February 7, 2010
Could Islam Help Us Against Honor Killings?
[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Yet another horrible honor killing took place in the southeast, the least developed part of Turkey. A 16-year-old girl was buried alive by her relatives simply for befriending boys. Forensic experts found soil in her lungs and stomach, indicating that the poor kid was conscious while being buried into the ground.
May God have mercy on her soul. And may her killers face punishment in this world and the next. What they did was cruel, monstrous and evil.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 11:01 PM | Comments (1)
January 30, 2010
The Shariah of Love
[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
One of the popular themes in our popular culture is that peculiar feeing called love, and the way it sometimes torments people. Love stories with unhappy endings are quite common, and the heartbreaks they cause are quite bitter. No wonder so much music has been devoted to this trouble. "Love hurts," a famous song warns, "love scars."
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2010
Toward a Liberal 'Political Islam'?
[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Political Islam, as you probably have noticed before, is a dirty term. It often refers to angry men who impose veils on women and ban anything that is fun. It even reminds us of the horrific reign of the Taliban, whose heaven on Earth in Afghanistan looked rather like hell for most of us.
There is a good reason for this notoriety of political Islam. Its main proponents, such as the Pakistani thinker Abul A'ala Mawdudi (1903-1979), defined it as the effort to create an "Islamic state," whose main mission would be the imposition of shariah, or Islamic law, within its most rigid and medieval interpretation.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)
January 6, 2010
Should Muslims 'Slay The Mockers of Islam'?
[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Alas, it happened again. An extremist Muslim attacked a Westerner to punish him for "mocking Islam." This time, the victim was the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, whose controversial caricature of the Prophet Mohammed had sparked a worldwide storm five years ago. A 28-year-old man of Somali origin broke into the cartoonist's home last Friday, wielding an axe and a knife. "We will get our revenge," he reportedly yelled, before being shot by the police and taken under custody.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 12:30 PM | Comments (4)
December 25, 2009
From the Archives: A Governing Sharia
Yet another belated post: My book review of Islam and The Secular State by Prof. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im. It was published in the December 2008 issue of First Things, a monthly theology magazine.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 9:04 PM | Comments (0)
Why The Turkish Caesar Crucified The Ecumenical Patriarch
[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew recently said on American TV that he feels "crucified" in Turkey. And many Turks got upset with him.
His All Holiness is right, though, to complain about the Turkish Republic. The latter has kept the Halki Seminary, the only institution to train Orthodox priests in the country, closed since 1971. Even the title "ecumenical" is lashed out at by some Turkish authorities and their nationalist supporters. Every year, international reports on religious freedom point to such pressures on the Ecumenical Patriarchate with concern, and they are right to do so.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 7:12 PM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2009
Appreciating Christmas As a Non-Christian
[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
A few weeks ago I had the chance to visit Antakya, the southern Turkish city whose name derives from the ancient city of Antioch. The latter, as New Testament readers would know, was a chief center of early Christianity. Evangelized by both Peter and Paul, the two main founding fathers of the new faith, Antioch was actually the place where the very word "Christian" was born.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 12:06 PM | Comments (4)
March 12, 2009
Inherit The Turkish Wind
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
Turkey has just been drawn to yet another controversy with the officially supported science magazine, "Bilim ve Teknik," refraining from publishing a 16-page cover story that highlighted Darwin's ideas. As also reported in these pages yesterday, the story prepared by the magazine's chief editor, Dr. Çiğdem Atakuman, was removed at the last minute by Professor Ömer Cebeci, the vice president of TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council), which sponsors the publication.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 1:00 PM | Comments (6)
December 25, 2008
Is Christmas Really Un-Islamic?
