"Peacefulness" should be set aside. It's a completely different quality from freedom of speech, a quality that has roots with last centuries of anti-establishment movements in Europe and North America. A country can have really large internal freedoms and be quite aggressive at the same time (one large country comes up in my mind).
Turkey is a "fairly westernized country", but it seems that it maintains a lot of "old-school" practices, most of which are also found in some western countries.
A lot of Turkey is under-developed, and under-development and democracy don't mix easily.
A government-organized and founded organization Diyanet is the most supreme Islamic religious authority and is "regulating the operation of the country's 75,000 registered mosques and employing local and provincial imams, who are civil servants" source
Slashdot Mirror
"Peacefulness" should be set aside. It's a completely different quality from freedom of speech, a quality that has roots with last centuries of anti-establishment movements in Europe and North America. A country can have really large internal freedoms and be quite aggressive at the same time (one large country comes up in my mind).
Turkey is a "fairly westernized country", but it seems that it maintains a lot of "old-school" practices, most of which are also found in some western countries. A lot of Turkey is under-developed, and under-development and democracy don't mix easily. A government-organized and founded organization Diyanet is the most supreme Islamic religious authority and is "regulating the operation of the country's 75,000 registered mosques and employing local and provincial imams, who are civil servants" source