Europe’s new president, Herman Van Rompuy, is little known outside his native Belgium. One of the few background facts about him circulating since his election is his opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union.  The operative quote, expressed in a 2004 speech when he was an opposition deputy in the Belgian parliament, is:

“Turkey is not a part of Europe and will never be part of Europe. An expansion of the EU to include Turkey cannot be considered as just another expansion as in the past . . . The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey.”

(Photo: Herman Van Pompuy, 19 Nov 2009/Sebastien Pirlet)

The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, said something quite similar In an interview with Le Figaro, also in 2004: “Turkey always represented another continent throughout history, in permanent contrast with Europe,” he said, and joining it to Europe would be a mistake. Europe is united by its “culture which gives it a common identity. The roots which formed … this continent are those of Christianity.”

Both these comments were made in the context of a debate about mentioning Europe’s Christian heritage in the EU constitution planned at the time. Some countries, most notably France, opposed any explicit mention of the traditional majority faith on the continent. The Vatican’s reaction was: “The Holy See cannot but express its distress over the opposition of some governments to the explicit recognition of the Christian roots of Europe. It is a question of disregard of the historical evidence and of the Christian identity of European peoples.”

Van Rompuy, a Christian Democrat, is a believeing Catholic who has no problem saying so in public. He attended a Jesuit high school in Brussels and the Catholic University Leuven. Back in 1985, he wrote a book entitled Het christendom. Een moderne gedachte (Christendom, a modern idea), which is now out of print.

(Photo: Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict), 10 April 2004/Max Rossi)

Van Rompuy’s personal blog (mostly in Dutch and French, some English) has a whole section on religion and several commentaries, articles and speeches posted on the blog deal with religous and philosophical issues such as  the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate or a discussion about love with the agnostic French thinker Luc Ferry.

This has prompted several European bloggers and commenters to slam him as having “no sensitivity whatever to Europe’s newer cultural diversity” or being “a Vatican puppet.” One blogger asked if the EU now had “a devout Roman Catholic leading a secular European Empire?”

Are we heading for another debate about Europe’s Christian roots? Or is it one thing, as his aides argue, to express views when one is an opposition politician and another when one holds a high office?

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Muslim creationism is back in the news. There’s been a spate of articles in the U.S. and British press recently about the spread of this scripture-based challenge to Darwinian evolution among Muslims, mostly in the Middle East but also in Europe. The fact that some Muslims have embraced creationism, a trademark belief of some conservative American Protestants, is not new. Reuters first wrote about it in 2006 — “Creation vs. Darwin takes Muslim twist in Turkey” – and this blog has run several posts on the issue, including an interview with Islam’s most prominent creationist, Harun Yahya. What’s new is that these ideas seem to be spreading and academics who defend evolution are holding conferences to discuss the phenomenon.

(Photo: Portrait of Charles Darwin, 12 Feb 2009/Gordon Jack)

There are too many recent articles about Islamic creationism out there now to discuss each one separately, so I’ll have to just link to them in the … New York Times … Washington Post … Boston Globe … Slate … Guardian … National … Beliefnet … … Many of these articles highlight the role of Harun Yahya, the once secretive Istanbul preacher and publisher who has gone on a PR offensive in recent years and turned very media-friendly (as Steve Paulson describes in that Slate article). But as Michael Reiss, a London education professor and Anglican priest told the Guardian, “what the Turks believe today is what the Germans and British believe tomorrow. It is because of the mass movement of people between countries. These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries.”

(Photo: Harun Yahya, 21 May 2008/Osman Orsal)

Over the weekend, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt hosted a conference on “Darwin’s Living Legacy: An International Conference on Evolution and Society” with the British Council. The simple fact of holding a conference on Darwin in the heart of the Middle East, where his theory of evolution is widely rejected, is already noteworthy. According to the Guardian’s Riazat Butt, Nidhal Guessoum, professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah, told the conference that only three Muslim or Muslim-majority countries out of a possible 22 taught evolution. Another participant, astronomer Salman Hameed, who is professor of integrated science & humanities from Hampshire College in Massachusetts, wrote on his informative science-and-religion blog Irtiqa: “It is incredible that this conference is taking place in Egypt. I don’t know what will be the reaction here. Simply by its location, it may remove some of the stigma regarding evolution in the Muslim world, or it may end up generating a backlash. Frankly, I have no idea about the reaction.”

