Good (news) Friday: Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak, spared a (Salman Rushdie) fatwa…

Turkey is arguably the most democratic and progressive of all Muslim countries. Yet, Article 301 of its penal code, which provides for the incarceration of anyone who “denigrates Turkish national identity”, has led to a series of criminal trials in recent years that make Turkey seem more like Afghanistan under the Taliban.

In fact, Turkey’s bid to become a member of the European Community has been jeopardized by zealous state enforcers of Article 301 who have persecuted everyone from people who criticized the government to writers who dared to air Turkey’s dirty laundry, including exposing its misogynistic treatment of women and genocidal pogroms against the Armenians.

But it’s the prosecution of writers that has incited most international recrimination against Turkey’s relatively liberal government. However, the good news is that the latest of these has proved to be so controversial that it may finally force the government to repeal Article 301. And here’s why:

Elif Shafak, 35, is a best-selling novelist who was tried recently for “comments made by her characters on the mass killings of Armenians in the final years of the Ottoman Empire in 1915.”

But, as a woman challenging Turkey’s vested national interest in denying that such mass killings (genocide) ever occurred (which is like an Iranian woman defying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that the Holocaust never occurred), she posed a particularly vexing defendant for prosecutors and doctrinaire revisionist historians.

For these very reasons, however, her case became a most sympathetic cause celebre - not only for progressive Turks but also for human rights advocates all over the world (who also stood with Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali in their fight for freedom of expression against Muslim fundamentalists). And, to say that her trial put Turkey’s suitability for admission into the EU centre stage would be an understatement.

Therefore, astute observers of Turkish (ultimately-pragmatic) politics were hardly surprised when a panel of judges dismissed the case yesterday - before prosecutors and the guardians of “Turkishness” had a chance to vent their jingoistic outrage. They ruled that there was insufficient evidence to prove that Shafak “denigrated Turkish national identity” in her novel, The Bastard Of Istanbul.

Understandably, the acquittal of Shafak was as insulting to Turkish nationalists as the acquittal of the white cops who beat the crap out of Rodney King was to blacks in Los Angeles. Therefore, not surprisingly, these Turks are also rioting in the streets to express their outrage. After all, nothing could be more denigrating to Turkish national identity than for Turks to be compared to genocidal German Nazis, a moral and historical equivalence Shafak draws with prosecutorial skill.

Nonetheless, that she was acquitted is in fact an indictment of Article 301. Because, in this seminal test of its true intent, it proved an unworthy foe to the universal value of freedom of expression. Moreover, if Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan “amends” it - as he vowed to do yesterday, this would enhance Turkish national identity immeasurably….

NOTE: Just months ago, former South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma was presumed politically crucified. Yet today, he seems so thoroughly resurrected that virtually no one doubts that he’ll be elected president in 2009. Click here to see why.

Elif Shafak, Turkish Article 301