Contextual and Conceptual Notes: Toward Understanding Mukaddesatçılık

Mukaddesatçılık is not an unknown word in Turkish intellectual space, yet it is usually juxtaposed alongside and conflated with conservatism, pietism, and nationalism without any serious attempt to distinguish these concepts. A probable reason for this unfortunate indifference has been the paradigmatic hegemony of secular-religious duality in analyses of Turkish society and politics.Footnote ¹¹ Scholarly inquiries espousing this duality rely on Şerif Mardin's classic center-periphery framework in which religiosity is an integral analytical component of analyzing the relationship between the elite and popular sectors from the Ottoman Empire throughout the republican era.Footnote ¹² Since the 1980s, it has been the prevalent framework for explaining the dynamics of Turkish society and politics, and often has been reduced to an essential cleavage between the secular center and the religious periphery.Footnote ¹³ The discourse on secular-religious duality has gone well beyond the realm of social science and become so hegemonic that politicians, pundits, and scholars alike often look on it as a natural outcome of Turkish modernization since its inception in the early 19th century.Footnote ¹⁴ Resting on this discourse, exponents of the emergent Muslim Turkish political identity made sense of political processes in Turkey, and the world at large, based on a strict in-group/out-group duality around religiosity.Footnote ¹⁵

The advent of modernization theory in the early Cold War era with its emphasis on secularization as a key dimension of modernization was the bulwark for the politicization of the secular-religious divide. Theories of modernization constructed a dichotomy between traditional and modern societies—designating a binary opposition between the secular (modern) and the religious (traditional).Footnote ¹⁶ Turkey represented a unique case for modernization theorists, because the country had already been following the steps to modernization, including the enforcement of French-inspired laicity from above to secularize the public sphere.Footnote ¹⁷ Therefore, Turkish political and intellectual space was all too ready for the political discourse of modernization with its vision of a secular-religious binary. Although sharing the secular-religious binary, Islam-inspired critics including Necip Fazıl Kısakürek rejected the singular vision of modernity offered by modernization theory. They argued for an alternative, Islamic modernity along with a new conception of Muslimness as an alternative way of being in the world. In so doing, they “counterintuitively contributed to a rigid Orientalist conception of Muslims as essentially different from the rest of humanity.”Footnote ¹⁸ Kısakürek and other Turkish Muslim intellectuals of the early Cold War such as Eşref Edib Fergan (1882–1971), Osman Yüksel Serdengeçti (1917–83), and Kadir Mısıroğlu (1933–2019) inherited the late imperial-era conception of a compartmentalized world along civilizational and racial lines.Footnote ¹⁹ More strikingly, based on this conception, they molded a distinct Muslim Turkish political identity as an alternative to the purportedly Westernized identity that modernizing founders of the republic offered. In other words, they refashioned this otherwise global discourse on Muslim identity to a local political contestation in their Islam-inspired resistance to modernization-as-Westernization. Mukaddesatçılık was the ideological fruit of the emergent Muslim Turkish political identity, responding to early Cold War discourse on modernization as secularization.

The emergence of mukaddesatçılık and Kısakürek's intervention into debates on modernization and Westernization in Turkey resonated very well with growing interests in national-religious revival and renewal at the onset of decolonization and the rise of postcolonial and anticolonial thought. Within the Muslim world, organizations such as the Ikhwan al-Muslimin in Egypt, Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, Fada'iyan-e Islam in Iran, and Hizb al-Tahrir in Palestine calling for an Islamic revival inspired by ideas of Islamist revivalist ideologues such as Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), Abul A'la Maududi (1903–79), and `Ali Shari`ati (1933–77) were founded around the time Kısakürek embarked on his self-imposed cause. Similar intellectual and political movements in other parts of the non-Western world also challenged Eurocentrism and the discourse of modernization—giving rise to a postcolonial discourse around vindication of indigenous identities and national revival.Footnote ²⁰ In this milieu, Kısakürek's mukaddesatçılık constructed a narrative of Turkish modernization, which associated secularization and Western-oriented modernization as the continuation of imperialist encroachments under a different guise.Footnote ²¹

