tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1 2010-03-07T23:46:05Z The writings of Mustafa Akyol -- on Turkey, Islam, modernity and more Movable Type Pro 4.23-en tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.368 2010-03-06T23:44:19Z 2010-03-07T23:46:05Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] Something very important happened last Monday. A short statement from the Turkish General Staff noted that its investigators had gathered "evidence that might prove the existence of the document in question." "The document in...

Hurriyet Daily News] Something very important happened last Monday. A short statement from the Turkish General Staff noted that its investigators had gathered "evidence that might prove the existence of the document in question." "The document in question" was quite a terrible one. It was a military plan to overthrow the AKP government and suppress the popular Islamic movement led by Fethullah Gülen, a retired preacher who lives in the U.S. One idea was to "find" weapons in the homes of people from the Gülen movement by planting them there first and thus portraying the peaceful community as a terrorist group.]]> Just a Bad Apple? This mind-boggling four-page document was first exposed some eight months ago. It was initially found by the police in the office of a lawyer of one of the officers who had been arrested in the Ergenekon case. Soon, the whole country learned about it through the media. The daily Taraf, a newspaper founded in 2007 by a cadre of anti-militarist liberals, ran a full first-page story with a bold headline: "The plan to finish off the AKP and Gülen." The original title of the document was "The action plan for struggle with irtica." The last word here, which is very popular in Turkey, is hard to translate into English. It literally means "backwardness," but what it more specifically refers to is the religious movements in society that the Kemalist establishment finds not modern enough. A lady who wears a headscarf, for example, is a perfect symbol of "irtica," for she refuses to make her hair visible, as Atatürk would have preferred to see. (Similarly, a Kurdish citizen is considered as a "bölücü," or a "separatist," when he simply dares to speak in Kurdish in public. Atatürk would have also preferred that every citizen speak only Turkish, and finds true happiness by proclaiming, "I am a Turk.") Yet the authenticity of plan was denied by the military. All that Taraf had, after all, was a photocopy. The chief of General Staff, Gen. İlker Başbuğ, gave a press conference in late June saying there is no such document but only a "piece of paper." He even launched a counter-attack. "We believe this piece of paper has been forged by certain circles," he said, "to wear out and smear the Turkish Armed Forces." The same line of reasoning, as you can guess, was also repeated in the media, especially by the journalists who seem to believe whatever the Turkish military does and says is absolutely right. Three months later, though, a copy of the original document, with the "wet signature" of Col. Dursun Çiçek, was sent to Istanbul prosecutors by a "deep throat" in the military. The same pro-military voices in the media dismissed this, too, by pointing out there are now "signature machines" that can produce perfect imitations. But with the original document, a forensic process began. First the police, then the official Council of Forensic Medicine and then TUBITAK, the national science academy, examined the papers, and all concluded that the signature really belonged to Col. Çiçek, who kept on denying the accusation. The real turning point came last Monday when the Turkish General Staff announced the criminal laboratory of the gendarme forces, too, found the signature authentic. That confirmation, which came from the very sources of the military itself, changed the whole picture. The same day Col. Çiçek was taken to a military court by the military, and now he is on trial for "misusing his duty." Still, this is not a convincing accusation. It is certainly good that Col. Çiçek will be facing justice for the crimes devised in the plan, but he cannot be alone. He was an "intelligence officer" working in the military's headquarters. So his "action plan" must be created for a hierarchy that he is a part of. This is not a matter of a bad apple, in other words, as some would have us believe. It is a matter of a lot of bad apples. The Army Way Of course, it is impossible to know what is really happening in the military, for it is such a closed box. But here is my informed guess: The military, like most other ideological institutions, has both a radical wing and a more moderate mainstream. None of the officers are fans of "irtica," I bet, but while the moderate mainstream is willing to remain "legit," the radical wing is ready to do whatever it takes to "save the country." All the mind-boggling "action plans" we have read in the past few years in Taraf, I guess, are the work of these hotheads. The problem is that while the moderate mainstream of the military, clearly represented by Gen. Başbuğ, wants to pacify and even exclude the radicals, they are trying to do this all too silently and secretly. "The prestige of the institution," which they constantly uphold, seems to be all too important. Well, perhaps this is how things are done in any military. "There are three ways to do something," people say in America, "the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way." I just wish the way of the Turkish army was just a bit closer to the right way.]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.367 2010-03-02T22:44:00Z 2010-03-02T22:45:10Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] The headline above was suggested to me yesterday by a Turkish friend from California. "That's what some people really expect to hear from you these days," she said on Skype. "Especially after [Prime Minister...

Hurriyet Daily News] The headline above was suggested to me yesterday by a Turkish friend from California. "That's what some people really expect to hear from you these days," she said on Skype. "Especially after [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan's latest attack on the media." Well, my friend has a point. Erdoğan's recent call for media bosses to fire the columnists whose pieces "increase tension in the country" is really over the top. It is shockingly illiberal and utterly unacceptable. No columnist has to write pieces Erdoğan, or anybody else, will approve. The fact the prime minister dared to say something like that is not just tragic but also worrying.]]> Remembering Menderes While this is a nuisance we should oppose, though, I think it is also one we should try to understand. To begin to understand things, I suggest you look back to the late 1950s. The Turkey of that time was a bit similar to that of today. The incumbent center-right Democrat Party, or DP, had won three elections in a row but was deeply troubled by the fierce opposition from the arch-Kemalist CHP and its allies in the mainstream media. The latter soon started to call the military to "duty" and even started to provoke the emergent junta by false propaganda. One of the notorious libels was that the DP government was killing Kemalist youngsters and "making minced meat" out of their corpses. Soon, on May 27, 1960, the military launched a coup directed solely against the DP, and, after a show trial, executed Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and two of his ministers. Before being sent to the gallows, Menderes was even abused and humiliated in various ways - a job the Turkish security forces have been always good at. The tragic fate of Menderes is something Erdoğan must be remembering quite often. And if he forgets, there are plenty of people around to update his memory. Deniz Baykal, the current leader of the CHP, and several prominent columnists in the mainstream media, unscrupulously told him at various times in the past few years to "bear the end of Menderes in mind." Another thing Erdoğan probably remembers well is the role of the mainstream media in the 1997 "soft coup" against his party. It was yet another time some journalists called the military "to duty" by spreading false propaganda. The average political IQ had risen slightly above what it was in the 1950s, so this time we did not have stories about minced meat made out of Kemalist bodies. But we had fear-mongering headlines written in the military headquarters and published word-for-word in mainstream papers the day after. What I am trying to say is Erdoğan's intolerance is partly rooted in his perception of the threat. He knows what every Turk knows: No military coup happens in this country without the media's support. But then he starts to see almost every criticism as part of such a giant conspiracy, which is of course neither correct nor acceptable. Perpetual patrimony The rest of the problem is rooted in Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, itself. Erdoğan, as he proudly noted a few times, is a man with a temper. The fact he is the only authority in his party is also making things worse. In the first term, the presence of Abdullah Gül as a second figure with authority was a good balancing factor. Now Gül is a very good president, but the AKP without Gül is not that good. The heart of the matter, though, is the patrimonial nature of Turkish politics. Not only the AKP but all notable political parties in this country are fiefdoms ruled by their all-powerful leaders. While this certainly has something to do with Turkish culture, which is not modern enough to establish individualism and meritocracy, it is also reinforced by the tumultuous political history of the nation. The four military coups and the more than two dozen party closures we had since 1960 have hampered something crucial for democracy: institutionalization. Parties simply do not survive long enough to become real institutions. In fact, leaders live much longer than the parties. Just look at Erdoğan's life. His political career includes four consecutive political parties, three of which were closed down in two separate military coups. If the AKP gets closed down, which is not out of the question, he will probably found a fifth one. Within such a punctuated non-equilibrium, parties inevitably turn into one-man shows. And those single men, who get unlimitedly powerful, do nothing but prove Lord Acton's dictum: All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.366 2010-02-25T22:40:13Z 2010-03-02T22:41:21Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] One of the great things about the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review is its lack of censorship. Hence, I can write in my columns what I believe, and, in return, readers can comment...

