The secularist Republican People's party will be the second biggest group in parliament.
The move would be unprecedented, but the election showed haywire voting patterns – Muslim Malays supporting a secularist, left-leaning Chinese party in Penang, for instance – while stories of cronyism and judicial corruption filled the ever-more-confident and influential blogosphere, which reports what tame newspapers won't.
He was a secularist and never defined himself in ethnic terms – partly, I think, because he was scared; partly out of the habit of not talking of such things; partly because he didn't like being defined by other people.
The US holds on (just) to secularist principles.
Allowing his secularist mask to slip for a moment, James Graham suggests that a religious ethos is better than no ethos at all.
Still rarer, this party, though not Islamist, has a clearly Muslim background the sort of thing that the secularist armed forces would not normally tolerate, indeed did not the last time (briefly, up to 1997) Turkey had an Islamic-led government.Such shifts would be striking in, say, Ireland.
The council's decision was swiftly criticised by Amnesty International, the human-rights lobby group, and secularist luminaries like Richard Dawkins, as well as by the theatre-goers of Belfast.
Their populist cultural complaints might sound typical of the bluster that seems to happen naturally wherever Islamist parties collide with a secularist state.
He shies away from being labelled a secularist and accepts that Islamic principles should underpin legislation.
By instinct, I am strongly secularist, as it happens.
A week ago he measured only a 2 on their scale (where 0 is totally secularist and 10 is a theocrat).
