Islamic Turkey Versus Islamist saudi Arabia

The Sultanahmet Mosque, named after the Ottoman Emperor who built it, in Istanbul, Turkey, between 1609 and 1616.

I spent the last two weeks of November traveling around Turkey. I was part of a tour group from the United States. Apart from affording me an opportunity to learn a lot more about Turkey, the tour helped me reaffirm that a country can be Islamic without being Islamist and that Islam and democracy can function side by side, if only the leaders and the led have the will for it.

Calling Turkey Islamic may be as inappropriate as calling India Hindu, for this simple reason: Both countries are firm in their faith in secularism and the concept has been enshrined in their constitutions. I am doing it partly because its population is overwhelmingly Muslim, most of them religious, but mainly to point out how different it is from an Islamist country like Saudi Arabia.

Turkey is 98 percent Muslim. It is also 100 percent democratic. Its commitment to two basic tenets of democracy – separation of church and state; and equality under the law and equal protection of all by the law – is as steadfast as that in any democracy in the world. Ever since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey and its first president, decided to put the country on a democratic path, in 1923, it has been distancing itself even from symbols and symbolisms one associates with Islam. Its ban on women wearing scarves in government offices and state-run institutions is just one example.

During the two weeks I spent in Turkey, I could count on my fingertips the number of women I saw wearing hijab or abaya. And burqa, the stifling head-to-toe shroud the Taliban type of Islamist-extremists force their women to wear? Not one. It only shows that, left to themselves, Muslim women would wear what they feel comfortable in. Most of the women I saw wore Western-style dresses. And men wearing the type of beard one tends to associate with Islam were a rarity. When I mentioned to a Turkish friend, in Istanbul, that one could see more hijabs and abayas in India, where only 14 percent of the population is Muslim, this is what he said:

Five Pillars of Islam

The Five Pillars of Islam – Shahadah (belief in the oneness of God and in Muhammad as His Prophet; Salah (praying five times a day); Zakah (alms-giving to the needy); Sawm (fasting during the month of Ramadan); and Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) – fulfilling which makes a person a true Muslim, say nothing about dresses and beards. Even of those five, absolute adherence is demanded only to the first one. The other four requirements are flexible, with individual circumstances allowing considerable latitude. Rules and regulations on dress and physical appearance, and the systematic relegation of women to an inferior status, have their origins in the interpretation of the Koran, over centuries, by mullahs. The more fanatical, self-righteous and self-serving the interpreter, the more stringent the rules and regulations.

With a smile on his face, my friend concluded: “We Turks are good Muslims. Most of us, at least. But we keep our faith strictly between us and Allah. We don’t force it down people’s throats as they do in Saudi Arabia and many other Arab countries.” Pointing to the famous Sultanahmet Mosque, he added, “Go inside any Friday. You will see it packed with religious Turks.” An otherwise unremarkable incident, one morning during the tour, drove home to me the difference in lifestyle of women in Turkey and of those in Saudi Arabia.

It was 7 a.m., November 27. We had arrived in Istanbul, the largest and most cosmopolitan city in Turkey, the previous evening. The tour of the city was to begin at 9 a.m. I decided to spend the two hours exploring the neighborhood on my own. There was another reason for me to get out of the hotel that early: I was anxious to make a phone call to my niece in Pune, India, who had got married the day before. And I wanted to do it using a pre-paid phone card and a public telephone. Using the phone at the hotel would cost me much much more. I had tried to call my niece the previous day, just before the wedding ceremony, but in vain.

With the phone card in hand, I started walking, looking for a pay phone. The receptionist at the hotel had told me that it was “around the corner.” Maybe I missed the corner he was referring to. I kept walking. But for the few street cleaners and early office-goers, the street was empty. What a contrast. The same street had been packed with shoppers and window-shoppers the previous evening. Looking at the good-looking men and women, most of them fashionably dressed, I had said to my friends in the tour group, “This could as well be a busy street in any European city. Can you tell the difference?” To which Betty Lou, from Waite Park, Minnesota, had responded, “That’s exactly what I have been thinking, too.”

Though anxious to make the phone call, I was thoroughly enjoying the walk. After five minutes or so, I approached a woman, maybe in her twenties, who was going in the same direction. She was wearing an overcoat (the weather was around 40 degrees, Fahrenheit). Because it was unbuttoned, I could see that she had a skirt and a jacket on underneath. She greeted me with a broad smile and “Gunaydin [Good Morning].” I returned the greeting in kind, which made her smile broader. (I had, by then, learned from the tour guide how to say a few words – like hello, good morning, good evening and good night – in Turkish.)

She took off her ear-piece – she was listening to music from an iPod – and said something in Turkish, which I took to mean, “What can I do for you?” The response I gave, in English, might not have made any sense to her. But with the phone card I had in one hand and the signs I made with both hands, there was no mistaking of what I was looking for. She gestured to me to accompany her.

