Facebook, Starbucks and traveller's sanity

Published in Hurriyet Daily News, 25 September

On some levels, I despise and love social networking sites and globalised brands.

Ethically, I have a lot of questions around sites like Facebook that register a significant amount of personal data on its users. Not only does this make me nervous about privacy issues, but the prospects of what a profit seeking company can do with such information scares me. In addition to this, I have growing worries about the long term effect, if not damage, these sites have over human bonds and relationships.

Similarly, I have a lot of ethical questions on globalised brands that haunt me pretty much everywhere I go, like the golden arches of McDonald’s or that chemical taste of Nescafe. I have a lot of questions over where and how they get their supplies and what they mean for local economies. In addition to this, we are all worried about how these popular products are changing other cultures and the long term damage they are causing their hosts.

All of these nag me each time I check my profile on that you-know-which website and every time order a grande cappuccino at that coffee shop chain store. Yet, I must be honest, I enjoy consuming them and most importantly, I am increasingly realizing their positive side effects.

When one starts travelling around the world, the thrill of the new things, new tastes and places is overpowering. Initially, every second of this exposure is exciting and energizing, especially for the adventurous traveller. However, the same excitement eventually gives way to various stages of integration to a new culture, which often involves frustration, agitation and hunger. Most people who dwell in a foreign country are able to come out of that process with a renewed sense of comfort and excitement.

For the frequent flyer, however, there is no chance of stability and continuity in adjusting to the new culture. Non-stop travels between countries, hotels, board rooms and airports become disorienting and increasingly damaging to physical and emotional health. After all, we human beings are not meant to live this way. Although constant familiarity gets boring, constant change is far from pleasant.

In previous years, I had sought counsel from various trained psychologists and books in order to develop practices that would enable me to cope with such tensions that emerge from over-travelling. Conventional wisdom suggested that I should take various pictures, small items, comfort food and music with me to wherever I travel, so at least I can create a personal and familiar space in an impersonal hotel room some random place. This tip has been a helpful one.

The internet and globalised brands, however, also bring a positive contribution to this curse of modern life. I step in to a coffee shop in Amman, or Beijing, or Cairo or Istanbul or Washington D.C. and I find the same decoration, almost the same menu, the familiar tastes and smells. When I grab my coffee and close my eyes, I could in fact be in that particular shop near my home in London, and for the next 30 minutes, I can charge my adaptation batteries.

Social networking sites help me to feel ‘connected’ with my life in normal circumstances. I step into an internet shop in Tehran or Beirut, or Manila, or Boston or Valetta, and within few minutes I share in the lives of my friends, while looking at their pictures, reading their musings and laughing at their silly comments. I hear news about who is going out with who, who likes which movie, who moved where, who just graduated and who just had a birthday. And with few clicks and sentences, my physical loneliness in a new setting disappears as I recharge my social batteries to handle all of the new people I am about to meet.

On some levels I know these are shallow coping mechanisms, with a hint of hypocrisy and guilt. And yet on other levels, I am glad for the globalised world we live in, not only for creating new challenges for us but also for giving us tools to handle them.

New Essay on Muslim-Majority States and Human Rights

"Muslim-Majority States and Human Rights: From the UDHR to Durban Conference", Religion Compass, Volume 4, Issue 5, Pages 876 - 886, September 2009

Abstract:

Thus far, public debates around human rights in the Islamic world have mostly been abstract debates around Islamic thought. This has taken the form of arguments around faulty notions of clash of civilisations or the attempts of Muslim thinkers to demonstrate that Islam is compatible with contemporary ideals of democracy and human rights. In contrast, this essay focuses exclusively on how Muslim-majority states have reacted to the development of the human rights both domestically and internationally. It presents an overview of the emergence of Cairo Declaration and Arab Charter on Human Rights and current debates around Defamation resolutions and Durban conferences on racism, along with politics of sharia and domestic power challenges faced by Muslim-majority states and their effects on implementation of human rights in the Islamic world.

Read the new essay by Ziya Meral at Religion Compass

What is your first language?

