Turkey's parliament speaker seeks religious constitution

Turkey should have a religious constitution, parliament speaker Ismail Kahraman says, in comments that will likely add to concerns of creeping Islamization under the ruling AKP party.

“As a Muslim country, why should we be in a situation where we are in retreat from religion?” state-run news agency Anatolia quotes him as saying.

“We are a Muslim country. As a consequence, we must have a religious constitution,” the AKP lawmaker tells a conference in Istanbul. “Secularism cannot feature in the new constitution.”

Critics accuse President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted AKP of eroding the secular values laid by modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk since it took power in 2002.

— AFP