A team of reformist Islamic scholars at Ankara University, acting under the auspices of the Diyanet or Directorate of Religious Affairs, the government body which oversees the country's 8,000 mosques and appoints imams, is said to be close to concluding a "reinterpretation" of parts of the Hadith, the collection of thousands of aphorisms and comments said to derive from the prophet Muhammad and which form the basis of Islamic jurisprudence or sharia law. "One of the team doing the revision said they are nearly finished," said Mustafa Akyol, an Istanbul commentator who reflects the thinking of the liberal camp in Erdogan's governing AK party. "They have problems with the misogynistic hadith, the ones against women. They may delete some from the collection, declaring them not authentic. That would be a very bold step. Or they may just add footnotes, saying they should be understood from a different historical context."

Fadi Hakura, a Turkey expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, described the project as an attempt to make Turkish Sunni Islam "fully compatible with contemporary social and moral values.

"They see this not as a revolution, but as a return to the original Islam, away from the excessive conservatism that has stymied all reforms for the last few centuries. It's somewhat akin to the Christian reformation, although not the same."

Under the guidance of Ali Bardokoglu, the liberal Islamic scholar who heads the religious directorate and was appointed by Erdogan, the Ankara theologians are writing a new five-volume "exegesis" of the Qur'an, taking the sacred text apart forensically, rooting it in its time and place, and redefining its message to and relevance for Muslims today. They are also ditching some of the Hadith, sayings ascribed to and comments on the prophet collected a couple of hundred years after his death.

It's not terribly surprising, therefore, that a critical review of the hadith has been taking place in Hanafi-dominated Turkey [where textual criticism was more common]. There would be more grounds for excitement if it was happening - say - in Saudi Arabia where the Hanbali school prevails and scholars produce the most conservative legal judgments, often based on literalist readings of the Qur'an and uncritical acceptance of the hadith.

One criticism of the Hanafi school is that its built-in flexibility has historically made its religious rulings susceptible to political influence. The Hanbali school, on the other hand, because it relies so heavily on the hadith, is relatively impervious to political influence; in Saudi Arabia it tends to control politics rather than the other way round.

In Turkey, the Department of Religious Affairs is not an independent body: it was established under the constitution to handle relations between the government and religious communities in accordance with the principles of secularism laid down by Ataturk. As a result of this background, no matter how academically sound the department's editing and revision of the hadith may be, there will always be a question mark hanging over it - in the minds of Muslims living outside Turkey as well as the more traditionalist Muslims inside the country. It probably won't cut much ice, either, with Turkey's Alawi Muslims - from the Shia branch of Islam - who are said to number around 12 million.

• Richard at 1948 reflects on the Turkish military's rather unhelpful and confrontational stance towards Turkey's media.


• Phil Hunt at Cabalamat has some rather harsh towards towards anti-poor and pro-torture Republicans.


• Ibn Kafka at 'Aqoul wonders if the American intelligence community hung Bush out to dry with their recent announcement on the non-existent Iranian nuclear weapons program.


• Centauri Dreams considers the likely effect of travel times in space on human polities. If Rome could exert authority over territories at most one year's travel time from its empire's core, what will this mean for interstellar societies even if relativistic speeds are possible?


• Crooked Timber delves into the question of whether or not the Israeli lobby in the Untied States is more exuberantly and ultranationalistically Israeli than the Israelis themselves.


• Aziz Poonawalla at City of Brass observes how recent fluctuations in the value of the United States dollar in the United Arab Emirates have badly hurt South Asian migrant workers there.


• Will Baird notes that, in a recent experiment, very low levels of hydrogen sulfide added to the air breathed by worms extended their lifespans by 7%. Might this lead eventually to human applications?


• Edward Hugh at A Fistful of Euros constructs a very worrying model of the Russian economy's evolution. Briefly put, Russia's labour force that's doomed to shrink significantly and is badly distributed relative to economic resources besides. Oil exports are financing strong economic growth, and this growth is reflected in wages, but labour shortages and the Dutch disease are contributing to slow growth in non-oil sectors of the Russian economy. The net result of this is that Russia's oil income is eventually going to finance the expanding consumption of goods by Russia's population via imports, with serious consequences for Russia's long-term growth.


• feorag at the Pagan Prattle blogs about how a Conservative MP in the United Kingdom is trying to get "Christianophobia" recognized as a prejudice.


• Strange Maps exposes to the Anglophone world and debunks a strange E-mail chain letter suggesting that the Untied States was planning to annex Brazil's Amazonian rain forest.