In an update on Sunday, Hameed wrote: “There have been some anti-evolutionary comments made in the sessions that dealt with religion and evolution - but overall, the reception seems to have been quite positive - both in Egyptian newspapers and among the local participants.”

(Photo: Salman Hameed/Irtiqa)

As a example of what they’re up against, another participant was Zaghloul El-Naggar, a leading proponent of the theory that the Koran foresaw scientific theories and discoveries, including the Big Bang and a possible cure for AIDS. He was quoted prominently in a recent Al-Jazeera report on the discovery of the 4.4 million year old skeleton known as Ardipithicus or “Ardi.” The report claimed that the find disproved Darwinian evolution — the opposite of what scientists said about the spectacular discovery of the most complete early hominid specimen we have.  The report only appeared in Al-Jazeera’s Arabic-language television channel, which is very popular in the Middle East, and not in its English-language broadcast. “The presence of El-Naggar totally polarized the debate and evoked an equally polarizing reaction from the audience,” wrote Hameed, who promised further posts from the conference ending today.

Last month, Hameed’s Hampshire College hosted a conference on Darwin and Evolution in the Muslim World. Webcasts of presentations there can be found on the conference website.

What do you think? Is the spread of creationism among Muslims a matter for concern? Is it the same as the battle between creationism and science in Christianity?

Here’s the video of the Al-Jazeera report, with subtitles in English added by critics of its presentation:

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German Muslims have inundated one of the country’s top soccer teams, Schalke 04, with complaints about a verse in the club’s anthem which, they say, is disparaging towards the Prophet Mohammad.

The club has its home in Gelsenkirchen in Germany’s industrial heartland and immigrants make up about a third of the town’s population. Most of them have a Turkish background. Germany’s biggest mosque was opened in nearby Duisburg last year and many Schalke supporters are Muslims, as chat rooms like this one point out.

The lines in question are: “Mohammad was a Prophet who doesn’t understand football” although the words that follow seem positive: “But from all the beautiful colours he came up with blue and white.” Schalke’s colours are blue and white.

The club, which plays in Germany’s Bundesliga top league and has some of the country’s most ardent fans, is taking the complaints seriously. A spokesman has said Schalke has asked an Islamic expert to analyse the text.

But what is most striking is that the song is not new. Some say it dates back to 1924.  So why has it suddenly started to offend Muslims?

The answer may lie in the mounting resentment in Germany’s Muslim community after politicians were slow to condemn the murder of an Egyptian woman in a court in eastern Germany about a month ago, which we blogged about at the time. The crime was widely viewed as racially motivated.

Germany’s Central Council of Muslims has summed up the situation. “Many Muslims in Germany no longer have a sense of security. Nerves are wearing thin,” General-Secretary Aiman Mazyek was quoted as saying in Bild daily, adding he did not believe the club had malicious intentions. 

This storm is another sign of just how tense community relations are in Germany. Maybe a passion for soccer can help overcome some of the divisions.

"Happy is he who calls himself a Turk."

One of the first things that catches your attention when you drive out of the airport of Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, is Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's famous phrase engraved on mountain slopes in big white letters.

Bent on building a secular and modern Turkey after World War One, Ataturk carved a united Turkish nation out of the disparate ethnic and religious groups that inhabited the old Ottoman empire -- sometimes by forced "Turkification" as was the case with ethnic Kurds.

That once-monolithic nation state is slowly being dented as pluralism becomes an acceptable fact of life in Turkish society.

Turkey's announcement this week that it is preparing a "democratic opening" for Kurds has raised hopes the EU candidate country might launch bold reforms to end a conflict that has killed 40,000 people and brought pain to many more.

Cynics have been quick to point out the plan, which might include political, cultural and economic measures, is timed to pre-empt a "road map" that jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan has said he will announce on Aug. 15.

