PLACE OF RELIGION IN POLITICS
On the outer margins of the debate over the place of religion in politics, there are two extreme positions, each fuelling the fundamentalism of the other
Ali Lakhani,
Special to the Sun
Published: Monday, September 25, 2006
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Richard Dawkins, a well-known critic of religion, wrote an article in the Guardian newspaper titled "Religion's Misguided Missiles."
In it, he referred to religion as "a ready-made system of mind control which has been honed over centuries, handed down through generations," which "teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end" and thereby promotes the ideology of the suicide bomber.
Dawkins concludes: "To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used."
Just two days before these remarks were published, Jerry Falwell, in an interview with fellow tele-evangelist Pat Robertson, had attributed the events of 9/11 as a divine retribution for secularism, infamously singling out, in words that he was later forced to retract: "The abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU . . . all of them who have tried to secularize America . . . you made this happen."
Now, religions do not advocate suicide bombing, though there is no doubt that many abuses are carried out in the name of religion. And religions do not need to be theocratic: They can easily co-exist with secular forms of government without attracting divine retribution.
That said, the statements by Dawkins and Falwell are illustrative of two extreme positions in the debate surrounding the place of religion in politics. These positions can be termed secular fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism respectively. They represent the outer margins of this debate, each fuelling the other and helping radicalize the other.
Is there a middle ground in this debate? Is there a legitimate role for religion in politics? And, if not, can religion, especially in the secular societies that we live in, be excluded from politics?
My contention is that religion, properly understood, cannot be excluded from politics for the simple reason that, though it may take the outer form of a political organization -- which can be denied political participation -- religion is in its essence much more than a political medium. It is a participative worldview, a way of seeing the world and ourselves as connected.
Such connection necessarily has political implications. Religious ideas are at their core concerned with making us aware that there is a transcendent dimension to reality -- something beyond the material world of our ordinary perceptions -- which sustains and connects us all. The awareness of this connection entails that we govern our relationships by living in harmony with all things. Thus it is futile to attempt to exclude religion from public life.
However, when religious expression becomes radicalized, it is in danger of transgressing the bounds of civil discourse and abrogating its right to political expression in civil society. It is important therefore to understand how such radicalization occurs to learn how it can be avoided.
One significant way in which religion becomes radicalized is by being falsely excluded from the public sphere. This happens because of misguided secularist notions of the need to muzzle religious expression.
Religion, even in its more benign democratic manifestations, is sometimes perceived as a threat to the political interests of non-democratic regimes, often backed by external powers whose economic or strategic interests are served by the suppression of political dissent. When non-democratic regimes are installed or propped up by such powers, this can have the effect of shunting dissent into religious expression, leading to a politicization of religious institutions and the radicalization of religious views, which emerge from such suppression in a less benign, often violent, form. Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia come to mind.
For example, Saudi Arabia has promoted its own controversial and radical brand of Islam -- Wahhabism -- which favours theocracy over democracy, ideological conformity over pluralism, and brooks little or no religious or political dissent. Yet it is a regime tolerated by dominant western powers because of its economic, political and military alliances with those powers.
The U.S. proxy war against the former Soviet invaders of Afghanistan was fought by Saudi warriors (mujahedeen) and its petro-dollars were used to promote the Wahhabi ideology through mosques and madrassahs, and to finance the Taliban. It is no coincidence that the perpetrators of 9/11 were mostly of Saudi descent. After the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan, radicalized Islam set its sights on battling perceived western injustices (chiefly, the Israeli occupation, and the proxy governments in the Middle East and Iraq), but its real victim has been the pluralistic and moderate message that lies at the heart of Islam.
Ironically and paradoxically, the suppression of this vital message has been, and continues to be, aided by western powers, by their failure to deal with the underlying roots of political and economic injustices, thereby enfeebling moderate expressions of dissent. This plays directly into the hands of radical (often religious) dissenters, who then take centre stage.
The political suppression of moderate religious expression is one of the chief influences of religious fundamentalism. Political suppression radicalizes dissent and influences religions to cling more forcefully to their outer forms, and thereby to lose their "spiritual compass," and the touchstones of pluralism and moderation.
While the outer elements (being the different faith traditions of the world) are what make each religious tradition unique and exclusive, the inner elements of each religion are not unique but universal, reflecting the adage: Truth is one, though its articulations are many. But the effect of political suppression of legitimate religious dissent is to create the conditions in which outer differences are more readily emphasized rather than inner connectedness.
There is a great danger of reducing a religion to merely its outer elements. To do so is to harden it, to reduce it to a mere carapace, to a set of calcified rules and disciplines rather than to a transformative embodiment of adaptable and living spiritual principles.
Another of the principal causes of religious fundamentalism is modernism, to which it is a reaction. This is to some extent Benjamin Barber's thesis of jihad as a reaction to McWorld.
Modernism relies on a way of knowing that is rooted in rational empiricism, and gives little or no credence to the supra-rational intelligence claimed by religions.
The ethos of modernism is materialist progressivism and its "reign of quantity," which emphasizes individualism and secularism over the religious worldview of a hierarchical reality rooted in transcendence, in a sense of the sacred.
Modernism grew to ascendancy in the West in the wake of medieval times, through the Renaissance. It is a worldview that increasingly marginalizes traditional religion, or indeed, any dimension of reality that it cannot empirically ascertain.
By ignoring the "heart" of religion -- and particularly by denying it its central position in our political lives, we risk yielding that central position to more radical elements.
Religion, when it regains its spiritual compass and moral centre, is -- as Rev. Martin Luther King put it -- the conscience of society, and has a vital role to play in our political lives.
Ali Lakhani, a Vancouver litigator, is the editor of The Sacred Foundations of Justice in Islam: The Teachings of Ali ibn Abi Taliband, and founder of the journal, Sacred Web, devoted to reconnecting the modern world with sacred values.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news ... 018c4904df (subscription)
The Relationship Between Religion and Politics in Islam
October 15, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
A Moral Philosophy for Middle-Class America
By DAVID BROOKS
Some people are religious conservatives, who believe that policies should align with the transcendent moral order of the universe. Other people are social libertarians, who believe government should be neutral on values issues, and individuals should be guaranteed their own private space to work out their own solutions to moral questions.
But others of us are social traditionalists. We differ from the religious conservatives in that we’re not sure about a transcendent moral order. Furthermore, we think it’s both too sectarian and too lofty to try to pattern government policies on God’s law.
We also disagree with the social libertarians. We don’t think government can be neutral on values issues. Nations are held together by shared beliefs. People flourish because they have been encouraged by society to adopt certain habits and behaviors. It’s a chimera to believe individuals come up with solutions to moral questions alone; human beings are social creatures whose actions and views are profoundly shaped by the social fabric that binds them.
We traditionalists observe that when policies fail, it’s usually because they are based on inaccurate assumptions about human nature. So we don’t base our thinking on the abstract arguments of theology. Nor do we base it on economics, with its image of profit-maximizing individuals. We begin our thinking with a study of what human beings in particular places are actually like.
We know, for example, that human beings are wired to form attachments with each other. As Daniel Goleman writes in his new book, “Social Intelligence,” the subconscious mind is able to detect nonverbal emotional messages that the conscious mind is not even aware of. Babies cry in sympathy with other infants. Young children use “mirror neurons” to imitate and learn. As adults, our brain and cardiovascular functions are influenced by the people around us, as we instinctively mimic their emotions.
We are engaged, Goleman writes, in endless “protoconversations,” and you get these social contagions. A mood or change can sweep through a group or a nation as people subconsciously mold one another’s behavior.
All of this was anticipated by Adam Smith nearly 250 years ago. In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith based his theory of morals on the intense sociability of human beings (rather than on divine law or the idea of maximum individual autonomy). His approach is a starting point for social traditionalists today.
Smith argued that more than just about everything else, people hunger for approval. We feel intense pleasure when we experience the sympathy of others. In a well-structured society, he continues, our desire for sympathy leads us to restrain our selfish or egotistical behaviors.
Furthermore, Smith continues, we not only want to feel praise, we want to feel praiseworthy. We want to act in ways that would deserve praise, if a wise, impartial spectator happened to be watching us. In our best moments, we want to live up to the ideals our society has gradually engraved upon us.
So for Smith, the crucial policy question was: How do you embed people in relationships that will discourage selfish behavior and emotionally reward virtue and self-control?
Today, while the religious conservatives and the social libertarians have their culture war flashpoints — how many crèches can you fit on the head of a publicly funded pin? — the traditionalists are interested in how to strengthen institutions that breed responsible people. How do you encourage marriage at a time when 70 percent of African-American babies are born out of wedlock? How can you embed young men in American cities, or in Iraq, in the constructive world of work, so they won’t drift into the world of violence? How can you build preschool programs so children from chaotic homes will have at least one stable place to develop self-control? How can you assimilate immigrants so they will internalize the social norms of the United States? How can parents keep cultural garbage out of their homes?
In the 1980’s, Smith was known as the apostle of free-market capitalism. But these days attention has shifted over to his social philosophy. The culture war has become self-parodic, so people are hungry for a morality that is neither absolutist nor nihilistic. As the economy has opened up opportunities, it’s become clear many people lack the cultural capital to take advantage of them.
A Republican Party in danger of dividing between religious conservatives on the one side and libertarians on the other might return to these traditionalist values after the coming deluge.
Op-Ed Columnist
A Moral Philosophy for Middle-Class America
By DAVID BROOKS
Some people are religious conservatives, who believe that policies should align with the transcendent moral order of the universe. Other people are social libertarians, who believe government should be neutral on values issues, and individuals should be guaranteed their own private space to work out their own solutions to moral questions.
But others of us are social traditionalists. We differ from the religious conservatives in that we’re not sure about a transcendent moral order. Furthermore, we think it’s both too sectarian and too lofty to try to pattern government policies on God’s law.
We also disagree with the social libertarians. We don’t think government can be neutral on values issues. Nations are held together by shared beliefs. People flourish because they have been encouraged by society to adopt certain habits and behaviors. It’s a chimera to believe individuals come up with solutions to moral questions alone; human beings are social creatures whose actions and views are profoundly shaped by the social fabric that binds them.
We traditionalists observe that when policies fail, it’s usually because they are based on inaccurate assumptions about human nature. So we don’t base our thinking on the abstract arguments of theology. Nor do we base it on economics, with its image of profit-maximizing individuals. We begin our thinking with a study of what human beings in particular places are actually like.
We know, for example, that human beings are wired to form attachments with each other. As Daniel Goleman writes in his new book, “Social Intelligence,” the subconscious mind is able to detect nonverbal emotional messages that the conscious mind is not even aware of. Babies cry in sympathy with other infants. Young children use “mirror neurons” to imitate and learn. As adults, our brain and cardiovascular functions are influenced by the people around us, as we instinctively mimic their emotions.
We are engaged, Goleman writes, in endless “protoconversations,” and you get these social contagions. A mood or change can sweep through a group or a nation as people subconsciously mold one another’s behavior.
All of this was anticipated by Adam Smith nearly 250 years ago. In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith based his theory of morals on the intense sociability of human beings (rather than on divine law or the idea of maximum individual autonomy). His approach is a starting point for social traditionalists today.
Smith argued that more than just about everything else, people hunger for approval. We feel intense pleasure when we experience the sympathy of others. In a well-structured society, he continues, our desire for sympathy leads us to restrain our selfish or egotistical behaviors.
Furthermore, Smith continues, we not only want to feel praise, we want to feel praiseworthy. We want to act in ways that would deserve praise, if a wise, impartial spectator happened to be watching us. In our best moments, we want to live up to the ideals our society has gradually engraved upon us.
So for Smith, the crucial policy question was: How do you embed people in relationships that will discourage selfish behavior and emotionally reward virtue and self-control?
Today, while the religious conservatives and the social libertarians have their culture war flashpoints — how many crèches can you fit on the head of a publicly funded pin? — the traditionalists are interested in how to strengthen institutions that breed responsible people. How do you encourage marriage at a time when 70 percent of African-American babies are born out of wedlock? How can you embed young men in American cities, or in Iraq, in the constructive world of work, so they won’t drift into the world of violence? How can you build preschool programs so children from chaotic homes will have at least one stable place to develop self-control? How can you assimilate immigrants so they will internalize the social norms of the United States? How can parents keep cultural garbage out of their homes?
In the 1980’s, Smith was known as the apostle of free-market capitalism. But these days attention has shifted over to his social philosophy. The culture war has become self-parodic, so people are hungry for a morality that is neither absolutist nor nihilistic. As the economy has opened up opportunities, it’s become clear many people lack the cultural capital to take advantage of them.
A Republican Party in danger of dividing between religious conservatives on the one side and libertarians on the other might return to these traditionalist values after the coming deluge.
The recent Der Spiegel Interview of Hazar Imam is an eye opener. Too often Religion and Politic is confused. I think each reply of this interview is worth a thousands books.
Admin
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October 12, 2006, 02:34 PM
SPIEGEL ONLINE
Interview of H.H. the Aga Khan
Interview conducted by Stefan Aust and Erich Follath.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Islam Is a Faith of Reason"
Karim Aga Khan IV, descendant of the prophet Muhammad and spiritual leader of 20 million Ismaili Muslims, discusses the foundations of his faith, the controversy over the pope's recent statements about Islam and ways of preventing a global clash between religions.
SPIEGEL: Your Highness, in a lecture Pope Benedict XVI quoted Emperor Manuel as saying: "Show me just what Muhammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as a command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." This quotation from the 14th century has caused great uproar in the Muslim world. Why? And what was your reaction?
Aga Khan: From my point of view, I would start by saying that I was concerned about this statement because this has caused great unhappiness in the Islamic world. There appears to be momentum towards more and more misunderstandings between religions, a degradation of relations. I think we all should try not to add anything to worsen the situation.
SPIEGEL: Benedict XVI did explicitly dissociate himself from the emperor's quoted statement. The pope's own position with regard to his lecture is that he wanted it to promote a dialogue; and since then, several times, he has expressed his respect for the world religion that is Islam. Was it just an unfortunate choice of words? Or was he deliberately misunderstood?
Aga Khan: I do not wish to pass judgement on that, nor can I. And it might also be unreasonable for me to presume that I know what he meant. But that (medieval) period in history, to my knowledge, was one of the periods of extraordinary theological exchanges and debates between the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world. A fascinating time. The emperor's statement does not reflect that, so I think it is somewhat out of context.
SPIEGEL: The theme of Pope Benedict's lecture was different, it was one of his favorites: the link between faith and reason which, he said, implies a rejection of any link between religion and violence. Is that something you could agree on?
Aga Khan: If you interpret his speech as one about faith and reason then I think that the debate is very exciting and could be enormously constructive between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world. So I have two reactions to the pope's lecture: There is my concern about the degradation of relations and, at the same time, I see an opportunity. A chance to talk about a serious, important issue: the relationship between faith and logic.
SPIEGEL: If the pope were to invite you to take part with other religious leaders in a debate about faith, reason and violence, would you accept?
Aga Khan: Yes, definitely. I would, however, make the point that an ecumenical discussion at a certain stage will meet certain limits. Therefore I would prefer to talk more about a cosmopolitan ethic stemming from all of Earth's great faiths.
SPIEGEL: Does Islam have a problem with reason?
Aga Khan: Not at all. Indeed, I would say the contrary. Of the Abrahamic faiths, Islam is probably the one that places the greatest emphasis on knowledge. The purpose is to understand God's creation, and therefore it is a faith which is eminently logical. Islam is a faith of reason.
SPIEGEL: So, what are the root causes of terrorism?
Aga Khan: Unsolved political conflicts, frustration and, above all, ignorance. Nothing that was born out of a theological conflict.
SPIEGEL: Which political conflicts do you mean?
Aga Khan: The ones in the Middle East and in Kashmir, for example. These conflicts have remained unresolved for decades. There is a lack of urgency in understanding that the situation there deteriorates, it's like a cancer. If you are not going to act on a cancer early enough, ultimately it's going to create terrible damage. It can become a breeding ground for terrorism.
Now to the issue of spreading faith by the sword: All faiths at some time in their history have used war to protect themselves or expand their influence, and there were situations when faiths have been used as justifications for military actions. But Islam does not call for that, it is a faith of peace.
SPIEGEL: It's true that horrible crimes were committed in the name of Christianity, for example by the crusaders. That was long ago, that's the past. But jihadists commit their crimes now, in our times.
Aga Khan: It is not so far in the past that we have seen bloody fights in the Christian world. Look at Northern Ireland. If we Muslims interpreted what happened there as a correct expression of Protestantism and Catholicism or even as the essence of the Christian faith you would simply say we don't know what we are talking about.
SPIEGEL: "The West (will stand) against the Rest" wrote Professor Samuel Huntington in his famous book "Clash of Civilizations." Is such a conflict, such a clash inevitable?
Aga Khan: I prefer to talk about a clash of ignorance. There is so much horrible, damaging, dangerous ignorance.
SPIEGEL: Which side is responsible?
Aga Khan: Both. But essentially the Western world. You would think that an educated person in the 21st century should know something about Islam; but you look at education in the Western world and you see that Islamic civilizations have been absent. What is taught about Islam? As far as I know -- nothing. What was known about Shiism before the Iranian revolution? What was known about the radical Sunni Wahhabism before the rise of the Taliban? We need a big educational effort to overcome this. Rather than shouting at each other, we should be learning to listen to each other. In the way we used to do it, by working together, with mutual give-and-take. Together we brought about some of the highest achievements of human civilization. There is a lot to build on. But I think you cannot build on ignorance.
SPIEGEL: Nonethless, it is striking that a particularly large number of Muslim-dominated states figure among the most backward and undemocratic states in the world. Is Islam in need of an era of enlightment? Is the faith even incompatible with democracy as others claim?
Aga Khan: As I said before, one has to be fair. Some of the political leaders have inherited problems that are in no way attributable to the faith. New governance solutions have to be tested and validated over time. Nor do I believe Muslim states are systematically economic underperformers. Some of the fastest growing economies and some of the most successful newly industrialized countries are in the Islamic world. Now concerning democracy: My democratic beliefs do not go back to the Greek or French (thinkers) but to an era 1,400 years ago. These are the principles underlying my religion. During the prophet's life (peace be upon him), there was a systematic consultative political process. And the first imam of the Shiites, Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, Hazrat Ali, emphasized: "No honor is like knowledge, no power is like forbearance, and no support is more reliable than consultation."
SPIEGEL: If pluralism, civil society and Islam can coexist harmoniously, as was proven in the past, then why is this so seldom achieved nowadays?
Aga Khan: I think we have a very diverse situation in the Islamic world. Wealthy countries with enormous ressources, newly industrialized countries, extremely poor ones.
SPIEGEL: Not many are functioning democracies.
Aga Khan: People speak about failed states. I do not think that states can fail, but democracies certainly can. The failure of democracy is not specific to the Islamic world. Indeed, about two years ago, the United Nations carried out an in-depth analysis of democracy in South America. About 55 percent of the population in South American states said that they would prefer to live under a paternalistic dictatorship instead of an incompetent or corrupt democracy that is not improving their living condition.
SPIEGEL: Most of your Ismaili constituency lives in states that cannot be called perfect democracies: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran. What makes democracies fail?
Aga Khan: I ask myself every day what we can do to sustain the multiple forms of democracy, to make these forms of government work, whether it is in Latin America, Africa or the Middle East.
SPIEGEL: And what do you believe to be the answer?
Aga Khan: I admit that I live in a mood of frustration. What is the point in these areas of the world of carrying out a referendum in a population that essentially cannot read and write? What is the point in testing a constitution with a population that knows no difference between a presidential regime or a constitutional monarchy? Elections, constitutions -- all this is necessary, but not sufficient. I think we have to accept that countries have different histories, different social structures, different needs, so we have to be a great deal more flexible than we have been.
SPIEGEL: Nor is democracy monolithic. The American model of democracy is no panacea for the rest of the world. Has George W. Bush aggrevated the situation with his particular way of bringing democracy to the Middle East? Can the United States still win the war in Iraq?
Aga Khan: I am very, very worried about Iraq. The invasion of Iraq had an impact across the world like nothing before in modern times. The invasion has unleashed every force in the Islamic world, including the relations between the Arabs and non-Arabs and the relationship between the Shia und the Sunni.
SPIEGEL: You mean the war created a new terrorist base and radicalized people?
Aga Khan: Indeed. It mobilized a large number of people across the Islamic world, who before then were not involved, and indeed I think they did not want to be.
SPIEGEL: Do you share the view of the American professor and Islam expert Vali Nasr that the balance of power in the Muslim world is undergoing a decisive shift, that Shiites could become the most influential force from Baghdad to Beirut, that the future of the Middle East will be shaped by wars between different Muslim factions?
Aga Khan: When the invasion of Iraq took place, we were told two things: (that there would be) regime change and democracy. Well, anyone who knew the situation in Iraq, as you did, I did, but what did that mean? That meant a Shia majority; it could not have been otherwise. Anyone who then concludes that the next issue is a Shia majority in Iraq is going to start thinking, What does that mean in the region, what does it mean in the Islamic world, what does it mean in relation to the West? All that was as clear as daylight, you didn't even have to be a Muslim or a scholar to know that.
SPIEGEL: In your opinion, was it pure ignorance and naivete that made the Bush government start the war? Was it really about introducing democracy or a strategic decision about conquering oil fields and military bases?
Aga Khan: I wish I could answer that question.
SPIEGEL: Are you in contact with the religious leaders in Iraq, like Grand Ayatollah Sistani? And with the religious leaders of Iran as well?
Aga Khan: We have frequent contacts with important personalities in both countries.
SPIEGEL: What would it take to get you to go to the region as a mediator?
Aga Khan: This is, at the moment, not one of my priorities. One day maybe, we might consider (participating in the) reconstruction (effort).
SPIEGEL: When you compare the invasion in Iraq with the one in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and al-Qaida worked hand in hand ...
Aga Khan: ... there I see a completely different picture. First of all, the Afghan regime at the time was quasi totally detested by the people; it was equally unpleasant for Sunnis as it was the for Shias and it was totally unacceptable I think just in terms of overall civilized life.
SPIEGEL: Afghanistan is currently being confronted with major problems and the situation seems to be deteriorating by the hour. What went wrong? And what can the West do to make the situation more stable?
Aga Khan: The security situation is indeed very worrying -- it is getting worse, especially in the south. Most of our projects are in the capital and in the north where (the situation) is better but not satisfying. We can supply energy from Tajikistan, we can provide civil services. We try to avoid the danger that certain areas in Afghanistan will be rehabilitated more quickly than others. If this development overlaps with ethnic divides you have another problem. But the main problem is that most people in Afghanistan have not seen an improvement in their daily lives. The process of reconstruction does not seem to be penetrating. We have not succeded in bringing a culture of hope to this country. One of the central lessons I have learned after a half century of working in the developing world is that the replacement of fear by hope is probably the most powerful trampoline of progress.
SPIEGEL: President Karzai is a personal friend of yours. Many people see him as a weak leader, and some call him "Mayor of Kabul" because he is unable to control large parts of the country.
Aga Khan: We should do everything to help him. He has an enomously complex agenda to deal with. He is our best hope. And besides, he is the elected leader and we have to work with the parliament.
SPIEGEL: Even if warlords and a former members of the Taliban are represented in Afghanistan's parliament?
Aga Khan: You either accept the results of democracy or you don't. Otherwise you talk about qualifying democracy.
SPIEGEL: That means the West should deal with the radical Islamist Hamas as well?
Aga Khan: You have to work with whoever the population has elected as long as they are willing to respect what I call cosmopolitan ethics. Now, it's true that Hamas has a record of conflict ...
SPIEGEL: ... of outright terror ...
Aga Khan: ... but it would not be the only time that movements that have such a record make it into parliament, and even end up in charge of government later on. Can I remind you of Jomo Kenyatta and his Mau Mau movement in Kenya, for example, or the ANC in South Africa? Take away the causes of extremism and extremists can come back to a more reasonable political agenda. That change to me is one of the wonderful things about the human race.
SPIEGEL: You know Syria's president, Bashar Assad, very well. You recently visited him again in Damascus. In contrast to the American administration, the German government is trying to get him involved in the Middle East peace process.
Aga Khan: I would like to compliment the German government and others in Europe who have taken the decision to invite President Assad to be a party to the peace process. The process of change from decades of political directionalism is something that needs time, as you saw in East Germany. I think there are many reasons to go out of our way to assist Syria in making the transition from the past to the future.
SPIEGEL: If you look back at the years that have passed since World War II -- the Cold War between the East and the West, the ideological conflict with communism -- would you ever have thought that this conflict could be replaced by one between the West and radical Islamists?
Aga Khan: I beg you, please get away from the concept of a conflict of religion. It is not such a conflict. Nobody will ever convince me that the faith of Islam, that Christianity, that Judaism will fight each other in our times -- they have too much in common. That's why I am talking about this global ethic which unites us all. That's why we are trying to work with the Catholic Church in Portugal on a program aimed at immigant minorities. I am aware of a sense of disaffection with the society that many young Muslims feel because they think that the Western society has the intention of marginalizing or damaging them.
SPIEGEL: The German government just organized a conference with many different Muslim groups and personalities who live in Germany. Do you consider such a forum useful or is it just window dressing?
Aga Khan: We can avoid misunderstandings by having such a forum where people from different faiths consult each other so they understand what really affects them. Once you have committed an offense all you can do is to try and reverse it. Anyone who knows the faith of Islam, for example, would have known that the caricatures of the prohet were profoundly offensive to all Muslims.
SPIEGEL: Again, this whole affair was misused by radical Islamists. They added caricatures much more offensive than the original ones to incite the masses.
Aga Khan: But I am told that there was an internal debate between the editors of that publication and they actually knew what they were doing. They took a risk and somebody should have said to them, Why get into that situation? Now we are talking about civility, which is a completely different concept. If we are talking about civility in a pluralist society, then how do you develop that notion of civility, particularly where there is ignorance. And that's the thing that's worrying. And that's why I get frustrated when I see these situations that go on and on and on. Because I'm not willing to believe that they are all inspired by evil intent.
SPIEGEL: Provocative, sad and distasteful. But the freedom of the press is one of the highest values in our democracy. We have to balance one thing against the other and we will allow non-believers to express even outrageous opinions.
Aga Khan: I think that you are now referring to one of the most difficult problems that we have and I don't know the answer. The industrialized West is highly secularized; the Muslim world is much less secularized and that stems largely from the nature of the faith of Islam, which you know and I know has an intrinsic meshing with everyday life. And that is a scenario where people of goodwill need to think very, very carefully.
SPIEGEL: In some of your speeches you mentioned Kemal Atatürk in a positive context. Turkey followed his path and is one of the very few countries with a predominant Muslim population where there is separation of church and state. Would you like to see others go the same way?
Aga Khan: I am not opposed to secularism as such. But I am opposed to unilateral secularism where the notions of faith and ethics just disappear from society.
SPIEGEL: Your Highness, we thank you for this interview.
Prince Karim Aga Khan IV
Prince Karim Aga Khan IV is considered to be the direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad and, as the 49th imam, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims. A minority community within the Muslim faith, the Ismailis include some 20 million members scattered across 25 countries in Central Asia, Europe and Eastern Africa. The Aga Khan himself lives near Paris in Aiglemont Palace. Born near Geneva, the prince grew up in Kenya, Switzerland and London before being educated at Harvard. At the age of 20, he succeeded his grandfather as the Aga Khan, thus becoming a religious leader and the administrator of billions in assets. Fed by his family inheritance and a 10 percent tithing fee from Ismaili Muslims, the Aga Khan channels much of the money into the Aga Khan Development Network, one of the world's most important private development aid organizations. The Aga Khan has two sons from his first marriage - - Rahim, 34, and Hussein, 32. He also has a son from his second marriage to the German princess Gabriele zu Leiningen - - six- year- old Ali Mohammed. The Aga Khan must name one of his sons as his successor, but that choice will remain a secret until his death.
Admin
----------------
October 12, 2006, 02:34 PM
SPIEGEL ONLINE
Interview of H.H. the Aga Khan
Interview conducted by Stefan Aust and Erich Follath.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Islam Is a Faith of Reason"
Karim Aga Khan IV, descendant of the prophet Muhammad and spiritual leader of 20 million Ismaili Muslims, discusses the foundations of his faith, the controversy over the pope's recent statements about Islam and ways of preventing a global clash between religions.
SPIEGEL: Your Highness, in a lecture Pope Benedict XVI quoted Emperor Manuel as saying: "Show me just what Muhammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as a command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." This quotation from the 14th century has caused great uproar in the Muslim world. Why? And what was your reaction?
Aga Khan: From my point of view, I would start by saying that I was concerned about this statement because this has caused great unhappiness in the Islamic world. There appears to be momentum towards more and more misunderstandings between religions, a degradation of relations. I think we all should try not to add anything to worsen the situation.
SPIEGEL: Benedict XVI did explicitly dissociate himself from the emperor's quoted statement. The pope's own position with regard to his lecture is that he wanted it to promote a dialogue; and since then, several times, he has expressed his respect for the world religion that is Islam. Was it just an unfortunate choice of words? Or was he deliberately misunderstood?
Aga Khan: I do not wish to pass judgement on that, nor can I. And it might also be unreasonable for me to presume that I know what he meant. But that (medieval) period in history, to my knowledge, was one of the periods of extraordinary theological exchanges and debates between the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world. A fascinating time. The emperor's statement does not reflect that, so I think it is somewhat out of context.
SPIEGEL: The theme of Pope Benedict's lecture was different, it was one of his favorites: the link between faith and reason which, he said, implies a rejection of any link between religion and violence. Is that something you could agree on?
Aga Khan: If you interpret his speech as one about faith and reason then I think that the debate is very exciting and could be enormously constructive between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world. So I have two reactions to the pope's lecture: There is my concern about the degradation of relations and, at the same time, I see an opportunity. A chance to talk about a serious, important issue: the relationship between faith and logic.
SPIEGEL: If the pope were to invite you to take part with other religious leaders in a debate about faith, reason and violence, would you accept?
Aga Khan: Yes, definitely. I would, however, make the point that an ecumenical discussion at a certain stage will meet certain limits. Therefore I would prefer to talk more about a cosmopolitan ethic stemming from all of Earth's great faiths.
SPIEGEL: Does Islam have a problem with reason?
Aga Khan: Not at all. Indeed, I would say the contrary. Of the Abrahamic faiths, Islam is probably the one that places the greatest emphasis on knowledge. The purpose is to understand God's creation, and therefore it is a faith which is eminently logical. Islam is a faith of reason.
SPIEGEL: So, what are the root causes of terrorism?
Aga Khan: Unsolved political conflicts, frustration and, above all, ignorance. Nothing that was born out of a theological conflict.
SPIEGEL: Which political conflicts do you mean?
Aga Khan: The ones in the Middle East and in Kashmir, for example. These conflicts have remained unresolved for decades. There is a lack of urgency in understanding that the situation there deteriorates, it's like a cancer. If you are not going to act on a cancer early enough, ultimately it's going to create terrible damage. It can become a breeding ground for terrorism.
Now to the issue of spreading faith by the sword: All faiths at some time in their history have used war to protect themselves or expand their influence, and there were situations when faiths have been used as justifications for military actions. But Islam does not call for that, it is a faith of peace.
SPIEGEL: It's true that horrible crimes were committed in the name of Christianity, for example by the crusaders. That was long ago, that's the past. But jihadists commit their crimes now, in our times.
Aga Khan: It is not so far in the past that we have seen bloody fights in the Christian world. Look at Northern Ireland. If we Muslims interpreted what happened there as a correct expression of Protestantism and Catholicism or even as the essence of the Christian faith you would simply say we don't know what we are talking about.
SPIEGEL: "The West (will stand) against the Rest" wrote Professor Samuel Huntington in his famous book "Clash of Civilizations." Is such a conflict, such a clash inevitable?
Aga Khan: I prefer to talk about a clash of ignorance. There is so much horrible, damaging, dangerous ignorance.
SPIEGEL: Which side is responsible?
Aga Khan: Both. But essentially the Western world. You would think that an educated person in the 21st century should know something about Islam; but you look at education in the Western world and you see that Islamic civilizations have been absent. What is taught about Islam? As far as I know -- nothing. What was known about Shiism before the Iranian revolution? What was known about the radical Sunni Wahhabism before the rise of the Taliban? We need a big educational effort to overcome this. Rather than shouting at each other, we should be learning to listen to each other. In the way we used to do it, by working together, with mutual give-and-take. Together we brought about some of the highest achievements of human civilization. There is a lot to build on. But I think you cannot build on ignorance.
SPIEGEL: Nonethless, it is striking that a particularly large number of Muslim-dominated states figure among the most backward and undemocratic states in the world. Is Islam in need of an era of enlightment? Is the faith even incompatible with democracy as others claim?
Aga Khan: As I said before, one has to be fair. Some of the political leaders have inherited problems that are in no way attributable to the faith. New governance solutions have to be tested and validated over time. Nor do I believe Muslim states are systematically economic underperformers. Some of the fastest growing economies and some of the most successful newly industrialized countries are in the Islamic world. Now concerning democracy: My democratic beliefs do not go back to the Greek or French (thinkers) but to an era 1,400 years ago. These are the principles underlying my religion. During the prophet's life (peace be upon him), there was a systematic consultative political process. And the first imam of the Shiites, Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, Hazrat Ali, emphasized: "No honor is like knowledge, no power is like forbearance, and no support is more reliable than consultation."
SPIEGEL: If pluralism, civil society and Islam can coexist harmoniously, as was proven in the past, then why is this so seldom achieved nowadays?
Aga Khan: I think we have a very diverse situation in the Islamic world. Wealthy countries with enormous ressources, newly industrialized countries, extremely poor ones.
SPIEGEL: Not many are functioning democracies.
Aga Khan: People speak about failed states. I do not think that states can fail, but democracies certainly can. The failure of democracy is not specific to the Islamic world. Indeed, about two years ago, the United Nations carried out an in-depth analysis of democracy in South America. About 55 percent of the population in South American states said that they would prefer to live under a paternalistic dictatorship instead of an incompetent or corrupt democracy that is not improving their living condition.
SPIEGEL: Most of your Ismaili constituency lives in states that cannot be called perfect democracies: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran. What makes democracies fail?
Aga Khan: I ask myself every day what we can do to sustain the multiple forms of democracy, to make these forms of government work, whether it is in Latin America, Africa or the Middle East.
SPIEGEL: And what do you believe to be the answer?
Aga Khan: I admit that I live in a mood of frustration. What is the point in these areas of the world of carrying out a referendum in a population that essentially cannot read and write? What is the point in testing a constitution with a population that knows no difference between a presidential regime or a constitutional monarchy? Elections, constitutions -- all this is necessary, but not sufficient. I think we have to accept that countries have different histories, different social structures, different needs, so we have to be a great deal more flexible than we have been.
SPIEGEL: Nor is democracy monolithic. The American model of democracy is no panacea for the rest of the world. Has George W. Bush aggrevated the situation with his particular way of bringing democracy to the Middle East? Can the United States still win the war in Iraq?
