Many people thought to themselves, “Secularists are rallying against Islamists,” and presumed that the protesters were “demanding democracy.” The Western minds could easily be deceived by the external appearance of this picture. According to an argument invented recently, civilization is under the threat of “Islam and Muslims.” Starting from the 1990s, they fabricated the concept of “fundamentalism,” which is actually specific to their own history of religion, and they started to use this Protestant fundamentalism to define Islam. This was followed by the denoting of “Islamic terrorism,” and the concept of “Islamophobia” is being developed with assistance from Huntington’s thesis. There is, however, another truth concealed behind the images in the picture: For almost half a century, the secularist or autocratic regimes in the Islamic world have been resorting to the fabrication of “Islamic threat” lies in order to sustain their grip on power. They need a “continuous threat” for Western powers to lend support their autocratic regimes. Repression is directed toward the political framework -- whichever it is -- where social opposition finds its expression. But it is them who represent a threat to regimes because they waste resources, failing to satisfy social needs. They are deep down in corruption, and they do nothing for the welfare and freedoms of their own people. Political succession is done through inheritance.
Although Turkey’s case is a bit different, it can be considered the same in essence in the final analysis. The opposition of certain groups against the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) was in effect fueling a nonexistent threat. This was the message sent to the Western public: “We are your natural ally in Turkey.” But in reality, the truth was different from what it seemed.
One needed to wait for several days in order to understand the truth. As time progressed, Western public opinion was shocked. What they saw was extremely paradoxical: Contrary to what was believed, Islamists were demanding democracy while secularists were in the anti-democratic camp. In Turkey, Islamists have been active supporters of freedom and democracy since 1856. Well-known Islamist figures opposed Abdülhamid, who is accused of establishing a repressive regime. Eventually, on June 3, 2007, the French newspaper Le Monde argued that the crisis in Turkey was “because of economic interests and power struggle, not because of religious reasons.” The paper stated that the secularist camp, which held rallies against the AK Party, “regarded themselves as the silent majority on the wake, but they were actually a minority” and further maintained that “this camp’s activities were devised and organized by the army members under the disguise of nongovernmental organizations such the Kemalist Thought Association [ADD], which is managed by a retired pro-coup general.” In the Le Monde story, titled “Wake of Atatürk’s Grandsons,” it was stated that the crisis in Turkey can be attributed not to religion, but to “sharing of power, including the economy, between the traditional Kemalist elites and the new AK Party elites.”
Just like those rallying against the AK Party, the people who opposed the AK Party were louder in terms of ideology but they were not bigger in terms of quantity. Western countries needed to wait for the results of the general elections of July 22 in order to comprehend this. The results were shocking. The organizers of the republic rallies had tried to give the message to the world that the ideology they advocated had strong social support. The aim of the rallies and the tension-based opposition is to preserve the positions the small minority had obtained throughout the 20th century. As put by Le Monde, this minority wants the “military tutelage” over Turkish politics to continue in order to maintain their unfair advantage and privileges. In short, Turkey is seeing a small-scale “class struggle.”
