Islam, Populism and Regime Change in Turkey

Making and Re-making the AKP

M. Hakan Yavuz, Ahmet Erdi Öztürk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000727074
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Islam, Populism and Regime Change in Turkey explores the role of religion (Sunni, Hanefi Islam) in the transformation of Turkey under the reign of President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi, AKP).

The chapters argue that the Turkish understanding of secularism was also one of the building blocks and the constitutive elements of Turkey's modernization until the rise of the AKP. Currently, however, it seems that religion has become a new or re-born element of the new Turkey and has been transforming many areas such as: the media, the Kurdish issue, implementation of the rule of law, foreign policy and gender issues. This book therefore aims to scrutinize the question: how does a religion-based transformation in Turkey influence the raison d'etat of the state, and effect in various ways different areas such as gender, foreign policy, economy and socio-political relations of various power groups within the society?

Islam, Populism and Regime Change in Turkey will be of great interest to scholars of Religion and Politics, and governance in Turkey. It was originally published as a special issue of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.

1 Turkish secularism and Islam under the reign of Erdoğan

M. Hakan Yavuz and Ahmet Erdi Öztürk

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a collection of articles that explore the role of religion (Sunni Islam) in the transformation of Turkey under the reign of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). This special issue argues that the Turkish understanding of secularism was also one of the building blocks or/and constitutive elements of Turkey’s modernisation until the rise of the AKP. Currently, however, it seems that religion has become a new or re-born element of the new Turkey and has been transforming many areas such as: the media, the Kurdish issue, implementation of the rule of law, foreign policy and gender issues. This special issue aims to scrutinise the question: how does a religion-based transformation in Turkey influence the raison d’etat of the state?

The history of the modern Turkish Republic is shaped by the forces of secularism (laiklik in a Turkish understanding) and Islamism. The relationship between the two forces has not always been hostile, as there have been periods of engagement as well as co-optation. It is important to understand the nature, origin and transformations of these two powerful socio-political movements by focusing on the historical background of the emergence of these two forces. In fact, the historical context, actors, and the motives pushing secularization during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods are essential to understanding the contours of the contemporary debates on secularism. As Öztürk (2019) mentions in his article, this background also helps us to comprehend the entanglement between religion and state and the state elite’s eventual desire to ‘control,’ `eliminate’ and `use’ religion to promote unity in Ottoman society under Abdulhamid II (1876–1908) and control Islam under the Young Turks. In addition, there was the co-optation of religion to mobilize political forces under a competitive multiparty system (1950–1980) and as an instrument for legitimizing and vernacularizing the neoliberal economic policies of Turgut Özal (1983–1993) (Öniş 2004). Finally, this historical analysis also guides us to visualize how social and political change in Turkish society restructured relations between Islam as Islamism and the state’s secularism in reconstituting Turkish-Islamic nationalism, as promoted by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Today there is no easy way in Turkey to strip Islam from secularism or vice versa. Islamic markers constitute the critical boundaries redefining what it means to be a Turk. Belonging to the Turkish nation today means being increasingly defined by Islamic practices and rituals. Thus, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) does not hesitate to marshal Islam to consolidate the boundaries of Turkish identity. Take the following hypothetical situation: a Turkish pilgrim in Mecca walks with a Turkish flag, and an Indian Muslim from Hyderabad asks the Turkish pilgrim, `Why are you carrying a Turkish flag in Mecca?’ His response is, `I am a Muslim because I am a Turk! This is the flag of Islam!’ This explains how in Turkey Islam has been reduced to a predominantly national identity. The Turkish education system also has become critical in using Islam to promote ethno-religious nationalism.

Any historical analysis of the relationship between secularism, as a modernizing and centralizing ideology, and Islamism, first as a social bonding agent and then as an identity of opposition, should start with the Tanzimat reforms of 1839. The modern Republic of Turkey evolved not only from the ashes of the late Ottoman state but also was created by the late Ottoman military elite, known as the Young Turks. The Turkish Republic’s understanding of secularism as an ideology for catching up with the West was inherited from the Tanzimat mentality. The purpose was to empower the state by imitating Western institutions, cultural practices and mentality. Conservative groups in society resisted this top-down modernization project through Islam, their shared identity that governed their philosophy of life. The aggressive secularizing (laikleşme-laikleştirme) policies of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk helped to turn Islam into an identity of resistance and a shared ideology among the periphery of Turkish society. The reformist Kemalist elite, mostly originating in the Balkans and heavily influenced by the Jacobin French ideology of social change, did not acknowledge nor understand the role of Islam in Anatolia. They did not know the degree to which Islam represented Anatolian Muslims and constituted their worldview. As the Kemalist reformers attempted to replace Islamic tradition with positive science and rationality to guide the day-to-day activities of ordinary Muslims in Anatolia, they confronted a series of local and regional rebellions led by Islamic actors.

