Even in a supposedly secular nation such as Turkey, the tides of religion can be turbulent. The recent coup attempt has stirred up the waters of Islam to an unexpected extent, as Mustafa Akyol reports in AL Monitor:
Those who are broadly called “modernists” lead one side in this debate. They are scholars, most of them theology professors who have reformist views on Islam. To them, the Gulenist problem is the result of a belief in a divinely-guided savior, a culture of blind obedience to a religious master and an esoteric understating of Islam that sees mystical signs everywhere. They argue that other Islamic communities in Turkey — such as Sufi orders or the Nur tradition — also share these “superstitious beliefs.”
One of the scholars who make this argument is Mustafa Cagrici, the former mufti of Istanbul, a professor of Islamic theology and columnist for the mildly pro-Justice and Development Party Karar. He recently wrote a controversial piece on the need to question Islamic communities. He argued that not just Gulenists but also many other Islamic communities in Turkey believe in notions such as the “mahdi,” the savior who will come at the end of times, which does not exist in the Quran. These myths, he wrote, “arise from the crooked religious information produced over the centuries,” and Gulenists turned this into a threat because they were able to acquire immense power.
On the other side, there are more traditionalist Islamists who blame the modernists themselves for the problem. One of the most hawkish voices in this choir, columnist for the hard-core pro-Erdogan Star Yakup Kose, wrote a piece headlined “Who will control faculties of theology?” In this view, the problem was not the mainstream Sunni tradition, but Gulenists’ deviation from it. Kose saw the roots of the problem in 19th-century Muslim reformists such as Jamaladdin Afghani or Muhammad Abduh, “who all claimed to renew Islam.” He also pointed to Gulenists’ “interfaith dialogue” with Christians, which he saw as a proof of their heresy. The real solution for him was to cleanse Turkey’s faculties of theology from all such modernists who deviate from the “pure creed” of Sunni Islam.
The more I see of this, the more I consider it simply maneuvering for power.
