By the time the AK Party took over from the generals, a decade ago, only about 2 percent of eligible children attended clerical schools.
The number of imam hatip (Sunni Islamic clerical training) schools has doubled in five years, and pupils who fail the new exam to get into their first choice have been pushed into imam hatip schools instead.
It would help if, for now, he turns a deaf ear to pious constituents' demands to relax bans on the headscarf and to ease university entrance for graduates of Islamic clerical training schools.
Mr Kotil denies this and maintains that only six of the company's entire staff are graduates of the Islamic clerical training schools known as imam hatips.Yet a newly Islamist spirit was undeniably on display when a group of employees sacrificed a camel near a runway at Istanbul airport last December and then distributed its meat to co-workers to celebrate the modernisation of the THY fleet.
He has overseen a revision of textbooks to promote creationism and the recruitment, as teachers, of hundreds of graduates of imam hatip, Islamic clerical-training schools.
It is true that, in deference to his party's grassroots, Mr Erdogan has sometimes touted a few overtly religious measures: the criminalisation of adultery, new privileges for imam hatip clerical-training schools, an Islamist as head of the central bank.
To supplement the income, Mrs. Ellis works as a clerical aide in school and as a weekend hairdresser.
The union's 121,000 members range from social workers and architects to clerical workers and school cafeteria personnel.
Optimistic translation: a new mandate for reformists to encroach on clerical domination of schools on the valid pretext that a seventh century core curriculum does not satisfy market needs.
The introduction of Koran classes for primary-school pupils and the revival of Islamic clerical training for middle schools are examples of creeping Islamisation, they say.
