The Turkish alternative

[Violet_Crumble]

Worth posting for the way the author suggested with a serious face that the PM of a country that is fervent in denying the Armenian genocide should be a spokesman for the Muslim world...

The Muslim world deserves a more respectable spokesman than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the extremist and hateful president of Iran. That voice could well belong to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

For almost half a century, the Muslim world has been witness to a variety of movements intended to unify it: nationalism that was a response to decolonization; the pan-Arabist ideologies of Gadhafi, Nasser and Saddam Hussein; and more recently, the Sunni version of Islamic radicalism typified by Al-Qaida, or the Shi'ite strain whose leader is the Islamic Republic of Iran. The dream of a unified Arab-Muslim world has imperceptibly metamorphized into the utopia of a unified Muslim world, bringing together the Umma, the community of believers. Today, the man who claims to personify this unity is President Ahmadinejad, even though he belongs to a minority within Islam, Shi'ism.

But that's not the worst of it. The type of rhetoric cultivated by the Iranian leader, which is based largely on the concept of jihad, "holy war," reflects an attitude of violence never before seen expressed toward the West, and specifically toward the United States and Israel, the latter of which he has threatened with annihilation. This warlike language is perceived as threatening even within the Muslim world, whose moderate regimes fear the creation of a Shi'ite crescent in the Middle East, one that could be a redoubtable force for destabilization. This impression is reinforced by the behavior of Iran's Lebanese client, Hezbollah, over the past few months.


On Iran's border, however, at the crossroads of West and East, is a country that manages to subtly maintain a balance between tradition and modernity: Turkey. Turkish society seems to have succeeded in making the transition to modernity by adapting Western values: secularism, freedom of thought and belief, and of course, democracy.

Here is a country that puts paid to all the theories characterizing Islam as incompatible with democracy. On the contrary, while clearly affirming its Muslim culture, Turkey manages to maintain a rights-based regime in the image of Western democracies.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/826188.html

[Igel]

1. "Rights-based", as long as

we construe it in a limited fashion.

After all, Xians still can't own property in Turkey--only Muslims can.

On the other hand, it's surely a good sign, as a 2004 Human Rights report states, that the number of forced, impromptu circumcisions of Xian inductee into the military is way, way down. (Circumcisions committed not by doctors, but by the soldiers' comrades at arms.)

[bemildred]

2. This appears to be occasional drivel.

Written for Olmert's visit to Turkey. I expect the Mooslims will decide for themselves what they "deserve" and whether they want to be unified or not. I would guess not. These are not good times for unifiers. You can sort of hear echoing in the background of this piece a worry that Turkey and Iran have a number of common interests and might be inclined to pursue them together, a sound concern.