Islamists and the state: changing discourses on the state, civil society and democracy in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Once an oppositional ideology in the 1990s that united Muslim intellectuals around a radical critique of the state based on the ideals of democracy, civil society and pluralism, how has Turkish Islamism transformed into a state-centric and conservative world-view? This paper aims to document this transformation by scrutinizing the writings of a group of intellectuals in the context of (I) the 28 February 1997, military memorandum and the subsequent events which culminated in the AKP’s first electoral victory in 2002; and (II) the series of trials that started in 2008 known as the Ergenekon trials through which the AKP gained the upper hand in Turkish politics. In so doing, the paper problematizes the prevalent narratives on the relationship between Islam, on the one hand, and democracy and civil society, on the other, that miss how formulations and articulations of Islamism evolve in changing political contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Muslim intellectuals
• Yeni Zemin
• Turkish politics
• civil society
• Islamism
• AKP

Acknowledgements

This paper emerged out of my M.A. thesis written at Koc University under the supervision of Alexis Rappas and Cihan Tugal. I owe them a lot. I would like to thank Alev Cinar and Ilker Ayturk as well as the editor and the two anonymous reviewers of Turkish Studies for their comments and criticisms to the earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Talha Köseoğlu is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Bilkent University and a research assistant in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Eskişehir Osmangazi University. He completed his M.A. degree in Comparative Studies in History and Society at Koç University. His research interests include comparative political theory, Islamic political thought, state-society relations, and political Islamic movements.

ORCID

Talha Köseoğlu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-0119

Notes

1. See for instance, Roy, Failure of Political Islam; Göle, “Authoritarian Secularism”; Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics; Bayat, “Post-Islamism”; and White, “The End of Islamism?”.

2. Schwedler, Faith in Moderation, 11–12, and Wickham, “Path to Moderation,” 206.

3. See for instance, Salame, Democracy Without Democrats?.

4. See, for instance, Turam, Islam and the State; Hale and Özbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism; and Dağı, “Post-Islamism à la Turca”.

5. Tuğal, The Turkish Model, 4–10.

6. Hamid, Temptations of Power, 47.

7. Bayat, “Post-Islamism at Large,” 27.

8. See Guida, “The New Islamists’”.

9. See Taşkın, “Hegemonizing Conservative Democracy”.

10. Michelangelo Guida has published another article which discusses reflections of five Islamist columnists on the Gezi Park Protests and the 15 July 2016 coup attempt. Although the period that article covers is very limited, Guida admirably shows the complexity within Turkish Islamism and comments on the possible causes of diversity in terms of the reception of these events among Islamist columnists some of whom are subject to scrutiny in this paper too. See, Guida, “Negotiating Values.”

11. See Yenigün, “The New Antinomies”.

12. Despite its frequent use, what or who is actually referred to by the term ‘Islamic segments’ is not always clear. Ayşe Buğra includes under the umbrella of the constituencies of political Islam ‘the newly emerging entrepreneurs [and] other segments of the middle class which include Islamic intellectuals and professionals, as well as the marginalized masses largely consisting of new immigrants in urban centres’. See Buğra, “Labour, Capital, and Religion,” 189. Perhaps, the most significant social groups that must be incorporated into this definition are religious orders.

13. Here, I use the term ‘imagined’ in a similar sense that Benedict Anderson defines nationalism. In so doing, I see the attachment to the Islamic segments of society as a variant of nationalism.

14. The magazine was dissolved itself after publishing its 17th issue in July 1994. There is no clear explanation as to why it was dissolved. Yet, such closures were very common among Islamist political magazines in the 1990s.

15. Nurcu is used to refer to the follower of Said Nursi (1877–1960), an important Islamic scholar in the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. The impact of the foundation’s ideological orientation can be observed in recurrent themes and discussions in the magazine. The Kurdish question was one of the most central themes in Yeni Zemin which often appeared side by side with Islamist demands. For the Kurdish-Islamic identity of the magazine see Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity, 176.

16. Metiner began publishing several other popular Islamic magazines and books in the 1980s. He first joined the Kurdish nationalist People’s Democracy Party (Halkın Demokrasi Partisi, HADEP) in 2000, and then joined the AKP and was elected to the Turkish parliament with the AKP in 2011 and 2015.

17. Özçetin, “Making of New Islamism,” 220.

18. Tan joined the Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi, SP) before the June 2018 snap elections. Yet, he couldn’t manage to keep his seat in the Parliament. The SP is an Islamist opposition party founded simultaneously with the AKP by the conservative wing of Milli Görüş in 2001.

19. Bulaç was released from prison after two years in May 2018 pending his trial.

20. Bora, Türk Sağının Üç Hali, 127.

21. Mardin, “Turkish Islamic Exceptionalism,” 147.

22. Tuğal, Passive Revolution, 149, 277, and Yenigün, “The New Antinomies,” 230.

23. İkinci cumhuriyetçiler, or second republicans refers to a group of liberal intellectuals who challenge the Kemalist principles dominant in the political system of Turkey and argue for democratization of the state and liberalization of politics and economy. See Ersoy and Üstüner, “‘Liberal intellectuals’ Narration,” 409.

