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Newsweek: Answered Prayers

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  • Newsweek: Answered Prayers

    Answered Prayers

    NEWSWEEK
    http://www.newsweek.com/2011/06/19/why-turkey-s-prime-minister-is-good-for-christians.html
    June 21 2011

    Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is redrawing the Constitution. Why
    the devout Muslim is good for the Christians.

    As a teenager growing up in a tough Istanbul neighborhood, Recep Tayyip
    Erdogan studied to be an Islamic cleric. His dream, though, was to
    become a professional player on the local Kasimpasa football team.

    In the end, neither ambition worked out: he became Turkey's prime
    minister instead. Now, after nine years in power, Erdogan has just
    pulled off his third-and biggest-general-election win on an ambitious
    program that includes a radical redrawing of Turkey's Constitution.

    The theology student from Kasimpasa now wants to remake the hard-wiring
    of the Turkish state by scrapping restrictions on religious freedom;
    creating a powerful French-style presidency (presumably with himself as
    the first incumbent); and by making the country's judges, universities,
    and Army more accountable to Parliament: a to-do list that rings
    loud alarm bells for many Turks-and friends of Turkey. The country's
    old secular elite fears that allowing Erdogan's Islamist-rooted
    AK Party a say in the appointment of judges, school principals,
    and university rectors will make the country more Muslim and more
    conservative. Pundits and politicians in America and Israel aren't
    thrilled with the idea of giving Erdogan more power-especially after
    he railed about a Jewish press conspiracy against him during the
    campaign. And Turkey's chattering classes are increasingly concerned
    about Erdogan's intolerance of criticism. One hostile newspaper magnate
    has been landed with crippling tax bills, while more than 60 Turkish
    journalists languish in jail-more than in China.

    Unexpectedly, though, Turkey's tiny but ancient Christian community
    has welcomed the AK Party's most recent landslide. Erdogan may be
    a deeply devout Muslim, and his party dominated by nondrinking,
    headscarf-wearing Sunni Muslims. But despite his Islamic grassroots,
    Erdogan advocates a historic softening of Turkey's 80-year-old
    anti-Christian rules. Most significantly, he has helped save the
    1,700-year old patriarchate of Constantinople. The current Patriarch
    Bartholomew, as senior bishop of the Orthodox Church, is spiritual
    leader of 300 million Orthodox faithful around the world. But a
    1923 Turkish law insists that the patriarch and all members of the
    Synod-the Orthodox equivalent of the Catholic College of Cardinals-be
    Turkish citizens drawn from Turkey's tiny ethnic-Greek community, now
    just 2,500 strong. With Bartholomew already 71, and most of the Synod
    not much younger, it looked as though the end of the institution was
    nigh. But by granting Turkish citizenship to a new crop of younger
    Orthodox bishops from around the world, Erdogan likely saved the
    institution by ensuring Bartholomew's succession.

    Father Dositheos Anagnostopulos of the patriarchate calls the move the
    "most positive thing I have heard from the Turkish government in my
    lifetime." Erdogan's government has also passed a new law that will
    allow Christians to reclaim land and property illegally confiscated
    over recent decades. An ancient Armenian church in eastern Turkey,
    derelict since the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman
    Armenians in 1915, has been restored at state expense, and Armenian
    priests have been allowed to hold services there; a mass was also
    recently allowed at the ancient Greek Orthodox Sumela Monastery.

    Erdogan's motivation is simple: giving Christians more control over
    their property and religious education will pave the way for Islamic
    institutions to have more freedom, too. And Turkey's leading clerics
    have made a point of speaking out in defense of Christian rights. "The
    freedom of the religious minorities is our freedom," Mehmet Gormez,
    the AK Party's recent appointee as head of the Turkish Religious
    Affairs Directorate, told a conference recently. "We feel the same
    pressures that they do." It's a nice interfaith solidarity statement
    but not the full picture. True, ultranationalist Turks are equally
    suspicious of Islamists and Christians. But the AK Party has used its
    power to give Islam a huge boost by sponsoring mosque building all over
    the country. Turkey's tiny Christian minorities, on the other hand,
    still face intense prejudice and discrimination from bureaucrats
    who believe that Christians are undermining Turkishness. The root
    of the problem is that Turkey's Greek, Armenian, and Syrian Orthodox
    communities highlight what French writer Sebastien de Courtois calls
    "Turkey's identity problem." Turks are fiercely proud of their
    homeland-yet Turks have been in Istanbul for not much longer than
    Europeans have been in America. "The true question is, how can you
    be a Muslim in a land where you still have representatives of an
    earlier culture?" says de Courtois. And Turkey's founding narrative,
    taught in all schools, is how Christian armies from Greece attempted
    to strangle the Turkish republic in its cradle in 1923. They are
    also taught that it was treacherous Armenians who massacred Turks in
    1915, not the other way around. Turks are still "poisoning themselves
    with lies," says Rakil Dink, widow of Hrant Dink, the editor of the
    Istanbul-based Armenian-language Agos newspaper who was gunned down by
    ultranationalists in 2007. "Fears, anger, rage, jealousies, hatreds,
    prejudices, and insecurity belittle all of us."

    Money plays a part, too. Plenty of Turks have benefited from the
    plunder of Christian properties-and aren't too happy about new laws
    that help the Greeks reclaim their holdings. Still, there are signs
    that attitudes are softening toward Turkish Christians. In 2007,
    after Dink's murder, an estimated 50,000 people protested, some
    carrying placards saying, "We Are All Armenians Now."

    It seems the Christians of Istanbul have found an unlikely ally in the
    AK Party-not just because of its reforms, but more because Erdogan has
    attacked the ultranationalists who have always been the Christians'
    biggest enemy. "Change is going to be painful and frightening,"
    says Dink. No doubt-but the Kasimpasa kid who almost became an imam
    is making the first moves to heal a century of nationalist hatred.

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