Published in Hurriyet Daily News, 11 September

The terms 'native tongue' or 'native language' have never sat comfortably with me. They are simply a static perception of languages as if they are biological functions. They are not. We are socialized to learn them.

When we are born, all that we have is our biological capacity to control sounds we can produce and place into a defined structure presented to us by our families, communities and education.

Depending on where we are born, we are confronted with expressions that we are trained to fit in. Our alignment with what is presented to us is both freedom and enslavement. Learning the language frees us to express ourselves, to be independent and to handle social transactions. Yet at the same time, it is enslavement as languages are also social products with limited vocabulary and sounds. Language limits us to certain vocal tones and certain perceptions and feelings.

This, becomes a problem when one learns another language. At its most visible level, we struggle to learn new sounds and use them properly. After all of these years, I still struggle with the 'th' sound in English, often pronouncing it as 't'. Similarly, I still can't hear the difference between 'w' and 'v' and often pronounce 'woman' as 'voman' and 'vision' as 'wision'. So I can't laugh too much when my Korean, Nepali and Bangladeshi friends pronounce my name 'Ciya' as the 'z' sound remains a problem for them.

Learning another language, however, is more than learning new sounds. It is learning an entirely new world of emotions, experiences and conceptualizations. It took me years to switch to 'ouch' rather than 'ah!' when hurt, or joke British style. When we learn a new language, we do more than learn words; we adjust to a completely new social code. So the Turkish 'Afiyet Olsun' does not work that neatly when translated into English, or 'Elinize Saglik' when complementing food. A Turk who learns English has to learn other behavior and language to adjust to table manners of another culture.

This thrilling opening of new horizons is challenging, as the bilingual person has to be a chameleon to dwell on both horizons simultaneously. This is easier said than done, as the person increasingly mixes vocabulary and syntax and expressions. I increasingly use Turkish expressions in English, and English ones in Turkish, which is always met with confused looks.

Recently, during a first visit to a friend's house in London, I exclaimed "So this is where the lion sleeps then." My 'witty' joke made no sense. I assumed that the English gentleman knew the Turkish expression "Aslan yattigi yerden belli olur"; a lion is known from where he sleeps. Similarly, I vividly remember when my then Cambodian housemate advised me not to pursue a romance with a colleague with the wise words: "As they say in Cambodia, 'Don't eat chicken in the Pagoda.'”

My grammar and sentence structures also get confused. I end up writing sentences in Turkish words on English skeletons. I have embarrassingly signed emails with the friendly wish "serin kal!" (stay cool!), which is utterly bizarre in Turkish. This gets more difficult as we learn other languages and live in contexts dominated by them.

After years of living on three different continents and being exposed to various languages, I find myself a bit confused when people ask me what my 'native tongue' is. Once, I stuck my tongue out and said "This one!" Yet, I cannot deny that Turkish has a special affect on me. I realize this when I listen to sad songs. Turkish ones touch me more deeply than any other language, perhaps because they are more depressing. Or perhaps at a young age I learned a particular way of suffering for love, a Turkish way, thus I am not moved that much by Scandinavian break-up songs.

I think particularly in one aspect the language of our initial upbringing always remains different than acquired languages: swearing. I find myself saying the rudest words in other languages with no shame or guilt. Whereas I blush using even the softest swear words in Turkish. This is due to my upbringing, which has caused me to internalize certain psychological responses to certain words. We automatically know that using swear words is improper in every language and country, thus we abide by the social norms, however, the language of our childhood evokes much deeper feelings of social reactions in us, thanks to our parents.

So, then, the question to ask to someone who lives in a country other than their own and who is potent in multiple languages, is not what their native language is, but which one they learned first.

Trotting the Globe by Day Light or Night

Published in Hurriyet Daily News, 29 August

I love people watching, especially at airports. If it’s a daytime flight, I make it sure to have a pleasurable extra hour beyond the hassle of check-ins and security checks. My travel ritual includes a grande cappuccino and an Italian mozzarella panini savored at a strategic corner of the terminal with the best view of the hurried masses.

This is in fact a mobile age and international travel has enriched and empowered our world beyond our wildest dreams. Encounters with other cultures, fleeting visits to far away lands and daily exposure to the images of the most unspoiled natural wonders around the world are all things we take for granted.

