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THE AKP AND TURKEY'S LONG TRADITION OF ISLAMO-FASCISM
March 5, 2015
By Toni Alaranta
Turkish Americans in Washington, DC rally on Sunday, June 16, 2013
to show support for their countrymen protesting government repression
in Istanbul. In the previous two days, hundreds of police raided Gezi
Park and Taksim Square.
Those who claim that democracy in Turkey has been handicapped because
of the repressive "Kemalist" regime overlook that the conservative
right has totally dominated Turkish politics. It is the traditions of
the Turkish right that need to be scrutinized in the search for the
matrix of current undemocratic practices. The Turkish Islamist poet
and political ideologue Necip Fazıl Kısakurek is a key figure in
this context. He propagated for a totalitarian Islamist-fascist regime
in Turkey, to be ruled by an Islamic version of a Fuhrer. And today
representatives of the AKP point out that understanding Kısakurek
is a precondition to understand the great "cause" ("dava") that the
AKP represents.
BACKGROUND: To make the claim that Turkey's governing Justice and
Development Party (AKP) would have anything to do with "Islamic
fascism" at first appears astonishing. This is, after all, a party
that was for many years defined - by itself and by sympathetic
observers in the West - as the Turkish equivalent to Western
conservative-democratic parties. The dominant scholarship on modern
Turkey has for several decades produced an image of an authoritarian
and even fascist Kemalist regime that was ended by the "democratic"
Muslims of the AKP. Two fundamental mistakes have thus been committed:
one concerns the nature of the regime that the AKP replaced and the
second is about the nature of the Islamists.
The narrative peddled by the AKP and its supporters is that the party
has ushered in democracy by putting an end to what is portrayed as a
regime run by elitist Kemalists, Westernizers who were alien to the
culture of their own country, and who for eighty years supposedly
suppressed the Anatolian conservative Muslims; and these latter are
taken to be the sole and legitimate expression of the popular will.
That there was such a wide expectation that the AKP would indeed
usher in pluralist, liberal values and democratization in Turkey
was to a considerable degree based on the Turkish liberals' role in
legitimating the party as the "voice of the oppressed." From their
chairs in prestigious universities, for nearly two decades, liberal
Turkish academics drummed in the message of how the awful "Kemalist
state" was repressing and harassing pious Muslims. In doing this,
they uncritically - and certainly very usefully - reproduced and
transmitted the most emotionally powerful narrative trope used by
the Turkish Islamist movement.
In reality, a "Kemalist state" has not existed in Turkey since the
end of the Republican
People's Party's (CHP) one-party regime in 1950. With the coming
to power of the conservative Democrat Party at that date, the
Turkish regime ceased to be based on the idea of radical and
utopian modernization; from then on, it has effectively been a
nationalist-conservative regime that has made considerable use
of religious symbols and themes. In this sense the "normalization"
process attached to the AKP was consummated already during the 1950s,
when, in the words of British scholar David McDowall, the Democrat
Party government "assisted the revival of traditional Islamic values
at the heart of the state."
Secondly, the notion of conservative Anatolian Muslims as a "natural"
force that would compel the authoritarian Turkish state to democratize
represents an enormous misrepresentation of the Turkish socio-political
reality. The tradition of Turkish conservative and Islamist parties
is fundamentally undemocratic. If one scratches the surface of the
AKP's ideological background, it becomes clear that the party's
agenda is deeply undemocratic. The only major difference between the
current AKP and the previous Islamist parties is that the AKP has
learned to adjust its economic policies to the global free market
regime. Through economic liberalization, inaugurated by Turgut Ozal,
prime minister and later president, during the 1980s the Anatolian
conservative middle class was integrated to the global economy.
IMPLICATIONS: Those who claim that democracy in Turkey has been
handicapped because of the repressive "Kemalist" regime somehow manage
to overlook that the conservative right has totally dominated Turkish
politics; it is the traditions of the Turkish right that need to
be scrutinized in the search for the matrix of current undemocratic
practices.
The AKP is in fact a large ideological coalition that has absorbed both
the nationalist-conservative tradition - represented by conservatives
like Adnan Menderes, Suleyman Demirel and Turgut Ozal - and the
Islamist tradition that was led by Necmettin Erbakan from the early
1970s to the 1990s. In addition, the AKP until recently collaborated
with the movement of Fethullah Gulen, the leading "civil society"
component of the Turkish Islamist movement.
Ali Bulac, who is one of the leading intellectuals within the Gulenist
camp, has pointed out that the "political" (AKP and previously the
Islamist "National Outlook" parties) and the "cultural" (in particular
the Gulen movement) components of Turkey's Islamist movement share a
common ideological background. This common background is the Ä°ttihad-i
Muhammedi Fırkası (Islamic Union Party) established in 1909, during
the Second Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire. According to
Bulac, it was within the ranks of this party that Turkish first modern
Islamic intellectuals emerged, and they have provided the intellectual
basis for both the "political" and the "cultural" manifestations of
the Islamic movement.
