Turkey’s American prosecutors

Any learned student of Turkish affairs would recognize that the country needs a huge judicial reform. But for people like Mr. Rubin, it's OK if prosecutors go after prominent civil religious figures such as Fethullah Gülen and political parties such as the AK Party simply because they don't find them secular enough for their Jacobin realm. It is no wonder that he calls the prosecutor behind the AK Party case, a staunch secularist, "one of the few independent judicial authorities." Mr. Rubin's affection for Turkish legal practices suddenly takes a break, however, when it comes to a real criminal case concerning the "Ergenekon" organization allegedly trying to undermine the Turkish Constitution by crafting military coups using psychological warfare and terrorist tactics.

In his eyes, a moderate religious scholar who has been constantly harassed by radically secularist prosecutors is no doubt guilty, despite well-deserved legal victories against anti-democratic Turkish legal practices. He also seems to believe religiously, like his idiosyncratic Turkish friends, that the AK Party and its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, are already guilty of undermining secularism, though the judicial process is only beginning. On the other hand, he vigorously criticizes a legal move against a well-known militarist journalist, İlhan Selçuk, who was recently interrogated by police under the orders of a prosecutor due to credible intelligence findings that indicated he was affiliated with the Ergenekon organization.

Last time I checked, Mr. Selçuk and the Cumhuriyet newspaper he leads represented one of the most intolerant, ultranationalist, anti-EU, anti-American schools of thought in Turkey. But Mr. Rubin, clearly blinded by his convictions, can attempt to sell Cumhuriyet as The New York Times and Mr. Selçuk as Walter Cronkite in the US. The likes of Rubin seem to embrace anyone as friends as long as they are ardent critics of the Islamic religion and observant Muslims.

Fringe newspapers, such as Cumhuriyet, which Rubin cites as a source, have long trumpeted ideas like "Gulen is like Khomeini" and "Erdoğan is like Ahmadinejad," although most facts on the ground prove the opposite. A short column cannot suffice for correcting the abundant factual and intellectual flaws in Mr. Rubin's piece. I'll only kindly ask you to think about the following questions:

How can anyone be taking Turkey toward an Iranian-type regime when he is leading a party during the tenure of which they have made unprecedented reforms securing Ankara a spot at the full-membership negotiating table of the European Union? How could they be undermining secularism, as the Turkish prosecutor suggests, when a main precondition of joining the EU bloc is secularism? I am talking about the AK Party and Erdoğan, who Rubin is alarmed about.

How can anyone be a Khomeini if he has advocated peace and tolerance throughout his life as a preacher and author, being received by the pope in 1998 as a result of relentless efforts to promote interfaith dialogue and threatened by extremist Islamic movements because he is too sympathetic to Christians and Jews? I am, of course, talking about Fethullah Gülen, who Rubin depicts as a Turkish Khomeini.

True, as Rubin says, Gülen is perhaps Turkey's most prominent theologian. And many academics and observers would agree that the faith-inspired civic movement he initiated almost 40 years ago in Turkey now represents one of the best hopes for the enlightened Islamic world and the West. But it looks like some prosecutors in Turkey and their imitators in US will never be convinced.

A golden piece of evidence loved by Gülenophobes that Rubin was eager to put forth was an old videotape that showed Gülen urging most likely a group of visiting young bureaucrats to keep a low profile and not reveal their religious affinities too much. What could be more sensible advice than this in a governing system obsessed with secularism and in a world full of Islamophobia? How far can pious people, especially if known to be affiliated with a religious group, go in Turkish bureaucracy? Thousands expelled from the military and many other government jobs provide the answer: not that far.

I'm sure Mr. Rubin is aware and most probably sympathetic to Alevi, Christian and Jewish minorities who wrestle with similar challenges emanating from Turkey's suppressive secularism and employ various survival techniques. Why does it become a plot to "infiltrate" state institutions when some pious Sunnis do the same to secure a spot for themselves in the public sector?