ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses whether Turkey’s recent transition to authoritarianism, which enjoys wide support of both erstwhile and current Islamists, represents a corresponding shift in the trajectory of Muslim governance models by the embrace of an authoritarian religious populism at the expense of the idea of an Islamic democracy. Through an analysis of Turkey’s democratic breakdown and engagement with the Turkish studies literature it lays out a narrative of the gradual deterioration of democracy by identifying the slow build-up of autocracy beginning with the earliest days of Erdoğan’s tenure. Given the success record of Erdoğan’s global bid for Muslim leadership, it inquires whether Turkey has come to serve as an authoritarian model for the Muslim-majority world. Resisting ideological analyses that reduce Turkey’s de-democratization to the AKP’s so-called Islamist ideology, the chapter argues that Erdoğan’s bid for Muslim leadership and patronage of Islamists may leave more lasting effects on Islamism’s trajectory and relationship with democracy. Islamists’ preference for strong religious populist leaders, in contradistinction with their longstanding declared principles of Islamic good governance, may have illustrated how democratic means can be used to create a decisively authoritarian state instead of providing a democratic model for the Muslim world, as Turkey under the AKP was once promoted.
