Michael Goldfarb GlobalPost
I'm going to type a word. Islamist. What images come to mind?
Now I'm going to type a phrase. Most dynamic city in the world.
What does it make you think of?
Can you reconcile the two?
Think Islamist, and you probably imagine some un-democratic place with a stagnant, corrupt economy and women encased from head to toe in black cloth. It is joyless and puritanical in the pejorative sense, with innate hostility to America and the West.
Dynamism probably makes you think of New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Rio and Mumbai — places where anything-goes-capitalism has revived after a period of recession.
Well, according to a recent Brookings Institution report the world's most dynamic city is Istanbul, whose Islamist former mayor, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is now Turkey's Prime Minister.
Reconcile that.
A significant part of official Washington sees Erdogan as an "Islamist" in the worst sense of the word. According to U.S. State Department cables released by Wikileaks, he is a hostile force "surrounded by sycophants," including a foreign minster who wants to return Turkey to the glory days of the Ottoman Empire. In 2009, one American diplomat sent a report back to Washington that asked rhetorically, "Does all this mean that the country is becoming more focused on the Islamist world and its Muslim tradition in its foreign policy? Absolutely."
