In his twenties, Erdo?an joined an explicitly Islamist political party that had been led by Necmettin Erbakan since the late sixties, inspired in part by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. Erbakan was an upper-class engineer who wore Versace ties, but his acolyte, Erdo?an, appealed to the working class. In 1994, at the age of forty, he was elected mayor of Istanbul, on a platform of clean hands, higher quality of life, and a devotion to municipal services. Even secularists gratefully recall that it was Erdo?an who got rid of the trash on the street corners, improved the water and the transportation systems, and planted the flowers. A journalist who interviewed Erdo?an in those years told me some people nicknamed him the Minister of Trees.
But Erdo?an terrified the elite by proclaiming himself the “imam of Istanbul” and banning alcohol in municipal buildings. In 1997, he read a poem at a public gathering: “The mosques are our barracks the domes our helmets the minarets our bayonets / and the believers our soldiers.” Its author was none other than Ziya G?kalp, Turkey’s founding nationalist intellectual, but Turkey’s generals accused Erdo?an of using the poem as an Islamist rallying cry and sent him to prison. The military had just led a nonviolent coup against the rising so-called Islamists, dissolving the Welfare Party, closing religious schools, and banning the head scarf on university campuses. Thousands of young women would have to go to college abroad, including Erdo?an’s daughter. His own brief time in prison wrought a marked change, if not in his political philosophy then in his political strategy: he became more acquiescent to his country’s Western-looking foreign and economic policy, to European Union reforms, and, for a while anyway, to the military.
In 2001, he founded the AK Party, and allied with another group of canny, smooth-talking religious Muslims called the Gülenists, after its founder, Fethullah Gülen, a preacher who lives in Pennsylvania. They were a mysterious and powerful group. They advertised themselves as peace-loving and “moderate,” a PR campaign that worked very well on Americans. Every month, Gülen representatives held seminars for foreign journalists in Istanbul, where they offered lectures related to the news of the day: the history of the AK Party, the compatibility of Islam with democracy. They introduced us to religious scholars and intellectuals, to young women pursuing PhDs who could confidently articulate their own reasons for wearing a head scarf. The Gülenists were aggressively helpful to foreigners. But many Turks, it seemed, feared their ubiquity; there was a sense that even the bread you bought at the local f?r?n might have been sponsored by the Gülen movement, that the bread itself could be “Gülen,” as Turks put it.
The Gülenist newspaper, Zaman, one of the most popular in the country, also used Erdo?an’s language of American liberalism and capitalism: “modernization,” “human rights,” “freedom,” “pro-business,” “privatization.” Then I had not thought to even question these words, so dazzled was I that they—the Islamists—were using that language at all. The new AK Party spoke approvingly of the West, both as a model for the Turkish economy and as a beacon of religious liberty. Erdo?an advocated for a program of market liberalization once designed by the IMF. They were one of the only major parties—the formerly Islamist party—that fully supported joining Europe. In accordance with the EU’s demands, the AK Party passed more than forty pieces of legislation to protect freedom of expression, improve the rights of women and children, and eliminate torture, and would eventually strengthen civilian control of the military, the last of which, of course, was the one most in Erdo?an’s personal interest. For the first time in history, a civilian politician would be free to run Turkey how he chose. So enamored was I with this most important of steps toward real democracy—no more military in politics!—that I didn’t consider how this newfound liberty might be corrosive even to a politician with the best possible intentions.
Both religious Turks and liberals were astonished at their “Tayyip’s” ability to bring about real change. In 2004, Time had noted approvingly: “Western leaders have been scouring the Muslim world for moderate politicians who see their future in democracy and pluralism. Erdo?an may be the best find yet.” Erdo?an and the AK Party appeared to be the sort of mild, moderate “good Muslims” who make Westerners feel better about the possibility of peace in the world, as well as the widespread appeal of Western-style democracy and market capitalism. And Erdo?an made me feel better, too. A friend from home said to me, “It feels utterly wrong that you would be more sympathetic to the Islamic party rather than the secular one.” But Erdo?an and his party, who so ably used words like “freedom” and “democracy,” appealed to me far more than the Turkish secularists who believed religious people were a threat to Atatürk’s country, whose bloodlust could be aroused because of a poem. Like many of the journalists, I celebrated the fact that Erdo?an was “pro-business,” because capitalism seemed like a Western antidote to the scary things about Islam. Many former leftists supported Erdo?an at that time—even the group of gay men I befriended in my neighborhood voted for him—and on some level, I supported Erdo?an, too. Could there be anyone more easily seduced by Erdo?an’s up-by-the-bootstraps story than Americans who treasured that same myth about themselves? “For so long, the secularists imitated the West, and they were ashamed of where they came from,” an artist told me. “Erdo?an doesn’t have any of that shame, and you can tell.” The AK Party won the election that year I arrived, and for the first time, Turkey had a prime minister, a president, and a ruling majority party in Parliament who were all former Islamists.
Rana had by then moved past any concern she had about Erdo?an and Gül’s piousness. She was seven steps ahead of me already. Her concerns centered on potential corruption, the kind that might be especially tempting to a segment of society that never before had unfettered access to the state’s economic and bureaucratic largesse. I admitted that few people in the foreign press at the time questioned the party’s economic policies or finances.
“So for a lot of people this is about a question of money?” I asked.
I’m surprised she didn’t kill me. “Obviously!” she nearly yelled. “Money, power, whatever. They’re politicians! I mean, if you Americans aren’t thinking about money, then who the hell will?”
Neither of us realized at the time that it was precisely because I was American that I did not think about money, not in this context anyway. I was consumed by this country’s cultural revolution. I had never been somewhere, I thought, where national and personal identity had been so deliberately and methodically engineered, and here I was watching the whole thing fall apart. For me, everything was somehow representative of this what-it-meant-to-be-a-Turk question, and I took it as my duty to understand this strange virus—nationalism—to which I assumed the Turks had been uniquely prone.