Today's Special

The CLS program through which I came to Turkey is really awesome. Not only do we go on all sorts of trips (next week: ISTANBUL!!!!), they organize special lectures and things for us, too. Yesterday the assistant to the UN High Council on Refugees in Turkey (I think I just botched that title, but you get the idea) came and gave a talk, and in doing so gave me a potential thesis topic (yay!).

And today, instead of six hours of Turkish (which, it turns out, not one person in our class can handle more than twice a week), we're going to visit parliament and the AK party headquarters!

I'm sure you all know what a parliament is, so I won't describe that. The AK party is the party of Erdogan, the prime minister, and Gul, the president. Or maybe the president can't officially have a party; I forget. AKP definitely backed him when he was running, at any rate. It's a hard party to figure out - it's accused of being "Islamist" (both Erdogan and Gul's wives wear headscarves) and a lot of the Turkish educated elite doesn't like them. (Including my host mother - I learned the words "reactionary" and "ignorant" in conversations with her about the AKP.) My host sister says she thinks they are trying to form an "Islamic bourgeoisie" and are basically giving money to conservative Muslims to do so, a fear based on the increasing numbers of headscarved women in more middle-class and affluent neighborhoods in Ankara.

On the other hand, my Turkish teacher has pointed out that AKP is the only party that's presented a reasonable plan for EU accession, and is in several other ways a party cut from Western liberal-democratic cloth. Politics is not really my cup of tea (although if it were, it would be my 587th cup of tea since arriving in Turkey), so I don't have much personal insight to add to this. I sort of wish I did... Anyway, I don't think I'll be figuring out anything earth-shaking today, but still, it should be a really interesting trip! Also, we get free lunch!