The full article is in the attached pdf file or you can go to our website: http://www.jcpa.org/.
Vol. 9, No. 24 9 May 2010
Harold Rhode
- From the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk founded a modern democratic state by forging the entirely unprecedented notion in the Islamic world of a secular Turkish identity. Moreover, this identity was to be based on the Western notion of loyalty to a geographic entity rather than religious solidarity.
- Today there is an internal battle among Turkish Muslims between forces that want to be part of the Western world and those that want to return Turkey's political identity to be based primarily on Islamic solidarity. But it isn't Ottoman Islam that these Islamist Turks seek to revive. Their Islam is more in tune with the fanatically anti-Western principles of Saudi Wahhabi Islam.
- It is not clear whether the present government of Turkey really cares to be part of the EU. Thus, when European leaders insist that Turkey has no place in Europe, they may be playing into the hands of the Islamist forces in Turkey who can say, in effect, "The EU is a Christian club which will never accept us, so we need to look elsewhere, to our Muslim brothers."
- In addition, American involvement has not always proven helpful. The U.S. attempted to reach out to radical leaders in a mistaken belief that they were forces of moderate Islam, thus inadvertently granting them legitimacy.
- If a moderate form of Turkish Islam is to be revived, it must stand up to the onslaught of Wahhabism and the temptations of Islamism.
