Tag: turkey

Haven't I Seen These Ruins Before?

Published on by D. G. Hart13 Comments

Out for my Sabbath stroll yesterday, I got a little lost though the statues atop the Basilica of St. John Lateran worked as my compass, I found my way to the Palatine Hill, which made the German Reformed side of me feel a little at home (though I now know “Palatine” has little to do with Germany and lots to do with an official’s status within the empire). As I progressed to the Foro Romano (Roman Forum for those mentally challenged) and looked out over the ruins to the Colosseum all I could think of was Ephesus. The temperature was as torridly hot as last year’s trip to Turkey, the sun as bright, the air as dry, my throat as parched, and the tourists as numerous.

The big difference is that Ephesus died. The city that was there — it was only second to Constantinople in the Byzantine Era — dried up as the harbor filled with silt and thereby cut of commercial access to the Aegean Sea. An earthquake in 614 did not do Ephesus great favors either. But to my untrained archaeological eye, the Turks have done a better job at restoring Ephesus’ ruins than the Romans have with the Roman Forum and its surroundings.

But that is not a knock on the Romans (as if I’m siding with Muslims over Roman Catholics) since they had matters to keep them preoccupied other than ruins and how to preserve them (and how to attract tourists to them). They had a major European capital city to build and maintain. So for all the money that may have gone into preserving the Colosseum in a way that would make it scaffolding-free for ME during MY trip, Rome’s citizens and officials also needed to worry about roads, a metro system, modern art, and pizza.

This means (at least for today) that the ruins in Rome are a lot more ho hum than in Turkey. Even though the Roman ruins are even more Roman than the Roman ruins in Turkey, they have a lot more to compete with in contemporary Rome. Thus far on this journey into one of the world’s ancient cities, I enjoy the competition.

The American Jesus on the Un-American Calvin

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Zach Hunt has read Calvin and he is disgusted. Here’s part of what he has to say to Calvin himself:

[Quotations from Calvin on predestination and human wickedness] are, as you demonstrate so well, the logical conclusions of your theology of divine sovereignty and, therefore, at the very heart of what you believe about God. Worse, this isn’t a case of you overstating without thinking through the conclusions. You’re clear that this sort of God who ordains genocide, murder, rape, children abuse, and every other conceivable horrendous act is the God you worship. . . .

The bigger issue I have, John, is that you have a tendency (cause I’ll be the first to admit they’re not all like this) to create incredibly arrogant and sometimes hateful followers who are just as cold, calculating, and callous in their theology and selective in their use of scripture as you are. Just like you, too many of your prominent followers today denounce their critics as heretics while praising God for a whole host of evil things that happen in the world from earthquakes and tornadoes to the marginalization, oppression, and destruction of people made in the image of God.

John, I don’t know how to say it any other way – you’ve got a bad habit of making disciples that aren’t very christlike in their love, mercy, compassion, and grace towards others.

This may or may not be a fair reading of Calvin, but it does do justice to those parts that are hard to square with modern notions about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And yet Americans continue to think that Calvinism bears some special and positive relationship to a political order committed to freedom, equality, and tolerance. In most narratives of American origins, the lines between John Winthrop’s Massachusetts and George Washington’s Philadelphia are smooth, straight, and easy to follow.

Could it be that Americans need to take a page from the Turks who seem to know that the caliph Suleyman the Great was not a forerunner of Ataturk? Consider, for instance, what ??? had to say about the current Turkish television sensation, “Magnificent Century”? Here is an interesting bit from Elif Batuman’s Feb. 17, 2014 piece on the series, “Ottomania: A Hit TV Show Reimagines Turkey’s Imperial Past.”

The debate over “Magnificent Century” touches on one of the key issues in Turkish politics: the question of national identity. Who were the Ottomans – enlightened cosmopolitans or decadent sociopaths? Who was Suleyman? Who are the Turks? For the first eighty years of the republic, national identity was defined largely by the figure of Kemal Ataturk, with his tailored suits, his commitment to scientific positivism and ballroom dancing, his devotion to an adopted daughter who became Turkey’s first female fighter pilot, and his emphatic rejection of all things Ottoman. Ataturk’s picture is on every denomination of Turkish currency, and hangs on the wall of every public building. It is a crime to insult his memory. . . .