Hurriyet Daily News] One of the great things about the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review is its lack of censorship. Hence, I can write in my columns what I believe, and, in return, readers can comment in the way they deem fit. Some can even bring in bold suggestions that I should be fired from the newspaper, then "jailed for life" and even "beheaded."]]> Liberalism as 'high treason' The Kemalists are often the most extreme addicts of this argument-by-accusation because the very ideology they subscribe to disallows any form of pluralism. After all, it was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the supreme leader of Kemalism, who denounced his political opponents as "the most treacherous minds" and purged them using various methods. One of Atatürk's top aides, Recep Peker, the long-time secretary general of the People's Republican Party, or CHP, was even more categorical. "Liberalism," he simply proclaimed in the parliament in 1935, "is high treason." But Kemalists are not the only one. The Islamic camp has its own version of hate speech mixed with paranoia. For decades, they have seen the secularists as "freemasons" or "crypto-Jews" serving some international conspiracy aimed at de-Islamizing Turkey. Our Marxists are hardly any better. For most of them, any support for the market economy is enough to make you a "comprador intellectual," if not directly a "CIA agent." I really think we Turks should get over with this national obsession. That's why I wrote a piece a few months ago in my Turkish column with the headline: "Nobody is a traitor." All of the different political camps in the country are patriotic, I argued, they just see the well-being of the country in different ways. Having said that, let me be a little bit more open on where I exactly see the well-being of Turkey. Because this, as I see, has been a matter of concern for the commentators who wish to see me put in prison or have my head chopped off. From what I have been writing, it must be obvious that I wish to see a post-Kemalist Turkey, rather than the Kemalist one we used to have. But please be careful: post-Kemalism is neither anti-Kemalist nor pre-Kemalist. In other words, I wish to see neither a backlash against Turkey's Kemalist elite, nor a return to the Ottoman days. Kemalism, as a program of authoritarian modernization, had its contributions to Turkey (such as the advance of women's rights), along with its damages (such as the suppression of Kurds or conservative Muslims). But whatever happened has happened. Now is the time, I believe, to move on to a free and democratic Turkey in which Kemalism will cease to be a "state ideology," and rather become one of the many competing ideologies. (Such a "privatization," as I have argued before, might even help Kemalism by forcing it to update itself.) But do I envision this post-Kemalist Turkey as an "Islamic" one? Do I want to have an "Islamic state" instead of the Kemalist state? No, not at all. This Manichean dichotomy, which the Kemalists love to propagate, is not real. Of course we have Islamists who wish to see "a constitution based on the Quran," rather than the current Constitution which is based on "Atatürk's nationalism." But those Islamists are increasingly becoming marginal in Turkey, and most of the people who are mistakenly called "Islamists" are actually religious conservatives who just want their fair share in society - such as the right to wear a headscarf and be able go to a college or get a public job. An Islamic state? As for me, not only am I not advocating an "Islamic state," I am also strongly against it. Because all states which call themselves "Islamic" impose the version of Islam they choose. But I want to be able to make my own decision on what God really says. I also want other Muslims, along with secularists, non-Muslims, agnostics, atheists, new-agers, and whomever you can imagine, to be able to live in the way they chose. In modern societies, all such diverse groups and individuals have to live together, and the system which will allow that is not an "Islamic state," but a secular one. Yet a secular state is one thing, whereas secularism, as an ideology aimed at secularizing the society, is another. And while I support the former, I am against the latter, for it is simply yet another form of tyranny. I even believe that the separation of religion and state, which is a must, does not equal the separation of religion and politics. In fact, an "Islamic politics" that will uphold the values of Islam within the democratic game is possible. My effort to find some liberal principles within the tradition of Islam, and even the shariah, was about that. More will be explored in my upcoming book, "The Islamic Case for Freedom." At the end of the day, what I wish for Turkey is simply more freedom and democracy. And, thank God, the days that people really get fired, jailed and executed for this are mostly over.]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.365 2010-02-22T22:37:06Z 2010-03-02T22:38:31Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] For decades and decades, Turkey's powerful generals, even if they often remained behind the scenes, ruled the country. And every Turk knew that. They also knew that if the elected politicians make the generals...

Hurriyet Daily News] For decades and decades, Turkey's powerful generals, even if they often remained behind the scenes, ruled the country. And every Turk knew that. They also knew that if the elected politicians make the generals angry, the latter would come down and teach them a damn good lesson.]]> Saving us via torture The place was the military prison in Mamak, a destitute neighborhood in Ankara, and it really did not look like a hotel. It rather resembled, to be honest, Auschwitz. There was barbed wire everywhere, besides watchtowers with machine guns, and lots of soldiers with rifles. We waited behind a corridor of barbed wire, at 7 a.m. on a snowy day, and then my father, along with a dozen other men, showed up in the distance. Their heads were shaven, and they were made to walk in a straight line while singing some military march. Then they lined on the other side of the corridor. I just remember that my father looked warmly at my scared eyes and said, "Don't worry, I will come home soon." He could come home only after spending 14 months in prison, a long-term arrest for no reasonable reason. Thousands of other politicians or activists were also jailed for months, and sometimes years, and often suffered terrible treatment. Unlike Auschwitz, to be fair, Mamak had no gas chambers. But, along with other military prisons in Istanbul and Diyarbakır, it had torture chambers. Some people died under the unbelievable agony they went through, which included notorious "techniques" that I don't have the stomach to talk about. The Turks who have gone through all this don't know what to say when some presumptuous foreigners, such as Israeli president Shimon Peres, utter incredible words like this: "Turkey is the only country in the world where a non-democratic institution, the Army, was in charge of preserving democracy. And they did it." The Army, of course, was not "preserving democracy." It was rather preempting it. It was also preventing us from finding non-military solutions to our acute problems such as the Kurdish question or the stalemate in Cyprus. Besides the military coups and interventions -- in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997 -- it was perpetually limiting the scope of democratic politics with the "red lines" it drew on all these big issues. The officers, to be sure, were doing all this to heroically "save" our nation from various threats. But this self-designated saviorship was very much intertwined with their arrogance. "Harbiye graduates are never fooled," read a popular slogan among them, referring to the top military academy. This self-righteousness blinded the generals from realizing that the authoritarian policies they pursued were often the very reason why we had so many "threats." By banning the Kurdish language, they fuelled violent Kurdish nationalism. By imposing a tyrannical form of secularism, they made some religious conservatives anti-secular. The third stage But, well, everything changes in this world, and even so does Turkey. Since 2002, there has been a government of which we know that the generals are not a fan. But unlike in the good old days, they can't overthrow it. Moreover, now some of them are even facing justice for attempting to overthrow it. The recent arrest of 50 commanders, including 14 retired generals and four active admirals, is all about that. This shows that Turkey is entering a third stage in terms of the military-civilian relationship. In the first stage, between 1960 and 2002, the military was clearly dominant and untouchable. In the second stage, from 2002 to the beginning of the Ergenekon case in 2007, it lost its dominance but preserved its untouchability. In 2005, a prosecutor in Van, who dared to point to a top general in his indictment about a bombing of a pro-Kurdish bookstore, was not just stripped of his duties, but also totally excommunicated from the legal profession by the Supreme Board of Prosecutors and Judges, or HSYK. After all, institutions such as the latter, as our top judges often proudly say, exist in order to "protect the regime" - and not to protect the people from the regime. Yet with the Ergenekon case, we are moving into the third phase, because the military is losing its untouchability, too. The officers, whose brainstorming sessions on how to launch coups have been exposed, are now being questioned. This is good news for Turkey. For a farewell to arms, and rulers in arms, is a must for democracy.]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.364 2010-02-19T13:18:52Z 2010-02-23T13:20:07Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] By now, it is clear to all that an unarmed war is going on within the Turkish state. The latest episode in Erzincan, a city in the east, and its repercussions in Ankara, a...

