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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.
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Posted in Change within Islam, Faith Matters, Fundamentalism (Islamic), Fundamentalism (Secular), Highly Recommended, Islam & Muslims, Unveiling Turkey | No Responses »
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.
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Posted in Change within Islam, Faith Matters, Fundamentalism (Islamic), Highly Recommended, Islam & Muslims, Rethinking The East, Suggested Reading | 4 Responses »
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
We Turks hotly debate the role of religion in public life all the time. But our frame of reference hardly goes beyond a few cliches that have been planted in our minds by the official ideology, education system, and other national narratives. That’s why it would be a good idea to raise our heads a bit and look at other sources which bring different perspectives to the same question.
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Posted in Highly Recommended, Unveiling Turkey | 4 Responses »
Thursday, January 8th, 2009
[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Sometimes an article by one man summarizes the mindset of millions. The piece titled “Bam Stirs Fear in Israel,” written by Ralph Peters and published in the New York Post on January 1, was like that. Fearing that “Bam” (i.e, Obama) could “stab Israel in the back” (i.e., tell her to stop the bloodbath in Gaza), Mr. Peters was trying to persuade his readers why it was crucial that the Israeli military kept on bombing the Gaza Strip – a deadly operation which has killed more than 150 women and children up to this point.
“Fighting terrorists effectively means going in on the ground, and sooner is better than later,” argued Mr. Peters. “You can’t impress fanatics into surrendering. You have to kill them. Nothing else works.”
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Posted in Highly Recommended, Islam & Muslims, Rethinking The West | 10 Responses »
Friday, November 21st, 2008
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
My column neighbor Burak Bekdil, with whom I often disagree, had an interesting piece last month titled “I give up… No Panama hats or alcohol!” By using sharp examples and witty stories, he was basically questioning the level of acceptance that religious-freedom-seeking Turks are ready to grant to those who seek freedom from religion.
“I am not an atheist, but I am very curious…,” he was asking, “…would the Istanbul Municipality agree to run ads on its buses that would read, ‘There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life’?”
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Posted in Faith Matters, Highly Recommended | 5 Responses »
Sunday, November 16th, 2008
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
In recent years, the more moderate and reasonable Kemalists are asking themselves a curious question: How in the world has Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s founder, who devoted himself to fighting “dogmatism” become a dogma himself? How has such a bold champion of “science and reason” turned into the symbol of a rigid, irrational, insensible ideology that impedes the country’s progress, including its candidacy for the European Union?
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Posted in Fundamentalism (Secular), Highly Recommended, Unveiling Turkey | 2 Responses »
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.
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Posted in Change within Islam, Faith Matters, Highly Recommended, Islam & Muslims, Rethinking The West | 18 Responses »
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
The people of Damal, a district of the eastern city of Ardahan, couldn’t have imagined that their modest and destitute town would attract droves of visitors and become the focus of the Turkish media. But that is exactly what happened in the past few years with the ”Atatürk miracle” discovered on the face of the Karadağ heights. Apparently, the silhouette of Turkey’s revered founder appears on the shadow that falls on these heights between June 15 and July 5. And thousands of Atatürk lovers, including military officers, bureaucrats and urban professionals, visit the region in order to observe this fascinating solstice.
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Posted in Fundamentalism (Secular), Highly Recommended, Suggested Reading, Unveiling Turkey | 7 Responses »
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.”
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Posted in Change within Islam, Fundamentalism (Islamic), Highly Recommended, Islam & Muslims, Suggested Reading | 9 Responses »
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
I just saw “Fitna,” the new controversial film produced by Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Freedom Party. The 17-minute video shows acts of violence, and expressions of hatred, by Muslims against “infidels.” Heads are cut off, bodies are blown apart, children are taught to denounce Jews as “apes and pigs,” imams call for world domination, and protesters hold signs that read, “God Bless Hitler.”
What makes all this disturbing scenery even more provocative, and, in a sense, more meaningful, is the way they are connected to the Koran. After each instance of ferocity, “Fitna” quotes a passage from the Muslim Scripture which, apparently, presents a justification.
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Posted in Faith Matters, Fundamentalism (Islamic), Highly Recommended | 15 Responses »
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
[Originally published in Wall Street Journal]
Who would you expect to be zealous enemies of “moderate Islam”? Islamic fundamentalists? You bet. From Osama bin Laden & Co. to less violent but equally fanatic groups, Islamist militants abhor their co-religionists who reject tyranny and violence in the name of God. But they are not alone. In this part of the world, there is another group that holds a totally opposite worldview but shares a similar hatred of moderate Islam: Turkey’s secular fundamentalists.
