In south Lebanon's last Communist holdout, alcohol sale under threat

[Originally published by Now Lebanon on 15/1/2016]

A petition decrying alcohol as “a violation of the shari`a of Islam” demands shops selling alcohol in Kfar Rumman be closed.

Not for nothing has Kfar Rumman long been nicknamed Kfar Moscow (NOW/Alex Rowell)

KFAR RUMMAN, Lebanon – In most respects, Rony Market could be any grocery store in south Lebanon. Sitting just off an intersection at the edge of the village, its modest-sized interior stocks the same basic food and household wares one would find in any so-called dikken across the country. As a handful of customers trickle in and out to buy phone recharge cards or packets of mixed nuts, two middle-aged men in leather jackets stand bantering with Rami Saleh, the shopkeeper, while smoking cigarettes.

In one crucial regard, however, Rony Market is highly unusual for a dikken in these predominantly Shiite Muslim, pro-Hezbollah provinces: its shelves also stock a (fairly extensive) range of wines, spirits, liqueurs, and araks. Two tall, glass-front fridges, moreover, are packed top-to-bottom with bottles of beer, both local and imported. For residents of Nabatieh governorate – whose eponymous capital lies just a kilometer and a half away to the southwest – Rony Market is one of the very few places where refreshments of the Dionysian variety may be sourced.

To a large extent, this is a product of the peculiar history of Kfar Rumman, the wartime headquarters of the leftist Lebanese National Resistance Front (LNRF) militia and still one of the last holdouts of Communism in the country. On the drive into the village, which boasts a large hammer-and-sickle monument just across the street from Rony Market, NOW encountered a bright red truck with a debonair Leon Trotsky painted on the side: not for nothing has it long been nicknamed Kfar Moscow. Today, though, the flag most visible on Kfar Rumman’s lampposts and balconies is not the red-and-yellow of the USSR but the yellow-and-green of the militia that helped crush the LNRF in the mid-1980s: Hezbollah.

And while the godless comrades and Partisans of God have largely made peace today, events this week demonstrate the tension remaining under the surface between the village’s secular-minded residents and their Islamist neighbors. On Wednesday, a petition written by “Sons of Kfar Rumman” surfaced online listing eight shops in the village that sell alcohol – including Rony Market. Citing a Quran verse critical of alcohol (“Verily, intoxicants, gambling, [sacrificing at] stone altars, and divining arrows are an abomination from among the works of Satan, so avoid them” – 5:90), the petition decried what the early Islamic poets fondly dubbed “the daughter of the vine” as a bane that “leads to the spreading of iniquity and evil and the violation of religious sentiment and the shari`a of Islam,” concluding with a demand that the governor of Nabatieh close the eight shops.

Talking to NOW in Rony Market Thursday, the shopkeeper Saleh spoke the words of a defiant man, though his demeanor at times appeared uncomfortable.

“No official, whether from the municipality or the governorate, has ordered us to close,” he told NOW. “On the contrary, the municipality has confirmed to us that we’re a legal business like any other […] I don’t accept anyone coming to say ‘I will close your shop’. I follow the law.”

Municipality head Kamal Ghabris did indeed confirm the same to NOW, saying he himself had received no request to close the shops, and there was no legal or other reason why they couldn’t continue to sell alcohol.

“We belong to the Lebanese republic, and we abide by the laws and constitution of this republic […] we want to keep our democracy, freedom and pluralism,” Ghabris told NOW.

Legal or not, though, alcohol shops have been the targets of similar campaigns in south Lebanon in the past, in some cases even being burnt down. Were there not fears, NOW asked another man in the shop, that something comparable could happen to Rony Market?

“Those arson attacks were probably done by [Islamist] Palestinians, who don’t exist here,” he replied. “If Hezbollah wanted these shops closed, it wouldn’t have to burn them down, it would just” – he gestured with his cell phone – “make a call, and they would close. But they haven’t made any such call.”

Indeed, Saleh, like the others in the shop, was very adamant on emphasizing that he didn’t blame Hezbollah for the petition.

“We don’t fear Hezbollah; they haven’t done anything against us,” said Saleh. “There are just individuals, certain religious zealots, who are against us. From time to time, some people get annoyed that we sell alcohol. We’re used to it here.”

