Blogging takes time, which I didn’t have on Friday after finishing an analysis for the Reuters wire about religion in Turkey posted here. I went to Istanbul to research several religion stories. The main impression I left with was that the prospect for religious policy changes raised by the “post- Islamist” AK Party government in recent years has mostly evaporated. The current political crisis that could end up banning the party and barring Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan from belonging to a political party means the end of any liberalisation. In fact, the steam went out of the reform drive a few years ago after Ankara got the green light to negotiate Turkish membership in the European Union.

Turkey has been a test case for what Islam experts call “post-Islamism,” a trend among Muslim political groups that have given up dreams of some kind of Islamic state in favour of more democracy and human rights that include greater religious freedom (here’s a useful summary of the concept). The idea that Islamists could turn into “Muslim democrats” (or “latte Islamists“!) without a hidden agenda to introduce Sharia law once in power met with considerable scepticism. But the Erdogan government, which promoted greater freedoms in Turkey as a means to join the European Union rather than to break down secularist controls on religion in the public sphere, seemed to be prove this view. His cautious approach seemed to reflect a long-term policy to make changes gradually. It’s too much to say this could be a “model” for other Muslim countries because there are too many aspects specific to Turkey and the limits its powerful secularist elite places on religion in the public sphere. But it could be an important test case for reconciling democracy and religious rights.

The political analysts I spoke to were unanimous in rejecting the idea that Erdogan’s AK Party had a long-term “hidden agenda” to “islamise” Turkey. The real goal of Erdogan’s policy was to establish his bloc of business interests from the more religious countryside as partners in the national power structure dominated by the secularist urban elite. Part of this process was to appeal to the religious sentiments of the masses, but religion was never the core of its program. They dropped this caution after their election victory in 2007 by pressing for an end to the ban on headscarves at universities — and paid the price by provoking the legal challenge to their legitimacy.

“They are the victims of their own limitations,” Ankara University sociologist Dogu Ergil told me. “They wanted a place in the power system and once they go it, they stopped… They have depleted their reformist arsenal. This is as far as they can go. This was the end of their liberalism and understanding of freedoms.”

Cengiz Aktar, a professor of European studies at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University, said the process of loosening restrictions on religion was not over, but it was now on hold for what he called a “period of restoration” that would reassert control by the secularist elite. “It’s put on ice. It’s not at its end. They will freeze it for some time. This ‘Turkish best practice’ needs to be rethought during this period of restoration. They will have to come back with a new idea.”

Rusen Cakir, a journalist who has written extensively on faith and politics in Turkey, agreed that efforts to reconcile democracy and Islam would continue but they were not the central issue for Turkish politics. The real issue was political power in Turkey, where the large state role in the economy means “if you control the government, you can control lots of money,” he said. Fears of a “hidden agenda” were unfounded, he said, but the secularist parties used them to mobilise their urban middle class base. “It’s kind of a class struggle. Each side has its own ideological tool — secularism or religion.” Or as Ergil put it, “religion here is a political instrument used by both sides.”

In a country where 99 percent of the population is Muslim, the remaining one percent is not politically significant. But the government’s attitude towards the religious minorities is a good barometer of how it feels about religious liberty. During my stay, I spoke with Catholic and Orthodox churchmen who reported little progress and some backsliding on the question of religious freedom. Their impression was also that Ankara had lost interest in any liberalisation after it got the green light for EU accession talks.

“The minorities were a hot issues for a while, but in the past two years, there has been no movement at all,” said an official at the Istanbul headquarters of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual head of all Orthodox Christians. A Catholic churchman said senior Church officials traveled under guard “and that tells you something.”

“We have to be very careful,” he said. “Some newspapers talk as if there were thousands of (Christian) missionaries in Turkey. We Catholics don’t evangelise. The Orthodox don’t either. Only some Protestant groups do, but they have also become very careful.” Turkish nationalists whippped up the spectre of Christian missionaries trying to “destroy Turkish identity,” he said. “The nationalists are in retreat, and this is a kind of parting shot from them.”

