Turkey’s forthcoming presidential election offers an opportunity to define secularism in the Muslim world as a political system ensuring separation of theology and state rather than as an anti-religious ideology.

For almost a century, secular elites in Muslim countries have equated progress and modernity with renunciation of Islamic symbols and practices. Now Turkey, the first secular republic with a majority Muslim population, is expected to elect a president who prays in public and whose wife wears a headscarf as a manifestation of her religious convictions.

Anti-religious secularists see this development as a threat to Turkey’s laicite. Those who realise that separating religion from matters of state does not necessarily mean taking religion out of people’s lives, see Turkey as choosing a path away from radical Islam as well as radical secularism.

The Adalat va Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) or Justice and Development Party, led by Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan, won July’s parliamentary polls with 47 per cent of the popular vote and a clear majority of seats in the Grand National Assembly. This was a significant improvement on AKP’s 34 per cent vote share in 2002 that first brought the conservative party with Islamist roots to power.

The polls were called earlier than scheduled because of an inconclusive presidential election in April. Then, AKP’s nominee for president, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, faced severe opposition from Turkey’s secular establishment led by the country’s army. Gul’s election was blocked by technical maneouvres backed by the outgoing president and top army generals, notwithstanding AKP’s majority in Parliament.

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