Turkish secularism and Islam under the reign of Erdoğan

ABSTRACT

This article introduces a collection of articles that explore the role of religion (Sunni Islam) in the transformation of Turkey under the reign of President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi, AKP). This special issue argues that the Turkish understanding of secularism was also one of the building blocks or/and constitutive elements of Turkey’s modernisation until the rise of the AKP. Currently, however, it seems that religion has become a new or re-born element of the new Turkey and has been transforming many areas such as: the media, the Kurdish issue, implementation of the rule of law, foreign policy and gender issues. This special issue aims to scrutinise the question: how does a religion-based transformation in Turkey influence the raison d’etat of the state?     

Islam,ethnicity and the state: contested spaces of legitimacy and power in the Kurdish-Turkish public sphere

ABSTRACT

The pro-Kurdish nationalist mobilization in Turkey was mostly built on the right to self-determination aligned with the Marxist-Leninist ideology for the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the early 1980s and ethnic minority rights for the secular-leftist pro-Kurdish legal parties in the 1990s. The Turkish state mostly framed the legal and illegal pro-Kurdish mobilization as ‘the enemy of the state’ and ‘the enemy of Islam’ in its counter-insurgency efforts. However, in the 2000s, the PKK and the pro-Kurdish legal parties became more tolerant and inclusive toward Islamic Kurdish identity by mobilizing their sympathizers in events such as ‘Civic Friday Prayers’ and a ‘Democratic Islamic Congress’. This move aimed to function as an antidote to the rising popularity of the ruling conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Kurdish Hizbullah in the early 2000s. In other words, Islam and pious Muslim identity has increasingly become contested among Turkish Islamists, Kurdish Islamists, and the secular Kurdish nationalists. This article seeks to unpack why, how, and under what conditions such competing actors and mechanisms shape the discursive and power relationships in the Kurdish-Turkish public sphere.     

An alternative reading of religion and authoritarianism: the new logic between religion and state in the AKP’s New Turkey

ABSTRACT

Since roughly 2011, the Turkish state and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been going through a process of mutual transformation. Some of the historical apprehensions, biases and frustrations exhibited by Turkey as a middle power have been absorbed by the relatively reformist AKP. Conversely, the AKP and its undisputed leader Erdo?an have seen their socio-political fears, power based conflicts and ethno-religious desires become dominant in all areas, including religion. As a consequence of this bilateral transformation, Turkey has become both an inclusionary and a hegemonic-authoritarian state, and at the same time a weak one. Within this new identity and structure of the state, Sunni Islam has become one of the regime’s key focal points, with a new logic. This article seeks to explain the transformation of the relations between the AKP’s Turkish state, religion and religious groups, by scrutinising Karrie Koesel’s logic of state-religion interaction in authoritarian regimes.     

Beyond ‘brotherhood’ and the ‘caliphate’: Kurdish relationships to Islam in an era of AKP authoritarianism and ISIS terror

ABSTRACT

Since the rise of the Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (AKP), Islam has come to play a more prominent role in public and political spheres in Turkey. This paper draws on ethnographic data gathered in Istanbul and Diyarbakir between 2013 and 2015 to highlight Kurdish attitudes to Islam. Following the electoral success of the AKP amongst Kurds in the general election of 2007, Kurdish actors have sought to incorporate Islamic sensibilities into their political offering in order to appeal to Kurdish constituents. Amid the AKP’s recent authoritarian turn and instrumentalization of religion, and the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), many Kurds have sought to redefine their relationship with Islam to clearly demarcate distinctly Kurdish religious and political spaces.     

From ‘clients’ to ‘magnates’: the (not so) curious case of Islamic authoritarianism in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This paper sketches out the historical emergence and progress of political Islam in modern Turkey by emphasizing its statist and clientelistic aspects emanating from the authoritarian basis of Turkish political modernization. The paper contends that there has always been an authoritarian and autocratic tendency in modern Turkish politics that depends on a peculiar and modernist articulation of both Islamism and secularism, which eventually stand on the same ground. This very ground is formed upon a sacred understanding of the state that can be defined as an all-encompassing and absolute perfection of political power, which manifests itself differently in content for secular nationalists and Islamists, and yet produces the same authoritarian tendency. Both the secular nationalism and Islamism appear to be state oriented movements in the sense that they both have emanated from the state, and envisage to control the state in an absolute sense.     

