Not long ago, at a resort in the Turkish town of Kızılcahamam, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stood before a gathering of leaders of the Justice and Development Party to celebrate both his country and himself. Erdoğan, a tall, athletic-looking man of fifty-eight, with a receding hairline and a pale mustache, wore a blue Western suit and no tie. His wife, Emine, wearing a traditional head scarf, looked on from a nearby seat. Erdoğan recalled the milestones in Turkey’s remarkable economic and geopolitical ascent since 2002, and the rise to power of the A.K. Party, as it is known by its Turkish initials. He pointed to the doubling of the gross domestic product; the sweeping transformation of the Turkish state and society; and the leading role that Turkey has come to play in world affairs. “With the A.K. Party, the whole world hears Turkey’s words,” Erdoğan said.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected in 2003, despite having been banned from holding office, and since then he has taken an increasingly harsh line against his opponents. In the past five years, more than seven hundred people have been arrested. Photograph by Abbas / Magnum

Erdoğan (pronounced er-do-wan) spoke with a vehemence that at times approached anger. When he came to the European Union, an organization that Turkey has aspired to join for forty-nine years, he practically shouted into the microphone. Over the past decade, he has led an ambitious campaign to remake the Turkish state as the Europeans asked him to, overhauling the judicial system and expanding the rights of women and minorities, only to find Turkey still outside the gates. “Look at their state of affairs,” he said of the E.U.’s member states. “They are crumbling! Their currency is in disarray!” He gripped the lectern, jabbing the air with his forefinger. “Turkey is on its feet—no thanks to them but to its own people!” He flashed a sharp, joyless grin suggesting both triumph and resentment. “Actually, we have already met the E.U. criteria. Why haven’t we become a member? you ask. They know very well why we haven’t been accepted, and we also know. . . . It doesn’t matter anyway.” Erdoğan was referring to the widespread belief among Turks that the E.U. has rebuffed Turkey because its population, of seventy-four million, is overwhelmingly Muslim.

Erdoğan carried on, mixing his paeans with bitter allusions to enemies and slights. The starting point of his speech was the state of affairs he inherited nine years ago, when Turkey was in an acute economic crisis and under the rule of an entrenched secular élite. There was also a deeply personal subtext. As every Turk knows, Erdoğan was imprisoned, in 1999, for his Islamist leanings. Now, with Turkey’s economy booming, and the opposition in disarray, the need for the Old Guard had receded, he suggested—and so had the need for dissent. “Dear friends, to be one, to be together, to walk together toward the same future is the biggest strength of our people,” he said. “For this reason, the first priority should be to eliminate those who do not want Turkey to grow, develop, and advance. Everyone should be at ease—we will not let anyone disturb this harmony.”

When Erdoğan and his comrades in the A.K. Party came to power, there were widespread concerns that, as ardent Islamists, they were intent on foisting a religious regime on secular Turkey. Erdoğan, for his part, feared the resistance of what is commonly referred to as derin devlet, the “deep state.” The deep state is a presumed clandestine network of military officers and their civilian allies who, for decades, suppressed and sometimes murdered dissidents, Communists, reporters, Islamists, Christian missionaries, and members of minority groups—anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order, established in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk. The deep state, historians say, has functioned as a kind of shadow government, disseminating propaganda to whip up public fear or destabilizing civilian governments not to its liking.

Friends and colleagues say Erdoğan worried that the deep state would never allow him to govern. But, to the surprise of many, he has pulled Turkey closer to the West, opening up the economy and becoming a crucial go-between for the West with Palestine, Iran, and Syria. He has called on the Assad government, in Damascus, to step down, and has tried to help build a bridge between the West and Tehran in the current nuclear standoff. In the eyes of American and European leaders, Erdoğan has fashioned Turkey into an indispensable Islamic democracy, offering a potential example for Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria.

Erdoğan has even dared to surprise his countrymen by reassessing painful chapters in Turkish history. In November, he told an audience of A.K. Party faithful about the massacre, in the nineteen-thirties, of more than thirteen thousand Alevis, members of a Shiite sect. “I am apologizing,” Erdoğan said, at one point holding up a sheaf of presumably damning documents. The moment encapsulated his attempt to force Turkey to confront its horrific record of persecuting its ethnic and religious minorities, including Kurds, Greeks, and Armenians, more than a million and a half of whom were massacred in the early twentieth century.

