By İHSAN YILMAZ

ihsan.yilmaz@todayszaman.com

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s chief adviser Etyen Mahçupyan repeatedly confessed that the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) involvement in corruption is real and that half of all AKP voters believe the AKP is corrupt. An AKP deputy and Erdoğan’s biggest mouthpiece, Mehmet Metiner, who claimed to have watched CCTV recording of hundreds of naked men torturing a headscarved woman in Kabataş (a lie Erdoğan used to mobilize his voters against the Gezi protesters), challenged and even subtly threatened Mahçupyan. And yet Mahçupyan insisted on his views. Then Erdoğan’s chief fatwa-giver, professor of Islamic law Hayrettin Karaman started writing in his pro-Erdoğan newspaper Yeni Şafak that the corruption is a fact and that rulers who live in luxury while the poor suffer are sinners.

Both Mahçupyan and Karaman are crucial figures since they are both fatwa-givers of Erdoğan’s authoritarianism and corrupt regime. Karaman is the Islamist fatwa-giver who distorts Islam to produce favorable fatwas, legitimizing the corrupt and illegal practices of the Islamist politicians and businessmen. This includes taking out loans from banks with interest, donating huge amounts of money to charities of politicians in return for favorable public tenders and contracts and even getting people killed for the benefit of the state.

As Ali Bulaç wrote, Erdoğan started getting these fatwas after becoming mayor of İstanbul in 1994. The justification is an Islamically perverted one. They argue that since Turkey is in the Dar al-Harb (an un-Islamic country, in the abode of war) and since what Islamists are doing is jihad, they can bend Islamic rules out of necessity and also break the official law. But so few people knew all this.

After the Dec. 17 corruption operations, Karaman started writing about these issues openly. I think he was trying to convince Erdoğan’s religious voters that “yes, Erdoğan did engage in corruption, but it was for dawah, jihad, for the Islamist cause, not for himself.” I do not know why but Karaman also wrote that for the sake of the state, individuals can be sacrificed and he mentioned Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu, who was killed in a very dubious helicopter accident, as an example. His Yeni Şafak piece is one of the greatest enigmas of the Erdoğan era.

While Karaman has been trying to persuade Erdoğan’s religious voters, Mahçupyan has been doing exactly the same thing for secular, liberal, leftists circles. The AKP would never send Karaman to the Western capitals to defend itself and it would not publish many of Karaman’s pieces in its English mouthpieces, such as Daily Sabah and Yeni Şafak English, but it would frequently ask Mahçupyan and Osman Can to visit the Western capitals to legitimize the authoritarianism of the AKP. Mahçupyan, a renowned and skillful intellectual, is the secular legitimizer of the Erdoğan regime.

Nevertheless, despite their efforts, both Karaman and Mahçupyan seem to be siding with Davutoğlu against Erdoğan. As I have written here before, despite his dreams of restoration (whatever that means), his Ottoman nostalgia, his intense lectures about the past, his zigzags in foreign policy, Davutoğlu is not a corrupt politician. He may eventually be engulfed by the corrupt elite of the AKP, but at the moment he speaks against corruption, nepotism, etc. He continuously mentions meritocracy. He is a relative of the Ülker family, whose business conglomerate is disliked by Erdoğan and had to invest more than $3 billion in the UK since Erdoğan did not permit it to invest in Turkey. It is known that Davutoğlu was not Erdoğan’s first choice for the job of prime minister, but Erdoğan had to chose him to balance Abdullah Gül’s influence on the AKP.

It is not possible in the short run since Erdoğan is still very popular, but Davutoğlu may be thinking of gradually isolating Erdoğan in the presidential palace, thinking that the Erdoğan dynasty is becoming a liability and a burden for the AKP. I know that there are now may people in the AKP ranks who think in that way and who are very upset with the fact that the AKP and the AKP media have become a family business of the Erdoğans. But I do not know if Davutoğlu thinks similarly or not. However, looking at Karaman and Mahçupyan and reading several columns in pro-AKP newspapers that concede corruption is taking place, I am inclined to think that they get their power indirectly from Davutoğlu.

All in all, this may be the wishful thinking of a naive columnist who is unaware of how power intoxicates people.