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
Every year, toward the end of December, warnings come from some of the conservative Islamic voices in Turkey. They advise their co-religionists to avoid indulging in New Year's Eve celebrations, which they see as a "Christian tradition." Some of them, especially the most orthodox, even go as far as saying that Muslims will be betraying their faith if they sympathize with Santa Claus or Christmas trees.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 9:25 AM | Comments (13)
November 21, 2008
There Is A God. So Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life
[Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News]
My column neighbor Burak Bekdil, with whom I often disagree, had an interesting piece last month titled “I give up... No Panama hats or alcohol!” By using sharp examples and witty stories, he was basically questioning the level of acceptance that religious-freedom-seeking Turks are ready to grant to those who seek freedom from religion.
“I am not an atheist, but I am very curious...,” he was asking, “...would the Istanbul Municipality agree to run ads on its buses that would read, ‘There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life'?”
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:37 PM | Comments (5)
October 12, 2008
Will Non-Muslims Go to Heaven, Too?
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
WARSAW – I was walking heedlessly in the Old Quarter of the Polish capital last Sunday until I saw a group of joyful singers on the street. Then I stopped and stared. They were about a dozen young Poles who were singing and clapping in the middle of a busy street and in the midst of a bitter cold. Soon, I realized that their art was very much related to their faith. As evangelical Catholics — a category which I just learnt that exits — they were praising God and calling on other people to do the same.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 1:04 PM | Comments (17)
June 19, 2008
Does The Secular Mind Beat The Religious One?
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Thanks to the new liberal daily Taraf, we now know that a bureaucratic Turkish cabal called the âRepublican Working Committeeâ has been working on yet another âsoft coupâ project for quite some time. It seems to have started in 2003, when 15 die-hard secular university rectors held a secret meeting with Gen. Åener Eruygur, the commander of the Gendarmerie. They all agreed to fasten the internal struggle against the âbackwardees.â (That term, âmürteciâ in Turkish, refers to conservative and observant Muslims, such as the women in headscarf.) The group emphasized the need to convert the âyoung backwardeesâ when they are at primary school age, and to crack down on their parents within state structure. Taraf writes that these ultra-secular rectors even swore to be martyrs for this unholy war to save the holy Republic from religion.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 4:11 PM | Comments (2)
April 5, 2008
'Fitna' Is Fanatical—But It Deserves a Voice
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
I just saw "Fitna," the new controversial film produced by Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Freedom Party. The 17-minute video shows acts of violence, and expressions of hatred, by Muslims against “infidels.” Heads are cut off, bodies are blown apart, children are taught to denounce Jews as "apes and pigs," imams call for world domination, and protesters hold signs that read, "God Bless Hitler." What makes all this disturbing scenery even more provocative, and, in a sense, more meaningful, is the way they are connected to the Koran. After each instance of ferocity, “Fitna” quotes a passage from the Muslim Scripture which, apparently, presents a justification.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 11:58 AM | Comments (14)
March 27, 2008
The Religious Way to The Open Society
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
NEW YORK – Peter Berger, one of the world’s leading authorities on sociology of religion, put in a nutshell what all secularists, and especially Turkey’s fuming ones, should get. “Modernization does not necessarily secularize societies,” the Boston University professor noted, “it rather pluralizes them.”
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:13 PM | Comments (2)
December 6, 2007
Dawkins' 'Delusion' Should Be Free
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Richard Dawkins is probably the world's most famous atheist evangelist. In his numerous books, the Oxford zoologist argues that modern science, and in particular the Darwinian theory of evolution, has disproved God. He is a gifted writer, and his recent volume, The God Delusion, has become a global bestseller. Some call him “the Harry Potter of non-fiction.”
