The E.U. bureaucrats are members of the same political class that all over Europe has shown itself willfully ignorant of Islam, and thus ignorant of the internecine war being waged within Turkey between the secularists and Erdogan and his followers. The latter know exactly how to use claimed pressure from the E.U. to change the laws. What seems to editorial writers in New York to be real "reforms" are in fact attempts only to weaken the secularists. Any seeming expansion of civil liberties has been the result of the desire by the most relentless enemies of the individual rights guaranteed by the advanced Western democracies to pretend to uphold those rights, and then to consolidate power and destroy the power of the centers of secularism - the university rectors, professors, judges, journalists, and above all the military.

Ataturk faced great opposition with the forces of black Islamic reaction in his attempt to push Turkey westward. But he had been a successful general, even a war hero during World War I, and he used his prestige, and every other weapon he could find, to transform Turkey as much as he could. He was also ruthless. He understood the power of Islam and the power of those who, in his view, wanted to keep Turkey mired in an Islam that, Ataturk understood, had been the cause of Turkey's backwardness and near-ruination. He was not a civil libertarian. And the secularists in Turkey today understand that, but have trouble spelling this out for people from outside, who have never had to deal with the threat of a resurgent Islam.

About ten years ago I went to a dinner party in Istanbul. The Turkish hosts and other guests were all assuredly secular. Some sent their children to school in the U.S. When at one point I asked why the Turkish government did not return Hagia Sophia to being a working church, since it was the first place so many Christian tourists went, and what would be the harm, my Turkish companions looked at me with surprise and pity, their expressions showing they had not realized how naïve I was, for, they all told me: "If we did that, we would have a revolution." They then explained that to allow the Hagia Sophia to again be a church (it had been used as a mosque until Ataturk turned it into a museum) would so enrage Muslims -- the "real Muslims" -- that it could never be contemplated. Until then, I had not understood how difficult was their situation, and how, even after 80 years of Kemalism, how great was the danger of backsliding. And the backsliding came, as the AKP won its election, and as the bonds that bound up Islam as a political and social force were undone, almost as systematically as they had once been put in place.

I doubt that the Editorial Board of the New York Times would understand the plight of the secularists, who understand, as we in the West do not, that the kind of solicitude for civil liberties that we in the advanced non-Muslim world take for granted would be counterproductive in the Turkish context, the context of Erdogan and the assault, using every conceivable weapon, on the secularists of Turkey by those pushing for Islam to come back in every sphere of life. Those on the Editorial Board of the Times do not think of Turkey as a place with a history, and a problem, and an attempt (by Ataturk) to ameliorate if not to solve that problem. Instead, they think of it merely as one more nation-state that should pull up its socks. Pulling up its socks means to adopt the kind of guarantees of rights, and limits on power, that can be found in the countries -- all of them non-Muslim -- of the E.U.

Turkish secularists have a problem. They cannot adequately convey the threat of Erdogan and of the primitives who follow and support him. They cannot explain, at least to the satisfaction of the bureaucrats of the E.U. or the editorialists of the Times, why certain freedoms cannot be immediately granted -- why the army, for example, or the judiciary, should be allowed to retain their power, a power required by the threat of Islam and those wishing to bring it back by undoing what Ataturk achieved.

But somehow they have to do this. Otherwise, one can imagine, in ten years, or twenty, a very different Istanbul in a very different Turkey. Imagine the cafes and bustling bookstores of Istiqlal Caddesi shuttered. The shuttered bookstores would include those that sell books by Bernard Lewis, and the antiquarian bookshops, the ones that always seem to be selling off the impressive collection of Turkica or Ottomanica that had been collected by some heir-less German Jewish refugee who ended up in Istanbul just before or during the war. The hijab, and all that it implies, would be back, and then bits and pieces of the Shari'a, as Turkey regressed, and became more like an Arab state, or like the Islamic Republic of Iran.

If you wish Turkey and the people who live in Turkey well, how could you wish the secularist, the hope of Turkey, to have to endure all that?