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June 30, 2007
Atilla Yayla and the Emperor’s Latest Clothes
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Next Monday, on July 2, a Turkish professor will be on trial in İzmir. The prosecutor will ask the judges that he should be put in prison for three years for the crime he committed in the same city about six months ago. The alleged felony is not something like theft, robbery or fraud, though. It is about “insulting Atatürk,” Turkey's revered founder, and the accused is Dr. Atilla Yayla, who teaches political science at Ankara's Gazi University and who is also the founder of the Association for Liberal Thinking.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 9:57 AM | Comments (23)
June 28, 2007
Why Nationalism Works—and How Capitalism Might Help
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
I was taking a nap on Cem Uzan's “election bus” last Wednesday when the shiny vehicle was about to reach Trabzon, a city that has been on the news lately for its rampant nationalism. The loud music and chanting coming from the party convoy woke me up, and the first thing I noticed was a pickup truck which had several youngsters hanging out from its windows. While the boys were cheering for Mr. Uzan's “Genç Parti” (Young Party), I noticed something more interesting on the back of their van. “I would rather have an enemy like a lion,” a rusty plate read, “instead of a friend like a jackal.”
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:37 AM | Comments (2)
June 22, 2007
Cem Uzan's Case for Nuts—and Neo-Nationalism
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
NEWS ANALYSIS - Who wouldn't prefer to pay just one Lira for gasoline instead of more than YTL two? Or which hazelnut producer wouldn't prefer to sell his product at a state-subsidized rate of eight Liras per kilogram, instead of market prices that don't give even half of that? While it is not hard to answer those questions, it was only Cem Uzan, leader of the up-and-coming Young Party (GP) who grasped its importance before anybody else, and, accordingly, laid out a very promising election strategy.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 3:28 PM | Comments (5)
June 16, 2007
Sex Matters -II- [The Tragedy of Kemalist Feminism]
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Last weekend I was sitting at one the busiest Starbucks Coffee shops in Istanbul and reading the recent report by the European Stability Initiative (ESI) titled, “Sex And Power In Turkey: Feminism, Islam and The Maturing of Turkish Democracy.” Suddenly someone said “Hi!” to me, and I realized that she was the perfect person to do so while reading a study on Turkish feminism. As a young, elegant and articulate Turkish woman, she runs a successful business and lives a perfectly Western life. But at the same time she believes that the U.S. and the EU are cooking up a conspiracy against Turkey, and the country is heading fast toward “shariah rule” because of those evil powers and their internal ally, the incumbent AKP. She is one of those types who would rather see tanks in the streets than a first lady with a headscarf.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 12:10 PM | Comments (25)
June 14, 2007
Sex Matters -I- [Toward a Post-Patriarchal Turkey]
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Do you recall the recent debate in Turkey about “Islamic capitalism?” Well, that was sparked by a 2005 report prepared by the Berlin-based think tank, European Stability Initiative (ESI), and which had the witty title, “Islamic Calvinists: Change and conservatism in Central Anatolia.” According to ESI, Turkey's conservative Muslim entrepreneurs were developing a “business ethic,” bit similar to that of the early Calvinists, who had spearheaded the flourishing of capitalism in Europe, as the analyses of sociologist Max Weber would later show.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 12:14 PM | Comments (1)
June 9, 2007
Uncivil Society Under a Jealous God
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
A few weeks ago, I gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations entitled “Turkey's Political Battle: Secularism vs. Democracy.” While I hope that the event, organized and presided by CFR's articulate Turkey expert, Steven Cook, helped the audience, I am pretty sure that it helped me. Once more I had an opportunity to see how Westerners perceive Turkey. From all the answers, reactions and comments that I received, and not just at the CFR meeting but also on many other occasions, I have come to notice that there is an important barrier for the uninitiated foreigner to understand Turkey's politics. Over here some political concepts have very different meanings.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 12:02 PM | Comments (3)
June 7, 2007
Michael Gerson, Washington Post Columnist, Reports
Michael Gerson, who used to be the speech writer of President Bush, and is currently a fellow at the CFR and a columnist for The Washington Post, has a piece titled, "An Islamic Test for Turkey." I appear in Mr. Gerson’s remarks as follows:
Secularists accuse the AKP of seeking a slow-motion Islamist revolution. Turkish writer Mustafa Akyol — a young, pro-American moderate conservative with a tendency to quote philosopher Leo Strauss — regards this as a serious overreaction: "The AK Party has traces of Islamism, but it is moving toward becoming a conservative, Muslim democratic party," more akin to the Christian Democratic parties of Europe. So far, the AKP has been pro-capitalism, pro-European Union and a defender of Islamic family values, instead of being an advocate of Islamic law.
Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 1:43 PM | Comments (0)
June 5, 2007
US News and World Report Reports
The weekly news magazine, US News and World Report published a detailed and very well-writen story about Turkey’s current political debates titled “Continental Divide: Turkey Again Tests Whether Islam Can Coexist With Democracy”. The writer, Mr. Jay Tolson, mentions me in the piece as follows:
[Turkey’s] delicate issues will continue to include Islam and the question of how much religion is permissible in the public sphere. Mustafa Akyol, a bright young columnist for the English-language Turkish Daily News, makes a very convincing case for the moderate traditional religiosity that most AKP supporters embrace.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 1:58 PM | Comments (1)
A Day of Infamy (June 5, 1925)
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Today is the anniversary of a tragedy in Turkish political history. Eighty-two years ago, on this day, Turkish democracy was crushed and an authoritarian regime was introduced. And the legacy of that moment has continued to doom our political system to date.
If this is totally news for you, don't worry. It is so for many Turks, too. For they have been raised on the creation myth of Republican Turkey, which can be summarized as something like this:
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:36 AM | Comments (15)
