Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

114 islamic political identity in turkeytity and ethics among the youth, did Islamic knowledge and practices move fromthe private to the public sphere. Despite the updating and the utilization of thenew opportunity spaces in media, one quickly perceives an enduring pattern oftraditional Muslim attitudes and frames in the writings of this generation ofIslamic intellectuals because their personalities were shaped by the Nak7ibendiorders. In some respects, then, Nak7ibendi orders became a “womb” for theformation of a new intellectual class in Turkey. 29 Since the Turkish communitywas organized by means of religious rituals, and everyday life was interpretedin the light of Islamic concepts, this genre of intellectuals did not confront majorproblems in communicating their Islamic ideas through the medium of poetryand novels. In fact, this group of poets and novelists became popular amongordinary people because they were intellectually connected with Turkish-Islamictradition and history. In addition, this group of poets and novelist tried to maintaincollective memory as a necessary base for identity and to create a morallanguage for everyday life by maintaining close ties with the Nak7ibendi order.The Islamic intellectuals, by using poetry, plays, and novels, managed totranscend the narrow ideologization of Islam. Thus, with the print culture asan opportunity space, these Muslim intellectuals managed to cultivate humanemotions of love, fear, struggle, and hope. These books and poems oVered analternative site for the imagination of a more humane society. Political oppressionforced Islamic thinkers to stress the inner spiritual aspects of the faith, theimportance of individual moral consciousness, and a transformation that wouldreform society from the bottom up. For years, however, Islamic thought wasconWned to the pages of literary and cultural periodicals. Only in the 1950s didvarious Muslim intellectual groups seek to organize around magazines andnewspapers, which became centers for examining domestic and internationalevents from an Islamic perspective. These eVorts represented the Wrst step towarddeveloping an Islamic perspective in the media since the anti-Islamic policiesof the Kemalist regime in the 1930s. Such journals played a key role in thepreservation and articulation of Islamic identity with an intellectual dimension.With the help of these new opportunity spaces, Islamic intellectuals tried todemonstrate that Islam was not the religion of the “backward periphery” incapableof revitalization, as the Kemalists claimed, but rather a dynamic force andsource for inspiration.The main thesis of these literary magazines was that Islam has its own “civilization”;for Muslims and for Turkey to prosper, they must be rooted in a senseof authenticity. Necip Fazìl (1904–1983), 30 Nurettin Topçu (1909–1975), 31 andSezai Karakoç (1932–) 32 may be considered the three pillars of this civilizationalintellectual movement. They all take the historical Ottoman period as a conceptualreference for examining social and political issues. Thus they did not treatIslam strictly as a religion but rather as a civilization with its own identity andcode of ethics. By civilization they meant that the principles, ideals, and preceptsof Islam are abridgements of a lived experience with their histories andparticular geography. For example, they reinvented the Ottoman past as beingthe essence of Islamic civilization, according to their deWnition. This historicalconsciousness induced the Wrst generation of Islamic intellectuals to embrace