Turkish crisis puts "post-Islamist" reform on hold

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor

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.

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