"Religious nationalism": A textbook case from Turkey

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 25, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 665-676

  Kaplan, Sam ^a  

^a BEN GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

NATIONALISM; RELIGION; TEXTBOOK;

EURASIA; TURKEY;

EID: 33344473599     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-25-3-665     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. John A. T. Kingsbury, "Religious Freedom in Turkey," Muslim World 50 (1960): 232-33.
2. Binnaz Toprak, "The State, Politics, and Religion in Turkey," in State, Democracy, and the Military: Turkey in the 1980s, ed. Metin Heper and Ahmet Evin (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 119-36.
3. The Ottoman sultan went by the title "Caliph of all Muslims on Earth" and "Protector of the Two Holy Cities [of Mecca and Medina]." In turn, the sultanate was imbued with sacredness, as befit its official name - "the well-protected [by God] domains" (memalik-i mahrusa). On how late-Ottoman state apparatuses garnered their legitimacy through close association with Islam, see Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998).
4. Indicative of the secular turn in the country's political culture was how the new Republican regime applied the 1924 Law of Unification of Instruction. First, the Ministry of Education took over all 454 theological seminaries (medreses), which until then were the prerogative of the Sharia and Pious Foundations Ministry; none of the seminaries continued operation. As a result, all educational institutions were wrested from Muslim men of religion and conferred on the secular state. Then, a year after the use of Latin characters and Western (i.e., Arabic) numerals was officially mandated in 1928, the study of Arabic and Persian was eliminated in government schools. Finally, the sudy of Islam was gradually eliminated from the national curricula; by 1938, neither urban nor rural schools offered religious instruction. P. Xavier Jacob, L'enseignement religieux dans la Turquie moderne (Religious Instruction in Modern Turkey) (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1982), 57.
5. Howard Reed, "Turkey's New Imam-Hatip Schools," Welt des Islam 4 (1956): 150-63.
6. This is not the place for a historical survey of the military's involvement in Turkish civilian politics between 1960 and 1980. Suffice it to say that as civil violence and labor unrest erupted all over the country during the 1960s and 1970s, military leaders began to reverse their attitude to religion and tacitly approved greater religiosity of the curriculum. During these two decades, Marxist student organizations openly opposed Turkey's membership in Western military alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Central Treaty Organization. Feroz Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 1950-1975 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977), 294-95.
7. On the relationship between the military and civilian governments, see William Hale, "The Turkish Army in Politics, 1960-1973," in Turkish State, Turkish Society, ed. Andrew Finkel and Nükhet Sirman (London: Routledge, 1990), 53-77.
8. For an overview of this ideological movement, see Bozkurt Güvenç, Gencay Şaylan, Ilhan Tekeli, and Şerafettin Turan, Türk-İslam sentezi (Turkish-Islamic Synthesis) (Istanbul: Sarmal Yayinevi, 1991);
9. and Ilhan Tekeli, "Türk-İslam sentezi üzerine" ("On Turkish Islamic Synthesis"), Bilim ve sanat (Arts and Science) 77 (1987): 5-8;
10. for a good analysis of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis in English, see Paul J. Magnarella, "State Politics: Desecularization, State Corporatism, and Elite Behavior in Turkey," in Human Materialism: A Model of Sociocultural Systems and a Strategy for Analysis (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 87-113.
11. On how the generals mobilized the Islamic faith to foster unity among citizens, and thereby sanctioned a syncretism of religion and nationalism in the curriculum, see Sam Kaplan, "Din-u devlet All Over Again? The Politics of Military Secularism and Religious Militarism in Turkey following the 1980 Coup," International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2002): 113-27.
12. Associating a distinct, sovereign national consciousness with a "spiritual domain of culture" has been a central feature in many non-Western nationalist movements since the nineteenth century. Partha Chaterjee, "History and the Nationalization of Hinduism," Social Research 59 (1992): 111-49. It goes without saying that this "derivative discourse" elides over doctrinal or sectarian differences within the religion.
13. Quoted in Güvenç et al., Türk-İslam sentezi, 54.
14. "Religion and Morals Program," Tebliǧler dergisi (TD) 45 (29 March 1982): 155-61;
15. quotation, 156. The biweekly Tebliǧler dergisi (Communications Journal) has reported all decisions of the Ministry of Education since 1939. These reports reveal the range and type of discourses existing at different sociohistorical moments: ministers' speeches, national education conferences, organization of school programs, criteria for selection of curricula, staff, and primers. In a confidential report circulated among the members of the junta (and subsequently leaked to the national press), the generals stated that they would no longer abide the previously "optional" religious lessons.
