What would be the EU reaction to this? The EU champions democracy and the rule of law so I expect that a ban of the AKP would put Turkey's EU membership application on ice.

Albert

It may be easy to align with one side or the other; and it is probable that below the surface questions of corruption and entrenched interests quickly come into play; but at least on the surface what we see happening in Turkey is the struggle of liberal ideals as espoused - at least nominally - in the secular state against popular fundamentalist ideals. Turkey is a kind of special microcosm of the middle east. It is special because Kemal made it a secular state in a way few regional leaders have tried to do. But it is a microcosm because the exact same struggle between the liberal, educated classes and the more conservative masses is an essential tension in many of the other states in the region.

In Iraq, for instance, the Shia majority is considerably more fundamentalist than Sunni minority. A change to "democracy" meant that the government would naturally reflect the fundamentalist religious views more than it did before; and that it would be less naturally inclined to look westward for guidance on all kinds of policy. This, anyone with about ten minutes of education about Iraq could have told you before the invasion.

So how does one choose sides in Turkey? Does one choose to side with the democratic impulses which would tend to drive the nation backward into the middle ages, embracing a fundamentalist islamic state? Or does one side with the educated upper classes who simultaneously look westward, bring the nation most of its wealth, but may be quite corrupt?

I question the idea that we ought to be choosing sides. I am not convinced that western interests or those of most Turks are best served if Turkey reverts to a religious state. So I take some exception to the use of language in the article - not because I believe it is necessarily inaccurate - but because it tends to bias our point of view in favor of one group over another.

My guess is that in the best of all possible worlds the AKP will win some political battles and it will lose others. And that it is in the best interests of all involved that this is so. It might be more productive to identify which battles it rightly ought to win and which it ought to lose. I personally am a little indifferent about whether head coverings are allowed or not; but when the question changes to whether they are required or not I will have to side with the Kemalists.

Asia Times
By M K Bhadrakumar
June 10

The Turkish constitutional court's verdict last Thursday overturning the attempt by the government in Ankara to create a legal basis to lift the ban on women wearing headscarves from attending universities, sets the stage for a battle royal between the ruling party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkey's secular elite comprising the judiciary, military and the "Kemalists".

Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) is fighting a last-ditch battle for survival within a year of its dramatic victory in last July's parliamentary elections in which it secured an unprecedented 40% of the votes polled. According to top political commentator Ilnur Cevik, "What we see in Turkey is a coup attempt spearheaded by the judiciary and supported by the elite

secularist groups." Cevik forewarned a few weeks ago, "In recent times [in Turkey] military coups have been replaced by post-modern interventions where certain elite civilian groups are encouraged to challenge the elected government and parliament and impose their will on the nation."

But what is unfolding cannot be viewed merely as political skullduggery. Profound issues are involved. The heart of the matter is whether the brand of political Islam practiced by the AKP will be allowed to function within the four walls of democratic principles and transform gradually, incrementally, as a progressive force rather than being forced into the entrapment of radicalism.

The outcome of the struggle will be keenly watched in the Middle East and wherever observant Muslims agonize over the state and religion. Needless to say, growing political instability in Turkey will have massive international repercussions at a time when the standoff between the US and Israel on one side and Iran is nearing a fateful climax in the coming months.

It seemed for a fleeting moment that last year's elections in Turkey would lead to engendering a balance between Islam, democracy, secularism and modernity. The AKP secured its mandate as a party of religiously observant people and as a party of the "average Turk" (to quote Erdogan), rather than as a party rooted in Islam.

The AKP insisted that its principal mission lay in integrating different sections of society as a movement dedicated to "socializing" secularism. The AKP challenged Turkey's brand of militant secularism as a one-dimensional concept, which the Kemalists in Turkey uphold as the final stage of their society's intellectual and organizational evolution. The AKP maintained that Turkey should not remain transfixed and must instead move in consonance with modern democratic societies' understanding of libertarian secularism, which provides scope for the cohabitation of individuals with different beliefs and lifestyles in society.

