Islamisation or Turkification ? ... or Little Red Cap

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Mar 18, 2007 at 19:27

Dear Plato,

You wrote :

> Ianus, I don't see Ataturk implementing any Islamic agenda.

It's hard to see exactly what agenda he was implementing except the agenda of self-glorification and gaining and retaining absolute power to carry out his most whimsical and extravagant ideas no one dared to question out of mortal fear upon which all his regime has been built.

He sailed in May 1919 to Sampsunt as an ardent Moslem and started organizing a new army in Central and Eastern Anatolia , although his job was supposed to be that of dismantling the army. All was Islamic at the beginning - turbans , Friday services, prayers, muezzins , ramadans . After some time when the secret army was ready he invited the caliph-sultan to join him and lead formally the army against the Western forces. But the caliph had a better idea. He ordered him back to Constantinople. Mustafa Pasha knew it would be his death sentence. He had no choice but to fight his caliph. But he was not so stupid as to disclose to his Moslem army what exactly had happened.

All thought he was as before. He wasn't. But it was a personal , accidental , not prinicpal conflict with the supreme Islamic leader. With a different caliph he would have remained what he at the bottom of his heart was - a Moslem. When he implemented his genocidal plants and the Greeks were no more (His famous phrase : " At last we have exterminated them! ") and his power was unlimited he took revenge on his caliph-sultan. First he deposed him as sultan and later after a mass campaign of terror and intimidation he got rid of "the shadow of Allah on earth " that once had wanted to get rid of him - the ghazi - the destroyers of the infidels .

> He may have used Islamic vocabulary and imagery to communitcate with the illiterate Anatolian peasantry to carry out his own agenda of Turkification which even by what you have been saying carried quite a lot of European content and reduced Islamic/Arabian content.

Nice catchy phrases ! ... Turkification! ...as if Anatolia had not been Turkish enough...as if the Turks had not been the master race of the empire...as if the offices and the army had been held by Armenians and Greeks and Arabs before !...As if the Turks had not despised all other races and nations ! ...

If Mustafa Pasha had wanted a real Turkification , then he should have collected all his Turks and led them back into their homeland - Turkestan to the banks of the Syrdaria where all this glorious "Turkification" had come from with his examplary ancestor - Seldjuk ogul Tugaka.

"European content" ? ...You mean "European forms" perhaps ? ...How can you imagine that introducing a Swiss penal code has made any Turkish prison-officer a different person from what he had been for generations - an arbitrary hangman ? ... The most conspicuous expression of what I mean is the order to make all Turks wear European clothes. They wore a cylinder hat formally as it was too dangerous to defy the "infallible" (his saliently Islamic feature ) and revengeful dictator, but what "European content" did it really convey into their minds ?

And you know surely the way Mustafa Pasha established European-style "opposition" in Turkey , don't you ?

"...The fiction of caliphate (pro-Western until the very end) had to give way to the anti-Western genocidal dictatorship of Mustafa Kemal - the new "sultan" and the new "caliph" in a turban of "secularism" , if I may use a metaphor understandable to his Moslem soldiers ."

> I do not have your detailed knowledge of Turkish history but the burden of all that you have said shows the anti-Western drive of Mustafa Kemal (despite his acceptance of Western learning, script, dress banning of the veil etc). His Islamic zeal, the really worrying stuff, is not visible.

The point is that I don't see the lack of his Islamic zeal as a proof of his secularism. Again the reason is that his fight with Islam was not a matter of principle , but of accident. Whatever his private agenda, history had a different agenda with his pure Moslem monoculture which he had sown across Anatolia. It's Islam that is and will always be Turkey's essence.

> > "Local events" ? Man , what are you talking about? The treaty of Sèvres abolished Turkey practically as a state....."

> Again Ianus, I defer to your superior knowledge of Turkish and European history. The defeat of Turkey was a cataclysmic world event but for the uneducated peasant population and army of Turkey the implications would have been immmediate and local. What kind of weltanschuung can you expect illiterate peasants to have( I concede madrassa education can give Muslims a kind of world view but not I think a vision for global Islamic domination.)

