Tag: Islamists

  • Islamists in Turkey Think About Sex—A Lot

    A look at some of the more interesting views spouted by Turkey’s political and cultural leaders

    Turkey’s Islamists are obsessed with sex, and no one typifies this obsession more completely than Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan isn’t shy about meddling in private lives, promoting an Islamic way of life in hopes of raising a “religious generation.”

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    He regularly encourages families to have “at least three children” and avoid C-section births. He’s also the first politician in Turkey’s history to openly take an anti-abortion stance. Most recently, he spoke about theperils of coed living—in college dorms and private apartments.

    Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan never passes up a chance to dispense religious advice.

    But Erdogan isn’t the first Islamist in Turkey to constantly cause controversy with his remarks on the lifestyle choices of his citizens. In fact, it’s a popular topic frequently visited by his fellow Islamist thinkers. Below, some of Turkey’s most eye-opening stances on sex and equality:

    “I Offered Another Friend to My Husband”

    Sex Turkey UresinSibel Üresin is totally cool with polygamy.

    Sibel Üresin, a self-dubbed Islamist life coach who rose to fame—and notoriety—in Turkey with her provocative statements on women’s issues. A vocal advocate of polygamy, her sentences speak for themselves:

    • “Rich men with solid careers and lots of sexual power can sometimes choose polygamy. No woman would ever become the second wife of a poor man. Men chase women who are more flirtatious, laugh more and who can satisfy them sexually. If I were a man, I would have been polygamous,” she said in May 2011.

    • “I offered a single friend of mine to my husband. ‘If you liked her and also want to marry her [as your second wife], it’s OK with me,’ I told him. But he didn’t accept my offer. Even if he did, I wouldn’t have divorced him,” she said in July 2012.

    • “Women talk ceaselessly. It is the woman’s fault if she is killed. Really, I know some women that never shut up. It is very normal that her husband’s going to go crazy,” she said in May 2013.

    It’s Acceptable to Marry Your Adopted Kid

    If Woody Allen were a Muslim, perhaps his marriage to Sun-Yi Previn wouldn’t be that big of a deal. While Turkish law currently prohibits marrying your adopted child, the issue has been hotly debated within Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs, a government branch that provides and regulates religious services in the country. In 2007, İsmail Karagöz, an Islamic scholar and member of the council, said, “When the adopted kid grows up, he or she becomes a stranger to the parent.” In other words, it is acceptable, according to Islam, to marry your adopted child.

    Father-to-Son Penis Transplants

    The Presidency of Religious Affairs deemed organ transplants to be not only religiously acceptable, but also crucial. Yet, its statement didn’t satisfy one Islamist writers who argued against the idea that the bodily organs won’t matter when Judgment Day comes.

    Mevlüt Özcan, the ultra conservative writer for Milli Gazette, an Islamic daily, offered this mind-boggling scenario as a rebuttal, just last week:

    “Let’s think for a second that a husband’s sister’s genitalia is transplanted to his wife? It’s a very dangerous situation. The same applies to men. What will happen when a father’s [penis] is attached to the son’s body? How will that son approach his own wife? Who will be responsible for that organ’s sins?”

    76-Year-Old Writer and a 14-Year-Old Girl

    The Turkish daily Yeni Akit is an advocate of Islamic law, with a track record of anti-Semitism, anti-secularism and anti-modernism.

    Sex Turkey KarakayaHasan Karakaya is a religious newspaper man with an edge.

    Although its circulation is low, its provocative stories cause a lot of negative buzz. The paper’s editor-in-chief, Hasan Karakaya, is regular fixture inside Erdogan’s inner circle and accompanies him on state visits. Yeni Akit also has a tainted history of hiring sex offenders as columnists. One of them is Hüseyin Üzmez.

    In 2009, he was charged with sexually abusing a minor and sentenced to 13 years in prison. The 76-year-old Üzmez had been arrested on charges of having a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl, with her mother’s knowledge. “A girl who has reached puberty, who’s having periods, is of age according to our beliefs,” he once said.

    But hey, older men with teenage girls isn’t so radical considering current President Abdullah Gül, now 63, was 30 when he married Hayrünnisa Gül, when she was 15.

