While Turkey was displaying clout on Friday, challenging its NATO partners over the choice of the alliance’s new secretary general, President Hugo Chávez was in Tehran, inaugurating the Iran-Venezuela Development Bank.
That in an increasingly hostile region Iran’s lone best friend seems to be the controversial Venezuelan — even as Turkey dictates policy at NATO, lectures at Davos and holds a seat on the U.N. Security Council — hints at the immense distance between two of the Muslim world’s most important nations.
So much separates Iran and Turkey in the court of world public opinion today that it is easy to forget just how many similarities they share. Both have ancient, pre-Islamic civilizations and were, for long stretches, empires. Both cover strategic territory in or near the Middle East and possess relatively large, well-educated populations (66 million for Iran, 76 million for Turkey). Neither is Arab, yet both are overwhelmingly Muslim. The two countries also share more than a millennia of rivalry and cooperation.
In the early 20th century both Iran and Turkey underwent military coups, with the putchists, Reza Shah and Ataturk, then becoming unlikely reformers. Ataturk introduced a secular constitution and women’s suffrage; he also made such a deep impression on the Iranian monarch that Turkey was the only foreign country Reza Shah visited in his reign.
By the mid-1970’s, when my family moved from Tehran to Ankara, Iran was awash in oil money and seemed well ahead of its neighbor in every respect. Barely a few years later it underwent a violent and traumatic revolution, followed by the bloody 10-year war with Iraq. A massive brain-drain to Europe and America followed — roughly one third of Iran’s physicians and almost half of its academics left in the years after the revolution, depriving the country of desperately needed talent.
Turkey, meanwhile, notwithstanding student riots, military coups and labor strikes, was building a strong industrial base. (The running joke among our Turkish neighbors in those days was that they would not shave until the country was able to produce its own razor blades.) Not cursed by oil, like Iran, Turkey was better able to diversify its economy and master its political destiny without outside meddling.
Today Turkey is an economic powerhouse in the region, holding sway from Central Asia to North Africa. Its image of a democratic, secular and thriving Islamic country is sustained by unprecedented diplomatic efforts. In recent years it has opened some 12 embassies and 20 consulates across Africa, and last year acted as host in Istanbul to the first Turkey-Africa Cooperation Summit, attended by 50 African states at the highest levels.
Iran, meanwhile, seems endlessly mired in an ever-deepening nuclear controversy; it has been put thrice under sanction by the U.N. Security Council; its citizens are pariahs at international gatherings. In 2008, Turkey’s stock of foreign investment abroad reached $14 billion; Iran’s was barely $1 billion.
Since the Islamic revolution in Iran, the paths followed by the two countries have vastly separated — nowhere more so than in the exercise of Islam itself.
Turkey’s secular credentials, despite having an Islamic party in power, remain strong. Last year it took the remarkable initiative of setting up a commission of scholars to conduct a revision of the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet and one of Islam’s most sacred texts. Turkey has also tried to establish academic and scholarly standards for its religious leaders, thereby strengthening its place as a real center of Islamic learning.
And while historically Iran had always been the more tolerant to its minorities, on this front, too, Turkey is gaining the upper hand: In March this year, the Turkish government commissioned the translation of the Koran into Kurdish in its continued efforts to rid itself of past demons and align itself with the European Union on granting political and cultural rights for its minorities.
Not surprisingly, the situation of women reflects the two differing ideologies: Turkey’s most famous entrepreneur, Guler Sabanji, is a woman, head of a multi-billion-dollar business conglomerate and frequently honored and feted by her government. Iran’s most prominent citizen on the other hand, the Nobel Prize winning lawyer Shirin Ebadi, regularly faces harassment for her efforts on behalf of human rights.
Today, only 2.8 percent of Iran’s parliamentarians are women, compared to Turkey’s 9.1 percent. Meanwhile the talents and potential of Iranian women, who make up 65 percent of all university students, are being wasted in countering edicts on the size of their veils or the length of their Islamic uniforms.
When my family lived in Turkey, we were frequently impressed by our Turkish friends’ confidence in their multiple and sophisticated identities. They seemed proudly and instinctively to feel Turkey as a real bridge between East and West. Modernism, secularism, their ancient culture and Islam seemed to sit together, ever so comfortably. This philosophy has served their nation well.
In the great narratives of national destiny, Iranians today look upon their Turkish cousins with admiration, but an admiration distinctly tinged with envy.
Nassrine Azimi is director of the Hiroshima office of the U.N. Institute for Training and Research.
nytimes.com/autos
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