Book Launch - Enduring Hold - Lahore Literary Festival
Interview with David S. Tonge about Enduring Hold
'Intellectual honesty' and 'required reading'
Francis Ghilès, associate senior researcher at CIDOB.
March 2025
If nothing else, Turkey today symbolises the failure of “the casebook experiment of burying Islam to build a modern society.” For six decades after the end of the Second World War, Western diplomats developed a wishful narrative which viewed Turkey as a westernising democracy. This was the Cold War era and western ideology found it convenient to project a country whose geographical location was important to America and Western Europe’s security as a model for the compatibility of Islam with parliamentary democracy. Little mind that military coups occurred frequently which locked up elected ministers and deputies, tortured opponents on a grand scale and curtailed freedom of the press. Even when Turkey was governed by elected governments, a powerful military which enjoyed many privileges kept an eagle eye on civilians. Furthermore there was always talk of a deep state which many Turks feared. The author of this salutary alternative to the long-standing doxa on Turkey is better placed than most to offer the first account in English of how religious orders dating back to the Ottoman times have risen to dominate and define the future of Turkey, Europe’s awkward neighbour and the major power in the eastern Mediterranean. He has known the country for sixty years, as a western newspaper correspondent and then as a resident consultant living in Istanbul. He speaks fluent Turkish. I must declare an interest here because I was introduced to Turkey in 1980 by David Tonge when we were both working for the Financial Times. I shared some of his views of Turkey but I was always suspicious of the capacity, and as I already saw it back then, the arrogance of the West’s belief in its superior civilisation which blindfolded it in North Africa, the geographical area I then specialised in, to the persistent weight of history and anthropology. Tonge speaks of western tutelage “now shaken off”. That tutelage has been shaken off in the Middle East and North Africa and has left many western politicians and media at a loss to understand, let alone formulate policy. The US is paying a price for their blindness but so are the former colonial powers France and Britain whose deep incursions into the heartland of Islamic faith has shaped the profoundly anti-western ethos of the Nakshibendis, one of Islam’s great religious orders, which is so powerful in modern day Turkey. Western commentators are surprised by the strength of such religious orders throughout the Middle East, conveniently forgetting the history of brutality they inflicted on millions of Muslims in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is yet another example of the historic illiteracy of western elites, history for them is what happened in the last decade or so. “Long buried are the hopes, burnished in the anguish of the post-September 11 world, that the Republic moulded by Ataturk would be a textbook example of Islam’s blending with modernity, modernity as described by the country’s Western allies. To cold warriors and liberals, it was a model for how Islam could and should be marginalised from politics, offering a forward-looking alternative to the discourse of al-Qaeda and ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.” By then, the secularist republic was in full retreat and had been for half a century, from before Turkey even joined NATO in 1950. Tonge recounts in detail how governments have come and gone but the one constant has been the advance of Islam. He notes how the cleric who fell out so dramatically with Erdogan a decade ago, the enigmatic Fettullah Gulen “is no outlier to this process.” The Americans misread Gulen completely. After 9/11, Washington was looking around for a Muslim voice for tolerance and dialogue and the Gulen movement seemed to fit the bill. As a senior US diplomat pointed out in those years, “It seemed almost too good to be true.” The author’s detailed description of how different sub-groups within the Nakshibendis made their way back into the military, business and education can at times get mind boggling, simply too complicated even for a reader interested in Turkey. He notes that Islam in the Ottoman Empire was “rich, deep, and variegated. The bookish and often learned ulema, the Sufi orders and with their mystical traditions, the urban intellectuals, the craftsmen and tradesmen of the towns with their vestiges of the medieval guilds, the rural communities, each followed different forms of Sunni Islam and interacted with their Alevi brethren and with Armenian, Greek and Jewish minorities.” The range of Islam on offer today has been reduced, the Sufis have a narrower cultural offer but one must never forget that the disappearance of minorities in the Middle East and North Africa is very much the result of colonial politics and the creation of the state of Israel, all of which have promoted a form of ethno-religion which is much more intolerant of the Other than was the case a century ago. Because of its intellectual honesty and because he knows and loves Turkey so well, Tonge’s book offers an informative guide to what western leaders and media would be well advised to understand about the country. And what applies to Turkey is true of most Middle East and North African countries. The fact that most western commentators, let alone diplomats know no Turkish, nor Arabic let alone Berber speaks eloquently of a Western arrogance which persists despite Europe and America’s diminished economic and diplomatic clout. The book should be required reading for those in the West who have to deal with Turkey all the more as many seem to have deluded themselves into thinking that that the country might revert to norm, so to speak, after Erdogan leaves power. The historian Peter Frankopan has pointed out that “it is not individuals who matter in history but the institutions that provide the pillars on which power is built. “This New Turkey has the Nakshibendi orders as its bedrock. They are pervasive today, their social base broadened, their structures resilient, their presence as ubiquitous as the Sufis of previous centuries.” They will shape Erdogan’s legacy and colour the contours of post-secular Turkey.
