Post by Sunday at midnight.
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Inbetween Regions, Turkey's public ideology of secular, open state endangered by its own history of Armenian Genocide in the early 20th century as the state was founded
3. Turkey was mentioned in the last week's blogs. I mentioned that countries, polities or histories of border areas between different presumed regions are an interesting way to view the congnitive element of how people deal with the stereotypes about a 'region' when they are given more of a geographical choice of whether to identify with one region they are near or another one. Turkey's 'modern state' has identified with the European side for all of the 20th century, from after World War One when the Turkish secular state was founded and Islam and other religious expressions were repressed in public. This is an interesting article that shows how the self-image of 'modern Turkey' depends on an ongoing construction that their state foundation was 'clean.' Instead quite a few atrocities happened during its foundation, and as the article wryly puts it, whether we look at their leader Attaturk as helping found a democracy or whether we think about him as someone like Lenin and the USSR's totalitarian model depends on how a country structures its own history. Seems that most Turks were 'educated' without awareness that there WAS a genocide against their Armenian minority during the 1920s.
Interesting how the 'region' and the history had to be constructed as pure nationalist. We will talk about this artificial community of the nation/region when we discuss Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities later in the semester.
------------------------
Turkey scared to admit Armenian genocide, says historian
· Remarks cast shadow over efforts to rebuild relations
· Turkish show interest in museum of tragedy
* Robert Tait in Yerevan
* The Guardian,
* Monday September 22 2008
* Article history
Members of the Armenian community join a demonstration march in London in 2005. Photograph: Edmond Terakopian/PA
Turkey risks a collapse of its secular political system akin to that of the Soviet Union if it bows to international pressure to recognise the 1915-22 Armenian genocide, the head of Armenia's state memorial to the event has told the Guardian.
Hayk Demoyan said Ankara could not acknowledge the systematic killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman troops during the first world war because it would lead to a wholesale re-writing of history and undermine the ideological [clean] basis of the Turkish state.
In remarks that will cast a shadow over attempts to forge a new Turkish-Armenian rapprochement, he said those implicated included Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey and a figure Turks are taught to revere. Historical documents proved Atatürk committed "war crimes" against Armenians and other groups in his drive to create [artifically] an ethnically homogeneous Turkish state, Demoyan insisted.
"Fear of rewriting history is the main fear of modern Turkey," said Demoyan, director of The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan, Armenia's capital.
"It is a fear of facing historical reality and causing a total collapse of the ideological axis that modern republican Turkey was formed around. Turks get panicked when you compare Atatürk's legacy to Lenin. Atatürk was sentenced to death in absentia by a military judge to punish war crimes during the first world war. There are documents from non-Armenian sources listing him as a war criminal."
Demoyan's remarks come amid fledgling attempts to re-establish links between two countries which have not had diplomatic relations since 1994, following a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Turkey's ally.
Tentative efforts towards normalising ties occurred this month when the Turkish president, Abdullah Gül, visited Yerevan [capital of Armenia] to attend a World Cup football match between Turkey and Armenia at the invitation of his Armenian counterpart, Serge Sarkisian.
Unlike most visiting heads of state, Gül did not visit the genocide museum, which displays documentary and photographic exhibits proving, Armenian officials say, that their ethnic brethren were subjected to deliberate genocide. Turkey vehemently denies this and has jailed Turkish citizens who argued otherwise. However, rising numbers of Turkish tourists and journalists have visited the museum recently.
"More than 500 Turks have visited this year. They've come in unprecedented numbers," Demoyan said. "Their reaction is one of shock. At first there is denial. Sometimes they ask: 'What is our sin?' or 'How can we be responsible for this?'. It's not taught in Turkish schools, so we understand their reaction."
Turkey claims the Armenian death toll has been exaggerated and that most victims died from starvation or disease. It also argues that many Turks were killed by Armenian groups.
---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/22/turkey
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
1. Lee Hyunjoo
2. Turks in German
3.
I'm interested in the situation of Turkishes in Germany. Because when I was travelling Germany while Eurocup was going there, I saw so many Turks shouting of joy for cheering themselves about their victory on match. Their shouting sounded a bit bitterly. ANd then after travel, I realized the fact that there are so many blue-collar Turkish workers in Germany. And most German ignore them eventhough they invited many Turkish to work in their own country many years ago. So there are a lot of problem between Turks and German till now. It's because Turk's religion is a lot more different to German's and other factors exist aw well. So i tried to find information about that.
