Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the securitization of islam and the triumph of the akp 257secularism, there is still a strong connection between Islam and an ethical ethosthat informs everyday life in Turkey. Over time, a close aYnity has developedbetween certain values and certain interests, and these class locations must betaken into account in the examination of the election results.In the transformation of the Islamic movement in general, and the electoralvictory of the AKP in particular, a “new” urban class, consisting of horizontallyconnected solidarity-based groups with rural origins and shared Islamicethos, played an important role. This “new” urban class has been excluded culturallyand economically by the Kemalist elite. The excluded segment of thepopulation utilized Islamic idioms and networks to overcome their exclusion.Thus Islamic networks both facilitated this group’s integration into modernopportunity spaces and oVered it a hope for social mobilization.Sociologically, the AKP appears to engage people of very diverse backgrounds,from teachers, policemen, vendors, traders, and new Muslim intellectualsto humble shopkeepers and businessmen. The AKP, however, was onlyformed in August 2001. Thus it was not so much the AKP that utilized traditionalsolidarity networks in neighborhoods to mobilize voters; rather, thesereligiously inspired networks mobilized themselves to redeWne the politicalcenter of Turkish politics in terms of their values. In short, this is a bottom-uppolitical change in which civil society wants to expand the boundaries of thepublic sphere and make the political instittutions representative of the peoplerather than of the oYcial state establishment. The AKP utilized culturally rootedgrassroots networks, personalities, and cultural frames to project itself as theparty of a 99 percent Muslim electorate in a country where most support groupsare inspired by religion yet are infused with the discourse of secularism andWesternism that has developed as a result of 80 years of Turkish experimentation.Furthermore, almost all Islamic groups oVer some form of communityservice, making such activity more common than prayer groups. These religiousgroups act as the social base of Islamic identity and have very strong commitmentsto social justice and direct participation in communal outreach programs.The AKP became the favored party of these networks, and this translated intopolitical support.The electoral cleavage is determined by the normative value conXict betweenthe secularist bureaucratic center and the Muslim values that constitute thesocietal center. As this book has shown, the history of modern Turkey is thestory of the struggle between the values of the Kemalist state and the values ofa Muslim society. In Turkey, the political center and the social center do notnecessarily overlap and often have been in constant conXict. Elections can beattempts by society to socialize the political center in terms of its values andnorms and to redeWne the boundaries of the state to open more space for societalparticipation and values. Islamic groups can use electoral processes to createnew political compasses in accordance with its values and to redraw theboundary between the state and civil society. This is what happened in the November2002 elections. The elections created a new actor with the mandate torestructure the state-society boundary. The people want the state to become the