Sultan Erdogan and the New Janissaries

Though Western Europe and Washington are reluctant to fess up to this unfortunate fact, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long ago given up even the pretence of being a democratic polity and is openly pursuing policies detrimental to democracy, the rule of law and Western security considerations. In short, Turkey has become an Islamist dictatorship every bit as inimical to Western interests as Iran, except for being allowed by the West to maintain the charade that it is still a member of NATO and the Western community of nations. This is a dangerous charade that will inevitably come back to haunt us. For the reality is that Erdogan the Islamist has ambitions that go beyond Turkey and even the Middle East.  Well known for his admiration for the Ottomans, Erdogan imagines himself as the leader of a new Ottoman Empire based on an Islamized Turkey, but exerting its influence far beyond. Many would dismiss this as an unrealistic pipe dream, and it probably is just that ultimately. But in pursuing it vigorously, Erdogan has already done much damage both in Turkey and abroad. Suffice it to say that Turks who had lived in Germany and the Netherlands for decades, voted for Erdogan in greater percentages (60% and 70% respectively) than voters in Turkey itself in the last referendum.  The key to spreading Erdogan’s Islamist message is an organization called Diyanet, a Turkish directorate for religious affairs that is directly subordinated to him. Few if any Western leaders have ever heard of it, despite its importance. It was originally set up by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1924 for the purpose of training imams for the mosques, but more importantly, it was tasked with preventing the radicalization of Turkish Islam. The type of education received in these madrassa-like institutions, called imam-hatip schools, was considered second-rate and did not qualify their graduates for the university or government work. At the time of Erdogan’s takeover of the government in 2002, there were 450

imam-hatip schools with some 60,000 students. Most of them were the sons of poorly-educated yet devout Muslims, which Erdogan, himself the product of such a school, considered prime islamization cadres. And so, after neutralizing the Turkish military by means of bogus but ultimately effective show trials, Erdogan set about to build up and promote an army of pious imam-hatip graduates devoted to him, not unlike the janissaries of the Ottoman Empire, who considered themselves the slaves of the sultan alone. Here it must be mentioned that these madrassas as well as the mandatory religious education curriculum in Turkey is highly discriminatory to the extent that it teaches exclusively the Sunni Hanafi school of Muslim jurisprudence, which is not practiced by the large populations of Alevis and the Kurds, who follow the shafi’i madhab, not to mention the millions of secular Turks.