Speakers: Thomas Small & Aimen Dean
Thomas: Aimen, I have a dad joke for you today.
Aimen: Unbelievable.
Thomas: What does President Erdogan have in common with Little Miss Muffet?
Aimen: What exactly?
Thomas: They both have Kurds in their way.
Aimen: Nice one.
Thomas: I hope that I'm not banned forever from visiting Turkey, a country that I totally love. And as it happens, we're not going to be speaking about Kurds really at all in this episode on President Erdogan, a man who has dominated Middle Eastern politics for three decades.
Erdogan is an enigma whose ties to the Muslim Brotherhood have long been alleged, but how strong are they and how did he cement his power in his homeland, the geo-strategically unique and vital country of Turkey? Let's find out.
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Aimen, is Erdogan a member of the Muslim Brotherhood? We've just spent two episodes talking about the Muslim Brotherhood, a bit about its history, a lot about its ideology. We ended up deciding that it's ambitions are certainly totalitarian, even if its methods are sometimes moderate.
But President Erdogan of Turkey, it's often said that he is one of the great leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Is he in the Muslim Brotherhood? What's the story there, Aimen?
Aimen: Well, Thomas, if it quacks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, or in this instance, we'll say if it walks like a turkey and sounds like a turkey.
Thomas: Oh man, you just had to get a dad joke in, of your own, didn't you?
Aimen: Indeed.
Thomas: You can't stand not having one. If it walks like a turkey, if it quacks like a turkey, it's an Islamist. That's what you're saying.
Aimen: Well, I mean, his history definitely would show as we would go further and further into his life that the question that puzzled many analysts across the world, is he or is he not? Well, we are going to unpack this for sure in this episode.
Thomas: In preparation for this episode, Aimen, I read Soner Cagaptay’s book, The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey. It only takes the story just a little bit beyond the attempted coup in 2016, which almost saw Erdogan thrown out of office.
And that's really where we'll be taking our story over the next two episodes, we'll discuss recent years a little bit at the end, but what we want to do is ground the present in the past. And we'll start at the beginning with Erdogan's birth the 26th of February 1954.
And already we are locked in an enigma. Was he born in Istanbul as some historical sources say, or was he born in a small village near Reza on the Black Sea Coast near Georgia. Already, just to know where the man was born, it's not clear.
Aimen: Well, for all intents and purposes, when he submitted his papers for the candidacy to become the mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, his birth certificate says Istanbul.
Thomas: Ah, that's very interesting. You must be some sort of spy, Aimen.
Aimen: Yes. Who would've thought of that? Anyway, so. However, he himself says that after birth, his family moved back to that tiny little village on the Georgian border on the Black Sea until he was 13. Then he returned back to Istanbul.
Thomas: It's a fascinating part of Turkey that coast, extremely ancient, deeply, deeply entrenched in all sorts of wonderful historical eras, and traditionally ethnically very diverse.
It was an area of Armenian, Greek, and Georgian settlement over many, many millennia, really, until the early 20th century. And this of course, we talked about last season in our episodes on Turkey and Anatolia, and the change in population that occurred as Turkey transitioned from the Ottoman Empire into the modern Turkish nation state. When that part of the world became much more Turkified and Erdogan's own family definitely reflects this change.
Aimen: Indeed, he is not even a Turk. Many people don't understand that he actually come from a family of Georgian origin. In fact, three generations ago, or possibly four generations, they were Christians.
So, they converted to Islam about three generations ago. And therefore, if we were to do a DNA test of Erdogan, we might find that he is more Caucasian than a Turk.
Thomas: Yeah, that part of the Turkey was the last part of Turkey to be Islamified, the last part of Turkey to convert to Islam. And scholars suggest that for that very reason, it is a hotbed of strict conservative Islam, kind of like how converts tend to be more zealous and serious than cradle religious people.
I know this for a fact, I am a convert after all. That part of Turkey, the Reza Province, is notoriously one of the most conservative in all of Turkey.
Aimen: Absolutely.
Thomas: And as you say, he never lost his links with Istanbul, where it seems he was born. He went back and forth throughout his childhood between Istanbul and Reza. He would spend the summers in Reza a lot where he helped to harvest the tea that his family grew in their little plot there.
And he would also in the summers attend religious schools for children. So, he had a very old-fashioned, quite traditional childhood coming from a poor family from the hinterlands of Anatolia.
