The fury of the Turkish storm keeps shifting. As it does, it visits brute force - police, political or profit-driven - on a people quietly going about their lives, and especially on those Turks who dare to insist on their rights.

We experience it firsthand on a sunny day in the grand boulevards of downtown Istanbul. Determined to thwart a peaceful remembrance for the 11 protesters killed and thousands injured when Turkish police stormed non-violent demonstrations in the city's Taksim Square and the adjoining Gezi Park back in the northern summer of 2013, the government unleashes an army of 40,000 policemen and 50 water cannon, scattering thousands of protesters with bruising water blasts and choking curtains of tear gas.

We feel it in Elmadere, a tiny coal-mining village in the mountains of Izmir, in Turkey's Aegean hinterland. Here, the grieving for 11 villagers who were among 301 miners incinerated or choked to death in the country's worst mining accident at nearby Soma, just weeks before we visit, is made more unbearable by the stupefying callousness of the Turkish government's "so what" response to the tragedy.

"It's not like [these accidents] don't happen elsewhere in the world," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed, citing distant disasters from the mid-19th century as justification for what happened at Soma in the 21st century.

It's palpable too at Istanbul's Besiktas Square, near the ornate Dolmabahce Palace, long the seat of power of the Ottoman Empire, which looks over the Bosphorus Strait. Every Saturday, there is a gathering here of the families of hundreds of military officers jailed on charges of plotting to overthrow the government. Wearing designer sunglasses pushed back on a mane of auburn hair, Irem Kutluk, 62, tells us what, more than three years on, is slowly dawning on the local and foreign supporters who cheered the prime minister for kicking an historically brutal, coup-prone officer corps back to its barracks: "The whole thing was a sham."

We see it in the fearful eyes of retirees Ergun and Guler outside their home in Istanbul's Sulukule district, in the shadow of the city's ancient walls. They're too scared to give their surname, but they are on guard 24/7, refusing to leave the house unattended, lest it be gobbled up in the rampant gentrification that is devouring the city.

And it hangs in the air where the Black Sea funnels into the top end of the Bosphorus. In the tiny village of Garipce, fishermen debate the likely impact on their lives and livelihoods of two awesome infrastructure projects: a massive new bridge that will span the waterway, linking Europe and Asia, and a new airport, billed as the fifth-biggest in the world, for which a nearby forest site almost as big as Manhattan is being cleared.

These then, are the threads of a story that reveals how, in little more than a year, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has transformed himself before the eyes of a bewildered world. Always a canny politician, he invariably manages to regain his balance, but each successive buffeting reveals a more worrisome side of the man in the customary dark suit, and of his rare capacity to fool nearly all of the people for much of the time.

Erdogan is the current prime minister. But he is embarking on a Putinesque lunge for political longevity - Erdogan is the candidate most likely to win in Turkey's first ever popular ballot, on August 10, to elect a president. It's a post he claims needs to be strengthened way beyond its current near-titular role and which he blithely declares should be his until the year 2023, when Turkey will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its becoming a republic.

Erdogan is the country's strongest leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who built the secular Turkish republic in the 1920s on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. In mid-June, Erdogan told a rally at which his long-anticipated candidacy was confirmed: "If elected, I'll be everyone's president ... it will be a very different type of presidency." Much of what is rightly referred to as the Erdogan era has been spectacular for many Turks - a quarter were deemed middle-class in the mid-1990s; today the number is 60 per cent. Health, education and transport have improved dramatically. The speed with which skyscrapers rip into the Istanbul sky is dizzying.

The economy is a regional powerhouse: growth is at record levels - more than 5 per cent a year since 2002 - at a time of global crisis, while inflation is down from 70 per cent to 7.4 per cent and foreign investment is pouring in. One-third of nearly $600 billion worth of construction has been for government projects, made easier for a new class of developers by a carpetbagging prime minister's constant tinkering with the bidding rules.

