The latest piece I penned for Al-Monitor was titled “A Salafi Assault on Turkish Theology?” I had used the term “Salafi” quite figuratively, as a label for the narrow-minded Islamic approach that sees philosophy, and other sources of secular knowledge, as a corruptive force for Muslims. The news was that this line of dogmatic thinking had just pushed philosophy out of the curriculum of Turkey's theology faculties. Since these faculties are tied to the Higher Education Council (HEC), which is tied to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, I had even concluded that this was a critical test for the future of Turkey.

I wrote: “Perhaps, this is one of the various indications that the AKP, after a pretty successful decade, is really at a serious crossroads: The party will either reform itself and move forward by adopting global norms of democracy — and, well, even reason. Or it will revert back to the narrow-minded Islamism that its cadre actually had abandoned in the late ’90s for a more liberal route.”

However, better things happened since I wrote these lines. Many opinion leaders in Turkey's Islamic camp also raised their voices against the HEC’s move. Various columnists in newspapers such as Yeni Safak, Star and Today's Zaman — all of them conservative and sympathetic to the AKP in various degrees — argued that “a theology without philosophy” would be lame.

Moreover, the top official religious authority, Mehmet Gormez, a theologian himself, also spoke out on the issue. He not only criticized the “top-down decision given by the HEC, without consulting hundreds of academics theology in the country.” He also defended philosophy education reminding us that Katip Celebi, a 17th century Ottoman historian, tied the decline of the Ottoman Empire to the diminishing of philosophy and wisdom in the madrassas.