Cleansing Islam from the Public Sphere(1).

• Author: YAVUZ, M. HAKAN

"Modern Turkey, like a transgendered body with the soul of one gender in the body of another, is in constant tension.... The soul of white Turkey and its Kemalist identify is in constant pain and conflict with the national body politic of Turkey."

In order to understand state-society relations in Turkey, it is first necessary to understand the relationship between Turkish nationalism and Islam. Although Turkey is a national and secular state, religion lies at the core of its political landscape and identity.(2) Islam has always played an important role in the vernacularization of Turkish nationalism; Turkish nationalists, in turn, have redefined Islam as an integral part of national identity. Turkish nationalism is essentially based on the cosmology of Islam and its conception of community. The patterns of collective action, the meaning of justice, community, legitimacy and organizational networks in Turkey are very much informed by Islamic practices and organizations. Islamic activism has emerged as a result of the expanding market and the changing patterns of religious authority; political liberalization and interaction with Europe. It is, therefore, an attempt to re-imagine and renegotiate the Islamic aspect of Turkish identity.

After Islam was ripped out of Turkey's social fabric by the reforms of Mustafa Kemal in the 1920s, the rhythms of this religio-political activism have been modulated by the changing policies of the Turkish state. These centralizing and homogenizing reforms divided Turkey into zones of prosperity and zones of conflict. The zones of prosperity are concentrated around the "white Turks," or governing political elite, who are at the center of state power, while the zones of conflict are centered around the poor and marginalized sectors of the population--"the black Turks."(3) Religion, as a residual variable of the category of the black Turks and Kurds, became the basis for the exclusion of the majority of the population by the hegemonic Kemalist discourse of the white Turks. Islam has become the oppositional identity for the excluded sectors of Turkish society.

Cultural cleavage is the basis of Turkish politics. Political divisions, which formed as a result of secular nation-building reforms, reflect such splits. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discursive origins and historical paradox of the cultural cleavage between Turkey's Muslim masses and its pseudo-Westernized elite, and the power struggle between them. The first part of this article analyzes the irresolvable paradox of the Turkish Republic by examining the process of "othering" Islam. It identifies Kemalism, an authoritarian Westernization project, as the source of the contemporary crisis. The second part examines the politicization and the fragmentation of Islamic social movements by focusing on the Sufi-centric movements and the political Islam of the National Order Movement. The final sections of the article examine the transformation of the National Order Movement and the socio-political implications of the February 28th process.

BLACK VS. WHITE TURKS, ISLAM AND NATIONALISM

Turkey embodies an irreconcilable paradox established during the foundation of the Republic in the 1920s. On one hand, the state used Islam to unify diverse ethno-linguistic groups; on the other, it defined its progressive civilizing ideology in opposition to Islam. It called upon the men and women of Turkey to participate in a jihad to liberate their homeland and Caliphate from the occupying European armies. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) stressed the common religious identity of Turks and Kurds as Muslims and referred to non-Muslims as a "minority." Turkey thereby refused to accept ethnicity as the basis of its national identity, referring instead to religio-territorial identity as its standard for unity. Islamic identity based on religious devotion, ritual practices and a set of historically structured socio-political roles and schematic frames,(4)served as the integrative glue for the establishment of the Turkish Republic.(5)

