"Secular Turks will settle for nothing less than a truly liberal society We cannot compromise our ideals just so Turkey can be a role model in the Middle East, says Mehmet Karli Friday August 31, 2007 The Guardian Your leader (Islam and democracy, August 22) is correct to state that a military intervention to defend secularism in Turkey would be 'bad for the military itself, ... bad for Turkey and, indeed, bad for the rest of the Muslim world'. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that it was the Turkish army that prepared the fertile ground for the development of political Islam. The military coup of 1980 cleared the way for political Islamists by crushing established political parties and by propagating an authoritarian ideology called the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, a poisonous mix of nationalism and Islamism."
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