"So do you think Turkey is being Islamized?"
Although my speech was more or less a detailed account of Turkey's domestic politics, I was expecting this classical and rather shallow question from the audience. Last week at the Bruno Kreisky Forum in Vienna, our topic of the day was the rising authoritarianism in Turkey. Yet again, Islamization is still inevitably the most juicy topic for some European audiences. Not only because it is easier to ask about and almost impossible to answer, but also because their expectations for Eastern European and Middle Eastern democracies are so low that they prefer to stick to the good old horrors of Islamization when talking about Turkey. My answer was "Maybe and maybe not. But that is not the real problem." I still think that the real problem is not the rising conservatism or Islamization of society, but the "Dubaization" of the country’s landscape, and therefore the shopping malls.
http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/%E2%80%98dubaiziation%E2%80%99-versus-what