46 Europe The EconomistJanuary 20th 2018
2 soft-spoken political novice who previous-
ly led the Czech Academy of Sciences, won
a larger-than-expected 26.6%, which puts
him in a good position to displace the in-
cumbent in the run-off at the end of the
month. Three days later, on January 16th,
parliament rejected MrBabis’s attempt to
form a minority government. As the leader
of the largest party, he was invited to try to
do so by the president, though he controls
just 78 of the 200 parliamentaryseats,
lacks a coalition partner and is accused of
fraud in connection with EU subsidies for a
development project. All told, the presi-
dential second round, on January
26th-27th, is shaping up as a referendum
on the direction of the country, if not the
entire region.
In SeptemberMPs voted by 123 to four
to strip MrBabis ofhis immunity from
prosecution on the fraud charges, but be-
cause parliament was then dissolved for
the October election, theymust now do so
again. In noticeable contrast to Mr Zeman,
Mr Drahos hascalled on Mr Babis to give
up his immunity voluntarily, and prove his
innocence. On January 16th MrBabis ob-
liged. With police and prosecutorspressing
the case, the Hospodarske Novinynewspa-
per recently leaked a report from EU inves-
tigators accusingMr Babisof “numerous
breaches of national and EU legislation”.
Mr Drahos is poaching supporters from
Mr Zeman; exit polls found that 14% of Mr
Zeman’s voters from 2013 opted for Mr Dra-
hos from a field of nine first-round candi-
dates. “Incompetence, corruption and vul-
garity have streamed from Prague Castle
for nearly five years,” Mr Drahos told The
Economistduring the campaign. Mr Zeman
is noted for his diatribes against the EU,
and for his love of Vladimir Putin (odd in a
country thatRussian troops invaded in
1968 to crush local hopes of liberty).
These days, Mr Zeman looks frail in his
rare public appearances. Confronted by a
topless protester from Femen, a radical
feminist group, as he cast his vote, a dishev-
elled Mr Zeman had to steady himself on a
nearby table. His election slogan, “Zeman
Znovu” (Zeman Again), is hardly inspiring,
and there have been reports that he has
cancer (which his office denies) to go with
his diabetes.
This leads many voters to question
whether Mr Zeman still has the fortitude to
guide the country and match witswith the
wily Mr Babis. Opinion polls have long
shown Mr Drahos defeating Mr Zeman in a
head-to-head contest, and the candidates
who finished third to sixth in the first
round (with a combined 32.5% of the vote)
have all pledged to support the former
chemist in the run-off. While still too early
to count out Mr Zeman, not to mention his
allies in the media and in Moscow, victory
for Mr Drahos would be a breath of fresh
air in a region where liberal values have
more recently been stifled. 7T
URKEY’s directorate of religious affairs,
known as the Diyanet, has a knack for
odd and outrageous pronouncements. The
body had already made it known that cele-
brating the new year, playing the lottery,
feedingdogs at home, and purchasing Bit-
coin were incompatible with the princi-
ples of Islam; men should not dye their
moustaches, nor couples hold hands. (Di-
vorcing one’s spouse by text message,
however, isOK.) But when the Diyanet de-
clared, in a glossary entryspotted on its
website atthe start of this year, that accord-
ing to Islamic law girls as young as nine
were able to marry, the ensuing outcry was
bigger than in recent memory. Some critics
called for the institution to close. The Diya-
net protested that it was only cataloguing,
not endorsing, principles laid down by Is-
lamic jurists, and soundly condemned
child marriage in a sermon. (The legal age
in Turkey is 18.) The offending post was tak-
en down.
To critics of the Diyanet the incident,
the latestin a series of controversies, of-
fered yet more evidence of the directorate’s
transformation. Over the past decade, and
especially amid the purges that followed a
coup attempt in 2016, Turkey’s president
Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-
rooted Justice and Development (AK)
party have tightened their grip on state in-
stitutions, restricting dissent within and
without. The Diyanet has been no excep-tion. Designed as a check against political
Islam, the directorate has become one of its
main platforms.
In constitutional terms, Turkey is a secu-
lar country. But whereas in most places this
implies the separation of religion and state,
in Turkey it means state control over reli-
gion. Enter the Diyanet. The brainchild of
modern Turkey’s founding father, Kemal
Ataturk, and his supporters, the directorate
replaced the office of the Sheikh ul-Islam
as the country’s main religious authority
on March 3rd 1924, the day parliament
abolished the Ottoman caliphate. A bu-
reaucratic behemoth, the Diyanet employs
all of Turkey’s imams, organises Koran
courses for children, issues its own, non-
binding interpretations of Islamic norms,
and pens sermons to be read in the coun-
try’s 90,000 mosques.
For most of its history, the Diyanet has
accommodated the politics of the secular
establishment, embracing a version of Is-
lam at ease with modernity, and keeping
fundamentalism at bay. (Support for sharia
in Turkey is considerably lower than in
most of the Muslim world.) UnderAK,
however, itseems less bound by secular
norms than ever before. “The Diyanet of
today has a more Islamist, more Arab
worldview,” says Mustafa Cagrici, the muf-
ti of Istanbul from 2003 to 2011. Much of
this has to do with the influx of hardline in-
terpretations of Islam from abroad and
Turkey’s budding relations with foreign Is-
lamist groups.
Despite a few early signsto the contrary,
the moderate, critical current within the
Diyanet has folded under increasing pres-
sure from hardliners. In 2004 the Diyanet
announced a project to verify and reinter-
pret the hadith, or the collected words and
acts of the Prophet Muhammad, in a mod-
ern light. Following grumblings by power-
ful Islamic brotherhoods and conserva-
tives inside AK, the fruit of the Diyanet’s
labours, a seven-volume study far less am-
bitious than its designers intended, took a
decade to appear, and did so to minimal
fanfare. Asked if a similar project might
even be started today, Mr Cagrici throws
back his head. “No way,” he says. The Diya-
net is bigger (it employs 117,000 people)
and wealthier (its budget has grown at
least fourfold since 2006) than at any time
in its history, but it is also more firmly un-
der the government’s thumb.
For almost a century, the Diyanet has
walked a fine line to help safeguard Tur-
key’s identity as a country that is both Mus-
lim and secular. By starting to endorse a
reading of Islam that is at odds with what
are still the laws of the state it serves, it now
appears to be veering off course. Turkey is
not about to become a theocracy. But the
heterodox, tolerant Islam that has set it
apart from much ofthe Middle East is un-
der threat. Despite itsoriginal purpose, the
Diyanet is not helping. 7TurkeyChecking up on
the imams
ISTANBUL
A body once meant to keep an eye on
political Islam is boosting itLet no man dye his moustache