Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (48 page)

8.
“Islâm dünyasının bugünü” [The Islamic World Today],
Yeni Asya
, May 4, 2007.

9.
Necmeddin sahiner,
Son sahitler Bediüzzaman Said Nursi’yi Anlatıyor
[The Last Witnesses Speak about Said Nursi] (Istanbul: Yeni Asya Publishing, 1994, p. 277.

10.
Avni Özgürel, “Yassıada infazlarını unutmamak gerek” [Don’t Forget the Executions of Yassıada],
Radikal
, September 20, 2009.

11.
serif Mardin, “Turkish Islamic Exceptionalism Yesterday and Today: Continuity, Rupture and Reconstruction in Operational Codes,”
Turkish Studies
6, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 145.

12.
Mehmet sevket Eygi,
Bugün
, February 10, 1969.

13.
The number of Nur followers in contemporary Turkey is estimated to be between two and six million. Yavuz and Esposito,
Turkish Islam and the Secular State
, p. 13.

14.
Mehmet Metiner,
Yemyesil seriat, Bembeyaz Demokrasi
[Strong Green Shariah, Snow White Democracy] (Istanbul: Dogan Publishing, 2004), p. 59.

15.
Ibid., pp. 58, 59.

16.
Ahmet Yasar Ocak,
Türkler, Türkiye ve Islam
[Turks, Turkey and Islam] (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayınları, 1999), p. 134.

17.
Robert D. Kaplan, “At the Gates of Brussels,”
The Atlantic
, December 2004.

18.
Ibid.

19.
Muhammed Çetin, “Business, Faith and Freedom,”
Today’s Zaman
,
October 23, 2008.

20.
In April 1998, Turkish newspapers started printing peculiar news stories linking several liberal journalists and the then-leader of the Human Rights Association (IHD) to a Kurdish terrorist group. The journalists lost their jobs and received death threats, while the leader of the IHD survived a near-fatal shooting. The two stories were proven false rather quickly, but it was not until 2000 that journalist Nazlı Ilıcak found evidence that the stories had been prepared on orders from the Turkish military. The case came to be called
Andıç
, a Turkish word unfamiliar to most, meaning “Memorandum.”

21.
“Tayyip’in Bitisi” [The End of Tayyip (Erdogan)],
Hürriyet
, September 24, 1998; “Muhtar Bile Olamayacak” [He Won’t Even Be a Local Governor],
Radikal
, September 24, 1998.

22.
In his public speech in Siirt Province on December 6, 1997, Erdogan recited part of a poem written in 1912 during the Ottoman Empire’s endless decade of war: “Mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets, believers our soldiers.”
Hürriyet
, September 24, 1998.

23.
Ibid.

24.
Nilüfer Narlı, “The Rise of the Islamist Movement in Turkey,”
Middle East Review of International Affairs
3, no. 3 (September 1999). Narlı observes this difference between Erbakan’s Welfare Party and the Virtue Party that replaced it, but the factor that made the difference was the reformist movement within these two subsequent parties.

25.
Sultan Tepe, “Turkey’s AKP: A Model ‘Muslim-Democratic’ Party?,”
Journal of Democracy
16, no. 3 (July 2005): 69–82.

26.
Fareed Zakaria, “A Quiet Prayer for Democracy,”
Newsweek
, May 14, 2007.

27.
“Turkish Armenians to Vote for Ruling AKP,” Armenian Online News, July 13, 2007,
http://www.hamovhotov.com/timeline/?p=860
.

28.
Mustafa Akyol, “The Protocols of the Elders of Turkey,”
Washington Post
, October 7, 2007.

29.
I wrote about this in Akyol, “AKP Is Not Islamist, But Somewhat Muslimist,”
Hürriyet Daily News
, December 8, 2009.

30.
Arınç gave this speech on April 16, 2007, at the Turgut Özal Thought and Action Society, which presented him with its annual Democracy Award.

31.
According to the records of the Turkish National Library, only eighty-five books with a title mentioning “liberalism” were published in Turkey between 1923 (the beginning of the Turkish Republic) and 1980. The number rose to 507 between 1908 and 2008. Taha Akyol, “Liberalizm Açıgı” [Liberalism Deficit],
Milliyet
, July 19, 2008. In academia, too, theses addressing “liberalism” or “liberal policies—are on the rise, from an average of six annually between 1989 and 1999 to an annual average of twenty-one between 2000 and 2007. Taha Akyol, “Üniversite ve Liberalizm” [The University and Liberalism],
Milliyet
, August 14, 2008.

