(The author is Ted Crawford, an editor of "Revolutionary History".)
Politics and Society in Turkey, 22-30 April 2007,
as seen through a coach window and contrasted
with Syria another country with Islamic
traditions, claiming to be secular. (1,825 words)
We were much the same group as went to Syria two
years ago of whom I wrote "We went with a section
of the more cultivated Ealing middle class
.
many of us were retired. There was much overlap
with the Golf Club and Bridge Club
the company
tended not to be of very Bolshevik opinions
."
We included a number of Poles one of whom
confided in me that his father as a young man in
Lodz had been a member of an extreme right wing
youth group that went about beating up Germans
and Jews and that his father had told him never,
never, ever to get involved in youth politics, whether of the right or left.
This is much less interesting than little pieces
that I have written about Syria or St Petersburg
since Turkey is much better known to people and
there is considerable comment on it in the Press
at present. First we went to western Turkey,
Ionia, almost entirely within the area claimed by
Greece after WWI, (See Ionian Vision: Greece in
Asia Minor, 1919-1922, Michael Llewellyn Smith.
1998, for a fascinating account, largely from
Greek sources, for this historical episode.)
Until 1922 much of this area was inhabited by
Greeks who were the local majority until their
murder and expulsion in 1922-24. It has a long
classical as well as eventful recent history and
more recently the wine industry is starting to
make a comeback. I sometimes detected on the
hillsides what I thought were old ruined terraces
which I am sure were once Hellenic vineyards.
Let me next contrast the economy of Turkey with
that of Syria derived from the CIA website
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html.
The Turks are a lot better off on average that
the Syrians, the CIA website says the Syrians
have a GDP [at PPPs] of $3,300 per capita and the
Turks $8,900 - about the same as the Russians but
I would guess the Gini coefficient at 42 is much
more unequal than for the Syrians, for which the
CIA makes no estimate. (The Russian Gini
coefficient is 40.) As a symptom of this at the
coastal resorts there were a lot of flash yachts
that must have mostly belonged to Turks.
But what is really striking about Turkey, though
articles which I have seen do not sufficiently
emphasise it, is the enormous dynamism of the
economy as suggested by construction work. Vast
numbers of flats are going up, the towns are
growing at a fantastic rate, the roads are often
new and excellent, so there is a huge effort to
upgrade the infrastructure not to speak of the
many factories that one could see. Again, this
may not be so typical of all Turkey, particularly
the eastern half, but is certainly striking in
the part in which we travelled. There was also a
great contrast between old and new such as hugely
flash modern hotels, in which we stayed and 200
yards away an elderly and poor looking shepherd
tending his flock. Again my guess is that the
rural population, certainly the agricultural one,
is falling, perhaps quite fast in the area in
which we were, though again that may not be so
true elsewhere to the east. The women and men
working in the fields seemed almost entirely
elderly, even if agricultural work does age the
participants. Again though Syria is growing
economically, it is not doing so nearly to the
same extent. I was told by someone on the bus who
was familiar with Turkey that there was a huge
shanty town on the west of Istanbul some
kilometres from the Theodosian wall, very
unpleasant with plastic sheet roofing etc. When
he asked the Turks about it they just said "Oh,
that's Kurds". But we never saw any shanty towns
in the towns through which we passed, some of
which were very large, Izmir for instance with 3
million people. (Istanbul is about 18 million, Ankara about 3 million.)
That brings us to social conditions. Life
expectancy at birth is 70 for males and 75 for
females, not so different from Syria but the
birth rate is far lower and the net fertility
rate is 1.89 as compared with 3.31 for Syria,
1.66 for the UK, 2.09 for the USA and 1.71 for
Iran, the latter the lowest in the Islamic world
though this is never emphasised by Mr Bush or
Professor Bernard Lewis. The net fertility rate
is a good proxy for the control that women have
over their fertility and therefore their status
and welfare generally and where it is 4 or 5 or
even above then women must be basically regarded
as baby making machines. That of course brings us
to the far more entertaining and exciting topic
of sexual behaviour. In Turkey it is true that a
great many women wear the hijab though
observation convinces me that this is correlated
with class to a considerable extent while you
never ever see little girls wearing it as you
often do among Muslims in the UK. We were told
that sociological studies had shown that young
people of Turkish origin in Germany were far more
conservative in their attitudes than people of the same age in Turkey itself.
