Why does one who cannot get a visa from the US for their nakedness take their anger out on Islamism?

It is a normal state of affairs that secularism, which has had a particular course in Turkey for a century, is reflected in people's minds in very different ways. What its true definition and its genuine, essential application are or are not is a separate matter. Past a certain point, what matters is who experiences it and how, and how they perceive it. The ways secularism, with its existence and practice approaching a century, is reflected in people's minds are an interesting subject in themselves. A superb phenomenological case.

For example, there is the perception of those who, having felt the pressure and persecution of a religious group, see secularism as something that frees them from the pressure of other religions or understandings of religion. Another form of perception is that of those who feel more strongly the pressure of secularism itself upon them and see, live and feel it as grounds for persecution, a source of pressure. Someone else, entirely from the standpoint of a ruler, may see secularism as a purely functional technique for keeping different religious groups and views together fairly.

Perhaps this is a perception in keeping with its definition as a form or principle of government, but very few people hold this perception. Even among rulers, very few in Turkey have perceived secularism in this form. In fact, perceptions that go beyond it are more widespread.

On one side are those who, instead of seeing secularism as a regulatory principle of the state meant to prevent religious groups or communities from oppressing one another, wronging one another, fighting or gaining supremacy over one another, see it in itself as a principle of truth above all religions. On the other side, at another point, are those who ascribe to secularism, on the contrary, a satanic role and see it as the mother of all evils.

In the end, what people have lived with regard to secularism determines the perception of secularism. Over time this perception can also change in different ways in everyone, with the different forms of secularism's application and experience. Those perceptions are not fixed either. In our country, no one's perceptions of secularism, for instance, are what they were 10 years ago. Until 10 years ago, secularism was a fetish subject that never left the country's main agenda.

It was something delicate and fragile that could be lost with headscarved women entering university, or with the doors of universities opening to Imam-Hatip schools, or with figures in religious garb being seen in a few places. Because its fetish side, rather than its functional side, was more dominant. Secularism had become not a regulatory, functional principle of government among different religions but itself a religion. Of course, for some the true religion, for others a false religion.

For its sake there were many coups and coup attempts. Even in the 15 July coup attempt, even if it was somehow left behind, there was no holding back from appealing to this fetish value of secularism. Yet today, at least for society at large, secularism no longer has such a fetish dimension. Today secularism is truly, as it should be, only a principle of government, and beyond regulating the relations of different religious and sectarian understandings with one another or with the state, it has no fetish meaning.

Of course, not for society at large, but there are still those who continue to load fetish meanings onto it and to have messianic expectations of it. And there is no limit or reckoning to these expectations. No one can keep a record of what anyone expects and hopes for, and what they nevertheless find. A phenomenon cannot be bounded.

The rebellion of a woman in the US, noted for the clothes she wore (or rather did not wear) when boarding a plane, and who was not allowed to board on the grounds that her boarding in that state would be seen as an act of aggression against other people, especially families with children, is also an interesting example of the unbounded limits of the perception of secularism.

However she had perceived secularism and whatever she had expected of it, she had thought that its most ideal form could be applied in the US, and in that state she turned up at the door of the plane. "That state" disturbed the airport staff at first sight even in the US, where a typical form of secularism is applied in its most model way, and which is today thought to tolerate multiculturalism and different lifestyles at the highest level. They found her boarding in that state unacceptable. The reason was that her state would disturb families.

The person, evidently suffering from the loss of secularism in Turkey, vented the rebellion right there not at the US but, via the US, at Islamism: "I am sick of this conservatism. I came here from an Islamist country. Because there women are second, third class, even classless. I am civilized enough to know what to wear. Here (Turkey) the pressure on women, bisexuals, trans people or gays is too much. And now I have experienced this incident. I really felt as if I were naked in another Islamist country. I am a woman and it hurt me!"

Although the word "secularism" does not appear anywhere in these words, they betray the whole course, in this person's mind, of what has been experienced regarding Turkey, secularism and Islamism, and of the discourses displayed against it.

The perception of identifying with Islam or Islamism all the universal moral limits that feel too narrow for oneself is not at all an unfounded, baseless perception.

From here, of course, a good door opens onto the following question: in Turkey, who wanted the freedom of what, and the Muslims or Islamists stood in the way? What kind of margin of freedom exists elsewhere in the world with regard to the things Muslims or conservatives are said to have obstructed, who knows how much, who takes it into account to what extent?

Moreover, don't the perceptions of this kind that have formed in Turkey about secularism and about Islamism have at their foundation roots of a tension that can never be removed, a discontent, an inability to accept? Who is going to try to prove what to whom and why? Who can prove what to whom, and how? Everyone acts according to their own temperament, don't they?