-----------------------------------
4.
Departments
News
HNN Articles
Hot Topics
Germany's Second Doubts About Its Turkish Immigrants
By Aaron Erlich
Mr. Erlich was formerly an HNN intern. He is pursuing a Masters degree at the BMW Center for German and European Studies, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
At the beginning of his class, Herr Michna makes it clear that it was a big mistake on Germany’s part to bring so many guestworkers (Gastarbeiter) from Turkey, and the question now is how to best fix the mistake. Michna begins by showing his students pictures of radical Islam from the front pages of several popular German magazines and newspapers. He mentions September 11th and the recent death of Theo Van Gogh. The problem of immigrants as Herr Michna frames it is existential in nature: either integrate the immigrants in society or face death by radical Islam.
An employee with the Social Ministry of the State of Hessen, with the confusingly German title of Leiter des Referats Zuwanderungspolitik und Landesausländerbeauftragter, Herr Michna picked me up from my office to attend his university class on German immigration politics he teaches for future state employees. Fortyish, with a receding hairline, although without a hint of grey in his hair and an observant Catholic, Herr Michna plays the part of the typical German Beamte, or state civil service employee.
Driving between the sleepy state capital of Wiesbaden and its largest city, Frankfurt am Main, I began to discuss with Herr Michna the comparative problem that we have in the United States. Conservative estimates believe that eight million illegal immigrants reside in the United States, mainly from Mexico. Herr Michna quickly retorted that the Mexicans are Catholic; the Turks, Michna continued, are Muslims. Furthermore, the Turks in Germany are not the educated elites from Ankara or Istanbul but come from the Anatolian Plain, a place that has not taken on the trappings of modernity and remains a cultural backwater. Michna explained that he had visited the Anatolian plain and witnessed life there firsthand. He could not believe that Turkey may join the EU.
II
Starting in the 1950s, to feed the post World War II economic miracle, Germany signed bilateral agreements with poorer Mediterranean countries to import guestworkers to fill vacant positions in the booming industrial economy. The first guestworkers came from southern European countries, mainly Italy, Croatia, Spain, and Greece. As these sources of labor dried up, the German authorities moved further afield. In the 1960s and 70s millions of Turks came to work in Germany. This Turkish population soon overtook all of the other guestworker populations and today 2,375,000 people of Turkish origin live in Germany and comprise approximately thirty percent of all those of foreign descent.
At the outset the Germans expected the Turks to leave and the Turks expected to return to Turkey. However, the political situation in Turkey was unstable and many Turks soon built a life for themselves in Germany and no longer expected to go home; children went to school and families bought property. The longer the guestworkers stayed in Germany, the more the guestworkers were treated as foreigners in their native Turkey. Furthermore, a complicated set of international agreements later backed up by the German courts decided that the Turks had a right to stay in Germany and could not be deported unless they had committed serious crimes. Until recently, however, Turkish immigrants and their German-born offspring could not acquire German citizenship.
As the German economic miracle ground to a halt in the 1980s, industrial jobs dried up and the famed German social state moved closer to the edge of bankruptcy. The Turkish population as well as other guestworker communities, not possessing the educational or linguistic skills to enter the modern economy, began to suffer extraordinarily high rates of unemployment and draw heavily on the German welfare state. Currently, the foreigner unemployment rate stands at approximately 21%, more than double the already high national average. The guestworkers' reliance on the welfare state has undoubtedly increased German antipathy toward its Turkish population, who are seen in the eyes of the German as the "typical foreigner," and has strengthened the German viewpoint that the Turks are moving away from integrating into German society, renouncing the trappings of Western life in order to create what the Germans term Parallelgesellschaft, or parallel society. Germans continually say that the problem in Germany is that you see third and fourth generation immigrants of Turkish descent still speaking Turkish on the street, something you only see in the most sealed off of American communities such as the ultra-orthodox Jews and the Amish.