Formerly mayor of Istanbul, 60-year-old Erdogan emerged initially as a deft regional powerbroker. For a while his "zero-problems" foreign policy seemed enlightened - but his full-throttle backing for Egypt's Islamist president Mohammed Morsi backfired when Morsi was swept away in a military coup, and Erdogan's misreading of the Syrian crisis torched Turkey's long-standing alliances with Tehran and Damascus and left much of the Middle East distrustful of him. Restricted by party rules to three terms in office, Erdogan told Turks that this current, and final, term as prime minister was to be his "master phase". Instead, he has endured a tumultuous year, fending off a burgeoning urban protest movement and serial corruption scandals that have engulfed his government, his circle of cronies and his family.

Erdogan is a co-founder of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym AKP. The party was established in 2001 and stormed to a landslide victory in parliamentary elections in 2002. It has polled strongly ever since. But increasingly it governs for the half of the country that votes for it and, more often than not, intimidates the other half - at the end of 2013 there were almost 11,000 cases pending against Turkey in the European Court of Human Rights alleging government violation of a range of personal and political freedoms. AKP's blending of traditional Islamism with what it describes as "conservative democracy" was hugely successful in challenging Turkey's historically powerful and military-backed secular elite. And along the way the party reinforced itself, cultivating and sustaining a new mega-rich business class who hail, in the main, from Turkey's Anatolian heartland. This group endorse Erdogan's Islamist values and understand that they must pay the piper - that is, Erdogan.

With the loss of his political Midas touch over the past year, Erdogan has morphed from a modern Islamist, with all the democratic sensitivities that made him and his party a credible model for dysfunctional neighbouring states, to a boorish autocrat. His winner-takes-all obsessions mark him more as a fellow traveller of the leaders swept away in the regional revolts of the Arab Spring than a rising force of enlightenment, as he was perceived in foreign capitals and the international media. Filled with rage and seemingly driven by fear, Erdogan veers from being a school headmaster who must admonish the nation to a capitalist crony doling out billion-dollar contracts for what even he describes as his "crazy projects".

He's prone to preaching: alcohol is bad; at least three babies for every woman is good; white bread is bad, wholegrain is good; tobacco is bad. He wants to "raise a pious youth" and to make education more religiously conservative. In this, Erdogan doesn't get that a society he sees as turning on him is his own creation. Turkish political analyst Ihsan Dagi told The Guardian: "He looks at how incomes have increased ... and asks why are people complaining? What he is missing is that in [this] new consumer society, people believe they have the right to make their own choices about what they buy, how they live and what they choose to drink."

Erdogan readily dispenses corporal punishment. One of the Soma miners claims he was slapped by the prime minister after he was booed when visiting the town. A young woman tells local reporters Erdogan also gave her a whack. And one of the prime minister's aides became notorious when pictures flashed around the world of him savagely, and not so courageously, putting the boot into a protesting miner who was pinned to the ground by two burly soldiers.

Reeking of class-conscious snobbery, Erdogan's highly personalised attacks on his critics reveal some of what the Turkish writer Mustafa Akyol describes as the prime minister's "poisonous mix of arrogance and paranoia". Challenged during a visit to Germany by a German politician of Turkish extraction, Erdogan snapped: "You must know your place, regardless of where you serve as a deputy." To an opposition MP who questioned Erdogan's presidential run: "Who the heck are you? Know your place, first." And to judges who wanted to attend a parliamentary commission: "You're not entitled to speak there - know your place."

Erdogan reflexively wants to punish and straighten any who offend him. He banned YouTube and Twitter because they became the conduit for sensational news on government corruption, which many in the mainstream Turkish media were too scared to report in detail. As he lost patience with the Gezi Park demonstrators ahead of ordering the first brutal police assault in 2013, he warned these ordinary Turks, whose single complaint was that they did not want to swap the city's last green space for a garish mall, "We'll be at the necks of the provocateurs and terrorists, and no one will get away with it." He appears heartless, too, unmoved as he was by the image that went around the world of a young woman in a red cotton dress with a white bag slung on her shoulder who simply stood in Gezi Park, quite dignified, as one of Erdogan's policemen wearing a gas mask doused her in tear gas.

