Black Turks, White Turks: On the Three ... - Insight Turkey

MÜCAHİT BİLİCİ
that a Turk is a citizen of the Turkish Republic (as they have been taught). But
what if you ask who is the ideal citizen of Turkey? Whom does the state cherish
as its preferred subject? What if you ask the average shopkeeper, schoolteacher, or
police officer, what image first pops into their heads? I argue that there are three
components of Turkish national identity: Muslimness, Turkishness and secularism.
This three-layered definition of Turkish national identity excludes a number
of groups. Some of these exclusions are visible and recognized while others are
invisible and in need of recognition. Any group that fails to meet all three requirements
fails to achieve full citizenship. They remain either externally attached to
the nation (as the Greeks, Armenians and Jews are) or relegated to other times
and places (on the mountains in the case of the Kurds, or in the past in the case
of religious people).
The Turkish Republic was built on the political, cultural and psychological debris
of the Ottoman Empire. Culturally it was extremely heterogeneous—an undesirable
condition for the taste of modern nation builders. Psychologically it was
just coming out of trauma caused by prolonged wars and a sense of having been
besieged by non-Muslim great powers. The Ottoman Empire lost the majority of
its territory (85 percent) and population (75 percent) in the last 50 years of its history.
It would also be further homogenized through the massacre of Armenians
in 1915 and the population exchange with Greece in 1923. In the late period of its
history, the Ottoman state was also engaged in building a nation based on Muslim
identity. A path-dependency initiated by the Ottoman millet system and deepened
by Sultan Abdulhamid II’s policy of constructing a “Muslim nation” became
the main legacy upon which the young Turkish Republic would construct its own
national identity.
The political and cultural elite that exercised power in defining the new nation
and its identity were mostly elite immigrants or of immigrant backgrounds,
originally from the Balkans and the Caucasus. Ironically, for the most part they
were not ethnic Turks. They were Macedonians, Circassians, Georgians, Bosnians
and Tatars. They were people whose history was shaped by persecution by non-
Muslims on the ever-shrinking frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. Their strong
attachment to Muslim identity was not necessarily religious but identity-related,
for their Islamic identity was the single most important cause of their displacement
and became the future avenue of their relocation within the remainder of
the empire. They were, more often than not, non-Turkish Muslims for whom
Muslimness and Turkishness were one and same thing. They were also more urbanized,
Westernized and secular than the local population of Anatolia, who were
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