The Islamization of Turkey’s Foreign Ministry

We all know "mon cher” is French for “my dear.” It is a term that was used by mostly the gents of Istanbul, Thessaloniki and Izmir, to embellish their daily social exchanges by using French when Westernization was in vogue in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. French was the leading international language of the time and Ottoman modernization had been long familiar with the French language. With the declaration of the Republic, “mon cher” faded away from daily usage but some other polite expressions as “merci” and “pardon” remained and are still in use.

But the meaning of “monsher” made up by combining two words of “mon cher” with their Turkish pronunciation is different. “Monsher” was the label affixed to better educated, refined, polite, worldly and urbanized men who preferred to solve their problems through dialogue by less educated, traditionalist and mainly patriarchal groups of rural origins and some politicians who claimed to represent them and their cultures in politics.

The “monsher” epithet has been resurrected by some Islamist conservatives to caricature “Westernized modernists” in the war of cultures that has been raging since the Ottoman days.

In recent years, the term ridicules the professionals of the Turkish Foreign Ministry, enriched with the institutional culture and manners that go back to the Ottoman era.