Turkey and Armenia will sign a landmark deal to establish diplomatic ties next month in Switzerland in a bid to end decades of animosity over World War I massacres, Turkish officials said Sunday.

"The foreign ministers will come together on October 10 and sign the drafted document," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters, without giving details.

The signing is to take place in Zurich, a government official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Foreign ministers Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey and Eduard Nalbandian of Armenia will ink two protocols, the texts of which had been agreed earlier and internationally hailed as a major breakthrough, he said.

Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, whose country acted as a mediator in reconciliation talks between the two neighbours, is also likely to attend the ceremony, he said.

Long estranged by a bloody history, Turkey and Armenia announced last month the talks had resulted in two protocols calling for the establishment of diplomatic ties and re-opening their border.

They also set a timetable for a series of steps to improve ties.

A Swiss foreign ministry official said the signing ceremony "will probably take place in Switzerland," while Armenian officials were not available for comment.

Hours after Turkey and Armenia announced a tentative, Swiss-mediated peace deal, opposition politicians in Turkey were blasting the proposal.

The plan would normalize relations and open the common border between the two neighbors.

Political analysts warn that there are still immense hurdles left, before Armenians and Turks can overcome nearly a century of bad blood and re-open a border that has been sealed shut for more then fifteen years.

In a joint press statement released late Monday night, Switzerland, Armenia and Turkey announced they had agreed to start six weeks of "internal political consultations" on two protocols, aimed at establishing diplomatic and bilateral relations.

"The protocol can be signed in six weeks, ratified by the parliament completing the process there and come into force," Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, in an interview to Turkey's NTV news station. "However it is not known how long the approval process would be."

Last year, Western countries put pressure on Beijing to hold a dialogue with representatives of the Dalai Lama, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy even threatening to boycott the Beijing Olympics if China refused. Beijing's protestations that Tibet was an internal Chinese affair were disregarded.

This time, however, the Western response is muted. The United States has adopted a mild tone, with President Barack Obama merely calling on all parties in Xinjiang “to exercise restraint.” The European Union has gone even further, taking the position that violence in Xinjiang “is a Chinese issue, not a European issue.” Serge Abou, the Eu's ambassador to China, said Europe also had its problems with minorities and “we would not like other governments to tell us what is to be done.”

While there are similarities between events last year in Tibet and those in Xinjiang this month, the world has changed: China is now seen as an indispensable partner of the United States and Europe, both of which are facing a financial crisis. Beijing's diplomatic assistance in resolving the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues is also seen as too important to put in jeopardy.

What reaction there has been came mainly from Muslim countries. The Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 57 Muslim governments, condemned what it called the excessive use of force against Uyghur civilians. At least 184 people, both Uyghurs and Han Chinese, have been killed.

The OIC statement declared: “The Islamic world is expecting from China, a major and responsible power in the world arena with historical friendly relations with the Muslim world, to deal with the problem of Muslim minority in China in broader perspective that tackles the root causes of the problem.”

The country that has taken the strongest position is Turkey, whose people share linguistic, religious and cultural links with the Uyghurs. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan actually went so far as to characterize what has happened as “a kind of genocide” and said his country would bring the matter up in the United Nations Security Council.

Thousands of Turks and Uyghur expatriates took to the streets across Turkey after Friday prayers, protesting the violence in Xinjiang and burning Chinese flags and products, AFP photographers and media reports said.

The biggest of the demonstrations was at Istanbul's Fatih Mosque, where an estimated 5,000 people gathered and said prayers for members of the Uyghur community who lost their lives in the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang, the NTV news channel said.

"No to ethnic cleansing!" chanted the crowd, waving the Uyghur flag depicting a white crescent on a blue background, as some protestors set fire to Chinese flags and goods produced in China.

Some 200 people attended similar prayers at Istanbul's Beyazit mosque at the call of a Turkey-based Uyghur association and Turkish nationalist groups, after which they held a brief demonstration, shouting "Murderer China", an AFP photgrapher said.