That said, the Roman Catholic Church in Turkey is quite hopeful that the commemorative year for Saint Paul, who was born 2,000 years ago in Tarsus in today’s southern Turkey, will bring some small gestures of flexibility. The Church wants officials to allow a former church in Tarsus, now used as a museum, to be returned to its original state as a house of worship. The “Pauline Year” starting on June 29 would be the occasion to hand over the building to the Church for the use of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims expected there during the following 12 months. Local officials have been quite helpful with preparations for the visitors, Bishop Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar for Anatolia, told me. But it’s still a big leap from being cooperative to actually handing over the church. Padovese is waiting for a final decision from the government.

In Tarsus, local business people clearly see the interest in the Pauline Year. The Tarsus Chamber of Commerce and Industry has set up the most interesting website about the commemoration that I’ve found. Among the gems are 360° panoramic views of the Tarsus church, both its interior and its exterior, the story of St. Paul’s life and a detailed account of his missionary travels.

After my quick initial post on this story, an American reader asked what greater religious freedom meant for the average Turk — a very difficult question that I tried to answer in the comments section here. A Turkish reader sent me an email calling my analysis “a piece of scrap,” saying that “latest developments in Turkey” were not a reform and disputing “that people were under pressure on religious matters during the pre-AKP period.” But he declined to elaborate his criticisms when I asked for more detail, so I can’t say more than that this sounds like a critique from a very secularist Turkish point of view, one I do not agree with.

I notice from other blogs that the idea of “post-Islamism” is either new or dubious to many readers out there. What do you think about the idea that “Muslim democrats” are working to reconcile Islam and modern political systems?

New York’s largest mosque, the Islamic Cultural Center (ICC) on East 96th Street in Manhattan, is getting applause from an unexpected quarter — the city’s influential Jewish community … Much of the credit for the upbeat mood goes to Mohammad Shamsi Ali, the ICC’s Indonesian-born imam who arrived here only 12 years ago and has been rated by New York magazine as the city’s most influential Islamic leader.

At the end of my trip to the U.S. to cover the pope’s visit, I visited the ICC and interviewed Ali. After more research and interviews, I wrote the feature quoted above that just ran on the Reuters wire today. There is no Grand Mosque of New York, but the ICC unofficially plays that role. And Ali has emerged as one of the city’s leading Islamic personalities. As New York magazine put it, “Ali is the one imam who can mediate between the diverse and fractious elements of the 800,000-member Muslim community in New York … Since 9/11, he has become the community’s unofficial emissary to law enforcement and the mayor’s office.”

During our interview, Ali ranged over a wide number of topics. The strict format for our news features leaves little room for some of them, but I’ve posted more on page two of this post. Other links not included in the feature are the Jewish Week article quoted there, a New York Daily News op-ed article by Ali on Muslims, terrorism and the police and the attack on him by a tiny (”we are less than a handful…”) group of Islamists.

What struck me while interviewing Ali and the two rabbis, Marc Schneier and Burton Visotzky, was their view that there was a lot more cooperation going on between Muslims and Jews than gets publicised. I’m the first to admit the media report a lot of negative stories — the negative element is usually what makes them news, just like a surprise element does. I have nothing against reporting positive news and was happy to be able to do so here.

On the next page, I’ve posted further quotes from the interview with Ali to give interested readers more insight into the issues mentioned in the feature. A lot of this just didn’t fit into one feature. Would you have written a different article with the material that was left out?

(more…)

Pope Benedict made so many positive comments about the positive role of faith in U.S. public life before and at the beginning of his U.S. visit that it was inevitable he would get around to a deeper analysis at some point. That point came in his meeting with American bishops in Washington on Wednesday. It was the kind of analysis we’ve come to expect from him — clearly expressed, intellectually ambitious and focused on his trademark issue of relativism.

“It is not enough to count on this traditional religiosity and go about business as usual, even as its foundations are being slowly undermined,” he warned the bishops gathered at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The “American brand of secularism,” he said, “can subtly reduce religious belief to a lowest common denominator.”

Here’s our news story on the speech and the full text, which is always useful to read if Benedict’s the author. He sets out his ideas over sentences and paragraphs that need to be read to the end to get the full flavour of what he’s saying.

