Word: secularize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...power to veto legislation, and is also considered an important symbol of the Turkish state. That's why the nomination for President this week by Turkey's ruling party of the country's Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, has reopened fierce debates about the place of Islam in the ferociously secular Turkish state...
...political party that has dominated Turkey's parliament for the past five years. But like most senior officials of his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, his roots are in an Islamic grouping that was banned in Turkey in the 1990s. His Arabic is better than his English, as secular Turks like to point out. And his wife wears a traditional Islamic headscarf. (In fact, she petitioned the European Court of Human Rights to declare unconstitutional Turkey's law banning headscarves in public buildings, although she later dropped the case.) If her husband is confirmed, Mrs. Gul would...
...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 values, "not only in words, but in essence...
...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...
...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. But in a country where the military retains an implicit veto over the actions of the democratically elected politicians, it remains to be seen how far the balance will be tipped...