    Norway's King Harald (2nd L) shakes hands with Turkey's President Abdullah Gul (2nd R), as their wives Queen Sonja (L) and First Lady Hayrunnisa Gul (R) look on, after a welcoming ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Ankara November 5, 2013. REUTERS/Umit Bektas (TURKEY - Tags: POLITICS ROYALS)Abdullah Gul and his wife, Hayrünnisa, have been together since she was 15. Here they are with the leader of Norway and his wife.

    Pregnant Women Should Just Stay Home

    During the month of Ramadan this summer, a religious scholar named Ömer Tugrul Inancer appeared on the state-owned TRT network and claimed that it is immoral for pregnant women to appear in public. “They should not walk around on the streets with huge bellies,” he argued. “First of all, it’s not aesthetic. It’s disgraceful, it’s immorality.”

    When his remarks caused an outrage among Turkish women, Inancer stood by his words: “[Getting pregnant] can not be the reason to swing your belly. What don’t you understand, it’s not aesthetic…. That’s why young girls are scared of giving birth.” Oh, he also added that maternity leave was for women to “stay at home, not wander around.”

    In another TV appearance in September, Inancer argued this time that “working women cause marriages to fall apart.” He explained, “Women serve their bosses, instead of their husbands.”

    The Coed Campus That Nearly Derailed a Minister

    Founded by Americans in 1863, The Bosphorus University has one of the most attractive campuses in the Turkey. Its grassy spaces are packed with students on sunny days. However, the site of young men and women together was too much to handle for Turkey’s current Minister of Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Binali Yildirim.

    During a speech in late January, he said: “Somebody told me about Bosphorus University, the many opportunities the school provides, such as employment in the States after graduation. I became confused and visited the campus. It was a different world there, as if entering a different country. Even the buildings were unique. And then young people, girls and boys together, were sitting on the lawn! I was shocked. ‘I will go off the road here,’ I thought.”

    Since then, #boysgirlstogether has become a popular Twitter hashtag and a running joke among Turkey’s millennials.

    Gender Equality Leads to Third Gender

    The conservative writer Ali Bulaç, whose work appears in the Turkish daily Zaman, a paper with more than 1 million subscribers, once claimed that gender equality is “ruining this world” and “women are becoming more like men.”

    He believes that a woman’s primary duty is to raise children and stay at home. He also believes that gender equality causes homosexuality: “If you try to upend male-female relationship with affirmative action or gender equality, you cause the families to dissolve, sexual deviances to occur and pave the way for the third gender.”

    AUTHOR: Oray Egin

  • Turkey: Is Atatürk Dead? Erdogan Islamism Replaces Kemalism

    Turkey: Is Atatürk Dead? Erdogan Islamism Replaces Kemalism

    Turks continue to idolize their staunchly secularist founding father. But democratic reforms have all but obliterated his Westward-looking vision.

    The photograph shows a pair of men in dusty work clothes, saluting proudly as they stand at attention inside a gutted reinforced-concrete building. The caption, in Turkish, tells us that the picture was taken Nov. 10. Every year on that date, the entire country—schools, government offices, hospitals, even traffic—comes to a halt at 9:05 a.m., the exact minute of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s death in 1938. The photo went viral on the Internet this year, desperately offered via Twitter and Facebook as proof that even though an Islamist government has ruled the country for the past decade, modern Turkey’s fiercely rationalist founder remains a source of inspiration to the masses.

    1355554315320.cached 
    Once eager to join Europe, Ankara is now turning its gaze eastward instead. (George Georgiou / Panos)

    The question is how much longer Mustafa Kemal can remain on that pedestal. To the people of his country, Atatürk—the sobriquet means “father of the Turks”—has been both a national hero and an ideology, bolstered by decades of indoctrination in the schools and by his ubiquitous image in the form of busts, portraits, statues, figurines, T-shirts, currency, key chains, and even iPhone cases. A reformist Ottoman Army general, he led an independence struggle against the invading Greek, French, and Italian armies after the First World War, culminating in the establishment of a modern republic in 1923.

