For the first time in the modern history of Turkey, Islamists, as represented by the Refah (Prosperity or Welfare) Party, achieved a major political victory when they garnered more than 21 percent of the popular vote and 158 seats in the 550-member National Assembly in the December 1995 parliamentary elections. Initially, the two largest secular center-right parties, the Motherland and True Path, pressured by the powerful military, denied Islamists the fruits of their electoral triumph by forming a minority coalition government. However, after three months of political paralysis, the forced marriage between the two leaders of the Motherland and True Path, Mesut Yilmaz and Tansu Ciller, respectively, collapsed in June 1996, opening the way for the Refah to form a government jointly with the True Path. Necmettin Erbakan, leader of Refah, was finally allowed to assume the position of prime minister.

The unthinkable had happened: The most secular state in the Middle East had succumbed to the Islamist surge. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's vision of a secular, modern state in the West's image lay in near ruins. In hindsight, like all visionaries, Ataturk failed in his quest to craft a new man who is unencumbered by the historical legacy of the five-hundred-year-old Ottoman empire. The Turks joined, though belatedly, their religious Persian and Arab cohorts in the quest for a synthesis between modernity, religion, and cultural authenticity. But unlike their Muslim neighbors, the Turks did so through constitutional avenues and the institutions established by the Kemalist state.