"An Important Analysis"
Sir John Goulden, former ambassador to Ankara, in the RSAA’s Asian Affairs, 2025
February 2025
This is an important analysis for anyone who wants to understand the paradox that a society dominated for two generations by the autocratic secularist Kemal Atatürk and his successors has been taken over by the equally autocratic Islamist, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The change has been sudden - in less than a generation - and is evident not just in Turkey's politics but in the military, judicial, media and, to a large extent, academic and commercial realms. David Tonge brings to this subject a distinguished journalistic career and the experience of living in Turkey, on and off, for 60 years. He draws on a large body of academic and press analysis as well as his observations and statistics to describe the origins, beliefs, and structures of the many 'tarikat' or religious orders that were a pillar of the Ottoman system. His focus is on how the orders survived during half a century of, often fierce, secularism, to re-emerge as a pillar of the Islamist parties that have changed Turkey from a pro-Western secular democracy to a maverick nationalist Islamic regime.
"A Wonderful Job"
Peter Frankopan, Financial Times
January 2025
This is the century of Turkey, as David Tonge reminds us in this excellent look under the bonnet of a rising — and reviving — superpower. The confident declaration is not the author’s own, but that of the man who has dominated the stage in Turkey for the past two decades: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. With the “foreign tutelage shaken off”, says Tonge, Erdoğan promised after his re-election as president in 2023, Turkey will become one of the top 10 countries in the world “in politics, economy, technology, military, diplomacy, all fields”. Tonge, an author and journalist who has spent time in Ankara as a correspondent, sets out to explore and explain the sinews that bind Turkey together. His focus falls on the “inexorable return of Sunni Islam in general, and the mystical religious orders in particular”, and the way that both are integral today “in the culture of the Turks”. Many may be surprised by the picture that Tonge paints. After all, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, Turkey has often been synonymous with the move towards secularisation, towards religious liberalism that was born from deeply rooted traditions of tolerance and inclusivity. No one epitomised this more than Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the man who led Turkey following the traumas of the first world war and dismemberment of an old empire by victorious European powers. Atatürk was determined to drag the Turks into the modern age and saw religion and religious leaders as standing in the way of important reforms. “Sermons are meant to enlighten and guide the people and nothing else”, the former officer said in the early 1920s. Reciting sermons that were hundreds of centuries older, or more, served to “leave the people in a state of ignorance and negligence”. Despite appearances, argues Tonge, the past century has not been one of declining influence of religion in Turkish society — but quite the opposite, for “Erdoğan’s New Turkey is Old Ottoman rather than neo-Ottoman.” Slowly but surely, Sunni Islam has been restored to its role as a central part of the people’s cultural identity. At the heart of this revival has been the Nakşibendi fraternity and its various branches — Erenköy, Süleymancı, İskenderpaşa, İsmailağa and Menzil — that have entrenched themselves across all Turkish institutions. These are just some of the tarikats — religious orders established to search for divine truth that have been part of Turkish religious, social and cultural life for centuries. Their hold on the state today is immense. They can and often do mobilise millions, whether at election time, to protest or make their voices heard. Leading figures have vast and intertwining business interests, often cemented by close family ties; some — like Osman Nuri Topbaş, a “fatherly figure” who combines being a religious preacher with a career as a prolific author — have enormous followings on social media, where their pronouncements are followed with passionate interest. As well as their profound influence in Turkey, the Nakşibendis have extraordinary reach outside the country — in part thanks to the extensive Turkish diasporas around the world, but also because of the effort and energy that has gone into building up infrastructure (and investment) from Central Asia to the Balkans, from Cologne to Brooklyn. As Tonge explains, the different Nakşibendi groupings sometimes compete with each other for hearts and minds — and well as for access to