The term mahalle bask?s? ( literally, neighborhood pressure) was coined in May 2007 by the foremost social scientist of Turkey, ?erif Mardin. It was extensively discussed in the media, particularly after the accession of AKP to power for the second time in July 2007. By this term Mardin referred to the rather implicit social pressures which might be exerted by Muslims for neighbors to conform to their view of Muslim behavior. His argument was that as a party of the existing political system, there was no doubt that AKP would rule the state according to the principles of the republican regime, but the political ideology of “democratic conservatism” that the AKP promotes may not be enough to counter that so-called “community pressure”. According to a survey done by Medya Takip Merkezi (Media Survey Center) mahalle bask?s? was reported in 630 news in a total of 31 national newspapers between 18 September and 1 October 2007 just after the general elections. A total 255 columnists, all of them addressed this concept at least once in their columns which fueled an ever growing public debate about the way in which AKP’s conservative politics will shape the future of the Turkish society. This paper discusses the different aspects of what made mahalle bask?s? so popular in an arduously democratizing country like Turkey in which Sunni Muslims constitute the majority . It argues that the popularity of the concept is due first to the paradoxical meanings that the term mahalle connotes in the Turkish context, apart from being an administrative unit, a municipal precinct, second, to the emergence of new types of both secular and religious civil societies each of which claims the public sphere in its own way and create new mechanisms of mutual “othering, and third, to its vast capacity of answering the need of finding new discursive strategies to show how anti-democratic the political ideology of “democratic conservatism” might be without employing the repressive discourses of official secularism.