A new face with old political roots
Güncelleme Tarihi:
by Şafak Timur
Oluşturulma Tarihi: Şubat 23, 2009 00:00
ISTANBUL - A huge gathering was organized last month in Istanbul by the Felicity Party, or SP, against the Israeli military operation in Gaza, which according to some political commentators played a key role in the Turkish prime minister’s subsequent harsh criticism of Israel.
The party’s newly elected leader, Numan Kurtulmuş, held up a picture of Rachel Corrie at the rally and said the Palestinian issue was a matter of humanity and not of religion. Corrie was an American activist killed in 2003 by a bulldozer in Gaza during a protest against the demolition of Palestinian homes.
"Anti-Semitism arguments are part of Zionist propaganda," Kurtulmuş told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review in a recent interview. According to Kurtulmuş, Turkey is not anti-Semitic but strongly anti-Zionist.
Kurtulmuş is from Istanbul’s Fatih neighborhood where his family has lived for the past 80 years. Coming from an established family, he is a well-known figure in Fatih. "Welcome my president," said an old man with a long beard, clasping Kurtulmuş’s hands as he got out of his car at Fatih mosque’s garden for Friday prayer. A small group of people surrounded Kurtulmuş in the garden and accompanied him to the mosque. This was after a long interview on Islam, Turkey and the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, coming from the same political tradition of the Milli Görüş (National View) of Islamist politician Necmettin Erbakan, however, with one major difference, AKP leaders say they "distanced themselves from the National View."
Kurtulmuş, after he was elected as the head of the SP in October, was welcomed by many as the potential rival to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, not in the upcoming local elections, but potentially in the near future. As he has created visible enthusiasm among the conservative electorate, Kurtulmuş seems set to worry the AKP.
"I do not currently believe that Kurtulmuş is a threat to Erdoğan. However, it took 2.3 percent of the votes (in the 2007 election) and was a serious handicap for the prime minister and his party regarding their electorate," said journalist Bilal Çetin, the Ankara representative of daily Vatan who closely watches political circles. "It is necessary to closely watch him because it is obvious he is a disturbing factor for the ruling party."
Ruşen Çakır, the politics editor at the private news channel NTV, said the SP and Kurtulmuş could be an alternative to the AKP only when the latter started to decline. It would be wrong to expect the SP to pull the AKP down at this stage, said Çakır.
’AKP a by-product of military intervention’
For Kurtulmuş, the main difference between his party and the AKP is the fact that the AKP is a by-product of special circumstances, meaning military intervention, and as such, he drew parallels to late President Turgut Özal’s Motherland Party that ruled the country after the 1980 military coup.
"The AKP is not a party of ideology or a certain paradigm, but a conjectural party," he said. "The political actors were all cleaned out in the aftermath of the 1980 coup, Özal would not have been meaningful if there was no Sept. 12 coup."
However, in the period around Feb. 28, 1997, both actors and spectators were thrown out of the political scene, according to Kurtulmuş. "The de-politicization of the people deepened," he said, adding that if the Welfare Party of Erbakan was not closed after Feb. 28, the AKP would not have existed.
The time when the military interfered in the coalition government of the True Path Party and the Welfare Party, referred to as the Feb. 28 period, occurred under the justification that the latter was pursuing anti-secular activity. The pressure exerted by the army through non-military means was described as a postmodern coup. It began with a National Security Council, or MGK, meeting and the period took its name from the date of the meeting.
The military listed what the government could and could not do, triggering a process that led to the resignation of the coalition government and the closure of the Welfare Party.
Kurtulmuş criticized the AKP for having an eclectic structure. The party takes ideas from the National View in part, some liberal ideas due to the support of liberal democrat intellectuals, and also partially supports the European Union while at the same time identifying with the current status quo, Kurtulmuş said.
One of the most common comments about Kurtulmuş is that he is an intellectual politician. "The existence of Kurtulmuş in Turkish politics is in itself a good thing," said Çakır. "He is an academic, which is not very common in Turkish politics," Çakır said, adding that Kurtulmuş was aware of the outside world because he had worked abroad as well.
Kurtulmuş is a graduate of a vocational religious high school and received academic degrees in management and human resources.
He is married to Sevgi Kurtulmuş, also an academic, who was dismissed from Istanbul University for wearing a headscarf during the term of Kemal Alemdaroğlu’s office as rector of the university.
An Islamic country
"Turkey is an Islamic country with regard to the [Muslim] majority of its population. However, it is also the remainder of an empire that included a variety of religions, sects and ethnicities that lived in peace throughout history," Kurtulmuş said.
What is critical for Kurtulmuş is that the Ottoman Empire managed to create an environment in which all the different ethnic and religious groups lived together in peace and harmony. "There is no Muslim country that uses the word ’gávur,’ (infidel). Gávur does not mean non-Muslim, it means the one who behaves cruelly, who is an imperialist," he said, adding that non-Muslims in Turkey do not think of themselves as gávur. "The Ottoman concept had an understanding that internalized everyone," he said, adding that past events, such as Sept. 6 to 7 when the shops and houses of non-Muslims were pillaged and destroyed and the Armenian issue, were all political provocations.
"The Kurdish question is a 30-year-old problem," he said. He then outlined four points on the issue, a frequent habit when speaking about his party’s policies. He said the four fundamental issues in southeastern Anatolia are economic problems, individual freedoms, the security and terror problem and the wrongful attitudes of public officials toward people in the region, and all of them have been neglected for years.
Secularism versus Islam
Kurtulmuş also said he did not believe practically nor historically that there was a conflict of Islam and secularism among the Turkish people. "Islam is a unionizing unit culturally, for non-Muslims, too," he said.
