Skip to main content

Turkey’s ‘Islamo-Liberal Synthesis’


Mustafa Akyol’s Islam without Extremes: a Muslim Case for Liberty (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), carries an excellent analysis on the convergence of the Islamic and liberal trends in Turkey. Turkey is one of few Muslim countries in the world today which somehow escaped Western colonialism and consequently, does not perceive the West as its hostile ‘Other’. If the Muslims have a nemesis, an antagonistic ‘Other’, it is Kemalist secularism (born of its founding father, Mustafa Kemal ‘Ataturk’) with its “dictatorship of the seculatariat”, aspiring to re-engineer citizens into a class of “homo kemalicus”. The Kemalist legacy, which made it an explicit point to emulate the West in all its manner and form, down to the minutest details – even demanding the people to wear the brimmed hat as a mark of modernity (!), attracted disdain and revulsion, not just from the Muslim (or Islamist) camp, but also from the liberals. As a result they joined hands to confront the military-backed secularism. Politically, the ideals of that alliance is represented by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), itself born of the reformist strands (led by Abdullah Gul) within the Islamist-dominated camp of Necmeddin Erbakan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Conscience of the Market

When we say that the market should be restrained by ethical norms we don’t by default mean that the state should carry that responsibility. Critics typically take as axiomatic that the market is the root of all evil that any instance of irregularity, deficiency or oppressive practices that occur in commercial contexts is taken to warrant immediate outside intervention; and by that is often meant the state. Such an assumption about the market seriously underestimates the possibility of the market itself in restraining its own excesses. The misplaced emphasis on developing measures external to the market to rectify the latter’s shortcomings has only the result of treating the symptom rather than the real disease.
Post a Comment
Read more

Al-Attas on 'Islamic civilization'

Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas’s definition of ‘Islamic civilization’: “I define Islamic civilization as a civilization that emerges among the diversity of cultures of Muslim peoples of the world as a result of the permeation of the basic elements of the religion of Islam which those peoples have caused to emerge from within themselves. The process by which such emergence comes about is called Islamization, which is the liberation first from magical, mythical, animistic and ethnic cultural tradition incompatible with Islam, and then from secular control over one’s reason and one’s language. Whatever basic and praiseworthy elements of the pre-Islamic civilization that bind people together and are accepted as compatible with Islam become part of Islamic civilization. It is a living civilization whose pulse describes a process of Islamization, not in the dialectical sense of an evolutionary ‘development’, but in the sense of a progress involving every generation of Muslim towards r...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberalism's flaw - the 'contingency' of freedom

One serious error in liberal articulation of freedom and human rights lies in its contingent theory of freedom. That is to say, liberalism posits freedom as the absence of state intrusion into the private lives of individuals: freedom is contingent on such omission by the state, barring which the individual is denied his freedom. At its basic and most fundamental level, it is a recognition that the state has the ability to undermine the freedom of the individual. The state is thus unduly given the power to decide and determine the freedom of the individual. This is grotesquely false for freedom is ultimately secured deep within the soul and it is so powerful that no one save God is able to take it away from the individual. In conceiving of freedom in the socio-political sense, liberal philosophers have practically mutilated it and truncated it beyond recognition such that ‘freedom’ is now given an exclusively narrow and limited province, robbing it off the vastness and richness that ...
Post a Comment
Read more