Whether Saleh genuinely believed Hezbollah had nothing at all to do with the petition, or was simply exercising prudent diplomacy, is a matter about which one could only speculate. At any rate, Hezbollah involvement has been suggested by some local media. The south Lebanese news site Janoubia, which called the petition “ISIS-like,” cited an anonymous “exclusive source” as claiming a draft of the document had been prepared by “a number of clerics affiliated with Hezbollah.” Other analysts suggested any role played by the Party was likely to be of an indirect nature.

“I don’t think the Party is directly responsible for issuing the petition,” said Ali al-Amin, a columnist from south Lebanon often critical of Hezbollah. In Amin’s view, the issue began when a relative of Saleh’s wrote a widely-shared anti-religious Facebook post – for which he received death threats– in light of Hezbollah’s participation in the siege of the Syrian town of Madaya. This angered “young people” among Hezbollah’s supporters in Kfar Rumman, said Amin, who then wrote the petition of their own accord.

That, if correct, could explain the timing, which is also interesting for coming two weeks after Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary-General, Sheikh Naim Qassem, raised eyebrows by telling an interviewer the Party was still committed to its ambition of creating a Shiite Islamic state in Lebanon. “As an Islamist, I can’t say, ‘I’m an Islamist and I propose Islam, but I don’t propose the establishment of an Islamic state,’ because that’s part of the project that we believe in, on the doctrinal and cultural level,” Qassem told Al-Mayadeen TV. “We believe the application of Islam is the solution to mankind’s problems, in all times and places.” While Hezbollah has never renounced its goal – formally articulated in a 1985 open letter – to one day establish an Islamic state, a speech given by Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in 2009 outlining the Party’s political program was seen by some as a relaxation on the point.

To what extent Qassem’s remark may have given further encouragement to the “religious zealots” Saleh blamed for the petition may never be determined. In the murky circumstances of the incident, perhaps all that can be said with confidence is it would have been unlikely to happen if Communism were still the prevailing ideology in the town.

Amin Nasr contributed reporting.

Alcohol ban marks Egypt's further decline

[Originally posted at NOW]

It has often been said that the test of a nation’s moral stature is its treatment of the poor. An alternative, and arguably no less reliable, barometer of societal well-being is the situation of alcohol, and its enthusiasts.

In a heady moment of collective madness fuelled by ascendant Protestant fundamentalism, the USA banned drink entirely from 1920 to 1933. The resulting boost to organized crime was only one of innumerable disasters inflicted on that country by its religious right, which generally continues to “abstain” from Bacchic indulgence today. A decade later, the Nazis sternly discouraged all consumption of the “genetic poisons” of booze and tobacco, and even went so far as to sterilize full-blown alcoholics.

More recently, and closer to home, the monstrous regimes of Saudi Arabia and Iran totally proscribe the fruits of the grape and grain, and routinely sentence imbibers to death. It’s perhaps of little surprise that their proxies around the region also take a dim view of the “Satanic” potations. Indeed, whenever Islamism is preparing to menace a society, it tends to announce its arrival by ecstatically smashing up some settings of conviviality. It happened here in Beirut in the 1980s, and it’s by no means uncommon now for alcohol proprietors in “conservative” neighborhoods to be bombed. Similar pogroms heralded the rise of Tunisia’s newly liberated Salafi-jihadis, who have since moved on to assassinating political opponents.

And now comes the depressingly unsurprising news that Egypt, the birthplace of modern Arab secularism and the nahda (“awakening”) of the 19th century, has announced the beginning of the end of alcohol sales. “We cannot allow [liquor] stores spreading debauchery in our society,” was the unsmiling declaration of the vice-president of the New Urban Communities Authority.

Much like the recent efforts to ban pornography, if this initiative succeeds, I wager that it too will be remembered – to borrow a phrase from a different, though not dissimilar Egyptian – as another milestone in the road of a once-great nation’s decline.

More "moderate" Islamists in Tunisia

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

“Even the Islamists are highly civilized!” Edward Said is said to have once told Christopher Hitchens in recommending Tunisia. It’s a refrain we’ve often heard since the Islamist “Ennahda” (“Awakening”) party won the parliamentary elections last October. Relax, we’re told. Islamists these days are just liberals with a twist of spirituality. Dreamers, who recite the Quran for the ecstasy of the poetry, and wisely steer clear of the “militant” and “blinkered” secularism of the West.

