


The dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has not been seen since he entered the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2. This has raised fears that he was murdered at the consulate.
In March 1924, when Mustafa Kemal abolished the khilafah in Turkey, it evoked three distinct responses from Muslims globally. In India under British colonial rule, with a substantial Muslim population, there was great anger...
Sister Safa Merve Kavakci’s hijab battle dominated the political debate in Turkey about the functioning of democratic norms and secularism until it was buried by the August earthquake. While the secular Kemalist government got egg on its face for its poor handling of the rescue efforts, the hijab issue is still being debated.
The Kemalists’ crusade against the Islamic movement is becoming more vicious. Last month there was another assault when an issue of the Selam Islamic weekly was confiscated.
Merve Kavakci, elected to Turkish parliament from Istanbul as a Fazilat (Virtue) Party candidate in the April 18 election, appears at first sight quite unassuming, even a little shy. But beneath that gentle exterior is a young Muslimah of steely nerves.
Turkey’s Islamist Fazilat party suffered a disappointing result in the country’s parliamentary elections on April 18. The largest party in the old Parliament, they hoped to increase their largest-single party status by increasing the number of seats they won.
The controversy over the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, and the subsequent backlash from Kurds inside and outside Turkey, have tended to overshadow the fact that Islam remains the Turkish secular establishment’s greatest fear.
To casual observers, the Turkish tourist industry may appear to be somewhat harmless and only superficially damaging to Islamic culture in Turkey. But this is facile and misleading. Tourism brings with it more insidious, and clearly damaging, trends
Istanbul, once a magnificent city of Islamic civilization, known to Muslims of another age as Jannatu dunya (paradise on earth), is today laid open for inspection by the prying eyes of western tourists.
Receb Tayyob Erdogan, the ‘Islamist’ mayor of Istanbul, was sentenced to ten months’ imprisonment on April 21 after being convicted of inciting ‘hatred based on religious differences’ by a special security court sitting in Diyarbakir.
The banning of Refah, Turkey’s ‘Islamic’ political party, was formalized on February 22, when the Constitutional Court’s full verdict was published.
Three weeks after Turkey’s constitutional court announced its decision to ban the Refah Party and Necmettin Erbakan for being too Islamic, publication of the verdict and its reasons in the official gazette are still awaited.
Two senior Islamic activists in Turkey were given long jail sentences by an Ankara state security court on October 15, on trumped up charges. Nuruddin Sirin, editor of the Islamic daily Selam, was jailed for 17-and-a-half years, and Bekir Yildiz, a former mayor of Ankara’s Sincan district...
Mesut Yilmaz’s vote of confidence (281 to 256) in the Turkish parliament on July 12 was marred by brawls and fist-fights. He described his elevation to the premier’s post as a return to ‘traditional Turkish politics.’ Indeed!