Hurriyet Daily News] By now, it is clear to all that an unarmed war is going on within the Turkish state. The latest episode in Erzincan, a city in the east, and its repercussions in Ankara, a city in turmoil, is telling enough. Things began several months ago. First, Erzincan's chief prosecutor, İlhan Cihaner, started an investigation about a conservative Islamic community in town. Meanwhile, a prosecutor from the neighboring city of Erzurum, Osman Şanal, who had a special authority to investigate the Ergenekon case, suspected something different.]]> The war within the state As I was writing this piece, both sides were still grinding their teeth against each other, and the TVs were full of commentators commenting on "the war within the state." This war has precedents in Turkish political history, but it has never been as deep and clear as it is today. Because, in the past, one side of this war, the Kemalists, was simply dominant. The non-Kemalist camp, which consists mostly of religious conservatives and political liberals, could not dare to challenge the "red lines" drawn by the two main guardians of the other camp: the military and the judiciary. The military, as you can guess, was the more important actor here. And it simply created the judiciary in its image. Following the military coup of 1960, the generals set up the political system that is still at work today, and made sure that the judiciary, to which they gave an important role, remains in the right hands. In just six months after the coup, more than 500 judges and prosecutors were fired, and so were half of the members of the Council of State. Then a system of "co-optation" was set up, allowing the members of the high judiciary to elect each other, and therefore keep the ruling cast intact. In short, the system we used to have was a Kemalist oligarchy. For some people, this was heaven on Earth. For others, those who were humiliated, suppressed, imprisoned, tortured or killed by the oligarchy, it really wasn't. But since 2002, the ascendance of the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and all the non-Kemalist actors in society, has started to challenge the system. The AKP has appointed its own people to important posts, and the oligarchy has started to lose its "strongholds" - a term the Kemalists routinely use. Now, anybody who knows something about Turkey is aware that this "counter-revolution" is happening. But they have diverse opinions on what this means. For the Kemalists, this is the end of the world as they know it, for religious "darkness," hand in hand with international "imperialism" (a.k.a. the EU) is taking over the country. For uncritical supporters of the AKP, everything the party does is right, and all criticisms raised against it are a part of the Kemalist plot to overthrow it (a.k.a. Ergenekon). I differ from the latter view, because I believe that the AKP is quite nepotistic, and that its political culture is also prone to authoritarianism and intolerance. That's why a Turkey totally dominated by the AKP would really not be fun - nor free and democratic. But I also think that the ongoing "counter-revolution" is not taking us there. It is rather, I believe, taking us to a self-styled "polyarchy," a system with more than one power center, and even a crude system of "checks and balances." 'Checks and balances' What this practically means is this: Kemalism will remain in state institutions, but it will be balanced by other institutions, or different people in the same institutions, as an opposing force. The most clear-cut example of this new "checks and balances" is the ascending role of the police in relation to the military. In the past, when generals decided to launch a coup, they would just do it. But now they know that the police intelligence, which is ideologically non-Kemalist and loyal to the government, is at their backs. The new non-Kemalist media is also in the picture, daring to expose the inner lives of the coup-craving officers. The same thing is also true for the judiciary. In the past, a prosecutor, by definition, would be an agent of the Kemalist establishment. Now, some still are, but others are not. Of course, in a real democracy, state institutions are supposed to be neutral. That is the ideal situation, from which Turkey is clearly far away. But the current situation, which is an ongoing struggle between opposing powers, is better than the previous one, which was a dominance of a single power. In other words, polyarchy, even in such a chaotic way, is better than oligarchy. If we are lucky, it might even lead us to liberal democracy.]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.363 2010-02-16T13:14:49Z 2010-02-23T13:16:48Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] Well, with a headline like the above, I know that I am on dangerous ground. Shariah, which roughly means Islamic law, is a toxic word for good reasons. Lots of horrific things are happening...

Hurriyet Daily News] Well, with a headline like the above, I know that I am on dangerous ground. Shariah, which roughly means Islamic law, is a toxic word for good reasons. Lots of horrific things are happening in our world by those who claim to implement this legal tradition. Shariah-imposing countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia are dictatorships that systematically violate human rights. The latter is especially hellish for its women.]]> The Guardian of Justice But literalism is not the only way to approach the shariah. Instead of understanding it as a set of rigid rules that should be implemented word-for-word, you can also interpret it as a set of principles that need to be reinterpreted according to changing times. A medieval Muslim scholar who laid the theoretical foundations for this non-literalist interpretation was Imam Shatibi of the 14th century. He examined all verdicts of the shariah, and argued that beyond their particular details, all of them were designed to protect five fundamental values: life, religion, property, progeny and intellect. These were, according to Shatibi, the "higher objectives" of the Islamic law, and the way they will be achieved could vary. Based on such precepts, the more flexible schools of the shariah, like the Hanafi school that the Ottoman Empire subscribed to, were able to make many adaptations in law, such as allowing interest-taking or rendering corporal punishments obsolete. Besides this flexibility, which is largely forgotten now, another aspect of the shariah that I found invaluable was its precedence over the state. Since this was a law rooted in the divine will, it was above all humans, including the political authority. Therefore the sultan and his men could not do just whatever they willed. Their excesses were often checked by the shariah and the scholars who upheld it. For example, when Selim the Grim of the early 16th century, a particularly heavy-handed Ottoman sultan, considered forcibly converting all Christians in his empire to Islam, for purely political reasons, he was obstructed by the shariah. His Sheik-ul Islam, the top scholar who oversaw the affairs of the state and checked their compatibility with Islamic law, dissuaded the sultan, explaining that forcing Christians into Islam would be unlawful. In the lower levels of the Ottoman justice system, too, the moral authority of the shariah helped protect human rights. Haim Gerber, professor emeritus of Islamic studies at Hebrew University, underlines this fact in his book, "Islamic Law and Culture, 1600-1840." Ottoman shariah, he observes, served as "not a tool of the upper class," but "a means for people of the lower classes to defend themselves against the possible encroachments of the elite." Ottoman muftis (official jurists), Gerber adds, despite being paid by the government, "did not hesitate to speak out against the government when [they] came face to face with an injustice." That's why, throughout the Ottoman centuries, when the sultan or local governors dared to do something terribly wrong, people would start to protest by chanting, "We want shariah!" What they were asking for was simply justice. State Versus Law In post-Ottoman Turkey, though, this belief in justice as a value higher than the state disappeared. The shariah was simply trashed out, and was replaced by not a liberal theory of politics based on natural law, but an authoritarian one based on positivism. In other words, in Republican Turkey, the state became the measure of all things. And "the supreme interests of the state," which our state-worshippers praise everyday, became higher than all other values. Here lies, I believe, the roots of the infamous illiberalism of Turkey's judicial class. A recent study by TESEV, a liberal think tank, highlighted this problem by asking hundreds of judges and prosecutors what they really uphold in their jobs. The most common answer was "the interests of the state," and not the rights of the citizens. And this takes me back to the question in my headline: Was Ottoman shariah better than Republican law? The latter is certainly much more advanced in many fields, such as women's rights, but that sort of anachronistic comparison is unfair. Had the Ottoman state lived, it would also have made lots of legal reforms, as it did since the early 19th century, relying on the legal maxim, "as times change, laws should change as well." The comparison should rather be on the values of these legal two systems, which seem to be exact opposites: The Ottomans believed that the state should serve justice. The Republic, apparently, assumes that justice should serve the state. Which one, do you think, is more noble?]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.362 2010-02-12T13:11:30Z 2010-02-23T13:12:35Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] LONDON - Every time I come to this magnificent city, I admire the way the British honor their past. This time, I was impressed even more, for I had a chance to spend a...