When one takes a thorough view on the dominant articulation of
the religious and conservative constituency from the 1950s to the
contemporary AKP, there is nothing that points towards genuine
pluralism. The Islamist-conservative poet and political ideologue
Necip Fazıl Kısakurek (1904-1983) is in many ways a key figure
in this context, and his writings are revealing. Kısakurek is the
esteemed partisan of both Turkish nationalist-conservative and Islamist
circles. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan especially admires Kısakurek,
often reciting his poems in public. Indeed, several representatives
of the AKP have stated that understanding Kısakurek is a precondition
to understand the great "cause" ("dava") that the AKP represents.
However, the admiration expressed for Kısakurek is ill-boding:
he never hid that he hated parliamentary democracy.
Political scientist Taner Timur has recently noted that Kısakurek was
not only a poet but an ideologue who propagated for the introduction
of a totalitarian Islamist-fascist regime in Turkey, to be ruled by
an Islamic version of a Fuhrer, that is, a "supreme leader" (called
"BaÅ~_yuce").
Erdogan is yet to implement Kısakurek's program in detail; but his
attempt to establish presidential rule and the way the majority's
Sunni Islamic faith is increasingly presented as the only legitimate
expression of the national will is worryingly well in line with
Kısakurek's blueprint for an Islamic-fascist regime.
During the 1950s, Kısakurek published his articles in the magazine
Buyuk Dogu (Great East), in which he called for the banning of CHP,
the Republican People's Party. It is thus noteworthy that Erdogan,
who has made such an enormous issue about the "Kemalists" always
supporting party closures, himself admires a man who called for the
banning the political organization of his opponents.
Kısakurek's writings offer keen insights into the way the Turkish
Islamists relate to a notion such as freedom. According to Kısakurek,
freedom is not a goal, but a tool, because a human being is not free
in that sense: a dog and a donkey are free, but a human being is
made by his Creator and thus above a mere nature and its meaningless
"freedom." The Turkish Islamists have not in any way abandoned the
basic idea according to which a human being is not "free": according to
the ideological worldview of Islamists, the kind of freedom espoused
by European Enlightenment - within which man measures all things by
solely depending on his rational mind - is a perversion.
Also those who are deemed "moderate" share this worldview.
When key AKP figures speak about their mission, to build a "New
Turkey" and to "close a hundred year old parenthesis" - as Prime
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has recently said - they refer not only
to the Young Turk and Kemalist Westernization project, but to the
whole of the modernization project that started in the Ottoman
Empire in the latter part of the 18th century. There is a telling
statement in this respect in Kısakurek's key work İdeolocya Orgusu,
("Plait of Ideology," published in 1977): "Ever since the Tanzimat
[the "Reorganization" reforms of the beginning of the 19th century],
the ongoing artificial reforms, and the artificial heroes produced
by these reforms, have been the main problem obstructing our cause."
Also the highly emotional discourse which makes a radical distinction
between the elitist, westernized so called "white Turks" and the
supposedly "real" and "authentic" nation composed of so called
"black Turks," which has been widely disseminated by AKP and its
partisans in pro-government think tanks and media, emanates directly
from Kısakurek.
CONCLUSIONS: The earlier assumptions about the AKP - that the party's
political mission and ideology is to produce and disseminate a
"healthy synthesis" of Western political thinking and Islamic
religious-political traditions - were deeply flawed. From the
İttihad-i Muhammedi Fırkası to Necip Fazil Kısakurek and the
current AKP, the Turkish Islamist tradition selectively utilizes
Western political concepts, but ultimately its purpose is to reject
them in order to rebuild an allegedly more superior and legitimate,
"authentic" Islamic socio-political order.
The AKP is a deeply anti-western political movement. It does not aim
to "correct" or "normalize" past "excesses" but to annihilate the
republican and Ottoman secularizing-westernizing reforms altogether.
Unlike in previous decades, the Turkish Islamic movement has now made
its peace with the state - by totally conquering it. President Erdogan
did not suddenly change from a genuine democrat to an authoritarian
Islamist: the ideological and organizational matrix of the AKP is
deeply undemocratic.
Toni Alaranta, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow at the Finnish
Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of the forthcoming
book National and State Identity in Turkey: The Transformation of the
Republic's Status in the International System (Rowman & Littlefield,
2015). His previous publications include Contemporary Kemalism:
>From Universal Secular-Humanism to Extreme Turkish Nationalism
(Routledge, 2014).
