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.