Turkey's voters turned in vast numbers this past weekend to a new and thoroughly untested political party with firm Islamic roots, but whose broad appeal lies in a moderate, pro-Western platform and its promises to fix the dismal economy and attack endemic corruption.

Regardless of which way the troubled country heads now, historians are likely to look back at this election as a watershed event. If the fledgling Justice and Development Party (known as the AKP, by its Turkish acronym) can live by its vow to respect the separation of mosque and state, it could signal a new era of democratic reform and tolerance for Turkey and become a model for Muslim democrats elsewhere searching for an alternative to extremism and dictatorship while adhering to their religious values.

But if the AKP is to become a model of how to channel mosque-fuelled religious sentiments while participating fully within a democratic political system, it will have to chart a decidedly tricky course that satisfies the army and the business community, those twin bastions of Turkish secularism, as well as its religious supporters.

This will be all the more difficult because Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the party's charismatic leader and a former mayor of Istanbul, was barred from politics this year and cannot become prime minister. His own party may yet face legal problems for refusing to drop him as its chief.

Mr. Erdogan's problem stems from a conviction in 1998 under a since-repealed law for "openly inciting the public to enmity and hate." His specific crime, for which he was sentenced to 10 months in prison (of which he served four), was to read a poem with this line: "The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the domes our helmets and the believers our soldiers."

Yet he was regarded as a relative liberal even when he was a leading member of the subsequently outlawed Islamic Welfare Party. And he has since been disavowing any ties to fundamentalism. "We have said in our party program that we are not a party with an Islamist axis," he told reporters after the election. "Our undertakings in the upcoming days will clearly show that."

Indeed, his first foreign visit will be to Greece, where he will press Turkey's case for admission to the European Union, one of the party's campaign planks. He also pledged to continue along the economic path demanded by the International Monetary Fund in exchange for a massive bailout.

Skeptical foreign leaders and bankers are willing to give Mr. Erdogan a chance to prove he means what he said on the campaign trail, if only because the majority government should provide Turkey with a rare degree of political stability.

The army, though, may be another matter. The generals have always regarded themselves as the true guardians of the secular Turkish state and helped drive the Islamic Welfare Party from power in 1997. The view of secularism enforced by the military has extended to the banning of Muslim women's traditional head scarves in schools and other public institutions and at state events.

The AKP's own strategists were stunned by the scale of its victory in its first electoral battle. The party, which was formed last year, not only swept to a resounding majority -- the first in Turkey in 15 years -- but annihilated the incumbent parties and their discredited leaders.

In fact, the AKP is only a handful of seats short of the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution. That would be a cause for concern only if the power were used to restrict freedom rather than expand it. For the moment, the world should give Turkey's still-maturing democracy the benefit of the doubt.