"The mosques are our barracks,/ their domes our helmets,/ the minarets our bayonets/ and the believers our soldiers." The poem by Ziya Gökalp, one of the ideologues of Turkish nationalism championed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk after the First World War, still appears in some textbooks of the Turkish educational system. With him he tries to explain the forging of a national identity that ended with the War of Independence and the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
From that first moment, and with Atatürk in the presidency, Turkey became a secular state after abolishing the caliphate and Islamic law. It also prohibited the veil and polygamy, replaced the Arabic alphabet with the Latin one, recognized the vote for women and replaced Islamic schools with a public education model. In religious worship, he even forbade Arabic in the mosques so that calls to prayer, prayers and readings from the Koran were carried out in Turkish, even though religious freedom was guaranteed.
Considered by the new Republic the necessary heritage of a rancid religiously based nationalism, Gökalp's verses gained unusual interest for the first generation of Turks born and educated already within the secular regime, but with deep Muslim family roots. A popular and rural grassroots movement led by an urban intellectual class that crystallized in the birth of the National Order Party led by Necmettin Erbakan. The formation, which had among its ideas the distance from the West and the recovery of the Islamic veil, seduced young people like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who did not hesitate to become a member of an Islamism viewed with suspicion by the State.
However, the National Order Party became in the 1970s the third Turkish political formation to form a government with both the conservative Justice Party and the progressive Republican People's Party. Even the 1980 military coup did not put an end to political Islamism, which regrouped under the acronym of the new Welfare Party, once again led by Erbakan and with whom Erdoğan ran for the presidency of the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul in 1989, – that until independence had been majority Greek, Jewish and Armenian – and already in 1994 to the mayoralty of Istanbul. He won it despite garnering just 25.2% of the vote in a highly fragmented election.
It was then that Erdoğan became the great champion of that thriving Turkish political Islamism – necessarily moderate – and when he did not hesitate to replicate Gökalp's verses in his public speeches. Until in a heated rally in 1997 in Siirt, his wife's city, where he went to visit the graves of the Muslim mystics Veysel Karanı, İbrahim Hakkı and İsmail Fakîrullah, his words led him to be prosecuted for a hate crime related to class, ethnicity, religion or origin, according to the Penal Code in force.
Erdoğan was imprisoned in the Pınarhisar prison, where he only remained for four months, although his fame as a martyr would end up catapulting him into his political career without the reserves of Justice or the opposition of the Armed Forces being able to stop him. Already at the head of the Justice and Development Party, without the anti-Western ballast that Erbakan represented, he became prime minister in 2003, a position he held until 2014. Since then, and after two victories at the polls, he has held the presidency, with a reinforced power after the constitutional reform approved in 2017, which meant the end of the parliamentary government system.
“There is no freedom of thought and there is racial discrimination in Türkiye. Our reference is Islam. They can never intimidate us. Even Westerners have freedom of belief. Why is this not respected in Türkiye? The minarets are our bayonets, the domes are our helmets, the mosques are our barracks!
”No one will be able to silence the call to prayer. We will definitely put an end to racial discrimination in Turkey because the Welfare Party does not agree with other parties.
“If the heavens and the earth were opened, if floods and volcanoes were poured out on us, we would not turn back, we would continue on our way. My reference is Islam. What is the meaning of my life if I cannot practice it? Even Westerners have freedom of belief. In Europe the cult and the veil are respected. But there is a ban in Türkiye. Why is this not respected in Türkiye?
”No one will be able to silence the call to prayer. Because where the call to prayer is replaced by silence, people will not have peace. It is not possible to distinguish between Kurds, Arabs and Circassians. Because the heaven where all people come together is Islam.
“We will definitely put an end to racial discrimination in Türkiye. Shame on those who made this happen. Those who were concerned about the success of the Welfare Party tried all sorts of ways to prevent it from coming to power. But no force could prevent it."
