WASHINGTON: Abdullah Gul’s election as Turkey’s president gives a resounding rebuke to the notion that democracy and Islam are fundamentally incompatible, just at the moment it is threatening to congeal as conventional wisdom in Washington.

A liberal and pro-Western politician, Abdullah Gul speaks fluent English and has been a steady if somewhat quiet friend of the United States during more than four years as foreign minister.

He also identifies himself as a religious Muslim in a country with an 85-year history of militant secularism. His wife wears a headscarf, which is banned from public offices, universities and — until now — the president’s Cankaya Palace in Ankara.

A lot of people in Turkey say they’re worried that Gul’s election will mark the beginning of the end of Western-style modernisation in their country. Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also has political roots in Islam.

Some people in Washington are worried, too — including partisans of Israel who suspect Erdogan of sympathy for the Palestinian Hamas movement and conservatives who charge him with plotting to undermine Turkey’s secular democracy.

The hardening conventional wisdom is that Islamists use democracy only to gain power so as to impose their totalitarian ideology — that any election they win will be the last one.

Yet in the Byzantine five-month power struggle that has preceded the election, the sides in Turkey have been reversed.

The Islamists have stood not only for democracy but also for compromise and moderation. The threat to Turkey’s political stability has come from the professed secularists, who have employed street demonstrations and twisted court rulings and pulled off what has come to be known as the world’s first internet coup.

That bizarre event unfolded on April 27, when the army posted a late-night statement on its website claiming to detect a “growing threat” to secular government.

At that moment Gul’s nomination as president was before parliament, but the Supreme Court was considering an improbable legal challenge based on the alleged absence of a quorum.

No doubt encouraged by the martial bluster, the court ruled in favour of the opposition plaintiffs, creating an impasse. The generals and Turkey’s traditional leftist and nationalist parties assumed that Gul would be forced to retire in favour of a “compromise” candidate cooked up in a back room.

Instead, Erdogan called a general election. By forcing a vote, he invited Turks to consider the record of his party in office, as opposed to the dark scenarios of creeping Islamisation sketched by the opposition and the military.

That was a brilliant manoeuvre. After all, Erdogan’s government has been one of the most liberal and modernising regimes in recent Turkish history.

Gul’s election by parliament now looks like a victory for democracy as well as for the principle that a Muslim political party can be moderate and liberal. You’d think the Bush administration would be ecstatic. Instead, it has looked curiously conflicted since the crisis began.

The State Department and White House mostly kept quiet during the events of April, even while European governments publicly urged the military to respect the democratic system. Even after Erdogan’s landslide, US officials were endorsing “consensus” on the presidential election — that is, a candidate other than Gul.

Gul didn’t back down, which means that Turkey will have a president who is more friendly to the United States than the vast majority of “secular” Turkish politicians — or Turks. Shouldn’t he be welcomed?—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service