Aga Khan: I am very, very worried about Iraq. The invasion of Iraq had an impact across the world like nothing before in modern times. The invasion has unleashed every force in the Islamic world, including the relations between the Arabs and non-Arabs and the relationship between the Shia und the Sunni.
SPIEGEL: You mean the war created a new terrorist base and radicalized people?
Aga Khan: Indeed. It mobilized a large number of people across the Islamic world, who before then were not involved, and indeed I think they did not want to be.
SPIEGEL: Do you share the view of the American professor and Islam expert Vali Nasr that the balance of power in the Muslim world is undergoing a decisive shift, that Shiites could become the most influential force from Baghdad to Beirut, that the future of the Middle East will be shaped by wars between different Muslim factions?
Aga Khan: When the invasion of Iraq took place, we were told two things: (that there would be) regime change and democracy. Well, anyone who knew the situation in Iraq, as you did, I did, but what did that mean? That meant a Shia majority; it could not have been otherwise. Anyone who then concludes that the next issue is a Shia majority in Iraq is going to start thinking, What does that mean in the region, what does it mean in the Islamic world, what does it mean in relation to the West? All that was as clear as daylight, you didn't even have to be a Muslim or a scholar to know that.
SPIEGEL: In your opinion, was it pure ignorance and naivete that made the Bush government start the war? Was it really about introducing democracy or a strategic decision about conquering oil fields and military bases?
Aga Khan: I wish I could answer that question.
SPIEGEL: Are you in contact with the religious leaders in Iraq, like Grand Ayatollah Sistani? And with the religious leaders of Iran as well?
Aga Khan: We have frequent contacts with important personalities in both countries.
SPIEGEL: What would it take to get you to go to the region as a mediator?
Aga Khan: This is, at the moment, not one of my priorities. One day maybe, we might consider (participating in the) reconstruction (effort).
SPIEGEL: When you compare the invasion in Iraq with the one in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and al-Qaida worked hand in hand ...
Aga Khan: ... there I see a completely different picture. First of all, the Afghan regime at the time was quasi totally detested by the people; it was equally unpleasant for Sunnis as it was the for Shias and it was totally unacceptable I think just in terms of overall civilized life.
SPIEGEL: Afghanistan is currently being confronted with major problems and the situation seems to be deteriorating by the hour. What went wrong? And what can the West do to make the situation more stable?
Aga Khan: The security situation is indeed very worrying -- it is getting worse, especially in the south. Most of our projects are in the capital and in the north where (the situation) is better but not satisfying. We can supply energy from Tajikistan, we can provide civil services. We try to avoid the danger that certain areas in Afghanistan will be rehabilitated more quickly than others. If this development overlaps with ethnic divides you have another problem. But the main problem is that most people in Afghanistan have not seen an improvement in their daily lives. The process of reconstruction does not seem to be penetrating. We have not succeded in bringing a culture of hope to this country. One of the central lessons I have learned after a half century of working in the developing world is that the replacement of fear by hope is probably the most powerful trampoline of progress.
SPIEGEL: President Karzai is a personal friend of yours. Many people see him as a weak leader, and some call him "Mayor of Kabul" because he is unable to control large parts of the country.
Aga Khan: We should do everything to help him. He has an enomously complex agenda to deal with. He is our best hope. And besides, he is the elected leader and we have to work with the parliament.
SPIEGEL: Even if warlords and a former members of the Taliban are represented in Afghanistan's parliament?
Aga Khan: You either accept the results of democracy or you don't. Otherwise you talk about qualifying democracy.
SPIEGEL: That means the West should deal with the radical Islamist Hamas as well?
Aga Khan: You have to work with whoever the population has elected as long as they are willing to respect what I call cosmopolitan ethics. Now, it's true that Hamas has a record of conflict ...
SPIEGEL: ... of outright terror ...
Aga Khan: ... but it would not be the only time that movements that have such a record make it into parliament, and even end up in charge of government later on. Can I remind you of Jomo Kenyatta and his Mau Mau movement in Kenya, for example, or the ANC in South Africa? Take away the causes of extremism and extremists can come back to a more reasonable political agenda. That change to me is one of the wonderful things about the human race.
SPIEGEL: You know Syria's president, Bashar Assad, very well. You recently visited him again in Damascus. In contrast to the American administration, the German government is trying to get him involved in the Middle East peace process.
Aga Khan: I would like to compliment the German government and others in Europe who have taken the decision to invite President Assad to be a party to the peace process. The process of change from decades of political directionalism is something that needs time, as you saw in East Germany. I think there are many reasons to go out of our way to assist Syria in making the transition from the past to the future.
SPIEGEL: If you look back at the years that have passed since World War II -- the Cold War between the East and the West, the ideological conflict with communism -- would you ever have thought that this conflict could be replaced by one between the West and radical Islamists?
Aga Khan: I beg you, please get away from the concept of a conflict of religion. It is not such a conflict. Nobody will ever convince me that the faith of Islam, that Christianity, that Judaism will fight each other in our times -- they have too much in common. That's why I am talking about this global ethic which unites us all. That's why we are trying to work with the Catholic Church in Portugal on a program aimed at immigant minorities. I am aware of a sense of disaffection with the society that many young Muslims feel because they think that the Western society has the intention of marginalizing or damaging them.
SPIEGEL: The German government just organized a conference with many different Muslim groups and personalities who live in Germany. Do you consider such a forum useful or is it just window dressing?
Aga Khan: We can avoid misunderstandings by having such a forum where people from different faiths consult each other so they understand what really affects them. Once you have committed an offense all you can do is to try and reverse it. Anyone who knows the faith of Islam, for example, would have known that the caricatures of the prohet were profoundly offensive to all Muslims.
SPIEGEL: Again, this whole affair was misused by radical Islamists. They added caricatures much more offensive than the original ones to incite the masses.
Aga Khan: But I am told that there was an internal debate between the editors of that publication and they actually knew what they were doing. They took a risk and somebody should have said to them, Why get into that situation? Now we are talking about civility, which is a completely different concept. If we are talking about civility in a pluralist society, then how do you develop that notion of civility, particularly where there is ignorance. And that's the thing that's worrying. And that's why I get frustrated when I see these situations that go on and on and on. Because I'm not willing to believe that they are all inspired by evil intent.
SPIEGEL: Provocative, sad and distasteful. But the freedom of the press is one of the highest values in our democracy. We have to balance one thing against the other and we will allow non-believers to express even outrageous opinions.
Aga Khan: I think that you are now referring to one of the most difficult problems that we have and I don't know the answer. The industrialized West is highly secularized; the Muslim world is much less secularized and that stems largely from the nature of the faith of Islam, which you know and I know has an intrinsic meshing with everyday life. And that is a scenario where people of goodwill need to think very, very carefully.
SPIEGEL: In some of your speeches you mentioned Kemal Atatürk in a positive context. Turkey followed his path and is one of the very few countries with a predominant Muslim population where there is separation of church and state. Would you like to see others go the same way?
Aga Khan: I am not opposed to secularism as such. But I am opposed to unilateral secularism where the notions of faith and ethics just disappear from society.
SPIEGEL: Your Highness, we thank you for this interview.
Prince Karim Aga Khan IV
Prince Karim Aga Khan IV is considered to be the direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad and, as the 49th imam, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims. A minority community within the Muslim faith, the Ismailis include some 20 million members scattered across 25 countries in Central Asia, Europe and Eastern Africa. The Aga Khan himself lives near Paris in Aiglemont Palace. Born near Geneva, the prince grew up in Kenya, Switzerland and London before being educated at Harvard. At the age of 20, he succeeded his grandfather as the Aga Khan, thus becoming a religious leader and the administrator of billions in assets. Fed by his family inheritance and a 10 percent tithing fee from Ismaili Muslims, the Aga Khan channels much of the money into the Aga Khan Development Network, one of the world's most important private development aid organizations. The Aga Khan has two sons from his first marriage - - Rahim, 34, and Hussein, 32. He also has a son from his second marriage to the German princess Gabriele zu Leiningen - - six- year- old Ali Mohammed. The Aga Khan must name one of his sons as his successor, but that choice will remain a secret until his death.
The following article illustrates how things can get muddled up if faith becomes a political instrument.
November 16, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Putting Faith Before Politics
By DAVID KUO
Alexandria, Va.
SINCE 1992, every national Republican electoral defeat has been accompanied by an obituary for the religious right. Every one of these obituaries has been premature — after these losses, the religious right only grew stronger. After the defeat of President George H. W. Bush in 1992, the conventional wisdom held that Christian evangelicals would be chastened. As one major magazine put it, Mr. Bush’s defeat meant that “time had run out on their crusade to create a Christian America.” Yet in the next two years, the Christian Coalition grew by leaps and bounds; in 1994, it helped usher in the Gingrich revolution.
In 1996, after Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole, Margaret Tutwiler, a Republican strategist, declared that in order for Republicans to win, “We’re going to have to take on the religious nuts.” Two years later, after Republicans failed to gain any ground on Democrats — despite Mr. Clinton’s impeachment — John Zogby, the pollster, concluded that “Christian absolutism” scared voters. Wrong again. Those same Christian “absolutists” helped sweep George W. Bush into office in 2000.
Jesus was resurrected only once. The religious right has been resurrected at least twice in just the past 15 years.
The conventional wisdom about the Democratic thumping of Republicans last week says something a little different about the religious right — that its members are beginning to migrate to the Democratic Party. The statistic that is exciting Democrats the most is that nearly 30 percent of white evangelicals, the true Republican base, voted Democratic. In addition, the red-blue split of weekly churchgoers has narrowed. Commentators are atwitter about the shrinking “God gap.”
Once again, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Yes, it is true that almost 30 percent of white evangelicals voted for the Democrats, up from the 22 percent Senator John Kerry received in the 2004 presidential race. But that 2004 number was aberrantly low. More typical were exit polls from the 1996 Congressional election, where 25 percent of white evangelicals voted for Democrats.
So before rearranging their public policy agenda in hopes of attracting evangelicals, the Democrats would be wise to think twice. There has been a radical change in the attitudes of evangelicals — it’s just not one that will automatically be in the Democrats’ favor.
You see, evangelicals aren’t re-examining their political priorities nearly as much as they are re-examining their spiritual priorities. That could be bad news for both political parties.
John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, the conservative Christian organization that gained notoriety during the 1990s when it represented Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against Bill Clinton, wrote this after the elections: “Modern Christianity, having lost sight of Christ’s teachings, has been co-opted by legalism, materialism and politics. Simply put, it has lost its spirituality.”
He went on, “Whereas Christianity was once synonymous with charity, compassion and love for one’s neighbor, today it is more often equated with partisan politics, anti-homosexual rhetoric and affluent mega-churches.”
Mr. Whitehead is hardly alone. Just before the elections, Gordon MacDonald, an evangelical leader, wrote that he was concerned that some evangelical personalities had been seduced and used by the White House. He worried that the movement might “fragment because it is more identified by a political agenda that seems to be failing and less identified by a commitment to Jesus and his kingdom.”
Certainly, the White House showed the heartlessness of politics in Ted Haggard’s fall. Mr. Haggard had once been welcomed at the White House, relied on to rally other evangelicals and invited to pray with the president.
Yet his downfall provoked only this reaction from a low-level White House spokesman: “He had been on a couple of calls, but was not a weekly participant in those calls. I believe he’s been to the White House one or two times.” To evangelicals who know that this statement was misleading, and know from the Bible what being kicked to the curb looks like, it was a revealing moment about the unchristian behavior politics inspires.
Perhaps that’s why a rift appears to be growing in what was once a strong alliance. Beliefnet.com’s post-election online survey of more than 2,000 people revealed that nearly 40 percent of evangelicals support the idea of a two-year Christian “fast” from intense political activism. Instead of directing their energies toward campaigns, evangelicals would spend their time helping the poor.
Why might such an idea get traction among evangelicals? For practical reasons as well as spiritual ones. Evangelicals are beginning to see the effect of their political involvement on those with whom they hope to share Jesus’ eternal message: non-evangelicals. Tellingly, Beliefnet’s poll showed that nearly 60 percent of non-evangelicals have a more negative view of Jesus because of Christian political involvement; almost 40 percent believe that George W. Bush’s faith has had a negative impact on his presidency.
There is also the matter of the record, which I saw being shaped during my time in the White House. Conservative Christians (like me) were promised that having an evangelical like Mr. Bush in office was a dream come true. Well, it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. The administration accomplished little that evangelicals really cared about.
Nowhere was this clearer than on the issue of abortion. Despite strong Republican majorities, and his own pro-life stands, Mr. Bush settled for the largely symbolic partial-birth abortion restriction rather than pursuing more substantial change. Then there were the forgotten commitments to give faith-based charities the resources they needed to care for the poor. Evangelicals are not likely to fall for such promises in the future.
Don’t expect conservative Christians in politics to start to disappear, of course. There are those who find the moral force of issues like abortion and gay marriage equal to that of the abolition of slavery — worth pursuing no matter what the risks of politics are for the soul. But the advocates working these special interests may, I think, be far fewer in coming years than in years past. Gay marriage was a less mobilizing force in 2006 than it was in 2004. In Arizona the ballot measure to outlaw it was defeated. The South Dakota abortion ban failed.
We will have to wait until 2008 to see just how deep this evangelical spiritual re-examination goes, and how seductive politics will continue to be to committed Christians. Meanwhile, evangelicals aren’t flocking to the Democratic Party. If anything, they are becoming more truly conservative in their recognition of the negative spiritual consequences of political obsession and of the limitations of government power.
C. S. Lewis once warned that any Christian who uses his faith as a means to a political end would corrupt both his faith and the faith writ large. A lot of Christians are reading C. S. Lewis these days.
David Kuo, the deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2001 to 2003, is the author of “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.”
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November 16, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Putting Faith Before Politics
By DAVID KUO
Alexandria, Va.
SINCE 1992, every national Republican electoral defeat has been accompanied by an obituary for the religious right. Every one of these obituaries has been premature — after these losses, the religious right only grew stronger. After the defeat of President George H. W. Bush in 1992, the conventional wisdom held that Christian evangelicals would be chastened. As one major magazine put it, Mr. Bush’s defeat meant that “time had run out on their crusade to create a Christian America.” Yet in the next two years, the Christian Coalition grew by leaps and bounds; in 1994, it helped usher in the Gingrich revolution.
In 1996, after Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole, Margaret Tutwiler, a Republican strategist, declared that in order for Republicans to win, “We’re going to have to take on the religious nuts.” Two years later, after Republicans failed to gain any ground on Democrats — despite Mr. Clinton’s impeachment — John Zogby, the pollster, concluded that “Christian absolutism” scared voters. Wrong again. Those same Christian “absolutists” helped sweep George W. Bush into office in 2000.
Jesus was resurrected only once. The religious right has been resurrected at least twice in just the past 15 years.
The conventional wisdom about the Democratic thumping of Republicans last week says something a little different about the religious right — that its members are beginning to migrate to the Democratic Party. The statistic that is exciting Democrats the most is that nearly 30 percent of white evangelicals, the true Republican base, voted Democratic. In addition, the red-blue split of weekly churchgoers has narrowed. Commentators are atwitter about the shrinking “God gap.”
Once again, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Yes, it is true that almost 30 percent of white evangelicals voted for the Democrats, up from the 22 percent Senator John Kerry received in the 2004 presidential race. But that 2004 number was aberrantly low. More typical were exit polls from the 1996 Congressional election, where 25 percent of white evangelicals voted for Democrats.
So before rearranging their public policy agenda in hopes of attracting evangelicals, the Democrats would be wise to think twice. There has been a radical change in the attitudes of evangelicals — it’s just not one that will automatically be in the Democrats’ favor.
You see, evangelicals aren’t re-examining their political priorities nearly as much as they are re-examining their spiritual priorities. That could be bad news for both political parties.
John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, the conservative Christian organization that gained notoriety during the 1990s when it represented Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against Bill Clinton, wrote this after the elections: “Modern Christianity, having lost sight of Christ’s teachings, has been co-opted by legalism, materialism and politics. Simply put, it has lost its spirituality.”
He went on, “Whereas Christianity was once synonymous with charity, compassion and love for one’s neighbor, today it is more often equated with partisan politics, anti-homosexual rhetoric and affluent mega-churches.”
Mr. Whitehead is hardly alone. Just before the elections, Gordon MacDonald, an evangelical leader, wrote that he was concerned that some evangelical personalities had been seduced and used by the White House. He worried that the movement might “fragment because it is more identified by a political agenda that seems to be failing and less identified by a commitment to Jesus and his kingdom.”
Certainly, the White House showed the heartlessness of politics in Ted Haggard’s fall. Mr. Haggard had once been welcomed at the White House, relied on to rally other evangelicals and invited to pray with the president.
Yet his downfall provoked only this reaction from a low-level White House spokesman: “He had been on a couple of calls, but was not a weekly participant in those calls. I believe he’s been to the White House one or two times.” To evangelicals who know that this statement was misleading, and know from the Bible what being kicked to the curb looks like, it was a revealing moment about the unchristian behavior politics inspires.
Perhaps that’s why a rift appears to be growing in what was once a strong alliance. Beliefnet.com’s post-election online survey of more than 2,000 people revealed that nearly 40 percent of evangelicals support the idea of a two-year Christian “fast” from intense political activism. Instead of directing their energies toward campaigns, evangelicals would spend their time helping the poor.
Why might such an idea get traction among evangelicals? For practical reasons as well as spiritual ones. Evangelicals are beginning to see the effect of their political involvement on those with whom they hope to share Jesus’ eternal message: non-evangelicals. Tellingly, Beliefnet’s poll showed that nearly 60 percent of non-evangelicals have a more negative view of Jesus because of Christian political involvement; almost 40 percent believe that George W. Bush’s faith has had a negative impact on his presidency.
There is also the matter of the record, which I saw being shaped during my time in the White House. Conservative Christians (like me) were promised that having an evangelical like Mr. Bush in office was a dream come true. Well, it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. The administration accomplished little that evangelicals really cared about.
Nowhere was this clearer than on the issue of abortion. Despite strong Republican majorities, and his own pro-life stands, Mr. Bush settled for the largely symbolic partial-birth abortion restriction rather than pursuing more substantial change. Then there were the forgotten commitments to give faith-based charities the resources they needed to care for the poor. Evangelicals are not likely to fall for such promises in the future.
Don’t expect conservative Christians in politics to start to disappear, of course. There are those who find the moral force of issues like abortion and gay marriage equal to that of the abolition of slavery — worth pursuing no matter what the risks of politics are for the soul. But the advocates working these special interests may, I think, be far fewer in coming years than in years past. Gay marriage was a less mobilizing force in 2006 than it was in 2004. In Arizona the ballot measure to outlaw it was defeated. The South Dakota abortion ban failed.
We will have to wait until 2008 to see just how deep this evangelical spiritual re-examination goes, and how seductive politics will continue to be to committed Christians. Meanwhile, evangelicals aren’t flocking to the Democratic Party. If anything, they are becoming more truly conservative in their recognition of the negative spiritual consequences of political obsession and of the limitations of government power.
C. S. Lewis once warned that any Christian who uses his faith as a means to a political end would corrupt both his faith and the faith writ large. A lot of Christians are reading C. S. Lewis these days.
David Kuo, the deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2001 to 2003, is the author of “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.”
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Turkish voters to decide between headscarves or a secular state
Muslim nation has long been western-oriented
Matthew Fisher
CanWest News Service
Saturday, July 21, 2007
CREDIT: Fatih Saribas, Reuters
Supporters of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan cheer as they wave the Turkish and AK Party flags, as Erdogan appears on stage during a rally by his ruling AK Party to campaign for Sunday's early parliamentary elections, in Turkey's Black Sea city of Trabzon on Friday.
Turks voting in parliamentary elections Sunday are focused on issues such as how to keep the vibrant economy racing ahead, preventing the rise of Kurdish power in northern Iraq from spilling over into Turkey's Kurdish areas, and whether to continue trying to win membership in the European Union.
But the most emotive issue by far is whether this country of 70 million, which forms a bridge between the Middle East and Europe, should remain secular and western-oriented, as it has been since Kemal Ataturk founded the republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire more than 80 years ago, or draw closer to its Islamist roots.
And if Turkey decides to turn towards Islam, will the staunchly secular Turkish military launch another coup?
Didem Mercan plans to vote for the Republican People's Party, which was founded by Ataturk, because she fears the Islamist connections of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
She worries that, if the AKP wins a second majority in parliament, it could force women to wear headscarves. Clad in blue jeans and a summery blouse, her fingernails painted bright red, the 23-year old communications student is a walking advertisement for her belief that "religion should have no place in my personal life, and I am prepared to fight for that right."
Mesut Topcu, on the other hand, said he intends to vote for the AKP because, since it won power in November 2002, the authorities have stopped hassling men in the deeply conservative Istanbul suburb of Fatih about wearing the skullcaps, baggy trousers and long beards of pious Muslims.
Topcu, an electrical engineer, was unequivocal about the value of headscarves, which remain banned in schools and government offices but are commonly worn by women in Fatih, as are black, Iranian-style full-body chadors. "I am sad for a woman who does not cover herself. She will go to hell on judgment day."
The public expression of such sharp differences in opinion is relatively new in Turkey, but the debate is actually many centuries old.
The country's population is about 98 per cent Muslim, but its history has been profoundly influenced by geography. In the northwest and northeast, Turkey is bordered by Christian Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia and Armenia, while in the east and south, it sits alongside Muslim Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq and Syria. It is also the only Muslim nation in NATO.
Istanbul, Turkey's largest city with a population of 12 million, has always felt the pull of east and west particularly keenly. Famously divided by the Bosporus Strait into European and Asian parts, Constantinople, as it was called until 77 years ago, is home to spectacular mosques and minarets as well as the Orthodox Church's oldest patriarchate.
Although he was Muslim, Ataturk replaced sharia law with a Swiss-style legal system. Women were given the vote, veils were banned, drinking alcohol was permitted, and Latin script replaced Arabic letters.
Many secularists are convinced that some of those fundamental changes are now at risk if the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wins another parliamentary majority.
"They are really Islamists and we believe that they wear a mask right now, trying to pretend that they aren't," said architect Eliz Ofil, 25, sitting in a smart cafe, watching huge tankers and freighters from Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran and many other countries gingerly navigate the narrow Bosporus artery between the Mediterranean and Black seas.
Metres away, Egeman Bargis, an AKP deputy and Erdogan's chief foreign policy adviser, did not hide his contempt for such views.
"This is not a difference of opinion between Islamists and secularists. It is a difference of opinion between those who want more democracy or less. The opposition has tried at every chance to create tension."
Although some of the AKP's most prominent members have Islamist ties, the party has not spoken much about religion since it emerged as a grassroots movement a few years ago. It has positioned itself on the centre-right and concentrated, with considerable success, on pursuing internationalist economic policies. Turkey's GDP has risen more than seven per cent per year since 2003, per-capita income has more than doubled, and inflation has been reduced to single digits for the first time in decades.
But the AKP crossed a line with the military when it proposed Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a practising Muslim whose wife covers her head, as its choice for president.
In what was dubbed an e-coup, the military derailed the plan last April by posting on its website a warning about a "growing threat" to Turkey's secular practices.
Erdogan's response, however, was to seek a new mandate by calling early parliamentary elections.
There are indications that the military may have misjudged the public mood, or perhaps didn't care what it was.
Polls suggest that the AKP's share of the vote will increase to more than 40 per cent from 34, largely because of a backlash against the military's stance.
Paradoxically, though, although the prime minister's party is more popular than ever in religiously conservative rural areas, and is gaining support in urban areas because of its economic policies, the AKP may actually win fewer seats.
That's because of an awkward electoral system that only allows parties with more than 10 per cent of the vote to have representation in the 550-seat parliament.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
****
COMMENTARY
Turkish Test
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
July 20, 2007; Page A13
Istanbul
Sunday's parliamentary elections here will make for yet another chapter in the long clash between secularism and Islam in Turkey.
Simmering disputes between partisans on both sides came to a boil with May's presidential elections. Street protests against the ruling and religiously oriented Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its candidate for president encouraged the army chiefs to stage the softest of their "soft coups" -- in this case a midnight Internet missive warning that "some circles . . . disturb fundamental values of the Republic of Turkey, especially secularism." Turkey's highest court, another secular bastion, got the message and followed up with a technical, but patently political, ruling on parliamentary quorums. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan angrily withdrew his candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül (who was assured to win the presidency in a straight parliament vote). To defuse tensions, early parliamentary elections were called and the presidential vote postponed.
None of it was very legitimate and the relief is bound to be temporary. With a wide lead in polls, Mr. Erdogan will almost certainly return and demand to pick the next president and push a constitutional overhaul to give his party a freer hand. The military, long the stewards of Kemal Atatürk's secular Republic, may be tempted to push back, perhaps not so softly this time. Kurdish terrorism in the southeast and the European Union's latest anxiety attack over Turkey's membership bid further complicate the outlook. Yet in spite of the turmoil, Turkey has never been as prosperous or free as it is now, and stands a betting chance of pulling through.
Even secularists acknowledge that Atatürk's 1923 design for modern Turkey -- with its fanatical opposition to religion in public life -- is overdue for an update. The surprise is that the AKP has taken the modernization mantle from them. Aside from well-publicized exceptions such as Mr. Erdogan's thwarted attempt to criminalize adultery, the AKP has made its mark by opening up the economy and by liberalizing laws on women's and Kurdish rights, free speech and civil liberties. And in an unfortunate role reversal, the once pro-Western secular parties have turned against the political and economic reforms demanded by the EU and backed by the AKP.
For a glimpse of the new Turkey, where economic growth has averaged 7% annually since 2001, look around Istanbul. Right off the Bosporus are gleaming business districts, garish nightclubs and bustling street scenes straight out of London or New York. Further inland the lower- and lower-middle class suburbs, called varos, are rising. With a million people in the 1950s, Turkey's commercial hub is today home, officially, to 10 million, but probably far more. Most of the new residents migrated from rural areas.
The old urban order, accustomed to running the country, is unsettled by its new neighbors, their village habits and mores. Ilber Ortayli, the director of the Topkapi palace in Istanbul and a noted historian of the Ottomans, despairs at the sight of "these peasants," whose women tend to cover their heads with scarves and whose men wear moustaches.
The mustachioed Mr. Erdogan, a former businessman and Istanbul mayor, himself emerged from the varos, and later tapped into massive support there for his AKP. The party's pro-business and anti-corruption planks, as well as pledges to loosen restrictions on wearing headscarves that date back to the Republic's early years, play well with this constituency of entrepreneurial and socially-conservative shopkeepers and blue-collar workers -- many of whom lately made the jump into the middle class. The AKP has injected funds for schools along with other goodies into the varos -- Islamist pork, so to speak.
But the AKP is hardly radical in its Islamic orientation. Its leaders were chastened by their brief stints in power in the 1990s; they've adopted and mostly stuck to a liberal agenda this time. The party bridges the traditional and modern world. To claim around 40% in recent polls, the AKP needs to attract its share of secular voters.
In this campaign, AKP leaders are able to claim credit for overseeing the growth of a sophisticated market economy, which like its democracy also makes Turkey unique in the Muslim world. The AKP pushed the most far-reaching privatization in Turkey's history. Corporate, income and sales taxes were cut. Unusually for the region, growth was driven by private consumption and investment, as the government kept a tight lid on its own spending. Turks who work outside the state sector showed their business chops, with exports up three-fold in the last five years. Foreign investment is 10 times the 2002 figure, at $20 billion last year.
Though there is widespread agreement that Turkey is headed in the right economic direction, cultural issues such as the headscarf are the focus of bitter debate. As in Atatürk's model, France, Turkey legislates on women's clothing, banning headscarves in schools and government offices. The AKP claims to want to institute positive rights to let women wear whatever wherever they please. The secularists see a slippery slope to enforced piety if the law is changed.
True enough, more girls in Turkish cities can be seen in headscarves than a decade or two ago. But is this a sign of rising Islamism? Or of Turkey's new economic and social pluralism?
As with much else, gender roles have shifted dramatically so that the headscarf doesn't automatically signal provincialism, submission or lack of education. Secular or not, women are asserting themselves in politics and business. The activist women's NGOs linked to the AKP gave rise to the term "Islamic feminism." Another irony is that the AKP has pushed women's rights further than any government since Atatürk abolished polygamy and Islamist courts. As part of an overhaul of the 1926 Penal Code, the AKP criminalized rape in marriage, eliminated sentence reductions for "honor killings," and ended legal discrimination against non-virgin and unmarried women.
They aren't noted feminists, but the men of AKP knew these changes were popular with women constituents and the EU. "With the new Penal Code," notes a European Stability Initiative report, "Turkey's legislation entered the post-patriarchal era." Needless to say, the secularists who accused the AKP of repressing women at the big protests in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir this spring give them little credit.
Mr. Erdogan makes no secret of wanting to relieve pressure on "social Islam." But secularists charge he secretly wants to implant "political Islam," which in the name of democracy would destroy it.
Anecdotes about alcohol bans in AKP strongholds or teachers bringing religion into classroom made headlines in Turkey's lively press, but are hardly proof of systematic Islamization. Lacking that, secularists fall back on speculation about the AKP's ulterior motives. Orhan Pamuk, who last year won Turkey's first Nobel, for literature, once told me, "Every time there's a political debate in this country we don't discuss what's really happening but what are the hidden intentions."
So what is happening? With the economic and political flowering of recent years has come a cultural and religious one too. According to one recent survey, 61% of Turks call themselves "very" or "quite" religious, compared with 31% in 1999. But Turks are also developing a clearer civic identity separate from Islam. The share of people who describe themselves first as "citizens of Turkey" -- as opposed to ethnic Turks or Muslims -- went up to 34.1% in 2006, from 29.9% seven years ago.
They're souring on political Islam, too. Opposition to the imposition of Shariah (Islamic law) rose from 67.9% in 1999 to 76.2% in 2006, while support for it fell from 21% to 9%. Meanwhile, the overall number of women in headscarves is dropping steadily. This just goes to show that prosperity and democracy tends to secularize without need for coercion.
The last three months have left voters bitter about politics. Mr. Erdogan's thin skin and arrogance can make the general staff look the model of civility; as a bunch, Turkish politicians aren't a pretty lot. But the flexible AKP machine responded to the crisis in the spring by purging 150 of its most hardline MPs from the electoral list and moving the party further into the mainstream. Independents are expected to claim a larger, possibly decisive block of seats. Political compromise is not a bad thing, as long as Turkey doesn't revert back to do-nothing coalition governments.
America can do worse than strongly encourage the Turks to play by democratic rules, especially by keeping the military in the barracks. Continued European engagement on future EU membership -- in jeopardy thanks to Continental politicians unable to think strategically (the latest being France's Nicolas Sarkozy) -- helps guide domestic reforms. Turkey is a crucial NATO state that borders Iran, Iraq, the Caucasus, Balkans and Mideast.
And though not an Arab country -- an important cultural and historical distinction -- Turkey is on a journey toward becoming a mature democratic nation-state that its Mideast neighbors have barely started, but are watching closely. In the past few years, Turks asked hard questions about themselves. Can Turkey stick together if Kurds get minority rights? What if discussion of the 1915 Armenian massacres is opened up? If women wear headscarves in schools? If the army stays out of politics? Most fundamentally, can public space be carved out in a Muslim country for Islam in a way that safeguards the rights of believers and nonbelievers and strengthens democracy in the process?
How unfortunate it would be to fail to get answers, and if this remarkable period in Turkish history were -- in the name of some 1920s-era notion of secularism -- prematurely brought to an end. Such an outcome would lead to the conclusion that Muslim polities are incorrigibly illiberal, unable to stomach real democracy. Though their politics are messy, the Turks give us good reason to believe otherwise.
Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118487879551972111.html
Muslim nation has long been western-oriented
Matthew Fisher
CanWest News Service
Saturday, July 21, 2007
CREDIT: Fatih Saribas, Reuters
Supporters of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan cheer as they wave the Turkish and AK Party flags, as Erdogan appears on stage during a rally by his ruling AK Party to campaign for Sunday's early parliamentary elections, in Turkey's Black Sea city of Trabzon on Friday.
Turks voting in parliamentary elections Sunday are focused on issues such as how to keep the vibrant economy racing ahead, preventing the rise of Kurdish power in northern Iraq from spilling over into Turkey's Kurdish areas, and whether to continue trying to win membership in the European Union.
But the most emotive issue by far is whether this country of 70 million, which forms a bridge between the Middle East and Europe, should remain secular and western-oriented, as it has been since Kemal Ataturk founded the republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire more than 80 years ago, or draw closer to its Islamist roots.
And if Turkey decides to turn towards Islam, will the staunchly secular Turkish military launch another coup?
Didem Mercan plans to vote for the Republican People's Party, which was founded by Ataturk, because she fears the Islamist connections of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
She worries that, if the AKP wins a second majority in parliament, it could force women to wear headscarves. Clad in blue jeans and a summery blouse, her fingernails painted bright red, the 23-year old communications student is a walking advertisement for her belief that "religion should have no place in my personal life, and I am prepared to fight for that right."
Mesut Topcu, on the other hand, said he intends to vote for the AKP because, since it won power in November 2002, the authorities have stopped hassling men in the deeply conservative Istanbul suburb of Fatih about wearing the skullcaps, baggy trousers and long beards of pious Muslims.
Topcu, an electrical engineer, was unequivocal about the value of headscarves, which remain banned in schools and government offices but are commonly worn by women in Fatih, as are black, Iranian-style full-body chadors. "I am sad for a woman who does not cover herself. She will go to hell on judgment day."
The public expression of such sharp differences in opinion is relatively new in Turkey, but the debate is actually many centuries old.
The country's population is about 98 per cent Muslim, but its history has been profoundly influenced by geography. In the northwest and northeast, Turkey is bordered by Christian Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia and Armenia, while in the east and south, it sits alongside Muslim Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq and Syria. It is also the only Muslim nation in NATO.
Istanbul, Turkey's largest city with a population of 12 million, has always felt the pull of east and west particularly keenly. Famously divided by the Bosporus Strait into European and Asian parts, Constantinople, as it was called until 77 years ago, is home to spectacular mosques and minarets as well as the Orthodox Church's oldest patriarchate.
Although he was Muslim, Ataturk replaced sharia law with a Swiss-style legal system. Women were given the vote, veils were banned, drinking alcohol was permitted, and Latin script replaced Arabic letters.
Many secularists are convinced that some of those fundamental changes are now at risk if the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wins another parliamentary majority.
"They are really Islamists and we believe that they wear a mask right now, trying to pretend that they aren't," said architect Eliz Ofil, 25, sitting in a smart cafe, watching huge tankers and freighters from Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran and many other countries gingerly navigate the narrow Bosporus artery between the Mediterranean and Black seas.
Metres away, Egeman Bargis, an AKP deputy and Erdogan's chief foreign policy adviser, did not hide his contempt for such views.
