Not long ago, the Muslim community in Dagestan and beyond was shaken by the story of the broadcast of Soviet military songs through the speakers of mosques in that republic on May 9.
Recently, however, something similar happened in Izmir, Turkey. Only this time it wasn’t the initiative of the authorities — hackers broke into the server of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and replaced the call to prayer with music broadcast through the loudspeakers of the central mosque.
There were also those who decided to show solidarity with the wrongdoers during the holy month of Ramadan. And it was not an informal group of extreme secularists or Islamophobes, but national politicians. Among them was Banu Ozdemir (pictured), one of the key figures in the Izmir branch of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), who posted a video to that effect in an approving context.
Ozdemir is currently being held as part of the police investigation into this case, but it must be said that there have long been serious questions about her. In particular, she showed solidarity with the YPJ — the women’s military wing of the Kurdish communist YPG/PKK, terrorist organizations with which Turkey is at war and which are at war against Turkey. This raises serious questions.
The CHP is a party founded by Mustafa Kemal and positions itself as a representative of his legacy and ideas. How Kemal related to Islam is certainly known to both his ideological fans and his ideological opponents among conscious Muslims. For most Turks, however, he remains an inviolable symbol as the leader of the national liberation struggle against the interveners in the 1920s and the creator of the Republic of Turkey on the ruins of the Ottoman Caliphate.
In order to prevent a civil war and the division of the Turkish nation into two irreconcilable camps, the leadership of the pro-Islamic forces in Turkey, fully understanding who Kemal was but also realizing the consequences of attempts to overthrow his cult, decided not to touch him and emphasized the aspects of his legacy that unite Turks. In particular, they preferred his statements from the early period, when he positioned himself as a Muslim and called for the defense of Muslim lands, etc.
This gave the CHP leadership a good chance to get rid of the reputation of being an anti-Islamic party and even to start fighting for the votes of a part of the conservative Muslim voters who, for one reason or another, became disillusioned with the ruling party (AKP). The great success of the CHP in last year’s elections in Istanbul was a result of this approach, as the newly elected mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, emphasized his Islamic religiosity and appealed to the religious electorate.
Against this background, the Ozdemir scandal throws the CHP back into the state we described four years ago (https://golosislama.com/news.php?id=29491), noting its transformation from a national party into a sectarian minority party. Today, fanatical Kemalism, which emphasizes the anti-Islamic component of Kemal’s legacy, is in agony because it is completely irrelevant to the majority of the Turkish population, where a consensus has been reached between pro-Islamic and secular circles based on respect for the nation’s historical and cultural heritage.
Therefore, the CHP will have to decide whether it is a party like Ozdemir, which expresses the wishes of the enemies of Islam, or a party in whose name Imamoglu addressed both secular and religious Turks.