Hello and welcome to episode 229 of Turkey Book Talk, I'm William Armstrong here in Istanbul.
In this episode we hear from Ezgi Basaran, she has been a prominent journalist in Turkey, serving a few years ago as editor-in-chief of the late Radikal newspaper and she's currently based at St.Anthony's College, University of Oxford.
And in this conversation, we discuss her new book, The New Spirit of Islamism, Interactions Between the AKP, Ennahda, and the Muslim Brotherhood, published by I.B.Taurus Bloomsbury.
The book looks at the aspirations of Islamist actors in Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, or Arab Spring, specifically from 2011 to 2013, when those forces were in the ascendancy.
Based on interviews with dozens of officials in government in all three countries at that time,
The book seeks to understand what motivated them, how they viewed each other, and whether they prioritized pragmatic or ideological and religious concerns in their political strategies.
Of course, the regional situation has shifted massively since 2013, even before the most recent events in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon, but the question of the role and future of political Islam remains a pertinent one in Turkey and elsewhere, and we talk about that
and much else in our conversation.But before we get started, let me appeal again for your support, which we need to be able to keep Turkey Book Talk going.
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But now onto our conversation with Ezgi Basaran and I started by asking her how exactly her research into this area and era started?
The research started out of curiosity about actually two main considerations.I wanted to look at Islamist entities that interacted right after the Arab uprisings, three of them, the AKP, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and Ennahda in Tunisia.
So the assumption among the media pundits and some of the scholars of Islamism was that this close interaction, this political confluence, was about an Islamist ideology.It was aimed to build an Ikhwani bloc or they had an Ummah vision
So the main argument of this book is that it is not about ideology.What I found out was the main aim of this dialogue, of this interaction, was success.
The AKP thought and were seen as a successful promoter of a model that is some say a post-Islamist model, some say Turkish model, and some say a neo-Islamist model, some say Islamic liberalism.What is striking was that whatever that model is,
It was sought after by Muslim Brotherhood, which is the oldest and the most traditional and the biggest Islamist movements, the father, the mother of all Islamist movements in the world, and ANNAFTA, similarly a way older Islamist organization, entity, than the AKP.
What they wanted was to learn this model of governance, of staying alive, surviving in a quote-unquote hostile political environment.And they thought AKP went through that experience, and it did.
And they would like to learn the modes of, you know, surviving and being a legitimate international and domestic entity.They were not talking about how to build an Ikhwani bloc,
the relationship can purely be explained by rational IR theories of pure cost and benefit.So that was my main argument.
And then from that, I structure something called the new spirit of Islamism, which is inspired by Weber's spirit of Protestantism, and then Boltanski's the new spirit of capitalism.
And it is actually founded on the concept that was put forward in the mid-1990s by Olivier Roy and Asif Bayat about the failure of political Islam or post-Islamism.
It is a step further on that concept with additions of how the market forces actually shape Islamist politics and Islamist actors.That is the story that I tell.
So this is really an approach that does something that some listeners might think is quite surprising, really, which is it's downplaying the importance of ideology.
And one thing that sometimes people assume with Islamism, as much as anything, it's an ideology.It's got a set of prescriptive ideas about how society and politics should be organised with religion. and Islam at its centre.
And you kind of turn that on its head and say, actually, the facts on the ground, when you look at the specific cases of these three particular countries at this particular time, around 10 years ago, we actually see that that isn't the case.
Could you just kind of dig into some of the details about how you make that case?
During my research, I've talked to the top echelons of Ikhwan, those who were in jail in Cairo, and Ennahda, and many of the AKP people who know this interaction, who were involved firsthand in these talks that started right after Mubarak and Ben Ali were ousted by the uprisings.
So I talked with them and a recurring theme of success kept coming up naturally in every interview and became the central focus of this study without any intentional influence.
So the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was really keen on understanding what made the Turkish model so successful and same with Rashid Ghanoushi, who after 2011 visited Turkey, which means actually Erdogan, on a monthly basis.
So the main argument came from over 50 key figures from various socio-economic and cultural and national backgrounds.And I didn't just pick people randomly.
I carefully chose them based on their, like I said, on their involvement and knowledge of the interactions.And all those interviews started between 2018 and 2021 in Istanbul, Ankara, Tunis, London.
