Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Turkish ruling party put on trial, BBC, July 1, 2008

Turkey’s chief prosecutor has appeared before the country’s Constitutional Court calling for the governing party to be closed down.

Founded by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Justice and Development Party, the AKP, won a landslide victory in the last election.

But its critics say it is trying to impose Sharia law on the secular state.

The party’s attempt to ease a ban on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf is expected to be central to the evidence.

Prosecutor Abdurraham Yalcinkaya, who has argued that the party has become the focal point of anti-secular activities in Turkey, is appearing before judges in a closed-door session.

“This risk has been increasing every day” reads the 162-page petition submitted to the Constitutional Court by Mr Yalcinkaya.

Carolyn Drake for the New York Times

In Turkey, Is Tension About Religion? Class Rivalry? Or Both? – New York Times, Feb. 19, 2008

ISTANBUL — When two women in Islamic head scarves were spotted in an Italian restaurant in this citys posh new shopping mall this month, Gulbin Simitcioglu did a double take.Covered women, long seen as backward peasants from the countryside, “have started to be everywhere,” said Ms. Simitcioglu, a sales clerk in an Italian clothing store, and it is making women like her more than a little uncomfortable. “We are Turkeys image. They are ruining it.”

As Turkey lurches toward a repeal of a ban on head scarves at universities, the countrys secular upper middle class is feeling increasingly threatened.

Religious Turks, once the underclass of society here, have become educated and middle class, and are moving into urban spaces that were once the exclusive domain of the elite. Now the repeal of the scarf ban — pressed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, passed by Parliament and now just awaiting an official signature — is again setting the two groups against each other, unleashing fears that have as much to do with class rivalry as with the growing influence of Islam.

European Pressphoto Agency

Tens of thousands of secular Turks demonstrated in Ankara against the lifting of a decades-old ban on Islamic head scarves at Turkey’s universities.

Turkey’s Parliament Votes to Lift Head Scarf Ban – New York Times, Feb. 9, 2008

ISTANBUL — Turkey’s parliament took a major step toward lifting a ban against women’s head scarves in universities on Saturday, setting the stage for a final showdown with the country’s secular elite over where Islam fits in the building of an open society.

Turkish lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of a measure supported by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to change two articles in Turkey’s Constitution that they say would guarantee every citizen the right to go to college regardless of how they dress. Turkish authorities imposed the ban in the late 1990’s, arguing that the growing numbers of covered women in colleges threatened secularism, one of the founding principles of modern Turkey.

Secular opposition lawmakers voted against the change, with about a fifth of all ballots cast. Large crowds of secular Turks backed them on the streets of Turkey’s capital, Ankara, chanting that secularism, and women’s right to resist being forced to wear head scarves by family members or religious authorities, was under threat and demanding that the government step down.

Andrew Finkel, The many battles for Turkey’s soul, Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2007

Turkey’s elections this summer have put both presidency and government into the hands of the post-Islamist AKP. The secularist old guard fears this unprecedented concentration of power and the idea that the AKP, which has handled economic difficulties gallantly, has become the natural party of government

By Andrew Finkel

Bill Clinton certainly never said: “It’s the future of the republic, stupid.” He only mentioned the economy. Yet many pundits were convinced that it wasn’t the Turkish economy that concerned voters during this politically hot summer, but the nature of its regime. More than one publication called the 22 July general election “the battle for Turkey’s soul”, although what was at stake, who represented God and who the Devil, was often left vague. Did the contest pit Islamists against secularists, democrats against autocrats, pro-Europeans against old-style nationalists, globalisers against protectionists, a new against an old elite, civil society against the military/bureaucratic guardians of the state, all or none of the above?

On the surface at least, Turks went to the poll a few months ahead of schedule because parliament was unable to carry out its constitutional obligation to elect a new president (1). This failure was all the more unexpected because the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) had more than enough MPs. Up to the actual contest the question was not whether it could choose a president, but what name the party’s inner cabal would put forward. The real suspense had been over whether the prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, would abandon his party for the presidential office or whether he would choose someone who would not irritate the sensitivities of Turkish establishment – someone whose wife did not wear the hijab.

