THE sculptor Necati Inci has spent his life making statues of General Mustafa Kemal, or Ataturk, father of the Turkish nation. There is hardly a square or a school in the land without one, so effectively has Inci, 67, cornered the market.

He works at a factory in a dusty suburb of Istanbul where he was drawing up plans last week for his most ambitious project: a likeness of Ataturk higher than America’s Statue of Liberty.

“We’ll have a lift going up through the leg,” he enthused, jabbing at the design on his desk. “Inside there’ll be a conference centre, a library. Up here,” he added, pointing to Ataturk’s military hat, “we’ll put a walkway so that people can admire the view.”

Time has done little to dampen the Turks’ enthusiasm for the founder of the republic, whose cult pervades every aspect of life.

Children must learn his utterances by heart. Insulting his memory is punishable with prison; last week he was at the heart of an increasingly bitter political struggle whose outcome in today’s parliamentary elections could shape the vast Muslim country’s future for decades to come.

The hard-drinking, chain-smoking Ataturk famously decreed that Turkey, the bridge between Europe and Asia, should be a secular state in which religion was strictly a private affair.

He abolished the caliphate and forbade the fez. Women were banned from wearing the headscarf in government offices. Today, however, that legacy is perceived to have come under threat. Although the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), which has its roots in Islam, denies that it plans to transform Turkey into an Islamic state, it is widely disbelieved by opponents who suspect it of a secret agenda and are - odd as it may seem to outsiders - appealing for arbitration to a national hero who died of cirrhosis of the liver seven decades ago.

His sacred legacy, they argue, is being eroded more quickly than Inci’s statues.

“Ataturk would be horrified,” said Nur Serter, a designer-clad professor of economics and “secularist” parliamentary candidate for the opposition Republican People’s party (CHP). She reeled off a long list of Islamist violations of the Ataturk code.

“Women are being advised to check with the imam if it is all right for them to have cosmetic surgery or get a divorce,” she said. “The education ministry is filled with people from religious backgrounds.”

According to Necla Arat, a retired philosophy professor and another female champion of the CHP, young girls are even being left to drown at sea because male lifeguards are forbidden by the Islamic code from handling them in any rescue attempt.

“In some municipalities run by the AKP,” she complained, “we have started to see ‘women only’ parks and ‘women only’ swimming pools.”

Oner Pehlivanoglu, a silver-haired army brigadier, grimly concurred. “I’ve come out of retirement to join this battle,” he said at the headquarters of an organisation committed to “the defence of the ideals of Ataturk” in an affluent Istanbul district.

“We don’t want an Islamic state,” he declared, in an office whose walls were covered in yellowing photographs of the blue-eyed leader from Macedonia. “The military is committed to preventing it.” He added: “By democratic means, of course.”

The Turkish military, the fiercest guardian of “Kemalism” as the cult of Ataturk is known, has used the threat to secularism as the pretext over the decades for many an intervention in politics. The latest came in April, when it stepped in to block the AKP’s choice for president in what some commentators described as a “soft coup” to stop too much power falling into the hands of the Islamists.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, was forced to call early parliamentary elections but the crisis is far from over. He enjoys a big lead over secular parties such as the CHP which fell from favour years ago over corruption and economic mismanagement and will certainly try again to install as president Abdullah Gul, the foreign minister whose wife wears a headscarf.

Will the army stay in its barracks?

In Turkey, things are never quite what they seem. For all the worries about creeping Islamisation, the AKP has stolen the modernisation mantle from the secularists and despite a few mistakes - Erdogan’s thwarted attempt to criminalise adultery was one - has opened up the economy and made the country more prosperous.

Forget about Turkish delight and carpets. Signs of a sophisticated market economy are visible everywhere from the glitzy shopping arcades to the throbbing city nightspots. The annual growth rate of 7% would be the envy of Europe.

At the same time, efforts to impress Europe into granting Turkey membership of the European Union have resulted in advances for “Islamic feminists”: the practice of reducing sentences for so-called honour killings has been outlawed. So has rape in marriage, and the AKP has ended legal discrimination against nonvirgin and unmarried women.

“Ataturk and secularism are all very well,” said Sinan Yerebakan, 35, an AKP supporter and entrepreneur who runs a camera rental business. “But he is not going to improve our balance of payments. Does it really matter whether women wear veils or not in universities? We need a new idea for a new epoch. Kemalism has run its course.”

