Word: secularists
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...intercourse with someone other than their lawful spouse. Verheugen was not impressed. "Turkey should not give other countries the impression that it's putting Islamic elements into its legal system," he told the newspaper Vatan. Parliament is expected to approve the package but President Ahmet Necdet Sezer - a staunch secularist - may well use his veto. Still, Erdogan's conservative allies "have proved that when they wanted to they could put their foot down," Mehmet Ali Birand, a political commentator, told TIME. Party politics - nothing un-European about that...
...have set up a new "counter-terror watch" desk, staffed around the clock, to assess and disseminate leads and threats faster and more adroitly to field agents and state and local authorities. Until now, few of these threats have been linked with Saddam Hussein. And since he is a secularist, some feel he may have less support among potential terrorists in the radical Muslim community. "But on the other side of the equation," says a senior counter-terror agent, "you will get a number of people who see the war against Iraq as a Western attack against Islam. A number...
...been barred from taking the top post because of a Turkish law excluding from public office anyone convicted of inciting religious hatred - as Erdogan was in 1997, for reading an Islamic poem at a rally. But the new AKP-dominated parliament lifted the ban, despite an initial veto by secularist President Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Erdogan will likely run in, and win, a local election in Siirt province, due within three months. The enigmatic populist can then officially take over from his close ally Abdullah Gul, who took the job until the legal problems could be sorted out. The changes should...
...with a portrait of Turkey's fiercely secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. There isn't a prayer bead in sight. "I am a Muslim," the beardless Erdogan, 48, dressed in a pressed blue suit and red tie, said in a recent interview with Time. "But I believe in a secularist state...
...problem dates back to Kemal Atat?rk, the army officer who founded the republic almost 80 years ago and who imposed stringent laws to keep fundamentalism at bay. Erdogan, 48, is just the latest politician to run afoul of such laws which - in the hands of zealous courts and a secularist army - have led to the banning of dozens of politicians and a handful of political parties over the years. Born to a working-class family (his father was a sea captain) on Turkey's Black Sea coast, Erdogan moved at age 13 with his family to Istanbul, where he joined...