"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" ... or vegetarian diet for the Moslem crocodile à la turque

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), May 22, 2008 at 07:56

I remember still vividly how last year Dr. Pipes announced a million "secular" Moslems on march in Turkey and in Pakistan. He saw them, he pinned his hopes upon them. In the meantime they seem to have stopped marching or if they do march the direction of the march is not that clear nor the numbers so impressive.

Anyway, Turkish "secular" Islam has achieved further triumphs in the meantime. An invasion of Northern Iraq with tacit US consent and support was carried out, some bad PKK terrorists were killed and the world opinion kept its otherwise so loud mouth shut; a friendly - equally "secularly" Moslem - state of Kosovo was established which the "secular" Turks were among the first to acknowledge together with some powerful friends of Islam and Turkey in Washington.

True, the resolution on the Armenian Genocide was passed by the Congress but Turkey's friends in America knew their Turkish friends' ancestors hadn't been able to exterminate anyone, least of all the Armenians. So they duly condemned the resolution. Now, the greatest news of all comes! Islam is going to be "reformed" in Turkey!!! But not by those million "secular" Moslems on the march in the unknown direction, but by the ruling Islamic party going in the known direction.

Yes, the idea to reform Islam stems from its leader - or in good Turkish "başbuğ" - and an inspired poet Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who in 1998 was convicted by a court for inciting religious hatred and sentenced to 10 months' imprisonment being banned from holding any public office. The other reformer of Islam is his closest associate and president of the Turkish Republic Abdullah Gül who from 1983 to 1991 had been working so hard at the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia where he had won many a wahhabi heart and mind not just as an outstanding economist but as an outstanding Moslem as well.

Few doubts can be cherished as to the direction of the march of the two. But things change , we are told, aren't they? Erdoğan's official biography states that "Erdogan has in recent years changed from being an outspoken Islamist into becoming a moderate conservative politician." The same applies to Gül, doesn't it ? ... At least until things change further as they fatally tend to do.

Now despite Dr. Pipes' final words of caution on Erdogan's clique's competence to reform Islam some strong hopes are still raised as to Islam's reformability with his pathetic wish of "aligning Islam with the best of modern mores". In my modest opinion we will sooner witness the Mahdi than these pious hopes fulfilled.

Now let's look at some quotes from the article ! "One of the project's 85 theology professors, Ismail Hakki Unal of Ankara University, explains its goal: "The Koran is our basic guide. Anything that conflicts with that, we are trying to eliminate." " Doesn't it sound quite strange? Unless explicitly stated as belonging to a Turkish mullah these words might be equally well ascribed to any extremist Wahhabi preacher. They have exactly the same goal in mind and the same source, so how can we reasonably expect the result won't be alike?

By the way, they have made that "basic guide" Saudi Arabia's constitution. Now the Turkish reforms make it their priority to implement the Saudi Constitution on Turkish soil. Good luck! "The project takes its inspiration from the interpretations of the modernist vein of Islam. … We want to bring out the positive side of Islam that promotes personal honor, human rights, justice, morality, women's rights, respect for the other." How can the vice president of Diyanet [=Directorate for Religious (=Islamic) Affairs] be serious about that? Where in his "basic guide" can he find anything as un-Islamic and so glaringly cotradicting 1000-year-old Islamic past of Turkey as e.g. "human rights", "respect for the other", "women's rights"? It's sheer nonsense, isn't it?

Anyway, why haven't the Moslems found them in their "basic guide" during these 1400 years if all of that was there while finding and implementing everywhere their very opposites? "Some Turks have great hopes for the Hadith Project, which aims to produce a multi-volume book in Turkish, Arabic, and Russian by year's end." I am puzzled why they produce no English version of that Turkified Hadith Scam to convince their US and Eurabian supporters how "secular" and "modern" they are? But one might greatly wonder why they do that in Russian instead?

Anyone familiar a little bit with the present-day official Turkish ideas can hardly doubt why. It's part of Pan-Turkism that is driving today's Turkey and is a uniting force both for the so called "secularists" or Kemalist "pashas" - as they are popularly called- and their acolytes and their alleged Islamic opponents. By exporting their Turkic Islam to Central Asia, the Crimea, the Volga provinces, the Northern Caucasus region where they have already established their strong Pan-Turkic bridgeheads they hope to more effectively influence the Turkic, but mostly Russian-speaking, population and win it for Pan-Turkism which has been making such a progress since 1991.

I can mention that the Turkish espionage and propaganda network in all Turkic areas in Russia is the most widespread and virulent and even more powerful than ever the CIA network has been there. Turkish spies, agents and agitators are caught on a regular basis in Russia but those activities go mostly unreported. It would be worth a special study to show how Pan-Turkism has been operating across the former USSR. The secularists know that they can't make their Pan-Turkic empire a reality without Islam.

So there is a natural cooperation between the two. The AK Party gives a convenient tool and the Turkish militarist state provides the means , its material and human resources to carry out the Pan-Turkic agenda. "The project being sponsored by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. AKP involvement means that "this reform movement is not being implemented by a secular group, but by the ruling [party, which] is very religious and conservative.

So this is an authentic internal process of change." One could comment on the above that the ruling party apart form the Pan-Turkic agenda which brings it so close to the Kemalist pashas, stands never-the-less in need of more arguments reconciling them with the powerful National Security Council and the Army with its ideology. The AK Party's predecessor was simply banned in 1998 while even now the AK part is being openly attacked by some militarists that dream of another coup d'etat or of banning the AK Party through a court decision.

Erdoğan is trying therefore desperately to create a fiction of reformed Islam in order to avert the fate of the Welfare Party, to appease and befriend the army which has a long and bloody record of staging coups d'etat and forming puppet governments. His final aim is to control the army. In short, as always among Moslems the Islamic Reformation project is just a scam and its real reaons for its emergence seem to be lying far from the misleading official explanations.

Surely, no one is really going to change Islam unless in the only possible Islamic sense of regress to the "Golden Age" of the prophet. What one is definitely going to do though is dupe as many people as possible both in Turkey and particularly in the west. Thus considerable internal and external political profits are going to be made for Turkey.

The image of Turkish Islam as approaching Dr. Pipes' will-o'-the wisp - "Islam that is modern, moderate, democratic, liberal, good-neighborly, humane, and respectful of women" will be strenghtened and popularized. The militarists will lose another argument against the Islamic ruling party and in the long run will be made dependent on it. Of course, all of it will not change the eating habits of the Moslem crocodile. Jihad, discrimination and oppression of non-Moslems are as natural to Turkish Islam as they are to the Saudis' Islam. The Turks are more flexible than the Saudis though. They do the same things yet dressed in Western clothes.

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