But regardless of its timing, there is no doubt that Turkey is changing.

Unthinkable only a few years ago, there is talk in Ankara's corridors of power of a "Kurdish initiative", an "Alevi initiative", an "Armenian initiative" and even a "Greek Orthodox initiative".

Ultra-nationalists and diehard statists are crying treason, fearing the dismemberment of the republic, and have accused the government of selling out Turkey to the European Union and the United States.

Some secular conservatives, always suspicious of a government with roots in political Islam, see change as part of a hidden plot to subvert Turkey's secular constitution and promote religion in public life.

Many of these changes have been motivated by Ankara's desire to join the EU and meet membership criteria, such as expanding rights to minorities and more free speech. Critics say the government is using the EU to advance its own agenda, and free the strictures on religious freedoms of Muslims.

But they also respond to demands from an increasingly dynamic, urban and diverse society open to global trends.

Bronze statues of Ataturk still gaze over Turkey decades after they were built but some of his ideals, such as a single Turkish nation using a single language, might be obsolete.

"Turkey belongs to the Turks," goes another of Ataturk's commonly cited phrases, but Turks are also more worldly.

The thriving middle class goes on holidays to Europe and other world destinations. News from all corners of the world is broadcast 24 hours a day. This has brought a different understanding toward diversity within its own borders.

The Kurdish, Alevi, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox initiatives reflect the growing pressure Turkey is facing to redefine a straightjacket notion of identity which no longer fits its society, analysts say.

Some newspapers have speculated the government is considering removing open displays of the "Happy is he who calls himself a Turk" slogan in the mainly Kurdish southeast to ease tensions. For years, Turkey's official ideology had rejected the notion that Kurds were a separate ethnic group and the display of the slogans was seen as an attempt at forced assimilation.

"Turkey still has a long way to go to solve these issues, but the fact that we have moved from the stage of chronic problems to that of initiatives is noted by everyone," Ibrahim Kalin wrote recently in the pro-government Zaman daily.

The silent halls and empty classrooms tended by elderly priests at a former Greek Orthodox seminary on an island off the Istanbul coast belie the crucible the school has become in Muslim Turkey’s quest to join the European Union.

The EU has said re-opening Halki seminary, a centre of Orthodox scholarship for more than a century until Turkey closed it down in 1971, is crucial if Ankara is to prove a commitment to human rights and pluralism and advance its membership bid.

(Photo: Halki seminary classroom, 18 Sept 2006/Tom Heneghan)

The pro-Islamist government, despite introducing other sweeping reforms to bring Turkey closer to EU membership, has thus far refused to re-open the 165-year-old school located on a pretty wooded isle called Heybeliada in the Sea of Marmara.

Now, senior Turkish officials have signalled a change in the government’s stance. Last week, Culture Minister Ertugrul Günay said he believed the seminary would re-open. Deputy Prime Minister Egemen Bagis, the chief EU negotiator, told the Greek newspaper Kathimerini in late June that the seminary should be opened to meet the needs of the country’s non-Muslim citizens.

Then on Monday, after holding talks with Turkey’s top Muslim cleric, Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill said he had received information the seminary would open. The renewed debate follows U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Turkey in April, when he called on the government to re-open Halki to “send a important signal” that it upholds freedom of religion and expression.

The reports have cheered Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Istanbul-based spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians. He told reporters on Saturday he believed the government was close to resolving the issue. For Bartholomew and the Greek Orthodox faithful, the school is key to the survival of their church in its historical seat of Constantinople, now Istanbul, a city of some 15 million mostly Muslim residents.

(Photo: Vice-abbot Dorotheos in the seminary library, 18 Sept 2006/Tom Heneghan)

The patriarchate is a vestige of the Greek Byzantine Empire’s 1,000-year reign from the banks of the Bosphorus Strait. Today, it has no means to train clergy, making it difficult to find a successor for Bartholomew, 69, himself a graduate of the school. Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a citizen of Turkey, but only about 2,500 ethnic Greeks remain in Istanbul, compared with some 125,000 a half-century ago.

