Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State

Christopher Houston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859734773
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181203
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Can Islamism, as is often claimed, truly unite Muslim Turks and Kurds in a discourse that supersedes ethnicity? This is a volatile and exciting time for a country whose long history has been characterized by dramatic power play. Evolving out of two years of fieldwork in Istanbul, this book examines the fragmenting Islamist political movement in Turkey. As Turkey emerges from a repressive modernizing project, various political identities are emerging and competing for influence. The Islamist movement celebrates the failure of Western liberalism in Turkey and the return of politics based on Muslim ideals. However, this vision is threatened by Kurdish nationalism and the country's troubled past. Is Islamist multiculturalism even possible? The ethnic tensions surfacing in Turkey beg the question whether the Muslim Turks and Kurds can find common ground in religion. Houston argues that such unification depends fundamentally upon the flexibility of the rationale behind the Islamist movement's struggle.

Part I

– 1 –
Global Cities, National Projects, Local Identities

A Tale of Two Suburbs

Kuzguncuk gives the impression of being physically straitjacketed by its human geography. The grounds and mansion of the Koç business empire dominate it from the hill at the rear, cemeteries surround it on three sides and the high wall of Fetih Paşa Korusu (Forest) constrict it on the fourth. A little way up the Bosphorus the soaring steel technology of the Suspension Bridge overwhelms the skyline, leaving Kuzguncuk crouched in its shadow. Around the bridge and extending back to the far edge of Kuzguncuk is an exclusive military zone: walking along the road separating the military and civil spaces one recoils from the blank gaze of the sentries, machine-guns in their arms.

If Kuzguncuk appears somewhat self-contained compared to most other suburbs, it seems appropriate to ask whether such urban segregation allows the neighbourhood much autonomy to ‘produce its own locality’ (to invoke a phrase of Appadurai). This is no idle reverie pandering to a misbegotten anthropological desire to minimize the effect of ‘outside’ forces on a discrete, self-reproducing community. On the contrary the question is to ascertain the extent to which Kuzguncuk functions as a conduit for the nation-state’s project of producing ‘citizen-subjects’ (or subject citizens). For it can be argued that neighbourhoods are where the ‘heavy’ work of nationalism is done. From the state’s perspective, their role is ‘to incubate and reproduce compliant national citizens’ (Appadurai 1995: 214). How variable the state’s success is in any given area depends of course on numerous factors.

This was visually demonstrated when the Turkish flag was thrown to the floor at the legal Kurdish party’s general conference in Ankara in 1996.¹ In immediate indignant response Kuzguncuk was festooned with the national flag for days afterwards, criss-crossing streets, obscuring the merchandise in shop windows, hanging off balconies, even fluttering on the rusty pole sticking out at right angles over the gateway to the mosque. No doubt this was a spontaneous outburst of patriotism - except that the state printing office was simultaneously pumping out posters adorned with the national flag, vowing 'While you are, we will be.' And then there was the even more chilling banner strung across the prime shopping streets: 'Memleket bölünmez. Esan susmaz. Bayrak indirmez ('The nation won't be split. The call to prayer silenced. The flag thrown down'). This from the supposedly secular party of the ruling coalition. By contrast, in the Istanbul suburb of Gazi Osman Pasa, where earlier riots in 1995 ended in a massacre by security forces, the refusal to fly the flag in reaction to its desecration was vilified by the republican press as an act of betrayal. The production of locality by recent Kurdish and Alevi migrants clashed here with the state's ambition to subordinate local neighbourhoods to its own national logic, to nationalize all space within its sovereign territory. Kuzguncuk's identification with the state's project, then, becomes as significant (and peculiar) as Gazi Osman Paşa's apparent resistance to it.

1. The perpetrator of the crime was sentenced to 22 years in gaol: the head of the party and the chairperson of that particular session were given 6 years apiece.

In fact during most of my fieldwork access to certain areas of Gazi Osman Paşa was strictly limited. Checkpoints manned by special police controlled the comings and goings of inhabitants and their visitors. The riot, which resulted in 23 protesters being shot dead by state security forces, ended only when the army occupied the suburb and clamped down on all unauthorized civil associations. Clearly, then, acquiescence in the civilizing project of the state was greater in Kuzguncuk than in Gazi Osman Paşa. And equally clearly, without the horrifying contrast of Gazi before us, we would be hard-pressed to discern the naturalizing effects of nation-state discourse, in which the achievement of state legitimacy resides in the very concealment of the artifice underlying its production.²

2. June Starr, in a follow-up to her research in the Bodrum area in the late 1960s, writes self-accusingly: ‘to my astonishment, a decade later, some of what I had taken as fixed had been challenged and undergone radical change at the top (the parliament, public stability, the Constitution’ (Starr 1992: 174). She then affixes a quote from Marx’s Grundrisse: ‘everything social that has a fixed form merely is a vanishing moment in the movement of society’ (ibid., p. 175).

