Here’s the scenario: a country with a long-running ethnic insurgency faces a choice between escalation and conciliation. The government bravely chooses the latter, unveiling a package of reforms to address separatist concerns and try to calm tensions, with a view to a negotiated settlement. The opposition plays the populist card, accusing the government of giving in to terrorists and betraying national unity.

It could be any number of places — Spain, for example, where the Basque separatist campaign has played out in much this fashion. But this week it’s Turkey, and the government is pursuing peace with the Kurds, whose very existence was long denied by official policy.

But in Turkey there’s an added twist to the story: the government that’s defying nationalist sentiment in the interests of peace is no band of leftist peaceniks but the Justice and Development Party (AKP), an “Islamist” party whose opponents accuse it of threatening Turkey’s secular status.

It’s an interesting week to have been visiting Turkey. I’ve pointed out before the way that an “Islamist” party — in the original sense of politicised Islam, not the mad Pipesian sense — can become a force for democracy and progress, but it’s worth repeating, because it runs against so many of our usual assumptions about Muslims, terrorism and the Middle East.

Announcing the peace package on Friday, AKP interior minister Besir Atalay promised parliament “an open-ended process” to “end terrorism and raise the level of democracy”. Measures will include allowing Kurdish-language television, ending a ban on campaigning in Kurdish and overturning the forced Turkisation of Kurdish place names.

It’s sad that measures such as this should be controversial, but the AKP’s opponents seem determined to pander to ethnic prejudice against the Kurds. The AKP is usually categorised as somewhere on the “right”, while its chief opponents, loyal to the ideas of Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder, are labelled as “left-wing” due to their aggressive secularism and etatist economics. But this sort of peace versus racism debate is hardly the way the left-right dynamic is supposed to play out.

AKP Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is determined to make Turkey a modern democracy, fit for membership of the EU, and peace with the Kurds is part of the equation. Diehards can continue to maintain, of course, that it just shows how “Islamists” are pro-terrorism — except that the Kurdish independence movement, the PKK, is based on revolutionary socialism, not Islam.

None of this is to say that there aren’t legitimate concerns about politicised Islam: there are, because there are concerns about politicising any sort of religion. But the belief that Islam is somehow uniquely dangerous in this respect has done far too much damage already. The example of Turkey should help us to put it to rest.