The Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which concludes August 18, can be a time of heightened friction in Istanbul, when the beliefs of the pious clash with the lifestyle preferences of secular-minded Turks. This year, Ramadan has been marked by a secularist outcry over recent efforts to restrict the consumption of alcohol.
In a display of muscle-flexing, Turkish tanks this week carried out military exercises on the Syrian border, just a few kilometers away from towns that Syrian Kurds had seized from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces.
One of the defining achievements of Justice and Development Party’s tenure in power in Turkey has been forcing the country’s once omnipotent army firmly back into the barracks and out of political life. Yet the military's economic power has been largely left untouched.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's expressed desire to create a more powerful presidency threatens to complicate efforts to re-write Turkey's military-era constitution in order to provide clearer guarantees of individual liberties, local analysts believe.
As Islam takes on a more visible public profile in Turkey, academia is becoming a battleground over the theory of evolution. Scholars who espouse creationist ideas are becoming more assertive in challenging Darwinism.
Turkey’s government is embroiled in a bitter dispute with secular-minded actors over freedom of expression in public theaters. Officials insist they respect the concept of artistic freedom, but Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has publicly derided stage actors as “Jacobins” who undermine traditional Turkish values.
For most of its 60 years as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Turkey has been content with a supporting role. But now, with Ankara feeling increasingly confident, Turkish authorities are flexing their diplomatic and economic muscles within the Atlantic Alliance.
Social media has been a boon for democratization forces around the world, most notably in the Middle East and North Africa. But a recent tragedy in Turkey helps highlights the fact that social media also has a potentially dark side for democratization efforts.
More than a decade in the making, Istanbul’s Museum of Innocence, the brainchild of Turkey's Nobel Literature Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk, offers visitors a chance to reenter a politically turbulent period in Turkey’s recent history -- the 1960s and 70s.
The last time that Turkey sought to mediate between Iran and the international community over Tehran’s nuclear energy program, it ended in a diplomatic fiasco. Now, two years later, Turkey is trying again. Will the results prove any different?
