Dawkins publisher may face prosecution in Turkey

JENS-ULRICH KOCH/AFP/Getty Images

This has not been a good day for free speech in the Muslim world. In addition to the news that the British teacher who was arrested in Sudan for insulting Islam by naming a teddy bear "Mohammed" at her class's request has been charged, the Turkish publisher of Richard Dawkins's atheist manifesto, The God Delusion, has been called in for questioning by prosecutors and may face charges of inciting religious hatred. Turkey took heat in 2005 for prosecuting Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk on the dubious charge of "insulting Turkishness." Those charges were eventually dropped and the government promised to soften the law.

That the Turkish government would enforce secularism by banning head scarves in universities ... while a prosecutor considers indicting a publisher for propagating the works of one of the world's leading secularists seems to reveal something deeply schizophrenic about Mosque-state relations in Turkey. I can't wait to hear Dinesh D'Souza weigh in on this one.