Islam: Between Pacification and Mobilisation

In the field of ideology, the 1980 coup invested in and systematically propagated Kemalism – the ideology that the coup perpetrators used to legitimise the suspension of multiparty democracy. This shallow version of Kemalism, premised primarily on the idolisation of Mustafa Kemal’s personality and authority, became ubiquitous throughout the country, without however interfacing with the actual challenges faced by Turkish society (Göçek 2011:31). To complement its ideological armour and to shield the country from the ‘communist menace’, which the coup leadership identified as one of the enemies of ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’, the National Security Council governing the country saw in Islam the potential to provide the legitimacy it needed, and to counter the left’s popularity among the youth who, they believed, had led the country into chaos in the second half of the 1970s. General Kenan Evren, the coup protagonist, was reported to suggest that the ‘rational’ Turkish Islam he wanted to propagate would be ‘an element in the service of the nation and nationalism’ and not in competition with either secularism or nationalism’; open to Western modernity and change and compatible to the secularism underpinning the Republic, it could buttress the Turkish state and society against Kurdish separatism and Marxism, which he considered to be the threats that his coup would eliminate (Yavuz 2003:70).

Accordingly, article 1924 of the 1982 constitution made religious education compulsory in primary and secondary schools as a means of propagating their version of a Turkish–Islamic Synthesis and instilling conservative values among the youth (Bora and Can 1999:174–5; Üstel 2004:290). The Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs) embarked on a mosque-building programme (Morris 2005:73), and was reorganised in order to play a role in a campaign to propagate the regime’s ideology and its version of Islam as a factor of societal and national cohesion especially in the southeast, where Kurdish separatism and the Kurdish left were seen as representing threats to the unity of Turkey (Yavuz 2003:70). The importance of, and new role attributed to Islam after the 1980 coup is even more obvious if one takes into account the expansion of religious television programmes, and the massive expansion of Imam Hatip schools and the recognition of their status as avenues to employment in the public sector (Baran 2010:36).

‘Rekindling’ a Flame Long Gone

The death of the Eternal Chief, as Atatürk was posthumously designated, as already pointed out, created a gap in the Republic’s political system, as it removed one of the pillars that bestowed on it the effects of his auctoritas, derived from his charisma and his privileged relationship with ‘the people’, within the political elite and in the country at large. The republican elite, partly in order to endow itself, the party and the Republic’s institutions with the auctoritas of the late president, planned the transition in ways that would allow it to emphasise the inextricable links connecting Atatürk, the state and the CHP. In strictly ritualistic terms, Atatürk was celebrated and commemorated, not only as the deceased President of the Republic, but also as the lost father of ‘the people’. The mourning mood of the sober ceremonies was reflected in the press coverage of Gazi’s passing and the popular reaction to it. Atatürk’s body lay in state in Dolmabahçe Palace flanked by three high torches at each side symbolising the six pillars of Kemalist ideology. There, over three days, thousands of mourners paid their respects (Hürriyet, 10 November 1998) and, after a religious funeral closed to the public, Atatürk’s body was transferred with military honours to a special funeral train awaiting it at İzmit, whence it completed its land trip to Ankara, where it was greeted by his successor, İsmet İnönü, and other high-ranking government officials amid widespread demonstrations of grief and mourning (Zürcher 2017:185).

İsmet İnönü, elected as president the day after Atatürk’s death thanks to support from CHP hardliners and the Turkish military, and as CHP leader at an extraordinary party congress in December 1938, was designated Permanent Party Chairman and, to ensure that the continuity of leadership of the party and the state became visible to the public, he was proclaimed National Chief (Millî Şef ), a title used for Atatürk in the 1930s. In that congress, Mustafa Kemal was designated the ‘eternal party chairman’, in an attempt to stress that his legacy was being kept alive in the CHP. İnönü made clear that his predecessor’s basic policies would be left intact, as would the guiding principles of Kemalism. The Republic claimed the unbroken continuity between the Atatürk era and the uncertain times whose arrival had been marked by his death.

