Young Master Smeet wrote: The

Incidentally, why? Why should the secularised and generally more politically advanced people of the large cities and towns accept to be "islamised" by a government relying on a "conservative rural vote"?Under these circumstances formal political democracy is merely what Marx called a "means of dupery". After all, he had first-hand experience of what happens when the vote is extended to everyone in a country with a rural conservative majority: a nephew of Napoleon won a landslide victory in the presidential election and within a couple of years proclaimed himself an emporer and suppressed radical dissent in Paris. We've recently seen the same sort of thing happen in Egypt.I agree with you, though, that the best that can come out of this is to force the government in Turkey to back down and not try to impose backward ideas and practices on the big towns.  Otherwise the ghost of Ataturk might well return and put the Islamisers back in their place. Remember that the last "democratically elected" Turkish prime minister who took re-islamisation too far, Adnan Menderes, was deposed in an army coup and hanged. A similar fate might await Erdogan. I wouldn't shed any tears.