Ahmed Fouad: Egypt is now publishing Friday sermons in English, but is anyone reading them/Cengiz Çandar: Erdogan gobbles up power in new Turkish government

Egypt is now publishing Friday sermons in English, but is anyone reading them?
Ahmed Fouad/Al-Monitor/November 26/15

CAIRO — The Egyptian Ministry of Awqaf (Religious Endowments) announced Nov. 2 its intention to publish the unified Friday sermon it prepares each week on the ministry’s website, in a bid to “convey moderate Islamic discourse to the whole world in various languages.” While the ministry has hinted at future plans to translate into languages other than English, the exact details have yet to be announced.  The Ministry of Awqaf decided in January 2014 to unify the Friday sermon in all Egyptian mosques, vowing to take over the administration of any mosque that violated the decision and strayed from the set sermon.
The ministry published its first English sermon on Nov. 6, followed by subsequent translations for Nov. 13 and Nov. 20. However, the declared goal behind the publication of the sermon in English — making it accessible to “the whole world” — isn’t being accomplished due to some flaws in how the English version is published.
The Ministry of Awqaf itself is responsible for some those flaws, as its website is designed in Arabic and has no English version. This makes it nearly impossible for those who do not read Arabic to find the published sermon, since all instructions leading to the English version are in Arabic.
Mohammad Aziz, one of the founders of 3rd i Studios, a website design and e-marketing company, spoke to Al-Monitor about the importance of proper website design when marketing content to audiences in multiple languages. He said that when non-Arabic speakers are trying to navigate an Arabic website, Google Translate may be the only option available to them. However, this “turns out to be useless” in the case of the ministry’s website, given the poor quality of Google’s translation and the fact that one must navigate through several pages to arrive at the English copy of the sermon.
“Having an English version of the website is not enough,” Aziz said. “The page must also be publicized [to English speakers], similarly to the English page of the Egyptian Dar al-Iftaa.” The latter has nearly 150,000 followers on its Facebook page.
The ministry’s website has very few visitors from outside Egypt. According to SimilarWeb, a site that provides traffic data for websites, the ministry’s site had 130,000 visits in October, with more than 90% of them coming from within Egypt. The percentage of foreign visitors is small compared with other Arab countries’ ministries of religious endowments. For example, the website of the Ministry of Awqaf in the United Arab Emirates, which has an English version, had 140,000 visitors in October 2015, with more than 65% of them coming from abroad.
Another flaw in publicizing the English version lies in the content of the sermon itself, which often fails to address current events that would be of interest to a global audience. On Nov. 6, when the first English sermon was published, the downing of the Russian airplane that took place on Oct. 31 was recent, and Wilayat Sinai (the Islamic State’s branch in the Sinai peninsula) had claimed responsibility for the attack. The sermon, however, made no mention of the incident despite its serious implications for Egyptian national security and Egyptian-Russian relations.
What’s more, the Ministry of Awqaf’s later sermons made no mention of the terrorist attacks that took place in Paris on Nov. 13, despite the fact that French mosques delivered a unified sermon on Nov. 20 to highlight Islam’s rejection of terrorism and crimes committed by IS. This unified anti-terrorism sermon was set to be delivered in “most American and European mosques after Islamic leaders on the three continents signed a religious work agreement to unify the Friday sermon of Nov. 20,” as per a statement issued on Nov. 19 by Mohamed Bechari, secretary-general of the Islamic European Conference (IEC) and chairman of the National Federation of Muslims in France. For his part, Abdel Fattah Idris, head of the Comparative Jurisprudence Department at Al-Azhar University, told Al-Monitor, “The Friday sermon must deal with the problems that people are grappling with, as the Prophet Muhammad did, and the biggest problem currently facing Muslims is terrorism. Just like other religions, Muslims are threatened and frightened by terrorism, which is distorting their image and tarnishing the image of Islam in the world as all of the [terrorist] organizations are using slogans of religion and Jihad [in an attempt to justify their actions].”
Until the Ministry of Awqaf focuses the unified sermon on issues that concern a wider audience — in addition to making the website accessible to English speakers — its goal of presenting moderate Islamic discourse to the world is not likely to be achieved. The ministry should work to publicize its English content and coordinate with Islamic leaders and institutions abroad to make translating the sermon a worthwhile venture.

