One nation under Allah? Islamic multiculturalism, Muslim nationalism and Turkey’s reforms for Kurds, Alevis, and non-Muslims

ABSTRACT

A number of reforms and initiatives, undertaken by the Justice and Development Party (AKP or AK Party) governments in Turkey, widely known as Kurdish and Alevi ‘openings,’ and the less prominent non-Muslim (primarily Armenian and Jewish) openings, have puzzled scholars as to their causes, consequences, and limitations. In this article, I first briefly review four different kinds of analytical accounts that seek to explain the AK Party’s openings. Second, I introduce my argument that an Islamic conceptualization of a new religious-national identity is both the main motivation and the main limitation of these reformist initiatives. Third, I provide an analysis of critical speeches, official statements, and declarations by AK Party leaders, in particular by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on the Kurdish, Alevi, and non-Muslim openings, demonstrating that they invoke overwhelmingly religious justifications.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic multiculturalism
• Muslim nationalism
• Alevis
• Armenians
• Kurds
• minorities in Turkey

Acknowledgments

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the ‘Imagining and regulating ethnic and religious diversity in Turkey’ workshop of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen in 9 July 2016. I thank the participants at this workshop, including Zachary Elkins, who served as the discussant for this paper. I also thank Paul Kubicek and two anonymous reviewers for Turkish Studies for their comments, and Yury Katliarou and Endri Ziu for their research assistance. This work was supported by the BAGEP Award of the Science Academy with funding supplied in 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Şener Aktürk is Associate Professor of International Relations at Koç University in Istanbul. His work focuses on comparative politics of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. His articles were published in World Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Social Science Quarterly, European Journal of Sociology, Turkish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Uluslararası İlişkiler, among others. His book, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2012) received the Joseph Rothschild Book Prize.

ORCID

Şener Aktürk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5897-6714

Notes

1. Although both AKP and AK Party are widely used abbreviations, the party officially (in Article 3 of its by laws, available at www.akparti.org.tr/upload/documents/akparti-tuzuk-2016.pdf) insists on ‘AK Party’ as its abbreviation. I thus considered the self-identification of the party in using the ‘AK Party’ abbreviation throughout this article.

2. This is reflected even in the titles of many scholarly articles on these openings. On the Kurdish Opening, see, for example, Demiralp, “The Odd Tango of the Islamic Right and Kurdish Left in Turkey” and Çiçek, “Elimination or Integration of Pro-Kurdish Politics.” On the Alevi Opening, see, for example, Çarkoğlu and Bilgili, “A Precarious Relationship” and Borovali and Boyraz, “An Opening without an Outcome?”

3. Bengütürk, “Nihayet ‘Büyük Türk Milleti’ dedi.” [He finally said ‘the great Turkish nation.’] August 28, 2014.

4. Akturk, “Persistence of the Islamic Millet as an Ottoman Legacy.”

5. Aşık, “Milletin adı yoksa”; Kurt, “Bu milletin adı ne?.”

6. Sarıoğlu, “Kimlik değişimi!”; Gerçek Gündem, “Erdoğan: Gürcü asıllıyım.”

7. Bulut, “Tayyip Bey’in milliyeti!” [The nationality of Mr. Tayyip!]; Özdil, “Laz mıyız Türk müyüz?” [Are we Laz or Turkish?]. The latter article was shared 10,321 times in the social media as of 19 January 2018, which is an indication of its remarkable popularity.

