Fasting and responsibility

Today, I would like to share a part of the speech I gave on the occasion of the 8th Traditional Iftar that the AK Parti Foreign Relations Department hosted for the ambassadors serving in our country:

"Fasting is a form of worship that begins before Islam, and is therefore known or practiced by very different religions, cultures and nations.

Historically, it connects different generations to one another. Geographically too, as a shared experience lived at the same time in every part of the world, it regularly reminds people of certain things.

What does it remind us of?

Whatever situation we may be in, it reminds us of our responsibility toward other people, especially toward those in need, toward those in hardship.

"He is not one of us who sleeps with a full stomach while his neighbor goes hungry," says the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).

Responsibility toward the neighbor is a very important ethical rule on which all religions insist.

In today's world, as you will appreciate, the meaning and scope of the neighbor have also changed considerably.

In the welfare societies we live in, there may be no neighbors lying hungry within our close proximity, no neighbors in distress.

Yet in our world, which has shrunk as it has globalized, the hungry people everywhere in the world, the people living under oppression and persecution, are our neighbors. We cannot disregard our responsibility toward them.

Their being geographically far from us does not lift their responsibility from us.

And our world, living in an abundance of prosperity, is giving a poor performance in the test posed by hunger, hardship, massacres, forced migrations, and displacement from homes and homelands.

At present, the number of people who have had to migrate to Turkey alone from Syria to save their lives has reached 2 million.

As many have had to migrate to Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.

When those forced to flee Assad's tyranny in Syria came knocking at its doors, Turkey understood that this was a human test, made a critical decision and implemented an open-door policy. It did not look at the religion, the sect or the ethnic origin of those who came to save their lives; it regarded them only as people in need of humanitarian aid and extended a helping hand to everyone without discrimination. Turkey did not even call those who came refugees; it regarded them as "guests of God."

Unfortunately, both in the world's general approach to the refugee problem and with regard to the problems that this acceptance has caused, Turkey has received no sufficient support from the world other than words of appreciation.

The world neither shows the necessary attention to this refugee problem nor is it able to display the will for a fundamental solution to the Syrian problem so as to prevent more deaths.

Every day we witness the lives of people, traveling in ships under inhuman conditions in search of hope toward Europe because of the instabilities in the Mediterranean, ending tragically at sea. The heavy shadow of these dramas falls upon our comfortable lives and our advanced standard of living.

Ramadan is a special time that not only makes us feel precisely these heavy shadows and reminds us of our responsibilities toward these events, but also turns this into a religious obligation.

While we are busy with the rush of raising our levels of prosperity every day, if people in other parts of the world are dying of hunger or suffering oppression, we cannot say "that is their problem, it does not concern us." The consciousness of Ramadan forbids such an approach.

In our prosperity, in our wealth, there is certainly a right of the people who have to spend their nights hungry.

And, remaining silent before oppression is being a partner to oppression.

Four years ago, the peoples of the countries of the Middle East set out with a demand for bread, dignity and freedom, and the world unfortunately did not give sufficient support to the democracy they reached within a short time. Those democratic popular revolutions were soon replaced by military coups or by civil wars in which dirty power-sharing prevailed.

A military coup that shed the blood of thousands of innocent people was carried out against Muhammad Morsi, the first president elected by the vote of the people in Egypt's 7,000-year history. Those who carried out this coup, instead of answering for their own crimes, have sentenced hundreds of the people they overthrew to death in a swift and arbitrary manner, and are now announcing to the whole world that they will carry out these executions as soon as possible. Unfortunately, we see no sufficient reaction from the world either to the military coups or to these massacres committed through the judiciary.

The state of besieged Gaza, which Israel has for a long time deprived of the possibility of meeting even its most basic needs, is plain for all to see today.

The insensitivity the world displays in the face of all this is in great contradiction with the spiritual climate of the month of Ramadan we are in.

In the field of foreign policy, Turkey has always displayed an approach that puts peace, justice and human values first.

That Turkey has set the goal of "zero problems with neighbors" as a foreign policy paradigm in this period is not merely a simple foreign policy option. It is also, in part, an expression of our existential responsibility toward our neighbors.

Those who, looking at the intense conflicts and problems taking place in the region, find this goal unattainable and this style of politics too romantic should know that this style of politics is an intention, a direction, and as such it is not a policy that can be falsified.

Within 13 years, under the strong leadership of the AK Parti, Turkey, while continuing on the one hand to advance with resolute steps on the path to the EU, has on the other hand undergone a process of change that is revolutionary in every respect.

One summary of this change is that we have reached "from a nation belonging to a state to a state belonging to a nation." In this change that puts human dignity at the center, we can comfortably say that there is now a state entirely at the command and service of its people, and rest assured, this state is much stronger than before.

Undoubtedly, we experienced the turning point of this revolution last year in the Presidential election process. For the first time the people directly elected their own president.

The election process we went through on 7 June after these elections, and the picture that has resulted from this process, are also a strong expression of the level we have reached in democratization with the fundamental reforms carried out in Turkey during the AK Parti era."