DIFFERENT FACES OF TURKISH ISLAMIC NATIONALISM
Washington Post
Feb 20 2015
By Senem Aslan February 20 at 9:52 AM
On Dec. 17, 2013, Turkish prosecutors started a corruption
investigation into the activities of the sons of three ministers of
the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, businessmen close
to the government, and bureaucrats. The corruption allegations later
included then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan after wiretapped
telephone conversations between Erdogan and his son about hiding
large sums of cash were leaked on the Internet. The prosecutors were
believed to be followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic scholar who
lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania.
The scandal exposed a conflict between two longtime Islamist allies,
the AKP and the Gulen movement, which has rapidly reshaped the Turkish
political scene. Many analysts have argued that the rift emerged from
a power struggle. Erdogan was threatened by the growing influence of
Gulenists within the state while the Gulenists were concerned about
Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism and personalization of power.
While there is certainly something to this, there are also deeper
reasons for the schism. The AKP-Gulen conflict also resulted from an
ideological clash about the nature of the relationship between Islam
and Turkish nationalism.
The AKP, which has ruled Turkey since 2002, is typically described as
a moderately Islamist party. The less well-understood Gulen movement
is Turkey’s most influential and internationally active religious
network. The community refers to itself as the Hizmet (service)
movement, encompassing a large commercial, media and education network,
inspired by the teachings of Fethullah Gulen. Although Gulenists
portray themselves as members of an apolitical, civil movement, this
image is misleading. The movement has been an influential player in
Turkish politics since the late 1980s. In the 2000s, it openly allied
with the AKP government, supporting a number of its key policies,
most importantly the weakening of the power of the military and
secularist judiciary. Many have alleged that the Gulenists have come
to dominate many cadres in the state bureaucracy, particularly the
police and the judiciary, making them a significant political force
to reckon with in Turkish politics. Today the AKP government accuses
the movement of forming a parallel organization within the state to
capture state authority. Since the corruption probe the government
has purged hundreds of alleged Gulenists from the cadres of the police
and the judiciary.
In the past decade, scholars have noted the rise of a different
conception of Turkish nationalism, called Muslim or Islamic
nationalism, which has led to a transformative shift in the official
state discourse. The AKP and the Gulen movement share some broad
tenets of Muslim nationalism. Challenging the secular and Westernist
character of Kemalist nationalism, they emphasize Muslim identity as
the key element in defining Turkishness. Accordingly, the ideal Turk
should have a strong moral character informed by Sunni Islamic values.
They criticize Kemalist nationalists for being elitist and imitative,
forcing people to change their authentic selves in the name of
Westernization. Muslim nationalists endorse this strong discourse
of victimhood and present themselves as the genuine representatives
of the Turkish nation. Building on this sense of victimhood, they
hold Kemalist nationalists responsible for Turkey’s loss of status
in the international arena, attributing it to the defensive and
inward-looking character of Kemalist nationalism. Instead, Muslim
nationalists imagine Turkey to be a major world power, guided by
an assertive and ambitious foreign policy that rests on building
Turkey’s soft power and economic strength. They associate national
pride with economic success and desire that Turkey play a leadership
role, particularly in the Muslim world.
Such commonalities aside, there have been significant disagreements
between the AKP and the Gulen movement. It is true that these two
groups’ nationalist discourses can be fluid, and at times multi-vocal.
Unlike the Gulen movement, the AKP is subject to the pressures of
electoral politics. The Gulen movement’s discourse can be inconsistent,
partly because what its representatives say or do in their “window
sites” can differ from what they say or do in private.
Nevertheless, it is possible to identify the broad points of
contention.
The most important difference between the Gulen movement and the AKP
is that while the first advocates an ethno-cultural understanding
of Turkishness, the latter prioritizes Muslim identity over ethnic
identity. Fethullah Gulen is a leading advocate of the Turkish-Islamic
synthesis, endorsing the view that Turkish Islam is unique and superior
to the Islam of other ethnic groups. According to this view, Islam did
not come to the Turkish world from the Arabs but came to Anatolia from
Central Asia by way of Sufi dervishes. This Sufi connection makes
Turkish Islam more moderate, tolerant and open to interpretation
and change than the Arab and Persian forms of Islam, which are more
prone to radicalization. Gulen emphasizes the importance of Turkey’s
cooperation with the Central Asian countries to create a strong
Turkic world. In his schools that are spread all around the world,
his followers try to familiarize their students with Turkish-Islamic
morality and culture, teaching them the Turkish language and
history. In Gulen’s writings and the movement’s spectacles, such
as the Turkish Language Olympiads, the central emphasis has been on
exalting and praising the culture of Turkish Anatolia.
