Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

10 islamic political identity in turkeyAfter the Wrst four chapters set the context of the Islamic identity movements,chapter 5 examines how Muslim agents construct and internalize Islamicpolitical identities. The current identity debate in Turkey also illustrates the waypower is constructed socially through religious symbols and networks. This isreXected in controversies over education and the dress code. 10 The main forcesin the formation and politicization of new Islamic frames of reference are theprint and visual media, religious education, and the formation of a new religiouslyinspired intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. This chapter therefore consistsof a detailed examination of the media, schools, and the new intellectual class.Study of the politicization of Islamic identity makes clear that schools and themedia are critical in this process. Through the institutional means of the schoolsand the media, the construction, internalization, and diVusion of Islamic identitytake place. The production of Islamist intellectuals and cultural entrepreneurswas hindered in the past by the lack of Wnance capital, which was readilyavailable only to those who were part of the Kemalist, state-centered intellectualclass. This economic hurdle was overcome only after 1980 by an Islamist capitalistclass that fully emerged in the wake of Özal’s policies of political and marketliberalization. This new class of Muslim entrepreneurs was able to circumventstate controls by creating its own alternative schools, printing presses, newspapers,journals, and radio and television stations.After two decades of struggle, an elaborate infrastructure of Islamic culturehas established itself in contemporary Turkey. Ironically, the policy of economicliberalization in Turkey encouraged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)did not favor those sections of society that were well disposed toward Kemalismas a result of their long dependence on the privileges of the Republic’s statisteconomic policies. Muslim entrepreneurs who were not dependent on statesubsidies and who were concentrated in foreign exchange–earning export industries,such as food processing and textiles, were particularly well placed toprosper in this period. This new counterelite, for the writer Erol Göka, is “protean,open to global discourses, and seeks to overcome the ‘lack of Wt’ betweenTurkish society and the state.” 11 This new Muslim business elite is represented,for example, in the new daily newspapers Türkiye, Yeni 6afak, and Zaman andthe magazines Aksiyon, Cuma, Giri7im, 8zlenim, and Yeni Zemin.As I shall demonstrate, publishing sets modernity apart from previousmodes of production and consumption of knowledge. Printing has a majorimpact on societies in terms of raising the consciousness of space and time andthe imagining of social and cultural ties. 12 Anthony Giddens argues that “thedevelopment of writing greatly extends the scope of distanciated interaction inspace as well as in time.” 13 Writing allowed people to study history and developa “linear time consciousness.” 14Chapter 6 focuses on SuW orders for two reasons: They provided structureand became a catalysis for the survival of religious-political education and spiritualdevelopment of Muslim society in Turkey, as they did in the case of similarlyWerce repression by antireligious forces in the Soviet Caucasus and CentralAsia. Moreover, SuW orders played a formative role in the foundation of thepolitical forerunners of the National Outlook Movement (MGH: Milli Görü7