Compared to Arabs, Turks were latecomers to the Muslim faith. The former were politically and intellectually more advanced until the 13th century, when the Arabs’ brilliant civilization was nearly destroyed by one of the most devastating conquests ever, the Mongol invasion. The formation of new global trade routes from the Middle East and the Levant to the oceans initiated a process that would steadily impoverish the Arab world, which owed much of its wealth to trade. The long-term result was the stagnation of the Arab peoples.

 

 

Meanwhile, leadership of the Islamic community was passing to the Turks, who created powerful states under the successive Seljuk and Ottoman dynasties. The Ottoman state extended its borders towards both the west and the east, and, in the 16th and much of the 17th centuries, acted as the world’s foremost superpower.

 

 

The political power of the Turks and their continual interaction with the western world gave them an important insight: They faced the rise of modernity. The Ottoman elite had to rule an empire, make practical decisions, adopt new technologies, and reform existing structures, all of which allowed them to understand and cope with secular realities. Sociologist Şerif Mardin defines the consequent praxis as “Ottoman secularity”, and notes that Ottomans started to discover “Western ways” more than two centuries before the founding of the Turkish Republic.

 

 

The 18th-century discovery of Europe by Ottoman bureaucrats resulted in the famous “Imperial Gülhane Decree of 1839”, also known as the Tanzimat Edict, which introduced the ideas of supremacy of law and modern citizenship to the empire. In a second substantive reform edict, in 1856, the dhimmi (“protected”) status of Jews and Christians was abolished, and they gained equal citizenship rights.

 

 

Later in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire accepted a constitution that guaranteed equal rights for citizens, and opened an elected parliament in which all peoples of the empire were represented. Muslim thinkers such as Namık Kemal made Islamic arguments in favor of liberal democracy, and Islamic feminists began arguing for equal rights for women. 

 

 

This much-forgotten Ottoman modernization ended with the demise of the empire in the First World War. From its ruins, what we now call the Middle East arose with a doomed legacy: almost all post-Ottoman states were colonized by European powers, a phenomenon that would soon breed anti-colonialism and anti-Westernism throughout the entire region. These sentiments also brought about the end of what the great historian of the Middle East, Albert Hourani, has called the “liberal age” of the Arab world: basically, the Arabic counterpart of Ottoman modernization.

But Turkey was never colonized. As an ever-independent nation, it continued its modernization process while not facing any backlash from its pious Muslim citizens. 

 

 

During much of the 20th century, the number one threat for Turkey’s pious Muslims was “godless communism”, and the free world was perceived as a valuable ally against that hated threat. Probably the most influential Islamic thinker in Turkey in the last hundred years, Said Nursi, repeatedly called for an alliance between Christianity and Islam against communism and its underlying materialist philosophy.

 

 

Turkish Islam has also been free of anti-Semitism. The Ottoman Empire welcomed the Jews that were expelled from Spain in 1492, and ever since, Jews have lived peacefully in Turkish lands. The Arab-Israeli conflict, although it has generated sympathy among Turks for the plight of the Palestinians, never created widespread hatred of Jews.

 

 

Despite all this, it is true that Turkey has had its own radical Islamist movements, especially since the early 1980s. But they have not been homegrown. Arab, Pakistani, and Iranian ideologues of radical Islam, such as Sayyid Qutb, Sayyid Abul-Ala Mawdudi, and Ali Shariati, inspired a generation of Turkish Islamists who deeemed the traditional praxis of their ethnic-religious community too pacifist. The political Islamism that would carry Necmettin Erbakan’s Refah (“Welfare”) party to power in 1996 was also of foreign origin: It was modeled on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and exploited the radicalism of the aforementioned Islamist youth. But in the late 1990s, this movement lost steam. Its more liberal faction gave birth to the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been in power since November 2002 and has proved itself one of the most reformist governments in Turkish history.

 

 

Today, too, Turkey’s Islamic heritage is not an obstacle to its ongoing modernization and democratization. On the contrary, it actually sometimes helps these processes, as when advocates of pluralism refer to the Ottoman past in order to criticize the narrow nationalist views that deny the rights of minorities. 

 

 

That is also why Turkey is often viewed as an inspiration to those in the Arab world who wish to build their own democratic nations. The recent wave of revolutions against Arab dictators, i.e. “the Arab Spring”, has been positively influenced by Turkey’s growing soft power in the region, as it allows democratically minded Muslims to point to a government that exemplifies their dreams. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan further stressed this role in his recent trips to Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, where he supported democratization and even spoke in favor of a secular state. A secular state which “stays an equal distance from all religious groups, including Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and atheist people,” is the best political model, Erdoğan said, and that is what Muslims should strive for.

 

 

To be sure, Turkey needs to work more within its own borders to consolidate and advance its democracy. But it is already a success story in its region. And this success did not come in spite of its religion, as some have assumed. On the contrary, Turkish Islam has contributed to Turkey’s democracy. 

 

 

Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish journalist, and the author of the recently released Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (W.W. Norton)