Two recent threads have recently brought the long simmering immigration question Germany (which in the eyes of the Germans means the Turkish debate) to a roiling boil. First, September 11th and the recent death of Theo van Gogh, has brought the presence of militant Islam to the attention of German authorities, and many Germans have become acutely aware of the religious difference between themselves and their immigrant population. The focus on Islam has directed attention towards a spate of honor killings that has outraged a German public, which feels that Islam oppresses women and does not allow them the freedom of choice. The media, for instance, has jumped on a recent case in Wiesbaden, a sleepy town of 200,000 where, in order to defend the honor of the family, a brother shot his sister after the sister decided to marry an ethnic German. Such kind of behavior is unfortunately all too normal. At a party recently, I spoke with a doctor who fulminated against what he sees in the urban hospital where he works in Mannheim. The doctor repeatedly stated that he had lots of Turkish friends and was not a nationalist but could not abide the Turkish women he saw daily who had been beaten to a bloody pulp by overzealous husbands. Such a perspective explains the European intolerance of the headscarf. Like this doctor, many Europeans do not believe that Muslim women are exercising their right to religious freedom by donning the headscarf, rather they see it as a political symbol that signifies oppression of women by the Islamic male patriarchy, which denies these women the right to learn German and interact in society and openly condones the physical abuse of women.
Second and more importantly in relationship to German history, in 2000, the government passed a revolutionary law that allowed for jus soli, or the territorial citizenship principle. Even after reconstruction of the German state after World War II, Germany continued to grant citizenship based on the ethnic classification of someone as German in contradistinction to France, which has for most of it modern history possessed a civic notion of nationality. This differentiation has led scholars such as Rogers Brubaker to claim that Germany can only conceive of itself as an ethnic nation. Indeed, an ethnic self-conception has not been abandoned by the mainstream conservative Christian Democrats in Germany, who still often claim that Germany is not a land of immigration (kein Einwanderungsland).
Nevertheless the liberal red-green coalition passed a law which allows for both jus sanguinus and jus soli, and non-ethnic Germans can now gain citizenship through birth or long-term residence in Germany . Under the new law many Turkish guestworkers have obtained German citizenship. Even the new citizenship laws, however, have not shed the vestiges of Germany’s past, and the citizenship laws, in their overly complicated and convoluted language, represent Germany’s tortured relationship with its own self-identity and the problematic definition of what German is.
In Germany one has the sense that even integrated Turks can somehow not be German, an experience that would not have been foreign to the hundreds of thousands of Jews, who, before the Holocaust, were never made to feel quite welcome as Germans no matter how hard they tried to assimilate. A highly-educated, incredibly bright German woman of Turkish origin in her mid-forties who has live in Germany since was nine and now runs a successful program for immigrant women told me that when she was promoted to manager at a German firm, all her ethnic German colleagues would scrutinize everything she wrote to see if there was an error in the text. She continually had to prove herself because her German colleagues did not believe she was qualified for the job. When there was an error in something she wrote, her colleagues would whisper that she was not fit for the position.
The citizenship laws were a political compromise, and the price of allowing Turks and other foreigners to obtain citizenship included a much more proactive stance towards integration on the part of the government. Among other things, prospective citizens must take 650 hours of language instruction as well as demonstrate knowledge of the German constitution. Those, however, who do not wish to acquire citizenship often remain ignorant of German law. More importantly, in order for Turks to naturalize they must demonstrate that they have renounced their Turkish citizenship, and since 2000 they must sign a document stating that they will not acquire a second citizenship. If they do acquire a second citizenship, they immediately lose their German one. Before 2000, many Turks, when they renounced their Turkish citizenship, were told by the Turkish embassy that they could reacquire Turkish citizenship after they obtained their German citizenship.
The German government, in the context of highly politicized elections, however, has begun to enforce the denaturalization of those Turks who reacquired Turkish citizenship, and it is estimated that approximately 50,000 Turks have lost their German citizenship. Approximately a third of these denaturalized Germans, re-applied for Turkish citizenship when it was still legal, but the acquisition took so long that they received only after the new law had passed. This denaturalization of a minority population eerily echoes Germany’s past sins. Citizenship has always signified the equality among residents before the law. Non-citizens have always had a secondary status. As Hannah Arendt so lucidly describes in the Origins of Totalitarianism, the first thing that the Nazis did in order be able to carry out its plans for the Jewish population was to strip them of their citizenship because non-citizens do not have rights.
