{"id":3553,"date":"2016-04-29T19:55:10","date_gmt":"2016-04-30T00:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=3553"},"modified":"2016-04-29T19:56:41","modified_gmt":"2016-04-30T00:56:41","slug":"turkish-secularism-ctd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/04\/29\/turkish-secularism-ctd\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkish Secularism, Ctd"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing this thread, AL Monitor<\/strong><\/em> shows nuance as they cover the other end of the spectrum – Islamophobia in<\/em> Turkey<\/a>, as Mahmut Bozarslan reports<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In an interview with Al-Monitor, [Mehmet Yanmis, a scholar of religious sociology at Dicle University in Diyarbakir,]\u00a0said the rise of the Islamic State (IS)\u00a0and its slaughter of civilians had fueled Islamophobia in Muslim societies as well, a process he believes will strengthen trends toward\u00a0secularization.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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\u00a0the killings of civilians,\u201d he said. \u201cI 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. \u2026 This will encourage secularization along with modernization.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Yanmis, who has been researching Islamophobia for six years and is a published author on the issue, the trend is very real\u00a0in Turkey, especially in the southeast, where a\u00a0bloody\u00a0feud<\/a>\u00a0between Islamist and secular nationalist Kurds dates back many years.<\/p>\n

The Kurdistan Workers\u00a0Party, 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.\u00a0In later years,\u00a0Hezbollah\u2019s chilling reputation reverberated across Turkey with the discovery of so-called \u201cgrave houses\u201d where dozens of the group\u2019s victims had been killed and buried after being tortured.\u00a0Old enmities flared\u00a0anew in October 2014 as Kurdish protests against the IS onslaught on Kobani<\/a>\u00a0in Syria degenerated into deadly street clashes between nationalist and Islamist Kurds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

According to Yanmis, Islamophobia appears in different forms in Turkey. \u201cWe keep discussing the West, but in Turkey we have Shariaphobia and reactionary-phobia. Those are the names of Islamophobia in our country. It\u2019s all the same,\u201d he said. \u201cEspecially 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pointing to the different faces of Islamophobia in the West and Muslim-majority countries, Yanmis said, \u201cIn 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 \u2014 first by shunning religious symbols and rituals and then, perhaps as an ultimate form, estrangement on the level of faith.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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,]\u00a0said the rise of the Islamic State (IS)\u00a0and its slaughter \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3553"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3556,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553\/revisions\/3556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}