Mustafa Akyol

Sometimes an article by one man summarizes the mindset of millions. The piece titled “Bam Stirs Fear in Israel,” written by Ralph Peters and published in the New York Post on January 1, was like that. Fearing that “Bam” (i.e, Obama) could “stab Israel in the back” (i.e., tell her to stop the bloodbath in Gaza), Mr. Peters was trying to persuade his readers why it was crucial that the Israeli military kept on bombing the Gaza Strip -- a deadly operation which has killed more than 150 women and children up to this point.

“Fighting terrorists effectively means going in on the ground, and sooner is better than later,” argued Mr. Peters. “You can't impress fanatics into surrendering. You have to kill them. Nothing else works.”

“Let me repeat that,” he continuingly wrote to make sure that we all get the message right: “You have to kill fanatics. Nothing else works.”

Why they become terrorists:
You can replace the word “fanatics” here by other ones such as “extremists” or “terrorists.” These are the terms we hear very often since September 11, 2001. Strangely they are used as if they refer to some bizarre creatures, some sort of sadist beasts, whose very nature compels them to inflict pain on innocent people.
Yet, in fact, there are no natural born terrorists. People become fanatics, extremists or terrorists for some reason.

What is that reason, then, in the case of the fanatics that Mr. Peters is referring to, the militants of Hamas? He and his likeminded would probably tell us that it is their political theology, i.e., Islamism, which makes them fight against Israel. If we accept this, we would have to assume that these people just happened to be seduced by a radical version of the Muslim faith for some accidental reason. They might have, for example, just picked up a twisted Koranic tasfeer (commentary) or start to attend a radical mosque.

But wait a minute, for God’s sake. In the past forty years, Palestine had generated all sorts of extremists, not just Islamists ones. In fact, for long, the tip of the Palestinian sphere had been sharpened by ideas other than Islam, such nationalism or Marxism. (That’s why Israel supported Hamas in the late 80’s, as an alternative to the then more militant Fatah.) One of the most radical terrorists which fought Israel was actually George Habash, a Palestinian Christian.

The truth is actually all-obvious: It is neither their nature nor their ideology which is creating all these “fanatics” in Palestine. The root of the problem is the occupation, oppression and humiliation that they have suffered for generations. Ideologies matter, but only as a catalyst. The main engine of radicalization is what Israel has done, and continues to do, to their people.

The Israeli air force has been bombing the Gaza Strip since last Saturday. As of yesterday, the death toll was over 400 hundred. According to the United Nations, a quarter of these people were women and children. The wounded, which again included hundreds of innocent civilians, were calculated to be more than 1,000. Now let’s stop there and think for a second. I repeat: the Israeli war machine has killed around 100 innocent civilians. Some children died bleeding in their mother’s arms, others were burned alive.

Worse than 9/11
Please try to understand want this means. Try to grasp the scale of this slaughter, too. Gaza’s population is around 1.5 million. The population of the United States is 200 times more than that. So, in order to understand the scale of the loss in Gaza, you need to multiply the number of its innocent victims with 200. (That is a method often used by Israelis to explain to the Americans the level of their sufferings.)

That will give you 20,000 dead bodies. As you can figure out, this six times more than the carnage that innocent Americans fell victim to on Sept. 11, 2001.

So, six 9/11’s in only six daysÉ That’s what the poor, imprisoned and humiliated people of Gaza have just suffered. And it is still going on. As I was writing this piece, the Israeli army was preparing a ground offensive.

Now, those Westerners, especially Americans, who have been asking, "Why do they hate us," in the face of radicalized Muslims, should find an answer here. Because while all the bloodshed is going on, the world, and especially the United States, is apparently doing nothing to stop it. In the eyes of the Muslims of the world, this is a clear and present proof that the West does not give a damn about the lives of their co-religionists.

I know how you would object to me. You will say that Israel does not target civilians on purpose and this is all "collateral damage." Unfortunately, most of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims don’t understand such delicate terms. They just see what is all-obvious: Israel’s U.S.-made helicopters are bombing houses and apartments, and killing unarmed civilians.

