Thoughts on Turkey, Saudi Arabia and

Secular Muslim Leaders of the World

By Kulamarva Balakrishna

I read with interest two articles recently published on this Web site, offering a comparative study between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. I like to share with the readers my own thoughts on the subject.

“What Makes Islamic Turkey Different from Islamist Saudi Arabia,” published on December 23, 2007, prompts me to say that it is not Turkey alone that stands apart from Saudi Arabia. Even Jordan, Palestine, Egypt and Syria are modern when compared with the Saudi kingdom. Iran, of course, is an entirely different cup of tea.

A recent experience in Saudi Arabia of a Turkish woman professor is very relevant in this regard. Prof. Yakin Erturk was on a visit to the kingdom, from February 3 to 13, as a United Nations Special Rapporteur. She was on a fact-finding mission, especially on the status of women there. The mission was met with a tirade from the Arabic daily Al-Watan. The paper seemed to be saying that there is nothing wrong with the status of Saudi women and that they are happy as they are. That is, they love to be protected from light, covered head-to-toe in dark shroud, the paper's ire seems to suggest.

The article by Irfan Khan, “Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey Should Not Be Compared to Saudi Arabia, Not Even to Pakistan,” fails to mention another Muslim participant in India’s freedom struggle whose secular credentials were stronger than those of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. I am, of course, referring to the late Pashtun leader Badshah Khan, whose commitment to Gandhian principles earned him the nickname Frontier Gandhi.

Muslim secularism was also glowing under the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Thanks to the legacy left behind by Nasser, even today’s Egypt has some elements of democracy and secularism. There are politicians in the U.S. who count Egypt among the flawed democracies of the world.

We should not fail to note that even the Palestinian movement is secular. It is unfortunate that most Jews refuse to recognize this fact.

Saudi Arabia is a special case, though. It is so arrogant as to think that it can buy respectability in the world as long as it is awash in oil wealth. Just now, as I write this, the Saudi rulers are trying to use this wealth to influence Malaysia, another predominantly Muslim country. Several thousand Saudi students are being sent to Malaysia to study there at their government's expense.

Saudis, and Saudis alone, are responsible for exporting a distorted version of Islam around the world. The world should never forget that, of the 19 people responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and for what the world has since been experiencing as a direct consequence of those attacks, 15 came out of Saudi Arabia. They were the products of the Saudi version of Islam.

           As for Turkey, even under Ottoman Caliphate, it was somewhat pluralistic. The growth of Sufism, the mystical brotherhood of Islam founded in the thirteenth century by Jalaluddin Rumi, was made possible because of that pluralism.

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(Kulamarva Balakrishna is an Indian journalist and social activist, currently living in Vienna, Austria. His social, political and religious views are regularly featured on his blog, humans austria.)

(First published on March 1, 2008. Since then it has been slightly edited.)

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