Ethnic and religious nationalism in Turkey: the cases of Atsız and Arvasi

ABSTRACT

This article compares the ideas of Hüseyin Nihal Atsız and Seyyid Ahmet Arvasi, two iconic ideologues of ethnic and religious nationalism in Turkey, respectively, on the issues of history, identity, and national ideal. It first argues that Atsız mainly presents a history of Turkish supremacism whereas Arvasi embraces a method of Islamization to remember history. It also demonstrates that Atsız tends to equate the racial and the national while Arvasi uses Islamic legitimacy for Turkish identity and nationalism. It is also evident that while Atsız offers classical pan-nationalism, Arvasi shows third-worldist and universalistic tendencies in defining Turkish destiny.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkish nationalism
• ethnic nationalism
• religious nationalism
• Atsız
• Arvasi

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professor Zana Çitak for her encouragement and her comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article. We would also like to thank the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kemalist nationalism, the state’s official ideology based fundamentally on secularism, patriotism, and civic nationhood, dominated the history of nationalism in Turkey until the 1940s. Since then, building on a critique of Kemalist nationalism, a number of non-Kemalist factions within Turkish nationalism has emerged, including a set of secular and Islamic variants from the racists-Turanists, the Turkish Nationalists Society, and the Anatolianists, to the National-Strugglists, the Intellectuals’ Hearth Movement, and the Nationalist Action Party, as Aytürk well outlines. See Aytürk, “Nationalism,” 695–697. The ethnic and religious variants, ‘which have been the two weakest points in Kemalism’ as Çetinsaya puts it, have constituted the main fault line in the nationalist movement in Turkey. See, Çetinsaya, “Rethinking,” 350. As this article will show in detail, the ethnic variant articulates its nationalism through a set of descent-related elements while religious Turkish nationalism invents strong connections between Islamic and national histories, identities and destinies.

2 See Kohn, The Idea; Smith, National; Greenfeld, Nationalism; and Ignatieff, Blood.

3 Religious nationalism is one form of the relationship between religion and nationalism. For the forms of this relationship, see Brubaker, “Religion”; Aktürk, “Nationalism”; and Rieffer, “Religion”. For religious nationalism, see Juergensmeyer, The New; Juergensmeyer, “The Worldwide”; Friedland, “Religious”; Friedland, “Money”; Friedland, “The Institutional”; Veer, Religious; Eastwood and Prevalakis, “Nationalism”; and Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu, “Religion.”

4 See, for example, Poultan, The Top Hat; Aytürk, “Nationalism”; Çetinsaya, “Rethinking”; Erken, “Ideological”; Uzer, An Intellectual History; and Uzer, “The Genealogy.”

5 See, for instance, Lewis, The Emergence; Berkes, The Development; Ahmad, The Making; Ahmad, Turkey; Parla and Davison, Corporatist; Xypolia, “Racist”; Kirişci, “Disaggregating”; Cagaptay, Islam; Cagaptay, “Race”; Cagaptay, “Citizenship”; and Eligür, “Ethnocultural”.

6 For some non-comparative analyses on ethnic and religious nationalism in Turkey, see Aslan, “A Turkish”; Grigoriadis, Instilling; Koyuncu-Lorasdağı, “On the Question”; Coşar, “Turkish Nationalism”; Armstrong, “Turkish”; Uzer, “Racism”; Aytürk, “The Racist”; and Landau, Pan-Turkism.

7 The nationalist movement from 1944 to the late 1960s with Atsız as its leading intellectual and with a feeble political representation paradigmatically promoted a non- or an anti-Kemalist ethnic agenda. In the 1960s, it was mainly an emerging political current led by Alparslan Türkeş and several intellectuals that mobilized a conservative turn within the nationalist movement. Since then, the nationalist movement has experienced a set of waves of Islamization, culminated in ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis/Ideal.’ Cizre rightly describes Seyyid Ahmet Arvasi as the theorist of this ultimate articulation. See Cizre, “The Ideology,” 162. One should note that the effort to combine nationalism and Islam has generated an amalgam of its protagonists. It is difficult to split the parties of this large amalgam into groups. For instance, Arvasi is not satisfied with the term synthesis in defining this nationalist-religious combination since, in his account, a synthesis requires the independent and antagonistic existence of a thesis and its antithesis. Therefore, it is not appropriate to use the term Turkish-Islamic Synthesis as ‘religion and nationality are not antithetic values’. See Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 13. Opting for the term Turkish-Islamic Ideal, Arvasi does not offer it as a rival to Turkish Islamic Synthesis. In fact, his ideas draw enormously on İbrahim Kafesoğlu, who ‘coined the term “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis”’. See Uzer, An Intellectual History, 176. Furthermore, Arvasi even declares that Turkish-Islamic Ideal is nothing short of a part or continuation of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek’s Great East. See Hışıroğlu, “Seyid Ahmet,” 19. Therefore, even though it is possible to find some more directly inspired by or akin to Arvasi’s thinking, such as Nevzat Kösoğlu and Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu, the boundaries between synthesis and ideal might be blurred. Therefore, one can consider the protagonists of this combination of religion and nationalism as interconnected waves of a conservative/religious nationalist paradigm.