I compare Turkey to Mexico in the sense that the U.S. has always had a very transactional policy towards Mexico. We have an energy relationship with them, we have an immigration relationship with them and there are remittance flows between the two countries. But while that transactional relationship is there, it hasn’t really been strategic since NAFTA. And now you see that many people are turning their back on NAFTA including, perhaps, the Obama administration. To me, that smacks of all that Europe has managed to avoid doing in their relationship with Turkey, despite all of the xenophobia in Western Europe.

For the last 40 years there has been a customs union, massive foreign investment and huge remittance flows between Europe and Turkey. They are working towards membership and accession [into the European Union] and retooling the Turkish economy. There are all kinds of binding agreements between the two sides, despite the fact that they don’t really like each other in a lot of ways. So for me it was just shocking that it was the “xenophobic Europe” that was having the success while we are not.

[. . .]

I really wanted to emphasize that the multidimensional strategy of engagement that Europe has had towards Turkey despite all of the high-level rhetoric. It works, and I don’t think there is any denying that. Now that doesn’t mean that there has to be an end state for the policy for have been a success; in this case membership into the EU. It is Turkish stability, prosperity and various forms of integration and cooperation with Europe that are the benchmarks of success, not whether a Turkish citizen has a EU passport. With Mexico, now, none of those things are happening. So for me there is a very stark contrast between the two relationships.

France's powerful Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, said today that he had turned against the idea of allowing Turkey to join the European Union because of Ankara’s behaviour at last week’s Nato summit.

Mr Kouchner, who came to prominence as co-founder of Medecins sans Frontieres, made the comment as Barack Obama - speaking to a gathering of students in Istanbul on the final event of his eight-day European tour - called once again for Turkey to be granted EU membership.

President Sarkozy has long been opposed to Turkey’s EU bid and that has been official French policy, but his left-wing Foreign Minister had been more open to the idea - at least until Saturday's summit in Strasbourg.

“Turkey’s evolution in, let’s say, a more religious direction, towards a less robust secularism, worries me,” the minister told RTL radio.

Mr Kouchner said that he had been surprised when Turkey’s delegation to the Nato summit had initially refused to accept the appointment of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, as the alliance’s new Secretary-General. Mr Rasmussen made enemies in the Muslim world in 2005 when he defended the freedom of expression of Danish cartoonists who mocked the Prophet Muhammad.

The Turkish President, Abdullah Gul, delayed Saturday's summit by refusing to accept his nomination and only dropped his veto threat after Mr Obama brokered a compromise deal under which Mr Rasmussen will have a Turkish deputy.

“I was very shocked by the pressure that was brought on us,” Mr Kouchner said.

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High atop a mountain chain in western Turkey stands Mezit village, a hamlet founded in the 19th century by Abkhaz rebels on the run from Tsarist Russian troops. More than 130 years later, Mezit’s Abkhaz residents now have one goal -- to return to Abkhazia, where Russian troops are now a welcome presence.

"We would like to see this place with our own eyes, a place where our language is spoken," said Nalan Uran, a middle-aged Mezit homemaker, as she indicated a black-and-white photograph of her great-grandfather in the Abkhaz capital, Sukhumi.

That is a desire the de facto Abkhaz government would like to encourage. Promoting the return of Diaspora members is seen as one way to strengthen efforts to secure the territory’s independence from Georgia.

Thousands of Abkhaz, known as makhadjiri, fled Abkhazia for Turkey in the mid-19th century after resisting the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. Today, Turkey is home to the world’s largest Abkhaz Diaspora community. Size estimates vary - Diaspora leaders say 1 million people; Abkhaz estimates range from 150,000 to 500,000.

Their value for the de facto government in Sukhumi lies more in their interest in Abkhazia -- and their financial influence. Turkey’s Diaspora community reportedly remains a potential key source of outside investment, a long-term priority for de facto leader Sergei Bagapsh’s administration. Campaigning for Turkish recognition of Abkhazia’s independence fulfills another role.

• Broadsides' Antonia Zerbisias reports on the mendacity of some anti-abortion researchers who apparently can't construct proper studies.


• Centauri Dreams reports on an astronomer who believes that there may be as many Earth-like planets as there are stars in the universe.


• How has political discourse been shaped by the recent mass nationalizations in Western economies? Crooked Timber considers: Might the US gain social democrats?