And each interview was kept in the dark about what the others had said and who the other interviewers were.I mean, they kept asking whom I talked to.For example, Nakhta people asked if I spoke to any Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members.
I think they just wanted to understand the scope of the research.But still, it is fair to ask if I was misled by the interviewees or influenced by party propaganda. Obviously, there's no definitive answer to that.
I mean, when I say ideology was not their main motive, the interviews were semi-structured in a way that the participants didn't lead the conversation, but also they were free moving.
And they actually shaped unknowingly the main thesis by coming back to the concept of success. And I took steps to minimize the risk of just hearing party propaganda.
I didn't ask questions that would directly confirm if individuals were pursuing personal success.Instead, I focused on the basics, like where did these meetings take place?Who was there?How often did they happen?What were you talking about?
And once I had that information, I shifted to exploring motivations by asking why these interactions occurred. And I approached this with an open mind.Only towards the end did I gently ask about their relationship with the AKP after the revolutions.
And I also cross-referenced, cross-checked each interview with each other and also with the events that they talk about, even though 90% of these meetings were unreported.
And you're talking specifically about the period between 2011-2013, kind of the golden age, essentially, of political Islam post Arab Spring.
It seemed like Turkey was almost the leading edge, surfing the wave of what would become a kind of a dominant political system across the region, basically. things change very quickly afterwards.
But this period particularly is one where, you know, this exchange between these parties was at its highest extent, it was the maximum period.And it seemed like, you know, that was really the moment to strike basically when the iron was hot.
As far as the AKP was concerned in Turkey, it was the circumstances couldn't have been more favorable.
So even then you're saying, though, that among all these parties in Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey, despite these very favorable conditions, even then it wasn't seen as like the priority would be to push this ideological project.
It was more each party looking out for their specific short-term interests, essentially.So even during this period, it wasn't a period when ideology was the number one concern of any of these actors.Is that what you're basically saying there?
Exactly.I mean, why would they go to AKP if they wanted to build something that is related to an Islamist or what they call Nizam Islami, like an Islamic establishment or an Islamic order in terms of state and society?Why would they go to the AKP?
Neither Muslim Brotherhood nor NATO at any point considered AKP quote unquote a real Islamist.
They said this several times, the top level leaders, they said AKPs, they are faithful, they are devout Muslims, but I don't consider them as a real Islamist party.
And it was kind of a, they were looking down on AKP in terms of their attachment or knowledge of Islamist canon, but they look up to AKP as the best practitioner of what Rashid Ganoushi initiated as Muslim democracy or quote unquote moderate Islam.
So just remember back in 2011, Turkey was still seen as the preferred Muslim power by the West because of its NATO membership.The EU accession process was ongoing. It still had strong ties with European trade markets.
It had an Islamist background, but also a European actor that had successfully implemented a market-friendly economic program, and it led to exceptional growth during that time.
So this made the AKP's model attractive to both the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia's Ennahda. The AKP offered these parties a way to be recognized as political actors, both at home and internationally.
So it is not surprising that these Islamist groups, along with other ideological entities that were suppressed nationally or internationally, They wanted to emulate this model.
This is not really uncommon to look for successful foreign models in certain political spectrum.I mean, the leftist parties talk to each other, far right parties talk to each other.So what I would like to
underline is you don't have to have an exceptional framework when you're dealing with Islamist parties.
I mean, it could be analyzed with the political science tools that you use with how you understand parties of, you know, nationalism or any right wing or left wing parties.I mean, these tools are enough to analyze these parties.
Obviously, you would need some a certain ethnographic background, but you don't have to exceptionalize Islamism or Middle East in any way, to be honest.
I wonder if we could come on to this question of the view of the AKP from among these Arab Islamist actors that you talk about there, because you talk in the book about how they very much approached the Turkish model actually with some suspicion, which wasn't just something that could be imported directly.
It was something that they didn't really, like you say, see Erdogan and other senior AKP officials as really a direct model to emulate.And they very much doubted, in fact, the Islamic credentials of that party.
And instead, it was just really a way of legitimizing themselves within their own national context, giving them legitimacy in the international arena. and providing as much as anything economic benefits rather than political ones.
You actually are referring the book to this episode that's probably forgotten, I think now, but we may remember Erdogan going to Egypt shortly after the Muslim Brotherhood came to power.