wallets and the corridors of power. Erdoğan understood this well, flattering spiritual leaders, turning up to their funerals, giving opportune speeches that chime with their messages, and building an all but unassailable power base as a result. One of the most effective calling cards, however, is the appeal to piety and to purity. In Tonge’s presentation, that has come at a high price. For one thing, that has meant an insistent presentation of a hardline version of Sunni Islam in schools where Darwinism is regularly challenged, or where leading thinkers state that watching television is more dangerous than “to sit with a snake”. For another, it has led to the evolution of parallel structures within government institutions that fuel the Netflix-ready psychodramas that involve scandals, plots and competition that sometimes bring the Turkish state to the brink. The most obvious and serious of these came in July 2016, when a full-blooded coup attempt took place, during which Turkish air force F-16s strafed the presidential palace. Blame was put squarely on Muhammed Fethullah Gülen, a man who seemed to many in the west as “an example of tolerant Islam, a symbol of Islamic enlightenment”, whose movement had been designated as a terror organisation by the government shortly before the attempted coup. Gülen, who died in October, had once been close to Erdoğan, but after a spectacular falling out had moved into exile in the US, from where he oversaw a multibillion-dollar empire spanning hundreds of schools, dozens of health institutions, trade unions and more. Tonge is an astute commentator who navigates the thorns of Turkish politics, identity and spiritual beliefs sympathetically and authoritatively. His conclusion, though, is a sad one. “Islam in the Ottoman Empire was rich, deep and variegated.” Sufi orders encouraged diversity and tolerance. Today, though, “the range of Islam on offer” has been reduced as mysticism and kindness has given way to a Nakşibendi world view that is identifiable across all the different fraternities that is strident and “intolerant”. That should give food for thought, since Turkey is about more than Erdoğan; the “New Turkey has Nakşibendi orders as its bedrock.” They have structures that are broad, ubiquitous and resilient. “They and their millions of adherents will be there to shape . . . and colour the contours of post-secular Turkey.” That is a crucial thing to understand — whether this proves to be the Turkish century or not. Tonge has done a wonderful job in reminding that it is not individuals that matter in history, but the institutions that provide the pillars on which power is built. Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at the University of Oxford. His 2023 book ‘The Earth Transformed: An Untold History’, is published by Bloomsbury
The Enduring Hold of Islam in Turkey
Author's Introduction
September 2024
A new history of modern Turkey, revealing its fifty-year retreat from Kemalist secularism. This is the first account in English of how Islamic religious orders dating back to Ottoman times have risen to dominate and define the future of Turkey, Europe’s awkward neighbour and the major power in the Eastern Mediterranean. Given its determined programme of secularization during the Atatürk period, Turkey is often projected as a model for the compatibility of Islam with parliamentary democracy. In this absorbing book, journalist and writer David S. Tonge reveals the limitations of that secularisation and its progressive reversal in what is a profoundly religious country where seven eighths of Turks describe themselves as religious or considerably religious. As he shows, the Turks’ religious identity is being progressively dominated by branches of one of Islam’s great religious orders, the Naqshbandis, whose profoundly anti-Western ethos was honed by British and French colonial incursions into the heartland of their faith. His tale is thus a salutary alternative to the wishful narrative developed by Western chancelleries during the Cold War, one which projected Turkey as a westernising democracy. This revival of Islam, leavened with the renewal of Turkish nationalism, fuelled President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rise to power, and will shape the regime that succeeds him. But, if the autocratic President is the new norm for a country long feted for balancing Islam with western concepts of modernisation, he emerges as both product and cause of the rise of Islamism in Turkey. As nationalism takes on fresh vigor, will this change? Past analysis has neglected this resurgence of the religious orders, but Erdoğan himself was nurtured by one of them, joined a second, cooperated hand-in-glove with a third (that of the infamous Fethullah