Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

12 islamic political identity in turkeyNurcu circles are very loose, there is a constant movement of members fromone circle to another. These reading groups are based on interpersonal trust andreciprocity. These informal networks are meant to be an instrument for buildinga religiously based Muslim society by raising spiritual consciousness andalso less directly by wielding informal political power through unoYcial ties topoliticians. These dershanes are important elements of Turkish civil society, asthey are outside the control of the state, self-supporting, voluntary, and informalin nature.In chapter 8, I seek to examine how Fethullah Gülen, the most active andvisible contemporary leader of the neo-Nur movement, with national televisionand newspaper franchises, reimagines the role of Islam within the nation-statesystem. In a way, Islamic movements and Islamic political identity are not “Islamic”in a solely religious sense but rather “national” in terms of seeking touse an Islamic ethos for fostering a regionally powerful Turkish state. Gülenhas succeeded in creating a new language of politics by mixing nationalistic,religious, and global discourses together. Although Gülen has been highly criticalof the RP, 18 his ideas and actions softened the opposition to Islamic politicalactivity among powerful sections of Turkish society and helped to create a newoutlook on the role of religion in contemporary Turkey. This, in turn, indirectlyprepared the ground for the Islamic RP’s rise to power with initially mutedopposition from the military and the traditional state establishment.Chapter 9 focuses on the MGH of Erbakan and examines the change in thediscourse of this political Islamic movement. This chapter analyzes the rise ofthe RP into the government by examining its organization, leadership, ideology,and communication channels. Since I treat the RP as an outcome ratherthan a cause of the unfolding sociopolitical processes in modern Turkey, I arguethat the RP in eVect has integrated most of the prominent Islamic groups (eventhose that are bitter rivals) into the political process. Although the party hasmanaged to expand its support base by addressing the questions of identity andjustice, it has had limited success in shaping individual identities and loyaltieson its own ideological terms.Finally, in chapter 10, I examine the way the military-bureaucratic establishmentused the national security concept to strike back at civil society. I examinethe causes and implications of the military’s soft coup of February 28,1997. I argue that the ongoing rearguard action by the Turkish state’s militarybureaucraticestablishment to preserve its authoritarian privileges could not besustained over the long term. By treating Kurdish and Islamic identities as threatsto the existence of the state, the military prepared the ground for the nationalisttakeover in the 1999 elections. However, the coup in the long run not onlynarrowed the legitimacy of the state but also forced traditional Sunni Turks andKurds to regard the Copenhagen criteria and EU membership as the only hopefor drastically reforming the authoritarian Turkish state and its ideology.Although many scholars and journalists have treated recent political developmentsin Turkey as a march backward from the “highway of Westernization,”such a view is as problematic as the teleological assumptions of the proponentsof early modernization theory. Contrary to the expectations of secularization and