Aimen: Like many historical figures who came from poverty, it's the same story with Erdogan. His father went back from Reza to Istanbul to work as a ferry skipper. As you know, and many people know, Istanbul is divided by many waterways.
Erdogan was 12, 13 at that time, according to his biography. And while his father was ferrying people around many waterways of Istanbul, he used to sell lemon cakes that his mom used to make in order to help the family.
So, it's not exactly a silver spoon, not even a wooden spoon, I would say. He is definitely coming from a humble background.
Thomas: They lived in the neighbourhood of Kasım Pasha on the Golden Horn, a seafront address. It was a poor neighbourhood filled with migrants from Anatolia, from the Turkish hinterland.
In the Ottoman period, it was an industrial district. It was the most polluted district in all of Turkey. And according to Cagaptay, in Turkish, there's a word today, it's Kasım Pashali, if I'm pronouncing it correctly. And it's a word to refer to an honour obsessed Turk, a straight-talking Turk, quick to humiliate his rivals.
Now, Erdogan fondly remembers in speeches and in interviews the social solidarity of this neighbourhood that he grew up in. And he often mourns that its values, its virtues have been lost as Turkey has modernised, which is ironic because he has been a principal agent of Turkish modernization.
But the idea of Erdogan growing up poor in the shadow of the richer districts all around in Galata, that picture reminds me a lot of Donald Trump. Not because he was poor, Donald Trump wasn't poor, but Donald Trump grew up on the other side of the Hudson River from Manhattan and was always looking across at the glittering lights of the Manhattan skyline.
And throughout his life, felt like he didn't belong, and he kind of resented the wealthy and the powerful and the social, those in Manhattan with the high social status. Erdogan has a bit of this in his character, doesn't he?
Aimen: Indeed. There is no question about it. And funny enough, I mean, his life would have taken a very boring traditional path if he just stuck to it. He went actually to join a school for imams and preachers.
So, by 1973, he was supposed to graduate as an imam and a preacher, but somehow after graduation, he decided not to take that path and instead wanted to go further and further into politics.
Thomas: We first have to set the historical scene because in order to understand not only Erdogan, but also the political party he leads, the Justice and Development Party, the AKP. We have to understand modern Turkish political history. All those decades we're talking the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Those decades loom large in the memories of all Turks. To this day, it's very contested history. It's very formative.
It also will carry on the story from the episode we recorded last season on Turkey called Turkquake. We ended our survey of modern Turkish history. In 1938, the death of Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic.
After Atatürk's death, his regime continued under his successor İnönü. Modernization, which he had absolutely spearheaded, continued unchecked. And the goal was to transform Turkey's largely agrarian society into something industrial.
And Aimen, this was true everywhere, Iran, even Russia at the time. It was the period, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the period of modernization.
Aimen: We have to understand that Ismet İnönü, the Turkish leader at the time, he wanted to double down even on Kemalism, because for him, Kemalism was the only way forward in order to modernise Turkey.
Thomas: Kemalism meaning the ideology of Kemal Atatürk, the founder.
Aimen: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, he established a nation that was Turkified because the predecessor of Turkey was the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire claimed to be a pan-Islamic pan-ethnic empire. And now the Turks need to find an identity of their own.
So, the first thing he did was to start a process of a de-Islamification of Turkey. And the first thing is to divorce the Turkish language from Arabic prior to Kemalism and prior to Atatürk taking the position of leadership in Turkey and abolishing the Ottoman caliphate, the Turkish language was written in the Arabic script.
He completely replaced the script with the Latin script and started the process of even interfering in the acts of worship, where he started to force acts of worship to be recited in Turkish rather than Arabic, which was-
Thomas: Well, he purged the Turkish language in Turkey of Arabic and to some extent Persian rooted words. He wanted a language that was purely Turkish. And along the way, he drew on a grab bag of European templates of state buildings.
So, he adopted a civil code from Switzerland. His criminal laws came from Italy. The commercial laws came from Germany, and he adopted French centralised administration and secularism. And this is what you're talking about, he was determined to make modern Turkey a secular nation.
Aimen: Indeed, it was an attempt by him to make Turkey into a secular nation by force. He was dragging Turkey into secularism, screaming, and kicking. But he did, nonetheless.
And by 1938, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk died, but his ideology did not. I mean, his ideology known as Kemalism continued to be strong. And in fact, his successor Ismet İnönü doubled down on this, enforcing this ideology on the Turkish Republic.
