"The Maturation of Turkish Democracy
Posted on April 5th, 2008 by Jenny White
Excerpt from Avni Dogru’s column, “Turkey: Ruling a Nation Through Fear”:
…In the past, the motto of “saving secularism” as an excuse to hoard power has always worked. But, if there was a real threat to secularism in Turkey, the results of a comparative study done by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), a leading Turkish think tank, in 1999 and late 2006 would show it. The study shows that from 1999 to 2006, the percentage of Turkish citizens who would favor a Shariah-based religious regime dropped from 21 percent to 9 percent. In the same period, the percentage of women wearing a headscarf decreased by 9 percent even though this choice of dress became more visible in larger cities due to migration."
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