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.”

The rest of the world often forgets that there are Christian churches dotted across the Muslim world and some of those communities date back to the earliest years of the faith. Fredrik Dahl and Reza Derakhshi from our Tehran bureau recently visited a remote medieval outpost of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their report says:

The last priest left the Black Church more than half a century ago and now the picture on the wall of a former monk’s cell is of the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, not Jesus.

But Iran says this medieval Armenian Christian retreat in a mountainous region close to Turkey and Armenia shows it is observing the rights of other faiths.

Read the full story here.

Dahl interviewed Sebouh Sarkissian, the Armenian archbishop of Tehran, for the feature. As a FaithWorld extra, here is the Q&A of their talk:

Armenians make up the largest Christian minority in Iran, their presence dating back to the time of the ancient Persian empire, but their numbers have declined since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Sebouh Sarkissian, Armenian archbishop in Tehran for the past eight years, spoke to Reuters at his office next to the Armenian cathedral in the Iranian capital about the situation for his community in the Islamic Republic.

Q. What do you think of Iran’s application for a medieval Armenian monastery, St Thaddeus Church, also known as the Black Church, to become a United Nations World Heritage site?

A. We have the feeling that the government is taking care of our religious heritage, historical churches and sacred sites … This of course makes us happy.

Q. What would it mean in practical terms?

A. It will be supervised by (an) international body … and it also somehow secures the existence of that church.

Q. So you are well-treated by the authorities?

A. In this manner yes; in keeping, maintaining, the spiritual richness and religious sites of this country.

Q. Any problems facing Armenians in Iran today?

A. Generally speaking, as citizens of this country, we are facing the same difficulties that every Iranian is facing nowadays … The Armenians, since they have been living here for
centuries, they have accommodated themselves to the Iranian lifestyle. Despite having said this, sometimes as a Christian community we face difficulties.

Q. Any examples?

A. Well, for instance, the government has prepared a textbook of religion and they have imposed (a rule) on us to teach that text book… Of course they are not familiar with Christian expressions and mentality … so that is one of the main difficulties.

Q. Do you think this book will be removed?

A. Once when I was talking to the (government) minister I asked him: ‘would you accept … that I prepare a text book on Islam, on the Koran, and ask some other Christians to come and teach it in your schools? Would you accept that?’ He started laughing.

Q. Does your community experience discrimination in Iran?

A. Not as such … I think it is an innovation from the West, that people are coming and always asking: is there discrimination in this country? I can tell you that I’ve felt
discrimination even in the United states, even in Europe.

Q. Can you drink alcohol, even though it is banned in Iran?

A. Alcoholic drinks are allowed, not officially of course … we use wine during the mass, the worship, and that’s why they somehow allow us to do (it) … but in general the
usage of alcohol is not good. It is not encouraged.

Q. Have many Armenians left Iran since the revolution?

A. The process of migration regarding the Armenian community started even before the revolution … Immigration and migration, it is a phenomenon all over the world … not
anything peculiar to Iran and Iranian society.”

Q. You don’t believe it is a sign they are not well-treated?

A. No, because even Iranians are emigrating from this country, not only Christians, not only Armenians.

Q. Do you see a future for the Armenian community in Iran?

A. Yes, definitely, our existence is rooted in this soil, in this country … I don’t think we are in danger. If we are in danger it means the whole society is in danger.

An unprecedented call from 138 Muslim scholars for better Christian-Muslim understanding had a Warholesque 15-minutes-of- fame in most media last week. Their letter to world Christian leaders got covered widely in English-speaking media (including by Reuters) and much less so in many European countries, possibly because the news conferences presenting it were in London and Washington. Some reactions from Christian leaders were included in the reporting that day. The following day, the reaction from the Vatican — the main addressee of the letter that represents more than half of Christianity — made for another story (here is our report and the original Vatican Radio report in Italian).

