The faithful our soldiers

Thoughts on Erdoğan's latest purge, hell raining down on the Houthis, Chinese consumption, and more.

In 1997, a 43-year-old upstart mayor of Istanbul named Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gave a speech at a political rally in Siirt, a city in southeastern Anatolia where his wife’s family is from. Erdoğan recited a few lines of poetry during his speech from Ziya Gökalp’s 1912 poem “A Soldier’s Prayer.”

"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets

The minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers....”

Turkey — more specifically, Turkish politics — was very different in 1997. Radical secularism was still deeply ingrained in its political structures. So much so, in fact, that Erdoğan’s seemingly innocuous poetic license resulted in his losing his mayorship, receiving a 10-month jail sentence, and a lifetime ban from politics for “inciting hatred.” Erdoğan’s use of language of Islamist imagery was seen as an incitement to violence and religious hatred — and even worse, as putting Islam at the heart of Turkish nationalism.

Erdoğan’s arrest in ‘97¹ was part of a larger Turkish government-led purge of Islamism in Turkish politics. In the months leading up to Erdoğan’s arrest, then-Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz instructed Turkish authorities to jail other Islamist mayors, close down religious education centers, and tighten strict secularist dress codes.²

Erdoğan mayoral victory in 1994 had come as a surprise — and a welcome one. According to one BBC article from the time, “Even his critics admit that he did a good job, making Istanbul cleaner and greener — although a decision to ban alcohol in city cafes did not please secularists.”³ Though Turkish politics was still avowedly secular, a rising demographic of socially conservative, Islamist-minded, and economically successful Turks saw a man who was fighting for them — in a secularist stronghold like Istanbul, no less.

In protesting his arrest, Erdoğan appealed to secular, not religious, principles. He described himself and his supporters as devout advocates of the rule of law: “We are people who believe in the supremacy of law and our reason for existence is the struggle for a state of law. We have no other concern or trouble than loving our nation, being in love with our nation.”⁴

If you are wondering why I am taking you down this little stroll down Turkish political memory lane, it is because of the bombshell news that came on Wednesday: That current Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was one of 87 people arrested, and that he stood accused of charges of “rampant corruption in the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IBB) and for aiding the PKK terrorist group by recruiting its sympathizers.”⁵

There have been widespread protests around Turkey in response to İmamoğlu’s arrest. That is because İmamoğlu is basically Erdoğan’s only serious political rival. İmamoğlu’s party— the Republican People's Party, or CHP (and the standard bearer of what is left of traditional Turkish political secularism) — was to hold a primary on Sunday, where İmamoğlu was expected to be chosen as its candidate in future presidential elections. (The election is currently scheduled for 2028, but the vote is expected to be brought forward.) The crackdown follows significant losses by Erdoğan's ruling party in local elections last year, and amid growing calls for early national elections

Markets did not like the news — the Turkish lira plunged more than 10% to new record lows on news of the arrest early on Wednesday, before paring losses to about 6%. The benchmark Borsa Istanbul 100 Index was also down 6%, with the banking sub-index dropping more than 9%. Government bond yields surged to the highest levels this year.⁶ Turkey’s central bank responded decisively on Thursday, raising the overnight lending rate to 46% and declaring it would act if “additional actions were deemed necessary.”⁷ For a great article on the economic impacts, see

Timothy Ash

’s great post here.

At a geopolitical level, it has been a dynamic recent few months for Turkey. Changes in U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Europe have opened up an opportunity for Turkey in Europe. Though Turkey has thus far been excluded from recent EU investments in the defense sector, Erdoğan recently traveled to Poland and declared that, “If the European Union wants to prevent or even reverse its loss of power and influence, it can only achieve this through Türkiye's full membership."⁸ Turkey has even floated its willingness to be part of a peacekeeping force eventually deployed to Ukraine.⁹ Meanwhile, the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has led to a significant deepening of Turkish influence in the Levant, which is already stressing Turkish-Iranian relations.¹⁰ Last month, Abdullah Öcalan, imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, commonly known as the PKK, called on the organization to dissolve itself and its militants to abandon their weapons.

Is that why Erdoğan chose to move against his political rival now? Does he know that he has leverage over Europe, that the U.S. doesn’t care, and that the potential resolution of the PKK and Syria problems give him an incredible opportunity to steer Turkey toward greater power? Perhaps, but I think that overweights the influence global politics has on Erdoğan’s decision-making.

Erdoğan has been around so long that his reputation in the West has morphed from honest young democratic mayor to illiberal autocrat to potential ally. I’ll never forget Anne Applebaum’s article in The Atlantic in 2021 in which she brashly declared “The Bad Guys Are Winning” — and defied the bad guys as Putin, Xi, Maduro, Lukashenko…and Erdoğan. What happens when a “good guy” (the EU) needs a “bad guy” (Erdoğan) to beat a different “bad guy”?