24. Aytürk, “Post-post Kemalizm,” 36–37.

25. Aktaş, “Devlet; ama nereye kadar?,” 19–20.

26. Dursun, “Türkiye’de değişenler,” 22–23.

27. Founded in 1983, the RP was one of the Milli Görüş parties lead by Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011). The RP rose its popularity among the Anatolian middle classes, the urban poor and lower-middle classes in the metropolitans especially in the early 1990s. The party captured significant municipalities including the capital Ankara and Istanbul in the 1994 local elections. The following year, it won the 1995 general elections and came to power as the leading coalition partner. However, soon after the National Security Council meeting on 28 February 1997, Erbakan resigned and the coalition broke up. As will be discussed in the next section, the RP was closed down by the Constitutional Court in January 1998 and imposed ban on political activities by party leaders including Erbakan and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then mayor of İstanbul. For a detailed analysis of the RP, see Yavuz, “Political Islam.”

28. Metiner, “Siyasette yeni arayışlar,” 24–25.

29. Dilipak, “Türkiye’de laiklik olmadı,” 17.

30. “Dinin özgürleşme talebi,” 7–8. It can be surmised that this article reflects the editorial line of the magazine.

31. Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity, 69–70.

32. Norton, “Introduction,” 22.

33. Similar interpretations of the ‘center-periphery’ approach propounded by Şerif Mardin in the early 1970s and became the prevalent framework to explain Turkish politics in the 1990s were highly popular among Yeni Zemin authors. These versions of center-periphery reflect their identitarian approach. See Dursun, “Türkiye’de değişenler”; Metiner, “Toplum merkezli, özgürlükçü”; Tan, “Türkiye yol ayrımında”; “Müslümanlar laiklik kıskacında”; and Dursun, “Mahalli yönetimler ve seçimler.”

34. Yeni Zemin evidently received negative responses from the readership. The editor Metiner felt necessary to justify the magazine’s position regarding democracy as well as other concepts associated with Western liberal thought in the editorials of the first few volumes. For instance, the editorial of the fifth volume asserted that Yeni Zemin was certainly based on an Islamic worldview:

That we speak in others’ [read “non-Islamic”] language does not mean that we surrendered. … We too know that it is not possible to build a new world with ‘borrowed concepts’ [such as democracy and civil society]. However, we believe that we should not turn our back to these concepts which are popularly used to conceive and express social-political issues, just because they are ‘foreign’.

See “Yeni Zemin’den”.

35. See Özdenören, “Demokrasi egemen sınıfın lehinedir,” and Bulaç, “Demokrasi içinde politikaya katılmak.”

36. Mert, “Tarihsel Bir Bakış,” 418.

37. Yıldırım, “Türkiye siyasal geleneğinde demokrasi,” 17.

38. Bayat, “Post-Islamism at Large,” 10.

39. Some notable magazines that Muslim intellectuals in Yeni Zemin contributed to in the 1990s were İzlenim, Bilgi ve Hikmet, Değişim and Sözleşme.

40. Hale and Özbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism, 244.

41. For different accounts of this development, see White, “The End of Islamism?”; Turam, Islam and the State; Hale and Özbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism; Dağı, “Post-Islamism à la Turca”; Atacan, “Explaining Religious Politics”; Tuğal, Passive Revolution; and Tezcür, Muslim Reformers.

42. Some religious communities with relatively large bases had been supporting the center-right parties instead of Erbakan-led Islamist parties. Most prominent among them was the Gülen community. Under state’s repression in the aftermath of the February 28, these communities supported the reformist wing of the RP and, in a way, they became part of the social coalition that made up the AKP. See Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity, 258.

43. Hale and Özbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism, 20. For the booklet, see Akdoğan, Muhafazakar Demokrasi.

44. Akdoğan, Muhafazakar Demokrasi, 82.

45. For more details of the AKP’s accommodationist strategy see Atacan, “Politics at Crossroads,” 194, and White, “The End of Islamism?,” 88.

46. Metiner, Yemyeşil Şeriat Bembeyaz Demokrasi, 550.

47. Dilipak and Yurdatapan, Ortak Payda, 66.

48. In fact, we can observe reflections of this trend among the popular sectors of the Islamic movement from the 1990s onwards. As democratic values and the rhetoric of human rights have reigned supreme following the end of the Cold War, Islamic demands such as freedom to wear the headscarf have been presented in the framework of freedom of faith and religion, civil liberties and/or human rights. See Mert, “Tarihsel Bir Bakış,” 411–9. Note that there was no consensus on presenting the hijab or other elements of Islam in a liberal framework. The dominant opinion among Muslim intellectuals was to convince people that the hijab is mandatory for Muslims. On the other hand, performing religious duties in accordance with one’s faith is considered within the realm of civil rights and liberties. For example, see Bulaç, “Başörtüsü,” 33–38.

