The soldiers came for Abdullah Buyuk, the imam of the Sultan Selim Mosque here, on Sept. 20, eight days after the military takeover.
They put him in a jeep and took him to the antiaircraft battalion camp outside the city, which is the religious capital of Turkey. His beard and hair were shaved off and he was blindfolded and interrogated. Thus began 42 days of captivity for the imam of Konya’s biggest mosque.
Buyuk is now free. He is again preaching at the mosque where before the coup, he says, as many as 25,000 people would come to listen to his Friday sermons in which he “evaluated current affairs from the point of view of Islam.”But he will soon appear before a military tribunal to answer charges of working for the formation of an Islamic state in Turkey and inciting his congregation to rise up against the established order.
They may hang me or put me before a firing squad or I may be reduced to working as a porter,” said the 32-year-old, thin, bespectacled imam. “But I will not divert from Islam and the prophet whom I love.
Although 95 percent of Turkey’s 45 million population is Moslem, Turkey is a secular state. Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey who is deeply revered by the Army, drew sharp lines dividing religion and the state. But imams are financed by the government in order to help keep control of them. Propagating the formation of an Islamic state is a crime as are the wearing of the turban or slogans in Arabic script.
