‘It was a boutique industry before, all very expensive,’ says Songül. ‘You would either hire a private villa or go to exclusive resorts where it costs around four thousand euros for a family holiday for one week.’
Over four days, Seçgin leads us on a tour of the new wave in pious holidaymaking – the mass-market halal hotels. The Bera, the first to be awarded halal status in Turkey, is our first stop. The sweet smell of hookah smoke wafts through the cavernous lobby, and a wide panorama of Istanbul’s Bosphorus Bridge with a mosque in the foreground hangs behind reception. The Bera is owned by a conglomerate with ties to Erdoğan: when he was mayor of Istanbul, the municipality sold it a piece of prime real estate in the heart of the city for a fraction of its true value. The television screens are showing ATV, a pro-Erdoğan channel, and Yeni şafak and Sabah, its newspaper equivalents, are propped up in a rack by the door. On leaving, I am handed a gift: an encyclopaedia of Ottoman history.
Otherwise, The Bera is just like any other package resort: filled with hyped-up small children and parents who look as if they’ve been craving this holiday since they flew home from the last. I ask a couple from Preston who are slumped in the lobby’s comfy chairs as their two tiny girls scoot around whether they thought twice about a holiday in Turkey after the coup attempt and terrorist attacks.
‘We’ve not really heard about those,’ the mother tells me, clearly wishing I would move on so she can relax. ‘We just came here last year and we liked it, so we decided to come again.’
The food at the buffet is halal – but otherwise no different to any other resort. In my comfortable, clean room I find not a Gideon Bible and a minibar stocked with beer and wine but a Quran and a Qibla, an arrow stuck to the ceiling to show the direction of Mecca. At reception in the women’s spa and beach area I am frisked by a (female) security guard and stripped of my phone and camera before being gestured through smoked-glass doors. Through the changing rooms and treatment suites, the path leads out onto a fifty-metre stretch of beach surrounded by billowing curtains of fabric hung between flagpoles thirty metres high. You cannot see out to the sea – the view is blocked by the sails, although the water can still lap in underneath. The women wear reasonably conservative bikinis on this boxed-off beach, even after being freed of the male gaze. I ask one if it bothers her that she cannot contemplate the horizon as she sunbathes.
‘But if it was open, the men could look at us as they come past on boats and jet-skis,’ she replies.
In the lobby that evening, as we relax with tea and flavoured tobacco, I ask Seçgin how the drop in visitor numbers to Turkey since last year’s coup attempt has affected his business. He looks at me as if I were crazy.
‘Drop?’ he replies. ‘Last year we doubled our business, and this year we doubled again!’
By 2017, Turkey has risen to become the world’s third most popular destination for halal travellers, a four-place rise on the year before (only Malaysia and the UAE score higher). In a global halal tourism market now worth $151 billion annually, Turkey dominates the beach-holiday sector. The country accounts for a disproportionate amount of the hotels listed on Halalbooking.com, not out of a conscious effort on Seçgin’s part but simply because Turkey is the place with the best-developed concept of what an all-inclusive halal holiday means. This, after all, is an evolution of the model the Turks have been fine-tuning on booze-soaked European tourists since the 1980s.
‘Turkey is the centre of package resorts,’ Seçgin continues. ‘At the lower end there are the mass-market resorts. And at the high end in the halal market there’s the Angels Resort, where the rooms start at three hundred and fifty euros a night. I have one customer from Ukraine this year – he booked six weeks there and spent thirty-one thousand euros!’
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 Erdoğ
an, 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 of 600 startled guests. At the last minute the hotel’s lawyers managed to cut a deal, and the fittings were returned – but three months later Akgündüz was arrested on embezzlement charges. He served sixteen months, and then immediately began talking about his next project.
‘The east will come to life, Turkey will be developed!’ he proclaimed to journalists waiting at the prison gate on the day of his release in March 2017.
The Gülenists
Akgündüz remains a free man – for now. The original owner of the similarly high-end halal Angels Resort in Marmaris, Turkish businessman and newspaper owner Akın İpek, has not been so lucky.
