on religious modernizers

Hugh Pope gets a ringside seat on the demonstrations in Istanbul:

The demonstrations are already about a lot more than sympathy for condemned trees in a street-widening scheme at the Gezi Park, and have taken on a distinctly anti-government tone. Reasons for the protests I’ve heard from friends over the past 48 hours include: a reaction to the ruling party’s focus on building shopping centers everywhere, even in Istanbul’s last patches of green, like the future mall planned for Gezi Park; how the half of the population that didn’t vote for the government resents what it sees as its increasingly high-handed, majoritarian, we-know-best style; among secularists, a sense that the ruling party revealed a Islamist agenda that could infringe its lifestyle with sudden new regulations this month on alcohol consumption (my blog on that here); among the 10 per cent Alevi minority, anger at this month’s choice of Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim’s name for a third bridge over the Bosphorus, since he killed many Alevis; the general feeling that there is little transparency in what the government plans and does, and that the media is under great pressure not to discuss real events or who benefits financially from projects (one mainstream TV program during last night’s was about radiation on Mars!); and above all, a sense of powerlessness, and frustration at the inadequacy of the main political opposition parties, which have left the bulk of secularists of Istanbul with a feeling that they’ve had no real political representation for years.

More background on the protests here; and here’s a deep dive into one of the Istanbul neighborhoods due to be erased by the Turkish government’s ongoing programme of authoritarian beautification.

Historically, the whole thing has a 19^th century French feel to it, in the sense of government dominated by a pious, provincial bourgeoisie wanting to tame the big city antinomians. But reading about this stuff it’s amazing how well a certain type of – in this case – Islamic piety dovetails with neoliberal concepts of modernization. Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising when you look at places like Dubai, but it’s remarkable how exact the comparisons are. The same basic suspicion of ‘urbanity’ in the widest sense of the word, the dislike for forms of life, commerce and culture perceived to be messy or low prestige, the way in which a form of commercial standardization seems to complement or substitute for a repressive moral code and the way in which the only unthreatening secular activity that the economic, political and in this case religious establishment can imagine is shopping. 

Comments

[shah8]

Actually, that para starting with Historically... is a really good turn of thought.

It dovetails alot with my thinking of just how Western press harps on Venezuela lacking toilet paper, and why they seem to think it's important in a way other than as an issue the gov't of Venezuela has to fix in the usual palette of governing crisis that all countries have.

I mean, many fairly modern place often lack toilet paper in public places (even if there is plenty in the stores), because toilet paper is one of those things people tend to hoard, even against family members...

There is just a real fascination with cleanliness and presentation when it comes to people being really authoritarian. Purity complex or something. And this tends to play out in the press of various political media organs. It also tends to play out in industrial (and especially housing) policy as well. Greece had this problem as well, and so does Turkey today, with the result that there isn't the kind of import/export balance that's particularly sustainable. Malls and subdivisions (a pernicious problem in Egypt and Mexico as well) are built, because transfering land in the name of "development" is a very profitable activity for regime insiders. No public parks for you lowly urban schlubs, it should be a MALL (and transfer public assets to private) for the glittering and most "modern" of Turks!

[Chris Williams]

How do state agencies make money? They can tax people, but the easiest way to do it is to develop state-owned land. Planning ('zoning') can often help here, by preventing anyone else from getting a look in. I suspect that as UK's local government is defunded, we're going to see a lot more 'development' which is mainly designed to see the local council's balance sheet in the black at the end of the year.