought the American feel-good multiculturalism he watches on his satellite TV would cause the United States to collapse in fits of relativism), it's also not entirely true. While leaders in virtually every other Muslim capital city have been forced to cope with varied numbers of spontaneous anti-American demonstrators, there have been few if any such displays in Turkey — an overwhelmingly Islamic nation whose history not only factors prominently in bin Laden's theology of inferiority, but could provide a roadmap out of this mess for the entire region.

Shortly after the U.S. air strikes on Afghanistan, when bin Laden ignored the Koranic injunction against graven images long enough to make a video of himself stomping his feet and holding his breath against all the injustices done to his people (which people? Saudi billionaires?), he left many people scratching their heads at the comment: "Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than 80 years." Some experts suggested that bin Laden was cryptically referring to the 1917 Balfour Declaration in favor of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, others thought it was just a general lashing out at the explosive spread of Western culture over the past century. But there is another possibility: Eighty years ago is when the plug was finally pulled on the sick man of Europe, the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of World War I. Out of the resulting chaos, a military commander named Mustafa Kemal (later dubbed Ataturk, or "Father of the Turks"), who had fought Churchill at Gallipoli, expelled the European nations that were attempting to carve Anatolia up for themselves, and founded the modern Turkish republic.

And then a funny thing happened. Instead of (as might be expected, in this day and age) turning Turkey into a backward or inward-looking dictatorship with a chip on its shoulder against decadent European imperialists while longing for some Islamic golden age — Ataturk turned his nation Westward, and did everything he could to transform the nascent republic into a modern state. Out went the traditional fez; men were to wear neckties and fedoras. Turkish women, who got the vote even before their British counterparts, were granted legal equality and forbidden from wearing a veil. Ataturk even brought in linguists from France to standardize the Turkish language and convert the country's alphabet from an Arabic-style script to a Roman one. And though it's had its share of military coups since then (the army considers itself the great protector of Turkish secularism and will unseat any government it perceives as a threat to this ideal), today the country is a reasonably functional democracy and American ally that for the most part has resisted hard-core Islamic movements.

Meanwhile, over the last 80 years — and especially in the last 20 or so — other Muslim-populated nations have glaringly gone the other way. Previously promising nations have been taken over by tin-horn dictators like Egypt's Mubarak (whose official press has been instrumental in suggesting that the attacks of September 11 were really a Mossad plot, even as his country takes in billions in American aid), and religious fanatics like the Ayatollahs of Iran. It's no wonder bin Laden is such a mental wreck: The more his coreligionists follow his example and turn against the West, the worse they do.

What the Muslim world really needs right now is not just one but a dozen or so Ataturks. In all the talk about the root causes of Islamic fundamentalism, pundits have ignored the "great man" school of history, perhaps because — in a world of Arafats, Husseins, Assads, and bin Ladens — it's awfully hard to see any greatness. Interestingly, though, it has been reported that Pakistan's President Musharraf admires Ataturk, the suggestion being that he has been so welcoming to U.S.-led forces in part out of a desire to create a Turkish-style secular government in his country. That's all well and good so far as it goes (and considering Pakistan's neighborhood, a stable, secular, and pro-Western government in Islamabad could only be a good thing), but it doesn't solve the larger problem. American diplomatic efforts across the Muslim world should aim to promote this Turkish model, rather than simply backing the more potentially friendly general whenever governments turn over or fight each other — a policy that has backfired spectacularly in the past. Perhaps, within the ranks of the Northern Alliance, a young Mustafa Kemal is out there to take over in Afghanistan; one can hardly imagine a better rebuke to the Taliban era. And it's probably wishful thinking, but with Turkey voting to commit troops to the American military effort that will surely come into play should an Iraqi front open up, now would be a great time for Brussels Eurocrats to stop making Turkish-prison jokes and offer Ankara full membership in the E.U.

One of the biggest obstacles the U.S. faces in the Middle East is the region's inflated notion of honor, which allows dictators to keep their grip on power by directing their nation's anger at alien forces somehow seeking to keep them down. By this convoluted logic, fundamentalists and dictators can blame a country's grinding poverty on the fact that Israel exists on "Muslim" territory and America supports Israel, therefore they're to blame for the fact that Cairo's slums are teeming with people who make far less money than Palestinians living on the West Bank. Of course, what is needed is leaders who can honestly tell their citizenry that the reason they are poor is that they don't have political freedom, they don't have economic freedom, and they keep half the workforce locked inside during business hours. The Turkish model offers a way out, showing how Muslim nations can create and preserve a proud state by embracing, rather than abhorring, the West.