Another Veil: Europe's Misplaced Fears

Europeans -some, many, most- need to get over their fear of Muslim parties winning democratic elections. From Algeria in 1991 to Turkey in 2007, Europe's anxiety over the Muslim world has been far from helpful and far from fair.

Erdogan's AKP (Justice and Development Party) won another resounding victory in July 22nd, against the wishes of Turkey's secularists and the the military establishment. Both had loudly objected to Erdogan's nomination for the post of President of the Republic, with street demonstrations, parliamentary boycotts, and even threats of a military intervention. Erdogan's choice, Abdullah Gul, is one of the most charismatic and well-regarded politicians of the country, but has one main flaw: his wife, Hayrunissa, wears a veil, a piece of clothing banned in government buildings and schools since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and Mustafa Kemal's westernization of the country in the 1920s. Forced to call early elections, AKP's share of the votes grew from an already generous 34 percent to an unprecedented 47 percent. Short of what would be the fifth military coup in Turkey's volatile democratic history, the Army won't be able to stop Gul's candidacy for President this time around.

Europe, or, more precisely, its Franco-German heart, did not cheer this development. If anything, it gave new vigor to the voices that object to Turkey's admission in the European Union at an uncertain date in the distant future. In the contest for Turkey's soul, it is easier to find Europeans sympathizing with the generals and the secularists than with Erdogan. And it may well be that, at least among policy elites and Eurocrats in Brussels, opposition to Turkey's candidacy stems from the difficulty to absorb 70 million people, many of whom are poor and farmers (how will French farmers survive, mon Dieu)-, but for ordinary Europeans Turkey is just too Muslim. Especially now that it is governed by a hijab-friendly Islamic party and Hayrunissa's veil is just the first step on a slippery slope towards another Green Revolution -this one unrelated to crops.

Here's an Islamic party that won a democratic election by a large margin in 2002, devoted its mandate to bread-and-butter issues, avoided confronting the country's secularism, won re-election by an even larger margin in 2007 after months of protests and veiled threats against it, and re-entered Gul's candidacy to the Presidency with his promises to respect the neutrality of the post and the country's laïcité, and to ask his wife to show a bit more hair. Could you ask for more? Meanwhile, the zealous guardians of Turkey's secularism, are the all-too-powerful military forces, partly responsible for Turkey's harsh limits on freedom of expression, its Armenian-genocide denials, its invasion of Cyprus and subsequent policies vis-a-vis the occupied north of the island, the four military coups interrupting democratically elected governments, and, until recently, its repression of Kurdish rights. If there's anything in Turkey for Europe to fear, it is not the Justice and Development Party.

Similar scenarios appear elsewhere. Many Westerners seem happy to support Fatah -supposedly secularist, but whose gunmen defiantly surrounded the EU office in Gaza and burned flags in the wake of the Danish cartoons' crisis- over Hamas, the winner of a free and fair democratic election in January 2005; happy to condone the repression of Islamist parties by authoritarian regimes in North Africa, from Morocco to Egypt; and terrified by the prospect of elections in Pakistan. In Pakistan, the threat posed by Islamic extremists -dramatically represented by the Red Mosque events- is enough to stall democratic reforms that would most likely benefit the "secular" party of Benazir Bhutto at a moment where the democratic-minded majority has shown how much it cares about the independence of the judiciary. Instead, it is deemed wiser to stick by President Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a military coup, has not fulfilled its promises of democratization, and whose much infamous Inter-Services Intelligence are found to be in bed with every unsavory character on that part of the planet, from the Taliban to Kashmiri jihadis to A. Q. Khan and his nukes-selling bazaar.

In 1991, Europe stood by as the Algerian military canceled the second round of elections after the FIS had won the first one. What followed was a gruesome civil war, among the worst in the century, and a clear sign to many Muslim groups that if they wanted to grab power they had to resort to less civilized means. This is a lesson that should be well learned by now.