Are we turning our backs on modernity?

last updated 8 January 2015

Turkey

TurkeyAre we turning our backs on modernity?Metin Munir

This could be the beginning of the end of modern Turkey, said Metin Munir in Istanbul’s Milliyet. For the first time since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, we have a prospective president “whose Arabic language skills are stronger than his English.” Compared with the conservative Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul was supposed to be the more moderate choice. But make no mistake, Gul, like Erdogan, is a committed member of the Islamist-leaning Justice and Development Party. Under his stewardship, Turkey would “enter a process of Islamism and rightism the end of which cannot be predicted.” Gül may claim he wants to lead Turkey into the European Union. But his party has appointed “only religious people to all high-level state positions.” And it has championed values “of the lower class,” such as wearing head scarves. Turkey will never join the E.U. with such practices. Keep this in mind: “The West begins at the place where secularism begins, and ends where it ends.”