Fitzgerald: Islam, democracy, and the Lords of Misrule

I think its best we keep our demands for Democracy in the Middle East quiet and keep paying for the call girls. Though what about Indonesia and Malaysia - does Asian sensibility trumps Middle Eastern-ism ?

I think its best we keep our demands for Democracy in the Middle East quiet and keep paying for the call girls. Though what about Indonesia and Malaysia - does Asian sensibility trumps Middle Eastern-ism ?

oops

Is there a word missing in the penultimate sentence --

"The tragedy is that those beneficiaries of Kemalism, now threatened by the sinister Erdogan and his associates, allowed the army, through its power to stage coups, to be the guarantor, through force, of Kemalism."

?

"Despotism comes naturally to Muslim polities."

Let's just look at that epitome of Muslim character - Mohammed. He did not establish anything more than one man (him), one ruler.
Mohammed did not even establish an order of succession, and as a result, Islam has been divided between Sunni and Shia ever since. Islam will always be at the mercy of any strong-willed despot who promises to enforce Sharia law make the kuffar submit to Islamic rule.

Does this mean Mohammed was a despot? This Islamophobe knows, but isn't telling..........

The penultimate sentence requires rephrasing for the intended meaning to be clear.

Thus, instead of

"The tragedy is that those beneficiaries of Kemalism, now threatened by the sinister Erdogan and his associates, allowed the army, through its power to stage coups, to be the guarantor, through force, of Kemalism."

It should read

"The tragedy is that those secular beneficiaries of Kemalism in Turkey, now threatened by the sinister Erdogan and his associates, relied largely on the army, through its power to stage coups, to be the guarantor, through force, of Kemalism."

Mr. Zakayev is not a Russian enforcer. He is former Foreign Minister of the rebel government under "President" Aslan Maskhadov, who, like all the other "Presidents of Chechnya", was killed by Russian forces. Mr. Zakayev is Vanessa Redgrave's favorite pet Chechen living in exile in U.K.. He is a thug to be sure and his home in Grozny was reported by Russian media to have a dungeon in the basement. But he is now an apostate because he wants to reach an accommodation with the Russian backed Ramzan Kadyrov, another thug but one who does serve Russia's interests in Chechnya. The people who have labeled him Zindiq are the worst hard core mohamaetan terrorists in the Caucasus. They have done so because he seems willing to give up the fight not because he enforces for the Russians. That role falls to Mr. Kadyrov.

nabi ZK (pbum)

Thanks Hugh. Something still doesn't quite click though in the interaction of the penultimate with the ultimate sentences:

The tragedy is that those beneficiaries of Kemalism, now threatened by the sinister Erdogan and his associates, allowed the army, through its power to stage coups, to be the guarantor, through force, of Kemalism.

Instead, the Kemalist effort ought to have continued, with a relentlessness and a ruthlessness that would match or overmatch the relentlessness and ruthlessness displayed by Erbakan, Erdogan, and all the others, including that most dangerous man, Fethulah Gulen.

Why is it in the penultimate sentence a "tragedy" that the beneficiaries of Kemalism "allowed" the army to do what in the ultimate sentence is described as something those same beneficiaries "ought to have continued"? Something still seems to be missing.

Great analysis.

Islam and democracy, that's an oxymoron. Turkey once was on the way to democracy, but only because Kemal Atatürk had abandoned Islam. In spite of all his assertions sinister Erdogan wants an Islamic state under the rule of sharia. We only have to think of his comparing democracy to a train you board and destination resched, you disembark.

Thanks for not even mentioning Indonesia, that Jimmy, the dhimmi, Carter praises as the world's third largest democracy. How he got that stupid idea, is unknown to me.

Great analysis.

Islam and democracy, that's an oxymoron. Turkey once was on the way to democracy, but only because Kemal Atatürk had abandoned Islam. In spite of all his assertions sinister Erdogan wants an Islamic state under the rule of sharia. We only have to think of his comparing democracy to a train you board and destination reached, you disembark.