As the seduction of “what is on offer,” or “exclusively” focuses our attention on all that can be bought with money – from taste to scenery, the darker side of this mobile age goes unnoticed by those who can afford to travel around the world in broad day light.

It isn’t only the “able” that travels around the world, gracing airports, cruises and border points out of a desire and means for something new. There is another group; the “forced”, as Zygmunt Bauman masterfully exposes in his Wasted Lives.

Unlike the able, the forced is not welcomed, lured and sought after. There are no marketing strategies seeking to attract them or no ‘fast track’ treatment to ease their discomfort. On the contrary, all border and immigration systems are designed to keep them out.

Unlike the able, the forced do not move around the world out of boredom. The forced are compelled to leave their lives, homes and affinities behind as a result of wars, persecution, famines and other calamities.

According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, UNHCR, “there were some 42 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2008.” Some of this 42 million are refugees and asylum seekers in other countries and some are internally displaced peoples. This number, of course, is a realistic guess and the truth is likely to be much higher.

In addition to this 42 million category, according to the U.S. State Department’s 2008 Trafficking in Persons Report, there are around 800,000 people, mostly women and girls, who were trafficked across nations, most of which end up in forced work in sex industry. This number does not include the people who are trafficked within their countries for forced labor and sexual exploitation.

To this most painful core of the forced, we must also add the millions of irregular migrants who venture into the unknown for the hope of a better future. They too watch the same commercials the able watch. They, too, are seduced to chase the exotic, the beautiful and the unspoiled. Just like hungry cats staring at a butcher’s window, the irregular migrants must wait for the perfect moment to sneak into the shop to grab whatever they can before being kicked out.

The irregular migrants, mostly young men who can risk the adventure of swimming across channels, jumping over fences, walking in wilderness or hiding among boxes of goods, just like millions of asylum seekers and stateless people, do not have the time or luxury of people watching and cappuccinos. They are hurried, anxious, fearful and shaken. Most of the forced travel contrary to their desires, or tastes, or dreams, and with no eyes to witness their ordeal.

Where as the border guards are at worst a nuisance who ask four or five questions at best and want to see what is in your bags for us the privileged who freely travel, credible reports show further suffering for the forced, in the forms of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, as well as detention in inhuman conditions and forced deportations back to the hands of their abusers or the reasons for their original departure.

The forced and the able are both products of the same globalization process. Their mobility is encouraged and enabled by the same structures. They travel on the same paths to the same lands. Yet, they experience the global world extremely differently from each other. One sees the world in bright light through excited eyes, the other in the dark with terrified eyes.

Do we ever return 'home'?

Published in Hurriyet Daily News, 14 August

During the last 10 years or so, I had the privilege and joy of living on three different continents, traveling widely in more than 25 countries, along the way learning foreign languages and undertaking in-depth academic studies on different religions, societies and cultures. I must admit one thing; I find leaving for a new place much easier than returning to where ‘I belong.’

A new country, a new language, a new cuisine, new friends and new thoughts thrill me. In those settings, I can make sense of my struggles, cultural misunderstandings and oddities. Both my hosts and I know that I am an outsider, cherish and treat me and communicate to me with that mutual understanding.

But, every journey also has a return. Adventurers might choose a solitary journey to reach where no one reached before, yet, with diaries kept and frantic pictures taken they signal their ultimate goal; to return and tell others. The same principle also applies to intellectual enquiry; although the human soul that pursues wisdom to make sense of the world around herself, ultimately she is moved to share what it discovered.

Just as those who ‘know,’ those who ‘see’ will tell, that they find communicating what they have experienced to people ‘back home’ much more difficult than the actual experiences, as they struggle to put the extraordinary into ordinary terms for those who are not aware of the reality outside their boundaries.

Those who return also face the horror of the disparity between their memories of the place they started their journey from and what they find when they eventually reach ‘home.’ Memories of intimacy, affinity and charm struggle accepting the difficulties in communication and the seeming inability of their old friends and families to ‘click’ with who they have become now.

