Religion

Meanwhile the true believers, threatened by declining levels of belief, by the modernity of cosmopolitan Turkey, have reacted quite predictably with a theocratic counter revolution. So as your article notes, in its first paragraph, politically Turkey is moving strongly in the opposite direction. As in Iran, the theocrats can successfully exploit the tension between a secular cosmopolitan population and a deeply religious rural population to consolidate its control. In fact a similar dynamic is in play in our own country.