I also know that Hamas has a responsibility in all this. They mindlessly started those firing those Qassam rockets into Israel, which has killed four civilians up to now. (As a side note, let me remind that those rockets had not been lethal until Israel started its attack on Gaza.) But, for God’s sake, that is why we define Hamas -- or at least its military wing -- as a terrorist organization. The fact that they are killing Israeli civilians is what makes them illegitimate. So, how are we supposed to define the Israeli army, which had killed 25 times more civilians than Hamas in the past six days?

It doesn’t matter whether you convince me or not to "understand" Israel. I am actually trying to convince fellow Muslims that I can reach to tell that the Hamas way is the wrong way. This week, I wrote a column in Turkish criticizing Hamas for refusing to join the peace process and ending the cease-fire. I also talked to a group of 300 conservative Muslims in Istanbul at a foundation and made the same argument. Even those who agreed that Hamas is subscribing to terrorist methods and is doing wrong, shouted out loud that Israel is "the real terrorist."

And this is Turkey, for God’s sake. Imagine how millions of other Muslims in other nations are thinking all about this. Imagine what if some of the most radicals among them decide to take revenge from "the Jews and Americans?" You see why do we have 9/11’s, London bombings, and Mumbai mayhems?

To be sure, Islamist terror groups such as Al Qaeda have fanatical ideologies that would drive them even if there were no state of Israel. But this bleeding problem in the Middle East is the main item on their agenda and the most compelling catalyst in their propaganda.

The United States, and especially the office President-elect Barack Obama, should see that this is a highway to hell. The more Israel acts ruthlessly in the Holy Land, the more radicalization in the Muslim World deepens. Pro-Israeli propagandists such as Alan M. Dershowitz can persuade the American public that everything the Jewish State is doing is just perfectly fine. Yossi Klein can continue tell us in The New Republic how laudable the Israeli army is. (His recent piece titled "Why Gaza Matters" starts like this: "It was Israel at its best. In response to random attacks aimed at its civilians, Israel launched precise attacks aimed at terrorists." Alas, he does not even bother to mention that a hundred of these "terrorists" were babies, kids and mothers.)

Yet Muslims don’t listen to Dershowitz, Klein, or even the CNN. Some even wouldn’t listen to their co-religionists who call for restraint. The more Israel kills, the more hatred is reaped among them. And we know what the harvest is.

Obama should step in
Arguments like "oh, sorry, what can Israel do, its enemies fire rockets from cities," do not work. As Zbigniew Brzezinski wisely said the other day on MSNBC, if your enemy is within a civilian population, then you should not hit. Israel tried the same ruthless and mindless tactic in Lebanon; what did she gain?

From the experience of my own kind country, I know that living in a constant milieu of military conflict can militarize a nation. The Israelis -- except their dovish minority -- seem to have a high dose of that combined with ideological steroids. Obama should force them, and Hamas of course, to stop killing the innocents and make concessions to achieve peace. Otherwise, we are all doomed.

Is there a "neighborhood pressure" on people with secular lifestyles in Turkey’s conservative towns? Are they, for example, harassed for drinking alcohol or wearing shorts?

