We learned this in school starting from the elementary level. State authorities spoke of this threat every opportunity they had and we never really objected to the state using religion as a tactic against communism, which ultimately made religion popular. It was believed that since the state kept a tight rein on everything, when the time came it would be able to impose its will on the religious groups, as well.The first striking discovery was revealed after we got the opportunity to learn about our recent past. We discovered that communism was never actually a threat to Turkey because the state itself always had a hand in communist politics. Yet the threat of Shariah, Islamic law, was easily believed. When members of the unprogressive Aczimendi brotherhood, dressed in black robes and baggy trousers and known as womanizers, appeared on television in 1997, it was hastily agreed that the state needed to take action. The military's Feb. 28, 1997 memorandum was approved. Judges, professor, artists and businessmen marched to Anıtkabir, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's mausoleum, and voiced their complaints about a “religionist society,” the members of which, according to them, were still unable to act like “normal men.” Turkey was always required to be vigilant against counterrevolutionary activities by religious groups whilst undergoing modernization. But the Ergenekon case humiliated this state of mind. It was understood that the secular circle had been sleeping all along, even during times it thought it was awake. Today, we know the regressive Aczimendi brotherhood was created by the state and that they were paid to put on that performance on television. We also know that the religious organization called Hizbullah, which has shed so much blood in Turkey, was a murder network developed on the state's initiative and that the person who attacked the Council of State to protest the headscarf ban was actually a member of a non-religious nationalist network.
Finally we have begun to wonder why we haven't asked the question of how the Ottomans' Shariah law would be implemented in the 20th century considering the fact that the Ottoman Empire interpreted religion subjectively and was never a Shariah state during its 600 years in power, although it used Islam as the source of its authoritarian administration's legitimacy.
We are facing a simple, yet hard-to-accept fact. The threat of Shariah was a virtual threat created by the state and was used to create a state-dependent secular community. The state ultimately succeeded in creating an ideologically sleeping secular community that thought it was awake. This state of being only virtually awake didn't give the secular community the strength of civilians, but instead raised it with fears and pushed it into the hands of the state after each virtual threat.
With the start of the investigation into Ergenekon, the curtains over these mentalities are being lifted, prompting a movement within the secular state.
Today, the highest authorities are telling us that there was an organization within the military constantly busy with plotting a coup. Just last week, retired Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Büyükanıt explained this reality. The talks between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the commanders of 2004 have been broken down, and we see that the mentality of the military personnel who weren't involved in plotting a coup wasn't very different.
The government was instructed on what it needed to do. It was told to consult the military before making any decision, and the prime minister was asked to manipulate the media as part of efforts to obtain certain results. Furthermore, the government was advised to take precautionary measures that would stall Turkey 's accession to the European Union. The meeting was concluded with threats of blackmail if the government failed to fulfill the requests.
Contextually the military tutelage regime depends on the country having been accustomed to the coup period. The basic reality of this country is that the republic has developed bureaucracy into an ideological class and has enabled this class to reproduce itself from a socio-economic perspective. But in an ostensibly democratic political system, this class does not have the talent to represent the requests of the public, so it used the bureaucracy's ability of ideological representation. In this way, the secular community became a social base. Politics focused on keeping secularists in an environment of various threats to make the state itself a political agent. This situation had benefits for the secular community, as well, because alignment with the state meant “other” identities would be kept away from its social and economic privileges. Hearing about the threat of Shariah was mouth-watering for them, because they knew they would be able to use it to legitimize greater levels of discrimination that would be in their favor.
From this perspective, the secularists certainly weren't sleeping. They were sly as foxes when it came to keeping religious and rural folk away from the public sphere. But the best label for these “modern people” who were essentially being fooled and kept clueless and felt OK with being ignorant is “sleeping beauty.” Today the secular community, which was competing in a beauty contest with the state, is now simply a cultural class and when it comes to political rights, they are considered a “regressive” class. Turkey 's experience has shown that secularism without democracy roams near the brink of fascism. In such cases, it is not difficult for the regime to create its own SS's from a socio-cultural perspective using the state's abilities of ideological representation.