In any case Turkey whether lay or religious is,
and certainly was, a socially very conservative
place though we were told that a bit of a sexual
revolution had taken place from the late 1980s
and 1990s even if I do not expect this was of the
same depth and intensity as that in the UK from
about 1964 when it suddenly seemed that all one's
Christmases had come at once. In Turkey it was
probably both geographically confined to the
western areas and rather more of the occasional
mutual furtive grope with one's contemporaries of
the same social class that had never been on
offer before. We saw secondary school kids
occasionally holding hands while Mary, with the
eagle eye of the retired deputy head, easily
spotted in Antalya the tarty one who had hoisted
up her school uniform skirts to show maximum leg
and was always surrounded by about five boys. It
was, she said, all very familiar. Syria was a
much, much more socially conservative place
despite - dare I mention it - the claims of those
who once viewed it as a "deformed workers state". (Do they still?)
Once again I must emphasise that this was in the
prosperous west. When I raised the matter of
"honour killings" with our guide, a highly
intelligent and cultivated man, he replied that
it happened among the Kurds. When I said that it
was interesting that it was mostly among the
Kurds he replied with some emphasis that it was
entirely among the Kurds. I have no reason to doubt his reliability.
And that brings us to politics. We were there but
not in the town itself when there were tremendous
demonstrations in Istanbul over the lay versus
religious issue but my total lack of Turkish
meant that I was quite unable to comment on what
the papers were saying while the only Turk we
were able to talk to about such sensitive
subjects was our guide who was a clearly very
secular individual (he knocked back the raki)
from a quite upper middle class Istanbul family.
Apparently one chant of large sections of the
crowd was "No coup, no sharia" from which I
deduce and sense that, like much, if not most, of
the population in the UK and elsewhere, most
Turks do not feel that any political party really
represents them. There are a few things to note
about Turkish secularism and its roots. First,
apart from Pakistan (like Israel a confessional
state), all the Muslim countries that freed
themselves from colonial or semi-colonial control
(Egypt, Iran, Arab countries, Indonesia etc) used
national movements in which most islamic elements
tagged along in a sort of popular front. They may
never have really taken a leading role but they
could participate. In Turkey on the other hand
Mustapha Kemal had to overthrow the religious
state, the Caliphate, before he could really take
on the Greek invaders. The old Ottoman state was
in effect a quisling formation by 1919.
Nevertheless there was an ambiguity as his tough
ragged peasant soldiers from Anatolia regarded
fighting the giaours, above all the Greeks, as a
jihad. Ataturk took his laicity to extremes and
when a muslim fanatic tried to assassinate him
had the top 20 or 30 religious authorities
(similar to the Archbishop of Canterbury
downwards) but only after the soldiers had
knocked them about a bit, hanged in front of him,
during ramadan while he drank copious drafts of
raki with evident enjoyment. No-one ever tried again.
The massive urbanisation in Turkey has meant of
course that many of the immigrants to the city
must have become a bit more lay in their attitude
but a good many stay religious and with the
people in countryside make up a majority. The
religious urban population has some of it become
rich while there is enough corruption in the
economy and society to be denounced by any
preacher or pious individual (though all the
sermons are written by the ministry of the
interior and the mosques are very carefully
controlled). Nevertheless it is easy to see how
western habits are often regarded as degraded and corrupt by decent people.
The nature of Turkish nationalism is therefore
peculiar both in relation to western Europe and
the rest of the Islamic umma. When the great
population exchange took place between Greece and
Turkey in 1924-5 the Turkish speaking Christians
were expelled along with the Greeks. It is only
fair to add that when the First Balkan war of
1912 broke out the Bulgarian generals blooded
their troops by sending them into the Pomak
villages, (Bulgarian speaking Muslims) in
Bulgaria where they threw the babies on the
bayonets in the approved and traditional way.
"
.in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters:
Your fathers taken by their silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls:
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
While the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds; as did the wives of Jewry,
At Herod's bloody hunting slaughtermen."
Read what Trotsky wrote in his Open Letter to
that dreadful bugger Dimitriev, the Bulgarian
commander. So nationalism is still defined by
religion rather than language as in the west, but
not by race for you can become a Turk if you
speak it and are a non-practising Muslim. I feel
the phenomenon needs a clear Marxist analysis
dealing with its peculiar formation while, though
it may have been done, I do not know of such.
Ted Crawford