The Ottoman revival has its roots in the Cold War, when the main political polarity in Turkey wasn’t Islamist versus secularist but pro-Communist versus anti-Communist. In Turkey, a NATO member and a U.S ally, widespread internal violence between leftist and rightist groups culminated in a military coup, in 1980. The new government addressed the threat of leftism by opening the Turkish market to global competition, and by promoting Islam as an ideological alternative to Communism. One result of these measure was the rise of a new class of observant Muslim businessmen – entrepreneurs who described themselves as “Islamic Calvinists,” characterized Muhammad as a merchant, and cited the Koran as an authority on limiting economic intervention by the government. Where Kemalism had its basis in economic isolationism and cultural Westernization, these businessmen wanted just the opposite: Western-style capitalism and a Turkish culture. In the Ottomans, they found the ready-made idea of a prosperous Muslim elite, trading on an equal footing with Europe but preferring halvah to profiteroles.

In some ways Turkish developments parable simultaneous U.S. history. During the Cold War, especially before 1965 when race, sex, gender, and war divided Americans, Calvinism and the Reformation became a bus stop on the modern ride from the Dark Ages to Enlightenment and the United States’ new order for the ages. In other words, religious roots became useful to both the Turks and Americans to justify national involvements. You can even compare the Religious Right to the Islamo-Calvinists – Americans who refashioned their religious and national heritages to concoct a national identity that made secular humanism illegitimate.

But unlike Turkey where the contrast between republican progress and religious past was always stark under Ataturk’s unruly eyebrows, in the United States the tension between the Puritans and the Founders was glossed or ignored. Americans, from Julia Ward Howe and Perry Miller to Rick Santorum, have rarely if ever been willing to acknowledge that Winthrop’s communitarian, religiously demanding, and exclusive Massachusetts was not what Ben Franklin, James Madison or even John Witherspoon had in mind for the United States (whether confederated or federated).

That dishonesty may be responsible for the secularist and atheistical reaction against the faith-based exceptionalism of the last four decades. It doesn’t make it pleasant or civil, but when you constantly hear about America’s Christian origins as a later iteration of the Puritans errand into the wilderness, you may want to push back.

At the very least, this dishonesty helps to explain why an HBO television series on Massachusetts Bay’s pastors’ wives will not becoming to Netflix soon. Not even the producers of Christian sentimental entertainment could turn those godly women into a series, say “Sectarians in the City,” where the distaff side of the Gospel Coalition could feel good about their small group Bible studies, enjoyment of sex, and cosmetic choices. Although, if someone could provoke the female allies to get their hubbies to read Anne Bradstreet, maybe the New Calvinists would stop being so d—d nice.

Turkey In the Middle

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

The trip to Turkey for college honors students will not include the Harts this year — a seminar in Rome conflicts with the Turkey trip. But I continue to follow Turkish developments while finding Ottoman and Turkish history fascinating for teaching and reflection on the West and the relations between religion and secularity. (Have I mentioned that Orhan Pamuk is a gifted writer?)

Turkey is the place where East meets West. For many centuries East stood for Islam and West for Christianity (first Eastern then Roman). For the last century East has stood for Turkishness (a secular construct thanks to Ataturk and the Kemalists, who borrowed freely from the French Revolution’s laïcité) and West has stood for post-Christian secularism. The latest wrinkle in East-West Turkisk relations is an Islamic ruling party that is pro-development in a way that would make the Cato Institute happy and has led journalists to coin the term Islamo-Calvinist, a party in addition that has also sought admission to the European Union after how many decades of being a good ally in NATO. But for all of these ties between Turkey and the West, Islam apparently continues to be the stumbling block. A recent op-ed from the Turkish newspaper, Hurriyet Daily News, put it this way:

At the end of the day, being a practicing Muslim and using religion for political gains may not be mutually exclusive for some politicians. It all depends on how you look at religion and politics. But this type of questioning among Europeans demonstrates the state of confusion about Erdoğan.

In the early days of his prime ministry, he was welcomed by European leaders and applauded as the great reformer of Turkey. At one stage, even U.S. president Barack Obama said Erdoğan was among the three of four leaders he kept talking on the phone.

