Suspicious minds in a secular land

"Turkey, with about the same population as Egypt, is one of the two largest Muslim states in the Middle East. It is also the only democratic Muslim state in the Middle East, the only one with a substantial Jewish population left and the only one that is a military ally of the US. Indeed Turkey has the second largest army in NATO after the US.

It is governed by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. AKP won office in November 2002. It was a breakaway from an overtly Islamist party. The last time Islamists held power in the 1980s, they were thrown out of office by the military for breaching the strict secularism of Turkey's constitution."

"Turkey's secularism is almost unique in the modern world. It is not designed to free religion from the interference of the state but to free the state from the interference of religion."


"My mother could wear miniskirts in Istanbul. You can't do that today or people will look at you strangely and make you feel uncomfortable. It's the immigrants from eastern Turkey. They come into Istanbul from the villages and it's like they bring their village life to Istanbul. Thank God we have a good army which protects the Turkish way of life."

"The real battle for Turkey is the battle for Turkish hearts and minds.

The coffee shops of Istanbul and Ankara, and Izmir and Kars, and the vast, fertile farms of Anatolia, through which conflicting, mad conspiracy theories swirl, in competition with more sane and liberal politics, are as much a battleground for the future of democracy and moderate Islam in the Middle East as is the Sunni triangle in Iraq.

And the outcome, perhaps, is almost as uncertain."
The Australian: Suspicious minds in a secular land [March 12, 2005]