A fine example of this “high civilization” arrived this week in the form of a good old-fashioned puritanical mob rampage, in which “bearded men burst into” Sidi Bouzid’s Hotel Horchani, “smashing bottles” of alcohol “and chasing away customers, before raiding the reception and the upstairs rooms, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Al-Sharab haram’ [drinking is a sin],” in the words of the AFP report.

The report added that a group of self-described “Salafi jihadis” proudly claimed responsibility for the attack, boasting that “it was done in response to the demands of the people.”

A few bad apples, you may say. Nothing to do with the tree-huggers over at Ennahda. Except that Wael Amami, the spokesperson for the attackers, had his life sentence amnestied following the overthrow of ex-President Ben Ali, an act that wouldn’t have been possible without Ennahda’s blessing. What’s more, Amami further bragged that “police don’t interfere” when he and his friends take vigilante action against illegal alcohol vendors elsewhere. AFP’s report ends by saying “the Islamist-led coalition government” has been accused of “not doing enough to rein [Salafists] in.”

Well I’ll be damned.

Turkish town bans alcohol

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Turkey’s beloved “moderate” Islamists – you know, the ones that everyone keeps telling Arab revolutionaries to “emulate” – are at it again.

Not content with attempting to criminalise adultery; demanding that the Danish Prime Minister violate his country’s constitution by censoring the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons; and defending the Sudanese war criminal Omar al-Bashir on the grounds that “it is not possible for a Muslim to commit genocide”; the AKP, or ‘Justice and Development Party’ of Prime Minister Erdoğan has now banned the sale and consumption of alcohol in the province of Afyonkarahisar, ostensibly in the interests of the “public good”, according to the Hürriyet newspaper.

You may choose to believe, if you wish, that the party’s “spiritual” leanings are merely incidental here. But Erdoğan’s contempt for and loathing of the fruits of the grape and grain have a rich history, going back to his days as Mayor of Istanbul in the ‘90s, when he banned the sale of alcohol in city-owned establishments. Since coming to high office, he has repeatedly raised taxes on the stuff, telling drinkers to “consume less” if they didn’t like it. He’s tightened regulations on its sale and advertising, and wondered aloud why anyone should drink wine when the alternative of simply eating grapes exists (surely an unimprovable definition of philistinism). Last year, Istanbul mayor and AKP apparatchik Ahmet Demircan banned establishments from using outdoor tables in Beyoğlu, which happens to be the capital’s liveliest and most convivial nightlife spot. According to Hürriyet, after Erdoğan complained at how many of his compatriots drink “until they sneeze and retch”, the satire-proof dolt “first rejected claims that the government was acting out of religious motivation [in its latest alcohol crackdown], then rhetorically questioned whether doing so was necessarily a bad thing.”

Well, what a question! But that’s for another day. For tonight – as it is Friday, after all – I encourage every reader who cares about the small matters of civil liberties and religious pluralism to support our beleaguered Turkish brothers and sisters by investing in some Turkish beer or, even better, raki. Just watch out for those damn sneezes.

Istanbul, graveyard of empires

That the description of being ‘where east meets west’ is applied to so many cities – ranging as vastly in look and location as from Sarajevo to Singapore – is of course an indictment of its essential vapidity. But to the extent that it's true of any city, it is surely truest of Istanbul, that ancient imperial capital with its spinal Bosphorus river across which the lands of Europe and Asia are quite literally ‘bridged’. In this distinction – of being a single city adjoining two continents – Istanbul is unique. Less trivially, and not coincidentally, it has the further unique distinction of being the former seat of four epochal empires – Roman; Byzantine; Latin; and Ottoman – making it in effect the global centre of power for more than 1,500 consecutive years. That these empires (as we sometimes forget) were officially faith-based gives the city the additional distinction of being the only former capital of both Christendom and the Islamic caliphate. And finally, in its latest form within the borders of modern Turkey, its people were the first in history to have thrown out the Islamic shari’a in favour of a secular constitution. 