Patterns of ‘Othering’ in Turkey: A Study of Ethnic,Ideological, and Sectarian Polarisation

This study explores who Turkish citizens view as the Other, their perceptions, evaluations, and the degree of Othering of these groups in the private and public spheres. Drawing from varied political science and social psychology literature, it also examines the role of social contact, perceived threat, and the strength of national and religious identification in predicting levels of Othering. Using a national representative sample, the findings reveal that Kurds are the most Othered group in the private sphere, while both Kurds and AKP (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi – Justice and Development Party) supporters are the most Othered groups in the public sphere. Regardless of who the Other is, lower social contact and higher levels of perceived threat are associated with higher levels of Othering of Kurds, Alevis, AKP supporters, and AKP opponents in both the private and public spheres.     

The intersectionality of gender,sexuality, and religion: novelties and continuities in Turkey during the AKP era

ABSTRACT

This article argues that in the AKP era, gender and sexuality play a central role in reshaping the secular-religious divide to instil ‘yeni milli’ (new national) – or as AKP members call it, ‘yerli ve milli’ (homegrown and national)- values. Adopting a feminist and reflexive approach, this article seeks to demonstrate that Erdo?an and the AKP have used gender and sexuality-related issue areas not as diversions to highjack the public agenda, as it is often assumed, but as a medium to regulate the neoliberal redistribution of conservative values. After a brief presentation of the historical background of the gendered evolution of the secular-religious divide in Turkish politics, this article focuses on the following three particular cases: the policies and discourse on LGBTI rights; the link that was established between the reproductive rights of women and ethnic identity; and how the AKP created new types of ‘other men’ and ‘other women.’ The article also seeks to show that in each case the meanings attributed to the secular and the religious in the secular-religious divide have shifted accordingly and that shift was reflective of, and was used to instil the particular set of values supportive of particular political positions.     

Cold war era relations between West Germany and Turkish political Islam: from an anti-communist alliance to a domestic security issue

ABSTRACT

West Germany played a significant role in the growth of Political Islam in Turkey during the Cold War. By recruiting from among Turkish workers in West Germany, Islamist organizations and the religious communities known as cemaats acquired significant economic revenues, which they used to fund their activities in Turkey. Moreover, West Germany served as a liaison between Turkish Islamists and Syrian and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members, who have influenced Political Islam in Turkey since the 1960s. Prominent Muslim Brotherhood representatives in West Germany took on important roles in the recruitment of Turks and also played some part in shaping the ideological development of Turkish Islamists. Due to the pervasiveness of anti-communism in West Germany and Turkey during the Cold War, the established orders in both countries viewed Political Islam as an antidote to the ascendancy of the Left. However, in the 1980s, Bonn and Ankara grew concerned about Islamist organizations becoming further radicalized and impossible to control; the two governments often cooperated in order to bring Political Islam under their own authority.     

Islam and economics in the political sphere: a critical evaluation of the AKP era in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Since Weber’s articulate conceptualisation of the nexus between religion and economics, these phenomena have been examined through various academic viewpoints. While some take religion as a determining factor of economic performance, others argue that it is the economy that influences religiosity. This paper focuses on the manifestation of religion and economics in the political sphere regarding the case of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). After discussing the literature on the relations between religion and economics, it scrutinises the AKP period, considering three specific pillars: (a) the early years of the AKP in which Western economic policies were implemented as a continuation of the Kemal Dervi? period; (b) between 2008 and 2015, when the idea ‘we can do as well’ maintained the centre stage; and (c) 2015 and onwards, when the Islamist influence on economic policy became highly apparent, particularly regarding interest rates. This study argues that the AKP changed politically in terms of Islamic influence upon the economic sphere, however this remains at the discursive level for the time being.     

Sacred Laïcité and the Politics of Religious Resurgence in France: Whither Religious Pluralism?

This article contributes to the current scholarly discussion by inviting us to look at secularism not as a static model of religious governance, but as a formation that shifts with time and that is deeply related to our contemporary understanding of religion. As such, it investigates the recent transformations of French secularism. In 2004 France passed a law banning visible religious symbols in public schools. Since then French secularism has increasingly become a sacred – non-negotiable – element of collective life. Drawing on Kim Knott's concept of the ‘secular sacred’, the article investigates, through an analysis of policy reports, law proposals and laws, how this discursive usage of secularism has been used to set apart particular spaces from others: secular spaces that carry the ‘supreme’ values of secularism. In this process, the role of public servants and citizens has been changing, as they have been invested with the responsibility of policing the boundaries of these spaces. New tools, such as charters of secularism, laws and regulations, and state bodies are being imagined to consolidate these boundaries. The article also explores how ‘religious resurgence’ (and more specifically ‘Islamic resurgence’) has been essential to this ‘sacred-making’ activity: to give substance to values that are non-negotiable and need to be separated from those that are not. Overall, the piece posits, in line with other recent works, that sacred-making is not reserved to the ‘religious’, but can become a central component of how secularism gets articulated and deployed. In so doing, it underscores the importance of documenting how meanings given to secularism shift to grasp the politics that underpin discourses on religious resurgence.     

