Behind the billboard lies the true struggle for Turkey

On busy Istiklal Avenue in Istanbul’s Beyoglu district, the paradox of Turkey in the 21st century is played out. Two women — one in early middle age, one younger — emerge from a shop with a provocative lingerie window display. Both wear the headscarves and long skirts denoting them as conservative and observant followers of Islam.

In the suburbs of featureless apartment houses that radiate for tens of kilometres out from the city centre, five-storey-high billboards depict models in underwear and bikinis. A steady stream of women with covered hair pass beneath the hoardings clutching shopping bags and children, oblivious to the half-naked women.

On July 22, when Turkey votes in early elections called to defuse the dangerous political and constitutional crisis that threatened last week to overwhelm the Turkish state, this contrast between the headscarf and the free, modern woman will again be pushed to the fore of the country’s debate.

And once again it will be deeply misleading. The confrontation of the past few weeks over whether Abdullah Gul — minister in the government of the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — should be appointed president, touches on the country’s deepest fault lines. And they are as much social as religious.

It is a crisis where symbols like the headscarf and the billboard images matter as much as the reality of modern Turkish life. The recent crisis has pitted Turkey’s secular opposition, which controls the judiciary, military, bureaucracy — and until now the presidency — against an AKP accused of allowing Islamisation of the state by the back door, with the question of who should be president as the key trigger.

Turkey’s powerful army threatened to intervene in that argument last weekend on the side of the opposition to block the entrance of Gul and his headscarfed wife into Ankara’s presidential palace.

Then, amid warnings of the risk of “conflict” by the main opposition leader, Deniz Baykal of the Republican People’s Party, the constitutional court intervened to annul Gul’s appointment after the opposition boycotted parliament over the vote for Gul’s selection.

But the truth of what has happened is not so easily corralled. The conflict has been as much about political power and class as it has been about Islam. The simple version paints out inconvenient facts: Erdogan’s avowed support for secularism, an AKP whose leadership rejects the label of Islamist, and a programme dedicated to gaining EU membership and attracting foreign investment.

But underpinning this confrontation is something more mundane. It is the fear of the wealthy, highly educated and westernised elite that has traditionally run Turkey — and who are secular — of being pushed aside by a newly-powerful group made up of the urban poor and the lower-middle classes, a group that is conservative and religiously observant.

An explanation of Turkey’s confrontation can be discerned in the vast modern suburbs that in 40 years have vastly increased the footprint of Istanbul. Whole villages have moved from the country to occupy fast-build apartment blocks. In these blocks lives a new Turkey in competition with the old. It is the constituency of parties such as the AKP.

“What we have seen over the past few weeks has been deeply undemocratic,” says Ihsan Dagi, a columnist on the Zaman newspaper, and a professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. “We have seen the [secular] opposition say: ‘We cannot elect a President because the Parliament is controlled by the AKP.’ And the Turkish establishment does not want that. So they boycotted the vote. They changed the rules of the game under the shadow of a military threat to intervene.

“But the crisis has not gone away. The AKP is likely to increase its share of the vote from 30 to 35 or even 40% in general election in July. That means there is a good chance they can achieve a quorum of 367 seats in the Parliament and pick their own candidate for the presidency anyway.”

Dagi is dubious that Turkey is undergoing the process of radical Islamisation. He believes the real issue is the “visibility” of those once on the periphery of Turkish economic and political life, which is alarming the elites who identify most closely with the secularist ideals of modern Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk.

“Islamic groups have become part of Turkey’s political and social modernity, but the centre is still pushing hard to exclude them. Even the increased visibility of headscarves is indicative that Turkish women from disadvantaged backgrounds are getting better access to Turkey’s social space. It is not a challenge to republicanism but a victory for it.” It is an argument supported by recent polling by the research institute Tesev, which showed 22% of Turks polled felt secularism was in danger. Only 8% declared themselves in favour of an Islamic state.

The same research established that the more wealthy and educated the respondent, the greater was the fear of threat to secularism. Even staunch defenders of secularism such as Dr Nilufer Narli, who has made a study of Islamist movements and fears their influence in Turkey, concedes that there is something far more complex going on in issues such as the increased visibility of the headscarf.

While Narli remains concerned by what she believes is the gradual encroachments of Islam into the state, she admits the transformation may be as much about social change as religion. “What we have seen is a huge expansion in the diversity of the lower middle classes,” she says. “We have seen a large influx of small and medium-size business owners into the cities from Anatolia — families that are religiously conservative. And they have been one of the main beneficiaries of the present buoyant economy [an economy averaging 7% growth since the government was elected].” Narli has noted too a transformation in social habits of religiously observant women. “It used to be that you would see headscarves being worn by women who were part of the urban or rural poor and they were a kind of uniform with the long coat that hid the body. Now you see many styles, women in headscarves wearing make-up and tightly fitted clothes. It is part of the increased social mobility that has occurred.”

All of which leads to a critical question: whether Turkey is being Islamised or whether Muslims in Turkey from once poor and ill-educated families are being modernised.

It is a conundrum that is reflected in the figure of Gul himself, a man whose background is in political Islam. Remarks he made to the Guardian in 1995 about wanting “to end secularism” have been widely quoted by those opposing his presidency. But in 1997 Gul told the Christian Science Monitor he envisioned the “Islamic head scarf and the miniskirt walking hand in hand”.

But the AKP has not always conducted itself in a way calculated to reassure the secular. In 2005 there was an attempt to recriminalise adultery, seen off by democratic debate. There was also a botched appointment to the Central Bank of a man with an Islamic banking background, leading to suspicions the AKP was monopolising all the key posts — although nepotism is hardly unique in Turkish politics.

But another question remains: whether an army that has intervened to oust governments four times since 1960, most recently in 1997, that has declared itself hostile to Islamisation and sees itself as Turkey’s “saviour” in times of strife, can refrain from intervening.

“We Turks like the army in some circumstances and hate them in others,” says Salih Erturk (25) a salesperson in the Robinson Crusoe bookstore, who allies himself with the left. “When there is a feeling it is interfering we don’t like it. But still there is a general feeling too that the army is the one that saves us.”

Secular history