German soccer blogs are not a place I usually go to for a story about religion, but an interesting one has popped up on the forum of the Eintracht Frankfurt team. The team let its fans vote over the Internet late last year to pick a 2008/2009 season jersey among 16 proposed models. Despite the fans’ enthusiasm for this innovation, Eintracht has ignored the result and chosen to use the runner-up design. As the team explained on its website:

After a close examination, we have decided that the winning jersey with the cross unfortunately cannot be used because the symbol on the front has a religious background. Inter Milan, an Italian club with a long tradition, has appeared in the current Champions League competition in a similar jersey and been strongly criticised for it. So after careful consideration, Eintracht Frankfurt has gone back and chosen the second jersey, which came in a close second in the vote.

The runner-up that came out on top has what Eintracht calls “hints of eagle claws on the front and a stylised eagle on the shoulder”. The city’s coat-of-arms has a red eagle that also figures on the Eintracht team logo.

So why the change? It turns out that a Turkish lawyer (and Fenerbahçe fan) asked UEFA in December to invalidate an Inter Milan victory over the Istanbul team in the Champions League last November because the red cross on the Italian jerseys recalled the Knights Templar crusaders. Shortly afterwards, the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia reported that fake FC Barcelona jerseys were on sale in Saudi Arabia with the crossbar removed from the cross on the team’s emblem. Eintracht doesn’t mention this Christian/Muslim angle explicitly, but it takes only a few clicks to find it.

Eintracht’s fan forum erupted with comments. The main thread on the jersey is up to 1,728 and climbing, many defending the loser as simply a better design. Almost 500 fans have signed a petition against the winner. The religious angle seemed irrelevant to most of them.

Do you think that teams should pay attention to possible religious overtones on their jerseys?

Following up our blogs on the Turkish project to revise the hadith, we have interviewed Professor Mehmet Gormez, vice-president of Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate, or Diyanet. We also have the transcript of the interview as follows, translated from Turkish:

Q. What is the aim of the project?

A. The religion of Islam is based on two main sources (the Koran and the hadith). As time passes people have difficulty understanding (their religion). This is true of all religions. As the Koran is a major source of knowledge, many commentaries have been written through history. The hadith are very dispersed but also a major source. Each hadith has a reason, each hadith has a relation with culture and geography. When this is lost, it becomes hard to understand what the Prophet meant by the words used. Therefore, many efforts have been made (to explain the meaning). But in the modern world, people misinterpret this knowledge. I liken this source of knowledge (the hadith) to a pharmacy. When a person gets sick, he goes to the pharmacy and thinks that every medicine can be used in the same way. But some pills can end up making you feel worse, not better … A person may not know what kind of chemicals a medicine contains but
happily takes it. At present, we have been using the hadith lacking methodology. And this brings many problems with it… By taking advantage of methods used in the modern world to understand religious texts, we aim to make (them) better understood, better practised and to purify them of mistakes.

(more…)

Forgive me for returning to the listening theme about the Turkish hadith reform story, but there are now two audio clips out there that help in understanding it. This also gives me the opportunity for a headline that plays on that crucial reporting rule of thumb from one of my favourite aphorists, Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot by just looking.”*

In its Reporting Religion programme this weekend, the BBC takes another crack at its hadith story — the plan to review the sayings of the Prophet Mohammad and reclassify the sexist and superstitious ones as unauthentic. This time it gives Mehmet Görmez more time to explain what’s up at Diyanet, the government’s religious affairs department where he is deputy head. The interview is the second of three on the audio clip. Among other things, he says that all these buzzwords — revolution, reformation and reform — are too linked to Christian history to apply. I think only “reformation” should be avoided in a religious context, because of its Christian overtones, but we have to be clear about what a revolution or a reform would be if we use them. The clip also has comments from Azzam Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London. “The West would love to see happen to Islam what happened to Christianity,” he says, adding why he thinks this could never occur.

A secularist physicist in Missouri might seem like the last person qualified to discuss Islam in Turkey, but Taner Edis talks a lot of sense. He has a natural advantage; he was born and brought up in Istanbul, with a Turkish father and American mother. Possibly thanks to his physics background, he sees Islam as a complex phenomenon that has to be understood on its own terms. On The Secular Outpost blog, he has a comment on the hadith story and an interview (about one-third into this podcast) that is not linked to the hadith story but quite relevant to this discussion. “Don’t look into the Christian experience and try to fit Muslims into that box,” he says. Islam fits neither “the Protestant version of secularisation” nor “medieval Catholicism.” It has no formal separation of church and state, but the Ottoman Empire had much more of a de facto separation between them than is assumed today, he says.

