Why Turkish cities are washed with blood every bayram?

Of course, one should seek some balance in denouncing this butchery, especially if he is not a principled vegetarian. Most of us do eat meat -- and rarely think that the beef on our plate comes from an animal that was happily chewing grass until recently. So, for most of us, the act of slaughtering animals should not be seen as barbaric. Moreover, we should note that Islamic legalists have emphasized the "rights" of the sacrifice animal Ñ that it should not be hurt before the final act and the slitting of the throat must be as quick and painless as possible.

In short, unless you are a vegetarian, you actually do not have much to say against the Feast of Sacrifice, for simply that it commands sacrifice.

The real problem, which has emerged in Turkey in the recent decades, is the way this ritual is practiced. In fact, quite a few Muslims prefer to observe this ritual unproblematically by simply donating to a charity that butchers the animals in modern slaughter-houses. But others decide to do it themselves, in the middle of Istanbul, with knives in their hands and blood on their aprons.

And here lies the essence of the problem: The latter group mostly consist of newcomers to the city. They are former villagers who just migrated to a big town in order to seek a better life. Yet most of their cultural codes are still shaped by the standards of rural life.

In their villages, they used to slaughter animals in their backyards and nobody ever made a fuss about it. But when they do the same thing in the middle of Istanbul, many people rightly raise eyebrows. And observers such as Christine Hafner, a spokeswoman for Europe’s Animal Welfare Organization, decided to write reports condemning "Turkey’s brutal practices."

Ms. Hafner and many others who despise what is going on every Kurban Bayramı have a point. But the problem is deeper and it stems from the peculiar social structure of Turkish society. In this country, religion, at least conservative religion, is mostly an issue of class. Upper class urban dwellers tend to be secular, whereas most of the pious happen to be either rural or newcomers to the city.

That is why the style, manners or even the accent of Turks very often hint whether they are religious or secular. If you go to a mosque, you do not expect to find people wearing designer jeans and speaking the "hip" Turkish which is filled with English words. If you go a trendy bar in Istanbul, this time you do not expect to hear the Anatolian accent and find someone who also attends the mosque.

Yet things were not this way a century ago, when Turkey was still called the Ottoman Empire. In the Ottoman society, religion was not an issue of class. Both the lower and the upper classes had their ways of commitment to Islam, and the way of the latter corresponded to a quite sophisticated culture. The best of Ottoman artists and intellectuals included many pious Muslims, who had articulated a refined Islamic way of life.

A great transformation
But the Kemalist Revolution, which dominated the second quarter of Turkey’s 20th century, changed everything. The Kemalist doctrine, which wanted to replace religion with "science," transformed the urban center, whereas religion survived only in the rural periphery. The sophisticated culture of Ottoman Islam was lost. Moreover, the revolution also destroyed the institutions which could preserve and update that culture: All Sufi orders, religious foundations and charitable organizations were banned. The aim was to create a society in which religion played no organizing role.

However, religion does a play a role, a big role, in most societies, and if you try to suppress it, you only worsen the nature of this powerful institution. This is exactly what happened in Turkey. From the 1950s on, cities started to receive more and more immigrants. These people brought their rural lifestyle with them. The religious beliefs and practices they carried were also rural and thus, from an urban point of view, unsophisticated. This only reinforced the secularism of the seculars, who thought that they were being encircled by the unwashed masses. The tension, as you would know, still goes on.

Time will help, though. The second and especially third generations of immigrants become better adapted to the city and its norms. Hence they develop a more urban Islam. And the medium we need to foster that modernization process is not secularist repression, as some argue, but religious freedom and free speech: Let everyone practice what they believe in. But also let them hear the criticism for what they do.