As a result of Turkey’s evolving socio-economic context, the relations between religion and politics are in constant flux. The direction and pace of transformation depends upon the socio-political elite and global dynamics, but social cleavages also consistently occur among religiously sensitive and secular groups that embrace and promote Turkish style secularism (Yavuz 2003; Davison 2003; Warhola and Bezci 2010). Then again, the cleavages are not clear separations because there are many areas where the two groups interact and overlap (Sakallioğlu 1996). For example, in a distinction unique to Turkey, culturally conservative and religiously sensitive people who promote secularism abound in society while those who define themselves as modernist, western and laik (secular) hold an exclusivist and politically conservative attitude. The country’s social realities, embedded as much in paradoxical situations as in dichotomies, fuel the dynamics that push Turkey to change further but not always in a progressive way. Under these circumstances, this special issue focuses on the dynamics of interaction between secularism and religion under the AKP-led government. The special issue contextualizes this relationship by exploring the changing role of Islam and Turkish laiklik.

To understand Islam’s role in modern Turkish society, one needs a dynamic definition of religion as an autonomous sphere of human experience embedded in its own traditions as well as in webs of socio-political networks that should not be reified. Indeed, as there is no consensus on the definition of religion, defining religion has always been a problematic exercise (Smaret 1989). With this proposition, one might argue that manifestations of Islamic faith have internal rules but defining their meanings and roles also depend on various contexts. Islamic idioms often constitute the grammar of Muslim societies to communicate and discuss how a moral life and a just society should be defined. These idioms do not dictate what Muslims should specifically say or how to act in certain situations, but they make communication and debate intelligible concerning how one might arrive at a desirable normative order. The process involves the constitution of the moral self, a repository of tenets to define the good life, the networks of social change or webs of resistance to power relations, and the production of admissible and proper social practices and concepts.

Secondly, it should be noted the history of secularism in the contemporary Islamic world is different from the European experience, where secularism emerged as an indigenous phenomenon, that is bottom-up in nature, and it entails accommodation and compromise among contentious societal groups (Yavuz 2009). One can look to the French Revolution, and its rejection of a heavily identified Catholic state (Gascoigne 2002), or the American constitutional debates, which articulated unprecedented ideals about social harmony and the necessity of separating church from state (Witte and Nichols 2016). The bottom-up dynamic approach or finding dialectic compromise, however, are not the features present in any of the Muslim cases, most of which have been formed and dictated instead from the top-down. As secularism increasingly identified with authoritarianism in the Kemalist system, Islamic groups and intellectuals used Islamically-rooted opposition language to criticize secular policies and practices. Islam had become a de facto voice of opposition, if not the voice of liberty itself. However, once in power, the Islamic parties demonstrated that it was not so much the oppression or authoritarianism they had opposed, and soon enough, they produced their own denomination and brand of authoritarianism. Instead, there were the progressive policies themselves, especially those regarding women’s rights, sexual freedom, and individual liberties they found so irksome. However, their prior complaints about oppression also gave them a rhetorical tool with which to garner support from other jilted compatriots. In this regard, secularism in its Middle Eastern context especially was linked not so much to an expansion of the public sphere or political participation but rather to the emergence of the authoritarian state system that aims to dominate the public sphere by excluding dissident voices, which often have been inspired by religious as well as other reformist impulses. Islamic opposition has internalized and mimicked the authoritarian nature of proponents of secularism.

A take on Turkish history through state-religion-society relations

To reiterate, one has to underline that laiklik in Turkey has a unique character. Turkish laiklik has never simply been a formal separation between religious and political authority and institutions, but rather it has been a positivist state ideology to engineer a new homogenous and stratified society (Öztürk 2016; Dressler and Mandair 2011). Laiklik in Turkey was derived from the Jacobin-Statist and positivist French tradition of the Third Republic (1871–1942) and differs markedly from the Anglo-Saxon understanding of secularism. Some aspects of Turkish laiklik used to be based on radical Jacobin laicism that aimed to transform society through the power of the state while eliminating religion from the public sphere. The Jacobin faith emphasized the primacy of politics and the ability of politics to reconstitute society, as guided by Mustafa Kemal and his associates (Eisenstadt 1999, 73). The Kemalist project treated laiklik as the most important principle of the Republic’s founding philosophy. Turkish laiklik drew the boundaries of public reasoning and functioned as a new form of civic religion to provide moral norms and political principles. Any attempt to use religious arguments in a public debate, even in the Turkish Parliament, could have been a basis to ban that party (Mecham 2004) or exclude the pertinent Islamic group. As an intellectual and political project in Turkey, laiklik has a long history of differentiating, marginalizing, and excluding large sectors of Turkish society.

