Die Medien berichten derzeit über den politischen Tumult in der Türkei. Die Hintergründe kommen wie immer zu kurz. Eine exzellente Analyse über die Entwicklung der Türkei in den letzten zehn Jahren findet man in der New York Review of Books.

Christopher de Bellaigue beleuchtet in Turkey: ‘Surreal, Menacing…Pompous’ nicht nur die Entwicklung in diesem Jahr und stellt diese in den zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext. Er betont auch, dass die säkulare Elite nicht immer die besten Interessen des Landes im Auge hatte:

The reforms that Turkey embarked upon in the mid-2000s were long overdue. For decades, the country’s pious majority had been suppressed by a secular elite claiming to uphold the values of the republic’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In 1923, Atatürk set up the Republic of Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire; he spent the rest of his life secularizing institutions and propagating European education, mores, and dress. Atatürk was a visionary and a genius, but Kemalism, the credo built around his memory, had degenerated into ancestor worship long before I was first able to observe it, after moving to the country in 1996. Atatürk’s picture and sayings were everywhere; the country’s leaders made countless pilgrimages to his tomb and used his memory to defend measures such as a ban on the Islamic head-covering in state institutions, which effectively denied millions of young women a university education.

Trotzdem hält er fest:

Now, more than ever, it is harder to argue for the compatibility of political Islam and democracy.