For Emre Aribulan, an employee at Shadows--a tattoo parlor near Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul's main pedestrian drag--Ataturk has begun to translate into a business opportunity. Young Turks are flooding shops like his to have Ataturk's likeness--or his signature--permanently inked onto their chests, shoulders, or forearms. Emre, himself a self-avowed Kemalist (as Ataturk's devotees call themselves), is delighted. "Just last week I had four people come in for an Ataturk tattoo," he says.

"I had mine done when I lived in Berlin," says Gurcan, age 23. "I wanted my friends in Germany to ask me why I got it, what it means, to ask me about Ataturk. I could talk to them about it for hours." Gurcan waxes lyrical about his hero. "For Turks, Ataturk opened the way to modernity. There has never been a man like him, and there probably never will be."

The growing popularity of tattoos like the one that adorns Gurcan's forearm is only one sign of Ataturk's reemergence as a weapon in Turkey's increasingly vicious culture wars. Many Turks perceive a "creeping Islamization" under the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and as the backlash grows, Ataturk's image has become omnipresent at anti-government demonstrations. The threat posed to his legacy by Prime Minister Taiypp Erdogan and the religiously conservative AKP has become one of the secular opposition's main rallying cries. The Ataturk cult has sometimes evolved in unexpected ways. At a lingerie shop in Nisantasi, Istanbul's pricey shopping district, the owner has hung a picture of Ataturk--captioned with a quote of his that reads, "Know that the Turkish republic cannot be a country of sheiks, dervishes, and disciples"--directly above a set of push-up bras.

"We love Ataturk," says Ayse, her left forearm bearing Ataturk's trademark signature, "but the tattoo is also a symbol and a protest against Erdogan and his ilk, the Islamists."

"These people want to want to divide Turkey," adds one of her friends. "That's because they're Jewish agents."

The young woman's casual anti-Semitism points to a peculiar paradox of modern Turkey. Conspiracy theories are the Turks' daily bread, but they have acquired a particular stronghold over a part of society that considers itself Turkey's enlightened vanguard. While Ataturk's devotees have adopted the Western lifestyle, they have been slow--at least slower than the new Muslim elites--to adopt the Western discourse on issues like pluralism, minority rights, and religious freedom.

The AKP government has increasingly catered to the interests of its conservative base, yet it has done more for Turkish democracy than any of its predecessors. It has banned the death penalty, eased restrictions on freedom of speech, expanded cultural rights for the Kurdish minority, and opened negotiations for Turkish membership in the European Union. Throughout it all, the Kemalists have more often than not appeared as a brake on the country's democratization. "They are now the most isolationist, anti-democratic force in society," says Murat Belge, a professor at Istanbul's Bilgi University.