Word: islamist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...April 29, nearly a million Turkish citizens flooded Istanbul's trendiest downtown district in one of the largest demonstrations the ancient capital has ever seen. The cause of their ire: Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had named Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a politician with an Islamist past, to be the next President. More precisely, their outrage focused on a singularly potent piece of symbolism: Gul's wife wears a head scarf. "If it was up to the government we'd all be in head scarves!" shouted Ezgi Kilic, 21, a member of Bosphorus University's college basketball...
...conservative Muslim voters has been steadily growing, as demonstrated by the AKP's landslide sweep to power in the 2002 elections. Whereas the secular middle class can be found almost exclusively in coastal cities like Istanbul and Izmir, the AKP, led by the former semipro soccer player and Islamist Erdogan, has its roots in the conservative Central Anatolian heartland, as well as among millions of poorer migrants from those areas. Despite secularists' warnings, a poll conducted last year by a leading Istanbul think tank found that only 8.9% of the population would like to see Turkey's legal system based...
...voting for a new President in the Turkish Parliament effectively forced the democratically elected government into early elections. That raised hopes of an imminent resolution to the crisis, which was sparked by secular opposition to the nomination for the presidency of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a politician with an Islamist background. The Turkish lira, for example, rebounded on the news after two days of sharp losses. But that vote will not necessarily resolve the standoff between Turkey's Justice and Development Party, or AKP as it is known by its Turkish initials, and Turkey's "secular establishment," including the military...
...election campaign will likely deepen the divisions over Turkey's political future that emerged following the Gul nomination. If, as some analysts fear, the campaign descends into fear-mongering about a looming Islamist threat, it could do lasting damage to an economy that has until now been performing extremely well. The Turkish army, which helped precipitate the crisis by issuing a widely condemned communique opposing the ruling party's choice for President, apparently hopes that Turkish voters will accept the generals' view that the pro-Islamic AKP poses a threat to Turkish society, and turn them out, or at least...
...military threat. Instead, Israeli ground troops found themselves bogged down in deadly urban combat with Hizballah guerilla whose tenacity and tactics the Israelis were unprepared for. That, together with the barrage of rockets into northern Israel that continued until the cease-fire went into effect, allowed the Islamist group to claim it had won a "Divine Victory" against the Jewish state, to the applause of the citizenry of most of the Arab world...