To better explain this for western readers, I’ve been trying to ignore the above advice and find parallels in Christianity to the reforms being discussed in Islam, both on the hadith in Turkey and on sharia in modern Islamic theology (which Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has read but didn’t explain). But the more I try, the more I see that the cookie cutters usually don’t work. The Bible and the Koran are the main holy books of Christianity and Islam, but they are different types of books. The hadith came after the Koran, but they are not like the epistles or the patristic writings. Classifying the hadith for authenticity is not exactly like drawing up the biblical canon or declaring some writings heretical.

There are similarities and differences between the world’s two largest religions but understanding them takes some effort. Maybe a rough rule of thumb for readers to take away from this hadith story is to mistrust articles that make it seem too easy.

Just out of curiosity, I scoured a list of Yogiisms to see what he might say in such a situation. The one that comes closest was actually a comment from his son Dale: “The similarities between me and my father are completely different.”

———–

*Attn Yogi fans: Yes, I know there are several versions of this one, but the idea is always the same. Anyway, he also famously declared: “I didn’t really say everything I said.”

Still confused about Turkey’s plan to review the sayings of the Prophet Mohammad and reclassify the sexist and superstitious ones as unauthentic? Unsure whether this is a revolution, a reform or a revision of Islam? I gave my take on it here yesterday, but I’ve since found two explanations that shed a lot more light on what’s going on. The better of the two is a column in today’s Turkish Daily News by Mustafa Akyol, a young Istanbul journalist with a knack for explaining Turkish Islam clearly. I won’t summarise it — just go read it, it’s not long.

IslamOnline did a good job on this, too, in an interview that gave Mehmet Görmez, deputy head of Diyanet (the government’s religious affairs department shown in the logo above) more space than he got in other reports to explain what’s being done.

Akyol and Görmez both make an important point. Many Western journalists approach Islam from a starting point vaguely based on Christianity (hence the misguided quest for an “Islamic Reformation”). They don’t have to be Christians or believers or even know much about Christianity to do this; it’s as much a part of our cultural baggage as our native languages. Conversely, Muslims approach Christianity from a square one closely linked to Islam, their primary religious reference. Nobody starts out tabula rasa in this exercise. The gap can be bridged, but to do this we have to report what is actually happening, rather than just what we think is going on. Listening to these two Turks is a good place to start.

Akyol says of the Koran: “Westerners who haven’t read this book generally assume that it must be something like the New Testament – i.e., a book which reports the life and works of the religion’s founder. Yet that is not the case at all. The Koran actually hardly speaks about Prophet Mohammed. It rather speaks to him.”

Görmez says: “The Western media have read what we are doing from a Christian perspective and understood it in line with their Christian and Western cultures.”

Diyanet made the same point in more official jargon in a communique it put out on Friday.

The headscarf issue and this hadith story have put a spotlight on Turkey and that’s a good thing, even if there are misunderstandings. Islam has many faces — just look at these recent Reuters stories and blog posts from Malaysia, Lebanon, India, United States and France — and the Saudi version is not the only one around. Turkey is at the cutting edge of some important trends in contemporary Islam. Bookmarking Akyol’s blog The White Path is a good way to keep up with what’s happening there.

Ali Bardakoglu, Turkey’s top religious official, says his country’s effort to purge the hadith of sexism and superstition is not an attempt to reform Islam but to change the Turkish way of practising it. This reform project hit the headlines this week when the BBC ran a story on what it called “a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion“. It said the revision of the hadith, the collection of the sayings of the Prophet Mohammad that are second only to the Koran as an authority for Muslims, was something akin to a Protestant Reformation in Islam.

Reacting to those reports, Bardakoglu, who is chairman of the Department of Religious Affairs, told the daily Sabah: “A team of 80 are scanning all existent hadith. For example, words humiliating women are attributed to the prophets. We are combing through such interpretations. We will publish six volumes. However, what we are doing is not reform on Islam… we are not reforming Islam; we are reforming ourselves, our own way of religiosity.” ‘

His deputy Mehmet Görmez told another daily, Zaman, that the BBC’s interpretation of the reform as a “radical modernisation” was wrong, saying: “We are going to take the appropriate legal measures for redress.”

