ISTANBUL, April 24 — Turkey’s ruling party on Tuesday chose a presidential candidate with an Islamic background, a move that will extend the reach of the party — and the emerging class of devout Muslims it represents — into the heart of Turkey’s secular establishment for the first time.
The selection has focused the worries of secular Turks who fear that gender equality, as well as drinking alcohol and wearing miniskirts, could eventually be in danger.
Abdullah Gul, 56, the foreign minister whose wife wears a Muslim headscarf and who is Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s closest political ally, is expected to be confirmed as president by Parliament in several rounds of voting that begin Friday. That will bolster Turkey’s new political class — modernizers from a religious background.
“These are the new forces, the new social powers,” said Ali Bulac, a columnist for a conservative newspaper, Zaman, in Istanbul. “They are very devout. They don’t drink. They don’t gamble. They don’t take holidays. They are loaded with a huge energy. This energy has been blocked by the state.”
. . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/world/europe/24cnd-turkey.htmlMany Turkish secularists decry what they see as the AK party's insincere stance on secularism and its champion, Ataturk, the revered founder of modern Turkey.
The protests sparked in April by Gul's first bid to become president triggered a political crisis and a stern warning by the staunchly secular military, which has unseated four elected governments in the last half century.
But in early elections on July 22 called to end the crisis, Erdogan's pro-business AK party emerged even stronger, taking nearly half the votes.
Now, the question is whether the secular foundations of Ataturk's republic can survive with a conservative Muslim president whose wife wears a head scarf -- a taboo in Turkey.
(Headscarves have been prohibited in Turkey for quite some time.)
More
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/pp082907.shtmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/world/europe/24cnd-turkey.htmlIn 1991, he ran for Parliament as part of the Welfare Party, an openly Islamist party.
The party was banned after the military forced it from power in 1997. Several years later, he joined Mr. Erdogan in breaking with the conservative Islamic party and founding the Justice and Development Party, which came to power in 2002.
“They became disenchanted with the undue attention that the party gave to religion,” Mr. Heper said. “They wanted to separate religion from politics altogether.”
But many critics remain unconvinced. “There is a large group of people in Turkey who still think that the statements he has made as a member of the Islamic political movement are his fundamental thoughts and cannot change with time,” said Yilmaz Esmer, a professor at Bahcesehir University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/world/europe/28gul.html?_r=1Interesting bit of gossip:
On August 20, 1980, Abdullah Gül married Hayrünnisa Özyurt (b. 1965), his first cousin, who also originates from Kayseri.<23><24> He was therefore thirty years old, to his wife's fifteen, at the time of their marriage. The couple has three children: two sons named Mehmet Emre and Ahmet Münir, and a daughter named Kübra.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_G%C3%BClNote: married his first cousin when she was 15. He was 30 at the time.
My comment: DUers should do some research on this guy and take a wait and see attitude before making him a hero.
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