Thomas: Erdogan would end up creating a new political ideology to challenge Kemalism. This is why it's important not only to wrap your head around Kemalism, dear listener, but also to remember, and I think Aimen, this is a point you wanted to stress, that Kemalism never actually commanded the hearts and minds of a huge chunk of the Turkish population.
Aimen: I mean, Kemalism is elitism. You will find it more in places like Ankara, Istanbul, İzmir, Anatolia. So, you will find it along the Aegean Coast, the Mediterranean, as well as the major urban towns.
And even in Istanbul, you wouldn't find Kemalism very popular in Fatih or Zeytinburnu, whatever. You will find it more popular in Galata or in Bebek, in the very high-end neighbourhoods. So, Kemalism was always synonymous with elitism.
Thomas: During Atatürk's reign, and immediately after, Turkey was a one-party state. It was controlled by Atatürk's Republican People's Party, the CHP, as it's known in Turkish.
However, after the Second World War, Turkey yoked its fortunes to the West, to America, to the UN and to the growing free world in the Cold War. And because it did that, because it aligned with the West and signed the UN charter, Turkey was placed on the course to democracy.
Four CHP members split off and formed their own party, the Democratic Party, which advocated greater democratic and liberal rights. And that began the process of something like party politics in Turkey.
In 1950, this new party, the Democrats swept the field and threw the CHP, the old one-party state into the opposition. İnönü was replaced as Prime Minister by Adnan Menderes, the champion of the rural land-owning class.
So, this was a class of people that had felt excluded by the CHP and its elitist politics. The two men, İnönü and Menderes would be fierce political opponents for the next decade.
Aimen: Again, we see here the divide between the coast and the heartland. While the CHP, the Kemalist party will always rely on the votes coming from the coastal regions and the people who regard themselves as a secular elite there.
However, Adnan Menderes’ party and the Democrats, who even though they were liberals, the heartland voters would vote for them, not because of their conservatism, but despite of their liberalism, because they really wanted to have some semblance of religious freedom.
That is why I remember one Turkish political commentator who I spoke to in the 1990s, was talking to me. He said, politics in Turkey is very strange. There is no way you could have a true conservative party coming in because the army will immediately intervene to prevent it.
That is why we always say in America, you have a government of the people, by the people, for the people. However, in Turkey, we have a government for the people, despite the people.
Thomas: Well, Erdogan would go on to challenge what that analyst told you in the 90s. That's kind of the whole story of his time in power.
But back in the 50s, yes, for sure the Democrats, this new party, it definitely wooed the religious vote, and in general came to power on the back of a broad-based kind of centre rural voter base. And Erdogan's own political party, the AKP is rooted in this voter base.
It's an Islamist party as we'll find out. But even so, the AKP owes a lot to the success of the Democrat Party in the 50s. And in 2010, Erdogan actually said in a speech, “The torch of democracy that Menderes and his friends lit has been passed from hand to hand and carried to our party today.”
So, Menderes and this movement in the 50s still lives on in the memory, certainly of Erdogan.
Aimen: Indeed. In fact, Erdogan built one of the best and most modern airports in Turkey, in Izmir. Of course, Izmir is not a city that is traditionally voting for the AKP. But nonetheless, he built that airport there, 25 million passenger capacity, and he named it Alshahid Adnan Menderes Airport, which means the martyr Adnan Menderes.
Thomas: There you go, given the game away. We'll get to that in a second. The Democrats did give their religious voters something. So, for example, they allowed for the Adhan, the call to prayer to be said in Arabic again after it had been outlawed for the previous 22 years.
However, as the 50s proceeded, the Democrats program of economic liberalisation and political liberalisation, as they saw it, began to be characterised by the CHP, their rivals as authoritarian and the CHP were able to rally their supporters against their rivals in response to which the Prime Minister Menderes began being authoritarian.
It has happened so often, actually, especially in the 50s. We covered it last year. People like Mosaddegh in Iran, liberals becoming authoritarian to impose their liberalism and then end up becoming their enemies. It's all very confusing.
Aimen: Yes of course, Mosaddegh in the 1950s, Adnan Menderes in the 1950s, Justin Trudeau in the 2020s, oh sorry.
Thomas: Oh, man. Menderes banned political activism, suspended political parties, declared martial law, and then he turned against his religious allies. He outlawed the Millet Party, as it was called a religious party, on the grounds that it was religious. And it revealed that Menderes was never anti-Kemalist. Not at all.