Gülen), and now has the support of two others. For those brought up in post-World War II Turkey, history largely started with the creation of the Republic in 1923. But such an approach failed to explain the changes which have taken place during the past two generations as religion and nationalism have moved to centre stage. To understand these one must remember that Islam originally came to Anatolia from the heart of Central Asia and spread to the walls of Vienna. And then faced a protracted and searching debate as the Ottoman sought to come to terms with the ravages of a rapacious Europe and local nationalisms. Modern scholarship now presents Kemalism in less black-and-white terms than those used by its more ardent advocates. The reality is that secularizing policies lasted only one generation. Three-quarters of the prime ministers who ruled Turkey after 1950 took measures favouring Islam. The secularisation of the early Republic – which was always more nuanced than its supporters would have us believe – has thus long been overtaken by the return of Islam to the central role it had in society through the six centuries of the Ottoman Empire. Most analysis of the country tends to deny the recrudescence of nationalism and religion, instead adopting a teleological vision of an upward march from Islamic empire to secular republic. But the power of these atavistic forces is the reality today as Turkey rises with arguably fewer regional competitors than at any time since the sixteenth century and with the orders feeding an aggressively anti-Western narrative, as do the perceived lessons of history. The book starts and ends with the present. It traces the role of the religious orders as an integral component of Islam, helping mediate between the believer and an austere Almighty, and long acting as a key element of social stability. It explains, in a way which is often neglected, the scars left by the powers of Europe as they dismembered the ageing Empire and by the Great War. For today’s Turks, Europe’s attempts to emasculate the defeated Ottoman Empire with the Treaty of Sèvres are a far more searing warning than, say, defeat in Vietnam is for most Americans. In this nostalgia for a Golden Age the anti-colonial teaching of the orders which have come to dominate modern Turkey shapes the country’s discourse. After setting the background, the author paints the tensions of the early Republic as, proclaiming secularism, it sought to bring a deeply-engrained religion under state control. He next explores the growth of the Naqshbandis from their origins in Central Asia through Mughal Delhi to their international predominance today. This is followed by a detailed description of the progressive undermining of this secularism and of the growth of the orders during Turkey’s wrenching transformation from peasant communities to industrial powerhouse. Inherent to this is Fethullah Gülen’s long march into the heart of the state and his eventual showdown with his long-term ally, the current President. This leads into an analysis of today’s Turkey as Erdoğan builds on the religious and nationalist foundations laid by earlier Islamist politicians. The book concludes by describing what the hold of Islam and of the orders means for the future. The book draws on the experience of half a life lived in Turkey, part of this as a journalist for the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian, International Herald Tribune, Observer and others, when the author came to know the country’s leaders such as Süleyman Demirel, Turgut Özal, and Bülent Ecevit. He thus lived the change as the breezy, self-confident heirs of the Republic were displaced by the current masters of the country. For those of his generation, brought up to believe that religion and nationalism had been displaced, here and elsewhere in the world, it has been a salutary lesson. In writing the book, the author met and talked with some orders’ leaders, participated in dervish rituals, travelled with one Sufi sheikh through the Balkans, and learnt to read the messages of the dervishes’ tombs. He visited faculties of theology and talked to historians, sociologists and political scientists. And he delved deeply into recent scholarship, local and foreign, drawing also on contemporary Turkish newspapers and political reviews. Turkey’s Islam has thus been influenced by the incursions of the west, leading both to changes in the emphasis of the religion and to the development of the nationalism which is resurgent in Turkey. This linkage lies at the heart of Turkey today, enabling President Erdoğan’s rise to power and shaping the regime that succeeds him. Illuminating and understanding Turkey’s realities of faith and religious politics have never been more important.
