Christians, Muslims, empathy

ICC Note:

There are immense double-standards within Turkey toward how Christians and Muslims are viewed and treated by society.

By Orhan Kemal Cengiz

3/26/2010 Turkey (Today’s Zaman) – In my previous article, I told the story of a Protestant boy who was forced to repeat “kalima-i shahadah” in the mandatory religious lesson he had to attend. Some readers did not like some of the words I used when I was trying to explain the boy’s situation.

In Turkey many things happen to non-Muslims which would drive Muslims crazy if the same things happened to them in a non-Muslim country. In spite of the lack of any legal provision criminalizing religious propaganda, Christian missionaries in Turkey have been arrested, interrogated and even put into jail for just trying to introduce their religious beliefs.

In the year 2000, Necati Aydın and Ercan Şengül were taken into custody while distributing Bibles and were arrested by the court in Kemalpaşa, İzmir. When I was looking at their file, something immediately struck me. There was a list of documents and publications seized from their houses and vehicles, and these materials were listed as “evidence of crime.” “Bibles” were amongst them. What would happen if this had occurred in a Christian country and the Quran was listed as “evidence of crime”?

This lack of empathy, which is partly caused by our cultural codes and partly because of the injection of nationalist sentiment into religious identities, is at the same time the biggest obstacle to understanding how the political system functions in Turkey. These two Christians became victims of a trap set by “deep state” elements back then. Şengül was interrogated by people who introduced themselves as members of JİTEM (an illegal extension of the gendarmerie) when he was arrested in Kemalpaşa. However, no one paid any attention to the details of this incident in the year 2000. Seven years later, Aydın was killed in a barbaric way in Malatya along with two other victims whose only crime was being Christian. Once again “the deep state” was in the background.