Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the enduring ottoman legacy 51memory of the accumulated beauty in the national consciousness,there will be a certain crudeness, a lowering of aesthetic standards. 48This abrupt rupture with the past did not trouble Atatürk; on the contrary,he viewed the inXuence of the religion of the Arabs as the main factor contributingto the perceived backwardness of his society and thus adopted a set ofreforms to promote the “disestablishment” of Islam. Atatürk argued that “ournational morality should be cleansed and supported with modern principles andfree thought.” 49 Science and rationalism were to be the true liberators and moralguides in the construction of this new Turkish society. The Kemalist understandingof rational-positivism was imposed on every aspect of society within reachof the state. Once the Ottoman-Islamic past had been discarded, the Republicanelite had an opportunity to Wll this lacuna by fabricating a new history andlanguage tailored to its vision of the “new Turk.” Atatürk himself encouragedhistorians to create pseudohistorical theories such as “the Turkish History Thesis”and the “Sun-Language Theory” in the Wrst half of the 1930s. 50 In the ThirdLanguage Convention, which met in the historical Dolmabahçe Palace (Istanbul)on September 24, 1934, it was generally accepted that the Sun Language Theoryproved that all other languages and civilizations sprang from Turkish. 51 In keepingwith the Kemalist insistence that Turks were “really Europeans,” a numberof papers at this convention insisted that the Turkish language belonged to theIndo-European language family. 52In analyzing eVorts to create a pseudoscientiWc national theory, EricHobsbawm argued that historical writings play a key role in the “invention oftraditions” by contributing “to the creation, dismantling and restructuring ofimages of the past which belong not only to the world of specialist investigationbut to the public sphere of man as a political being.” 53 Such texts, overtime, become more “real” than the “reality” of unwritten memory, accordingto Hobsbawm:The element of invention is particularly clear here, since the historywhich became part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of thenation-state or movement is not what has actually been preservedin popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured,popularized and institutionalized by those whose functions it is todo so. 54In the case of Turkey, state-sponsored historical theories stressed the pre-Islamic roots of the Turks and were meant to forge a politically correct continuitybetween the Republican present and an imagined pre-Islamic past. Althoughthis attempt to exclude Islam and Ottoman history from modern Turkish nationalismwas criticized by some intellectuals, Atatürk suppressed their dissent.Dissident historians, such as R1za Nur, the Wrst minister of education, andHamdullah Suphi, R1za Nur’s successor, continued to be discredited until 1950,when the introduction of the multiparty system made it possible for them todemand a redeWnition of Turkish nationalism that incorporated Islam and Ottomanhistory as legitimate and even essential aspects of modern Turkish na-