You bet. Most Anatolian cities have a pretty illiberal culture in which everybody is expected to subscribe to norms of "appropriate" dress code or behavior. That’s one reason why I rather live in Istanbul Ñ which is not a beacon of liberty, either, but at least much more diverse. Neighborhood pressureA recent survey on "Being Different in Anatolia," supported by the prestigious Boğaziçi University and the Open Society Institute, highlighted this problem. It was directed by political scientist Binnaz Toprak - my university professor - who led a team of three journalists which interviewed 401 people in 12 different cities of Anatolia such as Konya, Kayseri, Trabzon or Batman. All of the interviewed were specially chosen from groups with secular lifestyles: members of the Society for Kemalist Thought, CHP organizations, Alevis, student associations, feminist clubs, etc. And they told that they felt themselves under the pressure of the conservative and sometimes outright bigoted "neighborhood"s. "We heard from retailers, businessmen and civil servants," notes Prof. Toprak, "that most people have begun to attend Friday prayers or closed down their stores just to be seen as though they were going to mosque during prayer time." Or, she adds, "they hesitated to have drinks in public places and began to act as if they were fasting during Ramadan even though they were not..." Unfortunately, some conservative commentators, which have praised previous works by Professor Toprak, now criticize her severely and argue that the "neighborhood pressure" is imaginary. They should have done better. Because pressure is a very personal thing: only you decide whether you face it or not. By this dismissive attitude, those conservatives only mirror the lack of empathy that the secularists show when it comes to the official pressure on veiled women. That’s why we should take Dr. Toprak’s findings seriously. But we should also not exaggerate them. First of all, this is a targeted research, not a random survey. In other words, the interviewees went out to find out those specific groups that could be under neighborhood pressure. So, it does not give a full picture of the country.In fact, there are many signs showing that Anatolia is actually less conservative today than it used to be. It is more business-oriented, its women are more integrated into society, and it is more open to the world. But perhaps it is this very dynamic which creates a tension. Maybe the clash between the secular establishment and the AKP boils down in society to the tension between the mosque community and beer hall crowd. Maybe, because of their political ascendancy, the conservatives are now more self-confident and triumphant. These are all speculations, since Dr. Toprak’s research does not tells us much about the conservative side of the picture. We would be misleading ourselves by ignoring the complexities there.We would also be misleading ourselves by thinking that the conservatism in question comes all from religion. The survey tells us that among the "inappropriate" behaviors in Anatolia, there is not just consuming alcohol or "eating during Ramadan", but also speaking Kurdish. "Kurdish youth who are called on their cell phones in a bus by their relatives who don’t speak Turkish," the research says, "decide not to take the call". And allergy to Kurdish is not an Islamic reaction -- it is a nationalist one.The problem, then, is actually a lack of tolerance to anything that is different. And, alas, that is the problem of the whole of Turkey! Not just the religious conservatives but also the secularists are very, very, intolerant. That’s why neighborhood pressure exists everywhere, from conservative and parochial towns to secular and chic plazas. In the former, the headscarf is the demanded norm. In the latter, it is the expelled heresy.Two illiberal campsSo, you may ask, if it is such a nation of illiberals, is Turkey simply hopeless?Not really. I think we are still making progress. In the past, one illiberal camp -- the secular Kemalists -- had dominated the whole society. Now we have two illiberal camps clashing with other. That is better, because it paves the road to pluralism. The optimistic scenario is that these two warring camps will wear themselves out, and, over time, come to a live-and-let-live consensus. And the pessimistic scenario? Well, it is that we will be trapped in this cultural civil war, for ever and ever.

Every year, toward the end of December, warnings come from some of the conservative Islamic voices in Turkey. They advise their co-religionists to avoid indulging in New Year’s Eve celebrations, which they see as a "Christian tradition." Some of them, especially the most orthodox, even go as far as saying that Muslims will be betraying their faith if they sympathize with Santa Claus or Christmas trees. This year, it was "Cübbeli Ahmet" i.e., literally, Ahmet the robe-wearer, who was the most vocal bias-monger. This ultra-orthodox imam gave a shivering message to his small community of devout followers: had they died while celebrating the new year, they would have gone to the after-life as infidels.

Jesus of Nazareth
Of course, there is a lot ignorance, and confusion, here. First of all, Christmas and New Year’s Eve are separate things. While the former is specifically Christian, the latter is secular and somewhat universal Ñ at least if you do not have an objection to the Gregorian calendar that most of us use. So, a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, or anybody else can well skip Christmas and celebrate New Year’s Eve as the beginning of a new round of our lives.

But confusion is abundant and found on all sides. In Turkey, they exist among not only the ultra-orthodox, but also the ultra-secular as well. The latter happily use the imagery of Santa Claus and the Christmas tree by totally abandoning their religious meanings and attaching them rather to the secular, and often quite hedonistic, New Year’s Eve. Thus, in the last days of December, you can see Christmas trees in the houses of upper-class Turks. For them, it is simply the Western way to celebrate the new year. The secularists in the United States, who want to de-Christianize the "holiday" season, might perhaps take a hint from this Turkish way of de-Christianizing the symbols of Christ.