De-Europeanisation in Turkey: The Case of the Rule of Law

Abstract

This article investigates the political dynamics shaping the post-2010 ‘de-Europeanisation’ of Turkey’s judicial system, particularly regarding judicial independence and rule of law. The analysis suggests the limits of conventional Europeanisation accounts emphasising causal factors such as European Union (EU) conditionality and the ‘lock-in effects’ of liberal reforms due to the benefits of EU accession. The article argues that the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP’s) bid for political hegemony resulted in the reversal of rule of law reforms. De-Europeanisation is discussed in terms of both legislative changes and the government’s observed discourse shift.     

Proliferation of neopatrimonial domination in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Literature on Turkey’s post-2011 authoritarian turn – especially after the eruption of the 2013 nationwide Gezi Protests – adopts modern concepts such as ‘dictatorship’, ‘authoritarianism’, ‘totalitarianism’, ‘one-party government’, ‘party-state fusion’, and even ‘fascism’ mainly in order to pin down the nature of the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Turkish acronym) or depict the current character of Turkey’s regime. Through engaging the pre-modern concept of neopatrimonialism, which is derived from Max Weber’s concept of patrimonialism, this paper argues that Turkey’s encounter with authoritarianism is deeply associated with the proliferation of neopatrimonial domination, into which the legacy of patronage politics, fracture of security power, and the metastasis of crony capitalism have been conflated. This article argues that neopatrimonial features have always, to a degree, marked state-society relations in Turkey. Furthermore, this article suggests neopatrimonial characteristics started to dominate Turkey’s modern legal structure under the AKP, which led to a state crisis culminating in the 2016 attempted coup. However, despite the fact that neopatrimonialism cannot be argued as a pathological deviation from modern-legal domination, this paper concludes that tension exists between the crony capitalism-based economic model of neopatrimonalism and Turkey’s decades-long market-based capitalism.     

Political Parties and Grassroots Clientelist Strategies in Urban Turkey: One Neighbourhood at a Time

Both principal Turkish political parties make extensive use of patron–client networks, but in very different ways. The CHP relies on competing local brokers and synchronous vote buying. The AKP is at the centre of a network of public and private funding turning social policy to clientelist ends. Socially anchored AKP activists link the party to voters, allowing it to target social assistance for political advantage and take credit for improvement in local conditions. The case presented in this paper provides a natural experiment suggesting that this distinction is an important explanation for the AKP’s electoral success in low-income urban areas.     

Shifting Logics: The Discourses of Turkish Political Elites on EU Accession

Abstract

The article compares the EU accession discourses, during the 2002, 2007 and 2011 elections, of Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) with those of the two main opposition parties, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), tracking the continuities and shifts in their discourses. In the light of Habermas’s distinction between pragmatic, ethical and moral justifications, the discourses are analysed on the basis of three explanatory logics – interests, rights and identity – by means of a theoretically guided qualitative content analysis of the election manifestos of these three political parties. These logics, emerging and shifting in line with periodical dynamics, have been instrumental to varying degrees in the discourses of Turkey’s political elites.     

Facebook: An Emerging Arena for Politics of Self-Determination in northern Cyprus?

ABSTRACT

The present article aims to expand scholarship on the political role of social media by focusing on the case of Facebook and the self-determination claims of Turkish Cypriots vis-à-vis Turkey. Drawing upon a virtual ethnography of relevant Facebook sites and groups, this article scrutinises whether social media offer an innovative public platform for the politics of self-determination or on-line claims are in reality formed and negotiated in the same manner as the offline ones. The article concludes that Turkish Cypriots’ Facebook activism may very well be for strengthening their community, shielding their distinct characteristics from mainland Turkey and raising their self-esteem, rather than indicating demands for complete autonomy in the traditional political sense of the word and/or statehood.     

