Turkey’s ruling fundamentalist AK Party has led to a top down instituting of farcical Islamic directed programs, that have even infiltrated its national carrier, Turkish Airlines. This was pretty much all forewarned by an Israeli professor, Urliel Heyd in the 1960’s who observed Turkey’s slide into fundamentalist Islam after the death of its secular founder, Kemal Attaturk.
Here is what Andrew Bostom had to say about Prof.Heyd’s findings:
But Heyd’s own candid words, from the remarkably foresighted 1968 lecture excerpted at length, below, reveal another quality almost entirely absent from our present era’s infinitely less substantial “academic experts” on Islam: self-critical humility, and the ability to express mea culpa. Taking his own measure, Heyd confessed—in 1968,
“Until a few years ago many foreign observers, including, I admit, myself, were inclined to think that this development [Turkey’s re-Islamization] was no more than a renewed expression of sentiments which for a long time could not be freely manifested and that the overall process of secularization was going on very slowly but irresistibly. Today I doubt whether this view is still tenable.”
The fact that 42 years later, today’s far less astute “experts on Turkey and Turkish Islam, etc.” nonetheless, offer no apologies for their distressingly belated recognition of Turkey’s re-Islamization, adds insult to irony.
NOTE: Andy Bostom provides time and again a real window into the reality of the world as it actually is, not what others hope it to be. Is it any wonder that Allah-bikes are now being tossed about in academic circles in Turkey?
“For all their claims (AKP) of being able to reconcile religion with modernity, Islamic movements in Turkey have signally failed to do so,” argues Ali Alpar, an astrophysicist at Istanbul’s Sabanci University.
