An excellent polemic

Burak Bekdil wrote today an excellent column as a reply to Mustafa Akyol's column of last week. This is an excellent polemic, where the journalists are not insulting, not becoming personal but give their opinions from their points of view, and share them with their audience of TDN.
Now it's waiting on a reply of Mustafa. Excellent writing by the both of them.

Here is the column of Burak:

The sum of all secular fears – a reply
Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Last week, my ‘column neighbor’ Mustafa Akyol drew a very realistic typology: The secular Turk. That typology is so real, but does not explain Turkey as a whole. Hoping to make the picture more complete, I shall draw my typology: The Islamist/pragmatist Turk.

My “column neighbor” Mustafa Akyol wrote an excellent article titled, “The sum of all secular fears,” (Turkish Daily News, July 12, 2007) that was witty yet realistic; perfectly describing, in one virtual character that was the “secular Turk” coming home from a trip to “the West” with his girlfriend with fake blond hair, the superficiality of the “white Turk.” Mr. Akyol's account of the “secular Turk” in stylish jeans and t-shirt could not possibly be more accurate.
Allow me to remind you of Mr. Akyol's hero, the secular Turk, who takes a vacation to visit some place in Europe or North America: He is the boyfriend of the elegant girl with fake blond hair; he gets offended when the “indigenous westerner” he chats with during the flight believes all Turks wear fez or turbans; he believes in the Kemalist revolution “which worked really hard to wipe off anything Oriental from Turkish society;” he comes across terribly unpleasant scenes at Istanbul's Ataturk airport upon his return from the days of pilgrimage to the temples of modernity: Men with beards who prefer mosques to nightclubs and women with headscarves who as their role model take Prophet Mohammed's daughters and not Britney Spears; he calls these devout Muslims “cockroaches.”

Continue reading here.