If Cihan Tuğal’s book was filmed as a political thriller, the pre-credit sequence would go something like this: George Bush, against the backdrop of the Bosphorus Bridge, delivers a speech announcing the discovery of a cure for radical Islamism to the 2004 nato summit in Istanbul. As Commander-in-Chief of the ‘war on terror’, Bush has a flattering message for his Turkish hosts: ‘Your country stands as a model to others, and as Europe’s bridge to the wider world. Your success is vital to a future of progress and peace in Europe and in the broader Middle East.’ The ‘Turkish model’, showing the perfect match of moderate Islam with American-style democracy, would prevent a dangerous fundamentalism from taking hold. The camera would pan back to show the audience of Western leaders eagerly applauding Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, whose government epitomized the nato-friendly Islamic liberalism which they hoped would take root in the Middle East. At this point, the screen would darken and the words, ‘Twelve Years Later . . .’ would appear. In the next scene, the same world leaders would be seen sneaking into a monstrously flamboyant palace to beg an autocratic President Erdoğan to block the wave of Syrian refugees fleeing the war that the ‘democratic face of Islam’ had been stoking, with Western collusion, for the past five years. The screen darkens again and the movie’s title is emblazoned across it: ‘Falling Bridge, Rising Wall’.

The Fall of the Turkish Model offers a forensic analysis of the akp-Erdoğan phenomenon. For over ten years, Western mainstream intellectuals, media and politicians were so dazzled by this image of the perfect blend of East and West that objective thinking and critical stances were set aside. The Justice and Development Party (akp) and its leader were praised for creating a bon pour l’orient democracy—that is, good enough for the Middle East; clearly not up to Western standards, but acceptable. Abroad, critics of Erdoğan were labelled as self-hating Muslims, unable to cope with their identity. At home, they were at first stigmatized as alienated intellectuals, or cheerleaders for the Turkish Army’s role in politics; later they were simply branded ‘infidels’ or agents of foreign influence. The claim that a majority vote was the same thing as democracy created an atmosphere in which critics of the akp would automatically be defined as enemies of the people, to be subjected to constant online defamation by the akp’s trolls.

As the Turkish model has grown visibly more tarnished, a few more critics are to be found today, even in the mainstream American media. However, as Cihan Tuğal emphasizes, the complaints are still limited to Erdoğan’s authoritarian inclinations and do not question ‘Islamic liberalism’ itself. He traces the origins of Turkey’s Islamist project, its record in power, and its influence on movements elsewhere in the Middle East—especially Egypt and Tunisia, where attempts to emulate the akp ran into the ground after 2011. From an apparent high point in the first phase of the Arab uprisings, when Erdoğan’s disciples looked set to inherit the region, the Turkish brand of Islamism has now been driven back onto its home territory, where it has become ever more reliant on coercion to maintain its grip. Tuğal is critical of fashionable scholarly approaches which ‘eulogize civil society’ as a habitat for liberal Islamist mobilization against the ‘secular’ Middle Eastern state. He proposes instead a broadly Gramscian framework with a focus on ‘political society’, defined as ‘a field of actors and organizations that have comprehensive social visions’. In advanced economies with settled liberal democracies, he argues, parties usually predominate in this field; but in more dynamic situations, it will be ‘populated by sociopolitical organizations and groups that are difficult to classify’. The interaction of these actors with state and civic structures will determine whether a country faced with a strategic impasse will follow one of three paths: revolution, counter-revolution or passive revolution, in the Gramscian sense of ‘restoration–revolution’. For Tuğal, a nation’s socio-economic, political and cultural path is sustainable ‘only when it rests on a well-organized power bloc’ capable of welding together the ‘interests, dispositions and outlooks of various dominant strata’, and of mobilizing wider social layers behind its project.

This analytical framework is then used to examine the outcomes in four countries where modernizing, nationalist projects took shape under the direction of secular elites: Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Tunisia. By the closing decades of the twentieth century, all four had reached an impasse. The Egyptian and Tunisian regimes had largely discarded their nationalist trappings and become Western client states, in thrall to the Washington Consensus—especially Tunisia, which was, in Tuğal’s words, ‘the most orthodox neoliberal regime in the Arab world’ and something of a poster-child for the imf. On the other hand, the fall of Pahlavi’s dictatorship in Iran and its replacement by an Islamic Republic supplied a model, both positive and negative, for religious forces throughout the region. Turkish Islamists went through several organizational mutations before consolidating as the Welfare Party in the 1980s; they managed to increase their vote steadily, from 8 per cent in 1987 to 16 per cent in 1991 and 21 per cent in 1995, when they emerged as the largest party. The movement also trained a generation of cadres through the İmam Hatip religious schools: ‘In a country where intellectuals had previously been equated with the left, the emergence of this new, avowedly Muslim intelligentsia would be a significant element in the construction of Islamism as a hegemonic alternative.’

The first Welfare Party government under the leadership of Necmettin Erbakan clashed with Turkey’s Kemalist establishment and was deposed in a military coup in 1997. This experience helped crystallize the ideas of a younger generation of Islamist politicians grouped around the Istanbul mayor Tayyip Erdoğan, who first tried to take over Erbakan’s reconstituted party, then broke away to form the akp in 2001. As Tuğal explains, the new party set out to convince established power-holders at home and abroad that they had nothing to fear:

The akp would not challenge the headscarf ban, they reassured the old elite. They emphasized their allegiance to the free market (in line with the interests of their own increasingly bourgeois support base) and parliamentary democracy. The leaders were also vociferously pro-European and committed to the process of eu accession. They made frequent trips to the United States.

For Tuğal, the akp leadership was trying to forge ‘an updated version of that alliance of export-oriented businessmen, religious intellectuals and the state elite at which the subordinate fraction of the power bloc had traditionally aimed’. Above all, it was the newly rich provincial businessmen of the central Anatolian region that would provide the akp’s social foundation in the 1990s. Their offices were all decorated in the same fashion: a replica of the Bosphorus Bridge, bookshelves adorned with a set of Ana Britannica encyclopedias, and a cheap nylon seccade, or prayer rug. When asked why they had the seccade on display, the answer was always the same: ‘Nobody would want to do business with us otherwise.’ The modest prayer rug was a sign of humility and religious faith, while the Ana Britannica—a free promotional gift offered by newspapers and magazines in those days—symbolized respect for enlightenment. This nouveau-riche layer paved the way for Erdoğan and his party’s ascent by enlisting millions of their employees in the movement. The akp’s narrative of modern Turkish history presented these people as the real backbone of Turkey, a class formerly oppressed by the secular Kemalist elite. At the same time, the akp was highly successful in mobilizing support from liberals with its pro-eu orientation and talk of cutting the Army’s political role down to size.