Ottoman aspirations

The military has been regarded as the guardian of Turkey’s democracy since 1923. It also showed assertiveness toward Greece and others in the last century, particularly from 1974 onward. Erdogan was the first to consistently pursue a policy of peace in the 2000s until 2016, presumably because he could not control the military and preferred to keep it at bay. This changed abruptly after 2016, presumably because he grabbed control of the military for the first time. As he urgently needed to be seen as more patriotic than the Kemalists, he drew heavily from history and the glorious Islamist Ottoman past. Is this view correct?

Not only the Turkish military, but also the structure of the young Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was the self-declared guardian of the democracy in Turkey. Turkey, established as a secular republic at the end of World War I, long managed to hold sharia out of the official sphere, making it an outlier among Muslim-majority countries. However, the memory of the Ottoman Empire is still very fresh, and Erdogan has reminded Turkey’s citizens of this memory. This has been embraced even by parts of his opposition. While the secular constitutional system remains, polls and recent developments in Turkey together demonstrate a shift. For instance, some Turkish officials have broken with decades of precedent in what is still, at least nominally, a secular republic in recent years: They have begun describing the country’s military deployment in Syria as “jihad.” During the first two days of the operation, which began on January 20, the government’s Directorate of Religious Affairs ordered all of Turkey’s nearly 90,000 mosques to broadcast the “Al-Fath” verse from the Koran – “the prayer of conquest” – through the loudspeakers on their minarets. Mainstreaming religious dogma, which sanctions violence against those who “offend Islam,” is a crucial step in draping the gauze membrane of sharia over society, while Turkey stays nominally secular. Sadly, Turkey seems to be slowly moving along that path.