"Turkey: slipping into the vortex?"

As whack as the plan to supply Europe's electricity* from North Africa was, the idea of making Turkey a full member of the EU was a sign of mental illness at the highest levels of the self-annointed Eurocracy.
Seriously, have they been listening to what Erdogan is saying?

From the Financial Times Magazine:

Tensely poised between east and west, Turkey is a nation on the edge — negotiating with the EU but with the Isis jihadi wave lapping at its southern border 

In the shadow of Fatih mosque, named for the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople in 1453 and the first great monument of his dynasty, I learnt last month when the world is going to end. Sipping sweet tea at a shoeshine stand in this Islamist pocket of Istanbul, a preacher and a mystic together foretold for me the coming of the Mahdi — the Muslim messiah — the global triumph of Islam and the end of days.

Dialling up Mahdi lore from a millennium or more ago on their mobile phones, they reckoned all this will kick off in 2021. Except that, they pointed out, in a sense it is already under way. Two of the traditional harbingers of the Muslim apocalypse, they said, are the destruction of Syria and the emergence of an army with black banners — in this case of the jihadi millenarians of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), who last year declared their cross-border caliphate in the Euphrates valley.

I had come to Fatih to sound out local sentiment on this new jihadist wave, which is lapping at Turkey’s southern borders with Syria and Iraq, after credible reports that Isis had been recruiting in the district to swell its already numerous brigade of Turkish volunteers. Fatih, on a peninsula bordered by the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, was at the heart of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires over nearly 16 centuries, and a hub therefore first of Christianity and then Islam. Bisected by a 4th-century Roman aqueduct, its majestic 15th-century mosque became a rallying point for those who would supplant republican Turkey’s secular order with sharia law.

My initial questions at the shoeshine stall elicited a robust if standard defence of the neo-Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, elected president last year after more than a decade as prime minister, during which he won three general elections on a rising share of the vote. There is little doubt which way Fatih leans. Hassan Senay, 58, a small businessman typical of the ruling party’s rank and file, reels off the ways in which Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, has reinvigorated the marginalised municipality, with regular electricity and assured water supplies, new schools and clinics, as well as a costly restoration of Fatih mosque. “They counted us in whereas the others counted us out,” says Senay, referring to the previous, west-leaning establishment that owed allegiance to Mustafa Kemal — known as Ataturk or father of the Turks. Kemal forged modern Turkey from the debris of the Ottoman Empire defeated in the first world war and his followers presumed to rule it as of right.

While such temporal concerns translate into votes for Erdogan, it was when we started talking about Isis that the hour-long conversation suddenly lit up. Mehmet Barut, a 74-year-old with white hair and beard dressed in a three-piece suit, is a retired vaiz or mosque preacher, licensed — according to the credentials he showed me — by the Diyanet, Turkey’s religious affairs directorate, created by Ataturk after he abolished the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. His friend Fatih Halit Alkan, 61, is of Ottoman-Bosnian origin, with azure-blue eyes fixed on the middle distance and a pronounced mystical bent: “I have beautiful dreams,” he told me.

They both argue that Isis is a barbarous Anglo-American confection designed to provoke Sunni Muslims into revolt and then destroy them. But its real instrumental purpose, they say, is as the precursor of the end — Armageddon. There will be dissolution and destruction, says Barut. An infidel will take power in Syria. There will be drought and infertility, and in the mosques, naked dancers and raki (an anise liquor, to which Ataturk was famously partial). “The infidel wants to turn off God’s light, but that will never be possible,” Barut says. The angels will assemble, disarm America’s atomic bombs and sink the US naval fleets and, Alkan adds quietly, the Mahdi will emerge from a razed village near Damascus. The black banners of Isis will rally to his standard and he will enter Istanbul at the head of an army of 1.5 million soldiers, and from there set out to conquer the world for Islam.

It will not be as bloody as one might imagine, Barut reassures me, because during this apocalyptic battle “a blonde nation, maybe Germany or England, will choose Islam”, hastening the road to the Rapture. Alkan beckons to Tuncay Ergun, the 32-year-old who does the actual shoe-shining and who says this “father of the weak” rescued him from a heroin habit. They disappear into the Fatih mosque for afternoon prayers, leaving me the phial of rosewater they used for their ablutions.
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Turkey, geographically and culturally, is the east of the west and the west of the east. That is, historically and now, its irresistible selling point. But this straddle across Europe and Asia — joined by Istanbul’s bridges across the Bosporus — has started to feel tense. Millenarian musings aside, Erdogan’s Turkey sometimes has the feel of a country slipping from the ragged edges of Europe into the vortex of the Middle East.

10
Number of consecutive electoral victories by Erdogan since 2002

Consider the case of Turkish Airlines, the frenetically expanding national carrier and arguably the country’s leading brand, propelled by celebrity endorsements, from basketball titan Kobe Bryant to film star Kevin Costner, and lavish sponsorship deals with leading football clubs such as FC Barcelona and Manchester United. Turkish was voted the best airline in Europe in each of the past four years. Yet it tried to bar its female flight attendants from wearing red lipstick and nail polish. That decision was taken in May 2013, just before metropolitan and coastal Turkey erupted in rebellion.

The trigger for this protest was the decision to destroy Gezi Park, a little green oasis near Taksim Square in the chaos of central Istanbul, which the government had decided to bulldoze and redevelop. The Justice and Development party, assembled from the rubble of two Islamist parties banned by a Kemalist cabal of generals and judges, has delivered much of what its name promises, as Erdogan’s fans in Fatih say: lifting per capita income, spreading wealth and healthcare, education and roads, and raising up a new breed of “Anatolian tiger” entrepreneurs to take on Turkey’s incumbent business conglomerates....MUCH MORE 

Turkey: slipping into the vortex? - FT.com

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