İLEM 2024-2025 Academic Year Opening Conference was held!
İLEM 2024-2025 Opening Conference was held with a great participation. The opening was held on Friday, 11 October 2024 at 18:00 at Marmara University Faculty of Theology Prof. Dr. Raşit Küçük Conference Hall. The conference hosted a large audience from academic circles, the press, different non-governmental organisations, students and interested parties.
The opening speeches of the conference started with Mustafa Kömürcüoğlu, President of İLEM Education Commission. In his speech, Kömürcüoğlu congratulated the students who were accepted to the İLEM Education Programme in the new term. Opening and greeting speeches continued with the speech of Taha Eğri, Chairman of the Board of Directors of İLEM. Eğri mentioned the importance of the western-centred world criticism in İLEM's studies and then mentioned the value of Şener Aktürk's research on this subject. After Taha Eğri, Nihat Erdoğmuş, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of İLKE Foundation, delivered his speech. Erdoğmuş mentioned that the importance of civil society is more prominent in such scholarly activities.
Following the opening and greeting speeches, the first lecture of the new academic year was delivered by Şener Aktürk, a faculty member at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Koç University, with his lecture titled ‘Genocide, Population Engineering and the Development of the Western Eurocentric World Order’.
The main axis of Aktürk's speech was based on his article ‘Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe’, in which he raised the questions ‘What is the basis of the systematic targeting of Muslims, Jews and other religious minorities in the West?’, ‘When did a Western European identity identified with Christianity emerge?’, ‘Is there a precedent for Western Europe-centred world order, population engineering and genocide?’.
In addition, Aktürk drew attention to the current mono-religious (exclusively Christian), mono-denominational (exclusively Catholic) and mono-national (Western European) structure of Western Europe and pointed out that a similar situation does not exist in various parts of the world. For example, he emphasised that there is not such a homogenous structure in Africa, Russia and Eastern European countries and that there are different groups, but in Western Europe, there are no communities that are not of Catholic Christian origin.
Talking about this ethno-religious and cultural cleansing in Western Europe, Aktürk mentioned the population engineering against Muslims in Western Europe through the Crusades, and with reference to Ibn Havkal, he said that in the past there were 300 mosques in the historical city of Palermo in southern Italy, but today this number has been reduced to zero through systematic destruction.
In the continuation of his speech, Aktürk summarised the reasons for the genocide against Muslims under 3 main headings. The first reason is the fear of the Islamisation of Christians in contact with Muslims. The second reason is the Roman Catholic Church's desire to eliminate the population that would ensure the formation of a rival political power element in line with its geopolitical interests. The third reason is that the Roman Catholic Church strengthened its authority with the Gregorian Reformation.
At the end of his speech, Aktürk completed his presentation by answering the questions of the participants.
İLEM 2024-2025 Opening Conference, which was held with a wide participation, ended with the gift of the Atlas of Islamic Thought to Şener Aktürk by İLEM Chairman Taha Eğri.
