The behaviours that Mr Thompson points out are not a surprise. If however we can throw a spotlight upon it all and highlight the fact that none of it is either moral or good, then there is hope that such fanatical belief behaviours can begin to be tamed.
There is indeed much to hope for, I note from a recent survey a rather encouraging fact buried deep in the statistics. There on page 19 within Table 8 we find that 1 in every 4 Muslims who took part in the survey identify as non-religious. The survey covered 57 countries and did indeed cover much of the Islamic world, so gives us some insight into what is going on out there.
The open flow of information in our modern world via the Internet has changed the game and beliefs have thankfully failed to adapt. People now hear about and also see the things that are really going on. That exposes the truly horrendous atrocities and so people quietly drop the crazy beliefs, but also take a leaf from the belief and remain in stealth mode to ensure that they remain safe.
The survey I point to confirms that this is indeed exactly what is happening right across the Islamic world … even in Saudi Arabia, 1 in 4 confirmed that they are not actually religious. Can we trust the survey? And muslims who defend secularism is even more. I myself am a theist. And I have many friends who are like me or just unreligious. Ex-Muslims who dare to speak out are often cut off by their families and fear for their lives. A brave few tell us their stories. S ulaiman Vali is a softly spoken year-old software engineer.
He lives alone in a modest house on a quiet street in a small town in East Northamptonshire. The answer is that six years ago he decided to declare that he no longer accepted the fundamental tenets of Islam. He stopped being a believing Muslim and became instead an apostate. Last week the hacking to death in Bangladesh of the blogger Ananta Bijoy Das was a brutal reminder of the risks atheists face in some Muslim-majority countries.
The danger is confirmed by Imtiaz Shams, an energetic year-old who runs a group called Faith to Faithless , which aims to help Muslim nonbelievers speak out about their difficult situations. Shams has a visible presence on YouTube and has organised several events at universities.
It is stigma and rejection that causes so many ex-Muslims to conceal their apostasy. Like the gay liberation movement of a previous generation, Muslim apostates have to fight for the right to be recognised while knowing that recognition brings shame, rejection, intimidation and, very often, family expulsion.
Vali comes from a strictly religious Indian-heritage family. He was born in Kenya and moved with his parents and six siblings to England when he was It was when he left his home in Leicester to work in Cambridge that he first encountered an intellectual challenge to his worldview.
He found himself working alongside non-Muslims and atheists, and inevitably questions of faith arose. Initially he began researching criticism of Islam online and in the books of people such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as a means of defending his faith.
But in the process the suspicion took root that his opponents had the stronger arguments. Nevertheless, he kept his reservations to himself when he returned to live in Leicester, where an arranged marriage awaited him. His decision went down very badly. His family would have forgiven him, though, as long as he remained a Muslim. So he confessed his atheism to his horrified family. One of his brothers reminded him that the penalty sharia law stipulates for apostasy is capital punishment.
Instead he was ousted from the family. He was disowned. There has been a great deal of public debate in recent years about what drives young Muslims towards radicalisation. What is much less known about, and far less discussed, is the plight of young Muslims going in the opposite direction — those who not only turn away from radicalisation but from Islam itself. No one knows what numbers are involved, few understand the psychological difficulties individuals confront, or the social pressures they are compelled to resist.
As with many other areas of communal discourse, insiders are reluctant to talk about it, and outsiders are either too incurious or sensitive to ask. In this sense the struggle of ex-Muslims is markedly different from that of early gay rights campaigners. To raise the subject of apostasy is to risk demonising an embattled minority. Some will see it, almost by definition, as Islamophobic or even racist.
Between the two main pillars of Kemalism, nationalism, and secularism, the former has gained almost universal acceptance in Turkish society—with the notable exception of the largest ethnic minority, which is the Kurds. While other non-Turkish Muslim ethnic minorities—such as Bosnians, Albanians, Circassians, the Laz, and the Arabs—assimilated into the larger Turkish body, most Kurds retained a separate ethnic identity, and reacted to its suppression by the state.
