Turkey's Opium: Football
Great Ambition, Great Disappointment
Football is an integral part of daily life in many societies around the world. In Turkey, however, this passion takes on an altogether different dimension — particularly at the international level. As the heir to a collapsed empire, Turks experience football as a visible expression of a deep historical inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West. A victory against a Western...
Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam offers a useful starting point for understanding the current crisis of political Islam. Devji’s central argument is that political Islam should be treated not simply as a timeless expression of religion in politics, but as one of the great ideological projects of the modern age. Like Communism, Baathism, Pan-Arabism, or anti-colonial nationalism, political...
