You mean apart from the social and religious conservatism?

National Review's Andy McCarthy complains about an Amir Taheri op-ed in the New York Post:

One line, though, really rankles: "Since 1960, the Turkish army has staged a coup once every 10 years, either to curb the radical left or to stop the Islamist right from seizing control of the state."

I hate to see Taheri buy onto this mainstream media template. What is right-wing, as in conservative, about Islamists?  A revolutionary movement that wants to overthrow the secular system and impose sharia is hardly conservative just because the interpretation of Islam it follows is a fundamentalist one.  This seems to me close to the opposite of being a movement of the Right.  Taheri implicitly suggests as much in his next sentence:  "A new coup could trigger a bitter power struggle and push the more radical Islamists toward violent, even terrorist, methods."  What is conservative about that?

No, I can't think of anything either. You need not buy into Andrew Sullivan's "Christianist" thesis to find this nonsense and wilful confusion entertaining. There are many strands of conservatism, for sure, but it's loopy to pretend that a religious fundamentalism is not one of them.

On a less fanatical level, many Muslims in Britain would, I suspect, be rather more comfortable were societal norms in terms of personal conduct, family breakdown, sexual mores and general licentiousness more like how they were in the 1950s than the 21st century. In other words, they'd share something with National Review. Indeed, what could be more conservative - even in its mildly reactionary way - than this yearning for the benefits (real and rose-tinted) of the past: so near yet frustratingly so out of reach?

UPDATE: Daniel Larison, who knows vastly more about Turkey than I do (and rather more than Mr McCarthy and Mr Taheri too) explains it all here.