Word: islamist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...important veto power. With Gul as President, and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) a comfortable majority in parliament, secular Turks fear "it would be the beginning of the end for Turkey as we know it," says commentator Metin Munir. Their concern is that the AKP harbors a secret Islamist agenda, and that without the appropriate checks on their power, they will seek to adopt Sharia-based laws...
...Since taking power in 2002, the AKP has tried to distance itself from some of the Islamist rhetoric of its precursor party, and in government, it has done more for Turkey's European Union membership bid than any party before it. But its record is patchy. It also tried to pass a law that would criminalize adultery, and to appoint an Islamic banker as head of the central bank. Every day the papers carry a report of an AKP official in some town doing something outlandish - men and women being segregated at a municipal event, a swimming pool banning women...
...arrest of 172 Islamist militants by Saudi security forces represents another blow to al-Qaeda, but it also sheds light on the group's determination to use its base inside war-torn Iraq to spread its jihadist campaign to Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world...
...case.) If her husband is confirmed, Mrs. Gul would be the only Turkish First Lady ever to cover her hair in this way. By contrast, the incumbent, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a former judge and staunch secularist, has routinely wielded his veto to block AKP initiatives he deemed too Islamist...
...secularist backlash has already made itself felt: Gul is his party's second choice for President; for several months it has been assumed that the AKP's nomination would go to current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Islamist roots are more pronounced than Gul's, and who is widely distrusted by the Turkish military and secular establishment. At a huge secularist rally last weekend in Ankara, at least 300,000 people turned out to oppose Erdogan's candidacy, some saying they would prefer military rule to him being President. The AKP appears to have noted the warning...