Turkey has weathered five successful military coups since the founding of the Republic, in 1923, and what happened on Friday, with soldiers surging against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğanand his ruling Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., marks an attempt at the sixth. Turkey is a constitutionally secular state, though one that is over ninety-five-per-cent Muslim and which was once the seat of an Islamic empire.
.. The tension between secularism and religious fundamentalism is as essential to understanding today’s Turkish political life as is the tension between federalism and states’ rights in America.
.. Çevik Bir, one of the generals who planned the coup, stated his case with a metaphor any parent could understand: “In Turkey we have a marriage of Islam and democracy. . . . The child of this marriage is secularism. Now this child gets sick from time to time. The Turkish Armed Forces is the doctor who saves the child. Depending on how sick the kid is we administer the necessary medicine to make sure the child recuperates.”
.. After 1997, Turkey swiftly swung secular. The late nineteen-nineties famously saw the persecution of women wearing headscarves in public places, a ban that had been originally implemented but loosely enforced by Atatürk in an effort to firmly establish a secular nation.
One of the leaders was the mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was later imprisoned, in 1999, for a speech he gave in Siirt, a town in the religiously conservative and restive southeastern part of the country. He was convicted of “inciting hatred based on religious differences” for reciting the following verses by the poet and nationalist ideologist Ziya Gokalp:
Our minarets are our bayonets
Our domes are our helmets
Our mosques are our barracks.
We will put a final end to ethnic segregation.
No one can ever intimidate us. . . .
My reference is Islam. If I am not able to speak of this,
What is the use of living?
..He views himself as the father of a new Turkish identity, one aligned more closely with its Ottoman past, its Islamic heritage.
.. Opposition parties have also chosen to stand in solidarity with the government. The Peoples’ Democratic Party, or H.D.P., which mainly represents the country’s Kurdish minority, sent out a mailer against the coup: “The only solution is democratic politics!”
.. Atatürk’s legacy and longevity seem to extend without question. He was the one who advised, “He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth, and the teachings of science.”
What Caused the Turkish Coup Attempt
Gulen has lived in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, and the Turkish government is now accusing Washington of sheltering him—which provides the government with an opportunity to deflect attention away from its own actions.
.. The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is devoted to a view that emphasizes the right of majority rule over concepts of shared control by institutions within a constitutional system. His views are similar but not identical with the Muslim Brotherhood theory of government which does not recognize freedom of press, individual rights against the state, the separation of powers or a clear division between state and religion.
.. —The government accelerated moves in recent years to take over newspapers, TV stations and media outlets, resulting in almost total control of the media by the government;
—In the summer of 2013, the government forcibly repressed peaceful demonstrations nationwide against perceived government authoritarianism;
.. —Changes in Turkey’s educational system have introduced compulsory religious instruction and altered the governance of schools and universities in ways that weaken the secular nature of education.
.. In 1999, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a young politician with religious convictions and regarded as a successful mayor of Istanbul, one of the world’s largest cities, went to jail. He had publicly proclaimed an inflammatory reference to a Turkish poem: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”
.. In 2001, the Turkish economy imploded with the Turkish currency losing half its value within a few months. Thus, after a decade of bumbling misrule by secular parties, in 2002 the Turkish people, in essence realizing there was no other option, put Erdogan’s party in power with a powerful win.
.. Turkey, rigorously implemented economic reforms that slashed rampant inflation and launched new efforts to join the EU. It did what no previous government had been able to do for decades. Turkey’s GNP tripled within a few years.
.. In succeeding years, he converted the educational system into a religious friendly institution, altered the court system to his advantage, purged the police and judiciary, and with widespread show trials decapitated the Kemalist structure in the army. Extending that momentum, his party moved to dominate the press in Turkey.
Turkish Leader Erdogan Making New Enemies and Frustrating Old Friends
They were celebrating the 15th-century conquest of Istanbul by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, the golden moment of Turkey’s Muslim ancestors triumphing over the Christian West.
.. Where Mr. Erdogan once held up Turkey as a model of Muslim democracy, he now frequently attacks democratic institutions.
.. The editor in chief of Turkey’s largest daily has fled the country, and another is on trial on charges of revealing state secrets. The president has grown intolerant of criticism, purging his oldest allies from his inner circle and replacing them with yes men and, in some cases, relatives.
.. Mr. Erdogan hints darkly in near-daily speeches on Turkish television that foreign powers are plotting to destroy him
.. Now he has set his sights on a new target: transforming Turkey’s parliamentary system of government into a presidential one, a change his critics say could soon open the door to his seizing the title of president for life.
.. the Parliament, which his party controls, worked until 5:45 a.m. to pass sweeping legislation that will help pave the way by purging hundreds of judges from Turkey’s top two courts.
.. Mr. Erdogan, 62, is one of the most talented politicians Turkey has ever known
.. his critics — and even some of his admirers — say he became so absorbed in battling his enemies, both real and perceived, that he lost his way.
.. Even a former friend, who like others feared being identified, said he had known Mr. Erdogan for 40 years, but no longer recognized him.
..To gain control of Turkey’s bureaucracy, Mr. Erdogan struck an alliance with an opaque religious group led by a Muslim preacher, Fethullah Gulen, filling the ranks of the police and the judiciary with its highly educated members...As Mr. Erdogan grew more popular, winning broad pluralities and even majorities in each successive election, he began to behave with a kind of Bolshevism, believing that he was the very embodiment of the people, former officials said...Others argue that Turkey’s problems are as much about the country as they are about Mr. Erdogan... even though we have the hardware of democracy — institutions, elections — our software is not good. We are too attuned to status, too willing to submit to authority.”
President of Turkey Urges Resistance as Military Attempts Coup
Leaders of opposition political parties, who have otherwise worked against Mr. Erdogan’s government, also spoke out against a seizure of government by the military.
“This country has suffered a lot from coups,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main secular opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, known by its Turkish initials C.H.P., said in a written statement, according to Hurriyet Daily News. “It should be known that the C.H.P. fully depends on the free will of the people as indispensable of our parliamentary democracy.”
.. Mr. Erdogan blamed followers of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and who once was an ally before the two had a bitter falling-out in 2013 over a corruption inquiry that targeted Mr. Erdogan and his inner circle, for the coup attempt.
.. Since the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, the military has staged coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, and intervened in 1997. The military had long seen itself as the guardian of the secular system
.. Mr. Erdogan attracted a wide-ranging constituency in the early years of his tenure, including many liberals who supported his plans to reform the economy and remove the military from politics. But in recent years he has alienated many Turks with his increasingly autocratic ways, cracking down on freedom of expression, imposing a significant role for religion in public life and renewing war with Kurdish militants in the country’s southeast.
.. “The people tried to stand up against President Erdogan, but they couldn’t, they were crushed, so the military had no choice but to take over,” said Cem Yildiz, a taxi driver.