Ataturk would be horrified

Times Online

July 07

“Ataturk would be horrified,” said Nur Serter, a designer-clad professor of economics and “secularist” parliamentary candidate for the opposition Republican People’s party (CHP). She reeled off a long list of Islamist violations of the Ataturk code.

“Women are being advised to check with the imam if it is all right for them to have cosmetic surgery or get a divorce,” she said. “The education ministry is filled with people from religious backgrounds.”

According to Necla Arat, a retired philosophy professor and another female champion of the CHP, young girls are even being left to drown at sea because male lifeguards are forbidden by the Islamic code from handling them in any rescue attempt.

“In some municipalities run by the AKP,” she complained, “we have started to see ‘women only’ parks and ‘women only’ swimming pools.”

Oner Pehlivanoglu, a silver-haired army brigadier, grimly concurred. “I’ve come out of retirement to join this battle,” he said at the headquarters of an organisation committed to “the defence of the ideals of Ataturk” in an affluent Istanbul district ...

Even some secularists acknowledge that Ataturk’s 1923 blueprint for a sophisticated state may be in need of an update at a time when Turkey’s demographics are changing so quickly: last year 2m people moved from the countryside into Turkish cities. This has unsettled the old urban, secularist elite who look down their noses at the unsophisticated newcomers whose women often cover their heads with scarves and whose men tend to wear moustaches. Ilber Ortayli, the historian and director of Istanbul’s Topkapi palace, calls them “peasants”.

Erdogan is reputed to have said once that democracy was “like a train which you get off when you reach your destination” - an utterance often trotted out by opponents who suspect him of wanting to impose an Islamic state.