• Far Outliers explores the ways in which language was used, at the end of the Tokugawa, to denote change and its potential directions.


• Normblog mourns the recent death in the Buffalo plane crash of genocide scholar Alison Des Forges.


• The Pagan Prattle reports that the decision to ban the leaders of the ludicrous Westboro Baptist church from the United Kingdom has harmed positive community-building.


• Gideon Rachman shares his vision of a dystopian 2012. On the plus side, the Sarkozy-Madonna pairing does seem natural ...


• Slap Upside the Head reports that Toronto Anglicans are considering the questino of blessing same-sex unions; also, that Ethiopia's churches are calling for a ban on homosexuality.


• Towleroad provides more coverage of Atwood's decision to withdraw from the Dubai book festival and the organizer's response.


• Windows on Eurasia warns that the Russian HIV/AIDS epidemic is again growing, and takes note of the ways in which the Turkish president's visit to Tatarstan highlights Tatarstan as an international player.

north Toronto office tower, Tuncay Guney extends a delicate hand and introduces himself: "You are now talking to the most famous agent in the world."

Speaking through a translator, his tone is sardonic. But he lays out a pretty fair case.

The 36-year-old Turkish refugee claimant and former journalist goes on to describe meetings with Hezbollah chieftains and U.S. senators, a near escape from Turkish intelligence in the company of an Iranian general, close friendships with Kurdish rebel leaders and Iraqi president Jalal Talabani.

"James Bond has nothing on me," Guney said. He's joking again. Sort of.

It's a fantastical tale from the slight, bespectacled man, a former Muslim who now wears the garb of an Orthodox Jew.

But Guney is not taken lightly in his home country. He is the lynchpin in a sprawling trial accusing dozens of prominent Turks of plotting to overthrow their government. Many in Turkey see the trial as the result of a power struggle between the secular military and the pro-Islamist government of the ruling AK Party.

According to Turkish prosecutors, the labyrinthine ultranationalist cabal, code-named `Ergenekon', backed political assassinations and deadly terrorist attacks.

All the threads lead back to information provided eight years ago by Guney. He continues to launch verbal bombs from Toronto, appearing regularly via satellite on Turkish television .

This week, Turkish court officials released a list of 37 questions they want Guney to answer about Ergenekon. Did they conspire with separatist Kurdish rebels? Who did they kill? What is their relationship to international drug gangs?

"I am the `black box' of Ergenekon," Guney said, referencing one of his nicknames in the Turkish press. "They cannot solve anything until they reach me."

His standing among fellow expatriates is less lofty.

"Speaking as a member of the community, we are embarrassed that he lives in Canada among us," said Lale Eskicioglu, executive director of the Ottawa-based Council of Turkish Canadians. "Because of him, many innocent people have been interrogated. He has caused a lot of hell in Turkey."

Guney's rise from obscure journalist to renowned whistleblower began in 2001. That year, he was arrested for attempting to sell a stolen car. Over nine days of interrogation, Guney told police he had uncovered a wide-ranging plot to unbalance the Turkish state.

Guney claims he was tortured during questioning. "I told myself, I would get my revenge some day."

Police searched Guney's apartment, uncovering six batches of documents, some marked `Top Secret'. The papers laid out a portion of the conspiracy, naming as members some of Turkey's most prominent citizens.

"He got so much information that he cannot have gotten it by himself," said Ergun Babahan, a former editor of the Turkish newspaper, Sabah. "Someone gave it to him."

Despite a travel ban, Guney was mysteriously able to flee Turkey for the United States. "He went from Turkey to New York and then Toronto. That is not so easy to do," said Babahan. "I believe he has some sort of protection."

Different factions in Turkey have variously accused Guney of working for American and Iranian intelligence; Islamist interests and Ergenekon-linked secret police units. He denies all of it. He took off his black, broad-brimmed hat and skullcap before being photographed for this article because he feared it would bolster accusations that he works for Israel's Mossad.

Guney's files lay dormant until 2007, by which time the AK Party had won power. Then a raid on the house of a former military official turned up explosives that were later linked to an attack at a Turkish newspaper.