The city today bears the stamp of each of these origins, if in different ways and to uncertain extents. To take them broadly in order, the ‘European’ cloth of the tapestry is evident from the moment one steps into Atatürk International, which flexes the bulk and polish of a Schiphol or a Gatwick without the gilded glitz of, say, a Dubai. On the roads, the restraint and consideration shown to fellow drivers are truly foreign to anyone accustomed to the Middle East, as is the thoughtfully built and efficiently run public transportation system. The food, on the other hand, is unmistakeably ‘Asian’, as the faintest whiff of the Eminönü Spice Bazaar will confirm. Indeed, much of what is now eaten in the Arab world descends from traditional Ottoman cuisine: from the döner (shawarma in Arabic) and the şiş kebap (shish kabab) to the baklava sweets (baqlawa) and more (the Arabs were able to return the favour with their lahm b’ajin, the meat pastry now rendered in Turkish as lahmacun). In terms of dress, there’s been a good deal of cross-pollination, with about as many heels and skirts as headscarves and skull caps (on which more later). Perhaps above all else, it’s in the language that the cultural DNA is most nakedly revealed: distinctly Balkan to the ear, the vocabulary is nevertheless replete with loanwords not only from Arabic and Persian (including the most basic of all, merhaba, from the Arabic marhaba) but also from the West (one purchases a jeton to ride the tram, for instance). These adopted words persist despite attempts since the formation of the Republic in the 1920s to replace them with ‘purer’ Turkish equivalents – an initiative that also brought about the enforced Latinisation of the old Ottoman script. As we shall see, this is not the only way in which the Turks have not entirely taken to the ‘Reforms’ imposed by Atatürk. 

In the 4^th century AD, around the same time that Constantine ‘The Great’ was making Christianity the state religion of the Roman empire, the need was felt for a new capital east of Rome to address the vast territorial gains made in that direction. It was decided that the strategically-located city then known as Byzantion best met the requirements, and what was to become Constantinople was in fact briefly named Nea Roma, or ‘New Rome’. Much of the city as it was then remains visible in the Sultanahmet district of Istanbul today, from the Hippodrome with the surviving section of the Serpent Column to the Basilica Cistern now lying beneath Yerebatan Street. But the most striking creation of what became the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, empire was the Hagia Sophia cathedral completed in the 6^th century during the reign of the emperor Justinian. 

Egyptian obelisk in the Hippodrome

Basilica Cistern

Hagia Sophia/Ayasofya 'Museum'

This magnificent building - whose signature dome would inspire the Sultanahmet and Süleymaniye mosques a thousand years later, and which was in fact itself later converted into a mosque by Sultan Mehmet II - was by far the largest of its kind worldwide; a record it held for nine centuries until the building of the Saint Mary cathedral in Seville. After five hundred years as the ‘Ayasofya’ mosque, it was eventually stripped of its religious status by Atatürk and is today strictly referred to as a ‘museum’, much to the fury of fundamentalist Christians and Muslims alike.

Indeed, the ‘museum’ is nothing if not a damning testament to religious hatred and tyranny. Repeatedly sacked and pillaged throughout its existence – by the Islamic invaders but more devastatingly by the Catholic Crusaders (whose loathing of the Orthodox Church is still very much alive in eastern Europe today) – it’s a wonder the thing still stands at all. In addition to the four minarets added to the exterior by the Ottomans, inside one finds Islamic calligraphy on great black discs crudely affixed like cheap stickers to the walls, in places just metres from the original Christian mosaics. And the mosaics themselves tell a sordid story of their own; many of them depicting Christ and Mary shoulder to shoulder with Constantine and Justinian – brazen attempts to deify the emperors and thus render themselves, and their authority, infallible. That the Byzantine empire turned out to be very much fallible, and that it was an orgy of violence and despotism while it lasted, is a lesson in humility that far too few religions appear to have learned (not least of them Catholicism, which actually does still use the word ‘infallible’ in official descriptions of the pope).

Inside the Hagia Sophia/Ayasofya

Christian mosaics behind Islamic calligraphy

From left to right: Constantine, Mary, Jesus, Justinian

Of course, Atatürk couldn’t convert every house of worship into a museum, and the two most marvellous mosques still in use – the Sultanahmet, or ‘Blue’ one to the east of the Hippodrome; and the Süleymaniye one further to the west – have generously been made open to the public free of charge (entrance to the Hagia Sophia/Ayasofya costs 20 TL, or $11). These skyline-defining structures, exquisitely sculpted of marble and granite, are examples not only of the egos of the Sultans Ahmet and Süleyman (‘The Magnificent’) but also of the genius of the architect Mimar Sinan, the ‘Michelangelo of the East’, whose legacy extends from the Tekkiye Mosque in Damascus to the Sokolović Bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Yet perhaps the most interesting relic of the Islamic period is the colossal Topkapi Palace, personal residence of the Sultan and seat of the Ottoman government from the 15^th to the 19^th centuries. 

