Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (30 page)

The third factor that helps explain the transformation of the AKP was a gift from Özal to Turkey: free-market capitalism. And it was this factor that ultimately was so definitive and vital to the change in Turkish Islam.

T
HE
R
EBIRTH OF
I
SLAMIC
C
APITALISM

As we saw earlier in this book, Islam was born as a business-friendly religion. The subsequent rise of “Islamic capitalism” facilitated the dynamism and splendor of Islamic civilization, as we have seen, while its decline resulted in the stagnation and eventual decline of Islamdom. We have also seen that the Ottomans realized—albeit quite belatedly—the importance of private business and tried to jump-start it via some of the Tanzimat reforms.

However, even though the Ottoman efforts led to the appearance of a Muslim middle class, this development was very limited in scope. The bourgeoisie remained primarily non-Muslim until the fall of the empire. That’s why the Young Turks, and later the Kemalists, sought to create a “national bourgeoisie” that had state support. They were successful to a certain degree, but thanks to unfair methods. An “opportunity space” for Turkish capitalists opened up because of the wartime expulsion of Armenians—a tragic decision that led to sporadic mass murders—and later a “population exchange” with Greece.
³⁴
The Kemalist regime also imposed a hefty “wealth tax” on Jews, Greeks, and Armenians between 1942 and 1944, under a cabinet with Nazi sympathies.
³⁵
Those unable to pay, in line with the dark standards of the time, were sent to a labor camp in Eastern Turkey.
³⁶

Both the formation and the composition of this state-made “national bourgeoisie” were unfair. Only urbanites who could wine and dine the secular politicians and bureaucrats received lucrative contracts and loans from the state. By the end of the 1940s, the Kemalist “center” had successfully created a business elite in its own likeness.

Meanwhile, religion had survived mainly among the less privileged. “The nation-state belonged more to us than to the religious poor,” says Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel laureate in literature, recalling his childhood days in 1950s Istanbul. But, he adds, secular people like him were also afraid of “being outclassed by people who had no taste for secularism.”
³⁷

Pamuk’s fears would start to be realized a few decades later, during the Özal Revolution. By liberalizing the economy, diminishing the role of the state, and personally inspiring a religiously devout and economically entrepreneurial spirit, Özal created space for Islamic-minded entrepreneurs. As early as the late 1980s, economists started to talk about “Anatolian Tigers”—companies founded in the conservative cities of Anatolia that quickly utilized the groundbreaking opportunities for manufacturing and exporting in the brave new world of the free market.

In 1990, a group of these conservative businessmen created a union named MÜSI˙AD, a clear alternative to the well-established TÜSI˙AD (Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association), which represented the more secular “Istanbul bourgeoisie.” The letter “M” stood for the word
Müstakil
, or “Independent,” but many thought it actually meant “Muslim,” as most MÜSI˙AD members are mosque-going conservatives whose wives and daughters wear headscarves.

In 1994, MÜSI˙AD published an Islamic economic manifesto in a booklet titled
Homo Islamicus
. The document encouraged hard work and free trade, referring to the life of the Prophet Muhammad as a merchant. It vigorously defended the freedom of the markets and opposed the state’s intrusive role in the economy. It also added that theirs was a capitalism tamed by the compassionate and altruistic values of Islam, not a “ruthless” one.
³⁸

Since its founding, MÜSI˙AD has become increasingly influential and has consistently supported free-market reforms, whereas some members of TÜSI˙AD, who used to benefit from a “protected” economy, have remained less enthusiastic. This rift started in the early years of Turgut Özal, who supported “total liberation,” while most members of TÜSI˙AD favored a “mixed economy,” or a combination of capitalism and socialism.
³⁹

T
HE
“C
ALVINISTS
”
OF
I
SLAM

One of the urban centers that gave rise to the Anatolian Tigers was Kayseri, a midsize city in the heartland of Turkey. Kayserians had always been famous for both business-mindedness and religiosity, but they had their great leap forward courtesy of the Özal Revolution. From the mid-1980s onward, the city experienced an industrial boom, with hundreds of new factories opened. By the mid-2000s, just one of its textile companies produced one percent of the world’s denim for brands such as Levi’s, Wrangler, and Diesel. Kayseri’s furniture companies supplied 70 percent of the Turkish market and exported their wares to many countries in the Middle East.

In 2005, a Berlin-based think tank, the European Stability Initiative (ESI), studied Kayseri to understand the secret of its economic miracle. After several weeks conducting interviews with the city’s prominent businessmen, the ESI team wrote a report that emphasized the curious role of religion in the motivation of these entrepreneurs. “Nine out of ten of one’s fate depends on commerce and courage,” one of the Kayseri businessmen said, quoting the Prophet Muhammad. Another businessman argued, “It is good for a religious person to work hard,” and “to open a factory is a kind of prayer.” The founder of a furniture company stated, “I see no black and white opposition between being modern and [being] traditional,” and said that he was “open to innovation.”
⁴⁰

“To understand Kayseri,” the former mayor of the town, S¸ükrü Karatepe, told the ESI researchers, “one must read Max Weber.”
⁴¹
Weber, of course, pointed to the role that the ascetic and hardworking ethic of early Protestants, particularly Calvinists, played in the rise of modern capitalism in Europe. According to Karatepe, one could observe the same work ethic in Kayseri and a few other Anatolian cities, thanks to the teachings of Islam. Fittingly, the ESI researchers titled their report
Islamic Calvinists
. Their conclusion was that Kayseri was only a single case study, and, in general, “over the past decade [1995–2005], individualistic, pro-business currents [had] become prominent within Turkish Islam.”
⁴²