Imagine All the People? Mobilising Islamic Populism for Right-Wing Politics in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Right-wing politics in Indonesia is frequently associated with Islamic populist ideas. In part this is because Islamic organisations played a major role in the army-led destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party in the 1960s. Since then Islamic populism has evolved greatly and in post-authoritarian Indonesia it includes manifestations that see no fundamental contradiction between Islam and neo-liberal market economies as well as those that do. Significantly, like their counterparts in other countries, Indonesian Islamic populists maintain vigilance against the purveyors of class-based politics who may exert a divisive influence on the ummah. Thus, Indonesian Islamic populism shares with many of its counterparts a disdain for Leftist challenges to private property and capital accumulation besides political liberalism’s affinity to the secular national state. Yet strands of Islamic populism have relegated the project of establishing a state based on sharia to the background and embraced the democratic process. But this has not translated necessarily into social pluralist positions on a range of issues because the reinforcement of cultural idioms associated with Islam is required for the mobilisation of public support in contests over power and resources based on an ummah-based political identity.     

Women prisoners in Turkey

Historically, the closure of a party is a common phenomenon in Turkish politics. While the recent case against the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) was reminiscent of this trend, the decision of the Constitutional Court demonstrated that there are changes in the dynamics of the Turkish political structure. Although the literature cites the so-called ‘28 February Process’, the impact of EU accession, and the learning effects of democratization as explanations for the distinction of the AKP from its predecessors, this article argues that the AKP is different due to its extended business network and newly defined conservative base. The decision of the court in the recent closure case against the AKP reflects this structural political change within the foundation of Islamic parties in Turkey. While the court acknowledged the political legitimacy of the party by taking a decision against its closure, it has revealed the general discontent regarding AKP's non-adjusted conservative/pro-Islamic policies by cutting down its financial means.     

Struggling for the Kurdish vote: religion,ethnicity and victimhood in AKP and BDP/HDP rally speeches

This study explores the competition for Turkey's Kurdish vote through the instrumentalization of religion, ethnicity and victimhood in political competition. This becomes possible through the study of rally speeches of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi – AKP), the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (Bar?? ve Demokrasi Partisi – BDP) and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halklar?n Demokratik Partisi – HDP), in Turkey's June 2011 and June 2015 general elections. The AKP campaigns framed the resolution of the Kurdish issue along with an updated version of the ‘Turkish Islamic Synthesis’. The issue of ethnicity was toned down in contrast to the idea of common victimhood of pious Turkish and Kurdish Muslims in republican Turkey. On the other hand, the BDP/HDP moved from a more ethnic-oriented and exclusive identity approach in 2011 to a more inclusive, liberal and extrovert agenda based on a civic definition of Turkish national identity in 2015. Religion and victimhood appear as the two most enduring symbolic resources for political party mobilization.     

Reassessing Turkish National Memory: An Analysis of the Representation of Turkish National Memory by the AKP

In this article continuity and discontinuity of interpretations and manipulations of national memory during the successive governments of the Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (Justice and Development Party – AKP) in Turkey are investigated. The strong continuities between the Islamist parties of the 1990s and the AKP, with regard to the way they consider and manipulate Ottoman history as a means of political legitimation, are demonstrated. In addition, the continuity between the AKP's style of governance and that of preceding governments is shown. The conclusion of the article is that, in addition to continuities with its Islamist predecessors, the AKP is to a large extent still embedded within the boundaries of the nationalist framework set out by Kemalism with regard to the party's stance on Turkish citizenship, national identity, traumas in national history and leader-centred politics.     

The Nation and its Sermons: Islam,Kemalism and the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey

This article will attempt to develop an in-depth examination of the pivotal role of Islam in the articulation of Turkish nationalism and Turkish official identity by examining the sermons authorized and imposed by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA), the state agency regulating religion, and how the their cosmologies of social, moral and political order are entwined. We will further argue that this role involves a twofold process; firstly, the Muslim identity was imagined as a prerequisite for being considered as a Turk and a Turkish citizen and, secondly, the ‘cultural intimacy’ of Turkish nationalism is grounded on the ‘root paradigms’ inherited and attained from the Islamic tradition and theology. These arguments are particularly pertinent at a time when Islamist JDP (Justice and Development Party) consolidated its power and began to instrumentalize PRA for its priorities and visions of Islam. This, however, does not bring a radical reshuffling of PRA. On the contrary, the continuity from the Kemalist-monitored PRA to the JDP-monitored PRA can be attested not only in its organizational features but also in its ideological make up; especially in terms of its perceptions of society, state and social order.