Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

230 islamic political identity in turkeylitical culture. 73 In this region the party became an institutional expression ofSunni-Turkish identity vis-à-vis the Alevi identity. There were three reasons forthe enormous increase in the vote for the RP in central and eastern Anatolia.First, by adopting a new policy of indiVerence to the Kurdish problem in the1995 national election, the RP no longer was vulnerable to the accusation that itwas pro-Kurdish. Thus the RP became acceptable to the Turkish-Sunni voters,who did not vote for the ultranationalist MHP because of that party’s collaborationwith the discredited governing parties. Second, RP candidates embracedcertain anti-Alevi positions. Finally, the RP mayors of Ankara, Bayburt, Çorum,Erzincan, Kayseri, Konya, and Sivas, who had been elected in 1994, had performedbetter than was expected and with much less corruption than usual. TheRP mayors, even by secularist accounts, not only curtailed the widespread corruptionat the municipalities but also improved public services substantially.All these factors encouraged the Sunni-Turkish nationalist voters to opt for theRP and enabled the party to register a 9 percent increase in votes in centralAnatolia and a 7 percent gain in eastern Anatolia.In the Black Sea region, however, the RP strongholds were highly urbanizedor involved in the market-oriented production of tea, hazelnuts, or tobacco.In the 1994 municipal elections, for example, RP mayors won elections inTrabzon and Rize, two main Black Sea ports where economic development wasphenomenal, as a result of trade with the former Soviet republics. In both cities,the presence of Russian, Ukrainian, and Azeri women prostitutes promptedan “anti-Natasha” movement among local women’s groups, which were led byRP candidates. Islam as a code of conduct and a cultural framework was mosteVective in combating such social ills in this region. In the 1999 national election,the party increased its votes in the Black Sea area by 2.95 percent.In the Black Sea region Islamic activism has always been rooted in localreligious seminaries. When religious education was ignored during the Wrst threedecades of Kemalism, the informal Black Sea seminaries became the custodiansof Islam and provided “religious service” to diVerent regions of Turkey. TheBlack Sea region’s seminaries, from Ottoman times, traditionally have been veryactive and have oVered a more liberal interpretation of Islam than has beencommon in the rest of the country, and the Islam of this region remained moreliberal and practical than in other regions of Turkey. Limited agricultural landoften forced members of many families to move to diVerent regions of the country.This economic pressure induced the people of this region to see “religion”as a service to be sold and a profession in which to be employed; the Islamicseminaries in Of, Rize, Sürmene, Caykara, and Trabzon thus became the mainemployment centers of the region. After their training, the new ulema the seminariesproduced would work in diVerent parts of Turkey. Thus, the religioustraining in these seminaries has always been “functional” and extremely pragmatic.The ulema of the region did not react negatively to the reforms of MustafaKemal and utilized the job opportunities created in the newly established religiousbureaucracy—D8B. The seminaries remained pro-state and supported thesweeping Kemalist reforms. The Islam of the Black Sea region, unlike the SoutheastAnatolian version, never became an oppositional identity and always allied