This is certainly how he differs from Erdogan. Menderes remained Kemalist. He just had a slightly different, a slightly more liberal view economically, especially of what Kemalism meant.
And this movement towards an increasingly authoritarian style was irritating everyone, on top of which, by the end of the 50s, an economic boom, which the country had experienced after the Second World War ended as external investment began to dry up, and the economy suffered a massive downturn.
And so, in 1960, Menderes, who was now moving openly towards the reestablishment of a one-party state, he was controlling the press. He was organising attacks against the opposition, including the former Prime Minister İnönü, which was leading to student protests and all sorts of unrest.
This paved the way for a huge event in modern Turkish history. And in order to understand that event, we have to introduce a major player in Turkey, the army.
Aimen: We have to understand that one pillar of Kemalism is that the army must always be purely Kemalist. If you display any sign of religiosity in the army, then you are out. Whether you are a general or a corporal, it doesn't matter. That is why the army has remained a fiercely secular Kemalist institution for a very long time.
Then, of course, Turkey during the Second World War remained neutral all the way until the end when they declared war in Germany, that enabled them to get access to the Marshall Plan finances. The Americans were very keen actually to strengthen Turkey to make sure that the Turkish strategic position remain anti-Soviet, especially the straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.
Not to mention that Turkey even gained a membership into NATO, and the U.S. placed its nuclear weapons actually in Turkey in order to deter the Soviet Union from any attempt to invade Turkey. So, Turkey was very important.
However, the majority of the American aid went to strengthen the Turkish Army that enhanced the power, the prestige, the personnel, and all of this meant that the army always had the final say when it comes to guarding the legacy of Atatürk and Kemalism.
Thomas: The Turkish Army was very strong, very pro-western, very anti-communist and very secular. And they were very upset in 1960 at Menderes’ overtures towards the Soviets. And they were very upset in 1960 at the unrest that Menderes’ policies were causing, including the fact that when that external investment from the West dried up, he turned towards the Soviets.
So, in May of that year, on the 27th of May 1960, the army staged a coup. Now armies staging a coup is the light motif of modern Turkish politics. And now, Erdogan in 1960 was four-years-old. The military took over completely. Adnan Menderes, the prime minister was hanged alongside his foreign minister and his finance minister.
Erdogan's whole childhood and young adulthood would be overshadowed by a regular series of semi coups and outright coups by the army. And it's incredibly important to understanding him as a politician this idea that the army in Turkey is not to be trusted. The army in Turkey intervenes to overthrow the will of the Turkish people again and again.
Erdogan and his party, the AKP, regularly invoked the names of Menderes and the other men who were hanged following the 1960 coup as martyrs. Including as you mentioned, by naming that airport Martyr Menderes Airport, he often refers to menders his execution as a symbol of the ruthlessness of the Kemalist deep state.
These are themes which we will cover, especially in the next episode when Erdogan is in power. But I cannot stress enough, armies interfering in the politics of Turkey is Erdogan's political obsession.
Aimen: He always regarded the role of the army in intervening in politics as the biggest threat to the democratic will of the people. And he himself would be a subject of an almost successful coup.
Thomas: In 1965, now he's 11-years-old. He began attending an Imam Hatip school, as you said before, Aimen, this was a religious school that was set up during one of those periods when secularism was a little bit lessened by the state, set up to train clerics.
And a teacher had noticed how much Erdogan enjoyed what little religious material there was in the normal school he was attending and suggested to his father that Erdogan receive a religious education.
So, he went to an Imam Hatip school, a state sector religious school, free of charge, which is a sign of the family's poverty to some extent, but also a sign of Erdogan's family's religious conviction.
Erdogan boarded at the school because it was across the Golden Horn in Sultanahmet, the sort of classical heart of ancient Constantinople, of old Istanbul. And he was extremely devoted to his religious studies.
He became expert in reciting the Qur’an. He learned Arabic to a high level, and in addition to Arabic became especially expert in the use of the Turkish language. To this day, he is considered a great orator in the Turkish language.
But he did have one guilty pleasure, one pastime he loved so much that despite his father hating it, he sneaked out and made sure that he always played. And what was that Aimen?
Aimen: Dancing. He was a very keen footballer.