Studying this ideological response from the perspective of the history of political thought necessitates reevaluating established concepts of the field. Mukaddesatçılık is a restorationist ideology informed by religious conservatism, but at the same time it is closely tied to the revivalist current epitomized by modern Islamist movements.Footnote ²² It concerns the status of Islam in Turkey and the modern world at large, but it is also nourished by Turkish nationalism.Footnote ²³ The peculiarities and significance of its locally relevant configuration of these diverse ideological currents make it almost impossible to characterize mukaddesatçılık by any single concept in the established vocabulary of the history of political thought. By taking the discursive particulars situated in the local context on their own terms, analyzing mukaddesatçılık will shed light on the varieties of Islamic thought in Turkey.

Moreover, the analysis of mukaddesatçılık, I contend, would still be inadequate without doing justice to the emotive element in the articulation of its critique of modernization. The embedded sense of ressentiment in especially the writings and speeches of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek played a formative role in this nascent ideological position in early Cold War Turkey. The growing literature on the political significance of emotions in other fields of political science and sociology notwithstanding, students of intellectual history and political thought may easily, and regrettably, neglect the role of emotions in the formation and salience of political ideologies.Footnote ²⁴ Drawing attention to “the role of emotion in shaping the semantics of political language,” Michael Freeden argues for the necessity of taking emotion into account “not just as an adjunct or as a performative act that has an incidental impact on political practices, but as a constituent element of the complex layers of meaning contained in political thinking.”Footnote ²⁵ Mukaddesatçılık was able to emerge, persist, and triumph in Turkish political space due to its ability to channel discontent with modernity and Turkish modernization into a sense of ressentiment. The resentful voice in Kısakürek's writings and speeches was especially formative in the communication of mukaddesatçı ideas and ideals. Furthermore, the expression of mukaddesatçılık through the language of ressentiment by supposedly authentic Muslim Turkish identity against the Western-minded modernizing elite distinguishes the ideology from mainstream conservatism. Against an elitist undertone easily noticed in conservative intellectuals such as Nurettin Topçu (1909–75), Mümtaz Turhan (1908–69), Samiha Ayverdi (1905–93), or Cemil Meriç (1916–87), Kısakürek's mukaddesatçılık drew heavily on a populist line associating the people with Muslim identity and the elite with secularism.

Introducing Necip Fazıl Kısakürek

Born in 1904 in Istanbul, Kısakürek was from a well-to-do Istanbul family of provincial origin.Footnote ²⁶ He received a decent primary and secondary education above the standards of late Ottoman society and was well read in both French and English. He attended the Naval School (Bahriye Mektebi), a prestigious school from which numerous intellectuals and literary men graduated, which heavily influenced Kısakürek's personality and intellectual career. Kısakürek started to become acquainted with the literary elite in Istanbul thanks to poems he started writing in high school. When he enrolled in the philosophy department of Istanbul University (Darülfünun) upon graduating from high school, he further developed his contacts with important figures in Turkish politics and intelligentsia such as Mustafa Şekip (Tunç), Peyami Safa, Yakup Kadri (Karaosmanoğlu), Falih Rıfkı (Atay), Hasan Âli (Yücel), Ahmet Kutsi (Tecer), and Ahmet Hamdi (Tanpınar). In 1924, soon after he began higher education, he was awarded the state scholarship to continue his studies at the Sorbonne University in Paris. After an unsuccessful year in France, however, his scholarship was revoked, and he was called back home. Kısakürek remembered his experience in Paris as a lost period in his life, confessing in different writings to having adopted a bohemian lifestyle and to a gambling addiction—which presumably continued even after he started to advocate an Islamic worldview.Footnote ²⁷ He did not pursue higher education upon returning Istanbul. Having left his higher education incomplete, Kısakürek started working in banks in Turkey to make a living, while maintaining his ties with intellectual and literary circles. His articles, essays, and poems appeared in prestigious newspapers and magazines, securing him a position within the Westernizing elite of the newly founded republic.Footnote ²⁸

