Turkey’s gradual backsliding from an illiberal democracy to an autocracy has reached a new stage.
Having reinforced his power by suppressing all opposition, President Erdogan has now turned his attention to reigning in the dissenting voices in his party.
Friday’s surprise development at the Central Decision and Executive Board (MKYK) of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to take away the key prerogative of its leader to appoint provincial and district heads of the party was an unmistakable signal to Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu that his days may be numbered.
Earlier this week, the remarks by Ismail Kahraman, Speaker of the Grand National Assembly while he was standing in for the President during Mr Erdogan’s trip abroad, was another sign marking a critical point in Turkey’s transition.
Speaking to a group of religious scholars, Mr Kahraman, handpicked by the President after the November 1st elections to lead the Parliament, suggested that Turkey’s new constitution should not be secular but one that reflects the country’s Islamic identity. “It needs to discuss religion. It should not be irreligious, this new constitution should be a religious constitution” he said.
Secularism has long been the most bitter ideological battleground in Turkey and sure enough, the speaker’s comment sparked a stronger than usual reaction.
Both Mr Erdogan and the Prime Minister Davutoglu have dismissed suggestions that a religious constitution was on its way, claiming that the speaker of Parliament was speaking in a personal capacity, but Pandora’s Box has now been opened.
Mr Erdogan has been engineering a steady progression towards a constitutional referendum and it is now becoming crystal clear that consolidating his executive powers will not be the only target in his plans for the next year.
Plagued by political ineptitude, Turkey’s main opposition party CHP did not see it coming. Now presented with a choice of a religious constitution and a non-religious one, their space for a vigorous debate and advocacy for banishing all things religious from the public sphere will be suffocatingly small.
The principle of secularism has been, more or less explicitly, already undermined in Turkey. The victory won by Turkey’s Alevi community on Tuesday, at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) had created little stir in the country. Yet, the Court has ruled that Alevis’ right to freedom of religion had been violated, and the religious group was the subject of discrimination.
In recent years, there have been a number of prosecutions against writers, journalists and artists on charges of ‘insulting religious values’, ‘defamation of religion’ and ‘blasphemy’.
On Thursday, a court in Istanbul sentenced Cumhuriyet journalists Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Çetinkaya, for republishing the Charlie Hebdo cover image for “inciting hate and enmity. They were tried but acquitted of another charge of “openly insulting religious values”.
When the state, the executive and the judiciary are not standing neutral between different religions and beliefs, it is difficult to take the President’s and the Prime Minister’s repeatedly stated commitment to everyone’s religious liberty in Turkey seriously.
Back in 2012, when the- then- prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared their intention to raise a religious youth, some people dismissed it lightly, believing that Turkey’s complex society would not be so amenable to social engineering.
Since then, the country’s education system has been transformed beyond recognition. The massive growth of Islamic schools and the forced conversion of thousands of secular schools into religious vocational Imam Hatip schools as well as revision of school text books have already changed the educational landscape.
Speaking at a ceremony in Istanbul, organized by the ONDER Imam Hatip Schools Alumni Association on Thursday, Mr Erdogan told the Imam Hatip pupils that they were the only hope both for Turkey and the Islamic world.
With the systematic Islamic overhaul of the education system largely complete and the country’s media almost completely under control, the next step is going to be a comprehensive revision of history to make it compatible with the new narrative.
This is not a wild guess on my part. The President has already told the world.
Today’s Turkey is a country where winner-takes-all. Are you surprised the victors are about to rewrite their history?
This post is also available in: Turkish
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