Word: seculars
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...AFGHANISTAN 18% Drop in infant mortality in Afghanistan in the five years since the Taliban's fall in 2001, due to wider immunization and improved natal care 85 Number of students and teachers killed last year in attacks on Afghan schools, blamed on Islamic militants who oppose secular schooling for boys and education of any kind for girls...
Usually made of silk or cotton, the type of head scarf favored by strict Muslim women in Turkey typically measures just 1 m square. Yet that small quadrangle of cloth may bring down the nation's government and push its democratic institutions and secular traditions to crisis. On April 29, nearly a million Turkish citizens flooded Istanbul's trendiest downtown district in one of the largest demonstrations the ancient capital has ever seen. The cause of their ire: Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had named Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a politician with an Islamist past...
...much broader revolt by Turkey's self-described "secularists" against a popularly elected Islamic-leaning government that has held power-with considerable success-since November 2002. An ad hoc coalition of opposition parties, the military and parts of the judiciary, often referred to in Turkey as the "secular establishment," has in recent days derailed the presidential selection process in a standoff that underscores a more fundamental clash between the country's urban, secularist élites and its increasingly Islamic political class...
...Turkish democracy has always been a complicated and fragile phenomenon. On the one hand, the country's secular traditions date back to founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who mandated in 1923 a strict divide between mosque and state. (He banned the fez, and modeled his constitution on the Swiss Civil Code.) The secular middle class that grew out of that tradition, filling the ranks of the bureaucracy and profiting from its largesse, has dominated Turkey's political and economic landscape for most of the last century. The Turkish army has served as a guarantor of this successful arrangement. The self-appointed...
...over yet. Tuesday's ruling by the country's Constitutional Court that annulled the first round of voting for a new President in the Turkish Parliament effectively forced the democratically elected government into early elections. That raised hopes of an imminent resolution to the crisis, which was sparked by secular opposition to the nomination for the presidency of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a politician with an Islamist background. The Turkish lira, for example, rebounded on the news after two days of sharp losses. But that vote will not necessarily resolve the standoff between Turkey's Justice and Development Party...