Erdoğan knows better than anyone the “risk” he is taking — he turned his arrest as mayor of Istanbul at the hands of the Turkish government into the dominating position he now enjoys. Which means he doesn’t think it’s that big a risk. Either he has lost a step, or he assesses that İmamoğlu won’t be able to replicate his own rise to power. Based on Erdoğan’s track record, the latter seems a safer bet. Erdoğan weathered the 2013 Taksim Square protests. He used the strange 2016 failed coup attempt to stack the military with loyalists. He bested the CHP’s last candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, in 2023 elections that were ultimately, if imperfectly, democratic.

I’m not saying Erdoğan is without authoritarian tendencies. I’ve harshly critiqued his government in print in the past. He has certainly not shied away from using government power to limit dissent and political opposition. I will wait to see the charges against İmamoğlu before I make up my mind on the nature of these latest shenanigans, though the timing seems awfully suspect.

But all that said — for a dude who is supposedly a dictator, Erdoğan has won an awful lot of elections, and has continued to win them. These victories are a source of consternation of Turkish secularists and foreign observers, who don’t seem to be allow themselves to admit that maybe, just maybe, Erdoğan has a better read on what a majority of Turks want from their government than they do.

(That I haven’t been able to find a Turkish political analyst willing to come on the podcast and talk about this confirms my sense that Erdoğan is in control.)

I didn’t know about Erdoğan’s 1997 arrest until I started digging into Turkish political history after İmamoğlu’s arrest. Two things strike me about that episode that seem relevant today. The first is that I’m not at all sure Ziya Gökalp, the author of the poem Erdoğan purportedly quoted, would have been an AKP supporter. Gökalp rejected both the Ottomanism and Islamism in favor of Turkish nationalism.¹¹ He advocated a Turkification of the Ottoman Empire by promoting Turkish language and culture to all former Ottoman citizens. His nationalist ideals espoused a de-identification with Ottoman Turkey's nearby Arab neighbors, instead advocating for a super-national Turkish (or pan-Turkic) identity with "a territorial Northeast-orientation [to] Turkic peoples.”¹²

But these ideas, which seem more at home in the language of Turkish secularism than Erdoğan’s Islamism, are from Gökalp’s later writings, as he articulated a political rationale for a post-Ottoman Turkish Republic. The Ottoman Empire ceased to be after World War I, and so the ideas that Gökalp espoused in his 1912 poem that Erdoğan recited were obsolete by the founding of the Turkish Republic. Gökalp wrote that poem in the context of the First Balkan War, when Ottoman Forces suffered a massive defeat at the hands of a Bulgarian-Serbian-Montenegrin alliance. He was trying to rally the beleaguered Ottoman forces to no avail.

The 1912 First Balkan War was a good ol’fashioned ass-whooping.

But here’s the second thing: Gökalp never wrote the words Erdoğan ascribed to him. The poem begins, not with the lines Erdoğan apparently invented, but instead with these words:

“A rifle in my hand, faith in my heart,

I have two desires: Religion and the homeland…”

The point is still the same — a call to the religiosity of the fighters in their battle against the Balkan powers against them — but one can perhaps understand the reaction of Turkish secularists to Erdoğan’s poetry a little better when you consider he wasn’t being truthful about the source of his words.¹³ Why Erdoğan felt the need to change them we’ll probably know. But it is not just Erdoğan’s poetic license that is notable. It is the remainder of the stanza, which gets left out of most of the articles about Erdoğan’s arrest in ‘97, that seems most relevant today:

“The army is in my heart, the sultan is great…

Aid the Sultan, oh God!

Prolong his life, oh God!”¹⁴

Enough said.

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A few other things on my radar:

The U.S. bombed the Houthis in Yemen on Saturday, killing more than 100 people according to local media. The Houthis claimed a response on a US warship on Sunday evening, and the US bombed Yemen again after that. U.S. President Donald Trump warned the Houthis to stop attacks on Red Sea shipping or else “hell will rain down upon you like nothing you have ever seen.” He also told Iran to stop supporting the Houthis. (Can’t make this shit up.) Israel ended its ceasefire with Hamas this week and struck new targets in the Gaza Strip in what seemed pretty well-timed with the U.S. attack on the Houthis. The Houthis fired a few missiles at Israel after that. Is Trump a) bombing the Houthis after sending a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader a few weeks ago seeking a new nuclear deal, i.e., showing the stick after offering the carrot, in which case we should see these strikes as a prelude to a broader negotiation process that see Iran-U.S. ties…normalize is too strong, but at least stabilize, such that the U.S. will turn its focus on China for real or, b) bombing the Houthis because he wants to obliterate them and then foment regime change in Iran, i.e., the war in the Middle East that everyone has been worried about since Oct. 7 is nigh? I feel like a shoddy geopolitical analyst because the only answer that feels right is, "50-50 one or the other!”