8. Sözcü, “Erdoğan’ın kökeni nereye dayanıyor?”

9. Poyraz, Musa’nın Çocukları: Tayyip ve Emine.

10. Hürriyet, “Milliyetçilik ayak altında [Nationalism under the feet].”

11. Güzel, “Tek Millet, Tek Bayrak, Tek Vatan, Tek Devlet.”

12. Akdağ, “Rational political parties and electoral games,” 126.

13. Somer and Glüpker-Kesebir, “Is Islam the Solution?”, 554.

14. Ibid, 135; Kardaş and Balci, “Inter-societal security trilemma.”

15. There are 18 provinces where ethnic Kurds are estimated to constitute the majority, plurality, or nearly half of the population. The AK Party and HDP are hegemonic in 13 of these 18 provinces, regularly winning all the members of the parliament (MPs) allotted to these provinces. The Kemalist CHP sometimes wins the Kurdish Alevi province of Tunceli, whereas the Turkish nationalist MHP sometimes wins Iğdır, which has a mixed population of Azeris and Kurds. The CHP and MHP also have some appeal in Ardahan and Kars, sometimes sufficient to get one MP elected, but their appeal is primarily among non-Kurdish voters.

16. The CHP, from the 1950s until the 1970s, and CHP’s successor SHP (Social Democratic People’s Party), from the 1980s until the early 1990s, won landslide victories among many of the provinces heavily populated by the Kurds (also see the previous footnote), including in Diyarbakir, Mardin, and Van. In contrast, the CHP did not even get 5% of the vote, let alone any MPs, in these three principal metropolitan Kurdish cities in the 2015, 2011, or 2007 general elections.

17. Çarkoğlu, “Reflections of an Alevi-Sunni Cleavage.”

18. Al, “A dialectical analysis,” 94–5.

19. Ibid.

20. Kardaş and Balci, “Inter-societal security trilemma in Turkey.”

21. Unlike, for example, in Northern Ireland, where the English and Protestant Unionists are opposed by the Irish and Catholic Republicans, and these two ethno-religious-political blocs are mostly mutually exclusive, there is significant border crossing among Kurds between Kurdish nationalists and the political Islamists, and there is significant border crossing between formerly secular Turkish nationalists and the political Islamists.

22. Çiçek, “Elimination or Integration of Pro-Kurdish Politics.”

23. Borovali and Boyraz, “The Alevi Workshops.”

24. Çiçek, “Elimination or Integration of Pro-Kurdish Politics,” 16.

25. Borovali and Boyraz, “The Alevi Workshops,” 146.

26. Çarkoğlu and Bilgili, “The Alevi Minority,” 351.

27. Bardakçi, “The Alevi Opening of the AKP Government in Turkey,” 349.

28. Cengiz and Hoffmann, “Turkey’s European Union Accession,” 416.

29. Aktürk, “From Social Democracy to Islamic Multiculturalism,” Chapter 5 in his Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey, 163–94.

30. Akturk, “Persistence of the Islamic Millet”; and Akturk, “Religion and Nationalism.”

31. Pierson, Politics in Time; for an application of Pierson’s framework to the process of ethnic policy change in Turkey, see Aktürk, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood, 24.

32. Hürriyet, “Başbakan Diyarbakır’da konuştu.”

33. Ibid.

34. Quran, 30:22, Surah Ar-Rum [The Romans]. Available at http://quran.com/30/22. Accessed in January 19, 2018.

35. “Prophet Muhammad’s Last Sermon,” available at http://www.introductiontoislam.org/prophetlastsermon.shtml. Accessed in January 19, 2018.

36. Akturk, “Religion and nationalism.”

37. Eulogy of the Ottoman past could even derail the Alevi Opening, since there is a widespread perception that especially during and after the wars against Safavid Iran under Selim I, Alevis were massacred and persecuted thereafter.

38. For example, Ertan Efegil does not mention the role of religion or political Islam at all in his article, “AKP Government’s Policy.”

39. Ekmekci, “Understanding Kurdish ethno-nationalism.”

40. Sarigil and Fazlioglu, “Religion and ethno-nationalism,” and Jacoby and Tabak, “Islam, Nationalism, and Kurdish Ethnopolitics.”

41. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, direct quote from p.xi, and see in particular, chapter 3 on “The Topography of Postwar Debates,” 46–71.