In fact, there is a good reason for secular Turks to dismiss the religious meaning of Christmas: for them, Jesus Christ does not mean much. But is this true for religious Turks, as well?

Well, if they get their religion right, it shouldn’t be. Because, although some of them are not fully aware, Jesus Christ is also a holy figure for Muslims. The "Son of Mary," as he is sometimes called in the Koran, has a very special place in the Islamic faith. A very long chapter of Muslim Scripture, the "Sura of Mary," is devoted to the praise of his mother and the virgin birth she gave. In this chapter and also others, the preaching and miracles of Jesus are told in detail. In the sura named "Saff," Muslims are told to take his apostles as examples to follow. Jesus is even referred to in the Koran as "the Word of God," a term which has a curious resemblance to the introduction of the Fourth Gospel.

To be sure, the Koran rejects that Jesus is God, or "Son of God," and denounces the Doctrine of Trinity. What I have found always intriguing is that although this Koranic picture of Jesus contradicts mainstream Christianity, it looks very similar to that of the earliest Christians: the Jewish followers of Jesus who regarded him as the promised messiah, the Son of David, but not God. From a careful reading of the New Testament, we can understand that the leader of these Jewish Christians were James the Just, the brother of Jesus, whereas Paul started another line that would ultimately became gentile, and thus mainstream, Christianity.

While gentile Christianity was making inroads in Rome, to ultimately become its official faith, Jewish Christianity was struggling in the wilderness to perish in a few centuries. Early church history hints that the members of this line latter were called either "Nazarenes" or "Ebionites." The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that the Nazarenes "exalted Jesus as a just man, andÉ read the Gospel of Peter," which only survives in fragments today. Wikipedia underlines that the Ebionites "regarded Jesus as a mortal human messianic prophet, but not as divine." Had this earliest form of Christianity lived today, it would probably have a Christology that is much closer to the Islamic view.

Another Mevlid Kandili?
Whatever happened, happened. And Christianity took a Pauline form, whose logical end was the creation of the Doctrine of Trinity, which is unacceptable both to the Jewish and the Muslim understanding of monotheism.

Yet the fact remains that despite their different opinions on his nature today Christians and Muslims are the only groups on Earth which adore Jesus Christ. The Koran even describes Muslims as "those who have faith in God and His Messengers and do not differentiate between any of them," (4: 152). So, their affection to Jesus, or any other prophet, should not be less than to Muhammad.

That is why Christmas does not need to be seen by Muslims as an alien idea. The birthday of Prophet Muhammad is widely celebrated in the Muslim world as "Milad an-Nabi." In Turkey, it is called the "Mevlid Kandili." Why not welcome the birthday of another prophet, a most revered one in the Koran?

Well, then, I guess all that’s left is for me is to extend to my not just Christian, but also Muslim readers, that joyful wish: Merry Christmas!

The bizarre question in the headline does not come from me. It comes from a member of the Turkish Parliament on the ticket of the main opposition People’s Republican Party, or CHP. Mrs. Canan Arıtman, who represents the "most progressive city" in Turkey, İzmir, actually not curiously inquired but passionately argued that President Gül was a secret Armenian. "Look at his ethnic origins from his mother side," she said to journalists three days ago. "And you will see why he supports the Armenians." I personally don’t care where people’s ethnic origin come from, and it wouldn’t matter to me if our president had a lineage in any of the dozens of different ethnic groups that make up the "nation of Turkey." But many in this country who insist on defining the nation on ethnic "Turkishness" are obsessed with who-is-who in the countrywide family tree. This ethnicist Ñ something that is slightly short of racist Ñ attitude can be found in almost all political traditions. Yet, I think it was phenomenal that this week it came from the ranks of the CHP, which, amusingly, considers itself the standard bearer of "Turkish modernity."

