‘The minarets are our bayonets’

Istanbul

I have no doubt that Allah moves in mysterious ways. But if He has chosen Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the instrument of His vengeance on the infidel, He must be given credit for startling originality. Erdogan, whose party won a landslide victory in Turkey’s recent general election, may be feared in some quarters as a dangerous Islamist, in person he looks no more threatening than a rather blokeish bank manager. Even during his most animated moments on the campaign trail, his bearing was that of the trainer of a small-town football club rather than the Ayatollah Khomeini. One wonders what the fuss is about – Erdogan, with his clipped moustache and nondescript suit, evokes less the Nation of Islam than the Abbey National of Islam.

Yet the insurgence of Erdogan – and the Justice and Development party (AK for short) which he leads – has caused deep tremors of concern throughout Turkey’s establishment. The neo-conservative, pro-EU, pro-Nato and avowedly non-religious AK party may be just two years old, but Erdogan and most of its other leaders are lifelong members of Turkey’s Islamist movement. The army, which sees itself as the guarantor of the strictly secularist path set by the republic’s founder, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, smells a plot. It fears that AK is a cover for a darker, Islamist agenda, and has tried almost every trick in the book to foil Erdogan’s political rise.

Two of the parties in which Erdogan was active – ‘Virtue’ and ‘Welfare’ – were shut down for violating a constitutional ban on mixing religion and politics. Erdogan himself was jailed for four months in 1999 after reciting a poem to a crowd in south-eastern Turkey – it contained the lines ‘The minarets are our bayonets, the mosques are our barracks, the believers are our soldiers’ – and was judged seditious.