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Different Faces Of Turkish Islamic Nationalism

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  • Different Faces Of Turkish Islamic Nationalism

    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/

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