FARMINGTON – Guns and bombs, mad mullahs and illiterate shepherds living in tents. That’s how many in the West perceive Islam and the Muslim world, according to Council on American Islamic Relations opinion polls. Polls in 2005 showed nearly 50 percent of Americans held negative – if not extremely negative – views of Islam.

“Americans often see the Muslim world as being oppressed, backward, barbaric, uneducated, and unenlightened,” Rabiah Ahmed, of CAIR, said Friday. Many say Islam is inherently undemocratic. And looking at the paucity of Muslim democracies in the world today, maybe it’s hard not to wonder.

But reality shows us something different, Turkish religious history professor Sinasi Gunduz asserted Thursday in a lecture at the University of Maine at Farmington. Islam is a peaceful religion at it’s core, he said. As the only predominantly Muslim country where democracy and secularism rule the day, Turkey stands out.

And if you take Turkey as an example, Muslim countries are just as capable of democracy as Western nations are, he said. The violence going on now in the Muslim world is due more to historical, social, and political problems, than to Islamic theology.

Gunduz made his point outlining Ottoman history in broad strokes before an audience of about 75 UMF students and faculty. From the first Abbassid and Seljuk forays into the Byzantine west, to Ottoman rule over the Muslim world, to Turkey’s modernization under Mustafa Kemal “Ataturk,” Gunduz pointed to how social and political reform affected the way Turks think about religion.

The years between 1920 and today were fraught with difficulty as well as change for Turks. People were forced into secularism by the government – fez’s torn off, veils banned in universities, religious schools shut down, the Arabic script used for 1,000 years forbidden overnight. But, Gunduz said, it was through that struggle that liberal ideals like the separation of religion from political life, the preeminence of human rights, and the importance of civic life and education became ingrained into the Turkish psyche. Almost like how Henry XIII’s Anglican reformation – and the killings and demolition of churches that went along with it – ended up modernizing English society, he said.

Now, nearly a century after Ataturk’s forced secularization of the country, Turkey is growing into itself. Religion is found in the public sphere once again, he said, but secularism remains a driving force. Religions and cultures peacefully coexist. “You can listen to both the gongs of the churches and the the azan (call to prayer) from the mosques together,” he said.

This vision of Turkey – an economically vibrant, socially progressive, religiously devout Muslim society – is what folks all over the American and European world hope to see in the Middle East. And Turkey’s new brand of Islam blended with democratic society is a model, of sorts, Gunduz said. But it cannot be copied.

Instead, Arab and Muslim societies – and all societies grappling with the problems of globalization and modernization – have their own struggles. As each country faces up to it’s past and solves it’s economic and political problems, Islam will again ring of peace, he said.

For Americans in the audience, that was good to hear.

“These types of dialogues are really essential,” said Tyson Bourassa of Farmington. “We have to work through this stuff. We can’t avoid these issues.”

“In today’s world, you can’t help but be interested in how they (the Turks) pulled it off,” Susan Waller, of Farmington, said. “I learned that (democratization) didn’t just happen. It’s been in the works for hundreds of years.”