Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

introduction 11Hareketi) of Erbakan and they were also the intellectual fulcrums for the Nurmovement. A Muslim SuW order is an institutionalization of the set of rolesplayed between master and disciple that varies in time and space and from oneSuW lodge to another lodge. SuW groups, for example, seek to liberate the innerbeing (e.g., religious consciousness) from constraining social and political conditions.I examine the externalization of Islamic political identity and what I termthe Turkish Muslim Reformation equivalent of the Protestant Reformation. InTurkey, the new idiom of religion conceptualizes the individual as being capableof shaping the self and freeing it from alienating structural conditions. Salvationis not about giving up or withdrawing to an inner world but rather about astruggle over recognition and space. Traditionally, the ulema (religious scholarsof Islam)concerned themselves with the outward behavior of the Muslimcommunity and its conformity with the body politic, while SuWsm stressed thespiritual life of the believer and the inner dimensions of faith. 15 This chapterindicates how the web of religious networks has been transformed as a result ofnew social-economic conditions.In particular, I demonstrate how the Nak7ibendi SuW order served as thematrix for the emergence in the 1970s of the four leading contemporary TurkishIslamic political and social movements: the neo-Nak7ibendi SuW order ofSüleymanc1 and other orders; the new Islamist intellectuals; the Nurcu movementof Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, with its oVshoot led by the charismaticFethullah Gülen; and the MGH of Necmettin Erbakan. In order to understandthe formation of Islamic political identity, one needs to look at its intellectualand epistemological roots. During the 1970s, the juncture of leftist ideology andfar-right nationalism inXuenced social thought, but it was the writings of Nursiand SuW groups that played the most vital embryonic role for the present generationof Muslim intellectuals and community leaders.In chapter 7, I examine the social dynamics of Islamic discourses, that is,how and why Said Nursi (1876–1960), the writer of the volumes of exegesis onthe Qur’an known as The Epistles of Light (RNK: Risale-i Nur Külliyat1), becamea founder of the strongest and largest text-based Islamic movement in Turkey.The Nur (Light) movement, as it is known, seeks to move from an oral-basedtradition to one of print culture. 16 One also must consider how the meanings ofNursi’s writings are reproduced and read across the ethnic, social, and economicspectrum. The number of adherents of the Nur movement, known as Nurcular,varies between Wve and six million believers. 17 Thus, without a proper understandingof the Nur movement and its societal impact, one cannot grasp thepeaceful and gradual mobilization of an Islamic identity movement in Turkey.In this chapter on the Nur movement, I demonstrate that the understandingof political Islam in Turkey requires an awareness of the seminal role ofNurcu intellectuals and study circles as informal networks in articulating anddisseminating Islamic idioms into society. The Nurcu textual reading circles,known as dershanes, function as a cradle for a new class of intellectual entrepreneurspossessing a diVerent cultural capital vis-à-vis secular intellectuals. Thenumber of these reading groups, which meet twice a week in diVerent apartmentsand neighborhoods, is around 5,500. Since the entry requirements to