He has a long history of Islamist militancy, for which he has spent time in jail, and is still banned from public office because of it.

And yet, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been touring European capitals in recent weeks to portray his movement as “a branch of the Western democratic tree.” At a meeting with journalists in Paris last month, Erdogan said that the AKP’s main program was to “establish a truly secular system” in Turkey. “We are the true secularists,” he said to the amazement of those present.

What on earth could he mean?

For almost eight decades Turkey has proudly described itself as the first secular state in Islam, thus drawing fire from fundamentalists. And now we have Erdogan telling us that the Turkish state is not secular. “Secularism means a separation of religion and state,” Erdogan says. “In Turkey, however, the state controls religion.”

All started in 1924 when the newly established republic, having abolished the caliphate, realized that it needed some institution to assume some of its functions. A Bureau of Islamic Affairs (in Turkish: Diyanet Isleri Turk-Islam-Birligi or DITIB) was set up by Ataturk, the founder of the republic, to do the job.

The DITIB is an organization with assets worth billions of dollars. It controls thousands of endowment properties, from apartment blocs in Istanbul to farms in Anatolia. It also owns about 80,000 mosques and builds a further 1,500 each year. The DITIB employs almost 100,000 people, including 45,000 imam-khatibs who lead prayers at mosques and deliver the religious sermons. A 100-man team of writers produces the texts of the sermons that are approved by the authorities before delivery.

The DITIB has a monopoly of issuing fatwas (religious opinions) and is in charge of censuring publications that might stray from the official path in matters concerning Islam.

When religion controls the state there is theocracy. When the state controls religion there is plutocracy. Both could become different forms of dictatorship. “We want to become full Europeans,” Erdogan says. “ In Germany the government does not dictate what is said in church on Sundays. In Britain girls can go to university wearing whatever they like, including an Islamic hijab. In Turkey, however, speaking of Islam in your own way could land you in jail. And girls can certainly not enter universities or government offices, wearing the hijab.”

The new AKP government, headed by Prime Minister Abdallah Gul, has promised to change that with a series of constitutional amendments. Opponents of the AKP claim that Erdogan and Gul are playing the European card in a diabolical game aimed at removing barriers erected against radical Islamism over the past decades.

The abolition of the DITIB would mean the transfer of huge assets to private religious groups that could interpret, promote and use Islam in whatever way they like, regardless of the interests of the state. Such developments could provide the AKP with a solid socioeconomic base from which to strengthen itself over the years.

The hardcore of AKP’s vote is estimated at five to six percent of the electorate. In many parts of Turkey the AKP is not even physically present. But in the recent election the AKP collected 34 percent of the votes, by attracting protest voters. Wresting away the control of state-owned mosques, shrines, holy places, and, above all, endowed (waqf) businesses, would provide the AKP with a strong and permanent presence in virtually every town and village. The AKP could appoint thousands of its militants to influential and profitable positions throughout the land and make sure that its preachers control all the mosques.

Erdogan wants to turn the Turkish military’s version of secularism upside down, thus hoisting the Kemalists with their own petard. In Erdogan’s system the state and the mosque will be strictly separate, something that could please some gullible Europeans. But the party would control the mosque that, in turn, would control enough of the electorate to keep the AKP in power for years.

It is not the first time that a Turkish party has tried to break the hold of the state on religion so that it can use Islam as a power base. The temptation existed from the beginning when Ataturk created two political parties: the People’s Republican Party, designated as social democratic and strictly secular, and the Democrat Party which was to be more traditional and mildly Islamic.

Fawzi Chaqmac, the Democrat Party’s first leader used the Islamic theme by linking it to the “glory of the Ottomans”. His successors, Celal Bayar and Adnan Menderes, went further and injected overtly religious themes in their discourse. During Menderes’ term as prime minister more than 30,000 new mosques were built.

When the army intervened in 1960 to remove Menderes from power — he was subsequently hanged — one charge against him was an alleged attempt to use religion to undermine the secular republic. Later, other leaders, including Suleyman Demirel and Turgut Ozal, both of whom sprung from the Democrat Party, tried to use religious themes to win votes.

Erdogan is as much caught in his contradictions as are the Kemalists in theirs. This is because the whole debate about secularism is out of place in Islam. Secularism is relevant in a Christian context because Christianity regards the realms of God and of Caesar as distinct. No such distinction is possible in Islam in which attempts by either religion or state, Siamese twins that they are, to impose itself on the other lead to discord and disaster.

When Erdogan and Gul say they want to make Turkey “fully European” they should carefully contemplate what this actually means. Put plainly, secularism means a system in which man-made laws could, and often do, supersede, laws that religions present as divine.

Is this what Erdogan wants for Turkey?

When we put the question to him he dodged it with one of his charming smiles before chewing a corner of his Errol Flynn moustache.

Arab News Opinion 13 December 2002