Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the national outlook movement and the rise of the refah party 233municipalities. 85 The RP leadership, however, totally ignored this report and itsWndings during the 1995 national elections. The (unstated) reason was to appeaseTurkish voters susceptible to state propaganda portraying any attempt toameliorate the harsh conditions facing the vast majority of Turkey’s Kurds as“concessions to terrorists.” Equally important was the Werce hostility of theKemalist military and bureaucracy to any cooperation between what they viewedas the two mortal threats to their power: politically active Turkish Muslims andethnically conscious Kurds. 86 These political “realities” thus forestalled whatwould have been the most promising avenue for easing the terrible conXict inthe southeast.In the 1995 national election, a large number of Kurds who were disappointedwith the faintheartedness of the RP leadership voted for the Kurdishnationalist party, HADEP. Nonetheless, some Islamist-Kurdish nationalists,especially among the SuW orders in the southeast, still voted for the RP as analternative to the state-imposed, secular ethnolinguistic Turkish nationalism.Ironically, many state oYcials in the region—who had little personal connectionto Ankara—also voted for the RP. They did so because they viewed the partyas having the best long-term prescription for derailing the PKK’s program, whichwould create an unbreachable chasm between Anatolian Turks and Kurds.In the Marmara region (Istanbul and Adapazarì), the RP appealed to urbanKurds (as well as to Turks) by presenting a social democratic image of itself.Ercan Karata7, a prominent social democratic politician, noted that “the RP Wlledthe vacuum created by the collapse of social democrat parties in Turkey “ 87 AltanTan, a Kurdish-Islamist politician, argued that the RP in Istanbul emphasizedjustice and the distribution of beneWts and responsibilities, thus becoming a“Muslim social democrat party.” 88 The common theme here, whether in central,southeast, or western Anatolia, was the RP’s ability to express each region’ssocioeconomic problems in vague Islamic terms that had broad appeal becausethe symbolic structure of Turkish society is Islam. Because there are diVerentreadings of Islam in Turkey, what makes Islam relevant is not its ostensiblerigidity but rather its Xexibility. For example, landowners and party bosses insoutheast Anatolia invoked Islam to consolidate the old power structure, but inindustrialized cities, Islam became a banner for rallying the oppressed lowerclasses around demands for justice and equality. In general, the RP’s successderived from its appeal to four distinct social groups: Islamist intellectuals whodemanded freedom of expression for religion in the public sphere; Sunni Kurdswho sought either autonomy or a reorganization of the Turkish nation-state thatwould allow them to be recognized as a separate ethnic group; the gecekondulular(squatter town dwellers) who demanded social justice and integration into thecapitalist economy; and the new bourgeoisie who wanted less state intervention,more liberalization, and the eradication of state subsidies for big corporations.The RP represented a paradox for the Kemalist system. It was enemy andally at the same time. On the one hand it was a major force that should be controlledcarefully to maintain the secular nature of the state. On the other it wasa necessary political force that contained and gave hope to Turkey’s most dynamicand potentially destructive peripheral forces. The RP domesticated and