DAR AL ISLAM - TURKEY: ATATURK'S SECULAR TURKEY ON ITS DEATHBED

Turkish Secularism on the Ropes
By Robert Spencer

Turkish secularism is gravely threatened, and millions of Turks are deeply concerned that their country could become an Islamic state. The secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Democratic Left Party (DSP) have combined forces to try to stop the ruling AK Party, amid widespread fears that the AKP intends to destroy the secular foundation of the Turkish state. Turkish citizens have demonstrated in three immense pro-secularist rallies: 500,000 people demonstrated in Ankara, almost a million in Istanbul, and a million and a half in Izmir.

These large-scale rallies are most encouraging, and show that while there is widespread popular support for an Islamic state in Turkey (otherwise the Prime Minister and others would not be in office), there is also widespread support for Kemalism, the philosophy of Turkish secularism devised by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who abolished the caliphate in 1924 and instituted a number of other controls on political Islam in Turkey, many of which remain in place to this day. He instituted restrictions on various Islamic observances, secularized marriage law, mandated that Turkish be written in Roman rather than in Arabic characters, and above all monitored mosques and regulated preaching within them, making sure that the tenets of political Islam were not taught. Consequently the chief opposition to Kemalism has always been religious, as it is now.

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Ataturk became the first political figure ever in the Islamic world to reject -- avowedly and without apology -- political Islam in favor of a Western model of the separation of the religion from the state. While this would not forever prevent -- as recent events in Turkey clearly show -- a reassertion of political Islam, it would give the state greater ability to resist this reassertion, while a state that was nominally an Islamic one or that paid even lip service to Sharia in its Constitution would not have that ability. So Turkish secularism is predicated not on moderate Islam, but on premises that are not Islamic at all. And Oymen knows that any modification of Turkish law to change that will simply open the door to a full reassertion of Sharia -- Islamic law -- in Turkey.

It’s a principle with a much wider application than Turkey alone: for peaceful Muslims to prevail over the proponents of jihad and Sharia, they must be prepared not just to ignore, but to reject explicitly, the elements of Sharia that are at variance with accepted norms of human rights and with government that does not establish a state religion. Only then will they have a chance of defending those rights and standing up against the theological and societal challenge of jihadism. That is not just the Turks, but all free people, have a stake in the survival of Turkish secularism.


and

Turkish PM Erdogan in Speech During Term As Istanbul Mayor Attacks Turkey’s Constitution, Describing it As ‘A Huge Lie’: 'Sovereignty Belongs Unconditionally and Always To Allah'; 'One Cannot Be a Muslim, and Secular'

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan whose political origins are with the Milli Gorus -the radical and political Islamist movement founded by the former Islamist PM Erbakan - often attacked Turkey’s secular regime and it's Constitution.

PM Erdogan on Secularism:

"If the people want it, of course secularism will go away. You cannot rule this people by force; you don't have the power to do that. This [i.e. secularism] cannot work in spite of the people.
"And anyway, for the love of Allah, what is this secularism? You ask them to define it. They can't. They say that it varies from place to place. So what sort of a strange thing is this [secularism]?

"Today, for every concept there is a definition in the dictionary. Every concept must have a definition […] The interior minister comes and says that the state can interfere with religion. What about the rest? Why don't you say the rest? No! He does not say that the religion can interfere with the state.

"Yesterday I was at the Bosphorus University; and some of the - probably impressionable - young people there asked me, 'Mr. Mayor, what do you think about secularism? There are concerns that secularism is disappearing. What will happen?'

"This is what I said to those young friends: 'In the West they say, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God's. But this country's interior minister says that Caesar has rights but God does not!'

"But the fact is that 99% of the people of this country are Muslims. You cannot be both secular and a Muslim! You will either be a Muslim, or secular! When both are together, they create reverse magnetism [i.e. they repel one another]. For them to exist together is not a possibility! Therefore, it is not possible for a person who says 'I am a Muslim' to go on and say 'I am secular too.' And why is that? Because Allah, the creator of the Muslim, has absolute power and rule!"

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Read it all ! ! !

This trouble in Turkey will only get worse and Turkey will become a full blown shari'ah guided state, like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, etc...etc...etc...

Why does the United States continue to push Turkey's membership in the E.U.?!?

Does the United States not see that Europe is just this side of becoming a part of the newly forming caliphate and that if Turkey joins the E.U., Europe's islamization shall be complete?!?


Pertinent Links:

1) Turkish Secularism on the Ropes

2) Turkish PM Erdogan in Speech During Term As Istanbul Mayor Attacks Turkey’s Constitution, Describing it As ‘A Huge Lie’: 'Sovereignty Belongs Unconditionally and Always To Allah'; 'One Cannot Be a Muslim, and Secular'

3) MEMRI