During the early years of his life, Kısakürek was known for his poems reflecting a bohemian lifestyle and curiosity about spiritualist and mystical thought. Three autobiographical pieces he wrote presented these years as a period of protracted inquietude and a search for spiritual fulfillment to resolve the psychological and intellectual crises he claimed to experience.Footnote ²⁹ Suffering this melancholic mood, Kısakürek met a sufi shaykh in 1934 and gradually became a follower of the Naqshbandi order.Footnote ³⁰ His own narrative and the majority of existing studies about him depict this encounter as a life-changing moment that paved the way for Kısakürek to become the leading ideologue of Islamic revival in Turkey.Footnote ³¹ In a way, Kısakürek resolved the identity crisis he shared with the early republican intelligentsia by submitting himself to Islam and then invited his readers to do so as well. Nevertheless, following this shift, the early republican intelligentsia, including many of Kısakürek's close friends, distanced themselves from him. This was accompanied by a period in which Kısakürek was marked by the political elite as a dangerous reactionary and prosecuted for his writings after the 1940s. On the other hand, as an audacious man of letters who broke with Westernism and put his pen under the “service of Islam,” Kısakürek received great support from Islamist and Islamic conservative circles—especially from popular masses and youth with Islamic sensibilities. A key to his popular appeal was no doubt his ability to channel his own personal resentments toward the political and intellectual elite into a collective sense of ressentiment against the secular republic and Turkish modernization.

Kısakürek published many of his mukaddesatçı ideas and ideals in his Büyük Doğu (Great East) magazine that later became the banner of his lifelong ideological cause. When Kısakürek started publishing Büyük Doğu in 1943, the Turkish political and intellectual scene was not at all welcoming to Islamic-leaning activities in the public sphere—let alone a magazine espousing Islamic conservative, Ottomanist, and anti-Westernist views. Büyük Doğu was the pioneer of the republican era Islamic press, and was followed by a myriad of Islamic publications in early Cold War Turkey. Published with intervals until 1978, the magazine enjoyed great popularity among Islamic conservative circles and influenced Islamist, conservative, and nationalist youth. Kısakürek believed that Büyük Doğu was a harbinger for a mukaddesatçı generation which would save Turkey by reviving Islam, and which in turn would stir up the entire East, led by the Muslim world, against the encroachments of modern Western civilization. Kısakürek constantly reminded his audience in his writings and speeches that Büyük Doğu was the first voice in the Turkish intellectual space to raise an Islamic-inspired critique of Kemalism, Westernization, and secularism. Describing the early 1940s as a time when even the mentioning of Allah and morality was forbidden (Allah ve ahlak demenin yasak olduğu günler), he stated: “In 1943 the first Büyük Doğu appeared. This first Büyük Doğu produced a weak and stuttering sound. Iceberg [cumudiye]. . . . That was the age of the iceberg. There was no dirt, no cleaning. . . . Everything was frozen.”Footnote ³² For him, the voice of Büyük Doğu slowly but stubbornly melted that iceberg with the hope of carving out a diamond generation to actualize Kısakürek's aspirations. Not only the strength of his pen but also his gift of gab, if I may say, helped him convince his audience that he was the single most important figure promoting the “cause” (dava) of Islam in Turkey. Apart from his writings, mostly published in Büyük Doğu, Kısakürek delivered numerous speeches throughout Turkey, which broadened his sphere of influence and boosted his popularity.Footnote ³³