What’s up? Are we talking about a revolution in Islam here? Well, not quite. The aim is to publish a revised collection of hadith to be used in Turkey as a reference work for fatwas and other work of religious interpretation. The scholars are using modern methods of interpretation of the hadith to assess their validity, an approach that conservative scholars reject. But this is not a reinterpretation of the Koran, the absolute centre of authority. Islamic exegesis gets revolutionary when it is turned towards deconstructing the Koran, which Muslims believe is the literal word of Allah.

This project is not going there. It follows in a tradition of assessing and classifying hadith that dates back to the early days of the faith. So Bardakoglu and Görmez had no problem saying the project was not reforming Islam. The rejected hadith will not disappear; they’ll still be on the books in many other Muslim countries. But Turkey’s state-approved religious establishment won’t use them.

This is an updating of some aspects of Islam, though, and Bardakoglu and Görmez probably played that down so they don’t ruffle too many conservative feathers. The project is weeding out some hadith that Turkish Islam scholars say were written down long after the Prophet’s death and are little more than handed-down hearsay. These doubtful passages often contradict other sayings of Mohammad or express views that don’t jibe with his. The goal is “to convey the universal message of the Prophet Mohammed to the 21st century“, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) said in a statement on Thursday.

The project was well described two years ago in this Washington Post article by Mustafa Akyol, who gave a few examples of passages due to be cut:

• “Women are imperfect in intellect and religion.”
• “The best of women are those who are like sheep.”
• “If a woman doesn’t satisfy her husband’s desires, she should choose herself a place in hell.”
• “If a husband’s body is covered with pus and his wife licks it clean, she still wouldn’t have paid her dues.”
• “Your prayer will be invalid if a donkey, black dog or a woman passes in front of you.”

Felix Körner, a German Jesuit priest at Ankara University, is quoted in many of the reports. He has been studying the “Ankara School” of modern Islamic theology for several years and published a book about it in 2005 called Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics in Contemporary Turkish University Theology. Note the adjective “revisionist” — not revolutionary or radical.

Ali Eteraz, who has written a lot on reform in Islam, has trashed this effort as “fool’s gold” because he sees it mostly as the state meddling in religious affairs: “In my mind, this initiative has more to do with Turkey’s AKP party trying to get into the European Union. “Look, we threw out all the bad hadith,” it seems to be saying. “Now let us in! … Ultimately, this entire hadith affair represents an attempt on the part of Turkey to “nationalise” its Islam. Nothing more.”

Politics plays a part (Diyanet is a government body, after all) but this is not primarily a ploy to fool Brussels. Ali’s right that the Turkish state is meddling in Islam and that the idea of invalidating some hadith is nothing new. His opposition to having a state lead the reform effort is understandable. And yes, some coverage of the reform got pretty excited. Still, this reform reflects a broader trend of reinterpreting texts in Islam and the wider effect of it being endorsed by the religious authorities shouldn’t be underestimated. Many Muslim thinkers want a more modern interpretation of Islam — a lot of them are here in France — but this is regularly blocked by conservative religious establishments. Change on this front will only come step by step, and even a state authority like Diyanet can make some of it happen.

It started as a women’s protest for the right to wear Muslim headscarves at university, in this case at Marmara University in Istanbul. Then the men showed up with their banners and megaphones, lined up in front of the cameras and began speaking in place of the women. That left the ladies standing demurely on the sidelines or in the crowd, all decked out with their bright silk scarves with nothing to do but clap at what the men said.

It was just another case of what women here often complain about — that the headscarf has been hijacked by politics for decades, leaving ordinary women to suffer the consequences. Some have sacrificed an education for their faith, preferring not to go to university if it means uncovering, and they feel like little more than a political football in this very masculine power struggle.

Check out our video from Marmara University, especially the protester who says “We want freedom to wear headscarves!” Hmmm … do you think he’ll ever wear one?

Turkish politics is deeply divided over whether women should be allowed to wear the headscarf at university and elsewhere in public life. Secularists, who fear that pious Turks are bent on curbing their right to live as they please, are trying to protect Turkey’s official secularism so fiercely that they are accused of restricting religious freedom. Pious Muslims are clamouring for a change in the strict ban on headscarves as a human right. And, as in the video, it’s the men who do most of the talking.

