His All Holiness: God is not your central banker!
11/10/2011
BURAK BEKDİL
On this side of the most beautiful sea in the world, there is a silent war between those who think that the great earthquake of Istanbul in 1999 was an earthquake and those who think it was God’s punishment on decadent mortals who had gone astray.
And there is total chaos on the other side where a Mediterranean diet, as John Mole describes it, “consists of a cup of strong black coffee in the morning, a quarter pound of cheese and a couple of beers for elevenses, stews or a fry-up for lunch with eggs and chips and cheese, more meat and cheese at night and the odd cheese pie during the day when you feel peckish; plenty of salad but also plenty of fried vegetables, a liter or so of wine, a few more beers and a couple of ouzos along with whisky; and don’t forget a couple of packs of cigarettes a day.” It seems that not only the Turkish soap operas, but also the Turkish piousness has had an influence on some Greeks (both to Turkey’s west and south).
After a deadly munitions blast in July knocked out a key power station in Greek Cyprus, Archbishop Chrysostomos II called on Greek Cypriots not to use the electricity the Turks in the island’s north proposed to provide. I’d rather get by with a lantern and a flashlight, head of the Church of Cyprus said. Ironically, the man who criticized Chrysostomos II for that was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the archbishop’s Muslim colleague by profession. Mr. Erdoğan condemned that religious chauvinism by recalling that the Church of Cyprus had earlier declared the consumption of halloumi cheese produced by Turkish Cypriots as “religiously not permissible.”
Mr. Erdoğan’s reasonable reproach reminded me of Turkish imams who during the War of Independence preached to locals that in the name of Allah they should side with the occupying Greek forces against the liberation army of “that Muslim antichrist Mustafa Kemal.”
Over-reliance on religious sentiments or simply religious identity in managing worldly affairs does not always yield desirable outcomes, especially in science and politics. The founders of modern Turkey and their heirs to power probably saw Jews and Orthodox Christians as potential top security threats to Turkey, but not the Kurds because the Kurds are Muslim. Any one of the 40,000 or so graves scattered through Anatolia after the bloody war would tell you that was a miscalculation.
Hürriyet’s Monday edition quoted Bartholomew, archbishop of Constantinople and New Rome, as advising the Greeks that “the solution to the punishing economic crisis is a return to God and Christian values.” With due respect to the always admirable Ecumenical Patriarch, no doubt a man of wisdom, I must, well, not say too much.
His All Holiness: Greece is not on the verge of an embarrassing bankruptcy because the Greeks have forgotten to return to God and Christian values. Nor did that catastrophic earthquake hit Istanbul because girls in miniskirts drank at nightclubs, or gays had flourished or more young men were addicted to drugs. The Holocaust did not happen because Jews were eternally condemned, nor did the Japanese one day have to wake up to atomic bombs because they had prayed to the wrong god. By the way, if you are curious, the Turkish economy is not performing impressively well because Mr. Erdoğan’s men are pious; it does so because Mr. Erdoğan’s men are good at economic management.
His All Holiness: God is probably too busy to attend to Greek wages and unemployment, or to the Turkish-Kurdish war, which will not fade away if more Turks and Kurds returned to God and Muslim values. He is probably too busy to care about whether Greek Cypriots ate Turkish halloumi or consumed Turkish electricity or whether the good ship Piri Reis found any non-existent gas reserves underneath the Mediterranean.
