“Is Turkey going Islamist?” Daniel Pipes want to know. “Is it on the road to implementing Islamic law, known as the Shari’a?”
And what basis is there for supposing that the ultra-moderate AKP might be heading down that road? Well, they tried to reduce (not abolish but reduce) the penalties for teaching the Qur’an without state authorisation!
Mind you, the National Secular Society fully agrees with Pipes on this. Their report is headlined “Turkish secularism to be compromised by new penal code” . See NSS Newsline, 3 June 2005
Even though parliament voted overwhelmingly for a change in the law, Turkey’s president Ahmet Necdet intervened to veto it, on the grounds that it was incompatible with secularist principles. Phew! A welcome victory for civilised, democratic values. See Islam Online, 3 June 2005