“Some are trying to win votes by banning the headscarf, others by allowing it, and we’re stuck in the middle. For years they have been making politics over me and my headscarf,” one angry young woman told me at Marmara this week.

Turkey’s parliament in Ankara, dominated by the religious-leaning AK Party, has lifted a ban on the use of the headscarf at university. But the secularist establishment is rebelling. The reform has been challenged in court while some rectors refuse to let covered women into class until another law is passed. Secularist students have also protested against the reform, as in the photo to the right. The placard reads “The headscarf cannot liberate women.”

While the secularists accuse covered women of trying to undermine the secular republic, the women themselves deny any political agenda and appear to suffer deeply from what they consider restrictions on their personal freedom.

At the protest this week in Istanbul, one young woman whipped out a copy of the Koran to explain to me what it was all about. This was an order from God, she said, as she guided me patiently through the text. Others I spoke to kept using the word “humiliation” when they described how it felt to go to class “undressed.”

These women are now setting their sights on getting the ban lifted in other areas of public life — much to the horror of secularists — so they can put their degrees to use in the public sector. And that guarantees their wardrobe, whether they like it or not, will remain a political issue for years to come.

P.S. Whenever the headscarf issue comes back into the headlines, a wave of articles shows just how many aspects this story has. Here are a few of the most interesting recent ones:

• Al-Ahram Weekly reports on a beauty salon for covered women in a Cairo suburb.
• Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol comments on which other reforms the government should introduce now that it has allowed the headscarf at universities.
• The New York Times describes how secularised urban Turks react to headscarves.
• The Washington Institute for Near East Policy discuss the foreign policy implications of the headscarf issue for Turkey and the U.S.
• An American anthropoligist argues in Sightings that the controversy veils what the headscarf really means.
• British writer Madeleine Bunting says secularists have nothing to fear from women wearing headscarves.

Anyone looking at Turkish newspapers or television these days would be forgiven for thinking Turkey was in a deep political crisis over government plans to lift a decades-old ban on female students wearing the Muslim headscarf in universities. The two sides — the secular Turks who long held sway here and the newly empowered pious Turks — are debating the issue in the winner-take-all way Turks like to talk politics. The liberal daily Radikal found the tension rising so much that it ran a front page headline this week reading “Republic of Fear” with a reprint of Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” on the cover.

Readers abroad might ask what all the fuss is about. After all, Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country with a vibrant democracy. But the headscarf goes to the very heart of Turkey’s complex identity. For a feature on the headscarf issue, I spoke to devout and secular women and heard two diametrically opposed views. The devout women, some of whom had been expelled from universities because of the headscarf, said covering their hair was all about personal and religious freedoms. “I wear the headscarf, my cousin doesn’t and we go out to family dinners. It is no big deal,” one said. Many secular women feel their rights will be curtailed if the ban is lifted since — they fear — they will eventually be forced to wear the Islamic headscarf.

Male opinion can be just as split. Secular men say that easing the ban on wearing the headscarf in universities would weaken the current separation of state and religion. The pious Muslims — including Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan — say wearing the headscarf is a personal freedom and a right, just like secular women have the right not to wear it.

The two sides are no closer than they were in the 1980s when restrictions were tightened. The army is still against the headscarf. But many Turks do feel the headscarf should be permitted for university students. Thousands of students have decided not to attend university because of the ban or have defied the ban and been expelled. Many others have gone to study abroad.

But Turkey is a constantly evolving country. The once-mighty secularist elite, which includes the armed forces, no longer dominates the media and public life. Headscarves have become more common even in the big cities, where young women sport a wide variety of fashionable colours and patterns and match them with their other clothing. In shopping malls or at Starbucks, women with and without headscarves mix easily — they don’t seem to see any problem. So the more vocal, observant Muslim middle class that helped to clinch a second four-year term for the ruling religiously oriented AK Party last July now wants to see a change in the law.

Who’s right? No one really knows. In the meantime , though, each side is accusing the other of stirring tensions and hatred. It makes for a constant buzz whenever Turks get together. Today, some workers came around to my flat to fix the cable TV connection and our short chat quickly turned to politics. Like everyone else in this debate, they let me know loud and clear where they stood. They were convinced Turkey would soon become an Islamic republic if the ban was lifted.

The Rome trip’s over and it’s back to other interesting religion topics — like Islam in Turkey.