8 Carvalho and Gemenne, “Introduction,” 1–2.

9 Coakley, “Mobilizing,” 532.

10 Ibid., 533.

11 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 101.

12 Atsız, Bozkurtlar; Atsız, Bozkurtların Ölümü; Atsız, Bozkurtlar Diriliyor.

13 Atsız, Makaleler I, 201–5.

14 Ibid., 172–3, 291–2, 313.

15 Aytürk, “Nationalism,” 693–4.

16 Uzer, “The Kurdish,” 405.

17 For Aytürk, Danişmend’s 1959 book is the origin of ‘nearly all of the most important themes of the Turkish-Islamic discourse,’ and his Islamization of pre-Islamic Turks appears repeatedly in Turkish nationalist literature as ‘a justification for the Islamic turn.’ See Aytürk, “Nationalism,” 702–3.

18 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 113; also see Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 93, 99.

19 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 98.

20 Atsız, Makaleler I, 222.

21 For the concept of ethnic election, see Smith, “Ethnic Election,” and Smith, “The ‘Sacred’ Dimension”.

22 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 309–11; Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü II, 285; Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 243, 249; and Arvasi, Hasbihal IV, 324

23 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü II, 285, and Arvasi, Sohbetler, 92.

24 Tepe, “A Kemalist-Islamist,” 64–6.

25 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 57–8, 389, 394–5, and Atsız, Makaleler I, 172–4, 292, 314.

26 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 389.

27 Ibid., 102.

28 Atsız, Makaleler I, 85.

29 See Atsız, Makaleler IV, 41–2, and Atsız, Türk Tarihinde Meseleler, 39.

30 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 283; Atsız, Makaleler I, 219; see also Atsız, Makaleler I, 91–5, 115, 121, 123; and Atsız, Türk Tarihinde Meseleler, 9–16.

31 Atsız, Türk Ülküsü, 67, 92; Atsız, Makaleler I, 52, 138, 364.

32 Çetinsaya, “Rethinking,” 372.

33 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 113, 243.

34 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 113; Arvasi, Hasbihal II, 152; Arvasi, Hasbihal III, 141; Arvasi, Doğu Anadolu Gerçeği, 63; and Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 39, 95, 385.

35 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 385.

36 Rieffer, “Religion,” 225.

37 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 249, 263–4; Arvasi, Sohbetler, 92–3; Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 311–3; and Arvasi, Hasbihal IV, 303, 324.

38 See Arvasi, Hasbihal III, 71, 185, 303; Arvasi, Doğu Anadolu Gerçeği, 33, 63; Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 73, 93; Arvasi, Hasbihal II, 152; and Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü II, 15.

39 Arvasi, Hasbihal II, 262–3; Arvasi, Hasbihal III, 415; Arvasi, Hasbihal IV, 89; Arvasi, Hasbihal V, 23; and Arvasi, Şiirlerim, 17.

40 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 243.

41 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 93.

42 Friedland, “The Institutional,” 66.

43 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 58, 389, and Atsız, Makaleler I, 292, 314–5.

44 Atsız, Makaleler II, 187–8; see also Atsız, Makaleler IV, 391–2, and Atsız, Makaleler I, 336.

45 Atsız, Makaleler I, 86.

46 Anderson, Imagined, 3, 7.

47 Aytürk, “The Racist”.

48 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 394.

49 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 164, 283–5, and Atsız, Makaleler I, 58, 190.

50 Arvasi, Hasbihal VI, 43, 290; Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü III, 363–4; and Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü II, 159.

51 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 250; Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 387; Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü II, 13, 153–4, 157, 159; and Arvasi, Eğitim Sosyolojisi, 69.

52 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü III, 143.

53 Arvasi, Hasbihal VI, 175–6.

54 Atsız, Türk Ülküsü, 90.

55 Ibid., 7.

56 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 323–5.

57 Smith, National Identity, 75.

58 Triandafyllidou, “National,” 599.

59 Smith, National, 11.

60 Uzer, “Racism,” 120.

61 Aytürk, “The Racist,” 315.

62 Atsız, Makaleler III, 131.

63 Ibid., 454.

64 Ibid., 454.

65 Bora, Cereyanlar, 279–80.

66 Ibid., 25.

67 Atsız, Makaleler III, 355.

68 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 283; Arvasi, Doğu Anadolu Gerçeği; and Arvasi, Türkiye’de Şark Meselesi.

69 Juergensmeyer, “The Worldwide”.

70 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 106, 137; Arvasi, Sohbetler, 33–4; and Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 134–6, 240.

71 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 140. One might attribute his emphasis on Islam and social race in defining the nation to his supposed ‘Kurdish origins’, but it should still be noted that he neither acknowledges such an origin nor regards Kurds as a different nation. For a discussion on his ‘Kurdish origins’, see Uzer, “The Kurdish”.