"This is not a difference of opinion between Islamists and secularists. It is a difference of opinion between those who want more democracy or less. The opposition has tried at every chance to create tension."
Although some of the AKP's most prominent members have Islamist ties, the party has not spoken much about religion since it emerged as a grassroots movement a few years ago. It has positioned itself on the centre-right and concentrated, with considerable success, on pursuing internationalist economic policies. Turkey's GDP has risen more than seven per cent per year since 2003, per-capita income has more than doubled, and inflation has been reduced to single digits for the first time in decades.
But the AKP crossed a line with the military when it proposed Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a practising Muslim whose wife covers her head, as its choice for president.
In what was dubbed an e-coup, the military derailed the plan last April by posting on its website a warning about a "growing threat" to Turkey's secular practices.
Erdogan's response, however, was to seek a new mandate by calling early parliamentary elections.
There are indications that the military may have misjudged the public mood, or perhaps didn't care what it was.
Polls suggest that the AKP's share of the vote will increase to more than 40 per cent from 34, largely because of a backlash against the military's stance.
Paradoxically, though, although the prime minister's party is more popular than ever in religiously conservative rural areas, and is gaining support in urban areas because of its economic policies, the AKP may actually win fewer seats.
That's because of an awkward electoral system that only allows parties with more than 10 per cent of the vote to have representation in the 550-seat parliament.
© The Calgary Herald 2007
****
COMMENTARY
Turkish Test
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
July 20, 2007; Page A13
Istanbul
Sunday's parliamentary elections here will make for yet another chapter in the long clash between secularism and Islam in Turkey.
Simmering disputes between partisans on both sides came to a boil with May's presidential elections. Street protests against the ruling and religiously oriented Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its candidate for president encouraged the army chiefs to stage the softest of their "soft coups" -- in this case a midnight Internet missive warning that "some circles . . . disturb fundamental values of the Republic of Turkey, especially secularism." Turkey's highest court, another secular bastion, got the message and followed up with a technical, but patently political, ruling on parliamentary quorums. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan angrily withdrew his candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül (who was assured to win the presidency in a straight parliament vote). To defuse tensions, early parliamentary elections were called and the presidential vote postponed.
None of it was very legitimate and the relief is bound to be temporary. With a wide lead in polls, Mr. Erdogan will almost certainly return and demand to pick the next president and push a constitutional overhaul to give his party a freer hand. The military, long the stewards of Kemal Atatürk's secular Republic, may be tempted to push back, perhaps not so softly this time. Kurdish terrorism in the southeast and the European Union's latest anxiety attack over Turkey's membership bid further complicate the outlook. Yet in spite of the turmoil, Turkey has never been as prosperous or free as it is now, and stands a betting chance of pulling through.
Even secularists acknowledge that Atatürk's 1923 design for modern Turkey -- with its fanatical opposition to religion in public life -- is overdue for an update. The surprise is that the AKP has taken the modernization mantle from them. Aside from well-publicized exceptions such as Mr. Erdogan's thwarted attempt to criminalize adultery, the AKP has made its mark by opening up the economy and by liberalizing laws on women's and Kurdish rights, free speech and civil liberties. And in an unfortunate role reversal, the once pro-Western secular parties have turned against the political and economic reforms demanded by the EU and backed by the AKP.
For a glimpse of the new Turkey, where economic growth has averaged 7% annually since 2001, look around Istanbul. Right off the Bosporus are gleaming business districts, garish nightclubs and bustling street scenes straight out of London or New York. Further inland the lower- and lower-middle class suburbs, called varos, are rising. With a million people in the 1950s, Turkey's commercial hub is today home, officially, to 10 million, but probably far more. Most of the new residents migrated from rural areas.
The old urban order, accustomed to running the country, is unsettled by its new neighbors, their village habits and mores. Ilber Ortayli, the director of the Topkapi palace in Istanbul and a noted historian of the Ottomans, despairs at the sight of "these peasants," whose women tend to cover their heads with scarves and whose men wear moustaches.
The mustachioed Mr. Erdogan, a former businessman and Istanbul mayor, himself emerged from the varos, and later tapped into massive support there for his AKP. The party's pro-business and anti-corruption planks, as well as pledges to loosen restrictions on wearing headscarves that date back to the Republic's early years, play well with this constituency of entrepreneurial and socially-conservative shopkeepers and blue-collar workers -- many of whom lately made the jump into the middle class. The AKP has injected funds for schools along with other goodies into the varos -- Islamist pork, so to speak.
But the AKP is hardly radical in its Islamic orientation. Its leaders were chastened by their brief stints in power in the 1990s; they've adopted and mostly stuck to a liberal agenda this time. The party bridges the traditional and modern world. To claim around 40% in recent polls, the AKP needs to attract its share of secular voters.
In this campaign, AKP leaders are able to claim credit for overseeing the growth of a sophisticated market economy, which like its democracy also makes Turkey unique in the Muslim world. The AKP pushed the most far-reaching privatization in Turkey's history. Corporate, income and sales taxes were cut. Unusually for the region, growth was driven by private consumption and investment, as the government kept a tight lid on its own spending. Turks who work outside the state sector showed their business chops, with exports up three-fold in the last five years. Foreign investment is 10 times the 2002 figure, at $20 billion last year.
Though there is widespread agreement that Turkey is headed in the right economic direction, cultural issues such as the headscarf are the focus of bitter debate. As in Atatürk's model, France, Turkey legislates on women's clothing, banning headscarves in schools and government offices. The AKP claims to want to institute positive rights to let women wear whatever wherever they please. The secularists see a slippery slope to enforced piety if the law is changed.
True enough, more girls in Turkish cities can be seen in headscarves than a decade or two ago. But is this a sign of rising Islamism? Or of Turkey's new economic and social pluralism?
As with much else, gender roles have shifted dramatically so that the headscarf doesn't automatically signal provincialism, submission or lack of education. Secular or not, women are asserting themselves in politics and business. The activist women's NGOs linked to the AKP gave rise to the term "Islamic feminism." Another irony is that the AKP has pushed women's rights further than any government since Atatürk abolished polygamy and Islamist courts. As part of an overhaul of the 1926 Penal Code, the AKP criminalized rape in marriage, eliminated sentence reductions for "honor killings," and ended legal discrimination against non-virgin and unmarried women.
They aren't noted feminists, but the men of AKP knew these changes were popular with women constituents and the EU. "With the new Penal Code," notes a European Stability Initiative report, "Turkey's legislation entered the post-patriarchal era." Needless to say, the secularists who accused the AKP of repressing women at the big protests in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir this spring give them little credit.
Mr. Erdogan makes no secret of wanting to relieve pressure on "social Islam." But secularists charge he secretly wants to implant "political Islam," which in the name of democracy would destroy it.
Anecdotes about alcohol bans in AKP strongholds or teachers bringing religion into classroom made headlines in Turkey's lively press, but are hardly proof of systematic Islamization. Lacking that, secularists fall back on speculation about the AKP's ulterior motives. Orhan Pamuk, who last year won Turkey's first Nobel, for literature, once told me, "Every time there's a political debate in this country we don't discuss what's really happening but what are the hidden intentions."
So what is happening? With the economic and political flowering of recent years has come a cultural and religious one too. According to one recent survey, 61% of Turks call themselves "very" or "quite" religious, compared with 31% in 1999. But Turks are also developing a clearer civic identity separate from Islam. The share of people who describe themselves first as "citizens of Turkey" -- as opposed to ethnic Turks or Muslims -- went up to 34.1% in 2006, from 29.9% seven years ago.
They're souring on political Islam, too. Opposition to the imposition of Shariah (Islamic law) rose from 67.9% in 1999 to 76.2% in 2006, while support for it fell from 21% to 9%. Meanwhile, the overall number of women in headscarves is dropping steadily. This just goes to show that prosperity and democracy tends to secularize without need for coercion.
The last three months have left voters bitter about politics. Mr. Erdogan's thin skin and arrogance can make the general staff look the model of civility; as a bunch, Turkish politicians aren't a pretty lot. But the flexible AKP machine responded to the crisis in the spring by purging 150 of its most hardline MPs from the electoral list and moving the party further into the mainstream. Independents are expected to claim a larger, possibly decisive block of seats. Political compromise is not a bad thing, as long as Turkey doesn't revert back to do-nothing coalition governments.
America can do worse than strongly encourage the Turks to play by democratic rules, especially by keeping the military in the barracks. Continued European engagement on future EU membership -- in jeopardy thanks to Continental politicians unable to think strategically (the latest being France's Nicolas Sarkozy) -- helps guide domestic reforms. Turkey is a crucial NATO state that borders Iran, Iraq, the Caucasus, Balkans and Mideast.
And though not an Arab country -- an important cultural and historical distinction -- Turkey is on a journey toward becoming a mature democratic nation-state that its Mideast neighbors have barely started, but are watching closely. In the past few years, Turks asked hard questions about themselves. Can Turkey stick together if Kurds get minority rights? What if discussion of the 1915 Armenian massacres is opened up? If women wear headscarves in schools? If the army stays out of politics? Most fundamentally, can public space be carved out in a Muslim country for Islam in a way that safeguards the rights of believers and nonbelievers and strengthens democracy in the process?
How unfortunate it would be to fail to get answers, and if this remarkable period in Turkish history were -- in the name of some 1920s-era notion of secularism -- prematurely brought to an end. Such an outcome would lead to the conclusion that Muslim polities are incorrigibly illiberal, unable to stomach real democracy. Though their politics are messy, the Turks give us good reason to believe otherwise.
Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118487879551972111.html
'Firm' Muslim gathering draws almost 90,000
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Nearly 90,000 followers of a hard-line Muslim group packed a stadium in the Indonesian capital Sunday, calling for the creation of an Islamic state.
Hizbut Tahrir, a Sunni organization with an estimated 1 million members, is banned in some Asian and Arab countries, but drew supporters from Europe, Africa and the Middle East to Indonesia for a meeting of the group that is held every two years.
Speeches called for the return of the caliphate, or Islamic statehood, across the Muslim world. The crowd, divided into sections for women and men, roared in support.
"We need to carry this message from every corner from the east to west, so that on judgment day we can be proud," said Salim Frederick of Hizbut Tahrir's English branch.
The freedom of expression that Muslims enjoy in Indonesia is a luxury compared to most other countries, said Hassan Ko Nakata of the Japanese Muslim Association.
High school teacher Erni Tri, 40, said she drove two hours with her husband and three children to attend the prayers, music and speeches in Jakarta.
Hizbut Tahrir "is firm and uncompromising toward un-Islamic cultures," she said. "It is driven by love for Allah and has no hidden agenda to get votes or power."
The group has said it does not support violence to obtain its objective.
Speakers from England and Australia, Imran Waheed and Sheikh Ismail al Wahwah, were deported upon arrival in Indonesia, a spokesman said. It was not immediately clear why they were not allowed to attend.
"Those responsible for this are being paranoid," Ismail Yusanto told reporters. "This has hurt our right of freedom of expression."
Though Hizbut Tahrir's rallies are usually peaceful, the U.S. Embassy last week cautioned its citizens against going near the gathering, noting that some recent demonstrations in Indonesia — the world's most populous Muslim nation — have turned violent.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2 ... htm?csp=34
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Nearly 90,000 followers of a hard-line Muslim group packed a stadium in the Indonesian capital Sunday, calling for the creation of an Islamic state.
Hizbut Tahrir, a Sunni organization with an estimated 1 million members, is banned in some Asian and Arab countries, but drew supporters from Europe, Africa and the Middle East to Indonesia for a meeting of the group that is held every two years.
Speeches called for the return of the caliphate, or Islamic statehood, across the Muslim world. The crowd, divided into sections for women and men, roared in support.
"We need to carry this message from every corner from the east to west, so that on judgment day we can be proud," said Salim Frederick of Hizbut Tahrir's English branch.
The freedom of expression that Muslims enjoy in Indonesia is a luxury compared to most other countries, said Hassan Ko Nakata of the Japanese Muslim Association.
High school teacher Erni Tri, 40, said she drove two hours with her husband and three children to attend the prayers, music and speeches in Jakarta.
Hizbut Tahrir "is firm and uncompromising toward un-Islamic cultures," she said. "It is driven by love for Allah and has no hidden agenda to get votes or power."
The group has said it does not support violence to obtain its objective.
Speakers from England and Australia, Imran Waheed and Sheikh Ismail al Wahwah, were deported upon arrival in Indonesia, a spokesman said. It was not immediately clear why they were not allowed to attend.
"Those responsible for this are being paranoid," Ismail Yusanto told reporters. "This has hurt our right of freedom of expression."
Though Hizbut Tahrir's rallies are usually peaceful, the U.S. Embassy last week cautioned its citizens against going near the gathering, noting that some recent demonstrations in Indonesia — the world's most populous Muslim nation — have turned violent.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2 ... htm?csp=34
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... c380cf17ea
Amanpour examines God's Warriors
Graeme Morton
Calgary Herald
Saturday, August 18, 2007
CNN is screening a compelling, six-hour examination of the growing collision between religion and politics next week.
Christiane Amanpour, the network's chief international correspondent, spent months preparing God's Warriors, which will run from Tuesday, Aug. 21 to Thursday, Aug. 23.
It's an examination of millions of Jews, Muslims and Christians who share a deep dissatisfaction with modern, secular society.
"These are people who view the world through a religious prism," says Amanpour. "They want God back in the centre of their lives and it's a battle they say they can't afford to lose."
The series opens Tuesday with God's Jewish Warriors, which looks at settlers who view the occupation of the contested West Bank as fulfilling biblical prophecy. Amanpour also examines the growing alliance between conservative American evangelicals and Israel.
God's Muslim Warriors notes young Muslims in the U.S. are twice as likely as their parents to attend a mosque and to view themselves as Muslims first and Americans second.
For Thursday's final chapter, God's Christian Warriors, Amanpour talked at length with Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, just a week before he died of heart failure in mid-May.
Through his Liberty University, Falwell said he was "trying to raise a generation of young people who will confront the (secular) culture."
Amanpour notes one-third of Americans surveyed want to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools and replace it with creationism.
God's Warriors, which runs at 7 p.m. Tuesday to Thursday on CNN (Ch. 29), will interest both those within faith communities and those who view organized religion as a negative force.
gmorton@theherald.canwest.com
© The Calgary Herald 2007
Amanpour examines God's Warriors
Graeme Morton
Calgary Herald
Saturday, August 18, 2007
CNN is screening a compelling, six-hour examination of the growing collision between religion and politics next week.
Christiane Amanpour, the network's chief international correspondent, spent months preparing God's Warriors, which will run from Tuesday, Aug. 21 to Thursday, Aug. 23.
It's an examination of millions of Jews, Muslims and Christians who share a deep dissatisfaction with modern, secular society.
"These are people who view the world through a religious prism," says Amanpour. "They want God back in the centre of their lives and it's a battle they say they can't afford to lose."
The series opens Tuesday with God's Jewish Warriors, which looks at settlers who view the occupation of the contested West Bank as fulfilling biblical prophecy. Amanpour also examines the growing alliance between conservative American evangelicals and Israel.
God's Muslim Warriors notes young Muslims in the U.S. are twice as likely as their parents to attend a mosque and to view themselves as Muslims first and Americans second.
For Thursday's final chapter, God's Christian Warriors, Amanpour talked at length with Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, just a week before he died of heart failure in mid-May.
Through his Liberty University, Falwell said he was "trying to raise a generation of young people who will confront the (secular) culture."
Amanpour notes one-third of Americans surveyed want to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools and replace it with creationism.
God's Warriors, which runs at 7 p.m. Tuesday to Thursday on CNN (Ch. 29), will interest both those within faith communities and those who view organized religion as a negative force.
gmorton@theherald.canwest.com
© The Calgary Herald 2007
August 29, 2007
Turk With Islamic Ties Is Elected President
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and SEBNEM ARSU
ANKARA, Turkey, Aug. 28 — An observant Muslim with a background in Islamic politics was voted in on Tuesday as president, breaking an 84-year grip on power by the secular establishment and ushering a new religious middle class from Turkey’s heartland into the center of the staunchly secular state.
Lawmakers approved Abdullah Gul, a 56-year-old economist, with 339 votes, far above the simple majority required in the 550-member Parliament. Two candidates shared another 83 votes. The main party of the secular establishment boycotted the balloting.
The selection of Mr. Gul ended four months of political standoff that began when Turkey’s secular establishment and military, vehemently opposed to his candidacy, blocked it in May, forcing a national election last month.
But Mr. Gul’s party, Justice and Development, refused to back down, and his success was a rare occasion in Turkish history in which a party prevailed against the military.
There was no immediate statement from the military, which has ousted four elected governments since 1960. But its unspoken reaction was frosty: No military commander attended Mr. Gul’s inaugural ceremony, a highly unusual departure from protocol, considering that he is now the commander in chief.
“This is definitely a day when we are turning a page, an important page, in the political history of the country,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul.
“The boundaries have been expanded in favor of civilian democracy,” he added.
As president, Mr. Gul has veto power over legislation. He also has control over hundreds of appointments, particularly to the judiciary. His election places his party in control of most of the Turkish state, with the posts of prime minister, speaker of Parliament and president.
The election upsets the power hierarchy in Turkey, a secular democracy whose citizens are Muslims, by opening up the presidency — an elite secular post that was first occupied by this country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — to a new class of reform-minded leaders from Turkey’s provinces, for decades considered backward by the elite.
His hometown, Kayseri, was decorated with Turkish flags, and a sound system was installed in the city center to broadcast the ceremony and celebration, a scene carried by NTV television as he succeeded Ahmet Necdet Sezer.
But he will have to work to convince skeptical Turks of the country’s western cities that he will also represent them.
“He has on his shoulders a very heavy burden — an Islamist past,” said Baskin Oran, a liberal-minded political science professor who ran unsuccessfully for Parliament as an independent in July. “He has to be twice as careful as a secular statesman.”
In his acceptance speech in Parliament, Mr. Gul emphasized his commitment to Turkey’s secular values. He renewed his pledge to push for Turkey’s membership in the European Union, an effort that he has led tirelessly in his four years as foreign minister.
“Secularism, one of the basic principles of our republic, is a rule of social peace,” he said, dressed in a dark suit and a red tie. “My door will be open to everyone.”
A decade ago, Mr. Gul’s nomination would have been unthinkable: The elite and the military had kept the conservative middle class he comes from away from the center of power, on the grounds that they were the protectors of Ataturk’s legacy. The vote on Tuesday changed that.
Ali Murat Yel, chairman of the sociology department at Fatih University in Istanbul, said the selection of Mr. Gul was comparable in significance to an African-American being elected president in the United States.
“It’s a very important turning point,” Mr. Yel said. “Those people who are the peasants and farmers and petty bourgeoisie always had republican values imposed on them. Now they are rising against it. They are saying, ‘Hey, we are here, and we want our own way.’ ”
Though Turkey’s secular establishment has taken pains to portray Mr. Gul and his close ally, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as inseparable from their Islamic pasts, their supporters argue they have changed dramatically since the early 1990s, when they were members of the overtly Islamic Welfare Party.
“They can sit on the same table as some people who drink alcohol and they drink their Coke, and they would be able to talk to them,” Mr. Yel said. “They have come to terms with the reality of this country.”
Saban Disli, a deputy from Mr. Gul’s party, expressed frustration that no matter what the party did to convince Turks that its leaders had changed their ways, it was impossible to escape the label of Islamist.
“No matter what, there seems to be a sign plastered on our necks and we cannot get rid of it,” he said. “The time has come for people to believe in what they see, not what they hear.”
Most Turks strongly oppose the idea of a religiously oriented government, and the overwhelming portion of Mr. Gul’s constituency voted for his party because they said it had done well running the country, not because its leaders were pious men. Their policies over the past four years in power have reflected a careful respect for secular principles, many say, and have brought an economic boom and rising property values.
Beyond the elite’s desire to stay in power, less privileged Turks have concerns about Mr. Gul’s party, and the debate will now resume over where Islam fits in the building of an equitable society — a question also preoccupying Western democracies.
Thousands of rank-and-file party members are settling into the Turkish bureaucracy, and some Turks worry that a more conservative worldview could begin to affect their secular lifestyles in deeply personal areas, like education for their children.
“We are in uncharted waters,” Mr. Ozel said. “We don’t know how they will run the country. This is not a party that has articulated its world view very clearly.”
Among the early business of Mr. Gul’s party will be rewriting Turkey’s Constitution, to remove the military influences it had absorbed in the military coups.
“It is true that the Constitution needs fundamental changes,” said Akif Hamzacebi, a deputy from the secular opposition Republican People’s Party, but he added that it will probably serve the party’s purposes rather than Turkish society.
But many in Turkey do not agree. Mr. Oran argues that rewriting the Constitution would reserve the party a place in Turkish history books, and says that the fact that Mr. Gul’s wife wears a head scarf is in fact a plus, as her presence will teach Turks to value their differences, instead of using policy to stamp religion out of all public places.
“Ankara will also come to terms that the headscarf is not a gun to be frightened of, but a personal choice to be respected,” said Ahmet Hasyuncu, head of an industrial zone in Kayseri.
The American ambassador to Turkey, Ross Wilson, welcomed Mr. Gul’s election.
As for the military, one apparent effect of the election has been to weaken its hold over politics. On Monday, Yasar Buyukanit, the military’s chief of staff, said in a statement that “centers of evil” were working to erode secularism in Turkey. But the statement did not have the resonance of one in April, and few on Tuesday believed that there was a serious threat of a coup.
“Quite frankly, unless the world goes totally upside down, I don’t see how they could find a context in which they could legitimately intervene,” Mr. Ozel said.
Sabrina Tavernise reported from Baghdad, and Sebnem Arsu from Ankara.
Turk With Islamic Ties Is Elected President
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and SEBNEM ARSU
ANKARA, Turkey, Aug. 28 — An observant Muslim with a background in Islamic politics was voted in on Tuesday as president, breaking an 84-year grip on power by the secular establishment and ushering a new religious middle class from Turkey’s heartland into the center of the staunchly secular state.
Lawmakers approved Abdullah Gul, a 56-year-old economist, with 339 votes, far above the simple majority required in the 550-member Parliament. Two candidates shared another 83 votes. The main party of the secular establishment boycotted the balloting.
The selection of Mr. Gul ended four months of political standoff that began when Turkey’s secular establishment and military, vehemently opposed to his candidacy, blocked it in May, forcing a national election last month.
But Mr. Gul’s party, Justice and Development, refused to back down, and his success was a rare occasion in Turkish history in which a party prevailed against the military.
There was no immediate statement from the military, which has ousted four elected governments since 1960. But its unspoken reaction was frosty: No military commander attended Mr. Gul’s inaugural ceremony, a highly unusual departure from protocol, considering that he is now the commander in chief.
“This is definitely a day when we are turning a page, an important page, in the political history of the country,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul.
“The boundaries have been expanded in favor of civilian democracy,” he added.
As president, Mr. Gul has veto power over legislation. He also has control over hundreds of appointments, particularly to the judiciary. His election places his party in control of most of the Turkish state, with the posts of prime minister, speaker of Parliament and president.
The election upsets the power hierarchy in Turkey, a secular democracy whose citizens are Muslims, by opening up the presidency — an elite secular post that was first occupied by this country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — to a new class of reform-minded leaders from Turkey’s provinces, for decades considered backward by the elite.
His hometown, Kayseri, was decorated with Turkish flags, and a sound system was installed in the city center to broadcast the ceremony and celebration, a scene carried by NTV television as he succeeded Ahmet Necdet Sezer.
But he will have to work to convince skeptical Turks of the country’s western cities that he will also represent them.
“He has on his shoulders a very heavy burden — an Islamist past,” said Baskin Oran, a liberal-minded political science professor who ran unsuccessfully for Parliament as an independent in July. “He has to be twice as careful as a secular statesman.”
In his acceptance speech in Parliament, Mr. Gul emphasized his commitment to Turkey’s secular values. He renewed his pledge to push for Turkey’s membership in the European Union, an effort that he has led tirelessly in his four years as foreign minister.
“Secularism, one of the basic principles of our republic, is a rule of social peace,” he said, dressed in a dark suit and a red tie. “My door will be open to everyone.”
A decade ago, Mr. Gul’s nomination would have been unthinkable: The elite and the military had kept the conservative middle class he comes from away from the center of power, on the grounds that they were the protectors of Ataturk’s legacy. The vote on Tuesday changed that.
Ali Murat Yel, chairman of the sociology department at Fatih University in Istanbul, said the selection of Mr. Gul was comparable in significance to an African-American being elected president in the United States.
“It’s a very important turning point,” Mr. Yel said. “Those people who are the peasants and farmers and petty bourgeoisie always had republican values imposed on them. Now they are rising against it. They are saying, ‘Hey, we are here, and we want our own way.’ ”
Though Turkey’s secular establishment has taken pains to portray Mr. Gul and his close ally, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as inseparable from their Islamic pasts, their supporters argue they have changed dramatically since the early 1990s, when they were members of the overtly Islamic Welfare Party.
“They can sit on the same table as some people who drink alcohol and they drink their Coke, and they would be able to talk to them,” Mr. Yel said. “They have come to terms with the reality of this country.”
Saban Disli, a deputy from Mr. Gul’s party, expressed frustration that no matter what the party did to convince Turks that its leaders had changed their ways, it was impossible to escape the label of Islamist.
“No matter what, there seems to be a sign plastered on our necks and we cannot get rid of it,” he said. “The time has come for people to believe in what they see, not what they hear.”
Most Turks strongly oppose the idea of a religiously oriented government, and the overwhelming portion of Mr. Gul’s constituency voted for his party because they said it had done well running the country, not because its leaders were pious men. Their policies over the past four years in power have reflected a careful respect for secular principles, many say, and have brought an economic boom and rising property values.
Beyond the elite’s desire to stay in power, less privileged Turks have concerns about Mr. Gul’s party, and the debate will now resume over where Islam fits in the building of an equitable society — a question also preoccupying Western democracies.
Thousands of rank-and-file party members are settling into the Turkish bureaucracy, and some Turks worry that a more conservative worldview could begin to affect their secular lifestyles in deeply personal areas, like education for their children.
“We are in uncharted waters,” Mr. Ozel said. “We don’t know how they will run the country. This is not a party that has articulated its world view very clearly.”
Among the early business of Mr. Gul’s party will be rewriting Turkey’s Constitution, to remove the military influences it had absorbed in the military coups.
“It is true that the Constitution needs fundamental changes,” said Akif Hamzacebi, a deputy from the secular opposition Republican People’s Party, but he added that it will probably serve the party’s purposes rather than Turkish society.
But many in Turkey do not agree. Mr. Oran argues that rewriting the Constitution would reserve the party a place in Turkish history books, and says that the fact that Mr. Gul’s wife wears a head scarf is in fact a plus, as her presence will teach Turks to value their differences, instead of using policy to stamp religion out of all public places.
“Ankara will also come to terms that the headscarf is not a gun to be frightened of, but a personal choice to be respected,” said Ahmet Hasyuncu, head of an industrial zone in Kayseri.
The American ambassador to Turkey, Ross Wilson, welcomed Mr. Gul’s election.
As for the military, one apparent effect of the election has been to weaken its hold over politics. On Monday, Yasar Buyukanit, the military’s chief of staff, said in a statement that “centers of evil” were working to erode secularism in Turkey. But the statement did not have the resonance of one in April, and few on Tuesday believed that there was a serious threat of a coup.
“Quite frankly, unless the world goes totally upside down, I don’t see how they could find a context in which they could legitimately intervene,” Mr. Ozel said.
Sabrina Tavernise reported from Baghdad, and Sebnem Arsu from Ankara.
from the August 30, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0830/p09s01-coop.html
Four views on Islam and the state
Can Islam support a secular, democratic government?
I need a secular state
By Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im
ALTANTA – To be a Muslim by conviction and free choice – which is the only way one can be a Muslim – I need to live in a secular state. By a secular state, I mean one that is neutral regarding religious doctrine to facilitate genuine piety. The state should not enforce sharia (the religious law of Islam) because compliance should never be coerced by fear or faked to appease state officials. When observed voluntarily, sharia-based values can help shape laws and public policy through the democratic process. But if sharia principles are enacted as state law, the outcome will simply be the political will of the state.
Many Muslims equate secularism with antireligious attitudes. Yet I believe that a secular state can promote genuine religious experience among believers and affirm the role of Islam in public life.
The so-called Islamic state is conceptually incoherent and historically unprecedented. There simply is no scriptural basis for an "Islamic state" to enforce sharia.
The leadership of the prophet Muhammad in Medina is an inspiring model of the values Muslims should strive for in self-governance, transparency, and accountability. But since Muslims believe that there is no prophet after Muhammad, the Medina model cannot be replicated.
There's no precedent for an Islamic state in practice. Historically, rulers sought the support of Islamic scholars and religious leaders to legitimize their authority, but religious authorities needed to maintain their autonomy. This was always a negotiated relationship, not a marriage.
The experience of the vast majority of Muslims across the world today is about struggles for constitutionalism and human rights, economic development and social justice – not about the quest for Islamic states to enforce sharia. The world community must support Muslims in these struggles instead of punishing them for the sins of the extremist fringe of political Islamists.
Muslims and others often blame sharia and Islam for the backwardness and underdevelopment of Islamic societies. This view is inaccurate and unproductive. Such blame shifts responsibility and the ability to change away from Muslims as human agents to abstract forces or causes.
Historical interpretations of sharia that discriminate against women and non-Muslims can and should be reinterpreted and reformed. Without such transformation, state officials cannot be expected or trusted to uphold principles of constitutionalism and human rights. Yet those principles are prerequisites for advocating the necessary transformation. The secular state provides the space for and facilitates both aspects of this dialectic process.
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im is the author of the forthcoming book "Islam and Secular State: Negotiating the future of Sharia."
****
Burqas and ballots
By Jocelyne Cesari
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. – Islam is often perceived as a potential threat to democratization. Justifications for this view are grounded in the common view that for Islam there's no separation between politics and religion.
In the West, politics based on individual rights and religion as independent of the state have marked the triumph of a liberal vision of the self within a secularized public arena. It may be argued that no similar movement has taken place in the Muslim world. It may be tempting, then, to infer that the Muslim mind is resistant to secularization. However, the reasons for such resistance are political and contextual and have very little to do with the Koran.
Within the Muslim world, Islam either is a state religion or is under state control. Therefore, the state is almost always the primary agent responsible for the authoritative interpretation of tradition.
As a result, Islamic thought has lost a certain vitality, not only in questions of government, but also on issues of culture and society. Thus it is not that the so-called Muslim mind is naturally resistant to critical thinking, but rather that analysis and judgment have too often been the exclusive prerogative of political authorities.
In fact, recent polls show that Muslims praise democracy as the best political system. At the same time, they acknowledge the importance that sharia, or Islamic law, plays in their lives. This is where misunderstanding often occurs. Sharia does not refer to actual laws but to a set of moral principles and norms that guide Muslims in their personal and social choices.
In the same vein, most Muslims living in Europe and the US appreciate the democratic and secular nature of the states where they reside. With minor exceptions, there is no real attempt by Muslims in the West to change Western political regimes and to establish Islamic states.
This does not mean, however, that all tensions disappear. In other words, even if the caliphate (Islamic government comprising Muslims worldwide) is not really a priority for Muslims in the West, conflicts of interest on values have emerged as illustrated by the Salman Rushdie affair and the head-scarf and cartoon crises. Areas of conflict between interpretations of Islamic tradition and the social norms of secular democracies include the family, the status of women in marriage and divorce, and the education of children.
Thus, Muslims want to be democratic on their own terms. This means that they want religious norms to be visible in their personal, daily lives – even if they live in the West. Moreover, this means that members of democratic, Muslim-majority societies would want religious norms to be acknowledged in public social life.
This raises legitimate concerns about the recognition and freedom of other religious minorities within a social system dominated by Islamic references. Western politicians and intellectuals must acknowledge processes of modernization and democratization that include Islamic references, while striving to protect religious and cultural minorities and guarantee freedom of expression. Without these safeguards, it is impossible to envision any democracy, Islamic or otherwise.
• Jocelyne Cesari is a professor of Islamic studies at Harvard. Her essayappears courtesy of the Common Ground News Service.
The leery Arab street
By Jorgen S. Nielsen
DAMASCUS, SYRIA – Why is it that Muslims appear to find it so difficult to see anything positive in Western secularism?
In some Muslim languages, the discussion is made almost impossible by the fact that the word used for secularism translates into English as "no religion" or "without religion."
Certainly, Muslims do not like a lot of what they see as Western: the loneliness of the individual, the breakdown of the family, the destruction of drug addiction, random violence, recreational sex. Of course, they are not alone in feeling these concerns, and many conclude that the cause is the decline of religion.
In the mid-1920s, the Egyptian scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq's book "Islam and the Roots of Government" argued that the prophet Muhammad had founded a religion, not a state, so religion should not determine state structures today. The book was immediately condemned and, we are told by most Islamic scholars, is no longer of interest. But it has remained continuously in print since then and can still be bought in Cairo bookshops. So someone must be reading it!
I talked recently with a group of Islamic scholars from one of the more conservative movements in Britain. We got on to the topic of an "Islamic order." Clearly, it was not enough that a government or economic system should call itself Islamic. It had to be Islamic. But what did that mean? That led to things such as social justice, a reliable legal system, personal liberty, equality, popular participation, accountable rulers, etc. One scholar ventured that northern European welfare states were arguably a good deal more "Islamic" than any state in the Muslim world.
If there are such important shared values, why then such mixed feelings about the idea of secularism? Clearly, the attack on secularism is encouraged by the clerics. If religion in its traditional forms is pushed to the margins of public life, what remains for them?
On the Arab street, secularism is often seen as a foreign import, brought in by the colonialists as a way of limiting the power of the Islamic religious institutions that often provided the core of anticolonial resistance. Secular politics is also associated with the military dictatorships that survived in alliance with the opposing powers of the cold-war period.
Today, the only effective challenge to this inheritance comes from the Islamist movements, and people arguing for a secular perspective run the constant danger of being accused of collaboration with the West. It is this twin dynamic that makes it more likely for many to tilt away from modern, pluralistic secularism toward a religious political system.
• Jorgen S. Nielsen is director of the Danish Institute in Damascus. His essay is from the Common Ground News Service.
Political Islam's ethics
By Bill Warner
FRANKLIN, TENN. – Arguing about religion is fruitless, but we can and should talk about politics. Discussion about the relationship between Islam and secularism must be based on an understanding of political Islam and its dualism. What is Islam? Answers from Muslims and Westerners are contradictory and confusing. But the scientific method gives clarity.
Scientific analysis shows that there are two Korans, one written in Mecca (the early part) and the second written in Medina (the later part). The two Korans include contradictions. "You have your religion and I have mine" (109:6) is a far cry from "I shall cast terror in the hearts of the kafirs [non-Muslims]. Strike off their heads…" (8:12). The Koran gives an answer to these contradictions – the later verse is "better" than the earlier verse (2:106). The Koran defines an Islamic logic that is dualistic. In a unitary, scientific logic, if two things contradict each other, then one of them is false. Not so in dualistic logic – both can be true!