The arms seizure pulled the first thread that unravelled the alleged Ergenekon plot. As police investigated, they found Guney had already provided a road map of Ergenekon. Involving high-ranking military officials, businesspeople, gangsters and journalists, the conspiracy appeared to unmask what the Turks call the "deep state" – the real power hidden behind governments.

The Ergenekon plotters stand accused of a dizzying variety of crimes, all aimed at unhinging the government and prompting a military-backed coup.

Leaders of the six-million-strong Circassian community of Turkey met with that country’s President Abdulla Gul this week to press for the reopening of ferry service from Trabzon to the Abkhaz port of Sukhumi, a link that was suspended in 2006 when the CIS imposed an embargo on that breakaway republic.

On Monday, Gul received the leaders of the Caucasus Federation Khase, which unites 56 Circassian groups in Turkey, for 45 minutes to discuss this and Circassian demands for more broadcasting in their by Turkish channels and more Circassian language classes in Turkish universities (www.kafkasfederasyonu.org/haber/tr_basin/2009/070109_bianet.htm and
www.natpress.net/stat.php?id=3756).

After the meeting, Khase general coordinator Dzhumkhur Bal told the media that the reopening of sea communications with Abkhazia was not only possible but vital for his community because now after the August 2008 war, “there is no need for compatriots of Abkhazia [such as the Circassians living in Turkey] to obtain a Russian visa.”

And he added that expanding Circassian broadcasting in Turkey, where TRT-3 now broadcasts seven hours a day in that language was especially important given the increasing attention of his community to what is taking place in Abkhazia and other historically Circassian areas in the northern Caucasus.

[T]he Russian defeat of the Circassians (Çerkezler) in the North Caucasus in 1864 led to an estimated one million Muslim refugees fleeing to the Ottoman Empire.

The gradual contraction of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new states led to millions of Christians and Muslims being uprooted from their Ottoman homelands from the late 19th to early 20th century. Those displaced—many forcibly—included Armenians from eastern Anatolia and Greeks from central and western Anatolia, as well as Muslim Albanians, Bosnians, Pomaks, Tatars, and Turks from the Balkans.

The early years of the Turkish Republic continued to see large movements of people in both directions. Most significant of these was the forced exchange of population between Greece and Turkey in the mid-1920s, involving over a million Greeks from Turkey and almost half a million Muslims and Turks from Greece. The government also established an immigration program encouraging Muslims and Turks from the Balkans to settle in Turkey.

Academics such as Soli Özel, Ferhat Kentel, Baskın Oran and Ayhan Aktar stress that if the minorities had not been expelled, Turkey would be a different place in terms of the Kurdish question, the economy and secularism.

Aktar says there were two nations that eradicated their own bourgeoisie, the Russians in the 1917 revolution and the Turks, first by killing them and second by exchanging them. "This means that during the 1923-1934 period the bourgeoisie was liquidated. It was not possible to reach the export level of the Ottomans until 1928. Then there was the 1929 crisis, which introduced statism to Turkey," he says.

According to Kentel, statism created the bureaucracy and the new capitalist segment supported by it got richer but, because they didn’t know how to invest, they fed off of the resources of the state. This attitude brought all kinds of evils: corruption, a tolerance for mafia-style business and the legitimization of all types of immoral trade rules.

Oran stressed that the ability to invest, produce, export and find markets totally disappeared in 1915 and 1923. In an article published in the Agos newsweekly and the Radikal daily this week, industrialization was set back by at least 50 years. Özel argued that, after losing its minorities, Turkey had to spend 60 years creating sufficient human capital. Ergil notes that the locals in Anatolia asked state officials to bring back some of the minorities because it was not possible to find professionals and artisans, such as stove makers, mechanics and construction experts.

According to many academics, Turkey would also be a better place culturally, too. In his article Oran cited some examples and asked his readers to imagine what Turkey would look like if the cultural developments spurred on by minorities had not be ceased. "Anatolia before it was cleansed was a very civilized place. In Harput alone there were 92 schools, and there was a theater there a year before Atatürk was born. The Sasuryan brothers introduced photography in 1890,” he points out. Özel agrees, adding that if the Greeks and Armenians were still living in Turkey, Anatolia would not be a place of tensions.