And he rather ruffled feathers there, actually, because he gave this speech and he was preaching the importance of moderation and indeed respect for secularism, which everybody was really expecting.
But, you know, it was very interesting episode because it did reveal these different perspectives and the significance of these different worldviews, essentially, in these different national contexts.
Yes. That was a really interesting anecdote that was told both by the members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the AKPs.And it was a dinner and it was the second night of Erdogan in Cairo.So Erdogan came and they had dinner, it was nice.
But none of them knew that at the same time, Erdogan's interview was aired, and the interview was conducted by Mona Shazly, a very popular Ankara woman.
It was actually taped in Ankara right before Erdogan coming to Cairo, and it was aired at the night of that dinner.And the day after,
So they learned that Erdogan was preaching about, you know, I say to everyone, my Egyptian brothers, do not fear secularism.I am a Muslim.I am a devout Muslim.And I rule a country that is secular.And my party is ruling.
And you know how strong a Muslim I am.And that was the gist of it.But he kept underlining the secularism thing.And it was a shock to Ikhwanis, to be honest.
Later, some of the Arab Kyrene media approached them and the spokesperson for Muslim Brotherhood said probably there must be a translation mistake.Obviously, Erdogan didn't say secularism.But then they moved forward with no bitterness.
because they didn't care about what Erdogan does with his own party or what he preaches.They wanted to learn the tactics of winning elections, staying in power, and how to govern a city like Cairo.
When I want to, you know, simplify, like really crudely simplify my argument, I say that think of these very top Islamists and think of them as CEOs of Islamism.
So we can't really say that Muslim Brotherhood managed to use all those tactics and because they remain in power only eight months.So we can't really test how the tactics turned out in the Egyptian context. but they wanted to do it.That is the thing.
They aspired to be like a market-friendly political party and that is a huge step, huge leap from the ideology and the framework of governance that their forefathers Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb dictated.
I suppose one way that we might look at this is that in fact this emphasis on success and providing this successful model in different contexts is kind of a short-term goal, essentially.
It's laying the groundwork, but still the long-term goal is the same.
This would be the argument to kind of push back on the argument that you're making in the book, which is, of course, short-term success politically is very important in terms of winning elections and gaining support from the public.
there still this profound like civilizational difference or an awareness or feeling that there is a completely different project in the very long run that they're pushing towards and you know success is very important in terms of short in terms of the short term.
terms of winning elections and, you know, gaining legitimacy on the national level.But still, in the mid to long term, there's this goal, which is basically Islamic unity.Obviously, it is a very distant goal.
And, you know, there's a million hurdles in front of it, whether that's language or culture or national borders, etc.
But ultimately, there's this sense among many of these actors that that's the nirvana at the end of the very long process that it may turn out to be.
And maybe it's just a question of like timeframes, you know, when we're talking about success being the priority and this kind of pragmatic approach, that's the short term, but still the long term goal is the old one.Is that right?
I mean, obviously, you know, in 10 years, the goals of any political entity changes.What is really striking is that we hold Islamist parties to a higher moral benchmark.
Why do you think when we're actually leveled up in terms of neoliberal politics, where politics is eaten by economics, why would only Islamists keep to their initial core ideology, keep their core and not diffuse their core?
Because we've seen how malleable their ideology is since the founding of Muslim Brotherhood.They are very pragmatic and they do not rock the boat, nowhere. Obviously they have a core ideology, but it is very, very malleable.This is what I'm saying.
And why would they not want to learn from the Iranian model, but the Turkish model?They had the first opportunity of free elections and they did not want to do go ahead with the Iranian model.
that they didn't want to go with a nizam islami or an islamic order, they didn't want the sharia.
You know, when we look at islamism and say that they would eventually, in a certain time frame, go back and impose sharia law, this can be argued, but that kind of implementation would also be market friendly.That is the main thing.
This is the new spirit of islamism.
That leads on nicely to the question that I have about your interviews and how your interviewees reflected on learning the lessons of the AKP in terms of the economy.
Because chapter six in the book, it focuses on economic policies and how the AKP's relative economic success in those first couple of terms, their very pro-business policies were viewed
in both Tunisia and Egypt, and you've got some striking quotes along this line in the book.
You quote a former Moroccan minister saying that they mostly look for answers to the following question, how did Turkey raise its GDP from $2,500 to $10,000 during the AKP's time in power?This was the important thing to us.
