For a year or more now, there’s been a steady drip of “Who lost Turkey?” stories. The modern secular Muslim state – a country that gave women the vote before Britain did and was Israel’s best friend in an otherwise hostile region – certainly, that Turkey seems to be being de-boned by the hour: it now has an Islamist government whose Prime Minister has canceled trade deals with Israel, denounced the Iraqi elections, and frosted out the US Ambassador because he was Jewish; a new edition of Mein Kampf is prominently displayed at the airport bookstore. In other words, the Zionist Entity’s best pal is starting to look like just another cookie-cutter death-to-the-Great-Satan stan-of-the-month.
But among all the lamentations only Michel Gurfinkiel’s recent analysis in commentary got to the underlying reality: Since the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire, there have been two Turkeys: the Turks of Rumelia, or European Turkey,
and the Turks of Anatolia, or Asia Minor. Kemal Ataturk was from Rumelia and so
were most of his supporters, and they imposed the modern Turkish Republic on a
somewhat relunctant Anatolia, where Ataturk’s distinction between the state and
Islam was never accepted. In its 80-year history, the population has increased from 14 million in 1923 to 70 million today, but the vast bulk of that population growth has come from Anatolia, whose population has migrated from the rural hinterland to overwhelm the once solidly Kemalist cities. Ataturk’s modern secular Turkey has simply been outbred by fiercely Islamic Turkey. That’s a lesson in demography from an all-Muslim sample: no pasty white blokes were involved. So the fact that Muslim fertility is declining in Tunisia is no consolation: all that will do, as in Turkey, is remove moderate Muslims from the equation too early in the game.
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