     

    Under Mustafa Kemal’s leadership, the young republic made a clean break from its Ottoman past nearly nine decades ago, ditching the caliphate for a secular regime and turning away from the empire’s former Arab territories in favor of an anti-clerical, pro-Western vision that became known as Kemalism. He pushed for women’s suffrage, decreed the alphabet’s conversion from Arabic to Latin overnight, established parliamentary government, declared war on Islamic zealotry long before jihadism became a global concern, even banned the Ottoman fez in favor of European-style hats. Turkish schoolbooks today summarize the changes he imposed as “the Atatürk revolutions.”

    Nevertheless, Mustafa Kemal’s staunchly secularist legacy is now being challenged by a new Turkish strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Free at last to espouse and promote his conservative Muslim faith publicly, the prime minister embodies the political aspirations of millions of Turks who have been alienated from the military-backed secular establishment for generations: the rural folk, the urban poor, conservative Muslim clerics, and the rising religiously conservative business classes. While studiously avoiding direct confrontation with Atatürk’s Westernized ideals, Erdogan and other pro-Islamist leaders of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have inaugurated an era of deep political transformation.

    With the party’s encouragement, many Turks have come to regard Kemalism as an outmoded ideology unsuited to the needs of present-day Turkey’s dynamic society. “I don’t know if Atatürk himself is dead,” says liberal academic and commentator Mehmet Altan. “But Kemalism will eventually die, as Turkey democratizes.” Altan has argued for years against the Kemalist doctrine, calling instead for the creation of a “second republic” that would be less centralized, more inclusive of Kurds and Islamists, and less rigid in its secular and nationalist policies.

    That’s what’s already happening as the Erdogan government dismantles the Kemalist establishment. The military, once the country’s most powerful political force and the self-proclaimed guardian of secularism, has been relegated to the barracks and publicly reprimanded for the series of coups that have stunted democracy’s growth since Atatürk’s death. Religious conservatism is on the rise, and Ankara has turned its attention away from the country’s longstanding bid for European Union membership, seeking instead a more prominent role in the Middle East and the former Ottoman lands. Vestiges of the old Kemalist order—the headscarf ban on university campuses, restrictions on use of the Kurdish language, Soviet-style commemorations held in stadiums on national days—have nearly disappeared.

    And yet liberal democrats like Altan are not happy. Many feel that Erdogan’s government has lost its reformist drive, becoming authoritarian and single-mindedly Islamic instead. Intellectuals who once supported Erdogan against the military now complain about his efforts to control the media, his intolerance for dissent, and his halfhearted concessions to Kurdish demands. “Politics in Turkey has always been a struggle between the barracks and the mosque,” says Altan. “Because we never had a proper capitalist class, the Army represented the bourgeoisie, and the mosque represented the underprivileged. With AKP, we thought a democracy would emerge out of the mosque. But instead what we got was simply the revenge of the mosque.”

    A year ago Altan finally became one of the many journalists who have lost their jobs for criticizing Erdogan. It’s the same penalty commentators used to incur for finding fault with Atatürk. Altan grieves for the fading of Turkey’s European dreams. Bringing European standards to Turkey’s democracy was the only possible solution for the conflict between the secularists and the Islamists, he says. “But the EU reforms have stopped, and the government’s Islamic reflexes are more obvious now, making the division even sharper.”

    The Kemalists appear to have lost their 90-year political battle. Hundreds of military personnel and hard-core secularists are currently in jail for alleged roles in various coup investigations. In last year’s general elections, the country’s top secular opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—founded by Atatürk himself—drew only 26 percent of the vote, versus 50 percent for the AKP. And although “insulting Atatürk” remains a crime under the Turkish penal code, prosecutors seldom if ever bother to file such charges these days.

    And yet somehow the old man himself is still going strong. “How many leaders are there around the world whose name, 74 years after his death, is still being tattooed on people’s bodies?” demanded Yilmaz Özdil when I asked him if Atatürk is dead. A diehard Kemalist, Özdil writes for Turkey’s top newspaper, Hürriyet, and is by all accounts the country’s most popular columnist. Just look around, he says. He’s not speaking only of the skin-art parlors that honor Nov. 10 by offering free renditions of Atatürk’s signature. People decorate their baby strollers and cars with stickers bearing the founder’s picture, and audiences seem insatiable for books and films about his life.