The evolution of Islam and politics in Turkey is one of the most interesting recent developments in the Muslim world. One of the most interesting writers following this is Mustafa Akyol, an Istanbul journalist who is deputy editor of the English-language Turkish Daily News and regularly posts his TDN columns on his blog The White Path. Some of his articles require familiarity with today’s Turkish political scene, but his latest is an informative stand-back guide to how “Turkey now nurtures an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with modern values such as democracy, liberalism and capitalism.”

Akyol’s blog flags the article as “Turkey’s Veiled Democracy [A Must-Read Article].” It’s published in the November/December issue of The American Interest (here it is in PDF). In it, Akyol surveys the emergence of modernising trends in Islam during the Ottoman Empire, the creation of the secularist Turkish Republic by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the rise of modern “neo-orthodox” Muslims who formed the governing AKP party.

A fascinating aspect is the changing place of religion in Turkish politics in recent years:

“… a survey entitled “Religion, Society and Politics in a Changing Turkey”, carried out in 2006 by political scientists Binnaz Toprak and Ali Çarkoglu, revealed that not only is religiosity thriving in Turkey; it is also moving away from political Islam. In response to the question, “Should there be political parties based on religion?” the percentage of respondents answering “yes” has dropped from 41 to 25 percent in the past seven years. Moreover, demand for “a religious state based on sharia” has dropped dramatically from 21 percent to 9 percent. Only 2 percent support harsh sharia measures such as stoning. Turkish Islam is flourishing, but not as an obscurantist or anti-modern movement—just the reverse.“

Another point he makes is the influence of a Muslim middle class in Turkey. Many militant Islamists combine Muslim religious thought and Third World liberation politics. The religious vocabulary might be from the Koran, but the political vision owes much to the anti-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon and his 1961 classic The Wretched of the Earth. Akyol notes the socialist slant of political thinking in the Islamic world in the 20th century and then writes:

“The rise of an Islamic entrepreneurial class is a remarkable phenomenon, marking the beginning of a new stage for Islamic civilization. Most people understand religion not only according to its textual teachings, but also according to its function within their everyday social environment. Islam’s social environment has been feudal, imperial and bureaucratic in the past and present for the most part. Now, in Turkey and in a few other Muslim counties such as Malaysia, Islam is being transformed into a religion of the middle class and its rational, independent, individualist ethos. Anyone who thinks this social transformation won’t change religion knows nothing about the sociology of religion.”

A frequent argument about Islam in western countries is that it cannot reform and is not compatible with democracy. Akyol makes a strong case for the opposite. Are the people arguing that Islam is inherently undemocratic watching what is happening in Turkey? Do you think it shows there are more options within Islam than the ones usually seen in the news?

Turkey has signalled it may soon amend a free speech law that has been a stumbling block in its drive to join the European Union. Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin said this on Tuesday soon after the European Commission issued its annual progress report on Ankara’s membership bid. The interesting angle here for this blog is that the EU criticism singled out not only the much-criticised law on “insulting Turkishness” but also current restrictions on freedom of religion.

Releasing the report, Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn noted democracy had prevailed over military meddling in Turkish politics this year. “The new momentum should now be used to relaunch the reforms to improve fundamental freedoms, particularly the freedom of expression and religious freedom, so that they prevail in all corners of the country and in all walks of life,” he said (my emphasis).

The report gave Turkey a mixed review concerning religion. “As concerns freedom of religion, freedom of worship continues to be generally guaranteed,” it wrote. But it added: “Overall, the environment as regards freedom of religion has not been conducive to the full respect of this right in practice. A legal framework has yet to be established in line with the European Convention on Human Rights so that all religious communities can function without undue constraints. No real progress can be reported on the major difficulties encountered by the Alevis and non-Muslim religious communities.”

The ex-Islamist AK Party governing Turkey has argued for more religious freedom in general, seeing this as a way for Muslims to have more rights in the country’s rigidly secularist system. AK leaders have said these freedoms should also apply to the non-Muslim minorities there. But it takes time to translate that into practice. Several European governments are paying particular attention to progress on the religious freedom front, so the pressure is on Ankara to introduce reforms.

Other points in the report include:

– “The Association for Support of Jehovah’s Witnesses has received a final decision from the Turkish authorities confirming that the association is legally registered.”

– “On 19 June, the Ministry of Interior issued a Circular on freedom of religion of non-Muslim Turkish citizens. The Circular acknowledges that there has been an increase in individual crimes against non-Muslim citizens and their places of worship. It requests the governors of all provinces to take the necessary measures to prevent such incidents from happening again and to enhance tolerance towards individuals with different religion and beliefs.”

