How “secular” Turkey has converted Western literature to Islam

Usually we tend to think that mistakes are something bad, harmful and
undesirable. We take precautions to avoid them. Some go even further. They
are ashamed of their mistakes so that they hide them or if it is impossible any
longer they simply deny them. Denying one’s mistakes restores a very
comfortable feeling of infallibility and moral and intellectual superiority to those
who have committed them and “heals” one’s ailing memory. They feel mistakes
are bad and don’t want to have anything to do with them.
But on second thoughts one might marvel if indeed there isn’t something
quite positive, useful, even beneficient in mistakes? Don’t they contribue
sometimes to the dislosure of the truth? Can’t sometimes more be inferred and
gleaned from a casual mistake than from a most loudly advertised ‘success
story’ we’re often so fed up with looking at the world around us? Think of times
of upheaval, subversion , erosion of inherited values, of war and treason. Aren’t
such times moving closer and closer to us? Think what would have happened if
Hitler or Stalin had made no mistakes? If all their plans had been carried out as
they wished without a single blunder, a single leakage? After all it is what they
were after, weren’t they? Infallibility and perfection. Unfortunately for them
there were always some minor defects, leakages or inadvertance of this or that
person close to them which helped dislose the dark truth nonetheless. Some of
these persons were praised in major newspapers, in newsreels , in school books.
But later they was unmasked as „people’s enemies” or „foreign agents” or
„traitors” and had to disappear from the scene together with the newsreels,
books and newspapers which were re-edited and re-introduced into the archives
to serve as a „documentary” evidence that the Wise Leader had never had
anything to do with them.
 Now don’t we still –fortunately enough !- encounter such mistakes in most
unexpected places? Perhaps many still remember an incident which took place
in Turkey last year. First the Prime Minister in person Recep Tayyip Erdogan
and then his Minister of Education Assoc. Prof. Hüseyin Çelik got furious at
some publishers –mainly the latter’s old friends from the Ilkbiz Publishing
House from Istanbul. They threatened to sue and punish them with prison
sentences. The publishers were accused of ... an attempt to Islamize classical
Western literature. It might seem strange that it was not the Saudi Religion
Police but the „secular” Turkish Ministry of Education that took that essential
step towards the final ideal of Islamizating everything as in Turkey it may be
considered as a crime. It may be construed as an implicit attack on one of the
pillars of Ataturk’s Republic – „secularism”. Indeed, what was so bad about it
was that the news spread to the West where the belief in Turkish „secularism”
could be undermined. The West might finally understand that at home young
Turks have nothing to learn „multiculturism”, „tolerance” and other catchy
values forcibly imposed in the West from. Now , instead, owing to the
Islamisation of classical Western Literature the young Turks would necessarily
see in it just another reincarnation of Islam they all adhere to. Yet among many
strange things in the news was the quote by Minister Çelik : “We cannot check
the content of the books every day. But if there is slang and swear words, we
will sue them for using the ministry logo” . Not a single word of Islamisation -
just „slang and swear words” ...in classical Western literature !
And in fact what we learned about the questionable passages were no swears
or salacious phrases but quite arresting words :

„Pinocchio says “Give me some bread for the sake of Allah,” and gives thanks
to ‘Allah’” (...) D'Artagnan while on his way to see Aramis is stopped by an old
lady who explains: “You can't see him right now. He is surrounded by men of
religion. He converted to Islam after his illness.” (... ) Eleanor H. Porter's
"Pollyanna" confirms her belief in the Muslim apocalypse, while La Fontaine's
fisherman prays using Muslim terminology to catch more fish.” Several more
books have been altered, like La Fontaine's fables, and Victor Hugo's "Les
Miserables.” Not even Anton Chekhov or Oscar Wilde were spared. Ingenious
Islamic terminology was introduced into their works.

All of this would have probably never been uncovered if some journalists
from the Turkish newspaper „Radikal” had not by chance or by some hints
learnt of the secret project. Before the beginning of the Turkish school year at
the end of August 2006 the Turkish Ministry of Education had sent an order to
its publishing houses to re-issue „100 Essential Readings” which included
excerpts from the most important classical Western writers and children’s
literature. The collection was to serve as a textbook in schools across the
country. Of course, in Turkey no publisher would dare introduce any essential
changes to the books without the previous explicit wish or consent of the
Ministry. The idea in the new edition was that the works should avoid anything
that might allow doubts and inconvenient questions to rise in the young minds
through contrasting the positively presented Christian values of the classical
writers and the Islamic values surrounding and shaping the Turkish minds from
the very first to the very last moment of life. The solution was clear – Western
books had to be „improved” and „re-written” to obey the Muslim vaule system.
But through an unforeseeable coincidence the brilliant idea turned out to be a
painful mistake.
After the reports in „Radikal” also other newspapers took interest in the case.
Parliamentary discussion was initiated with opposition seeing their chance.
Engin Altay, the deputy of old Ataturk’s Republican Party, asked “if the books
of shame will be pulled from the shelves of school libraries,” demanding an
unambiguous reply from Çelik. Moreover he had the cheek to publically accuse
the ministry of something which most observers considered as obvious, namely
of contributing , if not ordering , the „corrected” version of „100 Essential
Readings”. Now the Turkish Government had to act. It dound at once a
convenient scapegoat. It was not the respectable Minister, educated in London
and other Western universities. He did not order or sponsor the project. No! The
government was not responsible for that! It was the arbitrary and incompetent
„Ilkbiz Publishing House” that had not acted according to the the wise and
„secularist” guidelines of the ministry. It was to blame for the scandal. But the
Ministry’s denigrated honour had be restored and besides all the traces of the
crime had be obliterated , bookshops and libraries purged. „We will sue them for
using the ministry logo !” said Celik to his electorate in the province of Van. No
one questioned the official version spread by the government. It is not advisable
to do that in Turkey.

This was all just a mistake of course, wasn’t it ? Some busybody read what
was intended just for children, not for him and then told someone else and the
newspapers made a scandal of it. It might have never happened though and we
might never learn that Turkish children avidly reading Alexandre Dumas or
Carlo Collodi read different authors, different stories and learn quite different
moral lessons from what we did in our childhood while eading the same writers.
We might never learn either that for many Islamic scholars Shakespeare was
a Moslem. The case is clear : his name is - after all - a combination of two
Arabic words for glory and greatness „Shaikh” and „Pir”, isn’t it?
Some witty observers suggested jokingly that because of that necessary
revisions should be done. Instead of sticking to the false works we should
discover the ancient originals : „A Mid-Summer Night's Bombing”, „Shahid of
Venice”, „The Merry Wives of Osama”, „Hamas, Prince of Denmark” and „The
Taming of the Jew”. The revisions should be undertaken not by the Saudi
Religion Police Literature Department , but by the “arch-secular” Turkish
Ministry of Education that has already shown its expertise, zeal and
inventiveness in the province of literature.
It might sound like a joke , but history likes perversities. A thing told today as
a joke may become bitter reality tomorrow.