Here is a glimpse of life in “secular Turkey” today: a Kemalist MP, that is, a member of the party that founded and defends Turkish secularism, brought charges of “openly offending Islam” against an MP who is member of the AKP — that is, the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which is rapidly dismantling Turkish secularism and re-Islamizing. Note also that the charge was dismissed not because it is not a crime to joke about the Qur’an in this “secular” state, but because “the wiretap recording did not come as a result of a legal eavesdropping operation.” No one involved seems to have pointed out that the charge itself was a challenge to the Turkish state’s ostensibly secular character.
“Prosecutor dismisses complaint against former EU minister on charges of insulting Islam,” Hürriyet Daily News, May 7, 2014 (thanks to Joshua):
The Ankara Chief Prosecutor’s Office has dismissed a complaint filed against former EU Minister Egemen Bağış on charges of “openly insulting Islam.”
Remarks allegedly delivered by Bağış during a wiretapped telephone conversation were subject to a complaint from main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) Istanbul deputy Mahmut Tanal.
In the leaked phone conversation with a journalist, Bağış allegedly joked about the Quran, saying that he “threw out” verses from the Quran every Friday.
The leak of the conversation was part of a series of audio recordings leaked through social media in the aftermath of the huge corruption probe that opened on Dec. 17, 2013.
The dismissal decision from the prosecutor’s office was based on the fact that the wiretap recording did not come as a result of a legal eavesdropping operation.
The prosecutor also ruled that the accused “insult” could only be punished if the act was “in public” and aimed at “abolishing public order.” As the conversation took place between two persons privately, it did not qualify as being “in public,” according to the prosecutor.
john spielman says
how in the world can anyone INSULT A CONCEPT( like Islam)?
we can insult people but how can one insult a inanimate abstract concept?
mortimer says
‘Questioning’ the veracity of anything Islamic is apostasy punishable by death. Even joking about ‘sanctities’ of Islam expresses a lack of faith which is infers apostasy. The safest course is to say nothing about religion, whether positive or negative. That is what most Muslims do…keep a tight lip and pretend to be pious. A society based on insincerity, ‘outwitting’ and fear.
Jay Boo says
Soon they will be so bold as to charge Obama with insulting Islam for not bending far enough to appease Turkey against Putin in Crimea and Assad in Syria.
Charli Main says
As sure as the light of the rising sun drives darkness out of the land, the day will come when Anatolia will throw off the Muslim yolk it has endured for 600 years.
Hagia Sophia, lost but not forgotten.
Falsafa says
“….Anatolia….has endured for 600 years.”
The Turkification of Anatolia began 943 years ago to be exact, if one starts counting from the battle of Manzikert (and the unfortunate defeat of the Byzantine Armies).
So I suppose with your comment, you would have preferred Anatolia to have been mainly an extension of modern day Greece which would automatically qualify it to become the economic backwater which Greece is today, dependent on EU handouts and a service industry – mainly tourism and shipping (no insult to Greece of Greeks intented, just stating a fact….). However being what Anatolia is today, ie. Turkey – it is progressing to become of one of the top ten economies within a decade – with its entrepreneurs and businessfolk fuelling an export driven manufacturing based economy.
What can I say, you make a convincing argument. When would you like us to pack our bags and vacate Asia Minor (and go back to east of the Caspian Sea) so that the Hagia Sophia can be “liberated” from the “yoke”?
dumbledoresarmy says
Sez the mohammedan, who is totally on board with the RUIN that was wrought upon Byzantium by centuries of imperialistic mohammedan raids, pillage, mass-murder and enslavement, and then subsequently upon Greece by centuries of the ruthless exploitation and degradation of the dhimma system, and who pretends that the genocide of the intelligent, hardworking, entrepeneurial Armenian Christians, and the killing and driving out of Greeks and Assyrians as well, did not happen or was all totally justifiable,
“Then would you like us to pack our bags and vacate Asia Minor (and go back to east of the Caspian Sea) so that the Hagia Sophia can be “liberated” from the “yoke”?”
Short answer: YES. (Though any Turks and Kurds who have converted to Christianity – and there are not a few, these days – or who have otherwise apostasised by, for example, becoming atheists , would be more than welcome to remain).
It is high time that, at the very least, the Hagia Sophia, which was for one thousand years a church, until it was STOLEN and DESECRATED and PILLAGED and VANDALIZED by vicious, invading, thieving mohammedans who had ZERO ancestral claim to the location on which it was built, should be given back to the Orthodox Christians, free and clear, so that they can restore it and cleanse it and use it for the purpose for which it was built and for which, for *one thousand years*, it was used.
