Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

islamic social movements 17Lewis, Tibi, and Sivan have exaggerated the impact of Islamic doctrine onthe conduct of individuals and on the patterns of institutions in society as a whole.In addition to their problematic approach to the issue of agency, they tend toargue that there is a Wxed political language and idiom in Islam that guidesMuslim conduct in the public sphere. Thus essentialist scholars have treateddiverse and competing Islamic movements as homogenous ideological movementsthat primarily are inXuenced by the Qur’an and the writings of certainindividuals such as Abu’l al-Ala Mawdudi (1903–1979), Sayyid Qutb (1906–1964),Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), and Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (1935–). 10This approach maintains that all contemporary Islamic social and political movementsare motivated and guided by an Islamic worldview. One aim of this bookis to show that the diversity of Muslim beliefs and practices is not compatiblewith an analysis that regards a monolithic, consistent, and unchanging “Islam”as the foundation of all social and political movements that call themselvesIslamic.Furthermore, by employing an ethnocentric and teleological deWnition ofmodernity, such scholars essentially are claiming that Muslim societies are inherentlytraditional and unable to modernize. In fact, some scholars of modernizationhave attributed the failure of democratization and capitalism inMuslim societies to a certain “cluster of absences, a missing middle class, themissing city, the absence of political rights.” 11 Daniel P. Lerner, for example,argued that Islam was a traditional ideology, reacting to the processes of modernization,and that in the case of Turkey it forced the country to choose between“Mecca and mechanization.” 12 Turkish scholars, no doubt inXuenced bythe aYnities of this approach with the Kemalist state ideology of Comtean positivism,have internalized Lerner’s framework in their studies of political developmentin their own country. 13 They, as well as a number of Western scholars,have tended to treat the Islamic movement as a reactionary force Wghting a vainrearguard action against the processes of Westernization and secularization. 14These theories tend to explain human conduct in terms of simplistic dichotomies,modern and traditional, while ignoring the causal mechanisms that in-Xuence the evolution of Islamic movements, economic expansion, popularimagination, and social change.Modernization theory dominated the social science research on Turkey, andexplicit assumptions about old versus new, tradition versus modernity, religionversus secularism, the inexorable march toward Westernization, and sociopoliticalreactions being religious fanaticism informed these studies. They presentedthe establishment of the Republican regime as the inevitable “emergenceof modern Turkey” and depicted its founding Kemalist ideology as the fulWllmentof destiny for the modernizing forces. This teleological, state-centric, and structuralistreading of the Turkish polity and society ignored the destruction of theAnatolian mosaic of Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Kurds, and other ethnic andreligious groups. Tar1k Z. Tunaya, Niyazi Berkes, and Bernard Lewis set theframework of Turkish studies in terms of “discovering” Turkish nationalism asa primordial identity that was awakened by Mustafa Kemal through his policiesof progressive secularism that cleansed this identity of its Islamic-Ottoman lay-