The crisis of faith in Muslim world: risks and opportunities

The Muslim world has been going through series of multidimensional crises for the last two centuries. With the dawn of modernity, many nations, states, empires and many religious traditions went through series of crises. Some of them successfully modernized themselves and survived to the new millennium; some created their own modernity; some failed and some have kept resisting the change. Being a non-unified entity, in the Muslim world several mixed responses have emerged to modernity. Some Muslim nations have successfully modernized their societies in terms of technology, education, politics and more. Some of them partially modernized their society, limiting its scope to the certain domains of social life and certain segments of the society. On the other hand, with few exceptions, Muslim religious elite (ulema) have kept resisting modernity for so long without producing viable and sustainable alternatives. It appears that today, this apologetic and anachronistic resistance to modernity has marginalized Muslim youth, creating a crisis of faith. In this regard, Turkey as only secularized Muslim society in the region poses a unique and provocative case. Guided with human development paradigm, this paper aims to explore the nature and scope of the crisis of faith in Turkish context projecting the potential risks, opportunities and human rights implications