Word: bardakoglu
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...against secular Turkey's greatest irony - the Religious Affairs Directorate, a massive state-run bureaucracy whose billion-dollar budget employs 88,500 people and funds mosques, churches and synagogues, but refuses to recognize Alevi cemevi meeting halls as places of worship. To do so, argues Directorate head Ali Bardakoglu, would be heresy. Last year, AKP lawmaker Mustafa Ozbayrak, referring to Alevi demands that they be allocated state funds, said, "If you give this to the Alevis, will you give the Satanists the same tomorrow...
...quoted his predecessor Pope John Paul II, who said on his own trip to Turkey in 1979 that Christians and Muslims must "recognize and develop the spiritual bonds that unite us." The most confrontational and politically charged word in fact came from Turkey's head of religious affairs Ali Bardakoglu who, in a speech during his meeting with Benedict in Ankara, warned against "Islamophobia." The Pope did not respond to this veiled swipe, and offered nothing of his own approaching the frank and sincere dialogue between the West and Islam that he'd called...
...famous hard-liner was going soft. After years of quietly, and then not-so-quietly, differentiating his approach to interfaith relations from Pope John Paul II's, the German Pope was sounding a lot like his predecessor. During Benedict's speech alongside Turkey's head of religious affairs Ali Bardakoglu, the Pope cited "mutual respect and esteem," "human and spiritual unity" and the common heritage of Islam and Christianity as ancestors of Abraham. In marked contrast to the nasty historical quote he'd cited in Regensburg, the Pope referred to a warm 11th century meeting of Pope Gregory...
...there is no hiding the fact that this is, above all, a diplomatic mission. A meeting Tuesday in Ankara with Turkey's head of religious affairs, Ali Bardakoglu, will be a chance for Benedict to try to definitively close the two-month fallout from his provocative remarks about Islam and the prophet Muhammad during a lecture at a German university. Many have tried to predict what the Pope might say about Islam, but most Vatican sources assure TIME that the Turkey trip will most definitely not be the occasion for a provocative follow-up to his University of Regensburg speech...
...university would spark a pointed discussion of Christian-Muslim relations and the rise of faith-based terrorism - just in time for his Turkey trip. What they sparked instead was a virtually instantaneous firestorm of criticism from Muslim leaders around the world. And the heat was hottest in Turkey. Ali Bardakoglu, head of the Turkish government-run religious-affairs directorate, said that Benedict should "replace the grudge in his heart with moral values and respect for the other." And that was among the tamer reactions. Another Turkish leader compared the German Pontiff to Hitler and Mussolini, calling him a "poor thing...