Originally, the secular Turkish state fashioned after Kemal Ataturk's vision, mastered "the art" of keeping official sites of the state free of religious symbols and headscarf. However, the election of a pious president, Abdullah Gul by the pro-Islamic party, Justice and Development (JD), and especially his wife's headscarf interrupted the presumably pristine "secular space" of the state. Immediately after Gul's nomination, the urban landscape of Istanbul also turned into sites of secularist protest and contestation against JD's Muslim politics. The secularist backlash on the streets parallels to new concerns of social scientists who point to the likelihood of a gap between the pious in power and the devout on the street. The pious communities, it has been argued, would have an independent life and social dynamics at the neighborhood level which may not be easily aligned with, shaped or controlled by the secular political institutions. This paper engages this debate on the power of the neighborhood communities, by bringing in another aspect of communal pressure. Concretely, I look at the secularist resistance to and the pressures on the pious in urban space. In order to explore the secularist pressures at the neighborhood level, I focus on a secular urban space, Tesvikiye. Exploring the meeting points of both political and urban sociology, the paper rethinks the concept of "the right to the city." First, ethnographic data parts ways with the predominant arguments, by illustrating conservatism in secular neighborhoods, and how secularist pressures confront the pious in urban daily life. I explore the links between these everyday secularist pressures and the secularist enforcements of the state. Second, even if we assume/accept that the pious in secular states may have a communal neighborhood life at the level that is at odds with or independent of the secular state, they still co-exist with and cant avoid facing the secularist non-state actors in urban daily life. The data shows that the secularist Istanbulites associate symbiotically with Kemal and "his" secular Republic. Hence, the pious in urban space continue interacting and negotiating "right to the city" directly with secularist communities or indirectly with secular state. The paper suggests that the debates around the powers and threats of pious neighborhood communities must take into account the nature and power of the secularist backlash, whether it is from the non-state actors in the cities or from the secular Republic itself.