Just hours before Turkey’s top prosecutor presented arguments in court that the AK Party should be closed and 70 of its top officials, including Prime Minister Erdogan banned from politics, police took yet another 22 people into custody ostensibly for plotting to overthrow the government. Three others are still “at large,” but expected to be taken into custody soon. (more…)

The Diyanet (Ministry on Religious Affairs) in Turkey apparently would like to remind Turkish women of their place, and also that they are living provocations to male sexual urges. In the words of the recent report by the Diyanet:

“Women have to be more careful, since they have stimulants,”

Unacceptable provocative behaviour includes flirting with men, wearing perfume outside the home and exposing skin. Also unmarried men and women shouldn’t be alone together and mixed-gender workplaces are not a good idea.

I wonder if they would also like women to be forbidden from driving and for them to need 4 male witnesses to prove rape, since it sounds like they’d much rather be like Iran and Saudi Arabia than be a island of moderate Islam.

The anti-AKP rally in Izmir was a success:

Hundreds of thousands of pro-secular Turks gathered in the third largest city of Turkey Sunday to protest against the Islamist-rooted government that they fear is working to raise the influence of religion on society and pressure the secularist center-left parties unite ahead of parliamentary elections set for July 22.

Organizers of the pro-secular rally estimated the participating crowd at around two million. This was the first ever rally which was staged simultaneously both on land and sea as scores of small ferry boats and fishermen boats packed with demonstrators joined the rally from the sea.

Izmir is a port city on the Aegean coast that is a bastion of secularism, and Islamic parties fare poorly there. According to eyewitness accounts the demonstration was the biggest ever held in the port city of Izmir since the 1977 campaign rally in the city by late Bülent Ecevit, who was then heading the Republican People’s Party (CHP). The CHP had won the 1977 parliamentary elections with a 43 percent landslide…

“Turkey is secular and will remain secular,” protesters chanted. “No to sharia (Islamic law).”

The CHP and other opposition parties hope to use the protests to build momentum for the parliamentary elections (July 22). At this moment, the AK Party is, sadly, doing quite well in the polls: more than 40% of Turkish voters say that they support Erdogan’s party.

Two million people, quite amazing.

The New York Times has an article up about today’s protest in Izmir as well.

The beautiful coastal city of Izmir, Turkey, has been hit by a terrorist attack earlier today. A bycycle bomb exploded on a market, injuring 15 people. As far as I know, so far, no one has been reported dead, thank God.

What group is responsible for the attack is, as of yet, unknown. “The blast came a day before a planned anti-government rally in Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, amid rising political tensions ahead of a July general election.” Perhaps that this has something to do with it. Of course, it could also be the PKK / Kurdish organization.

Izmir is one of the most secular Turkish cities: organizers say that the protest could “draw up to two million people opposed to the Islamist-rooted government of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.”

I have something personal with Izmir, so this blast worries me tremendously. Izmir is one of the most beautiful cities of Turkey: at the coast, surrounded by mountains / hills. It was occupied by the Greec right after the second World War, after which it was liberated by Atatürk(’s forces).

UPDATE
One of the 15 has passed away. 14 injured, 1 dead. May God bless that person.

As I understand it, people think that the PKK is behind the attack. If true, this could increase the call on the government to do something / to invade / attack northern Iraq.

H/t commenter Yonason

A good, hopeful article over at Daniel Pipes’ website:

“Moderate Unicorns,” huffed a reader, responding to my recent plea that Western states bolster moderate Muslims. Dismissing their existence as a myth, he notes that non-Muslims “are still waiting for moderates to stand and deliver, identifying and removing extremist thugs from their mosques and their communities.”

It’s a valid skepticism and a reasonable demand. Recent events in Pakistan and Turkey, however, prove that moderate Muslims are no myth.

In Pakistan, an estimated 100,000 people demonstrated on April 15 in Karachi, the country’s largest city, to protest the plans of a powerful mosque in Islamabad, the Lal Masjid, to establish a parallel court system based on Islamic law, the Shari‘a. “No to extremism,” roared the crowd. “We will strongly resist religious terrorism and religious extremism,” exhorted Altaf Hussain, leader of the Mutahida Qaumi Movement, at the rally.