In the end Erdogan went for broke. He stayed on as prime minister but nominated his closest political ally, foreign minister Abdullah Gul (whose wife does wear the hijab). Gul is important not just as the man who brokered the start of Turkish accession negotiations to the EU in 2005, but as the long-term architect of the AKP’s bid for the centre ground of Turkish politics. He helped lead the split from the more openly Islamic movement founded by Necmettin Erbakan, in whose government he had been a minister. And when the AKP swept into power in 2002, he became prime minister. In a rare act of political fealty, he kept the seat warm long enough for the more charismatic Erdogan to surmount his legal ban from politics, enter parliament at a by-election and take the job himself.

The AKP’s strategy since its inception has been simple. The party avoided mention of religion so as not to offend the constitution or Turkey’s secular elite. At the same time, it nodded at the conservative inclinations of its supporters. The body language said “trust us, we’re on your side”. The right to be more open about religion in public life was redefined as part of a more general struggle to make Turkey more fully democratic; and this prompted suspicions that for many AKP supporters, their own rights were more important than human rights in general. Even so, the rhetoric meant the AKP was less prone to Turkish nationalism and generally more tolerant of those who sought other rights, including the right to be Kurdish.

Turkey Takes Publisher to Task Over Book Questioning God – New York Times, November 30, 2007

ISTANBUL, Nov. 29 — Turkish prosecutors on Thursday questioned the Turkish publisher of the book “The God Delusion,” by a British author, Richard Dawkins, after a young reader complained that it was offensive, the publisher said.

Erol Karaaslan, whose publishing house is Kuzey Publications, does not face formal charges at this point for bringing out the book, which is a best seller in the United States. But he was informed by prosecutors that a young reader from the neighborhood of Kadikoy filed a complaint against him under a law prohibiting “inciting hatred,” Mr. Karaaslan said in a telephone interview.

In Turkey, the government can open cases against authors or publishers based on complaints about content filed by private citizens, a far-reaching power that sharply limits freedom of expression and is an enduring part of Turkey’s rigid state-controlled past.

The rules have led to the prosecution of authors including Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for literature. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is working to soften these rules as part of Turkey’s effort to join the European Union.

The book, which argues against the existence of God, upset the reader, who argued that it meets the criteria of “inciting hatred,” because it insults God and is offensive to Muslims, Christians and Jews in Turkey.

Johan Spanner for The New York Times

Halime, right, a mother of eight, said she celebrated the Kurdish spring festival of Nawruz for the first time several years ago.

Sabrina Tavernise, As Kurds’ Status Improves, Support for Militants Erodes in Turkey, New York Times, November 2, 2007

KIZILTEPE, Turkey, Oct. 31 — Ten years ago, Turkey ran the Kurdish region here in its southeast like a police state. All signs of Kurdish identity — the language, music, national dress — were strictly banned and subject to punishment. Checkpoints were everywhere. Going out after dark was forbidden.

Signs of Kurdish identity have increased in the southeast.

Today, Kurdish is heard on the streets and in shops, Kurdish satellite TV is legally beamed into homes, and Kurdish holidays are celebrated publicly. The improvements occurred after a 25-year war for Kurdish rights subsided, and are largely a result of legal changes Turkey made to qualify for the European Union.

But militant proponents of that Kurdish identity — a rebel group based in part in northern Iraq — threaten to complicate further progress on the very rights for which they claim to fight, many here say.

“They harm the Kurdish people more than anybody else with this violence,” said Mehmet Kaya, head of the chamber of commerce in the region’s capital, Diyarbakir, referring to the militants. “People of this region are starting to say out loud that they no longer want violence.”

Turkish general warns of irreversible damage to U.S. ties if genocide resolution passes – Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2007

President Bush has said the resolution is the wrong response to the Armenian deaths, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the measure’s timing was important “because many of the survivors are very old.”…

But Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the measure was “irresponsible.”

“Listen, there’s no question that the suffering of the Armenian people some 90 years ago was extreme. But what happened 90 years ago ought to be a subject for historians to sort out, not politicians here in Washington,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”

About 70 percent of U.S. air cargo headed for Iraq goes through Turkey as does about one-third of the fuel used by the U.S. military there. U.S. bases also get water and other supplies carried in overland by Turkish truckers who cross into Iraq’s northern Kurdish region.

