Islamic Political Identity in Turkey

the tempering of the kemalist revolution 79traditional group boundaries have been undermined, and new identity groupsare emerging. For instance, despite their unique language, the Zazas—speakersof an Iranian language—never regarded themselves as a separate ethnicgroup. Religious identity shaped their public identity and alignment. However,the last two decades have witnessed the construction of an Alevi Zaza consciousnessand the creation of a separate Zaza ethnolinguistic identity.ConclusionThe political developments in Turkey during the 1980s and early 1990s demonstratethat the state is contested not only as a set of institutions determiningpolicies but also, and more important, as a source of societal legitimacy andidentity. 8smail Kara, a leading scholar of political Islam, has argued that thestate stresses the public role of Islam to ensure social harmony and to serve asan ultimate source of legitimization just as it did in Ottoman times. 67 However,Kara’s stress on the state by itself does not explain the situation fully, becauseone needs to take social transformation and pressures into account to understandthe marked policy changes pursued by the Turkish state in this period.Since 1980, Turkish Muslims have begun to feel that the worst period ofKemalist oppression has passed and that their state could and should representtheir Ottoman-Islamic culture and identity. Democratization nationalizes politicalinstitutions by carrying collective identities into the public sphere. Due toincreased democratization, the gap between state and society has been reduced,and this process, in turn, has catalyzed other groups to resist the further penetrationof Sunni Islam into the state. The assertion of Alevi identity, for example,is a response to the tentative alliance between the state and Sunni Islam.Drastic changes also occurred during the 1980s in the composition of thestate elite. Although some scholars claim a certain continuity of the state-centricculture because of the power of the post-1980s bureaucracy, I would argue thatthere has been a major break with past Turkish political practice as a result ofseveral factors. For example, the state elite is not as homogenous as it used tobe. There is no single path to socioeconomic development as deWned in the oldideology of “Westernization.” Universal education and the expanding economybrought new recruits into state institutions who had a greater empathy for Islamicsentiments. Finally, with the end of the Cold War, the security situationof Turkey has been normalized. All of these factors have made possible theemergence of a new “organic elite”—that is, an elite that identiWes with societyand is attuned for electoral reasons to public concerns.