Why Are Turks Intolerant?
Mustafa Akyol offers his take on Semih Idiz's recent piece, “Just How Tolerant Are Turks?"
In his Al-Monitor piece titled, “Just How Tolerant Are Turks?,” Semih İdiz did a good job of showing that Turkey cannot be too authoritative when it preaches tolerance to other nations. After showing the “serious lack of sensitivity toward any kind of minority rights in Turkey,” he simply reminded us of a practical dictum: “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.”
As a fellow Turk who also tries to be critical of his people, I agreed with Mr. İdiz’s take. But I also wondered why Turks really rank as one of the less tolerant societies on Earth. (Half of the Turkish society, for example, was opposed to having Jewish and Christian neighbors.) Two questions came to my mind:
1) Were Turks always like this, or was this intolerance something new?
2) What was the underlying reason behind this intolerance? Was it really “an Islamic outlook, or a nationalist outlook that has Islam at its core,” as Mr. İdiz argued?
