DAR AL ISLAM - TURKEY: A BATTLE BETWEEN ISLAMISTS & SECULARISTS WILL TAKE PLACE DURING THIS WEEKENDS ELECTIONS IN TURKEY - - - ISLAMISTS WILL WIN ! !

Religious Politics

Turkey’s election is being cast as a battle between Islamists and secularists. But the real struggle is not over whether the country should be more religious but over whether it should be more European—and more free.

By Owen Matthews

July 19, 2007 - To hear Turkey’s opposition tell it, this weekend’s parliamentary election represents nothing less than a battle for the soul of the country. On one side stands Ankara’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AK Party (AKP), a party that has its roots in political Islam and which opponents accuse of harboring a secret fundamentalist agenda to undermine Turkey’s strict separation between religion and public life. On the other are a fractious group of left- and right-wing parties united by only two things: a conviction that the AKP is not doing enough to defend Turkey’s national interests against Kurdish terrorists and European Union bureaucrats, and a passionate opposition to any manifestation of political Islam.

Turkey’s nationalists are nothing if not vocal. As soon as parliamentary elections were called in May, middle-class secularist voters in their hundreds of thousands took to the streets in a series of mass rallies in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir to protest against Sharia (Islamic law). Carrying portraits of their country’s secularist founder, Kemal Ataturk, and draped in a sea of red Turkish flags, the protesters denounced the AKP for its alleged Islamism. WE DO NOT WANT TO LIVE IN IRAN! proclaimed one banner carried by a woman in jeans and a T shirt in Istanbul. WE DO NOT WANT TO WEAR THE VEIL! read another.

But the reality is rather different. In five years in power with the largest parliamentary majority in a generation, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has not, in fact, passed any laws that could be described as Islamist. Crucially, he has deliberately steered away from tackling one of the most draconian laws of the Turkish secular state, a ban on wearing Islamic headscarves in any state institutions—including schools, universities and government offices. At the same time, he’s actually liberalized restrictive laws on the property of Turkey’s religious minorities—Greeks, Armenians and Jews. And more importantly, he has introduced sweeping reforms that scrapped legal restrictions on freedom of speech and granted Kurds more cultural rights—reforms that last year allowed Turkey to open formal negotiations to join the European Union (EU). "It’s hard to see how incorporating European Law into your legal code is a way to introduce Sharia law," observes one European diplomat in Istanbul not authorized to speak on the record.

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