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sense of being Muslim didn’t cover. And yet my father also admired Atatürk for his strength and modernising mission despite Atatürk’s break with the collective Islamic past and his creation of a state that was, in its approach to religion, the exact opposite of Pakistan. So, at the very beginning of my journey, with six weeks set aside for Turkey, and with the words of men like Butt on one side and my father on the other – both, in their way, speaking of the great Islamic past – I wished to see how the faith had fared in the state that had broken with Islam.

    The man I waited for outside Starbucks on Istiklal was a young Marxist student who, when he heard of my interest, offered to show me a fuller Istanbul. He appeared a few minutes later with his hands in his pockets. He was short and wide, with dark, greasy hair, intense blue eyes and an erratic, jarring laugh. With Eyup, there were no pleasantries. A quick smile, a hello and immediately down to business. ‘Should we go to this very religious neighbourhood?’ he said, as if it were one of many possible plans. He hailed a taxi on Taksim Square, close to where I was staying, and asked the driver to take us to Fatih Carsamba.
    ‘They are very religious there, and they want to be like Arab countries and Iran,’ he explained. ‘It’s a kind of sub-culture.’ Istanbul was protean. It became another city on the way to Fatih Carsamba. Within an intersection, peroxide Turkish blondes, with lithe bodies, vanished, and stout women, in long, dark coats and beige headscarves, moved down a busy street, selling domestic wares and cheap, synthetic fashions. It was difficult to connect the gaudy advertising, the cars and household goods with the city we had left behind near Istiklal. The buildings were different, newer, but plainer, more rundown. There seemed even to be racial differences; the features here were coarser, less mixed, more Arab somehow. But this area was not a preparation for the religious neighbourhood: it was not a sub-culture.
    We paid the taxi driver and started to walk. And now Eyup and I, in jeans and winter jackets, looked out of place. Fatih Carsamba had made Eyup uncomfortable when he visited it as a teenager, and I soon began to see why. It came on with sinister suddenness. After a gentle bend in an inclining road, we seemed to come under a new law by which all women wore black and, but for a triangular opening for their noses and eyes, were covered completely. The men were in long robes with shaven upper lips and fistfuls of beard. There were bookshops with names like Dua, or Prayer, more bookshops than anywhere else so far, but they all carried the same green and red leatherbound religious books, Korans of all shapes and sizes and defensive pamphlets – Jesus and Islam , Modern Science and Islam , Status of Women and Islam – forestalling the questions people ask. Other shops delivered a steady drone of Koranic readings. Their racks of religious CDs were on display in polished glass windows, just like on Istiklal. Dull-coloured robes with machine embroidery, black on black, navy blue on navy blue, hung on wire coat-hangers in the doors of clothes shops. All varieties of Arab clothing from slinky latex under-veil garments to white skullcaps were available. It was an Islamic facsimile of a modern high street.
    ‘Sub-culture’, I thought, was a good word. It implied an aberration not just from urban Istanbul culture, but also from the traditional Islam of Turkey; it brought out the radical aspect of the new faith. For me, the word suggested punks and hippies, even neo-Nazis. It was a word I would have liked to have been able to use, when I first saw young radicalised British Pakistanis in northern England. There again, people were not simply religious in a traditional way; they were religious in a new way. The religion they embraced constituted an abrupt break from what had come before.
    We were attracting hostile attention and Eyup was trying