In Turkey, more than a million moderate Muslims in five marches protested the bid of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to take over the presidency of the republic, giving it control over the two top government offices (the other being the prime ministry, currently filled by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan).

He goes on to write about the situation in Turkey right now: moderate Muslims, political secularists, there are by no means inclined to let Erdogans AK Party, which has Islamist roots, take over the country. Abdullah Gül was forced to withdraw his candidacy due to the opposition, in Parliament, by the army, and by the Turkish people. These secular Turks refuse to sit by idle, they raise their voices in condemnation of Islamism and want to do everything necessary to preserve Turkey’s secular system.

Hopeful signs? On the one hand yes, on the other hand, no. Why not? Because it is now, seemingly, necessary (suddenly) for the secularists to do so. Suddenly, moderate Muslims feel forced to take action. This means that the situation has become, in their opinion at least, (too) dangerous.

When, then, ‘yes’ as well? Because at least, in Turkey (and some other Muslim countries), moderates are standing up and raising their voices in opposition to Islamism.

Quite surprising news (at least the timing of it): Abdullah Gül has withdrawn from the ‘race’.

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has withdrawn from the race to be Turkey’s president after supporters were unable to gather the necessary two-thirds quorum in the parliament for a vote on his candidacy.

The parliament’s speaker twice counted heads in the chamber Sunday but each time announced it was just eight members short of the needed 367 for a quorum.

It is the second time parliament has been unable to vote on Gul, due to a boycott by opposition parties.

Turkey’s Constitutional Court declared the first vote held on April 27 void because a two-thirds quorum was not present for the balloting.

Gul, a member of the ruling AK Party and the only candidate being considered, indicated he was no longer a candidate as he left the parliament building Sunday.

The news as such is not that surprising; the timing, however, is. I expected Gül to play the game like the CHP plays it: till the very end.

It will be interesting to see where they will go from here: early elections, will the AKP win / keep its majority or will the CHP (whose leader is highly unpopular) make a comeback?

It seems that the Turkish army has said that it will do everything necessary to to defend Turkey’s secular system.

In a statement released late on Friday night, the General Staff says it is following with ‘concern’ the debate over secular system in the presidential elections and would ‘openly display its position and attitudes when it becomes necessary’

The military issued a memorandum-like statement saying that Islamic reactionary activities were expanding in scope and vowing that it would fulfill its “lawful duties” to protect the state. The statement came on Friday night, hours after Parliament held the first round of the presidential election.
In a statement posted on its Web site, the General Staff said it was following with “concern” the debate over Turkey’s secular system in the presidential elections and would “openly display its position and attitudes when it becomes necessary.”

The is very powerful in Turkey and has several times in the past acted / overthrown governments. In other words, when the army makes statements like this, everybody takes it very serious.

Some Turkish civilians meanwhile responded with anger, as did some politicians and the EU.

The Turkish government itself did not remain silent either. Turkish Daily News:

The Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) government said Saturday a military warning against it was democratically unacceptable.

In a rather unaccustomed manner the Turkish government lashed out at the army, which accused it of endangering secularism, saying that the general staff “remains under the orders of the prime minister.”

“I would like to underline that it is inconceivable in a democratic state based on the rule of law for the general staff, which remains under the orders of the prime minister, to speak out against the government,” government spokesman Cemil Çiçek told a news conference.

He stressed the government’s commitment to the secular order of the country and said it was “unacceptable” for Turkey to resolve its problems outside the democratic system.

This is an extremely complicated matter. Turkey is secular and it would be a disaster for itself and for Europe if Erdogan and company destroy it bit by bit. On the other hand, a take over by the army would be quite disastrous as well, at least in the short term.

It seems to me that the army won’t act yet… but Erdogan and Gul have to be very, very careful. One mistake and the army might act.