Nowadays, Erdoğan’s popularity has taken a dive among Western leaders. “When there is a problem in Europe, one leader takes up the phone and calls the other one and has a frank discussion. But with Erdoğan, there is no leader willing to talk to him directly about issues of concern,” a European diplomat told me. . . . What had separated Turkey from Middle Eastern, Arab, Muslim countries, despite living in the same geography as them, was the fact that we had a leadership that – as a NATO and Council of Europe member and as an EU candidate – at least tried to talk the same language as Europe. Now we have a leadership that increasingly talks a different language than Europeans. It’s no wonder that it was Rusian President Vladimir Putin who was the only one rushing to congratulate Erdoğan after his local election victory in March.

And yet, Erdoğan’s Islamic outlook (at least an Ottomanian version thereof) may actually be responsible for his unthinkable outreach to Armenians. Here is how Mustafa Akyol explained Erdoğan’s almost-apology:

. . . let me also note that this relatively more open-minded stance on “the Armenian issue” by Erdoğan and his party, compared to the rigidity of former political elites of Turkey, has some ideological roots as well. In a nutshell, Erdoğan’s “Ottomanism” simply gives him more room to be reformist vis-a-vis the Armenians (and the Kurds, for that matter), than the “Turkish nationalism” that the former elites subscribed to.

The reason is “Ottomanism” implies a broad umbrella under which Turks co-existed peacefully with other peoples of the empire, including the Armenians and the Kurds. The tragic expulsion of Armenians in 1915 was not an outcome of this pluralist Ottoman paradigm. It was an outcome of the fall of that paradigm. The Young Turks, who decided on the exodus, were subscribers of a new ideology called “Turkish nationalism,” which was, as one must see, a response to the Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian nationalisms of the Balkans.

Soon after the foundation of the Republic, the more secularist version of the Young Turk ideology evolved into Kemalism and became the official creed. Today, Erdoğan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party), which had defeated the Kemalist establishment, is building a post-Kemalist Turkey. In this view, the expulsion of Armenians and the forced assimilation of the Kurds are historic mistakes that should be corrected.

In short, the very ideology of the AKP allows itself to take formerly unthinkable steps to reconcile with the Kurds and Armenians.

In other words, Turkey’s Islamic past, seasoned as it was with encounters with the West, is capable of magnanimity that Europeans still find difficult (at least when it comes to Muslims).

I’m not pretending to be an expert on any of this, but when it comes to thinking about Christianity and the West, America as a “Christian nation,” religion in the public square, and the “forces” of secularization, throwing Islam and the Turks into the discussion always complicates categories. And recognizing the complexity of the world and humans’ experience of it should be a welcome priority for all those who measure life in square inches.

Turkey Needs the United States (not for the reasons you think)

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

Do politicized Christians in the United States understand what Turkish Muslims are recognizing, that it’s not the morality but the scale of the government? Ponder this from Mustafa Akyol:

As you probably well know, Turkey has long been stressed by political tension between religious conservatives and secular nationalists, the latter also known as the Kemalists. However, that main fault line is somewhat passé these days given the emergence of a new kind of tension between the religious conservatives who had triumphed together in (OR: previous) tension from years gone by. This time, it is the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government and the powerful Fethullah Gülen Movement that are at odds with each other.

This new tension, like the old one, includes lots of mind-boggling details and jaw-dropping conspiracy theories. However, like the old one, it actually renders down to a simple question: the nature, and the masters, of the state. Since we have such an all-powerful and all-encompassing Leviathan, its control is a matter of life-and-death. Hence come all our bitter and zealous power struggles.

Another element in this new political tension is the Islamic credentials both sides have, according to their somewhat similar yet still distinct interpretations of religion. This religious element inspires a strong sense self-righteousness and causes the tension to get deeper and deeper.

But is there no way out? An interesting perspective came from an Islamic intellectual, Sibel Eraslan, who is a renowned novelist and a columnist for the conservative daily Star. She wrote:

“The [Gülen] Community-AKP conflict invites us to think more seriously on ‘secularism’… [because] the fight for political space and power among the pious forces us to look for a new referee.”

The term I translated here as “referee” (“hakem”) is a powerful word in Islam, referring to a neutral and fair judge who can settle disputes. And it is interesting that Ms. Eraslan, a pious, headscarf-wearing Muslim, thinks that this “referee” may be none other than secularism. Of course, this would not be the type of secularism that Turkey’s Kemalists have imposed for decades. That peculiar ideology, called “laiklik” (from the Frenchlaïcité), was based on the assumption that there was something wrong with religion and therefore it needed to be suppressed by the state.