To realize his ambitions Kısakürek pursued political activity by creating his own political movement first and approaching different right-wing parties or their leaders later—albeit without finding what he sought.Footnote ³⁴ His adversaries frequently invoked Kısakürek's political oscillations as well as the inconsistencies between his own lifestyle and the Islamic way of life—as evidenced by his gambling while advocating for Islamic principles in political and social life in his writings—to cast doubt on the intellectual worth of his ideas. For many, he was not a dignified intellectual but a mere charlatan who pursued his own personal interests and benefits. In addition, the lack of consistency and identifiable source or effect of one or another philosophical current overshadows the quality of his political, philosophical, and historical writings. These critics of Kısakürek may be justified, given the lack of intellectual quality and consistency in his writings, yet they fall short of explaining his prominent position in the Turkish Islamic revival in the mid-20th century and his continuing reputation today. Especially young people with conservative and modest backgrounds who usually came from provincial towns to major urban centers for higher education in the 1960s and 1970s took Kısakürek as their üstad. These include not only litterateurs and intellectuals like Sezai Karakoç (1933–2021) and Rasim Özdenören (1940–2022) but also today's politicians and bureaucrats—all of whom consider Kısakürek the pioneer of the Turkish Islamic revival.Footnote ³⁵ Rather than offering a systematic body of ideas, Kısakürek appealed to the power of sentiments, emotions, and rhetoric to draw the attention of his audience. He skillfully communicated feelings even in his most philosophical writings and speeches. What made him the most prominent ideologue of the Turkish Islamic revival was his ability to give voice to the basic sentiments, in particular of the youth with Islamic sensibilities who have been Kısakürek's main audience.

Formation of Mukaddesatçılık in Cold War Turkey

Kısakürek's ideological transformation happened at a time, following the first two decades of the republican regime, when an Islamic-inspired counterculture had started stirring beneath the surface.Footnote ³⁶ The Republican People's Party (RPP) founded by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and his associates remained the single party in this period and carried out Westernizing reforms, including abolishment of the caliphate; full secularization of education; adoption of the Swiss civil code, Gregorian calendar, and Latin alphabet; and implementation of a Western-style dress code in the public sphere. Alienated by the new regime, the Islamic intelligentsia withdrew from the public sphere and remained silent until the 1940s. As early observers suggested, some form of Islamic-inspired movement would inevitably emerge in the public sphere, motivated by Muslims’ quest to be accepted publicly as Muslims. Yet it was Kısakürek, with his unique, outspoken personality and worldview, who first expressed this quest.

Kısakürek had a favorable context in which to commence his ideological campaign in the early 1940s. At the domestic level, Turkey made a transition to a multiparty political system in 1945 (seven years after the death of Atatürk). In this context, the then-ruling RPP dropped its strict secularist attitude from the single-party period to make sure that pious electorates would not shy away from the party. Despite its failure to draw support from conservative sectors, as the latter initially supported the Islamist-leaning Millet Partisi and later, increasingly with its political success, the liberal-conservative Democrat Party, the RPP strategy arguably gave way to a tolerant stance toward Islam on the part of the state.Footnote ³⁷ Second, at the international level, the Cold War context enabled Islamist and nationalist movements to speak out against the perceived threat of communist spread.Footnote ³⁸ At times, from the 1940s to the 1980s, actors from these movements, including Kısakürek, were tried and sentenced due to their alleged endorsements of violent activities or assaults on the founding principles of the republic.Footnote ³⁹ Yet, the political and intellectual activities of Islamists and nationalists were mostly tolerated and sometimes even supported by subsequent governments during this time period, to the extent that they helped counter leftist ideologies.Footnote ⁴⁰

Therefore, starting in the 1940s, Islam was instrumentalized in Turkey for politicians’ vote-maximization strategies and state security concerns. Islamists and religious conservatives, including Kısakürek, found an opportunity to flourish in this milieu and extended their support to right-wing politicians—expecting them to uphold their self-declared cause of reviving Islam and fighting communism. Representing nationalist and religious sentiments as antidotes to left-wing ideologies was the main strategy in this effort to draw support from the political elite. Kısakürek, in this regard, expressed this strategy in a 1962 speech he delivered at a private club in Istanbul entitled “Communism is Coming!”:

