Claire Berlinski’s essay in today’s Washington Post, “In Turkey, a Looming Battle Over Islam,” offers a very clear guide to what’s going on in Turkey. As she concludes,
[D]on’t make the mistake of thinking that “secular” here means “liberal, democratic and friendly to the West.” That, it decidedly does not.
The illiberalism of “Turkish Secularism” is well illustrated by the ongoing prosecution of Dr. Attila Yayla, president of the Association for Liberal Thinking. (Contact my friend Ozlem Caglar Yilmaz, whose contact details are at the bottom of the linked article, for information on how to help.)
Mr Palmer,
why should nations be judged according to their friendliness to the west. This reminds me of “you are with us or against us” mentality. I found this very troubling. The people living in a nation should decide about the politics in their nation, it is not up to western nations to decide that.
cheers
Good point.
I think, however, that what is important is not so much “friendship,” but at least “non-hostility.” The Taliban were not only evil and brutal to their own people (executing women for minor social faux pas, for example, and executing homosexuals for consensual relations that Taliban leaders were having nonconsensually with boys), but openly hostile to “the West.” Note also that South Korea, Japan, and other nations are now routinely lumped together as part of “the West,” so the term is usually deployed to mean liberal democracies generally, not some geopolitical set of interests and forces.
The author in this case, however, does use the term in a confusing manner. She seems to mean by friendship “non-hostility” and by “the West” liberal democracy generally, but then she mentions the votes of secularists to oppose U.S. troop passage across Turkey, which certainly suggests the sense of “the West” as a geopolitical set of interests and forces.
I agree with Orhan in principle. However, the tone of Berlinski’s article does not suggest, to me, the troubling mentality he describes. Rather, the point the article seems to be driving at is that what we regularly associate with secularism (good for the country in question, and good for us) and Islamism (bad for the country in question, and bad for us) may be misleading when it comes to Turkey.
With the exception of the line about not allowing troops to cross through Turkey on their way to invade Iraq, I agree with Khaled’s take.