Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

64 islamic political identity in turkeySaid Nursi, who had passed away in 1960 after a long internal exile, was desecrated,and his corpse was disposed of in an unknown place in a vain attemptto exorcise the devotion of many of his pious followers. In the face of risingpopular discontent in August 1961, the military junta, known as the NationalUnity Committee, assured the people that the call to prayer would remain inArabic, that TRT would maintain its broadcasts of Qur’anic recitations, and thestate would allow the normal functioning of mosques. 15One sees a constant ambiguity and tension at this time in the policy of theRepublican state toward Islam. The source of this inherent tension was Kemalistpolitical philosophy on the one hand and modern participatory politics on theother. By recognizing the signiWcance of Islam in everyday life, the military coupleaders started to treat religion not only as a force to be crushed but also as anideology to be co-opted for its own ends. The coup reestablished the old Kemalistdistinction between “reactionary” and “enlightened” Islam and employed anumber of policies to train and educate enlightened religious leaders. GeneralCemal Gürses, the leader of the coup, said in Erzurum:Those who blame religion for our backwardness are wrong. No, thecause of our backwardness is not religion but those who havemisrepresented our religion to us. Islam is the most sacred, mostconstructive, most dynamic and powerful religion in the world. 16The economic and social changes that had transformed Turkey by 1960forced the Kemalist old guard to give up its dream of creating a “classless society”and redeWning Kemalism as the national security ideology of the state. Itsmain goal became the protection of the state and its purity against societal penetrations.Thus, in response to new emerging social and political actors,Kemalism became a more conservative ideology to protect the state against assertiveclass, religious, and ethnic identities. However, a group of leftist intellectuals,gathered around the socialist weekly Yön, tried to redeWne Kemalismas an antiimperialist and “nationalist liberation” ideology. 17 They stressed thestatist aspects of Kemalism and sought to consolidate state power against thenewly emerging bourgeoisie. In short, the 1960 coup marked the fragmentationof Kemalism into a security doctrine of the state and a protoleftist ideology.This fragmentation, in turn, further alienated the large conservative sector ofthe Turkish population from Kemalist ideology.The 1961 constitution ultimately created a freer environment for associationallife, although such an outcome was neither the intent of nor foreseen byits framers. Their goal was to check parliamentary majoritarianism by creatingnew autonomous institutions outside the control of the elected deputies and givemore rights to ordinary citizens. This new-found freedom allowed diverse groupsto penetrate the state indirectly. In the 1950s and 1960s, the patron-client relationshipsthat were established to court the popular vote reactivated religious,ethnic, and kinship-based networks. Following new elections in 1964, 46.6percent of the electorate voted for the new AP because it adopted a pro-Menderesand -DP position and implicitly criticized the coup supporters in the CHP, whichreceived only 38.4 percent of the total vote. 18 However, the military induced the