Whether Turkey’s secular parliamentary democracy provides a model for Arabs clamoring for a democratic future remains an open question. Turkey’s cultural influence spreading across the Middle East, with social implications that anger Islamists, however, is indisputable.

Take Egypt, for example, which many thought would be inspired by the Turkish model. When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Egyptians in September 2011 that they should not fear secularism — a statement that also surprised Turkish secularists given his Islamist credentials — he was immediately censured by the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood who eventually came to power in that country.

Turkey’s secular system was in fact a main reason why fundamentalists in the Arab world approached this country with suspicion in previous decades. Curiosity took the place of suspicion after the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept to power in 2002.

Curiosity in turn gave way to deep admiration when Erdogan blasted Israeli President Shimon Peres in Davos, in January 2009, only weeks after Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza, telling him during a panel covered by the international media that “Israel is a country that knows very well how to kill.”