Meanwhile, Ataturk’s party, the CHP, goes to court:

Turkey’s election of a new president headed to court Friday, after opposition deputies boycotted in an effort to deny a 367-vote majority to the nominee, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül. If the resort to the 11-judge Constitutional Court by opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is successful, it would mean the effective annulment of Gül’s election late in the afternoon by 357 votes of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and a handful of maverick deputies and new parliamentary elections.
Turkey’s unicameral legislature was the scene of day-long, high-stakes political maneuvering, as all sides sought to slalom through arcane procedures and interpretations of the Constitution, resulting in an ambiguous result that could take days or weeks to resolve. The skirmishing turns on a provision that requires a two-thirds majority — 367 votes — to elect a new president in the first two rounds of voting. If a choice is not made in the first two rounds, a final third round only requires a simple majority — 276 votes. After failing early Friday to win the support of independent and minor party deputies, the AKP strategy appeared to be a plan to muddle through two inconclusive voting rounds and put Gül in office on the third. The opposition, however, has countered that a 367 majority must at least be present during voting for the round to be legally completed and a second round authorized.

I wrote one week ago that we could expect more mass demonstrations in the coming weeks in Turkey. A Turkish commenter stopped by and said that I was wrong: there would be no protests. Well, if I were the “I told you so” type of person, I would say so now: “Some 700.000 Turks waving the red national flag flooded central Istanbul on Sunday to demand the resignation of the government, saying the Islamic roots of Turkey’s leaders threatened to destroy the country’s modern foundations.”

A retired government employee said (about Gül and Erdogan): “They want to drag Turkey to the dark ages.”

Ayse Bari on Gül’s headscarf wearing wife: “We don’t want a covered woman in Atatürks presidential palace. We want civilized, modern people there.”

More protests to come I am sure.

A controversial family. One of the main reasons? The headscarf Mrs. Gül wears.

Go to Turkish Daily News to find out more about Abdullah Gül’s wife, Hayrünisa Gül. She’s an independent thinking Lady, who dislikes many things, one of them being dependent on her husband.

Well, not entirely:

Although her family is well-off, she argued that she will be the one to lose if they went to a notary just after the change in the civil law for the property sharing between the man and woman.

“If I was in need of property, I could not ask my husband to give me any because of my pride. But if I would ask, I am sure that he would give me all his property. For example, I bought him a car but I know that if I didn’t have one, he would buy one for me. In Kayseri culture, many things are given to women. But today, I may be the one who loses if such an agreement is made.”

She is determined to wear her headscarf no matter what.

Hayrünisa Gül proposed a condition to her soon-to-be-husband in order to get married. “I didn’t want to give up education and he also did not demand that I did,” she said. After getting married, she completed her high school education but could not get a diploma in 1980, because of her headscarf…

After returning from Jeddah, she completed her education, entered the university exam in 1997 and was found eligible to study in the department of Arabic Language and Literature of Ankara University.

But because of her headscarf, she could not register at the university and applied to the Council of State (Danıştay). After a refusal, she applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) but after Gül became the foreign minister, she withdrew her application a month before the court’s March, 2004 decision, which was supportive of the university.

She also called the headscarf debate, which is raging in Turkey for quite a while already, “artificial.”

The issue is, of course, bigger than the headscarf. The real issue is secularism. Turkish secularists are proud that Turkey is a secular country and want to keep it that way. There are, however, many Turks who, to a degree, want to go back to the days of the Ottoman Empire, the rule of the Koran in public life. Not all Turks are secularists, to say the least, so secularists know that they have to guard their accomplishments closely.

In related news, it seems that Erdogan did want to run for President, but that he changed his mind after the mass anti-Erdogan / pro-Secularism demonstration (attended by 600,000 people) and the press conference of Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Büyükanıt in which he said: “We hope to see a president who is bound with the principle of the state and secularism in essence and not in words.”