While non-citizens have many more rights than they once had and the German government’s actions toward the Turkish population has nothing to do with Nazi ideology and what Nazis did to Jews, stripping people of their citizenship is certainly no way to go about integrating them into society. In the German state, where the government plays a much more central role than in the United States, thousand of jobs that are unrelated to the government in the United States, require German citizenship. I listened to the story of a man who had studied to be a pharmacist in Germany; he was going to have to give up his job, because he had reacquired Turkish citizenship. Apparently, under German law, pharmacists must be German citizens. By enforcing such rules, the German government will only cause more resentment, an attitude that was palpable in one of the meetings held to inform the Turks of their situation that I attended.
III
Seventeen university students filed into the classroom. They looked similar to a group of students attending state university in the U.S. Most of them are in their late teens or early twenties with the necessary tattoos and piercings. Judging from their names and accents, however, none of them is of other than German origin. This is an interesting fact given that more than 50 percent of those who live in Frankfurt have immigrated their within the last several decades and do not speak German as their first language. Those, who will control the future of the immigrant populations, have very little interaction with them.
In typical German style, this three hour class has been whittled down to 45 minutes because Herr Michna must attend a conference. However, this week Herr Michna wishes to leave his students with one important fact: the third generation is the most important. In his trip across the United States, he claims that officials continually told in the third generation it’s, “Princeton or prison, Yale or jail.” What the Germans want of the Turks, however, remains unclear.
ShareThis
-------------
http://hnn.us/articles/12640.html
1. Kim, Sukyung
2. India's remote faith battleground
3. India is not only a big countty but also a lot of religions and cultures are coexisting. This caused conficts among regions inside the country. Each group wants to form its own regionality by this battle, I think. I could be wrong. It's interesting that regionality connected to religions is still being made even between the same athnos, though. Also, it's worth considering how religions are working for regional issues.
-------------------------
4.Page last updated at 11:18 GMT, Friday, 26 September 2008 12:18 UK
India's remote faith battleground
Anti-Christian riots have rocked several parts of India over the past month. The BBC's Soutik Biswas has travelled to a remote region in the eastern state of Orissa, where it all began, to investigate the complex roots of the conflict.
A narrow ribbon of fraying tar snakes up from the plains of Orissa to the hills of Kandhamal, an unlikely setting for what is being described as the country's latest battle over faith.
There is no railroad to this remote landlocked district dominated by tribes people. Here, they and a growing number of Hindu untouchables who have converted to Christianity have lived together for centuries, tiling its fertile land, growing vegetables, turmeric and ginger.
It is also the place which has been rocked by violence between Hindus and Christians over the past month. Events here have triggered off anti-Christian attacks in a number of other states.
Villages have been attacked, people killed, churches and prayer houses desecrated. Radical Hindu groups have accused Christian groups of converting people against their will. Christian groups say these allegations are baseless.
Kandhamal continues to simmer a month after the murder of a controversial 82-year-old Hindu holy man and the consequent rioting between local tribes people and Christians.
Some 13,000 Christians are still living in tented refugee camps, with many having no homes to return to.
Tangled conflict
The popular narrative is that the conflict is all about tribes people, egged on by radical Hindu groups, targeting the Christian community to put an end to the church and its growing influence in the region.
But that is only a small part of Kandhamal's tangled conflict. To describe it as a war over religion is to simplify it, say analysts and officials.
They say it is essentially a decades-old conflict over identity, rights and entitlements.
Faith is now being used as a tool to rake up and settle old disputes. A similar bloody clash between the two communities in the early 1990's that killed some 24 people went largely unreported because it did not assume a religious hue.
At the root of the conflict is the unchecked rift among the majority Kandha tribes people - one of Orissa's 62 tribal communities who make up over 22% of the state's population- and the minority Hindu Pana untouchable community who have converted to Christianity in droves.
The Kandha tribes people comprise more than half of the district's 648,000 population and they openly say they are angry with their Christian neighbours.
'Proud and assertive'
Unlike their counterparts in many parts of India who have been ignored, exploited or displaced, the isolated tribes people of Kandhamal, in the words of local officials, are "proud and assertive".
Literacy among them has risen to around 40%, just a tad less than the 43% literacy rate for the district.
