FEARING A NEW HOLY EMPIRE
By Adnan R. Khan

Maclean’s, Canada
December 4, 2006

Just when Turks are worried about Christians, here comes the Pope

When Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Ankara on Nov. 28, few people expect
he’ll be given a warm welcome. In the aftermath of comments the pontiff
made on Sept. 12, quoting a Byzantine emperor who characterized some
of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings as "evil and inhuman," suspicions
over the planned visit to Turkey have intensified. Why now, many Turks
are asking, at a time when Turkey’s relations with Europe are tense,
and some observers are even forecasting the suspension of part of
Turkey’s EU membership negotiations when EU leaders meet next month.

In Europe, opposition to Turkey ever joining the EU is increasing.

Benedict, when he was still a cardinal, was part of that club: in
2004, just months before being elected pope, he stated that Turkey
"is founded upon Islam" and "thus the entry of Turkey into the EU
would be anti-historical." That assessment is still fresh in the minds
of Turks, as is the steady stream of reform demands from EU member
nations, not to mention France’s General Assembly recently passing
a provocative bill outlawing the denial of the Armenian genocide at
the hands of Ottoman Turks during the First World War.

That bill, more a message to Turkey’s government than a legitimate
addition to France’s legal code, is unlikely to be passed by the
French Senate, but it is still a bitter pill to swallow for Turks,
who have been busy trying to meet EU requirements before the leaders’
meeting in December. In fact, in protest against the legislation,
Turkey cut military ties to France.

But even as Turks grow increasingly embittered with the message from
Europe that they are not welcome, many are also concerned about the
pressures their society is facing from westernization. "The flow
of cultural values has been moving west to east for decades," says
Berdal Aral, a professor in the international relations department
of Fatih University, Istanbul’s most conservative post-secondary
institution. For many conservative Turks, the Pope’s visit falls into
a disturbing pattern of Christianization sweeping their nation. "They
want to transform us into a Christian country," says Muhiddin
Sanarslan, a 30-year-old Muslim living in the conservative Fatih
district of Istanbul. "That’s the only way they will accept us. Well,
forget it then. That will not happen."

But it is happening, if not literally then certainly in terms of
culture and iconography. In Istanbul, traditionally an intersection
of East and West, the West has, for some time now, had the green
light. From Sunday holidays to Santa Claus, symbols of Christian
tradition are gaining ground. More tangibly, figures published in
January 2004 in Turkey’s mainstream Milliyet newspaper claimed that
35,000 Muslims, the vast majority of them in Istanbul, had converted
to Christianity in 2003. While impossible to confirm (the Turkish
government does not release these figures), the rate of conversion,
according to Christian leaders in Turkey, is on the rise.

"Conversion is a very sensitive topic," says Behnan Konutgan, project
coordinator for Bible translation at the Bible Society in Turkey.

"The Milliyet figure sounds too high to me, but this is something no
one in the Christian community wants to talk about." As an evangelical,
Konutgan admits that speaking about his beliefs is part of his mission,
though he shies away from calling it proselytization.

Konutgan and his Bible Society have no illusions about the dangers of
working in a country where 99.8 per cent of the population is Muslim
and a growing number of those Muslims are hostile to his activities
(in a recent case, a 16-year-old boy from the conservative eastern
Anatolian city of Trabzon received 19 years in prison for the
murder of a Catholic priest, Andrea Santoro, in the midst of the
Danish cartoon crisis). His office, located near the Grand Bazaar in
Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet district, employs security precautions
comparable to those of any diplomatic mission. The locked gate leads
to a guardhouse where visitors must produce some form of identity and
confirm they are expected before being handed a visitor’s card. Inside
the complex, finding the society and the attached "prayer house"
is an intuitive venture–both are located behind an unmarked door.

"You have to be a brave person to be Christian in this society," says
Konutgan. "A Christian convert will likely lose his job, his friends,
his family. He will no longer be considered a Turk." To ease the
pressures on Christians, the outspoken pastor says his community is
"desperate" for Turkey to join the EU. Some key reforms to Turkey’s
existing laws would benefit minority groups like his, including a
recent, controversial amendment to property laws, demanded by the
EU, that would allow religious foundations to own property. That,
says Konutgan, could allow Christian groups to reclaim property
appropriated by the Turkish republic. "We’ve gone to the European
court to get our properties back," he adds. "We won the case and
Turkey changed some laws, but we’re still waiting for our land."

But the Christian community’s opponents argue that giving Christians
property rights would lead to a Christian "reoccupation" of Turkey.

"They will end up owning half our land," says 64-year-old Ali Shahin,
a retired religious studies teacher who opposes any concessions to
Christians for the sake of EU membership. "The Vatican will then send
money here to build churches. It is a new form of colonization. This
Pope is a dangerous man: he wants to create a new Christian empire."

Pope Benedict’s visit, officially described as an attempt to heal the
952-year-old schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, is
being interpreted by Istanbul’s conservative Muslims as an extension of
the Vatican’s push to confront Islam. "Istanbul," says Father Felice
at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, "is one of the most holy cities
in Christiandom. If Rome is one lung of the Christians, then Istanbul
is the other, and Pope Benedict is attempting to reunite the two." For
Orthodox Christians, a powerful denomination with deep-rooted influence
over much of Eastern Europe and Greece, Istanbul, or Constantinople
as many of them still call it, is their Rome. It is also the link
to the West for the few remaining Christians in other parts of the
Middle East, the majority of whom are Orthodox.

The underlying implications of Pope Benedict’s visit don’t sit well
with even moderate Muslims. "This Pope is extremely dangerous for
Islam," says professor Aral, echoing Ali Shahin’s sentiments. "He is
trying to form a united front against Islam. This is the perception
of many Muslims in Turkey." But, unlike the more radical Shahin,
the problem for moderates like him, he says, is not theological
or even confrontational. It is a question of identity. "Anatolian
Islam has always been moderate. But in recent years we’re seeing a
crystallization of religious and secular identities in Turkey." The
result is a rise in radicalism, with a parallel rise in secularism.

Both forces feed off each other in a dynamic city like Istanbul. As
more and more Turks express their "Europeanness," openly ignoring
traditional religious responsibilities like fasting during Ramadan,
which they see as vestiges of a retrogressive past, more Islamists
turn to a more radical version of their faith, concerned with the
corruption of their society and reacting to it with more fervour.

Members of this latter group, says Konutgan, now feel they can have
a purely Islamic identity that has nothing to do with the West.

The Pope’s visit and the reform of Turkish society over the course of
the EU accession bid could potentially widen the rift between these two
groups. But this is a natural process, argues Ayhan Kaya, director of
the Centre for European Studies at Istanbul Bilgi University. "We’re
still at the early stages of Turkey’s encounter with Europe. The
problem right now is that certain groups with vested interests are
taking advantage of certain perceptions in Turkish society." As
Turkey enters another electoral cycle, with a presidential election
slated for May 2007 and parliamentary elections six months later,
the typical partisan campaign process has begun.

"Political parties and reactionary groups are using the hot issues,"
he adds, "like property rights for Christians and conversions, to
promote their own interests." Kaya is optimistic that this phase will
end once the elections are over.

Others are not. "The only thing that will change the attitude of
Turkey’s Muslims toward its Christians," says Konutgan, "is if we
take all of the school textbooks that teach Muslim kids to hate
Christians and burn them." The same, radical Muslims would argue,
could be said about the current Pope, who has been regularly accused
of sowing hatred between the religions. Books and popes aside though,
the future of interfaith relations in Turkey seems set for more
controversy than reconciliation.