[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
About a month ago, I spent half a day with a group of journalists from Syria, who were visiting Istanbul for meetings with their Turkish colleagues. We contemplated on the historical ties between our countries, and spoke positively about our growing relations. During the lunch, one of the Syrian guests kindly posed me a personal question: “Which party are you from sir?”
Change within Islam
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Turkey’s Soft Power In The Arab World
Saturday, May 1st, 2010Islam, Women and Sex: Debunking A Few Myths
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
There are times that I strongly disagree with my colleague Barçın Yinanç, the associate editor of our paper, whose view of Turkey’s self-styled secularism is generally more positive than mine. But I felt quite in tune with her last weekend, when I read some of the fuming comments she received for simply saying something positive about Islam in her latest story. “Welcome to the club,” I then said to her in an email. “This is called Islamophobia.”
Could Islam Help Us Against Honor Killings?
Sunday, February 7th, 2010[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Yet another horrible honor killing took place in the southeast, the least developed part of Turkey. A 16-year-old girl was buried alive by her relatives simply for befriending boys. Forensic experts found soil in her lungs and stomach, indicating that the poor kid was conscious while being buried into the ground.
May God have mercy on her soul. And may her killers face punishment in this world and the next. What they did was cruel, monstrous and evil.
Toward A Liberal ‘Political Islam’?
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Political Islam, as you probably have noticed before, is a dirty term. It often refers to angry men who impose veils on women and ban anything that is fun. It even reminds us of the horrific reign of the Taliban, whose heaven on Earth in Afghanistan looked rather like hell for most of us.
There is a good reason for this notoriety of political Islam. Its main proponents, such as the Pakistani thinker Abul A’ala Mawdudi (1903-1979), defined it as the effort to create an “Islamic state,” whose main mission would be the imposition of shariah, or Islamic law, within its most rigid and medieval interpretation.
The Trouble With Islamo-Tribalism
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Nasty things are happening in Malaysia. Nine Christian churches have been vandalized or burnt just over the last weekend. Thank God, nobody has been hurt, yet, but the terror unleashed is terrifying enough for the Christian minority of this overwhelmingly Muslim nation.
Should Muslims ‘Slay The Mockers Of Islam’?
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Alas, it happened again. An extremist Muslim attacked a Westerner to punish him for “mocking Islam.” This time, the victim was the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, whose controversial caricature of the Prophet Mohammed had sparked a worldwide storm five years ago. A 28-year-old man of Somali origin broke into the cartoonist’s home last Friday, wielding an axe and a knife. “We will get our revenge,” he reportedly yelled, before being shot by the police and taken under custody.
Why Muslim Culture Needs More Fun
Thursday, December 31st, 2009[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
It happens toward every year’s end. The more Westernized part of Turkish society warms up for New Year’s Eve. Decorations are put up, parties are organized, and restaurants advertise eat-and-dance-all-night-long programs. Santa Clauses and pine trees show up in upscale malls.
The Turks who embrace these Christmas symbols often have no idea about Christ. They just like the lifestyle of the wealthy, happy and joyful people they see in Hollywood movies.
Are Minarets ‘Our Bayonets?’
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
The recent Swiss ban on minarets has the bad potential of being a watershed event in terms of Western-Muslim relations. Therefore, there is a lot to say about it.
First, the ban is clearly a violation of religious freedom. It would be a violation of religious freedom, too, if crosses were banned from church roofs or Magen Davids from those of synagogues. That’s why the whole affair is simply a “disgrace,” as a recent New York Times editorial aptly defined it.
Islam, Apostasy And ‘Erdoğanists’ In Malaysia
Saturday, May 9th, 2009[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
KUALA LUMPUR – It is my first time in this fascinating city, and I just hope that it won’t be the last. Thanks to the invitation from Malaysian Think Tank, a pioneering organization dedicated to popularize classical liberal ideas in Malaysian society, I had the chance to come here all the way down from Istanbul. And I was impressed by not just Malaysia’s common tourist attractions (gorgeous nature, great food, and diverse society) but also for the lessons it tells us about the interaction between Islam and modernity.
Will Non-Muslims Go To Heaven, Too?
Sunday, October 12th, 2008[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
WARSAW – I was walking heedlessly in the Old Quarter of the Polish capital last Sunday until I saw a group of joyful singers on the street. Then I stopped and stared. They were about a dozen young Poles who were singing and clapping in the middle of a busy street and in the midst of a bitter cold. Soon, I realized that their art was very much related to their faith. As evangelical Catholics — a category which I just learnt that exits — they were praising God and calling on other people to do the same.
A Mosque Reform On The Way?
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Turkey’s official religious institution, the Directorate of Religious Affairs, took a bold step two years ago by launching a project cleansing the Islamic tradition from misogyny. What the institution did was to employ a team of religious scholars to prepare a new collection of hadiths (the deeds and sayings attributed to Prophet Muhammad), and remove the degrading remarks against women, which represent not the original message of Islam but the male-dominated culture of the past. With that project, the Directorate, which is called Diyanet İşleri Başkanlğı” or simply Diyanet in Turkish, had shown that it was not just open-minded but also brave.
