When I was penning my piece, Why Islamophobes love Erdo?an and AKP,” for this column last week I had no idea that I would have to continue writing on the issue from a different angle because of a disgusting and deplorable terror attack in France.
I argued last week: We, academics, had been trying to disprove the accusations of the Islamophobes both in Turkey and in the world that Islam is incompatible with democracy, freedoms, pluralism and human rights by referring to the cases of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Hizmet movement. The Islamophobes must now be ecstatically applauding themselves for winning an argument. It seems that until proven wrong they will be free to claim that Islamists can never be true democrats. Erdo?an has shown that Islamists are die-hard Islamist and it is almost impossible for them to jettison their socialism-like, top-down, social engineering ideology that claims to know what is the best society and that tires to social engineer such society by using the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the state.
President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and the AKP, of course, do not seem to be supporting terrorism in the name of Islam. What I want to say is this: Similar to Erdo?an and the AKP helping Islamophobes to win the argument, those terrorists who claim to be Muslims are only helping the Islamophobes. I am, of course, neither a pragmatist nor an opportunist. So, I am not looking at the issue from a perspective that evaluates social phenomena through a lens that measures them in terms of their utilitarian value for Muslims. Yet, I humbly want to show these idiots and monsters who claim to serve Islam that if they are sincere in this serving Islam and Muslims, they must know that they are harming their religion and their co-religionists. I put co-religionists in speech marks, since I think that terrorists cease to be Muslims when they commit such cruel crimes against humanity.
I remember writing here that many Islamists and Islamophobes are mirror images of each other. They both want to prove that Islam is intolerant, exclusive, hostile, anti-pluralist, antI-democratic, anti-secularist, and anti-human rights. This is much more the case with the terrorists who claim to be Muslims. They simply prove the point of the Islamophobes. As a matter of fact, they both dislike the fact that Muslims and their religion have been flourishing in Western secular democratic societies. They hate to see that the overwhelming majority of Muslims have successfully integrated to Western societies and have been increasingly become good citizens. They deplore the fact that many practicing Muslims with their manifest Muslim identities can become engineers, doctors, judges, teachers, mayors, artists, members of the parliaments in almost all Western countries. Both Islamophobes and so-called Muslim terrorists denigrate pluralism and co-existence. They want to divide the world into two diametrically opposed, antagonistic and constantly belligerent political camps: Dar Al Harb (land of war) and Dar Al Islam (land of Islam). They do not want to hide the fact that they use the poisonous rhetoric of the Nazis. They would love to see a World War between secularist racist nationalists and fanatic radical Muslim terrorists.
Whenever I read pieces by authors who try to portray themselves objective but are deeply Islamophobic, I feel that their unbalanced and hostile approach to even moderate and peaceful Muslims who condemn violence only helps the monsters that I described above. Focusing only on the mistakes, differences and problematic aspects of these peaceful Muslims and disregarding their much stronger positive aspects is not helpful for pluralist co-existence. There are about 1.5 billion Muslims on the planet. If there are no plans to annihilate these people or change their religion, we have to work towards finding ways to co-exist.
If the West cannot talk with the peaceful Muslims, with whom will they talk? —?hsan Yilmaz
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