Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the role of literacy and the media in the islamic movement 121tive memory. In the case of Republican Turkey, one of the primary goals of theKemalist intelligentsia was to foster a radical sense of forgetting in order toembark on a radically new future. This lack of a sense of collective memoryprevents individuals from understanding the constructiveness of social relationsand organizations. The loss of memory deprives people of the historical consciousnessnecessary for the organizing of alternative practices or institutions.Thus collective memory and identity became one of the primary grounds forresistance for those thinkers who reject the radical Kemalist attempt to write anew script for Turkish society. This resistance should not be seen as a radicalrejection of modernity but rather a recontextualization of modern relations inlight of a consciousness of the past.Building an Islamic Education SystemAppreciating the role of education in the construction of Islamic consciousness,the Nak7ibendi orders and the Nur groups also are involved in educational activitiessuch as establishing new high schools and Kuran Kurslarì (Qur’anicschools for children). The struggle between state and society therefore is focusedlargely on achieving inXuence in the educational sphere, which naturally is seenas central to shaping the future of the country. Kemalists perceive the spread ofreligious schools as a threat to their secular educational objectives. Consequently,on February 28, 1997, the NSC demanded that the Ministry of Education undertakereforms aimed at curbing private schools that are funded by religiousassociations and closing the public 8mam Hatip middle schools and Qur’anicseminaries. The purpose was to curtail the growth of Islamic schools, whichthe NSC claimed were breeding grounds for Islamic “fundamentalism” and thusthreatened the country’s stability. In reaction to these demands, large mass rallieswere organized in the name of “freedom of education” and “privatizationof the educational sector.” 56 When the Erbakan government hesitated to implementthese directives, it was forced out by the military’s orchestrated soft coup.After the mid-1920s, the Republican state, by controlling education throughthe 1924 Law of UniWcation of Education, aimed to appropriate ideas, symbols,texts, and norms to fashion a new citizen committed to Kemalist principles. 57Through this means, the state sought to condition the individual’s thought patternsby encouraging students to think in terms of speciWc secular-nationalisticframes. These particular patterns of thought were promoted in order to create auniWed nation. The Kemalist state had come into being without a corresponding“nation” and society suitable to the new Republican elite’s vision of its destiny.Therefore, the state bureaucrats, who were also the functional intellectualsof the period, employed the instruments of education to mold a new secularistTurkey. 58 Universal state-sponsored education, however, did not result in theformation of a uniform secular Turkish citizenry but rather facilitated the emergenceof competing Kurdish, Alevi, and Sunni Islamic political identities. Thesegroups manifested their resistance either in Islamic symbols, such as the dresscode, or by attacking Kemalist icons. The educational sphere, therefore, became