The president of the A-G Research Company, Adil Gür, spoke to Taraf and revealed that the number of people fasting and performing daily prayers is decreasing. I have been observing this decline for some time now. But the statistics published by a certain media group were so convincingly presented that even I had begun to believe that the Turkish population was getting more and more religious. The number of veiled women was increasing in the streets and in the presidential palace. I have to be frank; as a religious person, I saw no problem in this and was happy to see Turkey getting more religious. But the reality is different. The country is not getting any more religious than it was in 1999. Gür's statistics are clear: The percentage of people who fast the entirety of Ramadan was 64 percent last year and dropped to 60 percent this year. On a recent visit to İstanbul I observed that the "city" was not fasting. In the past, Ramadan was felt heavily in the streets. Many restaurants would close down for a month and, with a short note on their windows, declare that they were closed due to Ramadan. This year Ramadan didn't come to the restaurants. In the past many fast-breakers would stay indoors to smoke or eat to avoid to hurting the feelings of fasting people. But with the increasing number of the shopping malls, eating became a public sphere issue and this year the old sensitivity is gone.
There is nothing to complain about. If people are not fasting and do want to be visible in that sense, the public sphere is all theirs. But let us admit the fact: Turkey is not getting any more religious -- unfortunately!
And the religious are getting corrupt, too. Gür is correct in observing that with their recent economic upward mobility religious people are loosening their ties with religion and other traditional values. In short, they are being swallowed by capitalism. Money corrupts. Indefinite amounts of money corrupt indefinitely.
Now the new chief of general staff is complaining to members of the accredited press that recent waves of migration to the cities from rural areas created a vacuum in which the state failed to provide the necessary services and that this vacuum was filled with religious cemaats (civil society communities). Here, on the one hand a respectful surveyor -- and common sense, too -- is saying that thanks to social mobility religious hard-liners are compromising with modernity; on the other hand, a soldier who only recently started to visit the streets of common men claims that religion is an imported phenomenon in the cities and is on the rise.
Gür observes that the visibility of the religious is on the rise, indeed. Ladies wearing the headscarf are more and more visible on the streets because they can afford traveling, wandering around the shopping malls and, due to their financially supported self-confidence, are frequenting traditionally secular main streets, such as Bağdat Caddesi and İstiklal Caddesi in İstanbul and the alleys of Kızılay in Ankara.
There is this secularist "my grandma" rhetoric that comes from the mouths of anti-headscarfists. "My grandma also covered her head, but not like these women. She used to tie her headscarf beneath her chin," they say. This style does not actually belong to our grandmothers. This is the style of the poor, the invisible and the domestic servant, who always stays domestic. Their grandmothers used to stay at home and the public sphere was all theirs.
Now the chief of general staff is complaining that the invisible has become visible. He does not recognize the transforming effect of social mobility, but is uncomfortable about the visual effects of it. During the imposed modernity programs of the early republican regime, "public police" used to wait in the Ankara train station and turn villagers with inappropriate clothing back to their "caves." Now the latest modernity-imposers are angry that the villagers have found beautiful clothes that fit into the streets of the city.
Religiosity is in decline and the religious newcomers to the power centers, both economic and political, are more corruptible than ever. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
