Religion Dispatches
…throne too long left empty. (I) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey The Good: The most influential leader of Turkey has done the impossible: he’s outmaneuvered a dictatorial secular minority and changed the Turkish landscape by making religion acceptable again. Recently Erdogan sidelined the military, has overseen a booming economy that has experienced a 300% rise in GDP in the last ten years, repaired relations with Israel, and the…
Read More…reating serious backlash among BYU students and faculty. Since then, Honor Code enforcement has been conducted through referrals—even third party referrals—of suspect students to a campus Honor Code office, a system of enforcement that has created significant opportunities for abuse. (When I was a BYU student, it was possible to make an anonymous third-party referral.) Honor Code enforcement on campus has been used to bait and target gays and libe…
Read More…th refugees, explores the challenges facing Syrians fleeing to and through Turkey, including debate over identifying migrants as refugees or “guests.” Syrians and other refugees are not here because Turkey is gracious. They’re not here because of our hospitality. They are exercising their fundamental rights guaranteed by international law. Turkey is not doing them a favor. Refuge is a fundamental human right. This is the direction that we need to…
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…le for months over a massive corruption probe targetting Rousseff’s party. Turkey: Timeline shows slide to anti-LGBT positions by Erdoğan’s party LGBTI News Turkey released a timeline showing the deterioration of the positions on LGBT issues taken by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which was founded in 2001. That year, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told a television interviewer, “Gays must have legal protections in terms of their rights and freedo…
Read More…s to his monthly “Ultimate Wealth Report”—one year, along with a bunch of “bonus reports” about capital gains and currency trading and the like—for $47. (Here I can’t resist pointing out that “bonus” is just a letter away from “bogus.”) It’s hard to know if Hyman has actually had any success as an investor. In the video, he makes a lot of his one big win, when, late last year, he predicted that Best Buy would jump from $11 a share to $40. Currentl…
Read More…ica. Even the country’s Prime Minister has sent a pair in. The connections between Turkey and Bosnia run deep. For one thing, Bosnia was part of the same imperium as Turkey, and many of the Ottoman Empire’s sultans had Bosnian wives and mothers. (It’s a distortion of history to call the empire “Turkish”—its army and bureaucracy was heavily Eastern European.) Millions of Turks are descendants of Balkan refugees who retreated with the Ottoman Empire…
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…ksgiving meal is ruined, let me confess that I know a way to make it taste better next year. Without a major shift in the way humans thinks about the earth, humans are not only causing the extinction of the biodiversity of the natural world, but also our own descendents. Facing the future must be more than driving a hybrid and recycling aluminum. We must recognize that tribalism is the most successful human social institution in the world. Tribes…
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…, our institutional leadership is some years behind the conversation. What Turkey was five years ago is not where Turkey appears to be headed five years from now. Why should American Muslim organizations endorse this? When I want American Muslims to be more politically involved, to talk to people who don’t talk to us, it’s not in order for us to accept their narratives uncritically. But to be willing to hear them, in order that we too may be heard…
Read More…pparently making their way, on Ukrainian aircraft, to Syria, via Qatar and Turkey. Of course the latter countries’ involvement means these are not helping Bashar, unless you think his overthrow is good for his long-term life plans. This means that the Sunni Islamist regime in North Africa, closely allied to China and Iran, is shipping locally- and Chinese-made weapons to Syrian rebels who are fighting against a regime whose survival is critical to…
Read More…he race in his constituency, becoming the only LGBT friendly mayor outside Turkey’s biggest metropolis. Homosexuality is legal in Turkey but discrimination and anti-gay violence persist; efforts to include constitutional protections failed when a new draft constitution was defeated last November. Turkey’s Islamist administration has announced that the government will construct separate prisons for openly gay or transgender inmates, something the g…
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