Turkish 'Exceptionalism'
In our times of governments looking to domesticate Islam, not tame it precisely, but to determine its geographic contours; that is a British Islam, a German Islam, a transnational European Islam, what role does Turkey play, what role can it play, in efforts to nationalise and transnationalise Islam in Europe?
I'm prompted by several developments, past and present, in exploring this. Around this time last year the Australian Intercultural Society (AIS) launched the Fethullah Gülen Chair in the Study of Islam and Muslim-Catholic relations at the Australian Catholic University (ACU). The chair is one of the first of its kind and was set up with the express intent of promoting perspectives on Islam that were non-Arab of origin.
"Islam doesn't equal Arabs and the Arabic language. Only a quarter of Muslims are Arabs, and since 9/11 the Western world would rather deal with Islam through Indonesian, Malaysian and Turkish cultures," Orhan Cicek of the Australian Intercultural Society, said at the ACU event inaugurating the office of the Chair.
Read another way, and in keeping with the principles of the Gülenciler (followers of the Gülen movement) Turkish Islam with its focus on Said Nursi's teachings of peace, love and tolerance, is more congenial to integration than the Islam taught and practised by other ethnicities.
There is also the matter of the Alliance of Civilizations (AoC) project, started by the Turkish and Spanish governments and now a UN sponsored initiative. Its next forum will take place in Istanbul in 2009. A year before Istanbul officially celebrates its ‘European Capital of Culture', designation.
The Alliance of Civilizations project has produced many recommendations in its work on building alliances. For example, promoting a more responsible press; one that isn't fixated on manipulating stories on Islam and Muslims for adverse effect, and encouraging more intercultural and interfaith youth activities to foster tolerant attitudes among adolescents that they will, hopefully, carry with them into adulthood.
The Turkish Government's interest in these matters is prudential, for sure. A thwarted demonstration in Cologne in autumn this year, organised by far right racist groups against the ‘Islamisation' of European cities, would have affected all of Europe's Muslim communities but particularly those in Cologne, a city known to have a large Turkish population.
Changes in attitudes towards immigration and public policies less tolerant of cultural differences in the Netherlands and Belgium would disproportionately affect the dominant Muslim ethnic groups in these countries; Turks and Moroccans.
And the Pew Global Attitudes survey on rising Islamophobia in Europe has already attracted the attention of the Turkish PM. He spoke out against it at a dinner hosted for his AoC co-sponsor Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain in Ramadan this year.
The matter was also raised by the Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu, who as head of the OIC has established an Observatory on Islamophobia in order to monitor and challenge it more effectively.
"Combating Islamophobia is and will continue to be one of the biggest challenges faced by the Muslim World," he told foreign ministers of the OIC countries in March this year as the Observatory's first report was launched.
There are many reasons for Turkey's angling on issues concerning Islam in Europe. Its EU ambition is but one reason, though certainly a significant one. The criticism it regularly faces over the levels of anti-Americanism in Turkey is another. Critics argue that while Turkey may well be disconcerted over the treatment of Muslims in Europe, it seems less bothered by the counter side of the same coin, anti western attitudes in Turkey itself. Tackling Islamophobia, both as a concept and as an impediment to Turkey's EU membership, will, hopefully, lessen anti western attitudes in Turkey too. Two birds with one stone one might say.
It is perhaps a product of the perversion of rational and focused debate on so many issues concerning Muslims in Europe today that initiatives and recommendations designed to tackle such issues exacerbate the very same perversity.
One often hears Turks complain, alongside all other Muslims, of the distortion of Islam by those driven to extremism and acts of terrorism. But one also hears them complain of the tarnishing of Turks by Muslims of subcontinental or Arab origin as Islam generically comes under attack. Not only are acts of violent extremism not Islamic, they are wholly incompatible with Turkish expressions of Islam.
There is something deeply worrying about this nationalisation of religion, whether by European states or by Muslim majority countries that want to project the parochial as the universal. It is in many ways like attempts to define British values as tolerance, constitutionalism and respect for the law and a commitment to democracy and the will of the majority without acknowledging that these concepts would make one a citizen of many countries, not just the UK.
A ‘Turkish' Islam, with its benign intent and medley of musings by Rumi, is certainly welcome but does it warrant an attention greater than that given to others? And does such a policy offer solutions that bring with them another set of problems?
There seems to be, in the present climate, a desperate attempt to endorse and encourage expressions of Islam that are seen as docile. It takes the form of either expressly supporting apolitical Muslim groups and associations or supporting those who skirt around politics preferring social and cultural activities as a means of bringing people together. In both cases the matter deferred, though central, is that of religion and politics, whether religionising politics (the alleged narrative of violent extremists) or politicising religion (the alleged narrative and game of Muslim groups in Europe).
And it extends to the question of Turkey in a yet further enlarged Europe. Is Turkey to be assessed on grounds of its adopting the acquis communautaire and becoming a democracy compatible with norms prevailing in Europe, or is it a question of a Muslim country seeking entry into a Christian Club? And are European Muslims (Turkish and non Turkish) to support Turkey's candidacy because of the latter, or the former?
The matter is in the end perhaps not one of exceptionalism at all but of the acutely mundane. That Islam in Europe, European Islam, or British Islam, or any other national variant, belongs to not one ethnic group but to them all. And the only thing exceptional about it is that it is British, or European, not because it is designated as such by states and politicians, but because Muslims, of all backgrounds, recognise it and practise it as such. (Elif Aydin)
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