Abiola points me to this fascinating piece in The New York Times (originally published in Der Spiegel). What many people forget when using the world “Turkey” and the term “Turkish” is that the nation has a fair amount of texture and detail. I recently listened to a BBC piece which noted that western Anatolia has a standard of living approaching Greece, but the vast east and southeast remains far more backward. A survey of economic difficulties in the southeast of Turkey suggests that “the per capita income of the poorest city in the region is only one-eleventh of that of an industrial center in the west.”
And this only focuses on the economic dimension. As the piece above notes, Turkey is divided into various religious clusters, with a secular western urban elite, a religiously orthodox striving bourgeois in the “heartland” and traditionalist peasants in the countryside. This should not be particularly surprising, it is a common pattern in many Muslim countries that the most religiously “conservative” and observant segment of society is not the peasantry, but the the striving middle class.1 A similar traditional trichotomy exists in Indonesian society, with the elite priyayi aristocrats molding a synthetic spirituality drawn from various sources, though they are nominally Muslim. The observant santri are generally identified with the urban trading classes and include many rural landowners. The abangan peasantry give nominal adherence to Islam, though in practice they tend to be more influenced day-to-day by Javanese spiritualism and traditional customs. As Javanese society becomes more urban & modern it will likely be that the abangan will disappear as a major force and the santri traditionalists will be opposed by “modernists” (which will likely include the cultural descendents of priyayi cosmopolitanism).
It should not surprise Westerners that economic advancement and some level of modernity tends to spark religous observance, after all, the Renaissance was followed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, with the relatively relaxed medieval Roman Catholic mass religion giving way to more personal and strict religious dispensations. The changes wrought by industralization across England in the 18th century occurred in concert with evangelical revivals and rise of “muscular Christianity.” The strength of American Born Again Christianity in large part tracks the movement of rural WASP Americans into the urban and suburban middle class. In a fast changing world, an strict adherence to the norms dictated by traditional religion might be a normal response.
In the context of Turkey, a nation of 100 million caught between here & there, all this suggests that great changes are imminent. I am skeptical that the EU can swallow such a nation whole.
1 – One can expand the scope of the generalization to India, where the Hindu nationalist parties often gain support from the non-English educated upper and middle castes, often small businessnmen and local professionals.
Posted by razib at 12:38 PM