Opponents of the seminary say it violates the secular constitution and reopening it would prompt radical Islamists to demand their own schools. All of Turkey’s Islamic theology faculties are located at strictly regulated state universities. Some Turks also fear it would legitimise Bartholomew’s ecumenical, or universal, title. Unlike most countries, Turkey doesn’t recognise that designation, arguing Bartholomew is only the head of the country’s tiny flock of Greek Orthodox.

Re-establishing a seminary would create an Orthodox “Vatican City” in Istanbul that could serve as a Fifth Column of Greece, the country’s historical foe, they argue. After all, Turkey closed Halki during a period of tension with Greece over Cyprus.

Constitutional scholars argue there’s little legal basis to keep the college closed, just a lack of political will, according to a May report from the Turkish think tank Tesev (see image at right)

The last serious attempt to re-open Halki was in 2006, when the secularist opposition blocked a government motion in parliament that would have allowed the seminary to operate.

“We have not lost hope, despite the broken promises, because a person only lives as long as he has hope. Even on his deathbed, he resists the end,” Metropolitan Apostolos Daniilidis, Halki’s abbot, said at the time from his office atop the Hill of Hope on Heybeliada.

And so each autumn, the priests of Halki sweep the halls and ready the classrooms for what they pray will be the imminent return of their first class of students in 38 years.

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Given the popularity of glitzy television gameshows of all sorts, it was probably inevitable that some secular channel somewhere one would come up with one about religion. Turkey’s Kanal T television station now has.

Its show, entitled “Penitents Compete,” will bring together spiritual guides from Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism who try to convert a group of non-believers. Those who get religion win a pilgrimage to a holy site of the faith they’ve chosen — Mecca for Muslims, the Vatican for Christians, Jerusalem for Jews and Tibet for Buddhists.

But the show, due to debut in September, has run into some unexpected trouble. The religious authorities in Muslim but secular Turkey have refused to provide an imam for the show, which they say will cheapen religion. Read the whole story here.

Do you think a program like this is offensive?

(Photo: Popular German TV gameshow “Wetten, dass…?”– “Bet that..?” — on 22 Jan 2005/Christian Charisius)

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The 700 children who have come to Turkey for the Turkish Language Olympics — an annual event described in my feature “Turkish language fest shows preacher’s global reach” — will know little if anything about the controversy here over the powerful socio-religious community behind their schools.

(Photo:School girls sing at Turkish Language Olympics in Istanbul, 3 June 2009/Halit Omer Camci)

Getting ready to perform in a huge auditorium in Istanbul more often used for international conferences, the 30-odd signing competition entrants appear giggly and excited, fussing over their elaborate folk costumes. Most are visiting for the first time and have been completely charmed by Turkey - just as Turkey has been charmed by them.

The children attend schools run by individuals or associations inspired by the teachings of Muslim preacher Fethullah Gülen. He is revered by many Turks as a tolerant, moderating force in Islam, but suspected by some secularist Turks of harbouring a covert political agenda. Gülen groups are active in publishing, inter-faith dialogue, charity and above all education.

A look at the invited audience here to watch the Olympics reveals where the Gülen community fits in the social fabric of Turkey. The vast majority of the women wear the Muslim headscarf and elegant ankle-length coats. These are the same observant professionals who vote for the ruling AK Party.

Turkey’s ardent secularists are suspicious of the Gülen community, but some concede the Turkish Language Olympics have put the international schools in an excellent light. The youngsters, often with full scholarships, are given chances they might never have had in local state education. When you speak to the children they are ambitious and confident and communicate in excellent Turkish, even though not all are from Turkish backgrounds. This helps stir nationalist hearts in Turkey.

While some of the most critical claims about Gülen schools assert he wants to train a new cadre of youngsters to lead a future Islamic Turkish state, what comes across most strongly from watching the finals is that this is a group of smart, spirited children relishing their experience abroad.

By Razak Ahmad

Should non-Muslims be allowed to join an Islamist party? Would the Islamists want them to join? This is the issue facing the Pan Malaysian Islamist Party (PAS) at its annual assembly this week.