What Ms. Eraslan probably implied, and what Turkey indeed needs, is a more American-like secularism. In other words, it should be based on the recognition that there is a problem not with religion, but with the concentration of political power.

North Pole Dancers

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John Fea’s piece about the War on Christmas reminded me of an entirely new front in that potential conflict. While listening to Philadelphia sports talk radio this morning, a show that my wife wishes I would abandon because of the too frequent banter about the female form, I heard an interview with dancers from a local “gentleman’s” club. They spoke of upcoming attractions — North Pole Dancers — that feature women wearing (and then not wearing) Santa outfits that would put audience members in the “spirit of Christmas.” I understand that the birth of Jesus involved some exposed flesh of both mother and child, but to associate a direct violation of the seventh commandment (sixth for Roman Catholics) with the incarnation is well nigh unfathomable.

It made me wonder if secular Turkish culture would ever stoop so low as to try to capture the “spirit of Ramadan” in strip club events. In many cities in Turkey visitors will find advertisements (and more) for clubs that feature scantily clad women. Turkey is by no means innocent. And perhaps the market forces of Islamo-Calvinism have tempted Turkish entrepreneurs to abuse Islam for the sake of profits. But I find hard to believe that Islam could ever be so domesticated as to allow Turks to confuse something holy with something so profane.

The market forces that underwrite the American Christmas make me think that Pope Francis was on to something. Now if he could only join Reformed Protestants in a call for ending the church calendar.

What's Good for the Turks is Good for the Protestants

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

Part of what makes studying the Ottoman Empire and Turkey fascinating is that you see aspects of civil society and political development that we in the West mostly take for granted. It is like studying a foreign language. I never understood English grammar as well as when taking Greek and Hebrew in seminary. To use English I never really needed to know the grammar. Not true for reading Greek (and faking my way through) Hebrew. The same goes for understanding the way western societies operate. We may take a civics class, but that doesn’t mean we understand the history behind or the choices made that resulted in a democratic and federated republic.

This is a way of introducing a poignant comment by Walter McDougall about the Turkish republic’s origins:

[Ataturk] set out to separate the state from Islamic religion, liberate women, define Turkish citizenship by residence rather than ethnicity, Westernize the legal system, promote economic development, and pursue peaceful relations with all of its neighbors.

In other words, Turkey accomplished in the 1920s what the United States did in the late 18th century. And Turkey also carried out some of the political outcomes that prevailed in Italy in 1870 when the papacy lost temporal authority over the Papal Legations. What was crucial in all three cases was for the laws of Turkey, Italy and the United States to be separated from the laws of Islam, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism respectively.

But apparently, some Protestants have not learned this lesson politics. They still insist that the state enforce God’s law. They also insist that they have no resemblance to Islam or Pius IX. In fact, one of the great ironies of U.S. history is that Protestants used a high-wall conception of the separation of church and state against any Roman Catholic attempts to receive state funding for parochial schools. When the courts then applied that same argument to public schools and removed prayer and Bible reading, Protestants (mainline, evangelical, and fundamentalist) cried foul. Apparently, separation of church and state is needed for Muslims and Roman Catholics, but not for our team.

Of course, the contemporary opponents of the secular may be right. The Bible may require a union of religion and politics and a return to Old Testament Israel. But are those contemporary critics of 2k and the secular willing to identify themselves as anti-American (not simply opposed to the U.S. of Obama but also to the republic of George Washington)? And are they willing to admit that they are anti-Western (in a way similar to political Islam)? Or do they want all the benefits of a constitutional republic in the West with whining rights about godless secular societies?