Since the end of the Cold War, Turkey's neighborhood -- and its relationship with Washington -- has drastically changed. Attempts to become a Central Asian or European power have failed, and the Turks are looking in different directions for opportunities. The Iraq war has proven that U.S. and Turkish security concerns are no longer in lockstep, leading Turkey to re-evaluate its alliance with the United States.

From the Turks' viewpoint, the United States can no longer be viewed as a stabilizing force, as it has been since World War II. Moreover, Turkey no longer is a weak economic force and is not as reliant on the United States for its security. Turkey's rapid economic growth and its strong military tradition are creating the conditions for Ankara to pull itself out of its post-World War I insularity and extend itself in the region once again. As a result, Turkey's foreign policy no longer needs to tie itself to the United States, and Ankara can afford to make bold moves concerning issues -- whether those issues relate to the Kurds, Armenians or Greeks -- without losing too much sleep over any follow-on damage to its relationship with the United States. If the United States is going to act as the destabilizing force in the region through creating a major upheaval in Iraq, Turkey must at the very least attempt to take control of the situations within its old sphere of influence.

• eerie at 'Aqoul questions Ayaan Hirsi Ali's judgement and finds it sorely lacking. While I still have a certain appreciation for her, I also have to agree that quite a few of her arguments--especially her most recent arguments--are dangerously stupid.


• Amused Cynicism's Phil Hunt explores how Melanie Phillips was able to take a half-cracked article by Daniel Pipes on Islamic finance and inflate it into one sign of the West's collaboration with its Muslim conquerors.


• Richard at Castrovalva makes the defensible argument that of all writers, J.G. Ballard has best captured the zeitgeist.


• City of Brass' Aziz Poonawalla observes at length the pointless controversy over the Untied States' production of a stamp commemorating Eid.


• John Quiggin points out at Crooked Timber that the multinational invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is justifiable in ways in which Iraq's isn't.


• Edward Lucas memorializes assassinated Russian journalist Anna Politovskaya.


• Hunting Monsters has two posts (1, 2) on the Armenian genocide and a link to a provocative Ben Kiernan article at Open Democracy on the global history of genocide.


• Marginalia's Peteris Cedrins has an essay on the intimate connection between environmentalism and nationalism in Latvia.


• Positive Liberty's Jason Kuznicki wonders whether modern-day American conservatives have been excessively influenced by the tactics of campus left-wing radicals from previous decades. In this thesis' favour, there is the famed Trotskyite-to-neoconservative trajectory.


• In his latest blog entry, the erudite John Reilly argues (among other things) that public pension plans have proven themselves somewhat more realistic than private pension funds, that the uptick in Polish birth rates can be traced to an echo of a baby boom and easier finance, and that Russia's Orthodox Christian revival is "excessively dependent on government patronage."

A U.S. House committee approved on Wednesday a resolution calling the 1915 massacres of Armenians genocide, brushing aside White House warnings that it would do "great harm" to ties with NATO ally Turkey, a key supporter in the Iraq war.

The House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee approved the resolution 27-21. It now goes to the House floor, where Democratic leaders say there will be a vote by mid-November. There is a companion bill in the Senate, but both measures are strictly symbolic, and do not require the president's signature.

Turkey calls the resolution an insult and rejects the Armenian position, backed by many Western historians, that up to 1.5 million Armenians suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turks during World War One.

Turkey has warned of damage to bilateral ties if Congress passes the measure, and President George W. Bush made the same point before the vote Wednesday.

"This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror," Bush said at the White House.

The military sees itself as the guardian of Turkish secular democracy, and will intervene in politics when it perceives that secularism is under siege. Such intervention runs the gamut from comments—meant to influence public opinion—to seizing power from governments thought to be "ineffective." Although the Turkish military has overthrown four governments since the Turkish republic’s founding, it has always returned power to civilian officials. The military, therefore, does not impede the functioning of Turkey’s democracy; rather, Perle said, it is an important check on the Turkish government’s power. "The model of the military coup that we’re familiar with doesn’t apply in the Turkish case", the scholar explained.

Consequently, Perle said that the EU must take care to preserve the Turkish military’s place in politics during the membership negotiations process. While some of the EU-mandated reforms will undoubtedly improve Turkish democracy if implemented, any European attempt to circumscribe the powers of the army would be misguided, Perle warned.

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

An important trait of liberalism, however, is the opportunity to learn by trial and error. Turkish secular liberals must start their own grass-roots movement, one with the message of individual freedom. They must restore the confidence of the electorate in entrusting Turkey's economy to them, and they must reconquer the institutions of education, information, police and justice.

