Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the role of literacy and the media in the islamic movement 115statist views, because Ottoman history was written as the story of the state ratherthan of the society. This new Muslim intellectual elite created a new languagethat merged Islamic esoteric traditions of inner dimensionality with the outwardmodern idiom of individuality. In other words, their conceptions of society andself have at the same time modern and traditional imprints. This new phenomenonof a Turkish urban Islamic intelligentsia evoking communal idioms witha decidedly modern twist to address social, political, and cultural concerns ofTurkish society demonstrates the likely course to be taken by modern Islamicrevivalist thinkers in general around the globe.One of the major implications of this historicization (Ottomanization) ofIslam has been the nationalization of Islam and the emergence of Turkish Islamas the basis for right-wing groups that sought to revive the suppressed collectivememory of the Ottoman-Islamic past and Wll the existing ethical void insociety. They reimagined their own tradition by adopting and modifying someKemalist terms and concepts to modern discourses of nationalism. Therefore, theWrst generation Turkish Muslim intellectuals consciously promoted an Islamicdiscourse that incorporated and domesticated the Turkish nationalism of theRepublican intelligentsia into its own project of synthesizing the Ottoman-Islamicpast with the modern Turkish present. These intellectuals did not create a separateand autonomous communal religious identity but rather reproduced anethnoreligious Turkish Islamic identity.Nurettin Topçu, the founder of Hareket Dergisi (1939–1974), who was heavilyinXuenced by the French philosopher Maurice Blondel and by the Nak7ibendisheik Abdülaziz Bekkine, sought to construct Turkish-Islamic nationalism. 33Because it utilized new opportunity spaces in media and the expanding educationalsystem in Turkey, Topçu’s magazine became the center of a new Islamicand Anatolian Turkish identity movement. Topçu defended the Nak7ibendiconception of the self and community by utilizing the ideas of French philosopherssuch as Blondel and Henri Bergson. Topçu’s understanding of religioninformed his ideas of self, community, and nationalism. 34 Religion, for Topçu,is a faith in God that is formed within the inner self, a psychological experienceand realization of God within oneself. This faith is manifested and articulatedin human conduct as ethics. Thus, religious ideas and experience form ethics,and this ethics, in turn, informs social order in community. He treats Islam asa religion of inner self and criticizes its politicization by religious groups orutilization by the state. However, Topçu supports the role of religious scholarsin the formation of public policy and believes that religion must stay outsideand above state policy. His main concern is the inner mobilization of theAnatolian population through “building their core center as spirituality” to overcomealienation created by the Kemalist form of top-down modernization. Inshort, Islam, for Topçu, is Wrst a source of ethics, this ethics is the source ofidentity, and this identity forms its own authentic civilization: social institutionsand practices.Topçu oVered the Wrst comprehensive critique of positivism and the dominantform of structuralist/functionalist explanations that denied any role forhuman agency in the constitution of society and social events. Topçu, unlike