Campus (prayer) wars

This column has twice borrowed Shelby Foote?s famous line, with a minor revision: ?A Turkish university, these days, is a group of buildings around a library and a small mosque.? That was not a prophecy if one was not too naïve about the Islamist mind.

In December 2007, this column offered colleagues a bet: ?When the campus ban on the turban is removed, there will be all sorts of other bans still in effect.? A month later, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) bigwigs, including then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, gave assurances that the government merely wanted to end all bans on campus and the state was an ?equal distance? from all faiths, this column asked: ?What if a student wishes to wear a Buddhist gown? A t-shirt with a political slogan the ruling ideology dislikes? A Star of David? A kippah? A cross? A t-shirt that says ?There is no God???

After seven good years, no student is suicidal enough to put on a Star of David or a kippah. No student would probably wear an atheist slogan, risking disciplinary action and possibly jail. The idea of ?Jedi? was unknown to a columnist who had never before watched a Star Wars episode, but a maverick Turkish student is trying to unmask Islamist hypocrisy on campus freedoms by revisiting this column?s 2007 question: What if a student wishes to wear a Buddhist gown?

The story is genuinely funny ? though embarrassing for the hypocrites. Over 25,000 students have signed an online petition demanding a Buddhist temple on their campus after a university president cited an online campaign demand in his plans to build a ?landmark? mosque on an Istanbul campus. 
Satire galore! One petitioner said: ?I can?t fulfill my religious duties because the closest Buddhist temple is 2,000 kilometers...