Conspiracy theories are liable to pop up even among people with a decent level of education and access to information via media free from state control. Look at the persistent conspiracy theories that still flourish around the Kennedy assassination. All such theories on the one hand stem from the ingenuity of the human mind and the impulse for story-telling, but on the other hand are evidence of total mistrust in authority. In the imagination of believers, some individual or group has the skill and the power to engage in deceiving the public.

Conspiracy theories thrive in Muslim countries partly because the level of education is lower and reliable information is not available from the media. Daniel Pipes, an eminent scholar and Orientalist, explored the phenomenon of Muslim conspiracy theory in The Hidden Hand, a valuable contribution to understanding it. One of the causes is what he sums up as “the Muslim fall from grace,” meaning that Islam promised superiority but the real world inflicts inferiority. The undeserving West, in other words, gets the better of blameless and deserving Muslims by all manner of stratagems so fiendishly clever that they are invisible.

Turkey used to be held up as the potential democratic and modern model for other Muslim states to follow. The reaction of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the terrorism that has just occurred in Paris shows that he suffers from the inferiority complex that Pipes analyzed. The fear is that the massacre by Muslims of French journalists, police, and hostages will reflect badly on Muslims in general. Therefore it has to be shown that Muslims truly are blameless and deserving, and so he comes out with conspiracy, that has to serve as explanation: “French citizens carry out such a massacre, and Muslims pay the price . . . Games are being played with the Islamic world, we need to be aware of this.” No hope for realism there. Goodbye, modern democratic Turkey.