With a background of an attempted coup (NYTimes) in Turkey today, the issue of national secularity – or lack thereof – is surely part of the struggle. President Erdogan, characterized as an Islamist, appealed for his supporters to take to the streets, according to the New York Times:
After Mr. Erdogan spoke, many of his followers obeyed his orders to go into the streets, and mosque loudspeakers exhorted his supporters to go out and protest against the coup attempt. [My bold – HW]
So just how secular has Turkey been? AL Monitor’s Mustafa Akyol reports on what he sees as the delusional empty shell of religion within society in the wake of the deadly Islamic State attack on Ataturk Airport:
In other words, as belated as it is, Turkey has begun taking a bolder stance against the terror organization that now threatens the world.
However, Turkey also needs a war of ideas against IS [the Islamic State]. Sadly, Turkey’s ruling religious-minded class seems to have little willingness and potential to do that. The reason is not any love affair with IS or any sympathy with its carnage. The reason is that most of Turkey’s Islamic opinion leaders who have the means to counter IS ideology instead choose to blind themselves to the nature of the problem and explain it as a Western conspiracy against Islam.
This tirade is most visible in the pro-government media sector, which reflects a large part of the Islamic camp. As explained in a recent Al-Monitor piece, several articles appeared in this sector after the attack on the Istanbul airport, putting the blame on “the CIA.” Moreover, there is a whole narrative explaining the very rise of IS as nothing but a Western plot to create a Trojan horse within Islam in order to stain the religion and advance Western imperialism in the Middle East. …
The big problem now with this entire obsession with Western conspiracies is not that it looks ridiculous to anyone who has a better sense of the world. The big problem is that it keeps Turkey’s new ruling class in a bubble of self-delusion, blinding them to the bitter and complex realities that Turkey faces. They seem to have almost no idea about the religious ideology of IS and its brand of Salafi-takfiri-jihadism, or of the social and political dynamics that drive thousands of young Muslims to this zealotry.
The human urge to see ourselves on the side of right will happily engage in all sorts of fancy & fantasy in order to avoid blemishing that which they hold most dear, and I do not hold anyone blameless in this arena, as we’ve seen this from the most conservative of theocrats (who conveniently designate that since God endorses them, they can do no wrong) to the most left-wing of the Marxists and Communists (“We torture you for the good of the State!”). I fear that humankind never evolved to have a disinterested viewpoint, so the alternative of a tremendous blow to the ego implies that we’ll never see these falsehoods stop. Or if we do, it’ll be time to stop calling ourselves humankind.
The motivations of the military involved in the coup remain murky at this time, as do their prospects.
