Word: secularist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...this count, White House hawks advocated prudent silence—the indefinite continuation of a century of defiant, nationalistic denial. Matters such as these show us that measured judgment and even condemnation have their place in international affairs—as in February, when the historically staunchly secularist Turks voted to roll back a ban on Islamic headscarves in state universities. Here, gender equity should prevail over democracy; the prohibition had served the commendable purpose of keeping a pattern of patriarchal exclusion out of educational institutions. The battle over the ban, still ongoing, is testament to Turkey?...
...disdain of Turkey's Sunni authorities may explain why many Alevi venerate the country's secularist founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In his separation of mosque and state, they finally found freedom from discrimination. But that eroded under subsequent governments, often violently. As recently as 1993, a group of 33 prominent Alevi poets, writers and musicians were burned to death by a fundamentalist Sunni mob in a hotel in eastern Turkey...
...this class, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), was reelected last summer with an overwhelming 47% of the vote. The old guard, having failed to beat the newcomers at the ballot box, has now asked the country's top court to ban the AKP and its leaders for undermining secularist principles they say are enshrined in Turkey's constitution...
...Heading the all-male cast in this drama is the solitary, hawkish and staunchly secularist chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, who has become an Islamist hate target for his 162-page indictment accusing the AKP of seeking to overthrow secularism. Arrayed against him is Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a tall, moody former football player who grew up a hard-line Islamist and was once jailed for reciting a poem deemed to incite religious hatred. His ally, President Abdullah Gul, a moderate, must now balance his party loyalties against the requirement that he be neutral. And lurking in the wings...
...books, Obama says he might not have become a Christian - his mother was a skeptical secularist and his absent father an atheist - if not for the special character of the black church. "Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation," he writes in The Audacity of Hope. It also matched his intellectual curiosity. "Perhaps it was out of this ... grounding of faith in struggle that the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn...