Hayrunisa Gul offers The Times tea and Turkish delicacies, smiles constantly,
laughs readily and talks enthusiastically about her children, her garden,
helping the disabled – about almost anything, in fact, except the deeply
controversial strip of floral-patterned silk that covers her head.
It is hard to believe that this lively and likeable woman is at the heart of
the political storm that has torn Turkey apart in the past month, pitting
the military against the Government, deepening the chasm between the pious
and the secular, bringing a million demonstrators on to the streets and
triggering an early general election to determine who really governs the
country.
Mrs Gul, 42, is the wife of Abdullah Gul, the Turkish Foreign Minister, who
was nominated for president by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister and
leader of the mildly Islamic AK party. Turkey’s “secular Establishment” –
the military, judiciary, bureaucracy, outgoing President and various
opposition parties – was appalled. It fears that if the AK party controls
the presidency as well as the Government and parliament it will sweep aside
the strict secularism of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, and
implement a radical Islamic agenda.
As proof of that hidden agenda, and exhibit No 1, it points to Mrs Gul’s
Islamic headscarf. To hardline Turkish secularists this is not a pretty silk
cloth but a huge red rag, and the idea of her wearing it at official
functions in the presidential palace is unthinkable. The military, which
considers itself the guardian of Turkish secularism and has overthrown four
previous governments, threatened to intervene again.
Opposition parties boycotted the parliamentary vote on Mr Gul’s nomination,
then complained to the constitutional court – itself part of the secular
Establishment – that the vote was inquorate. The court agreed, even though
more MPs voted for Mr Gul than for Turkey’s three most recent presidents. No
previous prime minister had dared to defy the generals, but Mr Erdogan
declared that the military was answerable to the Government, not vice-versa.
He called a snap election for July 22, and is battling to change the
constitution so that the president is also elected by popular vote.
This turmoil is engulfing a country of 70 million people that is supposed to
be a bridge between East and West, proof that democracy and Islam can
coexist and a future member of the European Union.
Mrs Gul, speaking in the Foreign Minister’s palatial residence overlooking
Ankara, appeared bemused by the controversy swirling round her. If she has a
hidden agenda, “I’m still looking for it,” she joked in her first proper
interview with a foreign newspaper. Of her headscarf she would say only: “It
saddens me to face prejudice on an issue which I see as completely my
personal preference.”
As the Foreign Minister’s wife she had travelled to more than 50 countries and
played host to thousands of foreign guests without any problems, she added.
In a dig at Turkey’s secular Establishment, she said that her husband’s
reforming Government was seeking to create a “world-class democracy within
which everyone can live in their own style”, and continued: “We should use
our energy in the right way. We have a lot of work to do.”
Mrs Gul is unquestionably devout. She prays five times a day and took Turkey
to the European Court of Human Rights after she was barred from attending
university because of her headscarf. But she comes across not as a fully
paid up member of the Taleban, but as a modern, Western-minded woman who
practises a very tolerant form of Islam.
She was happy talking and shaking hands with a male reporter. Her oldest son
works for Merrill Lynch in London, her daughter trained as an industrial
engineer and as an apprentice with Rolls-Royce in Britain and her youngest
son spent two terms at school in New York. Not all her female entourage wear
headscarves, and she sought to discourage her daughter from wearing one so
that she could go to university.
Mrs Gul also believes strongly in gender equality. If her husband became
president, she said, she would work to promote the education of Turkish
women and make them more aware of their political and legal rights.
Foreign diplomats say that the battle over the presidency is in part a simple
power struggle, with the secular Establishment fighting to retain its last
bastion. The president can veto legislation, heads the Armed Forces and
appoints top judges, generals and university chancellors. But, they say, the
battle also reflects a very deep and real fear among Turkey’s predominantly
metropolitan secular elite that Islamic radicals want to turn Turkey into
another Iran.
Except for an aborted attempt to outlaw adultery the AK party has refrained
conspicuously from pursuing an Islamist agenda since taking power in 2002,
focusing instead on the social and economic reforms required for EU
membership. The so-called “white Turks” of Istanbul and Ankara still feel
threatened, however.
In recent decades they have witnessed a huge influx of pious, conservative and
increasingly assertive countrymen from rural areas, and consider the
headscarf the harbinger of an Islamic fundamentalism that will destroy their
relaxed Western lifestyles.
At Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara The Times witnessed the secularists’ paranoia
first hand. A group of middle-class matrons, pointed at head-scarved women
climbing the steps to the great man’s tomb.
“Cockroaches,” said one. “They are dirtying the place with their feet,” said
another. “Atatürk’s bones would be aching right now,” said a third. They
claimed that the AK Government was “in league with the Arabs” and planning
secretly to introduce Sharia. “With this Government anything is possible.
Behind their smiling faces they are monsters.”
At a time of rising Islamic fundamentalism around the world they cannot
understand the West’s failure to see the danger, and the EU’s lack of
enthusiasm for Turkish membership merely fuels their sense of abandonment.
If Mrs Gul’s interview showed her moderation, her husband used a separate
interview with The Times to play down the embarrassment of a military
intervention that gave further ammunition to those EU members – France,
Germany and Austria – most hostile to Turkish membership.
He was saddened by the events of the past month, he said, and felt they had
given the world a misleading impression of today’s Turkey. But he said that
the military was entitled to express its concern, and blamed opposition MPs
for creating the crisis by boycotting the vote and taking the matter to the
constitutional court. “It’s a political issue rather than a military issue,”
he said. “If the opposition parties were present in the assembly there would
not be any problem.”
He said that the Government had restored order by accepting the court’s
ruling, calling an election and seeking to have the president elected by
popular vote. “Recently there was a turbulence but now it is over. Democracy
is working,” he insisted. “We have damage control.”
Mr Gul, 57, who has led Turkey’s application for EU membership and spent two
years in Britain as a student, ridiculed the idea that his party had a
hidden Islamic agenda. If that were the case, why had it spent the past four
years reforming and modernising the country, he asked. “Why should we push
so hard for Turkey to enter the EU?” He supported secularism, he insisted,
but challenged the state’s right to curtail such basic human freedoms as
wearing a headscarf.
Mr Gul even suggested that the AK Party was Atatürk’s true heir. When he
founded the modern republic in 1923 Atatürk embraced secularism because he
considered religion an obstacle to progress. His goal was to modernise
Turkey and unite it with Europe. “We have been doing this,” said Mr Gul. “We
are fulfilling the target Atatürk showed us.”
Turbulent days
April 24 Abdullah Gul, a former member of an Islamist party, is
nominated by majority AKP party for presidency, effectively assuring his
victory
April 27 Military says it is “absolute defender of secularism”;
opposition boycotts a parliamentary vote on the presidency
April 29 Hundreds of thousands rally in Istanbul, with banners reading
“Sharia [Islamic law] shall not rise to the Presidential Palace.”
May 6 Mr Gul withdraws his candidacy, after a second parliamentary vote
that failed to get the required majority
Source: Times archives