Indonesia's parliament passed revisions to the country's military law on Thursday, allocating more civilian posts for military officers as hundreds of students and activists protested against the legislation. Defense Minister Sjafrie “conveyed his view that the development of the strategic environment, the complexity of both conventional and non-conventional threats, as well as geopolitical changes and advances in global military technology require the TNI to transform. Therefore, the proposed amendment to the TNI Law submitted by the Indonesian House of Representatives is considered important to provide a clearer legal basis for the TNI's role in tasks other than war, without neglecting the principles of democracy and civilian supremacy.” Meanwhile, after Indonesian markets tanked on Tuesday, Indonesia's financial services regulator allowed listed companies to buy back their stocks without shareholders' approval, while the central bank conducted "bold" currency intervention to calm markets.¹⁵ I was originally hoping to pair the Turkey analysis above with an equally deep analysis of Indonesia’s politics this week. But it’s late and I’m stuck in an airport waiting on a delayed flight, so I’ll just note that it was a pretty negative week for a country I’ve been more bullish on lately. Increasing the role of the Indonesian military in the Indonesian economy/civil life seems like a step backwards — and like Prabowo showing us his real stripes.

China announced a new consumption action plan that The South China Morning Post described as “the most comprehensive package of policies for boosting consumer spending that the country has released in over four decades.” The action plan is mostly more of the same — but I was struck by three parts of the action plan: 1) “promoting reasonable growth of wage income”; 2) “stabilize the stock market…further enrich the variety of bond-related products suitable for individual investors”; and 3) “improve the income guarantee mechanism for grain-growing farmers and explore ways to revitalize and utilize farmers’ legally owned housing through leasing, equity investment, cooperation, etc.” Michael Pettis poo-pooed the announcement as “a lot of supply-side measures that may boost specific forms of consumption (e.g. winter sports, wearable tech gadgets) but because they don't relax budget constraints, they will do little to boost overall consumption”…but he also allowed that there were some spending support measures that could help if implemented. So, maybe, something?

Peru's government declared on Monday a state of emergency in the capital Lima while it also deployed soldiers to the streets to help quell a recent surge of violence that claimed the life of a popular singer. From bad to worse in Peru. RIP Paul Flores.¹⁶

Japan plans to deploy long-range missiles in its southwestern island of Kyushu near the East China Sea. China’s top envoy to Japan has warned Tokyo against using better ties with Beijing as a hedge against uncertainty in its ties with Washington. The U.S. Department of Defense is considering halting a planned expansion of U.S. Forces Japan (USFJ). Japan is trying to have its cake and eat it too…and it seems like neither Beijing or Washington are particularly happy about it.

1. In case you want some context for how long ago 1997 was, the Spice Girls were atop the Billboard charts back then.

2. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/22/world/istanbul-mayor-an-islamist-is-given-10-month-jail-term.html

3. https://web.archive.org/web/20191030100708/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2270642.stm

4. https://web.archive.org/web/20090531074150/http://arsiv.zaman.com.tr/1998/04/22/guncel/all.html

5. https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/istanbul-mayor-to-be-questioned-as-corruption-probe-deepens/news

6. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-19/turkey-assets-sink-as-arrest-of-erdogan-rival-ups-political-risk

7. https://t.co/vjO5ZWkbY5

8. https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/diplomacy/eu-can-regain-power-only-through-turkiyes-membership-erdogan

9. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkiye-may-join-peacekeeping-force-if-russia-ukraine-deal-reached-207145

10. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-summoned-turkeys-ambassador-following-ankaras-warning-regarding-syria-2025-03-04/

11. Moaddel, Mansoor. (2005). Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism. Episode and Discourse.

12. Mihran Dabag (2005). "Modern societies and collective violent: The framework of interdisciplinary genocide studies"

13. Ever the Dune addict, I cannot help but here “Long live the fighters” behind this, though that apparently has more of a link to Algerian independence fighters than anything related to Turkey. Oh well, that’s why it’s in the footnotes and not the main body! ;)

14. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=osu1419950705&disposition=inline

15. https://www.kemhan.go.id/2025/03/11/menhan-ri-hadiri-raker-di-komisi-i-dpr-bahas-ruu-tentang-perubahan-atas-uu-tni.html

16.