Erdogan Rising

But the OSCE also noted some serious flaws in the system. The AKP had won just 34 per cent of the vote but taken almost two-thirds of the seats in parliament. The only other party to take up seats was the CHP – a result of Turkey’s arcane election rules, which state that only parties that tally more than 10 per cent of the vote can enter parliament. The votes of those that fall below the threshold are distributed between those who have reached it.

Erdoğan, though chairman of the victorious party, could not take up one of its seats – his criminal conviction barred him from taking public office. Abdullah Gül became prime minister, but the AKP immediately began gathering cross-party support for the law barring Erdoğan to be changed. Gül served for just five months before stepping aside for Erdoğan in March 2003. Some within the party were unimpressed.

‘No one was expecting me to resign, even Tayyip Bey [a Turkish honorific, roughly Mr Tayyip],’ says Gül. ‘Everything was going very well. There was a lot of pressure, but I did not think it would be ethical for me to stay. [Erdoğan] was chairman of the party. It was an ethical matter. I thought it would be better for me to leave [the prime minister’s position].’

By April 2018, when I meet Cevat Olçok, Arter has stuck with the AKP and vice versa for seventeen years, through ten election campaigns and countless other publicity drives – and now the loss of their founder and visionary, Erol Olçok. Under him, they took their AKP formula international, working on political campaigns in northern Cyprus, Iraq, Georgia, Egypt, Malaysia, Albania, Macedonia, Libya, Tunisia and Ukraine. They also take on other work in the commercial sector.

But for Erdoğan, their number one client, Arter has always gone above and beyond the role of spin agency: Erol Olçok even stage-managed the grandiose society weddings of the president’s children. It was he who commissioned the song about Erdoğan for the 2014 presidential elections – and convinced his boss of its merit.

‘The mathematics of our campaign was like this. Our hero was Erdoğan,’ Erol Olçok later said. ‘Then Mr Erdoğan called me to his side. He said, “Is it too late to say this song is very personal and it would not be right to use it?” I said to him: “Mr Prime Minister, this song has nothing to do with you. This song is for the people who wish to express their love for you. This is their statement.”’

Set to the rhythm and tune of the dombra, a pounding Turkic-style war song, the lyrics still echo around the Erdoğan rallies I go to five years on: He is the voice of the oppressed, the lush voice of a silent world! Recep Tayyip Erdoğan …

‘Erdoğan is a genius in regards to political communications and so was Erol,’ says Cevat Olçok. ‘They knew … how to touch people and understand their feelings. They were a match.

‘Erdoğan and his party came to get rid of the old order. They widened Turkey’s perspectives and horizons. He gave us self-confidence. Now we have much bigger dreams. We will build our own electric car. We are building our own fighter jets and tactical helicopters. We are the seventeenth biggest economy in the world. We were the most expanding country in this year’s G20. Erdoğan is realising Turkey’s dreams. This is why he is a great brand.’

4

ERDOĞAN AND FRIENDS

The diaspora

Ufuk Seçgin is a Turk without Turkish citizenship and, at heart, a liberal. In Germany, where he was born, grew up and went to university, he supports the left-leaning Social Democrat Party. In Britain, where he has a second citizenship and runs his business, he is a Remainer. But in Turkey – in his DNA – he is a solid supporter of Erdoğan and the AKP. It is about more than just clever marketing.

‘You should have been in Turkey in the 1990s. Compare that with now, it’s day and night!’ Seçgin tells me in his crisp German-accented English. ‘Going to hospital was high risk, basically. I can remember how we were buying medicine from pharmacies in Germany and sending them because either they were not available in Turkey or they were so expensive they couldn’t buy them. And food banks, water cuts – there was no clean drinking water. Like fuel stations you would have water stations in the city. People would go with their empty containers and fill them, every day. Electricity just a few hours a day. You see that and then you see this, what’s going on now. And you say, well, this was definitely a success of the Ak Party.’

