Mr. Erdoğan’s fan club No doubt, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has millions of fans at home and abroad, including an unknown number of Turks who vow that they are ready to “die (and, surely, kill) for him.” Sociopolitical research reveals that his fans belong to Turkey’s poorer, religiously conservative and less educated masses. Empirical evidence reveals that his fans abroad belong to the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood school of extra-extra refined philosophical thinking.



Last year in Egypt, for example, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, president of the Association of Muslim Scholars and the ideological leader of the brotherhood, issued a fatwa that stated that he fully supported Mr. Erdoğan. Mr. al-Qaradawi went on to declare that the Gezi protests were “acting against Allah’s will.” Mr. Erdoğan’s “scholarly” friend and fierce supporter was not just a random scholar. In May 2004, he had said: “There is no dialogue between us [Muslims and Jews] except by the sword and the rifle.” A year later, he issued a fatwa permitting the killing of Jewish fetuses.



But the local branch of Mr. Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman fan club too has its own academic members with no less impressive ideas. A well-known fan is the (Islamic) theologian Ali Rıza Demircan, father of Mr. Erdoğan’s Beyoğlu, Istanbul, mayor, Ahmet Misbah Demircan. The elder Mr. Demircan’s latest fatwa orders us that “it would amount to sinning to listen to or to spread the tape recordings against Mr. Erdoğan.”



Naturally, one wonders who, really, Mr. Erdoğan’s “fans from the Islamic academia” are. The “scholarly” fan in Egypt apparently has very colorful ideas. But the “scholarly” fan in Turkey is no less eccentric.

Mr. Demircan had previously ruled that “capital punishment was part of human rights,” and that “the Alevi faith had no place in Islam,” thus declaring tens of millions of Alevis (and Nusayris and Shiite Muslims) non-Muslims and immediately shrinking the world’s Muslim population. But his remarkable academic expertise showcases itself through a more entertaining subject.



One of his masterpieces is the “Sexual Life According to Islam,” a two-volume book published in 1984. Here are some excerpts from that book which can be downloaded even today from Mr. Demircan’s popular blog:



- In heaven there will be no bachelors.

- Every man [residing in the lowest circle of heaven] will be given 72 women per day. A fully faithful Muslim will be given 100 virgins per day with whom he will have sex all day long. Women in heaven will become virgins immediately after having had sex with men.

- Every man in heaven will be given the [sexual] power of 100 men.

- Every person in heaven will return to the age of 33.

- Women will be given to men who died in the name of religion (Islam).

- Men in heaven will have a permanent erection.

- Every man in heaven will have sex with his wife and angelic girls all day long.



Of course, we in the non-academic world of simple people could ask Mr. Demircan if women should be faithful Muslims only to enter heaven and “be given to men as sex slaves,” or if we pray for his, my or other people’s mothers, wives and sisters so that they go to heaven “for that!”



Or ask the enlightened and enlightening scholar if this is what he really wished for the female members of his own family. We, simple people, probably would not, and keep on asking Mr. Demircan why people in heaven would return to the age of 33 and not 23; or what would happen to the faithful who died at the age of 8, 12, 18, 29 and went to heaven – why should they be “aged” rather than “rejuvenated.” Knowing that these would be questions of no importance…



It is futile, of course, to be curious about the logic behind any sick thinking as long as the sick thinking is the dominant thinking empowering and being empowered by other men who secretly or not-so-secretly share the same sick thinking.



But we can always ask, say, for journalistic curiosity or pastime, if President Barack Obama ever heard the saying that starts with the words “Tell me who your friend is….”