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Turkey and science: Peddling religion

Peddling religion

Why secular academics fret about an “Islamic bicycle”

Sep 15th 2012 | ISTANBUL | from the print edition

“A BICYCLE that is produced with God’s blessings in mind and man’s interests at its fore is an Islamic bicycle.” The pronouncement made at a recent conference in Istanbul by Alparslan Acikgenc, a professor from the Yildiz Technical University, brought nods of approval from his colleagues. “A bicycle that is painted with substances harmful to humans cannot be Islamic,” agreed another professor.

While the exchange elicited a flurry of mirthful commentary, not everyone was amused. Mustafa Akyol, a liberal Muslim writer, called the idea of an Islamic bicycle an “expression of the self-isolating mentality that has stagnated Muslim thought.” Secular academics have long fretted that the mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party, in power since 2002, is promoting Islam ahead of science. They point to the introduction this year of Koran lessons in state-run schools. The emphasis on religious education is part of a controversial overhaul of the national curriculum, which many argue flies in the face of the rigidly secular principles of Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founding father. This follows the appointments of overtly pious rectors to various state universities.

“For all their claims of being able to reconcile religion with modernity, Islamic movements in Turkey have signally failed to do so,” argues Ali Alpar, an astrophysicist at Istanbul’s Sabanci University. Mr Alpar is among a group of academics who resigned in protest from the country’s National Academy of Sciences last year after the government announced that it would henceforth be choosing some of its members.

In the event the government decided to let the country’s top science agency, known as TUBITAK, submit some of the names. Mr Alpar and his friends were unswayed. The agency has been steeped in controversy of its own. This erupted when it allegedly forced the editors of its science magazine to kill a cover story on Charles Darwin in March 2009. The move followed tweaks to TUBITAK’s charter that gave the government a greater say over its affairs. The agency later claimed that it had not censored the piece, blaming the change on editorial wrangles. But Mr Alpar says that an article on Galileo that the agency commissioned him to write was also spiked.

Suggestions that AK is steering Turkey towards Islamic rule are overwrought. And as the rest of Europe wrestles with the euro crisis, the Turkish economy continues to grow under AK’s steadying hand. Yet if Turkey is to remain competitive it needs to invest far more in research and development (the Directorate for Religious Affairs, which employs thousands of clerics, was allocated double the amount slated for TUBITAK last year). Alienating the country’s top scientists doesn’t help. “It is time,” says Mr Akyol, “for Muslims to rethink why early Islamic civilisation produced so much of universal value, from algebra to the lute, and why we hardly do that today.”

via Turkey and science: Peddling religion | The Economist.

September 15, 2012
Turkish politics: Erdogan’s counterproductive ambition

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is too focused on becoming Turkey’s next president

Sep 1st 2012 | ANKARA AND ISTANBUL | from the print edition

THE Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has recently been seen sporting a Cossack-style hat like Ataturk’s. Kemalists were horrified. Yet nobody could dispute that Mr Erdogan has been Turkey’s most impressive leader since the great man’s death in 1938. His mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party came to power in 2002 on a wave of popular support and a rejection of decades of inept rule. Mr Erdogan has lifted Turkey out of stagnation and political paralysis and made it an inspiration in its region.

He has chipped away at the generals’ might, improved the rights of women and Kurds, doubled GDP per head, built modern roads and hospitals and empowered the downtrodden. His reforms prodded the European Union into opening membership talks in 2005. Despite worries about a gaping current-account deficit, the economy has slowed but not crashed, unlike others in the Mediterranean.

»Erdogan’s counterproductive ambition

It was no surprise when AK won a third term of single-party rule in June 2011. Yet a year on Mr Erdogan is being tested as never before. Setbacks include an alleged bout with cancer, a row with the powerful Muslim Gulenist group, escalating Kurdish violence and the war in Syria. He has grown increasingly authoritarian, his judgment perhaps clouded by an ambition to be elected president when the term of the incumbent, Abdullah Gul, ends in 2014.

