Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the role of literacy and the media in the islamic movement 119constitutive role of Islam in the construction of self-identity. He stresses everydaylife and the “system” in which everyday life Xows. His problem is not withthe Republican ethos, or the “West,” but rather with the way the world system,that is, the forces of modernity, produces itself in terms of colonizing thinkingand everyday life. Islamic identity, for Özel, is the only site of resistance to thecolonization of everyday life by the totalizing consequences of modernity. 49 Heinvites Muslims to ignore modernity by not deWning Islam in opposition or inrelation to it. In fact, Islamic movements that seek to create an Islamic state becomeextensions of the world system. Religion, particularly Islam, is the only spacefor remaining outside this system. While Özel is successful in problematizing andquestioning modernity and its impact on society, one can say that he fails to linkIslamic consciousness with political and social action. In fact, he does not advocateresistance to the state at all. On the contrary, Özel treats the state as the ultimateinstitutional retainer of “the nation” and seeks to preserve it from societalsubversion. Consequently, he views cultural pluralism as a potentially imperialistproject trying to undermine Turkish sovereignty.Ali Bulaç, in contrast, sees the state as a national institution that shouldreXect societal cleavages and be subordinated to the principles of social coexistence.He argues that much of contemporary Islamic political ideology and notionsof the Islamic state are constructed through the lenses of nationalism andthe nation-state. His own project, which is derived from the Prophet Muhammad’sConstitution of Medina, is to construct a contemporary civil society basedon his concept of multilegal communities. 50 According to Bulaç,there are 10 million Alevis in this society and democracy is not asolution for them. You need to allow these people to utilize theirlegal rights within a framework. The solution is not democracywithin the nation-state but rather legal pluralism within the state. 51His writings have been quite inXuential. For example, Bahri Zengin, then deputychairman of the RP, sought to place democracy within this Islamic frameworkby introducing into the election platform of the RP in 1995 Bulaç’s concept ofmultilegal communities, which dates back to the Ottoman millet system, whereeach community was allowed to be ruled according to its own norms and laws.The Turkish Constitutional Court regarded the concept of “multilegal communities”as an indication of the RP’s anti-secularism and banned the party.A closer examination of the writings of Özel and Bulaç indicates that theirconcepts of an Islamic society and polity are not conditioned by a reactive returnto tradition but rather by the unfolding impact of modernity and capitalistdevelopment in Turkish society. 52 In fact, the intellectual issues and debateswithin Islamic thought are to a large degree derivatives from European intellectualthought. Islamization of society and politics, therefore, tends to be a vernacularizationof prevailing controversies surrounding issues of the nation-state, civilsociety, and modernity. These postmodern-inXuenced Islamic intellectuals areinvolved in a dual task: modernizing Islamic discourses on politics, civil society,gender, and technology; and Islamicizing sociocultural discourses in Turkey.For example, Bulaç argues that