They must also make EU leaders understand and respect the fact that the army and the Constitutional Court — besides defending the country and the constitution — are also, and maybe even more important, designed to protect Turkish democracy from Islam.

Bringing back true secularism does not mean just any secularism. It means secularism that protects individual freedoms and rights, not the ultra-nationalist kind that breeds an environment in which Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is a bestseller, the Armenian genocide is denied and minorities are persecuted. Hrant Dink, the Armenian editor, was murdered by such a nationalist.

It is this mix of virulent nationalism and predatory Islam in Turkey that makes the challenge for Turkish secular liberals greater than for any other liberal movement today.

angel80

optimussven

mawombat

Evidently, with the world being seen as a more dangerous place and repeated scandals tarnishing the image of democracy in many developing countries, military leaders are increasingly reasserting the role of arbiters and defining national security to include political security. The problem with this, of course, is that it results in the final judgment as to constitutional limitations being made by an unrepresentative body that isn't accountable to democratic discipline. In many instances, even those such as the Central African Republic and Guinea-Bissau where a plausible case could be made for intervention, the cure turned out to be worse than the disease, with the new rulers creating their own set of abuses which were made all the more severe due to the absence of institutional checks. "Good" coups such as that in Mauritania are as rare as philosopher-kings, and the tendency of militaries to idealize themselves makes the bad ones unlikely to change course. Praetorian rule may increasingly come in a constitutional guise, but it doesn't benefit constitutional self-rule.

The neoconservative platform has several planks: the Iraq war (at any rate before it went awry) and the larger scheme of democratizing the Middle East; strong support for Israel; and, far from least, ardent advocacy of Turkish admission to the European Union. Such American advocates have done Turkey no good at all, I might add: Every time George W. Bush in the White House or Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times demands that Turkey should be admitted, the Turkish case is set back further. After serving as a Tory Cabinet minister in London and then as the last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten became a European commissioner before returning home as chancellor of Oxford University. A few years ago, he was expressing the irritation of all his colleagues in Brussels—and every European politician—when he said dryly that it was very good of the Americans to keep offering Turkey EU membership, but that this was a question on which the Europeans themselves might feel they had some right to be heard.

In Canada's case, the complaint was that Prime Minister Stephen Harper last month recalled that both the Senate and the House of Commons had adopted resolutions recognizing the slaughter as genocide: "I and my party supported those resolutions and continue to recognize them today."

In France, parliamentary recognition of the genocide dates back eight years. One difference between France and Canada on the question is that France has an Armenian population of about 300,000. Canada's Armenian population is just 40,000, although individuals like film director Atom Egoyan have given Canadian Armenians an unmistakable visibility.

The Turkish government said the recall of the ambassadors would be for only a short time, yet there could still be serious economic repercussions. Turkey cancelled a multimillion-dollar arms deal with France in 2001, although economic relations appear to have returned to normal in recent years.

Turkey has withdrawn from an international military air exercise in Alberta in May and June in protest against Canada’s stand. And there is speculation in Turkish newspapers that Canada will be--or perhaps has been--excluded from the bidding to build a nuclear power plant in the Black Sea town of Sinop.

The dissonance between the high baroque hallways of the Czech parliament building and the horror depicted in the black and white images that hung from their walls this week could scarcely have been more stark.

The faded photographs showed a nation in flight, charred bodies by the side of the road, severed heads on pikes held by grinning guards, clusters of skeletal figures abandoned in the Mesopotamian desert, orphaned children wide-eyed with fear. In short, a people tormented, slaughtered, humiliated, and starved.

Call it what you will: genocide, mass murder or, as the Turkish government would have it, plain simple deportation, the deaths of so many Armenians in 1915-16 have come to be seen as one of the defining horrors of 20th century history.

A mass demonstration aimed at denouncing Armenian genocide claims, to be held in Berlin under the slogan "Take your flag and come to Berlin," has caused tension between Turkey and Germany. Flyers announcing the movement read, "If Western capitals don't want to be burned like Paris, unjust treatment towards Turkey must end."

IP leader Dogu Perincek and former Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) President Rauf Denktas will lead the planned demonstration with the participation of many representatives from Turkish political parties and European non-governmental organizations (NGOs) within the framework of the Talat Pasha Movement. The main aim of the group is to put pressure on the German Parliament to remove official recognition of the Armenian genocide claims. The movement also aims to attract some 5 million supporters, including some 1,000 from Turkey.

Denktas is expected to lay flowers at the place in Berlin where Talat Pasha was assassinated on March 15, 1921 by an Armenian, and an assembly will gather in a memorial for Talat Pasha on Sunday.