Word: secularization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the state security court sent Istanbul's Mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan to jail in 1998, his pro-Islamic Virtue Party wept crocodile tears. The courts, guardians of the secular Turkish state, had been lying in wait for the charismatic Erdogan. So when he recited a well-known poem at a political rally, it was their chance to pounce. Their verdict was that quoting "minarets are our bayonets"; amounted to using religion to incite hatred - but many believe his greater crime was appealing to voters who wouldn't normally opt for a party with an Islamic reputation. The Virtue Party...
...Erdogan's turn to weep tears, but of joy. In 1999 he was released after serving four months of a 10-month sentence. On June 22 Turkey's Constitutional Court banned the Virtue Party for being a "focal point of anti-secular"; activities, a development that leaves Erdogan, 47, in perfect position to lead a large number of rebel M.P.s, tired of the autocratic leadership of the disbanded Virtue Party, into a new party of their...
...chooses his words carefully. He no longer talks of minarets and bayonets but of "making moral values a pillar of modern administration."; The Islamic rhetoric of seven years ago is gone. He presents demands, like permission for women to wear Islamic headscarves at universities, not as threats to the secular state but as basic rights. Even so, a Turkish establishment that includes the army still suspects his moderation is just fa?ade. Other critics say he's too provincial to reform Turkey and lead it into the E.U. His reply, still to be tested, is that no one else can persuade...
...abbot to Rikon, where the exiles congregated, to provide them with spiritual care. Today the monastery continues to preserve and promote Tibetan culture. The monks, with their lifelong study of the Buddha's teachings, have always been at the heart of Tibet's religion. Living in isolation from secular concerns and dedicating themselves to meditation, they are able to achieve the salvation - Nirvana - necessary to understand the spirit. Parts of the Basel exhibition offer a look at the monks' lives, spiritual practices and rituals, which include astrology, medicine, music, dance and painting. One musical instrument featured in the exhibit...
...wind my way through theories about the manifold forms of heaven and earth, angels and demons, right and wrong, I'm melding the sacred and the secular. A mechanical medium seems inherently irreligious. But through it, I can latch onto - or into - some version of what the Hopi call "the holy something." Religion is interactive by nature. A message is conveyed to a believer, revealed, perhaps, by a Supreme Being, or manifest in one's surroundings, where spirits inhabit the trees, the rocks, the winds. The believer's life, fundamentally, becomes the response. This jibes rather nicely with the form...