WeApologize.Com
Let me first tell you how this came about. It started last Monday with a declaration prepared by four public intellectuals; Baskın Oran, Ali Bayramoğlu, Ahmet İnsel, Cengiz Aktar. (Besides his chair at Bahçeşehir University, Dr. Aktar is also a columnist for this paper.) They put up a website addressed www.ozurdiliyoruz.com, which means "WeApologize.Com," and said this: "My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them."

Many Turks, mostly intellectuals, joined the campaign, and in just a few days the number of signatories had reached 14,000. But the reaction against them also grew like wildfire. Political leaders, including the prime minister, said that they did not approve this "apology," because there wasn’t anything that Turks needed to apologize for. They voiced the common view in Turkey which regards the tragedy of 1915 as an episode of inter-communal violence, not a one-sided "genocide."

I did not join the campaign. I, too, think that much of the tragedy boils down to the inter-communal blood-lust that erupted during the fall of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. The loss of the Armenians were definitely greater than that of the other side, Turks and Kurds, and that is a deep pain that we have to respect, understand and share today. So, I could sign a declaration of "compassion," a term whose Latin origin means "suffering together." But a one-sided apology did not convince me to put my name to it.

Yet it is definitely a right for others to sign the declaration. And how can we blame them for expressing a sympathy that they genuinely feel? Many people do not understand that fact, because they think all citizens should be united behind "national causes." But the conscious of individuals are more valuable than such causes. In fact, setting this conscious free should actually be the greatest national cause. What made President Abdullah Gül a target of CHP’s not-so-closet fascism is that he defended this much-needed freedom of conscious. When asked about the "We Apologize" campaign, he, unlike party leaders who denounced it, simply said that it is "a matter of freedom of speech."

Hence came the attack by CHP’s İzmir MP, Canan Arıtman. She told the press that the president’s grandmother was of Armenian descent, and that was why he was "supporting the Armenians." The next day, Gül’s office issued a statement. "The president sees the free medium of debate on this topic," it read, "as the proof of the advanced and free democratic environment in Turkey, and the self-confidence of the Turkish people." But Mrs. Arıtman was too furious to calm down. She spoke the other day and insisted on her view. "If you are supporting the Armenians," she said, "it is only natural that people wonder whether you are Armenian."

Yesterday daily Radikal published a phone conversation between her and the paper’s Ankara representative, Murat Yetkin. It went like this:

Yetkin: Why do you think that the ethnic origin of the president’s family matters?

Arıtman: It doesn’t matter.

Yetkin: Then why did you mention it?

Arıtman: As president, he needs to protect the rights of this nation. But he is protecting his ethnic belongingÉ Whoever threatens Turkey by not opposing this campaign will be asked, ’are you an Armenian?’."



A Muslim democrat

To his credit, CHP Deputy Chairman Mustafa Özyürek criticized this outright fascism in his party’s ranks. However, we haven’t heard anything from the party’s leader, Deniz Baykal, yet. And we should note that Arıtman’s line of thinking is not alien to the CHP, which has proved to be xenophobic and minority-disliking over and over again in the recent years.

As for President Gül, I can only applaud him for the sane, democratic and liberal stance he takes. Fascist nutcases in this country depicted him as a crypto-Jew before. (A bestseller book, "The Gül of Moses," by a lunatic Kemalist author argued that he was a willing collaborator of the "elders of Zion.") And now he is being branded as a crypto-Armenian. All this only confirms that he is, in fact, a Muslim democrat.

On May 17, 2006, a horrible incident took place in Ankara. A 29-year-old lawyer named Alparslan Arslan stormed into one of Turkey’s legal strongholds, the Council of State, took his gun out and shot five senior judges. One of them, Mustafa Özbilgin, died. The killer was caught by the police and everything suggested that he was an Islamist fanatic. He reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" (God is great) as he fired his weapon. When got caught, he said that he was "a soldier of Allah." He also said that he shot the judges because of their stance against the right to wear headscarves. He even left a copy of the Islamist daily Vakit in his car, a paper which had strongly bashed the Council of State.

