Recent Developments

In the 2002 elections, Saadet only garnered 2.5% of the vote while the AKP won 35%, allowing it to form a single-party government. The secular establishment remains wary of gains by parties rooted in Islam.This was evident in April 2007, when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan nominated his foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, to become the next president. Gul would replace a staunch secularist, Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Massive street demonstrations followed. The first round of voting in parliament was boycotted by the opposition.

The army, which had removed three presidents and forced Turkey’s first Islamist Prime Minister from office, threatened to intervene. The generals, backed by Turkey’s Kemalist establishment, insisted that the president must be the guardian of the secular order. For them, Gul, an observant Muslim who had not climbed the ranks through either a military career or postings in the bureaucracy, lacked those qualifications. Perhaps to defuse the threat of a military coup, the constitutional court then cancelled the first-round vote, arguing that it lacked the necessary quorum. After an electoral sweep by the AKP in July 2007, which increased their numbers in parliament, Abdullah Gul became president.

Gul is widely regarded as an effective foreign minister who laid the ground work for Turkey’s membership talks in the European Union (EU). Yet secularists viewed him with suspicion because of his prominent positions in two banned Islamic parties, as well as the fact that his wife wears a head scarf. She chose not to attend his swearing in ceremony. The issue will remain contentious, however, given that Turkish women are constitutionally barred from wearing head scarves in public buildings, presumably including the presidential palace, Cankaya K6§ku. Turkish secularism, it should be noted, was influenced by ideas drawn from the French Enlightenment, which viewed religion as an obstacle to progress and therefore not accorded a place in public life. Turks now face the task of forging a redefinition of secularism to include recognition of individual rights, as well as the rights of believers, rather than protecting the state from being co-opted by religious interests.

Indeed, the conflict between secularism and individual rights was evident when President Gul amended the constitution to lift the head scarf ban for college campuses in February 2008. Turkish women who opt to cover their hair in accordance with Islamic beliefs made the case that this restriction had prevented generations of devout females from enrolling in post-secondary educational institutions. Perhaps to appease those who did not welcome the change, the government decreed that only head scarves tied below the chin-a style Turks view as more traditional than Islamic-would be permissible.