During the Independence struggle the seeds of Pan-Islamism were sown among Muslims in India through the Khilafat movement by Ali Brothers and company which led to the partition. By invoking the idea of ‘Caliph’ in the form of Turkey’s President Erdogan, the similar game is being played. The obsession with the concept of Caliph and accepting extra-territorial loyalties on the religious ground are dangerous trends. Turkey is known for anti-India statements especially on Jammu-Kashmir, open support to Pakistan and strategic alliance with China. With abysmal human rights record and baltant use of force against minorities, Turkey along with China poses the greatest threat to the democratic world. The visit of actor Aamir Khan to the Turkey’s first family should be seen in this light
-Abhinav Pandya
#Erdo?an: #Turkey is the only country that can lead the #Muslim world was the Headline in pro-government newspaper, Yeni ?afak, dated October 15, 2018.
It is a matter of record that India’s Muslim community is the target of determined efforts towards radicalisation by Saudi Arabia spreading its ultra-conservative Wahhabism and by Pakistani-sponsored jihadism.
Is Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attempting to join them?
How credible are reports of alarming outreach activities directed by Erdogan among India’s Muslims? To what extent does the Turkish president harbor ambitions to become the Muslim world’s pre-eminent leader? And how does India fit in to this scenario?
What do I mean when I refer to Erdogan’s Caliphate ambitions? It is a project aimed at fulfilling Erdogan’s ambitions to seize the political leadership of the Muslim world legitimated by consciously assuming the mantle as successor of the glorious history of the Ottoman empire. It is both a religious power play, on the back of his Islamist political roots, and a foreign policy manoeuver bolstering Turkey’s interests.
There are certainly signs that Erdogan seeks to call on the Ottoman imperial legacy to bolster his standing, justify his aggressive strategic posture in Mideast politics and to legitimate his increasingly authoritarian rule. Earlier this year he explicitly declared that the Republic of Turkey was “a continuation of the Ottoman Empire,” inferring that as its leader, he was analogous to the Caliph.
‘Pundits love to talk about “implacable historical confrontation” between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi. In reality it is the ideological gulf between Saudi Arabia and Turkey, not Iran, that is more deeply rooted. It is about the future of the Middle East.’
Commentator Borzou Daragahi quoting Graham E. Fuller in The Geopolitics Of The Khashoggi Murder
In any contest for leadership, Erdogan’s main obstacle would be Saudi Arabia. Indeed, Erdogan’s Saudi rivals have been quick to accuse him of trying to build a new “Ottoman caliphate.”
That may sound somewhat conspiratorial to those used to seeing the wider Middle East principally as the locus of rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’a Iran. But that ignores centuries of Ottoman – Wahhabi/ al-Saud rivalry, a tension that spiked most recently in the wake of the Jamal Khashoggi murder.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan studiously ignores Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ttthe G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina November 30, 2018
It was the Ottoman Turks who brought down the first Wahhabi empire in the early 19th century. One hundred years later, the treaty of Serves (1920) ended the caliphate, and Kemalist Turkey became a westernized secular-democracy. However, as is often the case with countries with a glorious imperial past, dreams of political resurrection and irrendentism die hard.
Despite Saudi Arabia being the “Guardian of the Holy Places” of Mecca and Medina, Erdogan’s bid for Muslim leadership has other factors in his favor. His potential popular support is less contaminated by accusations of collaboration with the United States. He is far less obsessed with the geostrategic threat of Iran, and with sectarian Shia-Sunni rivalries in general, and is already engaging with Iran and Qatar.
And despite Turkey’s descent towards becoming an elected dictatorship, its institutions of state are still far more embedded and robust than the non-existent democratic institutions of the Saudi absolute monarchy, which also makes it a more attractive model.
It should be noted that part of the discourse around a renewed Caliphate has become part of a dirty tricks and blame game between Erdogan and his public enemy number one, Fethullah Gulen.
Writing for the Gulen-associated “Turkish Minute,” Abdullah Bozkurt suggests that Turkey’s president has directed its diplomats to approach prominent clerics, businesspeople and politicians, pointing to specific extremist Islamic clerics such as Sheikh Salman Nadwi as a main conduit for establishing an Erdogan support base among Indian Muslims. Another anti-Erdogan writer, Aydogan Vatandas, suggests explicitly that the president’s real ambitions are to revive the institution of the caliphate by 2023.
What is a caliphate?
The definition of caliphate is “government under a caliph.” A caliph is a spiritual leader of Islam who claims succession from Muhammad. The word stems from the Arabic khalifa meaning “successor.”
Historically, caliphates are governance under Islamic law, which calls for election of leadership under Sunni practice and selection from a group of imams in the Shia tradition. The rule of law by Islamic ethics is a common thread to the governance under of a caliphate. Caliphate rule was largely symbolic, the power of local sultans and rulers handling the day-to-day operations of government.
The Ottomans, rulers of an empire centered in what is now Turkey, used the symbolism of the caliph to expand their rule in Arab countries, but it wasn’t until the late 18th century that the role of the caliph referred to political rather than spiritual leadership. When the Ottoman Empire came to an end with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, it was the end of the caliphate.
Indeed, Indian strategic experts tend to view Erdogan’s initiatives as targeting the influence of the Gulen movement (which focuses on faith-based Islamic education) and rule out the possibility of any larger geopolitical ambitions. But this seems to be a narrow and shortsighted view.
Erdogan has good reason to invest in Indian Muslims. Support from the world’s third largest Muslim population would be a welcome boost to Erdogan’s claim to be the modern-day leader of the Muslim world.