Islam divides humanity into two groups: Muslims and kafirs (unbelievers). The doctrine that applies to Muslims is cultural, legal, and religious. The doctrine that applies to kafirs is political. Sixty-seven percent of the Meccan Koran and 51 percent of the Medinan Koran is political. Even the concept of hell is political, not religious. Of the 146 parts of the Koran that refer to hell, only 4 percent deal with morality – such as murder or theft. But 96 percent refer to people who are hellbound if they do not agree with Islam's prophet Muhammad – an intellectual and political position.
Muhammad preached the religion of Islam for 13 years and garnered 150 followers. Then, in Medina, Islam became political, and through jihad, he became the first ruler of all Arabia. Islam succeeded in spreading across the globe largely because it became a form of politics.
The Koran says in 14 verses that a Muslim is not the friend of the kafir. This is pure dualism. The entire world is divided between Islam and the kafirs. The dualism of the Koran has no universal statements about humanity except that every person must submit to political Islam.
Ethics is the membrane between religion and politics. Islam has two sets of ethics. One set is for Muslims and the other set is for kafirs; this is dualistic ethics. A Muslim should not harm another Muslim, but the kafir can be robbed, killed, or cheated to advance Islam. Islamic political dualism is hidden by religion. The "good" verses of the Meccan Koran cover the verses of jihad in the Medinan Koran. Thus religious Islam shields political Islam from examination.
Some Muslims point to Turkey and claim that Islam can have a modern secular government. But authentic Islam and authentic secularism are contradictions. Secularism is made possible only on a foundation of a separation of religion and the state, freedom of conscience, and a universal ethical and legal system. But Muhammad integrated government and religion. Islam by definition means total submission to the will of Allah. And the dualistic logic of the Koran designates one set of ethics and laws for kafirs and another set for believers. Therefore, political Islam precludes secularism.
Bill Warner is director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam.
Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links
Four views on Islam and the state
Can Islam support a secular, democratic government?
I need a secular state
By Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im
ALTANTA – To be a Muslim by conviction and free choice – which is the only way one can be a Muslim – I need to live in a secular state. By a secular state, I mean one that is neutral regarding religious doctrine to facilitate genuine piety. The state should not enforce sharia (the religious law of Islam) because compliance should never be coerced by fear or faked to appease state officials. When observed voluntarily, sharia-based values can help shape laws and public policy through the democratic process. But if sharia principles are enacted as state law, the outcome will simply be the political will of the state.
Many Muslims equate secularism with antireligious attitudes. Yet I believe that a secular state can promote genuine religious experience among believers and affirm the role of Islam in public life.
The so-called Islamic state is conceptually incoherent and historically unprecedented. There simply is no scriptural basis for an "Islamic state" to enforce sharia.
The leadership of the prophet Muhammad in Medina is an inspiring model of the values Muslims should strive for in self-governance, transparency, and accountability. But since Muslims believe that there is no prophet after Muhammad, the Medina model cannot be replicated.
There's no precedent for an Islamic state in practice. Historically, rulers sought the support of Islamic scholars and religious leaders to legitimize their authority, but religious authorities needed to maintain their autonomy. This was always a negotiated relationship, not a marriage.
The experience of the vast majority of Muslims across the world today is about struggles for constitutionalism and human rights, economic development and social justice – not about the quest for Islamic states to enforce sharia. The world community must support Muslims in these struggles instead of punishing them for the sins of the extremist fringe of political Islamists.
Muslims and others often blame sharia and Islam for the backwardness and underdevelopment of Islamic societies. This view is inaccurate and unproductive. Such blame shifts responsibility and the ability to change away from Muslims as human agents to abstract forces or causes.
Historical interpretations of sharia that discriminate against women and non-Muslims can and should be reinterpreted and reformed. Without such transformation, state officials cannot be expected or trusted to uphold principles of constitutionalism and human rights. Yet those principles are prerequisites for advocating the necessary transformation. The secular state provides the space for and facilitates both aspects of this dialectic process.
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im is the author of the forthcoming book "Islam and Secular State: Negotiating the future of Sharia."
****
Burqas and ballots
By Jocelyne Cesari
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. – Islam is often perceived as a potential threat to democratization. Justifications for this view are grounded in the common view that for Islam there's no separation between politics and religion.
In the West, politics based on individual rights and religion as independent of the state have marked the triumph of a liberal vision of the self within a secularized public arena. It may be argued that no similar movement has taken place in the Muslim world. It may be tempting, then, to infer that the Muslim mind is resistant to secularization. However, the reasons for such resistance are political and contextual and have very little to do with the Koran.
Within the Muslim world, Islam either is a state religion or is under state control. Therefore, the state is almost always the primary agent responsible for the authoritative interpretation of tradition.
As a result, Islamic thought has lost a certain vitality, not only in questions of government, but also on issues of culture and society. Thus it is not that the so-called Muslim mind is naturally resistant to critical thinking, but rather that analysis and judgment have too often been the exclusive prerogative of political authorities.
In fact, recent polls show that Muslims praise democracy as the best political system. At the same time, they acknowledge the importance that sharia, or Islamic law, plays in their lives. This is where misunderstanding often occurs. Sharia does not refer to actual laws but to a set of moral principles and norms that guide Muslims in their personal and social choices.
In the same vein, most Muslims living in Europe and the US appreciate the democratic and secular nature of the states where they reside. With minor exceptions, there is no real attempt by Muslims in the West to change Western political regimes and to establish Islamic states.
This does not mean, however, that all tensions disappear. In other words, even if the caliphate (Islamic government comprising Muslims worldwide) is not really a priority for Muslims in the West, conflicts of interest on values have emerged as illustrated by the Salman Rushdie affair and the head-scarf and cartoon crises. Areas of conflict between interpretations of Islamic tradition and the social norms of secular democracies include the family, the status of women in marriage and divorce, and the education of children.
Thus, Muslims want to be democratic on their own terms. This means that they want religious norms to be visible in their personal, daily lives – even if they live in the West. Moreover, this means that members of democratic, Muslim-majority societies would want religious norms to be acknowledged in public social life.
This raises legitimate concerns about the recognition and freedom of other religious minorities within a social system dominated by Islamic references. Western politicians and intellectuals must acknowledge processes of modernization and democratization that include Islamic references, while striving to protect religious and cultural minorities and guarantee freedom of expression. Without these safeguards, it is impossible to envision any democracy, Islamic or otherwise.
• Jocelyne Cesari is a professor of Islamic studies at Harvard. Her essayappears courtesy of the Common Ground News Service.
The leery Arab street
By Jorgen S. Nielsen
DAMASCUS, SYRIA – Why is it that Muslims appear to find it so difficult to see anything positive in Western secularism?
In some Muslim languages, the discussion is made almost impossible by the fact that the word used for secularism translates into English as "no religion" or "without religion."
Certainly, Muslims do not like a lot of what they see as Western: the loneliness of the individual, the breakdown of the family, the destruction of drug addiction, random violence, recreational sex. Of course, they are not alone in feeling these concerns, and many conclude that the cause is the decline of religion.
In the mid-1920s, the Egyptian scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq's book "Islam and the Roots of Government" argued that the prophet Muhammad had founded a religion, not a state, so religion should not determine state structures today. The book was immediately condemned and, we are told by most Islamic scholars, is no longer of interest. But it has remained continuously in print since then and can still be bought in Cairo bookshops. So someone must be reading it!
I talked recently with a group of Islamic scholars from one of the more conservative movements in Britain. We got on to the topic of an "Islamic order." Clearly, it was not enough that a government or economic system should call itself Islamic. It had to be Islamic. But what did that mean? That led to things such as social justice, a reliable legal system, personal liberty, equality, popular participation, accountable rulers, etc. One scholar ventured that northern European welfare states were arguably a good deal more "Islamic" than any state in the Muslim world.
If there are such important shared values, why then such mixed feelings about the idea of secularism? Clearly, the attack on secularism is encouraged by the clerics. If religion in its traditional forms is pushed to the margins of public life, what remains for them?
On the Arab street, secularism is often seen as a foreign import, brought in by the colonialists as a way of limiting the power of the Islamic religious institutions that often provided the core of anticolonial resistance. Secular politics is also associated with the military dictatorships that survived in alliance with the opposing powers of the cold-war period.
Today, the only effective challenge to this inheritance comes from the Islamist movements, and people arguing for a secular perspective run the constant danger of being accused of collaboration with the West. It is this twin dynamic that makes it more likely for many to tilt away from modern, pluralistic secularism toward a religious political system.
• Jorgen S. Nielsen is director of the Danish Institute in Damascus. His essay is from the Common Ground News Service.
Political Islam's ethics
By Bill Warner
FRANKLIN, TENN. – Arguing about religion is fruitless, but we can and should talk about politics. Discussion about the relationship between Islam and secularism must be based on an understanding of political Islam and its dualism. What is Islam? Answers from Muslims and Westerners are contradictory and confusing. But the scientific method gives clarity.
Scientific analysis shows that there are two Korans, one written in Mecca (the early part) and the second written in Medina (the later part). The two Korans include contradictions. "You have your religion and I have mine" (109:6) is a far cry from "I shall cast terror in the hearts of the kafirs [non-Muslims]. Strike off their heads…" (8:12). The Koran gives an answer to these contradictions – the later verse is "better" than the earlier verse (2:106). The Koran defines an Islamic logic that is dualistic. In a unitary, scientific logic, if two things contradict each other, then one of them is false. Not so in dualistic logic – both can be true!
Islam divides humanity into two groups: Muslims and kafirs (unbelievers). The doctrine that applies to Muslims is cultural, legal, and religious. The doctrine that applies to kafirs is political. Sixty-seven percent of the Meccan Koran and 51 percent of the Medinan Koran is political. Even the concept of hell is political, not religious. Of the 146 parts of the Koran that refer to hell, only 4 percent deal with morality – such as murder or theft. But 96 percent refer to people who are hellbound if they do not agree with Islam's prophet Muhammad – an intellectual and political position.
Muhammad preached the religion of Islam for 13 years and garnered 150 followers. Then, in Medina, Islam became political, and through jihad, he became the first ruler of all Arabia. Islam succeeded in spreading across the globe largely because it became a form of politics.
The Koran says in 14 verses that a Muslim is not the friend of the kafir. This is pure dualism. The entire world is divided between Islam and the kafirs. The dualism of the Koran has no universal statements about humanity except that every person must submit to political Islam.
Ethics is the membrane between religion and politics. Islam has two sets of ethics. One set is for Muslims and the other set is for kafirs; this is dualistic ethics. A Muslim should not harm another Muslim, but the kafir can be robbed, killed, or cheated to advance Islam. Islamic political dualism is hidden by religion. The "good" verses of the Meccan Koran cover the verses of jihad in the Medinan Koran. Thus religious Islam shields political Islam from examination.
Some Muslims point to Turkey and claim that Islam can have a modern secular government. But authentic Islam and authentic secularism are contradictions. Secularism is made possible only on a foundation of a separation of religion and the state, freedom of conscience, and a universal ethical and legal system. But Muhammad integrated government and religion. Islam by definition means total submission to the will of Allah. And the dualistic logic of the Koran designates one set of ethics and laws for kafirs and another set for believers. Therefore, political Islam precludes secularism.
Bill Warner is director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam.
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Faith and politics
The new wars of religion
Nov 1st 2007
From The Economist print edition
Faith will unsettle politics everywhere this century; it will do so least when it is separated from the state
A RELIGIOUS fanatic feels persecuted, goes overseas to fight for his God and then returns home to attempt a bloody act of terrorism. Next week as Britons celebrate the capture of Guy Fawkes, a Catholic jihadist, under the Houses of Parliament in 1605, they might reflect how dismally modern the Gunpowder Plot and Europe's wars of religion now seem.
Back in the 20th century, most Western politicians and intellectuals (and even some clerics) assumed religion was becoming marginal to public life; faith was largely treated as an irrelevance in foreign policy. Symptomatically, State Department diaries ignored Muslim holidays until the 1990s. In the 21st century, by contrast, religion is playing a central role. From Nigeria to Sri Lanka, from Chechnya to Baghdad, people have been slain in God's name; and money and volunteers have poured into these regions. Once again, one of the world's great religions has a bloody divide (this time it is Sunnis and Shias, not Catholics and Protestants). And once again zealotry seems all too relevant to foreign policy: America would surely not have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan (and be thinking so actively of striking Iran) had 19 young Muslims not attacked New York and Washington.
It does not stop there. Outside Western Europe, religion has forced itself dramatically into the public square. In 1960 John Kennedy pleaded with Americans to treat his Catholicism as irrelevant; now a born-again Christian sits in the White House and his most likely Democrat replacement wants voters to know she prays. An Islamist party rules once-secular Turkey; Hindu nationalists may return to power in India's next election; ever more children in Israel and Palestine are attending religious schools that tell them that God granted them the whole Holy Land. On present trends, China will become the world's biggest Christian country—and perhaps its biggest Muslim one too. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, not usually a reliable authority on current affairs, got it right in an open letter to George Bush: “Whether we like it or not,” he wrote, “the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty.”
Gunpowder, treason and plot
How frightening (or inspiring) is this prospect? As our special report explains, the idea that religion has re-emerged in public life is to some extent an illusion. It never really went away—certainly not to the extent that French politicians and American college professors imagined. Its new power is mostly the consequence of two changes. The first is the failure of secular creeds: religion's political comeback started during the 1970s, when faith in government everywhere was crumbling. Second, although some theocracies survive in the Islamic world, religion has returned to the stage as a much more democratic, individualistic affair: a bottom-up marketing success, surprisingly in tune with globalisation. Secularism was not as modern as many intellectuals imagined, but pluralism is. Free up religion and ardent believers and ardent atheists both do well.
From a classical liberal point of view, this multiplicity of sects is a good thing. Freedom of conscience is an axiom of liberal thought. If man is a theotropic beast, inclined to believe in a hereafter, it is surely better that he chooses his faith, rather than follows the one his government orders. But that makes religion a complicated force to deal with. In domestic policy, adults who choose to become Pentecostals, Orthodox Jews or Muslim fundamentalists are far less likely to forget those beliefs when it comes to the ballot box. The culture wars that America has grown used to may become a global phenomenon; expect fierce battles about science, in particular.
Abroad, yes, there is a chance of full-blown war of religion between states. A conflagration between Iran and Israel would, alas, be seen as a faith-based conflict by millions; so would war between India and Pakistan. But compared with Guy Fawkes's time, when wars sprang from monarchs throwing their military might at others of different faiths, religious conflict today is the result as much of popular will as of state sponsorship: it is bottom-up, driven by volunteers not conscripts, their activities blessed by rogue preachers not popes, their fury mostly directed at apostates not competing civilisations. Ironically, America, the model for much choice-based religion, has often seemed stuck in the secular era, declaring war on state-sponsored terror, only to discover the main weapon of militant Islamism is often the ballot box.
Start praying now
For politicians doomed to deal with religion, two lessons stand out—one principled, the other pragmatic. The principle is that church and state are best kept separate. Subsidised religion has seldom made sense for either state or church: witness Europe's empty pews. In some cases, separating the two is easy. In private, people can choose to believe that the world was created exactly 6,003 years ago, but teachers should not be allowed to teach children creationism as science. The state should not tell people whether they can wear headscarves, let alone ban “unauthorised” reincarnation (as China did recently in Tibet). But the line is not always easy to draw: this paper disapproves of publicly financed faith schools, especially ones that discriminate against non-believers, but it also believes in giving poor parents more choice—and in American cities the main alternative to public schools is Catholic ones.
The religion that invades the public square most overtly is Islam: it affords secular power the least respect, teaching that the primary unit of society is the umma, the international brotherhood of believers. At its most theocratic, it forces people to follow sharia laws, sometimes with barbaric penalties. Yet Islam can clearly co-exist with a modern liberal state. For all its failures in the Arab world, democracy has taken root in Malaysia and Indonesia. America's Muslims worship freely and respect its secular constitution—a success the United States should make more of in its foreign policy. But the test case will be Turkey, a secular state currently ruled by Islamists whose progress is being watched with nervous attention.
The pragmatic lesson concerns those wars of religion. Partly because of their obsession with keeping church and state separate, Western powers (and religious leaders) have been too reluctant to look for faith-driven solutions to religious conflicts. Many of those struggles, notably the Middle East, began as secular tribal disputes. Now that they have a religious component they are much harder to solve: if God granted you the West Bank, you are less likely to trade it. “Inter-faith dialogue” may sound a wishy-washy concept; but it is a more realistic idea than presenting a secular peace to competing faiths without the backing of religious leaders. Priests and pastors condemned violence from both sides in Northern Ireland; that has not really happened in the Holy Land.
Atheists and agnostics hate the fact, but these days religion is an inescapable part of politics. Although it is not the state's business “to make windows into men's souls”, it is part of the government's job to prevent grievances from stirring into bloodshed, and fanatics from guiding policy. But it isn't easy. Catholics did not get back into Parliament for 224 years after the Gunpowder Plot. Unless politicians learn to take account of religious feelings and to draw a firm line between church and state, the new wars of religion may prove as intractable
The new wars of religion
Nov 1st 2007
From The Economist print edition
Faith will unsettle politics everywhere this century; it will do so least when it is separated from the state
A RELIGIOUS fanatic feels persecuted, goes overseas to fight for his God and then returns home to attempt a bloody act of terrorism. Next week as Britons celebrate the capture of Guy Fawkes, a Catholic jihadist, under the Houses of Parliament in 1605, they might reflect how dismally modern the Gunpowder Plot and Europe's wars of religion now seem.
Back in the 20th century, most Western politicians and intellectuals (and even some clerics) assumed religion was becoming marginal to public life; faith was largely treated as an irrelevance in foreign policy. Symptomatically, State Department diaries ignored Muslim holidays until the 1990s. In the 21st century, by contrast, religion is playing a central role. From Nigeria to Sri Lanka, from Chechnya to Baghdad, people have been slain in God's name; and money and volunteers have poured into these regions. Once again, one of the world's great religions has a bloody divide (this time it is Sunnis and Shias, not Catholics and Protestants). And once again zealotry seems all too relevant to foreign policy: America would surely not have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan (and be thinking so actively of striking Iran) had 19 young Muslims not attacked New York and Washington.
It does not stop there. Outside Western Europe, religion has forced itself dramatically into the public square. In 1960 John Kennedy pleaded with Americans to treat his Catholicism as irrelevant; now a born-again Christian sits in the White House and his most likely Democrat replacement wants voters to know she prays. An Islamist party rules once-secular Turkey; Hindu nationalists may return to power in India's next election; ever more children in Israel and Palestine are attending religious schools that tell them that God granted them the whole Holy Land. On present trends, China will become the world's biggest Christian country—and perhaps its biggest Muslim one too. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, not usually a reliable authority on current affairs, got it right in an open letter to George Bush: “Whether we like it or not,” he wrote, “the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty.”
Gunpowder, treason and plot
How frightening (or inspiring) is this prospect? As our special report explains, the idea that religion has re-emerged in public life is to some extent an illusion. It never really went away—certainly not to the extent that French politicians and American college professors imagined. Its new power is mostly the consequence of two changes. The first is the failure of secular creeds: religion's political comeback started during the 1970s, when faith in government everywhere was crumbling. Second, although some theocracies survive in the Islamic world, religion has returned to the stage as a much more democratic, individualistic affair: a bottom-up marketing success, surprisingly in tune with globalisation. Secularism was not as modern as many intellectuals imagined, but pluralism is. Free up religion and ardent believers and ardent atheists both do well.
From a classical liberal point of view, this multiplicity of sects is a good thing. Freedom of conscience is an axiom of liberal thought. If man is a theotropic beast, inclined to believe in a hereafter, it is surely better that he chooses his faith, rather than follows the one his government orders. But that makes religion a complicated force to deal with. In domestic policy, adults who choose to become Pentecostals, Orthodox Jews or Muslim fundamentalists are far less likely to forget those beliefs when it comes to the ballot box. The culture wars that America has grown used to may become a global phenomenon; expect fierce battles about science, in particular.
Abroad, yes, there is a chance of full-blown war of religion between states. A conflagration between Iran and Israel would, alas, be seen as a faith-based conflict by millions; so would war between India and Pakistan. But compared with Guy Fawkes's time, when wars sprang from monarchs throwing their military might at others of different faiths, religious conflict today is the result as much of popular will as of state sponsorship: it is bottom-up, driven by volunteers not conscripts, their activities blessed by rogue preachers not popes, their fury mostly directed at apostates not competing civilisations. Ironically, America, the model for much choice-based religion, has often seemed stuck in the secular era, declaring war on state-sponsored terror, only to discover the main weapon of militant Islamism is often the ballot box.
Start praying now
For politicians doomed to deal with religion, two lessons stand out—one principled, the other pragmatic. The principle is that church and state are best kept separate. Subsidised religion has seldom made sense for either state or church: witness Europe's empty pews. In some cases, separating the two is easy. In private, people can choose to believe that the world was created exactly 6,003 years ago, but teachers should not be allowed to teach children creationism as science. The state should not tell people whether they can wear headscarves, let alone ban “unauthorised” reincarnation (as China did recently in Tibet). But the line is not always easy to draw: this paper disapproves of publicly financed faith schools, especially ones that discriminate against non-believers, but it also believes in giving poor parents more choice—and in American cities the main alternative to public schools is Catholic ones.
The religion that invades the public square most overtly is Islam: it affords secular power the least respect, teaching that the primary unit of society is the umma, the international brotherhood of believers. At its most theocratic, it forces people to follow sharia laws, sometimes with barbaric penalties. Yet Islam can clearly co-exist with a modern liberal state. For all its failures in the Arab world, democracy has taken root in Malaysia and Indonesia. America's Muslims worship freely and respect its secular constitution—a success the United States should make more of in its foreign policy. But the test case will be Turkey, a secular state currently ruled by Islamists whose progress is being watched with nervous attention.
The pragmatic lesson concerns those wars of religion. Partly because of their obsession with keeping church and state separate, Western powers (and religious leaders) have been too reluctant to look for faith-driven solutions to religious conflicts. Many of those struggles, notably the Middle East, began as secular tribal disputes. Now that they have a religious component they are much harder to solve: if God granted you the West Bank, you are less likely to trade it. “Inter-faith dialogue” may sound a wishy-washy concept; but it is a more realistic idea than presenting a secular peace to competing faiths without the backing of religious leaders. Priests and pastors condemned violence from both sides in Northern Ireland; that has not really happened in the Holy Land.
Atheists and agnostics hate the fact, but these days religion is an inescapable part of politics. Although it is not the state's business “to make windows into men's souls”, it is part of the government's job to prevent grievances from stirring into bloodshed, and fanatics from guiding policy. But it isn't easy. Catholics did not get back into Parliament for 224 years after the Gunpowder Plot. Unless politicians learn to take account of religious feelings and to draw a firm line between church and state, the new wars of religion may prove as intractable
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... amism.html
Post-Islamism
The future of Islamic reform lies with post-Islamism - a recognition that politics rather than religion provides for welfare in this life.
Ali Eteraz
There is universal consensus that Muslim dictatorships, supported by the west, are the root of evil. They destroy political culture, kill extra-judicially and their repression foments violence.
The primary opponents of these dictators are the populist Islamists. They want to vote; except after voting they want to appoint an extra-constitutional body of clerics to strike down legislation they do not approve of.
Faced with only these two options - dictators or elected theocrats - in Muslim majority countries, the usual reaction by westerners is to throw their hands up in frustration and opt for apathy or give into a militaristic pessimism. These are both uninformed reactions. They fail to take into account the future of Islamic reform, which lies with the emergence of a post-Islamist political order in the Muslim majority world.
Post-Islamism is at hand because a new crop of Muslims have figured out how to reconcile liberal democracy with Islam. Upon doing so, they give up on creating religious organisations devoted to "da'wa" (Islamic evangelism) and move towards becoming organised as civil-political parties with platforms based on equality and pluralism. Incidentally, part of the credit for the popularity of post-Islamism goes to the theocratic Islamists. In their eagerness to merge religion with politics, they thought the result would be religion. Instead, the devout middle class realised that religion alone could not provide for their social concerns. Post-Islamism, thus, is the recognition that while religion may provide salvation in the next life, politics is what provides for welfare in this one. It is, at its barest, politics subsuming religion.
Today, post-Islamist groups are at work in various Muslim majority countries, including Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan. These parties look to Germany's Christian Democratic Union as a model.
Egypt's premier post-Islamist party (pdf) is called Center Party (Hizb ul-Wasat). It was founded in 1996, breaking away from the Muslim Brotherhood due to various factors. The reasons for the split included: the Brotherhood's unwillingness to accept non-Muslims as members of the party or as citizens of Egypt, unwillingness to cease splitting the world between the "Abode of War" and "Abode of Islam", and unwillingness to change their focus away from Islamic evangelism. Although Wasat calls itself an Islamic party, it is open to Christians and secularists. In fact, Rafiq Habib, a Protestant intellectual in Egypt, was among its founding members, and is on its five man board of operations. After a 10-year battle, Wasat was officially recognised as a political party in 2007.
One way to assure that Wasat is not Islamism in disguise is to note how much opposition from the Muslim Brotherhood it has faced, which went so far as to petition the hated Mubarak regime to not legalise it.
The fundamental point that makes Wasat post-Islamist is that instead of defining Islam as a religion, it defines Islam as a culture, or civilisation, which is inclusive of minorities. Thinking of Islam as a culture is similar to how certain people in the west refer to the west as "Judeo-Christian" while still leaving room for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists to practise freely therein.
Further, the Wasat Party's platform assures the separation of powers, rejects religious or gender-based discrimination, explicitly calls for pluralism and equality between men and women, and makes space for unions and syndicates. Most importantly, unlike the Brotherhood's platform it does not set up an extra-constitutional body of clerics who can veto legislation (like they do in Iran). Oddly, having laid out such a liberal platform, Wasat insists that it will still uphold the sharia, a claim that has been described as "lip service." For example, the Cairo Times stated in 1998 that Wasat considers "people rather than scripture as the ultimate source of authority".
While Wasat's location and its face-off against the Muslim Brotherhood make it the most intriguing of the post-Islamist groups, it is not the most successful. That designation belongs to Turkey's ruling AKP Party, which, just as Wasat, originated by breaking away from a fundamentalist Islamist organisation.
Comprehensive analyses of the AKP positions vis a vis the three important benchmarks - women, the west and Israel - show that its breakaway from traditional Islamists has been clear and conclusive, and that it is nothing like the traditional Islamists such as the Brotherhood. For example, one of the first things that the AKP declared upon its election in 2002, as reported by the New York Times, was that "secularism is the protector of all beliefs and religions. We are the guarantors of this secularism, and our management will clearly prove that." Certainly western liberals will be dissatisfied that in terms of social and economic policy AKP is center-right, but the dissatisfaction ought not be any different than that felt when a conservative in Paris or Rome comes to power.
Pakistan, in the form of Tehreek i Insaf Party, is also showing signs of developing a post-Islamist alternative, though there it is in its infancy. It has emerged only during the Musharraf years, led by cricketer turned politician, Imran Khan. One of the most notable elements about it is that while it is grounded in Islam, it rejects Wahhabism (opting for "Sufism") and further, in its manifesto explicitly rejects having any "parallel" legal system in the country, which is a reference to the sharia courts in Pakistan that currently co-exist with the secular courts.
Tehreek's other innovative solutions include, free education for women, legislation against sexual harrassment and setting aside 33% of the seats in all legislative assemblies for women. It justifies all of these by citing principles of Islamic welfare.
Interestingly, just as the Wasat has antagonised the Brotherhood in Egypt, Tehreek has criticised (link in Urdu) Pakistan's hardline Islamist organisations for collusion with anti-democratic forces. This again shows that post-Islamists are more concerned with the democratic pie than appeasing Islamists. While Tehreek is nascent, it should be monitored closely, because it has increasing support among Pakistan's youth and expatriate communities. It should be remembered that it took Turkey's AKP party barely 10 years from formation to become the ruling party.
Today, political Islam is entering its third generation. The first round was revolutionary and violent. The second round, still with us, became more methodical but was still domination-oriented and supremacist. The third round - the post-Islamist push - is committed to the democratic process and has ceased to think of itself as a religious movement, instead adopting a civil-political platform. A paper (pdf) presented at the University of Virginia sets forth an interesting link between economic patterns and the post-Islamist push, stating that "economic liberalisation strengthens and expands the devout middle classes" who then push for "moderation in political Islam for they believe that democracy, rule of law, and a limited state would serve their interests betters". If this is true, then it means that the way for the west to challenge traditional domination-oriented Islamists like Jamat e Islami and the Brotherhood is to engage citizens in business, paving the way for post-Islamism.
When post-Islamist groups come to power, they will be social conservatives focused on family and spirituality (though not Wahhabism). On the issue of religion in politics, a post-Islamist politician will sound somewhere between John Edwards and Mike Huckabee. In their foreign policy they will reject intrusions upon their sovereignty from all foreign groups, including on one hand Nato and other western coalitions, and on the other, al-Qaida and the Taliban. However, they will generally abide by international norms and not launch themselves into international conflicts, finding them to be fiscally and socially expensive. This makes sense because their largest support comes from the middle classes. Their biggest trouble will be local and national rebel groups, whether it's Kurd separatists, al-Qaida or the Taliban. Finally, just as Europe's Christian democratic parties gave birth to liberal democrats, it is likely that after consolidating power, post-Islamic parties will create space for openly secular parties to gain more traction.
As a conclusion to this seven-part series, I'd like to submit that since 2001 we have devoted far too much time to the Islamic reform cult of personality. Faced with an increasingly complicated world, the time for heightened sophistication is now. Structural and political discussions - for example, about separation of mosque and state, the making of a Muslim left, the ideas of Muslim secularists, the debate over Islamic liberal democracy and the emergence of a post-Islamist Islam - are a completely overlooked part of this thing called "Islamic reform". The true and original goal of Islamic reform was to help voiceless Muslims and minorities. The social transformation necessary for creating such a landscape requires acknowledging that Islamic reform is at its heart a political, not merely religious, project.
This article is the last in a series by Ali Eteraz on Islamic reform:
Article 1: The roots of Islamic reform
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... eform.html
Article 2: The Islamic reformation
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... ation.html
Article 3: An Islamic counter-reformation
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... ation.html
Article 4: Beyond Islamic enlightenment
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... nment.html
Article 5: The making of the Muslim left
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... _left.html
Article 6: Muslim secularism and its allies
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... llies.html
Article 7: Post-Islamism
Post-Islamism
The future of Islamic reform lies with post-Islamism - a recognition that politics rather than religion provides for welfare in this life.
Ali Eteraz
There is universal consensus that Muslim dictatorships, supported by the west, are the root of evil. They destroy political culture, kill extra-judicially and their repression foments violence.
The primary opponents of these dictators are the populist Islamists. They want to vote; except after voting they want to appoint an extra-constitutional body of clerics to strike down legislation they do not approve of.
Faced with only these two options - dictators or elected theocrats - in Muslim majority countries, the usual reaction by westerners is to throw their hands up in frustration and opt for apathy or give into a militaristic pessimism. These are both uninformed reactions. They fail to take into account the future of Islamic reform, which lies with the emergence of a post-Islamist political order in the Muslim majority world.
Post-Islamism is at hand because a new crop of Muslims have figured out how to reconcile liberal democracy with Islam. Upon doing so, they give up on creating religious organisations devoted to "da'wa" (Islamic evangelism) and move towards becoming organised as civil-political parties with platforms based on equality and pluralism. Incidentally, part of the credit for the popularity of post-Islamism goes to the theocratic Islamists. In their eagerness to merge religion with politics, they thought the result would be religion. Instead, the devout middle class realised that religion alone could not provide for their social concerns. Post-Islamism, thus, is the recognition that while religion may provide salvation in the next life, politics is what provides for welfare in this one. It is, at its barest, politics subsuming religion.
Today, post-Islamist groups are at work in various Muslim majority countries, including Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan. These parties look to Germany's Christian Democratic Union as a model.
Egypt's premier post-Islamist party (pdf) is called Center Party (Hizb ul-Wasat). It was founded in 1996, breaking away from the Muslim Brotherhood due to various factors. The reasons for the split included: the Brotherhood's unwillingness to accept non-Muslims as members of the party or as citizens of Egypt, unwillingness to cease splitting the world between the "Abode of War" and "Abode of Islam", and unwillingness to change their focus away from Islamic evangelism. Although Wasat calls itself an Islamic party, it is open to Christians and secularists. In fact, Rafiq Habib, a Protestant intellectual in Egypt, was among its founding members, and is on its five man board of operations. After a 10-year battle, Wasat was officially recognised as a political party in 2007.
One way to assure that Wasat is not Islamism in disguise is to note how much opposition from the Muslim Brotherhood it has faced, which went so far as to petition the hated Mubarak regime to not legalise it.
The fundamental point that makes Wasat post-Islamist is that instead of defining Islam as a religion, it defines Islam as a culture, or civilisation, which is inclusive of minorities. Thinking of Islam as a culture is similar to how certain people in the west refer to the west as "Judeo-Christian" while still leaving room for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists to practise freely therein.
Further, the Wasat Party's platform assures the separation of powers, rejects religious or gender-based discrimination, explicitly calls for pluralism and equality between men and women, and makes space for unions and syndicates. Most importantly, unlike the Brotherhood's platform it does not set up an extra-constitutional body of clerics who can veto legislation (like they do in Iran). Oddly, having laid out such a liberal platform, Wasat insists that it will still uphold the sharia, a claim that has been described as "lip service." For example, the Cairo Times stated in 1998 that Wasat considers "people rather than scripture as the ultimate source of authority".
While Wasat's location and its face-off against the Muslim Brotherhood make it the most intriguing of the post-Islamist groups, it is not the most successful. That designation belongs to Turkey's ruling AKP Party, which, just as Wasat, originated by breaking away from a fundamentalist Islamist organisation.
Comprehensive analyses of the AKP positions vis a vis the three important benchmarks - women, the west and Israel - show that its breakaway from traditional Islamists has been clear and conclusive, and that it is nothing like the traditional Islamists such as the Brotherhood. For example, one of the first things that the AKP declared upon its election in 2002, as reported by the New York Times, was that "secularism is the protector of all beliefs and religions. We are the guarantors of this secularism, and our management will clearly prove that." Certainly western liberals will be dissatisfied that in terms of social and economic policy AKP is center-right, but the dissatisfaction ought not be any different than that felt when a conservative in Paris or Rome comes to power.
Pakistan, in the form of Tehreek i Insaf Party, is also showing signs of developing a post-Islamist alternative, though there it is in its infancy. It has emerged only during the Musharraf years, led by cricketer turned politician, Imran Khan. One of the most notable elements about it is that while it is grounded in Islam, it rejects Wahhabism (opting for "Sufism") and further, in its manifesto explicitly rejects having any "parallel" legal system in the country, which is a reference to the sharia courts in Pakistan that currently co-exist with the secular courts.
