Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Church and state in Istanbul

"Christian missionaries infiltrating our country! Islam is slipping out of our hands!" These words represent the epitome of a very hot debate in Turkey in recent weeks. What made them more surprising than ever was that they belonged not to a conservative Muslim, but to Rahsan Ecevit — the influential wife of Bulent Ecevit, Turkey's former prime minister and long-time guru of left-wing, secularist ideology. Nobody had heard Mrs. Ecevit worrying about the future of Islam before; instead, she used to speak about the "threat" of it."

"Actually, Mrs. Ecevit is not the only secular Turk who is furious at Christian missionaries, whose only "crime" is distributing free Bibles on Turkish streets and opening small, in-house chapels for the tiny Christian community in Turkey."

"Thus, most consider the recent attack on missionaries to be a tactical move in the big game that the Kemalist elite are playing against democratization. By arguing that the bearers of the Cross are invading Turkey and that the AKP government is allowing this to happen, they hope to convince the conservative voters that the whole democratization process is a great conspiracy to destroy Turkey by weakening its national ethos."

"It is a pity that some conservative Muslims, or at least their pundits, are buying into this propaganda. Horrified by the imagined threat from Christianity, they appeal to the authoritarian measures of the state. They demand that Bible-distributing Christians should be arrested, or chapels in their homes should be put under police scrutiny. Alas, they are forgetting that they themselves have been victims of such persecutions from the authorities for many decades. They should realize that the real issue here is religious freedom, and if it is to be preserved, it must be extended to all."
Mustafa Akyol on Turkey on National Review Online

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