Can‘t understand these Erdogan fanboys from 3rd world countries mumbling about Islam here and Muslims there. Mostly from states with 55% literacy rate and 55 years life expectancy.
The foundation of Türkiye‘s modernization was Mustafa Kemal‘s vision of a new Turkish state: the adoption of Western science, education and technology, abolition of the Arab script for a higher literacy rate and introduction of strict laicism. And the most important part: national identity and pride. A good Turkish leader has to be a Turk first, a Turk second and a Turk third. Personal belief is a private matter.
The Muslim world is plagued with self-inflicted backwardness, corruption, nepotism, illiteracy, intolerance, violence, unlawfulness and laziness. All these paranoid narratives of Western-Zionist conspiracy are lame excuses for own failures of a fallen Islamic civilization.
Only educated, hard-working people can create a strong country. Stop praying, start studying.
I agree mostly, but let me be a devil's advocate for a bit here.
You know how when a state is accused of violating human rights, both western liberal people and their states start talking about boycotts, right? What this results in is isolation, and a public square dominated by domestic voices. Those domestic voices are almost always majority traditionalist conservative voices. The isolation resulting from boycotts then leads to lack of relations with foreigners, a more limited experience of other cultures and lower influence of rational dialogue.
I bring this example up to illustrate how two Muslim majority countries' society has developed in the past 40 years, something I've witnessed first hand: Turkey and Iran. Both these countries had a majority conservative population 40 years ago with a minority western influenced and educated elite. In Iran this elite was mostly congregated around the royal family in the capital city; in Turkey due to Atatürk's reforms this elite was more organic and decentralized and also bigger in numbers. This elite class dominated politics, media and entertainment industry in both countries; which is a natural outcome of that class' background: educated, more wealthy and with access to a network of influential people in the centers of the most populated cities with higher social mobility. What this domination of media, entertainment industry and politics creates is polarization, esp. when the elite class fails to spread the opportunities and the social dynamism to a higher number of people from the working class.
The image the country projects both to abroad and to its own people is dominated by media and entertainment industry. A conservative looking at this, seeing the t.v. programs, movies, etc. always presented and participated by people who do not look like him and don't share his values starts to amass a certain amount of resentment towards the system and people who represent it, who are rich, dress differently, look different, talk different and have very different and alien ideas. In reaction to this, and as a result of the failure of this elite class to spread their ideas and worldview institutionally through higher education and more equal opportunities in access to employment in critical sectors (which in turn are again dependent on the educational opportunities, again itself dependent upon quality primary and secondary education), these ideas and worldview which we can call modernism stays limited to that elite class, and the traditional communities throughout the country become alienated from them and this contrast of worldviews (one of which lords over them) hurls them towards more reactionary and rigid defense of their pre-held traditional worldview and values.
This increasing polarization leads to lesser social dynamism, lesser participation in civil society and lower presence of esp. women in the workforce and education sector. These results are in turn amplified through the negative feedback loop of growing polarization leading to less and less social dynamism. All of this pent up resentment towards the wealthy western-looking alien elites with their scandalous lifestyle leads to, in case of Iran a theocratic revolution; and in Turkey for the conservative rural and working class to push constantly for electing one of their own and someone who shares their ideas to public office to bring about their ideology and "drain the swamp". (this reaction was also clandestinely influenced in another more inconspicuous way; the way those rural conservative communities interpreted their own worldview (Sunni Islam in Turkey's case) was pushed towards more extremist interpretations due to Gladio and American project of supporting Wahhabism to counter communist ideologies taking hold in these societies, giving billions of dollars to Saudis to open religious schools all around the world, making Wahabbism the dominant interpretation of Islam for the first time in history due to the influence of thousands of Imams educated in these schools or ones influenced by them (Mujahideen, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabab all results of this wahhabi revolution); incidentally Gulen was the continuation of this trend for Central Asia and also inside Turkey).
Now we come full circle to what I pointed out at first; the issue of boycott and how isolation doesn't help change culture in traditional societies. You should now see what I'm going to argue for. The conservative rural class taking power over from the elite western-looking class leads to subsidence of the resentment from them as they see themselves more and more represented in government, albeit still much less in media and entertainment sector (this is different in Iran compared to Turkey as all entertainment and media is government owned so the rural conservative class came to dominate the media and entertainment sector there, leading to what I call a class-less society which has its own complications). This subsidence of resentment leads to higher presence and participation of the rural conservative class in civil society, higher education, critical sectors, and most important of all conservative women in education and workforce (this is the achilles heel of many Muslim-majority countries right now, imagine half the country not participating in the workforce); in itself leading to migration to cities due to heightened sense of social entitlement which in turn itself takes members of that class from their conservative setting, helping them change lifestyles, and even worldviews. This process is not as complete or as pervasive as one would like, but it does lead to urbanization and the values which come with it. It's a slow process but since it happened 40 years ago in Iran, it had transformed that society from a society that was much more conservative than Turkey, to a society with at least 40% atheist population and a meager 20 to 30% conservative population. This is a cultural shift there, which will reverse if the regime in Iran changes, because the urbanization, industrialization and percolation of ideas in civil society and public square is almost non-existent; so there, this change doesn't have the material substrate to make it sustainable and that society is extremely diseased, but this situation is due to the theocratic regime having constant power for 4 decades, going for its 5th decade now. So while the conservative women in workforce and education has been solved, it has created many other problems; but one cannot imagine if the gains for conservative women would have been made if the modernist elites were still in power, alienating conservatives, helping them stick even more fiercely to their traditional identity as a reaction.
In Turkey, our only chance now is to learn from the mistakes of the modernist elites of the yesteryear in isolating and shunning the conservative working class. It's on the educated urban class to provide the means in education for children of the conservative second generation urban dwelling conservatives to get out of their schools with a modernist, science-based tolerant but inquisitive view of the world, because the past that many fantasize about wasn't as rosy they picture it, because if it was, it wouldn't lead to the backlash that you saw in the past 30, 40 years.
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