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| Courtesy Cyprus Mail |
Do read the Cyprus Mail (South) semi regularly. It’s not the best newspaper in the world but it does publish seven days a week in English and includes stories not easily found elsewhere. It also leaves a reader’s fingers itching for a blue pencil.
Sometimes, in fairness, the problem is not down to writer or editor but to the staggering predictably of the story itself. As in the article today headlined Government Condemns New Orleans Attack. Though governments around the world must have made similar statements as microphones were shoved in the faces of heads of state.
There are occasional stories about the North, typically though not quite always casting it in a bad light. Today’s offering re the firing of a government personage who rejoiced in the title of Director of Religious Affairs needed no help in creating negativity. Ahmet Unsal has been fired effective February 1, although presumably the four week lag period is simply for salary purposes. He has held the position since 2021 and controversy is not new. Among his sins “…telling a seminar in Famagusta what he believed an ‘acceptable wife’ should do, with one of those things being that ‘you must accept your husband’s invitation to bed’”. Additionally he criticised women for having cats and jobs [in that order?] .
Another comment cited may have been made light heartedly and almost certainly has suffered a little in translation. Unsal is quoted as saying “Marriages are expensive now, ladies are very expensive. You used to be able to buy four, so if one woman wasn’t enough, there would be three more”. Islam did traditionally allow a man to have up to four wives but in practice few did so, in part because of the proviso that all had to be treated equally. Though in fact in Türkiye, an officially secular country, polygamy has been illegal for the last hundred years. And in practice TRNC is significantly more secular than Türkiye.
Still a number of parliamentarians have been enraged by the man, and the prime minister has announced that his tenure is over.