These “individualistic, pro-business currents” were certainly capitalist, but not materialist, hedonist, or selfish. Quite the contrary, they went hand in hand with a strong sense of social responsibility, as emphasized by Islam. Kayseri’s Islamic entrepreneurs spent more than $300 million in five years to support clinics, schools, and various other charitable organizations. By 2005, sixteen separate soup kitchens in the city were serving almost ten thousand people daily. Kayseri’s culture was a combination of “entrepreneurship, asceticism, and altruism.”
⁴³

The AKP’s political transformation was not unrelated to the interests of these Islamic Calvinists. The latter needed a Turkey that had been integrated into the global economy, had anchored its stability in the EU, and had closer ties with all the neighboring countries—the exact strategy of the AKP.
⁴⁴
No wonder all of the “Islamic Calvinists” were supporters of Erdog˘an and Gül, and Kayseri was in effect an AKP city, giving the party a staggering 66 percent of the votes in 2007.

T
HE
M
USLIM
M
IDDLE
C
LASS AND
I
TS
C
HANGING
C
ULTURE

In July 2009, the founder of MÜSI˙AD, Erol Yarar, a practicing Muslim, gave an interview to a Turkish newspaper, sparking a nationwide debate. The headline read, “We Are the Real Bourgeois Class of Turkey.” Yarar argued that while some big businesses were supported by the state, “we grew with our own effort, much like the bourgeoisie in Europe.”
⁴⁵

Yarar also noted something significant: On the one hand, Muslim entrepreneurs were creating a capitalism inspired by their religious values; on the other hand, their religious values were being altered by their engagement in capitalism. “When we held our first meeting in a five-star hotel,” he recalled,

some of our friends [in MÜSI˙AD] were asking, “What are we doing here?” . . . Most of them had never traveled abroad and were hostile to Europe, America, and Russia. . . . They wanted to leave their companies to their sons, and did not care much about the education of their daughters. Since then, these wrong notions have changed a lot. Now they are traveling to Europe just to see it more and more. . . . Recently I entered a little mosque in a big shopping mall in Istanbul. I looked at the shoes; they were all high-quality brands! This is the revolution that is taking place in Turkey.
⁴⁶

In other words, engagement with the modern world as its
partner
ameliorated formerly negative attitudes toward it. The experiences of these Muslim businessmen are quite different from engagement with the modern world as its
victims
—as Muslims under Western occupation or a secularist dictatorship would see themselves. It is also different from being the modern world’s
outsiders
, as many marginalized Muslim immigrants in European societies feel.

The Islamic Calvinists also created jobs for a new generation of Muslim professionals. Hence, in just two decades—from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s—a “Muslim middle class” emerged, to the shock of the secularists. As its social context changed, this middle class started to change its political attitudes. One example was the decline of Islamism. A public survey conducted by a liberal Turkish think tank in 2006 (when the AKP was in power) showed that the demand for a “Shariah state” in Turkish society had fallen from 21 percent to 9 percent in just seven years. When questions were asked about some extreme measures of the Shariah, such as stoning, this support dropped to one percent.
⁴⁷
This was an especially big change when compared to the heyday of the Turkish Islamists, when they had dreamed of imposing “a Taliban-like Shariah.”
⁴⁸

“Ah, those idealist
mujahids
of the 70s,” wrote an Islamic pundit in 2009, “now they all have become moneymaking
müteahhids
[i.e., building contractors].”
⁴⁹

In addition to its changed outlook on political life, the new Muslim middle class started to develop a whole new culture. An interesting study that demonstrates this transformation comes from a Turkish sociologist who examined the content of “Islamic novels” in Turkey. The change became clear when he contrasted two eras of novels—the first being the 1980s, the second starting from the mid-1990s. In the first era, all of the characters in these novels were clear-cut figures—immoral secularists versus exemplary Muslims. Each story had a hero who, after some soul-searching, saw the light and became a devotee of “the Islamic cause.” Even his marriage was about “raising good kids for Islam,” and not focused on romance and love.

In the second era, though, the characters in the “Islamic novels” became much more real and their stories more complex. Now the secular figures were not necessarily all bad, and the Islamic ones were more human—with sins, self-doubts, and love stories. Moreover, criticism was now directed not only to the outsiders but also to the Islamic camp itself. One of the female authors whose earlier novels idealized “the Islamic way of life” was now criticizing injustices within the Islamic community, such as misogynist husbands who adopt mistresses as their “second wives.”
⁵⁰

In short, Islamic literature shifted from “a rhetoric of collective salvation” to “new individualistic Muslimhoods.”
⁵¹
And this was directly related to the changing socioeconomic background of the writers and their readers. The Islamic novels of the 1980s “reflected the experiences of the newcomers to the big cities . . . people of the lower class.” But in the late 1990s, those people were no longer newcomers; “they had found modern jobs as engineers, mayors, businessmen and businesswomen.” No wonder that, in this era, the old “salvation novels” and other “ideological books” did not sell well anymore. What instead had become popular were books about personal development.
⁵²
As pious Muslims entered the urban middle class, in other words, their understanding of religion became less ideological and more individualistic.