Word: secularistic
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...Turkey's law banning headscarves in public buildings, although she later dropped the 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...
...Yunis, who mostly narrates this story to filmmakers Michael Tucker (Gunner's Palace) and Petra Epperlein, is a gentle, patient and tolerant soul; on the face of it about as far from being a fanatic as it is possible to be. He is a member of the striving, secularist Baghdad middle class (or what's left of it), working as a trusted, English-speaking freelance journalist and TV cameraman, without, so far as we can tell, an ideological thought in his head. This is a matter he keeps trying to explain to his captors, who are not paying the slightest...
...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...