Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is officially a secular entity, as Turkey's constitution requires of all political parties. However, it has become clear over the years that there is an informal religious guidance that the party leadership, especially President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, subscribes to. Views or “fatwas” from some trusted Islamic scholars help guide some of its policies.

The most notable figure among these guiding Islamic scholars is Hayrettin Karaman. He is a professor emeritus of Islamic law and a columnist for the daily Yeni Şafak, a prominent newspaper in the pro-Erdogan media. Karaman was recently criticized for issuing a "fatwa" that allegedly was used to justify corruption. (Reportedly, he had given the green light for the government to "encourage" the businessmen who won state contracts to make donations to certain charitable foundations that have ties to the government.) But last week, Karaman wrote two pieces in Yeni Safak in which he openly criticized corruption within the ruling AKP and called for the “moral” people in the party to take precautions.

In the more explicit piece, headlined “The AKP’s morality test,” Karaman classified the AKP's ranks. Accordingly, both at the ground level and among the executives of the party, there were “virtuous” people that Karaman fully trusted and respected. But there were two other types as well:

• The “initially goodwilled, relatively virtuous people who became corrupted over time,” Karaman explained, were perhaps averse to corruption in the beginning, “but their conscience gradually came to accept it as a fact of the party.”
• Those who joined the party for their “personal interests,” regardless of whether they were legitimate. These are the real "bad" people, Karaman explained.

He noted, “These [interest-seekers] block the way of the virtuous people in the party organization, municipalities, bureaucracy and business world, promoting their own collaborators. If they are loose in their religiosity, they take interests without caring whether they are 'halal' or 'haram.' Those who are relatively more religious do the same thing, by making things fit into the letter of the law.”