Turkey: A Model For the Muslim World

This morning I awoke to hear of hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets of Istanbul, but instead of them being Islamic fundamentalists trying to get support from Turkish secular Muslims to began a cultural war against the west, they were marching demanding their government remains secular. They were marching to demand their government remain Western. They were marching to defend nearly a century of Turkish values.

I have always heard, especially since 9/11, that the entire Muslim world was full of Islamic extremists, who hate democracy and hate America. When people say that to me, I remind them of Turkey.

Turkey is almost unanimously Muslim. It was once heart of the greatest Islamic empire known to man; the Ottoman Empire. Yet, it has become more culturally linked with it's neighbors to the west, rather than to the east. Turkey is what I think we all hoped and still hope Iraq would turn into one day.

Turkish secularism dates back 86 years to the 1921 constitution drafting the ideas of Turkey's first modern president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Unlike the empire the came before it, the new Turkey would not be a Caliphate with laws based on Sharia. It would instead reform into a secular state that practices Laïcité, a French word that stems from secularism in France after the French Revolution. Turkey would not allow any influence of Islam (or any other religion for that matter) in it's government. Even more amazingly, Muslims are prohibited from wearing traditional Islamic dress in schools, universities and government buildings, which is slightly more radical that here in the United States and way more radical that would be tolerated in it's near neighbors like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Turkey is proof that even it's not the religion, rather the power it's given, that causes extremism. I have always said; give Christians the power Muslims are given in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia and we would look just as bad.

I had feared that since 9/11 and the Iraq debacle, the West and the Muslim world would become more polarized. Turkey sits at a crossroads, literally, as it is one of the few, if not the only, Islamic Western Country. Today's protests in Istanbul are proof that Turkey is no where near making a sharp turn toward Islamic fundamentalism, will remain the major Islamic western nation, and will serve as a model for the Muslim world to show they can be both modern and Islamic at the same time.