Academics also say some of Turkey’s other problems would be different. For example, since there would be different cultures, tolerance would be learned naturally and secularism would not be a problem for Turkey. Ergil argues that Turkey would definitely be a pluralistic country. He also recalls that before the forced emigration of the Armenians, no one was talking about extreme poverty in eastern Anatolia.

They all also agree that the Kurdish question would be different. Kentel says there would be many languages spoken and that this would help the development of tolerance for different cultures. Aktar underlines that Turkey cannot have a population exchange or force Kurds to emigrate but, at the same time, it is not able to develop a culture of cohabitation. "If even only 5 percent of the population was composed of minorities, Turkey would have a culture of cohabitation and the Kurdish question would be at a different level."

• Bear Left writes about how soccer can be a vehicle for international amity, whether between Cubans and Americans or Turks and Armenians (this last also described by Douglas Muir at A Fistful of Euros). That said, there's also case studies of conflicts like the Football War of 1969.


• Centauri Dreams touches upon the idea of interstellar panspermia, the belief that microorganisms suitably prepared could not only traverse the vast distances within a planetary system but the vaster gaps between planetary systems. It's an evocative idea.


• Daniel Drezner addresses the question through links of whether or not al-Qaeda is still a threat, with Bruce Hoffman pro and Juan Cole con. I lean towards a moderate version of con--the organization proper might be down but the ideology has a lot of support.


• The Dragon's Tales' Will Baird wonders whether the poor showing of Russia's military equipment and its soldiers as evidenced in the Georgian war and its ongoing financial issues means that the current troubles are the reactions of a declining power.


• Gideon Rachman reports on polls suggesting that in only 9 out of 17 countries does a majority of the population believe that al-Qaeda was responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11th, with the American government coming next, then Israel


• Hunting Monsters takes a look at the increasingly publicized tendency for some Egyptian men to grope woman, making the plausible suggestion that this phenomenon is likely a product of sexual and other frustrations felt by young Egyptians.


• If not for The Pagan Prattle I would not have learned that the computer game Spore is evil because it deals with evolution. Sigh.
  
• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer reports that Bolivia is nearing civil war thanks to ethnic conflict and disputes over the sharing of hydrocarbon revenues.


• Wis(s)e Words reports on a remarkably reckless American military adviser who suggests that Georgia should model its armed forces on those of Hezbollah, combining light and highly mobile infantry with modern weapons. As if that would work in the face of an upset Russia.

• Amused Cynicism reports on Sarah Palin's belief that God told the United States to invade Iraq. Is it wrong for me to not be especially surprised at this sort of thing anymore?


• At 'Aqoul, The Lounsbury blogs about the potentially profitable abundance of nitrogen in the Middle East and questions about the relationship of language to corporate opacity among some companies in that region.


• Greg Davis at blogto reacts to the new Metrolinx transit plan ("an answer to the question 'if money was no issue what would you do to improve transit in the GTA?'") and 34 comments follow.


• Centauri Dreams reports on a book containing some of the latest work on solar sails, spacecraft propelled by the impact of light on highly-reflective low-mass "sails."


• Daniel Drezner (now a senior editor at The National Interest) reflects how the fact that the US/EU-sponsored state of Kosovo has been recognized by 46 countries while the Russia-sponsored states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been recognized only by Russia and Nicaragua says something about the distribution of power in the world.


• Gideon Rachman reports on Thailand's People’s Alliance for Democracy, a political movement that wants 70% of the seats in the Thai parliament to be appointed because it distrusts the ability of the rural majority of the country to choose wisely. Parallels with Ataturkism and Turkey, anyone?


• Spacing Toronto says that Torontonians should be happy that we don't live in Detroit.

• Reuters reports on the latest round of Cypriot reunification talks. The decision of the leaders of both sides to initiate the talks is hoepful, but is this likely to end in something, I ask my readers with more knowledge in this drawn-out affair?


• Hugo Chavez and King Juan Carlos of Spain appear to have made up, some months after last November's spat when, Chavez, after Chavez accused former Spansih prime minister Aznar of being a fascist, the King told Chavez to shut up.