Turkish national identity was modeled on the Islamic conception of community and was disseminated through Islamic terms.(6) The incorporation of religious vocabulary helped to nationalize Islamic identity. Examples of this include the incorporation of words, such as millet (referring to a religious community in the Ottoman empire, appropriated by the Republic to mean "nation"), vatan (homeland), gazi (the title of Mustafa Kemal, referring to those who fought in the name of Islam) and sehid (those who died for the protection and dissemination of Islam), into the nationalist lexicon. In another instance, the Caliphate was not abolished, but rather its authority was merely transferred from an individual to the National Assembly. After 1925, multiple identities that had coexisted freely during the Ottoman period officially coalesced into secular ethnic Turkish nationalism. The historians of the Kemalist period and the official Turkish Historical and Language Society redefined identity in terms of ethnicity and language. The state used the army, schools, media and art to consolidate Turkish national identity and break away from Islam and the Ottoman legacy. Nevertheless, during the formative Kemalist period between 1922 and 1950, two versions of Turkish nationalism actually competed: secular ethno-linguistic nationalism and religious communal nationalism. The Kemalist elite presented themselves as secular, progressive and in opposition to Islam.(7) The Westernization project was presented as emancipatory and anti-religious, without the critical post-Enlightenment thought on tolerance, liberalism and democracy. The Kemalists imagine themselves as secular, rational and `Western in their encounters with Islamic forces, though they have very little knowledge of the West or of what it means to be truly secular. While it would be difficult to maintain that the Turkish version of secularism is Western, it is true that Turkey's Westernizers always present themselves as religiously secular. Abdulhak Adnan Adivar argues that the Kemalist conception of secularism, similar to the positivism of the West, became the "official dogma of irreligion" and was "imposed on [Turkish society] just as Islamic dogma had been imposed in the past."(8) Kemalism, a form of authoritarian Westernism, not only became the ideology that created a new "white" Turk but was also deeply involved in the establishment and regulation of a state-monitored public sphere. This secular and national public sphere provided the arena in which to display the Western roles, attire and habits of the new white Turk, defined in terms of his or her ability to imitate external European appearances. By organizing the public sphere around the ideology of Westernism, the state was able to incorporate whatever it imagined constituted Western-ness into its display. For instance, during the 1930s and 1940s, villagers with traditional clothing were not allowed to enter the major streets in Ankara and were relegated to the less conspicuous back streets.(9) The Turkish project of modernization has been characterized more by concern for its Western appearance than by the actual social and philosophical roots of modernity. Modernity, for the Kemalists, was a product to be rented or bought.

After the Kemalist reforms, the public sphere had narrowed to the point that Muslims felt there was no longer any common public culture that would provide a context within which they could engage in communication and debate to exert influence over a newly emerging polity that would hold itself accountable to their opinions. In a real sense, the state was attempting to create its own public sphere. In response to this forced exclusion, many Muslims began to establish their own informal networks and education system to preserve and protect their sacred realm from the reaches of the radical Republican state. The mystical networks of Naqshbandis and the writings of Said Nursi, the founder of the most powerful faith movement, known as the Nurcu movement, became a counter-public sphere, and the incubator for the evolution of a more popular Islamic identity.(10) However, Islam remained imbedded both inside and outside the public sphere and continued to underscore the hidden identity of the Kemalist state.(11) Edmund Burke III aptly describes this paradox, stating that "nationalists are inside-out orientalists," who adopted the Orientalist critique of religion and "sought to portray themselves as secular, in opposition to the retrograde forces of religion."(12)

The hidden face of the Republican-imagined Turkish identity has always been Islam. As might be expected, this has created a sense of deep existential unease. Islam, excluded from the construction of Turkish identity, has come back to haunt the Kemalist imagination and disturb the Republican peace of mind.(13) It has created fear in the minds of the guardians of Kemalism and in their view, has polarized society into separate secular/Kemalist and Muslim/Islamic factions. The raison d'etre of the Kemalist establishment is to keep the Islamic "other" at bay, and this struggle is what unifies the Kemalists military-bureaucratic establishment. The major consequence of the transformation Turkey underwent in the 1980s was the recognition that the Kemalists themselves play the role of the "other" among others, namely the Islamists, Kurds and Alevis.

Modern Turkey, like a transgendered body with the soul of one gender in the body of another, is in constant tension. White Turks regard themselves as Western souls in the body of a foreign sociopolitical landscape. Its body is native to the land, but its soul is alien. The soul of white Turkey and its Kemalist identity is in constant pain and conflict with the national body politic of Turkey. Each side has its own discursive field. For the white Turks, identity is based on the ideology of militant...