Turks Find Much to Like In Ruling Party

But his complaint raised protests at a cafe in Umraniye, where a grapevine snaked up a trellis outside. Hasan Sucu, a 27-year-old who just completed 15 months of military service, told a story. He and his army colleagues used to give a share of their pay to the poorest soldier in the unit. At one point, they learned, the AK Party bought the soldier's family a house, took his mother to the hospital for treatment for rickets and found a job for his brother. Whether the tale was true didn't seem to matter.

"When I heard this story, I decided to vote for them in the next election," he said.

The ruling party has won support for its handling of the economy, after inflation prompted by a crisis in 2001 turned some people's life savings into a week's paycheck. The party has moved, too, to implement political and economic reforms in Turkey's bid to join the European Union. But the question of its religious intentions still shapes the debate among its critics and, somewhat counterintuitively, among its supporters. Some in Umraniye contended that the party's religious roots actually made it more tolerant, not less, providing room for their more conservative lifestyles.

"Secularism, secularism. They don't know how to say anything else," said Yalkanat, the factory worker, who was sitting with Sucu at the cafe.

Turkey's unremitting secularism dates to Ataturk's founding of the republic in 1923. In a sign of the fervor of that time, the government set up a commission in 1928 at Istanbul University charged with developing ways to modernize Islam. Among the suggestions: putting pews in mosques for the performance of prayers and introducing Western classical music at services. (In the end, these ideas were not adopted.)

"They talk about head scarves. Ninety percent of our parents wear head scarves. It's a question of freedom," Yalkanat said. "I'm not a religious person, I don't pray five times a day, but I believe. Freedom of belief is everywhere, everywhere but Turkey."

At a cafe down the street that serves as an impromptu taxi stand, Abdulmecid Batkitar, a 26-year-old driver who arrived three years ago from eastern Turkey, had a similar take. The party's religious roots freed it from the sometimes severe Turkish nationalism of its secular rivals. As a Kurd, he said, he felt the party was more tolerant, evinced by its equitable investment across the country.

"To me," he said, "they don't discriminate."

For decades, such questions of faith and politics, nationalism and ethnicity have been decreed, legislated and banned here, but for Mehmet Ugur, an unemployed laborer sitting in a mosque courtyard waiting for midday prayers, they have yet to be resolved. He calls himself a nationalist, but identifies himself as a Muslim before a Turk. He feels discriminated against and, he said, lied to.

"This is an issue that's lasted nearly a century. It's not an issue of a week or two weeks. It's their mentality," he said of the secular establishment. "They're ignoring the people and, of course, this we cannot accept. That would be impossible."