We were not going to learn Islamic ideology from Turkey.They were not interested in learning anything about Islam from us either.
And you also quote an executive member of Ennahda in Tunisia saying, quote, how Turkey managed to attract international and domestic investments was a good model for us.We thought that the Turkish export policy was one of the best policies.
So therefore, these figures are making the case that basically, in their eyes, it wasn't this religious dialogue that they were most interested in. most important topic for them and the AKP was basically how to improve the economy.
So could you just dwell on that a little bit?How does that fit into the argument?
So I need to correct that.The first quote was by an Egyptian minister, former minister, who is one of the leading members of, former leading members of Muslim Brotherhood.
So the main thing, I mean, obviously, Turkey is a very different economic sphere than Egypt and Tunisia.But the main thing that the AKP tried to quote-unquote teach them is to cultivate a bourgeoisie.There are several reasons why it is important.
First, And foremost is the obvious reason that is a cloud of new businessmen would contribute significantly to the economy through entrepreneurship. investment, job creation, and they would attract foreign investment.
This in turn would enable the Islamist movement or party in question to extend its soft power in the region.And also the internal structure of the movement gets affected by these developments.
So when you are so pro-businessmen, when you are so intertwined with the business elites, you change as the party as well. We've seen that with the AKP.
So this is actually the best transformation of a political party, especially with a hardcore ideology like Islamism.So when the elites of Islamist movements integrate more effectively in the global market economy,
the malleability of the ideology increases.
Secondly, a prosperous Islamist bourgeoisie is also a reliable support base for the political party in question, because this class can offer not only financial backing but also social and political support.
So this was the idea of Erdogan's team advocating to form two business associations, one in Egypt, in Cairo, and one in Tunis, mirroring the one and only AKP's support association, Musiad.
And the Musiad people went to Tunis and Cairo many times, helped found these two business associations.It was the most tangible evidence of this AKP model being diffused as a successful model to al-Nahda and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
bringing things slightly more up to date now, I wonder if we could just kind of reflect on the current landscape, basically, because you talk in the book about how there is this emerging academic consensus, essentially, that suggests that popular support for Islamism has actually reached its peak and is not likely to increase further.
There's a number of indications for that.
chief among them is these cross-regional opinion polls that we see primarily in Arab countries and they demonstrate this decline in support basically for religious parties and leaders and obviously we've seen a similar trend actually in Turkey as well with the decline in support for the AKP even though Erdogan is still very much ensconced in power.
So there's this emerging sense that you know this political Islamist generation is indeed that it's a generational thing it's not an eternal reality that's always going to be there.
It's perhaps one, maybe two generations that emerged at a particular historical juncture, and now it's on the decline.
Obviously, we've also seen politically a shift of the AKP's policy, Erdogan's policy, away really from the Muslim Brotherhood and the support for that group across the region.There's been this rapprochement with the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and
basically that's a 180 degree shift from the kind of policies that were being talked about 10 years ago, basically.
So you end the book with a chapter outlining that shift, but you actually argue also that that process adds to the evidence that the primary motivation of these actors is really not Islamic.It's not a religious motivation.
It's more just pragmatic and based on survival and success.Could you just bring the book right up to date and
talk about how that current situation across the region where it seems like political Islam is at a low ebb, at the low tide, and how that perhaps reinforces the argument that you're making in the book.
Yes, William, actually you've made a wonderful comment about this being a generational deadlock, because this is actually what is going on among Al-Nahdawi and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
It is so ironic that I argue that the main theme among these Islamist entities were success, and now we have three Islamist groups that got into power but failed to govern well, didn't fit into the existing system.
And in the AKP case, didn't follow democratic norms.They were tested in power and didn't quite make it to the Western benchmark of progress and success.
So it might seem like these Islamist movements try to follow the AKP's path to success, but ended up failing in power.But I believe this is overly simplistic.
And I don't think crisis are just black and white situations where you either succeed or fail. or right or wrong, live or die.So I prefer to think of crises as ongoing processes that don't always follow a straight path to progress.
What will happen, like you said, what is happening is that a certain generation will be cut off.
It will be cut off from the Muslim Brotherhood, from Ennahda, but I'm not really sure that this is a generational thing with the AKP, because AKP is a very institutionalized, professional political party for the last two decades.
