Trapped in History: The Crusader Delusion
Mustafa Akyol’s take on the recent “anti-Crusader” incident in Kayseri (click for full article):
The most tragic-comic news story of this week came from the central Anatolian town of Kayseri. A film crew was shooting a documentary about the medieval past of the town, and they decided to use the city’s ancient castle as a stage. But when they put a Crusader’s banner, a white plate with a red cross, on the walls, all hell broke loose. Dozens of Kayserians gathered under the castle to protest against the irritating banner. “This is Turkey,” one man yelled angrily, “and we want only the Turkish flag.”
One side of the problem here is simple ignorance. It is about not comprehending what a film is and how it differs from real life. In the past, there have been similarly funny incidents where some Turkish bystanders that were watching the shooting of an action scene on a street got so excited that they physically intervened to save the endangered actress from the bad guys. This naïveté seems to be the advanced version of the reaction to the first film ever, “The Great Train Robbery.” When the final shot of a gun was fired toward the camera in that silent movie, it is said that some in the audience pulled out their firearms and shot back….
In short, to see today’s world through the lens of the crusades is an illusion. Yet it is also a very popular one. Many Muslims just need to hear the C word in order to start building up conspiracy theories about the evil intentions of the “Christian West”….
That brings us to a fundamental problem that one can come across in the contemporary Islamic world: living in history. History is actually a great source of wisdom if you get it right. A secularist could tell you at this point that it is the Islamic culture which is responsible for this mind-blocking nostalgia. So, his reasoning would go, we should cleanse our minds from the effects of Islam.
Well, apparently things are not that simple. If you look at Turkey’s Kemalists, you will see that their passionately secular minds are deeply trapped in history, too. They just take their blueprint from the time of not Prophet Muhammad, but Supreme Leader Atatürk. They dogmatically believe that all enemies of Mustafa Kemal — the Greek invaders, the European colonialists, and the internal “collaborators” — are just alive and kicking today. No wonder the Crusade-phobia is also shared by Turkey’s Kemalo-nationalists. I am getting unsolicited emails from the marginal Workers Party (Isci Partisi) of the ex-Maoist and born-again-Kemalist Dogu Perincek almost every day on the joint Crusader/Islamist conspiracy against the Turkish Republic.
Apparently you can be delusional within any world view. As you can also be sensible within them.
I quote from the article:
To be fair, there were, and still are, lunatics around such as Ann Coulter who madly wrote, “We should invade [the Muslims’] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
Lunatic, eh? Would this be the same Ann Coulter whose book was talked up by the very same Akyol when it suited him?
He’s very much a part of creating the same kind of intellectual weakness and knee-jerk reactions among some of our half-educated about math and science that he seems to be exposing — from his imaginary high horse — among the other subsections of the society. The difference is, of course, that those others, misguided as they might be, are not talking from both sides of their mouths while passing themselves off as credible intellectuals.
the URL above should be: http://www.mustafaakyol.org/arsiv/2006/06/dna_allahin_kanitlari_ve_ateist_iman.php