Globalizing Istanbul

We may still find it strange that two districts within the one city (Kuzguncuk and Gazi Osman Paşa) can be so different in terms of their susceptibility to the seductive charms of national identity. For after all, both neighbourhoods have been exposed to the full repertoire of the Turkish nation-state’s techniques for producing an homogeneous citizenry: a standardized and nationalist school curriculum; a calendar year punctuated by national holidays like October 29th; the colonization of public space by monuments and memorials honouring the nation’s founding heroes; the encouragement of a collective remembering and forgetting; the endless repetition of the narrative of the nation’s birth, including the important genre of battle-accounts; the censorship – often by the proprietors – of the mass media in the name of national self-interest; the registration of residential permits by state-appointed functionaries; the omnipresence of police stations, gendarmeries, and military zones; the formalization of the ‘cultural’ sphere (particularly in the areas of folk-dance and music); the naming and renaming of streets, suburbs, public buildings, parks; even the permissibility of children’s names, etc.

But different suburbs of the same city - and certainly different regions within the state's borders - get caught up in the national imaginary in contrary ways over a period of time. The character of the various Istanbul neighbourhoods is affected by a multiplicity of factors. These include the degree of development of the local productive forces and the accompanying class struggles, as well as the incorporation or expulsion of trade unions from state mechanisms for negotiating labour issues. The radicalization of segments of the labour force resulting from the liberalization of the economy too is important, as is the ability of the state to lock in the loyalty of workers whose 'hold on citizenship has been dependent on jobs in manufacturing and other sectors protected and subsidized by national economic managers' (Beilharz 1996: 94). Significant too is the extent of ethnic segmentation in the division of labour, and competition between workers from different regions of the country for control of local jobs. We might think here, to bring us down to earth, of Eminönü porters or Kasimpaşa stevedores. Lastly, changes in the state's cultural policies and consequent effects on the politicization/reconstruction of ethnic and religious identities, including war, forced migration and mass urbanization, affect the kinds of locality constructed by inhabitants of a neighbourhood. Such factors test local sentiment towards solutions propounded by the state to die problems facing residents (or constituting them as problems!).

In this sense any particular neighbourhood’s task of producing locality (‘as a structure of feeling, a property of social life, and an ideology of situated community’ Appadurai 1995: 213) is under duress as much from the identity-forming discourse of the Turkish nation-state as from that ensemble of economic and cultural transformations most conveniently labelled globalization. Since the watershed of the 1980 military coup and the liberalization of the Turkish economy, the elites of Istanbul have repositioned it as the only Turkish metropolis capable of becoming a ‘global city’. In this process a newly imagined Istanbul has been re-defined vis-à-vis Ankara, while the national-developmentalist project coordinated from the Turkish capital falters, in both the economic and cultural spheres.

Yet if the present conjuncture of the world economy confers on [port] cities that manage to insinuate themselves into the transnational economy the possibility of greater autonomy from national capitals, not every neighbourhood within the city will be equally affected – or enthusiastic. Talk of a ‘global city’ may be misleading, unless the uneven processes of actual factory development, service operations, and sites of investment are seen as one of its hallmarks. As most studies show, global cities are intrinsically unequal cities, in terms of their citizens’ variable exposure to, and the redistribution of, income, property, access to services – and life chances and risk. Global cities are likewise producers of inequality by their incorporation into a hierarchical global urban system, whereby cities ‘function as production sites and market-places for global capital’ (Sassen 1994: 45).

Incorporation of influential cities within circuits of global capital accumulation is often taken to mean a corresponding crisis in the nation-state itself, which is unable to control the movements of capital within its borders. This in turn is assumed to herald the ‘erosion of the capability of the nation-state to monopolize loyalty’, opening up such things as a renewal of civic pride over against national affiliation (Appadurai 1993: 421). Yet obviously such renewals, if indeed they do exist, will be as unevenly distributed, even within particular neighbourhoods, as the selective transformation of the city and its economy by global forces. As Sassen points out, ‘processes of economic globalization [are thereby] reconstituted as concrete production complexes situated in specific places containing a multiplicity of activities and interests, many unconnected to global processes’ (1994: 44 – my emphasis).

In this process the scope for local autonomy, if any, in the art of producing locality needs to be re-visited. The question is not so much how global forces impinge on local communities, as if such communities were always there. Ethnography should not concern itself with attending to the integration/transformation of forms of cultural life it first has imaginatively to re-create. Rather we might wish to study the very construction of locality by such forces, to trace how ‘much of the promotion of locality is in fact done from above or outside’ (Robertson 1995: 26). In like manner, the constitution of those same ‘global forces’ may be best analysed by studying their embodiment in local sites, as in adding themselves they become indigenized. Here the disparate projects of national elites in the politics of state formation and their relative success in implementing them at the local level is a vital (mediating) third moment of analysis.