The prime minister was the only one who seemed not to get it after Gezi. His deputy apologised, saying that some of the protesters' demands should be met; the AKP mayor of Istanbul admitted that the crackdown on protesters was "a grave mistake", and the outgoing president defended their right to protest. But Erdogan doubled down. Apparently needing to show who was boss in Turkey, he threatened to flood the streets with a million of his own supporters.

When the violence abated at Gezi Park, Erdogan was not finished fighting. He went after Turkey's giant Koc Holding because its Divan Hotel, next to the park, had sheltered protesters trying to escape the relentless tear gas and pepper spray attacks. Almost $US1 billion was wiped from Koc's market capitalisation in response to a punitive tax audit. Investors dumped the stock because they knew the script.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his outbursts, Erdogan retains the loyalty of devout Muslims. It helps that the liberals, nationalists and secular urban middle-class are divided in their opposition to the prime minister. But with an election in the offing, Erdogan is hedging, attempting to widen his base by co-opting the military and the Kurdish minority. These are two social segments that have long been on Erdogan's list of "others" - groups he attacks quite calculatedly to reinforce the prejudices of his conservative base. Dividing society into loyalists and traitors, Erdogan's chief tactic in a crisis is to create what a local commentator describes as "an absolute enemy".

This brings us to an unprecedented confrontation in Turkish affairs. For the last 100 years, the nation's political contest has been secular versus religious, but a dramatic new twist in the crisis that confronts Erdogan is that we are witnessing a factional war in the Muslim community.

Days before we arrive in Istanbul, the Turkish press reports the death - after four years in a coma - of 51-year-old Ugur Suleyman Soylemez. He was one of hundreds of Turks who were part of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which was carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip when Israeli forces attacked the MV Mavi Marmara and five smaller boats in the Mediterranean at the end of May 2010.

There's just enough time to get Soylemez's face incorporated into a huge memorial banner featuring nine others, eight Turks and one Turkish-American, who died in a botched pre-dawn commando assault as the boats steamed through international waters. To mark the fourth anniversary of an attack that fractured the long-standing relationship between Turkey and Israel, the banner was strung the length of the Mavi Marmara as it lay moored at the Istanbul dock from which it had sailed for Gaza. Erdogan was lionised in the region and beyond for his vocal support of the Palestinians - and for his response to the Israeli attack.

The Mavi Marmara has become a floating shrine, with museum-like place-markers that bear a picture of each of the 10 victims and an account of how they died or were injured placed around the decks. Throughout the anniversary weekend, there were on-board reunions and commemorations and a lot of "what if" second-guessing of how events might have unfolded. Perhaps Erdogan was asking his own "what ifs" during that period.

Erdogan's backing for the flotilla and his handling of the implosion in relations with Israel are cited as the first in a series of ruptures in a marriage of convenience between the prime minister and a religious movement known as Hizmet. This movement viewed Erdogan's subsequent peace negotiations with Turkey's restive Kurdish minority as treasonous, and its supporters in the media took to mocking the prime minister as a self-appointed "pharaoh" following Erdogan's crazed response to the Gezi protests

The founder of Hizmet is the ailing Fethullah Gulen, a 75-year-old diabetic cleric who lives in seclusion on an expansive estate in - get this - a small town called Saylorsburg, in the US state of Pennsylvania. Gulen runs an Islamist network that purportedly operates in more than 150 countries, including Turkey, where it focuses on educating young Turks to take their place in the judicial and police services, in particular.

Gulen fled to the US in 1999 and was tried in absentia for conspiring against the then secular state. Part of the evidence was a video in which Gulen tells supporters: "You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing our existence, until you reach all the power centres ... You must wait until such time as you have gotten all of the state power."

In a 2009 cable, made available through Wikileaks, a former US Ambassador to Turkey, James Jeffrey, reports that in Turkey the Gulen political agenda is seen as "possibly insidious". Elsewhere, he describes the movement as "having perhaps millions of followers" and being "worth perhaps billions".

