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Abstract
This study explores the discursive strategies of the Islamist press against secular political project of Kemalism. Two best-selling Islamist newspapers were chosen to make a comparative analysis between radical Islamist and liberal Islamist way of representations during the 1990s. Theoretical context of psychoanalytic ideology critique is the main source for analytical frame. It is displayed that the historical antagonism between Islamism and Kemalism has still a constitutive effect for the representations of the Islamist press in Turkey. This antagonism is centered on the issue of turban (headscarf) for the last decade. Islamic newspapers do claim the universality of their understanding of laicism by equating the turban issue with the issue of human rights. By asserting the universality of their Islamic way of laicism, they also assert the particularity and locality of Kemalist laicism. Despite their struggle with the Western way of modernisation and the secularisation project from the constitution of Turkish Republic (1923) to the 1980s, Islamist newspapers have begun to benefit from the discourse of modernisation, freedom and human rights since the 1990s. This analysis focuses on mainly two ideological strategies of Islamist newspapers: First is the usage of the empty signifiers through the news, and second is the usage of discord between notions of universality and particularity as the constitutive of all ideologies.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Soek Fang Sim for her help with proof-reading and for valuable comments. I am also indepted to Yücel Dursun for his encouragement during my research.
Notes
1 A few good examples of these kind of researches on Turkey's Islamist political party (Refah Party) are Ayşe Öncü's (Citation1995) ‘Packaging Islam: cultural politics on the landscape of Turkish commercial television and Çiler Keleş Dursun's (1994) ‘A comparative analysis of the construction of the Refah Party on television news and struggle in discourse’ (in Turkish). Both are concerned with Islam as constructed by commercial television channels in Turkey.
2 The headscarf is a religion-based garment that religious women in Turkey have used to cover their hair (but not face) since the beginning of the 1970s. The headscarf is solely female headgear. It is also different from the the veil because the face is not concealed from men. To be seen by men is not forbidden by God according to young women using the headscarf in Turkey. This is not the traditional hair covering of rural Anatolian women, although it similarly hides women's hair but exposes their entire face. Despite being forbidden since the Kemalist cultural revolution, the headscarf has begun to penetrate the social realm (from the 1930s until today), unlike the veil, which is used only by a small minority of (usually older) religious women in cities and towns. The headscarf is accompanied by a long coat which conceals the womanish shape of the body, but in rural areas women do not wear long coats and don't try to hide their body shape.
3 Social antagonism introduces an irreconcilable negativity into social relations. The role of antagonism is formative of social objectivity itself and is evidence of the frontiers of social formation (Howarth, Citation1996). What gives specificity and authenticty or content to an antagonistic social relation can only be pursued through its historical determinants. The most simplified version of any antagonistic relation as enemies and friends is a valid frame for all ideological struggles between different parties, although this version cannot help us to see the wealth of struggles.
4 The most prominent of these antagonisms in the last 25 years derives from the ethnically diverse landscape of Turkey and stems from the multi-ethnic character of Turkish society, consisting mainly of Turk, Kurd, Laz, Cerkes and others.
5 Since Islamism has existed as a word, it become a political movement used to gather all Muslim communities around the caliphate and under the flag of Islam in the period of Sultan Abdülhamit II (Kara, Citation1986; Mardin, Citation1991, pp. 92–93).
6 Early nationalists asserted that ‘Turks … went so much further in being Muslim that they gave up their own alphabet and took the Arabic alphabet’.
7 In the multinational Ottoman Empire the word Turk was not a credible word even at the end of the 19th century. The word ‘Turk’ then refereed to a ‘nomad’’ or someone who was’ uncivilised/underdeveloped; it was a humiliating term.
8 The Democratic Party (DP) was a centre-right political party that claimed to represent the periphery against the secular bureaucratic intelligentsia (Sakallioglu, Citation1996, p. 237). It was committed to a republican state, modernization and progress via secularization, although the DP also encouraged the rise of Islam by setting up İmam Hatip Lycees (religious schools) as a parallel system to the secular schooling system, introducing religious courses into primary schools. Benefiting from traditional and popular Islam, the DP appealed to the popular vote and to tarikats such as Nakşibendi and Nurcu.
