Fazil Say, Turkey's most famous concert pianist, is no stranger to controversy. But he has rarely ruffled as many feathers as he did recently, when he launched into a searing attack on one of Turkey's most popular forms of music.

"Arabesk music is a reflection of the arabesk life-style," he wrote on his Twitter feed mid-July. "It is a weight on the shoulders of intellectualism, modernity, leadership and art.”

“It is full of unethical lies,” the 40-year-old Say also posted. He ended one Twitter post in capital letters. “I AM ASHAMED OF THE TURKISH PEOPLE'S LOUSY ARABESK SPINELESSNESS.”

While there is no mistaking the passionate tone of Say's complaint, the content is liable to baffle outsiders, who might wonder how music can be an obstacle to modernity, let alone be unethical.

But Turks recognized the posts immediately as a salvo in a long-running culture war – one that stretches back to the founding of the Turkish Republic, when secularists used the catastrophe of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to refashion Turkish identity from scratch.

The fez, popular religion, the Arabic alphabet and the "sick" quarter-tones of Ottoman court music were out. In their place came hats, enlightened religion, the Latin alphabet and Western music.

An official ban on Ottoman court music would remain in place until 1976. But banning music did not mean that the public’s appetite for it was eliminated. By the 1960s – drawing on Middle Eastern music, Anatolian folk tunes and western harmony -- a much-simplified version of Ottoman music was back, listened to this time by the villagers who had begun flocking to Turkish cities in the 1950s.

Failing to recognize it as a relative of the music they had banned, secularist detractors blamed it - via the name they invented for it - on the Arabs. The state, meanwhile, banned it from state radio and television right up to the late 1980s, when then-prime minister Turgut Ozal confessed he was fond of the arabesk style too.

By then, in any case, Ozal's green light to private radio and television stations had rendered the ban pretty much meaningless, and arabesk's popularity peaked.

Twenty years later, the arabesk style retains an almost unparalleled capacity to stir debate. Turkey's media immediately leapt on Say's words. Along with secular columnists critical of Turkey's Republican ideology, several Islamic writers accused the pianist of "cultural fascism."

A columnist hugely popular among secular-minded Turks, Hincal Uluc wrote in the daily Sabah that Say had been too polite in his comments about a "degenerate music" that had "swept this country's rich musical treasures from the market."

Widely seen as the doyen of arabesk, Orhan Gencebay reacted more temperately. "Fazil [Say] is an important virtuoso," he said. "But there are so many people in Turkey and around the world who listen to us. Fazil did them an injustice."

Experts on Turkish music think that Say, and those drawn into verbal duels with him, have completely missed the point.

Say appears to have made his remarks because two popular singers who, until now, would not have touched arabesk with a barge pole had just brought out albums dedicated to arabesk, says Ali Ergur, a sociologist at Istanbul's Galatasaray University who writes about music. "The days when the hearts of young urban Turks beat to arabesk is long gone," he said. "Youngsters these days listen to [the rap group] Ceza, not Gencebay, Shakira not [arabesk star] Muslum 'Baba.'"

The author of several books on Turkish popular music, Murat Meric agreed. "Arabesk has not come back, despite all the talk in the media," he said. "Instead, it followed the example of the [Ottoman army's] Mehter marching bands, which used to make enemies tremble and now turn out for tourists at the Military Museum" in central Istanbul.

Arabesk, Meric concluded, has become "a piece of urban folklore ... performed and listened to by outsiders."