P.S. The usual question and answer session, which he does off the cuff in German and Italian, was a bit more formal this time. He prepared his answers and read them out, with a German accent that some Americans have a hard time understanding. He has spoken off the cuff here, but most of what he says is pre-written. Before anyone out there in the blogosphere misunderstands, I mean all this just as an observation, not a criticism of his linguistic abilities. He is a fine linguist — I wish I could speak and read as many languages as he does. Wikipedia says: As well as his native German, Benedict XVI fluently speaks Italian, French, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Latin, and has a knowledge of Portuguese. He can read Ancient Greek and biblical Hebrew

The New York Times has an interesting article about how the Muslim Students Association (MSA) there is adapting to life in the United States. Founded in the 1960s by foreign students who wanted to pray together, the chapters “were basically little slices of Saudi Arabia. Women were banned. Only Muslim men who prayed, fasted and avoided alcohol and dating were welcomed. Meetings, even idle conversations, were in Arabic.” The MSA was largely financed by Saudi Arabia and Wahhabi views presumably came along with the cheques.

The local culture and the growing number of American-born Muslims have over time influenced even an organisation like this. Now some MSA chapters have held barbecues, dodge ball games and other events where men and women could mingle freely. There are debates about whether this is proper, but the events happen. “As American Islam gets its own identity, it is going to have to shed some of these notions that are distant from American culture,” said Rafia Zakaria, a student at Indiana University. “The tension is between what forms of tradition are essential and what forms are open to innovation.”

(The article doesn’t say whether the funds still flow so freely from Riyadh, but after 9/11 that seems unlikely.)

That Islam changes and adapts, both in the Muslim world and elsewhere, is nothing new. The American experience is especially interesting, though, because U.S. society is both highly individualistic and tolerant of religious practice. I discussed this with an American imam last year. Islam is adapting to local cultures in Europe as well, but with more difficulty.

The MSA example seems like one that Charles Taylor could have included in A Secular Age to illustrate how religion changes and adapts but still persists even in a post-modern world. Not that he needed another example, of course — the book is already 874 pages long…

The “Sarko & secularism” story takes on ever new twists. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has already kicked up lively debates in France by praising religious faith whenever he can, defending his country’s Christian roots in a Roman basilica and complimenting the Saudis in Riyadh for fighting against fanaticism and fundamentalism. After the Catholics and the Muslims, France’s Jews were in line for some presidential stroking. It came on Wednesday evening, at the annual dinner of the leading Jewish organisation here, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF).

Always good for a surprise, Sarkozy unexpectedly announced he wanted each 10-year-old pupil to study the life and death of one of France’s 11,000 child Holocaust victims. The president also announced he would visit Israel in May to mark its 60th anniversary and “won’t shake hands with people who refuse to recognise Israel” — a remark apparently ruling out any face-to-face meetings with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

One of Sarkozy’s remarks at the CRIF dinner seemed to go too far even for his hosts. He said: “The drama of the 20th century was not due to an excess of God, but to his awesome absence. There is not a line in the Torah, the Gospel or the Koran, when seen in its context and the fullness of its meaning, that can put up with the massacres committed in Europe during the 20th century in the name of totalitarianism and a world without God.”

CRIF President Richard Prasquier, who described himself as a secular Jew, made it clear he preferred the the traditional approach of keeping Godtalk down to a whisper. He defended the 1905 law on laïcité and said it had “given Jews the benevolent neutrality (of the state) that guaranteed equality and produced concrete solutions to practical problems. For us, this law is part of the superego that links us to the French republic.” As for the butchery of the 20th century, he said: “I have too much respect for those Righteous among the Nations who were atheists to believe that religions are the only barrier to evil.”

The idea of studying child Holocaust victims ran into criticism from politicians and teachers who said it might be psychologically too much for 10-year-olds to bear. “I don’t think we can impose remembrance,” former prime minister Dominique de Villepin said.

The teachers’ union SE-Unsa said it was “particularly shocked by this presidential initiative that completely ignores how young people form their personalities. Must every child of 10 years now be personally charged with this weighty act of posthumous adoption?”

