Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

146 islamic political identity in turkeywas charged with masterminding this event and spent several months in jail,where he was tortured by the police despite being 69 years old at the time. OnSeptember 16, 1959, a few months after his release from jail, he died. His sonin-law,Kemal Kacar (1917–2000), succeeded him as the organizational (notreligious) leader of the movement. Kacar, an outspoken critic of Erbakan’s politicalIslam, was elected to Parliament from Kütahya (1965–1973) and Istanbul(1977–1980) as AP deputy and played a signiWcant role in expanding Qur’anicseminaries. The Süleymancì community diVers somewhat from traditionalNak7ibendi orders, although its followers insist that they are Nak7ibendi. Intheir regular meeting, the followers read the classics of Nak7ibendi thought,such as the Mektubat of Rabbani.The Opportunity Spaces and the SüleymancìsThe economic and political opportunity spaces shaped the evolution of theSüleymancì movement. During the rigid period of secularization, Tunahan utilizedthe inner-self and private spheres to conserve and maintain Islamic ideasand practices. During the multiparty system, the state accommodated religiousidentity claims and allowed the establishment of Qur’an seminaries in 1949.This legal and political opening helped to shift the strategy of the Süleymancìsfrom “withdrawal” (1924–1949) to “engagement” (1949–1957), including evena degree of cooptation. As a result of the 1949 decision to open Qur’an seminariesand hire more preachers for the state mosques, Tunahan trained andemployed preachers for the Directorate of Religious AVairs (D8B). The seminariesoVered major employment opportunities to thousands of rural youth inthe religious civil service. The movement also institutionalized itself as the Associationof the Qur’an Seminaries and established a symbiotic relationship withthe state. The Süleymancì preachers had to accommodate themselves to thenational-secular philosophy of the state by incorporating nationalism and someRepublicanism into religious identity and adopting a religious position that waspro-state, nationalist, anticommunist, and antipolitical Islam. This crossfertilizationof nationalism and religion became the major characteristic of theSüleymancìs in the 1950s and 1960s. The Süleymancì preachers dominated thediVerent levels of the D8B until the new 1965 Directorate of Religious AVairsLaw, which allowed only the graduates of 8mam Hatip and Divinity schools tobe employed at the D8B. This sowed the seeds of an ongoing row between theSüleymancìs and the D8B. In order to present themselves as “acceptable” to thestate, the Sülemancìs never hesitated to accuse the graduates of 8mam Hatipschools of being “political Islamists and sympathizers of Arab radicalism.” Indeed,Erbakan’s campaign to establish more 8mam Hatip schools enhanced theirclaims about the politicization of the D8B.Despite the Süleymancì arguments, the 1971 military coup decided to “nationalize”the private Qur’an seminaries, which had to give up some of theirbuildings to the D8B. Thus, since the 1965 Law and the 1971 coup, the Süleymancìshave focused on the market and started to build a distinct “Turkish-