In addition, C-17 cargo planes fly military supplies to U.S. soldiers in remote areas of Iraq from Incirlik, avoiding the use of Iraqi roads vulnerable to bomb attacks. U.S. officials say the arrangement helps reduce American casualties.

Gary Kamiya, Genocide: An inconvenient truth | Salon.com, October 16, 2007

The International Association of Genocide Scholars, the leading body of genocide researchers, accepts that the destruction of the Armenians fits the definition of genocide and has called on Turkey to accept responsibility….There is no doubt that the controversy comes at a delicate time, because of both internal Turkish politics and the situation in Iraq. The vote could trigger a Turkish response that would be highly injurious to American interests, not just in Iraq but throughout the Middle East. Turkey could close Incirlik Air Base, through which 70 percent of air cargo for U.S. troops in Iraq passes, and refuse to cooperate with Washington on the war.

But the most dangerous consequence would be a Turkish attack on northern Iraq. In a piece of exquisitely bad timing, the committee vote took place against the background of a mounting drumbeat of war talk from the Gul administration, which is under heavy domestic pressure to smash Kurdish militant group the PKK. Just days before the vote, Kurdish militants killed 13 Turkish soldiers near the Iraq border, one of Turkey’s heaviest recent losses in the decades-long war.

de Bellaigue, Turkey at the Turning Point? – The New York Review of Books, october 25, 2007

It is hard to take seriously the more alarmist statements of Turkey’s die-hard secularists. As Erdogan deliberated on whether or not to run for the presidency, for example, Sezer claimed that Turkish secularism faced “its gravest threat” since the Republic’s inception—a statement that ignored the Islamist uprising that convulsed the Kurdish southeast in 1925 and the massacres of Alevis, members of a sect of heterodox Muslims, by Sunni bigots in the 1970s.

Since it came to power in 2002, the AKP has passed no overtly Islamist legislation. Erdogan tried to outlaw adultery, and some AKP mayors of provincial cities briefly set up alcohol-free zones, but these schemes met with protest and were abandoned. Erdogan’s education minister has been accused of Islamizing textbooks, and of packing his ministry with former employees of the Religious Affairs Directorate, but education remains, for the pupils at most state schools, a resoundingly secular experience. The AKP has not tried to limit or ban usury. Although it came to power promising satisfaction to those who chafe at the head-scarf ban, a highly controversial symbol of the secular–Islamist divide, it did not, in its first term, try to reverse this ban, and the sixty-two women it put up for election in July were all bare-headed. Moreover, over the past few years, the government has brought about what a recent report on women’s rights from the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based think tank, called “the most radical changes to the legal status of Turkish women in 80 years.”[1] Under these reforms, rape in marriage and sexual harassment in the workplace were made criminal offenses, and sexual crimes in general were classified as violations of the rights of the individual. They had formerly been defined as crimes against society, the family, or public morality.

US Viewed as Turkey’s ‘Greatest Threat’ – by Jonathan Bell, IPS, September 8, 2007

Nearly two-thirds of the Turkish public named the United States as their country’s greatest future threat, a recent Pew Global Attitudes Project survey has revealed – the highest percentage of any Middle Eastern or Islamic country polled.

The survey, which was also conducted in Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco and Israel, asked an open-ended question: “What country or groups pose the greatest threat to (survey country) in the future?” Turkey was the only country in which a majority of respondents pointed to the US.

Turkey, a US NATO ally and recipient of US and NATO security guarantees, also harbors the second-most negative attitudes towards the US, with 83 percent holding an “unfavorable” opinion of it – up 29 percent since 2002, the biggest drop in public opinion of the US in recent years.

Turkey – Abdullah Gul – New York Times, September 2, 2007
Still, even if religion in public life is not on the table now, questions of power and class are. Mr. Gul, like many observant Muslims, is from Kayseri, a working-class city in Turkey’s heartland. The urban secularists who were in power for so long are used to thinking of themselves as the elite.

Turkey is clearly an important example of moderate and democratic Islamism. As such, it needs to be studied carefully.

