Word: secularistic
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Turkey's pro-Islam governing party was handed a devastating legal defeat Wednesday when the country's top court ruled that a constitutional amendment to allow women in headscarves on university campuses was anti-secularist and hence unlawful...
...government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pushed through the amendment in February to make it possible for pious women to attain a higher education. But the case has even greater ramifications. Turkey's secularist establishment considers the government's campaign to lift the headscarf ban as key grounds for outlawing the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for its alleged Islamicizing agenda; that case will be decided in the next few months by the same Constitutional Court. A ban is being sought not just against the party but also against 71 party members, including Erdogan, who face being barred...
...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...
...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...