Justus For All

globeandmail.com: Papal visit underlines Turkish take on faith

“Perhaps this is the greatest accomplishment of the Turkish republic,” she said in an interview. “Islam is a political religion; it makes no distinction between Caesar and God. Mohammed was as much a political leader as he was a religious leader. So the Turkish Republic has finally created a form of Muslim belief that can be a private matter. It’s the first place to do this.”The apparent rise in religious belief, she said, is simply a new freedom of already devout people to express their beliefs. In the 1990s, Turkey’s major Islamist party was banned, and a deep divide opened between secular and religious Turks. That has changed after several years of rule by Mr. Erdogan, a former Islamic crusader who has favoured the devout even while modernizing the country. His courts outlawed spousal rape and honour killing.

“I think that the seeming increase in religiosity seems to do with the fact that people can express their religious beliefs more than in 1999,” Prof. Toprak said. “The whole atmosphere has become more normalized.”

Those three paragraphs probably contain the best summation of the problem in integrating Western and Muslim political views (terrorism is an extreme expression of this failure), and the clear hope that while difficult, this problem is not insoluble and is even being solved in at least one place.

Pope Benedict asked a few months ago if Islam was ammenable to reason or not, it seems that quietly and without fanfare, and often obscurred by radicals, the Muslims of Turkey have answered ‘yes.’