‘The Istanbul of the future’

The words were not unusual, but the speaker was. He is the father of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, whose nomination as Turkey’s president, eventually derailed, touched off a political crisis last month. The father’s modesty says something about Gul’s grass-roots appeal in Kayseri. And his words say something about the ruling Justice and Development Party’s draw here — as modernisers, populists and devout guardians of the poor.

Long the most secular and modern of Muslim nations, Turkey is in the throes of a social and political transformation that began nearly 60 years ago and crested with the Justice and Development Party’s surprising ascent to power in elections in 2002. It is sometimes cast as a simple contest between the secular orthodoxy of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and the ruling party’s origins in the country’s Islamic movement of the 1990s. But the party’s success in Kayseri shows how it has leveraged the rise of a new elite to create a broad, subtle, sometimes visceral appeal.

The Justice and Development Party has no equivalent in the Muslim world. Despite its roots, its leaders — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and others — disavow the label Islamic. In a region imbued with scepticism of the West, it has embraced the goal of membership in the European Union by undertaking far-reaching, liberal reforms. Its politics are decidedly capitalist, pushing ahead Turkey’s integration into the world economy. Its religious demands are articulated not in the context of Islam, but in the language of human rights.

Kayseri, a city of 700,000, is a laboratory for those policies. Here on the dry, wind-buffeted Anatolian steppe, the party has won the loyalty of the conservative but brash entrepreneurial class challenging Turkey’s old money. But it has also cemented the support of those left on the sidelines by that globalisation — the thousands of poor people given food each day at soup kitchens it has helped organise. Across the city, the party has measured success less by resolving the debate over the wearing of headscarves in public than by making Kayseri a model of responsive administration.

The result: the party and its predecessors have run the mayor’s office since 1994. In the last election, it won seven of the city’s eight seats in parliament; its goal this summer is the last seat. The influence of its long-standing rival, the Nationalist Action Party, has shrivelled as supporters defect, some complaining that the party lacks a programme beyond a vision of stern nationalism.

‘‘Kayseri will be the Istanbul of the future,’’ boasted Sedat Colak, a 20-year-old Justice and Development supporter, as he sat in a leafy park by a brick path winding to a newly built cafe shadowed by medieval Ottoman monuments.

Before Gul’s entry into politics, Kayseri was perhaps best known for its pastirma, a spicy cured beef. Its politics were no less pungent. A generation ago, it was renowned as a stronghold of the Gray Wolves, a right-wing paramilitary organisation with a name taken from Turkish mythology. Then and now, the city has also celebrated its commercial prowess, underlined by the saying that families will send their smart sons into business, their dim-witted ones to school.

These days, the city hews to its mercantile reputation, if not its nationalist past. ‘‘A president like Gul brings good to the country,’’ reads a banner hanging from the balcony of the local chapter of the Independent Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association.

The association, effectively a chamber of commerce, caters to the entrepreneurial class that emerged in the traditional, religiously conservative towns of Anatolia in the 1980s, vying for influence with the more traditional elite, in cities such as Istanbul and Ankara, that often grew to prominence with state patronage. It doesn’t hide its religious sensibilities, handing out Islamic literature along with information on its 28 branches and 2,700 members across the country. But its members speak an aggressively self-assured language of emerging markets, exports, high technology standards and integration with the global economy.

‘‘The only language the West understands is success,’’ said Saban Copuroglu, 41, head of the Kayseri chapter. ‘‘As Turkey opens to the outside, Kayseri has seen big changes, and we didn’t want to just stand by and watch them happen.’’

The influence of Anatolian businessmen such as Copuroglu is remaking this city, as it is the rest of Turkey. Day flights to Kayseri and other remote centres are often filled with young businessmen. Stores marketing Kayseri’s exports — furniture and appliances, for instance — line stately boulevards. Copuroglu, in a dark suit with a green tie that bordered on fluorescent, calls these businessmen ‘‘the new generation’’.

As he spoke, the banner for Gul fluttered outside. His loyalties to Gul and Erdogan were evident, echoing the sense among many businessmen in the city that the party has managed to both reflect and articulate their ambitions.

‘‘Both represent the real Anatolia,’’ Copuroglu said. ‘‘They’re the best example of ‘we’ instead of ‘me’.’’

The mayor here is Mehmet Ozhaseki, who was first elected in 1994 as a member of a ruling party predecessor, the more avowedly religious Welfare Party, which was banned in 1998. He won office a year later with its successor, the Virtue Party. That organisation was banned in 2001, and Ozhaseki joined the Justice and Development Party, winning office again in 2004 with more than 70 per cent of the vote.

The party’s secular critics suspect a hidden agenda; with Gul’s election, they feared, the party would reveal its colours and press ahead with Islamisation. Particularly upsetting to many was the prospect of Gul’s wife, who wears a head scarf, living in the presidential palace, a citadel of the secular state. But religion figures little in Ozhaseki’s administration, which, like Erdogan’s government, has tried to turn day-to-day civic effectiveness into an ideology.

Kayseri is a conservative city, and the debates raging along Turkey’s fault lines — between tradition and modernity, religion and secularism, the power of the centre and the emerging periphery in Kayseri and elsewhere — are reflected here. The state’s view of secularism, in which religion is subservient to the state and its bureaucracy, is seen as anachronistic by many ruling party supporters.

Critics of the ruling party believe it is out to dismantle Ataturk’s ideals, pointing to proposals such as the recriminalising of adultery as evidence of intent. The party’s supporters counter that they, too, are secularists, but of a different ilk. To them, the state should not enforce secularism as an ideology, but rather stand aside, allowing people to freely express their devotion — be it head scarves in universities or public prayers.

‘‘This secularism is only serving a small part of the society,’’ insisted Serife Gul Atila, 20, a nursing student at Erciyes University who was sitting with a friend in the downtown park, a statue of a martial Ataturk on a horse in the distance.

Atila considers herself devout but does not wear the veil, having been forced to remove it when she entered Erciyes University in 2001. She quit, then returned months later wearing a wig as a substitute. Atila said she had hoped the party would change the laws, but knew that the secular establishment, laying claim to the legacy of Ataturk, would prevent it.

‘‘They’re not the only ones who are pro-Ataturk,’’ she said of the secularists, her voice rising. ‘‘I am pro-Ataturk, too. At the same time, I don’t want to turn him into an icon and pray to him.’’