Word: seculars
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...fighting ended with the Shi'ites demanding that Jumblatt's Druze forces must turn over all their medium and heavy weapons. "We want everything from rocket-propelled grenade launchers and up," says Hussam Asrawi, a senior official with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a secular opposition party and ally of Hizballah. But Jumblatt has signaled some defiance, saying that he is willing to yield his weapons to the Lebanese army, but "our dignity is important and the people of the [Chouf] will not allow anyone to enter their homes...
...That the Alevi are such a large group - anywhere from 15% to 30% of Turkey's population, depending on who's counting - makes it all the more confounding that the Sunni-led AK Party doesn't even recognize them as a religion. The Alevi are also up against secular Turkey's greatest irony - the Religious Affairs Directorate, a massive state-run bureaucracy whose billion-dollar budget employs 88,500 people and funds mosques, churches and synagogues, but refuses to recognize Alevi cemevi meeting halls as places of worship. To do so, argues Directorate head Ali Bardakoglu, would be heresy. Last...
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...
...latest political problems show how Turkey's old secular establishment, a wealthy class rooted in western coastal cities, is not ready to surrender its prerogatives yet. It is backing the court challenge to the AKP, whose electoral base, incidentally, is central Anatolia. (Turkey's President, Abdullah Gul, is from Kayseri.) "The reason the economy was booming in recent years," says Raymond James analyst Avci, "was that there was finally political stability with a single-party government. That is now in jeopardy, which is worrying." And yet businessmen like Serdar Bilgili remain upbeat. The Istanbul entrepreneur just invested...