This post has been updated THREE TIMES.
Erdogan with rapturous Tunisians. Photo from Hurriyet
I read this article in full in the Wall St. Journal when it first came on the web today, but it has since retreated behind a paywall (here, excerpt below). Nevertheless, it indicates an interesting contradiction between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s expectations of the Turkish “model” — that it’s Islamic — and Erdoğan’s insistence that the Turkish model is secular, respecting all religions equally. To make his point, Erdoğan, who is in Egypt, visited the elderly Coptic patriarch. The Muslim Brothers, who had been happily following him around until his secularism remarks, were not amused.
I learned from a source this summer that the Egyptian military has said it too is enamored of the “Turkey model”, by which they mean the old Kemalist model of a powerful military keeping religion under its thumb.
The “Turkey Model” is like a Rorschach blot — it means something different to everyone.
CAIRO—The Muslim Brotherhood objected to statements by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan telling Egyptians not to fear building a secular state, in a rare clash that exposes the gap between the so-called Turkish model for building a Muslim democracy and what Islamists in the region believe when they invoke it…
OK, here’s an account of Erdoğan’s Egypt visit, what he said in his speeches, and what the Muslim Brotherhood thinks about Turkey’s secular system. Turkey’s policy toward Israel is helping Turkey (and Erdoğan) gain regional leadership despite suspicions about its “secularism”. The Muslim Brothers contend that “Turkey … violates Islamic Shariah law” because in Turkey “when a man finds a woman in bed with another man, he can’t punish her by law because it is permitted there”. It is striking that the MB impetus is to build a nation on punishment and sex rather than on tolerance and development. Turkey (and the AKP) has its faults, but it has its priorities straight. (click here)
Erdoğan said in an interview with Turkish reporters that the Egyptian saying the above was a FORMER member of the MB and doesn’t represent their views. As far as he’s concerned the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t have a problem with what he said. (click here, in Turkish)
UPDATE 2: Erdoğan is continuing his Arab Spring tour, after a rapturous reception in Egypt and Tunisia, and waxing eloquent on Turkey’s secular model: “Turkey is a democratic, secular and social state of law. As for secularism, a secular state has an equal distance to all religious groups, including Muslim, Christian, Jewish and atheist people… this is not secularism in the Anglo-Saxon or Western sense; a person is not secular, the state is secular. A Muslim can govern a secular state in a successful way. In Turkey, 99 percent of the population is Muslim, and it did not pose any problem. You can do the same here.” (click here for the article.) Next stop: Libya.
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