“So do you think Turkey is being Islamized?”
Although my speech was more or less a detailed account of Turkey’s domestic politics, I was expecting this classical and rather shallow question from the audience. Last week at the Bruno Kreisky Forum in Vienna, our topic of the day was the rising authoritarianism in Turkey. Yet again, Islamization is still inevitably the most juicy topic for some European audiences. Not only because it is easier to ask about and almost impossible to answer, but also because their expectations for Eastern European and Middle Eastern democracies are so low that they prefer to stick to the good old horrors of Islamization when talking about Turkey. My answer was “Maybe and maybe not. But that is not the real problem.” I still think that the real problem is not the rising conservatism or Islamization of society, but the “Dubaization” of the country’s landscape, and therefore the shopping malls.
This whole mall-show becomes painfully ironic when the shopping mall is located in the largest Kurdish town of Diyarbakır, which is a symbol for the Kurdish political struggle. Among several shopping malls in town, there is one that hosts a big men’s clothing shop called “The Identity”. Kurdish people who still suffer due to the lack of an “official identity” can freely go to the shop and dress themselves in “Identity” completely according to their personal tastes.
The AKP officials and the Prime Minister prefer to refer to the shopping malls as the sign of a prosperous country. If you are not a visitor to this parallel life, if you are not fine with freedom to consume or the illusion of consumption then there really must be something wrong with you. This automatically means that you are excommunicated from “society” and become an outsider, which, as we are very well taught, means invisibility on a good day and teargas on a not so good day. “Come to our very own Dubai” they say, “What more do you want, for God’s sake!”
Syria is still in question. USA officials constantly make statements that it is impossible to “do it” without Turkey. If the unspeakable happens and Turkey eventually becomes the enforced “leader of the region”, the model will become the social and economic project for the entire Sunni world. As the two powers and their rhetoric -one owned by Qatar and Turkey, the other by Iran and Syria- clash in the region, one can not stop but wonder about another big question. It might be horrifyingly limited and apparently not so brilliant, but the Sunni world has an international societal and economic project for the region. What has Iran got?
Ece Temelkuran is a political commentator, novelist and author of several books published in Turkish and English.
The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect Al-Akhbar’s editorial policy
