LOOK BEYOND 9/11 TO FIND MIDDLE EAST ANSWERS

WASHINGTON -- As the sixth anniversary of the tragic attacks of 9/11 approach next week, we need to move beyond grieving, hating -- and fighting -- and look for deeper answers to the profound cultural, political and economic reasons behind those attacks. I think we may find some of them in the surprise election to the Turkish presidency last week of a man described by the nation's secular traditionalists as one of the "Islamists" the West so fears.

There are few who would congratulate me on such an insight. In fact, among many Europeans and the many Turks who follow the historic road of the great Kemal Ataturk, who first made a modern country out of Turkey by isolating politics from religion in the 1920s, the election of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as president is a frightening event.
Gul's party, the Islamist Justice and Development Party, with its threatening Islamic roots that it has largely risen beyond, still deeply worries many who cannot get past the idea that the party REALLY wants to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state. Now, with the prime ministership held for nearly five years by the party's cosmopolitan Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the presidency held by Gul, they fear anything can happen. And if it could happen in modernized Turkey, well, then it could happen anywhere in the Middle East!
But let me go out on that proverbial limb and suggest that it is, to the contrary, likely that the changes in Turkey offer some answers to the deeper problems of the Middle East. Essentially these are problems of governance, which in practice means balancing and resolving the demands of political power and religious power. They happen also to be the problems -- whether in Saudi Arabia or Egypt or elsewhere -- that led to 9/11 and that haunt us daily in Iraq.
The newly elected Gul, to start with, is no cave-dwelling Muslim fundamentalist. He is an attractive man in Western dress with a doctorate in economics, and with study in London and Exeter and work with the Islamic Development Bank in Saudi Arabia behind him. As foreign minister, he became known for pushing for Turkey to join the European Union, for changes in a law that punished writers for "insulting Turkishness," and for devising a set of democratic reforms.
But most important, Gul's party, under Erdogan's leadership, has brought the country to an impressive new prosperity with an Islamic entrepreneurial class that springs from the formerly rigidly conservative hinterlands. It is centered around the new industries of the city of Kayseri, where, amazingly, an Islamic middle class has been created for the first time in Turkish history.
When a small group of us met with Prime Minister Erdogan last May, he said with passion: "This is a very different country today. It has become an open society. To use an Internet expression, it's a state on a 24-hour basis, an online country, an island of prosperity and stability. Our GNP has gone from $182 billion in 2002 to $400 billion by 2006, and the per capita income has risen in those four years from $2,600 to $5,500.
"Turkey is determined to become a full member of the European Union. ... In Europe, we find the harbinger of the possibility of the alliance of civilizations. Our goal is to become a responsible modern society, and we are a people who have totally internalized democracy."
There has been little reason over the last five years to doubt such statements. But now the Justice Party holds both the prime ministership and the presidency, and that gives it extraordinary powers that it did not have before -- and no one can be absolutely sure how its officials will use those powers.
Before, the cities of Turkey were filled with secular cosmopolites who would be at home anywhere in the world, while the poor and benighted of the countryside dragged hopelessly behind. But today, the formerly isolated and fearful countryside is taking part in that entrepreneurial progress -- and not only in Turkey.
In progressive Tunisia, for instance, development is moving so rapidly (again, across class and religious lines) that poverty is now below 2 percent.
In troubled Pakistan, as The Wall Street Journal just reported, "a clear demonstration of confidence in the country's future is coming from an emerging economic force: entrepreneurs." Americans hear little about Syria except for its support of terrorism, but in fact, entrepreneurship is also thriving in Syria. Even Iran, which the White House sees as unidimensionally bad, is in the middle of a profound struggle between the past and a progressive modernism favored overwhelmingly by the young.
America sees little in the Middle East except the war in Iraq. Yet it is in these other countries that we pinpoint the true and ultimately decisive struggles: bringing the traditionally conservative countryside of the past peacefully into the modern world of the cities, blending the world of religion peacefully with the secular world, and building equity for all in societies formerly dominated by the few.
And so, six years after 9/11, even while we fight a war in Iraq that fails to address these issues, at least we should understand the contours of the crucial question: Can you be modern and Muslim? Turkey may again provide some answers.