32.
A statement by former Turkish Islamist Mehmet Metiner, explaining why the Islamists in Turkey began to adopt more liberal views after the 1980s. “Fears for Turkey’s Future Roil Vote on Constitution,”
Wall Street Journal
, September 9, 2010.

33.
Aydın’s suggestion that the Islamic world needs “liberal democratic culture” to solve its ideological disputes appeared in an interview in
Zaman
, March 23, 1998.

34.
Sadik Ünay,
Neoliberal Globalization and Institutional Reform: The Political Economy of Development and Planning in Turkey
(New York: Nova Publishers, 2006), p. 37.

35.
The prime minister at the time, sükrü Saraçoglu, and his foreign minister, Numan Menemencioglu, had good relations with and a sympathetic attitude toward Nazi Germany.

36.
Resat Kasaba, ed.,
The Cambridge History of Turkey
, vol. 4 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 182–83.

37.
Orhan Pamuk,
Istanbul: Memories of a City
(New York: Vintage Books, 2006), p. 183.

38.
Hüner Sencan, Is
Hayatında Islam Insani
[Homo Islamicus in Business Life] (Istanbul: MÜSIAD, 1994).

39.
Feroz Ahmad, “The Development of Capitalism in Turkey,”
Journal of Third World Studies
(Fall 1998).

40.
European Stability Initiative,
Islamic Calvinists: Change and Conservatism in Central Anatolia
, September 19, 2005, Berlin/Istanbul, www.esiweb.org, pp. 23–24.

41.
Ibid., p. 24.

42.
Ibid.

43.
Zafer Özcan, “Akla ve Paraya Ihtiyacı Olmayan sehir Kayseri” [Kayseri, the City that Needs Neither Wisdom nor Money],
Aksiyon
571 (November 14, 2005).

44.
See Ziya Önis, “Conservative Globalists Versus Defensive Nationalists: Political Parties and Paradoxes of Europeanization in Turkey,”
Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies
, vol. 9, no. 3 (December 2007).

45.
“Türkiye’nin gerçek burjuva sınıfı biziz” [We Are the Real Bourgeois Class of Turkey],
Star
, July 20, 2009.

46.
Ibid.

47.
Ali Çarkoglu and Binnaz Toprak,
Religion, Society and Politics in a Changing Turkey
(Istanbul: TESEV [Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation] Publications, 2007, pp. 101, 33.

48.
The comparison to the Taliban comes from ex-Islamist Mehmet Metiner, who says, “We were thinking like the Taliban in the 70s,” in
Yemyesil Seriat, Bembeyaz Demokrasi
, p. 17.

49.
Mehmet sevket Eygi, “Yanlıs Kıraatler” [Wrong Readings],
Milli Gazete
, January 14, 2009. In this case, the term
mujahid
does not imply a violent movement. The term has been used often in Turkey to refer to committed Islamists who want to serve the cause by political, social, and intellectual action.

50.
Kenan Çayır,
Türkiye’de Islamcılık ve Islami Edebiyat: Toplu Hidayet Söyleminden Yeni Bireysel Müslümanlıklara
[Islamism and Islamic Literature in Turkey: From the Rhetoric of Collective Salvation to New Individualistic Muslimhoods] (Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2007), p. 128.

51.
Ibid.

52.
Ibid., p. 118.

53.
Ali Bardakoglu, “Dindarlıgımızın Güncellestirilmesi” [The Updating of Our Religiosity], interview in
Hürriyet
, September 10, 2004.

54.
“‘Kadının en makbulü koyun’ diyen hadis olmaz” [No Hadith Can Say, “The Best Woman Is like a Sheep”],
Vatan
, June 17, 2006.

55.
For more, see Mustafa Akyol, “[Sexism Deleted] in Turkey,”
Washington Post
, July 16, 2006.

56.
Personal interview with Dr. Mehmet Görmez, Istanbul, May 14, 2009.

57.
All quotes are from Mehmet sevki Aydın’s articles in the
Diyanet
magazine: October 2008, pp. 20–23; December 2008, pp. 24–27; November 2008, pp. 20–23.