16. Yelda Arslan, Sefa Kaplan, and Erdal Kiliçoǧlu, "Din eǧitimi, laiklik ve ötesi: 12 Eylül yönetiminin din raporu" ("Religious Education and Secularism: Religious Report of the September Twelfth Rulers"), Nokta 7 (26 March 1989):16-25.
17. The shift to greater religious instruction in the school system is part of a larger transformation in the political culture of Turkey. It reflects the changes in the official cultural politics of the country since World War II as previously un(der)represented religious publics have increasingly come to participate in the political sphere. In recent years, scholars have produced highly sophisticated studies on the rise and influence of religious views in Turkish politics and society. Alev Cinar, "National History as a Contested Site: The Conquest of Istanbul and Islamist Negotiations of the Nation," Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (2001): 364-91;
18. Nilufer Göle, "The Quest for the Islamic Self within the Context of Modernity," in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Sibel Bozdoǧan and Reşat Kasaba (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 81-94;
19. Yael Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002);
20. Ayse Nur Saktanber, Living Islam: Women, Religion, and the Politicization of Culture in Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002);
21. Jenny White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).
22. Ismail Kaplan, Türkiye'de Milli Eǧitim ideolojisi ve siyasal toplumsallaşma üzerindeki etkisi (Ideology of the National Educational System in Turkey and Its Impact on Political Socialization) (Istanbul: İletişim, 1999), 306.
23. Removal of religion from state schools is based on the educational reforms Jules Ferry implemented in France in the 1880s. Jules Ferry as prime minister (1880-81, 1883-85) established free compulsory secular education and forbade clerics from teaching in government schools. (In practice, parochial schools in France receive funds from the French government with the proviso that they closely follow the Ministry of Education's guidelines.) Most often, secularization signifies the dissolution of otherworldly political goals and rejection of the absoluteness of authority in religion. For a summary of the secularization debate, see Mark Chaves, "Secularization as Declining Religious Authority," Social Forces 72 (1994): 749-74;
24. and William H. Swatos Jr. and Kevin J. Christano, "Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept," Sociology of Religion 60 (1999): 209-28.
25. For a trenchant critique of "secularist" approaches in Turkish scholarship, see Şerif Mardin, "Projects as Methodology: Some Thoughts on Modern Turkish Social Science," in Bozdoǧan and Kasaba, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity, 64-80.
26. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, "French Feminism Revisited: Ethics and Politics," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 54-85, esp. 72.
27. What Spivak is calling into question is the familiar (but false) ideal/ material dichotomy In a similar vein, Jane Hill criticizes the Cartesian division that posits "the crucial nexus of representation in the relationship between reference and reality," between signifier and signified, between word and world, between language and action. Jane Hill, "'Today There Is No Respect': Nostalgia, 'Respect,' and Oppositional Discourse in Mexicano (Nahuatl) Language Ideology," Pragmatics 2 (1992): 263-80, 264.
28. In other words, political observers like John Kingsbury and İsmail Kaplan assume that reference is the sole function of language, which of course it is not. Paul Friedrich, "The Symbol and Its Relative Non-arbitrariness," in Language, Context, and the Imagination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 1-61;
29. Roman Jakobson, "Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. T. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350-78;
30. Categories, and Cultural Description," in Meaning in Anthropology, ed. Keith A. Basso and Henry A. Selby (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), 11-55.
31. Recent discursive analyses of textbooks have drawn our attention to the constructed nature and political implications of such texts. Exemplary studies on school primers in Middle East polities include Gabriel Piterberg, "The Tropes of Stagnation and Awakening in Nationalist Historical Consciousness: The Egyptian Case," in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 42-151;
32. Haggai Ram, "The Immemorial Iranian Nation? School Textbooks and Historical Memory in Post-revolutionary Iran," Nations and Nationalism 6 (2000): 67-90;
33. and Gregory Starrett, "Margins of Print: Children's Religious Literature in Egypt," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1996): 117-39.