We walked side by side, close to each other, like two friends. During the 10 minutes we were together, I tried to have a conversation with her. I would say something in English and she would respond in Turkish. I cursed myself for not having learned a few more words of Turkish before I started the tour. Though she spoke little English, she was able to convey to me what she did for a living and at what time she had to be at work. She said “office secretary” and “eight o’ clock” in English.

When we reached a small building, with a row of pay phones in front, I told her, “Thank you.” No, she was not ready to leave me as yet. She took the phone card from me, contacted the operator at the telephone exchange and said something, with the word “international” in it. Then she took from me the phone number in India I wanted to call and pressed all the numbers herself. I realized why my call the day before didn’t go through. Once she got through to India, she handed me the phone, shook hands with me and said “goodbye.” The words that came out of my mouth did not adequately express the depth of my gratitude. For two reasons: my niece had already started speaking at the other end of the phone; and I was too overwhelmed by the hospitality and helpful nature of this total stranger.

My immediate thought, during my walk back to the hotel, was: “What punishment would she have received from the authorities if she was found walking with a Hindu-agnostic like me, in Saudi Arabia?”

The thought about Saudi Arabia was not without reason. The sickening way the Saudi legal system treated a 19-year-old rape victim had been in the news for a few days. As though the pain, indignity, humiliation, and condemnation of Islamist-extremists the woman suffered, as a result of being gang-raped by seven men, were not sufficient, the highest legal entity in Saudi Arabia sentenced her to 200 lashes and six months in prison. What was her crime? She was found alone with a man who was not related to her.

The Saudi justice ministry issued a statement, on November 24, justifying the sentence. The statement, as reported by Reuters, said: “We reiterate that judicial rulings in this virtuous country … are based on God’s book (the Koran) and the traditions of his Prophet (Mohammad) and that no ruling is issued without being based on evidence….”

Whoever said that only the Saudi interpretation of the Koran and of the traditions of the Prophet is correct? Even going by the literal meaning of what is said in the Koran, only “The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication” are to be punished, and that too only “with 100 stripes.” The clerics on the Supreme Judicial Council, which is the highest legal entity in Saudi Arabia, decided to outsmart the Prophet by increasing the punishment to 200 stripes and six months in prison. What are the assumptions here? That a man and a woman can be together only to commit adultery or fornication? That a woman is man’s property? That she is incapable of taking care of herself?

Civilized people around the world were outraged by the news. The fact that the Saudi king, in the wake of the outrage, pardoned the rape victim does not make the Saudi legal system less disgusting. The victim will be living with the stigma for the rest of her life. Press reports say that she has already gone into hiding, fearing punishment from her own relatives. The punishment is death. They call it ‘honor killing’ and they find justification for it in their primitive interpretation of the Koran.

Abominable Practices

I can think of three reasons why the Saudi ruling clique is able to get away with their abominable practices. One, it can afford to ignore world criticism as long as it is the largest producer of oil in the world and the world hasn’t yet found an alternative fuel source. Two, being the custodian of Islam’s two holiest places, its interpretation of the Koran gets accepted as authentic by the gullible among Muslim believers. Three, the leader of the free world, the U.S., which never tires of preaching to the rest of the world the importance of freedom and democracy, has always been buddy-buddy with Saudi Arabia, in spite of its being one of the most authoritarian and undemocratic countries in the world. The buddy-buddy relationship will continue as long as big business in America needs Saudi oil to survive.

No wonder the Bush administration reacted to the Saudi verdict in the rape case (before the woman was pardoned) the way it did. “This is a part of a judicial procedure overseas in the court of a sovereign country,” Sean McCormack, State Department spokesman, said, on November 19. “That said, most would find this relatively astonishing that something like this happens.” Mark it: The U.S. State Department found it only "relatively astonishing."

President Bush outdid the State Department when he said at his press conference, on December 4: “My first thoughts were these. What happens if this happened to my daughter? How would I react? And I would have been – I would have been – I’d had – I would have been very emotional, of course. I’d have been angry at those who committed the crime. And I would be angry at the state that didn’t support the victim.”

Bah! What a profound observation! Victims of rape around the world would find those words very soothing.

Here is what well-wishers, like me, of Saudi Arabia have to say to the progressive-minded among the Saudis: Don’t expect the leader of the free world to start a campaign to bring democracy to your country. He learned from the killing fields of Iraq what high school children learn in their classrooms – that democracy cannot be imposed on a society from outside; it has to be built from within. The first step toward building it, in your case, should be to keep the clerics in check; to tell them to stop playing God. After all, Arabic is your mother tongue. Which means that you have access to the original version of the Koran. You don't need the interpretation of a medieval-minded mullah to understand it. The model for your country should be Turkey. You should do for your country what the Young Turks did for theirs in the 1920s. Who knows, one of you may emerge as the Kemal Ataturk of Saudi Arabia.

We enjoyed reading the article on Turkey and will continue to read the other pieces. Have a healthy, wealthy and happy New Year.

Bravo on your article. We think you did a great job comparing Turkey to Saudi Arabia. We can't wait to read your other articles. They will be a treat. We are sure your thoughts and sentiments will find favorable reviews among other readers also.

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