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Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of the Justice and Development Party.

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Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of the Justice and Development Party, Edited by-mit Cizre. Routledge, 2008. 238 pages. $130, hardcover.

Writing on the eve of Abdullah Gul's presidential election, -mit Cizre observed that "The courts have been at the forefront of the secular campaign to expose the JDP's (Justice and Development Party's) Islamic aspirations, warn the public about the possible consequences and adopt an exclusionary conception of 'identity', sharpening up the existing political polarization" (p. 11). Less than a year later, the state prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya asked Turkey's Constitutional Court to close down the Adalet ve Kalk inma Partisi (AKP) on the grounds that the party had become a focal point of antisecular activities. Not only did the AKP, Turkey's ruling party since 2002, fear the threat of being closed down; the state prosecutor wanted senior party members, including Prime Minister Erdogan and President Gill to be banned from politics. The so-called "closure case" ended on July 30, when the Constitutional Court found the AKP guilty of antisecular activities. However, due to continuous pressure coming from the European Union and the United States, as well as internal criticism concerning the high economic and political costs of closing down the party, the AKP merely suffered the loss of half its budget. Despite the national and international support in this case, intellectuals and columnists in Turkey, as well as leading European politicians who used to be supportive of AKP's democratization policies, have, nevertheless, lost their initial enthusiasm and complain about the lack of meaningful change since the opening of the EU-Turkey accession negotiations. Given the significance of these developments, the in-depth exploration of AKP's political identity and its interactions with internal and external political powers that this book provides will be of great interest to observers of both democratization and political Islam in the Middle East and Turkish politics.

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