    The wave of Atatürk mania has a distinct undertone of defiance—a response to the frustrations of secular urbanites these days. “Saying you love Atatürk is code for saying you are afraid of a religious state,” says Altan. Tens of thousands of middle-class Turks joined a demonstration against the AKP government this past Oct. 29, the country’s Republic Day. Elderly women and students carried pictures of Atatürk and chanted in unison: “We are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal!” While Erdogan watched a military parade at a stadium in Ankara, the protesters were being tear-gassed not far away. Finally breaking through police barricades, they marched to Atatürk’s mausoleum.

    Less than two weeks later, an estimated 400,000 Turks made pilgrimages to the secularist shrine. But Erdogan was far away, on a visit to Brunei. When critics in Parliament and the media accused him of avoiding the ceremonies, the prime minister brandished photos of the Turkish government–sponsored renovation of Kemal’s father’s old home in the Balkans and declared that the AKP’s economic-development policies have done more to ensure Atatürk’s legacy than the independence hero’s own party ever achieved.

    Regardless of the dwindling ranks who call themselves secular or Kemalist, surveys say Atatürk himself remains popular across the political spectrum. In one recent poll, 82.3 percent of respondents said they want “Atatürk principles and revolutions” included in the new constitution that is currently being drafted. “Whatever they say, his revolution has succeeded,” says Özdil. “Efforts to reverse it are creating a healthier interest in Atatürk.”

    In fact, it’s hard for Turks of any political affiliation to truly despise the republic’s founder. He was known as a lady’s man who loved to dance and drink, and yet his life had a melancholic quality. The 2008 film Mustafa upset many Kemalists with its rare but candid glimpse of the great leader’s private loneliness. The film portrayed him as subsisting on a daily diet of 3 packs of cigarettes, 15 cups of Turkish coffee, and 1 bottle of raki. A leading brand of the powerful Turkish liquor features an Atatürk look-alike on the label wearing a tux and visibly enjoying a glass. Secularists take pride in the image; in an age of religious conservatism and prohibitive taxation on alcohol, even drinking has become an act of political defiance.

    Turkey has an Atatürk for everyone. In contrast to the secularists’ idea of him, Islamists prefer to ignore his drinking and anti-religiosity, emphasizing instead his leadership on the battlefield against invading Western armies. Leftists picture him as an anti-imperialist with an anti-capitalist streak, while the country’s religious-minority Alevis consider him their defender against domination by hard-line Sunnis. Even the often-oppressed Kurds find good things to say about him. Over the past decade, imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan is said to have spent many hours musing to his lawyers about Kemalism, often concluding that much like Öcalan himself, Atatürk was misunderstood and isolated.

    And yet for all Atatürk’s enduring popularity, his vision is unlikely to survive the political climate change that is sweeping Turkey and the entire Middle East. The country has too many old internecine scores to settle—mass killings of Kurds in 1938, oppression of religious conservatives through most of modern Turkish history, massive human-rights violations following each of Turkey’s four military coups—all committed in the name of preserving Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s republic.

    A decade ahead of the republic’s centennial, Erdogan is floating what he calls the “2023 vision.” He envisions a complete overhaul of the state, scrapping the country’s parliamentary system and replacing it with an American-style tripartite government. And by all accounts, he intends to oversee the transformation personally. If he gets that wish, he will have remained in power for 20 years—five years longer than the father of the Turks himself. Turks can only ask themselves: what would Atatürk say?

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/12/16/turkey-is-ataturk-dead-erdogan-islamism-replaces-kemalism.html

  • Turkey’s Creeping Islamization

    Turkey’s Creeping Islamization

    While Western diplomats persist in calling Turkey a “model,” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist-leaning Justice and Development Party (AKP) continues to tweak relatively minor rules to change Turkish society fundamentally. He makes no secret of this. “Do you expect the conservative democrat AK Party to raise atheist generations? This may be your business and objective but not ours,” he declared last February.

    turkey islamism

    Previously, the Turkish parliament tightened licensing on alcohol sales, and has increased taxes more than 700 percent on beer. The ban on alcohol advertisements forced Efes Pilsen, one of Turkey’s most popular basketball teams, to change its name.

