The Foreign Service Journal, April 2008

A P R I L 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 29 he Turks have been wres- tling with their identity and the place of Islam in public life since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the new state in 1923. The architect of replacing the worn-out Ottoman Empire with an energetic new republic, he pointed Turkey firmly toward the West. For Ataturk, Islam represented the dead hand of the past. By enshrining secularism in the Constitution, he sought to make sure that Islamic practice would not stand in the way of Turkey’s modernization. During his lifetime he resolutely prevented the construction of any new mosques in the capital, Ankara. And all Islamic religious officials were, and continue to be, supervised and paid by the Turkish government. In his zeal to make Turkey a developed nation, Ataturk even investigated the possibil- ity that Protestantism’s work ethic, following the teach- ings of Max Weber, might energize the Turks to progress more rapidly, as it had done in Western Europe. Since Ataturk’s day, however, the pull of religion has made itself felt ever more strongly in Turkey. Over time, the secularism of the nation’s civilian elite became dilut- ed as new recruits from the periphery who increasingly took pride in their Islamic identity joined their ranks. By the 1990s, civilian politicians seeking to use religious appeal to succeed in politics were even able to form a rul- ing coalition. The military establishment, by contrast, remained fiercely committed to Ataturk’s secularism, a divide that has increasingly set the generals apart from the civilian politicians. The military took power directly twice, in 1960 and 1980, and its veiled threats brought down a civilian government for appearing to exploit Islam for political purposes as recently as 1997. It also encouraged Turks to demonstrate in defense of secularism in 2007. F O C U S O N P O L I T I C A L I S L A M C LIMBING THE G REASED P OLE : T URKEY ’ S I SLAMIC D EMOCRACY R ELIGION HAS BEEN PART OF THE BATTLEGROUND OF POLITICS IN T URKEY FOR DECADES , BUT THE STRUGGLE OVER THE ISSUE HAS RECENTLY TAKEN A NEW FORM . B Y G EORGE S. H ARRIS T George S. Harris is currently an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., carrying out research on Turkey and the Middle East. From 1957 to 1962, he was a political attaché in Embassy Ankara. He then returned to Washington, D.C., to work in the Office of National Estimates as an estimator until 1974, when he joined the Bureau of Intelligence and Research within the Department of State. In 1978 he became the bureau’s director of analysis for Western Europe; the following year, he was appointed INR’s director of analysis for Near East and South Asia. He retired from this last State Department position at the end of 1995. In addition to numerous articles on Turkey, he has writ- ten several books, including Troubled Alliance: Turkish- American Problems in Historical Perspective, 1945-1971 (1972) and The Communists and the Kadro Movement: Shaping Ideology in Ataturk’s Turkey (2002).