ISTANBUL LETTER: Has Turkey, with its embattled economy and its bedridden prime minister, finally found a panacea in football?
Judging by the scenes on Tuesday following the Turkish team's first ever qualification for the World Cup quarter finals, yes. Expatriate Turks as far off as Germany and Australia brought traffic to a standstill with their celebrations. In Izmir, on Turkey's west coast, a man had to be dragged from a car he had accidentally set alight in his excitement.
Turkey's largest newspaper, Hurriyet, celebrated victory with a second edition, something it last did in 1980, when the government was toppled by a military coup. But even football, it seems, is not enough to neutralise one of Turkey's most perennial bugbears, fear of political Islam.
In two articles in the mass circulation daily, Milliyet, sports columnist Tuncay Ozkan accuses the Turkish team of "suffering from the recrudescence of a disease that has plagued Turkish sport in general . . . the equation of professionalism with piety, prayer given precedence over skill." Turkey's footballers, he claims, have fallen into the hands of a tarikat, or Islamic sect, led by Turkey's star striker, Hakan Sukur. In the absence of a team manager charismatic enough to control them, Sukur's group decides who is sent home and who stays, who plays and who doesn't. Ozkan even goes as far as to suggest that the team doesn't pass the ball to players who don't pray.
This politicisation of Turkish sport has a long history. Back in 1982, Turkey's new military leaders reacted to a decade of vicious street-fighting between gangs of young left- and right-wingers with a law prohibiting under-18s from any form of political association. For the political parties, it was a disaster. With their traditional catchment area drained away, they were forced to turn to sports clubs for new recruits. "Different parties favoured different sports," sports writer Cuneyt Koryurek explains.
Some, like the extreme right-wing MHP, favoured martial arts clubs. "It wasn't so much infantry battalions they were trying to train," Koryurek says, "more a sort of nationalist ninja." But the increasing influence of Islamic groups on sport, a side-effect of political Islam's rapid rise in the 1980s and 1990s, was taken far more seriously by Turkey's secularist establishment and press. "Islam's first target was Turkey's traditionally rural and religious wrestling team," says Huncal Uluc, football commentator for Sabah.
The next to be infected was Galatasaray, Turkey's most successful football club. "Florea, the team's headquarters, became an Islamic centre," says Uluc. "While players insisted they should be allowed to fast during Ramadan, the management argued they couldn't, because it would affect their form."
Then, as now, Hakan Sukur was the most controversial figure. He was criticised for choosing moderate sect leader Fethullah Gulen as witness at his marriage. Gulen, indicted in August 2000 on charges of plotting to overthrow the state by force, fled to the US to avoid prison. Last year, another football club, Gaziantepspor, sacked Omer Catkic, the national team's reserve goalkeeper, and Mert Korkmaz, brother of Turkey's football captain, accusing them of excessive piety and forming a tarikat.
Reactions to Tuncay Ozkan's articles were not long in coming. He himself wrote to say that angry readers had denounced him as an apostate and a heretic. In a piece in the liberal newspaper Radikal on Tuesday, Ahmet Cakir was more temperate. "The absurdity of this whole affair is that the only evidence produced for these claims is a group of players going to Friday prayers," he snorts. "Yet the whole issue is portrayed as if they were caught fornicating and engaged in all sorts of debauchery."
For his namesake Rusen Cakir, an expert on Turkish political Islam, this tendency to see all religious activity as fundamentalist is another kind of fundamentalism. "The Brazilian players are religious, too," he says. "Does their press have discussions like this?" That such debates exist, he thinks, is simply proof that "the relationship between religion and society in Turkey is lived as a perpetual crisis."
Turkey is often described in the foreign press as being the only Muslim country to have a secular constitution. That may be. But there are many here who believe that its particular brand of secularism needs an overhaul.
"Turkish secularism is not, as is usually the case in western Europe, a case of 'a free church in a free state'," says Mustafa Erdogan, of the Association for Liberal Thought. Religion here is emphatically in state hands. Money for mosque-building and imams' salaries is controlled by the powerful Department for Religious Affairs. Public manifestations of religious identity are frowned upon. Earlier this month, a number of female students were prevented from sitting their university exams when they refused to take off their headscarves.
"One of Turkey's problems," says Hurriyet's Cuneyt Ulsever, "is that the state tends to interpret the social aspects of Islam in political terms." Ultimately, the football tarikat dispute has its roots in the foundation of the Republic in 1923. While the last sultans tried to hold their crumbling domains together by calling on Muslim unity, says Rusen Cakir, "Republicans preferred other national values to gather Turks together." Islam came to be seen as an obstacle to modernisation. The tarikats, with their influential networks of social solidarity, were seen as rivals of central authority and closed down in 1925.
All that is needed is informed debate, thinks Cuneyt Ulsever. "Both sides of the divide have to stop looking down the wrong end of their telescope."
Who knows? Perhaps a Turkish victory against Senegal tomorrow will get the ball rolling.