Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [96]
Erdoğan strolled into the void of Turkish politics in the 1990s, becoming mayor of Istanbul when the secular Turkish republic seemed to have failed most of its citizens. The economy was a catastrophe, reaching a complete collapse in 1994, and the city appeared to many to have become a garbage-strewn mess. He was a powerful enough force that even the residents of Mustafa Kemal gave him their vote.
The Welfare Party did bring something to the arrival city. In a thousand concrete ways, its campaign offices took the role that might have been occupied by the state, filling the gaps in a laissez-faire urban economy that left former villagers without support. One observer remembered its “army of covered women,” who “were there to help the sick land a hospital bed, to distribute food on freezing winter days, to provide a small present to newlyweds, to help with the cost of a funeral.”23 The party’s message also happened to appeal to the basic conservatism, driven by fear of urban perils and the collapse of old family certainties, that animates almost all immigrant communities, especially those living in the dangerous and precarious precincts of the arrival city. It tried (unsuccessfully) to outlaw adultery, and some female candidates covered their heads, a taboo in Kemalist Turkey. To villagers who were used to seeing women coddled and covered—not out of especially strong religious convictions but out of comforting custom—the city seemed full of family-destroying menace, and the party offered an alternative.
In 1997, the Welfare Party was banned from national politics by the Constitutional Court, at the insistence of the military. Erdoğan spent 10 months in prison for giving inflammatory speeches. In 2001, as Turkey experienced another financial meltdown, the Welfare Party split in two: Its Islamists formed the Felicity Party. Erdoğan and his allies, who were always more interested in social and economic policy, formed the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which quickly became known as the ultimate outsiders’ party, the national voice of the gecekondu. It seemed inevitable from the beginning that it would end up leading Turkey.
One neighborhood uphill from Mustafa Kemal is a hub of the new politics, a place called Bitterwater. It got that name in the late 1970s, when the villagers arriving here stayed up all night digging trenches and wells, which yielded water that was almost undrinkable. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing places in Istanbul. Life here is effectively controlled by the land registrar, a man with enormous political power, as he is able to declare people legal residents, enabling them to receive health care, schooling, and, possibly, ownership of their properties. He tells me that five or six new families come to his office every day, newly arrived from the villages. Some 18,000 people arrived here last year.
When people started coming here in the 1980s, residents say, this was a largely apolitical place. True, women in the neighborhood were more likely to cover their heads—a rarity then in Istanbul and still illegal in public places—but it was not because they were especially religious. Several women here explained to me that the custom is as much for practical reasons (the women tended to be agricultural laborers, working in the hot sun of Anatolia) as for any deep tie to Islam. Still, you’re far more likely to see headscarves here, and there are certainly more minarets poking above the storefronts.
As the economy collapsed and families in Bitterwater became desperate for assistance, it was not