A report on discrimination against secular Turks may itself end up being used as a weapon in an ongoing ideological war.
A STUDY documenting how non-practising Turks feel forced to conform to a former Islamist government's conservative values if they want government jobs or promotions has sparked heated debate, revealing once again the depth of divisions in this secular Muslim country.
The Open Society Institute's Being Different in Turkey is the first study to provide backing for secular Turks' fears that political Islam has affected their lives,
and it clashes with popular characterisations of Anatolia as a historical cradle of religious and ethnic tolerance.
Based on lengthy interviews with 401 people in 12 provincial towns across the country, it catalogues day-to-day acts of intolerance.
Schoolchildren tell of pressure from their classmates to fast during Ramadan.
Civil servants say getting food in staff canteens on fasting days is impossible.
Kurds in nationalist Turkish areas describe how they hang up on their non-Turkish-speaking mothers so as not to be overheard speaking Kurdish in public.
There has been a 13 per cent drop in the number of bars and supermarkets licensed to sell alcohol since 2005.
More importantly, the report provides statistical evidence of government nepotism. When the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, membership of an Islamic-minded civil servants' union was 40,000.
Today it has ballooned to 400,000. Membership of other unions has stayed stable.
"Ideally, states should be equidistant from all citizens and provide equal service to all," says Binnaz Toprak, the social scientist who ran the survey. "In Turkey, people feel bound to the government for all sorts of reasons - their jobs, their business contracts and so on."
The result, she says, is a population that feels the need to tack with the political wind.
"One of the most striking impressions we garnered from the survey was of a new, strange kind of insincerity," Toprak says.
Shopkeepers who don't pray close their shops during Friday prayers. Businessmen buy copies of pro-government newspapers. Others pretend to fast in their hometown and drive out of town to indulge themselves.
"Several towns we visited had the same phrase for this: 'crossing the bridge'," says Toprak.
The report has been met by a barrage of criticism from conservative circles.
"Soros's prostitutes", was the headline on the radical Islamist daily Vakit on Sunday, in a reference to financier George Soros, who founded the Open Society Institute.
Writing in the pro-AKP Yeni Safak, liberal-minded columnist Ayse Bohurler compares the report to "colonialist studies of indigenous people".
"The local inhabitants are treated like foreigners," she says.
While Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan's spokesman has declined to comment on the report, a senior AKP official denied on Sunday that the party exerted pressure on or discriminated against the non-devout. "The picture presented in the study does not reflect the realities of Turkey," said Nihat Ergun. "Even in our party, we have women in headscarves working alongside women who do not cover themselves and no one has ever complained of any pressure."
Such complaints are not entirely unfounded. Several academics say the report, which lists the complaints of interviewees, looks more like investigative journalism than a work of scholarship.
Intolerance and a fondness for packing government offices with friends and relatives is common to all Turkish political parties.
But Rusen Cakir, an expert on Turkish Islam, nonetheless finds the vehemence of conservative responses to the study significant.
"They used to have the monopoly on being oppressed in Turkey," he says, referring to ongoing university headscarf bans. "This study broke that. Now they are looking for pretexts to hide themselves from that fact."
Lionised by the conservative media for her earlier survey work, Toprak denies accusations of partiality. "The trouble with this country is that all camps - liberal intellectuals, leftists, Islamists - talk among themselves rather than sitting down with other groups to try to thrash out a rational solution to problems," she says.
"Our aim was to try to persuade all sides that what this country needs is consensus, not a new generation of politicians trying to impose their lifestyle choices on everyone."
It is early days yet, but liberal commentator Yavuz Baydar doubts if the study will serve that purpose. Just five months after the AKP survived secularist efforts to close it, "the gap between non-secular and secular in Turkey is widening", he says.
"There is a serious risk the report will end up being used as a weapon in the ideological war."