How much Islamic do you need to be to become 'secular' ? 100% !

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Jun 8, 2010 at 16:25

After reading Dr. Pipes' article I was wondering over one simple question. If all the problems for Israel and the West come from "bad Islamists" in Turkey , then why did "secular" Turkey vote against the creation of the state of Israel in 1947 together with such unsecular countries as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen , Pakistan ? In 1947 there was no bad Erdogan in office to blame and Kemal's one-party republic was ruled by Kemal's true followers .

It seems to me that Dr. Pipes rather too faithfully follows and reiterates the official Turkish tale of great Kemal and his good "secularist" successors heroically fighting "bad" Islamists . True , he realizes that one big problem of the Turkish tale is that "Turkey is nearly 100 percent Muslim" after all , but never mind ! You can always make a virtue of necessity and create out of a 100% Islamic monoculture "a purely secular state" according to the wise words of Kemal . And no one in Turkey can ever contradict in public what Kemal said without facing a jail sentence on charges of denigration of His Holiness Ataturk . There are special laws that make any open criticism of Kemal illegal . But alas reality and Turkish legal fiction hardly ever overlap .

Now , speaking without any political correctness , this Turkish farce of lies and dissimulations stands and falls with the silence on the lies and frauds Kemal himself used to achieve his goals . So let's refresh and enlarge our memory a bit and let's recall i.al. that the father of Turkish secularism bore the supreme Ottoman title of "ghazi" , i.e. Allah's holy warrior for exterminating Allah's enemies in 1921-1922 , just like the great Ottoman Sultans did ; that his crucial Soviet alliance is comfortably omitted or played down on behalf of a much more politically correct "Westernisation program" which wasn't as stringent as it is suggested if one remembers how e.g. Kemal in person cheated the US by his Chester Concession fraud to get US political support for Turkey in Lausanne and at the same time kept with lies and false complaints US and Western capital as far away from Turkey as possible ; his reliance on Soviet-style state-based economic system and arbitrary tyrannical rule including anti-Jewish pogroms in Thrace in 1934 don't seem to correspond to what we usually "associate" with Westernization either , do they ?

Also a glance at how thoroughly Northern Cyprus has been Islamized - with a new mosque and an imam in almost every village there - since the staunch guardians of "secularism" with unfailing US help occupied that part of the island 1974 shows in quite a different light Dr. Pipes declaration – again following his Turkish sources that " Atatürk's order persisted into the 1990s, guarded over by the military officer corps , which made it a priority to keep his memory alive and secularism entrenched." Unless Kemal's lies , frauds and war crimes are included , it's all too good to be true ! In Northern Cyprus nothing happens without the explicit will of the Turkish army of occupation and all these mosques, minarets , Quranic schools, imams , churches and monasteries changed into mosques or stables , desecrated Christian cemeteries , besmirched symbols of Christian , yet never of Islamic (!) faith were approved and directly organized or instigated by the "the military officer corps which made it a priority to keep his memory alive and secularism entrenched" . How could it be otherwise ? Now if Erdogan had conducted the Islamization campaign in Northrn Cyprus after 1974 with all his priorities , the result would be exactly the same as it is under his alleged opponents . So how can we explain that ? How can we we trust such sweeping , unverifiable claims which are nothing but a trap set by the official Turkish propaganda ?

For me the real issue in Turkey is not about mythical secularism fighting real Islam . Turkey has always been Islamic and has few chances to be freed from it without a major external defeat . For more than 1000 years Islam has ruled everything in Turkey and what is paradoxical and absurd about Turkey is that with this secularisation farce staged by Kemal the Ghazi Turkey has been made much more Islamic than it had ever been . It has never -even in the most glorious Ottoman days of Mehmet II or Soliman - been 99,8% Islamic as it is now - all thanks to Ataturk's forced "secularisation" .

So , the real issue is not about secularism vs. Islam . It is essentially about who will be enjoying real power, privileges and wealth for which both parties are fighting with deadly earnest . Kemal's regime gave power , wealth and privileges to a narrow group of militarists – sort of resurrected janissary corps with 'secularism' as their new bektashi order creed . This narrow group of secular janissaries exercised the power just like their older predecessors – in order to accumulate even more wealth and privileges in their own hands at the expense of all the rest of the society justifying its parasitic position with some superior esoteric ideology which is even more obscure and less comprehensible to an Islam-only society than the assertions of the bektashi sect about its own role that has guided the janissaries as the guardians of Islam and the caliph .

But this Kemalist militaristic parasitism has provoked vehement reaction . Its opponents are fighting in the first place against the privileges of the self-proclaimed "secularists" as much as they are hostile to the outlandish and un-Islamic justification of the privileged position held by the militarists who in all other things except their wealth are as Islamic as their underprivileged co-religionists . For despite all the ado about 'secularism" they all have been circumcised , have done their Quranic courses , know their country's Islamic past and the reality on the ground , they know there is no alternative to Islam for Turkey . Islam is permanent , Kemalism is transient

So I can well imagine that under such circumstances a hidden compromise has been or will be reached in Turkey between the "secularists" retaining their wealth and loyalty to the new Islamic government and the so called "Islamists" gaining political control . "Islamists" need an army to fight the Kurds ... or the Jews ( depending on the situation) , they need police and the secret services to suppress the communists and socialists . The last thing they need is a rebellion or a civil war like that between Kemal and his sultan in 1919-1922 , which was by the way the real cause of Kemal's antagonism against Islam and the caliph who had issued a death fatwa on kemal .

What is more , from the point of view of external policy , it might be very advantageous for both parties to keep up appearances and so to get help both from the West ( "If we don't give money and weapons to our poor secularists in uniforms , bad Islamists will take our staunch ally over ") and the Islamic East in form of "charities" and humanitarian and moral support . Saudi Arabia has invested in green money some 15 billion dollars into Turkey . With such support and such money one can do big politics and spread really big and successful lies to anybody concerned . Perfidy and treachery in Turkish politics is as much a legacy of Abdul Hamid as it is of Ghazi Mustafa Kemal Pasha Ataturk who was a perfect liar and fraudster knowing what lie would be best used for whom .

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