Profile: As talks get under way on accession to the European Union, Turkey is trying hard to maintain a shaky balance between modern aspirations and old Islamic values, writes Nicholas Birch
When the Istanbul city council laid out its plans last year to update the municipal beaches that line the city's coast, people applauded. After all, the argument went, what was it that attracted millions of tourists to Turkey every year if not the miles of sand and sea? Why shouldn't locals be allowed to have their own version on their doorsteps?
The work went ahead with a vengeance. Palm trees were imported from the south, sand from Saudi Arabia, wooden deckchairs from Italy. People old enough to remember describe the result as a perfect recreation of the 1950s, the golden age of Istanbul's bathing culture.
The trouble is that the city has changed since then, radically. And when holiday-makers turned up for their first dip, it wasn't temples of genteel relaxation they found, but a maelstrom of controversy.
The cause? Bathing costumes.
For the burghers of Istanbul's elite sea-side districts, beaches mean skimpy bikinis for the women and bermudas for the men. For the more conservative inhabitants of the suburbs and shanty towns, it's the other way round, almost. While the men will unashamedly strip to their briefs to bathe, many women only go in clad in baggy trousers and T-shirts.
It's a culture clash that enraged Mine Kirikkanat, a very chic French-speaking columnist for the liberal daily Radikal.
"Umraniye has gone to the beach," she wrote this July, referring to one of Istanbul's most conservative districts. "Head-scarved mothers fan barbecues, their men lie around in underpants, their endless brats shriek in the water." Her summing up of Turks' meat-eating habits was brutal: "Carnivore Islamistan", she called it.
The article was met with a barrage of criticism. One equally chic political scientist wrote in to accuse her of "a fascist's hatred for anybody who looks different". A few weeks later, the newspaper sacked her. Yet, while her descriptions of the "short-legged, hairy, scratching" masses were extreme, they were indicative of an issue that is often overlooked in discussions of Turkey.
Everybody knows a lot of Europeans fear what might happen if this poor, mainly Muslim country of 70 million people joins the European Union. What few realise is that the Turkish elite is every bit as afraid of ordinary Turks, if not more so.
It's a fear that goes back all the way to 1923, when Turkey's secular republic was founded amid the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Though Turkish histories still do their best to skirt around the issue, secularism had been alive and kicking in the Sultan's domains long before Turkey's dashing founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk arrived on the scene.
By 1900, a century after Sultans and their increasingly emancipated subjects began westernising the Empire, only family law remained in the hands of the Islamic clerics, purveyors of Sharia.
Ataturk of course went far further, dumping the Caliph of All Islam on the first Orient Express out of Turkey in 1924, and granting women more rights than they had in contemporary France or Ireland.
But his most famous reforms - banning the brimless felt cap, or fez, in favour of western hats, and replacing the Arabic script with the Latin one - were indicative of his two deepest-held beliefs.
First, homogeneity was vital if the new Republic was to survive its multi-ethnic origins. Second, in the words of sociologist Nilufer Narli, "the only way to be civilised is to be westernised". This was a top-down revolution par excellence. And to a large extent it worked. While religious zealots battle for control in Iraq to the south, and have controlled Iran to the east for the last 25 years, opinion polls regularly show that 90 per cent of Turks are in full support of their country's secular system.
As Fulya Guntekin, an Istanbul-based student put it to me last week, this feeling is nothing to do with fear of Turkey's secular guard dog, the army.
"It's because Turks have no memory for anything else, nor any inclination for anything else."
If such soothing words fail to convince many of Turkey's more outwardly westernised citizens, it's not so much because ordinary Turks have turned their backs on Ataturk's ideals. It's because ordinary Turks have become more visible.
Back in the 1950s, the heyday so fondly remembered by Istanbul's older generation, the city had a population of barely one million. Today, up to 15 million people are thought to live within its bounds.
Like other rapidly expanding Turkish urban centres, the "queen of cities" has become a cosmopolitan world where besuited gentlemen fresh from holidays in the south of France rub shoulders with labourers who only two years before were tilling somebody else's fields in eastern Anatolia.
Partisans of Turkey's strong state tradition, old-fashioned Republicans - strongest in the army and civilian bureaucracy - argue that rapid urbanisation has only increased the need to keep the people in check. They may raise eyebrows when over-zealous university rectors ban head-scarved mothers from attending their children's graduation ceremonies, as happened early this summer. But they are adamant that only bare-headed girls can attend classes. Anything else is political provocation.
The same reasoning lies behind the state's deep unwillingness to increase the cultural rights of minorities such as the Kurds.
It also explains the fact that the country's 70,000 imams, or clergymen, are encouraged every Friday to read sermons prepared by a 16-man state committee that includes a retired general.
It also explains why 15-year-olds throughout the country are obliged to attend weekly classes in "National Security Knowledge" taught by an army officer. The text book they use still contains a chapter entitled "Games played on the Turkish Republic" by outside powers.
For political scientist Mumtaz'er Turkone, the time has come for Turkey to relax its obsession with unity and togetherness, an offshoot of military influence on society.
"According to this view, if one language is spoken in public, if all women have uncovered heads, if every citizen receives the same education in schools, if everybody believes the same thing, order and discipline will be ensured.
"If, after 82 years of Republicanism, we still go to bed and wake up with nightmares of division", he adds, "it is evidence of the bankruptcy of the military analysis."
For Turkey's growing number of liberals, debate in the country has for too long been miscued. The choice is not between secularism and theocracy or division, they argue, but between imposed homogeneity and a more flexible system open to religious and ethnic particularities.
As Nilufer Gole puts it, referring to the headscarves worn by around 60 per cent of Turkish women, "Muslims want to be modern, but civilised, in a way that may be subtly different from western ways. So they are trying to tell us, like 'black is beautiful'."
This growing demand for change goes a long way towards explaining most Turks' enthusiasm for the European Union. Membership will of course bring stability to their economy, growing rapidly now but subject to terrible crises in the recent past. But they see it as a means to smooth out the edges in their imperfect democracy.
In the wake of Brussels's decision last weekend to start accession talks with Turkey, European and Turkish leaders alike waxed lyrical about the courageous step they had taken to disprove pessimistic talk of a clash of civilisations.
If Turkey is to become a member, the onus is on it to change. Typically delphic, French president Jacques Chirac was in a sense right when he talked of the need for a Turkish "cultural revolution". But Europe also needs to think hard about its attitudes towards Turkey.
When its leaders describe Turkey in glowing terms as an example of the melding of Islam, democracy and secularism, what are they referring to? To the superficially modern side of Turkey that Mine Kirikkanat tells us fills her with such pride - Istanbul's shiny international airport that shows Turkey's "non-Arab face to the world"? Or to the more profound modernity that, in many cases, exists within the heads of head-scarved women? Hakan Yavuz, a political scientist based in the US, puts the point slightly differently. "Europe," he says, "wants Turkey to dissolve into the Union like sugar in coffee, sweetening it slightly.
"Turkey wants to be like milk in coffee, changing the flavour and the colour." It remains to be seen whether Europe has bitten off more than it can chew.
What is it? Turkey, a mainly Sunni Muslim country of 70 million
Why is it in the news? After prolonged haggling, Turkey began accession proceedings for EU membership this week
Most appealing characteristic? The friendliness of the people
Least appealing characteristic? Relentless Turkish pop music played on overnight coach trips
Most likely to? Improve its postal system and other services. Anything worse is impossible
Least likely to? Follow Ireland by banning smoking in pubs