Thanks for not even mentioning Indonesia, that Jimmy, the dhimmi, Carter praises as the world's third largest democracy. How he got that stupid idea, is unknown to me.

But mostly, where there are not hereditary rulers -- monarchs and princes and sultans -- there are “republics.” The word “republic” means, in the Arab and Muslim context, not a “republic” in the Western sense...

Imagine if Hitler's Third Reich had won the war, then fast forward 1300 years, and what you would have left after all the internal power grab bickering and infighting would be what we see as "republics" or "democracies" in Islamophere today. Same war, different murderous nasties.

The temporary lull in Islamic ambitions after the fall of the Ottoman caliphate has now spontaneously recombusted into nuvoIslamic ambitions for a world caliphate ala Al Qeda, Iran's Ayatollahs, Saud supremacy, etc. Lucky for us the Islamics don't have the military efficiency, nor the smarts, so they continue to annoy with their Medieval corruption riddled nepotism with narcissistic sultanous ostentations ala Kadafi's 40 years of Islamo-fascist rule. Same was for Saddam, or other self proclaimed petty kinglets in the world of Islamophere. Mostly they merely anny7, but if these murderous nasties get any stronger with some sort of cobbled together caliphate, or the Bomb, we will war on them same as we warred on Hitler's Third Reich. Same war, different nasties is all.

"Despotism comes naturally to Muslim polities"
....................

Very true. How often have we heard Jihadists denouncing *even the appearance of democracy*, as they declare voting--in any context--to be "un-Islamic"?

And yet, this does not stop clueless Westerners, many of them, from insisting that the only reason the United States--and other Western nations--are hated is that they "support oppressive regimes in the Muslim world"?

Now, I am no fan of the sort of "realpolitik" that has us throwing our support behind ugly regimes in Dar-al-Islam--often on the very questionable basis that they may be slightly less vicious than their rivals, or may be slightly less anti-American or anti-Western, or may at least put forth an appearance of being more "small d" democratic. Very often, this is no more than the thinnest gloss, which gets them large amounts of foreign aid from the ever-hopeful West.

Much as I hate realpolitik--and question its usefullness--the fact of the matter is that often we are dealing with ugly, undemocratic regimes because there is no other sort to be found in the Muslim world. many Western critics--especially on the left, like to imply that--somehow--Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and Pakistan, and the Emirates, and on and on--would be enlightened democracies if not for backing from the West--especially the United States.

Where they get this notion I have no idea. There isn't a single full democracy in all of the Muslim world, and the only ones that have any democratic elements are those where--as Hugh noted--Islam is diluted by large Infidel populations, or constrained in some way by force.

Islam is a creed of force, and that is never seen more clearly than in the longing for the ultimate totalitarian state--the Caliphate, ruled over by the absolute ruler, the Caliph--and where there is never any sort of peaceful transfer of power except in the cases of dynasties--and the only other choices are assassination, palace intrigues, and coups.

Hugh, I was also puzzled by that comparison at the end of your essay. You say that it was a shame that the secular forces relied on the army to be the enforcer of kemalism, that the secularists should have been "relentless" and "ruthless" instead.

I had always understood the coup d'etat solution to be the best one. Isn't the problem now that the army is being punished for trying to reign in the Islamists? Wasn't using the army as an enforcer as close to "ruthless" and "relentless" as civilized secularists should get?

If it wasn't a typo on your part, I am anxious to learn what would have been a better solution on the part of the secularists than they route they chose.

From The 5000 Year Leap: 1st Principal; The only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law.

What is natural law? According to Cicero,it is right reason in agreement with nature,universal and unchanging. It is also a divine gift of human reason from the Creator of the Universe.

Natural Law is denied in Islam. Allah is not bound by "natural law" in Islamic dogma, and therefore cannot be knowable to humanity. Human reason is not encouraged in Islam. Human reason is denied completely and all must be spelled out to the Muslim masses. Islam is fatalistic, not interacting with a deity that is concerned with humanity. The very nature of Allah is contrary to Natural Law.

