In the nineteenth century, in Britain many artists sought new ways to introduce art into society, when machine production and unskilled labor threatened free artistic production. The resistance of romantic artists required a gathering of forces, and as a result, the guilds of the Middle Ages were recalled. It was first Welby Pugin who, in as early as 1836, presented the Christian Middle Ages as an alternative to the present time corrupted by mechanized industry. It was also he who first pointed out the problem of ornament, which was for him once an ecclesiastical language. Pugin’s campaign for restoring the values of Medieval Christian communities by means of restoring the values of “Christian architecture” did not go unheard. On the contrary, it started a movement that changed the course of arts and architecture in the West. Especially the ideas of cooperation and solidarity of skilled craftsmen, and their hand-made production of meaningful ornaments, beautiful objects and buildings captured the imagination of at least two generations who sought for the preservation of artistic freedom through solidarity and collective production of brothers organized around modern guilds.

Pugin’s campaign for restoring the values of Medieval Christian communities by means of restoring the values of “Christian architecture” did not go unheard.

Pugin’s immediate follower, John Ruskin, analyzed the medieval artists’ soul rather than the vocabulary of the forms he produced. The moral principles Ruskin derived from the Gothic through interpretation – principles which were heavily depended on nature as God’s creation – were to shed light on contemporary artistic production. Because in his writings the handwork of the medieval artisan was elevated to the level of highest art, Ruskin can be considered the founder of the moral philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement. He was also critical of the various outcomes of capitalism in society. The St. George Community which he had founded in 1871 was to be the first modern guild and agricultural cooperative, but Ruskin’s nervous breakdown prevented him from fulfilling his dream of a modern agrarian society where Nature would once again be the major inspiration for the arts.

The penetration of socialist ideas among the middle and upper classes in Britain helped pseudo-medieval collectivism to gain wide currency, especially in the romantic world of the artists. William Morris started his prolific career in such an atmosphere. The company Morris founded in London in 1862 for the purpose of producing hand-made household items for average middle class people set the standard for the cooperation of artists and craftsmen – a modus operandi which would be called Arts and Crafts. Morris aimed to transfer the techniques of the crafts to art, and the aesthetics of art to the crafts, and thus to connect utility with beauty.  As a result, the work would no longer be the impersonal labor offered to the capitalist and become once again an artistic craft, which was the key to make the meaningful environments of the pre-industrial past. To that end, Morris tried and succeeded in revitalizing old craft techniques in order to produce new art forms.

Meanwhile, modern guilds followed one after another. The Art Workers’ Guild was founded in 1884 by five young architects from the office of Norman Shaw, whose major inspiration were English country houses. In 1888, Charles Robert Ashbee started the Guild of Handicraft, which became a model for many other Arts and Crafts societies in Britain such as Newlyn, Keswick, Surrey and Birmingham. Ashbee’s carrying the guild from London to a small town named Chipping Campden in 1902 testifies to the eagerness of socialist architects and artists to create a utopian community outside the present one, although the experiment failed.

The Century Guild of Artists, which was founded in 1882 by three artists headed by Ruskin’s protege, Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, seems to be a turning point in the development of the guilds. The Century Guild was not open to new memberships, but invited freelance contributions to be produced by the Guild, so that it would not exercise pressure on the independence of the artists – a model which would be followed by similar organizations in Germany like the Vereinigten Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk. The separation of the approaches is very clear in Mackmurdo’s introduction to the first issue of the Guild’s journal, the Hobby Horse, in which he criticized Morris for mixing art with big matters like politics. For Mackmurdo, instead of seeking the naturalist or realist representation of the world, the artist should reflect his inner world in his work. The individualistic and psychological approach towards artistic representation would be the distinguishing characteristic of Art Nouveau in Continental Europe.

