The natural, the political and the religious in the borderlands of Europe

Abstract

‘The natural, the political and the religious in the borderlands of Europe’ seeks to contextualise the case studies on Islamist media responses to natural disasters, as they are examined by Ergul et al. in their study ‘The Wrath of Allah’. The authors expose significant differences in reaction to natural disasters between the Islamist and secular press in Turkey, and show that journalists and columnists in the Islamist press often employ deistic arguments in the face of earthquakes and droughts. In this commentary, I suggest that they do this not because of an underlying deistic, pre-modern or pre-rational mindset that is incapable of understanding catastrophes in terms of modern science or ignorant of a ‘modern consciousness’. Rather, they use the reference to religion and divine causation as a strategic resource in the performance of everyday political struggles. Even though there also exists an Islamist critique of the exploitative character of capitalism and the perception of nature in enlightenment thinking, this philosophical tradition is not at the root of the articles in Islamist papers, as examined in the ‘Wrath of Allah’. It is then not surprising that municipalities and government agencies controlled by the ‘moderately’ Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party, Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi in Turkish), while employing deistic arguments every now and then, and especially when political expediency demands, act on the basis of the enlightenment drive to control, contain and exploit nature.