Memories of hometowns clash with the towns as they are now. Streets look alien, cities all too small, and special hideouts extremely dull and ordinary. Even the populations seem different, as if an alien invasion took place and replaced the city overnight with some Martians.

It is not only the adventurer that has changed but also his or her audience. Time did not stop for those who stayed home, even though geographically they stayed still. They continued their existential journey full of successes, losses, disappointments and incommunicable explorations. They too struggle to make sense of the homecoming adventurer and they too face the odd disparity between then and now.

That is why the joy of seeing loved ones gives way to alienation quickly and that is why one feels more lonely and lost ‘back home’ than in foreign lands.

It is in fact true that no one can take a bath in the same river twice. Water runs, life moves on, riverbanks, cities, friends, music, food change. To expect a return to the sanitized memories of the past is impossible. To dictate relationships to be what they once were is a betrayal of the very intimacy one once cherished. To demand cities to shrink back into childhood memories that are possibly not the full picture is to demand an illusion.

For this reason, one must forget about ‘home’ if one wants to find one. The past must be laid to rest as the past, and the adventurer should do what he or she does best – learn a country all over again.

It in fact hurts to think that ‘home’ must be achieved and fought for. However, the truth is it was always so. It’s just that by losing it, we come to realize how much we take for granted.

My dream of a Cosmopolitan Turkey

Published in Hurriyet Daily News, 10 November

I do not know what has caused this article, the third glass of vodka Martini or the sadness of watching my beloved country being pushed into chaos and self-harm.

As a young Turk, not with the capital ‘Y’ of the World War 1 era, I do not have memories of 60s and 70s leftist-socialist-communist struggles against fascists and dictators. As a man of my age, my instinctive mistrust of utopias, revolutions and brand new futures only alienates me further from older Turks, whose political imaginations, language and modus operandi seem to have frozen in time. I cannot find a place for myself and people like me in their vocabularies; left vs. right, secular vs. religious, nationalist vs. separatist, liberal vs. conservative and socialist vs. capitalist.

I marvel daily at imaginary clashes, differences presented as irreconcilable, distances thought to be unbridgeable. I suffocate in homogenized dreams, where every trace of difference is a threat and every call for acceptance is seen as an attack. Those who are so ready to discard and dehumanize others, force and impose their visions at all costs, “for people, in spite of people,” scare me.

So I raise my glass; is there not another way? I sincerely hope so and I believe that actually there is.

It is true that nationalistic feelings have been on the rise in Turkey. It is also true that Turkey tops the global attitude surveys measuring xenophobia. It is also true that thanks to the self-serving politics of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, and their supporters, Turkish society has been polarized for no real reason. It is true that because of the failure of Turkish leftist political groups to unite and the inconsistent bizarreness of Baykal’s CHP, there is no solid alternative to the AKP’s dominance. It is also true that we are haunted by age-long problems with ethnic minorities and shady deep-state actors.

Turkey is changing

Yet, before we all sink into the despair of the status quo, we must learn to recognize the changing undercurrents. Turkey is evolving, a lot faster and a lot deeper than commentators give it credit for. The unrest and tension are only signals of a shift we are going through. Turkey is undergoing a metamorphosis from a 19th century vision of politics and society, into the reality of the 21st century. The system and its executors are being confronted with the end of their wisdom and know-how. Turkish armed forces are no more able to manipulate society or politics as they used to. Turkish politicians are facing an increasingly questioning and demanding public. Turkish police are struggling to accept that they are not lawless sheriffs anymore, only civil servants.

Our society is showing signs of anomie and feels lost in the face of an extremely complicated global world. It is not narcissism or even ethno-centrism that causes Turkish nationalism. It is the fear that we will be swallowed by this new era that leads Turks to hold tightly to what they perceive to be under threat.

Postmodern Turks

In the middle of all of this, a new breed of Turkish citizens is emerging. They are at home in the West and in the East. They cherish difference. They are pragmatic and forward looking. They are void of old-school politics. They mistrust authorities and elites and blind allegiances. They are not afraid to criticize. They are not afraid to disobey. They are not afraid of taboos and forbidden conversations. They respect others’ religions but do not want a theocracy or singular-dominance. In other words, there are the post-modern Turks, those whom the Turkish generals have declared to be the next face of their internal imagined enemies. Strange, that what the angry generals see as their enemy, is actually the future of our country.