As a child born to Turkish migrant parents in Hamburg in the 1970s, Seçgin could at first only claim Turkish citizenship. His German identity documents listed him as a ‘son of a Gastarbeiter’, the name for the Turks who flocked to Germany as economic migrants in the post-war boom. They were not allowed to become German nationals. Then, in the election campaign of 1998, the Social Democrat Party pledged to lift the rule that meant only people born of German parents could claim citizenship. Seçgin, a business student with big plans, saw a new spread of opportunities open up with the promise of EU citizenship. But though the SDP won the election they were shunted back on their promise by pressure from the right wing. The amendment to the citizenship law that was eventually passed allowed the children of Turkish migrants to become German citizens – but only if they renounced their Turkish nationality. Migrants from anywhere else were allowed to keep both.

‘That was because they wanted to avoid people running on both cars,’ says Seçgin. ‘It’s black or white. You’re German or you’re Turkish. Where are your priorities, that type of thing.

‘I still remember, I went into one of my local meetings with what was then the head of the foreign commission in the German parliament, a so-called veteran of politics. He had been forty years an MP in our region. I asked him why are you doing it this way, and gave him a list of citizenship rules from other countries. He started to give me stupid answers and I pushed further, and further. And the answer he gave me was: “What if Turkey enters a war against Germany? Who would you fight for?”’

Seçgin took German citizenship, and renounced his Turkish, in 2004. The Turkish government provides German-Turks in the same position as he is with a blue card, which allows them to live and work in Turkey as if they were citizens but without the right to vote. Nonetheless, they are invested. Seçgin was studying for an MBA at Cardiff University when the AKP was first elected in 2002. He was already a keen supporter. His flatmate – another German-Turk who, unlike Seçgin, weaved a booze-filled, Casanova-like path through British university life – joined the party online as he saw the votes coming in.

‘I said: “Anything Erdoğan or the Ak Party says is completely the opposite of what you believe. So why on earth are you joining?” And he said: “I’m going to be a businessman, and the earlier I join AKP the better for me in the future.”’

Both Turkey and Germany have since yanked at Ufuk Seçgin, trying to make him decide whom he loves more, but really all he wants is to be a successful Muslim businessman in a globalised world. Like many Turks he feels fed up with the EU and the endless merry-go-round of Turkey’s attempts to join it. He once supported Turkey’s membership bid, but now feels it would be better outside it. At the same time, in the UK he is facing the impacts of a Brexit he didn’t vote for, and which doesn’t appeal to him. He will no longer be able to hire talent from the continent with the same ease as he hires British workers, or to work across borders so easily.

Now, in the AKP and Erdoğan, Seçgin sees a party and a leader with some problems. He says there are few signs of a succession plan, no new generation of leaders being nurtured, and he feels the arrests of journalists in the wake of the coup attempt have gone too far. He worries that the Turkish economy, once so buoyant, may soon start to shrivel. But in uncertain times across the span of his world, Erdoğan is one of the few certainties Seçgin can cling to. The president has brought wealth, stability and honour to Turks like him – and to those looking in from the outside, Erdoğan’s flamboyance masks many of his flaws.

‘I don’t see, who has got that charisma? Someone like Erdoğan doesn’t come along every ten years. He comes along every thirty years or whatever,’ Seçgin says. ‘Even his opponents say he is really charismatic, knows his stuff. He has put Turkey back on the map.’

The new Muslim middle class

Seçgin is part of a wave of pious businessmen who have made it big in Erdoğan’s Turkey. Halalbooking.com, the business he co-founded in 2009, is an online holiday booking service aimed at observant Muslims. It is a fast-growing market; Halalbooking.com is currently valued at $60–70 million.

In May 2017 – the start of his most successful season to date – I accompany Seçgin on a tour of the halal resorts of Antalya alongside two dozen businessmen and women, all of them European Muslims. Thirty-six-year-old Songül, a stylish German-Turk from the city of Bremen, donned the Islamic headscarf and started practising her religion by the book six years ago after the birth of her two daughters. It was only then that she realised the dearth of lifestyle brands aimed at middle-class Muslims – and so she became one of the pioneers. Songül started her online bookings business in 2016, and still had only one competitor in the online halal tourism sector in Germany a year on.

