Turkey sits on a great seismic fault line from the Sea of Marmara to Lake Van. It is also subject to pressures of a man-made kind. It seems likely that the Kurdish PKK was responsible for the double-tap bombings in Istanbul last night which left sixteen dead and over a hundred injured in a populous residential area. Al Qaeda tends to hit western or Jewish targets in Turkey including banks, consulates and synagogues. Meanwhile, Turkey launches cross-border raids into northern Iraq to destroy PKK camps. There was an air strike on Sunday. The government also recently arrested over eighty people who were allegedly plotting a coup. A cache of grenades was found. Secular-minded prosecutors are also challenging the constitutional legality of the Islamic Justice and Development Party in the courts, after a law allowed head scarves to be worn in universities. Although I believe that people should be allowed to wear what they like, having seen the silent pressures exerted in Egypt for women to cover up, I also sympathise with the many women in urban Turkey who don't wish to abandon practices that have existed for eighty years or to submit to an insidious process of public shaming through a disapproving look or glance. So it is in Turkey where you don't have to stray too far inland from the coastal cities to be in a very traditional world, where the men play chequers and the women are bent double under bundles of fire wood. If the courts find against the ruling party- for trying to introduce sharia through the back door- it will entail the bizarre spectacle of a democratically elected government being turfed out for pursuing an unconstitutional agenda apparently involving freedom of choice. What happens in Turkey really matters to us. It has been a staunch member of NATO since the 1950s, and has one of the few armies in the alliance that can really fight wars. It has been a respected ally of the West and Israel, where it is currently brokering peace agreements with Syria. A lot of Kurds and even more Turks live in western Europe.