Word: moderners
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...part of the mildly apathetic global Gen X brigade, but like many an urban Turk, I was raised on a solid diet of modernist mantras. The secular zeal of Turkey's nation-builders runs in my blood. As an air force pilot, my grandfather fought alongside Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey's founder, in the country's war for independence. After it was won in 1923, his job was to help build Turkey's first fleet of biplanes. My grandmother was what's called an "Ataturk girl" - like many others, she was put on a train to Germany...
Allowing people to practice their religion is also entirely consistent with secularism—the ideological basis of modern Turkey. Secularism has its roots in the Enlightenment tradition of tolerance and the idea that religion is a choice subject only to individual sovereignty. Using force to prevent religious observance is a perversion of this philosophy, and is more reminiscent of the Inquisition than the Age of Reason...
Ever since they grew popular in the 1400s, embassies have been more about international power play than relations with local people or their own nationals. But only in the last half-century did they begin to participate fully in the bureaucratic inanity of modern government. Perhaps more than any other political institution, national consulates demonstrate the discrepancy between our hopes for meaningful government and the pragmatic reality of faceless, centralized administration. Instead of providing informed support (and often despite well-intentioned efforts to do so), governmental bodies are mired in paranoid self-regulation. Because, internally, what really matters...
...society, refusal to do so becomes a criterion for exclusion and harassment—something which women should never face, let alone in public institutions of higher learning. Moreover, the unique political circumstances of Turkey complicate the extent to which such strong secular practices are needed. Despite its modern history, contemporary Turkey faces a growing Islamic threat—and any concession to the religious conservatives is as an injury to the nation’s secularism. And in that war between secularists and Islamists, the classroom ought to remain a sacrosanct environment that ought to be free of religious...
...very 21st century conundrum: how can modern, open democracies provide basic homeland security in a world with nearly limitless mobility? On Wednesday, the European Commission tried to answer that by unveiling a border management plan calling for fingerprinting all foreign visitors to the European Union...