Kremlin’s Confidant - A hero none the less
A comment by Michael Welsh, the former MEP who befriended Martin when working with Levi Strauss in the 1970s.
November 2024
I am most impressed by an outstanding piece of journalism based on a formidable volume of research. It is indeed a monumental effort on your part, and evidently a remarkable journey for you. Reading Kremlin’s Confidant has made me think a great deal about Martin with whom I enjoyed a warm friendship over many years; my family have vivid memories of a holiday with Martin and Kiki in Kalamata in 1978 when we drove down from Brussels in a rather small Fiat and overnighted in Byron’s house in Athens. We always got on well, in part because we came from rather similar backgrounds, and I think I understood him better than many of the people he had to deal with. I knew quite a lot about the middle period of Martin’s career and many of the characters featured in the book are very familiar. I knew a lot less about the Russian period so reading it filled in a lot of gaps. As time went on, I saw Martin become less tolerant of any opinion but his own on issues such as Cyprus. For all that I still have a great deal of affection and admiration for Martin who by any test was one of the more remarkable people I have known. With this in mind and out of appreciation for your book I am adding a few random thoughts on Martin as I knew him, although I am fully in accord with your overall conclusions, notably in the Epilogue, which I think are admirably balanced. I think the key elements in understanding Martin’s character are his unbreakable self-belief and instinctive antipathy to most forms of established authority; these were fueled by his Hentyesque romanticism and the ethos and values of a public school education in the first half of the last century. The younger Martin could have stepped straight out of the pages of Stalky and Co. He saw himself as an idealist engaged in a constant battle with the forces of darkness to deliver a better world which conformed to his personal ideals and standards – there was no room for compromise. Unfortunately his judgements of people were frequently misplaced - if he thought you were on his side you must be OK, otherwise not. As a result, he frequently became embroiled with people who did him serious harm and failed to win over others who could have been helpful and supportive. The paramount example of this was his relationship with Mintoff which I feel is under stated in your account. Martin told me that when working for Naval Intelligence in Malta he had been given an informal assignment to keep tabs on Mintoff with whom he regularly played squash; Mintoff was clearly a man of considerable charm and Martin fell under his spell becoming something of a protégé; indeed when Martin was threatened with being taken off the assignment Mintoff insisted he remain on the basis that “Lt Cdr Packard knows all about my political ideas and activities.!” I am sure that the fact that Anne was Mintoff’s daughter was a key element in that disastrous relationship-– indeed he told me at the time that she was very like her father. This lamentable episode was like a modern version of Book 1 of The Faerie Queen with Martin as the Red Cross Knight, Kiki as Una, Anne as Duessa and Mintoff as the Necromancer! The corruption and criminality of the Mintoff government, his abiding legacy which continues to infect Maltese politics, are well set out in Paul Caruana Galizia’s book A Death in Malta, an account of the life and tragic death of his mother, the investigative journalist, Daphne, who was blown up with a car bomb in 2017. I cannot understand how Martin with his ideals and high principles could have been so comprehensively taken in. Other examples are Bertie Mizzi, the businessman, and Nicos Samson, a terrorist, both of whom were described by Martin in glowing terms before disillusion set in later. I am sure there must have been many others. I have vivid memories of having lunch with Kiki sitting on the balcony of the Kolonaki flat when Martin was living with Anne in Malta. At one point in a long conversation she said, “You know, happiness for Martin would be catching a train by running down the platform after the barriers have closed and jumping on to the last carriage as it pulls clear.” Not a bad metaphor, and one that says a lot about how she saw Martin at that stage. It is the story of the Knight Errant in an addictive, perpetual quest for adventure and excitement constantly testing himself against seemingly impossible odds; an epitome of that classic Greek literary concept of the flawed hero – tormented by the gods and never quite succeeding, but a hero none the less.