72 Arvasi, Sohbetler, 34, and Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 138–40.

73 Aslan, “A Turkish”.

74 Aytürk, “Religion,” 696.

75 Atsız, Makaleler I, 305.

76 For example, in a striking contrast to Arvasi, Atsız holds that ‘it is Turks that have glorified Islam, not the other way around’ as ‘Turks were already a great nation before Islam.’ See Atsız, Makaleler III, 455. It should also be noted that Atsız’s approach to religion shows divergences over time. His early attitude toward religion oscillated between an indifference and a functionalist acceptance of its role. However, as he was increasingly at war with conservative nationalists, religious communities, and siyasi ümmetçiler (political Islamists), which he saw as a threat to Turkish identity and the state, his later writings assumed a radical secularist stance, particularly from the 1960s onwards. See, for instance, Atsız, Makaleler III, 455–61.

77 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 94, 211, 384; Arvasi, Hasbihal II, 276; and Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü III, 135.

78 Arvasi, Hasbihal III, 289.

79 Arvasi, Doğu Anadolu Gerçeği, 36, and Arvasi, Hasbihal III, 289–91, 417.

80 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 228.

81 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 13, 157.

82 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 105, 140, and Atsız, Makaleler III, 354–5.

83 Uzer, “Racism,” 125.

84 Atsız, Makaleler I, 7, and Atsız, Makaleler IV, 10–13, 18.

85 Atsız, Çanakkale’ye Yürüyüş, 15–16.

86 Atsız, Makaleler III, 446.

87 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü II, 427–8; Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü III, 280–1, 356; and Arvasi, Sohbetler, 15.

88 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü III, 151–4

89 Arvasi, Hasbihal IV, 379–81.

90 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü II, 421–2.

91 See Arvasi, Hasbihal III, 259, 303–8; Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 95, 282–3; Arvasi, Sohbetler, 60; Arvasi, Türkiye’de Şark Meselesi, 28, 34; and Arvasi, Doğu Anadolu Gerçeği, 24, 33–5.

92 Smith, “Ethnic Election,” 332.

93 Smith, “History,” 198.

94 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 102, 106, 193.

95 Ibid., 194.

96 Atsız, Makaleler I, 27, 194; Atsız, Türk Ülküsü, 22–6; and Atsız, Türk Tarihinde Meseleler, 176.

97 Atsız, Türk Ülküsü, 17, 21.

98 Cizre, “The Ideology,” 153.

99 This concept finds its operationalization in Sorokin’s 1950 book, translated into Turkish by Mete Tunçay, a prominent political scientist in Turkey, in 1972. Arvasi employs the term ‘üst-sistem’, the direct Turkish translation of Sorokin’s ‘supersystem’ by Tunçay. See Sorokin, Social, and Sorokin, Bunalım.

100 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 248–9.

101 Arvasi, Sohbetler, 48, 91, and Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 306, 310–1.

102 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 311, and Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü II, 282–3.

103 Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü II, 281–3.

104 Koyuncu-Lorasdağı, “On the Question”.

105 Kohn, The Idea, 239.

106 Smith, National, 82–3.

107 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 106, 193, 305, and Atsız, Türk Ülküsü, 8.

108 Atsız, Türk Ülküsü, 83–4.

109 Ibid., 35.

110 Atsız, Makaleler III, 56, and Atsız, Türk Ülküsü, 90.

111 Atsız, Makaleler III, 53; Atsız, Makaleler I, 56–7; and Atsız, Türk Ülküsü, 19, 85–7.

112 Atsız, Makaleler III, 12, and Atsız, Türk Ülküsü, 11.

113 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 246.

114 Arvasi, Hasbihal III, 142, and Arvasi, Hasbihal IV, 325.

115 Arvasi, Hasbihal II, 299; Arvasi, Hasbihal III, 119; and Arvasi, Hasbihal IV, 403.

116 See Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 13, 115; Arvasi, İnsan ve İnsan Ötesi, 118; Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü I, 13, 345, 386; and Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü III, 250.

117 Arvasi, Hasbihal I, 23–6; Arvasi, Sohbetler, 93; and Arvasi, Türk İslam Ülküsü III, 230.

118 Cizre, “Kemalism,” 255.

119 Kadıoğlu, “The Paradox,” 178.

120 Cizre, “The Ideology,” 146.

121 Atsız, Makaleler IV, 303–5; also see Atsız, Türk Ülküsü, 7.

122 Atsız, Makaleler II, 250; Makaleler IV, 113–4, 331–3.

123 Brubaker, “Religion,” 13.

124 Uzer, “Racism,” 127, and Uzer, “The Genealogy,” 123.

125 Tepe, “A Kemalist-Islamist,” 69.

126 Aslan, “A Turkish,” 526–8.

127 Brubaker, “Religion,” 14–15.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tunahan Yıldız

Tunahan Yıldız is a PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations at Middle East Technical University. He works on nationalism, Turkish politics, Islamism, and sectarianism. His research has been published and/or is forthcoming in Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies and Middle Eastern Studies.

Didem Kizir

Didem Kizir is a research assistant in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at TED University, and a PhD student in the Program of Area Studies of Middle East Technical University. She is mainly interested in nationalism, colonialism, and Southeast Asian politics.