2nd Principal:A free people cannot survive under a republican constitution unless they remain virtuous and morally strong.

This is a quote from Benjamin Franklin, "Only virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."

I love that quote. It very succinctly describes the reason why Dar al Islam is not nor will it ever be democratic or free republics. Islam and its sharia have demonstrated since the seventh century why there is a need for strong despotic fascist dictators. Islam is vicious, barbaric and demonstrates no virtue,compassion, or forgiveness.

In my opinion if the West wants peace, we must put in place those despots of our choosing. Islam is not compatible with the Western concept of freedom, and has never demonstrated any kind of reform, nor does Islam or Muslims themselves show any inclination to do so (reform that is).

Islam is convinced that it and Mohamed, is the last answer in morality and virtue. So we must judge Islam and Mohamed honestly by Western moral standards and Natural law. I personally find both lacking.

Islam and Muslims WANT a political despot titled Caliph. Quite frankly,due to the evidence of Muslim behavior demonstrated throughout history and today, a Caliph is what they need. Every chance they get at "western freedom" is turned into a sharia state with few exceptions.

It is a mistake for the west to "free" them unless and until Islam separates itself from sharia and recognizes Natural Law as the order of the universe.

I guess it is obvious I like this book. I encourage people to take a look at it.

There are two major, and profoundly distinct, dimensions to democracy as it is practiced in the modern world. They are often confused and the result is that tens of millions have suffered miserably for it.

The first dimension is the type of democracy that is reduced to practice by despots in both the Muslim world and elsewhere. It is the method of choosing leaders, dictators and otherwise. The process of democratic election is only half the story of democracy but it is usually presented as the whole by Western and non-Western political leadership. The U.S. Dept. of State considers any country that conducts elections of its leaders a democracy. It is usually what is meant when the White House or 10 Downing Street spills the word "democracy" into the media. Let us recall, on this day especially, that Chancellor Hitler was democratically elected.

The other dimension, the true core of the Greek concept of democracy, is self-rule, in which sovereignty is vested in the people who are alive today, not in gods or priests or dead prophets and ancestors. This is the democracy that is anathema to Islam and shall never be compatible with Sharia. They are mutually exclusive ideological foundations. It is this democracy that is the heart and soul of Western polity. It is this democracy that Islam has for more than 13 centuries attempted to exterminate and continues to do so. It is for this democracy that Muslims kill those who refuse to submit to their barbaric tribal warrior code. It is because of this democracy that the Islamic ideology will forever fail to achieve ascendancy over the Western mind. And it is the Western mind that will forever triumph over the primitive nomads who attempt to assail its people and institutions.

SaracensAtTheGates, thank you for saying so clearly what I attempted and muddled.

I think the word democracy is frequently misused. The USA is a federal republic, not a democracy. Islamic countries have democratically elected leaders, they may well be democracies, but they are not republics, and the power does not remain with the people, especially when choices are severely limited as they are frequently in Muslim majority countries.

The last two sentences of this essay by Hugh are incoherent, if one tries to make sense of them within the context of the essay, and also within the broader context of this blog and Hugh's other essays.

From Nonie Darwish, her book about Sharia, called 'Cruel and Usual Punishment', page 192: "Sharia, even if only partially applied, can only produce tyranny and dictatorships. Sharia is more than a dictator-friendly law. It is a dictator's dream handed to him by allah".

"The last two sentences of this essay by Hugh are incoherent, if one tries to make sense of them within the context of the essay, and also within the broader context of this blog and Hugh's other essays."

I don't find my last two sentences incoherent, and I am surprised that apparently the words "ruthlessness" and "relentlessness" apparently carry, for some, the implication that military force must be involved. The whole point of those sentences is that the secular class in Turkey, the advanced class, ought never to have let up its vigilance, and ought never to have complacently assumed that the army's military might would always be there, and would always be used, to uphold the Kemalist reforms that made the very existence of that secular class possible.

