Soft secularism

Turkey has just elected a new president, Abdullah Gul. Mr Gul used to be an Islamist. His party was called the Welfare Party, which was shut down by the courts in 1998 on charges of attempting to subvert the secular Turkish state. Mr Gul then joined the Virtue Party, which was similar to the Welfare Party. But even that was closed down in 2001. Mr Gul then started the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The leader of this party was Recep Erdogan, who was later excluded from politics for four years for reciting a poem which the courts thought were an incitement to "divide the nation along religious lines". Mr Gul then became prime minister. In March 2003, Mr Erdogan came back into politics after winning a by-election, so Mr Gul stepped aside to let him become the prime minister and became Turkey's foreign minister instead. In May this year, he was prevented from becoming president, partly because his wife wore an Islamic head-dress and partly because of his Islamist past. But now, after three rounds of voting, he has just become president.

The third round of voting needs only a simple majority, whereas the first two rounds require a two-thirds majority, which he did not get. In that sense, Mr Gul does not have as complete a political endorsement as he might have liked. It is like a "sudden-death" win in sports. Now the traditional secularists are in a bind. They think Mr Gul has not got over his Islamist past but can't do very much about his election because all the necessary procedural formalities have been completed. They think he will do what he can to dismantle Turkey's splendidly secular constitution. Mr Gul's supporters say this is nonsense and that he believes in the church-state separation as much as Kamal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, did. Mr Gul himself has been at pains to repeat that he has said bye-bye to his past.

There is no way of telling what will happen next. But one thing seems certain: the army, which is very powerful in Turkey, will not countenance attempts to alter the basic structure of Turkey's constitution. Mr Gul will have to be mindful of that. After all, it has rid Turkey of four elected governments in the past. Its web-site has said that there are "centres of evil" that "systematically try to corrode the secular nature of the Turkish republic". So Mr Gul will have to be careful not to be seen by the army as being at the centre of the "centres of evil".

In some ways there is a class element in all this. Turkey has been ruled for the last 85 years by a Westernised urban elite which has tended to impose its value system on the Anatolian heartland. But Mr Gul comes from that heartland, which has a positive outlook on conservative Islam. In a way, Indians can understand what has happened by looking at it in terms of the BJP vs non-BJP debate here in India. It is also useful to keep in view the resurgence of the Christian Right in the US. On the whole, it would not be wrong to say that religious conservatism is being preferred to a strict interpretation of secularism.