This chapter scrutinizes the last resorts of the workers in the face of extreme exploitation and oppression. Although the organized labor movement declined with the state’s increasing power from the second half of the 1920s, this did not mean that the working-class protests, violence and even informal and spontaneous strikes in the form of walkouts ended. On the contrary, the working people resorted to more informal and individual daily strategies such as intimidation tactics, threats, fights and attacks when laborers felt exploited. It also examines collective protests and walkouts beyond the few well-known strikes of the time. This chapter shows that despite the lack of trade unions and organized movements, such methods were not inconclusive in negotiating working conditions and wages.

This chapter examines how the peasants who were discontented with the state policies, taxes, monopolies, local exploitation and oppression expressed their criticism and made their voices heard through letters to the press, petitions to official authorities, placards, rumors and folk culture. It traces the peasants’ complaints about agricultural prices, agricultural loans, interest rates, landlessness, taxes, monopolies, enclosure of forests and grazing lands, bureaucratic malfeasance, exploitation and oppression by large landowners, village headmen and gendarmes. It also evaluates how popular demands and complaints influenced the state’s decision-making.

First, this chapter analyzes the non-elite socialization places in which anti-secular opinions were produced and expressed such as mosques, Qur’an courses, houses and coffeehouses. It shows the people’s insistence on their religious practices by receiving secret Qur’an courses or by disobeying the Turkish call to prayer. Second, it outlines a wide range of ways people expressed their critical views, ranging from seditious conversations, rumors, placards and anonymous critical letters to authorities, to writing on walls, doors and trees. Third, this chapter examines the rhetoric and discursive strategies anti-secular talks used. Fourth, it reveals how those social groups or individuals who had lost their authority or economic advantages due to secular reforms or those people who were discontented with economic conditions took part in the production and dissemination of anti-secular and anti-regime discourses. This chapter also shows how the non-elite daily socialization places contested the state’s secular propaganda and socialization spaces such as People’s Houses and Rooms.

This chapter introduces the social, economic, political and cultural conditions of the working class. Industrial workers, artisans and wage earners in the service sector and low-income white collars and retirees constituted the largest proportion of the urban population. In contrast to the existing literature reducing the working class to factory workers, this chapter also covers all of these groups. It gives the backdrop against which they struggled. That is, this chapter describes how these groups experienced the social and economic policies and conditions of the first decades of the republic. This chapter especially underlines the low wages, problems with payments of salaries, paucity of social security measures, high cost of living and the urban masses’ material deprivation.

The republican rulers promoted positivism and tried to eliminate spiritual and traditional beliefs and practices by banning the systematic acts of visiting sacred tombs, faith healing, sorcery, Islamic tariqas, and sacred tombs. Besides, the new Civil Code, adopted in 1926 from the Swiss law, forbade polygamy and equated women with men. This chapter shows that despite this major legal reform and the government’s effort to eliminate existing spiritual and traditional beliefs and practices, the established ways of life and patterns of relations between men and women survived even in the big cities. This chapter also underlines the social and economic factors that underpinned the survival of these beliefs and practices.

The secularizing reforms of Turkey undoubtedly comprised one of the most comprehensive cultural reconstruction processes in world history. Both nationalist-secularist and critical accounts portray them as uncontested, uncompromising and top-down imposition. The role of Atatürk and republican intellectuals also cannot be denied. Partially for this reason, the literature about this period abounds with studies focusing primarily on the republican rulers, their ideological and political agenda and their legal and administrative changes. Owing to the splendor of the republic’s reforms, the implementation of the policies and people’s complex daily interactions with them have been generally underestimated. The projection of the later political rivalry between the RPP and the conservative-right parties in the historiography has reduced everything that happened during the early republic to a clash between secularism and religion. Works on opposition and protest tend to consider a few open uprisings and intellectual opposition as forms of resistance motivated solely by religious sentiments. Political Islamism especially enjoyed amplifying how Muslims and Islam were suppressed in this period.

The peasantry, which underwent a decline in developing countries, declined so slowly in Turkey that it persisted until the mid-1980s. As is well known, this was partially due to the structural limitations of Turkey’s industrialization and modernization. This part has revealed another important but lesser-known reason – that is, the peasants’ struggle to survive and the resulting social conflicts that further delayed the dissolution of the peasantry. Well aware of the unpopularity of the government, especially among the rural population, the decision makers tried to contain rural discontent through social and economic schemes as well as coercion. The result was the preservation of the peasantry and agriculture despite steady industrialization.

This chapter deals with the struggles of urban laborers to reappropriate their overexploited labor in everyday life. The historical studies on working-class politics during the early republic focused on the organizational, ideological working-class movements, strikes and open protests, mostly by industrial workers. Therefore, what happened in everyday life and in other segments of the working class has been ignored. This chapter reveals the forms of laborers’ struggles to seek their rights, to minimize their losses and to maximize their gains. Their ways to struggle varied from petitioning, suing and changing jobs to violating workplace rules by slowing down on the job, working perfunctorily, reducing work productivity and engaging in workplace theft. This chapter shows how the artisans, as the most neglected group in the republican working-class history, instead of submitting to the industry and importation, struggled for survival. Moreover, it also shows how all of these small and daily behaviors led to bigger consequences, which alarmed both employers and the government, causing them to consider social measures to ensure a stable and productive working class.

This chapter examines the working people’s critical opinions regarding social and economic matters ranging from poor wages, bad working conditions, bad treatment by employers, arbitrary firing, sexual harassment, work accidents and lack of social and job security due to the high cost of living. It shows how the working people in urban areas thought subjectively according to their interests rather than believing in the official propaganda, which depicted the Turkish nation as a “classless, harmonious, unified people.” It also surveys the ways the working people expressed their views and the discursive strategies they used to articulate and to legitimate their own complaints and demands.

This chapter has been structured around the question of the periodisation of the emergence of Kurdish nationalism and the Kurdish question in Iran. Raising the question of periodisation of the Kurdish question and politicisation of Kurdish national sentiment has been a precondition for understanding the background and reasons for the emergence of the Kurdish national movement. Identifying the root causes of the ongoing Iranian Kurdish question has required reflection on the contribution and impact of political and historical events with relevance to the emergence of Kurdish nationalism in earlier centuries (e.g. seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). In order to respond to and meet this requirement, studying the role of Kurdish intellectuals such as Ahmad Khani and Haji Qader Koyi in awaking Kurdish national sentiment and how this national self-understanding and self-image have been reflected through printed media have been the core elements of this chapter.

Chapter 9 takes a closer look at one of the book’s overarching themes, the relationship between faith and firepower. In the existing literature and the news media alike, much weight is given to the rhetoric Iranian leaders used during (and since) the Iran-Iraq War and the importance of faith and revolutionary fervor in understanding the Islamic Republic and its prosecution of the conflict. As this chapter demonstrates, the IRGC sources and Iran’s actions reveal a different story. By taking those as the basis of analysis, here the book illustrates that Iranian leaders prosecuted the war by relying on all the tools at their disposal, which included both faith—religious commitment, revolutionary ideology, and popular morale—and firepower—military professionalism, strategy, and weapons. In the second half of the chapter the theme of faith and firepower is utilized in another way, to examine how the Guards conceptualized the war in relation to Islam and the Iranian Revolution, and to demonstrate that they did so in order to expound the significance of the conflict.