Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the national outlook movement and the rise of the refah party 229was not the case for other parties that were centralized in terms of campaignstrategies and lacked the Xexibility to use verbal communications and face-tofaceexchanges. For example, when representatives of the RP visited a familyafter a funeral, they introduced an element of human contact that diVerentiatedthe party from the impersonal and faceless image of other political parties. Inthe March 1994 local elections, the DYP organized only 12 coVeehouse meetingsin the Maltepe neighborhood of Istanbul. In contrast, the RP held one ortwo meetings in coVeehouses or in private houses almost every night, hostinga total of 43 coVeehouse meetings alone. Moreover, after the elections, the RP’smeetings continued on a bimonthly basis. An RP oYcial’s speech illustratedhow the party critique of the system was informed by moral values. The RP’s“new type of state,” while not yet a fully developed concept, was similar to the“virtuous society” (fazilet toplumu), as was evidenced in his denunciation of thecurrent system:This system rewards Manukyan, who runs the chain of prostitutionmotels in Istanbul. The system rewards someone who sells thebodies of Fatma and Ay7e. Therefore, those who vote for the rulingparties and the ANAP will be held responsible for their act in thepresence of God. 71In using the names of Fatma, the daughter of the Prophet, and Ay7e, the wife ofthe Prophet, the lecturer was trying to convince Muslim individuals to distancethemselves from the governing party. 72The RP did not see election campaigning as an activity to inXuence a fewvoters; rather, it considered campaigning an opportunity to convert and gainlong-term member allegiance. The party’s eVorts continued after elections andmade an impact on Turkish domestic life long after the campaign banners wereput away. For example, the RP often utilized religious holidays to transmit itsmessage in face-to-face interactions, eVectively transforming such occasionsinto political events and spaces where public issues were discussed. Clearly,RP supporters perceived the political struggle as a war of cultural values. Politics,for the ordinary RP supporter, was not simply a mechanism for distributinggoods or rulemaking but also a means for articulating communal valuesin the public space. Political participation, therefore, was an avenue for culturalself-realization.The political map of Turkey was redrawn to correspond to the cultural andsocial landscape of a country that is marked by regional diVerences. The RP wonlocal and national elections in Bayburt, Diyarbakìr, Erzurum, Kayseri, Malatya,and Trabzon and in both Ankara (the capital of the reformist Republic) andIstanbul (the former Ottoman imperial capital). However, there were diVerentreasons for each regional victory, especially for those in Ankara and Istanbul.One of the features of the tesbih (rosary) organizational structure was the RP’sability to understand and respond to local cultural characteristics. In the townsof central Anatolia (Çorum, Erzurum, Sivas, and Yozgat), the RP supporters weremostly middle-class workers, small merchants, and farmers; ideologically, theywere conservative Sunni-Turkish nationalists who shared a state-oriented po-