Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

print-based islamic discourse 161inner self qua God. Like many SuWs, Nursi thought that the inner self is the onlyforce capable of resisting and generating imaginative dissent against oppressiveforces. This reXective and creative power of Muslims was Nursi’s main capital inmaintaining the journey of self-development. He knew the negative impact ofcapitalist forces and the ways by which the state and the market created the self asa stranger and a source of tension and problems. By stressing religious values,Nursi struggled to shape the self for power and to form the self with power toresist the “civilizing” policies of the state. He realized that the Kemalist projectwas producing persons short in collective memory and devoid of any cognitivemap of action. He sought to oVer an alternative reading of the self. He insistedthat the fundamental goal of life is not the search for power but rather the searchfor knowledge to realize the power of God. Nursi treated Islam as a source of innerpower to mobilize in confrontation with the state’s positivist ideology andmaterialism. His concerns were very similar to those of modern theorists whosay that rationalization threatens the self and society by depriving both of the capacityto posit anything but their own submission. He identiWed the sources ofthe autonomous self so as to resist its disempowerment by the bureaucratic systemand positivism, which assigned all decisions to experts. He thus gave a centralrole to the concepts of iman (faith) and insan (person) rather than to the conceptof power. Indeed, faith creates a capacity to initiate, resist, and alter power relationsat the micro and macro levels.To address these issues, Nursi sought to create a parallel inner space forthe ordinary Muslim to contemplate faith in everyday experiences. His writingis a vehicle to translate Islamic forms and practices into the rhythms of everydayconventions. He realized that he could use the medium of print as a newmeans of constructing consciousness. He also realized that the ulema could notrespond to these modern challenges. Therefore, he created a new locus for authority—thetext itself—to give equal footing to all Muslims, allowing them tomake sense of their faith according to their own encounters.Nursi’s ideas appeal to a large segment of Turkish society, partly becauseof his development of a new conceptual bridge for the transition from traditionto modernity, from oral to print culture, and from a rural to an urban environment.Nursi imagined a gradual transformation, beginning with the process of(1) raising individual Muslim consciousness, continuing to (2) the implementationof faith in everyday life, and then to (3) the restoration of the sharia. Hesought to equip individual Muslims with the necessary tools to guide their livesin accordance with Islamic precepts. By a sharia-governed society, Nursi meanta law-governed, just society. In addition to his stress on the concepts of justice,identity, community, and the connection between science and religion, Nursi’sextremely cautious attitude toward politics and the ideological state helped themovement to become more active in social and cultural spheres. Nursi’s understandingof the state diVered from that of the Young Turks and the laterKemalists, for he treated the state as the “servant” of the people and argued fora neutral state without any ideology. The state, for Nursi, should be moldedaccording to the needs and desires of the people. He argued that citizens andcommunities are rivers and streams, whereas the state is the pool: a change in