The experience of Turkish Islamism: Between transformation and impoverishment

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 5-22

  Duran, Burhanettin ^a  

^a Huzur Mahallesi   (Turkey)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951699319     PISSN: 19448953     EISSN: 19448961     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/19448950903507313     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Angel Rabasa and F. Stephen Larabee, The Rise of Political Islam in Turkey, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 2008, p. 1. In the November 2002 elections, the JDP won 34 per cent of the votes, enabling it to govern on its own. In the July 2007 elections, it fared even better, winning 46.6 per cent of the vote. In the March 2009 local elections, it also gathered about 39 per cent of the vote and is still the largest political party in Turkey
2. Ziya Meral, 'The AK Party, the failure of Islamism and traditional Turkish politics', Nthposition, 8 January 2008, .
3. Kemal Karpat interprets the JDP's retreat from Islamism as a revolution for both Turkey and the Muslim world. According to Karpat, Islamic circles have accepted all the arguments that the secularist state has defended until now, Derya Sazak's interview with Kemal Karpat, Milliyet, 12 July 2004.
4. Nilüfer Göle, 'Cumhuriyetçi İdeoloji Kendini Yenilemeli', Ayşe Özgun's interview, Hürriyet Pazar Eki, 29 July 2007.
5. Burhanettin Duran, 'JDP and foreign policy as an agent of transformation', in M. H. Yavuz (ed.), The Emergence of a New Turkey: Democracy and the Ak Parti, The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, UT, 2006, p. 281.
6. Kenan Çayir discovers self-reflexive and confessional aspects of Islamism in the 1990s by pointing out the transition from collectivism to individualism in the Islamist movement through an analysis of Islamic novels, Islamic Literature in Contemporary Turkey: From Epic to Novel, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007.
7. Securitization is a development that moves a particular issue beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics. Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO, 1998, p. 23.
8. Nilüfer Göle, 'Snapshots of Islamic modernities', Daedalus, 129(1), Winter 2000, p. 94.
9. The concept of multiple modernity, as developed particularly by Shmuel Eisenstadt's comparative approach to civilizations, presupposes that Western modernity is only one among other types of modernity evolving in the various civilizations of the world. It draws attention to the fact that religious and imperial traditions remain constitutive dimensions of modern societies despite various forms of secularization. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, 'Multiple modernities', Daedalus, 129(1), Winter 2000, pp. 1-29.
10. Willfried Spohn, 'Multiple modernity, nationalism and religion: a global perspective', Current Sociology, 51(3/4), May/July 2003, p. 282.
11. The JDP also uses the idea of a common, universal civilization to which Islam has contributed in order to justify Turkey's integration with the EU, see Daniella Kuzmanovic, 'Civilization and EU-Turkey relations', in Dietrich Jung and Catharina Raudvere (eds), Religion, Politics, and Turkey's EU Accession, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008, p. 53.
12. Menderes Çinar and Burhanettin Duran, 'The specific evolution of contemporary political Islam in Turkey and its "difference"', in Ümit Cizre (ed.), Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of the Justice and Development Party, Routledge, Abingdon, 2008, p. 18.
13. Mozaffari, op. cit., p. 23. Turkey is a significant country not only because it is the only Muslim country where secularism is established as a constitutional principle and where a secular culture has taken root, but also because it is a country that has a legacy of the Caliphate, the centre of the spiritual leadership in Islam, though it was abolished in 1924 in Turkey. This legacy, in the eyes of Turkish Islamists, gives Turkey an implicit right to claim a leadership of the Islamic world without mentioning the Caliphate.
14. Elisabeth Özdalga, 'The hidden Arab: a critical reading of the notion of "Turkish Islam"', Middle Eastern Studies, 42(4), July 2006, pp. 565-566.
15. Şerif Mardin, 'Turkish Islamic exceptionalism yesterday and today: continuity, rupture and reconstruction in operational codes', Turkish Studies, 6(2), 2005, p. 152.
16. See Metin Heper, The State Tradition in Turkey, Eothen Press, Walkington, 1985.
17. Nakşibendism is an international Sufi order that takes different political forms in various Islamic countries. It may take the form of a jihadist movement when faced with a colonial power. For the various manifestations of Sufism, depending on the local context of Islamic countries, see Martin van Bruinessen and Julia Day Howell (eds), Sufism and the Modern in Islam, I. B. Tauris, London, 2007.
18. Radical Islamist groups are very marginal and are not connected to any significant sector of Turkish society: Islamic Great Eastern Raiders-Front (IBDA-C), Turkish Hizbullah and the Union of Islamic Communities and Societies (UICS). Among these groups, Hizbullah is an important Kurdish Sunni organization which carried out hundreds of kidnappings and murders, and gained its identity during its fight with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party), Bülent Aras and Şule Toktaş, 'Al-Qaida, "War on Terror" and Turkey', Third World Quarterly, 28(5), 2007, pp. 1045-1046.
19. For the radicalization process of Hizbullah, see Emrullah Uslu, 'From local Hizbollah to global terror: militant Islam in Turkey', Middle East Policy, 14(1), Spring 2007.
