When a senior prosecutor filed a case at Turkey’s Constitutional Court, asking for the ruling party to be shut down and the Prime Minister and President banned from party politics over allegations of Islamic activism, few believed that the Turkish Government was really about to be abolished.

Although Turkey has a tradition of shutting down parties - mostly marginal Kurdish or Islamic parties that immediately re-form under other names - the European Union-candidate country was now considered to have travelled too far along the road to Western-style democracy to seriously indulge in such authoritarian meddling against a party as popular as the Justice and Development Party (AK).

But feelings run high in the battle for the soul of Turkish society, a staunchly secular republic where the predominant Muslim religion has yet to find a comfortable role.

As hearings begin today in a case that was sparked by AK’s efforts to allow girls to wear the Muslim headscarf at university, even the normally blustery Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is believed to be pessimistic and finding an escape route.

This is hardly the first time the Prime Minister, a hot-tempered pragmatist who was once jailed for a now-overturned conviction for sedition, has been under fire from the so-called secularist elite in Turkey - the powerful judiciary, military and bureaucracy.

When AK came to power in 2002, he was prohibited from running for election because of his time in prison and had to jump through a series of legal hoops before he was installed, first in Parliament and then as Prime Minister several months later.

This, however, is by far the strongest pressure he has felt in his party’s six years in office as Turkey struggles to reconcile a growth in moderate Islamism with the strict, military-led traditions of the 85-year-old secular republic.

Today, the centre stage is taken by a man who has become the icon of the anti-government march - Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, the chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals.

He believes that, in spite of AK Party’s pro-European record, the headscarf ruling and municipal attempts to restrict alcohol licences show that, unless it is stopped in its tracks, it will eventually introduce Islamic Sharia law and destroy Turkey's treasured secularism.

As well as the backing of the military and the secularist elite, he is also cheered on by many urban, Westernised Turks, who fear that the rise of an Islamic middle class under Mr Erdogan’s tenure will exert social pressure for a more overtly Muslim lifestyle.

Later in the week, after the prosecution makes its case, Mr Erdogan’s ministers will take the stage to argue that their party - which describes itself as 'Conservative Democratic' - believes in secularism as much as Turkey’s revered founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The party will highlight its pro-Western record and efforts to secure Turkey’s European Union candidacy as proof of these credentials. They will also argue that rare stability Turkey has enjoyed under the party, escaping a legacy of squabbling coalitions, is in serious danger because of the court case.

In spite of the arguments in court, however, attempts to unsettle the Government do not appear to have captured the imagination of most of the public, and have also failed to do so in the past. Last year, Mr Erdogan was forced to call early general elections after Constitutional Court judges attempted to stop him nominating Abdullah Gul, his Foreign Minister, as president, again claiming he had a secret Islamist agenda. The judges also derided his headscarf-wearing wife, the first ever Turkish First Lady to wear Islamic dress.

However, mass anti-government marches and statements by the military did not stop - and, indeed analysts believe, probably helped - July’s landslide in favour of AK, and Mr Gul was eventually elected president.

A recent poll commissioned by Milliyet newspaper suggests a similar public backlash against this week's court case. It showed that the Government’s popularity had suffered moderately, but was still around 43 percent, comfortable enough to win any new election and more than 20 per cent ahead of any other party.

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