BY TAHA AKYOL
MILLIYET- Columnist Taha Akyol comments on the relation between Islam, the state structure and today’s radically changing world. A summary of his column is as follows:
In his address to the Parliament yesterday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stressed the relationship between politics and the economy: For today’s Turkey, the level of contemporary civilization means nothing but economic development, democracy and EU membership, he declared. Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul also made a similar statement at the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Tehran. Here we have two conservative politicians favoring radical changes!
Today’s sweeping changes such as globalization of the economy, education, urbanization and mass communication are forcing all societies and political concepts to change and adapt.
It is very important for Turkey what kind of attitudes Islamists and secularists (Kemalists, those favoring Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s revolution) will assume to deal with these changes. For example, can closed Islamist regimes in Saudi Arabia or Syria manage to survive in such a global world where countries feel the opening of their economies to world markets as an inevitability?
OIC meetings usually focus on foreign policy issues. At this week’s gathering, Gul proposed a new perspective to his fellow Islamic countries. Here are the values he underlined: ‘Freedom, peace, welfare, democracy, transparency, equality between the sexes, rationalism, political participation...’ and so on.
All these values, especially the equality of the sexes, are modern; no traditional society favors them in terms of their contemporary meaning.
Although all traditional regimes attach great importance to ‘justice,’ the modern concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ emerged after the West’s Industrial Revolution. ‘Transparency’ and ‘economic rationality’ are the favorite concepts of recent discussions on globalization. Whether religious (Islamist) or modern (secular), political attitudes failing to develop new perspectives within their own discourses are doomed to suffer through crises during today’s transformation period. Let’s recall how demagogic the statements of old Islamist leaders (e.g. Erbakan) became! Also, let’s remember how certain circles began to advocate centralist, interventionist and bureaucratic state structures in the name of Kemalism.
For the Islamic world the issue is even more problematic, since the regimes are usually oppressive and the level of development quite low. However, they cannot resist change either. They have already begun to feel the winds of change blowing.
Is it really possible to maintain a closed regime in this era of global mass communications? As a matter of fact, states have two alternatives in this age, either closed systems or open, liberal regimes favoring globalization. The former means poverty and despotism. The latter brings economic welfare and democracy.
Let’s not forget that Turkey is the luckiest country in the Middle East. I believe that these latest statements of two conservative politicians very well known for their former pro-Islamist attitudes indicate positive developments for Turkey. However, the other side, circles advocating a bureaucratic, interventionist state structure, do not seem to be willing to change at all!’
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION