TURKEY:Islamic tourism is booming in Turkey, but not everybody is happy, writes Nicholas Birchfrom Cesme, near Izmir, western Turkey.
LIKE ALL good businessmen, hotelier Serafettin Ulukent has an eye for the right trend.
When he opened his holiday village on Turkey's Aegean coast in the 1980s, his first guests were German surfers, attracted by the region's winds. In 1998, he stepped in to bale out 100 conservative Turkish guests abandoned by a local operator to whom he had rented his property and he knew there was no turning back.
"I gave them a free holiday and they begged me to take them back next year," he remembers. "I agreed. The surfers were fun, but these people had real money."
Back then, Ulukent's New Meltem was only the second hotel in Turkey designed to cater for devout Muslim guests - no alcohol, segregated bathing for men and women and a golden- voiced pastry cook who earned an extra €50 a month to sing the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.
A decade on, Islamic tourism is the fastest-growing part of Turkey's €13 billion tourism sector, with are more than 30 Islamic hotels. With growth particularly rapid since the religious-minded AK Party came to power in 2002, some single out the hotels as evidence of what they see as a creeping Islamisation of Turkish society.
"All these covered women risk destroying the image of the place," says Senol Erkaya, a shop owner in the popular resort of Bodrum, where a new Islamic hotel opened last month. Just down the beach, half a dozen Dutch girls bathe topless.
A non-practising Muslim, Ulukent has had his share of fanatics. He remembers one guest angered by music coming from the women's bathing area.
"He said it was a sin," Ulukent says. "The tape turned out to be his wife's. We told him to calm down - this is a hotel, not a morgue."
He thinks talk of Islamisation misses the point. Like roughly two-thirds of Turkish women, his mother covered her head, he says, "and when we went to the sea, she'd sit as close as she could to the water to catch the spray.
"This is how ordinary Turks go to the beach. The only difference is that now they have fridges and TVs and they want to go swimming too."
Ulukent thinks it is men who have pushed the demand for hotels like his. Turkish men, he says, are jealous, unhappy with the thought that their wives might be seen by others. Dressed in a vivid orange headscarf, standing with her husband in a travel agents just off Istanbul's central Taksim square, Fatma Sarioglu disagrees.
She was the one demanding a summer holiday in one of the Islamic hotels on Turkey's southern coast, not her husband, she says.
"He and the kids can swim anywhere they like," she says. "If these sorts of places didn't exist, I'd have to content myself with the women's hour at the municipal pool."
In Turkey, where debates about Islam crystalise around its most visible symbol, the headscarf, it is women, not men, who are punished for their religious views, and not just in universities, which ban covered students.
In the past there were women- only beaches in Turkey, used both by headscarf-wearing women who considered stripping off on shared beaches against their religion, and by uncovered women keen to avoid unwanted male attention.
They were closed down during an army-led crackdown on political Islam in 1997 on the grounds that the coast is a "public space". Feminine modesty, Islamic or otherwise, now "constitutes an 'anti-secular' act in our country", says Nihal Bengisu Karaca, a well-known columnist.
A headscarf wearer and a keen swimmer, Bengisu knows all about the difficulties of balancing the two. She has dragged her husband and son down cliffs in search of secluded inlets. She has even braved the beach in a hasema, a baggy swimsuit designed to hide conservative women's curves while they swim. A little boy laughed.
It looked "like a Ku Klux Klan cloak", she says. She is no fan of Islamic hotels either, arguing that they give second-class service to women despite the fact that women are their primary clientele.
None has a women's beach and the women's pools are invariably smaller than the men's. Plus they are too expensive.
When she published an account of her experiences last summer, the headscarf-wearing wife of Turkey's president was among hundreds of women to congratulate her. Conservative men reacted less well. Bengisu puts their criticisms down to men's patriarchal attitudes.
"The attitude was 'when so much money is being spent to keep the wife happy, the very least she can do is not complain'."
She has now all but abandoned her dreams of balancing pleasure and piety. A covered woman on holiday, she says, is like "an out- of-tune singer in the middle of a concert".