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WHILE I WAS IN KABUL, I heard from everyone—from the Afghans who worked at the house I was staying in to upper-class politicians—that the best school for children in the city was, hands down, the “Turkish school.” From the road, it looked no different from the other pastel-hued bureaucratic buildings in Kabul, the kind that could have been a hospital as easily as it could have been the Department of Public Works. But inside I found myself in Turkey, not only because the school was sparklingly clean and well ordered, but because there hung on the walls a giant photograph of Atatürk. The school, however, was not some last-ditch attempt at Kemalist evangelism; the school was run by the Gülenists.
The Gülenists by then had established thousands of schools in hundreds of countries; Central Asia was one of their most important regions of influence. The other was the United States. With the schools came fleets of Turkish teachers and their families, nonprofit organizations and cultural festivals, and eventually, Turkey’s foreign policy apparatus. Erdo?an recognized the international diplomatic and financial potential in countries where the Gülenists had made such inroads, such as Somalia, Indonesia, and Japan. Through their schools, the Gülenists had created diplomatic outposts all over the world, which made doing business in those countries a lot easier, and in turn made the spread of the Gülen movement a financial reality. As one man formerly affiliated with the movement told me, “Those schools are not only there because they care so much about education. Those schools are there to further the movement.” I was too blind at the time to realize that the Erdo?an government was building an empire.
In fact, the period of the Gülenists and the AK Party’s power expansion had begun around the same time Zia-ul-Haq was using Islam to quell communism in Pakistan and funding the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Zia had shared his ideas with Kenan Evren, the military general who staged the 1980 coup in Turkey. It is one of the ironies of Turkish history that it was the Kemalist-secularist military’s coup that would usher in Turkey’s era of political Islam.
At the time, NATO approved of using Islam as a green belt, or a “wall,” to stop the advance of communism. Following this lead, Evren, and later Turgut ?zal, the prime minister who eventually succeeded the general, took a series of radical measures that changed Turkish society forever. Engin Cezzar had tried to explain this history to me when I visited his apartment. “I’m very sorry, but this awful American policy is killing us,” he said. “They want Turkey to be a mild Islamic republic.” I hadn’t listened.
Months before the coup, Turkey accepted an IMF package that would open up the country to global markets. Evren, who needed more capital to rebuild the country after the economic paralysis of the 1970s, turned to a country flush with oil revenue: Saudi Arabia. In 1976, an Islamic conference had been held in Pakistan called the Siret-i Nebi Congress. It was organized by Rabitat, which had been founded by the Saudis in 1962 in reaction to the rise of Egypt’s Nasser, and later Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Rabitat, according to the scholar Banu Eligür, “aimed at propagating a strict religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world,” by supplying countries with books, money for mosques, and salaries for imams. In 1981, the Saudis even began paying the salaries of imams in Turkish communities in Germany and Belgium.
Evren’s sudden alliance with Saudi Arabia set off a furor in Turkey, but he defensively praised the “improvement of our relations with the Middle East and Islamic countries.” Turkey is “an inextricable part of the Islamic community,” he said, words that for some were blasphemy. After the instability of the 1970s, Evren had come to believe that if the state did not offer a strict and moral religious upbringing for its citizens, then an inevitable void would be filled by Marxism or fascism. To counter such threats, Evren adopted something called the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, which had been developed in the 1960s by a group of right-wing nationalist intellectuals. These “idealists,” as they called themselves, saw the rise of Marxist militancy, as well as the Kemalists’ desperation to imitate the West, as an attack on “Turkishness” as well as on Islamic culture. “Both ‘red imperialism’ and ‘capitalist imperialism’ aim to destroy the Turkish nation by turning people against each other and provoking internal disorder,” a primary text on the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis suggested. “In order to achieve these purposes they alienated people from their religious and national values and conquered their souls and hearts with the fake ideals of equality and freedom.” Imperialism in all forms was to blame.
Once, Atatürk had sought to adopt Western lifestyles, while denouncing the West’s foreign policy. Under Kenan Evren, the Turks reversed course. Though Evren was pro-American, he wanted to wrest control of the Turks’ identity. Evren’s new Turkish ideology emphasized loyalty to the state, to the mosque, and to the family (i.e., the father). He saw Sunni Islam as a “useful tool for creating citizens who would be respectful and loyal.” Turkish students were required to take a course on Islam called “Religion and Ethics.” Evren began building hundreds of imam-hatip schools, which offered students a religious education, as well as many more mosques. “In this way,” writes Banu Eligür, the professedly secular military “tactically opened up a social and political space for Islamist mobilization in Turkey.”