This remark, reflected in other outlets of the conservative press in early Cold War Turkey as well, was foremost a call for those in positions of power to give rein to the Islamic revivalist movement.Footnote ⁴² Dramatizing the strength of communism in Turkey, as the title indicates, Kısakürek sought the justification he might need to press his ideological agenda vis-à-vis state officials and politicians. The anti-communist setting in early Cold War Turkey was an opportune environment for Kısakürek to vilify, even demonize, secularism and Westernism, as well as the RPP as the embodiment of these ideals, by holding them accountable for the advent of leftist ideologies. Moreover, the supposed leftist threat favored his attempts to reconcile nationalist and Islamic sensibilities to arrive at mukaddesatçılık as a new ideological position.

The Politicization of the Secular-Religious Divide

Kısakürek's association of communism with the agents and supporters of the Western-oriented modernization process was a milestone in the development of mukaddesatçılık. Not unlike nationalists, nativists, and Islamists in other parts of the world, Kısakürek purported that communism was a hazardous product of the advent of secular Western modernity at the expense of the faith. The emergence of ideological positions in the context of the Cold War in Turkey helped Kısakürek to relate communism to secular modernization. In this milieu, the existing tension between secular republicans and religious conservatives in Turkey was not exactly replaced by a universal left-right distinction; rather, the former overlapped with the latter. As a group of Kemalist intellectuals associated the republican reforms and Atatürk's modernizing vision with left-leaning anti-imperialism, the RPP reorganized itself as a center-left party with a social democratic program. This ideological shift in Kemalist intellectuals and politicians further united nationalists, Islamists, and conservatives, including Kısakürek, against the RPP and secularism, which came to be seen as socialism or communism under a different guise. These Cold War developments gave Kısakürek leverage to identify secularism with the political left, which had been the chief enemy in the Turkish political landscape since the early years of the Cold War.

In associating communism with secularism and modernization, Kısakürek negated the agents of the Turkish modernization process who were, in his own words, “generations of unbelievers, rootless and characterless imitators who have oppressed Islam from outside the circle of faith for a hundred years with all their supporters [outside Turkey].”Footnote ⁴³ In his sui generis style, Kısakürek referred to, first, modernizing reformers and like-minded intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries; and second the founders of the republic who accelerated the modernization process, and adherents of a worldview based on the founding principles of the republic, that is, the Kemalists. For Kısakürek, agents of Turkish modernization acted as part of the political community and claimed to rejuvenate Turkey with their reformist and modernist policies and ideas. Characterizing them as “false heroes” (sahte kahramanlar), Kısakürek argued that modernist reformers were “the agents of hatred who emerged within ourselves from our own flesh and blood,” who sought the cure for the ills of the country by denying the Islamic roots of Turkish identity and imitating the West.Footnote ⁴⁴ Kısakürek further maintained that these “agents of hatred” had been actively supported by Western imperialism, the international Jewish community, and freemasonry—all of which he demonized conspicuously in his writings.Footnote ⁴⁵

In response to the discourse of modernization in the mid-20th century, Kısakürek constructed a historical account of the Turkish modernization process that was central to the formation of a Muslim Turkish political identity for people with Islamic and nationalistic sensibilities who felt alienated by the Western-oriented political identity offered by the republican regime. This alternative modernization narrative rested on an existential secular-religious divide and presented secular modernizers as the oppressors and religious conservatives as the oppressed.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thereby, century-long intellectual contestations on modernization in Turkey were reduced to an existential divide between indigenous Muslim Turkish identity on one side, and sell-out appendages of Western imperialism on the other. Featuring an essential clash between secular and Islamic worldviews akin to the Kulturkampf of late 19th-century Germany, Kısakürek's alternative historical account aimed to debase secularism and amplified consolidation of mukaddesatçılık.