Thomas: Yes. And he would end up being semi-professional as a young man. He loved football. He loved the whole world of the Imam Hatip school. He thrived there. And the network of Imam Hatip schools around Turkey provided a magnet for Turkey's conservatives to gather around.
They gathered there for social events, poetry, recitals, Qur’anic recitations, lectures, things like that. The Imam Hatip schools became a kind of social network for the conservatives, the Muslim conservatives, the pious conservatives, who in the end would sweep Erdogan to power.
Erdogan thrived in them, as did a new arrival on the Turkish scene, Islamism. And when we get back after the short break, we will discuss the arrival into Turkish politics of a new brand of ideas growing up in the Muslim world, to some extent, articulated by a thinker by the name of Sayyid Qutb. We'll be back.
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We are back, dear listener. We're in the middle of our first episode in a two-part series on the life of President Erdogan of Turkey.
When we left him, he was in school enjoying his time at the Imam Hatip school, the religious school in Istanbul, around which the country's conservatives were circulating and feeling heard, feeling seen.
And in that environment, Erdogan's desire to join politics was born. And as a teenager, he joined the National Turkish Student Union, a right-wing anti-communist group, to which he soon became president of his high school's branch.
So, he was clearly bound for glory. He was extremely adept from a young age of achieving political office. And his ambition was to be a politician.
As such was this ambition, Aimen, and this was interesting, I didn't know this, that because at the time, due to Turkey's secularism laws, an Imam Hatip diploma would not allow you to go to university. Universities in Turkey at that time did not accept those diplomas.
And so, Erdogan, knowing that if he wanted to be a politician, he definitely needed to graduate from university, he switched out of the Imam Hatip School into a secular high school, just in time for graduation. And at the same time, his political leanings were being pulled towards a new player on the political scene in Turkey, Islamism.
Aimen: We have to understand that Kemalism did not get rid of Islam in Turkey whatsoever. And Islam remained to be the faith of the people. The people still were to some extent, especially in the heartland of Turkey, conservative.
However, Islamism as such, did not come to Turkey until the late 1960s, and it came through the writings of none other than our old friend, Sayyid Qutb.
So, Sayyid Qutb's writing, of course, after his execution in 1966. And even though it did not have the same resonance in Turkey, as in the Arab world, of course, the defeat in 1967 and the defeat of Arab nationalism by the Israelis, yet that defeat was a vindication of Sayyid Qutb's ideas.
So, through the Israeli defeat of the Arabs, and through the writings Sayyid Qutb, some of the Turkish translators believed that Sayyid Qutb's ideas were vindicated by that defeat.
And so, it started to appeal now to a sense of the injustice that the Turkish conservative Muslims were feeling under the rather somewhat militant secular state apparatus of Kemalism.
Thomas: And what's funny now is that at the time in Turkey, the authorities, the police, the military, the government, they were focused on left-wing and right-wing militant activists, not Islamists.
So, at the time in the early 70s, Turkish politics was really fraying. There was a lot of unhappiness at the failure of the Kemalist regime to maintain economic standards and to respond to the growing needs of a rapidly urbanising population.
This was resulting in extreme left-wing and right-wing activism that was violent, we're talking paramilitary in some cases. And the Islamists were very smart, and they kept their heads down.
They did not pursue any violent activism at the time, and they were being guided by an extremely important figure in the history of modern Turkey, Necmettin Erbakan, really the man who brought Islamism to Turkey.
He was Turkish, he was a middle-class man, a respectable engineer. He had a PhD, but he wanted to get into politics. And rejected by all the mainstream parties, in 1969, he was elected as an independent by the voters of Konya, which led the next year to him founding his own party, the National Order Party, Turkey's first Islamist party.
Aimen: For Necmettin Erbakan, who of course, I have read many of his writings and many of his interviews. He was clearly influenced by Hassan al-Banna, Abdul Qadir Audah and in particular also Sayyid Qutb.
He definitely saw that the time was right for Islamism as a force to be introduced into Turkey. After the rejection of the mainstream parties of him, he went to Konya of all places to be elected by the people there.
And why Konya in particular? Because remember, Konya is the home of Islam and Islamic conservatism in Turkey, it is the resting place of Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi, the early Muslim philosopher who many people quote in order to cry over their ex-boyfriends. But anyway.
Thomas: Alright, Rumi is a great Sufi and a wonderful man. He can inspire all manner of Valentine's Day cards.
