Turkey's Islamic-leaning Yeni Safak newspaper adorned an article previewing this week's visit by The Queen with a photograph of the monarch wearing a headscarf. A not-so-ironic nod, no doubt, to the publication's affinity with the Muslim religion, many of whose female adherents cover their heads for reasons of modesty.

Unflattering as this particular photograph was, it was hardly likely to cause a stir in the United Kingdom. But the pictures in today's newspapers of The Queen being hosted at dinner by Hayrunnisa Gul, the headscarved wife of President Abdullah Gul, set many Turkish pulses racing with anger.

In this Muslim but secular, European Union candidate country, a headscarf is so much more than something simply for covering the hair — it goes to the heart of an as-yet unresolved battle over Turkey's very identity.

With the recent rise of a conspicuously devout middle-class, and their political expression in many members of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Government of former political Islamists. the secularist, Western-looking establishment that has always run things is fighting an uneasy rearguard action on the streets, in the media, in backrooms and, now, in the courts.

And there is no more powerful symbol than the Muslim headscarf. Mrs Gul considers wearing the headscarf to be one of the rules her religion obliges her to obey, but for the self-styled secularists wedded to the founding principles 85 years ago of a Western-looking republic where religion and the state are separate, its presence in high places is a two fingers to everything that they stand for.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AK), which Mr Gul helped found, is in danger of being shut down for, among other things, its attempts to relax restrictions on the wearing of the headscarf in universities. The headscarf, and specifically Mrs Gul's headscarf, was at the heart of a political crisis that last year brought down the Government and triggered early elections as the secularist establishment rebelled at the thought of a headscarf-wearing First Lady parading about on the international stage. Elegantly attired as she was in a rose-pink scarf and dress, the image of Mrs Gul standing next to The Queen being wired around the world is exactly what the secularists wanted to avoid.

For them it is a symbol of "backwardness" that would erase all efforts to present Turkey as a modern republic that has no truck with the religious strife that is engulfing the world today. The supporters of the headscarf, or liberals angered at bans of any sort, claim that to sideline headscarf-wearing women was a violation of women's rights and would create a ghettoised society where conservatives failed to mix and became even more extreme. But for their detractors, the worry is that more headscarf wearing would create pressure on uncovered women who see their freedom to reject it as the legacy of the revered Ataturk.

Perhaps it is because Turkey was created so fast as a modern republic that outward appearance has taken on such importance. When founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created Turkey from the defunct Ottoman Empire in 1923, he focused heavily on dress: replacing the "eastern" Fes with a European style hat; banning much Islamic clothing and discouraging the headscarf; holding black-tie balls where his entourage walzed in Western-style splendour.

In return for the hostility to the headscarf, the new guard, including Mr Erdogan and Mr Gul, has conspicuously avoided wearing black tie even while embracing the sober dark suit. Indeed, it was almost more of a matter of speculation as to whether the pair would break a lifetime taboo for the Queen. In the end, her host, former Foreign Minister Mr Gul, did. The Prime Minister did not.

It is probably ironic, then, that while Turks are so vitally concerned with their image abroad, many foreigners I come in contact with — seasoned Turkey-watchers aside — tend to take one of two views regardless of the truth on the ground.

Either they assume that women generally wear a headscarf because the population is Muslim (in fact, around half do according to surveys). Or they assume from their trips to the more liberal coastal resorts on holiday that hardly anybody does. And they assume this regardless of any statistics or a succession of black-tie wearing heads of state and, in the early 1990s, even one blonde female economist as Prime Minister.

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