Calvinism's Debt to the Turks

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The arrangement and deployment of these symbols [of the Turks] – weapons and costume – began to alter subtly in the first decades of the eighteenth century, in part, remarkably, as a result of a shared interest in flowers. Flowers had been highly visible in the Ottoman capital from the mid-sixteenth century. By the 1630s the famous Turkish traveler Evliya Chelebi was estimating that there were some 300 florists in Constantinople. The open meadows along the Golden Horn were filled with tulips and lilacs in the spring and the lilacs’ scent was intoxicating. The introduction of the tulip to Europe from Turkey in the mid-sixteenth century, first to Augsburg in 1559, then to Antwerp and the Habsburg domains in the Netherlands between 1562 and 1583, revived a passion for flowers and gardens in the West. Mass production of blooms exported opened into an industry in the Netherlands, and tulip bulbs were exported across Europe. The Margrave of the small estate of Baden Durlach had more than 4,000 tulips in his garden by 1636, all carefully listed in his garden registers. . . .

It is impossible to be precise about the date but certainly beginning in the Tulip Era the symbolic connotations of “the Turk” began to gather new and extended meanings. The similarity of the tulip’s appearance to a turban was first noted by the Habsburg ambassador to Constantinople Ghislain de Busbecq in the 1550s. He was passionate about flowers and, based upon this visual connection, mistakenly gave the tulips their name, a corruption of the Turkish for turban, tulban. But turbans, once the symbol of Eastern violence, now acquired an additional, softer connection. . . . For the West, flowers, silks, and flowing robes suggested an indolent life rather than the rigors of the field of battle . . . (Wheatcroft, Infidels, 265, 266)

Life Among the Turks

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I brought along to Turkey a chapter from John B. Adger’s memoir, My Life and Times. For those unfamiliar with the name, Adger was an Old School Presbyterian who taught ecclesiastical history and church polity at Columbia Seminary, and was in some way the John Williamson Nevin (as in high church Calvinist) of the Southern Presbyterian communion. Before embarking on his teaching career, in the 1830s Adger was a missionary in Izmir (then Smyrna) not to the Muslims but the Armenians. He also ministered to African Americans in Savannah, Georgia, in connection with Independent Presbyterian Church.

Adger’s experience in Turkey was remarkably painful and would have driven your ordinary young and restless Calvinist to Joel Osteen. Three infants died during his tenure, and his wife also almost lost her life. Adger himself might have thought his days were numbered when he contracted small pox “of the confluent kind.”

But equally notable was how freely Adger moved about the Ottoman Empire, a regime ruled by the Caliph in Constantinople. Moderns might think that Christians were not tolerated in a Muslim society and that missionaries were even less welcome. Adger never mentions problems with the Turks nor does he suggest he was there to evangelize Muslims. Here is one description of his target group:

. . . the Armenian subjects of the Sultan are represented at his court by an officer called the Armenian Patriarch. This is always a bishop, who pays a large sum into the Sultan’s treasury for his official position and political and ecclesiastical power. He sells bishoprics to reimburse himself with a large profit. Bishops must sell priesthoods to reimburse themselves with a profit, and the priests must reimburse themselves by charges on the people for their priestly functions. Great is the power of the Armenian ecclesiastics. But perhaps the real lords paramount among these people are the rich Armenians of Constantinople, who are the bankers of the Sultan and all his pashas, and therefore able to make their power felt through all the empire. (95)

This kind of autonomy and power for Christians among the Turks, of course, had its limits. When Adger needed a Christian burial ground for his two infant boys, he could not find a church cemetery because he could not find a church:

There was no Protestant church building then at Boujah, but a suitable lot had been purchased, and a chapel was about to be erected. In that lot we buried our infants in one grave alongside of the one where we had shortly before assisted in depositing the remains of the wife of the Rev. Eli Smith, missionary to Beirut. No Christian church building can be built in Turkey without a special permit from the Sultan at Constantinople. Every effort to obtain this permission failed in this case. After a delay of some months, the Protestants purchased a dwelling house that had lately been erected, which with some inside alterations, would constitute a very commodious chapel. To this the Turks would make no objection. (105)

Compared to the experience of Jews in Rome and Bologna at roughly the same time (who were confined to ghettos), the Muslims were amazingly more tolerant than the Christians (more to come). And if the Ottoman Empire could be that commodious (for a price, of course), how much more the secular Turkish Republic?

Gallipoli

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Mel Gibson enthralled female movie-viewing audiences with his big blues and his down under twang when he starred in Gallipoli (1981), a film about a pivotal battle during the Great War (we didn’t count them then). Little did I know when I first saw the movie where in the world Gallipoli was – it’s in Turkey – or that I would some day visit it (twice so far).