Gulen's office did not respond to my request for an interview. But in a rare encounter with the BBC early in 2014, he denied Erdogan's charge that he was the instigator of the corruption probe in Istanbul. It was a curiously unrevealing encounter in which Gulen opted for sarcasm to make his point: "People in the judiciary and the police carried out investigations and launched this case, as their duties normally require. Apparently they weren't informed of the fact that corruption and bribery have ceased to be criminal acts in Turkey."

Gulen's organisation, its funding and influence, are described as "formidable" and there are detailed accounts from within the police force of how jobs, pay and promotions are controlled by his associates. His movement operates 135 charter schools in the US, and in Turkey it manages eight universities, dozens of private schools and hundreds of "cramming" centres that prep youngsters for vital university entrance exams. Erdogan reluctantly acknowledges that, from the start, his government was based on an informal deal in which Hizmet gained a significant footing in the bureaucracy, particularly in law and order and the judiciary, while, in return, Gulen used his considerable business and diplomatic connections to open doors for Erdogan at home and abroad.

Hizmet has been something of a sophisticated attack dog for the AKP. As explained by Turkey analyst Halil Karaveli, Erdogan needed its well-educated members and supporters to help run the country - especially the police and judiciary. That was the deal: if Gulen endorsed the AKP and its candidates, he would get effective control of swathes of the bureaucracy. But over time Erdogan became distrustful and a guerilla war ensued. The prime minister set about purging Gulenists from party lists. Then he wanted them weeded from the bureaucracy. Then the Hizmet university prep centres were deemed to be a threat to the national good and ordered to close. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Karaveli says: "The Gulen movement retaliated by supporting a corruption probe ... against several cabinet members and businessmen with close ties to the government."

So it was something of a cathartic moment in Turkish history when, in February 2014, a session of Erdogan's National Security Council, which includes the top generals, voted to list the Gulen movement as a threat to national security. Reportedly declaring "total war" on the movement, they approved purging government agencies of Gulenists. And weeks later, Erdogan declared himself to have been naive to allow the movement to acquire so much power.

In January 2014, a government insider told Britain's The Daily Telegraph that Erdogan was worried that the loyalty of Hizmet members on his payroll lay more with Gulen. "He fears they are plotting to destroy him," the paper was told. "He feels threatened."

In an overwrought victory speech after local-government elections in March 2014, Erdogan warned that he was after the Gulenists, declaring: "We'll walk into their dens ... They will pay for this." Gulen insists he is without power in the Turkish equation. But he, too, seemed overwrought in an sermon in December 2013 in which he inveighed against Erdogan. Without naming the prime minister, Gulen lambasted those "who turn a blind eye to the thief while punishing those who prosecute the thieves". And he climaxed with a plea to God to "consume their homes with fire, destroy their nests, and break their accords". Trying to unravel the Erdogan-Gulen conundrum, Istanbul-based writer Suzy Hansen commented: "If a prime minister can co-opt the laws and the media, and if a self-interested group can prosecute trials of dubious legality, and if citizens have nowhere to express themselves but the streets, then state institutions are broken."

But political sciences professor Ersin Kalaycioglu warns that the prime minister's skill as a political street fighter cannot be discounted. "Erdogan has not lost his capacity," he told me. "He's still very effective at communicating his message. He got 43 per cent of the vote in the March local elections - he was able to convince many people he is the victim of a conspiracy."

Halil Karaveli has a different read on the public mood in Turkey. Noting the outcome of an opinion poll in which there was 6 per cent support for Gulen and 28.5 per cent for AKP, and in which 45 per cent of respondents faulted them both, he went to the issue of a Muslim house divided: "This AKP-Gulenist back-biting represents a massive and collective failure of the Islamic conservative movement, from which none of its components may be able to recover."

Ever a politician, quotable quotes tumble from the mouth of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Perhaps he regrets this one, made while serving as mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s: "Democracy is like a tram - you ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off."

Is that, perhaps, how he sees the presidency?