Living outside the pale of India's oppressive caste system and on the margins of society with their animist practices, Kandhamal's tribes people have not found a good reason yet to convert to Christianity in large numbers.
The untouchables on the other hand have borne the brunt of the caste system and have converted for a better life and more dignity.
Resultantly, the Christian population in the district has leapt by 56% between 1991 and 2001, when India's last census was conducted, while the average population grew up only 18% during the same period.
The pet complaint among the tribes people is that after converting to Christianity, their neighbours have become aggressive.
They say they have grabbed their lands - land owned by tribes people in India cannot be bought under the country's laws - and used fake certificates to declare themselves as tribes people to take advantage of complex affirmative action benefits like government jobs.
"The Christian converts have been stealing our crops and livestock. They are ploughing and taking away our lands using force, they are faking their identities to get jobs. They want to have the best of both worlds," says Lambodhar Kanhar, who heads an increasingly influential group local group of tribes people.
Growing animosity
Officials say there is merit in some of these allegations and they should have been investigated and settled a long time ago. The failure to do so has led to growing animosity between the two groups.
"There are some issues. We are working to resolve the issues of land acquisitions and fake caste certificates," says the district's senior most official, Krishan Kumar.
Things began to take a religious turn some 40 years ago when a Hindu religious man, Laxmananda Saraswati, arrived here.
He set up schools and clinics, ran anti-liquor campaigns, openly railed against conversions and organised reconversions of some returnees to Hinduism.
He also became popular among the tribes people because his ire was mainly directed against Christian converts.
The holy man instantly became a target of his opponents, surviving some nine assassination attempts before he was murdered last month by a group of gun-toting men.
There are reports of local Maoist rebels taking responsibility, but officials rubbish this suggestion, saying that rebels do not gain anything by killing a Hindu holy man.
By all accounts, Laxmananda Saraswati was both a revered and feared man: the first, for his social work; the second, for his rabble rousing against the minorities.
He had clear links with the radical Hindu group, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, whose pamphlets describe him as a "formidable force against conversions by Christians" and somebody who "enlightened innocent tribes regarding their land rights".
With his killing, what was essentially a movement for identity and rights mutated into a religious battle between the tribes people and the Christian converts.
A spokesman for Orissa's Christian community insists it is basically a religious fight, provoked by radical Hindu groups who want to polarise people ahead of general elections.
"Why is the violence happening now? The radical Hindu groups want to polarise people to benefit Hindu nationalist parties during polls. It is also part of a larger design to attack Christians," says Dr Swaroopananda Patra.
Officials say that this is only a part of the problem.
"It is a cocktail of problems: economic, ethnic, religious. Any of these factors can precipitate violence in these parts," says Krishan Kumar.
What is clear that none of this would have happened if the state had carried out its duties on time - addressed the tribes peoples' grievances, prevented land and identity fraud and protected both communities from rabble rousers.
---
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7637087.stm
1. Park so jung
2. Islam in China
3.
It's unfamiliar chinese muslim so this is a very interesting stuff.
This article is pretty good to know how and why muslim went to china and what they did there.
---------------------------
Islam in China
Islam is still officially recognised in China ©
Muslims in China have managed to practise their faith in China, sometimes against great odds, since the seventh century. Islam is one of the religions that is still officially recognised in China.
Origins
It is believed that Islam began in China during the Caliphate of Uthman ibn Affan, the third Caliph of Islam.
The Caliph sent a deputation to China in 29 AH (650 CE, eighteen years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
The delegation was headed by Sa'ad ibn Waqqas a maternal uncle of the Prophet. Sa'ad Ibn Waaqas invited the Chinese Emperor (Yung-Wei) to embrace Islam.
To show his admiration for Islam the Emperor ordered the establishment of China's first Mosque. The magnificent Canton Mosque is known to this day as the 'memorial mosque' and it still stands after fourteen centuries.
In Arab records there are only sparse records of the event, but there is a brief mention in the ancient records of the Tang dynasty. Chinese Muslims consider this event to mark the birth of Islam in China.
Trade
Many Muslims went to China to trade, and these Muslims began to have a great economic impact and influence on the country. Muslims virtually dominated the import/export industry by the time of the Sung dynasty (960-1279).
-------
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/china_1.shtml
Post a Comment