The appeal of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey has been explained through its supposed Kemalist-friendly policy and the success of its “moderate” Islamic modus operandi. However, it is also fair to say that the party’s rise has had much to do with the disappointment felt by a large section of society over more than two decades of unfulfilled promises by social democratic parties. The recent revitalization of Islamism in Turkey – including its anti-secularist and anti-Kemalist strands – must be understood as a response to Kemalist secularism as well as an answer to the unfulfilled promises made by post-Kemalist social democrats. Understanding this context is important for anyone who wants to understand why and how Islamists were able to mobilize their base once again, after having been sidelined for so long. This article aims at exploring how anti-Kemalist practices have been reemerging through the revitalization of Islamism in Turkey. The secularization of Turkish politics over the past century has been the result of a complex process of which anti-clericalism is only one part. Kemalism, the secular ideology named after the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, has undergone phases of radicalization and liberalization. This has been true especially since the 1980s, when anti-clericalism was de-emphasized in order to ease the Kemalist program’s acceptance by the Islamic majority. Throughout this process, anti-secularists have complained of being treated as second-class citizens. However, anti-secularists were not only the target of Kemalist policies; they themselves were also often the source of radicalization in Turkish politics. There was nothing inevitable about the rise of Islamism in the 1980s. Indeed, in the early years of the Turkish Republic (1923-38), Islamists had been among Kemal’s most formidable and dangerous enemies. The Islamists’ efforts to undo this modernizing and secularizing revolution had been defeated in the 1930s, and their leaders had been exiled or executed. Kemalism, as a radical ideology, was aimed at a complete and permanent break with the past. Kemalism was based on a radical rupture with the Islamic past and on the creation of a new, Western-oriented Turkish identity. Thus, Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal, had called for the replacement of “imported” Sharia law with “customary law” based on “local conditions and customs.” Kemalism’s radical anti-Islamic thrust found its clearest expression in the prohibition of the veil in universities and government offices, the outlawing of polygamy, the introduction of the Swiss civil code with its strong emphasis on the rights of women etc. The Islamic party that was defined as “Islamic” by virtue of the fact that it was against Kemalism was able to create a new Islamic paradigm that was based on opposition to Kemalist secularism and, at the same time, on a “conservative” version of Islam. The core of this new Islamic mobilizing paradigm was “tradition,” in the form of a conservative religiosity that combined the rejection of Western modernity with the embrace of Islamic modernity, that is, with the selective adoption of Western technologies and values while rejecting Western culture, epistemology, and ontology. The Islamists’ struggle involved creating a new Islamic narrative and an alternative Islamic identity, based on tradition and not on the rejection of the past, as well as developing new Islamic practices aimed at providing an alternative to Kemalist secularism.
The ascendance of the Turkish state’s conservative-Islamist wing has been followed by a prolonged assault on the state’s Kemalist wing, including the army and the administrative bureaucracy. The Islamists’ project has been to dismantle Kemalism’s secularizing and modernizing institutions and replace them with conservative and Islamic alternatives. From the 1990s onward, the Islamic-conservative wing of the Turkish state and the country’s Islamists have waged a prolonged campaign to disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate the militant Kurdish movement, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The aim of this campaign has not been to solve Turkey’s Kurdish problem but to neutralize an anti-establishment force. The campaign to disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate the PKK has gone hand in hand with the demonization of another anti-Islamic and anti-conservative force, the followers of Fetullah Gulen, a secretive religious order with a global presence based in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. In the 1990s, Gulen’s movement had begun to establish itself as a powerful ally of the Turkish state’s conservative-Islamist wing. The movement’s schools and media outlets had helped the state to promote a conservative and anti-Kemalist version of Islam, as well as to win new supporters from among Turkey’s Kurdish minority. The conservative Islamists’ campaign to disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate the revolutionary Kurds has gone hand in hand with a drive to displace Gulen’s movement from the state institutions where it had established itself. Fethullah Gülen is a preacher whose great oratory talent is recognized by all Muslims as the origin of the “Turkish-Islamic synthesis”. Inspired by the Sufi teachings of his master, the Kurdish Islamist thinker Said Nursi, he launched a “soft” movement to re-Islamize Turkish society in the 1950s and 1960s, with the aim of offering an alternative to the secular Kemalist republic through the education of future national elites. It advocates an Islam that is open to inter-religious dialogue, modern in its relationship to science – while being creationist-, fiercely anti-communist, economically liberal but conservative in terms of morals. The place of women and the ban on blasphemy characterize this conservatism. Its project is long-term and envisages its completion in more than half a century. Originally, his movement was called cemaat, which means “community (of faith)”. As it grew and globalized, it began to call itself hizmet, a term that means “service” in Arabic and Turkish, and which illustrates the movement’s ambition to help the international community, humanity, by acting for dialogue and peace. The President of the Republic of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan was his disciple and the two men worked together for a long time: Gülen used his media network to promote the AKP, and the AKP facilitated the establishment of Hizmet schools. The split, which occurred in 2011, was consummated in 2013. It is not so much ideological as due to ego issues, Erdogan having decided to take all his freedom from Gülen to accelerate and brutalize the process of Islamization, thus trampling on the strategy of his former mentor. The break-up was due to personalities and strategy, since their social projects do not differ much from each other: religious conservatism, refusal of Kurdish autonomy, refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide. The former allies accuse each other of being, for one, “a power-hungry monster who tried to overthrow him,” and for the other the leader of a party guilty of authoritarian drift and nepotism.
The appeal of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey has been explained through its supposed Kemalist-friendly policy and the success of its “moderate” Islamic modus operandi. However, it is also fair to say that the party’s rise has had much to do with the disappointment felt by a large section of society over more than two decades of unfulfilled promises by social democratic parties. The recent revitalization of Islamism in Turkey – including its anti-secularist and anti-Kemalist strands – must be understood as a response to Kemalist secularism as well as an answer to the unfulfilled promises made by post-Kemalist social democrats. Understanding this context is important for anyone who wants to understand why and how Islamists were able to mobilize their base once again, after having been sidelined for so long. The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) or AKP, the Islamist party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has significantly reshaped Turkish politics since its coming of age in the 2000s. To be more specific, the AKP has been at the forefront of a “post-Kemalist” silent revolution in Turkey. How then did a party, which was founded by Islamists in the early 2000s, become a catalyst for a silent revolution that demobilized anti-Kemalist practices and strategies? This is because the formation of a secularist discourse in Turkey was not a given. Faced with the prospect of an Islamist-led government, the Kemalist elites were in a defensive mood in the early 2000s and they were cognizant of the fact that they could not govern the country with their old discourse and practices. They were compelled to make concessions and compromises with their ideological archenemies, the Islamists, and had to change their discourse and practices. The Kemalist elites accepted the legitimacy of the Islamist-led government, and the Islamists, in turn, made changes to their discourse and practices accordingly. The Islamists, who were previously equated with radical Islamism, became pragmatic Islamists. They made significant changes to their practices in order to bring about a silent revolution in Turkey. They amended their discourse to remove references to religion and Islamic symbols. They toned down their rhetoric, adopted liberalist-sounding slogans, and adopted a more conciliatory approach to its relationship with the Kemalist elites.
Kaynak: Gayrnesriyat.substack.com
