ON SEPT. 11, ARMENIAN MASSACRES, BUTTERFLIES, THE CALIPHATE AND THE EU
by ORHAN KEMAL CENGiZ

Today’s Zaman
Sept 11 2009
Turkey

If Turkey can recover its memory, if Turkey maintains peace with its
Muslim identity on the one hand and its long history with Christians
on the other, I believe this country will hold the key to the 21st
century.

Maybe I should write many different articles trying to explain
what I am trying to tell you now, but let us view this column as an
introduction to this vast area.

While the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating, it wasn’t only the
Christians who were massacred; the Muslim identity of this country was
also denied completely. It appears paradoxical, does it not? This is
what makes understanding Turkey so difficult. Christians were massacred
to purify Anatolia, to create a nation-state. These massacres were
carried out by the very people who tried to modernize Turkey. These
"modern" people orchestrated massacres to create a nation-state that is
based on a Muslim identity but also, in order to "modernize" society
and to create a "modern state," they banned every kind of expression
of religious identity in the public sphere and exerted extreme
control over every part of religious life. During these massacres,
many devoted Muslims disobeyed orders and tried to save non-Muslims,
believing this was what their religion ordered them to do.

Today is Sept. 11, the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks
on the twin towers in New York. Today our hearts will be with the
innocent Americans whose only mistake was being in those buildings at
the time of the attacks. It is not nice to speculate over incidents
involving human suffering, incidents that are very tragic. But to
prevent them from happening again, we should try to understand what
conditions made their occurrence possible.

What would you think if I offered you the thought that there is a
strong link between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and these
heinous attacks on the twin towers in New York? I call this the
suspended butterfly effect. The classic butterfly effect theory holds
that if a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it will set off a tornado
in California. The historical butterfly effect also worked like that:
The wind created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire unfortunately
turned into a tornado in New York in 2001. The collapse of the Ottoman
Empire and the abolishment of the caliphate (the central religious
and moral authority for all Muslims) created a huge vacuum in the
Muslim world, a vacuum from which the whole world still suffers.

Would it be possible for Osama bin Laden to issue a fatwa for jihad
if a Muslim world had a caliphate that had the hearts and minds of all
Muslims and was also loyal to democratic values? With the collapse of
the Ottoman Empire, Muslims lost a central authority, and today the
whole world suffers from the lack of this central Muslin authority
that would dare tell bin Laden that he misinterprets the Quran and
that Islam is a religion of peace, not the kind of war he masterminds.

Not only the lack of a caliphate but also the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire had a huge impact on the Muslim world. The vacuum left by the
Ottoman Empire was filled with endless wars and conflicts. Today we
are again at a critical conjuncture. Some are not aware, but Turkey’s
exclusion from Europe will have a similar butterfly effect to that of
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The whole Muslim world is watching
the progress. If the mentality of French President Nicolas Sarkozy
defines the future of Europe, Turkey will be excluded and Europe will
be a "Christian" entity. This will be the beginning of a disastrous
chain reaction in the world in which al-Qaeda and radicalism win and
reason loses.

I have a different scenario. Turkish Muslim democrats will make
peace with the past of this country. Turkey will remember being a
Muslims country but also remember its Christians, their suffering,
their anguish, their pain. Muslims will start the reconciliation
process with non-Muslims. This will be the beginning of a peace
between Islam and Christianity. Turkey will be the womb of the
universal reconciliation of religions. Turkey will regain its role
of being the leader of the Muslim world and at the same time it will
be a member of the European Union. It will show the whole world that
a Muslim country can be democratic, secular and European. Europe
will change the whole course of history with Turkey’s help, and
Turkey will overcome its memory loss and recover from its painful
neurosis. Sept. 11 started in Turkey and it will end here!

A note to my readers: I receive many messages from readers and am
grateful for that. Most of these messages are very positive and
stimulate me to write on new subjects. From some messages, though,
I gather the impression that I and some readers hold differing views
on the functions of columns. This column does not produce anything
scientific; I am not a scientist. I am simply thinking out loud. If
I can encourage the reader to look at matters from a different and
unconventional perspective, I deem myself successful. This is what
I am trying to do in this column. A second note: I use Facebook and
am delighted to exchange ideas with people over Facebook. So please,
do not hesitate to add me if you are a Facebook user.