For the AKP, on the other hand, the main points of reference
are Ottoman and Islamic history. The AKP’s symbolic capital rests
heavily on Ottoman and Islamic references as seen, for instance, in
the official celebrations of the conquest of Istanbul or the prophet
Muhammad’s birthday. The AKP’s nationalist view downplays the role
of ethnicity. It does not emphasize a hierarchy of nations within
the Muslim world and does not contain a critical discourse about
other Sunni-Muslim ethnic groups. In that sense, the AKP holds on to
a more universalist-Islamist perspective. It is nationalist because
it imagines a Turkey-centered Muslim world but the Muslim identity
is more dominant in its conception of the Turkish nation than a
unique Turkish ethnic identity. Erdogan’s special interest in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his outright support of activists who
tried to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza in violation of Israel’s naval
blockade in 2010 were informed by his Muslimhood-centered nationalism.
In contrast, Gulen criticized the initiative for violating Israel’s
sovereignty. The disagreement between the AKP and Gulen in fact first
revealed itself during the Gaza flotilla crisis.
This divergence in their nationalist perspectives has important
implications for their relations with minorities in Turkey,
particularly the Kurds. While both groups use the discourse of Muslim
brotherhood as a bond between the Turks and the Kurds, the AKP has
endorsed a more pragmatic approach toward the resolution of the
Kurdish problem. In his speeches, particularly those in the Kurdish
provinces, now-President Erdogan frequently brings up the concept of
citizenship, downplaying the discourse of ethnic Turkish identity. The
AKP government’s recognition of many Kurdish linguistic and cultural
rights and its negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)
have faced the Gulen community’s opposition. What crystallized the
rift between the two former allies were their clashing views about the
Kurdish question. The movement has been much less compromising toward
Kurdish nationalism. The movement sees the resolution of the Kurdish
conflict through the recognition of Kurdish linguistic rights (with
elective Kurdish classes in schools) and the provision of more social
services to the Kurdish areas but stops short of any negotiations
with the PKK and its affiliated groups. It refrains from forming
relations with Kurdish nationalists and supports military solutions
to end the insurgency. The pro-Gulen television channel, Samanyolu,
is noted for its militaristic and nationalist TV series. Because of
its heavy emphasis on Turkish nationalism, the Gulen movement has not
been popular with Kurdish activists. Many believe that the movement was
behind the mass arrests of pro-Kurdish activists. Starting in 2009,
thousands of journalists, politicians, mayors and publishers were
arrested because of their alleged membership in the KCK, the urban,
political wing of the PKK. While the movement has opened several
schools in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast as well as in Iraq’s Kurdish
autonomous region, Kurdish activists have perceived these schools as
institutions of assimilation.
Unlike its relations with the Kurds, however, the movement has had
closer relations with the leaders of Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities,
such as the Greek Orthodox and Jewish communities. Since the 1990s, the
movement’s Journalists and Writers Foundation has organized meetings on
interfaith dialogue, bringing religious minority leaders together. The
Gulen movement’s public face has nurtured a discourse of religious
tolerance and engagement and boasted of helping non-Muslim communities
solve their daily problems resulting from social prejudices.
The AKP, on the other hand, has had a more distanced relationship with
Turkey’s non-Muslims. Despite pressures from the European Union, it
refrained from addressing the major problems of Turkey’s non-Muslim
minorities. While it undertook legal reforms to ameliorate the
institutional autonomy and property rights of non-Muslim minorities,
it dragged its feet to enforce these changes. Particularly at times
of political challenge, the spontaneity and ease with which the AKP’s
rhetoric can take an anti-Westernist, anti-Christian or anti-Semitic
tone underline the stronger weight of its Islamist tradition. The
defiant, conspiratorial discourse of Erdogan, accusing the West,
Zionists, secularists and non-Muslims during and after the 2013 Gezi
protests, and his derogatory remarks about Jews and Armenians have
recently made hate speech against non-Muslims more visible and ordinary
in the public space. For example, in an interview, Erdogan stated:
“Let all Turks in Turkey say they are Turks and all Kurds say they
are Kurds. What is wrong with that? You wouldn’t believe the things
they have said about me. They have said I am Georgian. Excuse me,
but they have said even uglier things. They have called me Armenian,
but I am Turkish.”
The analyses of Muslim nationalism in Turkey have largely ignored the
conflicting trends within the Islamic discourse about Turkish national
identity. Like Kemalists, Muslim nationalists have not been coherent
and monolithic nor have they necessarily endorsed a more inclusive
understanding of Turkishness. The two main constructions of Muslim
nationalism have been exclusivist and intolerant of diversity, but in
different ways. How the conflict between the movement and the AKP will
be resolved is still not very clear. But the way it is resolved and
the upcoming general elections in June will have serious implications
for Turkey’s democracy, social peace and relations with minorities.
Senem Aslan is assistant professor in the Department of Politics at
Bates College. She is the author of “Nation-Building in Turkey and
Morocco: Governing Kurdish and Berber Dissent” (Cambridge University
Press, 2014).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/02/20/different-faces-of-turkish-islamic-nationalism/