Photo: Women’s wing of PAS prays at its national convention on 3 June, 2009/Bazuki Mujammad

For decades, PAS dreamed of a rigid theocratic state, even to the extent of issuing an edict in 1987 declaring the ruling Malay-Muslim nationalist ruling party as infidel. The ethnic minority Chinese and Indians who make up a combined 35% of the Southeast Asian country’s 27 million population were rarely in the Islamist party’s political equation.

But now PAS is part of Malaysia’s three-party opposition led by Anwar Ibrahim. It claims that 20,000 non-Muslims have joined the party’s supporters club, which will be recognised as an official party wing if a proposal on the matter is endorsed. This would in turn pave the way for non-Muslim members of the supporters club to become card carrying PAS members.

The party enjoyed a surge in support among non-Muslim voters in general elections last year after a group of party reformers took control of PAS and moderated the party’s hardline image. The supporters club is an extension of the party’s attempt to broaden its voter appeal but it is more than just an outreach.

PAS’ non-Muslim engagement parallels the evolution of other Islamist parties like Indonesia’s Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) or Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AK) to expand their appeal to moderate and progressive Muslims and even non-Muslims. The old paradigm of replicating Iran’s Islamic revolution in their home countries seems to have faded away.

Nonetheless in a multicultural society such as Malaysia and neighbouring Indonesia, rifts appear inevitable. Within PAS there are questions about how far the religious leadership is prepared to go to water down the party’s founding principles.

And of course, outreach isn’t a one way process, as U.S. President Barack Obama tried to show.

Having covered PAS extensively for the past 10 years, I  can say that PAS’ shifting trajectory has been remarkable — and so, too, has been the response.

What do you think about this new face of Islamist parties? Could non-Muslims vote for them?

When President Barack Obama delivers his long-awaited speech in Cairo on Thursday, will he address the Muslim world or the Arab world? In the pre-speech build-up, it’s being called a speech “to the Muslim world” or “to the world’s 1.x billion Muslims” (the estimated total mentioned in different articles fluctuates between 1and 1.5 billion). But the venue he’s chosen — Cairo — and all the focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict make it sound like a speech to and about the Middle East.

(Photo: President Barack Obama, 21 May 2009/Kevin Lamarque)

The Middle East is the heartland of Islam, but Arabs make up only about 20 percent of the world’s Muslims. Not all Arabs are Muslims. And non-Arab Iran is a major part of the Middle Eastern political scene. So is it correct to call this a speech to the Muslim world? Would it be better to call it a speech to the Middle East?

There is such an important overlap between the Arab and the Muslim worlds that it is hard to disentangle them. The Palestinian issue concerns Muslims around the world, but with varying intensity depending partly on whether it figures in regional politics or stands as a more distant symbol of oppression against Muslims. Politics can also poison Muslim relations with Jews, which can range from bitter enmity to interfaith cooperation depending on where, when and how one looks. The U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq may be justified in Washington as operations against international terrorism, but in Muslim countries they are often seen as attacks on Muslims and Islam.

When this speech was first announced as an address to the Muslim world, I blogged here and here that he should deliver it in Turkey or Indonesia because they were doing more to reconcile Islam and modern democracy than any Arab state. “As a politician from a country where church-state relations are a lively issue, one could expect him to ask what message his choice will send concerning the political relationship with religion in the state he chooses,” I wrote.

(Photo: Cairo at dusk, 14 April 2009/Tarek Mostafa)

The pressing question of how Islam relates to politics and society in the 21st century has an important religious component, because any adaptation or development would have to come from within a tradition that looks to religious authority to bless important changes. A speech addressing this would necessarily have to deal with religion, which is after all what Muslim countries have in common regardless of their geography, ethnicity, languages, traditions or politics.