    Now, the Turkish parliament is pushing along its crusade against alcohol to new levels. The Islamist-dominated parliament (the AKP holds 326 out of 550 seats) will reportedly change a labor law to enable employers to fire without severance any employer who shows up at work having drunk alcohol, as opposed to being drunk with alcohol. Accordingly, if a businessman consumes a single glass of wine or beer at a business lunch, he can be terminated immediately.

    Speaking at an American Enterprise Institute conference in Gdansk, Poland, in August 2005, senior State Department official Daniel Fried once commented that Erdoğan’s AKP was simply the Islamic equivalent of a European Christian Democratic party. Alas, it increasingly appears that the State Department has sacrificed the ideal of a Western-oriented Turkey upon the altar of political correctness.

    Topics: AKP, Islamism, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey

    via Turkey’s Creeping Islamization « Commentary Magazine.

  • Should Europe fear Islamic extremists?

    Should Europe fear Islamic extremists?

    Should Europe fear Islamic extremists?

    With EYP – the European Youth Parliament

    Masha from France:

    I’d like to know if Muslim extremism is a real issue in Europe.

    Michaël Privot, Director of the European Network Against Racism, responds:

    Reports from Europol on terrorism threats since 2006 show that, out of roughly 2,150 attacks in Europe, half of one percent were carried out by Muslim extremists, which is to say precisely 10. It’s important, in relation to that, to see the resources devoted to controlling this threat.

    In reality, 50% of Europe’s counter-terrorism resources have been used just for the 0.5 percent of terrorism called ‘Islamic’.

    So, how can this outright disproportion between the real threat and the means used be justified? You have to look at the political context. Since the attacks in London and Madrid especially, politicians have lived with a dread that an attack might take place in their voting area and therefore they do not scrimp on means, in order to show that they are taking things in hand.

    And then there’s the economic context today. Counter-terrorism, especially against Islamic terrorism, involves hundreds of thousands of jobs in Europe, whether it’s in the public sectors of law and order, security services — but also smaller private offices that draw ample benefit from this — all, obviously, in a context where the Muslim is seen as the absolutely different ‘other’, as the threat for our civilisation and our values.

    What we are especially interested in now is to see the impact on communities. Today we can say that minorities, Muslims in particular, are victims of this situation in three ways.

    Firstly because they are singled out as the scapegoat within the social majority — these minorities all the problems come through. The second thing is that with such a disproportionate attribution of means Muslims, notably young men, are often the victims of extra sharp scrutiny by the forces of order. And thirdly, given that the forces of order concentrate half their personnel on the fight against the Islamist terrorist who represents almost nothing, they do not take care of the much worse threats such as the terrorism of the extreme right such as we see in Germany, or recently in Italy, where there are certainly Muslim communities who are victims, along with black people, Roma and Jewish communities.

    Here I think it’s time we might learn some lessons from this, and return to our common sense and change radically, if we can say that, the policy being followed at European level and in the EU member states.

    Video:

  • Potential platform for the Islamist agenda

    Potential platform for the Islamist agenda

    GROUND ZERO

    August 11, 2010


    Farzana Hassan [farzanaqazi@yahoo.com]
    www.AverroesPress.Com

    As the controversy around the Ground-Zero Islamic Centre rages in New York and the rest of the USA, the response from the traditional leadership of the Muslim community has been predictable. Belligerence and arrogance.

    There comes a time in a religious community’s life when it must face its demons thoughtfully and honestly. For North American Muslims that time has long passed. They have shied away from much needed introspection on lingering issues, resulting in their failure to recognize the sure threat of radicalism within.