Aimen: Indeed, yes. However, he was elected, he established the National Order Party and among his first students, among his first admirers, and among the people who really followed him was none other than our dear friend, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Thomas: So, at that time, Erdogan was attending the Iskender Pasha Mosque in the conservative Fatih district of Istanbul. This is the district named after Mehmed, the conqueror, the great villain of Greek Orthodox everywhere, who conquered Constantinople in 1453.
Aimen: Sorry, sorry, the Great Conqueror of Islam. Yeah.
Thomas: In fact, Erdogan was part of a Sufi circle there and it's probably there where he first fell into Erbakan's orbit because Erbakan was also affiliated with the mosque and with that Sufi circle, and clearly Erbakan had a tremendous influence, had a tremendous effect on Erdogan.
It's a shame, dear listener, that their names sound so similar, but you're just going to have to distinguish between Erbakan and Erdogan. Erdogan would go on to name his firstborn son after Erbakan. This shows just how much he was influenced by him.
Now through many winding pathways, the National Order Party, which three years after its founding, would be rebranded as the National Salvation Party, and then later rebranded as the Welfare Party, and then later rebranded as the Virtue Party always rebranding as Turkey's constitutional court, which was the guarantor of Kemalism for the state, would have an anti-Islamist freakout shut down the party. And it would reemerge shortly thereafter, under a new name.
Through a very winding pathway, that party would eventually become the AKP, Erdogan's Party. So, it's founding in 1970 by an Islamist, inspired by Sayyid Qutb, who in the 90s would become the prime minister of the country, is very important to the story of Erdogan's life.
Aimen: Remember, 1973 is a tumultuous year. I mean, you have the year of the Yom Kippur War. The year in which the oil embargo happened, and it was really tumultuous here. And yet Erbakan's party, the Islamist won the second place in Parliament just after the CHP.
And so, they entered into an alliance, which was very strange, Kemalist and Islamist, together the same government. But because the head of the CHP at the time was Buland Ajawid and Buland Ajawid was pragmatist, and the two ministries that Erbakan demanded of the PM Buland Ajawid to give him was justice and interior. So, he wanted to control the law and the police. And this is classic-
Thomas: That's a very Islamist thing to do, Aimen.
Aimen: Exactly. Classic Islamist move, always moving in order to begin the process of right-wing Islamization of the police and the judges and the lawyers in order to start a counterweight within the deep state against the army.
Thomas: But how's this, Aimen, for Machiavellianism the next year, Erbakan having talked to the Kemalist Party into entering into a coalition with him the next year, he abandoned that coalition and entered into a coalition with their enemies, a coalition of right-wing nationalist parties, the nationalist front. Clearly Aimen, Erbakan was a very calculating political operator.
Aimen: Of course, he was, after all he was an engineer.
Thomas: Why are so many Islamists engineers, Aimen?
Aimen: Can I tell you something? Osama bin Laden was an engineer. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was an engineer. Ahmad Shah Massoud was an engineer. And what is his name? Morsi, the president of Egypt was engineer.
Thomas: You can't trust them. You can't trust Islamists. You can't trust engineers.
Aimen: In a lecture I was given to agents from my five and my six, I was saying, really, it's not the religious schools we have to close. It is the engineering faculties in all the Muslim universities that we have to close in order to get rid of extremism once and for all.
Thomas: Well, Erbakan now having reached positions of power in the government, he was able to get change to happen in the country's secularist kind of constitution. So, the government agreed to open more Imam Hatip schools across the country, and they were now admitting women too. This was one of the moves that Erbakan wanted to happen.
Now that is to me, a sign of Islamism as opposed to traditional Islam, that he wanted women to start going to the Imam Hatip schools and be indoctrinated into Islam or into Islamism.
Because traditionally, of course, women would not have gone to schools designed to create clerics. But Islamism is often progressive in some respects relative to traditional Islam. And there's a sign of the Islamism. Would you agree, Aimen?
Aimen: Yes. Because of course what Hassan al-Banna said, “Without teaching our women, how can we raise the next generation to be part of our movement?”
Thomas: Exactly. Well, Erdogan has been watching from the sidelines this man Erbakan move up the power ladder in Turkey. Erdogan's still extremely young, he's only 19, 20, 21 during all this time.
And in 1976, aged 22 and he's now in university in a school that would go on to be rebranded the University of Marmara, studying business administration and economics. Very important point given what he would do later when he was in power. And he was chosen at this young age of 22, chosen to be president of the National Salvation Party Youth branch in Istanbul's Beyoglu district.
