Do you now what the biggest nightmare of a secularist Turk is? Turkish Daily News’ Mustafa Akyol explains.
The Sum of all Secular Fears
July 16th, 2007 | Austrolabe | Uncategorized
July 16th, 2007 | Austrolabe | Uncategorized
Do you now what the biggest nightmare of a secularist Turk is? Turkish Daily News’ Mustafa Akyol explains.
8 comments ↓
How do we know that that’s the case? I can think of plenty of other reasons to be afraid of Islamists.
Besides since Turkey isn’t broken, why fix it with “tradition”?
Who knows. Those horrible Islamists might completely privatise the economy, act in a fiscally conservative manner, promote civil rights and freedoms, emphasise free thinking, and generally do what Turkey needs done instead of pandering to a pseudo-Fascist ideology.
What a horribel future!
anon, “since Turkey isn’t broken” – yeah, I think that means that the military knows much better than the people how to run the country into the ground, and since isolationism and “deep state” conniving with Mafias and terrorist organizations is obviously much better than open and transparent government; and that God help us if the people actually elect their own goverment and President rather than waiting for the secular elite to send it to them; since a state-organized economy on the model of Stalin’s “5 year plans” has obviously worked out so well… yeah, Anon, I think any concern about Turkey should be limited to a few girls wearing headscarves on university campuses – “The sky is falling!”
this was excellent from the article – (by the way, the article is out of tone from the usual at the TDN, and may mark an editorial tone to reflect the reality that the AK Party will win and that secularist paranoia has had its day) That would be the sum of the tragic story of Turkey’s authoritarian and radically secularist elite. The core of their problem is superficiality. While abandoning all the rich cultural heritage of the Islamic/Ottoman past, they only got the lifestyle of the West, not its ideas. So they well know how to dine, wine and valentine like a Westerner. Yet they don’t know to think with Western concepts such as rationality, and they have no clue about Western values such as individual freedom.
Dawud, Jazak Allah khair for your comments. What percentage of the Turkish public do you think are ’secular’?
So they well know how to dine, wine and valentine like a Westerner. Yet they don’t know to think with Western concepts such as rationality, and they have no clue about Western values such as individual freedom.
This describes not only Turkish secular liberals, but most of the secular elites in many other Muslim countries.
Amir, hard to say – if you mean the Turkish/French ‘laic’ and opposed to religion in public, along the lines of the dominant party, somewhere between 5 and 10 percent, mostly the wealthy and well-educated elite of Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir.
However, every single political party, on paper, signs up to the ’six points’ of Ataturk’s codes, including ’secularism,’ and as such even the quite openly Islamist Sa’adet party (of Necmettin Erbakan, prime minister until the ‘post-modern coup’ of 1997) endorses ’secularism,’ broadly understood as a seperation of powers between state officials and religious authorities, but then even the Ottomans (and the Ummayads and Abbasids before them, with the vizier, Imam or Shaykh-ul-Islam, and Amir-ul-Muqminin being distinct persons) had that.
Probably at least 15-20 % are firmly committed to not allowing ‘Islamists’ (including the AK Party) come to power, if one remembers that that includes state officials and employees (fully a fifth of the workers in the country are employed by some wing of the state, be it education or whatever, and are thus livelihood-dependent) – or else you have the Alevis, who fear Sunni ascendance and power and the widescale revival of the riots which broke out between Sunni nationalists (mostly right-wing MHP) and Alevi Kurds (mostly left-wing, socialist to communist) during the 70s and 80s, and they number between 10-15%, with any accurate count being made difficult by social factors.
The basic thrust is that the Turks, as they like to say, have ‘fully digested secularism and democracy,’ and the muslims are not desperate to overthrow the whole state but rather to make it work for them rather than for the small elite who currently rule – and the fear that they may very well do that keeps the ‘deep state’ secularists from sleeping well at night.
Can’t analyse it much better, sorry.
Dawud,
How precisely does directly electing the President make things better? How does it strenghten the rule of law? Does it maintain the balance of power between governmental institution?
Anon, I wouldn’t say that the sole concern in Turkey is directly electing the President – and no, changing the style of elected government won’t strenthen the rule of law, especially as you must know that the unelected State elements, particularly the judicial system and military / jandarma, are uninfluenced by any elected government.
‘Rentier economy’ is the economic word for those who live off the status quo, and describes quite well why Turkey has massive problems with unemployment, inflation, and squandering of resources – all very Middle Eastern, despite all attempts to dress it up as egalitarian and European.
Democracy and the free market do have their virtues, but they’re not panaceas and the hypocritical and skin-deep application of these while belying their essences, works about as well as those tanning lotions or skin-whitening creams, destroying the foundation of what is healthy to promote a rapidly decaying facade.
Leave a Comment