I'm guessing you have heard about the recent words of Republican People's Party (CHP) Secretary-General Önder Sav.

- 18 / 05 / 2008 09:31

Is it a fitting attitude for a former president of the Turkish Bar Association (TBB) to reply to an 80-year-old man's request to go on Hajj by saying, "Don't give your money to Arabs"? Who could make sense of this man -- who has served as the group deputy chairman in a party as established as the CHP, as the minister of labor and who has been the CHP secretary-general for the last eight years -- trying to dissuade an elderly prospective pilgrim by saying, "If you go there, Mohammed would not allow your return" [meaning he would die there]?

Worst of all, while defending himself Sav said, "I didn't know I was being filmed."

Shame; what a great shame!

Apparently, they utter such sentences when the cameras are not rolling. And when these words, which cannot be justified by any means for fairness and temperateness, are exposed, he displays an "I wish I wasn't filmed saying that"-type of regret (!) instead of apologizing to people.

Nonetheless, when you put together all such disrespectful statements made by Sav in the last few years, you see that one should not be astounded at all in the face of his recent remarks.

Up until the recent past, those who couldn't internalize people's conservativeness would criticize the religion through indirect remarks. They would either put forward their own judgments disguised as scientific thought, or they would spread the fear of radicalism.

Whenever they found a fault of externally religious people (such as imams or muezzins), they would not leave any negative remark unsaid. And when cautioned "Aren't you going too far?" they would defend themselves by saying they were only scrutinizing the error committed, not the people.

In so doing, they were able to make utterly trenchant remarks on religious issues and pretend to be struggling with "bigoted and fanatical" people who misinterpreted the religion, not with the rituals of the religion itself.

If this really was the case, then sincerely observant Muslims should have voluntarily stepped in to assist them in their efforts.

 As a matter of fact, real devout Muslims should struggle against those people or groups who smother the religion in innovations and who abuse sacred values for personal gain.

The famous description coined by the late poet Necip Fazıl, "unrefined bigots and coarse mullahs," should be opposed by all sincere Muslims through knowledge, sublime moral values and piety.

However the remarks, once purportedly made against misinterpretations of the religion, have been replaced with impertinent words uttered directly against the religion.

 For instance, a certain segment of cartoons drawn about Islam's Feast of the Sacrifice question things that are undisputed pillars of the faith, not wrong practices made in observing the pillar.

Some of the things written or said against Sacred Birth Week, organized and celebrated by the Directorate of Religious Affairs for about three decades, are out-and-out aimed at irreverence toward the Prophet…

And there comes the no-man's-land part of the thing: the Internet, which falls outside the reach of judicial supervision.

The extremely blasphemous statements published online, one after another, are so inciting and outrageous as to profoundly move any person with a little faith in Allah. You can choose to simply pass it off by saying, "These are the nonsensical remarks of an unbridled and unrestrained mass, at the end of the day…"; however, things are not that simple. A small but influential mass attacks our most sacred and sublime values sometimes as a result of losing their temper and sometimes as part of the psychological warfare they have been sustaining.

If you focus only on the sacrilegious statements made against the religion, you will be deceived and conclude that the problem has only one aspect, whereas this matter is the projection of another affair although it is being manifested as if it was enmity against religion.

The circles that long thought it their innate right to run this country are unwilling to share this power with the people from the periphery, and not only in the political realm -- this small group is unwilling to share this power in any field.

Now that the problem is but a kind of class struggle, why are they assaulting the religion so fearlessly?

The answer is obvious: The classic clan at the center sees the people from the periphery not only as unrefined and ignorant villagers but also as extremely religious.

They fly into a rage upon seeing the headscarved wives of the "Anatolian tigers" who have been making their way from the periphery to the center and launch into carrying out new verbal attacks to cover up the real reason for their great anger.

 In fact, as those knowledgeable about Turkey's DNA of modernism know it well, the people who are attacking the religion so pugnaciously are actually defending their own unjust power which they don't want to share.

And adopting flippant and impertinent attitudes against the religion while perpetrating all this makes them much more unlovable and uglier. I wonder if they ever have the chance to look in the mirror -- when they are not blinded by anger -- to see the situation into which they have fallen, because their "gains" cannot be sustained through waging a war on the religion; just the contrary, it necessitates new efforts to understand it.