Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [97]
Erdoğan’s AK Party exists here as the neighborhood’s capillary system, delivering fresh blood into the area’s isolated, depleted households. I spent a day here, just before Erdoğan’s second prime ministerial victory, with a young woman named Kadriye Kadabal, a university graduate who strolled the back streets in a white dress and a chic white headscarf. It was apparent that she knew every family by name, every house and its precise history, and could stroll with impunity through any door. She dropped in on one family, living in a collapsing rented gecekondu house, and quietly helped them obtain a government card that would provide free drugs to their sick child. Another family received a box of food; a third got a discreet payment for expenses while the father was tending to a family disaster. She described herself as having no complaint with Turkey’s secularism but was motivated by her personal faith. “According to our religion, the one who can sleep when a neighbor is hungry, he is not one of us. That is our motto.”
This is how the AK Party works in the streets. Kadabal oversees two dozen households and reports to Ali Tunel, the 36-year-old owner of a successful small furniture factory around the corner. He supervises 30 volunteers, who provide financial, medical, and bureaucratic aid to 700 families here. There are hundreds of men like Tunel in Istanbul. The party receives donations from supporters who have become wealthy, directed at its aid organization. “It is the AKP that fixes things around here between the rich people and the poor people,” says Tunel. “You should think of us as a conduit.”
AK Party officials bristle at comparisons to Hamas and Hezbollah, Islamic movements that employed similar community-organizing techniques, and prefer to mention the U.S. Democratic Party in the Tammany Hall days. They usually argue that the party is Islamic in the way that Germany’s Christian Democratic parties are Christian—that is, the faith is a symbolic touchstone, not a fundamental societal goal. When Erdoğan first became prime minister, in 2003, few urbanites believed this, and many saw him as a Trojan horse for Islamism. Those fears had a genuine basis among a moderate, educated Turkish minority who had somehow managed to maintain the Middle East’s only secular democracy (save for periodic military coups) for eight decades. Yet their fear of the AK Party was also a direct reflection of their fear of the arrival city. Once again, we see the old narrative of the conservative, backward villager bringing a village culture of religion and repression into the cosmopolitan realm of the city.
Yet Erdoğan won successive elections without bringing any popular support for political Islam with him. In fact, he seemed to devote most of his energies to integrating his country with Europe and strengthening its economy, ending the impasse with the Kurds in the southeast, and trying to stop the courts from punishing political dissidents. In an apparent reversal of his erstwhile adultery law, he also passed a dramatic women’s-rights bill that outlawed honor killing and made rape, even within marriage, the most serious sort of crime, the strongest law of its kind in the Islamic Middle East. Clearly, forces other than religious conservatism were emerging from the gecekondus.
In 2006, scholars at the well-regarded Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, a non-partisan academic think tank in Istanbul, produced an extraordinary large-scale study, which revealed that Turks had become dramatically less interested in any form of religious politics, even as support for the AK Party rose. The scholars