Top Turkish pianist and composer convicted of denigrating religion after making jokes about Islam and call to prayer on Twitter
Worldwide, Daily news | ankakh | April 16, 2013 22:02
Respected Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say has been convicted of denigrating religion through comments he made on Twitter, his lawyer said yesterday.
The 43-year-old, who has played with the New York Philharmonic and other orchestras, was on trial for sending tweets last year, including one that joked about a religious leader and Islamic practices.
He is the latest in a series of intellectuals and artists to be prosecuted in Turkey for expressing their opinions and his case has raised concerns over rights and freedoms in the mostly-Muslim country.
Say, who was given a 10-month suspended sentence, has also been a strong critic of the Islamic-rooted government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has alarmed some secular Turks.
In one tweet, Say joked about a call to prayer that he said lasted only 22 seconds. He tweeted: ‘Why such haste? Have you got a mistress waiting or a raki on the table?’
Raki is a traditional alcoholic drink made with aniseed. Islam forbids alcohol and many Islamists consider the remarks unacceptable.
Lawyer Meltem Akyol said the pianist’s sentence has been suspended for five years. The lawyer said Say has not yet decided whether to appeal the verdict. However he has closed his Twitter account.
Sevim Dagdelen, a German politician who has campaigned for Say, called his conviction a ‘scandal’, and said that Turkey’s attempts to join the European Union should be frozen.
Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted for his comments about the mass killings of Armenians under a law that made it a crime to insult the Turkish identity before the Government eased that in an amendment in 2008.
Ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who received death threats because of his comments about the killings of Armenians by Turks in 1915, was shot dead outside his office in Istanbul in 2007.
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