    For starters, Muslims must ponder the meaning of religious moderation. They must reflect on why certain categories of Muslims fail to meet that criterion. Any Muslim who upholds Sharia, a man-made system of religious stipulations cannot be deemed a moderate. Nor is anyone intending to establish a version of an Islamic state in North America a religious progressive.
    Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the construction of a gigantic Islamic Centre near Ground zero is one such Muslim. One must question why the Imam deliberately chose a site so close to the 9/11 site. Is he so naive as to think people do not, at least in part, blame radical Islam for 9/11? What about the sentiments of Americans who lost loved ones in the brutal AlQaeda attack nine years ago? Though the Imam claims to promote moderate Islam at the centre, Muslims of all persuasions–radicals, conservatives, orthodox, and self-proclaimed progressives will undoubtedly congregate at the mosque.

    Imam Faisal Rauf should pay heed to words of wisdom coming from the 85-year old Indian Islamic scholar, Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. In his book, Indian Muslims: The Need for a Positive Outlook, the respected Muslims scholar writes:

    “Muslims are commanded by God ‘to endure their persecution’ (14:12), so that a congenial atmosphere may be maintained between them and non-Muslims. How it is possible then that Islam could approve of such acts on the part of believers as would ultimately vitiate mutual relationships. For the above reason, it is incumbent upon Muslims to refrain totally from building a mosque at a site which could become, today or tomorrow, a controversial issue between the two parties.”

    And even before its birth, the Ground-Zero Islamic Centre has become much more than the “controversial issue” the Indian Islamic scholar warns of.

    If and when the mosque is built, will Imam Rauf screen every Muslim entering the mosque for possible radical opinions? Does he plan to develop a set of criteria to determine who is or isn’t a radical? How is he so sure he will be able to keep radical Muslims out of the mosque?

    Those who bristle at such suggestions may wish to consider the following: It is a commonly known fact that orthodox Islamic organizations and mosques receive major funding from Saudi Arabia.The Wahabbi ideology exported by Saudi Arabia endorses the doctrine of violent jihad. No wonder the Imam enjoys support for his project from people like Nihad Awad of CAIR, an organization designated as an unindicted co-conspirator by the US Justice Department in the Texas Terror Trial where all the accused were convicted on all charges.

    How will Imam Abdul Rauf live up to this claim of fostering a culture of tolerance and dialogue in the Islamic centre? Also worrisome are the Imam’s own pronouncements on the funding of the project. In a statement to Ashraq AlAwsat, an Arabic newspaper, he declared that the project would receive funds from ordinary Muslims as well as from various Islamic countries.

    Will the donors who lavish heavy sums on the mosque not wish to impose their ideologies on the mosque organizers and those they serve?

    The Imam has set the stage for a Trojan Horse, with all its financial and ideological infrastructure, to be established in the heart of a primary Western centre of tremendous media and socio-economic consequence. He has undoubtedly provided the means and cover for more formidable and hostile forces to gain credibility, respectability and influence there. In light of all this, one can only dread the building of a thirteen-story Islamic centre with such genuine potential for radicalization.

    Imam Abdul Rauf must reevaluate his objectives for the mosque. Goodwill, compassion and empathy demand that he withdraw his plans to construct an Islamic centre near ground zero. Prudence demands he anticipate the many pitfalls of constructing an enormous Islamic centre—one that can easily turn into a public platform for radical Islamists. Both overtly and surreptitiously, these goons will use the venue to propagate their hate-filled agenda. The contemplated Islamic centre near ground zero is an ill-conceived idea.

    ———-

    Farzana Hassan is the author of Islam, Women and the Challenge of Today. She sits on the board of the Muslim Canadian Congress. She can be reached at <farzanaqazi@yahoo.com>

    ———————————————————————————————————-

    Farzana Hassan


  • Muslims vs. Islamists

    Muslims vs. Islamists

    Muslims vs. Islamists
    Soner Cagaptay
    Hurriyet Daily News
    January 27, 2010

    I am thankful to Mr. Umaru Abdul Mutallab, the father of the failed Christmas day bomber. In late 2009, Mr. Abdul Mutallab, a Muslim, approached U.S. authorities in his native Nigeria to warn them of his son’s slide into Islamist ideology. Mr. Abdul Mutallab’s altruistic initiative is a case in point about the conflict between Muslims and Islamists.