Merging Turkish Nationalism with Islam

The aforementioned anti-communist speech of Kısakürek was also a recommendation to nationalists to reconcile under the umbrella of Islam and create a unified conservative-nationalist bloc against the left in Turkey. Already in the mid-20th century, there were nationalist and anti-communist associations within which nationalists, conservatives, and Islamists collaborated, including Kısakürek himself.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Cold War context forced these groups to cooperate against left-wing groups and the perceived communist threat. Although the use of nationalist themes by Islamic-oriented intellectuals might have been instrumental at the onset of the Cold War, in this process, Kısakürek and the like-minded intellectuals acquired a more nationalist outlook, and managed to infuse an Islamic tone into the Turkish nationalist movement.

Kısakürek's narrative on the constitution of Muslim Turkish identity hardly referred to the pre-Islamic Turkish history that Kısakürek associated with primitive social and political order and cultural backwardness. Pre-Islamic Turkish people were supposed to be energetic and warlike, yet they were unable to develop a proper and complex literature.Footnote ⁴⁸ As such, pre-Islamic Turkish history appeared as a period of immaturity to the emergent Turkish nation, almost akin to a prehistoric era. Against arguments for conceptions of Turkishness by secular and ethnic or racial nationalists without direct references to Islam, Kısakürek put forth that “if one is to talk about Turkishness, it is necessary to know that a Turk is a Turk only after he became a Muslim.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Kısakürek was particularly careful to highlight the pro-Islamic potential in certain variants of the Turkish nationalist movement at the time he delivered the 1962 speech quoted above, and rejected nationalism's secular variants by disparaging them as “recrement nationalism” (posa milliyetçiliği). He suggested that secular nationalists conceived Turkishness along exclusively ethnic or racial lines, which was supposed to denote the recrement (posa) of Turkish identity. For him, what gave Turkishness its “juice,” that is, essence (öz, keeping to his metaphor), was Islam. To solidify this metaphor Kısakürek registered his historical narrative, in which Islam brought dignity and civilized manners to the primitive nomadic Turks of the Central Asian steppes back in the 9th and 10th centuries. The Turks, after submitting themselves to Islam, immediately took up the cause of Islamic world domination with their dynamic combatant force.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this narrative, Muslim Turks since the high Middle Ages have been the carrier of the banner of Islam, and eventually the leader of the Muslim world with the acquisition of the caliphate by the Ottoman Empire in the early 16th century.

Alas, Kısakürek maintained, Islam's last caliphal center has become the focal point of its demise. Modernization movements and the eventual abolition of the caliphate in 1924 sealed this process. In Kısakürek's words, “everything was ruined here [in Turkey] and that ruined the whole Islamic world; now everything has to be regenerated here so that it can be regenerated elsewhere.”Footnote ⁵¹ Kısakürek, in fact, stretched the so-called Ottoman Islamic decline back to the 16th and 17th centuries when, for him, bigotry and fanaticism within the intellectual elite of Ottoman society led to the rejection of any technical and scientific development that did not fit into the framework of the Islamic shariʿa.Footnote ⁵² The only way to reverse the decline was to capture the true meaning of Islam, which Kısakürek himself claimed to do. Ottoman political elite since the Tanzimat edict of 1839, instead, had amplified the process of decline by resorting to carrying out reforms to Westernize Ottoman polity and society—therefore ruining everything for the Turks and for other Muslims. Although, according to Kısakürek, the Westernizing reforms had proved detrimental, they pointed out that true national rejuvenation was possible through the revival of Islam. Kısakürek's narrative was an all-out attack on secular strands of Turkish nationalism offered by Kemalism and the ethnic and racial nationalists of the early to the mid-20th century. It also appealed to irredentist and imperialist aspirations among Turkish nationalists by trying to convince them that it was the logical implication of the course of history that the sun of Islam should rise again where it had once set.Footnote ⁵³

