Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

268 islamic political identity in turkeysciousness of the Kurds. In the 1970s, the center-right and religious-right governmentcoalitions recruited thousands of new functionaries into the state administration.Most of these people came to Ankara from largely rural and moretraditional central Anatolia. This policy was maintained after the military coupin 1980. Since the Alevis were viewed as left-wing, the state remained very cooltoward them, and in the process of the purges carried out against the Left, manyAlevis were expelled from government and establishment positions.The main forces that have marked Islamic political discourse in modernTurkey have been a combination of the newly emergent middle classes of traditionalAnatolian background and a new genre of Islamic intellectuals who arereplacing the traditional role of the state functionaries and ulema and charismaticSuW leaders in articulating a modernist Islamic discourse to address pressingissues of national identity and state and society relations. The Turkish caseindicates that the inclusionary context provided by political pluralism, upwardsocial mobility, and an autonomous civil society creates conditions conducivefor the interpenetration and mutual recognition of secular-statist elites andIslamically deWned groups. The phenomena of upward social mobility and thewidespread use of publishing and the electronic media diVerentiate TurkishIslamic movements from other Islamic movements in the region. With the helpof these opportunity spaces, Turkish Islamic intellectuals for the most part havemanaged to bring a progressive and pluralist Islamic discourse into the mainstreamof Turkish intellectual life. The new Islamic intellectual elite often makesuse of Western writers and schools of thought as much as traditional Islamicones in presenting a more eclectic conception of knowledge and in seeking tocritique the implications of modernity and technology.Within the opportunity spaces of the media and the market, the Islamicgroups have managed to undermine the Kemalist ideology by destabilizing theold boundaries between the “modern” Kemalists and the “backward” Muslims.As Turkey has continued to develop politically and economically, such formerlyrigid dichotomies have broken down. The spread of universal education, thecreation of opportunity spaces through the print and electronic media, and thecreation of a new class of Anatolian bourgeoisie have eroded old boundaries,making them permeable and preventing any single ideological construct—Kemalist or Islamic—from dominating the public sphere in Turkey. While newopportunity spaces helped to decrease the division of lifestyles between theIslamists and Kemalists by new Muslim actors’ adopting new tastes and participatingin consumer culture, the same spaces simultaneously led to the diVerentiationof separate Islamic groups. Those who “moved up” by being able tolead a more aZuent lifestyle had to leave their old Islamic communal spacesand create new ones. Islamic groups are using opportunity spaces in the media,education, and the marketplace to carve a separate identity illustrated by newmodes of dress, furniture, cuisine, and architecture. For example, the economicallywell-oV Nak7ibendi circle of 8skenderpa7a diVerentiates itself from otherNak7ibendi circles by its visibly aZuent lifestyle, journals, radio stations, consumerpatterns, and economic activities. Thus, the human desire to develop more