Erdogan then came up with a list with four names. He reduced it to two. The two remaining (possible) candidates were state minister Beşir Atalay and defense minister Vecdi Gönül. Then:

The latest obstacle was the AKP’s third powerful figure, the Parliament Speaker Bülent Arınç. At first Gül went to visit Arınç on April 21. Gül proposed the names but Arınç was extremely committed to nominating someone from the AKP whose wife wore a headscarf. Otherwise he would put himself forward for the presidency. Arınç put pressure on Gül and Erdoğan who visited him on Monday that “the president should be himself, Erdoğan or Gül.”

As Arınç could not be convinced, Erdoğan suggested Gül as the AKP candidate and Arınç approved this alternative. In AKP corridors, this result is seen as a victory for Arınç who is the representative of the conservative group in the party.

So now we know that the AKP made a very consciously decision to nominate someone whose wife wears a headscarf. This was not an accident, it was a requirement.

Secular Turkey, where art thou, while the Islamists are taking over?

The New York Times reports that Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan will not seek the presidency. This is quite a surprising move, at least for me. I expected him to run. That being said, I think that for Turkey, for Erdogan and for his party this is the right decision: Erdogan is too controversial a figure. Instead of Erdogan, Turkey’s governing party has chosen Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as its candidate

Gul was expected to win the post when lawmakers vote Friday in the 55-member Parliament, where Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development party has a majority.

Erdogan said Gul would be a candidate who would be “embraced by all of Turkey.”

Now, that might seem to be a good decision, but, as I understand it, many Turks are not happy with this choice. Why not? Gül was prime minister before Erdogan: Erdogan wanted to become Prime Minister, but could not, and then Gül became Turkey’s PM. When Gül, however, was PM, Erdogan was the de facto Prime Minister. Erdogan ruled through Gül, many people would say.

For secularists there is no difference between Gül as President or Erdogan, again, as I understand it. Both are suspected of having Islamist tendencies. Ms. Erdogan and Ms. Gül both wear scarves.

In short: both are not (considered to be) secularists.

Expect more mass demonstrations in Turkey.

A great column at Today’s Zaman about Turkey’s ‘identity problem’:

It is hard to avoid the impression that every issue in Turkish politics somehow relates to the country’s complex identity problems. From the Kurdish question to whether the president’s wife can wear a headscarf, we are always debating identity issues.
Yet we are often unable to address the root causes of the problem. A major part of the problem has to do with the peculiarity of Turkey’s “civilizational” dilemmas with “Westernization.” Having a complex civilizational identity, or being a “torn country” to use Samuel Huntington’s terminology, is part of Turkish history. Indeed, the difficulty with assigning Turkey to a specific geography or civilization derives from the fact that it had always been a border country. A glance at the map shows why Turkey does not fit into any of the clear-cut geographical categories formulated by Western scholars. The country straddles the geographical and cultural borders between Europe and Asia, without really belonging to either. Such an “in-between” Turkish identity is made all the more complicated by a number of historical factors.

Perhaps most important is the fact that the Ottoman Empire was historically the intimate enemy of Europe. In religious and military terms, the Turk represented “the other” who played a crucial role in consolidating Europe’s own Christian identity. However, as centuries of Ottoman imperial splendor came to an end and territorial regression began, the Ottoman ruling elite sought salvation in one of the earliest projects of modernization. Since modernization was pragmatically identified with Christian Western Europe, the Ottomans faced major difficulties in adapting to the new paradigm without surrendering their Islamic pride. Throughout the 19th century, the result has often been a chaotic coexistence of traditional Islamic and modernized institutions. This situation did not change until the radicalization of the Westernization project, first under the Young Turks and later under their Kemalist successors.

The Kemalist revolution was by far the most radical attempt at cultural transformation in the Islamic world. Yet, it achieved a rather limited penetration of Turkish society at large. Especially the rural parts of Anatolia remained largely unaffected by the social engineering taking place in Ankara during the single party rule. In that sense, the Kemalism was too state-centered and elitist to be fully absorbed by Anatolian society. As in Ottoman times, it was essentially the governing elite and the urban bourgeoisie that supported Westernization and easily adapted to its norms. In the meantime, the gap between the state and rural periphery widened even further.