Reaping the secular whirlwind
Everybody denounced this killing, to be sure, but the secularists did so with a deeper passion. For them, this attack was the sum of all their fears: "Islamists," including the governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP, were trying to destroy the secular republic, and now they had even started an armed struggle against it. "This is an attack against our secular republic," President Ahmet Necdet Sezer said, "yet we will defend it for ever." The funeral of the killed judge turned into a political rally. "Turkey is secular and will remain secular," tens of thousands chanted. They also protested the AKP government for "encouraging the killer," for that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan had lately criticized the judges of the Council of State for a controversial decision they made. They had decided that a school teacher shouldn’t wear a headscarf even on her way home, because "children could see that and take a bad example.

The Council of State shooting, in other words, changed Turkey’s political mood overnight. From that point on, the secularist campaign to overthrow the AKP government gained momentum. It lead to the "republic rallies" of early 2007; the "e-memorandum" of April 27, 2007, that the military issued to stop then AKP member, Abdullah Gül, from becoming president; and the closure case that another legal stronghold, the High Court of Appeals, opened against the AKP in March 2008.

But lo and behold!.. Something happened last July which suggested that the Council of State shooting was not an Islamist crime, but a one which was designed to appear that way in order to create all this secularist hysteria and political turmoil. That something was the indictment of the Ergenekon case. Prepared by a group of Istanbul prosecutors, based on an extensive investigation which started by the discovery of a huge pile of guns and grenades in an Istanbul home, this indictment had a shocking argument: that there was a nationalist/secularist network which called itself Ergenekon and employed terrorist tactics. These folks were dedicated to "save" Turkey from the AKP government, and they were provoking the steadiest way to get rid of such popular governments in Turkey: a military coup. Among their crimes were, the indictment alleged, the shooting at the Council of State and the bombing of the staunchly secular daily Cumhuriyet. Both of these acts were designed to aggravate the secularist camp to grind their axes.

The Ergenekon prosecutors were basing this allegation from the links they discovered between Alparslan Arslan, the Council of State shooter and the Ergenekon grandees, such as retired general Veli Küçük. Moreover, everything about Mr. Arslan was suggesting that he was a nationalist rather than an Islamist.

The Ergenekon indictment was accepted by the Istanbul court right away and the case is still going on as one of the most dramatic cases in Turkish history. Yet for a while, there emerged a very bizarre paradox: five months before the Ergenekon case, another critical case was opened. This was the closure case launched by Chief Prosecutor of the High Court of Appeals Abdurrahan Yalçınkaya against the AKP for being the "center of anti-secular activities." Mr. Yalçınkaya was referring to the Council of State shooting in his indictment as the most dramatic example of the "anti-secular" onslaught that the government had supposedly "encouraged".

In other words, while one indictment was regarding the Council of State shooting as a provocation designed for overthrowing the government, the other indictment was regarding the same attack as a reason to overthrow the government. As you would know, the infamous "closure case" ended last summer with non-closure. That had turned most eyes rather to the Ergenekon case. And the other day, another decision came which just made the Ergenekon case even more vindicated. The High Court of Appeals overturned the verdict which a criminal court in Ankara had taken on the Council of State shooting. That Ankara court had sentenced shooter Alparslan Arslan and other suspects in the case to life in prison. Apparently the High Court of Appeals didn’t have a problem with punishment, but it decided that the case would not be soundly judged if its alleged links with Ergenekon weren’t investigated. Thus, the High Court of Appeals decided that the Council of State shooting case must be merged with the Ergenekon case. Now the two cases will be somehow integrated. This is simply phenomenal. The High Court of Appeals is not the greatest fan of the "Islamists," as evidenced by the closure case its chief prosecutor opened against the AKP. Yet it seems that the evidence for a link between "the soldier of Allah" and the masters of Ergenekon are so obvious that the High Court decided to reframe the case. With this game-changing decision, now the Ergenekon case makes even more sense.

