Ali Bardakoglu
Will it work? I myself doubt it, but it's an intriguing attempt. Now if we could get sermons on equal rights for non-Muslims and freedom of conscience for converts from Islam, we'll be making real progress!
From the Chicago Tribune, with thanks to Nicolei:
ISTANBUL -- Turkey's young governing party, with roots in political Islam, has confounded critics and some supporters alike by transforming the nation's 70,000 mosques into bully pulpits from which preachers advocate women's rights and other democratic reforms.The government's Directorate of Religious Affairs, which dictates the all-important Friday sermons, has instructed the nation's imams to turn their spiritual guidance to the arena of human rights and ridding Turkey of unwanted vestiges of traditional society.
Rather than the calls to holy war that echo through mosques in some parts of the world, worshipers here are being told that "honor killings," in which men murder female relatives suspected of tarnishing the family name, are a sin as well as against the law.Those attending services also are hearing about formerly taboo subjects, such as a need for equality of the sexes in the home and the workplace and women's reproductive rights. ...
The architect of the transformation is Ali Bardakoglu, the head of the Religious Affairs Directorate, which regulates religious practices in Turkey.
A former academic with a mild manner, Bardakoglu has taken the unusual step of consulting numerous women's groups and physicians as part of an effort to craft sermons addressing women's issues. ...
Bardakoglu said the country's religious practices must parallel the modernization under way in other sectors of Turkish society. Part of that transformation, he said, involves using the influences of imams to point out that abuses of human rights, particularly women's rights, do not originate in Islam.
"In modern Middle Eastern society, when you say `women's rights,' not everyone or every country has the same understanding of the term," he said. "Not only in Turkey but also throughout the Islamic world, we are trying to help these issues be better understood."
Bardakoglu said the government would prefer that the imams write their own sermons, but he said the majority of the preachers could not deliver the right message because they lack the proper training and resources.
As a result, a committee of 16 religious scholars affiliated with his agency prepares the sermons for the Friday services, and the messages are dispatched across the country. The imams, who are civil servants, risk losing their jobs if they do not deliver the sermons, though they are free to make their own comments afterward.
Eventually, Bardakoglu said, he hopes a majority of imams will be allowed to craft their own sermons, reflecting the simultaneous progress of religion and democracy in Turkey.
Not everyone is pleased with the process. Some conservative preachers bristle at the control exercised from Ankara, the nation's capital, angered as much by the meddling in religious affairs as the messages.
"In a secular state, which Turkey is supposed to be, this is not right," said Abdullah Sezer, imam at a mosque in Istanbul's conservative Fatih neighborhood. "But we do not have religious freedom in this country, the way they have it in the United States."
But a younger imam, who asked that his name not be used, said the government plays an important role.
"As a citizen and as a Muslim, I think government control is helpful," he said. "Without it, some mosques could go out of control."
The government-dictated sermons would seem to violate the strict secular tenets on which modern Turkey was founded in 1923. But the definition of secular here differs slightly from the American practice of separating church and state by tolerating all religions equally. In Turkey, as in France, there is a stricter understanding of secularism, which results in a ban on wearing head scarves in schools or beginning a parliamentary session with a prayer.
Imams resistant
In an attempt to eradicate religion from government, the staunchly secular Turkish military in 1996 ousted a prime minister it considered too Islamic, and the state established control over the mosques. Through the Religious Affairs Directorate, the state pays the salaries of the imams and regulates how religious schools are run.
Bardakoglu acknowledged, however, that getting the imams not only to deliver the sermons but also to embrace their sentiments will take time.
"It is a challenge for the imams that people close their ears to such things," he said. "The resistance is normal, though. It shows that change has begun."
An area where change cannot come fast enough for most Turks is honor killings. There is no reliable record of the numbers of victims annually, but it is thought that relatives kill dozens of Turkish women every year for supposedly besmirching the family honor.
The problem was dramatized in late February when two brothers shot their 22-year-old sister to death as she lay in a hospital bed in Istanbul. She had given birth to a child out of wedlock a few months earlier and was recovering from an earlier attempt on her life.
The Religious Affairs Directorate reacted immediately, bumping another sermon off the schedule. Bardakoglu issued a statement saying that honor killings are only one of the many problems faced by women around the world.
"These problems do not arise from a religious source," he said at the time. "These problems are caused by social, cultural and economic reasons. ... The fact that 14 centuries after the Koran was revealed to us women still face discrimination is saddening and thought-provoking."
It doesn't surprise me at all, in light of Sura 4:34 and other passages. It will be interesting to see how the Turkish authorities deal with such material.
Notice how quick the Trib's reporter is to grant done deal status to this proposed reform. The Trib is all breathless with isn't-it-wonderful enthusiasm that this proposed measure is already "transforming the nation's 70,000 mosques." Furthermore, the Trib is kidding itself by describing fascist Islam as nothing more than "unwanted vestiges." This is the kind of blind, PC, self-censored journalism that is killing us. I'm sure many readers of this site are aware of a recent British documentary in which a M.E. reporter admitted his colleagues are physically afraid of bodily retribution if they tell the truth about Islam. Actually, I respect that. Courage is a rare commodity and I don't claim a lot of it for myself. What I don't respect is self-consorship from fear of breaking a PC taboo.
