Erbakan's Cause, Part III
This is the third part in my series reviewing the semi-autobiography of Necmettin Erbakan, the founder of Millî Görüş (National View), Turkey’s main Islamist movement.
Part I was mostly on Erbakan’s early years as an engineer and the basics of his Islamism. Part II was on a long chapter called “the powers that rule the world” in which he gave a sweeping overview of modern history as he sees it.
I thought I’d make it a three-part series, but couldn’t quite fit everything into a single post, so there’s going to be a final post tomorrow or Friday.
Our Cause of Islamic Unity (İslam Birliği Davamız)
I started reading this section expecting abstract notions of Islamic unity, but there isn’t much of that there. Most of it is a narrative of Erbakan jet-setting between Islamic countries in the lead-up to the first Gulf War. It starts in the summer of 1990, when he visits Baghdad to talk to Saddam Hussein, but then jumps forward to December 1990 - January 1991. By this time, Saddam has invaded parts of Kuwait and the Americans have been building up forces and are preparing to attack Iraq. Erbakan is not in government at this time, but is trying to convince leaders in the Islamic world to resolve the Gulf Crisis and deny the West an excuse to intervene in the region.
It’s clear that Erbakan got lots of time with Saddam during these months, and he quotes him at length, often across several pages. These quotes, like all others in the book, are not to be read verbatim. Erbakan just recreates figures from his memory, often making them out to be saints or devils. His Saddam is a good, honest Muslim who is trying to resolve an understandable territorial dispute with his southern neighbor. Saddam’s overriding concern is to resist Western interventions into the Islamic world, which Erbakan, of course, shares.
There’s a flashback here to Erbakan’s days in Germany, when he was first confronted by Western designs on the Middle East. He says that in the spring of 1952, he was invited to a secret conference of the German aviation research agency (Deutsche Luftfahrforschung, best known for having developed the V1 and V2 rockets) held at the Kürhaus Hotel in Aachen. I did some basic googling, and the details of the institution and the hotel check out, but haven’t been able to verify anything beyond that. Erbakan reports that the conference reflected on ways to steal Middle Easter oil. There’s long quotes again, like this one by ESSO (now ExxonMobil) general manager “Dr. Müller,” who’s opening the session to this secret conference:
“I have invited you to a conference entitled ‘Today's Arabia,’ but the name of the conference is due to its secrecy. The main purpose of the meeting is this: I come from Dammam, the new oil region of Saudi Arabia. Together with the Americans, we have found the world's richest oil resources. In these secret meetings that we have planned to be held with select people from important cities in America and Europe, we want to consult on how we can ensure that this enormous wealth is used for the benefit of the people of the Western world. Therefore, after giving you brief information about this great wealth, I will be asking for your recommendations.”
Sounds a bit like a Bond villain, but Erbakan firmly believed these stories, and so did his followers. He says that some awful things were said about Islam and the local population, but that he couldn’t speak up because he was there on behalf of his mentor, Prof. Schmidt. Erbakan then went back to his room and wrote out a 40-page letter home about the awful things he heard at this secret conference.