Articles looking ahead to the speech focus mostly on the political, i.e. the Middle East peace process. Reuters has run a long curtainraiser today entitled “Obama to address tough issues in speech to Muslims” that touches on the Middle East, oil and international terrorism (BTW “speech to Muslims” is a neat way to get around the problem under discussion here). Washington also ran “Q+A: Why is Obama speech to Muslim world important?” and an earlier analysis on May 31 entitled “PREVIEW-Obama speech to Muslims key to new U.S. strategy.” That analysis mixed the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, saying “President Barack Obama will try to repair America’s tarnished image in the Muslim world on Thursday, as he looks to mobilize support for restarting Middle East peacemaking and thwarting Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

Another article by our Middle East Special Correspondent Alistair Lyon, “Muslims want more than fine talk from Obama,” shows how complex all this is. Surveying opinion across the Muslim world, he found the Palestinian issue stood out as their main concern. But wider issues also emerged, for example a general desire to feel the U.S. president respects Muslims and Islam — a message Obama has already been sending. As for the venue, it seems that Arabs found the choice of Cairo very appropriate while a Malaysian and an Iranian Lyon quoted thought it was a bad choice.

(Photo: Fireworks at Malaysia’s Putra Mosque near Kuala Lumpur, 31 Aug 2003/Bazuki Muhammad)

In one of its pre-speech articles, the New York Times wrote that “when President Obama delivers a much-anticipated speech in Cairo, he will be addressing so many audiences, and seeking to advance so many agendas, that even his oratorical gifts are likely to be taxed.”

How do you think Obama should pitch his speech? Is it possible to juggle both the immediate political concerns of the Middle East with wider issues concerning the whole Muslim world? Or is it impossible not to?

Senior figures from across Austria's political spectrum have condemned the head of the far-right Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, over his party's European election campaign directed against Israel and Turkey.

In an advertisement in the newspaper Kronen Zeitung, Freedom opposes the accession of Turkey and Israel to the European Union. Although Turkey is in EU accession talks, Israel is not.

Heinz-Christian Strache prepares for a TV discussion in Vienna, Sept. 17, 2008. REUTERS/Heinz-Peter Bader (AUSTRIA)

"What is the most distasteful and despicable is the style," says Ernst Strasser, the conservatives' candidate in next month's elections for the European Parliament, referring to Strache's campaign. "This style is abusive. He vilifies other religions and ethnicities."

According to Chancellor Werner Faymann, Strache is "a hate monger, a disgrace".

"It makes absolutely no sense for Israel to be mentioned. Israel is not a candidate for accession. There isn't even an accession process. The only reason to mention Israel is to serve anti-Semitic prejudices. It is disgraceful."

Strache, who denies he is preaching hatred, accuses Faymann of being a "rabble-rouser" and abusing his position as chancellor.

The dispute indicates more than just political opportunism in the run-up to the poll, although that is obviously playing a part.

Freedom, which polled 18 percent in September's national election, has become a hard-right party since former dental technician Strache took the helm in 2005. It has also focused on religion. A recent rally where Strache waved a crucifix drew condemnation from politicians and religious leaders. Another campaign slogan, "The West in Christian hands", was not well received, either.

The hard-right rhetoric, an eye-catching campaign aimed at the youth vote and dissatisfaction with the centre parties, appears to have given Freedom a boost. However, Strache's line has at times been a bonus for the more moderate Alliance for Austria's Future, the party of late far-right leader Joerg Haider, who used to lead Freedom.

A controversial European Union election campaign poster of Austrian far right Freedom party in Vienna May 11, 2009. Posterreads " The West in Christian hands - Judgement day". REUTERS/Dominic Ebenbichler

The parties are often lumped together as "Austria's far right", such as when they polled almost a third of the vote last year. Together they could make a serious political force -- they outpolled the conservatives and were just behind the Social Democrats in September. the Alliance has tried to use the dispute to portray itself as the more mature. "(Freedom) is using the only way to mobilise votes it has," Alliance's EU candidate Ewald Stadler says.

Freedom's popularity has nevertheless affected mainstream policy, with centre parties loath to open up a flank to the far right. The conservatives and Social Democrats have spoken out against the EU asylum directive and oppose lifting labour market restrictions to the eight ex-communist countries that joined the EU in 2004.