Since its founding by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, the People’s Republican Party (CHP) has been the staunch defender of Turkey’s French-style secularism. It always opposed using religious references in politics, arguing that it would amount to the “exploitation” of religion for political ends. It also opposed, for decades, “religious symbols in the public space,” such as the Islamic headscarf.

Yet the CHP has been changing lately, especially since Kemal Kilicdaroglu became its leader in 2010. First the CHP abandoned its intolerance for the headscarf, accepting hijab-wearing women’s right to go to college or get public jobs. Then it welcomed some conservative politicians with Islamic credentials to its ranks, such as Mehmet Bekaroglu. Moreover, Kilicdaroglu began to allude to Islamic values to support his arguments.

One notable example of the latter trend came last weekend, when Kilicdaroglu gave a press conference criticizing the mass purges and arrests the government initiated after the failed coup attempt of July 15. One of the violations he criticized was the arrest or suspension of the family members of some of those who are accused of the coup plot. For example, when the police could not find Adil Oksuz, a suspected civilian mastermind of the coup who is on the run, the man’s mother-in-law, father-in-law and sisters-in-law were detained. Against such persecution, Kilicdaroglu said:

“There is a principle called individual criminal responsibility. They [the government], however, created a notion of collective crime. … Let me refer to the farewell sermon of our beloved prophet, which is accepted as one of the most important human rights declarations in history. Here our beloved prophet said, ‘Everybody is responsible for his crime; a person’s crime can never be associated with his mother, father or child.’ This, in fact, is a universal rule. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares the same norm.”