Maybe they'll do a sermon about the rights of Gay and Lesbian Muslims, too. Don't think they exist? Look here:
http://www.faithfreedom.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=343
Anything good that happens in Turkey works only because the military keeps a very close eye on anything that happens in the Islamo-political sphere.
This phrase, "The government's Directorate of Religious Affairs, which dictates the all-important Friday sermons" is proof of this.
Hugh sides on letting Turkey into the EU. Would not that allow intra-boundary immigration?
Ethylred:
It is my understanding that Turkish citizens would be free to emigrate to any other EU country without limitation. Anyone know for sure?
Where is Hugh when you need him? :)
Though Ithe secular elite of Turkey deserves encouragement, membership in the EU is simply too dangerous and permanent a reward. The problem with Kemalism is that its achievements are never established. They require constant vigilance, and even the most soothing version of Islam, such as that which one might believe, from this item about sermons on women, can always be traded down, or up (depending on your point of view), to the real, pre-Kemalist thing. And that is a worry. There are more such people, especially in rural Turkey, than there are the kind of Turks whom American officials (such as Perle and Feith) meet in the Defense Ministry, or whom tourists meet on their careful itineraries (Hagia Sophia, Topkapi, Kariye Djami, Isiqlal Caddesi, a little boat trip across the Bosporus, then back to the Kempinski or Hilton or other thoroughly Western hotel). Bernard Lewis, too, who has outlived all of his contemporaries who mattered, and so who appears to be a Giant Sequioa when he is simply a solid English oak, has repeatedly promoted policies that were not only wrong, but should have been seen as faulty by someone who, while he has been a historian of Islamic civilization more than an analyst of Islamic tenets, such as Jihad and its natural corollary dhimmitude, and himself has been keen to note the "anxious propitiation" of Muslim sensibilities by others, has himself not lived for long periods within, and among, the Arabs (as has, for example, J. B. Kelly, or Elie Kedourie), save for a wartime stint in the Egypt of Farouk, hubble-bubbles, and a still-detectable whiff of Lord Cromer and Edward Cecil. Lewis who was a few years ago an enthusiastic supporter of the Oslo Accords (now irritated to be reminded of that enthusiasm) has, one suspects, deeply affected both by his inability to be heeded by the Foreign Office, or to be accepted by the Arabists of England (simply out of antisemitism), and that it was with some relief that he found himself not only welcomed, but positively lionized, by many Turkish scholars. His defense of Turkey has even involved a denial of the nature of the massacres of the Armenians; Lewis appears to have done a little nunc pro tunc backdating of Kemalism, as if the Turkey of 1894-1895 or of 1915, was a lot more like the Turkey of 1950 or 1960. N doubt having ties, both personal and professional, to distinguished Ottomanists, and even an Osmanli or two, also helped to cloud his otherwise lucid brain. He has always scanted the condition of dhimmis, limiting himself in his works to mention of the "jizya" and "other disabilities." He at one point described the devshirme system as one where Christian children were "recruited" (as if for a sports team) and even dilates upon the notion that some parents were eager to see their children seek preferment in such a fashion. Had Lewis not denied the Armenian genocide, had he not promoted Oslo, had he not pushed the "Hassan ibn Talal" candidacy for the new King of Iraq, one might take him more seriously today as a proponent of the "Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations" Project in Iraq. That project, also favored by another man who, like Lewis, has many admirable qualities (and of course, compared to Esposito, assorted former American ambassadors -- Akins, Peck, Kilgore, or such pygmies as Rami Khoury, Shibley Telhami, Fawaz Gerges, and others among the young thrusting generation of Arab academics and journalists offering their wares, the very latest fashion in Muslim apologetics and distractions)-- Ajami, like Lewis, is an absolute pleasure to read. But he is interested (like Kanan Makiya, like Ahmad Chalabi) in rescuing Iraq from "pan-Arabism."
Other fish need frying: not sorting out "pan-Arabism" (which far from being an alternative to pan-Islamism, is in fact simply an ideological subset of it). Lewis and Ajami are insufficiently alarmed by Islam itself -- not the "handful of extremists," not "Wahhabis," (Lewis' favorite target), but Islam itself. And because of this, they -- who have carried such weight among policymakers in the Pentagon -- actually have contributed to the current colossal misallocation of American resources (men, money, materiel, political capital).
The lesson of Kemalism is that, if carefully elaborated by those who understand the appeal of Islam, and the instruments that are used to maintain that appeal -- those who must come from within, not without, the world of Islam, either from an enlightened despot (Ataturk) or a completely disaffected populace (like Iranians today), certain kinds of laws can restrain Islamic practice and sufficiently weaken its hold, so that a critical mass of the truly secular can be formed, and can become self-sustaining. That is what Kemalism did for modern Turkey.