What a narrow-minded Moslem peasant saw was this : The Turks had had an Islamic empire and they lost it. The Turks had ruled this empire as a military and burocratic caste. Now the kaffirs invaded their shrunk Islamic empire and tried to put an end to it. They felt humiliated and their Islamic weltanschaung told them to wage a holy war to expell the kaffirs and restore whatever Islamic state they could regain where they could again be the master race as before and where Islam would be supreme. That's the reason for mad religious enthusiasm at the battle of the Zakharya and Dumlupinar.

"You're so optimistic, Plato.

My impression is that the internet and modern communication - value-neutral as they are - can serve quite the opposite purpose. They provide a good ground for brain-washing opportunities for "endangered" Moslems on how to oppose and combat those corrosive ideas. If I am not wrong most Moslems prefer to watch live reports from Mecca to reading our dimmi-no-more's disclosures of Moslem lies and tricks.">

> These media are value-neutral? What about their content?

Content can be either good or evil. Essentially , communication media are just a tool and as such can serve any purpose the user chooses to pursue. A knife can either cut a loaf of bread or a throat.

> Take answering-islam.org and answering-christianity.com at the opposites ends of the debate. The vlaues they espouse are obvious and the one doing it more honestly is also obvious. I picked just one topic 'Slavery' from the answering-christianity site. Unless you believe that merely being a Musliml voids one of all reason and logic, reading it, what comes through will be one of circumlocution, convoluted logic, sheer dishonesty. The value of these sites to me at least is obvious. I would also direct you to Memri, Faithfreedom.org. which have managed to at least give muslims food for thought.

I know the sites you refer to of course. I agree with you in this context of course. A most refined medium can't do anything about a primitive user's objectives. And a benign reader can always profit from a refined user.

"You have visibly forgotten the point of the original Greek myth. Sisyphus' stone is never worn to a pebble. It's an eternally useless toil. This particular punishment was invented for Sisyphus because of his hubris. He as a mortal believed that was cleverer than Zeus. If you change "Zeus" for "history" the same punsihment awaits those who believe they can outwit history. Moderate Islam is un-historical"

> No I have not forgotten the point. As to that rock, we are talking of Islamic theology, not Zeus' frictionless' rock. Though Muslims would love to think their theology and the Koran are immutable the facts show that both have evolved over time. Your whole argument here rests on the premise that moderate Islam is un-historical.

For 1400 years it has not evolved. Why should it emerge just now , pray ? Because some influential kaffirs desperately need it to fool other kaffirs into believing that imported Islam is not a python winding itself harder and harder around the neck of the Western civilization ? It's just a warm scarf our civilization indisposed with a cold needs to feel better !

There are of course good historical reason for this urgent need and success of anti-historical theories and entities. But our Clio - the Muse of history - is inexorable, dear Plato. It forgives no one who despises or prefers to ignore all the accumulated wisdom she provides. Perhaps she has inherited that peculiarity from her inexorable father Zeus.

> That is something I will have to agree to disagree with you, as our definition of moderate are very likely divergent.

Still we both share enough common views to remain friends , I presume.

>> "How do you mean ? What you say applies to the middle ages . In the 19th century we had many free-thinkers of whom we may be so proud. We're the only civilization with atheists and agnostics as a respectable class we owe much to."

> Well in the nineteenth century even Darwin hesistated to call himself an atheist (and he wasn't one). I brought in the 19th century just to make a point. In the East, the Indians had atheists and agnostics contributing to their philosophy and religion almost from day one. The Charvakas, Samkhya, even Buddhism, and Jainism.

I know, dear Plato. Once upon a time I was much interested in the Indian philosophy.

One essential difference between Eastern (analogous views emerged also in ancient China) and Western "Pyrrhonism" was however that the former had no social impact and was drowned by the Vedas while in the West it was much more than just a marginal phenomenon. It changed radically all of our civilization the moment our "Vedas" (The Bible) lost its deadening grip on our thinking.

