On July 15, a cabal of rogue officers attempted to overthrow the Turkish government. Had the putschists been staunch secularists, the bloody fiasco would have confirmed the thesis of author Shadi Hamid’s new book: The failure of democracy to take root in the Islamic world is owing not to the election of Islamists but to the panic their ascent to power prompts among secularists, who react by staging coups.
But these coup plotters were not secularists — or, at least, no one in Turkey thinks they were. What precisely happened is still opaque, but Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, often described as an Islamist, is certain that the coup was staged by Islamists of a rival camp — loyalists of the preacher Fethullah Gulen. All of Turkey’s politicians and parties, including the main opposition party — the “secular idiot elites,” in the words of one of Hamid’s interlocutors — agree that Gulenists were to blame. All offered their immediate, wholehearted support to Turkey’s elected Islamist government.
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