Created by progressive designers and architects around the turn of the century and generally with the motivation of creating psychological effects with mystic scenes, Art Nouveau is distinguished from its precursor in Britain by its lack of real socialist objectives. By quickly dominating the aesthetics of any consumer goods, Art Nouveau as a style proved that aesthetics, or design, had serious value in the market. It was perhaps the most important factor behind the erosion of the historical or traditional elements in the realm of artistic production. It was – as it is now – so important that designing the aesthetics itself became a central issue for the national policies of manufacture shaped by the powers of influence around the state, especially in Germany during the Wilhelmine and Weimar Republic periods. In that country, reaction to the social and environmental problems caused by industrialization had on the one hand created the rather traditionalist Heimatschutz (Protection of the Homeland) movement, and paved the way for the rather modernist Kunstgewerbe (Arts and Crafts) movement on the other.

The national Kunstgewerbe organization in Germany, the Verband des Deutschen Kunstgewerbes was created partly by the efforts of an architect affiliated with the German state, Herrmann Muthesisus, who had studied the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain for around six years. The same Muthesius initiated in 1907 an elite and even more progressive organization named the Deutsche Werkbund, following the ideas of the politician-thinker Friedrich Naumann. Muthesius and Naumann were both against the historicism supported by the landlord aristocracy (junker) and advocated a new attitude towards the values of the urban (bürgerlich) society.

With its efforts to bring together modern aesthetics and industrial techniques, Bauhaus became a world famous school of modern design.

As a politician and a thinker, Naumann’s main objective was to prevent class struggle and socialist revolution, and for that objective he was seeking a pragmatic synthesis between nationalism, socialism, liberalism and Christianity. Unlike Art Nouveau artists like Henry Van de Velde, who romantically believed creating a “beautiful environment” was the key to the solution of social problems, Naumann had practically found the link between aesthetics and welfare. His key concepts were business and quality. Even art works needed buyers and the mass produced goods were the real market for the application of modern arts and crafts, that is, the design. The “culture of visible things” (Kultur des Sichtbaren) has been an important issue since the Kunstgewerbe discussions. But Naumann believed that neither the appearance, nor the physical quality of the objects produced would be enough. He believed that the conditions of work were also essential for the Qualitätsarbeit, which involved the design of the work place, humane working hours, the democratic participation of workers in the direction of the production, and even sharing the profit with workers. All in all, Germany’s competition in the world market depended on quality, and quality was to be represented both by design and living.

In 1919, Walter Gropius, an architect and member of the Werkbund, took over the direction of the Weimar Kunstgewerbe school and rearranged it as a common space for the education of various crafts, like a modern school of guilds. The school, which was later moved to Dessau and renamed as the Bauhaus, included in its staff famous avant-garde artists like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Laszlo Maholy-Nagy. With its efforts to bring together modern aesthetics and industrial techniques, Bauhaus became a world famous school of modern design. After the Second World War, the United States and many other countries adopted the model of the Bauhaus for design education. Thus the history of artists’ struggle against the industrialized capitalism ended up with coming to terms with the mass-consumer markets.

Turkey has today become an industrialized nation, 90 percent of whose population is urbanized. Any panorama from any urbanized part of the country – whether from 70 years ago or recent years – will leave no doubt that Turkish society is not interested in the aesthetics of tradition, except in mosques. Among many other things, the fact that the erosion of traditional material culture occurred before industrialization became the major dynamics of the society, proves that Turkish culture does not inhere ideological barriers against change brought by the introduction of new material cultures. Besides, the intellectual reactions to industrialization and capitalism in the West, which is very shortly summarized above, has almost no equivalent in Turkey today or in any other part of the developing world. This, of course, is not always a good thing.

Like many industrialized Eastern nations, people in Turkey are also experiencing the alienation to the idea of the self, whether they are aware of it or not.

Like many industrialized Eastern nations, people in Turkey are also experiencing the alienation to the idea of the self, whether they are aware of it or not. The efforts to continue the tradition of Ottoman crafts (“traditional arts”), or adding Seljukid-Ottoman architectural motifs to despicable public buildings will not solve the problem, as nothing really has been intellectually problematized. As a final blow it should be said, that the story of revitalizing craft traditions in the West shows us that in industrialized capitalism, art can only serve the aesthetic value of an object as the design, with the intention to make it more preferable than others – a fact which does not leave much space for the so-called “traditional arts”.

