{"id":5056,"date":"2016-09-06T16:30:37","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T21:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=5056"},"modified":"2016-09-06T16:30:37","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T21:30:37","slug":"turkish-secularism-ctd-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/09\/06\/turkish-secularism-ctd-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkish Secularism, Ctd"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even in a supposedly secular nation<\/a> 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 <\/a>in AL Monitor<\/b><\/i>:<\/p>\n

Those who are broadly called \u201cmodernists\u201d lead one side in this debate. They\u00a0are scholars, most of them theology\u00a0professors\u00a0who have reformist views on Islam.\u00a0To them, the Gulenist problem is the result of a belief in a divinely-guided savior,\u00a0a culture of blind obedience to a religious master\u00a0and an esoteric understating of Islam that sees mystical signs everywhere. They argue that other Islamic communities in Turkey \u2014 such as Sufi orders\u00a0or the Nur\u00a0tradition \u2014 also share these \u201csuperstitious beliefs.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the scholars who make this argument is Mustafa Cagrici, the former mufti of Istanbul, a professor of Islamic theology\u00a0and\u00a0columnist for the mildly pro-Justice and Development Party Karar. He recently wrote a controversial piece on the\u00a0need to question Islamic\u00a0communities<\/a>.\u00a0He argued that not just Gulenists but also many other Islamic communities in Turkey believe in notions such as the \u201cmahdi,\u201d the savior who will come at the end of times,\u00a0which does not exist in the Quran. These myths, he wrote, \u201carise from the crooked religious information produced over the centuries,\u201d and Gulenists turned this into a threat\u00a0because they were able to acquire immense power.<\/p>\n

On the other side, there are more traditionalist Islamists who\u00a0blame the modernists themselves for the problem. One of the most hawkish voices in this choir,\u00a0columnist for the hard-core pro-Erdogan Star\u00a0Yakup Kose, wrote a piece headlined \u201cWho will control faculties of theology<\/a>?\u201d In this view, the problem was not the mainstream Sunni tradition, but Gulenists\u2019 deviation from it. Kose saw the roots of the problem in 19th-century Muslim reformists such as Jamaladdin Afghani or Muhammad Abduh, \u201cwho all claimed to renew Islam.\u201d He also pointed to Gulenists\u2019 \u201cinterfaith dialogue\u201d with Christians, which he saw as a proof of their heresy. The real solution for him was to cleanse Turkey\u2019s faculties of theology from all such modernists who deviate from the \u201cpure creed\u201d of\u00a0Sunni Islam.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The more I see of this, the more I consider it simply maneuvering for power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cmodernists\u201d lead one side in this debate. \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-5056","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\/5056","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=5056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5057,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5056\/revisions\/5057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}