Word: secularized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Since 2002, annual foreign direct investment in the mainly Muslim but officially secular country of more than 70 million people, which has traditionally served as a crossroads between East and West, has jumped more than 30-fold, to about $22 billion. Investment in banks, retail and commercial real estate has risen sharply. Turkish businesses have been investing aggressively in oil-rich Russia and the Middle East. All told, an economy that was shrinking as recently as 2001 expanded more than 5% a year through last year...
...Guard secular establishment is now backing a lawsuit aimed at banning the democratically elected AKP, casting a shadow over Turkey's prospects, at least in the short term. The suit seeks to bar the party and its members from political activity for allegedly violating Turkey's constitutional prohibition against mixing politics and religion. The move has rattled markets. After tripling from 2002 through last November, Turkey's stock index has dropped 32%. The global credit crunch has not helped. The ratings agency Standard & Poor's in April cut Turkey's credit rating to negative from stable, citing a fraught political...
Modern Turkey has looked Westward since its staunchly secular founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk decreed the separation of mosque and state shortly after World War I. The pro-Western political bent did not immediately translate into liberal economics. Corruption, cronyism and protectionism continued to cloud prospects until the 1980s. Even then, after a period of economic liberalization under reformist Prime Minister Turgut Ozal (a pal of Margaret Thatcher's), the old habits died hard. In 2001, Turkey suffered a full-blown financial crisis in which the Turkish currency lost nearly 50% of its value overnight...
...Kayseri's Chamber of Commerce, citing Turkey's entrepreneurial efforts and the youthfulness of its population, 70% of which is under 35. The region's growing economic clout, says Gerald Knaus, director of the European Stability Initiative, an Istanbul-based think tank, suggests that divisions in Turkey between wealthy, secular élites and the conservative Muslim middle class are disappearing. "We are seeing the transformation of an agrarian society into an industrial economy," he says...
...timed debate left little time to answer age-old questions of faith. Lewis M. Ward ’11 of the Harvard Secular Society acknowledged the shortcomings of the night’s format...