42. AK Parti, “Demokratik Açılım Süreci.”

43. Deniz Baykal, the leader of the main opposition party, the CHP, voiced his opposition to the Kurdish opening as an ideologically principled defense of the nation-state as a Kemalist. e.g. Milliyet, “Ulus devleti bozmayın” (Do not break the nation-state).

44. Sarıoğlu, “Kimlik değişimi.” Erdoğan related the same anecdote on a regular basis, including in 2016, see Hürriyet, “Babama Laz mıyız Türk müyüz diye sordum.” For a Kemalist nationalist criticism of Erdoğan’s anecdote, see Özdil, “Laz mıyız Türk müyüz?”.

45. Sarıoğlu, “Kimlik değişimi.”

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. Bianet, “Erdoğan: Kürt sorunu hepimizin sorunu.”

49. Erdogan’s advisors, led by the Kurdish intellectual and later politician Mehmet Metiner, prepared a report on the Kurdish question for Erdogan during his tenure as the head of the Welfare Party Istanbul branch in 1991 (much before being elected as the mayor of Istanbul in 1994), and this report is retrospectively seen as being very progressive for its time by openly acknowledging the moral and political necessity of granting Kurdish ethno-linguistic rights. Akkoyunlu, “Erdoğan çözümün yol haritasını 1991’de çizdi.”

50. NTV, “Erdoğan’ın konuşmasının tam metni.”

51. e.g. in Bursa in 6 June 2010. Bursa Belediyesi, “Atatürk Kongre Merkezi Başbakan Erdoğan tarafından açıldı.”

52. Similar to the Goethe Institutes for German and Cervantes Institutes for Spanish, 43 Yunus Emre Institutes were established in 35 countries around the world as of this writing. See http://www.yee.org.tr/tr/yunusemreenstitusu for further information, accessed in June 28, 2016.

53. Habertürk, “Erdoğan’dan tarihi konuşma.”

54. Bianet, “Erdoğan: Gölge Etmeyin.”

55. AK Parti, “1 Haziran Diyarbakır Mitingi konuşması.”

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. It is significant in this context that Kurdish socialists are not fond of and even incensed by references to Saladin Ayyubi, because of his Islamic symbolism. See Andreas Delsett, The Saladin Anthology, 4: ‘Suddenly, I was interrupted in the middle of a sentence, by a simple question: Why Saladin? ‘You know that he is not very highly regarded amongst the Kurds? He was religious and chose to fight for Islam, rather than the liberation of the Kurds’, explained the youngest of the group.’

59. AK Parti, “1 Haziran Diyarbakır Mitingi konuşması.”

60. Ibid. He is very clear about the CHP being the cause of the Kurdish question: ‘Dear brothers, the source of the Kurdish problem is the CHP. The source of my Kurdish brothers’ suffering is personally [bizzat] the CHP.’

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Unfortunately, the full text of Erdoğan’s Bingöl speech, which was available at the AK Party website when the first draft of this article was completed, has disappeared since then. For the time being, a copy is still available at Wikisource, “Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’ın 8 Haziran 2011 tarihli Bingöl mitinginde yaptığı konuşma.”

64. Ibid.

65. Tevhid Haber, “Erdoğan: Bitlis Said Nursi şehridir.”

66. Radikal, “Erdoğan: Kürtler Zerdüşt değil İslam’dır.”

67. Haber7, “Özerklik isteyenlere Erdoğan sert çıktı.”

68. Timeturk, “Erdoğan’dan Kürtlere Selahaddin Eyyubi’li çağrı.”

69. Yeni Şafak, “Erdoğan: Kur’an-ı Kerim’in Kürtçe mealini ortaya çıkardık.”

70. Sabah, “Erdoğan meydan okudu.”

71. Soner and Toktaş, “The Justice and Development Party’s Alevi Opening,” 419.

72. Lord, “Rethinking,” 278.

73. Özkul, “Alevi ‘Openings’,” 80.

