Since 2002, the year the Justice and Development Party won the elections, formed a majority government, and stayed in power until today, there has been a great deal of tension between the secularists and the pious. All along the secularists have had the fear that the secular Republic was under a grave threat. That the fear in question has stemmed from some Islamists’ covering themselves is well known. Also well known is the assumption that covering is an indication of being “backward” and “ignorant”. This particular state of affairs in Turkey leads to some critical questions” (1) Why is such a cause-and-effect relationship entertained between outer appearance on the one hand and backwardness and ignorance on the other? (2) Could one reason for this particular thinking pattern be the way Atatürkism has been taken, not as a cognitive revolution but as outer appearance? (3) Whether as a result the normative approach has turned out to be a far more widespread mentality than the analytical one among some people in Turkey? (4) If this is what indeed has turned out to be the case in Turkey, what could have been the most important result of the over emphasis on the normative approach at the expense of analytical approach – an inability on the part of many to conduct a diaogical debate, i.e., a debate in which parties to the debate may in the end agree at least with one of the arguments that the others come up with. This paper responds to all of these questions in the positive. The paper goes on to suggest that the basic story behind the stories above is the fact that while in the West, the analytical have shaped the normative, in Turkey the normative have left hardly any ground for the analytical. The paper points out that the Turkish case is an outcome of the fact that the country had gone through an induced transformation, i.e. a transformation brought about from above rather than an organic one, i.e. a transformation being the end result of societal dynamics. The induced transformation targeted in Turkey was total Westernization. The total Westernization in turn led to a process of mimicry. In this sense, Turkey has differed from Japan that had opted for selective Westernization. For mimicry has not required a pragmatic approach, i.e. an analytical exercise, of what may be readily adopted and what may not be adopted.