Turkish crisis puts "post-Islamist" reform on hold

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey's moves toward greater religious freedom, which some saw as the sign of an evolving moderate Muslim society, have been put on hold by a political crisis that could outlaw the "post-Islamist" ruling AK Party.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, whose bid to lift a ban on Islamic headscarves at universities triggered the crisis, would probably not champion further religious reform even if he won the court case against his party, Turkish analysts say.

This stalemate hits not only the majority Muslims, many of whom find Turkey's official state secularism limiting, but also the tiny Christian community that had been hoping that tight limits on their freedoms would be eased.

"They have depleted their reformist arsenal. This is as far as they can go," Ankara University sociologist Dogu Ergil said.

Religious reform has been "put on ice. They will keep it frozen for some time to come," Cengiz Aktar, a political scientist at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University said.

Turkey's Constitutional Court is considering whether to ban the AK Party, which has its roots in political Islam, for challenging the official policy that shuts faith out of public life and keeps tight state control over mosques and imams.

Islam experts call the AK Party "post-Islamist" because it dropped the dream of some kind of an Islamic republic about a decade ago for a modern democracy whose basic rights would bring in their wake more religious freedom than Turkey now allows.

ERDOGAN'S "BIG MISTAKE"

Erdogan and his supporters have also been dubbed "Muslim democrats", a term borrowed from the conservative Christian Democrats of post-war Western Europe.

Once jailed as an Islamic radical, Erdogan scored a major victory in 2003 by becoming prime minister despite fierce opposition from the secularist elite rooted in Turkey's army, judiciary, intelligencia and nationalist political movements.

His gradual approach, stressing the economy and a bid to join the European Union, established his bloc of business interests from the more religious countryside as partners in the power structure dominated by the secularist urban elite.

For five years, Erdogan delayed any overt religious reforms while stressing overall democratic rights. His caution was seen as a model for Muslims who want to combine Islam and democracy.

But after the AK Party's solid victories in the 2007 parliamentary and presidential elections, Erdogan moved to end the university headscarf ban, a deeply symbolic issue that triggered the legal suit by a chief prosecutor to close down the AK Party.

"They thought they could do whatever they liked," Aktar said. "That was their big mistake."

IDEOLOGICAL TOOLS

The fading of hope for religious reform fits into a larger picture of the ruling party's fading interest in the democratic reforms needed if Turkey is ever to become an EU member.

"They only wanted a place in the power system. Once they got it, they stopped," said Ergil.

Rusen Cakir, author of several books on Islam and politics in Turkey, said political power rather than religion was always key to the AK Party's confrontation with the secularist elite.

"It's kind of a class struggle and each side has its ideological tool, secularism or religion," he said.

Senior AK Party sources told Reuters last week that the party was preparing for a ban, as well as a ban for Erdogan from politics for five years. A successor party could be formed and might continue governing, but with more modest goals.

This did not mean the "post-Islamist project" had ended, Cakir said. "The process is going on. It's not finished yet."

The reform drive linked to Ankara's EU membership bid also raised hopes among Turkey's Christians, whose properties have been confiscated and rights curtailed in the name of secularism.

The Orthodox Church put great hopes in EU pressure to get back its only seminary, which that Turkey shut down in 1971. But with less interest in EU membership, that pressure has abated.

"The minorities were a hot issues for a while, but in the past two years, there has been no movement at all," said an official at the Istanbul headquarters of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual head of all Orthodox Christians.

In fact, a monastery church was recently confiscated by the state, he said, adding: "We are very disappointed."

The Roman Catholic Church is hoping to get permission to turn a museum in Tarsus back into a church in time for its Year of Saint Paul starting on June 21. Paul was born in Tarsus.

But one senior churchman said that did not mean an overall improvement for religious minorities. "I still have to travel with a bodyguard," he said.