Democratic Heresy

Until last week the political heirs of Turkey's late great Kemal Ataturk--Republicans and Democrats alike--have maintained a tacit agreement to stick by their leader's founding dictum: in modern Turkey "state and religion must be separate." Then dapper, driving Premier Adnan Menderes, trying to whip up popular support to offset rising big-city discontent with his extravagant inflationary policies (TIME, Oct. 24), took off on a speech-making swing through his Anatolian farm-country strongholds. At Konya, in the wheat-growing heart of what Istanbul calls the Koran belt, he blurted out the most direct pitch yet for the prayer-rug vote by a leader of modern Turkey: "If there are no courses on religion in our schools," he said, "citizens who want their children to learn religion are deprived ... It would be suitable to have courses on religion in our secondary schools."

To "emancipated" Turks, who honor Ataturk for liberating them from the hold of the mullahs, this was democratic heresy. Turkey's press forgot all about the penalties of Menderes' restrictive press law.

Said Vatan's Editor Ahmet Emin Yalman, Menderes' powerful press backer in two elections: "Laicism is one of the principal cornerstones of modern Turkey. To make concessions on this subject for political reasons is an action not befitting a head of government." Istanbul's Cumhuriyet, another past supporter of Menderes, denounced any plan to "touch the foundation pillar of the Ataturk era." The opposition Republicans and the new Freedom Party blasted Menderes' pronouncement as "unconstitutional" and conceived in failure. Though only last month the government had shut up two newspapers for saying less. Menderes made no reply to last week's attack. In the villages of Anatolia, the mullahs went on with their teaching in many elementary schools.

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