Continuing this thread, AL Monitor shows nuance as they cover the other end of the spectrum – Islamophobia in Turkey, as Mahmut Bozarslan reports:
In an interview with Al-Monitor, [Mehmet Yanmis, a scholar of religious sociology at Dicle University in Diyarbakir,] said the rise of the Islamic State (IS) and its slaughter of civilians had fueled Islamophobia in Muslim societies as well, a process he believes will strengthen trends toward secularization.
“In the Islamic world, young Muslim generations with a secular education or strong political or commercial bonds with the West are being estranged from Islam, especially by the killings of civilians,” he said. “I think Islamophobia or fear of fundamentalism will become a major topic of discussion in the near future for all of us in Muslim societies, from Morocco to Indonesia. … This will encourage secularization along with modernization.”
According to Yanmis, who has been researching Islamophobia for six years and is a published author on the issue, the trend is very real in Turkey, especially in the southeast, where a bloody feud between Islamist and secular nationalist Kurds dates back many years.
The Kurdistan Workers Party, which espouses a Marxist ideology, and the local Hezbollah, a Kurdish-dominated Islamist group unrelated to its Lebanese namesake, fought a vicious war in the 1990s that claimed hundreds of lives on both sides. In later years, Hezbollah’s chilling reputation reverberated across Turkey with the discovery of so-called “grave houses” where dozens of the group’s victims had been killed and buried after being tortured. Old enmities flared anew in October 2014 as Kurdish protests against the IS onslaught on Kobani in Syria degenerated into deadly street clashes between nationalist and Islamist Kurds.
So as the forces of religion push forward in Turkey, a reaction is setting in as the young, not yet set in their ways, ponder a future with or without their local religion.
According to Yanmis, Islamophobia appears in different forms in Turkey. “We keep discussing the West, but in Turkey we have Shariaphobia and reactionary-phobia. Those are the names of Islamophobia in our country. It’s all the same,” he said. “Especially in communities where religious tradition has weakened, young people, business people, and social and political elites are wary of Islam and opt for secular identities and lifestyles.”
Pointing to the different faces of Islamophobia in the West and Muslim-majority countries, Yanmis said, “In the West, we speak mostly of hatred for Islam because of fundamentalist attacks. In the Muslim world, this is manifested as an estrangement from Islam — first by shunning religious symbols and rituals and then, perhaps as an ultimate form, estrangement on the level of faith.”
