Turkey is among top ten reformers in 2018
Güven Sak, PhD
11 November 2018
The World Bank released its Doing Business 2019 report just about ten days ago. And guess what? Turkey is among the top ten reformers this year. That is good, but not enough if Turkey wants to fulfill its potential. Let me expand on that a bit.
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Answers to Misconceptions - What is Sunnism and what it is not
Hilmi Demir, PhD.
06 November 2018
The Sunni tradition represents the mainstream of fourteen centuries of Islamic tradition. As its accepting, inclusive, and tolerant language melts away, the its center is occupied by extreme views that should otherwise remain in the margins of society. The hierarchy of Islamic sciences and education has yielded its place to the ideological and transient manifests of political movement. Discourses that are not profound matters, that are distant to metaphysical tension, that are deprived of knowledge of law, method, aphorism and wisdom are bound to be discarded and left to wither away with the very first lights of the sun. That is what is happening. Instead of the Sunnism that has for centuries been put up status quo, accused by pacifism and castigated by with accusations of sectarianism, we
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How we all became “unknown Middle Easterners”
Güven Sak, PhD
04 November 2018
Every flower has a season. Every idea has its time. That’s what I have been thinking about at the D-8 meeting in Antalya this week. The “Developing 8” was established by the late Prof. Erbakan in 1997, when he was prime minister of Turkey. This was right around the time when the G20 started as a meeting of finance ministers in response to the 1997 financial crisis. Erbakan was Turkey’s first Islamist prime minster, and he set up the D-8 as a forum for major Muslim counties. It was composed of Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey which have 15 percent of the world population. Back then, the union was fairly representative of the Muslim world, but had little coherence aside from that. It didn’t really come together as a policy unit. Today, that has cha
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