Sultanahmet Mosque

Süleymaniye Mosque

Entrance to Topkapi Palace

Built on the ruins of the ancient Great Palace of Constantinople, the grounds of what we now call the Topkapi Palace Museum - which effectively comprise an entire borough of the city – are the very height of Ottoman glory and greed; containing not just the old living quarters of the Sultan and his 4,000-strong support staff, but a mosque, a Byzantine church, a library, a treasury, a hospital, a mint, and over a hundred acres of gardens and courtyards. Within these walls can be found an 86-carat diamond; thrones made of solid gold and ebony; emeralds and rubies the size of golf balls; and the most exquisite porcelain of China. One can also find several purported belongings of the Prophet Muhammad, including his swords; his cloak; a tooth and even the individual hairs of his beard (why anyone should want to see these, I couldn’t say). Most famously, one can also find the Harem; the private quarters where the Sultan lived in the company of his hundreds of concubines. These often very young women were bought, donated or simply stolen into slavery and put to whatever use the Sultan desired. A New York Times article elucidates the grotesque way in which the girls were forced to feign interest in their owner and master:

At times up to 300 young women lived here, most of them in tiny cubicles, including four wives, the favorite concubines, the young up-and-coming odalisques. Harem girls were captured in wars or bought as slaves; some were offered by their parents. Russian and Georgian girls were considered great beauties and much in demand. [The Sultan’s] Mother apparently had the first choice and alloted the girls different tasks so that they might or might not be noticed. If you were an odalisque you could try to catch the sultan's eye when you served his coffee or when he called for the girls to parade and perform dances for him. If he offered you his handkerchief, you knew.

One must never forget that this monstrous combination of slavery and rape is wholly licensed by the tenets of Islam. The Qur’an makes repeated reference to slaves as ma malakat aymankum, or ‘what your right hands possess’, e.g., Suras 4:24; 23:5-6; 70:29-35:

And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.

[The believers are those] who guard their modesty, save from their wives or the (slaves) that their right hands possess, for then they are not blameworthy.

And those who preserve their chastity, save with their wives and those whom their right hands possess [...] These will dwell in Gardens, honoured.

Muhammad himself had a number of concubines – indeed, the canonical tafsir, or exegesis, of Ibn Kathir tells the illuminating tale of Maria the Copt, the concubine whom Muhammad swore never again to see after his wife Hafsa found the pair of them in bed. “Why bannest thou that which Allah hath made lawful for thee, seeking to please thy wives”? was the Almighty’s contemptuous response (Sura 66:1). Thus the Ottoman Sultans, in consigning thousands of girls to lives of abuse and abjection, were in fact only following the example of their moral and spiritual tutor. 

Which seems as good a reason as any to celebrate the day in 1924 when the inaugural President of the Republic of Turkey put a stop to all that forever, abolishing the caliphate and establishing the first secular country of the former Muslim world. That state would quickly go on to grant equal rights to women in things like education and marriage; outlaw the degrading practice of polygamy; and give its female population the vote long before supposedly enlightened nations such as France and Canada would do the same. The social and economic dividends of these revolutionary steps were suggested by Turkey’s joining of NATO in 1952 (it remains the only Muslim-majority country in the organisation) and its candidacy – recognised in 1999 - for membership of the European Union. 

Today, however, these hard-won gains face a threat that cannot easily be exaggerated. Never entirely accepted by the Turks from the start, over the years Atatürk’s constitution has had to be upheld by a powerful military establishment that can be as ruthless as it needs to be against its enemies, perceived or actual. Or at least that was the case until July of this year, when in an event that went largely unnoticed outside the country – and is still not nearly well enough appreciated - the entire leadership of the armed forces simultaneously resigned. This major and unprecedented move, described by the Milliyet columnist Asli Aydintasbas as “the symbolic moment when the first Turkish republic ends and the second republic begins”, was in response to the arrests of dozens of generals on what may or may not be fabricated charges of plotting to overthrow the government. The man behind all this, of course, is the Prime Minister and top Atatürk-despiser, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. 

An incredible amount of loose talk has it that Turkey strikes the ideal balance between the secular and the Islamic (when Rachid Ghannouchi’s Ennahda party won last month’s elections in Tunisia, for example, he cited the Turkish “reconciliation between Islam and modernity” as though to negate fears about his own non-secular proclivities). Yet Erdoğan’s entire political career, from the day he joined the now-banned Islamist ‘National Salvation Party’ as a teenager, has been focused on advancing the former at the expense of the latter. 