Tehreek's other innovative solutions include, free education for women, legislation against sexual harrassment and setting aside 33% of the seats in all legislative assemblies for women. It justifies all of these by citing principles of Islamic welfare.
Interestingly, just as the Wasat has antagonised the Brotherhood in Egypt, Tehreek has criticised (link in Urdu) Pakistan's hardline Islamist organisations for collusion with anti-democratic forces. This again shows that post-Islamists are more concerned with the democratic pie than appeasing Islamists. While Tehreek is nascent, it should be monitored closely, because it has increasing support among Pakistan's youth and expatriate communities. It should be remembered that it took Turkey's AKP party barely 10 years from formation to become the ruling party.
Today, political Islam is entering its third generation. The first round was revolutionary and violent. The second round, still with us, became more methodical but was still domination-oriented and supremacist. The third round - the post-Islamist push - is committed to the democratic process and has ceased to think of itself as a religious movement, instead adopting a civil-political platform. A paper (pdf) presented at the University of Virginia sets forth an interesting link between economic patterns and the post-Islamist push, stating that "economic liberalisation strengthens and expands the devout middle classes" who then push for "moderation in political Islam for they believe that democracy, rule of law, and a limited state would serve their interests betters". If this is true, then it means that the way for the west to challenge traditional domination-oriented Islamists like Jamat e Islami and the Brotherhood is to engage citizens in business, paving the way for post-Islamism.
When post-Islamist groups come to power, they will be social conservatives focused on family and spirituality (though not Wahhabism). On the issue of religion in politics, a post-Islamist politician will sound somewhere between John Edwards and Mike Huckabee. In their foreign policy they will reject intrusions upon their sovereignty from all foreign groups, including on one hand Nato and other western coalitions, and on the other, al-Qaida and the Taliban. However, they will generally abide by international norms and not launch themselves into international conflicts, finding them to be fiscally and socially expensive. This makes sense because their largest support comes from the middle classes. Their biggest trouble will be local and national rebel groups, whether it's Kurd separatists, al-Qaida or the Taliban. Finally, just as Europe's Christian democratic parties gave birth to liberal democrats, it is likely that after consolidating power, post-Islamic parties will create space for openly secular parties to gain more traction.
As a conclusion to this seven-part series, I'd like to submit that since 2001 we have devoted far too much time to the Islamic reform cult of personality. Faced with an increasingly complicated world, the time for heightened sophistication is now. Structural and political discussions - for example, about separation of mosque and state, the making of a Muslim left, the ideas of Muslim secularists, the debate over Islamic liberal democracy and the emergence of a post-Islamist Islam - are a completely overlooked part of this thing called "Islamic reform". The true and original goal of Islamic reform was to help voiceless Muslims and minorities. The social transformation necessary for creating such a landscape requires acknowledging that Islamic reform is at its heart a political, not merely religious, project.
This article is the last in a series by Ali Eteraz on Islamic reform:
Article 1: The roots of Islamic reform
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... eform.html
Article 2: The Islamic reformation
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... ation.html
Article 3: An Islamic counter-reformation
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... ation.html
Article 4: Beyond Islamic enlightenment
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... nment.html
Article 5: The making of the Muslim left
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... _left.html
Article 6: Muslim secularism and its allies
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ali ... llies.html
Article 7: Post-Islamism
I fail to see any connection between the oil wars and the relationship between religion and politics in each country.vasanji wrote:Unfortunately, some of these efforts for understanding might be severely hampered as a result of the momentum and flow of events in the direction described by the following article. What then to do ?
Commentary
The essentials of a free society
Faith and secularism go hand in hand
IRSHAD MANJI
From Friday's Globe and Mail
November 30, 2007 at 7:11 AM EST
Among the most pressing questions of our day is this: Can secularism - the separation of organized religion and politics - withstand the rise of religious fundamentalism, which blurs the two realms?
Paradoxically, secularism must survive if faith is to have a hope in hell. At its best, secularism is bad for dogma and good for faith.
Whatever the risk of being excommunicated by doctrinaire rationalists, I defend faith. Science helps us appreciate all that we can do. Faith helps us appreciate what we should do. Ethics, in turn, grants meaning to progress.
My own faith as a Muslim gives me values that compete with materialism. I cannot say that the material world is always hollow and the spiritual sphere always hallowed. Such a claim would be too simplistic.
Rather, it is the tension between the mundane and the mysterious that I love. In that tension, I find the incentive to keep thinking, growing, stumbling, reconsidering and discovering - like a self-respecting scientist would.
Faith does not stop exploration. Dogma does. This difference is crucial. Faith, by its nature, is secure enough to handle questions. Dogma, on the other hand, is threatened by questions. By definition, dogma is rigid, brittle, often brutal, and therefore deserves to be threatened by questions.
Dogma can afflict every belief system, including secularism. Witness much of Western Europe today. There, people are calcifying the Enlightenment principles of social tolerance and individual liberty into an orthodoxy according to which anything goes. What is being tolerated includes the tolerance-trashing bigotry of Muslim fundamentalists.
Throughout Western Europe, diversity is the new dogma. And in its dogmatic form, diversity reflects not the most humane side of secularism, but its most strident: a theocracy of the sensitive, where asking questions about what other people believe - an exercise once known as inquiry - now so often invites inquisition.
In such a context, we need less dogma and more faith, bearing in mind that self-assured faith welcomes questions. I am not arguing that religious faith ought to merge with organized politics. But it can be a constructive companion to partisan politics.
Using a parliamentary metaphor, I see God-free parties as government
and God-conscious faith as the loyal opposition, constantly prodding the government but never being allowed to bully it. Once religious bullying begins, government has not just a right but also an obligation to intervene for the sake of human dignity.
Put another way, secularism works when it is imperfect and reflects our complicated humanity. Only then can it affirm that each of us is, in fact and in law, human.
Three years ago, for example, the king of Morocco joined Muslim feminists to revise outdated religious statutes. Taming the bullies of the clerical class, the king overhauled sharia law so that now, on paper at least, Morocco's women have equal access to divorce, child custody and alimony.
The same cannot be said of Israel, where women seeking divorce must
still go to rabbinical courts and frequently wind up with the shaft. Who, except government, can right this wrong?
But to stay in power, Israeli government coalitions need ultra-religious parties. So one interpretation of Judaism gets away with dehumanizing women and not a few men. Exactly because the dignity of all God's children must be protected, organized religion must know its place.
We, as human beings, should know our place, too. This brings me to
the ultimate reason that people of faith need to champion secularism. Heretical as it sounds, secularism reminds us that none of us is God.
According to the Abrahamic religions, God alone knows fully the Truth. That is why we have to be humble enough to accommodate multiple perspectives. In short, to recognize God's infinite wisdom is to accept our limited wisdom - and therefore let a thousand flowers bloom.
Pluralism of perspective can only thrive in a secular society, which clears space for all of us to worship, or not, as our personal consciences demand. Both theocratic and scientific fundamentalisms breed humiliation by marginalizing personal conscience.
Secularism breeds a competition of consciences. It demands not humiliation but humility by asking each of us to share oxygen with the other.
I, as a faithful Muslim, cannot imagine a more peaceful yet practical way to pay tribute to the Almighty instead of the Almighty's self-appointed ambassadors.
And there are many more like me. Gallup research of eight Muslim-
majority countries finds that, on average, 60 per cent of those surveyed want mullahs out of the constitution-writing business. Which tells us that to be a Muslim secularist is not a marginal position. Nor does it make you an atheist.
Let the good word go forth that, even as leaders spout dogma, ordinary people seem to favour faith. Maybe secularism has a prayer after all.
Irshad Manji is a senior fellow with the European Foundation
for Democracy and creator of the documentary Faith Without Fear.
http://www.irshadmanji.com
The essentials of a free society
Faith and secularism go hand in hand
IRSHAD MANJI
From Friday's Globe and Mail
November 30, 2007 at 7:11 AM EST
Among the most pressing questions of our day is this: Can secularism - the separation of organized religion and politics - withstand the rise of religious fundamentalism, which blurs the two realms?
Paradoxically, secularism must survive if faith is to have a hope in hell. At its best, secularism is bad for dogma and good for faith.
Whatever the risk of being excommunicated by doctrinaire rationalists, I defend faith. Science helps us appreciate all that we can do. Faith helps us appreciate what we should do. Ethics, in turn, grants meaning to progress.
My own faith as a Muslim gives me values that compete with materialism. I cannot say that the material world is always hollow and the spiritual sphere always hallowed. Such a claim would be too simplistic.
Rather, it is the tension between the mundane and the mysterious that I love. In that tension, I find the incentive to keep thinking, growing, stumbling, reconsidering and discovering - like a self-respecting scientist would.
Faith does not stop exploration. Dogma does. This difference is crucial. Faith, by its nature, is secure enough to handle questions. Dogma, on the other hand, is threatened by questions. By definition, dogma is rigid, brittle, often brutal, and therefore deserves to be threatened by questions.
Dogma can afflict every belief system, including secularism. Witness much of Western Europe today. There, people are calcifying the Enlightenment principles of social tolerance and individual liberty into an orthodoxy according to which anything goes. What is being tolerated includes the tolerance-trashing bigotry of Muslim fundamentalists.
Throughout Western Europe, diversity is the new dogma. And in its dogmatic form, diversity reflects not the most humane side of secularism, but its most strident: a theocracy of the sensitive, where asking questions about what other people believe - an exercise once known as inquiry - now so often invites inquisition.
In such a context, we need less dogma and more faith, bearing in mind that self-assured faith welcomes questions. I am not arguing that religious faith ought to merge with organized politics. But it can be a constructive companion to partisan politics.
Using a parliamentary metaphor, I see God-free parties as government
and God-conscious faith as the loyal opposition, constantly prodding the government but never being allowed to bully it. Once religious bullying begins, government has not just a right but also an obligation to intervene for the sake of human dignity.
Put another way, secularism works when it is imperfect and reflects our complicated humanity. Only then can it affirm that each of us is, in fact and in law, human.
Three years ago, for example, the king of Morocco joined Muslim feminists to revise outdated religious statutes. Taming the bullies of the clerical class, the king overhauled sharia law so that now, on paper at least, Morocco's women have equal access to divorce, child custody and alimony.
The same cannot be said of Israel, where women seeking divorce must
still go to rabbinical courts and frequently wind up with the shaft. Who, except government, can right this wrong?
But to stay in power, Israeli government coalitions need ultra-religious parties. So one interpretation of Judaism gets away with dehumanizing women and not a few men. Exactly because the dignity of all God's children must be protected, organized religion must know its place.
We, as human beings, should know our place, too. This brings me to
the ultimate reason that people of faith need to champion secularism. Heretical as it sounds, secularism reminds us that none of us is God.
According to the Abrahamic religions, God alone knows fully the Truth. That is why we have to be humble enough to accommodate multiple perspectives. In short, to recognize God's infinite wisdom is to accept our limited wisdom - and therefore let a thousand flowers bloom.
Pluralism of perspective can only thrive in a secular society, which clears space for all of us to worship, or not, as our personal consciences demand. Both theocratic and scientific fundamentalisms breed humiliation by marginalizing personal conscience.
Secularism breeds a competition of consciences. It demands not humiliation but humility by asking each of us to share oxygen with the other.
I, as a faithful Muslim, cannot imagine a more peaceful yet practical way to pay tribute to the Almighty instead of the Almighty's self-appointed ambassadors.
And there are many more like me. Gallup research of eight Muslim-
majority countries finds that, on average, 60 per cent of those surveyed want mullahs out of the constitution-writing business. Which tells us that to be a Muslim secularist is not a marginal position. Nor does it make you an atheist.
Let the good word go forth that, even as leaders spout dogma, ordinary people seem to favour faith. Maybe secularism has a prayer after all.
Irshad Manji is a senior fellow with the European Foundation
for Democracy and creator of the documentary Faith Without Fear.
http://www.irshadmanji.com
December 18, 2007
Memo From Egypt
Fashion and Faith Meet, on Foreheads of the Pious
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — There is a strong undercurrent of competition in Egypt these days, an unstated contest among people eager to prove just how religious they are. The field of battle is the street and the focus tends to be on appearance, as opposed to conviction.
It is not that the two are mutually exclusive, but they are not necessarily linked. As Egyptians increasingly emphasize Islam as the cornerstone of identity, there has been a growing emphasis on public displays of piety.
For women, that has rapidly translated into the nearly universal adoption of the hijab, a scarf fitted over the hair and ears and wrapped around the neck. For men, it is more and more popular to have a zebibah.
The zebibah, Arabic for raisin, is a dark circle of callused skin, or in some cases a protruding bump, between the hairline and the eyebrows. It emerges on the spot where worshipers press their foreheads into the ground during their daily prayers.
It may sometimes look like a painful wound, but in Egypt it is worn proudly, the way American professionals in the 1980s felt good about the dark circles under their eyes as a sign of long work hours and little sleep.
Two decades ago, Egypt was a Muslim country with a relatively secular style. Nationalism and Arabism had alternated places as the main element of identity. But today, Egypt, like much of the Arab Middle East, is experiencing the rise of Islam as the ideology of the day.
With that, religious symbols have become the fashion. “The zebibah is a way to show how important religion is for us,” said Muhammad al-Bikali, a hairstylist in Cairo, in an interview last month. Mr. Bikali had a well-trimmed mustache and an ever-so-subtle brown spot just beneath his hairline. “It shows how religious we are. It is a mark from God.”
Observant Muslims pray five times a day. Each prayer involves kneeling and touching one’s forehead and nose to the ground. All five prayers require placing one’s head on the ground for a total of 34 times, though many people add prayers and with them, more chances to press their heads to the ground. Some people say the bump is the inevitable result of so many prayers — and that is often the point: The person with the mark is broadcasting his observance, his adherence to one of the five pillars of Islam.
But the zebibah is primarily a phenomenon of Egypt. Muslim men pray throughout the Arab world. Indeed, Egyptian women pray, but few of them end up with a prayer bump. So why do so many Egyptian men press so hard when they pray?
“If we just take it for what it is, then it means that people are praying a lot,” said Gamal al-Ghitani, editor in chief of the newspaper Akhbar El Yom. “But there is a kind of statement in it. Sometimes as a personal statement to announce that he is a conservative Muslim and sometimes as a way of outbidding others by showing them that he is more religious or to say that they should be like him.”
There are many reasons for the Islamic revival that has swept Egypt and the Middle East, from the rise of satellite television, which offers 24 hours of religious programming, to economies that offer little hope of improving people’s lives, to the resentment of Western meddling in the Middle East.
But there is also peer pressure, a powerful force in a society where conformity and tradition are aspired to and rewarded.
“I will learn more about someone when I get to know him, but the appearance is the first impression,” said Khaled Ashry, 37, a security guard at a private school.
Hanaa el-Guindy, 21, an art student in Cairo, covers her head and wears a long loose-fitting dress to hide her figure. “The outward appearance is important,” Ms. Guindy said. “It says, ‘I am a good person.’ This is a good thing. On Judgment Day, this sign, the zebibah on their forehead, will shine. It will say, ‘God is great.’”
In much of the Arab world, symbols of extreme observance are fairly standard and tend to stem from the conservative religious cultures of Persian Gulf nations, like Saudi Arabia. There is the long beard. In extreme cases men wear a loose-fitting robe that stops at their ankles, just as the prophet Muhammad wore his own gown at ankle length.
Those symbols have seeped their way into Egypt, and are growing in popularity. More and more women, for example, are covering their faces with a niqab, a black mask of cloth that has come to Egypt from the Persian Gulf. The zebibah, however, is 100 percent Egyptian, and does not carry the negative connotation of imported symbols.
Men with long beards can still find it hard to get a job. The zebibah, on the other hand, can open doors. “The zebibah can help,” said Ahmed Mohsen, 35, a messenger for a law firm whose own mark was pinkish, bumpy and peeling. “It can lead to a kind of initial acceptance between people.”
There are no statistics on the zebibah’s prevalence. But today, perhaps more than any other time in recent history, Egyptians are eager to demonstrate to one another just how religious they are.
“In Egypt, it’s the way we pray; we probably hit our heads harder than most in order to get one,” said Ahmed Fathallah, 19, as he played dominoes one evening in a Cairo coffee shop. “You also have to understand that people here like to show off their piety, maybe almost more than in the rest of the Middle East.”
There are many rumors about men who use irritants, like sandpaper, to darken the callus. There may be no truth to the rumors, but the rumors themselves indicate how fashionable the mark has become.
Not everyone has a zebibah. Plenty of Egyptians still regard their faith as a personal matter. But the pressure is growing, as religion becomes the focus of individual identity, and the most easily accessible source of pride and dignity for all social and economic classes.
“You pray, but it doesn’t come out,” said Muhammad Hojri, 23, as he gently teased his brother, Mahmoud, 21, recently while they worked in a family kebab restaurant. Muhammad has a mark. Mahmoud does not, and did not appreciate his brother’s ribbing.
“I pray for God, not for this thing on my forehead,” Mahmoud shot back.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo.
Memo From Egypt
Fashion and Faith Meet, on Foreheads of the Pious
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — There is a strong undercurrent of competition in Egypt these days, an unstated contest among people eager to prove just how religious they are. The field of battle is the street and the focus tends to be on appearance, as opposed to conviction.
It is not that the two are mutually exclusive, but they are not necessarily linked. As Egyptians increasingly emphasize Islam as the cornerstone of identity, there has been a growing emphasis on public displays of piety.
For women, that has rapidly translated into the nearly universal adoption of the hijab, a scarf fitted over the hair and ears and wrapped around the neck. For men, it is more and more popular to have a zebibah.
The zebibah, Arabic for raisin, is a dark circle of callused skin, or in some cases a protruding bump, between the hairline and the eyebrows. It emerges on the spot where worshipers press their foreheads into the ground during their daily prayers.
It may sometimes look like a painful wound, but in Egypt it is worn proudly, the way American professionals in the 1980s felt good about the dark circles under their eyes as a sign of long work hours and little sleep.
Two decades ago, Egypt was a Muslim country with a relatively secular style. Nationalism and Arabism had alternated places as the main element of identity. But today, Egypt, like much of the Arab Middle East, is experiencing the rise of Islam as the ideology of the day.
With that, religious symbols have become the fashion. “The zebibah is a way to show how important religion is for us,” said Muhammad al-Bikali, a hairstylist in Cairo, in an interview last month. Mr. Bikali had a well-trimmed mustache and an ever-so-subtle brown spot just beneath his hairline. “It shows how religious we are. It is a mark from God.”
Observant Muslims pray five times a day. Each prayer involves kneeling and touching one’s forehead and nose to the ground. All five prayers require placing one’s head on the ground for a total of 34 times, though many people add prayers and with them, more chances to press their heads to the ground. Some people say the bump is the inevitable result of so many prayers — and that is often the point: The person with the mark is broadcasting his observance, his adherence to one of the five pillars of Islam.
But the zebibah is primarily a phenomenon of Egypt. Muslim men pray throughout the Arab world. Indeed, Egyptian women pray, but few of them end up with a prayer bump. So why do so many Egyptian men press so hard when they pray?
“If we just take it for what it is, then it means that people are praying a lot,” said Gamal al-Ghitani, editor in chief of the newspaper Akhbar El Yom. “But there is a kind of statement in it. Sometimes as a personal statement to announce that he is a conservative Muslim and sometimes as a way of outbidding others by showing them that he is more religious or to say that they should be like him.”
There are many reasons for the Islamic revival that has swept Egypt and the Middle East, from the rise of satellite television, which offers 24 hours of religious programming, to economies that offer little hope of improving people’s lives, to the resentment of Western meddling in the Middle East.
But there is also peer pressure, a powerful force in a society where conformity and tradition are aspired to and rewarded.
“I will learn more about someone when I get to know him, but the appearance is the first impression,” said Khaled Ashry, 37, a security guard at a private school.
Hanaa el-Guindy, 21, an art student in Cairo, covers her head and wears a long loose-fitting dress to hide her figure. “The outward appearance is important,” Ms. Guindy said. “It says, ‘I am a good person.’ This is a good thing. On Judgment Day, this sign, the zebibah on their forehead, will shine. It will say, ‘God is great.’”
In much of the Arab world, symbols of extreme observance are fairly standard and tend to stem from the conservative religious cultures of Persian Gulf nations, like Saudi Arabia. There is the long beard. In extreme cases men wear a loose-fitting robe that stops at their ankles, just as the prophet Muhammad wore his own gown at ankle length.
Those symbols have seeped their way into Egypt, and are growing in popularity. More and more women, for example, are covering their faces with a niqab, a black mask of cloth that has come to Egypt from the Persian Gulf. The zebibah, however, is 100 percent Egyptian, and does not carry the negative connotation of imported symbols.
Men with long beards can still find it hard to get a job. The zebibah, on the other hand, can open doors. “The zebibah can help,” said Ahmed Mohsen, 35, a messenger for a law firm whose own mark was pinkish, bumpy and peeling. “It can lead to a kind of initial acceptance between people.”
There are no statistics on the zebibah’s prevalence. But today, perhaps more than any other time in recent history, Egyptians are eager to demonstrate to one another just how religious they are.
“In Egypt, it’s the way we pray; we probably hit our heads harder than most in order to get one,” said Ahmed Fathallah, 19, as he played dominoes one evening in a Cairo coffee shop. “You also have to understand that people here like to show off their piety, maybe almost more than in the rest of the Middle East.”
There are many rumors about men who use irritants, like sandpaper, to darken the callus. There may be no truth to the rumors, but the rumors themselves indicate how fashionable the mark has become.
Not everyone has a zebibah. Plenty of Egyptians still regard their faith as a personal matter. But the pressure is growing, as religion becomes the focus of individual identity, and the most easily accessible source of pride and dignity for all social and economic classes.
“You pray, but it doesn’t come out,” said Muhammad Hojri, 23, as he gently teased his brother, Mahmoud, 21, recently while they worked in a family kebab restaurant. Muhammad has a mark. Mahmoud does not, and did not appreciate his brother’s ribbing.
“I pray for God, not for this thing on my forehead,” Mahmoud shot back.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo.
Don't believe myths about sharia law
Jason Burke The Observer, Sunday February 10 2008
This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday February 10 2008 on p28 of the Focus section. It was last updated at 12:28 on February 10 2008. The women had no doubt. Educated, young, articulate, they had one aim: to turn their country into a real Islamic state, run according to their interpretation of Islamic law, the shariat. Only then, they said, would they be protected from the chaos and violence of the modern world. Only then would there be an end to corruption and misgovernment. Only then would the country assume its true place as a Muslim nation.
The women were speaking in Rawalpindi, the crowded northern Pakistani city. All members of an Islamist party, they believed that the current system in Pakistan, where a secular legal system co-exists uncomfortably with a religious one, was doomed to failure. The coming of shariat was, they told me, inevitable.
They, like the archbishop of Canterbury, were interested in the degree to which the specific practices of a religious community, whether majority or minority, be allowed within the legal system of a nation.
All over the world, the same question is being posed. In recent years, with the weakening of the nation state and growth in alternative identities, often religious, it has taken on a new urgency, particularly in Western countries with large, newly assertive Muslim minority populations. The resulting tensions are becoming more and more obvious.
So in France, a country where the only identity officially recognised is that of 'citizen of the republic', last week's row provoked keen interest. The British system of multiculturalism is seen by many Frenchmen as evidence of an unforgiveable and incomprehensible laxness. Yet, at the same time that he demands 'immigrants' adhere to French values, President Nicolas Sarkozy has enraged defenders of his nation's aggressive secularism by insisting repeatedly that Europe has 'Christian roots' and that religion, in its broadest sense, is at the root of civilisation. In Germany and Holland similar debates are taking place as large immigrant communities, particularly those established for several decades, challenge the status quo, asking what their place is in 'Christian' countries?
In so doing, they bring to the West an element of a fiery debate that has been longstanding in the Islamic world. In Pakistan, for example, the argument over whether the state is 'a Muslim state or a state for Muslims' has never ceased, contributing greatly to its instability. Elsewhere accommodations have been found, often based on original settlements by colonial powers. So in India, which does not have a state religion, 140 million Muslims, like other communities, have retained their own civil laws governing marriages, divorces, deaths, births and inheritance. In overwhelmingly Muslim majority Egypt, religious minorities are governed under separate personal status laws and courts. The Coptic Christian minority in the country marry under Christian law and foreigners marry under the laws of their countries of origin.
And where Sharia law is applied, it varies too. In Saudi Arabia, there are frequent executions and amputations, justified by selective reading of the Islamic holy texts. Elsewhere such punishments are rarely or never applied. In Saudi Arabia too, women may not drive. In Bangladesh and Pakistan, they can. As there is no reference to motor vehicles in the Koran, the decision as to who can or can't drive them has been made by (male) Islamic scholars. States in the Islamic world have made repeated efforts over centuries to co-opt and control the clergy, frequently with disastrous results.
What is clear is that where there is sufficient demand for Islamic law, courts of some kind are likely to be found. In Afghanistan in the 1990s, in the anarchy of civil war, many initially supported the Taliban simply because they brought a form of order. In parts of western Pakistan, Islamic judges have long dealt out summary justice according to religious law and tribal customs. For locals, the choice between slow, corrupt and expensive state legal systems and the religious alternative, rough and ready though it may be, is not hard. Elsewhere, particularly in Africa, local religious holy men settle disputes.
There are also reports of 'informal' shariat courts in the UK. Although their rulings are not recognised by English law, participants often agree to abide by their decisions in the same way that Jewish civil disputes are often settled in their own, officially recognised court, the Beth Din. This is not surprising. That some measure of Islamic law is 'unavoidable' has already been recognised in the UK. British food regulations allow meat to be slaughtered according to Islamic practices and, as Islam forbids interest on the basis that it is money unjustly earned, the Treasury has approved Sharia-compliant mortgages and investments.
The women in Rawalpindi had no doubt why they wanted more rigorous application of Islamic law. Though educated, relatively wealthy and from solid family backgrounds, they said they felt disorientated and stressed by the pace and uncertainty of modern life. 'I know that in the law I have answers and that makes me calm,' one said.
Jason Burke The Observer, Sunday February 10 2008
This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday February 10 2008 on p28 of the Focus section. It was last updated at 12:28 on February 10 2008. The women had no doubt. Educated, young, articulate, they had one aim: to turn their country into a real Islamic state, run according to their interpretation of Islamic law, the shariat. Only then, they said, would they be protected from the chaos and violence of the modern world. Only then would there be an end to corruption and misgovernment. Only then would the country assume its true place as a Muslim nation.
The women were speaking in Rawalpindi, the crowded northern Pakistani city. All members of an Islamist party, they believed that the current system in Pakistan, where a secular legal system co-exists uncomfortably with a religious one, was doomed to failure. The coming of shariat was, they told me, inevitable.
They, like the archbishop of Canterbury, were interested in the degree to which the specific practices of a religious community, whether majority or minority, be allowed within the legal system of a nation.
All over the world, the same question is being posed. In recent years, with the weakening of the nation state and growth in alternative identities, often religious, it has taken on a new urgency, particularly in Western countries with large, newly assertive Muslim minority populations. The resulting tensions are becoming more and more obvious.
So in France, a country where the only identity officially recognised is that of 'citizen of the republic', last week's row provoked keen interest. The British system of multiculturalism is seen by many Frenchmen as evidence of an unforgiveable and incomprehensible laxness. Yet, at the same time that he demands 'immigrants' adhere to French values, President Nicolas Sarkozy has enraged defenders of his nation's aggressive secularism by insisting repeatedly that Europe has 'Christian roots' and that religion, in its broadest sense, is at the root of civilisation. In Germany and Holland similar debates are taking place as large immigrant communities, particularly those established for several decades, challenge the status quo, asking what their place is in 'Christian' countries?
In so doing, they bring to the West an element of a fiery debate that has been longstanding in the Islamic world. In Pakistan, for example, the argument over whether the state is 'a Muslim state or a state for Muslims' has never ceased, contributing greatly to its instability. Elsewhere accommodations have been found, often based on original settlements by colonial powers. So in India, which does not have a state religion, 140 million Muslims, like other communities, have retained their own civil laws governing marriages, divorces, deaths, births and inheritance. In overwhelmingly Muslim majority Egypt, religious minorities are governed under separate personal status laws and courts. The Coptic Christian minority in the country marry under Christian law and foreigners marry under the laws of their countries of origin.
And where Sharia law is applied, it varies too. In Saudi Arabia, there are frequent executions and amputations, justified by selective reading of the Islamic holy texts. Elsewhere such punishments are rarely or never applied. In Saudi Arabia too, women may not drive. In Bangladesh and Pakistan, they can. As there is no reference to motor vehicles in the Koran, the decision as to who can or can't drive them has been made by (male) Islamic scholars. States in the Islamic world have made repeated efforts over centuries to co-opt and control the clergy, frequently with disastrous results.
What is clear is that where there is sufficient demand for Islamic law, courts of some kind are likely to be found. In Afghanistan in the 1990s, in the anarchy of civil war, many initially supported the Taliban simply because they brought a form of order. In parts of western Pakistan, Islamic judges have long dealt out summary justice according to religious law and tribal customs. For locals, the choice between slow, corrupt and expensive state legal systems and the religious alternative, rough and ready though it may be, is not hard. Elsewhere, particularly in Africa, local religious holy men settle disputes.
There are also reports of 'informal' shariat courts in the UK. Although their rulings are not recognised by English law, participants often agree to abide by their decisions in the same way that Jewish civil disputes are often settled in their own, officially recognised court, the Beth Din. This is not surprising. That some measure of Islamic law is 'unavoidable' has already been recognised in the UK. British food regulations allow meat to be slaughtered according to Islamic practices and, as Islam forbids interest on the basis that it is money unjustly earned, the Treasury has approved Sharia-compliant mortgages and investments.
The women in Rawalpindi had no doubt why they wanted more rigorous application of Islamic law. Though educated, relatively wealthy and from solid family backgrounds, they said they felt disorientated and stressed by the pace and uncertainty of modern life. 'I know that in the law I have answers and that makes me calm,' one said.
Religion and secularism
May 1st 2008
From The Economist print edition
The slogans of political Islam remain highly resonant, whether as a programme for peaceful governance or an inspiration to wage war. Two new books explain why
The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
By Noah Feldman
Princeton University Press; 200 pages; $22.95 and £13.50
Buy it at
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda
By Mark Juergensmeyer
University of California Press; 384 pages; $27.50 and £16.95
Buy it at
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
WHEN the British and French empires were at their height, imperial service often provided an outlet for the talents of precociously clever ethnographers, social anthropologists and scholars of religion. On the face of things, Noah Feldman is a similar figure, rendering important services to the American imperium, both as a rising star in the intellectual establishment and in more practical ways—he helped to draft Iraq's new constitution.
A young professor at Harvard Law School with a doctorate in Islamic political thought, Mr Feldman is brimming with the sort of expertise that America's new proconsuls in the Middle East and Afghanistan badly need. Above all, he is qualified to opine on how America should react to the dilemma posed by the huge popular support, in Muslim lands, for explicitly Islamic forms of administration.
In a short, incisive and elegant book, he lays out for the non-specialist reader some of the forms that Islamic rule has taken over the centuries, while also stressing the differences between today's political Islam and previous forms of Islamic administration. In particular, he shows why “justice” is such a resonant slogan for Islamist movements. At least subliminally, it evokes memories of a dimly remembered era when Islamic law, as interpreted by scholars, acted as a real constraint on the power of rulers. To many Muslims, the legal tradition of their faith is not viewed as an alternative to Western democracy, based on secular law, but rather as the only real alternative to totalitarianism.
That perceived dilemma—either Muslim law and scholarship, or unfettered dictatorship—is not just a hangover from history; it also reflects the fact that many secular regimes which replaced traditional Muslim empires were dictatorships, with no separation of powers.
So far, that is a familiar argument. Mr Feldman becomes more interesting when he shows how the Ottoman empire, in its efforts to modernise while retaining some Islamic legitimacy, almost unavoidably grew more dictatorial and less Islamic.
The very fact that Islamic law was codified implied a downgrading in the authority of Muslim scholars; their task had been to apply a set of abstract, unwritten principles to an infinite variety of situations, and the written law code risked putting them out of a job. When the Ottoman sultan-caliph tried some cautious constitutional experiments in 1876, it appeared to his pious subjects that he was undermining God's sovereignty. This was not so much because the experiments seemed bad, but because constitutional change implied that an earthly ruler could tinker with systems that had been divinely ordained.
The modernising challenges facing the late Ottoman era dimly foreshadow, as Mr Feldman demonstrates, some of the problems of modern political Islam. But there are differences: the Islamists of today are not trying to reinstate the power of the scholars, which was a hallmark of all previous Islamic regimes. Instead, what modern Islamism proposes is an odd mix of popular sovereignty and the sovereignty of God; as though the people, having been offered sovereign power, freely decide to render that power straight back to God.
Another of Mr Feldman's paradoxes: any modern constitution or legal code that consciously proclaims its intention to be Islamic and deferential to God, will fall short of the early Islamic ideal, where the sovereignty of God was so deeply assumed that it did not need spelling out.
Mr Feldman's book is more descriptive than prescriptive. But many readers may conclude that in Islam's heartland only forms of governance that incorporate Muslim values can hope to be legitimate. If secularism has been imposed in many places by dictatorial methods, that is not because the secular rulers were gratuitously cruel; it was because secular principles had little hope of gaining spontaneous popular assent.
One huge question, unanswered by this book, is how minorities—practitioners of other religions or none—can expect to fare in countries where a form of political Islam is practised by the will of the majority. Even if the Islamic majority offers its non-Muslim compatriots generous forms of cultural autonomy, the infidel minorities can hardly be anything more than second-class subjects of an Islamic realm.
Whereas Mr Feldman's argument is about Islamic principles as a basis for creating stable, legitimate regimes, Mark Juergensmeyer, a professor of sociology and religious thought at the University of California, Santa Barbara, highlights the odd fact that the slogans of Islam, and other religions, are more effective than any secular battle-cry as a way of rallying people to wage war, or at least to live in armed readiness. Mixing analysis with reportage, he describes encounters with the leaders of Hamas, and with Jewish zealots who cheer the killing of Palestinians. He traces the advent of Hindu bigotry as a force in Indian politics and the role of Buddhism in Sri Lanka's conflict.
Any book that takes in such a sweep is bound to have errors of detail. But it is more than a minor error to describe the first decade of the Soviet communist regime as “relatively tolerant” towards religion. Still, Mr Juergensmeyer is right in his broader point—that in the early 21st century, religion retains a mobilising power that secular nationalism and universalist ideologies like Marxism have lost. If you are trying to make people risk their own lives and take the lives of others, then calling the enemy “infidels” (or, literally, demonising them) is more effective than calling them foreigners or class enemies.
In each of these books, there is at least one lacuna. Having made the fair point that scholarship and modern political Islam don't easily mix, Mr Feldman should have said something about Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the hugely influential and telegenic sheikh based in Qatar who seems to straddle both those worlds quite happily.
