What do Turks think about the attack on the Paris headquarters of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo? Do they believe that there is a new Western “crusade” against the Muslim world? How many Turks want to preserve a secular republic? Metropoll, a prominent Ankara-based polling company, has asked Turks these questions. Its study, conducted through interviews of a statistically representative 2,579 individuals from 28 provinces, turned up intriguing results.
Titled “Religion, Violence and Freedom,” the survey first focuses on Turkish perceptions of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Only 16% of respondents defined the incident solely as “an attack on freedom of speech,” arguably the dominant view in the West. A much larger portion, 56%, emphasized that it was wrong for Charlie Hebdo to insult the Prophet Muhammad, but that it was also wrong to murder its journalists. The most worrying response was agreed to by some 20% of participants, who believe the satirists of the prophet “got the response that they deserved.” Among voters of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), this percentage rose to 26%. Also among AKP voters, however, 61% agreed that “they insulted the prophet, but it was wrong to kill them.”