Kısakürek had reasons for spending so much energy bringing Turkish nationalism to the cause of Islam in the mid-20th century. At the time, nationalism was still commonly associated with secular worldviews such as Kemalism, which claimed to create a modern Turkish nation out of subjects of a traditional empire, and pan-Turkism, which tended to define nationality along ethnic or racial lines.Footnote ⁵⁴ Moreover, both Kemalist and pan-Turkist nationalisms did not exclude Muslimness altogether from their conceptions of the nation. From the deportation of Armenians in Anatolia in 1915 to the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the late Ottoman and early republican political elite, whom Kısakürek associated with a hostile attitude toward Islam, arguably created a homogenous Muslim Turkish population in Anatolia. Despite their secularizing reforms, Muslimness was covertly included in the definition of Turkishness by the modernizing elite.Footnote ⁵⁵ Silencing the past of the non-Muslim population of Anatolia as well as their contributions to Ottoman Anatolian history as part of the official history narrative were other aspects of this covert association of Turkishness and Muslimness. Although homogenization of the Anatolian population and the official association of Turkishness and Muslimness were arguably conditions allowing for the possibility of Kısakürek's notion of Muslim Turkish national identity, he actively engaged in an intellectual struggle to represent Kemalist and pan-Turkist nationalisms as anti-Islamic for the sake of consistency in his narrative, which was based on a strict secular-religious duality.Footnote ⁵⁶

The Conception of Islam in Kısakürek's Mukaddesatçılık

Finally, the third intended recipient of Kısakürek's 1962 speech was his usual audience, namely people with Islamic sensibilities. The latter did not need to hear about Islam's potential to resist communism to maintain their allegiances to religion. However, for Kısakürek's purposes, these people with Islamic sensibilities were lacking the necessary motivation and mobilization to (re)assert Islam as “the most excellent of systems.” According to Kısakürek, earlier Muslim generations had been mere spectators of the decline and eventual demise of Turkish Islamic civilization over the last four hundred years. By failing to grasp the dynamic nature of Islam, he maintained, passive Muslim generations “have oppressed Islam from inside the circle of faith” by arresting the material and spiritual expansion of the Islamic community and hindering its ability to flourish.Footnote ⁵⁷ Therefore, Kısakürek invited the younger generations in particular to take a more active stance in the revival of Islam by restoring values and institutions based on Islamic faith, which had once elevated Turkish Islamic civilization to the level of a world empire. Kısakürek's mukaddesatçılık, as such, shared with the Islamist revivalist movement the call for political mobilization and activity as well as the contempt for earlier Muslim generations, who allegedly had a deformed and defunct faith in Islam.

Nevertheless, Kısakürek's tendency to revivalism was limited by the particular conception of Islam that his mukaddesatçılık featured. Kısakürek acknowledged that religion necessitated renewal (tecdid) every once in while through removal of bid'ah (harmful or unnecessary innovation in the realm of religion, bidat in Turkish). Renewal did not mean for Kısakürek amending the system of religious principles through ijtihād, that is, interpretation of primary Islamic sources to arrive at new conclusions that were not found in shariʿa. Kısakürek unequivocally rejected the possibility of ijtihād with justifications that manifested his conception of tradition.Footnote ⁵⁸ Kısakürek identified those who exercised ijtihāds as reformists (reformacılar) whether they embraced the idea of reform or not. For him, reformists were no less dangerous than earlier Muslim generations in “oppressing Islam from inside the circle of faith.” He targeted two new groups who had claimed authority on Islamic knowledge: graduates of Islamic institutes and divinity schools founded by the state; and Muslim intellectuals outside Turkey who influenced Turkish Islamism increasingly during and after the 1960s.Footnote ⁵⁹ These new technicians of Islamic knowledge often took the Qur'an and, to varying degrees, sunna as the primary sources of Islamic knowledge production. In doing so, they challenged the legitimacy of traditional authorities, the elders of Sunni orthodoxy and shaykhs of Naqshbandiyya, and argued for the right of each and every Muslim to interpret primary sources by employing historical and rational methods such as hermeneutics to arrive at new rules and prescriptions for various social settings or to create new political programs. Kısakürek, on the other hand, was concerned with protecting the status of traditional authorities over Islamic knowledge. As a known adherent of the Khalidi branch of the Naqshbandi order, he prioritized revelation and mystical intuition over reason and rational methods of interpretation.Footnote ⁶⁰ Kısakürek's writings against non-Turkish Islamist intellectuals as well as the graduates of Islamic institutes and theology faculties were a traditionalist reflex to the extent that the latter posed a threat to the status of traditional Islamic authorities by freely interpreting Islamic sources of knowledge.