20. See Dale F. Eickelman and James P. Piscatori, Muslim Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996.
21. Çinar and Duran, op. cit., p. 24.
22. Çinar and Duran, op. cit., p. 25.
23. Demet Yalcin Mousseau, 'Democracy, human rights and market development in Turkey: are they related?', Government and Opposition, 41(2), 2006, pp. 325-326.
24. Sencer Ayata, 'Patronage, party and the state: the politicization of Islam in Turkey', Middle East Journal, 50(1), Winter 1996, p. 41.
25. Dietrich Jung, '"Secularism": a key to Turkish politics', Intellectual Discourse, 14(2), 2006, pp. 131, 133
26. Christopher Houston, 'Civilizing Islam, Islamist civilizing? Turkey's Islamist movement and the problem of ethnic difference', Thesis Eleven, No. 58, August 1999, p. 87.
27. Ibid., pp. 86-87.
28. Andrew Davison, 'Turkey, a "secular" state?: the challenge of description', The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102(2/3), Spring/Summer 2003, pp. 333-350.
29. Bobby S. Sayyid draws attention to the policy of trying to use Islam as the antagonistic 'other' of Kemalism, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, Zed Books, London, 1997.
30. Since Islam was continually being described as the constitutive 'outside' of Kemalism, at the same time it has been an issue of securitization as well. In fact, securitization is simply a stronger instance of the phenomenon of politicization, Michael Sheehan, International Security, Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO, 2005, p. 53.
31. Secularism is not the only issue of securitization in Turkey. There are other identity issues that have been expressed in security language such as the Alevi and Kurdish questions. These issues warrant further study. For more on Turkish national security, see Ümit Cizre, 'Demythologyzing the national security concept: the case of Turkey', Middle East Journal, 57(2), Spring 2003, pp. 213-229.
32. See Tuncay Kardas, 'Turkey: Islam, secularism and the EU', in Stig Hansen, Atle Mesoy and Tuncay Kardas (eds), The Borders of Islam, Columbia University Press, New York, 2009.
33. Pinar Bilgin finds an intimate relationship between secularism and security and argues that the securityness of secularism in Turkey should be located both in its national and international arena since the foundation of the Republic, 'The securityness of secularism? The case of Turkey', Security Dialogue, 39(6), December 2008, pp. 593-614.
34. Kim Shively, 'Taming Islam: studying religion in secular Turkey', Anthropological Quarterly, 81(3), Summer 2008, pp. 707, 687-688.
35. Çinar and Duran, op. cit., p. 28.
36. Starting at the end of 1996, a series of events during the Welfare-Party-led coalition government culminated in a crisis for the Turkish political regime. On 28 February 1997, the National Security Council (Milli Güvenlik Kurulu) made recommendations to the government about measures to be taken against the increasing anti-secular activities. This military intervention brought down the Welfare-led coalition government and later the Welfare Party was closed down by the Turkish Constitutional Court for its anti-secular activities.
37. See Ahmet Çǧdem, Taşra Epiǧi: Türk İdeolojileri ve İslamci{dotless}li{dotless}k, Birikim, İstanbul, 2001
38. See Tuncay Kardas, 'Security governmentality in Turkey', unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2006.
39. Yeşim Arat, 'Group-differentiated rights and the liberal democratic state: rethinking the headscarf controversy in Turkey', New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 25, Fall 2001, pp. 38-40. The issue of the headscarf as a subject of securitization also resurfaced when the JDP cooperated with the Nationalist Action Party to pass two amendments to the Constitution that would allow the wearing of headscarves in universities on 9 February 2008. The Republican People's Party (RPP), the main opposition party, took the issue to the Constitutional Court, which annulled the amendments on 5 June 2008. This securitizing atmosphere was intensified when the Chief Prosecutor of the Court of Appeals filed a case in the Constitutional Court for the closure of the JDP and a five-year political ban for 71 members of this party (including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan and President Abdullah Gul). On 30 July 2009, the Court ruled that the JDP should not be closed down, but declared that it was a focal point of anti-secular activities and it imposed fines on the party.
40. Burhanettin Duran and Engin Yildirim, 'Islamism, trade unionism and civil society: the case of Hak-İ labour confederation in Turkey', Middle Eastern Studies, 41(2), March 2005, pp. 227-248.
41. E. Fuat Keyman and Berrin Koyuncu, 'Globalization, alternative modernities and the political economy of Turkey', Review of International Political Economy, 12(1), February 2005, p. 120.
42. Ihsan Yilmaz, 'State, law, civil society and Islam in contemporary Turkey', The Muslim World, 95(3), July 2005, p. 400.
43. Mucahit Bilici, 'The Fethullah Gulen Movement and its politics of representation in Turkey', The Muslim World, 96(1), January 2006, pp. 17-18.
44. Ahmet Kuru, 'Globalization and diversification of Islamic movements: three Turkish cases', Political Science Quarterly, 120(2), 2005, p. 265.
