A Quote by Mustafa Akyol
Foreign journalists writing about Turkey like to focus on the most fundamental divide in Turkish society: the rift between religious conservatives and secularists.
Related Quotes
As things change in Turkey people find in religious observance a certain framework of safety, of continuity. This is quite a common phenomenon. In a strange way it's part of a democratization of society. Although religious observance seems more common these days, it's not that people who did not go to mosques have started to go to mosques. I don't know anyone in Turkey who's become a born-again Muslim. It's a question of individual choice, and it does not stop the organic secularization of Turkish society, which carries on regardless.
When I say all of this stuff about Turkey, people don't understand. They think I don't like Turkey. I love Turkey. I love my people. I love Turkish food and everything. But my problem is with the government.
Turkish society is divided not only culturally but also politically. You're either conservative or progressive. Islamist or secular. Right wing or left wing. This kind of division can be seen in any society, but in Turkey, the problem is that we are losing any kind of connection between groups and any kind of desire to understand one another. The groups hate each other and they are demolishing all bridges between themselves. So society is divided strictly.
It is beneficial for Turkish democracy that not all religious conservatives are united under one banner.
That's the ultimate goal of most turkey recipes: to create a great skin and stuffing to hide the fact that turkey meat, in its cooked state, is dry and flavorless. Does it have to be that way? No. We just have to focus on what the turkey is and what the turkey needs.
We loved one another, man. I mean all those stories about the rift ... there was no question of a rift between Charlie Parker and me.
Actually, I've taught creative writing in Turkey, at an English language university, where the students were native Turkish speakers, but they were writing their essays in English, and they were very interesting - even the sense of structure, the conventions of writing, the different styles of writing.
I don't think about the reader when I'm writing, but I do when I'm editing, of course. For instance, I self-consciously didn't want to do anything to increase the divide between mothers and nonmothers - I think that divide is so horrible and destructive and unnecessary.
In Turkey religion not only affects society but is affected by it, which is why Turkish Islam differs from Arab Islam. It's a more modern, more rational, more self-confident society.
Turkey is immersed in a profound social and political conflict between secularists, who have been in power since the republic was founded, and an insurgent Islamic-based movement that seeks to increase the role of religion in public life.
In the 20th century, the Muslim world created a vision of religious nationalism. Turkey, for example, had to be ethnically Turkish. Kurds, Armenians, other minorities didn't have a place in such a vision of a nation-state.
Foreign journalists have to have an approved interpreter assigned them, which they have to pay for, who also acts as guide. As an Iranian, even writing for foreign media, I've been mercifully unrestricted.
The 2016 election unquestionably deepened the divide between liberals and conservatives.
Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views. In the process they have made religious believers into second-class citizens.
If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special weight, their problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist.
The main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are honest about it. We're kind of dorks about it. We are kind of like Dungeons and Dragons geeks.
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