http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/201272011283765829.htmlTurkey is a paradox: it is secular and Islamic, modern and traditional, wants to be Western - yet tends to looks eastwards. But whatever Turkey is doing, it seems to be working.
Last year, Turkey emerged as a source of inspiration for countries in the Middle East during the Arab Spring; the country is now considered to be a regional superpower. Wherever Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan goes in the Arab world, he is mobbed by cheering crowds.
Meanwhile, Turkey's dynamic economy is breaking records. In 2011, it became the fastest growing economy in Europe - and the second fastest in the world. Foreign businesses are queuing up to invest in Turkey.
Is it any wonder that the country is thus held up as "the model", both for emerging economies and for Muslim-majority countries struggling with the transition to democracy? However, inside Turkey, some say liberal democracy and secular freedoms are under assault. There does seem to be a climate of fear in the country's largest city. In Istanbul, I met nervous journalists and bloggers willing to speak only in hushed tones about the growing number of restrictions on free speech. Within 24 hours of our arrival, one of my Al Jazeera colleagues was detained by police officers, who went through his bag and rifled through one of our scripts. They loudly objected to a line referring to the country's "increasingly authoritarian government". Who says that Turks don't do irony?
The Republic of Turkey now imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world; nearly 100 journalists are behind bars, according to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Yes, that's right: modern, secular, Western-oriented Turkey, with its democratically elected government, has locked away more members of the press than the People's Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran combined.
But this isn't just about the press - students, academics, artists and opposition MPs have all recently been targeted for daring to speak out against the government of Prime Minister Erdogan and his mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP. In February, Nuray Mert, a columnist for the Milliyet newspaper, was sacked and her TV show cancelled after she was publicly singled out for criticism by the prime minister. In May, Ali Akel, a conservative columnist for the pro-government newspaper Yeni Safak, was fired for daring to write a rare critical article about Erdogan's handling of the Kurdish issue. In June, Fazil Say, one of Turkey's leading classical pianists, was charged with "publicly insulting religious values that are adopted by a part of the nation" after he retweeted a few lines from a poem by the 11th century Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, that mocked the Islamic vision of heaven.
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Topic: The Turkish paradox