The idea of a universal doctrine of human rights is currently under attack in the name of cultural particularism and difference. Political leaders in China, Indonesia and Singapore have rejected Western expressions of concern about violations of human rights by their governments, with the argument that Western conceptions of human rights are not universal but culturally specific to the West, and the effort to impose these ideas on others is no less than arrogant cultural imperialism and interference in the affairs of sovereign states. In the Muslim world, too, we hear rejections of Western notions of human rights as culturally specific and the assertion that Islam has its own concepts of rights (which, for a believer, are universal). In this essay I shall explore some of the issues raised in this regard, with examples drawn mainly from Egypt and the Arab world, but which have obvious implications for current concerns in Turkey. I should make it clear at the outset that there is no one Islamic position on this issue, but many. In the Arab world, but more specially in Turkey, there are many Muslim thinkers and activists who have produced Muslim formulations of rights which are not different from the universal ideals.

Scholars of Islam in Turkish society have written penetrating analyses on the reciprocal influences and complementary relationships, as well as rivalries between, Alevi Islam, Sunni Islam, Islam of the Sufi orders, Islam of student activists, Islam of “Islamist intellectuals”, Islam as embedded in the oral culture and daily practices of the “mahalle”, Islam of the scriptures, and so on. There are clearly different ways of knowing Islam, distinct yet intertwined. My concern in the present study is with a particular knowledge of Islam—as constructed on the landscape of commercial television in Turkey.

Deeply rooted in “the great transformation” brought about by capitalism, industrialization and urban life, the history of modern architecture in the West is intricately intertwined with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Modernism in architecture, before anything else, is a reaction to the social and environmental ills of the industrial city, and to the bourgeois aesthetic of the 19th century. It emerged first as a series of critical, utopian and radical movements in the first decades of the twentieth century, eventually consolidating itself into an architectural establishment by the 1930s. The dissemination of the so-called “modern movement” outside Europe coincides with the eclipse of the plurality and critical force of early modernist currents and their reduction to a unified, formalist and doctrinaire position.

In the context of economic globalisation and the new international order taking shape after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Istanbul is assuming a new and strategic prominence in the world. What kind of city is Istanbul likely to become in its next phase of existence? What can we say of the urban culture and of the sense of urbanity that are now developing there? There are those who maintain that the new Istanbul is again becoming a cosmopolitan city, a cultural mosaic. What strike us most forcefully are the forces that are working to inhibit and undermine any such ideal. First, we consider the contemporary transformation in urban form, and then we shall go on to explore the changing cultural identity of the city.

No period was more decisive in the modern history of Palestine than the British Mandate, which lasted from the end of World War I until 1948. Not only did British rule establish the political boundaries of Palestine, the new realities forced both Jews and Arabs in the country to redefine their social boundaries and self-identity. But the cataclysmic events that continued through 1948, with the creation of Israel and what Arabs called al-Nakba (the catastrophe of dispersal and exile), took shape in the wake of key changes stretching over the last century of Ottoman rule. What was to be Palestine after World War I became increasingly more integrated territorially during the nineteenth century. And Arab society in the last century of Ottoman rule underwent critical changes that paved the way for the emergence of a Palestinian people in the twentieth century.

The Ottoman-Venetian war for the island of Crete in the middle of the 17th century (1645-1669) was in some ways an anachronistic struggle. The era of imperial struggle in the Mediterranean had come to a close in 1578 when the Portuguese army, assisted by Spain, was defeated at Alcazar in Morocco by the army of the Ottoman protégé, Abd al-Malik. The Ottoman victory was followed by a Spanish-Ottoman truce signed in 1580 which, though it seemed tentative at the time, ushered in a long period of peace in the Mediterranean region. The Spanish acquiesced to Ottoman control of North Africa and turned their attention to their acquisitions in the new world. The Ottomans, for their part, occupied themselves with military conquests in the East and no new campaigns were launched in the Mediterranean.