Turkey's secular hijab or "Kemalism is transient, Islam is permant".

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Oct 29, 2009 at 07:01

Hi, David Guy !

You wrote :

> There are still millions of secular Turks who wish to remain that way.

Where have you seen them? The statistics shows that 99,8% Turks are Moslems which makes only Saudi Arabia by 0,01% a more Islamized country on the globe.

My thinking faculties are perhaps limited but I can't imagine a Moslem and a secularist to dwell in the same brain. Either you believe in all the nonsense of Allah, the Quran and the last 'prophet' and his holy deeds/misdeeds or you don't. Yet, if you do believe it , i.e. if you are a Moslem, then you are lost to even the most remote and watered-down defintion of secularism as I understand it where no Allahs, no Qurans and no Bedouin prophets are allowed.

Please, don't overestimate the Turkish self-serving propaganda of "secularism". Mustafa Kemal Pasha's later obssession with 'secularism' had its root in his well-known opportunism and self-defence rather than in any sound assessment of the Turkish soul and willingness to change. To make a long story short, Kemal who was himself a ghazi - i.e. the victorious defender of Islam and Allah's mignon after the battle on the Sakhariya River in 1921 - got a death fatwa from the caliph and a civil war broke out which might have cost the ghazi's own life. The Caliph's Army was unleashed upon him and a paradise was promised to any Moslem who would kill him. So that the brand-new Ghazi had no choice but get rid of the caliph and restrict and fight the faith that had produced the caliphate and the death fatwa against him.

However, what was valid and important for Kemal the Ghazi had no relation to what was and is important and valid for the common Turk. And with time the common Turk has prevailed over the dead dictator. As someone has aptly put it : "Kemalism is transient, Islam is permant".

Now to give you a more precise idea of what today's Turkish "secularism" is worth for let me quote a few interesting lines on Ataturkistan :

" Today, Turkey has over 85,000 active mosques, one for every 350 citizens—compared to one hospital for every 60,000 citizens—the highest number per capita in the world and, with 90,000 imams, more imams than doctors or teachers. It has thousands of madrasa-like Imam-Hatip schools and about four thousand more official state-run Qur'an courses, not counting the unofficial Qur'an schools, which may expand the total number tenfold. Spending by the governmental Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet Işleri Başkanlığı) has grown five fold, from 553 trillion Turkish lira in 2002 (approximately US$325 million) to 2.7 quadrillion lira during the first four-and-a-half years of the AKP government; it has a larger budget than eight other ministries combined.The Friday prayer attendance rate in Turkey's mosques exceeds that of Iran's, and religion classes teaching Sunni Islam are compulsory in public schools ..."

http://www.meforum.org/2045/fethullah-gulens-grand-ambition

>What do we do about them?<

Well, I'd suggest to inspect their claims to 'secularism' in a more critical light and stop taking the fine Turkish hijabs and propaganda for reality. Will you disagree?

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