The story has now faded from the headlines but it’s one of those developments that cry out for a next step. The Muslim scholars invited their Christian counterparts to a dialogue, so the ball is in the Christians’ court. More specifically, it’s in the Vatican’s court. The Roman Catholic Church is the largest and most centralised branch of the Christian family. The Muslims also have a bone to pick with Pope Benedict, who just over a year ago gave his famous Regensburg speech that implied Islam was violent and irrational. That sparked off violent protests in the Muslim world and, in turn, inspired 38 Muslim scholars to write a first letter in October 2006 that denounced that violence, asked for a dialogue (which Benedict had suggested in Regensburg) and questioned his understanding of Islam.

The latest letter is a follow-up, with a far larger group of signatories and the more ambitious goal of engaging in a theological dialogue with Christians. The wealth of Koran and Bible quotes cited and the argument that Islam agrees with the heart of Christian teaching — to love God and neighbour — showed these scholars want a long and serious theological discussion with Christianity.

The question now is how the Vatican will respond. Soon after his election in 2005, Pope Benedict downgraded the Vatican department dealing with Islam by folding it into the Church’s culture ministry. Muslim leaders complained that this meant he wanted to deal with Islam as a culture and not a religion. After the Regensburg fiasco, many apologies and a fence-mending visit to Turkey, the pope did an about-face in May 2007 and re-established the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue as a separate dicastery (department). But instead of restoring its former head, Islam expert Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, he picked former diplomat Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran to run it.

Even as they presented the appeal in Washington, Iranian scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr (a signatory) of George Washington University and U.S. Islam expert John Esposito of Georgetown University seemed sceptical about the Vatican’s willingness to actually follow up on this invitation. According to the transcript of their news conference, Nasr said “Most of the response that has come from the Vatican, after the Islamic protest and all of these things, has been diplomatic, not theological. The very first meeting in the Vatican [after Regensburg] was with Muslim ambassadors. These are people appointed as ambassadors, many of whom know nothing at all about Islamic issues. What is being evaded all the time are those underlying differences in belief that then cause the political and social differences to manifest themselves on the surface. We have to be honest enough to tackle that, and not to hide it in the closet.”

Esposito agreed: “I think that you do have a strong school of thought in the Vatican which does not seem to believe that there can be a theological dialogue with Islam. It’s based on what I regard as an old theological position, and it’s a position with which I was raised. Before I did my work for the last 35 years on Islam, I was trained as a Catholic theologian. In those days, the whole approach was that because Islam says that the Prophet is the final prophet and has the final revelation, therefore there can’t be any theological dialogue. It seems to me we’ve moved beyond that, at least we ought to move beyond that. But this is one of the questions that has arisen, and it has not been answered during this papacy. The response to Regensburg did not answer that.”

Another possible stumbling block stands out in the Muslim letter. The first section on the love of God argues that both Islam and Chrisianity make this their first commandment. That’s fine. But the letter quotes several suras from the Koran stressing that “there is no god but God, He Alone, He hath no associate, His is the sovereignty and His is the praise and He hath power of all things.” This is the doctrine of tawhid, the oneness of God, that is fundamental to Islam and differs from the Trinity (three persons in one God) in Christianity. The signatories signalled they wanted to avoid the centuries-old disputes about this by not citing the most important sura for this doctrine (sura 112 –Say: He, Allah, is One. Allah is He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten. And none is like Him.). But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t come up.

It would be interesting to see if anyone on the Christian side takes the initiative to work out a consensus of opinions about Islam, maybe a reply to the Muslims’ letter. An invitation to actual discussions would be even more interesting. Some Protestants might be ready to give this a try, but the Vatican famously “thinks in centuries” and could turn out to be the slow boat in the convoy on this.

Here are texts of the letter in English, Arabic, French and Italian.

Some further reactions to it:

Anglican Communion — Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams
Church of England — Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali
World Council of Churches — General Secretary Rev. Samuel Kobia
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson (also president of the Lutheran World Federation)
Evangelical Alliance — General Director Rev. Joel Edwards
Arab News (Saudi Arabia) editorial
Gulf News (Dubai) editorial
Muslim Council of Britain — Assistant Secretary-General Inayat Bunglawala
National Review Online (U.S.)