Besides that Kurdish exception, whose political expression often claims some 10 percent of the electorate, nationalism in Turkey is today still the most powerful political idea and sentiment, cutting across party lines, including the Right-versus-Left or secular-versus-religious divide.
The influence of Kemalist secularism, however, has been more limited. Certain parts of Turkish society, mostly the urban population, welcomed the Kemalist cultural revolution and became its self-appointed guardians, to keep the Kemalist revolution intact, generation after generation.
The military, and other key elements of the Turkish bureaucracy such as the judiciary, became their bastions. However, the majority of Turks opposed Kemalist secularism. This was repeatedly shown by election results, from the time of the first free and fair elections in The majority of Turks voted over and over again against staunchly secularist candidates. This majority was largely made up of either rural or newly urbanized citizens, who demanded more respect for religion and tradition than the Kemalists were willing to grant.
These parties never challenged secularism as such. They only advocated, and tried to implement, a more religion-friendly secularism. Meanwhile, outright opposition to secularism has been a radical and even illegal concept. The only place the idea found a home, often implicitly rather than explicitly, was among Turkish Islamists, who appealed to some 10—15 percent of Turkish society, as indicated by election results and surveys.
Politically, the Islamist energy found its mainstream expression in the movement led by Necmettin Erbakan — , who first appeared in the late s with his National Order Party. The staunchly secular generals who soon forced Erbakan to resign aimed at getting rid of an Islamist government.
Accordingly, the presence of religious symbols in the public square had to be banned, for otherwise religion would take over and suffocate the secular citizens. It was, one could say, a doctrine of preemptive authoritarianism, since it was reacting to a speculative future threat, not one that had actually yet emerged.
The headscarf controversy began in the s, when Turkish universities started experiencing something unprecedented: female students who wore the Islamic headscarf. In earlier decades, the families who would send their daughters to college were almost universally urban secular ones whose culture had little place for a dress code as conservative as the headscarf.
Meanwhile, the traditional families whose culture did include the headscarf had little interest in giving higher education to their daughters, whose typical pattern was to get married soon after mandatory education. With the growing urbanization and modernization of the conservative class, however, there emerged a new type of conservative family that sought higher education for its daughters.
In the next three decades, secularists tried to impose the ban on the headscarf, which extended from the universities to other public buildings, including sometimes even hospitals. Meanwhile, Islamists, conservatives, and even secular liberals defended the right to wear a headscarf. Laiklik is a way of life, which bases nationalization, independence, national sovereignty, and the ideal of humanity upon the prevalence of reason, freedom, and democracy that developed through the scientific Enlightenment by destroying the dogmatism of the Middle Ages.
Laiklik is a social breakthrough based on sovereignty, democracy, freedom and information as well as a contemporary regulator of political, social and cultural life… 9. The main concern of Turkish secularists was freedom from religion, and almost never freedom of religion. Sign up for updates. Sign Up Follow us. For any serious Muslim with a commitment to practice his religion and manifest it in society, Kemalist secularism was difficult to accept.
It was identified with humiliating bans, and also constant harassment of Islamic communities and their opinion leaders. Therefore, overthrowing the secular order and enacting in its place an Islamic regime became a kind of utopian goal among the Islamists.
However, the larger conservative majority found a more pragmatic solution: supporting the forces that advocated a softer, more liberal, more religion-friendly secularism. In the first decade of the new millennium, the two key main actors of pro-Islamic politics—the ruling Justice and Development Party AKP of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and its best ally at the time, the Gulen Movement—both championed the American way versus the French one.
He also argued for the merits of the latter model. The book was published in English but was also reproduced in Turkish, and supplied the conservative media with helpful intellectual ammunition against the secularists.
The redefinition of secularism as the guarantee of religious freedom has allowed the AKP to actualize all the major demands of its religious base without ever challenging the constitutional principle of laiklik. In the early s the headscarf ban gradually vanished in all state institutions.
Sufi orders and other Islamic communities found more freedom—and in fact, privilege—than ever before, at least as long as they supported the government.
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