Recently, a single man stepped into the mass demonstrations and counter-demonstrations that have roiled Turkey for weeks. The man stood still and silent, staring at an image on a wall. Soon scores of his countrymen, concerned about their freedoms, stood silently beside him, not just in Gezi Park, but in parks and squares across Turkey. It was a potent symbol in a war of symbols. In the Middle East, it may one day rank beside another standing man -- the man who stood before the tanks of Tiananmen. Time will tell if it will prove equally futile.
The protest in Istanbul's Gezi Park marks another round in a battle for Turkey's future. Among the silent stand those who seek a return to the moderate, secular path set by modern Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk. They face down not the tanks, but the bulldozers of Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In the narrowest sense, Erdogan plans to bulldoze the last remaining green square in Istanbul (another weighty metaphor) to rebuild an Ottoman barracks. In the larger sense, he hopes to bulldoze the modern legacy of Ataturk, amend Turkey's constitution to create a presidency more powerful than even Ataturk ever held and then restore the glory of Ottoman Turkey and the caliphate that once bound the Sunni Islamic world together.
Erdogan's neo-Ottoman aims are not the paranoid musings of the crowd, but self-proclaimed; he and his AK Party's leadership invoke them regularly. His words will be felt, he habitually claims, from Sarajevo to Damascus to North Africa, all former Ottoman lands. Since gaining power ten years ago, he has steadily carved away at Ataturk's secular policies, with acts such as restoring the headscarf for woman and restricting alcohol sales. But he has moved, as well, against broad, democratic rights: jailing journalists and impinging on free media, undercutting an independent judiciary and using suspect prosecutions -- often without even specifying charges -- to curb the secular military leadership and political opponents.
Here, too, Gezi Park is symbolic, for it was Erdogan who first used the power of the state to decree the demolition of the park, then violated a court order to cease, and, still frustrated, attacked protesters with great force. In the "March 31st Incident," part of the Countercoup of 1909, Ottoman troops from the barracks Erdogan so eagerly wishes to rebuild (to house a shopping mall) fought to reverse pro-constitutional reforms instituted by the famous Young Turks movement and to restore the Sultan's power, the Caliphate and Islamic law.
By insisting on rebuilding these barracks, Erdogan honors those who resisted the secularization and the pro-Western movement that created modern Turkey. Indeed, it was Ataturk who razed the barracks and built the park seventy years ago as a sign of Turkey's modernization and secularism. Quite literally, what Ataturk built, Erdogan tears down. What Ataturk reviled, Erdogan prizes.
The protesters, Erdogan's allies claim, conspire with Turkey's external enemies and other nefarious forces to undermine the high estate that is Turkey's regional birthright. So Erdogan sponsored a counter-demonstration to answer the crowds in Gezi Park. Where? At Kazlicesme, just outside the ancient walls of Constantinople, the site from which the 15th century Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror launched the attack that captured Constantinople and drove the last western influence from Turkey. (How like Erdogan's recent call that Turkey's youth embrace the 11th century battle in which the Seljuk Turks first fought their way into then-Christian Anatolia.) At Kazlicesme and other rallies, Erdogan's supporters sing the Ottoman Army's marching song.
Erdogan's bulldozers seek to remake not just Gezi Park, but the face of Ataturk's Turkey. Erdogan has just broken ground on a massive new bridge across the Bosporus to be named for Ottoman Sultan Selim I, often known as Selim the Grim. As all Turkish school children know, Selim's conquests in 1517 first won Ottoman sultans the title of Caliph. Ottoman rulers bore this title for the next 400 years, until Ataturk abolished it.
On an elevated headland on the Asian side of Istanbul, facing Europe, Erdogan now undertakes to build the largest mosque in the world. Highly visible almost everywhere in Istanbul, it will resemble and surpass the great, celebratory mosques built over centuries by the Ottoman sultans. No such mosque has been built since Ataturk ended the caliphate. Thus, the square, the bridge, the mosque, the marching song are each a repudiation of Ataturk's legacy. They herald the caliphate over the republic, Erdogan's vision over Ataturk's.
