Balci is himself representative of the new Turkey. I had to schedule my late-June interview with him--at the Instanbul headquarters of Zaman Media Group, which publishes the Turkish Review as well as one of Istanbul's main newspapers--to accomodate his daily mid-afternoon prayer. For that matter, Zaman Media more broadly is representative of the new Turkey. It is staffed heavily by people who, like Balci, are part of the religious movement Hizmet, sometimes called the Gulen movement after its American-based leader, Fethullah Gulen. The Gulen movement, and Zaman Media, have been largely and consequentially supportive of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan's ruling party, the AKP, whose base includes lots of religious conservatives.

So maybe Balci's analysis should be taken with a grain of salt. Certainly it's not surprising that he would advance a benign view of the religious conservatism he's part of. But I ran the sociological core of his analysis by other Turks, including critics of AKP and the Gulen movement, and it doesn't seem to be eccentric. At any rate, it's a coherent and plausible account (and dovetails with some reccent scholarly analysis).

Turkey is of course famous for being a secular Muslim country--an identity that goes back to early twentieth-century Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's forceful campaign to westernize the country after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

But the campaign was less successful than it seemed. Though the cosmopolitan elites who ran Turkey after Ataturk were largely secular, out in the villages traditional religious practice persisted. And over the past few decades there has been a huge migration of Turks, including lots of religious ones, from villages to cities. So the main story behind increasingly conspicuous head scarves, says Balci, isn't newly covered heads but rather the movement of covered heads from villages to cities.

The story is of course a little more complicated than that. One Turk told me that, with the Erdogan government running things, a businessperson has a better shot at getting a government contract if he or she shows signs of devoutness, and for a woman that means wearing a head scarf. And, in any event, as head scarves become a more common sight in cities, some inconspicuously devout women have presumably come out of the closet.

Still, the big question, from the perspective of many westerners, is whether the newly visible displays of devoutness, whatever their sources, signal a growth in support for Islamism. According to Balci, the answer is no. He says the Islamist impulse was once stronger in Turkey, and has waned in part because wearing a head scarf in upscale parts of Istanbul is no longer considered odd --and because Turkey now has a prime minister whose wife wears a head scarf. "Islamism is an us-versus-them ideology," a "reactionary ideology that belongs to opposition," he says. The more Islam is embraced within the corridors of power, the more Islamism "loses its energy and attractiveness."