The Notion of ‘The People’

The use notion of ‘the people’ in the discourse of the social sciences is indeed one that has eluded consensus. Distinctions between ‘the serious’ and ‘the popular’ in, say, aesthetics and cultural studies, have for a long time informed connotations of a lowbrow, naïve or shallow quality for the products of popular creativity. The ‘serious/popular’ dichotomy sustained a series of other distinctions: ‘the people’ were distinguished from the elites, and, by extension, their more ‘refined’ tastes and cultural production, their more serious predispositions. As Derrida suggests, meaning is often defined in terms of binary oppositions, where ‘one of the two terms governs the other’; integrated in such binary schemata, concepts are categorised and hierarchised (Derrida 1992:41). Thus, to return to the fields of cultural studies and aesthetics where ‘the people’ became the subject of contestation and debate, the notion of ‘the popular’ became one of the central preoccupations for members of the Frankfurt School, mainly in the context of what was then referred to as ‘mass culture’, or the culture industry. In the work of Horkheimer and Adorno (1944), ‘the popular’ was often approached as a field comprising practices, ideologies and cultural products that debased the masses, or even flattered their ‘shallowness’. Dismayed at the state of mass culture, and equating it with popular culture, they produced a very pessimistic account of how ordinary people became passive consumers of culture industry products.

Standing on Precarious Divides

At a time when the term ‘populism’ is used indiscriminately to describe an array of phenomena that characterise contemporary politics, from authoritarianism to nativist politics and charismatic leadership, to forms of collective action such as the Occupy movement, or the Tahrir Square and the Gezi protests, developing an understanding of the concept that retains its theoretical and analytical utility and that provides us with the tools to demarcate populism from other forms of mobilisations and politics is paramount. In this book I attempted to ground the particular case of Turkey in socialhistorical terms as I have argued that current sociopolitical constellations also have a historical dimension in social memory, historically conditioned emotional economies and repertoires of action and discourse.

In the preceding pages I suggested that ‘the Turkish nation’ and ‘the people’ were born in response to a state of ontological insecurity. The diverse population of an imploding homeland whose territory was coveted by numerous suitors was forced literally to make up its mind on fundamental issues of identity that would determine the future, wellbeing and security of generations, and often go against the grain of vernacular traditions, profane and sacred alike. I used the term ‘forced’, as becoming Turkish was not a matter of a long-durée process that might entail encounters with relative strangers, cultural and political convergences or less abrupt and violent processes of assimilation. It was also forced as the population was made to ‘choose’, to support an unclear project, by a humiliated yet ambitious elite believing it had a mission to build a new nation. Although the nation-building enterprise was by no means planned in detail, it was nevertheless inspired by the project of Turkism espoused by the CUP, which steered the Ottoman Empire to its defeat. The imperative of building and consolidating a strong modern nation state and the negative experience of Ottoman experiments with parliamentary politics tilted the balance decisively to a project of selective modernisation from above. This envisaged the establishment of formally democratic, but in essence authoritarian, political institutions that would safeguard the unity and modernisation of Turkey.

‘The People’ as an Empty Signifier

As the Ottoman Empire was about to capitulate at the end of the First World War, the forces that would eventually form the National Movement represented themselves as campaigning against and making up for the Empire’s legitimacy deficit. Having their intellectual and many of their activist roots in the Young Turk movement, they were motivated by the same drive to ‘empower’ the Turkish national community in an empire that had granted constitutional equality to other ethnic groups and enabled them to pursue their own national goals at the expense of the Turkish nation. In this context, the National Movement, just like its contemporary movements, did indeed challenge the traditional foundations of authority that underpinned the ancient regime, and invested itself with the aura of popular consent (see Jenkins and Sofos 1996:10–11).

What can be said about the National Movement in particular, and Turkish nationalism at the end of the First World War in general, was that its ideology and politics were characterised by fluidity and ambiguity. As I argued in Chapter 3, leaving aside the underlying, yet widely shared, foundational belief that the Christian population of the territories that were included in the National Pact (Misak-ı Millî) and, eventually the territories that were ceded to the Turkish state in the treaties of Lausanne and Kars, were at best ‘minorities’ and, at worst, unworthy of citizenship, the political project of privileging Turkishness and subsuming in it all other alternative and potentially competing identities coexisted with a more open conception of the nation that acknowledged, and on occasion formally recognised. diversity among the Muslim peoples of the emergent Republic, their cultures and the ways they were organised. The various disagreements in the National Assembly over the nomenclature that would apply to ‘the people’ of the Republic were indicative of both the nationalist project’s not yet closed character and also the precariousness of its legitimacy, and where that rested.

