Is Kim Kardashian leading the evil eye jewelry craze?
Evil eye beads, which have become a celebrity craze in the United States, are the one red line that Islamists in Turkey have not crossed so far.
Every culture is mesmerized by the unexplainable, but rarely does one find a talisman that could turn an ancient belief into a versatile global image as the Turkish "nazar boncugu," the famed evil eye beads.
Although their appearances may vary, evil eye beads usually come in tricolor glass: a black dot in the middle, enclosed in a white inner circle and with both surrounded by a dark blue edging. The talisman goes by different names around the Levant and the Mediterranean, all meaning the glare of the envious, the jealous: "ayn al hasud" in Arabic, "ayn hara" in Hebrew, "to mati" in Greek and "nazar" in Turkish.
