The situation is even worse than the Dutch version of “Fitna” – that short film condemned by the Muslim world as blasphemy against Islam and its sacred values.

- 19 / 05 / 2008 14:52

A search is continuing in Ankara. The situation is even worse than the Dutch version of “Fitna” – that short film condemned by the Muslim world as blasphemy against Islam and its sacred values. While the identity of the politician who pulled the trigger – or financed – the Dutch “Fitna” is known by all: Controversial ultra-nationalist (modern version of saying fascist) Geert Wilders. The identity of the Turkish “fitna” however remains secret so far.

  “Fitna” is an Arabic word, which is generally regarded as very difficult to translate but at the same time is considered to be an all-encompassing word referring to schism, secession, upheaval and anarchy at once.

  According to Wikipedia, “fitna” is often used to refer to the First Islamic civil war, in 656–661 A.D., a prolonged struggle for the caliphate after assassination in 656 of the caliph Uthman ibn Affan. The Second Fitna, or Second Islamic civil war, is usually identified as the 683–685 A.D. conflict among the Umayyads for control of the caliphate. The third one refers to the taifas at the end of the Caliph of Córdoba's rule. It is often used to describe instigation against religion or religious law, that is Shariah or the law of Koran.

  In “secularist” usage, however, it means instigation of trouble or disorder based on wrong, unfounded claims or fabricated news. 

Who's that minister?:

  According to Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek – who is also the government spokesman – it was an act of “fitna” by a “cabinet member” to speak to a foreign news agency that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has begun to expect that the Constitutional Court will close it down in the next few months and ban the prime minister from politics, and is now searching for a way to hold onto power.

  As if the minister said something not said by anyone else until now, a hunt has been started to find out who that minister involved in “fitna” is. However, was it not Çiçek himself under the spotlight a while ago as the “most possible source” of an article by respected Milliyet's Ankara representative Fikret Bila that said the AKP was facing trouble today because the prime minister preferred majority rule to pluralism, carried away with the July 22 landslide in parliamentary elections and indulged in a program of achieving some “long over-due targets” of political Islam by ignoring the sensitivities of the secularist segments of society? That statement, which was not denied by Çiçek, was as well acknowledging that the AKP made some serious mistakes and it was highly probable that it would be closed down.

  Why is Çiçek accusing that minister who spoke about the high probability that the court will close down the AKP of being involved in “fitna”? Why is this hunt for the minister alleged to have engaged in “fitna” taking place now?

  Is it not a fact for some time that excluding public remarks, almost everyone in the AKP has been talking about closure of the AKP by the court as a “foregone conclusion” and exchanging views on how to establish a new party and how to go around the laws and make Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – who is among the 71 names the prosecutor asked to be banished from politics – an independent candidate in a possible snap poll and the probability of President Abdullah Gül – also risking a political ban but as presidency is “above politics” will stay in office even if banned – designating “independent” Erdoğan to form the new government?

  Though the Constitutional Court's Chief Judge Haşim Kılıç was quoted as saying yesterday that irrespective what it would be, the court's decision would consolidate Turkish democracy as well as respect to law in this country, it is obvious that regardless of whether the AKP is closed down or Erdoğan is banned from politics, in the period ahead Turkey must concentrate on establishing a new consensus on the place of Islam in a secular state system which would provide on the one hand wider religious liberties on an individual basis while on the other hand safeguard adequately the secular democracy of the country from aspirations of political Islam.

Confused perceptions:

  What we have in Turkey is not a freedom struggle by some Islamists and conservative secularists opposing such an effort. What we have is a confrontation between lifestyles, one shaped by religion, one shaped by modernity. One shaped by supremacy of reason, information, thought, science, and one by emotion, religion and such but disguised under the veil of “democratic demands.”

  This has been the real fitna in Turkey.