These ambiguities notwithstanding, the National Movement claimed to be expressing the will of ‘the people’ of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and eventually of the territories of Anatolia and Thrace, that would become republican Turkey. Long before Mustafa Kemal described the Turkish state as ‘populist’ in 1931, in an effort to afford it legitimacy, the National Movement was claiming to be acting in the name of ‘the people’.

Introduction: Between Empire and Republic

The transition from the Ottoman state to the new Turkish Republic, between roughly the end of 1919 and the formal establishment of the Turkish state on 29 October 1923, was a complex process of trial and error. The nationalist officers and the bureaucratic middle class that led the process, apart from their overarching agreement on the goal of creating a modern nation state that would be free of the inertia and shortcomings of its Ottoman predecessor, were not unanimous in the detail of their vision. Even the fundamental specificities of what the new nation state would look like in its territory, population composition and identity were not clear – the key actors in the search for a post-imperial order had different views on who the people of this new state would be, and what would be the elements that would bring them together and inspire loyalty and a sense of patriotism. Identification, during this time of transition to political modernity in the former Ottoman sphere, was a fluid and quite often complex process, riddled with contradictions that would ultimately be suppressed with the ascendance of nationalism in general in the territories of the Empire, and the establishment of hegemonic nationalisms including Turkish or Arab ones in particular, in due course.

This is, to be fair, not unique to the post-Ottoman space. As Billig suggests in his discussion of the imagination of nationhood (1995:74–7), contradictory themes, definitions and understandings can coexist within the same experiential framework and context of continuous interaction and negotiation that makes possible, sustains and reproduces social action systems. Some of these key actors remained deliberately vague as to these details as they were aware of the enormity of the task of bringing the pieces of the linguistic, ethnic and religious mosaic of the territories of the Empire that they could salvage, and forging out of them a cohesive nation that would not be susceptible to the pull of centrifugal forces that alternative, competing nationalisms represented and, more importantly, that would be willing to fight for their new motherland. This explains the ambiguity, and even diglossia, of the leadership of the nationalist movement at a time when it seemed that the mobilising force of religion, and of identities other than the Turkish, were greater than an appeal to a clearly defined nation.

‘Othering’ and Turkishness

As already discussed in the preceding pages, leading nationalist figures, including Mustafa Kemal himself and İsmet Paşa (İnönü), followed the European imagination of modernity in establishing a ‘secular’ nation state, where the diverse Muslim populations were racialised under the single category, ‘Turk’. The founders of the Republic made clear on numerous occasions, especially after the turning point of 1925, that the Republic they envisaged would be a Republic for its Turkish citizens. The annihilation of the Armenian population and forced exchange of Greek Orthodox Christians with Greek Muslims were two critical events that contributed to the ‘post‐Ottoman’ realisation of Turkey’s image as an ethno‐sectarian state for non‐Arabic‐speaking Ottoman Muslims.

The tolerance of diversity that was exhibited during the War of Independence, and the references to an (at least internally) diverse Muslim ‘people’, had run their course and outlived their utility. As the new state had acquired international recognition through the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, the republican elites felt that they were given a free hand to work towards the creation of a strong unitary state based on an ethnically homogeneous ‘people’. Alternative identities were thus seen as an aberration, with the potential to undermine the unity of the nation they sought to construct. In May 1925, Prime Minister İsmet Paşa, addressing an audience of schoolteachers, expressed clearly the aspiration to create a monolithic (yekpâre) state:

In his address, İsmet Paşa admits that the Turkish nation is in a state of incompleteness and lacks maturity, and suggests that its maturation relies on the eventual prevalence of Turkish culture over all alternatives, which must dissolve as a result of a considerable intellectual and cultural effort.