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News had broken in late October that the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) would be firing hundreds more imams, particularly in eastern and southeastern towns where the majority of residents are Kurds, for their alleged support of the PKK. This follows the directorate’s previous wave of firing more than 2,500 personnel accused of being Gulenists.

there is no local demand for Diyanet to provide either male or female preachers

One former mufti who is an Islamic scholar and jurist told Al-Monitor, “For decades, the Turkish state struggled to 'Turkify' the Kurds. Finally, the Kurdish identity became more acceptable in Turkey with the peace process initiated by [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan." Since the process collapsed, however, "Erdogan and supporters in the ever-expanding Diyanet have found a new solution: 'Sunnifying' the Kurds. They claim that due to lack of development, Kurdish towns have been neglected and they forgot real Islam. They have nominated male imams and preachers, but it has not been effective,” the scholar said. Instead, thousands of people in the southeast joined civilian resistance movements, which included local, unofficial Friday prayers. Civilian Friday prayers meant boycotting the government mosques and holding the prayers in the street, with an unofficial imam, in Kurdish.

He questioned whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was really a Muslim, which will likely provoke Alawites inside Turkey and abroad

Erdogan denied interfering in Syria’s internal affairs. He launched an attack on Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the opposition Republican People's Party, describing him as part of an anti-Turkey campaign. He said that “just like there is the Baath Party in Syria, there is the Republican People's Party in Turkey.”

the ISIS military and weapons training and the ISIS “obligatory shariah training” in which new male recruits are taught the ISIS takfir ideology, an ideology that justifies use of violence against those considered heretics or unbelievers, including against fellow Muslims.

Abu Mansour explains the format and nature of intake forms that were filled out at the ISIS reception area. “It was a form about experience, countries you visited, etc. I don’t remember it very well, but it was very detailed,” he explains. He further continues, “There were several people who came with higher education. We wrote his discipline, his studies, his languages. These things were recorded on my forms.” According to Abu Mansour, job placements occurred after another intake took place inside the training camps. “At those places, there were very trusted people running the ISIS offices of recruiting, so if you say you’re an engineer, they put you to that kind of job. It was an office of human resources management,” he states, adding, “but of course different, because in ours we also had, ‘I want to be a martyr.’

According to Abu Mansour, the numbers of would-be “martyrs” went down as the Caliphate was in fact established. “It started to go down as Raqqa stabilized. [Then,] most came simply to live. It was a small ratio of those who came to martyr themselves.” Adhering to his uncanny ability to remember exact recruiting figures, he explains, “Before 2014, 50 percent came to martyr themselves. Then it went under 20 percent.”

in public conversation in America today, “Islam” is a racial term. Being Muslim doesn’t just mean not being Christian or Jewish. It means not being white.

in the struggle to be classified as white, Middle Eastern Christians had an advantage: Jesus. In the 1915 case Dow v. United States, a Syrian Christian successfully argued that he was white because Jesus, the original Middle Eastern Christian, was too. In 1925, in United States v. Cartozian, the Court designated Armenians as white because, “[a]lthough the Armenian province is within the confines of the Turkish Empire, being in Asia Minor, the people thereof have always held themselves aloof from Turks, the Kurds, and allied peoples, principally, it might be said, on account of their [Christian] religion.” In the 1942 case In Re Ahmed Hassan, a Michigan Court said a petitioner from Yemen was not white because, “Apart from the dark skin of the Arabs, it is well known that they are a part of the Mohammedan world and that a wide gulf separates their culture from that of the predominately Christian peoples of Europe.”

Often, the politicians and pundits most eager to profile Muslims are the same folks who in the 1980s and 1990s defended the “racial profiling” of blacks. And listening to them, you sometimes get the sense that they think the process would work the same way: just look to see who the Muslims are. In 2011, for instance, Long Island Congressman Peter King suggested that when deciding who police should target as potential terror suspects, a “person’s religious background or ethnicity can be a factor.” But if the problem is Muslims—a billion person religion with adherents from Malaysia to Mauritania—what does “ethnicity” have to do with it?

a resurgence of attacks by the Islamic State group in northern Iraq

In neighboring Syria, IS attacks on security forces, oil fields and civilian sites have also intensified.

the militant group is taking advantage of governments absorbed in tackling the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing slide into economic chaos.

after a career spent in an Islamist movement erected in opposition to Ataturk’s steamrolling push to secularize Turkey and turn its back on its former Muslim dominions, Erdogan, a professionally trained Muslim cleric, has set about making Ataturk all his

nothing prepared Erdogan’s pious base for his latest and very public embrace of Ataturk on Nov. 10, the 79th anniversary of his death. Erdogan breezily claimed that the ties between the late leader and the pro-secular main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which Ataturk founded, had ended on the day that he died. Coup plotters and assorted others “hostile to the history of our homeland and the values of our people” had only invoked his name. “Are we going to leave [Ataturk] to the hands of those fascist circles with their Marxist rhetoric?” he thundered. “We will not allow a shapeless party such as the CHP to steal Ataturk from our people.”

The consensus among Erdogan’s critics is that his newfound love of Ataturk is meant to justify his bloated monopoly over power in the wake of last year’s bloodily botched coup. Just as Ataturk had to keep an iron grip on the young and struggling republic to ensure its survival in the face of myriad enemies, so too does Erdogan, according to this reasoning. Thus jailing tens of thousands of citizens on thinly supported terror links and using military force to snuff out Kurdish nationalism is de rigueur.

For the Shiite communities in Iraq and Lebanon, Tehran and its proxies have failed to translate military and political victories into a socioeconomic vision; simply put, Iran’s resistance narrative did not put food on the table.

Today, Iran seems to be winning the long game. Its proxy in Lebanon prevailed in last year’s parliamentary elections. In Syria, Iran managed to save its ally, President Bashar al-Assad. In the past several years, Iran has also gained a lot more power in Baghdad through its proxies, including the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the Shiite militias created to fight the Islamic State.

Hezbollah’s costly involvement in the Syrian war and pressure from U.S. sanctions on Iran have forced the party to cut salaries and services, widening the gap between the rich and the poor within its own community. Meanwhile, the party also drafted mostly Shiites from poor neighborhoods to go fight in Syria, while its officials benefited from the war riches, causing much resentment.

In Iraq, the protesters mostly consisted of angry young working-class men, and they were quickly confronted with violence. In Lebanon, meanwhile, the protests have been marked by that country’s unmistakable sense of style and festive spirit, and the initiators have mostly been from the upper social classes. In downtown Beirut this past weekend, the sea of protesters included a woman in white-rimmed retro sunglasses with her dog named Pucci and a young man waving a Lebanese flag while lying in an inflatable kiddie pool. Yet despite the stark contrast between the protests, the rebels in both countries are in fact very similar. They are confronting many of the same political problems and are making essentially the same demand. They want the downfall of their countries’ existing self-serving elites, and big changes to the sectarian constitutional systems that enabled them

if austerity measures were a trigger, the protesters now have much bigger complaints on their minds

Iraqi protesters share the Lebanese view of their ruling elite as corrupt and inefficient (although they have also learned their government is quicker to resort to violence to restore order)