‘It was a boutique industry before, all very expensive,’ says Songül. ‘You would either hire a private villa or go to exclusive resorts where it costs around four thousand euros for a family holiday for one week.’

Over four days, Seçgin leads us on a tour of the new wave in pious holidaymaking – the mass-market halal hotels. The Bera, the first to be awarded halal status in Turkey, is our first stop. The sweet smell of hookah smoke wafts through the cavernous lobby, and a wide panorama of Istanbul’s Bosphorus Bridge with a mosque in the foreground hangs behind reception. The Bera is owned by a conglomerate with ties to Erdoğan: when he was mayor of Istanbul, the municipality sold it a piece of prime real estate in the heart of the city for a fraction of its true value. The television screens are showing ATV, a pro-Erdoğan channel, and Yeni şafak and Sabah, its newspaper equivalents, are propped up in a rack by the door. On leaving, I am handed a gift: an encyclopaedia of Ottoman history.

Otherwise, The Bera is just like any other package resort: filled with hyped-up small children and parents who look as if they’ve been craving this holiday since they flew home from the last. I ask a couple from Preston who are slumped in the lobby’s comfy chairs as their two tiny girls scoot around whether they thought twice about a holiday in Turkey after the coup attempt and terrorist attacks.

‘We’ve not really heard about those,’ the mother tells me, clearly wishing I would move on so she can relax. ‘We just came here last year and we liked it, so we decided to come again.’

The food at the buffet is halal – but otherwise no different to any other resort. In my comfortable, clean room I find not a Gideon Bible and a minibar stocked with beer and wine but a Quran and a Qibla, an arrow stuck to the ceiling to show the direction of Mecca. At reception in the women’s spa and beach area I am frisked by a (female) security guard and stripped of my phone and camera before being gestured through smoked-glass doors. Through the changing rooms and treatment suites, the path leads out onto a fifty-metre stretch of beach surrounded by billowing curtains of fabric hung between flagpoles thirty metres high. You cannot see out to the sea – the view is blocked by the sails, although the water can still lap in underneath. The women wear reasonably conservative bikinis on this boxed-off beach, even after being freed of the male gaze. I ask one if it bothers her that she cannot contemplate the horizon as she sunbathes.

‘But if it was open, the men could look at us as they come past on boats and jet-skis,’ she replies.

In the lobby that evening, as we relax with tea and flavoured tobacco, I ask Seçgin how the drop in visitor numbers to Turkey since last year’s coup attempt has affected his business. He looks at me as if I were crazy.

‘Drop?’ he replies. ‘Last year we doubled our business, and this year we doubled again!’

By 2017, Turkey has risen to become the world’s third most popular destination for halal travellers, a four-place rise on the year before (only Malaysia and the UAE score higher). In a global halal tourism market now worth $151 billion annually, Turkey dominates the beach-holiday sector. The country accounts for a disproportionate amount of the hotels listed on Halalbooking.com, not out of a conscious effort on Seçgin’s part but simply because Turkey is the place with the best-developed concept of what an all-inclusive halal holiday means. This, after all, is an evolution of the model the Turks have been fine-tuning on booze-soaked European tourists since the 1980s.

‘Turkey is the centre of package resorts,’ Seçgin continues. ‘At the lower end there are the mass-market resorts. And at the high end in the halal market there’s the Angels Resort, where the rooms start at three hundred and fifty euros a night. I have one customer from Ukraine this year – he booked six weeks there and spent thirty-one thousand euros!’

But this is Turkey. And here, the sacred always comes with a side serving of the profane.

The original pioneer of the country’s now-booming Islamic leisure sector is the unlikely Fadıl Akgündüz, who goes by the nickname ‘Jet’ and is a conman of such confidence that every time he is released from prison he starts plotting his next swindle. Most recently, he served fifteen months for a libel conviction after he claimed that the governor of an Aegean province had tried to assassinate him in a car crash. Before that, he defrauded hundreds with dodgy timeshare deals, and back in the late 1990s he collected millions of pounds from investors, many of them Turks in the European diaspora, for a construction project in Ankara that never materialised. Before that, though, he launched his first and only successful project: Turkey’s first halal holiday resort.

