The Fierce Saladin

“The most powerful Turkish president since Atatürk’s time”, as the saying goes. In the words of The Spectator, also “the most powerful man in Europe”. And in those of the Turkish columnist Abdurrahman Dilipak, a contributor to the Islamist daily Yeni Akit, even the “new caliph”. It is not Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He has been at the helm of NATO’s second-strongest military power for fifteen years; he has spies throughout Europe via a dense network of mosques, associations and cultural centres; he has propelled his country to the top of the global rankings for the number of jailed journalists (Europe is now full of Turkish exiles, such as Can Dündar); he has silenced European comedians with the threat of legal action; he has had his hand on the immigration taps ever since he extracted six billion euros from Brussels to keep the refugee camps closed; and he lives in the dream of a historic revenge against his country’s historic nemesis.

Just a few years ago, our political, economic and media elites were all in favour of Turkey’s accession to the EU, and the Americans were praising Turkey for its ‘moderate Islamism’. Erdogan is still in power, but his mask has slipped. Or rather, his masks. The democrat has turned into an autocrat, and the European into an Ottoman. The worse Erdogan behaves – as in the war against the Kurds in Syria – the greater the influence he gains in Europe. Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, implored Erdogan to consider how “we treated you like a prince in Brussels”. Erdogan, “prince of Europe” – yet another title. The founder of Stratfor, George Friedman, believes that Turkey will become a superpower. “It is the world’s seventeenth-largest economy, bigger than Saudi Arabia; it has an army and military capabilities superior to anyone in Europe; it could defeat the Germans in an afternoon and the French in an hour; and every time the Islamic world has seen unification over the last thousand years, it has been under Turkish rule.” Last May, a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute revealed that Turkey had increased its military spending more than any of the fifteen countries with the largest defence budgets in the world (between 2009 and 2018, Turkish military spending rose by 65 per cent). Erdogan is using the army to expand Turkish influence: “Not since the days of the Ottoman Empire has the Turkish army had such a wide global reach,” writes Selcan Hagalou in Bloomberg.

Mosques, demographics, history, the army: Erdogan’s four weapons for restoring Turkey to its former Ottoman glory. “Kurds in Turkey today have twice as many children as Turks; the pressure for secession will increase, which is why he wants to drive them out of Syria”

“Erdogan believes that Ankara should deal with its traditional Western partners, such as the United States and Europe, whilst seeking new partners, such as Russia and Iran,” Soner Cagaptay, director of Turkish Studies at the Washington Institute for East Policy and author of the book “Erdogan’s Empire”, tells “Il Foglio”. “Although Ankara remains anchored to NATO, in Erdogan’s view it ultimately retains its autonomy. He wants to ensure that everyone respects Turks and Muslims and that, thanks to its role in protecting Muslims, Turkey is recognised as a global player. Before Erdogan took the reins, perceiving itself as a middle power and at times a weak one, Turkey firmly aligned itself with a superpower or a global bloc. Drawing on the memory of the mighty Ottoman Empire, Erdogan wants to revive Turkey’s greatness and, to that end, is not afraid to break away from the Western-led system.” Erdogan evokes the Ottoman past. “Nations that were once empires, such as Turkey, romanticise their golden age,” Cagaptay continues in Il Foglio. “Understanding the significance of Turkey’s imperial past is essential. A romanticised view of the Ottoman Empire continues to shape the views of Turks.” This distances them from the West. “Unlike his predecessors, Erdogan does not see Turkey as part of the political or cultural West. The good news, however, is that he needs the West financially.” Ever since his Justice and Development Party became the dominant force in 2002, elevating the public role of Islam has been more than just a slogan for Erdogan. At public rallies, the Turkish president makes a hand gesture with four fingers raised and his thumb hidden. This is the “Rabia salute”, commemorating the killing of Muslim Brotherhood supporters by the Egyptian military. Erdogan sees himself as a global Islamic leader with national elections to win (and he does not always succeed, as in Istanbul). “Erdogan, the leader of the ummah”, reads the title of a social media page with 100,000 followers. Erdogan wields enormous influence in Europe through four million Turkish Muslims in Germany and large communities in the Netherlands, France, Austria and elsewhere. He has commissioned the construction of 17,000 mosques (a fifth of the total). The largest stands in Çamlıca, on the Asian side of Istanbul, from where the East, to quote Jean Cocteau, extends “its old, jewelled hand” towards Europe. From Mali to Moscow, via Cambridge and Amsterdam, Erdogan is at the forefront of this religious diplomacy. The “largest mosque in the Balkans” is Turkish and is located in Tirana. The Turkish mosque in Accra, Ghana, is “the largest in West Africa”. The Turkish mosque in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, is “the largest in Central Asia”. The Turkish mosque in Strasbourg, the “largest mosque in Europe”, is also under construction, with 40-metre-high minarets and capacity for 3,000 worshippers.

Erdogan has strengthened the Diyanet, the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which has a budget equivalent to that of twelve ministries combined and 120,000 employees (up from 72,000 in 2004). Its budget has more than quadrupled since Erdogan’s first term in office. Through this religious network, Erdogan has a foothold in European affairs. Turkey controls 900 of the 2,400 mosques in Germany. These serve to slow down the assimilation of Turks into European society and to convey his message to the diaspora. Last year, the German magazine Spiegel reported that Turkish imams had led prayers in support of the military incursion into Afrin in Syria. A few months ago, Austria closed a number of Turkish mosques after dozens of Turkish children dressed in camouflage re-enacted the Gallipoli campaign, when the Triple Entente (the French, British and Russians) were defeated by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. “Have five children; the future of Europe is yours,” Erdogan told the diaspora. He is addressing them because in Turkey the message is not getting through as he would like.

