Tolerance combines with tradition

The sweeping electoral victory in Turkey of a party with Islamic roots should bring to an end the delusion of those who seek to "enforce" secularism in Muslim countries as an anti-religious ideology rather than a political system ensuring separation of church and state.

The Adalet va Kalkinma Partisi (AKP), or Justice and Development Party, is not an Islamist group because it does not demand the enforcement of Shariah. But its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is a practicing Muslim who was once active in the Islamist movement.

Erdogan has been banned from running for office at the behest of Turkey's military, which balks at all public manifestations of Islamic religion as anti-secular. In the last 42 years, the Turkish elite, comprising military generals, civil servants, bankers and Western-educated businessmen, have conspired to ban several political parties and disqualify many politicians accused of compromising the country's secular identity.

Models rejected

AKP's outright victory, despite its leader's disqualification, serves as a challenge to this elitist view of what a secular democratic Turkey must look like. If Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, wants to understand the flaws of his stated vision for Pakistan - a Turkish-style, military-dominated state - he should study the political developments currently taking place in Turkey.

After three military interventions and an equal number of constitutions, Turkey has learnt that there is no substitute for political compromise under stable institutions. And the electoral success of a group hated by the establishment shows that the people can reject the political models worked out by military leaders defining themselves as the nation's saviours.

The election of a born-again or Church-going Christian as president of the United States or Prime Minister of Britain does not raise the kind of spectre that the success of Erdogan's party has done in case of Muslim-majority Turkey.

Erdogan has tried to re-assure the world of his pragmatic credentials in every possible way, from supporting Turkey's membership of the European Union to maintaining ties with Israel. From an international point of view, there could be nothing better than a Muslim Turkey seeking to integrate with Europe and serving as a bridge between the Israelis and the Palestinians while retaining its Muslim identity.

Most Turkish voters backed AKP because they were tired of the corrupt and incompetent politicians born out of the Turkish military's many attempts to set the course of the country's polity. If the Turkish military, or its allies in the Prosecutor's office and the judiciary, try to exclude AKP from the political process, Turkey will have to forget its dream of joining the European Union. Europe does not want pseudo-secularism at the expense of genuine democracy.

Strict separation

Erdogan and AKP are likely to change the irrational aspects of Turkey's anti-religious secularism, bringing it closer to the definition of secularism in the West. For example, a Muslim schoolgirl in secular, pre-dominantly Christian, United States can wear a headscarf to school if she so desires. But a schoolgirl in secular, predominantly Muslim Turkey is legally forbidden from doing so. The secular tradition in the United States evolved from a commitment to religious tolerance.

Everyone enjoys a constitutional freedom to practice, promote or even change his/her religion. There is strict separation between church and state, which is interpreted to mean that the state cannot promote any specific religion or its practices. Laws are made by elected legislatures but do not derive their sanction from religious texts.

Although bigots exist, as in all societies, the force of law is on the side of tolerance. In such an environment, a schoolgirl wearing a headscarf is not deemed to threaten the secular tradition. In fact, any effort to force anyone to change his/her dress code (religiously ordained or not) is likely to be met with stiff resistance from defenders of civil liberties.

In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in reaction to the obscurantism of the Ottoman Empire, enforced secularism. Ataturk was interested in Westernising Turkey in a hurry and was not particularly bothered by niceties of individual freedom.

He ordered men to shave off their beards, forbade the Fez cap and the female headscarf, issued decrees to close down religious schools and even mosques, and banned the Azan. Under Kemalist influence Turkey acquired a Western veneer but stopped short of becoming a secular democracy in the true sense. The army, rather than popular will, became the guarantor of secularism.

Islamic sentiment surfaced whenever democracy was allowed to function and an appeal to the electorate was made. An elite, which maintains lifestyles incompatible with the resources available to the majority of its compatriots, supported the military's political interventions rather than allowing the poor to question social injustice using the idiom of religion.

In Turkey's 1995 General Elections, Necmettin Erbakan's Refah (Welfare) Party won almost a quarter of the votes cast and emerged as the single largest part in parliament. Although Erbakan was described as an Islamist by the Turkish establishment, he described himself as a devout Muslim not averse to secularism.

In his view, Kemalism is anti-religious, not secular. In secularism the state is not supposed to force any religious beliefs on the people, he argued. According to Erbakan, it is as wrong to prevent people from practicing their religion as it is to force the practice of specific religious tenets.

Elite threatened

Anywhere in the Western world, Erbakan's argument would have found few opponents. But the Turkish elite felt threatened by any compromise on enforced secularisation. As in Pakistan, they explained their fears by invoking history as well as the examples of other Muslim countries. The intolerance of Islamists elsewhere was used as justification for their own intolerance.

Erbakan was forced to resign after serving as prime minister for a short period. The Welfare Party was banned, just as other Islamic parties had been banned earlier. From the Turkish State's point of view, if fundamentalists can enforce their own brand of Islam without taking into account the will of individuals, why can't secularism be similarly enforced?

The problem with coercion as a means of promoting any set of beliefs is that it does not last and almost invariably produces a reaction. Religion is a matter relating to hearts and minds.

Pakistan's General Ziaul Haq, Iran's Pasdaran and Afghanistan's Taliban have tried and failed to fulfill claims of building more pious societies by issuing decrees. Ataturk's attempt to create a secular Turkey through force has resulted in a backlash 75 years later.

The AKP's electoral success amounts to a rejection of the Turkish establishment's tendency to ignore popular sentiment and insisting on imposing political and social solutions from the top.

There is no substitute for tolerance. Muslim societies have to recognise this fact sooner or later and political groups such as AKP, with Islamic roots but secular manifestoes, can h