• The Globe and Mail's Mark MacKinnon writes about the irony that the bulldozers that Israel uses to demolish Palestinian homes and wreck their livelihoods are now being used against Israelis.


• More and more frequently of late news comes out of massive job cuts and layoffs in the Canadian (actually, Ontarian) auto industry. This will do wonders for the cities surrounding Toronto--Oshawa comes particularly to mind.


• Turkey's ruling and quite popular AKP party has been saved from being banned, which is quite good for Turkish democracy and still allows some faint hope of Turkey getting into the European Union along with Latveria. The Wall Street Journal has a quite interesting article on the ongoing political tensions in Turkey, making a convincing argument that Turkish secularists' devotion to Ataturk is almost as much of a religion as Islam.


• The blog IBEX Salad suggests that the economic health of a nation can be guaged by the cost of being smuggled into that coutnry. (The price of illegal migrants to Spain has dropped by half.)


• Finally, the extensive tract of forested land in British Columbia bought by German noble His Royal Highness Duke Carl Herzog von Wurttemberg after the Soviet invasino of Czechoslovakia, has been bought up by an environmental group that wants to operate it as a nature reserve.

The "Ergenekon network" or "Ergenekon" (Turkish: Ergenekon or Ergenekon terör örgütü) is an alleged clandestine Gladio-type ultra-nationalist terrorist organization within Turkey, plotting to foment unrest in Turkey, inter alia by assassinating intellectuals, including Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, with the ultimate goal of toppling the present government.

Revelations emanating from the investigation thus far have shown that many of the attacks attributed to separatist or Islamist groups or seen as hate crimes against minorities were actually "inside jobs."

The investigation into the gang, 33 of whose members were taken into police custody earlier this week as part of an investigation into an arms depot found in İstanbul in June of last year, has exposed solid links between an attack on the Council of State in 2006, threats and attacks against people accused of being unpatriotic and a 1996 car crash known as the Susurluk incident, which revealed links between a police chief, a convicted ultranationalist fugitive and a member of Parliament as well as links to plans of some groups in Turkey's powerful military to overthrow the government.

Meanwhile, 15 of the suspects detained on Tuesday on charges of membership in the Ergenekon terrorist organization were taken to a courthouse in İstanbul's Beşiktaş district under tight security on Friday, while one of them, retired Maj. Zekeriya Öztürk, was arrested. Three of the suspects were released on Thursday by the prosecutor after their interrogation was complete, while the court released one of the suspects.

The gang is a part of a structure named Ergenekon, declared a terrorist organization by the İstanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office, an aggregation of many groups of varying sizes, many of which have in their names adjectives such as "patriotic," "national," "nationalist," "Kemalist" or "Atatürkist." Ergenekon is the name of a legend that describes how Turks came into existence.

A number of those detained in the recent raids, including Veli Küçük, Sami Hoştan, Drej Ali and Muzaffer Tekin -- who was already in jail prior to Tuesday's detentions-- have repeatedly been named in many similar investigations.

The investigation has found that the Ergenekon phenomenon, also referred to as Turkey's "deep state," stages attacks using "behind-the-scenes" paramilitary organizations to manipulate public opinion according its own political agenda.

• Der Spiegel's English-language edition has a story describing how many skilled German Turks, employable but unable to find positions in Germany, are emigrating, mainly to Turkey or to the Anglophone world.


• The Baltimore Sun describes how Spain is reclaiming its Sephardic Jewish heritage, not only through in-depth historical studies and immigration but through tourism.


• Kangla Online has an article that seems to constitute a warning about the risks facing Vietnamese and Cambodian women who emigrate to South Korea to marry Korean husband, and of mass movements generally.


• In the wake of a suicide bomb attack on a Kandahar jail that freed hundreds of Taliban warriors, the Taliban is now swarming Kandahar.


• Robert Mugabe warns the opposition that if the ongoing election-related violence in Zimbabwe continues they will be arrested.


• The fatal shooting of two 25-year-old men as they sat in their car with a girlfriend in a gentrifying area of Toronto has thrown Toronto.

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.