Turkish elections bring Arab silence – Haaretz
While Arab opposition parties, civil society and democracy activists cheered the news from Turkey, there was official silence from Arab governments, as if the elections had occurred on another planet. Unlike the front-page headlines in independent media, the state-controlled media in many Arab countries either ignored, delayed or relegated the Turkish elections’ story to internal pages or the tail end of their regular news.

By the third or fourth day, these media pundits went out of their way to tell their respective audiences how different the situation in Turkey was from that of Arab countries. Some played up the chronic Kurdish, Armenian and Cypriot problems as if to dampen any Arab joy for their northern neighbor.

Turk With Islamic Ties Is Elected President – New York Times, 8/29/2007
Ali Murat Yel, chairman of the sociology department at Fatih University in Istanbul, said the selection of Mr. Gul was comparable in significance to an African-American being elected president in the United States.

“It’s a very important turning point,” Mr. Yel said. “Those people who are the peasants and farmers and petty bourgeoisie always had republican values imposed on them. Now they are rising against it. They are saying, ‘Hey, we are here, and we want our own way.’ ”

Though Turkey’s secular establishment has taken pains to portray Mr. Gul and his close ally, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as inseparable from their Islamic pasts, their supporters argue they have changed dramatically since the early 1990s, when they were members of the overtly Islamic Welfare Party.

“They can sit on the same table as some people who drink alcohol and they drink their Coke, and they would be able to talk to them,” Mr. Yel said. “They have come to terms with the reality of this country.”

MEMRI is a right-wing Israeli organization that seeks to attribute Arab and Muslim hostility to Israel to anti-Semitism and thereby divert attention from the agony of the Palestinians. This perspective is both absurd and morally repugnant. That said, Islamist antisemitism is also absurd and morally repugnant. Middle East experts who are rightly critical of attempts to demonize all Islamists should not go to the opposite extreme of idealizing them all. The fact that Islamist antisemitism is often used to divert attention from Palestinian suffering does not mean it can be ignored. The following statements by the former Turkish prime minister Prof. Necmettin Erbakan, who is the founder and leader of the Islamist movement Milli Gorus are clearly outrageous. And those of us outraged by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should condemn such rhetoric just as vehemently as we condemn the bigotry of Christian and Jewish religious reactionaries. If we do not, we simply invert the moral myopia of the neoconservatives.

MEMRI:
Erbakan: “When we look at the map of the world, we see about 200 countries painted in colors, and we think that there are many races, religions, and nations. The fact is that for 300 years, all these [200 nations] have been controlled from one center only. This center is the racist, imperialist Zionism. Unless you make this correct diagnosis for the illness, you cannot find the cure to it. You will ask, ‘What is this belief, this racist imperialism that destroys happiness in this world?’

“This belief began 5,765 years ago, when the children of Israel were living in Egypt, with a book of magic that was written by someone called Kabbala. The author or authors of this book later claimed that they belonged to the tribe of Moses, but this is not true. They distorted the Tevrat [bible] of Moses and put in it the Kabbala. If you want to see proof of this, you can look at their Tevrat and then look at the Kabbala.

“What do these people believe in? Their belief has four principles [while ours has six] that say: [...] 1) You are the real people of God; all others are created to be your slaves; you were created as men and others [were created] as monkeys that later turned into men. This is what they believe and what they teach. They believe that they are the superior class. 2) This superiority will be not only in thought, but will be materialized, actually realized. They will be the masters and the others will be their slaves. 3) For all this to come true, they must perform three duties: The first duty will be to gather all the exiled sons of Israel into Quds [Jerusalem]; the second duty is to build the ‘Greater Israel’ between the Nile and the Euphrates, within these determined borders, and to provide for the safety of this Greater Israel.

“Do you know what the safety of Israel means? It means that they will rule the 28 countries from Morocco to Indonesia. Since all the Crusades were organized by the Zionists, and since it was our forefathers the Seljuks who stopped them, according to the Kabbala there should be no sovereign state in Anatolia. This is these people’s [i.e. the Jews'] religion, their faith. You can’t argue or negotiate with them. This is their religion, and it comes from the Kabbala.

Secularists and Islamists face off again, Guardian, August 14, 2007