If so, much of the blame goes to the French model of secularism, or laicité, which Ataturk wrote into the Turkish constitution. Under his regime Islam was virtually purged from public life. “It’s based on the French Revolution, the thinking that religion represents backwardness and needs to be controlled and oppressed,” said Alpay. “It is an authoritarian kind of secularism.” In essence, Kemalism insisted that Turkey’s Muslim and Western identities were incompatible.

Enter Erdogan and the AKP, which swept to power offering a new vision, one that embraced Turkey’s Muslim identity. At first, the party promoted Islamic values while reaching out to Europe and courting membership of the European Union. Erdogan’s early political moves, aimed at reforming the authoritarian character of the Turkish state, were carried out in the name of “democratic” reform, not under the banner of Islam. With stable political leadership for more than a decade, Turkey has boasted historic economic growth, attracting record levels of foreign investment.

All of this led many Western leaders and observers to conclude that Turkey was on the path towards a liberal Islamic democracy, one that could influence the Arab Spring and reconcile the Muslim world to the West. President Barack Obama has praised Erdogan as one of five world leaders with whom he has the closest relationship. “For all his Islamist sympathies, Mr Erdogan is at root a pragmatist,” concluded the New York Times in 2011. “After working within Turkey’s democratic framework rather than outside it, he is recognised as perhaps the Middle East’s most influential figure.”

Few people still cling to such dreamy delusions. Ilter Turan, a political science professor at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, was blunt. “It is totally unrealistic to think that Erdogan could moderate the Arab Spring,” he told me as we sipped tea in his wine shop. He went on to warn that Turkey will not advance toward a fully liberal democracy with Erdogan in charge. “It is impossible as long as the president continues to wield enormous influence on the party.”

Even the editors at the New York Times have done an about-turn: they now compare Erdogan’s autocratic style to that of Vladimir Putin and complain about Turkey’s “battered democracy” under his rule.

Democracy has indeed taken a beating in recent years. In 2013 the government violently quashed demonstrations in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, where thousands had gathered peacefully to protest against the park’s demolition. Among the list of grievances against Erdogan and the AKP: a sustained crackdown on media critical of the government; prosecutions for “insulting” public officials; the sacking of hundreds of police and judges; and a new security policy that expands the use of police power and creates stiffer penalties for protesters. Even party officials such as Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, one of the founders of the AKP, recently complained that Erdogan was “seeking to become a dictator.”

This fear became widespread among Erdogan’s critics when he announced his plan to transform Turkey’s parliamentary system into a presidential system, thus expanding and legitimising his presidential powers. That would have required the AKP to ram through parliament a constitutional amendment, which Erdogan fully intended to do had his party won the required 330-seat majority. “The election results mean that liberal democracy has taken root in Turkey,” Alpay, a columnist at Today’s Zaman, told me, “and that the people will not accept arbitrary and authoritarian rule.”

That may be so, but Erdogan and the AKP have altered the political culture in Turkey in ways that will not be easy to undo. Consider the new education agenda. The government has begun to convert secular state schools into imam-hatips, religious schools that dedicate up to 30 per cent of class time to Sunni Islamic study. Erdogan, who attended an imam-hatipschool as a child, told an assembly of AKP youth: “We want to raise pious generations.”