“An authoritarian country, with a limited democracy, lacking secularism and freedom of expression, which is taking its revenge on the West.” “It is obsessed with the fall of Constantinople in 1453,” says Gürsel, who is on trial in Istanbul for his novel “Le figlie di Allah”

According to David P. Goldman, founder of Asia Times and an American expert on geopolitics, Turkey is currently facing a paradox. “Islamisation is at the top of Erdogan’s agenda,” Goldman explains. “He has allied himself with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Qatari monarchy and hopes to overthrow the Saudi regime and replace them as leader of the Sunni world. The Ottoman Empire had a Christian population making up twenty per cent of Anatolia. Erdogan envisages a Sunni-Turkish empire.” Speaking in Gaugazia, the Turkish region in Moldova, Erdogan said a year ago: “We are one big family of three hundred million people stretching from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China.” Domestic demographics stand in his way. “Erdogan has described himself as a ‘black Turk’, a devout Muslim from the Anatolian hinterland, in contrast to the ‘white Turks’, the European-style secularists who came to power under Kemal Atatürk and remained in power until the 2000s. Turkey’s political crisis stems from demographic imbalances and confessional, social and ethnic divisions. The problem is that its Kurdish minority, now accounting for 20 per cent of the population, is having twice as many children as Turks – so many that half the population of military age will speak Kurdish as their first language in less than twenty years. By the mid-2040s, half of Turkish citizens under the age of 30 will come from Kurdish-speaking families. The pressure to redraw Turkey’s borders and for Kurdish secession will be enormous. That is why Erdogan wants to expel the Kurds from Syria and replace them with Sunni Arabs. More generally, Erdogan envisages a pan-Turkic empire economically supported by China. “There are not enough Turks in Turkey, but there are many Turks outside it.” According to Turkstat, the official statistics agency, the Turkish provinces with the lowest fertility rates are all in the north and north-west of the country, where women have an average of just 1.5 children. The Kurdish south-east has fertility rates of between 3.2 and 4.2 children per woman. Between 2001 and 2015, the number of marriages in Istanbul fell by over 30 per cent and by 40 per cent in Ankara.

It is unclear whether Turkey is in crisis or whether it will prove to be a strong contender. “Neither,” concludes Goldman. “It is a horse harnessed to a Chinese cart.” And, curiously, the Turks do not seem to be any more devout than they were ten years ago. According to a study by Konda, a polling company, between 2008 and 2018 the proportion of Turks who describe themselves as religious fell from 55 to 51 per cent, the number of women wearing the headscarf rose from 52 to 53 per cent, and the percentage of those who fast regularly fell from 77 to 65 per cent.” Erdogan knows, however, that the figures are on his side: in one year, there were 1.2 million births in Turkey, compared with five million across all 28 EU member states. As early as 1994, when he was campaigning to become mayor of Istanbul, his party described Erdogan’s rise as “the second conquest of Istanbul”, a triumph not unlike the first conquest by Fatih Sultan Mehmet in 1453. In 1996, as mayor, Erdogan unveiled plans for a mosque in Taksim Square, the heart of the city and a symbol of Ataturk’s modern, Western and secular Republic. Bulent Batuman, professor of Urban Planning at Bilkent University in Ankara, says that Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman mosques are by no means nostalgic; that would imply an acceptance of the end of the Empire; for Erdogan, they represent “a rejection of that failure” and an attempt to restore Ottoman glory. More recently, in a speech in January in Izmir, Erdogan himself stated that Turkey’s borders extend “from Vienna to the Adriatic Sea, from East Turkistan (the Chinese autonomous region of Xinjiang) to the Black Sea”.

Nedim Gürsel, a writer of Turkish origin and French nationality, has stood trial twice in Erdogan’s Turkey. He is accused of insulting the Islamic faith in his novel, "Le figlie di Allah". The Ministry of Religious Affairs has heavily criticised Gürsel’s book, describing it as “sarcastic and insulting towards Allah”. With "Le figlie di Allah", Gürsel had received Turkey’s highest literary award in 1976, whilst his book "La prima donna" led to him being accused of offending public morality (both books were banned). “Erdogan’s ideology is that of Ottoman conquest, exploited for political ends,” Gürsel tells "Il Foglio". “The country’s unity hinges on this strategy. It is a grand plan modelled on the capture of Constantinople. Authoritarian, if not totalitarian, Turkey; its restricted democracy, which is no longer respected – just like secularism and freedom of expression – all stem from this. Erdogan wants to assert supremacy over the West. When he was mayor of Istanbul, he spoke of the ‘second conquest of Constantinople’, whilst the first is celebrated by the government in the presence of the president, who took the initiative for this commemoration when he was mayor.” “Hagia Sophia will no longer be a museum; we will call it a mosque,” Erdogan declared in March. “Celebrating a conquest that took place more than five centuries ago may seem anachronistic – I would even say absurd – to European leaders who are content not to celebrate but merely to commemorate more recent battles such as Verdun,” continues Gürsel. “For Erdogan, the fall of Constantinople is yet another pretext to challenge the West and restore his people’s suppressed pride. Turkey today is expansionist, hence the military intervention in Syria. Erdogan admires Putin’s Russia and the mullahs’ Iran. He wants to place himself at the head of the ummah. He has built thousands of mosques in a reversal of secularism. Erdogan would never say he hates Atatürk, but he is destroying his secularism.”

When he needs to rally the Turks, Erdogan invokes a cursed name: Sèvres, the 1920 treaty that divided the Ottoman Empire. “If we stop, we will find ourselves facing the terms of Sevres,” Erdogan repeats. It remains to be seen whether the Turkey he has re-Islamised will be a new Ottoman Empire or whether, as is the case with many aggressive countries, it is fostering an internal crisis similar to the one that led to the collapse of the Sublime Porte.