WHY DO THEY HATE THE ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE?
Hurriyet
July 11 2012
Turkey
The other night, I hosted Emre Oktem, an associate professor of
international law, on my weekly TV program called “Political Reason.”
Our main focus was the Ecumenical Patriarchate and its still-closed
Halki Seminary, which has once again become a matter of public debate
after a visit to the patriarchate by Turkey’s top Islamic authority.
Dr. Oktem, an expert on non-Muslim minorities in Turkey, not only
explained how the Ecumenical Patriarchate suffered official oppression
in modern-day Turkey, but he also argued how things should change. We
both agreed that the Halki Seminary, which has been closed since 1971,
should be reopened, and that no Turkish authority should ever make
an issue out of the name of the patriarchate. (The word “Ecumenical”
has been rejected vehemently by Turkish officials.)
We also agreed that this is simply a matter of religious freedom,
a principle which should be advanced on both side of the Aegean.
(Greece, for example, should change its shameful policy of not allowing
even a single mosque in Athens and insisting that its Turkish citizens
are not really Turks.)
It all sounded very logical, and I actually wondered why anyone would
disagree with all this. Very soon, though, I found out. On the way
back home from the studio, I turned on the radio and came across
another political discussion show focusing on the same issue.
One of the participants was an academic from Marmara University:
NurÅ~_en Mazıcı, a female professor of history and a committed
Kemalist.
Dr. Mazıcı had all the looks that a Western observer could take
as evidence of “liberalism.” (When they come to this part of this
world, some Westerners readily assume that a woman who wears a modern
outfit with chic makeup rather than a headscarf is, by definition, a
“liberal.”) But she was in fact defending the most illiberal stance
on the patriarchate: Yes, Greeks in Turkey should have the “right to
worship,” she said, but the Halki Seminary should be kept closed and
the word “Ecumenical” should never be allowed.
But why? According to Ms. Mazıcı, all answers were rooted in history.
She argued that, during the fall of the Ottoman Empire, some of
the Armenian or Greek institutions were used as secret weapons and
ammunition caches that were later used against Turkish forces. This,
she, said, was enough of a reason for modern-day Turks to look at
these Christian institutions “with suspicion.”
At that moment, I desperately wanted to be in the same studio to ask
her: “So, do you really think that if the Halki Seminary was reopened,
bombs and rifles would soon be stockpiled there to be used by the
3,000 Greeks that have remained in Istanbul against 70 million Turks?”
A minute later, Dr. Mazıcı insisted that the patriarchate should
never be allowed to use the word “Ecumenical.” Her reasoning was
mind-boggling: The world, particularly the United States, was
pressuring Turkey to set the patriarchate fully free, and heeding
that advice would be “subservience to America.”
With the same line of reasoning, one could have argued that Turkey had
to torture its citizens systematically as it did until a decade ago,
because otherwise it would be “subservient” to the European Union,
which has pressured Ankara to respect human rights.
This is the intellectual level and the moral quality of the enemies
of religious freedom in Turkey. It is a sad fact that they cannot be
convinced for the better. But it is a refreshing fact that they are
more marginal than they used to be.