So, this included the neighbourhood that he grew up in, and the next year he became the president of the youth branch for all of Istanbul. He was very much in Islamist circles at the time.
In 1978, he met his wife at an Islamist event. They married. So, we have to understand that Erdogan is really connected now. I mean, he's linked directly to these Islamist political circles in Istanbul.
Aimen: Oh, how romantic of Recep Erdogan to marry in 1978, because he got married in the same year I was born. That's a good thing actually, in my opinion.
Anyway, so in 1978 until 1980, there are some beginnings, telltale signs of his infatuation with the Muslim Brotherhood. There was a conference organised by WAMI. WAMI for those who don't know what it is, it stands for the World Association of Muslim Youth, an organisation that was founded in Saudi Arabia by the Muslim Brotherhood when the Muslim Brotherhood were tolerated in Saudi Arabia.
And he seemed to have attended. And at that time, he met none other than one of the great founders of the Muslim Brotherhood Organization, an Egyptian called Kamal El-Helbawy, which indicates that Erdogan was already more or less close to Muslim Brotherhood circles to be invited to such conference.
Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. The 70s in Turkey were horrible. By the late 70s, Turkey's economy was in full blown crisis, which was part of the global crisis that was happening as a result of the increased oil price of that decade. If you remember in the 70s, everywhere was suffering. Certainly, Turkey was.
Left and right politics were becoming ever more extreme, ever more violent. All the parties had paramilitary wings, including starting in that year, 1978, the National Salvation Party. It got its own paramilitary wing.
And this all culminated in 1980 with yet another military coup, a very brutal coup, a total military takeover. 122,000 people were arrested within a year. And by the end of the decade, by 1990 500,000 Turks had been arrested.
There was widespread torture in Turkish prisons. All civil societies were banned. And the National Salvation Front along with lots of other parties and all Islamist parties was shut down.
Erbakan, Erdogan's idol was banned from politics. Erdogan himself lost his role as head of the Istanbul youth branch of the party. And it seemed like everything was really smashed to bits.
And yet unexpectedly, I think for the coup leaders following the coup in line, really with what was going out throughout the Sunni world, Turkey began to embrace its Sunni Islamic identity more, which the coup leaders supported to some extent.
I mean, they were primarily anti-communist in their orientation, and they were also trying to rejig Kemalism a bit to include greater respect for Turkey's Muslim Ottoman past. This was designed to combat the growing Islamist movement.
So, the Kemalists were like, “Well, if we can include Islam a little bit in our ideology, then it will dampen Islamism, which is on the rise.”
But of course, it only worked to strengthen Islamism. You give them an inch; they'll take a mile. Erdogan would of course end up benefiting enormously from this development.
In 1981, he graduated from university, he did his year of military service and then joined the private sector. At this point, Aimen, his association with Islamists would really grow because in his capacity working in the private sector, he would travel around the Muslim world to some large degree.
Aimen: Erdogan of the 1980s is very different. This is where we see Erdogan, the internationalist Islamist. He's travelling to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, he's travelling to Egypt. He is travelling to Saudi Arabia, to Jordan where he is meeting with many different pillars of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He met with Abdullah Azzam, he met with Hekmatyar, he met with Burhānuddīn Rabbānī in Afghanistan. He met with Ahmad Shah Massoud. He met with Khaled Mashaal of Hamas. He met with Abdul Majeed al-Zindani in Yemen.
We could go on and on about the many people he met. And we're not talking about speculation or hearsay. These are all documented by photos that were taken at that time.
Thomas: You sent me the photos, Aimen. You sent me the photos. That's unmistakable. There is Erdogan standing next to Qaradawi. There is Erdogan standing with Hekmatyar. I mean, it's there. You can't deny it.
Aimen: Absolutely. So, and there is with Mashaal and there is with Zindani. And so, the man was definitely part of this international effort to support the Afghan jihad. He was part of the international effort to connect with like-minded Muslims at that time, who really felt the duty towards supporting the Afghan jihad.
And the Afghan jihad was supported mostly by the Muslim Brotherhood. And also, there was a photo of him meeting with Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the head of Jamaat-e-Islami, which is the Muslim Brotherhood branch of Pakistan.
There is no mistaking that he was avidly a Muslim Brotherhood influenced person. Can we say he is a member of the global organisation? There is no hard evidence of that. But his associations are just too much to ignore.
