Travelling the Istanbul Metro reveals the diversity of Turkish society. I once witnessed a teenage girl, suntanned, with free-flowing hair, sporting tight jeans and fashionable trainers, speaking cheerfully on her mobile phone as the train rattled through the suburbs. Watching her intently all the while was another girl, of similar age, wearing the neat gabardine and headscarf of the religiously observant. This was not a rancorous encounter. The phone correspondent was breezily unaware of being watched, but the conservative girl was clearly fascinated. It struck me that they each represented a very current snapshot of Istanbul, but from entirely different demographics.

Some assume that the gap between the devout and the secular is the most important rift in Turkish society, one that is even more unbridgeable than the ethnic division between Turks and Kurds. Yet creating such clear divisions is simplistic and reductive. The dynamics of ethnic and religious identification are complex and multivalent – and sometimes overlap – in Turkey. From its establishment, the Republic of Turkey kept a tight rein on Islam, adopting a top-down approach, regulating how religion could be practised and disseminated throughout the country. There are analogies here with how the Kemalist state viewed ethnic diversity. It perceived religion and ethnicity as potential threats and sought to manage both lest they became lightning rods for dissent or derailed processes of modernisation and Westernisation. Over time, however, both have retained salience in Turkish society and have had profound impacts on politics and daily life.

Another widely shared assumption is that religion is of only marginal importance in Kurdish politics and negligible as a marker of Kurdish identity. Such an assertion is lent credence by the fact that the major Kurdish political parties in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria all adopt secular agendas. Martin Van Bruinessen documents a saying common in several languages of the Middle East: ‘Compared to the unbeliever, the Kurd is a Muslim.’