You don’t need to have a PhD in Ottoman studies to grasp the fact that what’s happening in Turkey is a reflection of what is occurring through so much of the world: a cultural tension between a religious concept of society and a secularist one.

As the best commentator on Turkish affairs, the historian Professor Norman Stone, has explained, the Turkish military commanders are resentful of the expansion of “religiously minded obscurantism that pushes their daughters into silly shapeless clothes and stops them from having a beer”. While President Erdogan, who comes from a humble background, “wants to raise a new pious generation” – and to encourage Turkish women to have more children.