Language of New Turkey Vol. 3

The words Islamists use for their opponents

It’s been a while since I did “Language of New Turkey” post. In these, I take a few phrases from daily political speech and unpack them. You can see the first two below.

The Language Of New Turkey: Vol. 1

The Language of New Turkey: Vol. 2

Let’s get into Vol.3.

Azgın azınlık (The Rabid Minority)

This is a nasty way to talk about a minority. Let me explain my translation first. The second word, “azınlık” just means “minority.” Easy. Looking at the first word, the az- prefix would traditionally denote something that has gone off path or accelerated recklessly, but in modern usage it tends to refer to sexual lust, often in an inappropriate way. In that sense, “azgın” might mean “lustful” or “perverse.”

The problem is that “lustful minority” (or as Google Translate would have it, “horny minority”) sounds like a bad porno. “Perverse minority” doesn’t quite capture the invective nature of it. So I’m going to divert from the literal translation and go for “rabid minority.” I think that conveys the sense of an aggressive and sexually deviant group.

These days, you’d mostly hear this term coming from Islamist outlets. They generally use it as a slur to describe progressive activists. In 2021 for example, students and professors were protesting against the government’s seizure of Boğaziçi University, one of the country’s top schools. These things usually involve a great many signs, stands, and protest art. At one of the protest stands, there was apparently a picture of the Kaaba, juxtaposed on which was a figure I believe to be the Şahmeran and rainbow flags. At some point this picture ended up on the ground, and someone took a photo of it.

The offending picture. Source: Gazete Kritik. For a clearer view of the picture, see: Diken

All hell broke loose. Whenever the government gets a chance of depicting protestors as “margina"l” and deviant group, they’ll take it. The police arrested several students and hardened their crackdown on the Boğaziçi protests (I visited around the winter of 2021, and it looked like a border crossing in Israel-Palestine.) Fahrettin Altun, the head of the Presidency’s Communication arm and the regime’s propagandist-in-chief, tweeted:

The rabid minority are trying to normalize deviant thought and lifestyles with the sauce of freedom, equality and human rights. The aim of this is to corrupt our generations. Its only motivation is to trample on the things we deem holy. The scenes at Boğaziçi University are proof of this.

We will never allow those who try to hawk immorality, sacrilege, hatred and terror as freedom. This rabid minority, whose eyes are blind and hearts are sealed, have been condemned in the collective conscience of our beloved nation. Woe to us if fail to prevent your depravity!

So in its contemporary usage, the “rabid minority” is another phrase for the whore of Babylon, the “people of Lut,” a group that must be extirpated from the otherwise wholesome body politic.

Where does the word come from? The way azgın azınlık rolls off the tongue, and the way it fits the Islamist narrative, made me think that it must be old. I did a search though, and the earliest occurrence I could find was in the June 2002 issue of an Islamist magazine called Anadolu Gençlik (Anatolian Youth). It’s an article by writer D. Mehmet Doğan, entitled “The rabid minority is admonishing the reasonable majority!” So here we have the antithesis of the rabid minority: the reasonable majority, which sounds a bit like Nixon’s “silent majority” to me. Doğan’s problem here is that the intelligentsia of the 2000s is pushing around the conservatives:

In our day, words in Turkey are being made enemies of truth and justice. Words are being changed, and if they cannot be changed, their meanings are distorted, thwarted, they are practically [sexually] violated.

He then writes that “rabid minority” and “reasonable majority” are examples of such distortions, presumably in the mainstream press. He’s implying that they are describing the Islamists as a “rabid minority.” This, he writes, “substitutes its opinion for the reasonable opinion of society, just like the Bolsheviks used to do.” So he’s not just criticizing the mainstream press for its portrayal for of the Islamists, he’s turning things the other way around, saying I’m not the rabid minority, you’re the rabid minority.

The full article, for your reading pleasure. Source: IDP

I think most of the cases where liberals, Kemalists and perhaps leftists called the Islamists a rabid minority were before the internet, and thus hard to find. There’s one Milliyet column from 2004 where the Güneri Cıvaoğlu writes about a liberal Muslim NGO:

According to them, the moderate and secular Muslim majority must now weigh in against the fundamentalist, oppressive and violent Islamist minority that has influenced Europe. In other words, the silent majority should not cower in the face of the rabid minority.

There’s also Mehmet Yılmaz, who referred to radical Islamists as a “rabid minority” just last year. Both of these writers are older and might be using the language of the 1990s.

So Doğan, and probably people like him, flipped the phrase around. I think the way Islamists use “rabid minority” is still defensive, perhaps even reciprocal. I think they are more likely to use the phrase when they need to cover up immoral sexual practices in their own midst. Late last year, for example, a man belonging to the İsmailağa Islamic order was reported to have married his daughter off at the age of six. Civil society groups and the media put pressure on the government to do something about it, and eventually got the father and supposed husband arrested. İsmailağa’s members were soon protesting in front of government buildings.

Here is a brief clip of those gentlemen:

Their slogan was “AKP don’t give way to the rabid minority.” That was strange to hear. If you support the government, you don’t call it “AKP,” you say “AK Parti.” Saying “AKP” puts distance between you and the party, signaling that your support for it is conditional. Groups like İsmailağa tend to think the government is too deep into the secular world, but as long as it bends things in their favor over the long run, they’ll support it. This particular court case is still in progress, but the prosecutors seem to be having a hard time pinning down the two men. I’m not surprised. İsmailağa is a very powerful order.

Something similar happened in 2017, when, İhsan Şenocak, a preacher known for his fire and brimstone sermons, argued that if fathers allow their daughters to wear jeans and live independently of men, they are condemning their daughters to hell, and should be prosecuted for it. There was a public uproar about this, and Diyanet (the body supervising mosques) briefly suspended him. The Islamist newspaper Yeni Akit’s headline the next day, referring to Diyanet, read “They bowed their heads to the rabid minority.”

Akit’s headline on October 29, 2017. Source: Medyafaresi. Şenocak, by the way, was returned to his position shortly thereafter. He quit again the next year. He pressures has had a lot of success pulling the government in a more Islamist direction as a free preacher.

Azgın azınlık has also been used by political leaders in recent years. Soon after the opposition won the big cities in the municipal elections in 2019, Erdoğan said:

We will not allow the rabid minority, which is in conflict with the beliefs of the people and Istanbul’s history, to destroy this city’s fabric, and this city’s ancient character.

It was mildly scandalous that he said that, and sparked a bit of commentary. It was one thing for Islamist newspapers to say it, another for the president - no matter his origins - to join in.

In 2021, Ali Babacan, the former AK Party member and now free-floating opposition figure, said “we are determined not to leave our country to a rabid minority that feeds on revenge.” This was a striking way to address his fellow opposition parties, and a lot of people in the opposition media piled on him for it. Babacan later walked back some of his remarks, saying that his words “exceed their purposes,” but still, he said, he stood by the gist of it. Opposition conservatism, it seemed, was about preventing the godless minority from commanding over a devout majority. His party’s promise was to split the “reasonable minority” from Erdoğan and take their votes into the opposition. (That failed to happen, and Babacan had to list his MPs under the CHP in the recent elections.)

In June 2022 again, while accepting an award from the Yeni Şafak newspaper, Erdoğan said “We did not allow the rabid minority, which sees itself as the boss of Turkey, to exert pressure over the silent majority.” The reference to Nixon had become explicit here. Nobody considered it scandalous any more. It had became a pretty normal thing to say.