Beyond the Fig Tree

Turkey has got to be one of the most fascinating political experiments around, yet somehow (maybe because we’re singapore), we never really get wind of what is happening there.

Here’s the story:

Turkey is an Islamic country. More specifically, it is a country with an Islamic majority. Turkey’s pride however, rests on its secular constitution and its adherence to democracy. The obvious irony here is that Islam, as a religion, presupposes that the state and religion are one. There is no distinction like in Christian society. Furthermore, Islam itself demands an authoritative rule, and insists its followers migrate to lands that are governed by Islamic governments .

The second one helps wind the rope another round. In its democratic elections, the Turkish population elected an Islamic party, known as the “AK party”. Their Prime Minister, a guy called Erdogan, reminds us of a Jose Mourinho like figure. He made himself famous recently by storming out of the World Economic Forum whilst on stage. So anyway, what do you do when a secular democracy elects an Islamic party to power? Do Muslims have to migrate then?

btw, speaking of ironies, Istanbul used to be Constantinople!

Then, to further complicate matters, the ‘democracy’ itself is under question. The secular constitution is generally regarded as sacred, and its Father, a guy called Kemal Ataturk (renamed, obviously) is its patriarch – think LKY with Obama’s cult following. In fact, Turkey has deeply entrenched, constitution-guarding powers such as its judiciary (which recently, tried to ban the AK party) and the military. These are fierce guardians of the secular constitution, but, as a result are protected by the constitution itself.

So in reforming the constitution, you limit their powers, for the sake of democracy. But does that allow the AK party to hold reforms further, and sow the seed for an Islamic state take place? And we don’t know if that is necessarily worse.

As a fourth complication, Mr Erdogan and his AK party are extremely confusing and no one knows what their motives are. They are pushing for EU membership and have undertaken reforms, but this has died down. So economically they appear to be ‘westernizing’. Culturally though, they recently tried reimposing the headscarf rule! So are they trying to make it an Islamic state? I would think people in general are quite confused.

Its quite astonishing the number of historic things happening at a given time. I thought Obama and the financial crisis was probably it. Truth is, there’s a whole lot of important stuff out there that we in Singapore don’t really know about. In the past I knew Turkey for two reasons. The first was its gastronomical name. Like Hamburg. Second was a fear that United would draw a Turkish team lest some stadium massacre repeat itself. “Istanbul”, had this ominous ring to it. I had no idea it was even a secular state – I thought it was some den for terrorists! Turns out its a pretty interesting social experiment after all.