More recently Dr. Dawkins made the news in Turkey, too, yet not by his arguments. As the Turkish Daily News reported on Nov. 29, following a complaint by a Turkish reader that some passages in the The God Delusion were an assault on "sacred values," an Istanbul prosecutor has opened an official investigation on the book's Turkish version. Its publisher, Erol Karaaslan, is said be “questioned” soon.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 10:05 AM | Comments (6)
November 24, 2007
Yes, Muslims are Indeed 'Christians'
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
In yesterday's Turkish Daily News, there was a photo of a group of Turkish demonstrators who gathered in Istanbul's Taksim Square and held a banner that read, "We are all Christians!" They were protesting against the attacks on Christian communities and especially the savage slaughter of three missionaries in Malatya seven months ago by a gang of ultra-nationalist brutes.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 12:28 PM | Comments (18)
September 13, 2007
The Opium of the Atheists
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
KRYNICA-ZDROJ — This little Polish town not only has a name hard to pronounce, but it is also quite difficult to reach. In order to arrive at this nice spa resort, you need to first fly to Warsaw, then take another plane to Krakow, and then drive for more than 200 kilometers. Yet this long and winding – and nowadays heavily raining – road apparently does not prevent thousands of people to meet here every September for what they call “the Davos of Central-Eastern Europe:” The Krynica Economic Forum, which brings together top-level politicians including heads of state, and businessmen from Central Europe, the former Soviet Union and many other places.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 9:57 AM | Comments (4)
Tidings of Comfort, Joy and Ramadan
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Today you might have made your breakfast before taking a copy of the Turkish Daily News, and might even be sipping coffee while reading this story. For hundreds of millions of Muslims all around the world, though, that would be out of question. Today is the first day of the holy month of Ramadan, and all observant Muslims are expected to refrain from eating and drinking until sunset. It is a religious duty which has been kept unbroken since the 7th century.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 9:03 AM | Comments (2)
September 2, 2007
The Koran and Non-Muslims—Facts Versus Myths
[Originally published in Turkish Daily News]
Many years ago, I came across a book, which claimed to explain “Israeli terrorism” in the light of the Hebrew Scriptures. It was full of photos showing Israeli soldiers attacking and harassing Palestinians, and presented huge captions that included verses from the Old Testament, and especially the Book of Joshua. If the Israelis were breaking the bones of a Palestinian youngster — a globally notorious scene from the ‘80s — then the caption would include a verse with something like “Thou shall break their bones.” The book's argument was blunt and simple: The Israelis were torturing a nation because that was what their religion ordered them to do.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 9:31 AM | Comments (15)
January 18, 2005
In Defense of Mary the Virgin
[Originally published in Islam Online]
In their recent books entitled Mary: The Mother of Jesus and Mary: A Dogmatic Journey, two "Catholic" writers, the journalist Jacques Duquesne and the theologian Dominique Cerbelaud, display an overt disbelief in the virginity of Mary the mother of Jesus Christ. Mr. Duquesne argues that it is a belief that is "not compatible with science." Mr. Cerbelaud asserts that the faith in the virgin birth came about "for reasons that spring from collective psychology."
I believe both arguments to be inconsistent and based on a flawed understanding of science. Before explaining these, however, let me elaborate on why the virgin birth matters for me — since some non-Muslims might wonder why a Muslim cares about this controversy at all.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 3:56 PM | Comments (5)
January 11, 2005
The Parliament of The World's Religions and The Axis of Theism
[Originally published in The New Pantagruel]
On July 7-13, 2004, in the beautiful city of Barcelona, there was an extraordinary international meeting that gathered some seven thousand people from all over the world. The meeting was for The Parliament of the World's Religions and the attendees were believers from all different kind of traditions. From many denominations of Christians, Jews and Muslims to Buddhist, Sikhs, Hindus or even self-proclaimed pagans, it was truly a global coverage of the world's faiths. During the seven days of the Parliament, hundreds of lectures, workshops, panels, concerts, prayers and rituals were performed.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 5:11 PM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2004
Why Muslims Should Support Intelligent Design
[Originally published in Islam Online]
I have traveled a lot around the US and the UK, lecturing to Muslim audiences. One common trait I have noticed is the concern Muslims feel for the future of their children. Several conferences I attended had topics such as "Saving Our Families" or "How To Raise Our Children As Good Muslims." The reason for this concern is obvious: These Muslim families are living in a highly secularized society that has cultural traits that are destructive to traditional values. The profane culture of MTV, pornography, consumerism and hedonism — what political scientist Benjamin Barber calls the "The McWorld" — is at odds with Muslim values.
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Posted by Mustafa Akyol at 4:41 PM | Comments (3)
