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Byzantine Empire, Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk "Father of Modern Republic of Turkey" versus Adnan Menderes "Great Riot of Istanbul"The Western Roman Empire fell on September 4, 476 AD, but the Eastern Roman Empire continued nearly another 1,000 years. Its capital city was Constantinople, founded by Emperor Constantine in 330 AD, regarded for centuries as the largest and greatest city on earth. Constantinople was located where the East and West met, being situated where the Black Sea empties into the Mediterranean Sea, and trade routes from the Far East and Central Asia connected to Europe. The Eastern Roman Empire was...

World War I ended with the Ottoman Empire vanquished and facing imminent collapse, its doomed alliance with Imperial Germany costing hundreds of thousands of Ottoman lives and dealing a death blow to the already creaking empire. But 100 years after the surrender of the Ottomans to the Allied powers at Mudros on October 30, 1918, the Great War is in no way seen as a pointless waste or even a defeat by modern Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Rather than focusing on the four years of devastating conflict that ended in the capitulation and eventual dissolution of the empire,...

NEWS ANALYSIS: Post-coup actions turn precarious for Christians, and potentially fatal for a vision of a civil Islam. In Turkey, a failed military coup against President Recep ErdoÄŸan on July 15, squelched in about six hours, has triggered a fierce government response: mass civilian arrests, declaration of a state of emergency giving ErdoÄŸan authoritarian power for at least three months and a hateful atmosphere of accusation that puts Christians at risk. As a longtime American ally, a member of NATO since 1952 and a country where important American military assets are located, TurkeyÂ’s stability has special significance for the U.S....

As dawn broke in Istanbul on Saturday, Turkey's largest city, it was still unclear whether an attempt by the military to wrest control from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been successful. A defiant Erdogan addressed crowds in the city, telling them that the coup had been quashed. "The government is in control," he told supporters.

A muezzin’s call to prayer reverberated inside the sixth-century Istanbul landmark Hagia Sophia for the first time in 85 years on July 1. The building in the city’s historic Sultanahmet district broadcast the azan from its minarets following July 1’s Laylat al-Qadr, or night of power, marking the first revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. The broadcast of the morning call to prayer from within Hagia Sophia is likely to reignite controversy over the use of the building, which was designated a museum in 1935 under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic. Although the...

Istanbul governor: 28 killed and 60 wounded We have just received an update on the casualties from the attack from Istanbul's governor. At least 28 people have died, with approximately 60 more wounded.

Two suicide bombers open fire before detonating their explosives at Turkey's biggest airport. At least 28 people have been killed and 60 wounded in twin explosions at the main airport in Istanbul, the city's govenor has said. Two attackers opened fire before blowing themselves up at the entrance to Istanbul Ataturk Airport's international terminal, an official said, citing information from the interior ministry. Police fired shots to try to stop the attackers but they detonated their explosives, the official said. A witness told NBC News that he saw a police officer diving to tackle one of the attackers - who...

Two explosions and gunfire took place at the Istanbul Ataturk airport Tuesday, the Turkish interior ministry said. The ministry reported multiple injuries, but the exact number was not immediately clear.

Explosion and gunfire heard at Istanbul's Ataturk airport, Turkish media report

These guys are not kidding. And the media is also going ballistics (see Washington Post, The Jerusalem Post and Turkish Today’s Zaman, also here). The media explosion started when the head of a provincial branch of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has stirred the pot by tweeting that the country should “get ready for the caliphate” of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A caliph is a spiritual leader of Islam who claims succession from Prophet Muhammad. The word, stemming from the Arabic khalifa meaning “successor,” has been the focus of much debate since being claimed by the Islamic State...

After ISIS, what’s next and who will finally contain it? Will the U.S. succeed in crushing ISIS or will it simply be encompassed by a much bigger dog? And where will this Caliphate story end, or better yet, mushroom into an uncontrollable phenomenon. We have maintained, that ISIS will never produce the ultimate Caliphate. Two decades ago we trumpeted that the Islamists of Turkey will revive the Ottoman Empire and today we remind, that you have seen this happening right before your very eyes and the evidence is mounting by the day. And we warn that the next 4 years,...