Right after the second world war, the Kemalist regime was forced to hold multiparty elections: different parties divided the country in to left and right and, “Kurdish and Islamic dissent were no longer high on the political agenda, since they soon came to be absorbed by the new political divisions in Turkey.”

When left-wing and rightwing politics lost their relevance with the end of the Cold War, Kurdish and Islamic dissent quickly re-emerged. This Kurdish and Islamic revival during the 1990s once again triggered a strong Kemalist reaction. After the long Cold War interlude, it was as if Turkey was back in the 1930s. The military had to take the initiative against Kurdish-Islamic forces by forcefully reasserting Turkish nationalism and secularism. The result was the “lost decade” of the 1990s. If we want to avoid another lost decade, now that similar dynamics are once again at play, we need to find liberal solutions to our identity problems.

Read the whole thing at Today’s Zaman.

I find this to be a more than fascinating subject. Turkey’s ‘identity problem’ is highly interesting, not in the least because Western European nations struggle with the same problem these days. Oversecularization, moral relativism and a sense that it is wrong to be proud of one’s country and history, combined with the constant flow of Muslim immigrants have caused many European countries to have some of the same problems Turkey has.

The Haaretz reports that approximately 300,000 Turks protested in the capital, Ankara, today “to try to stop the ruling AK Party from picking Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan as their presidential candidate next week because of his Islamist roots.”

The protestors, most of them members / supporters of the party founded by the father of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, shouted slogans like “Turkey is secular and will remain secular forever!” while waving Turkish flags and banners of Ataturk.

As the article at the Haaretz points out, “the AK Party has its roots in political Islam, and a possible presidency headed by Erdogan has split this secular but predominantly Muslim country seeking European Union membership.”

Secularists - who count, historically, among themselves the powerful army - “fear that if Erdogan, or someone close to him, wins the presidency next month, the government will be able to implement an Islamic agenda without opposition.”

A victory for Erdogan will definitely be a step back for Turkey. Turkey is the most secular ‘Muslim country’ in the world - and the secularists are - as anybody who knows quite some Turks knows - darned proud of it.

“Turkey’s staunchly pro-secular president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer” is one of Erdogan’s fiercest opponents. He warned the Turkish people that “for the first time, the pillars of the secular republic are being openly questioned.”

“‘We are aware of the danger’, the pro-secular Cumhuriyet newspaper headlined on Saturday in white letters printed against a red background.”

Although Erdogan “has shown his commitment to future European Union membership by enacting sweeping reforms that allowed the country to start accession talks in 2005″, secularists do not believe for one second that Erdogan has distanced himself from his Islamist roots: “he has also stoked secularist concerns by speaking out against restrictions on wearing Islamic-style head scarves in government offices and schools and taking steps to bolster religious schools. He tried to criminalize adultery before being forced to back down under intense EU pressure. Some party-run municipalities have taken steps to ban alcohol consumption.”

The chief of the Turkish military - which is, as said, still very powerful in Turkey - General Yasar Buyukanit, has already warned Erdogan not to run for president. Or, at least, that is how his words were interpreted by many. He said last Thursday: “As a citizen and as a member of the armed forces, we hope that someone who is loyal to the principles of the republic - not just in words but in essence - is elected president.”

If Turkey wants to join the E.U. (which more and more Turks oppose, mainly because the E.U. has demanded some ridiculous things of Turkey), it better not elect Erdogan as its president. Many, many Europeans are already quite suspicious about Turkey (yes, because it is a Muslim country. Don’t underestimate the influence of the E.U. - it is much, much more than a European NAFTA. In time, most Europeans expect the EU to become the United States of Europe), a victory for Erdogan won’t do that any good, to say the least.

As I said, quite some Turks are very proud secularists. For these Turks, secularism is an intregal part of the Turkish identity: without secularism, Turkey will no longer truly be Turkey for them.

Lets hope that these secularists will be victorious.