The importance of being Turkey

Recent events in Turkey and Egypt have highlighted the hypocrisy in the US policy on Islam. As an article by William Dalrymple explains, the war on terror - intended to highlight the danger of Islamic extremism - has actually had the opposite effect. Voters in countries such as Turkey and Egypt, Palestine and Pakistan have flocked to religious parties after witnessing the complicity of their secular governments in the civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture at Abu Ghraib and the extraordinary rendition program that seizes Muslims at will. The louder the anti-Islam rhetoric booms from Washington, the strong the attraction of religious parties to disaffected Muslims.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that another US misjudgment in the political temperature in the Middle East will be to the detriment of democracy. The US government's allies in the area - Mubarak in Egypt, Abbas in Palestine and Musharraf in Pakistan - are each clinging to power by a range of undemocratic and exclusionary measures. None can be said to speak with the voice of their state and each represents the supposed incompatibility of moderate religion and politics.

The election of Abdullah Gul as president of Turkey - a land as fiercely secular as it gets - shows both the extraordinary increase in the popularity of political Islam and the hope that the religion/politics dichotomy is a fallacy. Gul and his AK party have the opportunity to prove that a democratically elected, moderately Islamic government can rule with calm, authority and prosperity. Furthermore, the significant unrest that greeted Gul's first tilt at the presidency provides the government with an ideological restraining order that it must obey in order to survive.

The chances of Gul and his AK party surviving are difficult to predict. The deafening hullabaloo over the veiled appearance of his wife, Hayrünnisa, diverted too much attention away from his policy agenda. Unlike, for example, the presidency of Israel, Gul is more than a ceremonial figure wheeled out for state occasions. He has a legal veto and can appoint members of the judiciary. Much depends on the party's respect for their secular opponents. A new constitution is currently in the draft stage and it is likely to include a clause permitting the wearing of the headscarf in schools and offices. It can be argued that allowing Muslim women to continue their education is broadly in line with Ataturk's vision, but a greater democratic measure would be a repeal of clause 301 used to punish dissidents (such as Orhan Pamuk) for 'insulting Turkishness'.

Should Gul prove diplomatically capable of steering Turkey through the current choppy waters, significant pressure would be applied to President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, whose vice grip on the Muslim Brotherhood has tightened during 2007. The group, which renounces violence, are officially banned as a religious political party, but its members still won a fifth of the parliamentary seats at the last election, despite the handicap of running as independents. The Brotherhood has become a classic victim of its own success, where greater support brings stiffer punishments from the government. Despite considerable media-muzzling, stories of mass arrests, torture and harassment of its members were commonplace over the summer.

Of course, another reason for Mubarak's crackdown is the blind eye turned by the US. Since the Bush administration realised that promoting democracy was benefiting political Islam, pressure on Egypt has evaporated. This then, is the wider significance of the Turkish presidential election, which has the potential to change Western views on moderate Islam, in addition to those of Turkish secularists. If Gul can teach the world anything, it is the necessity of supporting free and fair elections over propping up repressive regimes just to keep religion out of politics.