İpek shot into the stratosphere of the Turkish business elite during the first decade of the millennium – the early AKP era. It was a time when certain connections promised considerable bounty, both political and economic. İpek, like many others, was an open supporter of Fethullah Gülen – the cleric turned cult leader who built his small Turkish congregation into a worldwide movement. Born in 1941 in the eastern province of Erzurum, Gülen trained as an imam and joined the Diyanet, the state’s religious agency, which was set up under the republic’s first constitution in 1924. The Diyanet employs all of Turkey’s clerics and posts them to mosques around the country. Gülen graduated in 1958 and was dispatched to coastal İzmir, where he quickly began working to extend his reach outside the mosque. According to the movement’s biography, he began speaking in tea houses and at town meetings. ‘The subject matter of his speeches, whether formal or informal, was not restricted explicitly to religious questions; he also talked about education, science, Darwinism, about the economy and social justice,’ the biography claims.
Having built his local following, Gülen retired from the Diyanet in 1981 and started preaching freelance both in Turkey and abroad. He also began opening schools and charitable foundations.
In the conservative city of Kayseri, one businessman remembered how a charismatic imam came to town in 1986 and started delivering lectures to huge crowds. ‘His speeches were so good, all the women in Kayseri’s high society soon started wearing the headscarf. We all liked his speeches and meetings so much that we started collecting money for the movement. I gave one cheque to them. There was a doctor, he wasn’t interested in religion but the hoca [teacher] even converted him. After a while I began to see that they are conmen, but lots of people didn’t care. All the state contracts were given to Gülenist businesses when the AKP came to power. One of my friends said to me, “I got rich because of them, they are buying everything from me.” People wanted to believe in what the Gülenists were saying because there was so much state pressure on religion. And here was a Muslim organisation that was working in every area except the political space.’
In February 1997, the Turkish army launched what became known as its postmodern coup. Tanks rolled through Ankara and Istanbul, setting off a series of events that would eventually force Fethullah Gülen into exile. The generals had been stirred into action after Necmettin Erbakan, leader of Erdoğan’s Refah Party, became prime minister in 1996 – Turkey’s first full-blooded Islamist premier. After the generals issued a memo from their boardroom, and Erbakan’s governing coalition partners rounded on him, he stepped down. For the next years political Islam was again forced into the shadows in Turkey; Refah was shut down, Erbakan’s political career was finished, and the AKP’s shoots started growing in the dark.
Gülen moved to the United States in 1999 and has remained there ever since, now living in a vast secluded ranch in Pennsylvania and rarely venturing out. But he has never stopped preaching. Gülen’s videos draw millions of views and both adulation and hilarity on YouTube (one has been superimposed with cartoon watermelons to make it look as though the imam is chopping them with his flailing hands as he rants).
Although he was little known outside Turkey, Gülen’s following had grown so huge by 2013 that he was propelled to the number one spot in Time magazine’s annual 100 Most Influential People in the World list. His devotees, loyal, worldly and h
ighly organised, had voted en masse to get him there. The magazine’s blurb betrays the bemusement the editors must have felt at finding the votes flooding in for this unknown man. But there is also a prescient hint of what was to come:
Fethullah Gülen is among the world’s most intriguing religious leaders. From a secluded retreat in Pennsylvania, he preaches a message of tolerance that has won him admirers around the world. Schools founded by Gülen’s followers thrive in an estimated 140 countries. Doctors who respond to his wishes work without pay in disaster-afflicted countries.
Gülen, however, is also a man of mystery. His influence in his native Turkey is immense, exercised by graduates of his schools who have reached key posts in the government, judiciary and police. This makes him seem like a shadowy puppeteer, and he is scorned by almost as many Turks as love him.
The political rise and fall of the Gülenists is the murkiest and most controversial part of the Erdoğan story. But the first thing to say is that the core of Erdoğan’s allegations against the group are true – that as bizarre and conspiratorial as it sounds, Gülen’s followers really did become a shadowy cabal who spent decades inching their way up through the Turkish state.
Here is a taste of how the Gülenists operated. In September 2015, as the relationship between Erdoğan and Gülen was imploding, an email dropped into my inbox from Hawthorn Advisors, a London public relations and ‘reputation management’ agency, publicising a study written by a group of British barristers. It was titled A report on the rule of law and respect for human rights in Turkey since December 2013, and had been commissioned by the Journalists’ and Writers’ Foundation – a well-known Gülenist front group. Established in 1994, the JWF operated from an office in Istanbul’s pious Üsküdar district and was, according to Joshua Hendrick, a US academic who immersed himself among the Gülenists in the 2000s, ‘the primary public face of the movement’.
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