Turkey: Threat to secular state or modernising force? Ruling party awaits the verdict

Constitutional court to rule on old guard attempt to ban AKP leaders from politics
Pro-secular demonstrators, one of them holding a portrait of modern Turkey's founder Ataturk, chant slogans during a protest in Istanbul, Turkey
Pro-secular demonstrators, one of them holding a portrait of modern Turkey's founder Ataturk, chant slogans during a protest in Istanbul, Turkey. Photograph: Murad Sezer/AP

The prospect of successful careers in medicine should have brightened the mood of the four newly qualified doctors. Yet the glow of achievement was overshadowed by foreboding about the future. They feared the strictly secular Turkey they had grown up in was giving way to an Islamist new order where men and women were segregated, alcohol was banned and people were told how to dress.

A litany of anecdotes supported their concerns: religious female student doctors refusing to treat male patients, and vice-versa; more women students wearing the turban, or headscarf, despite it being banned from campuses and government workplaces as an Islamist political symbol; secular women shying away from wearing revealing clothes for fear of being harassed or reprimanded as immodest.

The students had no doubt about who to blame - the socially conservative Justice and Development party (AKP) government, which has upset secularists by demanding a more prominent place for Islam in the country's life.

"Religious people feel that with the AKP in government there is an organisation there to support this kind of behaviour," said Ferhat Korkmas, 26, as he prepared to graduate from Erciyes University in Kayseri, a city in central Anatolia seen as the AKP's electoral and spiritual heartland. "The head of the bureaucracy will turn a blind eye to the female doctor wearing a headscarf or refusing to treat a male patient."

Recalling how he was once publicly berated for walking about in Kayseri wearing bermuda shorts, Korkmas added: "We don't want to be like Iran, the land of bans, where everything is forbidden. It is scary to think Turkey isn't the same as it was five years ago."

The concerns echo those of Turkey's secular old guard - represented mainly by the army and judiciary - as it tries to push the AKP from power for allegedly plotting to introduce sharia law.


In a landmark case, the constitutional court, the country's highest legal forum, will decide in the coming week whether to shut the party down and ban its leaders, including the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from politics for five years. The chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, accuses the AKP of anti-secularism and of seeking to dismantle the political system devised by modern Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, that keeps religion subservient to the state.

The AKP, which has governed since 2002 and won a landslide second successive election victory last summer, dismisses the charges as an attempted judicial coup by an entrenched elite that is threatened by the party's electoral strength, drawn from a broad cross-section of the emerging middle classes.

It has tried to play down its Islamist roots by portraying itself as a modernising force that is driving forward Turkey's application to join the EU.

But the medical graduates insist that the charges of Islamism ring true.

"There's no question that it's true," said Ebau Ozdemir, 26. "Erdogan said years ago they wanted to bring in people of their own agenda, in the health service, for example, to make sure women doctors feel comfortable wearing the headscarf. There is now more pressure on women than before. If you are on a bus and a conservative man sees a young woman with a headscarf and an old woman uncovered, both standing, he gives up his seat to the young woman. That's common practice."

The complaints carry more weight for being voiced in Kayseri, an affluent, conservative city that is the home town of President Abdullah Gul, one of 71 AKP members now facing a political ban. Gul only took office after the army, troubled by his Islamist past, tried unsuccessfully to block his election by MPs last year, ostensibly on procedural grounds.

Kayseri is also home to some of Turkey's biggest firms. With its gleaming shopping malls and state-of-the-art light rail network under construction, the city has been seen as a showcase for the AKP's claim to marry religious conservatism with modern free market capitalism. Civic leaders have coined the phrase "Islamic Calvinism" to explain its economic success, insisting it chimes with the prophet Muhammad's advocacy of commerce and enterprise. But the credo contradicts Ataturk's widely assumed philosophy of equating economic development with secularism and overt religion with backwardness.

In the industrial zones on Kayseri's outskirts business leaders have begun to pose a more direct challenge to that outlook by building mosques and prayer rooms for their workers and encouraging them to fast during Ramadan.


Safak Civci, a secular businesswoman and owner of Sefes, a furniture factory, said: "They [the workers] are all going to Mecca on the hajj. That has suddenly become the trend. The majority of factories here stop serving lunch during Ramadan. We have heard from other places that employees really have to take care not to be caught eating then."

Such practices have prompted the AKP's opponents to accuse it of applying "neighbourhood pressure" to force secularists to conform to a more religious environment. Critics say such tactics have made Kayseri alcohol-free, with its few bars driven to close in recent years. The only remaining licensed premises are the Hilton hotel and multinational supermarket chains.

Local Alevis - members of a sect that shuns traditional practices such as praying in mosques and wearing headscarfs - complain of pressure from devout neighbours to attend Qur'an readings, while recently retired teachers report a sharp rise in religious classes at the expense of other subjects.

"The chief prosecutor's case is right, secular thought is under threat," said Ali Yaldiz, chairman of Kayseri's Alevi foundation.

The local AKP denies trying to create a more religious climate. "The mosques here were already full before the AKP came to power," said Aykut Iltekin, vice-chairman of the party's Kayseri branch, who said he occasionally drank alcohol.

"The issue here is the transfer of power from an old elite to newcomers. The AKP has done well in the economy, education and the health service, so the only pretext our opponents can use against us is being insensitive to secularism, which is false."

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