By dominating the entire society, and not leaving any legitimate room for civil religious movements, the Turkish state has unintentionally channeled the ‘Islamic energy’ to politics. If there is a ‘State ideology,’ it is only natural that believers try to redefine it according to their value system.
A few weeks ago, I gave a speech […]
Islamism arose in Turkey not because its Islamic tradition was prone to it. No. It arose because the secular fundamentalist establishment kept on suppressing even the most moderate and progressive expressions of religion. And, well, they can do the same thing again.
Today is the anniversary of a tragedy in Turkish political history. Eighty-two years […]
Yesterday’s Turkish Daily News had a piece by Mr. Faruk Loğoğlu, former Turkish Ambassador to Washington, titled “The apologists are wrong, dead wrong about Turkey.” The “apologists” included Suat Kınıklıoğlu (of the German Marshall Fund), Fareed Zakaria (of Newsweek), The Economist magazine, and me. And what we “the apologists” have been doing, according to Mr. […]
AKP’s strong support for the EU process, free markets, and liberal reforms is an invaluable experience showing the possibility of a Western-friendly and still genuinely Muslim popular movement. This should not be sacrificed to the paranoid fears and the authoritarian ambitions of Turkey’s secular fundamentalists.
In the past two decades, the violence perpetrated by the […]
A popular fallacy is at work in Turkey nowadays, which one can justifiably call as Reductio ad Sharium: the reduction of any public visibility of Islam, and the demand for more religious freedom for the country’s practicing Muslims, as a stepping stone to “Shariah,” i.e. Islamic law.
The Latin term, Reductio ad absurdum (“reduction to […]