Turkey needs to have constitutionally defined secularism, according to Kurtulmuş. He said secularism is not a concept that occurred within Turkey’s culture but one that came from the French Revolution, when the clergy were targeted because they were seen as accomplices of the aristocracy. "In our roots there is no aristocracy and no mosque that supports aristocracy, neither were there Muslim ecclesiasts," he said.
"Anti-Semitism arguments are part of Zionist propaganda," Kurtulmuş told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review in a recent interview. According to Kurtulmuş, Turkey is not anti-Semitic but strongly anti-Zionist.
Kurtulmuş is from Istanbul’s Fatih neighborhood where his family has lived for the past 80 years. Coming from an established family, he is a well-known figure in Fatih. "Welcome my president," said an old man with a long beard, clasping Kurtulmuş’s hands as he got out of his car at Fatih mosque’s garden for Friday prayer. A small group of people surrounded Kurtulmuş in the garden and accompanied him to the mosque. This was after a long interview on Islam, Turkey and the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, coming from the same political tradition of the Milli Görüş (National View) of Islamist politician Necmettin Erbakan, however, with one major difference, AKP leaders say they "distanced themselves from the National View."
Kurtulmuş, after he was elected as the head of the SP in October, was welcomed by many as the potential rival to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, not in the upcoming local elections, but potentially in the near future. As he has created visible enthusiasm among the conservative electorate, Kurtulmuş seems set to worry the AKP.
"I do not currently believe that Kurtulmuş is a threat to Erdoğan. However, it took 2.3 percent of the votes (in the 2007 election) and was a serious handicap for the prime minister and his party regarding their electorate," said journalist Bilal Çetin, the Ankara representative of daily Vatan who closely watches political circles. "It is necessary to closely watch him because it is obvious he is a disturbing factor for the ruling party."
Ruşen Çakır, the politics editor at the private news channel NTV, said the SP and Kurtulmuş could be an alternative to the AKP only when the latter started to decline. It would be wrong to expect the SP to pull the AKP down at this stage, said Çakır.
’AKP a by-product of military intervention’
For Kurtulmuş, the main difference between his party and the AKP is the fact that the AKP is a by-product of special circumstances, meaning military intervention, and as such, he drew parallels to late President Turgut Özal’s Motherland Party that ruled the country after the 1980 military coup.
"The AKP is not a party of ideology or a certain paradigm, but a conjectural party," he said. "The political actors were all cleaned out in the aftermath of the 1980 coup, Özal would not have been meaningful if there was no Sept. 12 coup."
However, in the period around Feb. 28, 1997, both actors and spectators were thrown out of the political scene, according to Kurtulmuş. "The de-politicization of the people deepened," he said, adding that if the Welfare Party of Erbakan was not closed after Feb. 28, the AKP would not have existed.
The time when the military interfered in the coalition government of the True Path Party and the Welfare Party, referred to as the Feb. 28 period, occurred under the justification that the latter was pursuing anti-secular activity. The pressure exerted by the army through non-military means was described as a postmodern coup. It began with a National Security Council, or MGK, meeting and the period took its name from the date of the meeting.
The military listed what the government could and could not do, triggering a process that led to the resignation of the coalition government and the closure of the Welfare Party.
Kurtulmuş criticized the AKP for having an eclectic structure. The party takes ideas from the National View in part, some liberal ideas due to the support of liberal democrat intellectuals, and also partially supports the European Union while at the same time identifying with the current status quo, Kurtulmuş said.
One of the most common comments about Kurtulmuş is that he is an intellectual politician. "The existence of Kurtulmuş in Turkish politics is in itself a good thing," said Çakır. "He is an academic, which is not very common in Turkish politics," Çakır said, adding that Kurtulmuş was aware of the outside world because he had worked abroad as well.
Kurtulmuş is a graduate of a vocational religious high school and received academic degrees in management and human resources.
He is married to Sevgi Kurtulmuş, also an academic, who was dismissed from Istanbul University for wearing a headscarf during the term of Kemal Alemdaroğlu’s office as rector of the university.
An Islamic country
"Turkey is an Islamic country with regard to the [Muslim] majority of its population. However, it is also the remainder of an empire that included a variety of religions, sects and ethnicities that lived in peace throughout history," Kurtulmuş said.
What is critical for Kurtulmuş is that the Ottoman Empire managed to create an environment in which all the different ethnic and religious groups lived together in peace and harmony. "There is no Muslim country that uses the word ’gávur,’ (infidel). Gávur does not mean non-Muslim, it means the one who behaves cruelly, who is an imperialist," he said, adding that non-Muslims in Turkey do not think of themselves as gávur. "The Ottoman concept had an understanding that internalized everyone," he said, adding that past events, such as Sept. 6 to 7 when the shops and houses of non-Muslims were pillaged and destroyed and the Armenian issue, were all political provocations.
"The Kurdish question is a 30-year-old problem," he said. He then outlined four points on the issue, a frequent habit when speaking about his party’s policies. He said the four fundamental issues in southeastern Anatolia are economic problems, individual freedoms, the security and terror problem and the wrongful attitudes of public officials toward people in the region, and all of them have been neglected for years.
Secularism versus Islam
Kurtulmuş also said he did not believe practically nor historically that there was a conflict of Islam and secularism among the Turkish people. "Islam is a unionizing unit culturally, for non-Muslims, too," he said.
Turkey needs to have constitutionally defined secularism, according to Kurtulmuş. He said secularism is not a concept that occurred within Turkey’s culture but one that came from the French Revolution, when the clergy were targeted because they were seen as accomplices of the aristocracy. "In our roots there is no aristocracy and no mosque that supports aristocracy, neither were there Muslim ecclesiasts," he said.