If you live in Istanbul, or any other major Turkish city, and have toured around a bit during the recent Kurban Bayramı, or the Feast of Sacrifice, you might have seen some carnage. For hundreds of thousands of sheep have been slaughtered in the four days of the religious holiday and some of this bloodshed took place right on the streets or near the highways. Many in the Turkish media criticized these "uncivilized scenes," and, they were right to do so. The practice of slaughtering animals in public space indeed looks, and is, uncivilized. Of course, one should seek some balance in denouncing this butchery, especially if he is not a principled vegetarian. Most of us do eat meat -- and rarely think that the beef on our plate comes from an animal that was happily chewing grass until recently. So, for most of us, the act of slaughtering animals should not be seen as barbaric. Moreover, we should note that Islamic legalists have emphasized the "rights" of the sacrifice animal Ñ that it should not be hurt before the final act and the slitting of the throat must be as quick and painless as possible.

In short, unless you are a vegetarian, you actually do not have much to say against the Feast of Sacrifice, for simply that it commands sacrifice.

The real problem, which has emerged in Turkey in the recent decades, is the way this ritual is practiced. In fact, quite a few Muslims prefer to observe this ritual unproblematically by simply donating to a charity that butchers the animals in modern slaughter-houses. But others decide to do it themselves, in the middle of Istanbul, with knives in their hands and blood on their aprons.

And here lies the essence of the problem: The latter group mostly consist of newcomers to the city. They are former villagers who just migrated to a big town in order to seek a better life. Yet most of their cultural codes are still shaped by the standards of rural life.

In their villages, they used to slaughter animals in their backyards and nobody ever made a fuss about it. But when they do the same thing in the middle of Istanbul, many people rightly raise eyebrows. And observers such as Christine Hafner, a spokeswoman for Europe’s Animal Welfare Organization, decided to write reports condemning "Turkey’s brutal practices."

Ms. Hafner and many others who despise what is going on every Kurban Bayramı have a point. But the problem is deeper and it stems from the peculiar social structure of Turkish society. In this country, religion, at least conservative religion, is mostly an issue of class. Upper class urban dwellers tend to be secular, whereas most of the pious happen to be either rural or newcomers to the city.

That is why the style, manners or even the accent of Turks very often hint whether they are religious or secular. If you go to a mosque, you do not expect to find people wearing designer jeans and speaking the "hip" Turkish which is filled with English words. If you go a trendy bar in Istanbul, this time you do not expect to hear the Anatolian accent and find someone who also attends the mosque.

Yet things were not this way a century ago, when Turkey was still called the Ottoman Empire. In the Ottoman society, religion was not an issue of class. Both the lower and the upper classes had their ways of commitment to Islam, and the way of the latter corresponded to a quite sophisticated culture. The best of Ottoman artists and intellectuals included many pious Muslims, who had articulated a refined Islamic way of life.

A great transformation
But the Kemalist Revolution, which dominated the second quarter of Turkey’s 20th century, changed everything. The Kemalist doctrine, which wanted to replace religion with "science," transformed the urban center, whereas religion survived only in the rural periphery. The sophisticated culture of Ottoman Islam was lost. Moreover, the revolution also destroyed the institutions which could preserve and update that culture: All Sufi orders, religious foundations and charitable organizations were banned. The aim was to create a society in which religion played no organizing role.

However, religion does a play a role, a big role, in most societies, and if you try to suppress it, you only worsen the nature of this powerful institution. This is exactly what happened in Turkey. From the 1950s on, cities started to receive more and more immigrants. These people brought their rural lifestyle with them. The religious beliefs and practices they carried were also rural and thus, from an urban point of view, unsophisticated. This only reinforced the secularism of the seculars, who thought that they were being encircled by the unwashed masses. The tension, as you would know, still goes on.

Time will help, though. The second and especially third generations of immigrants become better adapted to the city and its norms. Hence they develop a more urban Islam. And the medium we need to foster that modernization process is not secularist repression, as some argue, but religious freedom and free speech: Let everyone practice what they believe in. But also let them hear the criticism for what they do.

Deniz Baykal, the leader of the main opposition People’s Republican Party, or CHP, has been surprising us for a while. For years, he had slashed his sword for all the ultra-secularist causes you can imagine, including the ban on the Islamic headscarf in the "public square." But just a month ago, he made a surprising move by blessing the acceptance ceremony of a group of veiled women in his party. And, alas, these ladies were the most orthodox of all: they wore the all-black, all-covering chador. "We can’t push these people to the AKP’s ranks," he mind-bogglingly said. "They, too, deserve a place under the CHP roof."

