Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

56 islamic political identity in turkeyness but never viewed as alien to it. Islam, unlike a nationalism based strictlyon language and ethnicity, oVered a more durable political community and languagefor communication. It had a familiar set of transcendent symbols for interpretingthe world that the Muslims in the periphery could readily use to voicetheir discontent and opposition.The Inward Migration of Turkish IslamIn the period between 1923 and 1950, two forms of oppositional movementstook place in response to the cultural revolution that Turkish society was forcedto undergo. These movements were led by Nak7ibendi and Nurcu religiousgroups. The Nurcus led a spiritual or inward-looking Islamic movement whosegoals were self-puriWcation and self-consciousness. This inward-oriented movementsought ways to free itself from state control, which was perceived as illegitimate,and viewed self-transformation and individual piety as the basis forsocietal and eventual state control. The Nak7ibendi orders, unlike the inwardlookingNur movement, pursued a more revolutionary and confrontational strategyby leading several conspicuous antisecular disturbances. The main goal ofthe Nak7ibendi order was to make tangible inroads into centers of state authority.Both movements, however, stressed the constitutive role of Islam as a sharedlanguage and practice for a community to have a meaningful life.By removing Islam from the public domain, the Kemalist revolutionarieswere seeking to cut oV the populace from their own shared language of imagination.This policy succeeded in large urban centers but failed to transform themajority of the populace in rural areas of Turkey. The new political discoursewas rigid and did not have the Xexibility and symbolic nature of Islam, whichoVered ever-changing meanings in a given context. During the years of Kemalistrepression, three social institutions (family, neighborhood, and religious groups)became the only habitat for the preservation and reproduction of traditional valuesand identities. With the removal of the caliphate and other symbolic structuresof the Ottoman state, society experienced the loss of authority and power,since politics became a matter of nation-building and was largely conWned to asmall authoritarian circle in Ankara. With this loss of public space and vernacularpolitical language, devout Muslims focused on the home as the new strongholdfor maintaining Muslim morality and identity within an antireligious state.The household became the center of a sacred arena where the outer door representedthe boundary between private belief and the unstable bifurcated personalitythat Muslims were forced to adopt in the open. Outside, the Muslim was aWctitious public citizen in the Kemalist secular-positivist order, but within hissacred zone he could be true to an earlier identity. The door not only distinguishedthe inside from the outside but also exempliWed the divide between theearlier moral normative ground of Ottoman-Islam and what many viewed as themoral vacuum of Kemalist positivism. 8smet Özel, an ex-Marxist convert andthe most prominent Islamist intellectual, argued that it was Atatürk‘s reformsthat, ironically, Islamicized Turkey by forcing people to internalize and value