Mustafa Akyol Quotes
Foreign journalists writing about Turkey like to focus on the most fundamental divide in Turkish society: the rift between religious conservatives and secularists.
Akyol, Mustafa. "A Break in the Turkish Coalition." The New York Times, 26 Nov. 2013.
From the latter part of the 20th century onward, religious nationalism was no longer a force for most religions and nations except Muslim countries. It was the only religion left where a large proportion of the adherents saw no distinction between the religion and the government. Nations that had separation of church and state were not conducive to the extreme fundamentalist form of Islam where the Secular Leader and the Religious leader was to be embodied as a single person. As a result Islamic religious nationalists argued for a Theocracy and at times fought for it with violent means. The secular government typically, to curtail the violence and prevent a religious takeover, often outlawed the extreme religious Islamic parties. While Aslan cites the Muslim Brotherhood failure in Egypt as a desirable outcome, the only way the other forces of Egyptian society could prevent the Islamists from taking over turning the country into a theocracy was to forcefully repress the extremists. The Turkish outcome was much better, but there was the threat of repression of the Justice and Development Party when it won a majority control of the government. There were explicit threats that if it tried to weaken the secular nature of the government as Ataturk had formulated it, the military would come “out of the barracks” and oust the government as they had done before. There were nations like China which persecuted religions such as certain forms of Christianity, but those religions were not fighting for religious nationalism. They only wished the freedom to practice their religion and had no program or theology that argued for Christianizing the government. The Tamil Hindus of Sri Lanka did not want a Hindu government and were perfectly free to practice their religion. The problem was that they felt that there was systemic social and economic discrimination against the Tamils and they fought for independence—not of a Hindu state, but of a secular, nondiscriminatory state of equal opportunity.
The Ataturk reforms modernized Turkey and turned it into the most modern and democratic of the Islamic countries. However, there were always forces and populist governments that tried to erode the Ataturk reforms—especially secularism.
He was providing historical perspective to the 2016 Republican Party split in which nativism and anti-immigration was a major factor.
What if you are a conservative in a liberal environment? Then what you are conserving is liberalism.
His reference was to his experience as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, which he and associates views as a liberal organization, while others viewed it as a conservative bastion of the establishment.
Ataturk was one of the few revolutionary leaders who appreciated the importance of maintaining a Republic over time and allowed for the possibility that the revolutionary government might become corrupt. So like Thomas Jefferson, he always told citizens to be ever vigilant. In the case of Turkey, on several occasions fundamentalist religious forces have attempted to regain control of the secular republic and the government and mindful of Ataturk’s warnings the Army and other forces have rallied to keep Turkey independent and secular.
Ironically, without the word “wicked” most people would regard the first sentence as a good description of elements of a modern democracy. It illustrates that for the Islamic fundamentalist democracy substitutes the rule of man for the rule of God, freedom of speech allows heresy and blasphemy to to uttered and communicated, and religion which is supposed to inform and direct politics. So what is good for the lover of democracy is the very thing that is bad for Islam. This is not a uniquely Islamic viewpoint. It has been and is held by fundamentalist Christians and Jews as well who would return to Biblical law punishing blasphemy and heresy with death and have religion drive all politics.
This speech was given in the early days of WWII when it was far from clear that we would win.
Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish writer and journalist. He is the author of Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, long-listed in 2012 for the Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the world's best non-fiction book in English. He became a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times in 2013. He is mainly famous in the western world for his arguments that Islam is highly compatible with classical liberalism and Enlightenment values, and that Islamic practice and the governance of Muslim-majority countries should be reformed along those lines similar to what previously happened in Christian-majority Europe.