Hurriyet Daily News] LONDON - Every time I come to this magnificent city, I admire the way the British honor their past. This time, I was impressed even more, for I had a chance to spend a whole morning in the House of Lords, at which a conference about Turkey's emerging role in the world was held. While walking in the corridors of the splendid building, I could not count the number of statues of former statesmen that I saw. But I could well feel how tradition keeps the British proud and dignified.]]> Cultural Revolution Is this because we Turks came to the face of the Earth just out of the blue, without any history, and history of democracy? No, not at all. The first Ottoman Parliament was opened in 1876. It was a much more impressive assembly than the current one, not just architecturally, but also with regards to its diversity: It hosted deputies from all religious and ethnic communities of the empire. One-third of the seats were held by non-Muslims, such as Armenians, Greeks, or Jews. But today most Turks hardly know anything about this Ottoman heritage. The only thing they rather know is that Turkey was in "darkness" before the Republic, which shone on us "like a sun" in 1923. Well, it is hard for these Turks to do fact checking about this official picture, for they have no easy access to history. The Republic was not just a political but also a cultural revolution, and the latter included the controversial "language reform." Not just the alphabet was changed; even the words people had used for centuries were replaced by artificial ones created by the Turkish Language Institution. The idea was to "cleanse" the Turkish language from "foreign" (mostly Arabic and Persian) words, which had actually given the Ottoman language most of its sophistication. As a result, a Turk on the street today has no chance to go into a library and read a book that was written a century ago in his hometown. An average Briton can easily read John Locke or Adam Smith, but an average Turk has no way of understanding Namık Kemal or Sabahattin Bey, the Ottoman proponents of classical liberalism in the late 19th and early 20th century. The language reform was only one aspect of the Kemalist cultural revolution that Turkish society went through during the single-party era (1925-46). The whole idea was to change the very identity of the society and make it totally "Western" in all aspects. One iconic step was the "Hat Reform" of 1925, by which traditional Ottoman fez was banned and the Western-imported trimmed hat was made compulsory for civil servants. For a brief period in the 30's, even Turkish music was banned on Turkish radios. Only Western classics would be played, and Turkish ears that enjoyed them would have "progress." This type of "modernization," as you can guess, is not my cup of tea. I rather opt for a modernization driven by industrialization, economic rationality, democratization and the consolidation of individual liberty. The latter view has also been the philosophy of Turkey's center-right, which, unlike the Kemalists, focused on building highways and dams, and boosting production and export, rather than imposing hats and banning headscarves. And today, the ever-globalizing world proves the center-right right, and Kemalism wrong. Because in this world, your culture has no "market value" unless it brings something unique and authentic to the table. Incredible India Take India, for example. It has a booming economy, a functioning democracy, and an astonishing culture. Do you think it would be as interesting as it is today if it went through a "hat reform" and a "skirt reform," and there were no Indian men and women who wore the turban and the sauri? Or what would you think if all bands in India played Bach, but not any Hindustani? Or would Bollywood have this much appeal, if it had nothing original, and were just a bad imitation of Hollywood? Not really. And, similarly, a Turkey which is simply a bad imitation of the West has nothing interesting to offer to the world. Think for yourself: If you want to listen to Mozart, would you order a CD from the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra, or the Presidential Symphony Orchestra of Ankara? And wouldn't the latter be more interesting if it played the works of Ottoman composers, which were really not bad, and perhaps their modernized versions? What all this means is that if we Turks don't want to remain as European wannabes that people joke about, we have to get rid of this 80-year inferiority complex. There are many things in the West to admire, to be sure, but adopting them should not mean denying ourselves. There is nothing admirable about that.]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.361 2010-02-10T11:21:02Z 2010-02-10T11:22:21Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] An opinion piece published in these pages a few days ago was praising Turkey's self-styled secularism with generous words. This thing called laicite, originally an import from France, was, according to the argument, so...