34. Willie van Peer, "Invisible Textbooks: Writing as a Cultural Practice," in Language, Authority, and Criticism: Readings on the School Textbook, ed. Suzanne de Castell, Allan Luke, and Carmen Luke (New York: Falmer, 1989), 123-32; quotation, 127.
35. Public conformity to school views (e.g., correct answers to tests) should not be construed as either passive consumption of knowledge or acceptance of the semantic meaning of the signifiers used in the curriculum. Pupils and their teachers can and do insert their private selves in the public discourse of textbooks and, in the process, reconceptualize their political and social selves. See Sam Kaplan, "Nuriye's Dilemma: Turkish Lessons of Democracy and the Gendered State," American Ethnologist 30 (2003): 401-17.
36. The main outlines of this historical thesis continue to be taught in the school system, albeit in a much more attenuated manner; e.g., "Minister of Education Avni Akyol on Social Sciences for Fourth and Fifth Grades, 1990-1991 School Year," TD 53 (1990):457-74. In a school play I attended, a character by the name Çinar states "that the Turkish Nation did not result from a small lineage but raised hundreds of lineages and, since time immemorial, has sowed the seeds of civilization to the whole world."
37. Ayşe Çaǧlar, "The Greywolves as Metaphor," in Turkish State, Turkish Society, ed. Andrew Finkel and Nükhet Sirman (London: Routledge, 1990), 79-101. Underlying this appeal to biology was a widely shared belief in the inherent links between bioracial characteristics and ethnonational identity; namely, morphological conceptualization of the body's overt forms permitted moral readings of an ethnos and its history. Turkish nationalists were intent on disproving those Europeans who assigned the "yellow race" to the Turks. Throughout the 1930s, biology and history textbooks stressed the "whiteness" of the Turkish people;
38. see Sam Kaplan, "Education and the Politics of National Culture in a Turkish Community, circa 1990" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1996), 36-40;
39. Ziya Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism (Leiden: Brill, 1958), 40;
40. and Tekin Alp, "The Restoration of Turkish History," in Nationalism in Asia and Africa, ed. Elie Kedourie (1937; repr., London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970), 207-24.
41. Necmeddin Sadik, Sosyoloji, liseler için yeni programa grama göre (Sociology, According to the New Program for High Schools) (Ankara: Deviet Matbaasi, 1936), 47.
42. Cihad Tunç, Din kültürü ve ahlâk bilgisi 2 (DK2) (Istanbul: Millî Eǧitim Basimevi, 1987), 94.
43. Ibid., 93.
44. Most illustrious Muslims from the Middle East are ascribed Turkish ancestry (see note 26).
45. Ibid., 51.
46. This nationalist representation of Islam is also found to be the case in television programming. Thus, during the monthlong Ramadan fast, the "religious programs [on television] were presented in the context of Turkey's national heritage, not in the context of the pan-Islamic community." Emilie Olson, "Muslim Identity and Secularism in Contemporary Turkey: The Headscarf Dispute," Anthropological Quarterly 58 (1985): 161-71; emphasis in original.
47. DK2, 96-97. Other religion textbooks consider the natural scientist Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and the great theologian Gazzali to have Turkish ancestry. Jacob, L'enseignement religieux, 377.
48. Note that even though Western-derived institutions and innovations are not mentioned, the author cites Westerners' approval of Islam, be it Thomas Carlyle's praise of Muhammad or Robinson's admiration for Muslim armies (DK2, 60). Other religious manuals mention praise from Alphonse Lamartine, Otto von Bismark, John Davenport, and Thomas Arnold (Jacob, L'enseignement religieux, 399). It is irrelevant whether pupils (or for that matter instructors) have heard of these Westerners; what matters is that the "West" admires the genius of Islam, that is, the Turkish schoolchildren's faith.
49. Implicit is the idea that schoolchildren are supposed to recuperate the religious heritage in order that the Turkish people once more regain ascendancy in the world. To note, a race against time dominates the Turkish educational system. Keeping up to date, living in sync with the developed world obsesses policy makers and educators alike. Frequently, they mention the need "to catch up with the times" (čaǧi yakalamak), "to skip an era" (čaǧ atlamak), "to not remain behind" (gerisinde kalmamak). Thus, at a televised speech he delivered on the occasion of the opening of the 1990-91 school year, Prime Minister Yildirim Akbulut declared: "Turkey will very soon catch up with the present era in the field of education as in all other undertakings" (Evening News, 17 September 1990).
