It wants to put right misunderstandings about the French secular state and the obligations of religious groups.
Mr el Mahdi wants talks with the government based on the principle of a democratic, secular state.
"A secular state does not mean that the people are atheists, " Erdogan told a television show in Cairo.
The primacy of a secular state was solidified when the First Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights.
The country does not collect its own statistics on religion in accordance with laws enshrining France's status as a secular state.
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Take India, which once aspired to be a secular state, and whose constitution calls for a uniform civil code for all citizens.
In April, Obama chose Turkey, a more secular state, as the site of his first presidential speech to a Muslim majority nation.
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He described himself as a Muslim prime minister of a secular state.
Obama chose Turkey, a more secular state, as the site of his first presidential speech to a Muslim majority nation, on April 6.
The declaration stated that Sudan should be a secular state or, failing this, that the south should be able to exercise the right of self-determination.
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So, with elections looming, will India continue as a secular state?
Announcing guidelines on religion in schools, the president called for a balance between the right to private religious faith and the principle of secular state education.
Ennahda, which was banned under Ben Ali, says it has modelled itself on Turkey's governing AK Party, another Muslim-majority country which has remained a secular state.
But the late (Jewish-born) Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, was a staunch defender of the secular state as a bulwark against all forms of fundamentalism.
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The headscarf ban is seen by some as one of the cornerstones of the secular state - a symbol of the exclusion of Islam from state activities.
They accused supporters of President Mohammed Khatami - without naming them directly - of abandoning the principles of Islamic revolution and working to turn Iran into a secular state.
Nonetheless, there is some evidence that the Brotherhood is a diverse, pragmatic movement more concerned with reducing the influence of the secular state than erecting a theocracy in its place.
The Turkish parliament is currently discussing a new constitution, with the Turkish and Kurdish leaders seeking to renegotiate the foundation of the secular state drawn up by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s.
But even in Ankara, tensions persist between the government and a military command that sees itself as the guardian of a secular state, and the government is accused of stifling and harassing its critics.
The country had been set up as a homeland for Indian Muslims, but it had been a more or less secular state, as envisaged by its founder, the clean-shaven, tweed-jacketed, and Anglicized Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
There are no nativity plays in France's strictly secular state schools, no carol-singers in the streets and almost no Christmas cards two per person on average, compared with 28 in Britain, and then usually as greetings for the new year.
The contest between theocratic politics and a notionally secular state looks even more unequal in another ex-British land, Malaysia, where freedom of choice in religion is enshrined in the federal constitution, but Islamic law is imposed with growing strictness on the Muslim majority.
The government has already pushed through a string of laws that should much improve prisoners' rights and make it far less likely, in the first place, that Turks are prosecuted for crimes of self-expression which have habitually been deemed by judges to abet terrorism or undermine the secular state.
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Yet the Islamists said, started to worry about the word, or the expression civilian might be construed, as the lawyers would like to say, into the possibility of becoming a secular state and they were, you know, violently, you know, demonstrating in the streets at Tahrir, hundreds of thousands there.
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Both Turkey's dwindling Christian minority, and members of its Muslim majority, accuse the strictly secular Turkish state of restricting their religious freedoms.
Caliphate, which aims to overthrow the secular Turkish state, had previously been criticised for "aggressive, anti-semitic and anti-democratic agitation, " in German intelligence reports.
Even in a "secular" state like West Bengal - which has been ruled by a Communist coalition for nearly 30 years - child marriages continue to be practised by different religions.
At the center of the new Great Game is Moscow's effort to put the squeeze on Azerbaijan, a secular Muslim state whose President, Heydar Aliyev, once a member of the Soviet Politburo, welcomes Western investment.
The Clinton Administration's reflexive deference to Moscow has only slowly begun to give way to an appreciation that an economically successful, pro-Western and secular Muslim state in Azerbaijan is in the U.S. interest, even if it is not in the Kremlin's.
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