SOUL FOOD:Radical groups seem to mask killings under religious reasons

There’s an old saw preachers use from time to time when making the point that merely saying you’re a Christian doesn’t make you one: Put a horse in a garage and call it a car if you like, the analogy goes, but calling a horse a car doesn’t make it one.

This is akin, I think, to what happens at times when we grant religious motives to profane acts that are at heart rooted in hegemony or politics. A perpetrator can claim religious reasons for an act, or we can presume them, but neither makes it so.

Last week I took exception to questions raised by Jeffery Weiss who writes on religion for The Dallas Morning News. Considering the killings of three Christian men in Malatya, Turkey last month, Weiss asked on the Dallas News religion blog (religion.beloblog.com), “Should I care more about evil done in the name of God vs. evil done for power or politics or any other myriad of reasons? And if so, why?

“What makes those three deaths worth singling out in a world where genocide and mass tortures are all-too easily found?”

The questions goaded me. Is it best if we attend to savagery only when, like so much else in our culture, it’s super-sized? Were these killings in essence even about religion?

Many linked the slaughter of Tilmann Geske, Ugur Yuksel and Necati Aydin to the slayings of Armenian Orthodox journalist Hrant Dink and Roman Catholic priest Andrea Santoro. So the Vatican’s envoy to Turkey, Antonio Lucibello, stood out when he took pains not to.

Sounding like a man treading on eggshells, he criticized the dead rather than their assailants. “Some Christians,” he said, “are not careful about missionary work.”

The killings in Malatya were notably more gruesome than the shooting deaths of Dink and Santoro. Before the throats of Geske and Yuksel and Aydin were cut ear to ear, the men were tortured for several hours.

Yes, the dead men were Christians. Yes, an account of what happened written as an “Open Letter from the Protestant Church in Smyrna” said of the youths arrested for the murders: “These young men, one of whom is the son of a mayor in the Province of Malatya, are part of a tarikat, or a group of ‘faithful believers’ in Islam.”

Yes, notes in the pockets of all five youths allegedly claimed, “We did this for our country. They are attacking our religion.” Yes, they allegedly told police, “We did it for our religion.”

But did they?

I questioned Atilla Kahveci, the interfaith dialogue director for the Global Cultural Connections Foundations in Irvine (whose members are mostly Turkish), about the reference to “tarikat” in the letter from the Protestant Church in Smyrna. His horror at the idea was palpable.

“No tarika encourages such killing,” he said in an e-mail to me.

When I exchanged e-mails with several scholars about the possible connection they granted that to a point but their views were more complex. Jenny White, associate professor of anthropology at Boston University and author of “Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics,” wrote, “A tarikat is not a terrorist organization. It’s a religious brotherhood. So it would not condone killing.”

But she added a caveat. Through the strong relationships forged in such groups, it’s conceivable in her view that some young men might act on the orders of a leader whose motive is “larger” and not “simply religious,” if religious at all.

In his own words, Mark Sedgwick agreed. Sedgwick, associate professor of history at the American University in Cairo, has written “Saints and Sons: The Making and Remaking of the Rashidi Ahmadi Sufi Order,” “Establishments and Sects in the Islamic World,” and “Sufism: The Essentials,” among numerous other publications.

Yes, he said, tarikat are Sufi, and Sufism, as a whole, does not encourage killing people. In the letter from the Protestant Church in Smyrna, he found the phrase “group of ‘faithful believers’ in Islam” misleading.

It is a group. Of believers. Still, he said, “Saying someone belongs to a tarika tells you nothing more than saying someone goes to church.” In the mind of Michael Meeker, professor emeritus of anthropology at UC San Diego and affiliate professor at the University of Washington, there is no doubt groups with extremist ideas of some sort exist.

One example, he said, is the Kaplan group in Germany, which desires to establish Islamic sharia as state law.

Yet its members, he says, would have been “promptly jailed” had they tried to organize in Turkey. When it comes to the killings in Malatya, Meeker doesn’t see a tarikat as the key.

Like the others, he’s doubtful of their religious motive. The “overtones,” as White called them, may be religious but in the end it’s the efforts of those Kahveci describes as “a few extremists or fanatics,” whose goal is to undermine Turkey’s accession to the European Union.

For Kahveci, whose mission through the Global Cultural Connections Foundation is to foster love, respect and acceptance for others regardless of their religion, race or culture, these slayings were clearly more than drops in the world’s bucket of misery.

The accused killers, wrote Kahveci, “played with [religion] for their own ends … shouting slogans [while] the meaning of the religion they were shouting for did not go [even] as deep as their throats.”

He and other member-volunteers for the Global Cultural Connections Foundation devote endless time to their cause. Then, laments Kahveci, it takes only one who, “comes from nowhere and has a match in his hand with the intention of burning the house in a second, and here is what he does … “

The shame is, White explained, while the United States keeps silent and the European Union drags its feet, such men are emboldened.