There should have been a constant, world-without-end campaign to expand the number of secular people, and to weaken the hold of Islam at every level. That would have required more laws on the books, and more vigilance about the clever exploitation both of Turksih civil rights, and of the rights required by a largely uncomprehending or even islamophilic E.U. Bureacracy, which has imposed demands on Turkey, as part of its attempt to gain admission to the E.U., that limit the frredom to act of the army, and that should have been foreseen. Why are the Muslims so cunning, and those they would upend so very un-cunning?

But I will dilate upon this matter later tonight, and have something ready for tomorrow, for those who are puzzled by what should not be puzzling at all.

Hugh, the whole problem in the last two sentences resides in the penultimate sentence's "...tragedy is that those beneficiaries of Kemalism, ...allowed the army..."

How was it a tragedy to allow the army? In Turkey, allowing the army is a good thing, not a bad thing. Capisce?

You don't understand another meaning of the word "allowed." I used the word "allowed" in the sense that they "allowed" the army to be the sole defender, through force or the threat of force, of Kemalism. They "allowed" others to do what they too should have done, should have seen the necessity of doing. It was important not to have accepted the benefits of Kemalism -- the people who can think, the secular class, are those beneficiaries -- without at the same time accepting the main responsibiility for defending Kemalism, extending its gains, and using control of higher education to make sure that Islam, in subtle ways, continued to be held up for inspection, analysis, and criticism.

But I will put together something, as I promised -- I'll do it fast -- and it should be put up here at some point today.

"Why is it in the penultimate sentence [of this article: a "tragedy" that the beneficiaries of Kemalism "allowed" the army to do what in the ultimate sentence is described as something those same beneficiaries "ought to have continued"? Something still seems to be missing."
-- from a commenter’s query here: http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/027423.php#respond

It is a "tragedy" -- I am using the word in its current, lazily loose sense -- to have handed over to the upper officer corps of the army the sole responsibility for being the upholder of Kemalism. For when the army is given such a task, the army can easily become the object of widespread resentment on the part of civilians, and can more easily be painted as an oppressive force. And mere force - while sometimes useful -- cannot in the end enlarge the numbers of those Turks who have the mental freedom to move away, in general attitudes, from the constrains of Islam, even if many of them still call themselves “cultural Muslims,” and even if they secretly or openly thank god every day for Ataturk. In the last few decades there have been several – four? – military coups by the Turkish army.

After all, the very phrase “military coup” is in bad odor in the West, and generally, that reaction is deserved. Think of all the ambitious colonels, the would-be caudillos of Latin America. For example, there was the unpleasant bully-boy Noriega. There was the unpleasant Pinochet. There have been coups in Guatemala, and Brazil, in Bolivia and Peru. In Honduras, the other day, there was a “military coup” which insteantly, knee-jerkishly, was opposed by the O.A.C. and a rushing-to-judgment Obama Administration. In fact, the Honduras coup was one prompted by fears that Zelaya was another potential Chavez -- Morales in Bolivia was a warning – and MIcheletti, his replacement, was a civilian. But the fact of a “military coup” was enough to get things off to a bad start. Then there are all those “military coups” in Africa. Think of Qaddafy, who seized power in 1969, when King Idris went off for medical treatment in the West – and Qaddafy is now celebrating forty years of his daffy Qaddafy-ism. Think of Charles Taylor in Liberia, or Omar Bongo, or Jean-Bedel Bokassa with his peculiar cuisine, or the most infamous of them all, Idi Amin Dada (see “The King of Scotland”) who grew a little tired of risingthrough the ranks and simply seized murderous control, and as the dictator of Uganda killed hundreds of thousands, before retiring to Saudi Arabia where, as a Muslim, he knew he would not be touched (but just think of how the Saudis would have dealt with him if, say, he had converted back to Christianity and, born-again, tearfully confessed his many sins).