As you can imagine, not all CHP folks were happy with this unexpected u-turn. Criticism against Baykal for "selling out secularism" grew in party ranks and newspaper columns. But, to date, he has remained defiant. He even took a bolder step this week, by countering his critics with a critique of the golden age of Turkish ultra-secularism: the "single party" period.

Rejecting the Golden Age?
That period had begun in 1925 when the newly founded CHP banned all political opposition in order to reign uncontested for a quarter of a century. In the '30’s, the party even became identical with the state, as was the case in Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy.

We Turks politely call that period "the single party regime," because the more common name given to such regimes, i.e., dictatorship, offends our sensibilities. It is just like calling our Kurds "southeasterners," or calling Iraqi Kurdistan "northern Iraq." This is a country of euphemisms.

For most Kemalists the "single party period" is what the age of Prophet Mohammed and the "rightly guided caliphs" are to devout Muslims. It is the ideal era when pure wisdom reigned supreme, only to be corrupted by the latecomers. That’s why the end of the "single party regime" is often described by Kemalist pundits, and even historians, as the beginning of the "counter-revolution."

In a speech he gave at parliament last Tuesday, Mr. Baykal referred to one of the tragicomic episodes from the Kemalist Golden Age: The ban put on villagers to walk on the Atatürk Boulevard of Ankara.

That massive avenue, that still passes from the heart of Ankara, was designed to be the symbol of the new republic and the new man it wanted to create. Decorated with statues of Atatürk himself, the Greek-god-look-alike monument in Güven Park, and the rediscovered "sun" of the pagan Hitites, this boulevard was meant to represent a clean break from the Ottoman-Islamic past.

But designing the public space was not enough: The people who will strolled on it had to be designed as well. All members of the new Kemalist class, gentlemen who wore bowler hats and ladies who put on feathery ones, were most welcome, of course. But much of Turkey did not look that chic. While these elites were enjoying fancy balls that reflected the "Western way of life" that the regime preferred for its citizens, the majority of these citizens were living in destitute poverty.

The villagers of Ankara, for example, had little chance to buy bowler hats and tuxedos. Their main shopping item was bread. So, when these not-so-stylish-looking peasants dared to come downtown for some business, they didn’t fit into the aesthetic standards of the regime. Therefore their presence on the Atatürk Boulevard was banned. The police literally pushed these easterners away from the westernized avenue, so that the national travesty could go on uninterrupted Ğ at least in the "public square."

This tell-tale memoir of the "single party" era is what Deniz Baykal referred to last Tuesday in order to defend his new line on the headscarf. "In the single party era, people were told to change their dress codes first in order to be welcomed onto the Atatürk Boulevard," he reminded people. "But we can’t do this today."
The genie out of the bottle
With that surprising comment, Mr. Baykal only raised the level of discontent in his camp. Necla Arat, a member of parliament on CHP’s ticket, strongly criticized the leader of her party by blaming him for "rejecting the CHP’s heritage" and being influenced by "the liberals," which she sees as counter-revolutionaries. Tufan Türenç, a hardcore secular columnist, nervously reminded yesterday that the CHP is "the party of Atatürk, not Baykal."

A good question here is how serious and sincere Mr. Baykal is in this new direction he seems to be taking. I personally am not holding my breath. He is a pragmatic politician before anything else, and I am sure that his motivation is nothing but to increase his votes in the upcoming local elections of March 2009. I think he realizes that the secular fundamentalist core that he has aspired to until very recently will never take him above the usual 20 percent that his party gets. But if he fails to gain new votes with this post-Kemalist rhetoric, he can well retreat to his old position.

Yet it is still meaningful that a leader of the CHP, the main political pillar of Kemalism, says things that are critical of the golden age of that ideology. Whatever Baykal does in the future, the step he has taken in the recent weeks will leave a mark in Turkish political history. The post-Kemalist genie has shown its face out of the bottle. It is not possible to push it back completely.