It is true, we are not there yet. But as I gaze out to sea from a hotel room, I cannot help but feel optimistic. All of this mess has the potential to give birth to an entire new Turkey. A cosmopolitan Turkey; a Turkey beyond futile polarizations and ideologies! A convivial Turkey; a Turkey that celebrates its ethnic multiplicity! A global Turkey that is proud of its own identity yet at the same time, warm and inclusive towards the world.

British and Turkish taxpayers' money

Published in Turkish Daily News, 28 October

Nowadays, the words “tax payers’ money” seem to be used in every third sentence in the British media, right after the words “credit crunch”. The over use of the word signals an important element of British politics for those of us who are denizens of Her Majesty’s country.

There is not a single sacred cow in the UK that cannot be challenged by British citizens. Whether it is the royal family or the government, the houses of Parliament, the armed forces, the British public and the media regularly question how their money is spent and how their country is led. The underlying notion is that the state is there to serve its people and it is accountable to them for its performance.

British armed forces have been publicly challenged all throughout their Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns on everything from how many troops were deployed to where and to what kind of boots, uniforms and gadgets were provided to soldiers. Similarly, the royal family and politicians have been continually and decisively challenged on their spending of public funds. This challenge is beyond simply being freedom of expression. It is a binding and quite powerful pressure on the state to behave properly.

Although this is an honourable notion, it can also open the door for absurdity. For example, since the start of the collapse of Northern Rock bank and the growing damage the credit crunch is causing to British banking, the British media has played the populist card of accusing the Labour government with wasting tax payers' money to cover up the greed and luxurious gains of city bankers. The news clips included huge amounts of cash that the government was getting ready to spend alongside lucrative bonuses received by bankers and comments of random people on the street who are being led to react to the government’s efforts. Of course, the same media would crucify the weakening Brown government if they did not take this massive economic crisis seriously.

Public Accountability in Turkey

Public accountability is in its foetus stage in Turkey. Our beloved Prime Minister is renowned for filing libel charges against anyone who says not so lovely things about him. He is also a master of insults, heavy accusations and condemnation to anyone who exhorts him to act as a Prime Minister.

For example, he has just condemned business patrons and journalists who are urging Turkey to take serious economic measures as people who are trying to gain benefits from a crisis, rather than acting like the leader of a mature democracy and showing us his plans to protect our country from disaster. This he did alongside his under-the-belt threats to the Dogan media group, which has stepped on his nerves by raising some questions about corruption in AK Party circles.

However, things in Turkey have come a long way, much to the dissatisfaction of the likes of Mr Erdogan. Recent criticisms of the Turkish armed forces and accusations of negligence in protecting Turkish soldiers would have led to disappearances, indefinite detentions and heavy sentences just 10 years ago. The main reason why the military chiefs have engaged in extremely angry verbal exchanges with the Turkish media is not that our national security has been jeopardized by debates in the media. They are simply angry because the Turkish public no longer accepts its ascribed place; sheepish and humble subjects.

The Turkish armed forces still spend the biggest cut of the Turkish budget, and no one except itself knows where the money goes and no civilian authority is in place to keep it accountable. In a funny twist of the story, Mr Erdogan has gone to their aid and joined the chorus of asking the critics to return to the place they belong to.

Dear pashas and sultans, I got bad news. It is you that needs to get used to this new place, as there is no going back for us to the old shoebox. You need to be able to learn how to relate to increasingly educated, sophisticated and independent Turkish public. We, your humble subjects, the Turkish intellectuals and media, are increasingly confident of using our freedom of expression and thought and you should increasingly internalise that you are there to serve and protect us.