Global cities can be imagined, then, as urban mosaics, but mosaics in which both the colour and contours of the tiles keep changing, so that such cities become nodal points for global capital and cultural flows that re-shape them into contested spatial terrains.

National Construction and Islamist Whitewash

It is a considerable irony, then, that in order to become a global city – i.e. a city to which ‘overly irritable capital which is technologically disposed to hyper-mobility’ is persuaded to relocate – cities are exhorted to appropriate or re-package or even invent a specialty by which to sell themselves (Keyder and Öncü 1994: 391). Thus ‘those who are in a position to engage in this entrepreneurship will have to carefully think about the niche where the city will present itself, and will have to come up with an image of the city to advertise, and indeed to sell’. Or again ‘successful cities have all engaged in such a sales effort; those cities which lack the power structure, or the vision, or are too encumbered by conflict that makes the evolution of such a vision difficult, fall behind in the competition . . .’ (1994: 391) What can a city sell that makes it unique? Certainly not cowed labour, or tax-free havens, or well-organized infrastructure, or consumer services for a new global political class, though of course it needs to sell all these as well. What it can sell is its particular ‘localness’.

In Istanbul’s case this has entailed a re-structuring inspired by the global discourse of heritage conservation, in which the historic peninsula has been reconceived as an open-air museum, a ‘consumption-artifact’ (1994: 412). Touristification has involved the clearing of slum dwellings, the creation of parks, the restoration of old churches, bazaars, mosques and significant Ottoman wooden houses, as well as the construction of highways, overpasses and broad thoroughfares to enable quick access to the 13 new five-star hotels put up since 1983 on prime sites overlooking the Bosphorus.

Here the diffusion of a global discourse concerning the ‘expectation of uniqueness of identity’ (Robertson 1990: 50), and a commodification of a particular interpretation of history combine to legitimize the transformation of urban space in Istanbul. In this process the selective retention and appropriation of ‘localness’ no longer conform mainly to nation-state requirements for constituting a national culture, but also to the market’s sponsorship of commodity localism. Localisms ‘remembered’ by the nation, and localisms ‘remembered’ by the market do not always coincide in terms of their logic – this despite the close links between political and business elites. The marketing for consumption of symbols that signify the national-culture – that is, their circulation as commodities in a process of de-etatism – means that the actual definition of the national culture is inherently plural. Further, it is obvious that the Republican state itself is not totally unified, but open to influence (‘infiltration’ if one does not like the directions of the change) by interests not necessarily linked to the reformist bureaucracy and its cultural project. Here class, cultural and political agendas interact in complex ways that make historiography in particular, and related attempts to symbolize those histories in monumental architecture and spatial practice, a vital part of current political struggle.

Yet historiography is not merely instrumental for present-day struggles. The acceptance or otherwise of a historical interpretation by groups or individuals who are also invited to become the subject of the narrative is a complex affair. People give their assent to a historical narrative because their experiences, lives and hopes confirm the possibility of the truth of the interpretation. In the same way, the constitution and consolidation of historical narratives in architectural design and built interventions in the public domain enter into the contest over the organization of the individual’s ‘interior space’ (identity). Certain kinds of political hegemonies are effective to the extent that they bring into conformity exterior politicization of space with agents’ subjectivity, and inefficient to the extent that people resist such efforts.

Stokes sums up the changes initiated in the late 1980s by Istanbul’s controversial mayor Bedrettin Dalan as ‘an explicit attempt to reconstruct Istanbul as the Islamic and Ottoman capital of the age of conquest . . .’, so that ‘monuments in public space, once exclusively and conspicuously reserved for Atatürk, now focused upon the conqueror [of Constantinople], Mehmet II, as an image of an outwardly oriented and very different kind of Turkey’ (Stokes 1994a: 25). We might note in passing that such urban renewal practices trace a long pedigree in ‘Islamic’ cities. Both Henri Prost in Morocco and later in Istanbul, and Le Corbusier in Algiers and Izmir, displayed in their work what Rabinow calls a discourse of ‘techno-cosmopolitanism’, which entails a philosophical commitment to architectural (and cultural) conservatism. Neither architect was a technocratic modernist, suppressing (or simply bypassing) in the name of efficiency the earlier built traces of life, history or material culture. As Çelik puts it, Le Corbusier’s Algiers projects were ‘an attempt to establish an ambitious dialogue with Islamic culture, albeit within a confrontational colonial framework’ (Çelik 1991: 60). Meanwhile, Abu-Lughod argues, the redeeming grace ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Epilogue
• References
• Index