Islamisation Debate: Has Turkey Become Like Malaysia?

Among secular Turks, anxiety once centred on Malaysia’s Islamisation trajectory. Two decades on, the comparison reveals less about where Turkey ended up than about how Islamism itself has transformed.

International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, where I found myself returning not as a reporter this time, but to think through how Islamism has transformed over the last two decades.

Almost two decades ago, I was working for Turkey’s top mainstream newspaper, Hürriyet, as a reporter when the editor-in-chief of the paper, Ertuğrul Özkök, decided to send me to Malaysia for a story.

I was not the only reporter from Istanbul. The other major newspaper, Milliyet, had sent its top journalist, Ece Temelkuran, now a major author whose recently released book Nation of Strangers is shortlisted for the prestigious Women’s Prize.

Ece and I each spent a week in Malaysia without encountering one another, trying to answer a question that had come to dominate public discussion at the time.

Will Turkey become like Malaysia?

The question did not emerge in a vacuum. By 2006 and 2007, Turkey was moving through a series of political confrontations that exposed a deeper struggle over who would contro…