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.

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