9 Islamists have sided with partial westernization since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. An inability to follow the rise of Western civilization over the last two centuries was seen as the main reason for the decline of the Empire. Therefore, Islamists have tried to create an ecletic way of following the West by reconciling the cultural and moral values of Islam and the scientific, industrial and technical superiorities of the West (Kara, Citation1986). This pragmatic way of recapturing the ‘good old days’ of the Ottoman Empire was of no great use since the values and principles of Western civilisation as content cannot be separated from the Western system as form.
10 With the aim, first, of making a strong connection between Islam and a modern way of life instead of a secular way of life, Ottoman intellectuals such as Ziya Gokalp and Yusuf Akcura tried to articulate ideological formulations for the continuation of the Empire.
11 The ‘national culture’ of the Synthesis is the essence of the nation, which is accepted as an organic being and the result of not merely consent or law but also passions implanted by nature and history.
12 The Turkish–Islamic Synthesis is an ideology formulated by Aydınlar Ocagi (Intellectuals Hearth) and placed on the political agenda in the 1970s. This ideology did not achieve political hegemony until the 12 September 1980 coup. It gained significant political power and influenced policies such as the Ataturk Language and History Higher Comission and the State Planning Organization. Nevertheless this does not mean that the Synthesis was not influential before military intervention. The Turkish–Islamic Synthesis tried to respond to dislocations in the social structure and to political oscillations in Turkey by emphasizing the importance of ‘national culture’. The Synthesis was an ideal introduced by right-wing politicians and intellectuals surrounding Aydinlar Ocagi and was aimed at disseminating Turkish nationalism by developing the national consciousness and culture (since May 1970). The inclusion of Turkism and Islam in the naming of an ideology signifies that the constitutive antagonism of the Synthesis is not between Turkism and Islam (Dursun, Citation2004), rather, a certain and irreversible connection is claimed between being Turk and being Muslim: Islam is asserted as a precondition of being and remaining a real Turk. The synthesis considers Islam as a sine qua non of being a Turk. The origin of being a real Turk is anchored in the acceptance of Islam. However, being a Turk is not considered a precondition for remaining a Muslim according to this ideology. The main claim of this Synthesis is that there is a unity and harmony between Turkism and Islam. The emphasis is on the coexistence of these elements. not the difference between them although, there has been a difference between the nationalist political project and the Islamist political project since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
13 The nature of the unconscious is a constitutive and creative source of subjectivity and human experience according to Freud. His work stressed that the individual subject creates thoughts and images in an indeterminate manner against the trace of desire. Unconscious desire is seen as a potential realm against domination and as full of possibilities of alternative futures. By introducing this and related concepts, psychonalaytic theory plays a crucial role in social critique by focusing on deformed and crippled forms of repressed human desire. Thinkers of the Frankfurt School, like Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer, reformulated some notions of Freudian theory of repression to adequately comprehend certain intersections between the psychological and social fields. The source of the individual subject's incorporation within the dominant cultural values of modern society was explained by the manipulation of unconscious processes. According to critical theorists, a new and more powerful form of ideological incorporation arises through the repression of consciousness. The fractured character of self identity and the split between consciousness and the unconscious is seen as the foundation of contemporary social divisions and antagonisms (Elliot, Citation1992).
14 While Freud used this concept as opposed to the reality (an illusory product of the imagination), Lacan emphasized the fantasy scene as a defense that veils castration (Evans, Citation1996, p. 60).
15 From a Lacanian perspective the central point is that ideological processes are driven by the need to escape the horrifying condition of lack and trauma in the Real. This horrifying kernel is the impossiblity of access to the Real as a complete state of being. To escape from the Real, reality is constructed.
16 I fully agree with Zizek's comment that those
who directly translate the political antagonism into moral terms (the struggle of Good and Evil) is sooner or later compelled to perform the political instrumentalisation of the domain of morals: to subordinate their moral assesments to the actual needs of their political struggle. (Zizek, Citation2000)
Thus, just as the moralization of politics necessarily ends up in its very opposite, the politicization of morality, so too the Islamization of politics ends up in the politicization of Islam in Turkey. This is the logic of the negation of negation in the Hegelian sense, which was perfectly interpreted by Slavoj Zizek (1989, 2000). When the negation of negation is considered not as a magical reversal but as a repetition at its purest, it is not wrong to say that the passage from in-itself to for-itself asserts what it already was in itself. The politicization of Islam should not be seen as an unexpected outcome of the Kemalist revolutions but as a return of the repressed in a psyhcoanalytic sense, or as a sign that the symbolic death of a negated system (Islamism) could not succesed.