74. Kaya, “The Alevi-Bektashi order in Turkey.”

75. Karaosmanoğlu, “Beyond essentialism,” 580.

76. Köse, “Ideological or religious?,” 576.

77. Subaşı, “The Alevi Opening,” 165 (in the Abstract), 168 (in the photo caption), and 170 (in the main text).

78. Subaşı, “The Alevi Opening,” 169, and endnote 2, on page 177. Rather curiously, in this summary of his (and presumbaly government’s) view of Alevism, Subaşı references the work of the famous scholar of Alevism, Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, and specifically, Ocak’s Alevi ve Bektaşi İnançlarının İslam Öncesi Temelleri (İstanbul: İletişim, 2000), in which Ocak discusses the pre-Islamic foundations of Alevism.

79. Köse, “Between Nationalism, Modernism and Secularism,” 590.

80. CNN Turk, “Başbakan Erdoğan Alevi iftarında.”

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid.

83. Radikal, “Erdoğan: Alevilik din değil.”

84. Milliyet, “Erdoğan: Alevilik Hz. Ali’yi sevmekse ben dört dörtlük bir Alevi’yim.”

85. Ibid.

86. Haberler.com, “Erdoğan: Sünni-Alevi Böyle Bir Şeyi Tanımayacağız.”.

87. Ibid.

88. Par, “Alevi dedesiyim.”

89. Yüksel, “Alevi-Bektaşi Kimliği Etrafında Tekke ve Zaviyeler.”

90. e.g. Dressler, Writing Religion.

91. Hürriyet, “Almanya’daki Alevilerden yanıt.”

92. BBC, “Ankara restores Armenian church.”

93. Yackley, “Turkey unveils Great Synagogue.”

94. T.C. Başbakanlık, “Sayın Başbakanımızın 1915 olaylarına ilişkin mesajı.”

95. Valansi, “The end of innocence.”

96. Vatan, “Erdoğan Dinler Bahçesi açılışında.”

97. Çolak, “Ottomanism vs. Kemalism.”

98. e.g. Onar, “Echoes of a universalism lost.”

99. Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 232.

100. Among many others, Kardaş and Balci, “Understanding the failure of the 2009 Kurdish Opening.”

101. Hüseyin Tuğcu argued that, ‘people who cussed at the state [devlete küfredenler] once upon a time are trying to solve Alevis’ problems.’ He also specifically stated that he warned Erdoğan about the dangers of this initiative. CNN Türk, “Alevi açılımı AK Parti içinde sorun yarattı.”

102. Coşkun, “Markar Esayan’ın Mehmet Metiner’den farkı yok.” This interview is particularly significant since Paylan claims that ‘Esayan is no different than Mehmet Metiner,’ a prominent Kurdish MP of AK Party, since Paylan lambasts both Esayan and Metiner for not representing the true interests of the Armenians and Kurds, hence providing a poignant demonstration of the intra-group schism between anti-AK Party and pro-AK Party Armenians and Kurds at once.

103. My use of ‘Republican Alliance’ is inspired by Ceren Belge’s article (‘Friends of the Court’) on this topic. Republican alliance denotes not just the CHP (Republican People’s Party), the main Kemalist secularist political party, but also many other secularist and leftist fellow travelers of the CHP, including most importantly, ‘republicans’ in unelected components of government such as the military, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy at large.

104. Tezcür, “When democracy radicalizes.”

105. T24, “KCK ateşkesin bittiğini açıkladı”; Aktürk, “Why did the PKK declare Revolutionary People’s War?”.

106. Aktürk, “Turkey’s Civil Rights Movement.”

107. The referendum passed with a narrow margin of 51.4% voting in favor and 48.6% voting against nationally. For the provincial breakdown, see Sabah, “Nisan 2017 referandum sonuçları,” and Cumhuriyet, “16 Nisan 2017 Referandum Haritası.”