A DIFFERENT PATH IN TURKEY
By Michael Gerson

Washington Post, DC
June 8 2007

ISTANBUL — The shining achievement of modern Turkey is declared
by the darkness around it. In Saudi Arabia or northern Sudan,
conversion from Islam is considered apostasy, a crime punishable by
death. Even in traditionally tolerant Malaysia, a Christian convert
was recently prevented from officially changing her religious status,
being informed by a court that "the plaintiff exists under the tenets
of Islam until her death." In Turkey, a legal change of religion on
your identity card merely requires a notarized letter, and several
hundred Christian converts have made the switch.

Yet even in Turkey, religious liberty is the most disputed and
troublesome of freedoms. The secular establishment, fearful of
accumulated sectarian power, has traditionally denied minority
religious groups the right to own property, to provide religious
education beyond high school or to train their own clergy. As a result,
the Armenian and Greek Orthodox churches are slowly being asphyxiated
for lack of priests — and the government has sometimes hastened the
process by expropriating church property without compensation. The
nationalist yellow press whips up resentment against religious
minorities by repeating popular conspiracy theories: that Christian
missionaries run prostitution rings or bribe Muslims into converting.

The rise of a more publicly assertive Islam in Turkey has added
an unpredictable element to these long-standing challenges. The
religiously influenced government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan advocates Turkish membership in the European Union, which
would give both Muslims and religious minorities a firmer legal
basis for the free exercise of religion. Under pressure from the
European Union, Turkey’s parliament passed legislation to return some
confiscated church property and ratified international treaties that
affirm freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Many American conservatives have little use for the European Union,
but this is its usefulness: Across Eastern Europe, and now across
the Bosporus, it has offered tangible economic benefits in exchange
for the acceptance of international standards of human rights. That
is more than the American freedom agenda is accomplishing.

But even as the legal environment for religion improves in Turkey,
rising Islamist influence has caused sudden storms of violence. Seven
weeks ago, two Turkish Christian converts and a German citizen were
ritually murdered in the southern city of Malatya by killers spouting
nationalist and Islamist slogans. Pastors around the country have begun
hiring professional security. The Armenian patriarch is followed by
a bodyguard even during his procession to the altar — an unsettling
liturgy of fear.

Muslim societies, of course, have no monopoly on religious repression,
which is practiced with enthusiasm from Hindu India to Buddhist
Sri Lanka to atheist China, where many of the victims are Muslims
themselves. But Islam is conducting a lively and sometimes deadly
internal debate on religious liberty. Modernist theologians argue for
tolerance based on the Koran’s assertion that there is "no compulsion
in religion." Fundamentalists point to a long tradition of severe
treatment for apostates, and they have gained the upper hand in many
parts of the Muslim world.

Few things are more frightening in a traditional society than the
prospect of the young abandoning the faith of their fathers. For many
in conservative cultures, religion is not primarily the belief of
an individual but the definition of a community — not a choice but
an identity. The very idea of changing your faith is bewildering to
many, like changing your ethnicity or hiring new parents. In Turkey,
converts are often referred to as "foreigners" who have repudiated
Turkishness itself.

But however controversial religious liberty may be, it is not optional
in a democracy. The practice of freedom is ultimately inseparable
from individualism — a belief in the right and ability of men and
women to govern their own affairs. And individualism means little
without the ability to choose one’s own creed about God, morality
and the universe. For traditional societies, this is a difficult
adjustment. For every free society, it is a necessary adjustment.

The Malatya murders acted like the flash of an X-ray, revealing
some hidden and disturbing trends in a close ally. But the shock of
that violence also provoked a counter-reaction. After the murders,
Ali Bardakoglu — the highly respected Sunni theologian who heads the
Turkish Religious Affairs Directorate — was asked if missionary work
was a danger to Turkey. He replied, "No, it is their natural right.

We must learn to respect even the personal choice of an atheist,
let alone other religions."

That kind of clarity from a Muslim leader is the reason that Turkey,
if it did not exist, would need to be invented.