Description

The tensions currently convulsing the Middle East— Western military offensive, Islamicized resistance, economic
turbulence, demographic upheaval—have taken a peculiarly Americanized form in Turkey.1 The secular Republic of
Kemal Atatürk, nato’s longstanding bulwark in the region, is now ruled by men who pray. Recep Tayyip ErdogFan’s Justice and Development Party (akp)—the latest incarnation of a once-banned Islamist movement— has a 60 per cent majority in the Assembly, or Meclis, forming
the first non-coalition government in Ankara for fifteen years. Prime
Minister ErdogFan is himself a possible candidate for the presidency, a seven-year appointment in the gift of the Meclis under the Republic’s notoriously unrepresentative democracy.