Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the enduring ottoman legacy 53bellion, the Wrst ethnoreligious uprising, made the Turkish Republic very suspiciousof any form of Kurdish and Islamic (Nak7ibendi) activities.In response to this major rural religious popular revolt, in which theNak7ibendi SuW order provided an organizational framework, the liberal governmentof Fethi Bey (Okyar) was forced to resign, and the new government of8smet 8nönü introduced a draconian legal system that closed all SuW orders andremoved other potential obstacles to its secularizing revolution. The decision toban all SuW orders had two consequences. By removing the traditional SuWnetwork system, the ban, in the short run, prevented the potential utilization ofSuWsm by nationalist Kurdish intellectuals. In the long run, by removing SuWloyalties and leadership, which had made it relatively easy to blur ethnic linesby stressing Islamic brotherhood between Turks and Kurds, the ban consolidatedKurdish ethnic identity and politicized Kurdish national consciousness.In October 1927 a group of Kurdish tribal leaders and intellectuals formed theKurdish National League (Hoyboun) under the leadership of 8hsan Nuri Pa7a ofBitlis, a successful Ottoman general. This group organized the revolt of A;r1(Ararat) Mountain in 1930–1931. The Turkish army had diYculty putting therebellion down in its early stages because the rebels received better arms fromoutside, but eventually prevailed, and 8hsan Pa7a took refuge in Iran. In orderto establish law and order in the region, the 1934 Resettlement Law organizeda selective deportation and exiled some Kurdish tribal chiefs to western Turkey. 56Meanwhile Atatürk again decided to expand the political base of the state andordered his close friend Fethi Okyar to establish the Free Republican Party(Serbest Cumhuriyet F1rkas1) in August 1930. 57 This experiment at controlledtwo-party politics lasted only three months because the population of rural andsmall-town areas immediately utilized the party as a means of expressing theirdiscontent with Kemalist policies, especially those of radical secularization. 58Atatürk grew apprehensive about these protests and ended the experiment onNovember 17, 1930. On December 22, 1930, six weeks after this short-lived andlimited experiment in political openness to the masses, the Menemen rebelliontook place. 59 In this incident, a group of militant Muslims rebelled under theleadership of the Nak7ibendi sheik Dervi7 Mehmet in the city of Menemen andkilled a military oYcer, Mustafa Fehmi (Kubilay). The events of 1925 and 1930awakened Ankara to the fact that its new national ideology had not really takenroot. Atatürk subsequently made a three-month visit to the countryside and cameto the conclusion that his “reforms” had not penetrated the periphery. 60The failure to penetrate the periphery was demonstrated again in 1937–1938,when Kemalist policies triggered a new revolt in and around the mountainousareas of Dersim, inhabited mostly by the Alevi Kurds, known as Zazas. Aftersuppressing the rebellion, during which several key military posts were attackedand hundreds of soldiers were killed, the Turkish state destroyed Dersim andcreated a new town, Tunceli, in its place. 61 These rebellions against the youngand inexperienced Republic created a cumulative image of the people of the ruralAnatolia as socially tribal, religiously fanatical, economically backward, and mostimportant, a threat to the national integrity of the Republic of Turkey. For ex-