And then there are the coups in Arab and Muslim lands. Think of those Pakistani generals who have staged coups when they felt more Islam was necessary -- ,such as Zia ul-Haq, he one whom Anglophone sophisticated Pakistanis of the upper-class like to pretend is the one who caused all the trouble, who brought Islam to Pakistan – as if it had not been there all along, in the lower depths, waiting for a chance to find the right representative who would seize power. Think of Colonels Nasser and Naguib and a few others (Nasser to elbow the others quickly out of the way), who seized power because of their disgust with the ancient regime of fat Farouk, with his yachts and his harem and, especially, his too-compliant attitude toward the West. Think of the coup of that Alawite Air Force Major, the quiet plotter Hafez al-Assad, who put the Alawites firmly in control of the officer corps, and hence of the military, and hence of all of Syria. Think of the succession of coups – the one of Colonel Qassem, during which the Prince Regent was killed, and so too, even more importantly, was the “strong man” of Iraq (that was the fixed epithet for him at the time) Nuri as-Said, who had been a plotter ever since the days of Rashid Ali, and who, in turn, found himself plotted against, and though he tried to escape from Baghdad dressed as a woman, was found, killed, his body mutilated, and then the mutilated body dragged through the streets of Baghdad so that anyone who wanted to further mutilate it would get his chance (this is the country to which George Bush wanted to bring “freedom” for “ordinary moms and dads”).

Now those who know history know that the Army has sometimes been a force for good in the larger society, and that includes the occasional coup. I hesitate to dilate upon this for one very good reason: years ago, possibly a decade or two ago, I read in some journal – Revue international de sociologie, possibly, if such exists, in an issue devoted to the sociology of the military – an essay by Raymond Aron, who as always was enlightening, on the different and surprising roles of the military, which in some countries, at some times, had been a force not of black reaction, as we have been taught unthinkingly to believe, but as a force for enlightenment and progress. Those who remember, for example, what were called the Army-McCarthy hearings, back in 1954, remember the celebrated Hale-and-Dorr bow-tied Boston Brahmin Joseph Welch, Esq. who sent McCarthy, that demagogue and drunk, back on his uppers with his famous “Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you no decency?” speech. But they forget that it was the American Army itself that was being attacked, by McCarthy, as a harborer of Communists, and that just wouldn’t wash, and didn’t. The Army’s resistance to McCarthy, and not just the speech of Joseph Welch, he of Hale and Door, and Beacon Hill, in a city where – this will seem strange to Hindus – only the Brahmins are untouchable) (who was a

But reliance on the military in Turkey, the certainty that it would always be there to rescue the situation, had a bad effect. For it allowed the secular class – and many in that secular class are downright charming because…. Well, because they are practically like us, they inhabit something like the same intellectual and moral universe as we in the non-Muslim West do, and such a phenomenon cannot be found among any other large group of Muslims, save those non-Muslim Muslims, Tatars and Kazakhs, and others who thanks to 70 years of Soviet rule, and physical attacks on moques and imams, and above all ideological attacks on Islam as part of a general attack on religion in Central Asia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Empire. Such a secular class might actually develop in Iran after the Islamic Republic unravels, for the Iranians have available to them a pre=Islamic history, and a cultural heritage that includes a narrative in which Persian poets patriotically withstand the attempt at linguistic and cultural imperialism by the Arabs, and if the would-be secularists in Iran, finally shaken to their senses by what the Islamic Republic has wrought ever since the fateful day that Khomeini came back in triumph (but to Tehean, not to Persepolis, and no Theridamas or Usumcasane accompanied him the Ayatollah and Lonely Supreme Leader). ) to allowed the secular class to become less vigilant, not only less vigilant about the wiles and guiles of Erbakan, Erdogan, Fethuleh Gulen (now allowed, from his center in Virgina, to conduct his sinister campaign that, of course, is misunderstood in the Western world, and regarded -- madly -- as the innocuous "moderate" Islam some even think we should encourage.

