Building trust in Turkey

BY ROSALIE E. DUNBAR, NEWS EDITOR

Turkey plays a vital role as a member of NATO and a US ally. Although modern Turkey is 99.8 percent Muslim, it was established as a strictly secular government in 1923 under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a Turkish army commander. In recent years, however, secularism has come under significant pressure from a growing Islamist influence on government and society.

The Justice and Development Party, headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has spearheaded this change in various ways, including increasing pressure to allow women to wear head scarves. As the BBC's Islamic affairs analyst put it, the head scarf is seen by secularists as a "provocative political symbol" (Roger Hardy, "Islam in Turkey: Odd one out," November 18, 2010), and the issue has been front-page news in Turkish newspapers.

Some people fear that all women will eventually be required to wear head scarves, even if they are not Muslim, and see this as the opening wedge of larger losses of human rights. To some extent this has distracted people from focusing on a related issue that is even more important: plans to revise the nation's constitution.

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