On 5/5/07, Sabri Oncu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie:
> Sabri says they aren't elitist, at least not as much as the NYT
> claims they are, and I'm sure he's right, but they sure don't seem
> as concerned about workers as they appear to be about secularism.
I did not say that they are not elitists or otherwise. All I said was that
those people who took to the streets were not a homogeneous group of people.
They were mostly urban middle class people well "trained" in the tradition of
Kemalizm but there were those from the rural Turkey as well, in addition to the
ultranationalists and the urban elite.
Majority of Turkey, to the north of 70 percent of the population, neither has
anything to do with Islamism nor do they support the AKP or other hard core
Islamist parties. What is described in the English media is a distortion of the
reality. Among those 70 percent there are those who are devout Muslims who
practice their prayers five times a day regularly but they are not Islamists.
Being a devout Muslim is one thing, being an Islamist is another. Devout
Muslims who are not Islamists focus on the other world whereas Islamists focus
on this world and try to organize it to their liking, whatever their liking is.
And those who took to the streets are not concerned about workers to our liking
because most of them are obedient citizens of the Republic of Turkey, just as
an average American is an obedient citizen of the US, who do not question what
their leaders are up to. Most of them were your average Turkish, whatever
Turkish means in this context.
Traditional Muslims tended to be apolitical and quietist in many
societies, and to this day that may be true in Turkey as well as
elsewhere. The same probably goes for the irreligious, though; as you
say, most citizens of many societies, whatever their religion, are
obedient citizens who don't question the status quo or get involved in
politics to change it.
In any society, though, politics gets decided by those who are
politically active, with the result not necessarily reflecting the
general will of the total population comprising both the politically
active and the politically inactive.
The reason why an increasing number of people among the voters who
participate in political processes in Turkey (as opposed to those who
are apolitical or alienated from them) have turned to Islamism, enough
to push the AKP to the top of the polls (albeit merely a plurarity
rather than a majority), is that the irreligious people who care about
whether the AKP or a secular party is the governing party enough to
protest in the streets "are not concerned about workers," nor are
secular parties big enough to compete with the AKP, no? It looks to
me that secularist protesters fail to realize that. It seems that
they are now demanding mergers of secular parties to better compete
with the AKP. That may help in terms of electioneering, but will
mergers simply based on secularism alone, without a platform that
appeals to workers and a political network that actually engages them,
backed up by grassroots work comparable to what the AKP has apparently
done, go far? Those who are concerned about the rise of the Islamist
party need to go to the root of the problem.
--
Yoshie