n Virginia, as once upon a time Khomeini was given refuge in Neauphle-le-Chateau) A coup here and a coup there, and a coup everywhere, might work, temporarily, but what really needs to be changed are the minds of men. And the journalists, the university rectors, the professors, the people who, thanks to their benefitting from the Kemalist reforms that tied political Islam in knots, underestimated the cunning of the erdogans and guls and gulens of this world, did not do what they should have done, were insufficiently vigilant in further extending what Ataturk set out to do.

What might they have done? They might, for example, have used the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, nearby, to show how retrograde Iran had become, to use every nightmarish bit of information about Iran under Khomeini and his epigones, beginning with the wave of terror instituted by that hanging judge Khalkhali, and with the execution of leaders of the Baha'i and Jewish communities, and continuing with the turning on, and assassination of, the original leftists and secularists who, with such miscalculation, underestimated -- they wanted to underestimate -- the forces of black reactionary Islam -- and joined forces with Khomeini against the Shah, whose regime, admittedly corrupt, and led by a vainglorious man who did not understand how unhinged the oil money, both through that evident corruption at court, which was widely deplored, and the changes it brought, or threatened to bring, to rural, and deeply Muslim villagers, not to mention the opposition roused in Muslim bazaaris, was brought down not only by Khomeini, but by those who, on what might be called the secular left, the worshippers of weepy Mossadegh, refused to believe that Islam was as powerful as it proved to be.

That seems to be a general fault of the so-called liberals and reformers, the ones best able to talk to Westerners, and to inveigle them, out of self-interest, into adventures that will promote the position of those “reformers” and may, for all I know, rescue their own societies, at least as long as the Americans stay or keep lavishing largesse of every kind, on those Muslim societies, thus rescuing them from the consequences of their own political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures and, what is still worse, delaying the day when Muslims have to begin to examine and realistically analyze—without conspiracy-theorizing that comes so naturally to people raised up in a system that everywhere discourages free and skeptical inquiry, beginning with any questioning of any part of Islam, but not stopping there.

No, the Turkish secularists should have not let a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour go by, without pushing into the consiciousness of the Turksih public the sheer awfulness of the mullahs and of the practice of Islam in Iran, the Islamic Repbublic of Iran. They should have played upon the natural impulse of Turks to declare their dislike, or even hatred, of the Arabs, and started a line of discussion, centered on all the ways in which Islam has been a vehicle of Arab supremacism.

They should have engaged in massive translations – for example, of such books as ibn Warraq’s “Why I Am Not A Muslim” and Ayaan HIrsi Ali’s “Infidel” and Anwar Sheikh’s “Islam: the Arab National Religion” and Bat Ye’or’s “The Dimmi” and “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam.”
They might, furthermore, have begun to ask questions about the Armenian massacres, and insisted that – in a kind of absolution of Turks qua Turks –both the 1915-1918 massacres, and the earlier ones from 1894096, were not the result of Turks alone, but of other Muslims, impelled by Islam. Thus, in owning up to the Armenian massacres, these secular Turks would, deliberately and truthfully, put the blame not on all Turks, but on all the Muslims in the area who, impelled by Islam, had committed those crimes, and with especially fiendish glee, had attacked Armenian priests and their (often) pregnant wives. There is ample testimony, from American and German eyewitnesses (some of them missionaries) as to the Muslim nature of the statements made by the killers, and there is ample testimony, too, by the Armenians who survived and wrote their own testimonies, as to what impelled Turks (and Kurds) to kill Armenians in Anatolia, and what led the marauding Arabs, when they could, to grab Armenian women and girls, who often made the trek without their murdered husbands and sons.