After all, something must be done! Turkish reaction to the outcomes of industrialization, consumerism and urbanization must find a unique way to challenge the Zeitgeist, and this must involve both the idea of the self and the experience of the West. The disconnection between self-identity and the built-environment will remain an acute problem if traditions will be seen only as techniques or forms, because traditional techniques and forms cannot compete with global trends. The solution may be in looking for a new culture of vision, a unique Kultur des Sichtbaren, and that culture may be derived from our traditions.

Nowadays, it is clear that Islamophobia constitutes one of the most troubling symptoms of this new global disorder, which seriously threatens to jeopardize world peace.

Nowadays, it is clear that Islamophobia constitutes one of the most troubling symptoms of this new global disorder, which seriously threatens to jeopardize world peace. Islamophobia can be defined, at its most general level, as the unfounded fear and dislike of Muslims, which leads to exclusion, discrimination, prejudice and sometimes violence. The main objective of this article is to complexify this first definition, which is insufficient if one really wants to understand and defeat this global plague.

Indeed, Islamophobia can only be grasped fully in terms of its complexity if one takes into consideration a series of intertwined factors. These factors range from the growing disparities generated by the globalization of the world economy to the difficult multicultural reshaping of homogeneous societies prompted by postcolonial migration flows, the challenge to national integrity from the multiplication of cultural, ethnic and confessional conflicts and the creation of proxy wars that mostly affect already struggling countries. Thus, the best way to approach Islamophobia is, first, to understand that it is a global and multifaceted phenomenon in a globalized world: media coverage and “common sense” could give the first impression that Islamophobia is a social phenomenon almost exclusively affecting Christian and Western (especially European) countries in which important Muslim minorities reside.

The best way to approach Islamophobia is, first, to understand that it is a global and multifaceted phenomenon in a globalized world.

It is true that, in recent years, countries such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom have witnessed a dramatic increase in Islamophobic acts. For example, the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), which monitors all incidents on French soil that target Muslims, from verbal abuse and vandalism (mostly desecration of Mosques and other Muslim premises) to physical violence, including murder, recorded 905 Islamophobic acts in 2015, which is a sharp increase compared to the already high 691 acts targeting French Muslims in 2013. In just the first six months following the January 2015 Paris attacks, the CCIF registered a 23.5% increase in Islamophobic acts. However, even if these crimes are indeed higher in the European countries that host large Muslim communities, it would be a dangerous mistake to assume that the level of Islamophobia in Europe is mechanically proportionate to the size of the Muslim population.

The first paradox is that Islamophobia is also a widespread phenomenon in countries in which the Muslim population is almost inexistent, as shown by SETA’s (Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research) latest comprehensive report. It can be seen that, where Muslims constitute a tiny fraction of the total population of countries such as Finland (0.8%), Romania (0.3%), Hungary and the Czech Republic (0.2%), Slovakia and Poland (0.1%) and even Lithuania (0.08%), Islamophobia remains a visible phenomenon in civil society. In the virtual absence of Muslim people, this targeting of Islam is accomplished at the media level (mostly in cyberspace, which easily escapes legal regulation) but also at the political level where the demonization of Islam is commonly used for electoral purposes.

In the virtual absence of Muslim people, this targeting of Islam is accomplished at the media level but also at the political level.

The second paradox is that Islamophobia is also present in countries in which Islam remains the most dominant religion. Countries such as Albania or Bosnia (and even Turkey, where less than 1% of the population is non-Muslim) are also confronted, to differing degrees, with more subtle but still pernicious forms of anti-Islam rhetoric, and sometimes discrimination.

The third paradox is even more counterintuitive since it shows that the presence of a larger Muslim minority and the rise of Islamophobic crimes do not automatically translate into a higher form of collective intolerance towards Islam. On the contrary, recent studies have shown that those European countries with the largest Muslim communities tend to have the most positive collective perception of Islam, whereas those countries that hold the most negative views of Islam are, paradoxically, European countries in which the Muslim communities are the smallest. In its 2014 report on public opinion in the European Union, the Pew Center showed that 64% of those surveyed in the United Kingdom and 58% in Germany (two countries where Muslims represent around 5% of the total population) have a favorable view of Muslims. In contrast, 63% of those surveyed in Italy, 53% in Greece and 50% in Poland have a negative view of Muslims, even though these countries have a lower percentage of Muslims in their total population (2% in Italy, 4.7% in Greece and 0.2% in Poland).

