Are Muslims abandoning the Chief, or is the Chief abandoning Islam? (28.05.2018)

Let me start with the Felicity Party.

On 10 February of this year, Felicity Party’s leader Temel Karamollaoğlu and the AKP’s Chief came together. It was not mentioned in the official post-meeting statements, but, from what leaked out, there was discussion of the electoral cooperation that would be named the “People’s Alliance” following an election to be held either early or on time, and agreement was not reached.

Indeed, on 21 April, Tayyip Erdoğan said on a TV station, “The Felicity Party did not give a positive response to our call for an alliance.”

Why?

This question somehow failed to attract the degree of debate it deserved on the political plane and in the media. Two parties hailing from the same political tradition and fuelled by more or less the same religious brotherhood sources, two parties of political Islam predominantly Sunni and Hanafi, distant from Alevis and having contradictions incompatible with secularism let alone Kemalism, could have forgotten their past spats and quite cosily made an electoral alliance and united in the “People’s Alliance.”

But, it was not to be.

The Felicity Party is known to be the side that did the rejecting and no serious objection to this rejection came from within the party. Even more curious, weeks later, when the Felicity Party combined in a “Nation Alliance” with the CHP, which carries great Kemalist weight in Turkey and defends secularism with a decisiveness that does not invite contemplation of an alternative, yet again no objection was forthcoming from within the party or religious brotherhoods close to the party.

In the election campaign following the taking of the early (indeed, too early) election decision, harsher criticism has been and is being directed here and there from the Felicity Party wing at both the political line followed by the AKP and the AKP Chief than from the CHP.

There has to be a reason, an explanation, for the Felicity Party making such a - in my view most astonishing - political preference, doesn’t there?

 ***

 There is more.

The day before yesterday, an - in my view most astonishing – announcement came from another party aligned with “political Islam.”

Sait Şahin, spokesperson of Hüda-Par, which exerts an influence not to be belittled in Kurdish provinces, attaches more importance to its religious identity than its ethnic identity and has its roots almost entirely among Kurdish members and voters, spoke on a TV programme and made an unexpected pronouncement.

He officially announced that the AKP Chief had also wanted Hüda-Par to join the “People’s Alliance” and added:

“... An invitation came from the Ak Party. There were talks; in the end, there was no meeting of minds and an agreement did not take place.”

However, the Hüda-Par spokesperson did not stop at that, and held out an olive branch to the HDP, which until yesterday it had seen, not as a “political rival,” but an “ideological enemy.” Indeed, it issued a call that would make the description “olive branch” appear tame.

I quote those astonishing sentences verbatim:

“... We believe that two parties whose bases are Kurdish need to normalise and we have taken steps in this direction. When we speak of Kurds, one brother sides with Hüda-Par and one brother with the HDP. We are speaking of the same issue. The HDP-Hüda-Par issue is a family issue. (...) We are ready to imbibe the sweet drink of peace, to imbibe the sweet drink of dialogue, to imbibe the sweet drink of normalisation. I am coming out with it this straight.”

The Hüda-Par spokesperson is right. It is indeed very straight.

We are, however, talking about a party that derives from the bloody, very bloody, Islamist organisation of the 90’s, Hezbollah. A Hezbollah that in those moronic “wham-bam generals” days of the 90’s did away with many a fine Kurdish lad through the “single bullet to the back of the neck” method.

(Oh, that was how my fine handsome friend Habib Kılıç was done away with in Batman. The pain of it has now once more pricked my heart.)

 ***

 Coming from relations based on such a bloody past, there has to be an explanation for Hüda-Par’s “sweet drink of peace call” to the HDP today and, even more importantly, its refusal to take part in the AKP Chief’s alliance.

Its refusal, just like the Felicity Party, to take part in the front named the “People’s Alliance.”

Why, pray, did Felicity and Hüda-Par not consent to stand side by side with the AKP and set up an alliance? Why did they spurn the AKP Chief in the knowledge that if they sided up to him they might get a few seats (perhaps a lot) in parliament?

Was it because they did not see the AKP as being a party in the ranks of political Islam and Erdoğan as being a leader of political Islam?

Makes sense, if you ask me.

And, it is true to a large extent.

 Müslümanlar Reis’i mi, yoksa Reis İslamı mı terk ediyor?