But Erdoğan’s rule has another, darker side, which the West seems intent on ignoring: an increasingly harsh campaign to crush domestic opposition. In the past five years, more than seven hundred people have been arrested, including generals, admirals, members of parliament, newspaper editors and other journalists, owners of television networks, directors of charitable organizations, and university officials. Some fifteen per cent of the active admirals and generals in the Turkish armed forces are now on trial for conspiring to overthrow the government.

The American response to this intensifying repression has been tepid. President Barack Obama has developed a close relationship with Erdoğan, whom he regards as a dynamic and democratically minded leader. A White House official told me that Obama has regularly voiced his concerns about the treatment of religious and ethnic minorities. On the rare occasion that an American official has made his criticisms public, Erdoğan has easily dismissed them. Last year, the American Ambassador, Frank Ricciardone, raised the issue of detained journalists. Erdoğan mocked Ricciardone, a veteran diplomat and a Turkish speaker, as “a rookie ambassador.”

One explanation for American passivity, repeated by a number of Turks, is that Obama is desperate for allies in the Muslim world and is determined to hold on to Erdoğan as a friend in an increasingly combustible region. When I mentioned this to a Western diplomat, he said that Erdoğan had proved to be a positive leader for Turkey. As the diplomat told me, “Turkey is Muslim, prosperous, and democratic. There isn’t another country like that.” And yet some Turks compare Erdoğan’s Turkey less to the democracies of the West than to the Russian and Chinese models, in which free-market economics are championed and domestic dissent is repressed.

The Palace, a café in the working-class Istanbul neighborhood of Kasımpaşa, is on the same noisy street where Tayyip Erdoğan spent his youth. A concrete-block building occupies the spot where Erdoğan’s father, a seaman for a state shipping company, brought the family after migrating, when Erdoğan was a child, from the Black Sea town of Rize. The street is treeless and bordered by cemeteries, where the tombstones are adorned with Ottoman script. When trucks rumble past, they rattle the Palace’s big front window.

When I went into the café not long ago, a group of men were sitting at a table playing cards. There were no women there, and none of the men could recall the last time one had ventured in. “I win!” one of them yelled, slamming his hand on the table. “I win again.”

On seeing me, some of the cardplayers came over to talk. Affecting the same sort of tough-guy swagger as the Prime Minister, they were happy to discuss Erdoğan. He was one of them, a champion and a native son. Erdoğan, they said, was the most serious, the most pious, the most respectful young man that Kasımpaşa had ever produced. “He was a flower in the marsh,” one said. As a boy, Erdoğan would climb onto an elevated platform at Sinan Paşa, a sixteenth-century neighborhood mosque that was restored by the government two years ago, and read Koranic verses aloud to the assembled. “If a bunch of guys started staring at a girl and teasing her, Tayyip would always shut them up,” one of the men said.

Erdoğan bypassed the local state-run secondary school to attend what is called an Imam Hatip school; technically, this is where young men prepare to become imams, but in practice, in a country where the display of religious devotion was officially discouraged and sometimes forcibly suppressed, it was one of the few places where parents could send their sons to receive a religious education. The men admired Erdoğan’s toughness, as well as his piety. He played as a striker for Erokspor, a local soccer club. Yaşar Kırıcı, the owner of the Palace, said, “I’ll tell you one thing—he never backed down from a fight.”

The Palace, whose walls are crowded with old photographs, is a shrine to both Erdoğan and Atatürk, who, having established the modern Turkish nation, abolished the Caliphate, the sacred seat of the Muslim world for four hundred years. Seventy-four years after Atatürk’s death, portraits of him still hang in almost every restaurant and tea house in the country. The Palace has more than a dozen.

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The café also features many photographs of Erdoğan throughout his public career: as mayor of Istanbul, as Prime Minister. There is even a picture of the prison where he was incarcerated. Erdoğan has returned to Kasımpaşa many times since he was elected Prime Minister but has never entered the Palace; possibly, the men said, because of the card playing, which conservative Muslims associate with gambling.

The largest picture of Erdoğan in the café shows him at a meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, in 2009, angrily jabbing a finger at Shimon Peres, the Israeli President. The poster reads, across the bottom, “One Minute! One Minute!” The moment came during a panel discussion about the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. “One minute!” Erdoğan, whose command of English is minimal, shouted. He turned to Peres and said, “When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill.” Then he stalked off the stage and headed for the airport. For years, Turkey’s leaders had charted a lonely course in the region by forming a close relationship with Israel. Erdoğan was theatrically demonstrating to the audience, and to the world, that Israel could no longer take for granted its friendship with Turkey. When he landed in Istanbul, he was greeted by crowds waving Palestinian and Turkish flags.