The Turkey Analyst http://www.horizonweekly.ca/news/details/62870
March 5, 2015
By Toni Alaranta
Turkish Americans in Washington, DC rally on Sunday, June 16, 2013
to show support for their countrymen protesting government repression
in Istanbul. In the previous two days, hundreds of police raided Gezi
Park and Taksim Square.
Those who claim that democracy in Turkey has been handicapped because
of the repressive "Kemalist" regime overlook that the conservative
right has totally dominated Turkish politics. It is the traditions of
the Turkish right that need to be scrutinized in the search for the
matrix of current undemocratic practices. The Turkish Islamist poet
and political ideologue Necip Fazıl Kısakurek is a key figure in
this context. He propagated for a totalitarian Islamist-fascist regime
in Turkey, to be ruled by an Islamic version of a Fuhrer. And today
representatives of the AKP point out that understanding Kısakurek
is a precondition to understand the great "cause" ("dava") that the
AKP represents.
BACKGROUND: To make the claim that Turkey's governing Justice and
Development Party (AKP) would have anything to do with "Islamic
fascism" at first appears astonishing. This is, after all, a party
that was for many years defined - by itself and by sympathetic
observers in the West - as the Turkish equivalent to Western
conservative-democratic parties. The dominant scholarship on modern
Turkey has for several decades produced an image of an authoritarian
and even fascist Kemalist regime that was ended by the "democratic"
Muslims of the AKP. Two fundamental mistakes have thus been committed:
one concerns the nature of the regime that the AKP replaced and the
second is about the nature of the Islamists.
The narrative peddled by the AKP and its supporters is that the party
has ushered in democracy by putting an end to what is portrayed as a
regime run by elitist Kemalists, Westernizers who were alien to the
culture of their own country, and who for eighty years supposedly
suppressed the Anatolian conservative Muslims; and these latter are
taken to be the sole and legitimate expression of the popular will.
That there was such a wide expectation that the AKP would indeed
usher in pluralist, liberal values and democratization in Turkey
was to a considerable degree based on the Turkish liberals' role in
legitimating the party as the "voice of the oppressed." From their
chairs in prestigious universities, for nearly two decades, liberal
Turkish academics drummed in the message of how the awful "Kemalist
state" was repressing and harassing pious Muslims. In doing this,
they uncritically - and certainly very usefully - reproduced and
transmitted the most emotionally powerful narrative trope used by
the Turkish Islamist movement.
In reality, a "Kemalist state" has not existed in Turkey since the
end of the Republican
People's Party's (CHP) one-party regime in 1950. With the coming
to power of the conservative Democrat Party at that date, the
Turkish regime ceased to be based on the idea of radical and
utopian modernization; from then on, it has effectively been a
nationalist-conservative regime that has made considerable use
of religious symbols and themes. In this sense the "normalization"
process attached to the AKP was consummated already during the 1950s,
when, in the words of British scholar David McDowall, the Democrat
Party government "assisted the revival of traditional Islamic values
at the heart of the state."
Secondly, the notion of conservative Anatolian Muslims as a "natural"
force that would compel the authoritarian Turkish state to democratize
represents an enormous misrepresentation of the Turkish socio-political
reality. The tradition of Turkish conservative and Islamist parties
is fundamentally undemocratic. If one scratches the surface of the
AKP's ideological background, it becomes clear that the party's
agenda is deeply undemocratic. The only major difference between the
current AKP and the previous Islamist parties is that the AKP has
learned to adjust its economic policies to the global free market
regime. Through economic liberalization, inaugurated by Turgut Ozal,
prime minister and later president, during the 1980s the Anatolian
conservative middle class was integrated to the global economy.
IMPLICATIONS: Those who claim that democracy in Turkey has been
handicapped because of the repressive "Kemalist" regime somehow manage
to overlook that the conservative right has totally dominated Turkish
politics; it is the traditions of the Turkish right that need to
be scrutinized in the search for the matrix of current undemocratic
practices.
The AKP is in fact a large ideological coalition that has absorbed both
the nationalist-conservative tradition - represented by conservatives
like Adnan Menderes, Suleyman Demirel and Turgut Ozal - and the
Islamist tradition that was led by Necmettin Erbakan from the early
1970s to the 1990s. In addition, the AKP until recently collaborated
with the movement of Fethullah Gulen, the leading "civil society"
component of the Turkish Islamist movement.
Ali Bulac, who is one of the leading intellectuals within the Gulenist
camp, has pointed out that the "political" (AKP and previously the
Islamist "National Outlook" parties) and the "cultural" (in particular
the Gulen movement) components of Turkey's Islamist movement share a
common ideological background. This common background is the Ä°ttihad-i
Muhammedi Fırkası (Islamic Union Party) established in 1909, during
the Second Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire. According to
Bulac, it was within the ranks of this party that Turkish first modern
Islamic intellectuals emerged, and they have provided the intellectual
basis for both the "political" and the "cultural" manifestations of
the Islamic movement.
