{"id":44095,"date":"2011-09-19T13:28:18","date_gmt":"2011-09-19T10:28:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=44095"},"modified":"2012-09-19T15:48:39","modified_gmt":"2012-09-19T12:48:39","slug":"turkey-not-a-muslim-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2011\/09\/19\/turkey-not-a-muslim-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey not a Muslim democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Turkey not a Muslim democracy<\/p>\n<p>Re: Turkey\u2019s risky gambit, Editorial Sept. 17<\/p>\n<p>The statement, \u201cTurkey has flourished as a Muslim democracy,\u201d implies that Islam is the state religion of Turkey. It is not so. Although the current Prime Minister is from an Islamist party, the constitution of Turkey is secular and without a state religion.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, and more importantly, the term \u201cMuslim democracy\u201d is incorrect. A cardinal principle of democracy is that it must be secular and that there must be a separation of church and state. If a country has a state religion \u2014 let\u2019s say Islam \u2014 then it can be called an Muslim republic or theocracy, but it can never be called a democracy.<\/p>\n<p>Sukumar Roy, Newmarket<\/p>\n<p>via Turkey not a Muslim democracy &#8211; thestar.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Turkey not a Muslim democracy Re: Turkey\u2019s risky gambit, Editorial Sept. 17 The statement, \u201cTurkey has flourished as a Muslim democracy,\u201d implies that Islam is the state religion of Turkey. It is not so. Although the current Prime Minister is from an Islamist party, the constitution of Turkey is secular and without a state religion. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":51346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[1628,1328],"class_list":["post-44095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-islam-and-democracy","tag-secularism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}