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Europe
Is Turkey going Islamofascist? Maybe not.
2007-07-23
IS TURKEY ISLAMIFYING? Not so much, according to InstaPundit's Istanbul correspondent, Claire Berlinski, who writes:

Hi Glenn,

Does this look like Iran to you? David took these a few hours ago at the AKP headquarters in Istanbul. Lots of women in headscarves were dancing arm-in-arm with women who looked like this, lots of women were dancing arm-in-arm with men, and lots of people -- of all ages and both sexes and in various degrees of undress -- were dancing, period, which is hardly an activity commonly associated with Islamist tyranny. I felt completely welcome and comfortable even though I was wearing the shortest skirt in my wardrobe. I don't at all dismiss concerns about the AKP, and I think my credentials as someone who takes the rise of Islamic extremism seriously are well-established, but what I saw tonight was utterly benign. Here's a short video. It won't win any cinematography awards (I took it with my digital camera and the light wasn't good) but you can definitely see that this looks nothing like Iran. Again: This is the AKP headquarters.


The images do look pretty non-Iran-like to me.

Photos at the link.
Posted by:Mike

#5  Sorry, clicked on that prematurely. What I meant to say is that the hijab was a symbol of traditions which many villagers in Iran felt were under seige by the Shah's government.

I suspect some of that is at play in Turkey as well, with the austere secularism of Kemal rubbing some who are otherwise not Islamicist.
Posted by: lotp   2007-07-23 19:56  

#4  When the Shah was toppled, one of the chief complaints the Islamicists had against him was that he was educating girls -- and in co-ed schools, to boot.
Posted by: lotp   2007-07-23 19:54  

#3  From snips from articles in Austin's Statesman on Sunday

ISTANBUL, Turkey — A general election on Sunday in this mostly Muslim nation might help answer a divisive question: whether women should be allowed to wear head scarves in official settings and state institutions.

It was a tempest over a head scarf that helped trigger the elections in the first place. Secularists reacted with outrage when the Islamic-oriented ruling party proposed a presidential candidate whose wife covered her head.

The opposition boycotted the presidential vote in Parliament and secularists held massive rallies in several cities to protest the nomination of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.

A key element of the opposition's position was that it would be a disgrace for a headscarf-clad first lady to live in the mansion once occupied by Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — who established the modern secular state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. The government was eventually forced to withdraw Gul's candidacy and called the July elections.

The ban imposed on Islamic-style headscarf is a long running problem that has increasingly dominated the agenda here, in parallel to the rise of the country's political Islamic movement.

Ataturk carved the Republic of Turkey from the tatters of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. He declared religion to be a backward force that contributed to the Turks' defeat in the war and he changed the country's identity from Islamic to secular. Turkish law bans students, teachers, judges and state employees from wearing head scarves to work or class or exhibiting religious symbols in public buildings.

That legacy has fostered a Turkish sense of nationalism divorced from Islam, with Turkey's military seeing itself as defender of the secular order. The military has staged four coups in the past 40 years, suppressed political dissidents and, in 1982, imposed a new constitution on the country.

Push for women's rights

In Izmir, Hotar Goksel, a self-described secular Turk who favors linen pantsuits and diamond earrings, and wears her light-brown hair straight down her back, heads the AKP's list of candidates. She spent 20 years teaching social policy at Izmir's leading university before accepting Erdogan's offer to join his team. Elected to parliament in 2002, she is a member of the party's executive committee, which meets weekly with Erdogan to shape legislative policy.

Erdogan's government has become known for furthering women's rights more than any other after Ataturk pushed for a woman's right to vote in 1925. Husbands are no longer officially heads of households, and wives do not need their consent to work. Laws that used to dismiss rape charges if the man married his victim have been rewritten.

Goksel says supporting religion is not anti-Turkish. If re-elected today, she plans to push for an end to the head scarf ban in universities. Such a move, she said, will increase the number of women seeking higher education, especially from rural areas.

Sound to me like wearing of the scraf is an issue
Posted by: Sherry   2007-07-23 12:43  

#2  Necessary but not sufficient, except to assure exclusion from the EU.
Posted by: Nimble Spemble   2007-07-23 11:44  

#1  There were a lot of women amongst the "students" that occupied the U.S. embassy in Iran as well. Unfortunately for them the definition of good muslim got increasingly radical.

Note that the French revolution didn't start with terror and the Russian revolution wasn't initially Stalinist. They both devolved to it.

Both Hitler and Chavez were elected before becoming dictators.

I don't know where Turkey will end up, but its current direction is more Islamic. The fact that there are women dancing is nice, but Islamic societies tend more to crushing that sort of thing than promoting it.
Posted by: DoDo   2007-07-23 11:37  

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