Turkish Islamists stress Muslim values, not laws

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor

PARIS (Reuters) - Abdullah Gul's election as Turkey's president is a victory for a strain of political Islam centered on promoting Muslim values democratically rather than imposing sharia, Islamic law, experts on the Islamic world say.

Asking if his Islamic-rooted AK Party aims for a religious state is the wrong question, they say, because it has already given up that goal in favor of secular democracy's respect for individual rights -- including the freedom to believe.

This school of conservative "Muslim Democrats" -- a term recalling the Christian Democrats of post-war western Europe -- emerged in the 1990s after Iranian-style radical political Islam failed to take root elsewhere in the Muslim world, they say.

Several analysts hoped Turkey would inspire Arab Islamists, many of whom dream of taking over a state and enforcing strict sharia, but Turkey's long history of secularism created a political climate not found in the Middle East.

"This is not about sharia, but about the great moral lessons of Islam," said Fawaz Gerges, a Middle East historian at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.

"Arab Islamists have not been able to transcend their obsession with sharia and founding an Islamic state."

Warnings by Turkey's army that the AK Party threatened the secularism established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s were a "red herring," said Boston University anthropologist Jenny White, who has studied Islamist politics in Turkey.

"The struggle in Turkey is not between Islamists and secularists, but between rival elites in a zero-sum game where the success of one diminishes the power and wealth of the other," she said.