European countries with the largest Muslim communities tend to have the most positive collective perception of Islam, whereas those countries that hold the most negative views.

The case of France is even more telling: even though France has the highest percentage of Muslims compared to all other European countries (between 6% and 10%, depending on the data available), it is also the European country with the most favorable rating: according to the Pew Center study, 72% of French nationals have a favorable view of the Muslim minority. One could intuitively assume that the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish grocery store would have put an end to this trend of tolerance. Even though the number of Islamophobic actions dramatically surged in the aftermath of the terror attacks, one also notices a parallel rise in positive views of Islam and Muslims in the general public opinion in France (76% of those surveyed or a 4-point increase compared to the 2014 survey).

Many factors can explain this parallel rise of Islamophobia and Islamophilia: first, the French government and the main political parties (with the notable exception of the Far-Right National Front) convincingly explained that the main objective of DAESH was to divide and polarize French society and to turn the general population against its Muslim minority. Confronted with such a dangerous challenge, all Islamic denominations united against these terror attacks by stating they had nothing to do with the Islam practiced in France. This collective solidarity also allowed important Muslim figures to access larger media representation and challenge the provocative demonization of Islam sought by DAESH. Far from being a purely positive phenomenon, this higher collective understanding and tolerance towards Islam has also favored a dramatic rise in Islamophobic acts on French soil through the radicalization of the most anti-Muslim segments of the French population.

A society does not need to be in direct contact with a large Muslim community to express Islamophobic resentment.

In conclusion, a society does not need to be in direct contact with a large Muslim community to express Islamophobic resentment and, inversely, the presence of a strong Muslim minority can translate into a higher understanding and acceptance of Islam. However, it must also be remembered that such a growing tolerance towards Islam will not automatically make Islamophobia disappear. At a time when populist, xenophobic and Islamophobic far-right political movements are increasingly shaping the European political agenda, it is vital for the peaceful and harmonious future of Europe to clearly understand that the rise of Islamophobia is not just a symptom of the new world disorder: it could also announce the end of the European dream. The recent demonization of Turkey and Islam in the Brexit campaign reminds us that the next victims of Islamophobia could be the European nations themselves.

To be sure, the two powers, the British and the French, stood for their own imperial interests and not for the interests of the inhabitants of the region.

As the secret arrangement gradually became operational with the eventual defeat of the Central Powers, including Germany and the Ottoman Empire, the seeds of hate and mistrust began to be sown in the region. This very fragmentation led to the frustration of the Arab aspirations for a united Arab state and led to the never-ending internecine bickering and even conflict among the much truncated Arab “sub-nation-states”. The Sykes-Picot thus symbolizes the extension of British and French case of colonialism into the former Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire. This instance of colonialism was “legalized” under the rubric of the Mandates System as sanctified by the League of Nations which was founded in 1919.

Whatever the designation, this carve-up was a full-blown attack against the aspirations of the Arab peoples for collective self-determination in the Middle East. The final nail in the coffin of the failure to achieve “Arab unity” was the case of the UN General Assembly Resolution No. 181 which partitioned Palestine between Jews and Arabs, while Jerusalem was designated as an “international city” under the administration of the UN. The great chunk of territory (56 percent) was literally “donated” to the Jews that constituted less than one third of the population in Palestine.

The Cold War was indeed the scene of Israel’s neo-colonial uprooting of the Palestinians to the extent that most of the indigenous inhabitants of the area were forced to flee their homeland; thus, most became refugees. The creation of the state of Israel in historic Palestine was surely a painful legacy of the Sykes-Picot arrangement. More of this legacy can be traced in the ceaseless internecine conflicts, chaos and instability in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Jordan after the Second World War. Inter-state wars likewise exploded among a number of Arab states as in the case of Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990). Furthermore, Israeli armed aggression against Egypt in 1956 and against Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in 1967 which led to Israel occupying land four times as big as its territory.

It is no exaggeration to claim that the fraudulent order of the Sykes-Picot has brought untold tragedies to the Arabs (and to the minority communities like Kurds) living in the Levant and Iraq.

