Word: secularist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Orthodox patriarchate has been located in this city, formerly known as Constantinople, since the fourth century. Despite pressure from the European Union, the Turkish government argues that opening the Halki school would put it under pressure to allow similar Islamic colleges - a prospect deemed nightmarish by the secularist authorities...
...even the face-covering niqab - and the Islamic fundamentalism and subjugation of women critics ascribe to these symbols - or by the hypocrisy and low-grade xenophobia of those telling Muslim women that this attack on their religious practice is really for their own good? Beneath all the reminders of secularist tradition and progressive discourse cited in Europe's headscarf debate lies the mean, provincial "not in our country, you don't" attitude - even when many of the women at whom it's addressed to were born and raised in "our country". When all is said and done, the headscarf furor...
...tough room, Benedict has certainly booked himself into a doozy. In the racial memory of Western Europe, the Turks were the face of militant Islam, besieging Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and for centuries thereafter representing a kind of stock bogeyman. In 2002, after nearly a century of determinedly secularist rule, the country elected a moderate Islamist party. For many in the West, that makes Turkey simultaneously a symbol of hope (of moderation) and fear (of Islamism...
...booed out of the Assembly and subsequently stripped of her citizenship. Now the country's conservative Muslim Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to lift the head-scarf ban, and millions of conservative Turks would be pleased if he did. But Erdogan risks provoking the ire of hard-line secularists. At a recent secularist demonstration in Ankara, a chanting mob surrounded a woman passing by in a head scarf and ordered her to take it off; she pleaded with the crowd, but eventually removed it. In the run-up to elections next year, confrontations over Turkey's secular constitution...
...year, the president extended his appeal to Iran's urban middle class by taking a tough stand on the country's right to nuclear power. That radical approach won over many Iranians, especially when the U.S. finally agreed to join Europe in negotiations with Iran. Even the most ardent secularist I know, a Westernized engineer, started quoting from Ahmadinejad's speeches, and ordered his staff to stop circulating jokes about the president on their mobile phones. But the hard-line approach has yet to produce any tangible concessions, which is damaging his credibility. Though the nuclear dispute remains...