The great Turkish experiment
THE ELECTION of Abdullah Gul, a moderate Islamist, as president of Turkey marks a new stage in that country's struggle between a secular establishment centered in the army and Gul's Justice and Development Party, which has its social base in a recently urbanized middle class loath to abandon provincial habits of piety.
As a former economics professor and the foreign minister who steered Turkey's campaign for membership in the European Union, Gul is unquestionably qualified to serve as head of state. Yet crucial questions hover over his ascension to a position that gives him the power to veto laws, appoint top judges, and approve senior military leaders.
Gul and his party need to show they have truly tempered their original Islamist leanings. And the generals, who see themselves as guardians of the secular values of the Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, will have to refrain from toppling an elected government for the fifth time.
In his acceptance address, Gul sounded the right notes. He said he intends to uphold the secular, democratic principles of the Kemalist state and aspires to be a president for all the people of Turkey. In a symbolic gesture that may be lost on foreigners but not on his domestic audience, Gul did not have his wife at his side for his inauguration. Her wearing of an Islamic headscarf in public has been taken by suspicious secularists as a defiant sign that Gul and his party mean to dismantle the strict Kemalist separation between religion and politics. The secularists particularly resented her past efforts to seek a judgment from the European Court of Human Rights on Turkey's ban against headscarves in universities.
Turkey's military leaders also chose not to attend Gul's swearing-in. These emblematic gestures foreshadow a high-stakes struggle for the identity of Turkey.
The governing party of Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has succeeed in fostering high growth rates and reforms aimed at making Turkey eligible for acceptance in the European Union. Indeed, the EU's requirement that the military cede its role as the ultimate arbiter of the Turkish state suits the interests of the party.
But from now on, both sides will need to exercise tolerance. It is one thing for moderate Islamists, in the name of human rights, to amend Turkey's constitution to permit headscarves in universities. But it would violate human rights for Islamists to enact religiously derived laws depriving women, homosexuals, or non-Muslims of fair treatment.
For Europe and for the Muslim countries to the south, Turkey is now becoming center-stage in a drama of the age: whether a moderate variant of political Islam can be compatible with liberal democracy. The onlookers owe it to themselves to help Turkey come up with an affirmative answer.