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Posted in Fundamentalism (Secular), Highly Recommended, Unveiling Turkey | 7 Responses »
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
You really shouldn’t miss this. Last week, the head of the CHP (People’s Republican Party) in the city of Denizli, Mr. Ali Kavak, unveiled yet another heinous attack on our secular Republic and its founder. He, with all seriousness, posed in front of cameras with a photo of the statue of M. Kemal Atatürk that rests at the center of his city. “As you see,” he said, “the penis of the horse that Atatürk sits on has been broken.”
Then he moved on to disclose the wicked plan behind this blasphemy: “We think that the AKP (Justice and Development Party) cadres have broken the penis,” he asserted, “the mindset which covers our women’s heads with scarves is now attacking artworks!”
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Posted in Fundamentalism (Secular), Highly Recommended, Suggested Reading, Unveiling Turkey | 7 Responses »
Friday, February 15th, 2008
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Proverbs are sometimes a good way of getting a sense of a nation’s culture. You can especially learn many things about Turkey by looking at it popular maxims. One of them is particularly important vis-à-vis the political mindset. It is short and beautifully simple: “If you give your hand,” it warns, “then you will lose your arm.”
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Posted in Highly Recommended, Suggested Reading, Unveiling Turkey | 5 Responses »
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
This might not be the most politically correct thing to say, but I cannot resist the temptation to proclaim the truth: Most Turkish women are horrible drivers. You will see what I mean if you spend a couple of years, or even months, in Turkish streets. If there is a car in front of you which is too slow, too undecided, and too paralyzed, there is 95 percent change that a lady will be sitting in its driver seat. Indeed, it is a truism among Turkish men that “women can’t drive.”
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Posted in Highly Recommended, Rethinking The East, Suggested Reading, Unveiling Turkey | 4 Responses »
Saturday, December 29th, 2007
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Chou En-Lai, the late prime minister of communist China, was once asked what he thought about the French Revolution. He declined to comment, and explained, “It’s too early to tell.”
That was in the early 1960s. Perhaps today it is a little bit less early to comment on whether the French Revolution really was a good idea. That seminal event – which inspired not just the French but also many other revolutionaries in many countries all around the world, including Turkey – has borne some notable fruits by which we might judge their political roots.
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Posted in Fundamentalism (Secular), Highly Recommended, Rethinking The West, Unveiling Turkey | 9 Responses »
Thursday, December 27th, 2007
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Cautionary note: The country, events and characters in this piece are all real. I am not kidding at all.
Is it possible to build a machine that will work forever without having any energy input? Many mechanics were fascinated by that idea during the Middle Ages, well into the 19th century. But at last, thanks to the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, the zeal for such a “perpetual motion machine” died out. The scientific community decided that it was impossible to build such a marvelous device — at least in the universe we live in.
But wait a minute… Perhaps the scientists got it wrong. Maybe they did not employ the correct principles that would allow for the creation of a perpetual motion machine. They, particularly, did not take into account the most important guiding light that the Turkish nation has ever seen.
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Posted in Fundamentalism (Secular), Highly Recommended, Suggested Reading, Unveiling Turkey | 9 Responses »
Saturday, December 8th, 2007
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Music has not saved the world, as some pot smoking flower-powerists used to believe it would in the 1960s. Yet musicians have occasionally uttered words of wisdom that might have helped us calm our hypes. Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, better known by his stage name Sting, once gave one such message of restraint. In one of his greatest songs, “The Russians,” released very timely in 1985, Sting sang the following:
“In Europe and America,
There is a growing feeling of hysteria,
Conditioned to respond to all the threats,
In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets.
Mr. Khrushchev said we will bury you,
[But] I don’t subscribe to this point of view,
It would be such an ignorant thing to do,
If the Russians love their children, too.”
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Posted in Fundamentalism (Islamic), Highly Recommended, Islam & Muslims, Rethinking The East, Suggested Reading | 11 Responses »
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.
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Posted in Change within Islam, Highly Recommended, Islam & Muslims | 3 Responses »
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
KRYNICA-ZDROJ — This little Polish town not only has a name hard to pronounce, but it is also quite difficult to reach. In order to arrive at this nice spa resort, you need to first fly to Warsaw, then take another plane to Krakow, and then drive for more than 200 kilometers.
Yet this long and winding – and nowadays heavily raining – road apparently does not prevent thousands of people to meet here every September for what they call “the Davos of Central-Eastern Europe:” The Krynica Economic Forum, which brings together top-level politicians including heads of state, and businessmen from Central Europe, the former Soviet Union and many other places.
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Posted in Faith Matters, Fundamentalism (Secular), Highly Recommended, Suggested Reading | 5 Responses »