Hurriyet Daily News] An opinion piece published in these pages a few days ago was praising Turkey's self-styled secularism with generous words. This thing called laicite, originally an import from France, was, according to the argument, so great that now it was "becoming an asset for Turkey's relations with Europe." And the proof, the reasoning went, was that a few European countries were studying Turkey's Religious Affairs Directorate in order to train their own state-supported imams. Well, I have hardly heard an argument that is this objectionable. And let me tell you why.]]> Laicite revisited First of all, here is what I think: Secularism, in the sense of separation of religion and state, is something I am fully supportive of. For I do not want the state to tell me what is right or wrong in regard to religion. I also do not want a particular religious group to impose its own interpretation of religion on the state. Separate the two, and we will all be better off. But Turkish laicite does not serve this liberalizing purpose. It has two main characteristics that are both pretty authoritarian. First, it wants to erase religion from public life by suppressing religious practices and symbols. The ban on the headscarf is a good example, among many others. The second thing about Turkish laicite is that it totally dominates and manipulates religion for the state's purposes. It even wants to monopolize religion, for it does not allow the existence of any civil religious movement that is independent from the state. For example, all Sufi orders and other Islamic communities who have their own charismatic leaders have been officially banned in Turkey since 1924. This ban was quite strict in the heydays of laicite (1925 to 1950), and Islamic figures such as Said Nursi were jailed for simply writing books that praise Islam. Newpapers from the '30s were full of headlines about the followers of Nursi, or "Nurcus," arrested by the police with their "illegal materials," such as books, letters and prayer caps. This ban has been softened over the years, and communities such as Nurcus have started to operate relatively freely, but they still feel themselves under threat. That is why, when you ask, they would hardly define themselves as a religious movement. They rather use euphemistic concepts such as culture, wisdom or even "love." This is not because they are dishonest. It is rather because they are living in a system in which any reference to religion is unwelcome and even dangerous. Now, some secularist Turks who are articulate enough to chat with you on liberal democracy would tell you that this authoritarian laicite is actually good, for it saves us from a greater evil, which is fundamentalist Islam. "Had Atatürk not crushed those Islamic orders," they could even whisper to your ear, "we would not be looking over the Bosphorus and sipping these nice martini cocktails." Well, do not buy into that. This argument presupposes that Turkey was something like the Taliban's Afghanistan before laicite saved us. The truth, however, was that Turkey had already been modernizing itself since early 19th century, and its Islam was hardly fundamentalist. (So, you would certainly be able to find bars in pre-Kemalist Istanbul, places where many Ottomans, including the young Mustafa Kemal Paşa, frequented.) The connection between laicite and fundamentalism is actually the opposite of what the Turkish secularists argue. The former is not a precaution to the latter; they are rather the two sides of the same coin. By suppressing even the most moderate expressions of Islam, and impoverishing Islamic thought by closing down all of its institutions, laicite opened the way for a more unrefined, literalist and angry Islam that emerged in Turkey in the '70s. This trend soon created the "Milli Görüş" (National View) movement of Necmeddin Erbakan, which was a great step back from the Islamic liberalism that Ottoman intellectuals such as Namik Kemal were able to articulate a century before. Diyanet matters Finally, let's come to Turkey's Religious Affairs Directorate, or, as it is simply called in Turkish, the Diyanet. I, too, think positively about this institution, and its growing prestige in Europe and the Middle East. And it is true that the Diyanet is a part of the state system that laicite had formulated. However, the institution is rooted in the Ottoman experience, and not in Turkish laicite's strong aversion to religion. The latter had allowed Diyanet only unwillingly and kept it quite weak until the Cold War when the Machiavellian Turkish state realized that a little bit of religion can be helpful against the communist threat. Yet still, the Diyanet has remained highly unpopular among Turkey's conservative Muslims, for it was seen as a tool of the authoritarian state. This started to change in the last two decades when the Diyanet started to prove that it was not a yes-man of the laicite regime. The latter's ban on the headscarf, for example, was never supported by the Diyanet, and the latter kept on saying that it is an established practice in the Islamic tradition. To sum it up, I should say Turkey indeed has an Islamic heritage that it can proudly share with the outside world. But that heritage was not produced by laicite. It rather has survived in spite of it.]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.360 2010-02-07T21:01:07Z 2010-02-09T21:03:17Z

[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...

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.]]> Who is to blame? Honor killings, unfortunately, are a widespread phenomenon in the Middle East, and people have diverse opinions on where it exactly has its roots. These disagreements were also reflected in the dozens of comments the Daily News website received yesterday. One commentator, who probably was a nationalist Turk, argued that the killers of the 16-year-old girl "were Kurds, and this is their culture." Another commentator soon responded by blaming the "Turkish government," for it "kept the Kurds... in the dark age." The truth is, yes, honor killings in Turkey are a problem mostly of the Kurdish population, for the latter is still under the influence of tribalism and all the related patriarchal codes. But this is neither an inherent characteristic of the Kurdish people, nor a conspiracy cooked up against them by the Turkish authorities. The problem is the topography of historical Kurdistan. It is a very mountainous region, which is inhospitable to trade routs, railways and highways. Hence its inhabitants have lived almost isolated from the outside world for centuries, and have remained largely untouched by modernity. The same is also true for the ill-famed "tribal areas" of Pakistan, which is, again, very mountainous. Another issue about honor killings which came out in the comments to the Daily News, and which I want to focus on, was their link to Islam -- or the lack thereof. A commentator was quite certain on this. "The problem [is] not the Muslims," he (or she) wrote. "The problem is Islam." Well, I beg to differ. I rather think that honor killings exist because not just modernity but also Islam could not penetrate enough into the patriarchal cultures of the Middle East. Let me explain. Of course, Islam, like other Abrahamic religions, has laws and punishments about sexual morality. The Qur'an, for example, criminalizes adultery, and thus Islamic law, or the shariah, has developed a system of regulating how it will be penalized. I personally have reformist views on this (for example I am totally against stoning, which is a part of the classical shariah) but that is another matter. What matters here is that honor killings go against even the most conservative interpretations of the shariah. Why?.. Well, because while the Qur'an defines adultery as a crime, it holds both the female and the male equally responsible for it. But have you ever seen a man who is killed for "honor"? I haven't. What I have rather seen is that while women are being killed, beaten, or at least humiliated for extra-marital relationships, men are often congratulated by their male friends for their "virility." In the face of this hypocritical male-domination, the Qur'an actually tried to protect women by penalizing false accusation of adultery brought against them. Unless there were "four eye witnesses" who saw the actual intercourse, no women could be accused of adultery, and those who spread rumors about her would be flogged. So, if the shariah were applied to the situation of the 16-year-old girl who was buried alive by her relatives, it was the latter that should have been punished, for that they brought a false accusation of adultery. An academic who has studied honor killings, Dr. Kecia Ali, agrees that Islam is not to blame here. In her report for The Feminist Sexual Ethics Project she notes that while "some have viewed honor killings as a logical extension of traditional Islamic gender practices," others have "argued that honor killings are the antithesis of Islamic morality." And she finds the latter view as "essentially correct from the perspective of Qur'an, prophetic traditions, and Islamic legal thought." Religion versus tradition Dr. Stefanie Eileen Nanes, another academic who studied the honor killings in Jordan, agrees. "In fact, this practice predates Islam," she notes, "and young men who commit these murders have been quoted as saying that in these cases, despite what Islam says, tradition is stronger than religion." What this means is that religion can be helpful in the much-needed campaign against honor killings. To its credit, the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs (the "Diyanet") has noted this and its imams have given sermons throughout Turkey denouncing the horrific practice. But much more is needed. Throughout the Middle East, Islamic scholars and other opinion makers should focus on this problem, and make strong, not half-hearted, denunciations of honor killings. And if they don't find themselves willing to do that, they should question whether they are, too, under the influence of the patriarchal codes of male-domination, rather than the Islamic norms of justice. ]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.359 2010-02-02T21:55:51Z 2010-02-02T21:59:32Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] Do you think that Turkey would be better off if it achieves "economic independence"? Would we Turks be wealthier if, for example, we drive all foreign companies out and "nationalize" the whole economy? I...

