This is an example of clicktivism, a term I only recently learned (again from my students). Clicktivism means feeling that you are politically active by forwarding something on Facebook or following a social media trend to express support or disapproval (like changing your picture to TC in Turkey– or as in the US recently when 2.7 million people changed their image to a red = to voice support for same sex marriage in a case being heard before the [U.S.!] Supreme Court).
Good news. I just learned that my book, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, will be translated into Turkish and published by the well-regarded Iletişim Press. There have been quite a few reviews, quite positive ones I’m gratified to report. Most recently, a review in Al Jazeera (in Arabic). I’m also giving a few talks, in [...]
The irony doesn’t escape me that the new constitution (a preliminary draft of which was leaked last week) appears to be being written primarily by a coalition of AKP and the Kurdish BDP (Peace and Democracy Party), with the internally divided CHP and the nationalist MHP on the margins. All four parties have a place [...]
Didem Aykel Collinsworth of the International Crisis Group reported on a recent Kurdish movement conference in Switzerland. What were the portends within the Kurdish activist community that recent talks between the Turkish government and jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan would actually lead to peace after decades of violence? What was necessary for this to happen? Would [...]
According to an interview with 90-year-old Dikran Çerçiyan in Hurriyet Daily News, Ataturk’s emblematic signature, familiar to everyone in Turkey, was developed by his father, Hagop Vahram Çerçiyan. For 55 years Çerçiyan was a teacher of math and geography at Robert College, which graduated former Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, former foreign ministers Selim Sarper and Turgut Menemencioğluları and former [...]
Nervana Mahmoud, writing in the Daily News Egypt, worries that Turkey’s schmoozing with other Muslim countries will expose Turkish society to the virus of radical Salafism. I have argued in my writings that Turkey’s extreme nationalism, Hanefi and Sufi-inflected forms of Islam immunize them to a great extent against non-Turkish transnational forms of Islamism. Naksibendi, [...]
Another review of my new book, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, has just appeared, this time in Muftah.org (click here). In case anyone is interested, all the reviews are listed on my website here.
In a twist of irony, Turkey is at once celebrating the lifting of decades-old bans on 453 books and 645 periodicals while waiting for the fate of two classics whose fates are yet to be decided. One of these classics is John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” The other one is the beloved children’s book [...]
My book has been published; it has taken its hat in hand and run out into the world. And the first review is out as well, in The Economist: Click here. Muslim Nationalism and the New TurksJenny White Read Chapter 1 Table of Contents
…The exhumed body of Turkey’s late President Turgut Ozal, who led the country out of military rule in the 1980s, contained poison but the cause of death was unclear, local media reported an autopsy as showing on Wednesday. There have long been rumours that Ozal, who died of heart failure in 1993 aged 65, was [...]