Erbakan's Cause, Part IV
Education, Industrialization, and the Just Order
This is the fourth and last part in the series on Necmettin Erbakan’s treatise/biography.
Part I was mostly on Erbakan’s early years as an engineer and the basics of his Islamism. Part II was on a long chapter called “the powers that rule the world” in which he gave a sweeping overview of modern history as he sees it. Part III was on foreign policy issues, including Islamic unity and Cyprus.
Here I’ll finish my summary of the chapters, and for paid subscribers, reflect briefly on Erbakan’s legacy, including the rise of his youngest son, Fatih Erbakan, and the relationship between the AK Party and New Welfare.
Our Educational Cause (Maarif Davamız)
At 4.6 pages, this is the shortest chapter in the book. Erbakan says that educational outcomes in Turkey have been awful because the curriculum is a mere imitation Western education. He argues that if Milli Görüş came to power and restore the nation’s wholesome Muslim identity, they would re-orient the education system towards fulfilling the country’s actual needs. Schools and universities would be put into the service of practical needs like growing agricultural output, creating an industrial base, and developing indigenous weapons systems.
It’s telling that this is the shortest section. Education has always been an afterthought for the Islamists, which is why it’s almost universally acknowledged to be the policy area in which the AK Party has done the worst. They weren’t really able to institute practical education, but have been more successful at infusing religious doctrine into the K-12 educational curriculum. A recent law called the “Turkey Century Education Policy” using the same type of pseudo-Ottoman language that Erbakan liked, has kids spend roughly half of their time on religious studies.
Our Industrial Cause (Sanayi Davamız)
The one policy goal that Erbakan focused more than anything else was building the capabilities for indigenous weapons systems. He rightly thought that the way to get there was to establish a base of heavy industry.
As discussed before in this book, Erbakan believed that modern science and heavy industry are originally the intellectual property of the Muslim world. The West stole it and appropriated it to gaslight Muslims into believing that they are an inferior civilization. This chapter is rich on this topic:
To give an example, the steel-producing city of Solingen in Germany was named after a German named “Solingen” who came to our country centuries ago during the Crusades… After his return, he opened a smithy in this village in Germany and started to practice the art he learned from Muslims there. Today, that village has become one of the largest industrial centers in Germany. However, when history is examined, it becomes clear that this astonishingly developed center of steel has us as its instructor, the Islamic civilization that we belong to.
Erbakan then launches into a short history of modernization and industrialization in Turkey, starting from the late Ottoman period. He argues that Abdulhamid II engaged in industrial projects that were ahead of the Europeans (a vast exaggeration) and that the West - via the Young Turks - stopped him. He then says that the early Republican period also saw some attempts at industrialization, but that these were again scuppered by a corrupt elite. There’s an example from 1951, when he says Turkey could have developed buses of its own, but was made to import parts and assemble them. He says Turkey imported intermediary machinery to build roads, but didn’t build those machines itself, so its road construction remained rudimentary. Yugoslavia, meanwhile, took the longer route and did better.
All this meant that Turkey couldn’t develop its own weapons. There’s an extraordinary bit towards the end where Erbakan is fantasizing about destroying American warships. He says that a group of Turkish MPs once went on an American warship off the coast of Istanbul and told him about how shocked they were at the level of technology:
The man puts down the [tea] cup in his hand, turns to his right and presses some computer keys, giving the necessary command for the missile launch. There is a tremor on the ship as a missile takes off. On the screen, they show live the missile heading towards the ocean and then hitting the target.
In other words, they have developed technology so to an extent that they commit the greatest cruelty by drinking tea and coffee while sitting at home.
This might have seemed like a bit of a stretch in Erbakan’s time, but it isn’t anymore. I’m not sure drone operators are allowed to have beverages on the job, but they could.
This isn’t as awful as it might appear, Erbakan argues, because technology has a way of working for the underdog. You don’t have to match the enemy’s firepower, you just have to get to a technological edge that will allow you to develop a counter:
Now, we, as the Islamic world and the entire oppressed world, want to protect our rights. So how will you protect it? They have 40 aircraft carriers. If you say “sir, let me make 40,” then until you build these 40 ships, they will build 80.
What will you do then, how will you think of this? Will we never be able to surpass the advanced technology they have?
You create such a magnetic field in the air that can intercept the missile launched from that ship. You can even repel that missile with the superior technology you have and hurl it back at the ship that launched it.