50. Republican educators upheld scientific and causal laws as the only credible source of truth and reliable means for national salvation. The desacralization of school knowledge was based on secular positivism, which maintained that reality is experienced only through rational observations, not through a preset, otherworldly cosmology. That is to say, only when "scientific mentality" in all its cognitive and intellectual functions took hold of the masses would the Turkish people be liberated from poverty and ignorance. On the impact of positivist thought in Turkey, see Serif Mardin, "The Just and the Unjust," Daedalus 120 (1991): 113-29, esp. 124.
51. Quoted in Kirby Page, "Nationalism Interprets Islam," Christian Century 47 (1930): 113-14.
52. DK2, 24-25.
53. Ibid., 101.
54. This concerted effort at having children identify with Atatürk in all subject matters begins in kindergarten. Six-year-old children are expected "to pronounce correctly the name of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, recite the names of his family members, know his place of birth, recognize several of his pictures, appreciate his heroism, know the date and place of his death as well as his tomb." "Program for Six-Year-Old Pupils on Republic Day and Atatürk Commemorative Day," TD 48 (1985): 341-59,
55. In the first-grade primer, one-seventh (six out of forty-seven) of the reading passages are devoted to Atatürk; in the fifth-grade primer, one-fourth (thirteen out of fifty two). The overall aim is that schoolchildren behave as if they were extensions of Atatürk, capable of emulating his qualities. Ahmet Üst's poem "My Dear Teacher," which is included in the fifth-grade reader, exemplifies this emulation of the statesman. The poem ends with "MY TEACHER, take me and make me into a MUSTAFA KEMAL!" İlkokul Türkçe ders kitabi 5 (Istanbul: Millî Eǧitim, 1990), 59; capitalization in original.
56. DK2, 44.
57. Ibid., 121.
58. See, e.g., Michael Meeker's discussion of radical Muslim social thinkers who aspire to recapture a premodern society. Meeker, "The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey," in Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics, and Literature in a Secular State, ed. Richard Tapper (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991), 189-219.
59. To note, distinguishing superstition and false belief from true religion goes back to the pre-Republican education. Of course, there are substantial differences between the Ottoman and the republican regimes. Ottoman officials claimed in the name of the state to uphold canonical law and punished those individuals accused of leading astray the Muslim community. Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 71, 77. The current school system intervenes by promoting those beliefs, practices, and ethics to which believers will willingly give assent because they belong to the natural order and thus naturally befit the Turkish people.
60. TD 45 (1982): 156.
61. Four years later, another directive repeated verbatim the same wording; "Program of Religious Culture and Morals Knowledge for All Primary and Secondary Schools," TD 49 (1986): 402.
62. It is important to bear in mind that, while positive evaluation of pious modernity is replete with neologisms such as bilimsel (scientific), akilci (rational), aktif (active), and ilerme (progress), almost all the negative traits attributed to devalued forms of Islam draw on Arabic cognates; for example, a directive on teaching Atatürk's principles attacks "superstition, sophistry, and ignorance" (hurafe, safasata ve cehalet). "Directives on Instruction of Atatürk's Reforms and Principles for Primary and Secondary Schools," TD 45 (1982): 36-39, esp. 38.
63. DK2, 88, 44, respectively.
64. In Egypt, the state promotes a similar functionalist role to Islam. Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
65. DK2, 89.
66. Ibid., 120.
67. Webb Keane, Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 9.
68. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 199.
69. Zekâi Baloǧlu, Türkiye'de eǧitim, sorunlar ve deǧişime yapisal uyum önerileri (Education in Turkey: Proposed Structural Adaptations to Problems and Changes) (Istanbul: TÜSIAD, 1990).
70. The Directorate of Religious Affairs, which is under the prime minister's office, is legally responsible for administering mosques, training religious leaders, and scripting Friday mosque sermons that conform closely to a nationalist, "scientific" version of Islam. Sencer Ayata, "Patronage, Party, and State: The Politicization of Islam in Turkey," Middle East Journal 50 (1996): 40-56.
71. Ayşe Güneş-Ayata, "Pluralism versus Authoritarianism: Political ideals in Islamic Publications," in Tapper, Islam in Modern Turkey, 254-79; quotation, 275.
72. James Collins, "Socialization to Text: Structure and Contradiction in Schooled Literacy," in Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 203-28; quotation, 204.