When one takes a thorough view on the dominant articulation of
the religious and conservative constituency from the 1950s to the
contemporary AKP, there is nothing that points towards genuine
pluralism. The Islamist-conservative poet and political ideologue
Necip Fazıl Kısakurek (1904-1983) is in many ways a key figure
in this context, and his writings are revealing. Kısakurek is the
esteemed partisan of both Turkish nationalist-conservative and Islamist
circles. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan especially admires Kısakurek,
often reciting his poems in public. Indeed, several representatives
of the AKP have stated that understanding Kısakurek is a precondition
to understand the great "cause" ("dava") that the AKP represents.
However, the admiration expressed for Kısakurek is ill-boding:
he never hid that he hated parliamentary democracy.
Political scientist Taner Timur has recently noted that Kısakurek was
not only a poet but an ideologue who propagated for the introduction
of a totalitarian Islamist-fascist regime in Turkey, to be ruled by
an Islamic version of a Fuhrer, that is, a "supreme leader" (called
"BaÅ~_yuce").
Erdogan is yet to implement Kısakurek's program in detail; but his
attempt to establish presidential rule and the way the majority's
Sunni Islamic faith is increasingly presented as the only legitimate
expression of the national will is worryingly well in line with
Kısakurek's blueprint for an Islamic-fascist regime.
During the 1950s, Kısakurek published his articles in the magazine
Buyuk Dogu (Great East), in which he called for the banning of CHP,
the Republican People's Party. It is thus noteworthy that Erdogan,
who has made such an enormous issue about the "Kemalists" always
supporting party closures, himself admires a man who called for the
banning the political organization of his opponents.
Kısakurek's writings offer keen insights into the way the Turkish
Islamists relate to a notion such as freedom. According to Kısakurek,
freedom is not a goal, but a tool, because a human being is not free
in that sense: a dog and a donkey are free, but a human being is
made by his Creator and thus above a mere nature and its meaningless
"freedom." The Turkish Islamists have not in any way abandoned the
basic idea according to which a human being is not "free": according to
the ideological worldview of Islamists, the kind of freedom espoused
by European Enlightenment - within which man measures all things by
solely depending on his rational mind - is a perversion.
Also those who are deemed "moderate" share this worldview.
When key AKP figures speak about their mission, to build a "New
Turkey" and to "close a hundred year old parenthesis" - as Prime
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has recently said - they refer not only
to the Young Turk and Kemalist Westernization project, but to the
whole of the modernization project that started in the Ottoman
Empire in the latter part of the 18th century. There is a telling
statement in this respect in Kısakurek's key work İdeolocya Orgusu,
("Plait of Ideology," published in 1977): "Ever since the Tanzimat
[the "Reorganization" reforms of the beginning of the 19th century],
the ongoing artificial reforms, and the artificial heroes produced
by these reforms, have been the main problem obstructing our cause."
Also the highly emotional discourse which makes a radical distinction
between the elitist, westernized so called "white Turks" and the
supposedly "real" and "authentic" nation composed of so called
"black Turks," which has been widely disseminated by AKP and its
partisans in pro-government think tanks and media, emanates directly
from Kısakurek.
CONCLUSIONS: The earlier assumptions about the AKP - that the party's
political mission and ideology is to produce and disseminate a
"healthy synthesis" of Western political thinking and Islamic
religious-political traditions - were deeply flawed. From the
İttihad-i Muhammedi Fırkası to Necip Fazil Kısakurek and the
current AKP, the Turkish Islamist tradition selectively utilizes
Western political concepts, but ultimately its purpose is to reject
them in order to rebuild an allegedly more superior and legitimate,
"authentic" Islamic socio-political order.
The AKP is a deeply anti-western political movement. It does not aim
to "correct" or "normalize" past "excesses" but to annihilate the
republican and Ottoman secularizing-westernizing reforms altogether.
Unlike in previous decades, the Turkish Islamic movement has now made
its peace with the state - by totally conquering it. President Erdogan
did not suddenly change from a genuine democrat to an authoritarian
Islamist: the ideological and organizational matrix of the AKP is
deeply undemocratic.
Toni Alaranta, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow at the Finnish
Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of the forthcoming
book National and State Identity in Turkey: The Transformation of the
Republic's Status in the International System (Rowman & Littlefield,
2015). His previous publications include Contemporary Kemalism:
>From Universal Secular-Humanism to Extreme Turkish Nationalism
(Routledge, 2014).
The Turkey Analyst http://www.horizonweekly.ca/news/details/62870