Mr Juergensmeyer distinguishes between the effects of secular nationalism and transnational religion, but he says little about religious nationalism, the opportunistic but effective combination of these two supposed opposites. As any thieving Balkan warlord knows, decent people often kill in the name of a half-forgotten national cause and for a religion in which they hardly believe. Using both tricks at once is especially effective.
The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State.
By Noah Feldman.
Princeton University Press; 200 pages; $22.95 and £13.50
Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda.
By Mark Juergensmeyer.
University of California Press; 384 pages; $27.50 and £16.95
May 1st 2008
From The Economist print edition
The slogans of political Islam remain highly resonant, whether as a programme for peaceful governance or an inspiration to wage war. Two new books explain why
The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
By Noah Feldman
Princeton University Press; 200 pages; $22.95 and £13.50
Buy it at
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda
By Mark Juergensmeyer
University of California Press; 384 pages; $27.50 and £16.95
Buy it at
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
WHEN the British and French empires were at their height, imperial service often provided an outlet for the talents of precociously clever ethnographers, social anthropologists and scholars of religion. On the face of things, Noah Feldman is a similar figure, rendering important services to the American imperium, both as a rising star in the intellectual establishment and in more practical ways—he helped to draft Iraq's new constitution.
A young professor at Harvard Law School with a doctorate in Islamic political thought, Mr Feldman is brimming with the sort of expertise that America's new proconsuls in the Middle East and Afghanistan badly need. Above all, he is qualified to opine on how America should react to the dilemma posed by the huge popular support, in Muslim lands, for explicitly Islamic forms of administration.
In a short, incisive and elegant book, he lays out for the non-specialist reader some of the forms that Islamic rule has taken over the centuries, while also stressing the differences between today's political Islam and previous forms of Islamic administration. In particular, he shows why “justice” is such a resonant slogan for Islamist movements. At least subliminally, it evokes memories of a dimly remembered era when Islamic law, as interpreted by scholars, acted as a real constraint on the power of rulers. To many Muslims, the legal tradition of their faith is not viewed as an alternative to Western democracy, based on secular law, but rather as the only real alternative to totalitarianism.
That perceived dilemma—either Muslim law and scholarship, or unfettered dictatorship—is not just a hangover from history; it also reflects the fact that many secular regimes which replaced traditional Muslim empires were dictatorships, with no separation of powers.
So far, that is a familiar argument. Mr Feldman becomes more interesting when he shows how the Ottoman empire, in its efforts to modernise while retaining some Islamic legitimacy, almost unavoidably grew more dictatorial and less Islamic.
The very fact that Islamic law was codified implied a downgrading in the authority of Muslim scholars; their task had been to apply a set of abstract, unwritten principles to an infinite variety of situations, and the written law code risked putting them out of a job. When the Ottoman sultan-caliph tried some cautious constitutional experiments in 1876, it appeared to his pious subjects that he was undermining God's sovereignty. This was not so much because the experiments seemed bad, but because constitutional change implied that an earthly ruler could tinker with systems that had been divinely ordained.
The modernising challenges facing the late Ottoman era dimly foreshadow, as Mr Feldman demonstrates, some of the problems of modern political Islam. But there are differences: the Islamists of today are not trying to reinstate the power of the scholars, which was a hallmark of all previous Islamic regimes. Instead, what modern Islamism proposes is an odd mix of popular sovereignty and the sovereignty of God; as though the people, having been offered sovereign power, freely decide to render that power straight back to God.
Another of Mr Feldman's paradoxes: any modern constitution or legal code that consciously proclaims its intention to be Islamic and deferential to God, will fall short of the early Islamic ideal, where the sovereignty of God was so deeply assumed that it did not need spelling out.
Mr Feldman's book is more descriptive than prescriptive. But many readers may conclude that in Islam's heartland only forms of governance that incorporate Muslim values can hope to be legitimate. If secularism has been imposed in many places by dictatorial methods, that is not because the secular rulers were gratuitously cruel; it was because secular principles had little hope of gaining spontaneous popular assent.
One huge question, unanswered by this book, is how minorities—practitioners of other religions or none—can expect to fare in countries where a form of political Islam is practised by the will of the majority. Even if the Islamic majority offers its non-Muslim compatriots generous forms of cultural autonomy, the infidel minorities can hardly be anything more than second-class subjects of an Islamic realm.
Whereas Mr Feldman's argument is about Islamic principles as a basis for creating stable, legitimate regimes, Mark Juergensmeyer, a professor of sociology and religious thought at the University of California, Santa Barbara, highlights the odd fact that the slogans of Islam, and other religions, are more effective than any secular battle-cry as a way of rallying people to wage war, or at least to live in armed readiness. Mixing analysis with reportage, he describes encounters with the leaders of Hamas, and with Jewish zealots who cheer the killing of Palestinians. He traces the advent of Hindu bigotry as a force in Indian politics and the role of Buddhism in Sri Lanka's conflict.
Any book that takes in such a sweep is bound to have errors of detail. But it is more than a minor error to describe the first decade of the Soviet communist regime as “relatively tolerant” towards religion. Still, Mr Juergensmeyer is right in his broader point—that in the early 21st century, religion retains a mobilising power that secular nationalism and universalist ideologies like Marxism have lost. If you are trying to make people risk their own lives and take the lives of others, then calling the enemy “infidels” (or, literally, demonising them) is more effective than calling them foreigners or class enemies.
In each of these books, there is at least one lacuna. Having made the fair point that scholarship and modern political Islam don't easily mix, Mr Feldman should have said something about Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the hugely influential and telegenic sheikh based in Qatar who seems to straddle both those worlds quite happily.
Mr Juergensmeyer distinguishes between the effects of secular nationalism and transnational religion, but he says little about religious nationalism, the opportunistic but effective combination of these two supposed opposites. As any thieving Balkan warlord knows, decent people often kill in the name of a half-forgotten national cause and for a religion in which they hardly believe. Using both tricks at once is especially effective.
The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State.
By Noah Feldman.
Princeton University Press; 200 pages; $22.95 and £13.50
Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda.
By Mark Juergensmeyer.
University of California Press; 384 pages; $27.50 and £16.95
Muslim author's book calls on Canadians to condemn Islamists
Nigel Hannaford
Calgary Herald
Saturday, May 24, 2008
The irony of the Muslim world is that to exercise basic human rights, such as freedom of religion, conscience and speech, Muslims have to leave Islamic states. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is not a place where people agree to disagree over the finer points of Islam. Nor is Pakistan, or Iran: And, while the Taliban had control, neither was Afghanistan.
So, it makes you wonder why anybody who has left these places to start a new life in Canada (or any of the other liberal democracies) would want to establish in their new home, what they left behind in their old. But, as Londoners found a few years ago, there is such a thing as home-grown terrorism. Meanwhile, here in Canada several young Canadian-born Muslim men remain in custody after evidence was discovered of a plot to bomb buildings and kill the prime minister.
My gut says this will prove at trial to be an amateur-hour effort, but even blithering idiots can kill people. (One of the IRA's few redeeming features was how many of its adherents blew themselves up while building bombs intended for somebody else.) And, there has been a serious attempt to introduce the thin end of the sharia law wedge into Ontario.
Now, if I -- as an unreconstructed white guy, and a Christian to boot -- made these assertions based on no more than my own observations, I would probably be up to my knees in paperwork from somebody's human rights commission. Pointing out the lack of human rights in Islamic states, you see, is the kind of seditious talk that human rights commissions in Canada hate.
However, I'm actually just quoting the gist of what Tarek Fatah says in his new book, Chasing a Mirage: the Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State. As he puts it, "Today, the only Muslims who are free to practice their faith as they choose and participate in public life as equal citizens without having to validate their tribal, racial, or family lineage live as tiny minorities in secular democracies such as India, South Africa, Canada and many European countries. Yet, even while seeing the advantages of life under secular civil society, many of them are committed to the establishment of the Islamic State."
I guess that makes me an infidel, and Fatah a heretic.
I ran into him at the Hyatt this week, after a book signing. If I were a Liberal (he claims to be, though I believe he may be salvageable) I'd call him a poster boy for multicultural Canada.
"An Indian born in Pakistan; a Punjabi born in Islam," he writes of himself, a Muslim with Hindu ancestors, a left-wing student imprisoned for radical activities against the Pakistani military junta, who reported for a Karachi newspaper, sold ads in Saudi Arabia and admires Tommy Douglas and Pierre Trudeau. He came to Canada in 1987, and worked in Bob Rae's office while Rae was Ontario premier.
How does he like Canada?
"It is only here in Canada that I can speak out against the hijacking of my faith and the encroaching spectre of a new Islamo-fascism."
He is obviously completely integrated. So, what about the Muslims he writes of, who are not? They have been seduced, he says, by the tragic illusion referred to in his book's title: An Islamic State. Deeply ingrained in the Muslim psyche, he writes, is the idea of replicating the so-called Golden Age of the Rightly Guided Caliphs -- but few Muslims are willing to consider the implications of what they're asking for.
That's his argument, and his book, a comprehensive review of Muslim history to back up his contention that Islamic States cannot be deduced from the teachings of the prophet, and where they have existed, they have been Muslims' most egregious oppressors.
Christians, many of whom deplore the same things in western society that radical Islamists so despise, are routinely challenged from the pulpit to internalize their faith, rather than follow an empty form of it. Thus, Christian living is supposed to follow from an inner desire to please God, not conformity to external rules. Indeed, some Christians will concede a Christian state could easily become a suffocating society, even without the rigorous compulsions once made available by the state to the church.
Tarek makes a parallel plea, for Muslims to aspire to a "state of Islam," rather than an Islamic State, the current iterations of which take compulsion all the way to public beheading.
His book will not impress hard-line Islamists. Canadians, however, may take it as evidence one can be a Muslim, and loyal to a secular state. We need to hear that more often from Muslims -- and also what Tarek says of white liberals, that they should quit excusing extremists.
He certainly doesn't.
nhannaford@theherald.canwest.com
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Nigel Hannaford
Calgary Herald
Saturday, May 24, 2008
The irony of the Muslim world is that to exercise basic human rights, such as freedom of religion, conscience and speech, Muslims have to leave Islamic states. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is not a place where people agree to disagree over the finer points of Islam. Nor is Pakistan, or Iran: And, while the Taliban had control, neither was Afghanistan.
So, it makes you wonder why anybody who has left these places to start a new life in Canada (or any of the other liberal democracies) would want to establish in their new home, what they left behind in their old. But, as Londoners found a few years ago, there is such a thing as home-grown terrorism. Meanwhile, here in Canada several young Canadian-born Muslim men remain in custody after evidence was discovered of a plot to bomb buildings and kill the prime minister.
My gut says this will prove at trial to be an amateur-hour effort, but even blithering idiots can kill people. (One of the IRA's few redeeming features was how many of its adherents blew themselves up while building bombs intended for somebody else.) And, there has been a serious attempt to introduce the thin end of the sharia law wedge into Ontario.
Now, if I -- as an unreconstructed white guy, and a Christian to boot -- made these assertions based on no more than my own observations, I would probably be up to my knees in paperwork from somebody's human rights commission. Pointing out the lack of human rights in Islamic states, you see, is the kind of seditious talk that human rights commissions in Canada hate.
However, I'm actually just quoting the gist of what Tarek Fatah says in his new book, Chasing a Mirage: the Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State. As he puts it, "Today, the only Muslims who are free to practice their faith as they choose and participate in public life as equal citizens without having to validate their tribal, racial, or family lineage live as tiny minorities in secular democracies such as India, South Africa, Canada and many European countries. Yet, even while seeing the advantages of life under secular civil society, many of them are committed to the establishment of the Islamic State."
I guess that makes me an infidel, and Fatah a heretic.
I ran into him at the Hyatt this week, after a book signing. If I were a Liberal (he claims to be, though I believe he may be salvageable) I'd call him a poster boy for multicultural Canada.
"An Indian born in Pakistan; a Punjabi born in Islam," he writes of himself, a Muslim with Hindu ancestors, a left-wing student imprisoned for radical activities against the Pakistani military junta, who reported for a Karachi newspaper, sold ads in Saudi Arabia and admires Tommy Douglas and Pierre Trudeau. He came to Canada in 1987, and worked in Bob Rae's office while Rae was Ontario premier.
How does he like Canada?
"It is only here in Canada that I can speak out against the hijacking of my faith and the encroaching spectre of a new Islamo-fascism."
He is obviously completely integrated. So, what about the Muslims he writes of, who are not? They have been seduced, he says, by the tragic illusion referred to in his book's title: An Islamic State. Deeply ingrained in the Muslim psyche, he writes, is the idea of replicating the so-called Golden Age of the Rightly Guided Caliphs -- but few Muslims are willing to consider the implications of what they're asking for.
That's his argument, and his book, a comprehensive review of Muslim history to back up his contention that Islamic States cannot be deduced from the teachings of the prophet, and where they have existed, they have been Muslims' most egregious oppressors.
Christians, many of whom deplore the same things in western society that radical Islamists so despise, are routinely challenged from the pulpit to internalize their faith, rather than follow an empty form of it. Thus, Christian living is supposed to follow from an inner desire to please God, not conformity to external rules. Indeed, some Christians will concede a Christian state could easily become a suffocating society, even without the rigorous compulsions once made available by the state to the church.
Tarek makes a parallel plea, for Muslims to aspire to a "state of Islam," rather than an Islamic State, the current iterations of which take compulsion all the way to public beheading.
His book will not impress hard-line Islamists. Canadians, however, may take it as evidence one can be a Muslim, and loyal to a secular state. We need to hear that more often from Muslims -- and also what Tarek says of white liberals, that they should quit excusing extremists.
He certainly doesn't.
nhannaford@theherald.canwest.com
© The Calgary Herald 2008
June 5, 2008
Court Annuls Turkish Headscarf Bill
By REUTERS
Filed at 1:27 p.m. ET
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's ruling AK party appeared to move a step closer to being shut down on Thursday when the Constitutional Court overturned a reform that would have allowed women to wear Islamic headscarves in universities.
The headscarf amendment plays a central role in a separate, crucial case that seeks to outlaw the AK Party for anti-secular activities, and ban 71 members, including the prime minister and president, from belonging to a political party for five years.
"This guarantees the closure of the party. I don't think we can talk of any calm before full chaos," said Cengiz Aktar, a political scientist at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University.
The court said in a statement it upheld, by 9 votes to 2, an appeal from the main opposition CHP party, seeking to block a legal amendment allowing students to wear the garment on campus.
More conservative secularists saw the amendment as a violation of strict separation between Mosque and state, and evidence the AK Party has a secret agenda to introduce a system of Islamic law. AK denies such ambitions and has introduced many social reforms aimed at European Union membership.
"With this decision the Constitutional Court has exceeded its authority. I see this decision as contrary to the constitution," said AK Party deputy group chairman Bekir Bozdag.
The AK Party has roots in political Islam and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan served a prison sentence for Islamist activity in the 1990s. But it was formed, six years ago, as a broad coalition of religious conservatives, nationalists, market liberals and centre-right activists.
The Turkish lira fell 1 percent against the dollar on the news, with markets fearing prolonged political uncertainty in the EU-applicant country and a slow-down of economic and political reforms.
ANTI-SECULAR MOVE
The Constitutional Court, the highest judicial body, said lifting the headscarf ban was contrary to three articles in the constitution, including article two that specifies that Turkey is a secular republic. Turkey is also 99 percent Muslim.
The AK Party says the right to wear the headscarf at university is a personal and religious freedom. Secularists see it as a symbol of political Islam.
"If Turkey is a secular, democratic state, we must all respect the (court's) decisions. The ruling states the obvious," military chief General Yasar Buyukanit told reporters.
A powerful elite of military, judicial and academic officials regard themselves as the custodians of secularism and the army, with public support, edged a party from power as recently as 1997 on accusations of Islamist activity.
In AK, however, the secularist elite faces a party with a large parliamentary majority and a highly popular leader.
Senior AK Party members told Reuters recently the party has started to believe it would be closed down and Erdogan banned from belonging to a political party for five years.
The closure case is expected to take months to conclude.
Secularists, who until recently controlled key state institutions, are now accused by some of using the judiciary to hit back at an increasingly prosperous and assertive religious middle class that forms the bedrock of support for the AK Party.
"These guys are playing their last card and they won't take any chances. They can't do a coup d'etat any more like in 1960, 1971 or 1980," Aktar said.
If AK is outlawed its members in parliament are expected to form a new political party and form the next government, analysts said, but added they may face serious legal hurdles.
More than 80 years after revolutionary secularists led by Mustafal Kemal Ataturk abolished the Ottoman Islamic Caliphate, the divisive potential of Islam in Turkey remains high.
"We fear this ruling will accelerate the process of dividing and polarizing Turkish society on the basis of belief," said Devlet Bahceli, leader of the MHP, which supported the AK Party in pushing the headscarf-related amendments through parliament.
(Additional reporting by Selcuk Gokoluk in Ankara, Daren Butler, Thomas Grove, and Zerin Elci in Istanbul; Writing by Paul de Bendern)
Court Annuls Turkish Headscarf Bill
By REUTERS
Filed at 1:27 p.m. ET
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's ruling AK party appeared to move a step closer to being shut down on Thursday when the Constitutional Court overturned a reform that would have allowed women to wear Islamic headscarves in universities.
The headscarf amendment plays a central role in a separate, crucial case that seeks to outlaw the AK Party for anti-secular activities, and ban 71 members, including the prime minister and president, from belonging to a political party for five years.
"This guarantees the closure of the party. I don't think we can talk of any calm before full chaos," said Cengiz Aktar, a political scientist at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University.
The court said in a statement it upheld, by 9 votes to 2, an appeal from the main opposition CHP party, seeking to block a legal amendment allowing students to wear the garment on campus.
More conservative secularists saw the amendment as a violation of strict separation between Mosque and state, and evidence the AK Party has a secret agenda to introduce a system of Islamic law. AK denies such ambitions and has introduced many social reforms aimed at European Union membership.
"With this decision the Constitutional Court has exceeded its authority. I see this decision as contrary to the constitution," said AK Party deputy group chairman Bekir Bozdag.
The AK Party has roots in political Islam and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan served a prison sentence for Islamist activity in the 1990s. But it was formed, six years ago, as a broad coalition of religious conservatives, nationalists, market liberals and centre-right activists.
The Turkish lira fell 1 percent against the dollar on the news, with markets fearing prolonged political uncertainty in the EU-applicant country and a slow-down of economic and political reforms.
ANTI-SECULAR MOVE
The Constitutional Court, the highest judicial body, said lifting the headscarf ban was contrary to three articles in the constitution, including article two that specifies that Turkey is a secular republic. Turkey is also 99 percent Muslim.
The AK Party says the right to wear the headscarf at university is a personal and religious freedom. Secularists see it as a symbol of political Islam.
"If Turkey is a secular, democratic state, we must all respect the (court's) decisions. The ruling states the obvious," military chief General Yasar Buyukanit told reporters.
A powerful elite of military, judicial and academic officials regard themselves as the custodians of secularism and the army, with public support, edged a party from power as recently as 1997 on accusations of Islamist activity.
In AK, however, the secularist elite faces a party with a large parliamentary majority and a highly popular leader.
Senior AK Party members told Reuters recently the party has started to believe it would be closed down and Erdogan banned from belonging to a political party for five years.
The closure case is expected to take months to conclude.
Secularists, who until recently controlled key state institutions, are now accused by some of using the judiciary to hit back at an increasingly prosperous and assertive religious middle class that forms the bedrock of support for the AK Party.
"These guys are playing their last card and they won't take any chances. They can't do a coup d'etat any more like in 1960, 1971 or 1980," Aktar said.
If AK is outlawed its members in parliament are expected to form a new political party and form the next government, analysts said, but added they may face serious legal hurdles.
More than 80 years after revolutionary secularists led by Mustafal Kemal Ataturk abolished the Ottoman Islamic Caliphate, the divisive potential of Islam in Turkey remains high.
"We fear this ruling will accelerate the process of dividing and polarizing Turkish society on the basis of belief," said Devlet Bahceli, leader of the MHP, which supported the AK Party in pushing the headscarf-related amendments through parliament.
(Additional reporting by Selcuk Gokoluk in Ankara, Daren Butler, Thomas Grove, and Zerin Elci in Istanbul; Writing by Paul de Bendern)
Turkey's dangerous message to the Muslim world
A court ban on the most pro-Western party would be a big mistake.
By Alex Taurel and Shadi Hamid
from the July 24, 2008 edition
Washington - President Bush's vision of a democratic Middle East was premised in part on the region's popular Islamist groups reconciling themselves to the give-and-take nature of democracy.
It might make sense then, that the Bush administration would do what it could to support a party that has made such a transformation in Turkey. But it's not.
Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP), which fashioned itself as the Muslim equivalent of Europe's Christian Democrats, has stood out by passing a series of unprecedented political reforms as the country's ruling party.
Yet the Turkish Constitutional Court – bastion of the hard-line secularist old guard – is now threatening to close down the AKP and ban its leading figures, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, from party politics for five years. And the Bush administration, in the face of this impending judicial coup, has chosen to remain indifferent. The consequences could reach beyond a setback to democracy in Turkey and affect the Middle East.
The Constitutional Court will rule as soon as next week on an indictment accusing the AKP of being a "focal point of antisecular activities."
Turkey's Constitution establishes secularism as an unalterable principle and allows the court to ban parties it deems antisecular. But disbanding a democratically-elected party on such dubious grounds as attempting to lift a controversial ban on wearing head scarves in universities – the crux of the case against the AKP – is not how mature democracies handle divisive issues. Judges should not decide parties' fates; voters should.
Indeed, voters have flocked to the AKP since its founding by break away reformists within the Islamic movement. The party was elected in 2002 on pledges to preserve secularism and vigorously pursue Turkey's efforts to join the European Union. It also explicitly disavowed the Islamist label.
The AKP-led government then passed a series of democratic reforms that led Brussels to begin formal accession negotiations with Turkey. Those reforms, together with a booming economy, spurred 47 percent of Turks to vote for the AKP in its landslide 2007 reelection.
To be sure, the AKP's democratic credentials are hardly perfect. It has been overly cautious in repealing certain restrictions on freedom of speech, and it abruptly lifted the head scarf ban without first initiating a national dialogue.
Yet despite its flaws, the AKP is the most democratically inclined – and somewhat ironically, the most pro-Western – political party on the Turkish scene today. Closing it down would be a mistake.
A ban on a party that nearly half of the country supports could spark violence – which Turkey's secularist generals might then use as a pretext for a direct military intervention. Regardless, senior EU figures have criticized the closure case and warned that banning the AKP could gravely damage Turkey's candidacy.
Even more troubling is the message it would send to the rest of the Muslim world – no matter how much Islamists moderate, they won't be accepted as legitimate participants in the democratic process.
In recent years, mainstream Islamist groups throughout the region – including in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco – have embraced many of the foundational components of democratic life. Yet their moderation has been met with harsh government repression, or more subtle designs to restrict their political participation.
More is at stake than may initially appear. If the AKP – the most moderate, pro-democratic "Islamist" party in the region today – is disbanded, it will strengthen those Islamists who see violence and confrontation as a surer means to influence political power.
During the past year, a number of Islamist leaders we've spoken to in Egypt and Jordan have warned that rank-and-file activists are losing faith in the democratic process, and may soon become attracted to more radical approaches. A ban on the AKP would only make it that much harder for moderates to continue making the case that participating in elections is worthwhile.
Though US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praises the AKP's democratization agenda, last month she said, "Obviously, we are not going to get involved in … the current controversy in Turkey about the court case." Yet moments later she opined, "Sometimes when I'm asked what might democracy look like in the Middle East, I think it might look like Turkey." It's difficult to tell if she's referring to the new, democratizing Turkey of the past five years – or the reactionary Turkey where judges and generals flagrantly overrule the people's will.
President Bush has one last opportunity to reinvigorate the cause of Middle East democracy. By publicly denouncing the closure case, the administration would signal that the US not only supports Turkish democracy against a dangerous internal assault, but that it is also committed to defending all actors willing to abide by democratic principles in a region that desperately needs more of them.
• Alex Taurel is a research associate at the Project on Middle East Democracy. Shadi Hamid is the director of research there and a research fellow at the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan.
Find this article at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0724/p09s02-coop.html
A court ban on the most pro-Western party would be a big mistake.
By Alex Taurel and Shadi Hamid
from the July 24, 2008 edition
Washington - President Bush's vision of a democratic Middle East was premised in part on the region's popular Islamist groups reconciling themselves to the give-and-take nature of democracy.
It might make sense then, that the Bush administration would do what it could to support a party that has made such a transformation in Turkey. But it's not.
Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP), which fashioned itself as the Muslim equivalent of Europe's Christian Democrats, has stood out by passing a series of unprecedented political reforms as the country's ruling party.
Yet the Turkish Constitutional Court – bastion of the hard-line secularist old guard – is now threatening to close down the AKP and ban its leading figures, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, from party politics for five years. And the Bush administration, in the face of this impending judicial coup, has chosen to remain indifferent. The consequences could reach beyond a setback to democracy in Turkey and affect the Middle East.
The Constitutional Court will rule as soon as next week on an indictment accusing the AKP of being a "focal point of antisecular activities."
Turkey's Constitution establishes secularism as an unalterable principle and allows the court to ban parties it deems antisecular. But disbanding a democratically-elected party on such dubious grounds as attempting to lift a controversial ban on wearing head scarves in universities – the crux of the case against the AKP – is not how mature democracies handle divisive issues. Judges should not decide parties' fates; voters should.
Indeed, voters have flocked to the AKP since its founding by break away reformists within the Islamic movement. The party was elected in 2002 on pledges to preserve secularism and vigorously pursue Turkey's efforts to join the European Union. It also explicitly disavowed the Islamist label.
The AKP-led government then passed a series of democratic reforms that led Brussels to begin formal accession negotiations with Turkey. Those reforms, together with a booming economy, spurred 47 percent of Turks to vote for the AKP in its landslide 2007 reelection.
To be sure, the AKP's democratic credentials are hardly perfect. It has been overly cautious in repealing certain restrictions on freedom of speech, and it abruptly lifted the head scarf ban without first initiating a national dialogue.
Yet despite its flaws, the AKP is the most democratically inclined – and somewhat ironically, the most pro-Western – political party on the Turkish scene today. Closing it down would be a mistake.
A ban on a party that nearly half of the country supports could spark violence – which Turkey's secularist generals might then use as a pretext for a direct military intervention. Regardless, senior EU figures have criticized the closure case and warned that banning the AKP could gravely damage Turkey's candidacy.
Even more troubling is the message it would send to the rest of the Muslim world – no matter how much Islamists moderate, they won't be accepted as legitimate participants in the democratic process.
In recent years, mainstream Islamist groups throughout the region – including in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco – have embraced many of the foundational components of democratic life. Yet their moderation has been met with harsh government repression, or more subtle designs to restrict their political participation.
More is at stake than may initially appear. If the AKP – the most moderate, pro-democratic "Islamist" party in the region today – is disbanded, it will strengthen those Islamists who see violence and confrontation as a surer means to influence political power.
During the past year, a number of Islamist leaders we've spoken to in Egypt and Jordan have warned that rank-and-file activists are losing faith in the democratic process, and may soon become attracted to more radical approaches. A ban on the AKP would only make it that much harder for moderates to continue making the case that participating in elections is worthwhile.
Though US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praises the AKP's democratization agenda, last month she said, "Obviously, we are not going to get involved in … the current controversy in Turkey about the court case." Yet moments later she opined, "Sometimes when I'm asked what might democracy look like in the Middle East, I think it might look like Turkey." It's difficult to tell if she's referring to the new, democratizing Turkey of the past five years – or the reactionary Turkey where judges and generals flagrantly overrule the people's will.
President Bush has one last opportunity to reinvigorate the cause of Middle East democracy. By publicly denouncing the closure case, the administration would signal that the US not only supports Turkish democracy against a dangerous internal assault, but that it is also committed to defending all actors willing to abide by democratic principles in a region that desperately needs more of them.
• Alex Taurel is a research associate at the Project on Middle East Democracy. Shadi Hamid is the director of research there and a research fellow at the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan.
Find this article at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0724/p09s02-coop.html
July 31, 2008
Turkish Court Calls Ruling Party Constitutional
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and SEBNEM ARSU
Turkey’s governing party narrowly missed being banned in a court ruling on Wednesday that relieved months of pressure in the country and handed a victory to the party’s leader, a former Islamist.
The party, Justice and Development, or AKP, as it is known in Turkish, was kept alive by just one vote — six members of Turkey’s Constitutional Court voted to close it for violating the country’s secular principles, but seven were required. A ban would have brought down the government, forcing elections for the second time in a year and pitching Turkey into political chaos.
“A great uncertainty blocking Turkey’s future has been lifted,” said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the party, speaking in Ankara, the capital.
The court case was the culmination of an epic battle between the country’s secular establishment — a powerful coterie of judges and generals that has deposed elected governments four times in Turkish history — and Mr. Erdogan, a broadly popular politician whose supporters say that his past as a political Islamist is firmly behind him.
And while the ruling was widely viewed as a victory for Mr. Erdogan, and in turn for Turkish democracy, the court reined the party in, imposing a strong but not fatal sanction to cut its public financing in half and issuing a “serious warning” that it was steering the country in too Islamic a direction. Legislation pressed by the party that would have allowed women in head scarves to attend universities, for example, raised suspicions about its agenda.
“AKP is on probation,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul. “The court clearly said it sees the party as a focal institution for Islamizing the country.”
Still, by overcoming the case, which accused the party of trying to bring Islamic rule to Turkey, the party and its supporters have prevailed against the country’s staunchly secular old guard, which has steered the country from behind the scenes since Turkey’s founding by Ataturk in 1923.
The ruling releases the political deadlock that had paralyzed politics in Turkey since March, when the case was filed, and seems to have softened the sharp polarization that had formed between parts of Turkish society — those who want a more openly religious society and those who fear that too much space for Islam will end up curbing secular lifestyles. In a live news conference interrupted by jubilant supporters, Mr. Erdogan said his party had “never been the focus of antisecular activities,” and pledged that it would “continue to protect the fundamental principles of our republic also in the future.”
Turkey is overwhelmingly Muslim, but its system of government is secular. While the case against the AKP was broadly criticized as weak, secular Turks still worry that the party, with its control of Parliament, the presidency and the government, has too much leeway to impose policies that appeal to its socially conservative base.
But the ruling seemed to have something for everyone, clearing the air politically and allowing even Turkey’s most adamant secularists to claim it as a victory.
“AKP can no longer continue with its previous line in politics,” said Onur Oymen, the deputy chairman of the secular opposition Republican People’s Party. “They have been granted a chance. In order to make the best of it, they need to go through some serious self-critique.”
There appear to be no practical implications for the party aside from the cut in financing, which is expected to be made up from other sources in the party’s vast middle- and upper-class network of supporters. The ruling opens a new opportunity for Mr. Erdogan to reach out to liberal Turks, who oppose the secular elite but resented his legislation on the head scarves. They felt that he had abandoned other liberal issues like freedom of speech.
“They can no longer afford to act single-handedly,” said Ersin Kalaycioglu, political science professor of Sabanci University in Istanbul, who compared the party to a soccer player “with a yellow card to be expelled from the game after one more mistake.”
The ruling was an “elegant solution,” said Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who used a metaphor to describe its effect: “If the AKP was a river that has overflown its banks, the court has set up embankments, forcing it back into its bed. It has not put a dam in front of it.”
The ruling came at a time of great tension in the country. A bomb attack had killed 17 people in Istanbul just three days before, and a ban of the party and its senior members would have brought great instability. On Wednesday, the Istanbul police detained nine people in connection with the blast, Turkey’s state-run Anatolian News Agency reported.
“The judges must have judged that the consequences of closure would have been intolerable for the country,” Mr. Ozel said.
A government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the party had taken the ruling to heart. “A new period is ahead,” the official said. “The self-critique following the verdict,” he said, “will be seen in our actions, not in words.”
Turkey is trying to gain membership in the European Union, and its chances could have been dented if the party was closed.
“There is a great sense of relief among the Europeans,” said Joost Lagendijk, a member of the European Parliament who works on matters regarding Turkey.
The case has paralleled another sensational legal proceeding — the prosecution of 86 people, including writers, members of civic organizations and former military officers who are charged with plotting to overthrow the government — and many in Turkey saw the effects of that case in the ruling on Wednesday.
The case, referred to as Ergenekon, the name of the ultranationalist organization the people belong to, is one of the first public accountings of the darker side of Turkey’s deep state.
Baskin Oran, a professor of international relations at Ankara University, said the ruling was a sign that Turkey’s judiciary, long believed to be well in the sphere of the secular establishment, seemed to have broken ranks.
“Everybody is very happy with this decision,” he said. “Otherwise it would have created a hell of a situation for Turkey.”
Sabrina Tavernise reported from Baghdad, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.
Turkish Court Calls Ruling Party Constitutional
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and SEBNEM ARSU
Turkey’s governing party narrowly missed being banned in a court ruling on Wednesday that relieved months of pressure in the country and handed a victory to the party’s leader, a former Islamist.
The party, Justice and Development, or AKP, as it is known in Turkish, was kept alive by just one vote — six members of Turkey’s Constitutional Court voted to close it for violating the country’s secular principles, but seven were required. A ban would have brought down the government, forcing elections for the second time in a year and pitching Turkey into political chaos.
“A great uncertainty blocking Turkey’s future has been lifted,” said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the party, speaking in Ankara, the capital.
The court case was the culmination of an epic battle between the country’s secular establishment — a powerful coterie of judges and generals that has deposed elected governments four times in Turkish history — and Mr. Erdogan, a broadly popular politician whose supporters say that his past as a political Islamist is firmly behind him.
And while the ruling was widely viewed as a victory for Mr. Erdogan, and in turn for Turkish democracy, the court reined the party in, imposing a strong but not fatal sanction to cut its public financing in half and issuing a “serious warning” that it was steering the country in too Islamic a direction. Legislation pressed by the party that would have allowed women in head scarves to attend universities, for example, raised suspicions about its agenda.
“AKP is on probation,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul. “The court clearly said it sees the party as a focal institution for Islamizing the country.”
Still, by overcoming the case, which accused the party of trying to bring Islamic rule to Turkey, the party and its supporters have prevailed against the country’s staunchly secular old guard, which has steered the country from behind the scenes since Turkey’s founding by Ataturk in 1923.
The ruling releases the political deadlock that had paralyzed politics in Turkey since March, when the case was filed, and seems to have softened the sharp polarization that had formed between parts of Turkish society — those who want a more openly religious society and those who fear that too much space for Islam will end up curbing secular lifestyles. In a live news conference interrupted by jubilant supporters, Mr. Erdogan said his party had “never been the focus of antisecular activities,” and pledged that it would “continue to protect the fundamental principles of our republic also in the future.”
Turkey is overwhelmingly Muslim, but its system of government is secular. While the case against the AKP was broadly criticized as weak, secular Turks still worry that the party, with its control of Parliament, the presidency and the government, has too much leeway to impose policies that appeal to its socially conservative base.
