In the comfortable residential streets near Istanbul’s protest-scarred Taksim Square, you won’t see a lot of Islamic headscarves. You’ll see people drinking beer on patios, and inside the expensive, crumbling apartments are portraits of Kemal Ataturk, the secular revolutionary who founded modern Turkey in the 1920s, and almost none of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the economically liberal, socially conservative politician who has been Turkey’s Prime Minister for 10 years. Speak to the residents and you will hear nostalgia for the days of a proudly secular, officially uni-ethnic Turkey whose state-owned economy gave this old middle class a security and status it has not since enjoyed.
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