Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

270 islamic political identity in turkeyTurkish nation. At the grassroots of society, one also observes a gradual move awayfrom national solidarity to communal solidarity. This move has been fostered bythe diminishing role of the state, due to its Wscal and ideological problems, butthis communal solidarity has not completely displaced the notion of “nation.”The dynamism of Islamic movements in contemporary Turkey should notbe viewed as a reaction to the failure of the state’s developmental policies andstructural adjustment programs. Social and political despair has not forcedpeople to take refuge in imagined religious-ethnic communities. Rather, thesecommunities have become a means for upwardly mobile segments of the populationto move from the margins to the center of social and political life. Thus ithas not been the most marginalized sectors of society that have been politicizedby Islam but, on the contrary, it has been the most upwardly mobile ones wholed the current wave of social and political Islamization.The spread of print Islam and modern associational life has helped to diversifythe epistemological sources and interpretations of Islamic discourses.The Nur movement founded by Said Nursi has been the main force behind thepluralization of sources in the debate on the relevance of Islamic values andtraditions in contemporary Turkish life. Nursi, for example, sought to accommodatea religious worldview with modern science and rationality. In otherwords, in this Xexible and evolving religious understanding, not only the naturalsciences but also democracy and pluralism can be reconciled with revelation.Attempts at such intellectual reconciliation of reason and revelation havenot produced a simple, stable, and coherent Islamic discourse but rather haveled to further destabilization and intellectual hybridism. The internal fracturingof the Nur movement, for instance, indicates that diVerent voices constantlyare heard and produced, as a result of the opening up of discursive spacesthrough the print and media revolutions, and that it is impossible in presentdayTurkey for any single ideology, either Islamic or secularist, to impose itseVective hegemony on society and the state.In the case of Turkey, the Kemalist revolution, in the process of seeking tooverthrow tradition, inadvertently promoted both its transformation and itsperpetuation. Because of this pressure “from above,” one sees the emergenceof an Islamic enlightenment in terms of the new emphases on human dignity,civic virtue, and social justice. The Islamic movements seek to form their ownmodernities in terms of drawing on their own traditions and values. In otherwords, the Nur movement and the Nak7ibendi groups do not mimic Westernpatterns and forms of modernity, but they are not able either to reify a particularIslamic tradition in their struggle to create their own multiple discourses.One witnesses a distinctly posttraditional discourse and an implicit tension withmodernity. By examining competitive Islamic identities within society and betweenIslamic groups, one sees that Islamic identity does not amalgamate ethnic,class, regional, and sectarian identities into one seamless Islamic construct.Interactions between Islamic and secular ideologies create more pluralisticimages and options for identity and ideology in contemporary Turkey.The construction of Islamic political identity has led to the fragmentationand pluralization of Islamic social and political movements. The rise of a print