Turkey Saved
That’s a little exaggerated, but the Times is reporting that a court in Turkey has refused to ban the governing AKP party. Although this shouldn’t be surprising, considering Turkey’s history of the secular elite overthrowing Islamist leaning parties, it actually is. It’s also incredibly important. For a long time, among many secular elites, the Turkish model was thought to be the right one for the Islamic world. And for a long time, they seemed right. The Turks managed to keep Islamic political feeling under control, and be a dependable ally to the West. But other countries attempted this strategy, and it hasn’t worked as well. Egypt, for example, runs a similar (less democratic) model, and it bred the grandfather of Islamic terrorism largely because the government sough to exclude the Muslim Brotherhood from the process. Today, it’s not surprise the the Brotherhood is the largest and most effective democratic advocate in the country.
Turkey is more mature – the AKP, under the leadership of Tayiip Erdogan (who was imprisoned in 1998 for being part of the Islamist Welfare Party) has implemented all manners of reforms with the goal of joining the EU. But they’ve also made some symbolic moves that angered the secular elite – namely trying to allow the wearing of head scarves in schools. Overall, however, they’ve been a liberal party in the sense that they have been democratically elected (47 percent of the vote in a multi-party system) without the implicit support of the illiberal military.
The person who’s shaped my thinking most on Islamic democracy is Shadi Hamid. He had a great piece for Democracy looking at moderate Islamist movements and arguing that the US ought to engage with them. He also had a fantastic post at Democracy Arsenal lamenting the (now moot) possibility of AKP being banned. For people who care about the Middle East and about real democracy promotion, this is a huge deal.