– “Attacks against clergy and places of worship of non-Muslim communities have
been reported. Missionaries have been portrayed in the media or by the authorities as a threat to the integrity of the country and non-Muslim minorities as not being an integral part of Turkish society. To date, use of language that might incite hatred against non-Muslim minorities has been left unpunished.”

– “Non-Muslim religious communities - as organised structures of religious groups - continue to face problems such as lack of legal personality and restricted property rights. These communities have also encountered problems with the management of their foundations and ith recovering property by judicial means.”

– “Several churches ave not been able to register their places of worship. Alevis face difficulties with opening their places of worship (Cem houses or “Cemevi”). Cem houses are not recognised as places of worship and receive no funding from the authorities.

– The Halki (Heybeliada) Greek Orthodox seminary remains closed.”

– “The Ecumenical Patriarch is not free to use the ecclesiastical title Ecumenical on all
occasions. In June 2007, the Court of Cassation ruled on a case against the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate … This decision potentially creates further difficulties to the Patriarchate and to other non-Muslim religious communities in the exercise of their rights guaranteed under the European Convention of Human Rights.”

– “In December 2006, 122 foreign clergy were working in Turkey under the Bylaw on the Law on Work Permits for Foreigners. However, there are still cases reported of foreign clergy who wish to work in Turkey facing difficulties and whose right to equal treatment with Turkish nationals is not ensured.”

It is now clear that Turkey, a country to which Western visitors have often applied adjectives such as “timeless” and “slothful”, is changing profoundly, and with un-Oriental speed.

Anyone who’s been following the news out of Turkey this year has to nod in agreement when reading the lead to Christopher de Bellaigue’s interesting article in the New York Review of Books. It was only last April that the army issued a veiled threat to intervene if the governing AK party — usually called a “party with Islamist roots” — tried to overturn Turkey’s secular system.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan called their bluff and won a snap general election, allowing his AK partner Abdullah Gül to be elected president. The AK-led government now plans to replace the military-era constitution with a new document that will confirm “our democratic, secular and social state and guarantee basic rights and freedoms”, as Gül told parliament early this month.

Gül and Erdogan started their careers as Islamists critical of secularism, but along the way came to see secularism as the best guarantee of more rights for Muslims. The secular system, they found, pledges to respect individual rights — the problem was that the rigid army-guided secularism of Kemalist Turkey did not allow them. One shorthand way of describing these ex-Islamists is “Muslim Democrats” analogous to the Christian Democrats of post-war Western Europe. Their stress is much more on promoting Muslim values than imposing Muslim laws. This is an important turn in political thinking in the Muslim world. If Turkey continues along the road it’s on, it could become easier to answer the question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy.

De Bellaigue’s “Turkey at the Turning Point?” gives a useful overview of the evolution of the AK party which he says “gives grounds for hope. It is possible that an Islamist movement with a history of intolerance and bigotry will succeed in transforming Turkish politics along genuinely democratic lines”.

One of the factors behind this evolution in Islamist thinking in Turkey is Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim preacher who founded a large and influential movement named after him. He advocates what might be called a “middle class Islam” that advocates a secular state, personal freedom, religious tolerance and an entrepreneurial spirit. The movement has built up a large media and business empire in Turkey and a network of more than 100 schools in Turkey and Central Asia. It is active in international dialogue with other religions.

A three-day conference on Gülen and his movement was held in London last weekend. Its website has posted a massive 755-page PDF with all the papers presented there. Two that are particularly helpful for understanding this movement and the changing relationship between Islam and politics in Turkey are “What Made The Gülen Movement Possible?” by Mustafa Akyol and “Changing Perspectives on Islamism and Secularism in Turkey: The Gülen Movement and the AK Party” by Ahmet T. Kuru.

Akyol makes the interesting point that these Turkish Muslims came to see the West as better than the limited “Westernising” that Turkey’s secularist establishment offered them. He quotes Gülen, who lives in the United States, as saying:

“Islam flourishes in American and Europe much better than in many Muslim countries. This means freedom and the rule of law are necessary for personal Islam. Moreover, Islam does not need the state to survive, but rather needs educated and financially rich communities to flourish. In a way, not the state but rather community is needed under a full democratic system.”