Hurriyet Daily News] Do you think that Turkey would be better off if it achieves "economic independence"? Would we Turks be wealthier if, for example, we drive all foreign companies out and "nationalize" the whole economy? I don't know how you would answer these questions, but some circles in Turkey certainly answer them very positively. These are often the Marxist-Leninists, and other shades and grades of the radical left, who believe that global capitalism is a monster that plunders the nations it breaks into. ]]> The North Korean dream Since I am really not the greatest fan of North Korea, or any other communist dictatorship of the past century, I am not inspired by this "anti-imperialist" vision of the Turkish radical left. But this group doesn't keep me awake at night, for it is really a marginal force in Turkish politics. However, there are other forces in the country that have a similar vision and are not marginal at all. This recently became exposed with the controversial "Sledgehammer" scheme, which was, apparently, a military coup plan devised by a team of hotheaded generals in 2002. The media has been discussing the plan very heatedly, focusing mostly on its extravagant elements, such as the bombing of a few Istanbul mosques in order to stir up instability. So far, the generals under the spotlight have denied these criminal elements in the scheme. But, as far as I am aware, they have not denied the economic ideas in the plan, which are most interesting. These ideas are articulated in a specific chapter of the long "Sledgehammer" document under the title "Economic Policies." The generals start with a general analysis of what went wrong in the Turkish economy: Atatürk established a brilliant "economic independence" in the mid-'20s, and Turkey arguably was able to have a great leap forward thanks to its "national character." Then the post-Kemalist dark age began, the generals argue, with the coming of democracy. Center-right governments opened up the economy to "the imperialists," constantly "selling" the homeland to these "plunderers." What really happened after 1945 (i.e., after full Kemalist dictatorship), according to the generals, was this: "Our country has been politically, culturally and economically besieged, and Western countries have been able to realize the Treaty of Sevres (to tear Turkey into pieces), which they could not realize in Atatürk's time, via the IMF, World Bank and the European Union." So, what is to be done, as Lenin would have asked? The solution, as the "Sledgehammer" document nicely explains, is to stage a military coup that will return Turkey to the "freshness of 1923." Some of the measures that will follow include: - All relations with "non-national" economic institutions such as the IMF will be called off, and all properties within Turkey owned by foreign capital will be confiscated. - All previous state companies that were privatized by the current government and its predecessors will be restored back to state ownership. - Financial assets of the "Islamists" and non-Muslim minorities will be inspected, and their transfer to foreign banks will be blocked. - Retired generals will be appointed to the administrative posts of the Central Bank, all banks and big holdings. According to Cemil Ertem, who teaches economics at Istanbul University, these ideas "reflect the anti-market programs of the orthodox left" and are "even bolder than those of the Turkish Communist Party." But why? Why have our die-hard Kemalist generals, who have considered the Marxist Left a threat for long, turned so lefty? Reviving corporatism The generals, of course, are not Marxists. The reason they sound like the latter is their distaste for free-market capitalism. And the reason that they have this distaste is that they realize something important: Free markets erode the dictatorial powers of the state, and open the way for a free society. Kemalism has always been an anti-capitalist ideology for this very reason. The economic model it accepted in the early '30s was corporatism, which defined the society as a giant organism orchestrated by the all-powerful state. Kemalist ideologue Recep Peker, the secretary-general of Atatürk's party, adopted this doctrine from the Italian National Fascist Party, who leader, Benito Mussolini, had put the idea in a nice nutshell: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." This was how Turkey was structured in the '30s. In subsequent decades, we saw three important eras of economic liberalization: First under the Democrat Party (1950-60), then under Turgut Özal (1983-93) and under the AKP since 2002. The Kemalists, as you can guess, have despised all these actors. They even launched a military coup against the first one, and killed its leader, Adnan Menderes. The only frustration they have now is that they can't do the same thing with the AKP, and bring back to the "freshness of 1923."]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.357 2010-01-30T20:06:53Z 2010-01-30T20:07:58Z

[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...

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."]]> Enter the Sufi way These questions came to mind recently as I was reading the latest novel, "Aşk" (Love), by Elif Şafak, one of Turkey's best writers. The book, which became a Turkish bestseller for months, has not been translated into English yet, but if it ever is, I strongly recommend it. It presents two parallel stories, one set in present-day America, the other in 13th-century Konya; the connection is a book within the book titled "The Shariah of Love." I won't go into the details of Şafak's novel, but will focus only on the Sufi understanding of love that she touched upon. The Sufis were the mystics of Islam. They wanted to surpass the cold legalism of the scholars of Shariah, or Islamic law, and "be one with God" through a discovery of the heart. Love, therefore, was an invaluable concept for the Sufis. But theirs was not a love atomized and divided into pieces, like we modern people are used to experiencing. It was rather a love connected to, and directed at, a single source. I know it sounds ambiguous. So, let me try to explain by posing a question: With whom do you think people fall in love? You might answer by saying, "Well, people often fall in love with beautiful, intelligent, witty, confident or honest people." And here is the difference. The Sufis would say, "Well, people often fall in love with Beauty, Intelligence, Wit, Confidence or Honesty." The Sufis, in other words, would see certain attributes as objects of love, rather than the specific people who happen to manifest them. This makes sense, because people are mortal and unstable, while attributes are ever-lasting. Many beautiful women and men have lived throughout history, for example. All of them are gone, but Beauty, as an attribute, has remained. All the beautiful people we see today will also perish. But Beauty, again, will endure. According to the Sufis, there was a good reason why the attributes were everlasting: They were rooted in none other than God, the one and only Absolute Being. It was Him, in other words, who was the source of all the wonderful things that we love. Mortal humans were just reflecting them for a while, often misleading us to think that they owned the attributes. But in fact they were just like mirrors reflecting the light from the sun. And the sun, with which everything shines, was God. That's why Ibn Arabi, the great Sufi, said: "If you love a being for his beauty, you love none other than God, for He is the Beautiful Being." If you are not religious, all this "God talk" will probably not make much sense to you. But then you can think of the attributes I am referring to as Plato's Forms. According to the Greek philosopher, all the objects we see in the material world are imperfect copies of the perfect Forms that exist in a non-material realm. Everything we see with our eyes, in other words, are just "shadows" of the ultimate reality. The mirror and the sun "Well, interesting philosophy," you may say. "But what does it mean for our lives?" What it means is that if you have the guts to take the Sufi - or the Platonic - approach, you will see the world with a whole new perspective. You will experience, as a result, this whole love thing in a way that is different from most other people. Then you will still love people, and other created beings, but you will realize that they are not the owners of the attributes that attract you. So you will not come to the level of worshipping them, as lovers often do in our non-Sufi, non-Platonic and highly superficial popular culture. When you lose someone you love, you will still grieve, but you won't come to the point of despair. You won't come to the point where, as one of the celebrated thinkers of our age, Mariah Carey, put it, "I can't live, if living is without you." You will rather understand that you lost a "mirror," but the "sun" is still out there. And you will know that the sun never leaves you out in the cold. ]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.358 2010-01-26T20:11:26Z 2010-01-30T20:13:23Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] Turkey's latest national controversy over the alleged coup plan codenamed "Sledgehammer" will probably remain as just that: a controversy. The generals who seem responsible will probably not face any trial, for the military...