But Jewish writer Marek Halter said it was a “tremendous initiative … for a child at school, the death of six million people is an abstraction.” But they could imagine “the face of a little Moshe, a little Isaac or a Jean-Jacques Rabinovitch.”

Education Minister Xavier Darcos said pupils would not be allowed to refuse to participate. Muslim pupils have been reported to refuse to discuss the Holocaust in class or to deny that it ever happened. “They are rare cases,” Darcos told France2 television. “It’s unacceptable and it is not accepted.”

Click here for interesting Le Monde analysis of “Sarkozy et Dieu” (in French).

We’ve had several news stories and blog posts about President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to modify France’s policy of laïcité, that almost untranslatable term for secularism. The focus in the discussion here is usually on what that would mean for Muslims and Christians. But what about Sarkozy and France’s Jews? Before I got the chance to look into that, my former Reuters colleague Bernard Edinger produced a very informative piece on this for the Jerusalem Report . I’ll let him tell the story right here.

Karen Armstrong, the best-selling British writer and lecturer on religion, has given a long interview to Reuters in Islamabad after addressing a conference in the Pakistani capital. A former Catholic nun who now describes herself as a “freelance monotheist,” she has written 21 books on the main world religions, religious fundamentalism in these faiths and religious leaders such as Mohammad and Buddha. Her latest book is The Bible: A Biography. The short version of what she said is in the Reuters story linked here. We don’t publish the Q&A text of our interviews on our news wire, but we can do it here on the blog.

Q:You were last in Pakistan in 2006. What brought you back this time?

A: There is a really poignant hunger here, as well as in other parts of the Muslim world, to hear a friendly Western voice speaking appreciatively of Islam. It is a sad thing for me that this should be such an unusual event, but given the precarious state of relationships between so-called Islam and the West it seems something that is important to do.

Q: Pakistan seems to be a crucial place for the future of Islam at the moment. How do you see the impact of events in Pakistan in terms of developments in Islam as a whole?

A: Pakistan is on the frontier of this present struggle, in a sense. It’s right on the border there, with Afghanistan. It’s a country born of displacement. I think it’s not so much important for the future of Islam as important for the future of the world. What happens here will be very decisive in how the so-called war against terror proceeds in other regions. This is, after all, a frontier that that has for years cooperated with the West and is now reaping a grim harvest for that cooperation from its extremists.

It is a nuclear power. And it is a country born out the horrendous events of the partition of India, with a really difficult question to ask: How do you become a secular Muslim state? If there are no Muslim symbols in your country, why on earth are they here? Interestingly enough, the kind of conversations I have about this topic remind me very much of conversations I had in Israel, another secular state born out of displacement and tragedy. Israeli friends who are adamantly secular have said to me that if there are no Jewish symbols or no Jewish feel to this secular state, then what on earth are we doing here?

Q: At the moment, many Western politicians seem to take a quick fix approach to Pakistan: give full support to President Musharraf, close down the madrasas, send in troops into the tribal areas. Do you thing these policies can be effective against something as hard to grapple with as a religious movement?

A: Well, I’m not sure that this all is religious, to be perfectly honest. Some of this trouble up in the tribal areas is much more to do with tribal honour than it is to do with Islam per se. But I think military force is never an answer. Surely we have learned this just by looking at what has happened in Iraq and in the Middle East. There the military option has opened up a can of worms and another set of disasters. I think what we need to do is not do this short-term business of supporting one politician one day, another politician another day, busing somebody else in as our own candidate chanting the word democracy, as though it was some kind of saving mantra, when what is needed is a much longer term view, a less self-interested view, less of an ability to just use a country to further our Western policies in a region and (rather) see what is actually good for the country as a whole.

France and India are two countries that proudly proclaim the secular nature of their democracies. The principles of church-state separation and state neutrality towards religion are the same. But somehow the accents were different when French President Nicolas Sarkozy visited India last week. While they both were dealing with the concept called “secularism” in English, it was clear that Sarkozy’s thinking was based on the French word laïcité while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh clearly had the Hindi term dharmanirpekshta in mind.

