Here We Go Again

I am curious what verbal bombshell President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is planning to drop next week. Last week, he managed to capture the headlines by rewriting the history of America's discovery.
A few days ago, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader created a new round of both excitement and dismay by promoting his outspoken opinions on gender equality at the Women and Justice Summit.
His remarks were not really surprising and reflected the kind of standard conservative thinking you will find all over Europe among religiously inspired politicians from all creeds. It was a mix of evident truths (women are less capable of physically demanding jobs), misperceptions (pregnancy is an obstacle to equal opportunity in the workplace) and prejudices (feminists reject motherhood). So, how should we react?
Many have dismissed Erdoğan's two latest provocations as all-too-obvious diversionary tactics. With the president facing criticism about the lavish spending on his new palace and the government increasingly isolated over its foreign policy, we know how cunning Erdoğan is in redefining Turkey's public opinion priorities. For that reason, some women warned not to take the bait on the president's remarks because that is exactly what he wants. I am sure distraction was part of the calculus but, as with Erdoğan's denigration of Christopher Columbus, there is more to this intervention.
On similar occasions in the past -- when, for instance, Erdoğan called on Turkish women to have three children and spoke out strongly against abortion -- many observers, including myself, used to interpret these ideologically motivated outbursts as hopelessly out of touch with the unstoppable emancipation of women in Turkish society. In that view, better-educated, middle-class women, secular and pious alike, would decide themselves about the planning and number of their children. The idea that political leaders can influence the outcome of these autonomous processes looked hopelessly old-fashioned and prospect-less. That might, however, be an underestimation of the power of constantly repeated ideological preferences.
Another problem with the established practice of putting Erdoğan's moral crusading into perspective is the tendency to believe his strong opinions are not that harmful because they are almost never translated into new legislation. So why worry about the well-known ethical inclinations of the AKP leadership when in daily life nothing changes?
To be honest, I have recently started to doubt that relativistic approach. I am afraid that in addition to being convenient distractions, Erdoğan's systematic moral teachings are -- combined with the ongoing educational reforms -- part of a long game to change the hearts and minds of Turkey's next generation.
In a stimulating article on the AKP's rule since 2002 in The National, David Lepeska last week described Erdoğan's New Turkey pet project as the construction of a nation "where a majoritarian state embraces conservatives, moral codes are prescribed if not strictly enforced and Islam informs policy decisions at home and abroad.” Lepeska also quoted one of the leading specialists on political Islam, Shadi Hamid, on the AKP: "Here you have a government that feels the state should be promoting values through the state apparatus. ... power is being used to promote a gradual soft Islamisation of society.”
Since 2011, I have become more and more concerned that Lepeska and Hamid are correct in their analysis. What we have witnessed, since the ruling party managed to get the votes of 50 percent of the population, is that ad hoc remarks and interventions on lifestyle issues are slowly being transformed into a systematic campaign to change some of the basic settings of the Turkish state. The imposition of conservative values on gender relations is part of that project.
No, this does not mean that some of the early AKP critics were right in predicting an Iranian-style theocracy in Turkey. There is no reason to think that Turkish political Islamists are trying to copy such an extreme example of an Islamic state. What we are witnessing these days in Turkey is a slow-motion operation to replace one set of distorted values -- the Kemalist ones -- with a new set, the “Erdoğanist” version. The problem is not that by doing so the AKP reflects the opinions of most socially conservative Turks. What makes this social engineering so disturbing and worrying is the absence of any tolerance for women and men who do not agree with the majority and their illiberal spokespersons in power.

JOOST LAGENDIJK (Cihan/Today's Zaman)