Dervish: The Invention of Modern Turkey.

• Author: Mango, Andrew

Is the west "losing" Turkey? The question has been prompted by the accession to power in Ankara in June 1996 of a coalition government in which the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP) is the senior partner, with its leader, Necmettin Erbakan, the prime minister. Concern in the West increased when in August Turkey agreed to buy $23 billion worth of natural gas from Iran, just as the U.S. administration was intensifying its efforts to ostracize the regime in Tehran.

The fact, too, that Erbakan chose Muslim countries - Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia - for his first foreign trip as prime minister suggested that Turkey might shift orientation from West to East. Furthermore, Erbakan's ambition to develop relations with Iran, Iraq, and Syria on the basis of Islamic solidarity appeared to dash hopes that a Turkish model of Western secularism would offset the Iranian fundamentalist one in the former Soviet Union as well as the Middle East. Erbakan's homely rhetoric has also strengthened the impression of a man bent on pushing away all that is Western. "If the West had to repay the debt it owes to the Muslim world for the gift of Arabic numerals", he told an audience in Malaysia, "it would have to mortgage its pants."

Turkish secularists shuddered at all this, seeing their worst fears confirmed: The religious men who had come to rule them were not only reactionaries but vulgarians. Millions of Turks, happy in their Western lifestyles, had long warned of the dangerous opening that Western-style democracy afforded to political Islam, and the pro-secularist media, which predominate in Turkey, were not slow to communicate their heightened fears to receptive Western democrats.

But while media passions have risen in Turkey and abroad, the scene inside the country has changed little. Topless tourists still crowd the beaches; Turkish drivers continue to threaten life and limb under the influence of alcohol; the Western world's favorite mixture of sex and violence is still provided in good measure on numerous Turkish television channels. Just as customary pleasures go on, so do the old pains, only more so: The budget deficit is growing faster than before, as are prices, and the Kurdish insurgency in the southeast is claiming more victims. The International Monetary Fund has warned again that the country must live within its means. And an old familiar face, that of Mrs. Tansu Ciller, U.S.-trained professor of macroeconomics who had presided over the rake's progress of the Turkish economy, has reappeared after a brief absence, this time not as a prime minister needing Western help to stem the Islamic tide, but as a deputy prime minister and foreign minister in the Islamist-led coalition.

To crown the matter, the U.S.-Iraqi confrontation of late August and early September, which resulted in a dramatic alteration of the status quo in northern Iraq and a series of intense U.S.-Turkish exchanges, was met by stark silence from Mr. Erbakan. So stark was it, indeed, that it sent ripples of disapproval through the party faithful, among whom were those still expecting Erbakan's actions in office to bear a family resemblance to his words before and during the campaign. Even. with respect to major initiatives, such as the establishment of a Turkish security zone inside northern Iraq, the prime minister was silent. Gone too was talk of Islamic solidarity, an Islamic NATO, a southwest Asian Islamic common market. When he returned from an unsuccessful trip to Egypt, Libya, and Nigeria in October, Erbakan defended himself by claiming that his aim had been to promote Turkish exports. His secularist rivals had said much the same.

So, then, what is new in Turkey? That an avowed Islamist is prime minister certainly is new in the seventy-odd year history of the republic. The constituency he represents, the backwoodsmen of the Anatolian Plateau, Turkey's poorest region, have long felt despised by their richer, more European neighbors in the western coastlands. The migrants they have sent to the city slums have good grounds for distrusting the leadership of the secularist parties. "He's a good Muslim, so he is less likely to steal", they reasoned, as their...