The AKP's contention is that secularism cannot be projected as an alternative to religion, as it is not the individual but the state that is secular. Arguably, this approach is not quite at odds with the European-inspired secular nationalism that provided the ideological underpinning for the Anglo-French system of states in the Middle East that came about after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

But what is at issue is the reality that the nationalist regimes in the region - including in Turkey - have increasingly lost their political legitimacy in the past few decades, which in turn created a vacuum that Islamism increasingly strove to fill in. The discredited secularist camp is unable to meet the challenge of Islamism, which has shown tremendous skill in integrating socio-economic grievances, couching it in appealing revolutionary idiom and giving it the coloring of anti-Western nationalism that is widespread in the region.

To be sure, the post-September 11, 2001, world politics and the "Islamo-fascism" that the US and Britain insisted be at the core of the "war on terror", provided much boost to the platform of political Islam. Simply put, the Islamist forces are frontally challenging the established currency of political power.

MORE

By Sabrina Tavernise
Published: June 22, 2008
IHT

ISTANBUL: As Turkey's governing party braces for a high court ruling that could close it down and bar many of its members from politics, party officials like to talk about what they did that caused so much trouble.

"Watch out, you're talking to a sinner," said Sadullah Ergin, an official in the Justice and Development party, whose founders, some of them former Islamists, now want Turkey to be a more open society for practicing Muslims.

Ergin's offense, detailed in a more than 160-page indictment of the party and its officials that has paralyzed Turkish politics since it was filed in March, was saying that a ban on women wearing head scarves in universities violated human rights, adding his signature to a draft law that helped cancel it and talking about it on a television talk show.

Most of all, his crime lay in his association with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the Justice and Development party.

With its control of the presidency, Parliament and the government, the party has come further than any other in modern Turkey to breaking the grip of the secular establishment on power.

The indictment accuses the party of trying to turn Turkey, a secular democracy, into an Islamic state, a charge that Ergin contends is "political, not legal."

Even Turkey's liberals, who would be among the first to speak out against Islamic activism in government, agree with that assessment.

Many see the case as the last stand by Turkey's secular old guard - a powerful class that includes the military and judiciary - that is against the ropes and trying desperately to hang on to power. The military's attempt to stare down Erdogan last year led to a pro-Justice and Development retaliation at the ballot boxes, and now it has turned to its judicial allies to try to stop Erdogan. A ruling by the constitutional court is expected in the next few months.

"They are playing their last game," said Baskin Oran, a professor of international relations at Ankara University. "The military is no longer able to make coups. The last line to hold onto is the constitutional court."

On Saturday evening, a diverse crowd of several thousand people marched in central Istanbul, blowing whistles, banging drums and carrying round, pink signs that read, "Make Noise Against Coups."

"This is the first time that people are speaking out against coups," said Hilal Kaplan, a graduate student shaking a soda can filled with corn. "People were really angry. It filled up in us over all those years and now it's coming out."

The party that is supported by the old guard, the Republican People's Party, says Erdogan is packing ministries with his own people and must be stopped to preserve the secular nature of Turkey.

"Secularism is like the lungs of a Muslim society that opens it up to freedoms," said Bihlun Tamayligil, a People's Party member. "It is the greatest insurance for women."

Erdogan says he also wants a secular state, just with more freedoms for its citizens. Turkey's struggle is the latest chapter in a remarkable history that began in the 1920s, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, looking toward Europe, destroyed all connections to the East, changing the alphabet into Latin letters, placing mosques under state control and crushing the religious hierarchy.

"Turkish society has been traumatized," said Dengir Firat, vice chairman of Justice and Development. "Overnight, they were told to change their dress, their language. Their religious ways were dismantled."

Firat, whose offense in the indictment was to have told a journalist that people who were nervous about head scarves should see psychiatrists, added: "Societies without that trauma could not care less how people dress."

Turkey's painful experiment, unique in the Muslim world, has resulted in a vibrant society that remains extremely self-conscious about issues of religion, ethnicity and class.

The Turkish political system had another peculiarity: A powerful coterie of generals and judges steered the country from behind the scenes for years, deposing elected governments four times since 1960.

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