KEY POINTS:
It was not a tactful way to start in his job as a government spokesman, but Suat Kiniklioglu did cut to the heart of the matter.
The reaction to the recent Turkish elections in other Muslim countries, he said, "can be roughly summed up as asking: What did the Turks do right that we didn't? How come they can manage a predominantly Muslim population, negotiate (for membership) with the European Union, and have a workable democracy while we're stuck with these idiotic autocrats".
Idiotic autocrats? Could he be referring to the generals who rule so many Muslim countries, and the "colonel" who has ruled Libya for 38 years?
Might he even be including the kings and sheikhs who rule most of the rest of the Muslim world, from Morocco to Brunei, sometimes with a parliamentary facade, sometimes without it? Idiotic autocrats? That's a bit strong, especially as the Turks ruled most of the Arab world for centuries, with not the slightest nod to democracy until shortly before the empire collapsed in World War I.
Kiniklioglu may lack tact, but his question does weigh on the minds of people elsewhere in the Muslim world. They wonder why so many Muslims are indeed still ruled by autocrats. Some even wonder if there is a incompatibility between democracy and Islam. The "Islamist" extremists not only believe this; they proclaim it as a virtue. What they all forget is that the Turks have been working on this for 100 years.
Turkey is an exception among the larger Muslim countries: a democracy with a booming economy that is a candidate to join the EU. But then, Turkey was never a colony.
The Turkish state has existed for six centuries, whereas most other Muslim countries have scarcely been independent for six decades. And for almost 100 years, the country has been ruled by people with a plan to modernise.
Much of the early modernisation was the work of one Young Turk officer, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who rose to fame in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915.
By 1923 the Sultan was deposed, Turkey was a republic, and Mustafa Kemal (who took the surname Ataturk - "Father of the Turks") was in charge. He created a militantly secular state that rejected any public role for Islam, and set about imposing European systems and norms in every domain. It was formally a democracy by the 1950s, but it was really still run by an modernising, secular elite who monopolised the officer corps, the judiciary and the higher ranks of the bureaucracy.
The old elite believed that if Islam were not confined to the private sphere, it would drag Turkey back into a Middle East that they saw as being run by "idiotic autocrats", but they were wrong. The problem is not Islam, but the people who use it to justify autocracy. And now in Turkey, the Muslim democrats of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party have won a key confrontation with the army and elected their man, Abdullah Gul, to the presidency.
When the leaders of the AK party say that they support the secular state, the old elite think they are lying, and 15 years ago some of them probably were. But the leaders and the party have both matured, and now believe that the best way to protect Islam in a modern state is to have the state neutral.
Kiniklioglu himself, like many of AK party's new stars, is a "not very religious" liberal who joined the party because he saw it as the best vehicle for completing the democratisation of Turkey. What does this mean for less fortunate Muslim states? Turkey's value to them is as proof that economic success, democracy and freedom of religion are all fully compatible in a Muslim country.
Other countries will have to follow different routes to the same destination, but it shouldn't take them so long to get there.
* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
