COMMENT Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the Islamist-democrat who some time ago was held up in parts of the democratising world as the object of emulation.

The leader of the religiously-inclined Justice and Development Party (AKP), elected to rule Turkey in 2002 after years of misrule by secular parties, would demonstrate for all the Western and Muslim worlds to see that an Islamist orientation would not render a governor inhospitable to democracy.

Pakatan Rakyat supremo Anwar Ibrahim would favourably cite Erdogan every chance he got during the long prelude to Election 2013.

He, like Erodgan, was going - if given the chance at GE13 - to reshape the widespread assumption that an Islamist worldview was necessarily hostile to the premises and postulates of democracy...