Why Are Turks Intolerant? - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/03/turkish-society-intolerant-others-nationalism.html
1) Were Turks always like this, or was this intolerance something new?
2) What was the underlying reason behind this intolerance? Was it really “an Islamic outlook, or a nationalist outlook that has Islam at its core,” as Mr. İdiz argued?
On the first question, I can confidently argue that the anti-Christian (and in fact, anti-non-Muslim) attitude in Turkey is a new phenomenon, if we speak within the long-term perspective of history. Because the land that we call Turkey was for centuries ruled by the Ottoman Empire, which was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state, in which diverse communities lived side by side. In other words, having a Christian or Jewish neighbor would not be disturbing at all for the traditional Ottoman Muslim; it was a simple fact of life. In the late 19th century, an era of liberal reforms, even seeing Christians or Jews among the ruling elite had become a fact of life. One third of the Ottoman Parliament, which first convened in 1876, consisted of non-Muslims — a large representation that is unthinkable in today’s Turkey.
What really destroyed this Ottoman pluralism, and the underlying tolerance, was not “an Islamic outlook,” but a modern, secular ideology: nationalism. (In fact, the Islamic outlook had nurtured tolerance, by its traditional respect for “the People of the Book.”) One of the many academic studies that confirm this view is a fresh new title by historian Nicholas N. Doumanis: Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and its Destruction in Late-Ottoman Anatolia. In his Oxford University Press book, Dr. Doumanis, referring to an “oral archive containing interviews with over 5,000 refugees,” shows that there was an age in Turkey where Muslim and Christians “worked and drank coffee together, participated in each other’s festivals, and even prayed to the same saints.”