The heritage of centuries has been wiped out in little more than a year. Eventually the need to wipe out all traces of unbelief becomes obsessive. At one time, for instance, Egyptian law demanded that any house found to contain a copy of The Apology of al-Kindi (a book containing a polemical dialogue between a Muslim and a Christian) would be demolished along with 40 houses around it. Ethics were defined by what Allah said was good or evil in Sharia law. The Islamic State's behaviour is solidly rooted in Islamic ideology, law and practice. It is only when this...

Turkey has lifted a ban on the Islamic-style headscarf in schools, allowing girls from the fifth grade and up to cover their hair in a further easing of generations-old restrictions on the public expression of faith. The government, whose roots are in political Islam, has already lifted a ban on religious garb for university students and female civil servants, scrapping curbs stemming from the founding of Turkey's secular republic in 1923 on the ashes of Islamic Ottoman Empire. "Our female students have yearned" for the end of the ban, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said late on Monday after a...

“These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” ~ Erdogan, PM of Turkey Turkey took another step backwards this week … lurching toward Sharia … when 4 female MPs marked the end of a ban enforced since the early days of the Turkish Republic. The female MPs were wearing headscarves, as they walked into Turkey’s parliament in Ankara on Oct. 31st, designating the end of a prohibition vigorously imposed since the dawn of a secular Turkey. On its face, this step...

ISTANBUL — Police officers attacked a group of peaceful demonstrators on Friday in Istanbul’s Taksim Square with water cannons and tear gas, sending scores of people, protesters and tourists alike, scurrying into shops and luxury hotels and turning the center of this city into a battle zone at the height of tourist season.

The rich heritage of Tunisia, maybe the only place where the Arab Spring stands a chance Modern-day Tunisians, more Westernized than most Arabs, see themselves as descendants of the great Carthaginian general who invaded Italy. The Arab Spring began in Sidi Bouzid, a small Tunisian town, at the end of 2010. In a desperate protest against the corrupt and oppressive government that had made it impossible for him to earn a living, food-cart vendor Mohamed Bouazizi stood before City Hall, doused himself with gasoline, and lit a match. His suicide seeded a revolutionary storm that swept the countryside and eventually...

Video: Video Gallery -- May 31 -- Police fired into the air and used tear gas and water cannons on crowds responsible for hurling rocks at Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's convoy. Deborah Gembara reports.

WORLD’S “MOST DANGEROUS ISLAMIST” ALIVE, WELL, AND LIVING IN PENNSYLVANIA FEDS TURN BLIND EYE TO MOUNTING HOMELAND SECURITY THREAT by Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. The most dangerous Islamist in the world is neither Afghani nor Arab. He comes from neither Sudan nor Somalia. And he resides in neither the mountains of Pakistan nor the deserts of the Palestinian territories. This individual has toppled the secular government of Turkey and established madrassahs throughout the world. His schools indoctrinate children in the tenets of radical Islam and prepare adolescents for the Islamization of the world. More than 90 of these madrassahs have...

A Muslim siege is re-born in Turkey. Since the founding of modern Turkey in 1923 by secular military officer Kemal Ataturk, there has been an ongoing battle between the military services and the forces of political Islam over how the nation shall be governed – by Sharia (Muslim law) or by secular democratic methods. The recent arrests of fifty senior Turkish military officers, charging twenty of them with a 2003 plot to overthrow the government, demonstrate that Islam and Sharia are alive and well in that nation. The implications for the freedom of Europe and The West are significant, as...

In 2006, Thailand announced it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P address, and then identified 20 offensive videos for Google to remove as a condition of unblocking the site. ‘If your whole game is to increase market share,’ says Lawrence Lessig, speaking of Google, ‘it’s hard to . . . gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or in ways that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.’ In March of last year, Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google, was notified that there had been a precipitous drop in activity...