“The jandarma knew,” my elderly informants affirmed that unofficial imams were teaching the children. “They came into the village to break up the Koran classes.” In one village where a strong link to Ottoman Islamic society remained, “the imams would continue secretly, once the jandarme left.” But in other villages where people were afraid, young people did not learn to read the Koran in Arabic. Some fear they will be damned for this failing. “I can read neither the new nor old script. I will burn,” said one elderly woman. These descriptions of the efforts of the Inonu (1938-1950) government to control the activities of rural imams in a region of Turkey north of Manisa are remembered and retold as villagers reflect upon the fickleness of the government and the status of Sunni Islam as a state-constructed religion. The stories contribute to a local distrust of governments and politicians and question the legitimacy of state-imposed secularization. Though implicitly the argument is made, villagers do not explicitly criticize the government or Ataturk because this is a crime. In their behavior, however, as well as the practice of telling and retelling and at times not telling, they demonstrate their sense of ambivalence about the state control of Islam and the effects of radical secularization policies. The contemporary effect is to educate children and grandchildren to read the Koran in Arabic. While some choose to send their children to the official imam for instruction during summer classes, others rely upon unofficial imams who tutor children and women, or boarding Koran courses run by the Suleymanci tarikat. Employing Roy’s conceptualization of global Islamic movements (2004), this “neo-fundamentalist” Islamic brotherhood was founded during the early years of the republic to address the state control and subjugation of Islamic learning and training. While this group is illegal, its activities are tolerated by the post-Islamist, AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinlar Partisi, Justice and Development Party) government. The paper, based on a decade of ethnographic research, addresses the link between stories from elderly informants and the development of Islamic movements, as well as the motivations of those who support the state construction of Islam in the Diyanet, Presidency of Religious Affairs, and those who comfortably combine both approaches, which otherwise appear ideologically opposed.