49. See, for instance, Metiner, Yemyeşil Şeriat Bembeyaz Demokrasi, 458. A similar pragmatic shift can be observed in Islamists’ stance towards the EU in this period. There was a conviction that the EU harmonization process was the only possible way to end the Kemalist bureaucratic tutelage and the rigid implementation of secularism which had led to the political, economic and social exclusion of the Islamic segments of the society. As the EU became instrumental in channeling the demands of Muslim intellectuals for change, their quest for an Islamic alternative to Western modernity was largely replaced by the necessity of reforms for Turkey’s harmonization with the EU. See Metiner, Cennet Düşü, 56–57; Bulaç, Avrupa Birliği ve Türkiye; and Akdoğan, Kırk Yıllık Düş.

50. Bulaç, “Demokrasi.”

51. Dursun, “Siyasetin daralması.”

52. Although most former Yeni Zemin authors seemed to align themselves with the AKP, they did not refrain from criticizing the party and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. For example, Ali Bulaç was among the Islamist opposition to the AKP government’s support for Turkey’s involvement in American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Another example is Mehmet Metiner’s reaction against Erdoğan’s outburst in the ‘adultery debate’ in 2004. See Metiner, Cennet Düşü, 59.

53. Özdenören, “Bir Demokrasi Türü,” 32.

54. Aktaş, “Ütopya’nın Çöküşü,” 122.

55. In 2008, an assumed clandestine organization, Ergenekon, was accused of establishing networks in the military, judiciary, bureaucracy, academia, media and civil society to plot against the government. A series of indictments were issued against a number of high profile military officers, bureaucrats, journalists and NGO leaders in what is known as the ‘Ergenekon trials’. See Kaya, “The Ergenekon Case,” 152. The process was followed by trials against an alleged coup attempt known as Balyoz (sledgehammer) and then by an investigation of the February 28 military memorandum. As of October 2016, most of the charges have been dropped in those trials, some of the military officers who were accused of being involved in coup attempts were released and some officers have returned to duty. See Hurriyet, “Mağdur oldular, cezaevinde yattılar, beraat ettiler ve göreve dönüyorlar,” July 22, 2016, at http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/magdur-oldular-cezaevinde-yattilar-beraat-ettiler-ve-yeniden-atandilar-40163342. Accessed on October 24, 2016.

56. Müftüler-Baç and Keyman, “Dominant-Party Politics,” 85.

57. Ersoy and Üstüner, “Liberal Intellectuals’ Narration,” 416–8.

58. In accordance with the government’s project for renovation of Taksim square, the City Council of Istanbul decided to destroy Gezi Park nearby the square and re-build an Ottoman military barrack. Following the decision, a group of environmental activists pitch their tents in the park to resist the destruction. The violent attack of security forces to remove the protesters from the park to continue the construction process on 28 May2013 severely backlashed. Thousands of people rushed into the square to repel the security forces and occupy the park. The process escalated in public protests all around the country. Targeting mainly the government and its authoritarian tendencies, the protests lasted until the mid-June in Istanbul as well as in other major cities.

59. In making this observation, I rely on the writings of the intellectuals I analyze in this paper. For examples of repercussions of the 2008 crisis among Muslim intellectuals, see Dilipak, “Ah Fukuyama ah!”; Bulaç, “‘Çok hukuklu’ olmak”; and Dilipak, “Evet eksen kayması … .” Recent studies on AKP’s authoritarian shift excessively focus on domestic politics to account for it. I believe a thorough analysis of the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis on AKP and Islamism is still needed.

60. The tension between Gülen network and the AKP is presumably dated back to Turkey’s conflict with Israel after Israeli soldiers attacked on Gaza flotilla in 2010, known as ‘Mavi Marmara’ incident. The tension became an open strife after the government corruption scandal in late 2014. The AKP claimed that the investigations in 17 and 25 December 2014 were carried out by government and media figures in Gülen network in order to topple down the AKP government. The conflict came to its zenith after the coup attempt in 15 July 2016 and thousands of military and civil officers have been arrested.

61. For the AKP’s hegemony in Turkish politics after its second term, see Özbudun, “AKP at the Crossroads”; Çınar, “Emerging Electoral Hegemony”; Yeşilada, “The Future of Erdoğan”; and Öniş, “Monopolising the Centre.”

62. From the beginning, Bulaç had an ambivalent attitude towards the AKP. While he tried to keep himself as an independent intellectual who maintain a distance, his arguments were usually in tune with the position of the government. Although Bulaç never explicitly associated himself with the Gülen network, he has become increasingly critical of the AKP after the party begun a battle with Gülen and his followers in late 2013.

63. Özdenören, “Yenilikçilerle tutucuların savaşımı.”

64. Aktaş, “‘Pasif devrim’ mi,” 86.

65. Bulaç, “Özeleştiri.”

66. For instance, Ayşe Buğra and Osman Savaşkan illustrates the rise of Islamic-oriented business associations through cooperation with the AKP government while other associations have been marginalized both at macro and micro levels. See Buğra and Savaşkan, New Capitalism in Turkey.

67. Metiner, “Vesayet vesayettir işte!.”

68. ibid.

69. Dilipak, “Mesele park meselesi değil.”

70. Dilipak, “Şahin Alpay’dan.”

71. See for instance Özdenören, “Büyük devlete doğru.”