Thomas: These Islamist credentials were going to serve Erdogan in very good stead, when in 1983, military rule formally ended in Turkey and Erbakan was able to reopen his political party. This time as the Welfare Party. Erdogan immediately joins it and soon becomes chairman of the party in Istanbul.
And so, in 1987, when a ban on Islamist parties is lifted, the Welfare Party is able to join party politics again in full force. And Erdogan goes for it.
In 1989, he ran for mayor of Beyoglu, that large Istanbul district in which he grew up. And immediately he proved himself a very able campaigner. He had a popular touch.
He only narrowly lost. And this is interesting. It was so narrow, his loss, that he went to court to contest it. And during the trial, he called the judge drunk. He was arrested and detained for a week.
This is postmodern politics, Aimen. This is Trumpist politics. This is very able politicking by a man who's trying to get the people behind him. I'm going to stand up for you against the corrupt elites. He's doing it. He's doing it before Trump. He's the original master.
Aimen: Indeed. And that's why he and Trump got along very well.
Thomas: They would, wouldn't they? So, flash forward to the early 90s. There's another massive economic crisis in Turkey. In the midst of the chaos, Erbakan's voice is growing louder.
He's decrying the whole system in Turkey, he's claiming to offer Turks what he called a just order, where there will be no corruption, there will be no exploitation of the poor. His was an extremely Islamist vision of order, including increasing antisemitic rhetoric where the Jews and world Zionism is being blamed for Turkey's ills.
And yet, at the same time, the party is somewhat progressive. It's showing uncovered women in their ads. It's allowing uncovered women to have positions of power in the party.
And as a result of all of this, the Welfare Party's popularity is exploding. The membership numbers are reaching into the millions. And on the back of this, in 1994, Erdogan runs for and wins the mayorship of Istanbul. This is what begins his inexorable rise to absolute power in Turkey.
Aimen: Remember Thomas, from season three on our episode in Algeria, we talked about classic textbook Islamism. First get the positions of power and municipalities, fix the day-to-day lives of people. And this is how you prove your competence as an administrator.
Erdogan did exactly the same. He followed exactly the textbook Islamism, which is go for a position of power that would touch people's everyday lives. So, he immediately went to the jugular.
First, he started by combating corruption within the municipalities of Istanbul. Second, he started to interfere in the police work and make sure that they do not take bribes from the people. Third, he cleaned the streets. Fourth, he started by improving the sewage and water treatment systems.
And furthermore, he started to improve the air quality. He started to improve the roads and the metro system. The man just went to work and made sure that the streets are cleaned, crime is reduced, tourism has improved.
He made sure that services has improved significantly. This is how you win over the people. You build a macrocosm of what greater Turkey would experience if you elect me and my party in the future as the steward of the Turkey state. It worked.
Thomas: It certainly did. It's how he got elected to the mayorship in the first place. The city had been facing enormous problems. It was riddled with corruption and was filthy. And yes, as you say, he did all those good things.
The one thing I will counter, the one thing is that I don't think it's true to say that he tackled corruption exactly. Certainly, his detractors would say that yes, he took non-Welfare Party cronies out of the system, but he replaced them with Welfare Party cronies. He could say, I'm attacking corruption, but this is a classic Islamist move as well.
Aimen: Look Thomas, I'm not saying that he tackled corruption entirely. I'm saying that before him corruption was so unsustainable. People were taking exuberant bribes.
However, he replaced the corrupt people with less corrupt people. So, we moved from unsustainable corruption to sustainable corruption, man.
Thomas: That is the Islamist way, Aimen. From unsustainable to sustainable corruption. And that's where we're going to leave Erdogan now, he's mayor of Istanbul. He's doing a bang-up job proving his competence as the leader of that city, improving everything, and using democratic party politics to his advantage.
The question is, how much did he really believe in democracy? And Aimen, you told me about an interview that Mayor Erdogan gave in 1996 to a journalist, which rather shines a light on this question. How much of a believer in democracy was Erdogan? Can you remember, Aimen, what he said?
Aimen: Oh yeah. He said, “Democracy is like a tram, once you reach your station, you get off.”
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Thomas: Well, that's the Islamist way I think. You use democracy to gain power, and once you have it, you keep it. And that's what we will see in the next episode in this history of President Erdogan of Turkey having attained power, what steps he takes to keep it. Stay tuned.
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.