Its story is divergent from the ones who are really fledgling political parties, political entities, movements now.
So Muslim Brotherhood faced several challenges in governing Egypt, but blaming the Brotherhood's difficulties solely on Islamism oversimplifies the situation. It was true that they could not adapt quickly enough in terms of governance.
They also had the Shura Council and the political party, FJP, and they were like two heads in a row, but they ruled only eight months.So we can't really judge them in terms of how they evolved or moderate within the system.
And also in consolidating the Islamist base, the AKP in Turkey didn't have to compete with Salafi elements, unlike Ennahda in Tunisia and Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.And also AKP never had to go and deal with sectarian tensions.
like Muslim Brotherhood did between Copts and Muslims.So when we compare the success story of Turkey with Tunisia and Egypt, it would be an unfair, unfair game.
As for now, Ennahda's fall from power, it wasn't because of their own mistakes mostly, but also because of President Saeed's power grab, which affected Tunisia's democratic institutions all over.
And NAFTA did try to address public concerns while they were in power.For example, they resigned, remember, from the government in 2014 after the public was outraged over the assassinations of leftist politicians.
And in 2016, they announced they were shifting from being an Islamist party to a Muslim Democratic So, of course, Ennahda leaders admitted to me that they had trouble effectively governing and dealing with Tunisia's long-standing economic problems.
But these issues can't be just blamed on Ennahda's perceived incompetence or its Islamist nature.But still, we have to realize there was a cyclerotic
older generation that really was, especially in the case of Muslim Brotherhood, that really, quote unquote, messed up with the ongoing process of governance.
Now, there are certain factions within these groups, both with the Tunisian case and the Egyptian case.They can't even point fingers as to who the leader or the spokesperson is.There's a huge rift
between certain groups and the younger generation just they feel disenchanted with politics and also their base is disenchanted with political parties in general but you know disenchantment with the established political parties is everywhere in the political spectrum and it's a global phenomenon.
And to conclude coming back to the Turkish front it's the question that some people raise often
which is, you know, Erdogan is now, I think, widely believed reaching not the end of the road, but he's coming into the final stretch, basically, of his time in power.And that final stretch may go on for many, many years indeed.
But people are beginning to think about the post-Erdogan situation in Turkey.And Erdogan has obviously been the figurehead of this political movement in Turkey for the last over two decades now.
big impossible question to end with, but once Erdogan is out of the scene and replaced by whoever inherits from him, whether it's from the opposition or otherwise, would you say that that is the end of Islamism in Turkey?
Or would you say that just something new will come in its place?How would you interpret that post-Erdogan landscape that will emerge eventually, whether that's in the short or the long term?
To be honest, some people would point to several policies, great number of policies actually in terms of education or in the social and cultural realm that Erdogan government imposed as pure examples of Islamism.
For example, Hagia Sophia being turned into a mosque would be the epitome of how Islamist the AKP is.I don't think so.I don't think so.And these things, I believe, were cheap Islamization because the real Islamism requires a revolutionary action.
A revolutionary action-oriented ideology is what Islamism is.What AKP has been doing in the last two decades is like a really right-wing conservative political party in a Muslim-majority country.I believe some of the policies
could very well be implemented in the same way if the MHP, the nationalist hawkish political party, were in power instead of the AKP.
So the real Islamists of Turkey are the Erbakan's party, and that is 2%, 3%, or 5% within the threshold of the electorate. Islamism will never die, but the proportion of mainstream Islamist vote in Turkey will never be more than 5%.
Just because Tayyip Erdogan is a quote-unquote disciple of Necmettin Erbakan and a devout Muslim doesn't mean that the AKP is a textbook Islamist party.That was why, because it is not, that it became a model.
So post-Erdogan period will be really, really chaotic in terms of center-right shifts. within the political spectrum and I do not think that it will be the end of Islamist era because it was not the Islamist era in my opinion.
And I think the whole research and the argument of this book offers another way of looking at both the AKP era and Islamist politics.
That was Ezgi Basaran, many thanks to her for joining for episode 229.If that interview peaked your interest you can buy her book at a 35% discount if you join as a Turkey Book Talk member on Patreon or Substack.
Indeed all Turkey Ottoman History books published by IB Taurus and Bloomsbury are available to Turkey Book Talk members for a 35% discount.
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