And if Gul can successfully walk the fine line between the nation's secular constitution and the desire of religious Turks to see their values reflected in the nation's laws, there may be a real model for Muslims to follow.

After being shut out of the presidency last spring, Abdullah Gul, a religious man in the assiduously secular realm of Turkish politics, allowed himself a little soul-searching.

“Has the government limited women’s rights?” Mr. Gul, 56, asked a panel of newspaper editors on national television, hoping to persuade Turkey’s establishment that it had nothing to fear from his candidacy.

After all, he argued, his party was already in power, but “has the government closed down places where young people or modern people go? Has the government done some secret things and those been disclosed? What happened?”

As he saw it, he had done everything right. As foreign minister, he pushed for Turkey to join the European Union. He called for changes to a law that punished writers for “insulting Turkishness.” He raised Turkey’s profile abroad and helped devise a set of democratic reforms.

But for TurkeyÂ’s secular class, all that was beside the point. Mr. Gul came from a party that espoused political Islam, his wife wore an Islamic head scarf and the fear that inspired outweighed his accomplishments. A high court blocked his candidacy at the request of the main secular opposition party.

Four months later, he is running again, after Turks voted overwhelmingly for his party in a national election. This time, in todayÂ’s parliamentary vote, he is almost certain to win.

Turkey’s secular class is still clearly uncomfortable with the choice. Turkey’s powerful military, which has ousted four elected governments, said on its Web site on Monday that there were “centers of evil” that “systematically try to corrode the secular nature of the Turkish Republic.”

But TurkeyÂ’s secular elite won only a fifth of the vote last month, and Mr. Gul, an outsider from TurkeyÂ’s religious heartland, seems to be calculating that he no longer needs its consent.

His approval will thrust a group of young, reform-minded members of the Islamic middle class into the upper echelons of secular power in Turkey, a fundamental reversal of the hierarchy in place since the founding of the state in 1923. For most of TurkeyÂ’s history, upper-class Turks have occupied the presidency and imposed Western values onto the conservative Anatolian heartland below. With Mr. GulÂ’s election, that heartland is on top.

Given that Gul and his supporters appear to be the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Coalition, I hope they are successful in their efforts to balance religion and politics.

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