Wanted: Stories of Turks who saved their Armenian Neighbors

Published in Turkish Daily News, 15 September

The 20th century is full of things that we wish never happened, but they happened and nothing can undo them. Even though both Plato and Nietzsche urged us to start tabula rasa with a mighty and necessary lie that will enable the youth to forget the past completely, we know all too well that what is left in oblivion is always more present than we would ever want it to be. Forgetting is not an option, if not impossible, but mere remembering alone does not guarantee that things will happen “never again.” The battle we need to fight is not only against “too much forgetting” and “too much remembering,” both of which destroy the present and any chance of a better future, but also against how and what we remember.

“Righteous Gentiles”:

I don't remember at what age I first came to learn about the Holocaust, but I vividly remember what I felt when I read each page Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl wrote. As my academic interests took me deeper into genocides and ethnic violence, my realization that normal people like me had turned out to be mass murderers has shaken my trust completely in my own and human beings' goodness. However, it was also within the same darkness that I have come to find hope in the deep and profound human potential to love and sacrifice for the other.

Hanna Arendt recounted the story of a German soldier, Anton Schmid, who disobeyed his orders and helped the rescue of 250 Jews till his execution by the Nazis. In his last letter to his wife, Schmid told her that he “merely behaved as a human being” when he risked his own life. After sharing the effect of listening to the story of Schmid during the Eichmann trial, Arendt noted; “How utterly different everything would have been in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told."

This is exactly what Holocaust memorials have tried to do. With the Jewish concept of ‘Righteous Gentiles', Jews have found the moral backbone to not only remember the destruction and brutality but also the great courage and virtue that has been showed by non-Jews in risking their own lives to save their Jewish neighbors. There is a section dedicated to them in memorial sites, and Holocaust movies almost always include helpful Gentile characters.

While remembering the human truth in all of its beauty and darkness at the same time, the memory of the Holocaust has moved from being exclusively a Jewish memory. It is now the memory of our old race, the memory of the moment that humanity failed, not just Nazi Germany. It's because it has shifted from being exclusively a memory of ‘perpetrator Nazis' killing ‘Jews', both Jews and Germans and all of us can mourn together for what has happened.

'‘Righteous Turks':

I similarly don't remember when I first came to hear about massacres of Armenians, but I remember how I cried in the memorial in Yerevan for hours for all that has happened. I still shiver with pain each time I see pictures and hear stories of families scattered around the world. However, as I continued to read and reflect on memorial practices and sites, I have come to be increasingly worried that there were hardly any mention of ‘righteous Turks'- Turks who risked their lives to save their Armenian friends or even complete strangers – in the literature and commemorations. This is disturbing, given that a significant portion of Armenians who survived deportations would testify to the roles played by such Turkish friends in their escapes.

Failure to acknowledge the presence of these people not only betrays the truthfulness of the recollected accounts, but also reduces a historical event to its darkest moment without showing us all of its complexities. This failure automatically prepares the ground for dehumanization and stereotyping, which would have us believe the opposite of what we all know about the human condition: the line separating good and evil goes through the heart of each individual and given the right set of conditions we - regardless of race, nationality, gender, education, class and religion – are all vulnerable to commit the most grotesque violence against our neighbors.

For this reason, I have personally begun a web-based initiative, named Project Common Humanity, or PCH, to gather the untold stories of courage, virtue and sacrifice. My humble and limited attempt is in no way meant to undermine the suffering of the victims or even getting involved in debates on whether or not what happened was genocide. My only desire is that as we remember not only the pain but also the human beauty, we will come to see what happened under the broken shadow of Ararat not in terms of ‘Armenians' and ‘Turks', but as ‘our story'.

So if you know any such story, published or not, please consider sharing it with all of us. Visit PCH's amateurish blog and send your stories in Turkish or English. And join me to celebrate what unites us in an age that is obsessed with fixing what separates us.

Shiny Olympics shouldn't disguise China's dark reality

Published in Turkish Daily News, 1 September

I still remember the inquisitive looks of the Chinese students who listened carefully to a presentation I gave on Turkey while I was doing a course at a university in central China. Following a few relatively legitimate questions, one postgraduate student left me answerless (if there is such a word in English). With confidence and a heavy accent he asked; “what are the Chinese influences in Turkey?”

