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Erdogan Rising. Hannah Smith Lucinda
Читать онлайн.Название Erdogan Rising
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008308865
Автор произведения Hannah Smith Lucinda
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
But this is Turkey. And here, the sacred always comes with a side serving of the profane.
The original pioneer of the country’s now-booming Islamic leisure sector is the unlikely Fadıl Akgündüz, who goes by the nickname ‘Jet’ and is a conman of such confidence that every time he is released from prison he starts plotting his next swindle. Most recently, he served fifteen months for a libel conviction after he claimed that the governor of an Aegean province had tried to assassinate him in a car crash. Before that, he defrauded hundreds with dodgy timeshare deals, and back in the late 1990s he collected millions of pounds from investors, many of them Turks in the European diaspora, for a construction project in Ankara that never materialised. Before that, though, he launched his first and only successful project: Turkey’s first halal holiday resort.
The Caprice Hotel in the Aegean seaside town of Didim is a monstrosity of glass and plastic façades that looks, at a distance, like the stern of a sinking cruise ship. Inside, it is pure neo-Baroque. The domed ceiling of its lobby is painted with tulip motifs in the style of the old mosques of Istanbul. Its floor is inlaid with gold mosaics. Like any other hotel catering to the mass tourism market, it has an all-you-can-eat buffet every mealtime, a huge swimming complex and spas, and a path leading straight to the beach. There are also à la carte restaurants serving Chinese and Italian food, and a designer boutique offering some of Turkey’s top brands. Turkish stars perform in the hotel’s entertainment centre every week. The well-heeled tourists who stay here would have no reason to leave its gaudy confines, apart from acute claustrophobia. And if they are devout Muslims – as almost all of them are – they can relax safe in the knowledge that they will never miss prayer time.
Jet Fadıl Akgündüz opened the resort in 1996 with the strapline: ‘A modern vacation complex, where the call to prayer is heard five times a day.’ The idea of a hotel catering to the Islamic market was unheard of in Turkey at that time. It was the era when the Refah Party’s Necmettin Erbakan was prime minister and Erdoğan the mayor of Istanbul – but Erdoğan’s jailing and the toppling of Erbakan’s government in the ‘postmodern’ military coup of 1997 would remind everyone that the Kemalists were still in charge. Local residents in this largely secular part of Turkey were dismayed when Akgündüz bought what had once been a resort for debauched European tourists and turned it into a haven for the devout – but his business boomed. Muslims with money to spend had previously had to share their hotels with customers who followed totally different lifestyles: drinking alcohol, sunbathing in bikinis in mixed-gender areas, and disregarding the patterns of the Islamic day. Now, they could spend their leisure time in an environment just like that of their homes. In halal hotels, the swimming pool and spa areas are segregated by gender, there is no trace of alcohol anywhere, and prayer rooms are provided so that guests can slip straight from the poolside to the prayer mat.
Slowly, other Turkish businessmen caught on to the potential and by the time the AKP took power in 2002 there were five halal hotels in Turkey. By 2014 the sector had mushroomed to 152 halal resorts, spas and boutique hotels across the country, including a halal ski resort and a cruise ship. Part of that growth can be explained by the overall rise in wealth in Turkey over the same period, which lifted the poorest – and generally most pious – section of the society from a subsistence-level existence to a level affording them disposable income. The average annual income in Turkey in 1998, two years after the Caprice opened, was $8,567 and the average rent costs in the gecekondu – literally, ‘built in the night’ – districts ate up half of a family’s income. By 2014 the average wage was $19,610 and rent or mortgage repayments now only took up a quarter of their pay. A new middle class has risen, buoyed by a growing class of businessmen from the conservative cities of central Anatolia. And they want in on all the things the elites have been enjoying for decades.
There is also the Erdoğan factor.
‘There is more Islamic political influence now,’ says Seçgin. ‘Muslim people are standing up and saying: “Hang on, I also work hard, I have more money, I want to take part in all these great things that everyone else is doing, the upper ten to fifteen per cent of the society.” The industry was starting to develop before Erdoğan, and until recently there hadn’t been a single policy by the tourism ministry in support of this industry. Nothing. So, you might argue that without Erdoğan the industry would probably have developed anyway. But my fear is that for political and ideological reasons, some people in Turkey may have tried to prevent this sector from thriving. By Erdoğan and the AK Party being in power, their passiveness, they have helped the industry to thrive. They didn’t support us at all, but they also didn’t do anything to prevent or hinder us. And that’s already a good thing, because under different governments, I can imagine some would have tried to stop this industry from going further.’
The Turkish Standards Institute started providing halal hotel certification in June 2014. Until then Turkey had lagged behind in the sector compared to other Islamic countries such as Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates; even the UK’s tourism board, Visit Britain, held halal tourism conferences before Turkey. But without much official help, the sector has taken root and flowered amid the fleshpots of the Aegean and Mediterranean coastlines. Some of the halal resorts are spanking new and purpose-built. Others are older hotels that were once stuffed with hard-drinking Russians and Europeans but which have now been converted – stripped of their bars, fitted with prayer rooms, their swimming pools and beaches divided into men’s and women’s sections.
As the halal tourism market evolved, so too did the business plan of its original entrepreneur, Jet Fadıl Akgündüz. As more mass-market resorts opened, he upgraded the Caprice to a five-star luxury resort and changed the ‘Hotel’ in its name to ‘Palace’.
‘Thank you, Caprice Palace, for providing so much for the ladies!’ gushes the dubbed star of the hotel’s tacky and stilted promotion video, as an unseen male narrator guides her through the seemingly endless facilities. ‘My god! What beauty is this? What spaciousness? What tranquillity? Caprice Palace … I wouldn’t have believed that a palace like this existed in the world!’
Akgündüz was also working on other projects: a second Caprice in Istanbul, a residential complex in Ankara, a football club packed with celebrity players and a plan to manufacture Turkey’s first indigenous cars in the impoverished eastern province of Siirt, his birthplace. None of them came to fruition, and scores of investors were left empty-handed and furious. Akgündüz fled the country in 1998 to avoid criminal charges, but only four years later, after the 2002 elections (in which the AKP took power for the first time), he returned to Turkey after standing for and winning a seat in Siirt as an independent candidate. His political career was short-lived; the high election council immediately cancelled his parliamentary membership, meaning that he was also stripped of the immunity from prosecution that he had briefly enjoyed as an elected deputy. He was sent to the Istanbul courthouse and then to the prison in his private limousine with the number plate 34 JET 25.
A year later Akgündüz was freed, and spent the next decade skipping town before serving another jail term and then hatching another plan. In 2014 he announced that he had bought an island in the Maldives, which he would turn into ‘an island for the Muslims’. He began to dress in robes and turban in the style of an Ottoman dignitary, and claimed to be investing $170 million in his new project. Some of Turkey’s most prominent pious Muslims gave it their backing by issuing a fatwa (an Islamic legal decree) stating that such a project was permissible in the eyes of Allah. When investors in this latest scheme discovered that it was a swindle, too, one of the preachers who had given it his stamp of approval was confronted by a journalist. ‘I didn’t say buy a place. I just said it’s permissible under the fatwa,’ he insisted. ‘If you didn’t listen and did a stupid thing, so did I. I lost my apartments, too.’
In 2015 a court order was issued for the original Caprice to be confiscated in order to help pay the compensation claims levied against Akgündüz’s still-unfinished Istanbul project. The local police raided the Caprice Palace Didim and began loading the furniture, minibar fridges and computers onto trucks in front