The Allies decided in 1915 to try to break the stalemate on the Western Front by landing forces on Gallipoli, a peninsula along the Dardanelles of strategic significance, and sending them in from the East (along with Russia’s military). The reason the Australians made a movie about the battle is that Australians and New Zealanders made up the bulk of units to attempt to land at Gallipoli, and it was their first full-fledged service as part of the British Empire’s military (as I understand it).

But thanks to poor planning and Ottoman resourcefulness, the Allies experienced a bitter defeat in one of the most brutal series of battles – 100,000 soldiers died on both sides in eight months of fighting. (One irony is that the British won the rights to name bathrooms in Turkey – rule WC!) It was a pivotal event, not only in the larger war, but also in the history of Turkey and Australia. The war gave Australians, arguably for the first time, a sense of Australian nationalism – hence the movie. And for Turkey, Gallipoli produced a military leader – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk – who would become the father of the Turkish Republic. History runs on unintended consequences.

Each year Australian and New Zealand tourists flock back to Turkey to commemorate the dead and participate in ceremonies (April 25) that honor this war. The Turks welcome the Aussies and the Aussies in turn honor the Turks. The reason for the latter has something to do with the exceptional maintenance provided to the military cemeteries that hold the deceased Australian and New Zealand soldiers (some of whom could not be buried until after Armistice). Like many military cemeteries, the neat rows of white grave markers, surrounded by closely cut grass and war monuments of various kinds, are moving in themselves.

But the epitaphs we read yesterday were as touching as they were puzzling. They were curious, partly because the biblical references were small compared to what someone might expect from British colonial culture of the Victorian era. We did see one – had to be a Presbyterian – which spoke of justification by faith and peace with God. Another one invoked the second petition of the Lord’s prayer fittingly. But the one that was the most moving was also the one devoid of religion (an impossibility I know for the neo-Calvinist). It read “my only darling boy.”

Maybe a creative grad student has already done this, but a dissertation on gravestone epitaphs might be a useful way to measure biblical literacy and religious conviction. If the student compared wars, he or she might find ascending or descending rates of religiosity.

Another Coincidence?

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Islamic Calvinism.

Religion in Kayseri plays a central part in people’s lives. The city has a traditional reputation; the only place to get a drink is at the international hotel. But where in the past in Turkey business was dominated by the country’s secular elite, which firmly kept religion out of the boardroom, in Kayseri it has a central role.

And it seems to be a winning combination. Kayseri is booming. It holds the world record for the number of factories opening in a day – 190. The city boasts 50 out of 500 of the wealthiest people in Turkey.

But you would use never guess it walking on the streets of the city. There are few expensive cars, as ostentatious behaviour is frowned upon. Kayseri does have a rather puritanical feel to it. But that shouldn’t be a surprise, according Gerald Gnaus of the European Stability Initiative (ESI).

Gnaus recently published a report which draws a parallel with the 19th century Calvinists. Gnaus argues Kayseri buries the widely held belief that Islam and capitalism are incompatible.

“Many people in Western Europe — very serious thinkers too — have held that Islam is a fatalistic religion and that it suits a trading economy but not an industrial economy,” Gnaus says. “What we found in Kayseri is that on the contrary, the kind of characteristic traits that Max Weber attributed to the Calvinists – very hard working, very sober, not given to ostentatious displays of wealth – are the characteristic traits you find in businessmen in Kayseri.”

The term “Islamic Calvinism” caused a bit of a stir in Turkey, being angrily denounced by some in the Islamic media. But in Kayseri, most seemed quite happy with the label.

Mustafa Boydak is the head of the Kayseri chamber of commerce. He also runs one of the largest companies in the city Boydak. He also sees parallels with the 19th century puritans:

“In Calvinism there is this understanding that work is a form of worship, and Kayseri people share that understanding. Islam also teaches us to be tolerant, and open to new ideas, which is very important in business, and to people living here. But Christianity shares this ideal, and the influence of Christianity here is important. For centuries many Christian Greeks and Armenians lived here and were very involved in business, and this too has shaped people’s ideals.”

I’m not sure about the tolerance bit, though Mustafa Akyol makes as good a 2k case for Islam as any Western 2ker does for Calvinism. But when it comes to work ethic, the Turks would put many residents of Massachusetts to shame.