Addressing the seventh edition of the Religious Council organized by the Presidency of Religious Affairs on Tuesday in the capital, Ankara, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan highlighted the danger emanating from “a digital movement that aims to create an artificial religion by targeting Abrahamic religions, especially Islam.”
He urged measures to protect Muslim values against “digital belief systems.”
The council’s theme is religious services in a digitalized world, and participants, including Islamic scholars, academics specialized in communications, digital content creators and AI experts, will discuss the topic in the two-day event.
“Undoubtedly, our religion is in safe hands, but this does not mean that we, believers, should abstain responsibility to safeguard it,” Erdoğan told the audience.
He noted that the West’s “advances based on blood, tears, colonialism and massacres” gave it superiority over the East’s humanitarian civilization, but “the day will come where this era of advances excluding the sacred values and human beings themselves will end.”
“The Western civilization will collapse and our humanitarian civilization will rise again,” Erdoğan stated.
The president said Muslims have been subject to attacks for centuries and it now peaked. “Attacks are more intense now. You see those committing genocide in Palestine,” he said, referring to Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
“Our sinister enemy is resorting to every method, but more recently, they turned to social media,” he stated.
Erdoğan said Muslims were the direct target of the “digital world destroying all values on a global level.” He said social media was also a breeding ground for racist movements.
“Those trying to disrupt peace in our regions directly attack our faith. Attacks on Islam and Muslims are through deism and atheism and similar attempts to sow seeds of strife. We have to stop attacks that primarily aim at the minds of our youth,” he said.