    While Islam is the faith of 1.4 billion people, Islamism is not a form of the Muslim faith or an expression of Muslim piety. Rather, it is a political ideology that strives to derive legitimacy from Islam. Islam and Islamism are not synonymous, and there is even a tension between the two, exemplified by the case of this Nigerian Muslim father turning in his Islamist son to the authorities.

    So if Islam is a faith, then what is Islamism? It can be best described as an “anti-” ideology, in the sense that it defines itself only in opposition to things. That is, Islamism stands not for but against.

    For starters, Islamism is anti-Semitic in promoting the view that Jews are evil. Because Jews live in Israel, it is also anti-Israeli, and it is also anti-American due to its distorted view of Jews’ role in the United States. “Jews are evil, they run America, therefore America is evil” — this is the mantra of Islamist thinking.

    Islamism is also anti-Christian, having a perverted view of the religion as well. And since Jews and Christians live in the West, many Islamists are anti-Western. They likewise oppose liberal democracy and secularism, as these institutions originated in the West.

    What is more, Islamists tend to be anti-capitalist because — now you follow the logic — capitalism originates from the West. Many also believe that “Jews invented capitalism” and therefore see capitalism as doubly evil. When they make money, however, Islamists often soften their negative attitude toward capitalism, anti-capitalism being ever the corruptible link in the Islamists’ “anti-” ideology.

    Paradoxically, Islamists also consider communism evil — “the Jews invented that as well.” That Karl Marx, who had Jewish grandparents, was raised a secular Protestant is irrelevant to Islamist zealots who find “evil Jews” everywhere. Islamists see Jewishness in all things they dislike politically. Take, for instance, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who had no Jewish heritage. Many Islamists, who cannot imagine a genuine Muslim who shares Western values, will tell you he is a crypto-Jew.

    Islamism is therefore not about the Islamic faith. Rather, it is a dystopian ideology that distorts religion and reality to fit its “anti-” platform. In fall 2009, in a recent case demonstrating this pattern, Turkish Islamists attended the funeral of Caliph Ertugrul Osman, the descendant of Westernizing Ottoman sultans, lamenting the caliphate as the anti-Western institution par excellence.

    Distortedly, these Islamists envisioned Osman, a Scotch-drinking, Wagner-listening, Western Muslim and resident of Upper East Side in New York City, as the leader of their Islamist crusade, arriving at his funeral only to celebrate this delusion.

    But perhaps worst of all, Islamists distort their very own religious texts so as to befit this “anti-” platform. Consider the various annotations of the Muslim sacred book, the Koran. The book was originally written in classical Arabic, a rich, sophisticated language with tens of thousands of words and nuances, as well as flowing poetry. Over eighty percent of the world’s Muslims don’t speak or read Arabic, so the book has to be translated, requiring the addition of numerous annotations. These annotations differ depending on the edition of the text. In the case of Islamists, these are the seeds of hatred.

    I was raised in Turkey and read the Koran with Turkish annotations. The first time I read an Islamist Koran was when I was 26, living in New York City. Praying at an American mosque, I came across an English-language Koran printed in Saudi Arabia, the main purveyor of Islamist texts worldwide. In its man-made annotations, this Koran preached violence and hatred towards Jews, Christians, the West and Western institutions generally.

    In Turkey, the Diyanet, the country’s highest authority for the Muslim faith, prints Korans that are “halal,” i.e., without such hateful annotations. This institution is part of the secular government bureaucracy in Turkey, an ironic fact that is not without good consequences. The Diyanet promotes and protects tolerant Turkish/Balkan Islam, which explains why generations of Turks have grown up in Turkey shunning Islamism. The right Koran can firewall the minds of Muslims against Islamism, and in Turkey, Muslims have thus far won out against the Islamists.

    The future of many countries in the world, and the future of the West, will be determined by this battle between Muslims and Islamists. Islamists want to convert Muslims to their hateful ideology. God knows the world needs more Muslims and fewer Islamists.

    Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute.

    View this Op-Ed on our website.