And in the universities, there might have been much more vigilant attempts to undercut and discredit , if not Islam, then at least Arab Islam. There might have been a requirement that, for example, in Turkish law schools, students analyse the Shari’a and compare it to Western systems of law, especially in regard to the rights of women and non-Muslim minorities. There might be courses on the development in the West of the idea of democracy, and what, besides the ballot-box, was considered indispensable to an advanced Western democracy.
And if one remembers Alex Haley’s “Roots,” and the fascination, all over the Western world, with discovering who one’s ancestors were, and where they came from – this is especially of interest in the United States – why could not Turks be urged to find out about, wherever possible, their own pre-Islamic roots. How many of those who are convinced, in Turkey, that they are Muslims, and their families have always been Muslim, in fact are the descendents of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, who converted either forcibly, or in order to escape the onerous condition of the dhimmi? We have all read stories about this or that Turk who , though he thought himself to be a Muslim, suddenly finds out that his grandparents or great-grandparents were Armenian, and this has the electrifying effect of causing some to shed Islam as promptly as a snake sheds its skin. Just as in India, were Hindus to begin to discuss openly the conditions that led millions of Hindus (and Jains, and Buddhists) to convert to Islam (hint: it was not the sheer wonderfulness of Islam that led them to do it) who knows how many of those who have come to suspect or think that perhaps, even for the mental and moral development of their own children, Islam might not be quite as wonderful as they had once thought, would welcome a way out, a way to “return” to being Jains, or Buddhists, or Hindus.

Oh, there’s a lot that the secular class of Turks ought to have done, and now they are panicky, and right to panic, for Erdogan is cunning and relentless, and the re-appearance of Islam as a powerful social and political force must deeply disturb those who, with their parents and grandparents, have assumed --- as did such well-respected foreign students of modern Turkey as Bernard Lewis – that Kemalism was here to stay, and that in case of need, the army could always come in. The army cannot always be expected to do what needs to be done through education, and a slow undermining of those who want to bring back Islam by undoing the Kemalist ties that so cleverly blind. The army cannot control Fethuleh Gulen, for example, and the insidious effect of his schools and institutions of higher learning. But the rectors, the professors, the journalists, the writers,the scientists – including those who go abroad for full mental freedom – can keep up the assault, and not only in Turkey itself, but by warning the outside world of what the “Islamists” are about, possibly help, in Western Europe, to encourage not fellow Muslims but the imperiled non-Muslims, to watch their step, and to be vigilant about the tariq-ramadans, those smylers with the knyf under the cloke, as Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled (or so I’ve heard) once memorably translated Boccaccio’s allegorical “Il Tradimento.”

No, reliance on the army alone was never enough. There is still time for those who have most benefitted from Kemalism to assume their own responsibility not merely for defending what Ataturk achieved, but in ruthlessly, and relentlessly, extending his reforms, so that the secular class of Turks will swell, from one-quarter of the population to something like one-half. That should do it. But the rule must be to never let down your guard when it comes to the True Believers. For they never give up.

Belated response from me, but your premise is that sufficient numbers of Muslims in Turkey are viably disposed to become de-Islamified by some other force than military. I don't see Muslims in Turkey as any different from Muslims anywhere: there will never be a sufficient number to be evolved by some force other than military to a state of mind achieved by non-Muslims (especially in the West). What makes Muslims in Turkey special?

Hesperado,

"I don't see Muslims in Turkey as any different from Muslims anywhere: there will never be a sufficient number to be evolved by some force other than military to a state of mind achieved by non-Muslims (especially in the West). What makes Muslims in Turkey special?"

What of Malaysia and Indonesia..(again I ask this)? They are countries that HAVE , though not "de-islamified certainly contrained and reinterpreted Islam , in contrast and against the Big-W Saudi brand...they have almost managed to normalise it to the Christian standard, (yes its called living with the contradictions and learning to live with the odd bomber). With out Miltary , Malaysians have managed to evolve into a 'state of mind' similiar to the West , to use your words. HF's optismism that a class other than the military can be grown to counter the Islamic siren call is possible.