The regulation of state, religion and society also has a unique history in contemporary Turkey. In the late 1920s, laiklik became the constituting principle in the Kemalist project of building a Western style nation-state. In the 4th Congress of the People’s Republican Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) in 1935, the single party of the time, Kemal codified his ideas and goals as Kemalism, which consisted of six eclectic principles: Nationalism (Milliyetçilik), laiklik, Republicanism (Cumhuriyetçilik), Statism (Devletçilik), Revolutionarism (Devrimcilik), and Populism (Halkçılık) to guide the party, state and the nation (Parla 1992; Köker 1995). The Kemalist doctrine perceived modernization as westernization, and was heavily informed by dominant European repressive ideologies of the 1930s. In practice, Kemalism became the ideology that engendered the practice of eliminating ethnic and religious sources of conflict by seeking to create a nationally (Turkish) united, laik (implying cleansed of all religious signs and practices from the public sphere), and homogenized society.

Thus, a fear of dissidence became the guiding principle of the Kemalist state. Moreover, due to the impact of French positivism, the Kemalist project’s sole legitimate agent of change has been the state itself. The change becomes ‘modern’ and acceptable only if it is carried out by the state. Thus, any form of a bottom-up modernization project or a guided civil society change becomes a source of worry and suspicion for the Orthodox Kemalist elite. As Kemalism framed the nation and state as one and the same, Islam has been subordinated to the needs of the nation and state. The Kemalist reforms strived to establish a new society and define `homo Kemalicus,’ a persona guided by voluntary positivism and forced amnesia. This Kemalist archetype was neither democratic nor liberal, yet it was relatively repressive, elitist, and intolerant toward diversity. Indeed, the establishment of `homo Kemalicus’ also created its antithesis in Turkish society, with which it has always been in conflict.

To understand Turkey’s current normative conflict, one must examine the historic tension between the modernizing elite’s determination to impose a laik way of life to enhance the power of the state, and the Islamic response from the marginalized masses of Anatolia (Mardin 1973). Islamic groups, especially Naksibendi Sufi orders, reacted to the modernizing reforms. These orders and communities acted as a protective shield for religious traditions and communities against the excesses of state power. They contained and nourished a sensitized and accommodating code of social interactions. In the formulation of laik ideology, the state-centric elite relied on negative images of Islam to justify their modernization project and the national identity they imposed. Thus, at very early stages, laiklik became a modernizing ideology and any challenge to this top-down modernization was framed as ‘Islamic fanaticism’. The practice of laiklik in Turkey outlawed the social and political claims of Islamic identity as well as ethnic ones, as in the case of Kurds (Yavuz 2001). The authoritarian attempt to build a seamless and homogenous society has been at the root of many tragic conflicts and bloodshed in the modern Turkish Republic.

The Turkish state has always tried to use, regulate and control Islam for its own goals. However, the multiparty system also created new political spaces for Islamic movements to work closely with political parties (Öztürk and Sözeri 2018, 632). The Cold War conditions and emergence of leftist movements in Turkey forced the state to use Islamic movements as an antidote to the rise of the left. Two factors – the deepening of electoral democracy and the repressio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Turkish secularism and Islam under the reign of Erdoğan
• 2 From ‘clients’ to ‘magnates’: the (not so) curious case of Islamic authoritarianism in Turkey
• 3 Cold war era relations between West Germany and Turkish political Islam: from an anticommunist alliance to a domestic security issue
• 4 Understanding Turkish secularism in the 21st century: a contextual roadmap
• 5 An alternative reading of religion and authoritarianism: the new logic between religion and state in the AKP’s New Turkey
• 6 The intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and religion: novelties and continuities in Turkey during the AKP era
• 7 Islam, ethnicity and the state: contested spaces of legitimacy and power in the Kurdish-Turkish public sphere
• 8 Islam and economics in the political sphere: a critical evaluation of the AKP era in Turkey
• 9 The transformation of Turkey’s Islamic media and its marriage with neo-liberalism
• 10 From paradigm shift to retooling: the foundation and maintenance of the AKP
• Index