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Abstract
The tired old civilisational categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’, loosely identified with ‘Islam’ and ‘modernity’, are alive and well, nowhere more so than in contemporary Turkey. The Justice Development Party (AKP) currently in government employs them assiduously to political advantage but they have a long history, having defined the parameters of societal identity and political discourse throughout the history of the Turkish Republic. The paper takes the strength of the categories as its starting point but moves beyond them by asking if discourses, narratives and identities, individual and collective, exist in Turkey which question, overcome and ultimately undermine the categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’. The paper starts by investigating the evolution of ideas about East and West since the late Ottoman period and accepts that they are still dominant. However, since the 1980s in particular, they are being undermined in a de facto way by cultural developments in literature and music, new trends in historiography and novel ways of relating to the past. In some ways in contemporary Turkey, the paper concludes, culture trumps the inherently essentialist idea of ‘civilisation’ and Turkish society is ahead of its political and intellectual elites.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was made possible by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2015–2016, for which the author is very grateful. Thanks also to Rachel George, Buğra Süsler, and Marc Sinan Winrow; and the many other colleagues in Turkey and the UK who assisted with my research and engaged with my ideas.
Notes
1. Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations?”, 42–3.
2. Stokes, Republic of Love, 11.
3. See, for example: Tuğal, Passive Revolution; Hale and Özbudun, Islamism, Democracy, and Liberalism; White, New Turks.
4. See, for example, the controversy which has surrounded Göle, Forbidden Modern.
5. See, for example, the debate that has raged around Pagden, Worlds at War.
6. Khalid, “Pan-Islamism in Practice”; Aydın, Politics of Anti-Westernism.
7. Hanioğlu, Brief History, 210.
8. Dressler, “Rereading Ziya Gökalp.”
9. Davison, Secularism and Revivalism, 90–133; Stokes, Arabesk Debate, 25–6, 34.
10. Zürcher, Turkey, 4.
11. Kadıoğlu, Oxymoron, 174.
12. Ibid., 173.
13. Ibid., 176.
14. Mango, “Atatürk”; Zürcher, Young Turk Legacy, 149.
15. Berkes, Development of Secularism, 437–9.
16. Abou-el-Fadl, “Divergent Paths, Diverging Choices.”
17. Erbakan, Adil Düzen [Just Order], 2.
18. Poyraz, “Thinking About Turkish Modernization,” 438.
19. Lapidot-Firilla, “Introducing Cemil Meric,” 126.
20. Safa, Doğu-Batı Sentezi, 11.
21. Ibid., 75.
22. Ibid., 132–3.
23. Poyraz, “Thinking About Turkish Modernization,” 445.
24. Ayvazoğlu, “Peyami Safa”, 227–8.
25. Gürbilek, Sessizin Payı [Share of the Silenced], 93.
26. Ibid., 86.
27. Heper and Toktaş, “Islam, Modernity, and Democracy.”
28. Davutoğlu, Stratejik Derinlik [Strategic Depth]; Davutoğlu, “Alternative Paradigms”; and Davutoğlu, “Civilizational Transformation.”
29. The same can be said about the conception of civilisation by Recep Şentürk; see, for example, his “Unity in Multiplexity.”
30. Giridharadas, “In Turkey.”
31. For similar developments in art and architecture see, for example, Bozdoğan “Art and Architecture,” particularly 455–69.
32. This questioning of the categories of ‘Islam’ versus ‘secularism’ is very much implicit in anthropological studies of Turkey of the decades already before 1980, most notably in Tapper, “Islam in Modern Turkey.”
33. Kerslake, “New Directions,” 118.
34. Gürbilek, New Cultural Climate, 9.
35. Gürbilek describes her essays ‘not merely as the tale of a far-off land of darkness but of Turkey’s West within’: Ibid., 4.
36. Stokes, Republic of Love, 19.
37. Ibid., 5.
38. Ibid., 99.
39. Ibid., 109.
40. Ibid., 10.
41. Ibid., 116–20, 126.
42. Stokes, Arabesk Debate, 7.
43. Stokes, Republic of Love, 9–10. Stokes argues that new Islamist leaders ‘not only questioned the West’s monopolization of the idea of the modern but showed themselves to be, in many regards, better at being “modern” than the secularists’. I find this approach problematic, as it does not distinguish between being modernist, in the sense of championing the values of modernity, and being modern.
44. Stokes, Republic of Love, 18–9.
45. Stokes, Arabesk Debate, 36–49.
46. Ibid., 5–6.
47. Ibid., 18–9.
48. Göknar, “Novel in Turkish”, 476.
49. Ibid., 472–3.
50. Ibid., 474. Turkish literature has been caught between the perception of being imitative of other traditions, European or Persian, or emphasising an unchanging Turkishness that can be traced to ancient times. These two dominant perspectives of modernity – the ‘orientalist–nationalist binary’ – both ahistorical, plague surveys of Turkish literature (475).
51. Ibid., 480.
52. Göknar, “Novel in Turkish,” 489–93. In the 1950s and beyond, the dominant theme in Turkish literature had been ‘westernization and the conflict between East and West’; in the so-called ‘village novels’, for example, ‘the idealist teacher was depicted as “representative of civilization”, with the religious figures seen as sources of backwardness’. An alternative literary construction was produced by Kısakürek and Karakoç, however, in the post-1950 period, in poetry: Çayır, Islamic Literature in Contemporary Turkey, 5–6.