It is this ambition that critics say is undermining Mr Erdogan’s promises to deliver a new democratic constitution. A parliamentary committee supposed to produce a draft text appears designed to fail. It needs unanimous approval from all its members for every article. “Are the nationalists going to agree to the Kurds’ demands for Kurdish-language education? Of course not,” says Levent Gultekin, a pro-Islamic commentator. Many suspect Mr Erdogan wants the AK party to produce its own blueprint that would boost the powers of the presidency, enabling him to keep running the country after the party’s rules require him to step down as prime minister. Since he does not have a two-thirds majority in parliament, a new constitution would need to be put to a referendum; most polls give AK a big lead.

Still, he is not taking chances. Over the past year he has been increasingly hawkish over the Kurds, scrapping secret talks with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to end their bloody 28-year insurgency. He has reverted to force and the mass arrests of thousands of Kurdish activists. “The bond between Turks and Kurds is growing weaker by the day,” warns Selahattin Demirtas, leader of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party.

Media bosses fearful of losing government contracts have sacked critical journalists. At least 80 journalists are in jail, many of them Kurds accused of PKK membership. The government’s intolerance extends to students, 2,824 of whom are in prison, almost a quarter of them charged with “membership of a terrorist group” for calling for free education and other “sins”.

Mr Erdogan’s secular opponents accuse him of reverting to his Islamist roots. Calling for a “more religious youth”, he has proposed to restrict abortions and has reintroduced imam hatip (clerical-training) middle schools. A new curriculum includes optional Koran and Arabic-language classes. Mr Erdogan’s embrace of pious nationalism is calculated to appeal to the far right and to conservative voters. But he may be overplaying his hand. The army’s battle against the PKK has had little effect. Scores of soldiers have been killed this year and the rebels have carried their battle from the mainly Kurdish south-east as far west as Izmir.

Mr Erdogan has taken to blaming the Syrian president, Bashar Assad, for the renewed violence. Mr Assad has ceded control of Kurdish towns along the border to a Syrian Kurdish group affiliated to the PKK. Yet critics point to Turkey’s overt support for the Syrian rebels, which has antagonised not only Mr Assad but also Iran. With scores of generals jailed on coup-plotting charges the army has been cowed into silence. But even Mr Erdogan’s supporters are questioning his Syrian gamble. His gibes at Turkey’s Alevi minority, which has spiritual bonds with Mr Assad’s Alawite sect, have not helped.

With America distracted by its presidential election, Europe bogged down in the euro crisis and the EU membership talks stuck, Turkey’s Western friends have little sway. A recent poll suggests that only 17% of Turks now believe they can join the EU. Many fear their country may be sucked into a regional war. Mr Erdogan is a master at scenting the public mood, but his popularity is falling. His priority ought to be putting his house in order, with a constitution that supports all Turkish citizens rather than his presidential aspirations.

from the print edition | Europe

via Turkish politics: Erdogan’s counterproductive ambition | The Economist.

September 3, 2012
Turkey’s leaders livid over Economist article

By Daren Butler

ISTANBUL | Mon Jun 6, 2011 11:37am EDT

Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan greets his Justice and Development Party (AKP) supporters during an election rally in Istanbul June 5, 2011. Credit: Reuters/Osman Orsal

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish leaders have lined up to condemn the Economist magazine for an editorial that urged voters to back the opposition in Sunday’s election, calling it part of an anti-democratic, pro-Israeli campaign to weaken Turkey.

Opinion polls indicate Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party will comfortably secure a third term.

Erdogan himself said the article showed Israeli influence.

“The international media, because they are backed by Israel, wouldn’t be happy with the continuation of the AK Party government,” Erdogan said, according to comments reported by the state-run Anatolian agency at the weekend.

Relations between Turkey and Israel, which had already gone from friendly to strained after Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, broke down completely a year ago after Israeli commandos killed nine Turks in a raid on a flotilla carrying aid for Gaza.

In an editorial entitled “One for the opposition,” the avowedly pro-free-market, pro-democracy Economist, which regularly expresses a party preference in advance of elections, wrote: “The best way for Turks to promote democracy would be to vote against the ruling party.”

State Minister Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s chief negotiator in membership talks with the EU, said the foreign press was now included in an alliance under the umbrella of “anti-democratic and mafia-like organizations.”

“The Economist, in order to redeem itself, should ask for an apology from Turkish nation,” Bagis wrote in a newsletter.

A leading member of Erdogan’s AK Party, which currently has a large majority in parliament, saw the article as reflecting a desire in Europe to weaken Turkey.

