Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Kemal’s secular fundamentalists

Turkey is increasingly being pushed towards a new kind of extremism

When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk established modern Turkey, he envisioned a nation free from all kinds of fundamentalism, including “Islamism” and “Turkishness”. Perhaps he never knew 90 years hence, some of his followers will push it towards a completely different kind of fundamentalism, best described as militant secularism. In what may seriously damage political stability in West Asia, secularists or Kemalists, as they are called, are in the advance stages of banning the ruling party!

The ruling party's decision to lift a ban on female students wearing the Muslim headscarf at universities was seen as a catalyst for the closure case, the indictment for which is packed with references to the headscarf. A couple of months ago, the Constitutional Court had accepted a case by the Court of Appeals’ Chief Prosecutor, who sought closure of the AK Party.Appeal’s chief prosecutor also wants as many as 71 members of the AK party banned–that includes President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan–over charges of “breaching Turkey's constitution by supporting Islamist activities.”


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

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