In Islam the Quran will never lose its lethal grip upon the minds of the Moslems . So they will never have their Charvakas and Smakhyas, let alone their Humes and Darwins. They are all doomed to this sickening nonsense their illiterate prophet happened to excogitate to cheat them to be worshipped by them.

> "And you pin so much hope to that ? Which verses did they mean ? Probably those already abrogated in the prophet's own time like "There is no compulsion in religion"."

This is the exchange to which you reply as above:

I wrote: They can be persuaded to interpret their religion differently.

Your reply: "Differently ? How do you mean that ? They will invent un-Islamic Islam like Islamo-democracy and Islamo-humanism or what ?

"I again wrote:Of course if you assume that the moment anyone is born into a Muslim family he has an operating system that can accept only the software of the Koran then yes, Muslims are machines programmed to carry out the Koranic injunctions.

It's what the experience of 1400 year-old history teaches without using the computer science terminology.

"Would it ? Wouldn't it rather give a new meaning to this schizophrenia with a new caliph in "secular" clothes , so to speak."

"It looks as though only people from countries who have never been Islamic can be truly secular. Anyone from a Muslim country who speaks the secular language is a wolf in sheep's clothing?

Indeed , a Moslem (I don't mean "ex-Moslem") speaking a secular language reminds me most vividly of the language spoken by the wolf in the Grimm brothers' fairy-tale "Little Red Cap" ! Change the anonymous little sweet girl who " did not know what a wicked animal the wolf was, and was not afraid of him" with the avarage kaffir and the wolf with the Moslem and you'll have a good modern interpretation of this classical fairy-tale. As too the grandmother , she is our civilization.

Of course the happy end of the fairy-tale is for children. In our fairy-tale the end can be quite un-child-like .

This is what I wrote about 'entropy':

> "Are you sure of your metaphor , Plato ? Entropy is a property of this universe that entails that order everywhere decreases and disorder in this universe increases over time. So you sentence sounds "The civilizational disorder of the world seems to increase" . Did you really mean that ?

"Yes I am sure. As long you remember that it is a metaphor. Ideologies, religions enforce order (communism, Islam, dictators, monarchs...) .

Reason enforces order , I assume. Chaos is contrary to reason. Hence the Greek fear of " to apeiron" (the infinite) as irrational.

> Democrcay and freedom can best be described as a kind of disorder.

Particular kind of disorder , I hope....Anarchy also creates disorder , doesn't it ? ... Is it the same disorder or a different one you mean ?

> When the shackles of unnecessary order are removed we feel happier, when there is less government we feel happier, the reason why Marx wanted the state to wither away.

"Unnecessary order"? ... Hard to say what is "necessary" and what is "unnecssary" order

> Civilisational content is not the same as civilisational disorder. The greater the freedom the less the regimentation of ideologies or religions. The freedom to be onself without order imposed from outside is the content that I am referring to.

For me this is a very strange theory , dear Plato , if I grasp it right. At all creation myths tell exactly contrary stories to what you're saying. They all have chaos and disorder as their starting point and civilization or order (mark it - in Greek "oder" is "ho kosmos" ) arise after bitter struggle against the forces of chaos and disorder. They impose order from outside to make civilization possible. In the Babylonian creation myth - Enuma Elish - the primordial chaos Tiamat is overpowered by Marduk. In Greece the Olympian gods had to conduct a death and life struggle before they overcame chaos and imposed external limits upon humans to make culture possible. Those like Sisyphus who in their hubris trespassed those limits were punished severely. One has to pay a price for living in a civilization if wants to preserve it.

> The civilizationall content of the world seems to increase over time, somewhat like entropy. The order of ideologies, religions and cultures give way to the disorder of democracy (individualism over collectivism).

> One of the curious ideas I have noted on one blog is that some Muslims claim many of the Koran's directives were meant only for prophetic times i.e. for those directly addressed by the prophets and those not directly addressed are generally not subject to them.

Curious but Islamically invalid. Has Allah written the Quran only for the Prophetic times ? Is He going to reveal another Quran for our times or how do you mean ?

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