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Or will he side with Allah? Well we of course all know the answer to that one.......
ISTANBUL -- Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan flew back to a Turkey rocked by days of anti-government unrest on Friday and declared before a sea of flag-waving supporters at Istanbul airport: "These protests must end immediately."
"No power but Allah can stop Turkey's rise," he told thousands who gathered in the early hours to greet him in the first pro-Erdogan rally since demonstrations began a week ago.
Question for you conservatives who are backing the protesters in Turkey:
If a local government here in the U.S. were to propose replacing a city park with a shopping mall, and a bunch of college students went out and protested that decision, whose side would you be on?
Turkey has a similar "red/blue" divide as the United States does. The western coast, and especially Istanbul (which has upwards of 18 million, all told, and is mostly on the European side of the strait), is Western-leaning, secular, etc. The eastern section of Turkey is more traditional, rural, religious, and socially conservative. In recent years the "red" half of the country got their act together politically, hence the rise of Erdogan.
The problem with Egypt is as follows: the secular, educated, urban youth started the revolt, but then the majority of Egyptians are religious hicks. (This doesn't mean they're militant jihaadists, it just means they're rural, uneducated, deeply conservative, and religious.) Once everyone actually got to vote, the people that actually did the fighting in the streets were outnumbered by the masses that had stayed out of it.
The same thing happened in Iran. It was the urban left who ousted the Shah, but in the ensuing chaos the Ayatollahs were able to take advantage, relying on the fact that the majority of Iranians were rural religious types. Demographically that's now changing; the country is leaning more secular, urban, and young. This is the greatest long-term threat to Iranian theocracy.
If America's hardcore rural religious crowd were as numerous as their counterparts in countries such as Egypt, or Turkey for that matter (though nowhere near as extreme as in Egypt; for one, the Turks practice a mellower version of Islam, and Turkey as an economy/society is much more developed) the resultant representative government would be about as frightening.
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