45. With the proclamation of the Tanzimat in 1839, known as Gülhane Hatt-i{dotless} Şerif-i (the Noble Edict of the Rose Garden), the Ottoman statesmen aimed to restructure the Ottoman administration and to establish the rule of law.
46. For conservative democracy, see Yalçin Akdoǧan, 'The meaning of conservative democratic identity', in M. H. Yavuz (ed.), The Emergence of a New Turkey: Democracy and the AK Parti, The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2006, pp. 49-65.
47. Ahmet Davutoǧlu, 'Turkey's foreign policy vision: an assessment of 2007', Insight Turkey, 10(1), 2008, p. 78.
48. Bulent Aras, 'Davutoǧlu era in Turkish foreign policy', SETA Policy Brief, No. 32, May 2009, p. 4.
49. Ahmet Davutoǧlu, Stratejik Derinlik: Turkiye'nin Uluslararasi{dotless} Konumu, Küre, İstanbul, 2001.
50. Ibrahim Kaya, 'Identity politics: the struggle for recognition or hegemony?', East European Politics and Societies, 21(4), 2007, pp. 711-712, 714-715.
51. Ilter Turan, 'Unstable stability: Turkish politics at the crossroads?', International Affairs, 83(2), 2007, p. 326.
52. Perry Anderson, 'After Kemal', London Review of Books, 25 September 2008, pp. 148-149.
53. Thomas W. Smith, 'Between Allah and Ataturk: liberal Islam in Turkey', The International Journal of Human Rights, 9(3), September 2005, p. 308.
54. Berna Turam, Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2007, pp. 4, 6, 7.
55. For the retreat of Islamist demands on daily life, the rising conservatism and the narrowing vision within the Islamic movement see Cihan Akta̧, 'İslami Hayat Tarzi{dotless}ni{dotless}n Yeniden Keşfi', in Tani{dotless}l Bora and Murat Gultekin (eds), Modern Turkiye'de Siyasi Düşunce, Vol. 9, İletişim, İstanbul, 2009, pp. 651-668.
56. Fatma K. Barbarosoǧlu, 'Ya Şişman Deǧilsek', Yeni Şafak, 23 June 2009.
57. In order to get rid of the conditions of repression and wrong-doing in the existing world, Islamists mainly propose two ideal reference points: the Mecca model and the Medina model, that is, society as it was shaped by the prophet Muhammad himself and the classical era of the Caliphate. The Constitution of Medina established the terms for an alliance between Muhammad, his religious community and the eight tribes of Medina in about AD 627. The contracting parties, both Muslims and Jews, agreed to recognize Muhammad as their leader. Mozaffari, op. cit., p. 25. Ali Bulaç revived the idea of the Medina Document in the 1990s in a series of articles in Kitap Dergisi, Birikim and Bilgi ve Hikmet in order to present a new voluntary accord among different social blocs in Turkey.
58. see Menderes Çinar and Ayşe Kadioǧlu, 'An Islamic critique of modernity in Turkey: politics of difference backwards', Orient, 40(1), 1999, pp. 53-69.
59. The WP adopted this model as a significant part of its alternative ideology, Just Order (Adil Duzen). This model was based on the Islamist intellectuals' critique of Kemalist nationalism, the latter rejects representations of different identities in the public sphere. This multicultural model advocated a new kind of Islamic pluralism that would revitalize the classical Islamic mechanism of legal pluralities, relying on the idea of the self-rule of each legal community and rejecting the rule of the majority, Yilmaz Çolak, 'Ottomanism vs. Kemalism: collective memory and cultural pluralism in 1990s Turkey', Middle Eastern Studies, 42(4), July 2006, pp. 595-596.
60. Yasin Aktay argues that the transformation of Turkish Islamism in the case of the JDP represents not 'a failure of Islamism' but 'a further politicization' (daha yuksek bir siyasalla̧ma), 'İslamci{dotless} Politik Teolojinin Seyir Notlari{dotless}', in Tani{dotless}l Bora and Murat Gultekin (eds), Modern Türkiye'de Siyasi Düşünce, Vol. 9, İletişim, İstanbul, 2009, pp. 1258-1280.
61. Nilüfer Göle, 'Islamic visibilities and public sphere', in Nilüfer Göle and Ludwig Ammann (eds), Islam in Public, Istanbul Bilgi University Press, Istanbul, 2006, p. 28.
62. For the transformation in the JDP and Erdoǧan's political outlook see Metin Heper and Şule Toktaş, 'Islam, modernity and democracy in contemporary Turkey: the case of Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan', The Muslim World, 93(2), April 2003, pp. 157-185.
63. Menderes Çinar, 'Turkey's transformation under the AKP rule', The Muslim World, 96(3), July 2006.
64. There were of course some instances where Islamist intellectuals criticized the JDP for losing its willingness to transform the system and express its earlier Islamic sensitivities. The luxury lifestyle of the rising Islamic bourgeoisie is also the main subject in these critiques. Sezai Karakoç, Ahmet Taşgetiren, Hamza Türkmen, Fehmi Koru and Ali Bulaç are five examples of critical Islamists to be mentioned here.