Gridlock
We residents of İstanbul had our revenge eaten tepid this week — or at least those of us who happened to be wandering around the American capital. This time it was the turn of Washingtonians to be stuck in the same traffic gridlock that accompanies a really important visit from a head of state. Just as İstanbul grimaced in a controlled fury as it waited and waited for the cavalcades to pass when George Bush came to town, so Washington resigned itself to running late as the security barricades went up to allow the pope to make his way from the Vatican residence to the White House or to address the heads of Catholic universities. The logistics of his visit to America were obviously all that more difficult than Benedict XVI's fence-mending expedition to Turkey early on in his papacy. This is because a quarter of the American population is estimated to profess Catholicism, and thousands lined the streets to catch sight of their spiritual leader or queued from the early hours of the morning to get a seat in the baseball stadium where, on Thursday, the pope conducted Mass.
One can imagine Turks in their gazillions queuing early to see a foreign footballer from Chelsea play Fenerbahçe, but it would be a spectacle indeed to see a stadium full of believers inspired by the presence of a foreign spiritual leader. Many in Turkey regard with some horror even homegrown religious leaders, certainly those whose authority is independent of the state-appointed Religious Affairs Directorate. The obvious example is Fethullah Gülen, a theologian who carries sway with some (but not all) of those responsible for this particular newspaper and who is in a form of self-imposed exile in the United States. The influence he still holds is regarded with some alarm by some neocons in Washington. A recent piece by Michael Rubin in the online version of the conservative magazine National Review (and which has been quoted for obvious reasons with agitated opprobrium in the columns of this paper) likens Gülen to a Khomeini-in-waiting, a wolf in cleric's garb.
The gist of Mr. Rubin's argument is that America should not confuse democracy with a system that produces a government according to the side that gets the most votes. "The State Department and National Security Council fumbled US interests in Iraq, Gaza and Lebanon. One man, one vote, once; parties that enforce discipline at the point of a gun; and politicians who seek to subvert the rule of law to an imam's conception of God do little for US national security," he writes, urging the State Department not to interfere with the Turkish Constitutional Court's hearing of an indictment that he describes as "shoddily written and poorly argued" but right in intent. The US should "not abandon its ideological compatriots for the ephemeral promises of parties that use religion to subvert democracy and seek mob rather than constitutional rule."
Part of that "shoddily written" indictment paradoxically accuses the US of being an accomplice to the government's villainy; Mr. Rubin's "ideological compatriots" regard Washington and Brussels as the same sort of threat to Turkey's sovereignty as American Protestants once did the Catholic Church. It wasn't so many years ago that John Kennedy had to address a prejudice that his Catholicism would entail denying American interests at the whim of papal bulls. I can't imagine the Turkish legal establishment, now heating the branding irons in the current secularist auto de fé, having anything but for contempt for a US president who advertises that he is on a mission inspired by Jesus. That same establishment is no doubt pulling what is left of its hair at reports of Barack Obama's friendship with radical clerics like Jeremiah "God damn America" Wright. And their stomachs are probably churning as they listen to Hillary Clinton insist how faith and church will guide her hand on the tiller of power. And how they would react if a religious leader rented a stadium one night when Beşiktaş was playing away does not even bear thinking about.
So while no less a person than Turkey's chief prosecutor accuses the ruling party of unsuccessfully concealing a radical, theocratic agenda based on religious belief, American politicians are bending over backward to convince the electorate they have a hotline to God. Turkish governing politicians stand accused of takkiye — the religiously sanctioned hypocrisy of hiding one's faith to defend it. Many American politicians are under investigation for the more grievous crime of false piety.
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