In Turkey’s March 1994 local elections, the pro-Islamist Refah (Welfare) Party won 19 percent of all votes nationwide. This was almost equivalent to the roughly 20 percent each of the government party (True Path) and of the major opposition party (Motherland), and significantly higher than the 13 percent of the junior partner of the coalition government, the Social Democratic Populist Party. Refah particularly triumphed in big cities and in the southeast. Both Istanbul and Ankara now have Islamist mayors, as do most of the towns and cities in the Kurdish region. Non-Islamist circles reacted to this Refah victory with shock and disbelief, despite indications that foreshadowed it throughout the second half of the 1980s.

Egyptian courts have increasingly become a site of political struggle between Islamists and secularists. In a state that restricts political parties and open political debate, courts are now one of the main venues for political expression for groups such as the Muslim Brothers. In the last few years, their lawyers have filed dozens of cases against what they perceive as “un-Islamic” writings by secular intellectuals or “un-Islamic” government decisions. They use the ambiguity inherent in the Egyptian legal system, which seems torn between mainly secular codified positive laws and the rules and regulations of the shari‘a, as interpreted by Islamic law scholars.

Tal‘at Qasim got his start in al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya [1] (the Islamic Group) in the 1970s when it took control of many student organizations in the Egyptian universities. He led the student union in Minya, a hotbed of the Islamist movement, and later was a founding member of the majlis al-shura (governing council) of the organization at large. Sheikh ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman later became head of the majlis.

In the summer of 1993, True Path Party delegates -- 99.8 percent of them males -- selected Tansu Çiller as chairperson of their party and thus their candidate for prime minister. For the first time since 1934, when women gained the right to vote and to be elected to Parliament, a woman became prime minister of Turkey. If citizenship involves the rights and responsibilities of membership to a state, here was a woman who had fully exercised her right to head the government of her country.