53. Kerslake, “New Directions,” 116.
54. Göknar, “Novel in Tukish,” 493–5.
55. Berna Moran, quoted in Kerslake, “New Directions,” 101.
56. Kerslake, “New Directions,” 102.
57. Göknar, “Novel in Turkish,” 498.
58. Ibid., 499–503.
59. Seyhan, Tales of Crossed Destinies, 6.
60. Belge, “Turkish Novel,” 69 quoted in Paker, “Translator’s Introduction,” 13.
61. Gürsoy Sökmen, “Statement”; and author’s interview, Istanbul, December 2015.
62. Göknar, “Novel in Turkish,” 498.
63. Çayır, Islamic Literature in Contemporary Turkey.
64. Meriç saw the Islamic novel as ‘social sickness’, a result of class conflict. This critical stance was continued by others such as Bulaç in the 1980s; he does not deny the importance of literature but argues it should be based on an Islamic vision of the world. Despite these criticisms a group of Islamic novelists emerge in the 1970s; Çayır, Islamic Literature in Contemporary Turkey, 6–7.
65. Ibid., 14.
66. Ibid., 18.
67. Ibid., xxx.
68. Ibid., 37.
69. Ibid., 39–41.
70. Ibid., 50.
71. Ibid., 118.
72. Ibid., xxiii.
73. Ibid., 116.
74. Ibid., 144.
75. Ibid., 150–1.
76. Ibid., 160.
77. Ibid., 156.
78. Karakatsanis, “We’, ‘They’ and the ‘Human’,” 233.
79. Ibid., 235–6.
80. Ibid., 237.
81. Ibid., 253.
82. Fisher Onar, “Echoes of a Universalism Lost,” 229–41.
83. Kara, ‘Turban and Fez,’ 179–83.
84. Ibid. The Islamist view that actual Islamic history was one of decline and had to be overcome was shared between Islamist critics and the secularist Young Turks and Kemalists, for different reasons.
85. These emerged partly in synergy between the liberal-left and Islamism in the 1980s, as the former sought to root their ideas in the ‘real’ Turkey, and within a general ‘post-Kemalist’ intellectual context; Aytürk, “Post Post-Kemalizm” [“Post-Post Kemalism”]; see also Erdoğan and Üstüner, “‘Siyaset Sonrası’ Söylemler” [“Post-Politics Discourses”], 658–66.
86. One such example is the İstanbul Düşünce Evi [Istanbul Think-House] based in Üsküdar. My lecture there on the topic of this paper in October 2016 attracted a lot of attention. One of the most interesting aspects of the event, however, was the audience of young people who, in terms of dress and style, defied categorisation!
87. Author’s interview with Haldun Gülalp, Yıldız University, Istanbul, December 2015.
88. Kırbaşoğlu, “İslamcıların Şartı” [“Conditions of Islamism”].
89. Göksel, “Revolution, Liberation, and Islam,” 13.
90. One critic of civilisation in contemporary Turkey, from an Islamic perspective, is Bedri Gencer who, in his many writings, castigates civilisation for being a secular term and for essentialising Islam and placing it alongside other religions. He is critical of Davutoğlu’s ‘conventional’ view of civilisation; interviews with the author, Istanbul, December 2015 and March 2016. Gencer is difficult to characterise: perhaps he can be described an ‘Islamist universalist’ from an anti-modernist perspective. For his views on civilisation see, for example, his “Modern Kültüre Karşı Koymak” [“Resisting Modern Culture”].
91. Özel’s critique of civilisation is wide-ranging; he argued that ‘a civilisation is a stunted culture’; interview with the author, Istanbul, March 2016. His stance is very different from Yenigün’s, however, because it is anti-modernist position. I am very grateful to Hilal İbrahim Yenigün for helping me clarify a number of these issues, in a personal communication.
92. Yenigün, Rise and Demise, 220.
93. Ibid., 206.
94. Ibid., 219.
95. Çarkoğlu and Kalaycıoğlu, Rising Tide.
96. Ertit, Endişeli Muhafazakarlar Çağı [Era of Anxious Conservatives].
97. Yılmaz, “Conservatism in Turkey”; Eurobarometer surveys; Ekonomik İktisadi Kalkınma Vakfı [Economic Development Foundation], Kamuoyu Araştırması [Public Opinion Survey].
98. Çayır, Islamic Literature, xxv.
99. Author’s interview with İlker Aytürk, Bilkent University, Ankara, March 2016.
100. Giridharadas, “In Turkey.”
101. Altınay, “This Generation.”
102. Author’s interview with Fulya Atacan, Yıldız University, Istanbul, December 2015.
103. Turam, Gaining Freedoms, 4, 6.
104. Ibid., 8.
105. Ibid., 12.
106. Ibid., 9–10.
107. Ibid., 17.
108. Gürbilek, Sessizin Payı [Share of the Silenced], 87.
109. Ibid., 87.
110. Ibid., 86.
111. Ibid., 86.
112. Ibid., 104–5. On Gezi generally see also the documentary film Yeryüzü Aşkın Yüzü Oluncaya Dek [Love Will Change the Earth].
113. Kongar in Renda and Kartepeter, “Turkey’s Cultural Transformation,” 61.