But the ruling seemed to have something for everyone, clearing the air politically and allowing even Turkey’s most adamant secularists to claim it as a victory.
“AKP can no longer continue with its previous line in politics,” said Onur Oymen, the deputy chairman of the secular opposition Republican People’s Party. “They have been granted a chance. In order to make the best of it, they need to go through some serious self-critique.”
There appear to be no practical implications for the party aside from the cut in financing, which is expected to be made up from other sources in the party’s vast middle- and upper-class network of supporters. The ruling opens a new opportunity for Mr. Erdogan to reach out to liberal Turks, who oppose the secular elite but resented his legislation on the head scarves. They felt that he had abandoned other liberal issues like freedom of speech.
“They can no longer afford to act single-handedly,” said Ersin Kalaycioglu, political science professor of Sabanci University in Istanbul, who compared the party to a soccer player “with a yellow card to be expelled from the game after one more mistake.”
The ruling was an “elegant solution,” said Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who used a metaphor to describe its effect: “If the AKP was a river that has overflown its banks, the court has set up embankments, forcing it back into its bed. It has not put a dam in front of it.”
The ruling came at a time of great tension in the country. A bomb attack had killed 17 people in Istanbul just three days before, and a ban of the party and its senior members would have brought great instability. On Wednesday, the Istanbul police detained nine people in connection with the blast, Turkey’s state-run Anatolian News Agency reported.
“The judges must have judged that the consequences of closure would have been intolerable for the country,” Mr. Ozel said.
A government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the party had taken the ruling to heart. “A new period is ahead,” the official said. “The self-critique following the verdict,” he said, “will be seen in our actions, not in words.”
Turkey is trying to gain membership in the European Union, and its chances could have been dented if the party was closed.
“There is a great sense of relief among the Europeans,” said Joost Lagendijk, a member of the European Parliament who works on matters regarding Turkey.
The case has paralleled another sensational legal proceeding — the prosecution of 86 people, including writers, members of civic organizations and former military officers who are charged with plotting to overthrow the government — and many in Turkey saw the effects of that case in the ruling on Wednesday.
The case, referred to as Ergenekon, the name of the ultranationalist organization the people belong to, is one of the first public accountings of the darker side of Turkey’s deep state.
Baskin Oran, a professor of international relations at Ankara University, said the ruling was a sign that Turkey’s judiciary, long believed to be well in the sphere of the secular establishment, seemed to have broken ranks.
“Everybody is very happy with this decision,” he said. “Otherwise it would have created a hell of a situation for Turkey.”
Sabrina Tavernise reported from Baghdad, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.
Separation of Mosque and State
Turkey's Constitutional Court has decided against disbanding the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and ruled instead to cut the party's public funding. This sent a clear signal that the AKP is now on probation, and may yet be shut down if it pursues what ardent secularists view as a policy of creeping Islamization.
These decisions echo beyond the Middle East. From Istanbul to Paris, and from Cairo to Jakarta, the conflict between Muslims who want to tighten versus loosen the mosque-state link is escalating. In Middle East countries that have pursued modest political reform, this elemental dispute is undercutting democratization. But even where democracy is on firmer ground, the battle between Islamists and secularists is eroding the quality of democratic governance. The stakes are enormous.
Consider Turkey and France. While it may seem odd to put them in the same basket, the political systems of both countries have long been guided by elites who champion an ideology of state-enforced secularism. Although upheld as a key ingredient of democratic life, this ideology was animated by a profoundly illiberal impulse: to keep any display of faith out of the public sphere. This arrangement worked so long as the vast majority of French and Turks favored or acquiesced to it. But in recent years, social, demographic and economic changes have enhanced the clout of a new generation of Muslims--many of whom are not ready to fold up their headscarves when they walk into a public university or government office. Alarmed, the defenders of "laïcite" and Ataturk-style secularism are striking back.
Thus in France, political leaders left and right have applauded the recent decision by that country's highest court to deny citizenship to a Moroccan woman because, among other reasons, she wears a burka (a full body cover traditionally worn in Afghanistan). This clothing, the Court stated, is "incompatible with values of the French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes." Echoing a similar logic, Turkey's Constitutional Court cancelled an amendment proposed by the AKP that would have allowed for the wearing of headscarves in public universities. The Court went a step further when it considered a proposal to disband the AKP itself. But while the Court has stepped back from the brink, a hobbled AKP must now tread carefully between its desire to promote "religious freedom" and the ardent determination of secularists to confine that freedom to family or the mosque.
In France and Turkey, unelected courts have intervened in ways that ignore or defy the voice of elected parliaments. But at what cost? France's democracy will certainly survive. But it is a huge leap of state authority for France's highest court to deny citizenship on the grounds that someone's religious values clash with prevailing notions of gender equality. While French intellectuals are busy debating whether the burka-clad woman in question suffers from false consciousness, they should ponder the broader implications of the Court's actions (particularly in a country that practically invented the term liberté).
By contrast, the decisions taken by Turkey's Constitutional Court may --or may not-- create a space for the deepening of democracy. Much will depend on whether moderate political leaders on both sides of the Islamist-secularist divide can use this fragile moment to craft a mutually acceptable vision of secularism.
It won't be easy. It may be that AKP leaders genuinely believe that allowing headscarves is not part of some grand conspiracy to Islamicize society. But many secular Turks think otherwise. After all, they argue, the issue is not merely freedom of religion but freedom from religion. Open up the universities to headscarves and many secular women may feel growing social pressures to wear religious garb. Islamicization will come, not out of choice, but out of a fear.
While such concerns may be exaggerated, they should not be dismissed. True, the banning of the AKP would have been a disaster not merely for Turkey, but for the wider Middle East, where a new generation of Arab Islamists has been inspired by the AKP's quest to forge a pluralistic vision that is also attentive to conservative religious values. Yet Washington should not romanticize the AKP by ignoring or downplaying the tensions and fears provoked by its efforts to advance a post-Islamist secularism. Instead, the U.S. should take a cue from European leaders, who are now encouraging the AKP to address the concerns of secular Turks, many of whom voted for the party only to wonder about its ultimate intensions.
Posted by Daniel Brumberg on August 7, 2008 10:09 AM
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfa ... state.html
Daniel Brumberg
Daniel Brumberg is an Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University and Co-Director of the Democracy and Governance Studies at GU. He also serves as a Acting Director of the United States Institute of Peace Muslim World Initiative, where he directs a number of programs on democracy and political change in the Muslim world. A former senior associate in the Carnegie Endowment's Democracy and Rule of Law Project (2003–04). Brumberg previously was a Jennings Randolph senior fellow at USIP, where he pursued a study of power sharing in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In 1997, Brumberg was a Mellon junior fellow at Georgetown University and a visiting fellow at the International Forum on Democratic Studies. He was a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University and a visiting fellow in the Middle East Program in the Jimmy Carter Center, and has also taught at the University of Chicago and Sciences Po, Paris. He received his B.A. from Indiana University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His books include "Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and "Islam and Democracy in the Middle East, co-edited with Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Close.
Turkey's Constitutional Court has decided against disbanding the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and ruled instead to cut the party's public funding. This sent a clear signal that the AKP is now on probation, and may yet be shut down if it pursues what ardent secularists view as a policy of creeping Islamization.
These decisions echo beyond the Middle East. From Istanbul to Paris, and from Cairo to Jakarta, the conflict between Muslims who want to tighten versus loosen the mosque-state link is escalating. In Middle East countries that have pursued modest political reform, this elemental dispute is undercutting democratization. But even where democracy is on firmer ground, the battle between Islamists and secularists is eroding the quality of democratic governance. The stakes are enormous.
Consider Turkey and France. While it may seem odd to put them in the same basket, the political systems of both countries have long been guided by elites who champion an ideology of state-enforced secularism. Although upheld as a key ingredient of democratic life, this ideology was animated by a profoundly illiberal impulse: to keep any display of faith out of the public sphere. This arrangement worked so long as the vast majority of French and Turks favored or acquiesced to it. But in recent years, social, demographic and economic changes have enhanced the clout of a new generation of Muslims--many of whom are not ready to fold up their headscarves when they walk into a public university or government office. Alarmed, the defenders of "laïcite" and Ataturk-style secularism are striking back.
Thus in France, political leaders left and right have applauded the recent decision by that country's highest court to deny citizenship to a Moroccan woman because, among other reasons, she wears a burka (a full body cover traditionally worn in Afghanistan). This clothing, the Court stated, is "incompatible with values of the French community, particularly the principle of equality of the sexes." Echoing a similar logic, Turkey's Constitutional Court cancelled an amendment proposed by the AKP that would have allowed for the wearing of headscarves in public universities. The Court went a step further when it considered a proposal to disband the AKP itself. But while the Court has stepped back from the brink, a hobbled AKP must now tread carefully between its desire to promote "religious freedom" and the ardent determination of secularists to confine that freedom to family or the mosque.
In France and Turkey, unelected courts have intervened in ways that ignore or defy the voice of elected parliaments. But at what cost? France's democracy will certainly survive. But it is a huge leap of state authority for France's highest court to deny citizenship on the grounds that someone's religious values clash with prevailing notions of gender equality. While French intellectuals are busy debating whether the burka-clad woman in question suffers from false consciousness, they should ponder the broader implications of the Court's actions (particularly in a country that practically invented the term liberté).
By contrast, the decisions taken by Turkey's Constitutional Court may --or may not-- create a space for the deepening of democracy. Much will depend on whether moderate political leaders on both sides of the Islamist-secularist divide can use this fragile moment to craft a mutually acceptable vision of secularism.
It won't be easy. It may be that AKP leaders genuinely believe that allowing headscarves is not part of some grand conspiracy to Islamicize society. But many secular Turks think otherwise. After all, they argue, the issue is not merely freedom of religion but freedom from religion. Open up the universities to headscarves and many secular women may feel growing social pressures to wear religious garb. Islamicization will come, not out of choice, but out of a fear.
While such concerns may be exaggerated, they should not be dismissed. True, the banning of the AKP would have been a disaster not merely for Turkey, but for the wider Middle East, where a new generation of Arab Islamists has been inspired by the AKP's quest to forge a pluralistic vision that is also attentive to conservative religious values. Yet Washington should not romanticize the AKP by ignoring or downplaying the tensions and fears provoked by its efforts to advance a post-Islamist secularism. Instead, the U.S. should take a cue from European leaders, who are now encouraging the AKP to address the concerns of secular Turks, many of whom voted for the party only to wonder about its ultimate intensions.
Posted by Daniel Brumberg on August 7, 2008 10:09 AM
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfa ... state.html
Daniel Brumberg
Daniel Brumberg is an Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University and Co-Director of the Democracy and Governance Studies at GU. He also serves as a Acting Director of the United States Institute of Peace Muslim World Initiative, where he directs a number of programs on democracy and political change in the Muslim world. A former senior associate in the Carnegie Endowment's Democracy and Rule of Law Project (2003–04). Brumberg previously was a Jennings Randolph senior fellow at USIP, where he pursued a study of power sharing in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In 1997, Brumberg was a Mellon junior fellow at Georgetown University and a visiting fellow at the International Forum on Democratic Studies. He was a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University and a visiting fellow in the Middle East Program in the Jimmy Carter Center, and has also taught at the University of Chicago and Sciences Po, Paris. He received his B.A. from Indiana University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His books include "Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and "Islam and Democracy in the Middle East, co-edited with Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Close.
Religion and State, Never. Faith and Poliitcs, Always.
Right on, Rick Warren! Now let's hope he means it. But whether or not we trust his intentions, we can all learn from his words. The separation of church and state is one of the great ideas of the modern world. It attempted to end the thousands year old tradition, among all three Abrahamic faiths at least, of people using state power to kill other people in order to make God happy. But the idea that faith should be separated from politics is one of the worst expressions of "baby-out-with-the-bathwater" thinking that has come along in almost as many years. Instead of killing people for God, we tried to kill God for people, only that has worked so well either.
We have managed to kill as many people over the last two hundred years, without God in the mix, as we did in the thousands of years before. So maybe we need to try something else. Instead of killing off either God, or those who don't share our beliefs, perhaps we should reintegrate the two in a healthier way. That is what I find so useful about Rev. Warren's comment.
Neither the state nor religions are well served when they are one and the same - not in America, not in Saudi Arabia, and not in Israel. But neither are they maximized when they are totally disconnected from each other either. Our faiths, the beliefs which animate our lives, whatever they may be, must inform our politics if they are to be anything more than occasional, spiritual entertainment. Our beliefs, if deeply held, will always affect our politics, if we actually care about people other than ourselves.
Faith, or the lack of it, is a personal matter and must always remain so. But the values and commitments that flow from that personal decision must be about something larger than our own personal lives. If not, neither our faith nor our lack of it, is anything more than narcissism with good footnotes. The real test is not whether that which we believe has a political agenda, it is whether or not the faiths and politics we profess, leave room for the agendas of others.
Please e-mail On Faith if you'd like to receive an email notification when On Faith sends out a new question.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfa ... faith.html
Right on, Rick Warren! Now let's hope he means it. But whether or not we trust his intentions, we can all learn from his words. The separation of church and state is one of the great ideas of the modern world. It attempted to end the thousands year old tradition, among all three Abrahamic faiths at least, of people using state power to kill other people in order to make God happy. But the idea that faith should be separated from politics is one of the worst expressions of "baby-out-with-the-bathwater" thinking that has come along in almost as many years. Instead of killing people for God, we tried to kill God for people, only that has worked so well either.
We have managed to kill as many people over the last two hundred years, without God in the mix, as we did in the thousands of years before. So maybe we need to try something else. Instead of killing off either God, or those who don't share our beliefs, perhaps we should reintegrate the two in a healthier way. That is what I find so useful about Rev. Warren's comment.
Neither the state nor religions are well served when they are one and the same - not in America, not in Saudi Arabia, and not in Israel. But neither are they maximized when they are totally disconnected from each other either. Our faiths, the beliefs which animate our lives, whatever they may be, must inform our politics if they are to be anything more than occasional, spiritual entertainment. Our beliefs, if deeply held, will always affect our politics, if we actually care about people other than ourselves.
Faith, or the lack of it, is a personal matter and must always remain so. But the values and commitments that flow from that personal decision must be about something larger than our own personal lives. If not, neither our faith nor our lack of it, is anything more than narcissism with good footnotes. The real test is not whether that which we believe has a political agenda, it is whether or not the faiths and politics we profess, leave room for the agendas of others.
Please e-mail On Faith if you'd like to receive an email notification when On Faith sends out a new question.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfa ... faith.html
Meet Fethullah Gülen, the World’s Top Public Intellectual
Posted August 2008
When Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine asked readers to vote for the world’s top public intellectual, one man won in a landslide: Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, an inspirational leader to millions of followers around the world and persona non grata to many in his native Turkey, where some consider him a threat to the country’s secular order. In a rare interview, Gülen speaks to FP about terrorism, political ambitions, and why his movement is so misunderstood.
Illustration: Lara Tomlin for FP
Foreign Policy: How do you feel about being named the world’s top public intellectual?
Fethullah Gülen: I have never imagined being or wished to be chosen as something important in the world. I have always tried to be a humble servant of God and a humble member of humanity. The Koran says that humanity has been created to recognize and worship God and, as a dimension of this worship, to improve the world in strict avoidance of corruption and bloodshed. It requires treating all things and beings with deep compassion. This is my philosophy, which obliges me to remain aloof from all worldly titles and ranks. However, I am not indifferent to the appreciation of kind people. [The voters were] extremely kind in naming me the world’s top public intellectual, a title to which I can never see myself as entitled.
FP: Do you harbor any political ambitions?
FG: I have never had, nor will I ever have, any [political] ambitions. The only thing on which I have always set my heart is being able to gain God’s good pleasure and, therefore, trying to make him known correctly and loved by humanity.
FP: Where does Islam fit in a Muslim’s political life?
FG: Islam as a religion focuses primarily on the immutable aspects of life and existence, whereas a political system concerns only social aspects of our worldly life. Islam’s basic principles of belief, worship, morality, and behavior are not affected by changing times. Islam does not propose a certain unchangeable form of government or attempt to shape it. Islam has never offered nor established a theocracy in its name. Instead, Islam establishes fundamental principles that orient a government’s general character. So, politics can be a factor neither in shaping Islam nor directing Muslims’ acts and attitudes in Islam’s name.
FP: Why do you believe your movement is suspected by so many Turks?
FG: I do not believe so many Turks suspect my activities. The idea that this movement of volunteers is suspected by many Turks arises in the same way and for the same reasons that the world hears more about those Muslims whom the media call radicals. Since those who give this impression are extremely loud, some observers can be deceived.
FP: Hundreds of schools have been opened around the world based on a model you pioneered, blending science and religion. How centrally controlled are the schools run by the Gülenist movement?
FG: My only role in the opening of the schools has been to suggest and encourage opening them. But it is impossible for there to be a [central authority] controlling the schools. They are in more than 100 countries, and there must be many different companies that have opened and run them. Some of them may have closer relations or interactions. Some may be sharing their experiences with others.
FP: What is the most misunderstood thing about the Gülenist movement?
FG: I cannot accept concepts such as Gülenism or Gülenist. I was only a writer and an official preacher among people. I can have no direct influence on any person or activity. It is inconceivable that I can exert pressure on anybody.
But some people may regard my views well and show respect to me, and I hope they have not deceived themselves in doing so. Some people think that I am a leader of a movement. Some think that there is a central organization responsible for all the institutions they wrongly think affiliated with me. They ignore the zeal of many to serve humanity and to gain God’s good pleasure in doing so. They ignore people’s generosity. Such misunderstandings may lead others to have suspicions about the financial resources of the schools. A small minority in Turkey even accuses me of having political ambitions, when in fact I have been struggling with various illnesses for many years.
FP: You preach a moderate, tolerant Islam. What do you think causes terrorism?.
FG: Islam abhors and absolutely condemns terrorism and any terrorist activity. I have repeatedly declared that it is impossible for a true Muslim to be a terrorist, nor can a terrorist be regarded as a true Muslim. Terrorism is one of the cardinal sins that the Koran threatens with hellfire.
It is a fact that Muslims have lagged behind in science and technology for the last few centuries. The Muslim world suffers from internal divisions, antidemocratic practices, and the violation of fundamental human rights and freedoms. But Muslims have never been and never can be so base as to expect any solutions to their problems through terror.
[Terrorism] is formed of certain fundamental problems, [including] ignorance, poverty, and fear of others. Some people take advantage of the young and foolish. They are manipulated, abused, and even drugged to such an extent that they can be used as murderers on the pretext of some crazy ideals or goals.
To defeat terrorism, we must acknowledge that we are all human beings. It is not our choice to belong to a particular race or family. We should be freed from fear of the other and enjoy diversity within democracy. I believe that dialogue and education are the most effective means to surpass our differences.
FP: Would you like to return to Turkey someday?
FG: I certainly long for my country and my friends there. However, I have submitted myself to my fate and am willingly resigned to however it judges.
Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic scholar now living in the United States, was voted the world’s top public intellectual in the 2008 FOREIGN POLICY/Prospect poll.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms. ... ry_id=4349
Posted August 2008
When Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine asked readers to vote for the world’s top public intellectual, one man won in a landslide: Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, an inspirational leader to millions of followers around the world and persona non grata to many in his native Turkey, where some consider him a threat to the country’s secular order. In a rare interview, Gülen speaks to FP about terrorism, political ambitions, and why his movement is so misunderstood.
Illustration: Lara Tomlin for FP
Foreign Policy: How do you feel about being named the world’s top public intellectual?
Fethullah Gülen: I have never imagined being or wished to be chosen as something important in the world. I have always tried to be a humble servant of God and a humble member of humanity. The Koran says that humanity has been created to recognize and worship God and, as a dimension of this worship, to improve the world in strict avoidance of corruption and bloodshed. It requires treating all things and beings with deep compassion. This is my philosophy, which obliges me to remain aloof from all worldly titles and ranks. However, I am not indifferent to the appreciation of kind people. [The voters were] extremely kind in naming me the world’s top public intellectual, a title to which I can never see myself as entitled.
FP: Do you harbor any political ambitions?
FG: I have never had, nor will I ever have, any [political] ambitions. The only thing on which I have always set my heart is being able to gain God’s good pleasure and, therefore, trying to make him known correctly and loved by humanity.
FP: Where does Islam fit in a Muslim’s political life?
FG: Islam as a religion focuses primarily on the immutable aspects of life and existence, whereas a political system concerns only social aspects of our worldly life. Islam’s basic principles of belief, worship, morality, and behavior are not affected by changing times. Islam does not propose a certain unchangeable form of government or attempt to shape it. Islam has never offered nor established a theocracy in its name. Instead, Islam establishes fundamental principles that orient a government’s general character. So, politics can be a factor neither in shaping Islam nor directing Muslims’ acts and attitudes in Islam’s name.
FP: Why do you believe your movement is suspected by so many Turks?
FG: I do not believe so many Turks suspect my activities. The idea that this movement of volunteers is suspected by many Turks arises in the same way and for the same reasons that the world hears more about those Muslims whom the media call radicals. Since those who give this impression are extremely loud, some observers can be deceived.
FP: Hundreds of schools have been opened around the world based on a model you pioneered, blending science and religion. How centrally controlled are the schools run by the Gülenist movement?
FG: My only role in the opening of the schools has been to suggest and encourage opening them. But it is impossible for there to be a [central authority] controlling the schools. They are in more than 100 countries, and there must be many different companies that have opened and run them. Some of them may have closer relations or interactions. Some may be sharing their experiences with others.
FP: What is the most misunderstood thing about the Gülenist movement?
FG: I cannot accept concepts such as Gülenism or Gülenist. I was only a writer and an official preacher among people. I can have no direct influence on any person or activity. It is inconceivable that I can exert pressure on anybody.
But some people may regard my views well and show respect to me, and I hope they have not deceived themselves in doing so. Some people think that I am a leader of a movement. Some think that there is a central organization responsible for all the institutions they wrongly think affiliated with me. They ignore the zeal of many to serve humanity and to gain God’s good pleasure in doing so. They ignore people’s generosity. Such misunderstandings may lead others to have suspicions about the financial resources of the schools. A small minority in Turkey even accuses me of having political ambitions, when in fact I have been struggling with various illnesses for many years.
FP: You preach a moderate, tolerant Islam. What do you think causes terrorism?.
FG: Islam abhors and absolutely condemns terrorism and any terrorist activity. I have repeatedly declared that it is impossible for a true Muslim to be a terrorist, nor can a terrorist be regarded as a true Muslim. Terrorism is one of the cardinal sins that the Koran threatens with hellfire.
It is a fact that Muslims have lagged behind in science and technology for the last few centuries. The Muslim world suffers from internal divisions, antidemocratic practices, and the violation of fundamental human rights and freedoms. But Muslims have never been and never can be so base as to expect any solutions to their problems through terror.
[Terrorism] is formed of certain fundamental problems, [including] ignorance, poverty, and fear of others. Some people take advantage of the young and foolish. They are manipulated, abused, and even drugged to such an extent that they can be used as murderers on the pretext of some crazy ideals or goals.
To defeat terrorism, we must acknowledge that we are all human beings. It is not our choice to belong to a particular race or family. We should be freed from fear of the other and enjoy diversity within democracy. I believe that dialogue and education are the most effective means to surpass our differences.
FP: Would you like to return to Turkey someday?
FG: I certainly long for my country and my friends there. However, I have submitted myself to my fate and am willingly resigned to however it judges.
Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic scholar now living in the United States, was voted the world’s top public intellectual in the 2008 FOREIGN POLICY/Prospect poll.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms. ... ry_id=4349
June 22, 2009
News Analysis
In Iran, Both Sides Seek to Carry Islam’s Banner
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, ended his prayer sermon in tears on Friday, invoking the name of a disappeared Shiite prophet to suggest that his government was besieged by forces of evil out to destroy a legitimate Islamic government.
The opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, in criticizing the government, demanded the kind of justice promised by the Koran and exhorted his followers to take to their rooftops at night to cry out, “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.”
In the battle to control Iran’s streets, both the government and the opposition are deploying religious symbols and parables to portray themselves as pursing the ideal of a just Islamic state.
That struggle could prove the main fulcrum in the battle for the hearts and minds of most ordinary Iranians, because the Islamic Revolution, since its inception, has painted itself as battling evil. If the government fails the test of being just, not least by using excessive violence against its citizens, it risks letting the opposition wrap itself in the mantle of Islamic virtue.
“If either the reformists or the conservatives can make reference to Islamic values in a way that the majority of citizens understand, they will win,” said Mohsen Kadivar, a senior Iranian religious scholar teaching Islamic studies at Duke University.
Perhaps most important, the outcome may determine the support the government enjoys among the ideological zealots who form the backbone of the security forces. Some Iran experts see the level of violence in the week ahead as crucial in the tug of war over Islam.
“What is really smart about Moussavi and his group is that they say they are part of the Islamic Revolution and they want to say ‘God is great’ and overthrow tyranny,” said Said A. Arjomand, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “It is a struggle over the appropriation of the old symbols. If the public says we want Hussein and ‘God is great’ and then the militias are told to go kill them, that will be a little hard.”
The dawn of the Shiite faith can be traced back to the death of Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson; his killing at the hands of a far larger force in 680 has long infused the faith with a sense of being the underdog. Hence, both sides in Iran portray themselves as ready to be martyrs to their cause — Ayatollah Khamenei suggested it in his sermon, and Mr. Moussavi was quoted as saying that he was also ready to give his life.
The argument on both sides has stayed narrowly within the bounds of Islam, with the opposition even deftly using green, the color of Islam and the family of the prophet, as a subtle symbol that its protests are rooted in the faith. Both sides say they are the true heirs of the revered revolutionary patriarch, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in trying to carry out Islamic principles.
In his criticism on Sunday, Mr. Moussavi avoided any direct assault against the supreme leader, instead saying the government cheated on the results of the June 12 presidential election.
“Every Muslim understands that anyone who would lie in this way is not just,” said Mr. Kadivar, the Duke professor, who was a senior adviser to the previous reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. “The basic requirement for being the supreme leader is to be just. Justice is a key point in Islamic values.”
The argument by Ayatollah Khamenei, laid out in his Friday sermon, is that he is the spiritual guide and therefore challenging him is challenging Islam. In the short term he probably has the more potent argument, analysts said, but sustained violence to subdue demonstrations will work against him.
“Both sides want to paint the other as responsible for the violence,” said Mr. Arjomand, adding that the opposition could not label Ayatollah Khamenei a dictator. “They don’t want to push it too far; they know they will lose because ultimately Khamenei has the better claim to being Khomeini’s heir.”
On the other hand, every time anyone inside Iran opens a Web site and sees the images of a teenage girl shot dead in a protest, it chips away at the government’s claim to being moral.
“If the movement is successful, they could spread the idea that the regime is evil,” said Fatimah Haghighatjoo, a former reformist member of the Iranian Parliament who is now a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
In student uprisings against the government in 1999 and 2003, demonstrators challenged the idea of having a supreme leader. It proved relatively easy to crush them, not just because of their small numbers, but because they were challenging the very foundation of the system.
“The people inside Iran are not saying they want regime change. They are saying, ‘Where is my vote?’ ” Ms. Haghighatjoo said. “It is just people coming down into the streets to defend their vote; they can’t accuse them of being anti-regime. I don’t think the lowest-level Basijis would accept shooting people because they are protesting cheating on the elections.”
The Basij — paramilitary, plainclothes vigilantes — is the main force the government uses to try to dispel antigovernment protesters. Thus far, that has been done mostly through beatings, arrests and other intimidation tactics. But the death toll is reportedly 10 to 19 people nationwide.
“In general, the Basij is an ideologically or culturally driven force, but the majority are very committed fundamentalists,” said Afshon P. Ostovar, who is writing his doctoral thesis at the University of Michigan about the Iranian security forces.
That ideology may not hold out if the crackdowns start to divide society, however. “You may see the middle ground in the Basij and even the Revolutionary Guards start to question their commitment,” Mr. Ostovar said.
This is one reason the suppression has not been as violent as it could be, he added.
Analysts also believe that the government has been holding back because the most senior ayatollahs, who so far have been largely silent about the election, could no longer sit on the sidelines. A few prominent liberal ayatollahs have criticized the election outcome.
But wider bloodshed would likely prompt the most senior conservative clerics in the holy city of Qum, as well as Najaf in Iraq, to weigh in against the government. That would have a significant impact on turning popular opinion toward the opposition.
The strength of the protests is that they have remained within religion, said Roxanne Varzi, an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the way the government spreads its ideology.
“It was easier to play on the discourse of the infidel versus the righteous citizen,” said Ms. Varzi, but the opposition movement adopted the whole Islamic discourse. “It is not meant to be something anti-Islamic, even for those who are secular in their practices. Because they have kept inside that structure, it is hard for the government to justify clamping down on them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/world ... nted=print
News Analysis
In Iran, Both Sides Seek to Carry Islam’s Banner
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, ended his prayer sermon in tears on Friday, invoking the name of a disappeared Shiite prophet to suggest that his government was besieged by forces of evil out to destroy a legitimate Islamic government.
The opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, in criticizing the government, demanded the kind of justice promised by the Koran and exhorted his followers to take to their rooftops at night to cry out, “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.”
In the battle to control Iran’s streets, both the government and the opposition are deploying religious symbols and parables to portray themselves as pursing the ideal of a just Islamic state.
That struggle could prove the main fulcrum in the battle for the hearts and minds of most ordinary Iranians, because the Islamic Revolution, since its inception, has painted itself as battling evil. If the government fails the test of being just, not least by using excessive violence against its citizens, it risks letting the opposition wrap itself in the mantle of Islamic virtue.
“If either the reformists or the conservatives can make reference to Islamic values in a way that the majority of citizens understand, they will win,” said Mohsen Kadivar, a senior Iranian religious scholar teaching Islamic studies at Duke University.
Perhaps most important, the outcome may determine the support the government enjoys among the ideological zealots who form the backbone of the security forces. Some Iran experts see the level of violence in the week ahead as crucial in the tug of war over Islam.
“What is really smart about Moussavi and his group is that they say they are part of the Islamic Revolution and they want to say ‘God is great’ and overthrow tyranny,” said Said A. Arjomand, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “It is a struggle over the appropriation of the old symbols. If the public says we want Hussein and ‘God is great’ and then the militias are told to go kill them, that will be a little hard.”
The dawn of the Shiite faith can be traced back to the death of Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson; his killing at the hands of a far larger force in 680 has long infused the faith with a sense of being the underdog. Hence, both sides in Iran portray themselves as ready to be martyrs to their cause — Ayatollah Khamenei suggested it in his sermon, and Mr. Moussavi was quoted as saying that he was also ready to give his life.
The argument on both sides has stayed narrowly within the bounds of Islam, with the opposition even deftly using green, the color of Islam and the family of the prophet, as a subtle symbol that its protests are rooted in the faith. Both sides say they are the true heirs of the revered revolutionary patriarch, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in trying to carry out Islamic principles.
In his criticism on Sunday, Mr. Moussavi avoided any direct assault against the supreme leader, instead saying the government cheated on the results of the June 12 presidential election.
“Every Muslim understands that anyone who would lie in this way is not just,” said Mr. Kadivar, the Duke professor, who was a senior adviser to the previous reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. “The basic requirement for being the supreme leader is to be just. Justice is a key point in Islamic values.”
The argument by Ayatollah Khamenei, laid out in his Friday sermon, is that he is the spiritual guide and therefore challenging him is challenging Islam. In the short term he probably has the more potent argument, analysts said, but sustained violence to subdue demonstrations will work against him.
“Both sides want to paint the other as responsible for the violence,” said Mr. Arjomand, adding that the opposition could not label Ayatollah Khamenei a dictator. “They don’t want to push it too far; they know they will lose because ultimately Khamenei has the better claim to being Khomeini’s heir.”
On the other hand, every time anyone inside Iran opens a Web site and sees the images of a teenage girl shot dead in a protest, it chips away at the government’s claim to being moral.
“If the movement is successful, they could spread the idea that the regime is evil,” said Fatimah Haghighatjoo, a former reformist member of the Iranian Parliament who is now a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
In student uprisings against the government in 1999 and 2003, demonstrators challenged the idea of having a supreme leader. It proved relatively easy to crush them, not just because of their small numbers, but because they were challenging the very foundation of the system.
“The people inside Iran are not saying they want regime change. They are saying, ‘Where is my vote?’ ” Ms. Haghighatjoo said. “It is just people coming down into the streets to defend their vote; they can’t accuse them of being anti-regime. I don’t think the lowest-level Basijis would accept shooting people because they are protesting cheating on the elections.”
The Basij — paramilitary, plainclothes vigilantes — is the main force the government uses to try to dispel antigovernment protesters. Thus far, that has been done mostly through beatings, arrests and other intimidation tactics. But the death toll is reportedly 10 to 19 people nationwide.
“In general, the Basij is an ideologically or culturally driven force, but the majority are very committed fundamentalists,” said Afshon P. Ostovar, who is writing his doctoral thesis at the University of Michigan about the Iranian security forces.
That ideology may not hold out if the crackdowns start to divide society, however. “You may see the middle ground in the Basij and even the Revolutionary Guards start to question their commitment,” Mr. Ostovar said.
This is one reason the suppression has not been as violent as it could be, he added.
Analysts also believe that the government has been holding back because the most senior ayatollahs, who so far have been largely silent about the election, could no longer sit on the sidelines. A few prominent liberal ayatollahs have criticized the election outcome.
But wider bloodshed would likely prompt the most senior conservative clerics in the holy city of Qum, as well as Najaf in Iraq, to weigh in against the government. That would have a significant impact on turning popular opinion toward the opposition.
The strength of the protests is that they have remained within religion, said Roxanne Varzi, an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the way the government spreads its ideology.
“It was easier to play on the discourse of the infidel versus the righteous citizen,” said Ms. Varzi, but the opposition movement adopted the whole Islamic discourse. “It is not meant to be something anti-Islamic, even for those who are secular in their practices. Because they have kept inside that structure, it is hard for the government to justify clamping down on them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/world ... nted=print
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Iran Protest Ends In Deathskmaherali wrote:June 22, 2009
News Analysis
In Iran, Both Sides Seek to Carry Islam’s Banner
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, ended his prayer sermon in tears on Friday, invoking the name of a disappeared Shiite prophet to suggest that his government was besieged by forces of evil out to destroy a legitimate Islamic government.
The opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, in criticizing the government, demanded the kind of justice promised by the Koran and exhorted his followers to take to their rooftops at night to cry out, “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.”
In the battle to control Iran’s streets, both the government and the opposition are deploying religious symbols and parables to portray themselves as pursing the ideal of a just Islamic state.
That struggle could prove the main fulcrum in the battle for the hearts and minds of most ordinary Iranians, because the Islamic Revolution, since its inception, has painted itself as battling evil. If the government fails the test of being just, not least by using excessive violence against its citizens, it risks letting the opposition wrap itself in the mantle of Islamic virtue.