The Caprice Hotel in the Aegean seaside town of Didim is a monstrosity of glass and plastic façades that looks, at a distance, like the stern of a sinking cruise ship. Inside, it is pure neo-Baroque. The domed ceiling of its lobby is painted with tulip motifs in the style of the old mosques of Istanbul. Its floor is inlaid with gold mosaics. Like any other hotel catering to the mass tourism market, it has an all-you-can-eat buffet every mealtime, a huge swimming complex and spas, and a path leading straight to the beach. There are also à la carte restaurants serving Chinese and Italian food, and a designer boutique offering some of Turkey’s top brands. Turkish stars perform in the hotel’s entertainment centre every week. The well-heeled tourists who stay here would have no reason to leave its gaudy confines, apart from acute claustrophobia. And if they are devout Muslims – as almost all of them are – they can relax safe in the knowledge that they will never miss prayer time.

Jet Fadıl Akgündüz opened the resort in 1996 with the strapline: ‘A modern vacation complex, where the call to prayer is heard five times a day.’ The idea of a hotel catering to the Islamic market was unheard of in Turkey at that time. It was the era when the Refah Party’s Necmettin Erbakan was prime minister and Erdoğan the mayor of Istanbul – but Erdoğan’s jailing and the toppling of Erbakan’s government in the ‘postmodern’ military coup of 1997 would remind everyone that the Kemalists were still in charge. Local residents in this largely secular part of Turkey were dismayed when Akgündüz bought what had once been a resort for debauched European tourists and turned it into a haven for the devout – but his business boomed. Muslims with money to spend had previously had to share their hotels with customers who followed totally different lifestyles: drinking alcohol, sunbathing in bikinis in mixed-gender areas, and disregarding the patterns of the Islamic day. Now, they could spend their leisure time in an environment just like that of their homes. In halal hotels, the swimming pool and spa areas are segregated by gender, there is no trace of alcohol anywhere, and prayer rooms are provided so that guests can slip straight from the poolside to the prayer mat.

Slowly, other Turkish businessmen caught on to the potential and by the time the AKP took power in 2002 there were five halal hotels in Turkey. By 2014 the sector had mushroomed to 152 halal resorts, spas and boutique hotels across the country, including a halal ski resort and a cruise ship. Part of that growth can be explained by the overall rise in wealth in Turkey over the same period, which lifted the poorest – and generally most pious – section of the society from a subsistence-level existence to a level affording them disposable income. The average annual income in Turkey in 1998, two years after the Caprice opened, was $8,567 and the average rent costs in the gecekondu – literally, ‘built in the night’ – districts ate up half of a family’s income. By 2014 the average wage was $19,610 and rent or mortgage repayments now only took up a quarter of their pay. A new middle class has risen, buoyed by a growing class of businessmen from the conservative cities of central Anatolia. And they want in on all the things the elites have been enjoying for decades.

There is also the Erdoğan factor.

‘There is more Islamic political influence now,’ says Seçgin. ‘Muslim people are standing up and saying: “Hang on, I also work hard, I have more money, I want to take part in all these great things that everyone else is doing, the upper ten to fifteen per cent of the society.” The industry was starting to develop before Erdoğan, and until recently there hadn’t been a single policy by the tourism ministry in support of this industry. Nothing. So, you might argue that without Erdoğan the industry would probably have developed anyway. But my fear is that for political and ideological reasons, some people in Turkey may have tried to prevent this sector from thriving. By Erdoğan and the AK Party being in power, their passiveness, they have helped the industry to thrive. They didn’t support us at all, but they also didn’t do anything to prevent or hinder us. And that’s already a good thing, because under different governments, I can imagine some would have tried to stop this industry from going further.’

The Turkish Standards Institute started providing halal hotel certification in June 2014. Until then Turkey had lagged behind in the sector compared to other Islamic countries such as Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates; even the UK’s tourism board, Visit Britain, held halal tourism conferences before Turkey. But without much official help, the sector has taken root and flowered amid the fleshpots of the Aegean and Mediterranean coastlines. Some of the halal resorts are spanking new and purpose-built. Others are older hotels that were once stuffed with hard-drinking Russians and Europeans but which have now been converted – stripped of their bars, fitted with prayer rooms, their swimming pools and beaches divided into men’s and women’s sections.