As the Mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, elected on the Islamist ‘Welfare Party’ ticket (also now banned), Erdoğan illegalised the sale of alcohol in city-owned establishments. Having presumably been on the military’s hit list for some time, the man describing himself as a “servant of the shari’a” was eventually arrested and imprisoned in 1998 for the somewhat ridiculous crime of ‘inciting religious hatred’ for reading a poem at a rally that contained the lines:

The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the believers our soldiers.

Since coming to high office in 2003, Erdoğan has, to borrow a phrase used by Patrick Cockburn in another context, done as much harm as he can and as much good as he must. His ‘Justice and Development’ party attempted to criminalise adultery in 2004, a blatantly Islamist move defended by Erdoğan as a question of “human honour”. At a NATO summit in 2009, the Turkish delegation made enemies of everyone in the room when it threatened to veto the appointment of the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Rasmussen, to the post of Secretary-General, on the preposterous and fascistic grounds that he had not censored the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in the Danish media – something the Danish constitution would not have allowed him to do even if he had wanted to. This sinister piece of galling impertinence led the French Foreign Minister to publicly withdraw his support for Turkey’s EU bid. And while Erdoğan has become something of a hero in the Arab world for (rightly) standing up to the Israelis, his defence of Palestine rests on the insulting notion of it as an ‘Islamic’ territory. Certainly, he seems to mind much less about slaughter and military occupation when the subjects of Armenia, Cyprus or Kurdistan are brought up – not to mention that he’s happy enough in the company of mass-murderers such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (“my good friend”) and Omar al-Bashir, whom he defended from the charges brought against him by the International Criminal Court by saying it was “not possible for a Muslim to commit genocide”. 

And then of course there is the drink question. Happily, the ban from the ‘90s has been repealed, but Erdoğan has never been one to give up easily on the imperatives of moral policing. Indeed, for the fruits of the grape and grain he appears to reserve especial distaste. After yet again raising taxes on alcohol in October, his advice for disgruntled drinkers was to “consume less alcohol”, echoing the call he made last year for Turks to eat grapes rather than drink wine. The courts had to get involved in 2007 to block a proposal to create designated “red zones” outside the cities in which alcoholic venues could be quarantined. While I was able to get a glass of raki easily enough in the famously convivial Beyoğlu district, the atmosphere was slightly but perceptibly diminished by the brand new law banning outdoor seating. This of course came after a series of restrictions introduced in January on things like advertising alcohol and the way in which it may be served at events (not for free, and not to anyone younger than 24). That package was to spark one of the most heartening sights of the year: crowds of protesters gathered in city centres across the country, each man and woman equipped with a brimming tumbler of tipple, in what they called a “drinking action” demonstration. To irk the forces of clerical fascism and get jolly drunk in the process is as fine a day’s work as any. 

There are still a lot of Turks, in other words, for whom secularism and individual liberties mean a great deal (there had, after all, been a number of rather larger rallies in 2007, when over a million people took to the streets to protest the presidential nomination of Erdoğan’s ally, Abdullah Gül). Whether they outnumber their more pious compatriots, however, is unclear. Peter Hitchens – a man with whom I very often disagree – made the interesting observation that while in the seriously Islamist country of Iran, the young women have a healthy contempt for the veil, in Turkey a very ugly kind of zealous conservatism appears to have become the fashion:

The Iranian women mock the headscarf as they wear it, pushed as far back as possible on the head, revealing as much bleached-blonde, teased hair as the piety police will allow. 

Their message is: 'The law can make me wear this, but it cannot make me look as if I want to.' The young Turks, by contrast, are saying: 'This is how I want to look, even if the law says I cannot.' For the scarf is banned by law in many universities and in government offices, and they view this ban as a challenge they must defy. 

There is no simpler way of making the point that, while Iran is a secular country with a Muslim government, Turkey is a Muslim country with a secular government. 

If Turkey truly hopes to be a First World nation, it would do well to start taking large strides away from, rather than toward the ideals that have turned life in the great Persian nation into a waking nightmare. And unless it wishes to lose its few remaining secular friends, it will have to come to terms with being the graveyard of the Islamic empire, and not the soil of its rebirth.