And every *other* church in Turkey that has been stolen and turned into a mosque should be given back, as well.
Falsafa says
for the actual destruction of Byzantium you should refer to the Latin invasions of the 4th crusade which really was what sealed the fate of their fate. The Ottomans actually preserved and protected Christian folk throughout their existense as an Empire…and has a far better track record in terms of human rights then any Christian power of the day. Happy to give back any church including the Hagia Sophia back to Christian worhip…I wonder would such a gesture be met with equal reciprocity to the muslim places of worship in the Balkans, Greece and Spain?
Charli Main says
DDA–What the Muslims always forget and sweep under the carpet is that almost all the ” Mosques ” in Spain, Greece and the Balkans which they claim are their holy sites were in fact churches that they defiled and desecrated when Muslims invaded those countries.
If Falsafa wants a true Muslim Mosque, he needs to go to Mecca.
John C. Barile says
Turkey shows what Islam in modernity is reduced to: a rigoristic hypocrisy that ultimately trumps modern, nuanced legal codes with vetoes, red lines, and sacred cows–backed by whatever ulemas, mobs, pervasive piety, ignorance, and bigotry Islam may yet muster.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
Why the big deal with insulting Islam, openly or privately? Two things:
1) It’s not possible to insult Islam; it’s so bad that nothing can be said that it doesn’t deserve, and
2) All people should derogate Islam, in private and in public, everywhere all the time.
mariam rove says
well said. M
Brian Hoff says
When I was than anti-vietman war I notice than far right winger pro war supporter place than torn america flag in the gargeo can, so I called the police they arrest him for not burning the america flag.
dumbledoresarmy says
Above, the infinitely vile apologist for mohammedan evil, the Turkish mohammedan ‘falsafa’ spewed absolute BS. To wit:
“…for the actual destruction of Byzantium you should refer to the Latin invasions of the 4th crusade which really was what sealed the fate of their fate. ”
NONSENSE. The Muslim assault upon Byzantium had been going on for a long time before the 4th crusade (which took place in 1202-1204), and *continued* unrelentingly, after that time, for *two centuries*, until 1453. Claiming that something that happened two hundred years *before* 1453 was *the* decisive event and that everything that the *Muslims* had been doing before and since was NOT, is just typical mohammedan blame-shifting. It is also an attempt to push guilt buttons (among any westerners/ western christians reading this) and thus demoralise; and an attempt to stir up resentment among *eastern* Christians here present, against their western brethren, thus *distracting* from those who were *really* responsible for the total wreck of Christian Constantinople in 1453, “Black Tuesday”, the Last Day of the World, namely, MUSLIMS.
And then the mohammedan spews even more ugly BS, when it burbles:
“The Ottomans actually preserved and protected Christian folk throughout their existense as an Empire”.
GARBAGE.
One word: devshirme. The forcible seizure of thousands of Christian children, boys and girls, who were dragged off by the Muslim overlords and forcibly “converted” to Islam. The boys became janissaries, to continue the brutal oppression – and the invasions – of Christian peoples. The girls…went into the harems, to be used as sex slaves.
Protection? SPIT. PUKE. *Nothing* justifies or excuses the centuries-long cruelty of the devshirme system. It stank to high heaven; it stinks to high heaven.
Anyone who has read Bat Yeor’s “The Dhimmi” and “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam” knows what life was like for the dhimmis in the lands under Ottoman Muslim rule…as also for other dhimmi populations, in every land invaded and occupied by *any* kind of Muslim. A living death. “Life” in an abyss of oppression: humiliated, degraded, exploited, and perpetually exposed to the risk of being raped, bashed, kicked, spat upon, robbed, and …murdered, whether individually or en masse. Like what life is like for Christians and Hindus in Pakistan today… only *worse*.
Oh, and back to the Ottoman/ Turkish Muslims: besides the mass murder of the Armenians (and Assyrians, and Greeks) between the 1890s and 1920s, there’s that little matter of the massacre-pillage-gang-rape-murder of the Bulgarian Christians that also took place in the 19th century. And similar atrocities – e.g. against the Greek Christians – punctuating the entire history of the Ottoman – MUSLIM – empire, wherever it went and wherever it ruled. The Ottoman Empire was evil, totally evil, and I am *glad* that it was soundly thrashed and driven back at Vienna in 1683, and I am *glad* that the Serbs and Greeks and Bulgarians and Hungarians, one by one, in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, threw off its bloody yoke. I am *glad* that in 1917 we Aussies had a hand in helping defeat the Turkish Muslims and drive them out of the Land of Israel.