“A growing Turkey does not suit the British or the Germans or the French. They want Turkey to be condemned to coalition governments again. That is the scenario,” Anatolian reported senior AK Party official Suat Kilic as saying.

The Economist said it was not surprising voters were set to return the AK Party to power as the economy had done very well under its rule, while reforms had secured the start of EU talks and sent the politically intrusive army back to its barracks.

But it said Erdogan’s victories in struggles with the army and judiciary had eliminated many checks and balances, freeing him to “indulge his natural intolerance of criticism” and feeding his “autocratic instincts.”

It a vote for the opposition CHP “would both reduce the risks of unilateral changes that would make the constitution worse and give the opposition a fair chance of winning a future election.”

“That would be by far the best guarantee of Turkey’s democracy,” it said.

(Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

via Turkey’s leaders livid over Economist article | Reuters.

June 7, 2011
The Economist’s unforgivable silence on Sayyid Qutb’s anti-Semitism
By Richard Cohen

Qutb was hanged in 1966 by the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser after the customary torture. He had been the intellectual leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and a man of copious literary output. One of his efforts was called “Our Struggle with the Jews.” It is a work of unabashed, breathtakingly stupid anti-Semitism, one of the reasons the New York Review of Books recently characterized Qutb’s views”as extreme as Hitler’s.” About all this, the Economist is oddly, ominously and unforgivably silent.

This is both puzzling and troublesome. After all, it’s not as if Qutb was some minor figure. He is, as a secondary headline on the Economist review says, “the father of Islamic fundamentalism,” and it is impossible to read anything about him that does not attest to his immense contemporary importance. Nor was Qutb’s anti-Semitism some sort of juvenile madness, expressed in the hormonal certainty of youth and later recanted as both certainty and hairline receded. It was, instead, the creation of his middle age and was published in the early 1950s. In other words, his essay is a post-Holocaust work, written in full knowledge of what anti-Semitism had just accomplished. The mass murder of Europe’s Jews didn’t give him the slightest pause. Qutb was undaunted.

But so, apparently, are some others who write about him. In his recent and well-received book, “The Arabs,” Eugene Rogan of Oxford University gives Qutb his due “as one of the most influential Islamic reformers of the [20th] century” but does not mention his anti-Semitism or, for that matter, his raging hatred of America. Like the Sept. 11 terrorists, Qutb spent some time in America — Greeley, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; and Palo Alto, Calif. — learning to loathe Americans. He was particularly revolted by its overly sexualized women. Imagine if he had been to New York!

The Economist’s review is stunning in its omission. Can it be that a mere 65 years after the fires of Auschwitz were banked, anti-Semitism has been relegated to a trivial, personal matter, like a preference for blondes — something not worth mentioning? Yet, Qutb is not like Richard Wagner, whose anti-Semitism was repellent but did not in the least affect his music. Qutb’s Jew-hatred was not incidental to his work. While not quite central, it has nevertheless proved important, having been adopted along with his other ideas by Hamas. Qutb blames Jews for almost everything: “atheistic materialism,” “animalistic sexuality,” “the destruction of the family” and, of course, an incessant war against Islam itself.

Obviously, this is no minor matter. Critics of Israel frequently accuse it of racism in its treatment of Palestinians. Sometimes, the charge is apt. But there is nothing in the Israeli media or popular culture that even approaches what is openly, and with official sanction, said in the Arab world about Jews. The message is an echo of Nazi racism, and the prescription, stated or merely implied, is the same.

The Economist and Rogan are insufficient in themselves to constitute a movement. Yet I cannot quite suppress the feeling that the need to demonize Israel is so great that the immense moral failings of some of its enemies have to be swept under the carpet. As Jacob Weisberg pointed out recently in Slate, the “boycott Israel” movement is oddly unbalanced — so much fury directed at Israel, so little at countries like China or Venezuela. Can it be that the French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch was prescient when he suggested years ago that anti-Zionism “gives us the permission and even the right and even the duty to be anti-Semitic in the name of democracy”? The line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, a demarcation I have always acknowledged, is becoming increasingly blurred.