17 It should be noted that these are the only analytical categories which are going to help us clarify the oppositions and the strategic reversals in Islamist discursive operation. Each of these problems is transitive to each other when it is represented by a newspaper. For example, in the news the headscarf issue is intertwined with the problem of the existing order. This makes it more difficult to identify which issue is central for the newspaper. However, if the actual news event can be considered as originatory content, it becomes possible to make a meaningful separation between issues. I have followed this procedure when analysing news.
18 For the last 10 years an Islamist oriented party has identified itself as the voice of all the supressed and unhappy people in Turkey. At the end of the historical developments mentioned above, a newly established (in 2002) conservative religious party called the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) gained a majority during the parlimentary elections (two-thirds of the members of the Turkish National Assembly), although it only gained 35% of the valid votes on 3 November 2002.
19 Cultural studies has had a great impact on communication studies and news analysis because it provides new gounds for making connections between ideology and the media. Very productive research studying the ideological function of the media and pseudo-‘objective news’ was undertaken by critical theorists like Fairclough, van Dijk, the Center for Critical and Cultural Studies (CCCS) and the Glasgow University Media Group during the 1980s and 1990s.
20 The definition of reaction as something against the existing system is so powerful that the last two military interventions in Turkey (1980s and 1997) were justified by the armed forces as opposition to religious fundamentalism and to the power of reactionary movements. However, when it came to maintaining the unity of the nation, ironically the military regime of the 1980s strongly emphasized the significance of religion and Islam, which was used as the ‘ideological cement’ holding together divided political, ideological sides.
21 This enabled Islamists to make a pragmatic articulation between critics of Western culture and the desire to achieve the highest point of Western technology and civilization. Although it is also a conservative articulation, the difference between the Islamist parties and the central right-wing parties in Turkey stems from the fact that conservative rightists had always kept Kemalism as an ultimate reference point, while Islamists have tried to retraditionalize social and cultural life according to Islamist principles.
22 An Akit columnist mentioned that ‘those who say I'm Muslim means 95% of the population in Turkey is also reactionary’ (Karaali, Citation2000). He has, ironically, equated being Muslim with being a reactionary.
23 Concrete universality involves the central impossibility of acquiring a figure that would be adequate to its notion. It is impossible since there is a gap, a hole in the midst of the particular content of the Universality. However, the Universal always asserts itself in the guise of some particular content which, as Zizek mentioned, ‘claims to embody it directly, excluding other content as merely particular’ (Zizek, Citation2000, p. 101).
24 According to Zizek, a radical consequence of this difference is that ‘the split is located on the side of the Universal, not on the side of the Particular’ (Zizek, Citation1991, p. 44). In sum, what makes the Universal universal is not its opposition to a wealth of particular diversity, but its opposition to both its own absence and to the particular. As again Zizek remarked, ‘the impetus of the dialectical process is precisely this contradiction between the Universal and the Particular’ (Zizek, Citation1991, p. 43).
25 Following the establisment of the Turkish Republic, the necessary legal arrangements were made to remove existing religious authorities, communities and sectarians from public life. Thereafter the secularist system placed new and modern positions into social life, whose interests were dependent on the continuity of this new secularist structure.
26 The irony of these kind of claims in the ideological political process was well expressed by Zizek:
when a political agent criticises rival parties for considering only their narrow party interests, he thereby offers his own party as a neutral force working for the benefit of the whole nation. Consequently … the dividing line that structures his speech runs between his own party and all the rest. What is at work here is again the logic of ‘oppositional determination.’ The alleged universality beyond petty party interests encounters itself in a particular party—that is contradiction. (Zizek, Citation1993, p. 133)
27 Oppression to the aggrievers is the phenomenon of a spirit of late capitalism which encompasses the Turkish- Islamic land” according to Açıkel. He graspes the aggrieverness as a specific position seeking some credibility and power through a political fantasy called Turkish- Islamic synthesis (Açıkel, Citation1996, p. 180–185). When the society losts its class origins and cultural foundations, subordinated subjects might be articulated to any kind of oppressive political apparatuses. The division between oppressive and aggrieved people has a central function in Islamist discourse. By substituting his/her impotent feelings with the omnipotencey of God, an aggrieved person tries to get rid of a deep suffer derived from the powerless position in a secular life.