The visit focused mostly on expanding investment and defence cooperation, with much gossip on the side about whether the freshly divorced president’s new flame Carla Bruni would join him at the Taj Mahal (much to the chagrin of the paparazzi, she didn’t).

Hidden behind the headlines, though, was a fascinating disagreement about Sarkozy’s plan to present Taslima Nasreen, an exiled Bangladeshi writer living in India, with the “Simone de Beauvoir Prize For Women’s Freedom.” This prize sponsored by CulturesFrance (part of the French Foreign Ministry) and a Paris publisher went this year to Nasreen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, two women of Muslim background who have been threatened with death by Islamists because of their forceful criticism of the religion.

Sarkozy wanted to present the award to Nasreen in New Delhi, presumably at a ceremony to be broadcast back home where he is under fire for allegedly violating French laïcité. He was even thinking of doing it at the safe house where she is hiding from death threats. This caused considerable concern in the Indian government, which worried about a possible Muslim backlash over any honour for the award-winning writer they accuse of blasphemy. The Indian army had to be called in to quell anti-Nasreen riots by Islamist groups in Kolkata last November.

In the end, it didn’t happen. The grand French gesture was reduced to a request to India to “facilitate Ms Nasreen’s journey to France” to pick up her award.

It looks like a case of thinking that secularism was the same the world around. The French version, laïcité, was a reaction to the power of the majority Catholic Church and aimed to keep religion out of public life. Defending this is as natural for a French president as praising apple pie and motherhood is for his American counterpart.

With religion such a part of public life, India’s dharmanirpekshta aims more at making sure no one religious group dominates this country of 1.1 billion people. While Hindus are the majority at around 80 percent, Muslims are more than 13 percent of the population. Christians and Sikhs each account for about 2 percent of the population while Buddhists and other religions account for the rest. Indian law also makes major concessions to religions. For example, Indian laws on family, divorce and adoption differ depending on your religion.

Prime Minister Singh was largely silent on Nasreen’s case last year, sparking criticism from secular intellectuals that the government was failing to defend the country’s principles. In the Hindustan Times, Karan Thapar wrote of India: “Democratic we may be, but liberal we most certainly are not.” His low profile has also drawn fire from Hindu nationalists, who charged he was appeasing Muslims by not vocally supporting Nasreen. There may not have been much he could say. Criticism of the Muslims could have prompted the Hindu nationalist opposition to cry even more loudly that Islamist groups are a threat to the Indian state.

For the moment, it seems as if Singh has won on both counts. He headed off both Sarkozy and a possible uproar from Muslims over his award ceremony plans. In a recent broadside, Jamaat-i-Islami Hind focused on the government’s decision to extend the visa of “a foreign controversial lady.”

Nasreen has since said she will not go to Paris for the award and asked that it be sent to her residence in Kolkata.

The controversy, for now, appears to be fading. And the French have bounced back into the cultural news headlines smartly with another, less controversial award. On Sunday, the French ambassador decorated the Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan with the country’s highest decoration for artists, the “Order of Arts and Letters.”

In India, it was a much safer bet.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s serial taboo-breaking is getting him into hot water. Anybody following the news these days knows about his roller-coaster love life, which has hurt his popularity ratings in a country where Monsieur le Président is supposed to be more discreet. Now his challenge to France’s laïcité — a word signifying both the separation of church and state and the taboo against bringing religion into public affairs — is provoking a backlash. What especially seems to have got his critics going is the fact that he not only praised religion in a speech in Riyahd on Monday but also counted his Saudi hosts among those Muslims “who struggle against fanaticism and terrorism, those who appeal to the basic values of Islam to combat the fundamentalism that negates them.” The fact he was also trying to sell nuclear power plants and other big-ticket French export items to Muslim countries during the same trip did not go unnoticed in his detractors’ comments.

The issue came up during parliamentary questions in the National Assembly on Wednesday (click here and search for Glavany for the exchange in French). Now criticism is coming in from the left and the right of the political spectrum, as well as in editorials. Jean Bauberot, a professor of the history of laïcité, told the Catholic daily La Croix he was worried that Sarkozy was pursuing a “lay Catholic civil religion” that might define France as a Catholic nation rather than a secular one.

