Pope Benedict XVI will visit Turkey next week. The Los Angeles Times reports that many Muslims in the country remain angry over the Pope’s speech in Regensburg, Germany last September that was seen by many as unfairly critical of Islam. (See prior posting.) Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who will be away at a NATO summit during part of the Pope’s visit, will not be meeting with the Pope. The Pope’s planned visit to Istanbul's St. Sophia, built in the 6th century as a Byzantine church and converted into a mosque 900 years later, has also created controversy as an Islamic newspaper charged that the Pope was planning to bless the former church in an attempt to "revive Byzantium". Actually, the main purpose of the Pope’s trip is to bridge the split between the Vatican and the world’s Orthodox Christians led by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in Istanbul. (Houston Chronicle).
This week, Turkey’s leading think tank, the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, released a poll suggesting that political Islam is not taking hold in the country. It shows that while religion is flourishing in Turkey, it is undergoing modernization and liberalization. (Turkish Weekly.)
Meanwhile, in what is seen as a precedent-setting decision, a Turkish court this week ruled that a student who was a member of Turkey’s Alevi community was exempt from mandatory religion courses taught in Turkish schools. The case was brought by Ali Kenanoglu, Deputy Chairman of the Alevi-Bektashi Foundation, in order to get the exemption for his son. Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate has insisted that Alevis are not members of a separate religious faith. In a separate case, an appeal is pending before the European Court of Human Rights by an Alevi challenging mandatory religion classes in Turkish schools. (Reports from Sabah and from the Turkish Daily News.)
UPDATE: Zenit on Sunday carried an interesting interview with Raphaela M.T. Schmid, the Rome director of the Becket Institute for Religious Liberty on The State of Religious Liberty in Turkey. She says: "Christian churches want more religious freedom but they too are aware that the secularism of the Turkish state may also be a bulwark against a more radical form of Islam."
