Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the tempering of the kemalist revolution 71terpretation of and contribution to the understanding of Kemalism. Thesebooks rediscover a new pious Mustafa Kemal who realized the necessity ofenlightened Islam and implemented modernizing reforms to free Islam fromreactionary forces. These books have three messages: religion is necessary forthe social cohesiveness of the nation; Kemalism and Islam are compatible; andsecularism is necessary for the development of “true Islam,” that is, enlightenedIslam and Kemal’s reforms aimed for the development of “a rational andlogical religion.” 40Evren had a much better understanding of the role of religion as the cementof society, the source of morality, and an intellectual force to arm ordinaryMuslims against the communist threat. 41 The rhetoric and policies of the1980 coup treated Islam as an element in the service of the nation and nationalismrather than as an autonomous force to compete with either secularismor nationalism. The idea that Islam is the most important cement of theTurkish nation and nationalism was not new. 42 Those nationalist-conservativeintellectuals who stressed the ethnoreligious aspect of Turkish nationalismhad a major opportunity to put their ideas into practice. Islam, for them, inspiredas well as brought a sense of personal and communal identity to Turks.It is in this nationalist context that the issue of the sacred as the source of dutyorientedmoral responsibility to homeland, state, and nation has been addressedcollectively.The military courts decided that “the Basic Law of Education encouragesthe teaching of love of God and the Prophet as a way of cultivating moral valuesin students, and these would lead to the love of fatherland, state, and family.” 43Thus the military-dominated court did not see all religious instruction in highschools as an antisecular act. The military sought to cement national unity byusing Islam as its shared social bond. Its Turkish-Islamic Synthesis was constructedby a group of conservative scholars who were members of the Intellectuals’Hearth Association, an organization founded in 1970 supposedly to protectthe Turkish soul from foreign cultures. 44 This new ideology sought to createpublic consent for the consolidation of state power. The Intellectuals’ HearthAssociation was sympathetic to the Islamic dimension of modern Turkish identityand enjoyed good relations with the state-civil apparatus. The military leadershipviewed this group of intellectuals as ideal for constructing this newideology because the sterility of Kemalist positivism as an ideology of state legitimizationhad become obvious by 1980. The Intellectuals’ Hearth Associationattempted to create a new ideology out of Ottoman, Islamic, and Turkishpopular culture in order to justify the hegemony of the ruling elite. They reinterpretedthe state as being integral to the nation and society, and their repertoireof Ottoman-Islamic myths and symbols was selectively deployed, for theWrst time in the Republican era, to make the past seem relevant to the present.One can see the codeterminacy of Islam and Turkish nationalism in this statementby Mustafa Erkal, the leading member of the Hearth:Islam is a religion that seeks unity without negating diVerencesabove all diversity. How can you bring the Turks together or unify