It is customary for the leaders of Turkey’s political parties represented in the parliament to address their members and rant about the burning issues of the day. In that way, yesterday was no exception — but it was extraordinary.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey's notionally secular republic, stood over a pair of little girls flanking a little boy as they proceeded to recite nationalist poems spiked with heavy dollops of Islam in front of the speaker's podium. Set against the tidal wave of Islamic nationalism engulfing Turkey, there was nothing singularly unusual about that.

But one of the little girls — she looked not a day older than six — was being paraded by the president in a snowy white hijab covering her head and shoulders and a matching ankle-length dress.

With a red satin ribbon emblazoned with “Turkey” wound around the child’s head, the outfit certainly captured the so-called Turkish-Islamic synthesis that has prevailed over Turkish politics since the days of the Young Turk revolutionaries. And military-inspired bans on the Islamic-style headscarf in the parliament, universities and government offices are a thing of the past.