Never plain sailing in Byzantium

It is difficult to imagine Istanbul being any more chaotic than what hapens on the streets but the life in the news appears just as full as mayhem. There is a trial in swing of 46 people accused of plotting to overthrow the Turkish government and yesterday the judges announced they were refusing to grant them bail. The defendants, known as the Ergenekon network, all have high profiles and they include former army officers, journalists, and a retired university dean. All 46 have denied the charges and claim the trial was politically instigated by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's government in order to censor its critics.

The Ergenekon trial is the topic of most conversations around the city and has sharply divided opinion into three camps. Firstly there are those who support the defendants and say the case is an excuse for the Islamist government to suppress its opponents. A second group of government supporters say the suppression of the secretive Ergenekon clique is a major step in the road to enhance Turkey's democracy. The third and most cautious camp consists of the intelligentsia who believe the trial will not result in any concrete gains for democracy as the indictment for the case is weak. But everyone has an opinion. The fact the indictees include generals, journalists, business leaders and an actress means that the case has enormous cachet on the streets.

And what incredibly noisy streets they are. Trams, cars, dolmus and buses compete for space with ever industrious trolley-boys, sackmen and slack-jawed tourists straining to capture the spirit of the place with yet another photograph. The central district of Sultanahmet is almost entirely surrounded by water. The Sea of Marmara lies to the south where an enormous queue of cargo boats awaits a spot to load and unload. East is the Bosporus and Asia across the water. A steady stream of ferries take the thousands home and abroad though the toll-spanned Bosporus Bridge is eating in to their traffic. North is the Haliç – the Golden Horn which splits the two European arms of Istanbul. Here the bridges are awash with fishermen and foodstalls and a clutter of noise and energy.

Napoleon reputedly once said that if the world had a capital then Istanbul would be it. And although it is not even the capital of its own country, the Corsican genius had a good point. Not only is the city's geography illustrious, so is its history. That history is most redolent in the three buildings that dominate Sultanahmet's Bosporus shoreline, the Blue Mosque, Aghia Sophia and the Topkapi Palace.

The Blue Mosque is the colloquial name for the Sultan Ahmed (Sultanahmet) mosque and is the country's national house of prayer. It was built in the 16th century by Ahmed as the first mosque of his massive Ottoman Empire which stretched from Morocco to Persia and from Ethiopia to the gates of Venice. The mosque earned its common name thanks to the blue tiles adorning the walls of its interior.

The Ottomans had inherited the great city of Constantinople two centuries earlier when it finally ended the thousand-year reign of the Eastern Roman Empire. Back in 532, its great emperor Justinian had also ordered the construction of a great building in Istanbul to honour his deities. That building was the Aghia Sophia, which would be the largest basilica in the world for a thousand years. When the city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, it was re-consecrated as a mosque still replete with Byzantine murals. Then in 1923 Turkey's great modern secular leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk turned it into a museum as part of his move to abolish the caliphate.

Also now a museum is the next door Topkapi Palace. Topkapi was the home of the Ottoman emperors for 400 years. It was built after the capture of the city and is a complex structure divided into four courtyards each one leading into more restricted parts of the palace. By the mid 19th century, its Asiatic style was becoming tiresome to the more sophisticated tastes of the Europeanised sultanate. They abandoned it in 1853 and Kemal Ataturk transformed it into a national museum in the 1920s.

The ghost of Ataturk still haunts the city. His image appears on many Turkish flags branding by streetsellers and hangs from the windows and from portraits on the walls of shops. Erdogan's government may have the veneer of Islamism that provoked the ire of the plotters but a strong taint of capitalist secularism lines the streets. The merchants compete on equal terms with the muezzins. Money is the real religion here.

Double challenge for Turkey’s embattled Premier Erdogan

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has been forced to defend his country’s democracy in the face of two major challenges to his power. Turkey is still coming to grips with the news of a planned military coup by an ultra-nationalist organisation probably backed by the military. Meanwhile his own Justice and Development Party (AKP) faces court charges accused of introducing Islamic rule. Erdogan went on the attack overnight against this double challenge. "I want to stress once again that the democratic system is working with its institutions and rules in Turkey within the framework of the law," he told party members. "Turkey has the experience to overcome this painful period and solve its problems with its domestic dynamics. Nobody should be worried.”

But many in his audience are very worried. The court case will decide the very future of the AKP. This landmark case in the country’s highest court, the constitutional court, will have to decide this week not only whether to shut the party down but to also ban its leaders including Prime Minister Erdogan, from politics for five years. The chief prosecutor accuses the AKP of anti-secularism and of seeking to dismantle the secular political system introduced by Ataturk in the 1920s. The AKP dismisses the charges as a politically motivated elitist judicial coup. It says they court is threatened by the party's electoral strength, drawn from a broad cross-section of the emerging middle classes.

While the AKP has its day in court, Ankara police are shedding more light on Ergenekon Operation. The operation is named for an ultra-nationalist political gang which has been carrying out secret preparation for an overthrow of the government. Dozens of high profile arrests have been made including a former chief of police, the head of Ankara’s chamber of commerce and several retired army generals. The plot shows the increasing desperation of the military elite at the continued popularity of Erdogan’s party.

The AKP has governed since 2002 and won a landslide second successive election victory last summer. Their reign of power in Turkey has been matched by the growing Islamism at a local level. Turkish academic Professor Sarif Mardin calls it "neighbourhood pressure" aimed at forcing secularists to conform to a more religious environment. Mardin says the secularist middle class is succumbing to mounting social pressure at the hands of rising conservative class, which, although increasingly westernised and globalised, has questioned several social values upon which the state was founded. Importantly, this included the role of religion in shaping public space and social ethics.

Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923 out of the ruins of the old Ottoman Empire. His grand aim was to modernise the nation. He set upon a course of rapid secularisation and quickly disestablished the Islamic institutions that held a stranglehold over the legal and education systems. Active opposition to Kemal’s reforms was ruthlessly stamped out. When a pro-Islamic party won power after World War II (thanks to elections encouraged by the US), the pro-Kemal army removed it in a coup after a decade of rule.

Under military rule, the Islamists retreated to the domains of education and the press to get their message across. In the seventies a revitalised Islamist National Salvation party formed the balance of power between left and right wing groups in Turkey until another military coup ended democracy in 1980. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was active in National Salvation and joined its successor party Welfare in 1983. He successfully ran for mayor of Istanbul in 1994 on the strength of his excellent skill in oratory. With Welfare growing to become the largest party in Turkey, the army clamped down and banned it in 1997. Erdogan was arrested and convicted of “religious hatred” and spent four months in prison.

Erdogan and others formed the AKP out of the ashes of Welfare in 2001 claiming it to be a “moderate conservative party” to avoid further armed interference. Just a year later, AKP won a crushing victory in a general election despite winning just 34 percent of the vote. Their victory was widely interpreted as a protest against Turkey corruption-ridden body politic rather than a sweeping endorsement of Erdogan’s religious nationalism. But Erdogan has proved to be a competent and attractive leader and was comfortably re-elected last year. As Angus Reid points out, since taking office Erdogan has reconciled the secularist principles of the Turkish Republic with the democratic code that demands that the State respect individual freedoms. But his party’s Islamist roots leave the military deeply suspicious. They may be ready to step in again, either under the cloak of the courts or a coup.