Even some secularists acknowledge that Ataturk’s 1923 blueprint for a sophisticated state may be in need of an update at a time when Turkey’s demographics are changing so quickly: last year 2m people moved from the countryside into Turkish cities. This has unsettled the old urban, secularist elite who look down their noses at the unsophisticated newcomers whose women often cover their heads with scarves and whose men tend to wear moustaches. Ilber Ortayli, the historian and director of Istanbul’s Topkapi palace, calls them “peasants”.

Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, emerged from such a suburb. His party’s pledges to ease restrictions on wearing headscarves - secularists fear this could lead to enforced religious observance - have played well to the recently urbanised, socially conservative constituency.

“My wife wears a veil,” said Yerebakan, “and I don’t see why she shouldn’t be able to. She should also be able to swim in a women-only pool if she wants to. In our religion, she should not show her body to any man other than her husband.”

Erdogan is reputed to have said once that democracy was “like a train which you get off when you reach your destination” - an utterance often trotted out by opponents who suspect him of wanting to impose an Islamic state.

Yet Turkey seemed to have little appetite for such an outcome even in the unlikely event that Erdogan did: opposition to the imposition of sharia (Islamic law) rose from 68% in 1999 to 76% in 2006, while support for it fell from 21% to 9%. At the same time the proportion of people who describe themselves first as “citizens of Turkey” as opposed to ethnic Turks or Muslims rose from 30% seven years ago to 34% in 2006.

Many are worried, however, particularly the “Kemalists” who view the preAtaturk Ottoman and Islamic past as an age of ignorant savagery to which they do not want to return. The enlightenment, in their view, occurred when Ataturk brought in the Swiss civil code, Mussolini’s penal code and the Latin alphabet.

Turkan Erkin, an 83-year-old former English literature professor, remembers it clearly.

“I picked up the new alphabet quickly enough,” she recalled last week in the offices of the Ataturk organisation. “It took my parents much longer, though, to change from the Arabic script. I remember as a child translating the subtitles at the cinema for them.”

She also remembered, at the age of four, seeing her father donning a bowler hat - besides western headgear, Ataturk also advocated waltzing - and her mother uncovering her hair for the first time. “After all this time as a modern country, I am very afraid of Turkey going backwards,” she said.

It will not happen without more struggle over the memory of the great statesman. Most towns in Turkey have museums where his belongings are proudly displayed: the son of one of Ataturk’s cronies even claims to have the butt of the great leader’s last cigarette.

For better or worse, times are changing. Inci frets about not finding the £50m he reckons he needs to make his mega-monument: Mehmed, his son, explained that the market for Ataturk sculptures was dwindling.

Hoping to branch out, he has been letting his imagination run riot and last week unveiled a bas relief of Uma Thurman, the actress, wielding a samurai sword in character with her role in the film Kill Bill.

“There’s nothing wrong with Ataturk,” he explained, “but we have to move on if we’re to survive as a company.” The same thing could apply to the country.

Why this is a historic choice

Why are the elections important? The ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), which has its roots in Islam, wants a bigger majority so that it can change the constitution. Opponents say this would allow it to dismantle the blueprint for a modern secularist state established by Kemal Ataturk in 1923.

What’s wrong with reform? Opponents accuse the AKP of having a secret agenda to establish an Islamic state. In April the prime minister nominated an ally as president, which would have meant that the parliament, government and presidency were all controlled by the Islamic party.

The military, which has overthrown four governments in 50 years, intervened. The generals described themselves as the “absolute defenders of secularism” - a clear warning that the army was prepared to stage a coup - and the government backed down.

Will elections solve the crisis? Probably not. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, insists that Abdullah Gul, his foreign minister, will remain a candidate for the presidency. This raises the question of whether the military would act again, risking Turkey’s credentials as a democracy just as it was pressing to join the European Union.

Will the AKP get the majority it wants? It enjoys a big lead over secularist and nationalist parties discredited by corruption and economic mismanagement. A poll last week gave the AKP 43% of the vote, ahead of the Republican People’s party at 17% and the Nationalist Movement party at 12.5%.

What are the other issues? All Turkish parties are critical of US policy in neighbouring Iraq, which they believe is leading towards the creation of an independent Kurdish state that could fan separatism among Turkey’s own large Kurdish population.

Turkey has chilly relations with Baghdad owing to Iraq’s failure to crack down on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers party. The KWP has stepped up attacks on military and civilian targets, sparking calls for a Turkish army incursion into Iraq.

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