There are minerals whose friction in the air is so low that the missile you make from them will travel a thousand times faster than any missile and open like a magnetic shield in the air. It will catch their [Western] missiles and warplanes in the air and neutralize them. The cost of that warplane is $100 million. The cost of this magnetic shield I speak of is $500,000. You can counter their $100 million weapon with $500,000. This is what technology is.
It is the grace of God. It is actually a great opportunity for underdeveloped countries to get ahead of countries that consider themselves advanced. When you do this, there is no need to build an aircraft carrier. His aircraft carriers are then practically yours. Let him fire as many missiles as he wants, they will explode on his head anyways.
What are we talking about? How do we [Erbakan] know these things?
Because we are also a technical professor. We have specialized in these issues for years.
That is why we can never accept foreign dependence and insufficient industrialization. Our cause, our fight for industrialization, begins at this point. If they have missiles, we must have the technology to return them whence they came.
We say that this noble nation possesses this talent and this strength.
It is just a matter of believing and shifting gears accordingly.
There you go. I say Israel should be paying Erbakan’s estate royalties for every missile launched from an Iron Dome battery.
On a more serious note, I can see how Erbakan might be right about technology and defense. In some sense, the more important technology is in defense, the easier it becomes to catch up. Turkey has been able to put together a cheap drone and use it effectively and reach interesting strategic objectives with it. As we’ve seen in Ukraine, industrial brawn still matters in war, but technology does allow you to cover a lot of ground without a hugely taxing increase in defense spending. That seems to be the course Turkey is on right now. Erdoğan wants high-yield defense technology without breaking the bank.
People unfamiliar with the Islamist tradition might also find it jarring that a major Turkish politician is fantasizing about Americans launching missiles at Turkey, and that Turkey (presumably representing the Islamic world) would return fire. All I can say is that this sort of thing was very common across the Islamist imagination, and it’s very common today in most pro-government circles. It’s considered inappropriate in official, and especially diplomatic circles of course, but it’s very prominent in popular media and certainly everyday discourse.
Our cause of the Just Order (Adil Düzen Davamız)
In the last chapter, Erbakan lays out his vision for the economic and social structure of Turkey. I think this is the most neglected part of Erbakan’s legacy. For the Islamist movement, it’s the path not traveled.
The chapter starts with a long and scattered rant about how the world order is unjust, and how Communism and Capitalism are both evil and decadent forces. Erbakan then suggests that he has developed the answer, and calls it “Adil Düzen,” (AD) meaning “Just Order.” This was the policy platform he ran on in various local and national elections.
It’d be a mistake to treat AD like a serious policy. It’s more like a concept sketch, a utopian vision that Erbakan presented as a finished policy platform. AD would strip away the things Erbakan didn’t like about the capitalist economy and put in other things. He’d get rid of interest lending and fiat money, and substitute it with Islamic finance. In AD, the state would set priorities, and individuals and companies could choose the roles they are going to fulfill. Workers would also own a share of the businesses they work in. So if there’s no interest, no excessive profits, it would mean that there’d be no incentive structures that put workers and bosses on different paths. Everyone would be inundated in wholesome Islamic principles anyways, so they’d all be genuinely motivated to advance the national cause, and wouldn’t get distracted with strange ideas of class struggle or self-actualization.
Erbakan always believed that if he could implement this system, it would yield amazing results very quickly, and Turkey would soar into unheard-of production numbers. It would also uplift other Islamic countries, not just through the force of its example, but also through excess production. In that sense it’s a very utopian idea.
He doesn’t say it in his book, but Erbakan didn’t come up with AD on his own. It was first advanced by the late theorist Süleyman Karagülle, another İstanbul Technical University (İTÜ) graduate. Karagülle was a more Orthodox Islamist, and spent a lot of time working on the Quran directly in an effort to extract social and economic principles from it. I’m a (somewhat distant) relative of his, and always thought that he was a very thoughtful person. He passed away due to COVID in 2021 at the age of 93.
Of course AD didn’t go anywhere, but among all the Islamist causes, this is the one I actually have some sympathy for. I think it’s reasoning from false premises - I don’t think we can derive immutable social laws from ancient scripture - but I think it’s good for people to take a closer look at Capitalism and Socialism, and try to reason from the ground up. Karagülle actually tried to put AD into action, but that’s for another post.
The AK Party departed from this thought. They decided to hold on to the liberal economic order in the West. It was the early 2000s, the age of “third-way” liberalism, and the AK Party’s founders thought that they would hitch their wagons on neoliberal economics, rise to power, and revise later. Erdoğan has occasionally come back to AD territory, infamously by becoming his own central banker and lowering interest rates with the expectation to kill inflation (it did the opposite).
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