Is Islam For ‘Victory?’ Or For God?
Saturday, June 21st, 2008[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
A few weeks ago, I ran into a quote from Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian Muslim scholar and Al-Jazeera televangelist, in Turkey’s controversial Islamist daily, Vakit. “Victory,” the 80-year-old cleric was saying, “is only possible by returning to Islam.” The “victory” he was referring to was the one Muslims would have won against Israel. “The defeat of the Jewish State is possible,” he reportedly declared in a sermon in Qatar, “only when Muslims fully return to the pure teaching of Islam.”
The Religious Way To The Open Society
Thursday, March 27th, 2008[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
NEW YORK – Peter Berger, one of the world’s leading authorities on sociology of religion, put in a nutshell what all secularists, and especially Turkey’s fuming ones, should get.
“Modernization does not necessarily secularize societies,” the Boston University professor noted, “it rather pluralizes them.”
Welcome To Islamic Reformation 101
Saturday, March 1st, 2008[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
This week Turkey made international headlines not only with its military’s land operation in northern Iraq or its never-ending tug of war over the headscarf. There was also the scholarly and tedious work carried out by a group of theologians in Ankara, supported by the Diyanet (Turkey’s official religious body), to revise the “hadiths” – the words and deeds of Prophet Mohammed. “Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts,” read the BBC’s headline. “Turkey strives,” the Guardian observed, “for 21st century form of Islam.” According to the Financial Times, this was “Turkey’s fresh look at Prophet.”
Apostasy Is A Right, Not A Crime
Monday, November 5th, 2007[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
NEW YORK- Western governments and the international media focused on a bizarre court case in Afghanistan in February 2006. The accused was Abdul Rahman, a 41-year-old Afghan citizen, who was on the verge of receiving a death penalty. His crime was abandoning Islam and converting to Christianity.
Soon Rahman was saved thanks to international pressure on the Afghan government, but his story was only one of the many severe violations of religious freedom in the contemporary Islamic world.
God, Gold And Islam
Monday, October 29th, 2007[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
LONDON — One of the things that strikes visitors to the British capital are the countless signs of its magnificence. The grandeur of the Big Ben or the Westminster Abbey, the elegance of The National Gallery or the Tate, along with all the handsome avenues and eye-catching monuments of central London seem to be testament to the majesty of the British Empire, which was, until just a half century ago, the world’s preeminent superpower.
The Islamic Case For A Secular State -III-
Monday, October 8th, 2007[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
In June 1998, a very significant meeting took place at a hotel near Abant, which is a beautiful lake in the east of Istanbul. The participants included some of the most respected theologians and Islamic intellectuals in Turkey. For three days, the group of nearly 50 scholars discussed the concept of a secular state and its compatibility with Islam. At the end, they all agreed to sign a common declaration that drew some important conclusions
The Islamic Case For A Secular State -II-
Thursday, October 4th, 2007[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
There are some myths that many well-educated Turks believe to be true. One of them is the idea that the Ottoman Empire’s modernization efforts were continuously resisted and crippled by religion. Italian scholar Rossella Bottoni summarizes the falsity of this cliché well in her article titled, “The Origins of Secularism in Turkey.” “According to received wisdom,” she notes:
“In the Ottoman Empire there was a Manichaean struggle between, on one side, the reformers who were Westernizers, liberals, secularizers and modern, and, on the other side, the opponents, especially the ulema (Islamic scholars), who were obscurantist, backward-looking and hooked on the most obsolete customs dictated by religion.”
The Islamic Case For A Secular State -I-
Saturday, September 29th, 2007[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
One reason why Turkey’s secularist elite is so obsessed with religious practice is their concern about the secularity of the state. If a society becomes more religious, they believe, then the secular system will be less secure. If more Turks follow God’s orders in daily life, they ask themselves, why shouldn’t they impose them on others using state power?
There is, to be frank, some justification for this worry. There are religious tyrannies in the Muslim world which impose their narrow interpretation of Islam to their citizens. Moreover, there have been groups and individuals in Turkey who talk about doing the same thing.
Cartoons Of Muhammad and Clash Of Civilizations
Friday, September 28th, 2007[Originally published in in Swedish in the Göteborg-Posten, and Turkish Daily News ]
As if we haven’t had enough troubles with the Danish cartoon crisis of 2005, yet another one erupted recently in Sweden. Artist Lars Vilks pictured a cartoon showing Prophet Muhammad’s head on the body of a dog, and the daily Nerikes Allehanda published it Aug. 19.
Not too surprisingly, many Muslims found the depiction highly insulting. Demonstrators took the streets in Pakistan and burnt a Swedish flag. Egypt, Pakistan and Iran made diplomatic protests. And just recently, Al Qaeda in Iraq offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who kills Vilks.