It is no exaggeration to claim that the fraudulent order of the Sykes-Picot has brought untold tragedies to the Arabs (and to the minority communities like Kurds) living in the Levant and Iraq. The two old colonial powers that were “architects” of the current rancorous territorial boundaries and the dismal states system in the Middle East have since incessantly sought to maintain the status quo in the region at whatever cost. The USA later joined in the scramble for imperial supremacy in the region principally on account of its rich reserves of oil, but also because of geopolitical vitality and the presence of Israel which had by then become a “very special” US ally. That is why the US and its European allies mobilized the whole gamut of the UN system, particularly the Security Council, to “liberate” the tiny Kuwaiti state after it was occupied by Iraq in August 1990, although it was known that the Security Council had almost always chosen to close its eyes to similar direct and indirect armed aggressions elsewhere during the Cold War. Iraq had to be punished heavily as a deterrent to other potential “Saddams” who would dare to tear up the Sykes-Picot straitjacket in the Middle East.

This, then, suggests that the Sykes-Picot order also signifies the refusal of the West-sponsored Westphalian system to allow the Arab inhabitants of the Middle East to unite under one flag, thus becoming like other “nation-states”.  Arabs were, in the early 1920s, and still are a single “nation” on account of the unity of their language (Arabic), ethnicity (predominantly Arab), and (a prevalent) religion (Islam). It isn’t an exaggeration to claim that, since the end of the I. World War, Arabs have come to represent an arrested nation which has been forced to be partitioned among a list of artificially carved-up sub-states. So long as the Arab world remains fragmented as “sub-nation-states”, the regional order established by the spirit, if not by the substance, of Sykes-Picot will continue to sap the energy of the Arab body politics in the Middle East.

The ghost of the colonial yoke of the Sykes Picot is still around us.

The recent attacks launched in Western cities by international terrorist movements such as Al Qaida and ISIS, inter alia, are a testimony that Western neo-colonial and imperialistic interventions at the heart of the Muslim world, combined with the Western support for authoritarian regimes in Muslim countries, have backfired and thus have come to hit the Western “security community”. Today, ISIS is challenging this artificial fragmentation by refusing to recognize any separation between Iraq and Syria.

Strangely, the still hegemonic and imperialistic West is not averse to such eventuality so long as both states are carved up further. This is where the risk lies. If the Sykes-Picot arrangement is to be overwhelmed by new territorial reshuffle, this should not come in the form of further partition; instead, it should take the form of territorial enlargement if the inhabitants so wish. This, we call, “self-determination”.

As for today, that we have not been able to change the term, a colonial-leftover, “the Middle East” into the more respectful “Western Asia”, because less tainted with colonial intrusion,”; testifies that the ghost of the colonial yoke of the Sykes Picot is still around us.

Western countries must cease treating the Middle Eastern peoples as juvenile and not mature enough to determine their own fates.

Western countries must cease treating the Middle Eastern peoples as juvenile and not mature enough to determine their own fates. Aware of the global and regional developments, Middle Eastern peoples are nowadays struggling against external intervention as well as domestic tutelage. Maybe the current picture of the Middle East does not leave space for much optimism, but one thing is for certain: the Middle Eastern peoples know what it means to be free and to have a government that will represent them and no solution is possible unless these conditions are met. Both regional regimes and global powers have to be aware of the increasing awareness in the region and behave accordingly. Otherwise, continuous political instability, regional chaos and economic backwardness will continue to detrimentally influence the future of European countries. In today’s increasingly interdependent and interconnected world, it is not the flame but the smoke of the blazing fire that will vitally damage the health of Europe.

Dividing the region into smaller political units will not bring political stability to the Middle East. The smaller the political units, the more dependent they will be on the global powers; the more interference from foreign powers in regional affairs, the longer the crises will continue. The West must stop preferring authoritarian or personalistic regimes to democratic movements. If global powers want to contribute to the stabilization of the region, they must support the mainstream groups, rather than manipulating the fault lines between different groups and abetting violent non-state actors. The future of the region relies on the support of mainstream, democratic and non-violent groups.