Beginning of the End? The murder of a respected judge touches off a secular, anti-Islamist backlash--and throws Turkey's government into crisis.(Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin)

Byline: Owen Matthews and Sami Kohen

The scene was sadly familiar, especially in the strife-torn Middle East. In the shadow of a great mosque, a crowd of 40,000 gathered to bury a victim of political violence--and vent their rage at the authorities. But this was not Iraq or the Palestinian territories. It was downtown Ankara. Nor were the demonstrators angry Islamist fanatics. They were judges, bureaucrats and businessmen, staunch secularists shouting out their loyalty to the state--and denouncing a government they say is taking Turkey down a dangerously Islamic path. "Turkey is secular and will remain secular," they chanted. "Turkey will not become an Iran."

The occasion was the funeral of Judge Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, killed by a 28-year-old lawyer who opened fire recently inside Turkey's High Court. The gunman's motives are not yet clear, but the presumption of most in the crowd was that he was a militant Islamist getting revenge for a court ruling last November that upheld restrictions on the wearing of headscarves in and around public schools. "This is an attack on the secular republic," declared President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, who accused Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, of seeking to "destroy the regime" by undermining the country's strict division between mosque and state.

Sezer's attack--and the demonstrations following Ozbilgin's murder--were a direct challenge to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's mildly Islamist prime minister. AKP ministers who attended the funeral were booed and jeered by the crowd. But more worryingly for Erdogan were the sentiments expressed by Turkey's ultrasecular chief of the staff, Hilmi Ozkok, who called the protests "truly hope-giving and admirable" and said their example "should be followed by everyone all the time." When the Turkish Army speaks, elected leaders tend to listen. Necmettin Erbakan, Turkey's last Islamist prime minister and Erdogan's political mentor, was removed in 1997 in a bloodless coup orchestrated by the military. His crime? The same as Erdogan's, at least as Sezer sees it--undermining the secular state.

Turkey's P.M. isn't about to be ousted in a military coup, of course. Erdogan is much more moderate than Erbakan ever was, and more popular. Nonetheless, he now faces the most serious crisis of his career. Ever since he came to power in a landslide victory in 2002, Erdogan has been trying to roll back Turkey's brand of draconian secularism. His party has appointed religiously minded bureaucrats to senior positions in the Education Ministry; last year it tried (unsuccessfully) to criminalize adultery. The AKP has steadily campaigned to lift the ban on headscarves in schools, universities and government offices, though so far Turkish courts (and even the European Court of Human Rights) have rejected their plea. Most controversially, last month Bulent Arinc, the AKP speaker of Parliament, suggested the time had come to "reconsider the concept of secularism as it is practiced in Turkey"--triggering a storm of protest. Erdogan's Islamism may be mild by Middle Eastern standards, but this month's demonstrations are a clear sign that he may have gone too far. "The so-far silent secularists have now raised their voice," says Professor Nilufer Narli of Istanbul's Bahcesehir University. "This is a massive movement of people from all walks of life."

Rattled by the show of secularist strength, Erdogan and his party appear to be backpedaling. They rushed to join the secularists in their loud condemnation of the court attack. Ozbilgin's killer is an "enemy of the regime, of secularism and the rule of law," said Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. The government also tried to downplay the more overtly Islamist elements of its program. The headscarf issue is "a problem perhaps for only one and a half percent of the people," according to Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin, who insists that the government's priority is unemployment and the economy.

But ...