After the 1980 coup, the army was seeking societal reform
that would counterbalance the extreme ideologies of both the Marxist left and
the fascist right, both of which had disrupted Turkish politics.
The alternative they presented came to be known as the Turkish Islamic Synthesis,
which meant a controlled Islamization process,
undertaken through the vehicle of state-supervised religious education.
The military now redefined the role of religion as a possible
source of solidarity to cushion the tensions arising from the multiple
ideologies between left and right.
State-sponsored Islam, it was thought,
would serve as a barrier to the penetration of more radical Islamists.
As a consequence, religion made some headway into Parliament and
personal religious devotion was now considered normal, and so
religiosity became much more publicly visible from the 1980s.
After all the political parties were shut down by the army in 1980,
new parties were established in 1983, when military rule ended.
The newly established Motherland Party, which was a heterogeneous coalition
of liberal secularists and Islamists, dominated politics in the 1980s.
They adopted a conciliatory stand towards religion,
due in part to the rising influence of the Islamist Welfare Party,
which had replaced the National Salvation Party in 1983.
In the December 1995 general elections,
the Welfare Party emerged as the largest party and joined as senior partner
a coalition government with the True Path Party in early 1996.
Religious mystical orders became more active and
there was another huge increase in the number of Imam Hatip schools.
The army, displeased by the growing Islamist influence,
now represented in the ruling government, intervened again, but
not by a coup this time, but by what was called a postmodern military intervention.