Growing up Poor and Pious in Secular Turkey

The boy from the other side of the tracks

In his 2015 novel A Strangeness in My Mind, Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk introduces Mevlut, a poor, conservative immigrant from Anatolia (the Asian part of Turkey) who grew up in Istanbul in the 1960s and 1970s, only to come to hate the city's secular, Westernized elites. Recep Tayyip Erdogan could well be an earlier and real-life version of Mevlut. Erdogan, whose family migrated to Istanbul from a conservative town, grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Kasimpasa in the 1950s and 1960s when Turkey was a poor, "third-world" country. Located in the heart of the city, Kasimpasa sits at the bottom of a hill that ascends to Istanbul's bohemian Beyoglu district, and then to Nisantasi, the city's exclusive upper-crust and old-money enclave. During Erdogan's childhood, Nisantasi was a refuge for the privileged few, who would sip cocktails in high-end hotels and shop for expensive clothing on nearby leafy boulevards. The sights and sounds of Kasimpasa along the Golden Horn — a thin waterway that cleaves into the downtown European side of Istanbul — could not have been more different from those of Nisantasi. The Golden Horn was the hub of Turkey's industrial revolution. As early as the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire established factories along this inlet to take advantage of the waterway's central location and easy maritime access.

By the time Erdogan was a child growing up along the Golden Horn, this busy inlet had become the most polluted area in Turkey. Open sewers and industrial waste flew into it. During the summer, the breeze from the estuary would carry an overwhelming stench into the narrow alleyways of Kasimpasa, and with every rainstorm the rough cobbled streets would fill with mud. It was a decaying industrial neighborhood, populated mostly by recent arrivals to Istanbul from the Anatolian hinterland. Indeed, Erdogan himself is descended from a generation of Anatolian Turks fleeing the grinding poverty of rural Turkey in an attempt to make a better life in Istanbul.

Ever since the Ottoman period, when it was a popular area for sailors, Kasimpasa has been known for its culture of bravado. To this day, the expression Kasimpasali ("of Kasimpasa") is used in Turkey to describe local street toughs who abide by a distinctive code of honor that values unadorned bluntness. A Kasimpasali Turk will not shy away from humiliating his counterpart to undermine him — a characteristic Erdogan has displayed readily in his political career.

There is, though, a gentler side to growing up in Kasimpasa. Erdogan remembers fondly the richly woven social fabric of the local streets: "In my time, we were close with everyone in the neighborhood," he once mused in a televised interview, recounting how families would look after one another's children and share meals with each other. "We had solidarity. The bonds of the neighborhood were very strong" Erdogan has been known to boast of Turkey's technological and economic advancements in recent years, but he has also mourned the passing of this traditional social unit, a consequence of Turkey's rapid socio-economic transformation since the 1980s.

So much of the old Kasimpasa helps explain Erdogan. The experience of growing up in this rough-hewn, conservative area, "the bad zip code" part of Istanbul, would forever shape his view of the "other," that is, Turkey's elite, rich, Westernized communities and their secularist, Kemalist ideology. Even when Erdogan entered business in the 1990s and became wealthy, he maintained his contempt for this elite. In some ways, Erdogan eternally remains the guy from the other side of the tracks. Rising to power within Islamist parties, considered peripheral movements in Turkey until the 1990s, he has dominated Turkish politics after taking office as prime minister in March 2003. Gradually, he has amassed so much political power that he has become Turkey's most powerful leader since Ataturk. But still Erdogan carries a chip on his shoulder: a deep grudge against secular Turks, as if to remind them of how unkindly they treated him as a poor, conservative, and pious youth from Kasimpasa. Erdogan has rarely let his guard down against his secular opponents, whose power is waning next to his. This is a result of his persistent fear that one day those opponents could push him back to Kasimpasa. Erdogan's biggest strength as a politician and biggest weakness as a citizen is that despite being in tight control of the country, he feels as if he is still an outsider.

Summers on the Black Sea

In the summer, Erdogan would travel with his family to Rize, a province on the eastern Black Sea coast in northeast Anatolia populated by Georgians, Greek- and Armenian-speaking Muslims, Turks, and Lazes (an ethnic group related to Georgians). There they would stay with relatives for a few weeks, sometimes a month, joining them in the fields to harvest tea in the remote village of Dumankaya. His father would also arrange for him to take lessons with local religious teachers to supplement his education. The eastern Black Sea coast is one of Turkey's most conservative regions and was the last to convert from Christianity to Islam. It was governed by the Byzantine Empire of Trebizond until its capture in 1461 by the Ottomans, following which it was Islamicized. This late conversion has created a brand of Islam in the region that is especially fiery and pious. Located in its heart, Rize Province is notoriously one of the most conservative in all of Turkey.

Traveling to Rize each summer exposed the young Erdogan to this particularly ardent and observant brand of Islam. The province left an indelible mark on the future president, partly because Turkey has a traditional belief, going back to the Ottomans, that one's identity is shaped not necessarily by where one is born, but by where one's parents are from. For Erdogan, this is Rize. The province will always be his home. Similarly, the people there see Erdogan as one of their own. This goes some way to explaining his immense popularity in the region: in 2014, when he ran to become the country's first popularly elected president--following his passing of a constitutional amendment in 2007, before which Turkish presidents were elected by parliament--Erdogan received a whopping 80.6 percent of the vote in Rize. Whatever his legacy in Turkey at large, Erdogan will be lionized there for decades to come. Successive generations of this eastern Black Sea province will remember him as the local boy who changed...