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Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
[Published in The Daily]
Since 9/11, much ink has been spilled on the troubles of the world of Islam. The problem was painfully obvious: There were only a few functioning democracies in the Muslim world, and simply none among the Arabs. Some even presumed a fundamental contradiction between Islam and democracy. Islam, they argued, could only produce dictatorial regimes.
But there was a serious flaw in this argument. Most of the Middle Eastern dictators — Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Bashar al-Assad of Syria — were secular, not Islamic, figures. In fact, the Islamic groups in these countries, such as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and its various franchises, were often brutally suppressed by the secular autocrats in question.
Read more in The Daily ».
Posted in Change within Islam, Islam & Muslims, Suggested Reading | 3 Responses »
Saturday, April 24th, 2010
[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Ninety-five years ago, on this very day, a dark episode began in the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Around 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were arrested in Istanbul and deported to Anatolia, never to return.
The real catastrophe began a month later. The Union and Progress government, the Young Turk Party that overtook the empire with a military coup in 1913, passed an Expulsion Law, giving itself the authority to deport anyone that is deemed as a threat to national security.
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Posted in Highly Recommended, Suggested Reading, Unveiling Turkey | 3 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 »
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 »
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, January 5th, 2008
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
This week some Turkish newspapers ran annoyed stories about a new billboard on German streets: “Mach mich nicht an, Ali!,” it read, which means, “Don’t abuse me, Ali!” The stylish blonde lady that stood beside this cold warning was evidently representative of many other Teutonic females who, apparently, had a problem with sexually abusive Turkish men.
Yet the Turkish media imagined a totally opposite — and cultural, not sexual — abuse behind this German poster. They thought this was a case of racist bigotry against Turks. One of our top selling newspapers ran the story with the headline, ”The latest crusade.” Another one defined the poster as a piece of ”anti-Turkey propaganda.”
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Posted in Suggested Reading, Unveiling Turkey | 20 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 »
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 »
Friday, July 13th, 2007
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Do you now what the biggest nightmare of a secularist Turk is?
It takes place mostly when he takes a vacation to visit some place in Europe or North America. He packs up, wears his stylish jeans and t-shirt, puts on his iPod, takes his elegant girlfriend and boards a plane. During the flight, he chats with one of the European or American passengers on board. At some point this indigenous Westerner learns that this chic couple is from Turkey and he confusedly asks, “Hey, don’t you guys wear fez or turbans in your country, is this your national dress?”
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Posted in Fundamentalism (Secular), Highly Recommended, Suggested Reading | 12 Responses »
Saturday, May 5th, 2007
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Did you know that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan and his wife are crypto-Jews who secretly collaborate with the Mossad? And that they are trying to cook-up “moderate Islam” and destroy Turkish secularism for the sake of serving the elders of Zion?
Well, I had no clue about that terrible conspiracy either, until I went into a major Istanbul bookstore last weekend and checked the bestsellers list. There were a few usual titles telling stories about how the beloved Secular Turkish Republic is targeted by internal and external plots — a highly popular and powerful paranoia in the country these days — but none of them were as informative as the one penned by a die-secularist named Ergün Poyraz.
“The Children of Moses” is the title of Mr. Poyraz’s masterpiece, and in its subtitle, there are two unexpected names: “Tayyip and Emine.” On the book’s cover, there is even a more stunning graphic message: a huge Star of David encircles the photos of Mr. and Mrs. Erdoğan.
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Posted in Suggested Reading, Unveiling Turkey | 16 Responses »
