Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

86 islamic political identity in turkeywas an act of conscious resistance and rebellion against the attempts by the stateto inscribe an oYcial and radically diVerent high culture. Arabesk songs genuinelyattempted to reXect the pain and hardship of modernization, as experiencedby vast yet marginalized sectors of Turkey’s nascent capitalist economy. Thesesongs articulated the feeling newcomers had that they were “strangers” withintheir own country; their lyrics emphasize themes of poverty, social mobility, andalienation. Another common theme in this music is the presentation of the cityas both a locus of opportunity and a place of corruption and dissolution.Arabesk music was oYcially banned on public broadcasting stations untilthe early 1990s because it evoked a diVerent set of cultural norms than whatthe Kemalist state sought to promote. 16 The Republican regime attempted touse music via the radio as a tool for creating uniform sensibilities and tastes.The state-owned radio regularly broadcast European classical music in order toencourage Turks to accept the Kemalist agenda of realizing a European identity.17 However, the Turkish urban poor either turned their radios oV or turnedtheir dials to Egyptian popular music broadcasts, which were a closer reXectionof their authentic tastes. With the Islamization of urban life, a new form ofpopular music evolved, stressing the heritage of Ottoman classical music. Althoughthe second generation of Arabesk singers has its origins in village culture,they constructed a hybrid music that bridges rural and urban culture inTurkey. 18 They conceive of the city no longer as a source of fear and isolationbut rather as a space that can be shaped and improved. This generation, unlikethe previous one, demonstrates a conWdence that results from growing up inthe squatter towns. They have had greater opportunity to be trained in Ottomanclassical music, and their close ties with the Turkish diaspora in Europe allowthem to keep up with changing fashions.As a result of the expansion of urbanization and education and the developmentof print and video media, Wrst- and second-generation urban intellectualsadapted local and oral Islamic traditions and idioms into new discourses on urbanlife. 19 Islam constituted a language for new urban dwellers, a cement for bringingdiverse groups together, and a social security network that the governmentwas unable to rival. The children of the Wrst wave of migrants seized the educationalopportunities of the 1970s and began to hold public oYces in the early1980s. Some of them have come to form a new and important group of vernacularIslamic intellectuals and musicians. Their image of Islam is diVerent fromthat of their fathers; it is rearticulated to meet the challenges of modern urbanlife and the overtly Europeanizing program of the Republican old guard.The Treacherous Path to a Market Economy:Economic Development in the 1980sThe young Turkish Republic intended to pursue a liberal economic policy; however,the depression in the global market prevented this from happening, andTurkey instead pursued a statist policy designed to protect its own economy. 20However, economic étatism soon became enshrined because it overlapped with