One vehicle set up by a close Erdogan aide appears to have a clear mission to spread the good news of the coming Turkish caliphate specifically among South Asian Muslims.
The South Asia Strategic Research Center (GASAM in Turkish) is a think-tank established by Ali Sahin, a Turkish Islamist who studied in Pakistan who now serves as deputy minister for European Affairs in Erdogan’s cabinet. GASAM organizes conferences to which it invites Muslim clerics, politicians and community leaders from South Asia, to export AKP’s Islamist ideology to Indian Muslims. Sheikh Nadwi’s son Yunus, currently studying in Turkey, is a regular panelist in the conferences organized by GASAM.
The links between Erdogan’s Islamist coterie and Indian clerics are long-standing but also deepening: a number of controversial Turkish Islamist clerics are regular visitors to India; one of them, Sardar Demirel, who was educated in Pakistan, visited Kolkata in 2016 to participate in a protest march against PM Modi’s Uniform Civil Code (a reform measure to bring Muslim divorce laws in line with India’s secular laws).
Concurrently, Turkey has extended a warm welcome to several extremist Indian Muslim preachers, such as Zakir Naik, called “the world’s leading Salafi evangelist,” notorious for inspiring one of the Islamist terrorists who perpetrated Bangladesh’s worst terrorist attack – on a cafe in Dhaka in 2016, in which 24 people were killed; he is currently facing an arrest warrant in India.
Naik delivered a speech at TUGWA (an Islamist group run by Erdogan’s son Bilal) in 2017 and In his speech, available on YouTube with nearly 25,000 views, he declares that Erdogan is the only Muslim ruler who has the guts to support Islam openly: “O Muslim world, wake up…May [Erdogan] be the next ruler of the Muslim world.”
Turkish state media, especially international channels such as TRT World, have also been reaching out to Indian Muslims, by playing particularly on alleged Indian abuses in Kashmir, a hot button topic.
Turkey also funds NGOs for outreach among Indian Muslims, Muslim student exchange programs, and influence within madrasas and mosques – not yet on the scale of Erdogan’s initiatives with the Turkish diaspora in Germany and Austria and other EU states, but with the same intention: to ensure an equation between Muslim leadership and the personality of Erdogan.
Indeed, Erdogan’s victory in the presidential elections of June 2018 led to huge celebrations from Kerala to Kashmir. Kashmiri separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farookh was among the first to congratulate Erdogan.
How does Erdogan’s strategy fit into the context of India -Turkey relations more generally?
After India’s independence, relations with Turkey were cold at worst, formal at best. Turkey, to India’s discomfort, always took positions on Kashmir that reflected its political proximity to Pakistan.
Turkey’s foreign policy, in recent years, favors Pakistan and China, India’s geopolitical rivals, and hostile to moves cementing a more prominent position for India in international institutions such as the UN Security Council and its long opposition to India joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which Ankara lifted only in 2016.
Erdogan’s visit to India in April 2017, and the cordial relations between Erdogan and Modi showcased on the sidelines of the recent G20 summit are evidence of some personal chemistry between the two leaders, as well as points of contact between their leadership styles.
However, Turkey’s unfavorable positions on key strategic issues for India remain a hurdle, as is India’s warm relations with Saudi Arabia: veteran Indian diplomat Rakesh Sood has noted, “opening a new page for India -Turkey relations clearly needs to wait for better times.”
Zakir Naik
What is the likelihood that the Muslim community in India may be susceptible to Erdogan’s charms?
Firstly, Turkey and the vast majority of India’s Muslims, both non-Arab Muslim communities, both follow the same Hanafi school of Sunni Islam. That Hanafi school – in India, the Deobandi and Barelvi traditions –is a built-in advantage for Turkey over Saudi Arabia, whose far more alien Wahhabist Islam faces resistance from local Hanafi schools and India’s indigenous Muslim culture.
Secondly, there’s a tradition of reverence for the Ottoman caliphate. After the revolt of 1857, to escape British persecution, several Indian clerics sought, and were given, refuge in Ottoman territory. In 1919, Gandhi launched the Khilafat movement against the dismemberment of Caliphate by the British, with the massive support of Indian Muslims.
Thirdly, the culture and temperament of Indian Muslims are such that the brutal and extremist methods of an ISIS-style caliphate or Saudi-style Wahhabism has little traction, already proven by the fact that despite boasting the world’s third largest Muslim population, only 112 Indians have traveled abroad to join ISIS.
The Dangerous Alliance: Erdogan is in tactical alliance with another despotic
regime led by Xi Jinping. This coming together of despotic ideologies is a danger to the world peace
regime led by Xi Jinping. This coming together of despotic ideologies is a danger to the world peace
Turkey’s moderate version of political Islam, with Erdogan as the leader figure, is more likely to be welcomed by Indian Muslims. As Erdogan ratchets up the authoritarian nature of his rule, owning ever more comfortably the nomenclature of “Sultan,” his aspiration to be recognized beyond Turkey’s borders as a transnational leader of the Muslim world – a Caliph – expands.
And as the Hindu nationalist footprint strengthens in India, and Muslims feel increasingly threatened, they may seek a more powerful backer abroad to protect their interests, rights, security and identity.
(The author is a Cornell University graduate in public affairs, is a policy analyst specialising in counterterrorism, geopolitics. Wahhabi radicalisation in India. The article was originally published on www.haaretz.com & reproduced with the prior permission of the author)
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