Pope Benedict XVI safely returns from his trip to Muslim Turkey where he takes the opportunity to look Islamic religious leaders in the eye. The Pope makes news when he prays facing Mecca in an historic Mosque, as if the location and direction of prayer makes any difference. Catholics, after all, don’t worship a spot on a planet. Turkey’s largest paper Zaman extensively covers the visit but also reports a strange meeting with U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Matt Bryza.
Coupe in Strong Turkish Democracy Unimaginable: “I can’t imagine why that need [for a military intervention] would arise at this point. Turkey is a strong democracy,” said Bryza. “Any sort of deviation from Turkey’s strong democratic principles undermines the strategic value of Turkey to the U.S.”
Asked whether the United States would possibly back a military intervention aiming to protect secularism in Turkey, and whether this would be a post-modern intervention or an explicit coup d’etat?, Bryza said “no” and explained, “Turkey has a secular democracy in which the military plays a role that is different than other countries, unique, in my experience. But it is precisely the strength of Turkey’s secular democratic institutions with its Muslim majority that makes Turkey strategic to the US significantly.”
Islamic Radicalism in Central Asia and the Caucasus: July 2006 (pdf). The one point on which Islam in Central Asia and the Caucasus followed the Arabs was its close links to political power. St. Paul’s dictum to “Render unto Caesar…” has no meaning for either Arab or Central Asian Islam, which assume instead that the secular power’s first responsibility is always to protect the faith.
Realism About Turkey: If we are to have a serious debate on America’s long-term interests in eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East experts in Washington should stop pretending that Turkey is democratic. At present it is, at best, a "guided democracy" in which no institution, judicial or civil, is independent of the state and the lurking power behind the state, the generals of the Turkish army whose tough Kemalist ideology is all that stands between Turkey and chaos.
It is also time to admit that any real "democratization" of Turkey will mean its irreversible Islamization. This is because Turkey is a polity based on an Islamic ethos, regardless of its political superstructure…. Just as enormous oil revenues could not resolve the problem in Iran, there is no reason to believe that the proposed massive injections of foreign aid and support, of whatever kind, will do the trick in Turkey. The Kemalist dream of strict secularism has never penetrated beyond the military and a relatively narrow stratum of urban elite centered in Istanbul.
