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August 30, 2007
A President of the People, for the People, by the People
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
On Aug. 28, 2007, the Turkish Parliament elected Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül as the country's 11th president. By doing so, Parliament not only chose the most eligible man for the top office, but it also proclaimed that Turkey is a democracy, and not a banana republic.
Let me explain what this means. Since the beginning of the Republic, which was announced in 1923, Turkey has been under the rule of a bureaucratic elite which thinks that it knows what is best for the nation, and that it has the right to dictate its goals to the people. While the bureaucratic elite and their intellectual allies deemed themselves enlightened and refined modernizers, they regarded the people as backward-minded and crude reactionaries. In the 30s, their authoritarian strategy was wittily summarized by the motto, for the people, in spite of the people.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:37 AM | Comments (3)
August 26, 2007
A Critique of a Fellow Columnist
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
We columnists are actually not too different from readers like you. We read the papers everyday, especially the ones we write for, and we find pieces that we like or don't like. One of my favorite columnists in this paper is Mr. Burak Bekdil. He has a readable style, a smart and witty prose, and he catches good topics. It is no secret that we strongly disagree on many issues relating to Turkey, especially on the role religion in public life, and that's why we had opposing pieces in the recent months. And although I continue to appreciate the quality of his columns, I think Mr. Bekdil has become growingly unreasonable since the general elections. The AKP won them, and Mr. Bekdil, who fears that the end is near for the good old secular republic, has gone extreme.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:17 PM | Comments (5)
August 18, 2007
A Farewell to Homo habilis, a Modern Icon
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
All of us moderns are familiar with the popular from-ape-to-man drawings, which show a series of bipeds starting with an ape and gradually turning into cavemen, and finally into a fine gentleman. You can see these graphs almost everywhere, and advertisers in particular love them. It has become cliché to put a satisfied customer of this or that product at the very end of the evolutionary line. Read the French daily Libération, for example, an ad implies, and become the most sophisticated chap in the from-ape-to-man saga.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2007
It Is an Honor to be Boycotted by the CHP
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
The expectations came true and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) announced its candidate for the presidency: Foreign minister Abdullah Gül, whose bid was blocked just three months ago by the secularism memorandum of the Turkish military and all the legal tricks which followed. The AKP did the right thing by taking that decision, simply because Mr. Gül deserves the presidency and his opponents don't deserve the luxury of freely interfering with the democratic system by using threats and blackmail.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:09 AM | Comments (2)
August 11, 2007
Gül’s Presidency Will Fade Apartheid, Not Secularity
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Nowadays the big question in Turkey is whether Mr. Abdullah Gül, arguably the most successful foreign minister in the history of this country, will be the next president. Actually the same issue was a bone of contention in April, too, when Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan declared Mr. Gül as his candidate for the top post. Mr. Erdoğan's party, the AKP, had enough seats in Parliament to elect Mr. Gül, but the secular elders of Ankara got infuriated, simply because Mr. Gül is a practicing Muslim and his wife wears the headscarf. Hence they blocked the parliamentary process. Consequently Mr. Erdoğan called for early elections, and, alas, won them on July 22 with an astounding victory.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:04 AM | Comments (1)
August 9, 2007
Why Turkey Is the Homeland of Modern Islamophobia -II-
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Abdullah Cevdet (1869-1932), a late Ottoman intellectual whose views impressed many of his contemporaries, was an avowed secularist. “There are two types of people,” he once declared, “the wise, i.e., the irreligious, and the fool, i.e., the religious.” Anybody who believes in a deity that masters the universe, according to Cevdet, was “in total delusion.” He was convinced that the only way forward for humanity, and his fellow Ottomans, was to abandon religion, and, instead, cling on to “science and reason.” He was so outspoken against his intellectual war on the Almighty that some religious figures of the time argued that he did not deserve the name “Abdullah,” which means “the servant of God.” They rather called him "Aduvullah" — the enemy of God.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 2:56 PM | Comments (2)
August 6, 2007
Why Turkey Is the Homeland of Modern Islamophobia -I-
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
A friend of mine from Chicago — a middle aged American woman and a successful entrepreneur who made some investments in Istanbul — once told me about a strange “Turkish experience” she had. She invited all the Turks she knew in town to a party at her house. As it happened, one of the guests was wearing a headscarf. When others saw this observant lady, they felt horrified, and silently asked my friend, “Why did you invite this woman?” She first couldn't understand the question. “I initially thought she was a known criminal or something,” my friend explained to me, “then I realized that the problem was the obsession of other Turks about her dress.” And she asked me where that idée fixe came from.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 9:39 PM | Comments (1)
August 2, 2007
A Post-Kemalist Constitution?.. Not a Bad Idea
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
We Turks love overblown political controversies and simply can't do without them. Right after the general elections, we have created a new one out of a comment made by Dr. Zafer Üskül, who used to be a prominent professor of law, and is now one of the newly elected MP's of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Overnight, Dr. Üskül became the new bête noire of Turkey's hardline secularists – for simply saying that Turkey should have a new liberal constitution in which “Atatürk's principles” should not be referred to.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:09 AM | Comments (12)
