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July 28, 2007

Winning Kurdish Hearts and Minds

[Orgininally published in Turkish Daily News]

Hasan Uğur is a “haci,” a word used to describe pilgrims to the Kaaba, the Muslim holy shrine in Mecca. Like many hacis, he has a nicely trimmed beard and wears a kippa-like cap. After some comments in Kurdish and some prayers in Arabic, he kindly passes loaves of bread and dishes of goat meat to me and a dozen other men, who are all brothers, nephews or grandsons of Uğur, and are all sitting on the same carpet. This is one of the handful of houses in the Dalbudak Mezrası, a mini village tied to Ergani, a province of Diyarbakır.

While enjoying the generous hospitality of this large Kurdish family, in which all fathers have at least seven or eight children, my eyes are caught by a less friendly object hanging on the wall: An AK-47.

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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:42 AM | Comments (2)

July 26, 2007

Turkey’s Illiberal Seculars

[Originally published in The Wall Street Journal, also available in Albanian]

Sunday’s general elections in Turkey were seen by some commentators as the vote that would shape the upcoming decades of this overwhelmingly Muslim and yet resolutely secular republic. While it was widely expected that the incumbent Justice and Development Party, also known by its Turkish initials as AKP, would come out as the strongest party, very few predicted the extent of its victory. The AKP gained 46.6% of the votes and 340 seats in a parliament of 550--an astounding electoral triumph that has many implications for Turkey and even the broader Islamic world.

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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 2:03 AM | Comments (2)

The Victory and Its Aftermath

[Originally published in Turkish Daily News ]

In my latest article in the TDN, which was published a day before the general elections, I talked about Turkey's authoritarian secularists and made a prediction about their very near future. “My guess is that the election results will be a disappointment for them,” I wrote, “and a blessing for the rest of the country.”

The blessing indeed came with the astonishing victory of the Justice and Development Party, aka the AKP – a result which guaranteed that Turkey will continue on its path toward democratization, economic development and EU membership.

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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 1:05 AM | Comments (1)

July 24, 2007

Deciphering the Kurdish Code

[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]

DİYARBAKIR -This town has always been the most prominent city in Turkey's southeast. In Ottoman times, in fact the whole region was called the “Diyarbekir province.” Today, with its 1.2 million inhabitants, it is not only the most populous of the southeastern towns, but also the most developed one. This explains why the city has also become the center of the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey. Since Kurdish nationalism is a modern, not traditional, ideology, it appeals to the urban dwellers of Diyarbakır more then the tribal villagers of, say, Mardin.

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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 8:22 AM | Comments (1)

July 21, 2007

The Sum of All Secular Fears—A Sequel

[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]

Recently the TDN ran a piece of mine titled "The Sum of All Secular Fears." Last Wednesday my "column neighbor" Burak Bekdil responded with "The Sum of All Secular Fears—A Reply.” And now here is my reply to the reply.

First, I should thank Mr. Bekdil for his kind and generous remarks about my piece. I can unreservedly express the same appreciation for his column, including this recent "reply," which was definitely smart and witty. Yet I have to add several refinements and even an outright correction.

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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:44 AM | Comments (2)

July 17, 2007

News from The Dallas Morning News

In his piece titled "For Turkey, A Clash of Civilizations" Rod Dreher, editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News, writes the following:

Mustafa Akyol, a 35-year-old Istanbul journalist who often defends the AKP in his column, says the party miscalculated when it tried to criminalize adultery and to create alcohol-free areas in some towns. That gave secularists an excuse to accuse the party of setting off on the slippery slope to Turkey's Talibanization. "From my point of view, this is just a conservative moral policy which even sometimes I criticize – but this is not the way to sharia," Mr. Akyol says. "If you can't negotiate and agree on these things, you push [observant Muslims], and you tell them there is no place for your lifestyle in this country."

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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2007

The Sum of All Secular Fears

[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 by Mustafa Akyol at 8:53 AM | Comments (12)

July 7, 2007

Morocco's 'AKP' Is Moroccan, After All

[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]

EL ESCORIAL - The medieval monks who built the giant Monastery of El Escorial couldn't have imagined that their all-Catholic civitas dei would someday host hot debates on the future of political Islam. Yet that's exactly what happened here, in this little Spanish town located some 45 kilometers northwest of Madrid, this week. The “political Islam” in question was Turkey's incumbent AKP, the Justice and Development Party, and its namesake in Morocco, the Parti de la Justice et du Développement.

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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:46 PM | Comments (4)