Hurriyet Daily News] Turkey's latest national controversy over the alleged coup plan codenamed "Sledgehammer" will probably remain as just that: a controversy. The generals who seem responsible will probably not face any trial, for the military remains as an untouchable institution, especially after being saved last week by the Constitutional Court from civilian scrutiny. A bit like the ancient legal maxim, "The prince is above the law," Turkish laws place the generals above the justice system that we, the lesser mortals, are subject to.]]> The ideology in arms However, beyond all these uncertainties behind the alleged coup plan, there is a fact on the ground that is bitter enough. There is an elephant, as the saying goes, in our living room: The Turkish military exists not just to protect the nation from foreign threats. More than that, it exists to protect a certain ideology from the citizens who happen to have different ideologies. This ideology, as we all know, is Kemalism, which is inferred from the policies of Mustafa Kemal, modern Turkey's founder. Radical secularism, assimilationist nationalism and "statism" are its main pillars. It is not my cup of tea, to be honest, but there are many Turks who see it as the best idea that ever befell on the nation - or even any nation. The party most Kemalists often vote for is the Republican People's Party, or CHP, which was founded by Mustafa Kemal himself in 1923. And it is perfectly fine for the CHP, or other political forces, to support and advance Kemalism within Turkey's multiparty politics. But it is not fine for the military to do the same thing. Because the latter means that the political parties and social groups that disagree with Kemalism are challenged not only by the democratic politics of the CHP, and other similar parties, but also the tanks and guns of the military. The latter has staged four military coups since 1960, and all of them were directed against non-Kemalist (center-right or pro-Islamic) governments. Moreover, the fear that it can launch new coups, stage assassinations or do other nasty things is constantly in the air, like a Sword of Damocles over the whole nation. The only other political ideology in Turkey that enjoys similar support from an armed organization is - guess what - Kurdish nationalism. The armed organization here is the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. Its terrorist attacks are widely (and rightly) considered as big a problem for Turkey, because it not only costs innocent lives but also constantly sabotages democratic politics with violence. That's why Turkish democrats call for the disarmament of the PKK, and invite its sympathizers to do politics without leaning their back on "the mountains" - a reference to Kurdish guerillas. In the same way, Kemalist politicians and ideologues, too, need to learn to do politics without constantly leaning their back on "the barracks" - a reference to Turkish officers. What this practically means is that, for Turkey to become a real democracy, the military needs to be de-ideologized, and turn into a politically neutral organization doing its democratically defined professional job: to protect the nation from potential foreign threats. Privatization saves Of course, how to force the Turkish military into that great transformation is the million-dollar question. But that's another debate. Here let me just make another point. If this transformation ever takes place, and thus Kemalism gets disarmed, it will be good for not just Turkey, but also this very ideology. Losing the support of the authoritarian state, and becoming an equal player in the marketplace of ideas, can push Kemalism to reconnect with society, rather than looking down upon it, and start to change. Economics can give us a perspective here. One of the success stories of free market capitalism is privatization, for it has often turned stagnant and sinister state enterprises into booming and smiling private companies. What I am talking about here is a similar "privatization" of Kemalism, which can help ideology move forward from its archaic dogmas, and come to the realities of the 21st century. Kemalist parties might then try to win new voters by pragmatic stances on real issues, rather than dispersing fear and calling the generals to "duty." They might even start to think that democracy is really not that bad.]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.356 2010-01-23T21:37:40Z 2010-01-23T21:41:19Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] Have you taken a look at the recent exposure about the amazing adventures of Turkey's Dr. Strangelovish generals? It is a must-see. What I am referring to is the action plan called "Balyoz" (Sledgehammer)...

Hurriyet Daily News] Have you taken a look at the recent exposure about the amazing adventures of Turkey's Dr. Strangelovish generals? It is a must-see. What I am referring to is the action plan called "Balyoz" (Sledgehammer) that the liberal daily Taraf published a few days ago. The extensive document, whose full name is the "Sledgehammer Security Operation Plan," was apparently drafted in 2003, a little after the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, came to power.]]> Against 'reactionary forces' The masterminds of the plan, reportedly, were retired Gen. Çetin Doğan, the then-commander of the 1st Army, retired Former Air Forces Cmdr. Gen. İbrahim Fırtına and another retired general, Ergin Saygun. According to Taraf, their scheme was devised at a military meeting attended by 162 active military members, including 29 generals. One bold idea was to stir up chaos in society through violent acts so that a military takeover would be justified. Options included bombing an Istanbul mosque during the Friday prayer, which would provoke the Islamic masses and lead them to a clash with security forces. In the face of this "Islamist uprising," the military would roll its tanks, and save the country from the incumbent "reactionary forces." Another option was intentionally bringing down a Turkish warplane on the Aegean, putting the blame on Greece, and thus creating tension between the two countries - something that would show the dovish government as weak, and, again, lead to the military's ascendance. The Sledgehammer document also included creative solutions about the media. Some 36 journalists, mostly liberal columnists, were listed as "those to be arrested." One of them is Cengiz Çandar, whose column I hope you enjoy in these pages. (Personally, to be honest, I was a little disappointed to be out of the list. But then I recalled that I wasn't writing at all when this document was drafted, i.e., in 2003. I am just hoping to show up later in updated versions.) On the other hand, there was another list of 137 journalists that the generals put under a category of "those who can be helpful." I am sure you must have heard at least some of them before. What the generals ultimately wanted to do with all this, apparently, was "a return to 1923." That year marked not only the beginning of the Turkish Republic, but also the coming of the "single party" dictatorship of the Kemalist ideology, during which Turkey had not the slightest touch of democracy and political freedom. So, the main goal of the generals was to restore a bygone dictatorship. (Well, what else can you do with a military coup, right?) What needed to be done the day after was also nicely planned. "All the assets and financial resources of individuals and groups suspected of involvement in acts of reactionaryism will be confiscated," a paragraph from the document reads, "and necessary steps will be taken to freeze their financial resources abroad." In other words, the junta would steal the money of all citizens and institutions that it deemed too Muslim. So, at the end of the day, some citizens would be killed, others would be arrested (and God knows how they would be treated in military prisons), and many others would be financially crushed. All for the sake of saving the Turkish nation - from its own religious beliefs and political choices. All internal enemies There are many other details of the Sledgehammer plan, and you can read them in the press. The military's response, so far, has been bizarre. The man under the spotlight, retired Gen. Çetin Doğan, first spoke to a Web site and said, "It is the job of the Turkish Armed Forces to protect Turkey from external and internal threats." He also noted, "The military of course has plans against the internal threats ... which include [religious] reactionism." Later he only rejected parts of the plan, such as mosque bombings and bringing down warplanes. The General Chief of Staff, too, made an ambiguous declaration. It did not deny the existence of the plan, but argued that it was only about "foreign threats" and "martial law." It also said, "nobody with conscious and reason can accept the allegations," but did not address the fact the "allegations" just came from what is apparently written on the military document. Of course, the "allegations" will remain as allegations until they are proven to be true by a court. But what court? Yesterday, the Constitutional Court, an ideological ally of the military, annulled a recent law that would allow military personnel to be tried in civilian courts, instead of the military ones. (Here is one of the niceties about our regime: Soldiers can be tried only by other soldiers.) So, how can we, the People, ever be able to get the real answer to the chilling question that the Sledgehammer plan, besides previous others, puts in front of us: Does the Turkish military really make plans to kill Turkish people?]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.355 2010-01-19T21:33:00Z 2010-01-23T21:34:49Z

[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...