“No one in the Muslim world has ever stood up to Israel like that,” Kırıcı said proudly. “Tayyip’s not afraid of anyone.”

Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, and he governed as a non-ideological and highly competent technocrat. He modernized much of the city’s antiquated water system, introduced eco-friendly buses that ran on natural gas, and expanded the city’s network of roads. By 1997, however, Turkey was on the verge of one of its periodic political convulsions. The Prime Minister, Necmettin Erbakan, a committed Islamist (and a mentor to Erdoğan), had proved to be erratic and ineffectual, especially in the eyes of the country’s secular establishment and the military. Erbakan alienated the secular élite by opposing plans to enter the European Union, vowing to pull the country out of NATO, and moving closer to Islamists across the Middle East.

On June 18, 1997, following a series of ultimatums from the military, Erbakan resigned. His party, the Welfare Party, was banned, as were three other Islamist parties that Erbakan and Erdoğan had once belonged to. No shots were fired: the generals stood back and the civilians sheepishly slinked off the political stage. The event is still referred to as the “postmodern coup.”

Around the same time, a group of military officers calling themselves the Western Working Group began to reassert their authority and tried to remove any traces of what they regarded as undue Islamist influence. Public servants, even university professors, were required to attend lectures by military officers on the menace of political Islam. The generals aimed at getting rid of Erdoğan, who, as the mayor of Istanbul, was regarded as the most powerful local leader. Their opportunity came in December, 1997, when Erdoğan went to the city of Siirt and read aloud an Islamic-accented poem:

The mosques are our barracks The domes our helmets The minarets our bayonets And the faithful our soldiers.

In fact, the poem was written by Ziya Gökalp, one of the country’s most famous secular nationalists, in 1912. Nevertheless, Erdoğan was charged with “incitement of religious hatred,” sentenced to ten months in prison (of which he served four), and banned from politics. “He was the most popular politician in the country,” Cüneyd Zapsu, a conservative pro-Western businessman who became one of Erdoğan’s closest advisers, told me. “That’s why they went after him. Everyone knew the charge was unjust.”

Erdoğan’s arrest and Erbakan’s humiliation were emphatic assertions of the military’s self-appointed role as the steward of Kemalist, secular Turkey. In the first eighty years of the republic, the military has intervened four times to remove civilian governments that were thought to have lost control of the country or to have strayed from the principles of secularism or anti-Communism. In 1960, the generals arrested and later executed Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. In 1980, after a coup that resulted in the deaths and detentions of tens of thousands, the military rewrote the constitution to grant it the explicit right to overthrow civilian governments. The military often acted on behalf of a class of elected officials and civil servants. These people and the institutions they belonged to—including newspapers, such as Hürriyet; the sprawling family-owned holding companies that sometimes received favorable treatment from the government; and the heads of the country’s leading universities—represented roughly thirty per cent of the population. They are still referred to, often dismissively, as the White Turks; everyone else is a Black Turk.

The Kemalist order was also sustained by the dynamics of the Cold War. Beginning in the nineteen-forties, Western intelligence agencies, including the C.I.A., trained Turkish soldiers and civilians to operate as resistance forces in the event of a Soviet invasion. These groups, known as “Gladios” and “stay-behind” forces, received military and intelligence training, and hid weapons caches to be recovered in the event of an attack. According to Gareth Jenkins, an independent researcher in Istanbul who has written about the subject, these groups were the genesis of the deep state. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they also established connections to individuals involved in organized crime.

Few people in Turkey contest the notion that something resembling a deep state existed, but its scale, its nature, and its life span are not entirely clear. According to Kerem Öktem, a research fellow at Oxford University, the courts and the police protected the operatives of the deep state. “These people carried out assassinations and acts of sabotage, and they staged events that were designed to instill fear,” Öktem told me. “And they always got away.”

Prosecutors, historians, and journalists say that the deep state was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, including dissident political leaders, intellectuals, and journalists. It played a central role in combating the Kurdish insurgency of the nineteen-eighties and nineties—the so-called dirty war—when tens of thousands of guerrillas and civilians were killed or disappeared. Death squads in predominantly Kurdish cities like Diyarbakır operated with near-impunity, even using a signature vehicle: a white Renault sedan, in which military-age Kurdish males were often taken away. “Whenever you saw a white Renault, the streets would empty,” Selahattin Demirtaş, the head of the Peace and Democracy Party, the main Kurdish political party, told me. “I’ve been inside the Renaults. A lot of people I know never made it out of them.”