Turkey is handling Islam differently!
My good friend, David Sheath, whom I heard preaching last Sunday, started his prayer letter to us this week by saying, “I do want to apologise to anyone who found last Sunday’s sermon introduction too confronting. I spoke of the horrific torture and murder of three Christians in Turkey. My intention was to highlight the incredible prayer of forgiveness from one of the murdered men’s wives. In a TV interview she prayed “Father forgive them, they know not what they do”. You can read the story here (but be warned – this report is even more graphic than the details I mentioned in my sermon.”
There is dreadful persecution of some Christians in Turkey but that is confined largely to Islamic extremists who are opposed by the Turkish Government as well as the minority Christian Church. It is extremely difficult for Christians to function in Turkey faced with increasing fundamentalist Islam and a secular Government. On more than one visit I have travelled extensively to every part of Turkey including the Far East usually never seen by tourists. It is one of my favourite overseas countries. What is happening there is far different from every other Muslim nation.
Vincent Boland writes in “Ataturk’s Shadow,” (Financial Times, 5/3/07) that according to Omer Faruk Genckaya, a professor at Bikent University in Turkey, “Secularism is the most defining element of the establishment of the republic. It is a kind of religion in Turkey that is as important as Islam. The idea of secularism as religion is a paradox, but it helps to explain the singular notion of what Turkish secularism actually means.”
Turkey is the most important bridge between east and west, especially between Europe and the Middle East. In Turkey you can see the dynamics of religions including secularism competing to shape society. This is a country of 74 million people, of whom 93 percent are Muslim. Yet its state structure, established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, has been absolutely secular, meaning the exclusion of all Muslim practices – even the wearing of head scarves at school and at work – in the affairs of government, the economy and in education.
In dress and attitude, Turkey is a Western Muslim nation. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Ataturk established government and citizenship in terms of secular nationalism rather than Islam. He banned the Burka and the Fez, took to wearing Western clothes and established a secular state. He followed the French laicism, which had forcefully displaced public Christianity with secularism. Ataturk was successful beyond expectation. Secular nationalism was taught so well in schools and enforced so strongly in public life that it became a secular religion.
Not everyone was converted to the new public religion, but most accommodated themselves to its requirements enforced by secularist elites, especially the military.
Yet, isn’t the privatization of Islam a contradiction in terms? Muslims believe in a God who transcends all human governments. There can be nothing higher than the law of Allah. It might be one thing for Muslims to accommodate themselves somewhat uncomfortably to a regime that disallows full public expression of Islam, but to demand of all citizens that they accept public secularism as a matter of faith is another thing altogether.
Since 1923, many kinds of rebellion and resistance to Turkey’s secularism but the army put down rebellions, ousted governments, and made clear to everyone that force was on the side of political secularism.
James W. Skillen, President of the US Center for Public Justice, writes with insight:
“However, over time and particularly in the last two decades, quieter popular movements arose to address the needs of the middle classes and the poorer communities in Turkey’s cities, villages, and countryside, needs that were not being met by the increasingly complacent elites. Leaders among the common people focused on jobs, health care, and other public services, and the development efforts were expressive of obligations incumbent on the Muslim faithful. Before long, some of these leaders were elected to city councils and then eventually to mayoral offices, and finally, through the rapidly expanding Justice and Development Party (the AKP), to the prime minister’s office in 2002. The relatively new AKP, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who became prime minister, won the support of masses of ordinary people who had not been served well by the secular nationalists..”
“Here was something new, a political party that did not hold to or insist on the religion of secularism but did accept the practice of democracy with no evident intention of seeking governmental power to establish Islam as a public monopoly. Erdogan and his supporters fostered economic growth, built up the infrastructure, and worked harder than any prior government to move Turkey toward entrance into the European Union.”
“And the AKP has demonstrated that it is not necessary for citizens to believe in secularism in order to enjoy full citizenship in the republic. In essence, the AKP is putting something new into practice, different from both monopolistic secularism and monopolistic Islam. We might call it public pluralism through which people of all faiths, including both secularists and Muslims as well as the minority Christians, are given room to live out their faiths in public life without any one of them being allowed to monopolize the political arena.”
“The thing to watch in Turkey now, with the upcoming July election for president (the only office not yet won by the AKP), is whether the AKP government can maintain popular support for public pluralism and an open democratic society. Will the more radical Islamists support such a society in which they have more room to express themselves but cannot dominate? And will radical secularists, including the military leaders, accept a system that gives believing secularists continued access to political life but no longer a monopoly on government, the military, and the bureaucracy? If so, Turkey may well be developing a model that could have potent significance for other Muslim countries, and for religiously diversified countries such as India and Indonesia.”
I am intrigued what Western countries which are having troubles with Islamic minorities such as Great Britain, France, Germany, USA and Australia can learn from how Turkey is handling its internal Islamic troubles. I am not jumping to conclusions or even making suggestions, but just watching carefully for any positive suggestions to help our society with its Muslim minority.
REV THE HON. DR GORDON MOYES, A.C., M.L.C.