Piety or not, the government has vastly expanded the number of imam-hatip schools. In 2002, when the AKP took power, there were about 65,000 students in the religious schools. Today there are nearly a million. In addition, the state has made religion classes — promoting Sunni Islam — mandatory throughout state schools, involving about 17 million students. As recognised religious minorities, Christians and Jews can opt out. But Alevis, who follow a mystical branch of Islam and are the second-largest religious community in Turkey, are unrecognised and hence required to attend.

“It looks like religious indoctrination,” Isil Oral, an analyst at the Educational Reform Initiative, told me. As we spoke in her office at Sabanci Universtity, Oral worried that the new religious agenda will weaken a public school system already struggling with issues of quality and equity. In 2012, the government launched a controversial information and technology initiative in the schools known as the Fatih Project, evoking the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, the “Fatih,” or conqueror, of Constantinople. As Oral put it: “There is a trend in this country that being religious pays off.”

Erdogan has been the chief trendsetter. His speeches are infused with religious references, recalling Islam’s glorious past. At the AKP’s fourth party congress he evoked the Battle of Manzikert (1071), in which the Seljuk Turks dealt a decisive blow to the Byzantine Empire and went on to conquer most of Anatolia. At a March ceremony honouring army veterans, Erdogan delivered a fiery mix of Turkish nationalism, Islamism and paranoia. “Don’t even think that the struggle that began 1,400 years ago between truth and fallacy is over,” he said. “This long-standing struggle is going on and will go on.” Erdogan warns about “those who want to turn Turkey into another Andalusia” — a reference to the fall of the Muslim city of Granada to Catholic forces in 1492, ending nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula.

In all this Erdogan seems to fancy himself as a new caliph in a rejuvenated Turkish Ottoman empire. “The Ottoman caliph was the standard bearer and he wants to restore Turkey to that historic mission,” Mustafa Akyol, an author and columnist at the Hurriyet Daily News, told me over lunch. “That’s why Erdogan needs these conspiracy theories.”

Erdogan’s opponents are in two minds about his ultimate motivation. For some, he and the AKP have become intoxicated with power and exploit Islam in the pursuit of it. “It has nothing to do with Islam,” Alpay said. “It is sheer corruption that is driving the AKP machine.” Corruption charges were levelled against top-ranking government officials in December 2013, and have left a cloud of suspicion.

For others, Erdogan’s early reformist talk was a mere façade for his hardcore Islamism. “He wants Islam to be the main determinant in society,” said Hursit Gunes, a former deputy chairman of the CHP. “That has always been the agenda.” The state has doubled the budget of the Religious Affairs Directorate (known as the Diyanet) and added tens of thousands of new employees attached to Sunni mosques around the country.

Of course, both theories may be correct. The lust for power corrupts religion, just as the quest for piety is vulnerable to hubris. As Cengiz Erdogan, a CHP member who runs a car repair workshop, put it to me: “He’s power-hungry and he’s dedicated to the Islamist way.” Or, as C.S. Lewis once warned: “Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst.”

That may be reason enough to cheer Turkey’s election results: they offer the hope that corrupted religion will find it harder to derail the nation’s experiment in democratic self-government. More than hope, of course, will be needed. For if secular authoritarianism has left the stage in Turkey, its religious counterpart is waiting hungrily in the wings.