Erdogan gobbles up power in new Turkish government
Cengiz Çandar/Al-Monitor/November 26/15
I was waiting for the announcement of the new Turkish Cabinet on Nov. 24 when a Russian fighter jet was shot down by a Turkish F-16 on the border between Turkey and Syria. The magnitude of the international crisis that the incident may generate is still too early to predict. Hearing an angry Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said Russia was “stabbed in the back by those who abetted the terrorists” and accused Turkey of aiding the Islamic State (IS) in transporting and selling its oil, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov canceling his visit to Ankara and calling on Russians not to go to Turkey, it is not hard to predict the days ahead could hold very serious developments. The announcement of the anxiously awaited new Turkish Cabinet revealed the identity of the government that has been much debated. Would it be the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or a coalition between the president and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu? Following the announcement of the new Cabinet, it is clear that the 64th government of the Republic of Turkey is the government of Erdogan.
One of the 72 founding members of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), who asked to remain unidentified, talked to Al-Monitor about the nature of the expected government a few hours before the announcement. The official, who was until he was sidelined recently a well-known figure within the AKP, speculated that the new government would reflect the power that Erdogan has with some minor concessions given to Davutoglu for face-saving purposes.
The announcement of the new government had in store surprises even for the most well-informed AKP veterans. The darling of the Western financial circles in terms of preserving trust in the Turkish economy, former Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan, who has been in charge of running the Turkish economy for over a decade and who Davutoglu has insisted on keeping his post, was excluded. Former Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek replaced Babacan, as if to assuage the worries of international markets. Two names on the list leave no doubt that this new government will be ruled by Erdogan: Binali Yildirim and Erdogan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak, who took key portfolios. Yildirim, formerly Erdogan’s minister of transport, who is considered his de facto prime minister, assumed his former post. It is well known that Davutoglu had showed some resistance against having him in the government.
Yildirim’s position requires close relations with the construction sector, which has been the main engine of the Turkish economy under Erdogan. Albayrak, who has been the CEO of Calik Holding, an energy company involved in energy deals with the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, since 2007, gives Erdogan a strong hand in controlling the economic and finance policies of the new government in his position as minister of energy and natural resources.
The posts of the interior and justice ministries have also gone to staunch Erdogan loyalists: Efkan Ala and Bekir Bozdag.
The Foreign Ministry post has returned to the hands of the unimpressive Mevlut Cavusoglu.
However, with the downing of the Russian Su-24, by an air-to-air missile shot from a Turkish F-16, the new Cabinet announcement and analyses were overshadowed. Only time will tell how the events will unfold, but it is fairly safe to assume that the Nov. 24 incident will further deteriorate the relations of parties considered central to a possible solution of the Syrian conflict. Deteriorating relations between Turkey and Russia may have a significant negative impact on the optimism generated during the Vienna talks. Another victim of the latest development could be the positive expectations in the conflict between Turkey and the Syrian Kurds. Iran is delighted by Putin’s sensational visit to Tehran and his meeting with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a few days ago. And of course Russia would be overtly supporting the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) fighters against IS with military cooperation from the United States in its offensive against Raqqa, the capital of IS in Syria. The souring of relations between Ankara and Moscow might also cast a shadow on the cooperation between Turkey and the United States to evict IS from the 98-kilometer (61-mile) border that is still under the control of IS in northern Syria. Turkey enlisted the Americans by opening up its Incirlik Air Base, in exchange for a tacit pledge to prevent YPG forces from moving to “west of the Euphrates.”
If Russia were to provide overt support to the YPG in its quest to remove IS from the border region, such a political move could further complicate not only the US-Russian relations but also the cooperation between Washington and Ankara.
After all, Turkey is a member of NATO, but for Washington, under the Obama administration that is serving its last year in office and is increasingly reluctant to engage in any sort of direct military involvement in Syria, it might be difficult to push “the unruly teenager of the Transatlantic Alliance” to invoke Article 5. Article 5, which describes the principle of collective defense and states that “an attack on one Ally shall be considered an attack on all Allies,” has been invoked only once in NATO’s history — after the 9/11 attacks, when the United States was targeted by a relatively obscure nonstate actor, al-Qaeda.
Would NATO invoke Article 5 for Turkey, which might be threatened by a resurgent Russia, ostensibly seeking to fight against IS in the aftermath of the Paris attacks? It remains to be seen