Because the Economist’s book reviews are unsigned, it’s impossible to know — and the Economist would not say — who’s at fault here. So the magazine itself is accountable not just for bad taste or unfathomable ignorance but for disregarding its own vow, published on its first page, “to take part in a severe contest between intelligence . . . and an unworthy timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” During the week of July 15, it didn’t just lose the contest — it never even showed up for it.

cohenr@washpost.com

www.washingtonpost.com, August 10, 2010

—

Cohen

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Cohen (surname), the most common Jewish surname
- Kohen, a direct male descendant of the Biblical Aaron, brother of Moses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohen
February 13, 2011
Temper tantrums

Temper tantrums

Feb 5th 2009 | ANKARA
From The Economist print edition

A dramatic Davos walkout raises new questions about Recep Tayyip Erdogan

WAS it premeditated? Or did Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, lose control? Mr Erdogan’s walkout from a debate with Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, in Davos has made him the most talked about Turkish leader since Kemal Ataturk. His audience of financiers and policy wonks was stunned. But Muslims worldwide cheered as Mr Erdogan scolded Mr Peres over Israel’s war in Gaza. “When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill. I know well how you hit and kill children on beaches,” thundered a crimson-faced Mr Erdogan.

The incident has led to new debate over Turkey’s strategic alliance with Israel, whether an increasingly erratic Mr Erdogan is fit to lead Turkey at all and, if so, in what direction: east or west? There is no question of Turkey walking away from NATO or the European Union, or scrapping military ties with Israel and America. Mr Erdogan’s critics say his outburst was a ploy to please voters. If so, it worked: his approval ratings have shot up. Polls suggest that 80% of Turks support Mr Erdogan’s actions. His mildly Islamist Justice and Development party will reap dividends in municipal elections on March 29th.

Mr Erdogan’s defiance has also helped to assuage his people’s long-running feelings of humiliation and inferiority, which date back as far as the Ottoman defeat in the first world war. Many insist that Mr Erdogan’s reaction was spontaneous and utterly sincere. Turkey has assumed “moral leadership” based on Western values, opined Cengiz Candar, a liberal commentator. Mindful of the public mood, Turkey’s secular opposition leader, Deniz Baykal, grudgingly declared that his rival had done the right thing.

Not everybody agrees, however. Mr Erdogan’s behaviour makes it less likely that Turkey can successfully mediate between Israel and Syria. His call to Barack Obama to “redefine” what terrorist means has been seen as an appeal to remove the label from Hamas. Although European and American reaction has been muted, in private officials are unhappy. “What [the Davos spat] does leave in Europe is the feeling that Mr Erdogan is unpredictable,” says a European diplomat. Mr Obama is highly unlikely now to pay Turkey an early visit.

Mr Erdogan’s temper tantrums are not new. But they used to be reserved for his critics at home. The Davos affair, says another foreign diplomat, is further evidence of “Mr Erdogan’s conviction that the West needs Turkey more than Turkey needs it.” It is of a piece with Mr Erdogan’s threat to back out of the much-touted Nabucco pipeline to carry gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe via Turkey. In Brussels recently Mr Erdogan said that, if there were no progress on the energy chapter of Turkey’s EU accession talks then “we would of course review our position”. Meanwhile, Turkey sided with Saudi Arabia and the Vatican in opposing a UN statement suggested by the EU to call for the global decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Mr Erdogan’s supporters argue that EU foot-dragging on Turkey’s membership bid explains why Turkey is now seeking new friends in the Middle East and beyond. Its growing regional clout is another reason why the EU should embrace Turkey. But the reverse is also true. It is because it is the sole Muslim country that is at once secular, democratic and allied with the West that Turkey commands such respect in the rest of the world. Growing numbers of Arab investors have flocked to Turkey, “because we see it as part of Europe, not the Middle East,” says an Arab banker in Istanbul.

To retain its allure, Turkey will need to swallow its pride and make further concessions on Cyprus. The EU may suspend membership talks altogether unless Turkey meets a December 2009 deadline to open its ports to Greek-Cypriots. The hope is that Egemen Bagis, who was chosen as Turkey’s official EU negotiator in January, will remind Mr Erdogan that, at least in these talks, it is Turkey that is the supplicant not the other way round.

Source: Economist, Feb 5th 2009

February 6, 2009