This was some 7 years ago and there were hardly any Chinese present in Turkey, only a handful of odd Chinese restaurants in the big cities. When I explained that we did consume Chinese products, but that there is really no tangible Chinese influence or involvement in Turkey, his tone turned sharper and more aggressive. He said; “surely there are Chinese communities, towns, businessmen and Chinese government investments in Turkey.” And subjected me to a tiresome mini-lecture on Chinese civilization and what great inspiration it has been for people in the world. Having been almost beaten up by two drunk Chinese men the night before, who thought I was an American, I humbly accepted that China rules!

What the Olympics showed:

All throughout the Beijing 2008 Olympics, I kept thinking about that postgraduate student. What did he make of the Olympics? Or more importantly, what do the millions of educated and increasingly dangerous patriotic Chinese youth see the international legacy of the Beijing Olympics to be? Has the world bowed down in front of the raising Dragon? Has the Middle-Kingdom (literal translation of the Chinese word for China; Zhonguo) finally assumed the central position it has always thought itself to deserve? Yes and No, but mostly No!

China has showed us that it can deliver the cookies, meet the deadlines and meet all expected infrastructure standards to a good quality. Great Britain, still haunted with the memories of Wembley Stadium and the Millennium Dome, will struggle to match the Chinese success on this front.

China has showed us that it has a remarkable amount of money it can dispose of for an event. That's one thing the UK will never be able to do, as the British public will never accept their government spending 25 billion pounds on an ego boost. It is already struggling to justify its humble 9 billion pound budget, which is higher than the initial estimations.

China has showed us that is has a remarkable amount of human resources it can dispose of with great control. Zhang Yimou, the artistic mind behind the opening and closing ceremonies, noted rather proudly that after North Korea, only the Chinese had the skills to perform such mass choreographies that we saw. According to the renowned director, Westerners lack the necessary discipline. I am not sure if it can ever be a point of pride to declare that only the country who can top China with its social management skills is a country with work (read death) camps and absolute totalitarian brutality.

Behind the scenes:

China showed us that it can be, or at least attempt to be, trendy, cool and warm, in its own way and with its own charm. But China has also inevitably showed us the face behind the mask. The computer animated fireworks and the cute girl lip-syncing the next-door-neighbors-kid's voice are the simplest confirmations that short term beautifying projects can't wipe away long-term ugliness.

Before, during and after the Olympic Games, the Chinese police detained, harassed, ‘cracked down' on, and forcefully removed from their homes those subversive people who stubbornly continued to insist on being treated as human beings. Others were banned from entering Beijing all together. The Chinese activists, religious leaders, and victims, who gave interviews to international media, disappeared after the interviews. The Tibet issue has always been the sexiest of the human rights issues in China, yet so much suffering was airbrushed over during the Olympics.

China's horrible domestic human rights track record, extremely dark and aggressive involvement in Africa and the dodgy backing of all possible dodgy countries of the world remain unshaken. So, after all that has been said and done, the arguments that the Olympics might bring an improvement on the human rights situation and force a maverick country into genuine relationship with the rest of the world have been washed away with that famous itsy-bitsy spider.

The outcome of the other main argument, that the Olympics and the number of foreign visitors to the country will help in opening the eyes of the Chinese society, has yet to prove itself true or be declared hallow. Given the internet terror launched by patriotic Chinese hackers and the self-gratification that the completion of the games without any major glitch gave birth to, it seems that none of the reactions against the Olympic torch or concerns of the international community have gone deeply under the skin.

The global public opinion, which has an extremely short memory span, will mainly remember the amazing World Records we witnessed, and then every now and then the magnificent opening ceremony. It is the sport - athletes and athletic achievements that makes the Olympics what it is, not the excess of narcissism maintenance efforts of its temporary host. To that extent, the legacy of the Beijing Olympics will always be remembered as ‘that Olympics where we have seen the super-human beings who ran and swam way faster than we could have imagined.

Egyptian zebibas and Turkish headscarves

Published in Turkish Daily News, 18 August 2008

Religiosity is quite difficult to measure. Is it the wearing of religious symbols that shows how deep a society is religious? Can you measure what role a religion plays in a society by keeping records of attendance throughout the years and come to the conclusion that high attendance means high religiosity and low attendance low religiosity?