As the halal tourism market evolved, so too did the business plan of its original entrepreneur, Jet Fadıl Akgündüz. As more mass-market resorts opened, he upgraded the Caprice to a five-star luxury resort and changed the ‘Hotel’ in its name to ‘Palace’.

‘Thank you, Caprice Palace, for providing so much for the ladies!’ gushes the dubbed star of the hotel’s tacky and stilted promotion video, as an unseen male narrator guides her through the seemingly endless facilities. ‘My god! What beauty is this? What spaciousness? What tranquillity? Caprice Palace … I wouldn’t have believed that a palace like this existed in the world!’

Akgündüz was also working on other projects: a second Caprice in Istanbul, a residential complex in Ankara, a football club packed with celebrity players and a plan to manufacture Turkey’s first indigenous cars in the impoverished eastern province of Siirt, his birthplace. None of them came to fruition, and scores of investors were left empty-handed and furious. Akgündüz fled the country in 1998 to avoid criminal charges, but only four years later, after the 2002 elections (in which the AKP took power for the first time), he returned to Turkey after standing for and winning a seat in Siirt as an independent candidate. His political career was short-lived; the high election council immediately cancelled his parliamentary membership, meaning that he was also stripped of the immunity from prosecution that he had briefly enjoyed as an elected deputy. He was sent to the Istanbul courthouse and then to the prison in his private limousine with the number plate 34 JET 25.

A year later Akgündüz was freed, and spent the next decade skipping town before serving another jail term and then hatching another plan. In 2014 he announced that he had bought an island in the Maldives, which he would turn into ‘an island for the Muslims’. He began to dress in robes and turban in the style of an Ottoman dignitary, and claimed to be investing $170 million in his new project. Some of Turkey’s most prominent pious Muslims gave it their backing by issuing a fatwa (an Islamic legal decree) stating that such a project was permissible in the eyes of Allah. When investors in this latest scheme discovered that it was a swindle, too, one of the preachers who had given it his stamp of approval was confronted by a journalist. ‘I didn’t say buy a place. I just said it’s permissible under the fatwa,’ he insisted. ‘If you didn’t listen and did a stupid thing, so did I. I lost my apartments, too.’

In 2015 a court order was issued for the original Caprice to be confiscated in order to help pay the compensation claims levied against Akgündüz’s still-unfinished Istanbul project. The local police raided the Caprice Palace Didim and began loading the furniture, minibar fridges and computers onto trucks in front of 600 startled guests. At the last minute the hotel’s lawyers managed to cut a deal, and the fittings were returned – but three months later Akgündüz was arrested on embezzlement charges. He served sixteen months, and then immediately began talking about his next project.

‘The east will come to life, Turkey will be developed!’ he proclaimed to journalists waiting at the prison gate on the day of his release in March 2017.

The Gülenists

Akgündüz remains a free man – for now. The original owner of the similarly high-end halal Angels Resort in Marmaris, Turkish businessman and newspaper owner Akın İpek, has not been so lucky.

İpek shot into the stratosphere of the Turkish business elite during the first decade of the millennium – the early AKP era. It was a time when certain connections promised considerable bounty, both political and economic. İpek, like many others, was an open supporter of Fethullah Gülen – the cleric turned cult leader who built his small Turkish congregation into a worldwide movement. Born in 1941 in the eastern province of Erzurum, Gülen trained as an imam and joined the Diyanet, the state’s religious agency, which was set up under the republic’s first constitution in 1924. The Diyanet employs all of Turkey’s clerics and posts them to mosques around the country. Gülen graduated in 1958 and was dispatched to coastal İzmir, where he quickly began working to extend his reach outside the mosque. According to the movement’s biography, he began speaking in tea houses and at town meetings. ‘The subject matter of his speeches, whether formal or informal, was not restricted explicitly to religious questions; he also talked about education, science, Darwinism, about the economy and social justice,’ the biography claims.