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. ]]> The great transformation As a response, secularists often argue that political Islam has no place in a democracy, because it simply wants to overthrow the democratic system. The cure to this threat, the argument goes, is to accept "separation between religion and politics." (Beware: this is different from separation between religion and state, which is a must for a liberal political order. The state should be secular, whereas politics can be informed by Islam, Christianity, dialectical materialism, positivism, nature-worship or whatever you want.) Actually, both the secularists and the Mawdudi-type Islamists make the same mistake by missing the same crucial point: A political vision informed by Islam doesn't necessarily have to be authoritarian. It doesn't have to strive for an "Islamic state." It might rather decide to uphold Islamic values - such as justice, rights and public morals - within the secular democratic system. It might be, believe it or not, even liberal. I am not just speculating, for such a liberal political Islam has been in the making in Turkey since the mid '90s. Last week, Ümit Aktaş, an established Islamic intellectual, underlined this in a long interview he gave to Taraf, the radically liberal national daily. First, Mr. Aktaş acknowledged the great transformation that he and the likeminded have gone through. "Before the '80s, democracy was something like disbelief for us," he said. "But then concepts such as change, innovation, liberation and democracy started to be debated, and accepted, by Islamists." As Mr. Aktaş pointed out, one case study to see this change is the approach to the Kurdish question. Until the '90s, Kurdish rights were really not high up in the rhetoric of Islamic circles. But their struggle with the authoritarian Kemalist state helped them understand and sympathize with other suppressed groups, which included the Kurds. These days it is common to hear from Islamic commentators that the Kurdish language should be totally free, because human languages, according to the Koran, are among God's creations. The same thing can be observed with regard to the rights of non-Muslims, too. Today, the defenders of the rights of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, such as the reopening of the Halki seminary, include Islamic thinkers who believe that religious freedom must be championed for all. (The secularists, meanwhile, are busy with restricting religious freedom for all.) But what about the incumbent AKP, the Justice and Development Party? Is it representative of the liberal political Islam that Mr. Aktaş speaks about? Well, only to a degree. As an explanation, Mr. Aktaş spoke about three distinct trends within what is superficially wrapped up as "the Islamic camp" in Turkey: The Easternists, the Conservatives and the Islamists. The people in the first group have been against all sorts of Westernization, and believe in a monarchical Caliphate rather than a democratic republic. The second group, the Conservatives, are people who "simply wish to preserve the status quo, the existing social patterns." And the Islamists, according to Mr. Aktaş, are the people "who wish to represent Islam on a political level in order to defend the denied rights of Muslims." The faces of the AKP Among these three, Mr. Aktaş also added, Easternism is almost a dead phenomenon today, at least in the ranks of the AKP. The party, he argued, is rather made up of the two other trends: Conservatism as represented by people such as Cemil Çiçek, and Islamism as represented by people such as Ömer Çelik. The latter camp, he added, is more reformist and liberal on issues ranging from women's role in society to minority rights. The AKP still suffers from other problems, such as patrimonialism and leader-domination, both of which are Turkish classics. But the Islamo-liberal synthesis that it has in its composition is still helpful, and is promising for the future. Flatly rejecting this option, and believing that Islamist authoritarianism is the only possible form of political Islam, is wrong. It is like assuming that "political Christianity" is expressed through only the Inquisition and the crusades, and not the Christian democrats of today's Europe. I know that the current Muslim world sometimes looks more similar to medieval Christendom than contemporary Europe. But change is possible. And it should be welcomed.]]> tag:www.thewhitepath.com,2010://1.354 2010-01-17T22:32:40Z 2010-01-19T22:34:19Z

[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News] Dear friends, I hope all is well in the Holy Land. Things are not too bad here in Turkey. Yet one thing that certainly does not look great is relations between our countries, which...

Hurriyet Daily News] Dear friends, I hope all is well in the Holy Land. Things are not too bad here in Turkey. Yet one thing that certainly does not look great is relations between our countries, which hit an ugly low this week. In fact, since the beginning of your government's "Operation Cast Lead" in Gaza, which happened a year ago, a continual war of words has been going on between your leaders and ours.]]> The New Turkish Republic First, we all should see something: The Turkish Republic of today is more democratic and more Muslim-minded than it ever used to be. And these two things are not contradictory at all. In the last decade, the power of the democratically elected government has steadily increased vis-à-vis the secularist bureaucratic elite that had dominated the country since the late '20s. As a result, the cultural sensibilities of the majority of Turkish society, in which Muslimhood plays a great role, have become more influential in policymaking. The practical result of this is that Turkey is ruled by people such as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has a greater emotional connection with the Muslim Palestinians, and not by the ultra-secular generals who look at the Islamic world with distaste. (I know that some of you think Turkey was doing much better under those generals, but I strongly suggest consulting with our liberals or Kurds, who tasted torture in military prisons or who saw their friends assassinated by the gendarme.) This is not to say that everything that comes out of this more democratic Turkey is sensible - no, not at all. Some of the harsh rhetoric against Israel that we see in our media is indeed fueled by anti-Semitism, which exists within various political camps. The recent TV series that depicted the Israeli military as a bunch of sadists were indeed childish and silly. Turks are a highly emotional people and their anger against the carnage in Gaza, which I share, can easily lead to the vilification of Israel, which I criticize. However, what I or you would prefer to see does not matter much here. What matters is that this New Turkish Republic, as political analyst Graham Fuller wisely calls it, is here to stay. But is this bad news for Israel? Well, it depends. If you are willing to achieve a fair two-state solution, which will bring security to you and a viable homeland to the Palestinians, the rising popularity of Turkey on the "Arab street" might actually be an asset. People say that Erdoğan is the new hero of the Middle East, and please note that he has achieved this by calling for not a "world without Zionism," but a Gaza with happy children. If you really want peace, a just peace, this New Turkish Republic can help you by reaching out to some of your toughest enemies, such as Hamas. But if you are willing instead to keep and even expand your illegitimate settlements in "the territories," and continue to rely on an Iron Wall to defend yourself from an angry nation to whom you have done wrong, then, sorry. The New Turkish Republic will not be of any help. Because, believe me, it will never, ever forsake the Palestinian people. The lesson we learned When we Turks raise the issue of the plight of the Palestinians, though, you Israelis often remind us of our own sins, such as the plight of the Kurds. You have a point. But I have a point too. So please listen. Yes, we Turks have been oppressive to our Kurdish citizens since the '20s, banning even their very right to speak their own language. Yet we are not occupiers in southeastern Turkey, and the place that we really occupied, northern Cyprus, is at least safe and sound. But I want to tell you something else that the saner among us have understood over our decades-long "war against terrorism" directed at the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. Our powerful generals repeatedly told us that this was a military problem and they would "solve" it swiftly by "killing all terrorists, one by one." Some also believed that "the Kurds only understand brute force," and showed a great deal of it by burning thousands of villages. Only now are we realizing that the PKK stemmed not only from its fanatical ideology, but also from the original sins of our state and its arrogant suppression of the Kurds. One thing I really like about the New Turkish Republic is that it gets this fundamental truth, and embraces a much less militarist and much more reconciliatory paradigm. I think you should take the hint. You should see that there is no military solution to terrorism rooted in an angry people. The real solution is to admit the wrongs you have done to those people, give them back what they deserve, and, by doing all this, empower the moderates on their side. If you keep on rejecting this and relying on militarism, then, my friends, the future does not look bright for you. The end of this road is to become something like the apartheid regime in South Africa. Look, even now your soldiers cannot enter the U.K. -- the U.K., for God's sake! -- fearing that they might be arrested for their assault on Gaza, which a U.N. report said included war crimes. I really don't want you to go down that way; hence my prayers go to the peaceniks on your side. And, unlike some others here, I am not hopeless. For I know that the Jewish people, with all their admirable history, faith and culture, have the potential to be a light unto nations, rather than bring death unto the children of Palestine.]]>