“If either the reformists or the conservatives can make reference to Islamic values in a way that the majority of citizens understand, they will win,” said Mohsen Kadivar, a senior Iranian religious scholar teaching Islamic studies at Duke University.
Perhaps most important, the outcome may determine the support the government enjoys among the ideological zealots who form the backbone of the security forces. Some Iran experts see the level of violence in the week ahead as crucial in the tug of war over Islam.
“What is really smart about Moussavi and his group is that they say they are part of the Islamic Revolution and they want to say ‘God is great’ and overthrow tyranny,” said Said A. Arjomand, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “It is a struggle over the appropriation of the old symbols. If the public says we want Hussein and ‘God is great’ and then the militias are told to go kill them, that will be a little hard.”
The dawn of the Shiite faith can be traced back to the death of Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson; his killing at the hands of a far larger force in 680 has long infused the faith with a sense of being the underdog. Hence, both sides in Iran portray themselves as ready to be martyrs to their cause — Ayatollah Khamenei suggested it in his sermon, and Mr. Moussavi was quoted as saying that he was also ready to give his life.
The argument on both sides has stayed narrowly within the bounds of Islam, with the opposition even deftly using green, the color of Islam and the family of the prophet, as a subtle symbol that its protests are rooted in the faith. Both sides say they are the true heirs of the revered revolutionary patriarch, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in trying to carry out Islamic principles.
In his criticism on Sunday, Mr. Moussavi avoided any direct assault against the supreme leader, instead saying the government cheated on the results of the June 12 presidential election.
“Every Muslim understands that anyone who would lie in this way is not just,” said Mr. Kadivar, the Duke professor, who was a senior adviser to the previous reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. “The basic requirement for being the supreme leader is to be just. Justice is a key point in Islamic values.”
The argument by Ayatollah Khamenei, laid out in his Friday sermon, is that he is the spiritual guide and therefore challenging him is challenging Islam. In the short term he probably has the more potent argument, analysts said, but sustained violence to subdue demonstrations will work against him.
“Both sides want to paint the other as responsible for the violence,” said Mr. Arjomand, adding that the opposition could not label Ayatollah Khamenei a dictator. “They don’t want to push it too far; they know they will lose because ultimately Khamenei has the better claim to being Khomeini’s heir.”
On the other hand, every time anyone inside Iran opens a Web site and sees the images of a teenage girl shot dead in a protest, it chips away at the government’s claim to being moral.
“If the movement is successful, they could spread the idea that the regime is evil,” said Fatimah Haghighatjoo, a former reformist member of the Iranian Parliament who is now a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
In student uprisings against the government in 1999 and 2003, demonstrators challenged the idea of having a supreme leader. It proved relatively easy to crush them, not just because of their small numbers, but because they were challenging the very foundation of the system.
“The people inside Iran are not saying they want regime change. They are saying, ‘Where is my vote?’ ” Ms. Haghighatjoo said. “It is just people coming down into the streets to defend their vote; they can’t accuse them of being anti-regime. I don’t think the lowest-level Basijis would accept shooting people because they are protesting cheating on the elections.”
The Basij — paramilitary, plainclothes vigilantes — is the main force the government uses to try to dispel antigovernment protesters. Thus far, that has been done mostly through beatings, arrests and other intimidation tactics. But the death toll is reportedly 10 to 19 people nationwide.
“In general, the Basij is an ideologically or culturally driven force, but the majority are very committed fundamentalists,” said Afshon P. Ostovar, who is writing his doctoral thesis at the University of Michigan about the Iranian security forces.
That ideology may not hold out if the crackdowns start to divide society, however. “You may see the middle ground in the Basij and even the Revolutionary Guards start to question their commitment,” Mr. Ostovar said.
This is one reason the suppression has not been as violent as it could be, he added.
Analysts also believe that the government has been holding back because the most senior ayatollahs, who so far have been largely silent about the election, could no longer sit on the sidelines. A few prominent liberal ayatollahs have criticized the election outcome.
But wider bloodshed would likely prompt the most senior conservative clerics in the holy city of Qum, as well as Najaf in Iraq, to weigh in against the government. That would have a significant impact on turning popular opinion toward the opposition.
The strength of the protests is that they have remained within religion, said Roxanne Varzi, an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the way the government spreads its ideology.
“It was easier to play on the discourse of the infidel versus the righteous citizen,” said Ms. Varzi, but the opposition movement adopted the whole Islamic discourse. “It is not meant to be something anti-Islamic, even for those who are secular in their practices. Because they have kept inside that structure, it is hard for the government to justify clamping down on them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/world ... nted=print
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SRuzL77BDI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiFtoEmCHDs&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWozRk-kDxE&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... an+protest
November 22, 2009
In Turkey, Trial Casts Wide Net of Mistrust
By DAN BILEFSKY
ISTANBUL — Few here doubt that the case began with something threatening: in June 2007, 27 hand grenades and fuses were found in the attic of a house in an Istanbul slum. Investigators claimed they were stashed there by an ultranationalist retired officer and they were later linked to an elaborate coup plot.
But the question many are asking, inside and outside Turkey, is whether the Islamic-inspired government is exaggerating the threat in order to wage a much larger battle against this moderate Muslim nation’s secular establishment.
Since 2007, 300 people have been detained during the investigation of an underground group known as Ergenekon, including a writer of erotic novels, four-star generals and other military officers, professors, editors and underworld figures — some of whom appear to have committed no offense greater than speaking in favor of Turkey as a secular state.
“Ergenekon has become a larger project in which the investigation is being used as a tool to sweep across civic society and cleanse Turkey of all secular opponents,” said Aysel Celikel, a former justice minister and president of a charity that finances the secular education of underprivileged rural girls. “As such, the country’s democracy, its rule of law and its freedom of expression are at stake.”
In all, 194 people have been charged, accused of trying to overthrow the government as part of Ergenekon (pronounced ahr-GEN-eh-kahn), named after a mythic Turkish valley. Prosecutors contend that they planned to engage in civil unrest, assassinations and terrorism to create chaos and undermine the stability of Turkey as groundwork for a coup.
Their trial, widely referred to by the group’s name, has become one of the most explosive in the nation’s modern history and has captivated Turks unused to seeing political secrets aired in public.
The case has brought into relief the larger strains in Turkey between a secular elite seeking to hold on to its waning influence and a growing, increasingly assertive population of observant Muslims. The case is being watched closely in Brussels, headquarters of the European Union, as a barometer of Turkey’s adherence to Western standards of justice. It comes as the country’s prospects for joining the bloc seem to be diminishing.
Proponents of the investigation argue that the trial is a long-overdue historical reckoning aimed at bringing to account what Turks call “the deep state”: a murky group of operatives, linked to the military, thought to have battled perceived enemies of the state since the cold war. The military, which sees itself as the guardian of Turkey’s secular state, has overthrown four elected governments in the past 50 years.
“No one has the right to establish a militia to overthrow a democratically elected government,” Egemen Bagis, the minister for European Union affairs, said in an interview.
Violence for which the authorities blame Ergenekon includes an armed attack on a senior state court in 2006 and the 2007 bombing of a leftist newspaper in Istanbul, Cumhuriyet.
But critics accuse investigators of overreaching in their pursuit of the perpetrators. Legal experts say zealous prosecutors have detained dozens of suspects without charges, and incriminating conversations intercepted from cellphones, as well as private documents, including love letters, seized during raids, have surfaced in pro-government newspapers and on Web sites.
In an extensive study of the case for the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, a Washington research institute affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, Gareth Jenkins, a Turkey specialist, noted the pervasive fear among Western analysts of Turkey that Ergenekon “represents a major step, not, as its proponents maintain, towards the consolidation of pluralistic democracy in Turkey, but towards an authoritarian one-party state.”
In Ms. Celikel’s view, the fate of her predecessor at the charity, Turkan Saylan, an outspoken 73-year-old, is evidence of a political pogrom.
In April, as Ms. Saylan was recovering from chemotherapy for breast cancer, police officers raided her home, carting away dozens of files. Colleagues say she was put on a watch list by prosecutors because of her secular political views. She died of cancer the next month. No charges were ever brought.
Further, Ms. Celikel said, at the same time, investigators raided 95 of the charity’s offices across Turkey, taking the files of more than 15,000 students, confiscating computers and interrogating 14 board members, some of whom were remanded to prison without charges. Ms. Celikel said prosecutors had even sought to link some of the charity’s students to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, know as the P.K.K. and considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and the United States.
The Ergenekon case certainly seems intertwined with other major battles over Turkey’s way forward — as more Islamic, or more secular.
Last year, a top prosecutor sued in the Constitutional Court seeking to ban the governing party on the grounds that it was undermining Turkey’s secular state by, among other things, seeking to relax a prohibition on the wearing of Islamic head scarves by women in universities. The court kept the party, Justice and Development, alive by just one vote.
Government critics say the Ergenekon case is a concerted effort by Justice and Development to restore its dented credibility by demonizing its opponents.
Mr. Jenkins, who has analyzed the first two of three vast mass Ergenekon indictments — 2,455 and 1,909 pages — argued that some allegations were absurd.
He said the first indictment said the group’s members had met with Dick Cheney when he was vice president to discuss toppling and replacing the government. He said it also maintained that investigators had evidence that the group planned to “manufacture chemical and biological weapons and then, with the high revenue it earned from selling them, to finance and control every terrorist organization not just in Turkey but in the entire world.”
Suheyl Batum, who teaches constitutional law at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, is advising a team of lawyers for several defendants, including Ergun Poyraz, who has written more than five books critical of the government, and Tuncay Ozkan, a secular journalist and critic of the governing party who helped organize antigovernment rallies two years ago.
Professor Batum said Mr. Poyraz had been detained for 29 months and Mr. Ozkan for 13 months without any evidence that either had committed a crime. He argued that snippets from their recorded cellphone conversations — like “What should we do about antisecular policies?” — were construed as evidence that they were plotting to overthrow the government.
After dozens of such cellphone wiretap transcripts were published in pro-government newspapers, intellectuals and journalists said it was now common for dinner parties to begin with everyone switching off cellphones.
“I believe that people who hope that Turkey’s dark past will be enlightened by the Ergenekon case will be disappointed,” said Nedim Sener, a journalist who has investigated Ergenekon for Milliyet, a leading newspaper, and who now fears that he could also be a target in the investigation. “As a result of Ergenekon, the Turkish justice system has been broken in pieces.”
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/world ... nted=print
******
November 22, 2009
Cleric Wields Religion to Challenge Iran’s Theocracy
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — For years, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri criticized Iran’s supreme leader and argued that the country was not the Islamic democracy it claimed to be, but his words seemed to fall on deaf ears. Now many Iranians, including some former government leaders, are listening.
Ayatollah Montazeri has emerged as the spiritual leader of the opposition, an adversary the state has been unable to silence or jail because of his religious credentials and seminal role in the founding of the republic.
He is widely regarded as the most knowledgeable religious scholar in Iran and once expected to become the country’s supreme leader until a falling-out with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 revolution and Iran’s supreme leader until his death in 1989.
Now, as the Iranian government has cracked down to suppress the protests that erupted after the presidential election in June and devastated the reform movement, Ayatollah Montazeri uses religion to attack the government’s legitimacy.
“We have many intellectuals who criticize this regime from the democratic point of view,” said Mehdi Khalaji, a former seminary student in Qum and now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “He criticizes this regime purely from a religious point of view, and this is very hurtful. The regime wants to say, ‘If I am not democratic enough that doesn’t matter, I am Islamic.’
“He says it is not an Islamic government.”
Now in his mid-80s, frail and ill, Ayatollah Montazeri has remained in his home in Qum, the center of religious learning in Iran, issuing one politically charged religious edict after another, helping keep alive a faltering opposition movement. The man whom Ayatollah Khomeini once called “the fruit of my life” has condemned the state he helped to create.
“A political system based on force, oppression, changing people’s votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate,” he said in one of a flurry of written comments posted on Web sites since the election.
Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has limited religious credentials. But Ayatollah Montazeri, a marja or source of emulation, has achieved the highest standing a cleric can hold in Shiite Islam. He is also the architect of Velayat-e Faqih, or guardianship of the jurist, the foundation of Iran’s theocracy and the source of the supreme leader’s legitimacy. Indeed, when Ayatollah Khamenei was a student, Ayatollah Montazeri was one of his teachers.
“He is able to delegitimize Khamenei more than anybody else on the Earth,” Mr. Khalaji said.
Some Iran experts argue that Ayatollah Montazeri’s involvement in politics has undermined his religious credibility, and that he does not have as large a following as other grand ayatollahs. But there is evidence, others say, that the recent conflict has increased his popularity among younger Iranians who knew little of him, and that his edicts resonate with the pious masses.
Despite the arrests of thousands of protesters and reformists, with many complaining of torture and even rape, the government has failed to silence the opposition, led mostly by the clerics who built the Islamic Republic from the earliest days: a former prime minister and presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi; a former speaker of Parliament and presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi; and a former president, Mohammad Khatami.
These men have now adopted positions that Ayatollah Montazeri has argued for years, that even in a religious state legitimacy comes from the people. “The government will not achieve legitimacy without the support of the people, and as the necessary and obligatory condition for the legitimacy of the ruler is his popularity and the people’s satisfaction with him,” Ayatollah Montazeri said last month in response to questions the BBC sent to him.
In the early years of the revolution, he did not attract a broad following, in part because he was so plain-spoken. He was mocked by the elite and the middle class.
Despite his religious learning he came off as a sort of country bumpkin. In one joke that circulated after the revolution, he visited a medical school where students were studying to be pediatricians. Ayatollah Montazeri, the joke went, told them that if they studied harder they could become doctors for adults.
He was embraced by Ayatollah Khomeini because he promoted the concept of Velayat-e Faqih, which called for a religious leader to reign supreme over the government. The concept was ultimately embedded in the bedrock of the Islamic Republic. But Ayatollah Montazeri has also repeatedly said that he meant the faqih, or leader, should serve as an adviser, not as the final arbiter of all matters of state and religion.
Ayatollah Montazeri’s disillusionment, and his alienation from the state, came within a decade of the revolution. He mocked Ayatollah Khomeini’s decision to issue a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” saying, “People in the world are getting the idea that our business in Iran is just murdering people.”
The breach with Ayatollah Khomeini became irreparable in January 1988, when Ayatollah Montazeri objected to a wave of executions of political prisoners and challenged the leadership to export the revolution by example, not by violence.
“He was not willing to sell his soul to stay in power,” said Muhammad Sahimi, a professor at the University of Southern California. The next month, Ayatollah Khomeini criticized Ayatollah Montazeri in a letter and then forced him to resign as his deputy and heir apparent.
He returned home to Qum where he remained relatively quiet until the rise of the reform movement, which he embraced. In 1997, Ayatollah Khamenei placed him under house arrest, which was lifted in 2003 under growing political pressure.
“There is no one else in the current leadership of the Green Movement who risked as much, as publicly, as early, as consistently as he has, and has lost as much,” said Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University who as a young man shared a jail cell with Ayatollah Montazeri during the time of the shah.
In recent times, Ayatollah Montazeri has kept up the pressure, taking the unprecedented step of apologizing for his support for the 1979 takeover of the United States Embassy. He also has said that the Islamic Republic is neither Islamic, nor a republic, and that the supreme leader has lost his legitimacy.
“Independence,” he said in a recent speech on ethics, “is being free of foreign intervention, and freedom is giving people the freedom to express their opinions. Not being put in prison for every protest one utters.”
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It is Mehdi Khalaji, not Mehdi Khaliji.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/world ... nted=print
In Turkey, Trial Casts Wide Net of Mistrust
By DAN BILEFSKY
ISTANBUL — Few here doubt that the case began with something threatening: in June 2007, 27 hand grenades and fuses were found in the attic of a house in an Istanbul slum. Investigators claimed they were stashed there by an ultranationalist retired officer and they were later linked to an elaborate coup plot.
But the question many are asking, inside and outside Turkey, is whether the Islamic-inspired government is exaggerating the threat in order to wage a much larger battle against this moderate Muslim nation’s secular establishment.
Since 2007, 300 people have been detained during the investigation of an underground group known as Ergenekon, including a writer of erotic novels, four-star generals and other military officers, professors, editors and underworld figures — some of whom appear to have committed no offense greater than speaking in favor of Turkey as a secular state.
“Ergenekon has become a larger project in which the investigation is being used as a tool to sweep across civic society and cleanse Turkey of all secular opponents,” said Aysel Celikel, a former justice minister and president of a charity that finances the secular education of underprivileged rural girls. “As such, the country’s democracy, its rule of law and its freedom of expression are at stake.”
In all, 194 people have been charged, accused of trying to overthrow the government as part of Ergenekon (pronounced ahr-GEN-eh-kahn), named after a mythic Turkish valley. Prosecutors contend that they planned to engage in civil unrest, assassinations and terrorism to create chaos and undermine the stability of Turkey as groundwork for a coup.
Their trial, widely referred to by the group’s name, has become one of the most explosive in the nation’s modern history and has captivated Turks unused to seeing political secrets aired in public.
The case has brought into relief the larger strains in Turkey between a secular elite seeking to hold on to its waning influence and a growing, increasingly assertive population of observant Muslims. The case is being watched closely in Brussels, headquarters of the European Union, as a barometer of Turkey’s adherence to Western standards of justice. It comes as the country’s prospects for joining the bloc seem to be diminishing.
Proponents of the investigation argue that the trial is a long-overdue historical reckoning aimed at bringing to account what Turks call “the deep state”: a murky group of operatives, linked to the military, thought to have battled perceived enemies of the state since the cold war. The military, which sees itself as the guardian of Turkey’s secular state, has overthrown four elected governments in the past 50 years.
“No one has the right to establish a militia to overthrow a democratically elected government,” Egemen Bagis, the minister for European Union affairs, said in an interview.
Violence for which the authorities blame Ergenekon includes an armed attack on a senior state court in 2006 and the 2007 bombing of a leftist newspaper in Istanbul, Cumhuriyet.
But critics accuse investigators of overreaching in their pursuit of the perpetrators. Legal experts say zealous prosecutors have detained dozens of suspects without charges, and incriminating conversations intercepted from cellphones, as well as private documents, including love letters, seized during raids, have surfaced in pro-government newspapers and on Web sites.
In an extensive study of the case for the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, a Washington research institute affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, Gareth Jenkins, a Turkey specialist, noted the pervasive fear among Western analysts of Turkey that Ergenekon “represents a major step, not, as its proponents maintain, towards the consolidation of pluralistic democracy in Turkey, but towards an authoritarian one-party state.”
In Ms. Celikel’s view, the fate of her predecessor at the charity, Turkan Saylan, an outspoken 73-year-old, is evidence of a political pogrom.
In April, as Ms. Saylan was recovering from chemotherapy for breast cancer, police officers raided her home, carting away dozens of files. Colleagues say she was put on a watch list by prosecutors because of her secular political views. She died of cancer the next month. No charges were ever brought.
Further, Ms. Celikel said, at the same time, investigators raided 95 of the charity’s offices across Turkey, taking the files of more than 15,000 students, confiscating computers and interrogating 14 board members, some of whom were remanded to prison without charges. Ms. Celikel said prosecutors had even sought to link some of the charity’s students to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, know as the P.K.K. and considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and the United States.
The Ergenekon case certainly seems intertwined with other major battles over Turkey’s way forward — as more Islamic, or more secular.
Last year, a top prosecutor sued in the Constitutional Court seeking to ban the governing party on the grounds that it was undermining Turkey’s secular state by, among other things, seeking to relax a prohibition on the wearing of Islamic head scarves by women in universities. The court kept the party, Justice and Development, alive by just one vote.
Government critics say the Ergenekon case is a concerted effort by Justice and Development to restore its dented credibility by demonizing its opponents.
Mr. Jenkins, who has analyzed the first two of three vast mass Ergenekon indictments — 2,455 and 1,909 pages — argued that some allegations were absurd.
He said the first indictment said the group’s members had met with Dick Cheney when he was vice president to discuss toppling and replacing the government. He said it also maintained that investigators had evidence that the group planned to “manufacture chemical and biological weapons and then, with the high revenue it earned from selling them, to finance and control every terrorist organization not just in Turkey but in the entire world.”
Suheyl Batum, who teaches constitutional law at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, is advising a team of lawyers for several defendants, including Ergun Poyraz, who has written more than five books critical of the government, and Tuncay Ozkan, a secular journalist and critic of the governing party who helped organize antigovernment rallies two years ago.
Professor Batum said Mr. Poyraz had been detained for 29 months and Mr. Ozkan for 13 months without any evidence that either had committed a crime. He argued that snippets from their recorded cellphone conversations — like “What should we do about antisecular policies?” — were construed as evidence that they were plotting to overthrow the government.
After dozens of such cellphone wiretap transcripts were published in pro-government newspapers, intellectuals and journalists said it was now common for dinner parties to begin with everyone switching off cellphones.
“I believe that people who hope that Turkey’s dark past will be enlightened by the Ergenekon case will be disappointed,” said Nedim Sener, a journalist who has investigated Ergenekon for Milliyet, a leading newspaper, and who now fears that he could also be a target in the investigation. “As a result of Ergenekon, the Turkish justice system has been broken in pieces.”
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/world ... nted=print
******
November 22, 2009
Cleric Wields Religion to Challenge Iran’s Theocracy
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — For years, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri criticized Iran’s supreme leader and argued that the country was not the Islamic democracy it claimed to be, but his words seemed to fall on deaf ears. Now many Iranians, including some former government leaders, are listening.
Ayatollah Montazeri has emerged as the spiritual leader of the opposition, an adversary the state has been unable to silence or jail because of his religious credentials and seminal role in the founding of the republic.
He is widely regarded as the most knowledgeable religious scholar in Iran and once expected to become the country’s supreme leader until a falling-out with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 revolution and Iran’s supreme leader until his death in 1989.
Now, as the Iranian government has cracked down to suppress the protests that erupted after the presidential election in June and devastated the reform movement, Ayatollah Montazeri uses religion to attack the government’s legitimacy.
“We have many intellectuals who criticize this regime from the democratic point of view,” said Mehdi Khalaji, a former seminary student in Qum and now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “He criticizes this regime purely from a religious point of view, and this is very hurtful. The regime wants to say, ‘If I am not democratic enough that doesn’t matter, I am Islamic.’
“He says it is not an Islamic government.”
Now in his mid-80s, frail and ill, Ayatollah Montazeri has remained in his home in Qum, the center of religious learning in Iran, issuing one politically charged religious edict after another, helping keep alive a faltering opposition movement. The man whom Ayatollah Khomeini once called “the fruit of my life” has condemned the state he helped to create.
“A political system based on force, oppression, changing people’s votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate,” he said in one of a flurry of written comments posted on Web sites since the election.
Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has limited religious credentials. But Ayatollah Montazeri, a marja or source of emulation, has achieved the highest standing a cleric can hold in Shiite Islam. He is also the architect of Velayat-e Faqih, or guardianship of the jurist, the foundation of Iran’s theocracy and the source of the supreme leader’s legitimacy. Indeed, when Ayatollah Khamenei was a student, Ayatollah Montazeri was one of his teachers.
“He is able to delegitimize Khamenei more than anybody else on the Earth,” Mr. Khalaji said.
Some Iran experts argue that Ayatollah Montazeri’s involvement in politics has undermined his religious credibility, and that he does not have as large a following as other grand ayatollahs. But there is evidence, others say, that the recent conflict has increased his popularity among younger Iranians who knew little of him, and that his edicts resonate with the pious masses.
Despite the arrests of thousands of protesters and reformists, with many complaining of torture and even rape, the government has failed to silence the opposition, led mostly by the clerics who built the Islamic Republic from the earliest days: a former prime minister and presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi; a former speaker of Parliament and presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi; and a former president, Mohammad Khatami.
These men have now adopted positions that Ayatollah Montazeri has argued for years, that even in a religious state legitimacy comes from the people. “The government will not achieve legitimacy without the support of the people, and as the necessary and obligatory condition for the legitimacy of the ruler is his popularity and the people’s satisfaction with him,” Ayatollah Montazeri said last month in response to questions the BBC sent to him.
In the early years of the revolution, he did not attract a broad following, in part because he was so plain-spoken. He was mocked by the elite and the middle class.
Despite his religious learning he came off as a sort of country bumpkin. In one joke that circulated after the revolution, he visited a medical school where students were studying to be pediatricians. Ayatollah Montazeri, the joke went, told them that if they studied harder they could become doctors for adults.
He was embraced by Ayatollah Khomeini because he promoted the concept of Velayat-e Faqih, which called for a religious leader to reign supreme over the government. The concept was ultimately embedded in the bedrock of the Islamic Republic. But Ayatollah Montazeri has also repeatedly said that he meant the faqih, or leader, should serve as an adviser, not as the final arbiter of all matters of state and religion.
Ayatollah Montazeri’s disillusionment, and his alienation from the state, came within a decade of the revolution. He mocked Ayatollah Khomeini’s decision to issue a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” saying, “People in the world are getting the idea that our business in Iran is just murdering people.”
The breach with Ayatollah Khomeini became irreparable in January 1988, when Ayatollah Montazeri objected to a wave of executions of political prisoners and challenged the leadership to export the revolution by example, not by violence.
“He was not willing to sell his soul to stay in power,” said Muhammad Sahimi, a professor at the University of Southern California. The next month, Ayatollah Khomeini criticized Ayatollah Montazeri in a letter and then forced him to resign as his deputy and heir apparent.
He returned home to Qum where he remained relatively quiet until the rise of the reform movement, which he embraced. In 1997, Ayatollah Khamenei placed him under house arrest, which was lifted in 2003 under growing political pressure.
“There is no one else in the current leadership of the Green Movement who risked as much, as publicly, as early, as consistently as he has, and has lost as much,” said Abbas Milani, a professor of Iranian studies at Stanford University who as a young man shared a jail cell with Ayatollah Montazeri during the time of the shah.
In recent times, Ayatollah Montazeri has kept up the pressure, taking the unprecedented step of apologizing for his support for the 1979 takeover of the United States Embassy. He also has said that the Islamic Republic is neither Islamic, nor a republic, and that the supreme leader has lost his legitimacy.
“Independence,” he said in a recent speech on ethics, “is being free of foreign intervention, and freedom is giving people the freedom to express their opinions. Not being put in prison for every protest one utters.”
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It is Mehdi Khalaji, not Mehdi Khaliji.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/world ... nted=print
June 18, 2010
Letter From Istanbul, Part 2
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Istanbul
Highlight:
There is an inner struggle over that identity, between those who would like to see Turkey more aligned with the Islamic world and values and those who want it to remain more secular, Western and pluralistic. Who defines Turkey will determine a lot about whether we end up in a war of civilizations. We need to be involved but proceed delicately.
I leave Istanbul with four questions that Turks asked me echoing in my head. Forget the answers, just these questions will tell you all you need to understand the situation here. The four questions, which were asked of me by different Turkish journalists, academics or businessmen, can be summarized as follows:
One: Do you think we are seeing the death of the West and the rise of new world powers in the East? Two: Tom, it was great talking to you this morning, but would you mind not quoting me by name? I’m afraid the government will retaliate against me, my newspaper or my business if you do. Three: Is it true, as Prime Minister Erdogan believes, that Israel is behind the attacks by the Kurdish terrorist group P.K.K. on Turkey? Four: Do you really think Obama can punish Turkey for voting against the U.S. at the U.N. on Iran sanctions? After all, America needs Turkey more than Turkey needs America.
The question about the death of the West is really about the rise of Turkey, which is actually a wonderful story. The Turks wanted to get into the European Union and were rebuffed, but I’m not sure Turkish businessmen even care today. The E.U. feels dead next to Turkey, which last year was right behind India and China among the fastest-growing economies in the world — just under 7 percent — and was the fastest-growing economy in Europe.
Americans have tended to look at Turkey as a bridge or a base — either a cultural bridge that connects the West and the Muslim world, or as our base (Incirlik Air Base) that serves as the main U.S. supply hub for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Turks see themselves differently.
“Turkey is not a bridge. It’s a center,” explained Muzaffer Senel, an international relations researcher at Istanbul Sehir University.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey has become the center of its own economic space, stretching from southern Russia, all through the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia, and down through Iraq, Syria, Iran and the Middle East. All you have to do is stand in the Istanbul airport and look at the departures board for Turkish Airlines, which flies to cities half of which I cannot even pronounce, to appreciate what a pulsating economic center this has become for Central Asia. I met Turkish businessmen who were running hotel chains in Moscow, banks in Bosnia and Greece, road-building projects in Iraq and huge trading operations with Iran and Syria. In 1980, Turkey’s total exports were worth $3 billion. In 2008, they were $132 billion. There are now 250 industrial zones throughout Anatolia. Turkey’s cellphone users have gone from virtually none in the 1990s to 64 million in 2008.
So Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees himself as the leader of a rising economic powerhouse of 70 million people who is entitled to play an independent geopolitical role — hence his U.N. vote against sanctioning Iran. But how Turkey rises really matters — and Erdogan definitely has some troubling Hugo Chávez-Vladimir Putin tendencies. I’ve never visited a democracy where more people whom I interviewed asked me not to quote them by name for fear of retribution by Erdogan’s circle — in the form of lawsuits, tax investigations or being shut out of government contracts. The media here is rampantly self-censored.
Moreover, Erdogan has evolved from just railing against Israel’s attacks on Hamas in Gaza to spouting conspiracy theories — like the insane notion that Israel is backing the P.K.K. terrorists — as a way of consolidating his political base among conservative Muslims in Turkey and abroad.
Is there anything the U.S. can do? My advice: Avoid a public confrontation that Erdogan can exploit to build more support, draw U.S. redlines in private and let Turkish democrats take the lead. Turkey is full of energy and hormones, and is trying to figure out its new identity. There is an inner struggle over that identity, between those who would like to see Turkey more aligned with the Islamic world and values and those who want it to remain more secular, Western and pluralistic. Who defines Turkey will determine a lot about whether we end up in a war of civilizations. We need to be involved but proceed delicately.
This struggle is for Turks, and they are on it. Only two weeks before the Gaza flotilla incident, a leading poll showed Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., trailing his main opposition — the secularist Republican People’s Party — for the first time since the A.K.P. came to office in 2002.
That is surely one reason Erdogan openly took sides with one of the most radical forces in the region, Hamas — to re-energize his political base. But did he overplay his hand? Up to now, Erdogan has been very cunning, treating his opponents like frogs in a pail, always just gradually turning up the heat so they never quite knew they were boiling. But now they know. The secular and moderate Muslim forces in Turkey are alarmed; the moderate Arab regimes are alarmed; the Americans are alarmed. The fight for Turkey’s soul is about to be joined in a much more vigorous way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/opini ... ?th&emc=th
Letter From Istanbul, Part 2
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Istanbul
Highlight:
There is an inner struggle over that identity, between those who would like to see Turkey more aligned with the Islamic world and values and those who want it to remain more secular, Western and pluralistic. Who defines Turkey will determine a lot about whether we end up in a war of civilizations. We need to be involved but proceed delicately.
I leave Istanbul with four questions that Turks asked me echoing in my head. Forget the answers, just these questions will tell you all you need to understand the situation here. The four questions, which were asked of me by different Turkish journalists, academics or businessmen, can be summarized as follows:
One: Do you think we are seeing the death of the West and the rise of new world powers in the East? Two: Tom, it was great talking to you this morning, but would you mind not quoting me by name? I’m afraid the government will retaliate against me, my newspaper or my business if you do. Three: Is it true, as Prime Minister Erdogan believes, that Israel is behind the attacks by the Kurdish terrorist group P.K.K. on Turkey? Four: Do you really think Obama can punish Turkey for voting against the U.S. at the U.N. on Iran sanctions? After all, America needs Turkey more than Turkey needs America.
The question about the death of the West is really about the rise of Turkey, which is actually a wonderful story. The Turks wanted to get into the European Union and were rebuffed, but I’m not sure Turkish businessmen even care today. The E.U. feels dead next to Turkey, which last year was right behind India and China among the fastest-growing economies in the world — just under 7 percent — and was the fastest-growing economy in Europe.
Americans have tended to look at Turkey as a bridge or a base — either a cultural bridge that connects the West and the Muslim world, or as our base (Incirlik Air Base) that serves as the main U.S. supply hub for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Turks see themselves differently.
“Turkey is not a bridge. It’s a center,” explained Muzaffer Senel, an international relations researcher at Istanbul Sehir University.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey has become the center of its own economic space, stretching from southern Russia, all through the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia, and down through Iraq, Syria, Iran and the Middle East. All you have to do is stand in the Istanbul airport and look at the departures board for Turkish Airlines, which flies to cities half of which I cannot even pronounce, to appreciate what a pulsating economic center this has become for Central Asia. I met Turkish businessmen who were running hotel chains in Moscow, banks in Bosnia and Greece, road-building projects in Iraq and huge trading operations with Iran and Syria. In 1980, Turkey’s total exports were worth $3 billion. In 2008, they were $132 billion. There are now 250 industrial zones throughout Anatolia. Turkey’s cellphone users have gone from virtually none in the 1990s to 64 million in 2008.
So Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees himself as the leader of a rising economic powerhouse of 70 million people who is entitled to play an independent geopolitical role — hence his U.N. vote against sanctioning Iran. But how Turkey rises really matters — and Erdogan definitely has some troubling Hugo Chávez-Vladimir Putin tendencies. I’ve never visited a democracy where more people whom I interviewed asked me not to quote them by name for fear of retribution by Erdogan’s circle — in the form of lawsuits, tax investigations or being shut out of government contracts. The media here is rampantly self-censored.
Moreover, Erdogan has evolved from just railing against Israel’s attacks on Hamas in Gaza to spouting conspiracy theories — like the insane notion that Israel is backing the P.K.K. terrorists — as a way of consolidating his political base among conservative Muslims in Turkey and abroad.
Is there anything the U.S. can do? My advice: Avoid a public confrontation that Erdogan can exploit to build more support, draw U.S. redlines in private and let Turkish democrats take the lead. Turkey is full of energy and hormones, and is trying to figure out its new identity. There is an inner struggle over that identity, between those who would like to see Turkey more aligned with the Islamic world and values and those who want it to remain more secular, Western and pluralistic. Who defines Turkey will determine a lot about whether we end up in a war of civilizations. We need to be involved but proceed delicately.
This struggle is for Turks, and they are on it. Only two weeks before the Gaza flotilla incident, a leading poll showed Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., trailing his main opposition — the secularist Republican People’s Party — for the first time since the A.K.P. came to office in 2002.
That is surely one reason Erdogan openly took sides with one of the most radical forces in the region, Hamas — to re-energize his political base. But did he overplay his hand? Up to now, Erdogan has been very cunning, treating his opponents like frogs in a pail, always just gradually turning up the heat so they never quite knew they were boiling. But now they know. The secular and moderate Muslim forces in Turkey are alarmed; the moderate Arab regimes are alarmed; the Americans are alarmed. The fight for Turkey’s soul is about to be joined in a much more vigorous way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/opini ... ?th&emc=th