Word: secularity
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...Erdogan does not look like a man so dangerous as to have been accused of "inciting religious hatred." His comfortably furnished offices in Ankara look more like a banker's suite than a fundamentalist's den. Impressionist prints adorn the walls, along with a portrait of Turkey's fiercely secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. There isn't a prayer bead in sight. "I am a Muslim," the beardless Erdogan, 48, dressed in a pressed blue suit and red tie, said in a recent interview with Time. "But I believe in a secularist state...
...poem that contained the lines: "Our minarets are our bayonets, our believers are our soldiers." He served four months in jail and was banned from public office for life. Yet last week the clean-cut populist was back. His pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AK) drubbed Turkey's secular old guard in the general election, amassing nearly two-thirds of the seats in parliament - albeit with only one-third of the popular vote. With only one other grouping, the old-line Republican People's Party (CHP), making it into parliament, the AK will be the first party to rule...
...individual freedom in Islam. Although non-Muslim readers may be daunted by the quotations and counter-quotations from hadiths (the reported sayings of the Prophet) that fill so much of any Muslim theological discussion, the book provides a fascinating glimpse of how Islamic traditions are faring in a modern, secular society. The book reads like a series of e-mail exchanges, in which Babès and Oubrou put forward their own tightly-argued positions and then respond to each other's criticisms. One of the main strands of debate concerns the nature of the Shari'a - Islam's prescriptions...
...head of Indonesia's main Muslim political group, the United Development Party, the third largest party in parliament; in 1999 he opposed Megawati's first bid for the presidency on the ground that the world's largest Muslim country should not be run by a woman. Megawati's secular Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle controls just one-third of the seats in parliament. High unemployment and chronic government corruption have caused many to doubt her resolve to tackle tough problems. So to hang on to power and get re-elected in 2004, Megawati can't afford to ignore the conservatives...
ISRAEL Hizballah's Henchmen Israel's military is its most honored secular institution, with a reputation for ruthless efficiency and impregnability. That almost mythic image suffered a heavy blow last week, with the revelation that the army had a spy in its senior ranks. Lieut. Colonel Omar al-Hayeb, a Bedouin Arab from a well-known tribe in northern Israel, was remanded by a Tel Aviv court on charges he traded secrets to the Lebanese fundamentalist group Hizballah for a lucrative role in the drug route across the Lebanon-Israel border. Officials said Al-Hayeb passed on maps, details about...