Word: secularistic
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...Sunday morning, the Burberry set - trendy teenagers in Ray-ban Aviators, pensioners in sun hats, young professionals and entire families - turned revolutionary. Waving red and white Turkish flags and chanting "Turkey will not become Iran," they streamed up the road by the hundreds to join the city's biggest secularist rally in recent memory. Fed up with the politics of Turkey's Islamic-rooted government, the so-called White Turks have finally taken to the streets...
...Speaker of the Parliament. (In parliamentary elections later this year , the AKP is expected to be returned to power, albeit with a reduced mandate). The election to all three top positions of officials who "come from the same Islamic-rooted tree," writes columnist Metin Munir in the leading secularist daily Milliyet, augurs "the end of Turkey as we know it. "Turkey, he warned, is about to enter "a period of Islamicizing and conservatism: It is hard to tell where it will...
...Such fears may be exaggerated, however, since Turkey's institutions have potent safeguards against the introduction of political Islam. And the powerful Turkish military, self-appointed guardians of the secularist state, stands ready to intervene should those safeguards be breached. (It did so a decade ago by removing Gul's former party from government.) The AKP has so far been reluctant to introduce any changes that might provoke the wrath of the generals. At a rare press conference prior to this week's nomination of Gul, the hawkish army chief Yasar Buyukanit warned that a Turkish President must have secular...
...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...
...selection removes a key institutional check on his party's agenda, which is likely to increase friction with the military. The choice also represents a broader shift in political power away from the secularist elite in Turkey's coastal cities and towards the conservative Islamic heartland. Gul himself hails from Central Anatolia, the Turkish equivalent of America's Bible Belt. His party's ascendance over the past five years poses a clear challenge not only to the military, but to Turkey's old secular establishment. It's a challenge based on a democratic mandate from the electorate...