There’s a kind of White Turk, usually with grandparents born after or around the founding of the Turkish Republic, always of a slightly (if only in their imaginations) leftist bent, urban, fairly well-educated, who, rebelling against their parents, and in order to feel good about themselves, made their mission a rejection of Kemalist secularism as bourgeois and anti-democratic, and prioritized the liberation of “popular” Islamism from the racist shackles of the Republic as part of their discourse — a discourse of slumming that folks of their class always engage in; in doing so — and in castrating the military in any way they could — they enabled and laid the road for the Erdoğanist Muslim Brotherhood ideology that is turning Turkey into an international pariah, though he had already made his quasi-taqiyya beliefs (“democracy is a bus…we take it when needed and then get off at the stop we want”) very obviously obvious as early as the 90s, but that’s what “the people” — though they ordinarily have nothing to do with the people — wanted, and if you objected to bringing that Islamist ideology into Turkish politics, they would call you an Islamophobe, though Erdoğan’s combo of Muslim triumphalism and Turanian triumphalism (Hagia Sophia: “ours by right of conquest” in 2020) mutually reinforce each other in the most powerful way possible.
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But now you’re angry because it’s hit your pocketbook? Well, my message: suck on it now. You wanted to play around with that kind of fire? You deserve to be called to account for what an ugly country Turkey has made of itself.
I’m wondering if he’s going to take on the Mouchliotissa also, which is the only Byzantine church in the city that wasn’t turned into a mosque and has the honor — but for the grace of God — of functioning continuously for 800 years, and a good muslim must certainly not allow centuries of that kind of rezili to continue.
Or if it’ll get to a point where he starts converting Ottoman-era churches, of which there are a good thirty or more, in other neighborhoods in Istanbul.
The Mouchliotissa or St. Mary of the Mongol’s, below. Read for an explanation of the strange name.
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
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