This has been the case for studying religiosity in Europe. Attendance -- or lack of it -- to official churches was taken as proof that religious belief was in decline, almost non-existent. Yet, religion in contemporary Europe proves that although attendance to traditional churches has fallen along with the trust of Europeans of any authority and institution, religious beliefs have modified themselves and given birth to “belief without belonging” and non-traditional forms. It appears that God has not died after all; it's just that our measurements have been faulty and religious beliefs still play a significant role across Europe.

A similar problem of measurement emerges when we try to assert that Islam is rising or falling in a given country. Is it the number of people at the mosque? Or the number of people who wear headscarves? Given the fact that all women wear headscarves in Iran, can we conclude that Iranian society is deeply Islamic? Given that under the Taliban every man prayed regularly and attended the mosque, can we conclude that Afghan society was full of devout Muslims? In both cases, enforced practices are in no way true reflections of how deeply Islam is internalized.

Measuring religion in Turkey

This fundamental problem in social scientific research has serious implications for ongoing arguments about the “rise of Islam” in Turkey. There are two types of evidence used to argue that Turkey is becoming more Islamic: anecdotal and quantitative. Anecdotal evidence is made up of personal stories of the daughters of friends, who went “undercover” overnight or of foreigners who have been coming to Turkey every couple of years and say they feel people are more religious now. Quantitative evidence is the result of surveys that present a percentage for the broader society based upon data found through studying small populations, such as questionnaires showing us what percentage of respondents want Shariah rule in Turkey.

Anecdotal evidence is always problematic as it is driven from a small sample wearing subjective lenses and drawing subjective conclusions. Where I live, whom I know or what I am worried about may easily define what I see or think about Islam, which may never reflect the full picture accurately. Quantitative research suffers from similar weaknesses in design and outcome, but the most important issue is that the data itself is hardly conclusive.

It is true that quantitative studies as well as anecdotal narrations show us, with a serious margin of error and no authoritative percentage, that the numbers of women who wear headscarves in Turkey has increased. Yet, those who conclude that these data on their own prove the indisputable fact that theocracy is on its way shall not rejoice that quickly.

Egyptian zebiba

Allow me to show the problem with this premature conclusion by comparing Turkey with Egypt. Almost every year, I travel to Egypt and realize the increasing number of men, especially young, who have dark spots on their foreheads. These are called “zebiba,” and it is claimed that a life of prayer leads to visible marks on the spot where the head touches the prayer mat during Islamic prayers.

So, the increase in the number of “zebibas” should ipso facto mean the increase of religiosity among Egyptian men. However, I never see “zebibas” in any other Muslim country, but only in Egypt. Also, “zebibas” are increasing especially among young men, signaling the possibility that the traditional assertion of lifelong devotion is short-circuited by the youth. Honest conversations with Egyptians show further that most men use certain prayer mats and work “extra hours” to burn their skin so they can be accepted by the Muslim Brotherhood and find socioeconomic support.

This rational investment in “zebiba” points out that when religious groups gain social significance and individuals can benefit from association with them, human beings will learn to play the game in line with their own calculations of cost and benefit.

Turkish Headscarves

A similar point can be made about headscarves in Turkey. The quantitative “facts” that headscarves are increasing but the number of people who want Shariah rule in Turkey is still less than 10 percent, signal a significant problem with those who read the headscarf data as undeniable evidence of a Turkish retrogression to Iran. In many ways, the power-center change that came with the Justice and Development, or AK, Party has developed a new elite. Until recently employment, economic opportunities and state “favor” demanded one kind of affiliation; now the new game in town demands another. So the rise in headscarves might also be seen as a “rational social-economic investment” not reflective of deep religiosity.

On the other hand, one cannot deny that on some other levels Islam is gaining a fresh popularity in Turkey. Turkish Islam is increasingly becoming attractive on its own terms. When it is juxtaposed with other Islams across the world, it is the most dynamic, and believe it or not, secular, modern and pragmatic expression of the Islamic faith today. Ironically, Turkish Islam owes its regeneration and modernization to Ataturk's legacy and the current failures of Turkish politics and globalization..