True to form, Sarkozy broke with the presidential tradition of staying above the fray and shot back at his critics in an aside during a speech on Thursday about economic policy: “I know people accuse me of being much too interested in religion … I am not questioning the secular system.”

One of the things that strikes me is that Sarkozy seems to be going beyond not only the normal French politician’s way of talking about faith (i.e. ignoring it) but also the usual comments we hear from American politicians. Some French have said that he’s speaking like an American politician. Sure, we’ve heard some quite clear comments about God and faith from former Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee or from Mitt Romney in his “Faith in America” speech. But most U.S. politicians seem to talk about faith without getting too specific about, for example, who God is for them. Being too specific carries with it the risk of pinning yourself down too much and alienating voters who don’t have the same view.

In his Riyadh speech on Monday, Sarkozy talked about “… the one God of the religions of the book … the transcendent God who is in the thoughts and hearts of everyone … God who does not enslave man but free him … God who is the rampart against the enormous pride and folly of mankind … God who, beyond all the difference, never stops sending manking a message of humility and love, a message of peace and fraternity, a message of tolerance and respect…”

Do you think Sarkozy, by being so specific in talking about God, goes beyond the kind of civil religion echoed in most U.S. political speeches? We know he likes America (that in itself amounts to breaking a taboo in France!). But is he now going even a step further than most American politicians would?

Nicolas Sarkozy does not do things by half. After being criticised for highlighting his country’s Christian roots during a speech in Rome last month, the French president went a step further in a speech in Riyadh on Monday. He praised “the transcendent God who is in the thoughts and the hearts of every person” and described Islam as “one of the greatest and most beautiful civilisations the world has known.” Addressing Saudi Arabia’s Shura advisory council, he stressed he was speaking of “the one God of the people of the book … God who does not enslave man but frees him“.

“We have to watch Nicolas Sarkozy when he travels,” the outspoken left-wing magazine Marianne commented. “Outside our borders, our president can reveal himself to be a passionate missionary for Christ, as he did during his papal visit. Travelling in Arab lands, Nicolas Sarkozy has transformed himself into a fanatical zealot for Islam.”

In a more moderate tone, the Paris newspaper Le Monde commented that the “God who does not enslave man” quote was “surprising for a head of a secular state“. Laïcité, the legal separation of church and state imposed on the traditionally Catholic country in 1905, is a key concept of modern French democracy and presidents before Sarkozy never challenged it. Public attachment to laïcité has actually strengthened in recent years as religious demands by the growing Muslim minority upset the quiet consensus against allowing faith a role in public life.

Sarkozy avoided linking Islam and terrorism, telling his Saudi audience that crimes had been commited in the name of religion throughout history. “They were not dictated by piety, by religious feelings or by faith, but by sectarianism, fanaticism or the will to power. Religious feelings have often been instrumentalised,” he said. “Today it is not religious feeling that is dangerous, but its utilisation for regressive political ends.”

He appealed for a “policy of civilisation“, an approach stressing common values among diverse peoples. “This is what is done by those within Islam — as in the other religions — who struggle against fanaticism and terrorism, those who appeal to the basic values of Islam to combat the fundamentalism that negates them.” This leads to “the synthesis of modernity and the deep identity of Islam, without shocking the consciences of the citizens.” He then said Saudi King Abdullah, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Moroccan King Mohammed were promoting just such a policy.

Blunt as always, Marianne accused Sarkozy of praising a feudal monarchy supported by “Wahhabism, an obscurantist doctrine that applies shariah law and its barbaric punishments and excludes all other religions but Islam from the country.” Even the conservative daily Le Figaro, which praised his focus on common values across borders, said it hoped his speech would give food for thought to the Saudis “who ban all other religions except the Muslim faith and even ban the import of Christmas trees“.

Many Western political and religious leaders have been saying that Saudi Arabia must let other religions operate freely there, just as Western countries allow Muslims to build mosques and pray freely. Do you think Sarkozy should have taken a tougher line in his speech?