But there is no permanent victory here, no permanent security. Islamic texts remain as before; imams who wish to smuggle certain lessons into their khutbas need to be permanently monitored. Technological advances -- audiocassettes, videocassettes, satellite channels such as Al-Jazeera, the Internet -- make it even more difficult to close off the sinister appeals of those who are well-grounded in Islamic teachings. Khomeini, Bin Laden, and company are not wild men; they have the texts mostly on their side. Those who pretend to be "reformers" but refuse to admit this, are simply another variety of sly apologists. Some, such as Tariq Ramadan, are simply hoping to islamize the West not through bombs, but through da'wa, the Call to Islam -- going out to what Ramadan, in particular, sees as a demoralized West longing for the certainties of Islam.
Islamic tenets keep coming back; they are harder to kill than Rasputin; indeed, there never will be aPrince Yusupoff or Purishkevitch to finish the job. Islamic tenets, and the attraction of Islam for those who seek a Total Solution of the Universe (or whose amour-propre is indissolubly tied up with Islam -- most true for Arabs, less true for Turks and Persians and Berbers and Kurds), remain unchanged. No "reformer," phony as they are -- whether of the smooth Tariq Ramadan variety, or the "reformed Khomeinist" Anis Sorroush, or any of the others now being given such play by the likes of NPR -- can change one ayat in Qur'an and hadith. The doctrine of abrogation by which the softer verses are cancelled by the harsher ones, cannot itself be abrogated.
Mustapha Kemal understood this, and he sought to tie Islam down in other ways. The problem is: it keeps untying those Kemalist knots, and escaping -- and sometimes the Turkish army has to come in and retie it.
Despite what has been achieved in Turkey during 80 years of uninterrupted Kemalism, those achievements remain permanently in question. And it will be thus until vast numbers of Turks become either openly non-Muslim, or "post-Muslim" in precisely the way as in Western Europe, we are endlessly told, the population has become largely "post-Christian."
To allow into the EU a country of 80 million people, of whom at least 50 million have been hardly affected by Kemalist secularism, which would then allow those 80 million to move freely about the entire European community without control or oversight, would be a security nightmare. And it would make Europe ever more open and susceptible to Islam. It would be madness.
When Turkey's application is turned down, as it undoubtedly will be, the Turkish authorities, working with the Americans, should long before have prepared to place the blame where the blame is due: the "bad image" of inoffensive and "moderate" Turkish Islam (nudge-nudge wink-wink) caused by the crazed Khomeinists and, especially, by the "Arabs" whom the Turks pride themselves on despising. Let Turkish fury be vented not at "post-Christian" or "Christian" Europe, but at those who they can pretend have "perverted" Islam (as all of us are now so used to pretending). In that way, the rejection of Turkey's membership mightlead not to a renewal of Islamic solidarity, in fury at the rejection (which could happen), but to a renewal of Kemalism, and a further distancing from the Arabs. Perhaps -- who knows -- if Kemalism is encouraged further, a wider Turkish understanding that Turkish identity is far more than Islam, that it predates Islam (and how many of those actually living in Anatolia are the descendants of those forced to convert under either Seljik or Ottoman conquest?), and the rich palimpsest of Anatolian history before Islam, outside of Islam, deserves recovery, reconsideration, respect, even reverence. Encourage the Turks, instead of slouching toward Byzantium, to run -- and on the double.
Be careful what you wish for! (Just kidding, Hugh!)
The Trib article can't even get it right about American government. What makes you think that they know what's happening in a foreign country? *ROFL* The article references the imaginary construct of "separation of church and state", going to show you the bias and ignorance of the reporter straight out of the gate.
The only way is to de-fang Islam and to let it die slowly. Freedom of mind, body, and soul can do this.
What Turkey is currently doing is a model which needs looking at, and perhaps adding even more teeth into, and importing it to western countries to regulate all things Islam. A slow death by banning it's violent scripture is possible if Governments have the will. The problem in the USA is, the government cannot by constitution interfere in the church, so Islam must be redefined not as a religion, but a cult. Only then can it be regulated.
To Hugh:
I thought that I had remembered something from you that was for Turkey's entry into the EU. I clearly was mistaken, and could not agree more with you, which was my own point, much less well put!
Ethylred
the division in the constitution is church and state. there is no mention of mosque in it.
What achivements of Kemalism? The military is making sure that the imams and other clerics stay out of politics, so that this frees space for the Turkish military to dominate politics. Hardly an achievement. The only reason the "Directorate of Religious Affairs" exists is because without it, Islamic clerics would usurp Turkish generals in steering the country.
I have always admired the way the turks have dealt with muslim extremism. they seem to know its dangers far more than any other country.
Turkey's entry to the EU may indeed weaken to the levels of France UK holland and the other dhimified countries.
The EU legistature would then enable turkey to be taken over by islamist extremistm.
ATaturk must rolling in his coffin. The EU could do to turkey what the Ottaman empire spent eons preventing from happening.
I also read that turkey has both secular and islamic schools but limits entry to universities to religious schools graduates.
Can you imagine what the EU BOYS WOULD SAY ABOUT THAT!
the west can learn lots from the turks in how they have staved off the wahabists for hundreds of years.