Moreover, Kısakürek's rebuke of new interpretations of Islam aimed to preserve the supposed purity of Islam from the possible influence of external ideational forces, notably competing political ideologies in the context of the Cold War. The foremost target of this concern over purity was socialistic interpretations of Islam. Presumably inspired by Marxist socialists in the Cold War context, Islamic intellectual circles beginning in the 1960s were increasingly interested in the idea of social justice. People, especially the youth, with Islamist sensibilities in Turkey became familiar with the idea that primary Islamic sources of knowledge, the Qur'an and sunna, could be read and interpreted to derive new principles for social and political processes—for instance, upholding the cause of social justice that had hitherto been the concern of the left—mostly through the writings of Islamist intellectuals outside Turkey.Footnote ⁶¹ Kısakürek saw this new wave of Islamism that opened Islamic sources to interpretation for the cause of social justice as an effort to find a rapprochement between Islam and socialism.Footnote ⁶² He treated tendencies to merge Islam and other political ideologies with a strictly rejective mentality, because he believed that Islam alone stood as a perfect ideology (“the most excellent of systems”), commanding all aspects of life.Footnote ⁶³ Kısakürek was convinced that Islam was a total and dynamic system, and that the political system based on Islamic ideology did not need any reference to other ideologies, which could only lead to deformation of the faith.

All in all, against the backdrop of the Cold War and the Turkish political landscape, mukaddesatçılık was, at the outset, an anti-communist ideology constructed alongside the exigencies of early Cold War Turkey. Kısakürek played a crucial role in shaping Turkish anti-communism as an Islam-based movement against not only Western ideologies but also different trends within the global Islamic intellectual space. Kısakürek's mukaddesatçılık aimed to draw the boundaries of Islam by rejecting representatives of modern Islamic thought and the idea of international Islamism—in the context of the declining appeal of secular nationalism throughout the Islamic world and the rising popularity of Muslim internationalist movements such as the Ikhwan al-Muslimin and Jamaat-e-Islami. Instead, mukaddesatçılık drew on a traditionalist conception of Islam that was fused with Turkish nationalist themes to speak to social sectors and intellectual circles that felt alienated by Turkish modernization and disempowered by its outcomes. It became the ideology of their discontent as well as their will-to-power.Footnote ⁶⁴ Kısakürek, in formulating mukaddesatçılık, not only brought these sectors together by reconciling elements of religious conservatism, Islamist revivalism, and nationalism, he also interwove this ideological struggle with existing sentiments of alienation and resentment.

Kısakürek's Mukaddesatçılık as an Ideology of Ressentiment

Although he had been a member of the secular republican elite until his thirties, Kısakürek admirably captured the sense of alienation among people with Islamic sensibilities. The latter found in Kısakürek's raging voice, especially in his poems, the refined expression of ressentiment against anyone who was supposedly responsible for the sufferings of Muslim Turks. In one of his most popular poems, “Sakarya Ballad” (Sakarya Türküsü), Kısakürek reflected both the sense of alienation and the quest for retribution. Addressing the Muslim Turk, one of the most-cited lines of the poem reads, “You are a stranger in your homeland, a pariah in your own country” (Öz yurdunda garipsin, öz vatanında parya). The line powerfully expressed Islamists’ perception of losing the ground beneath their feet during the process of modernization. The carefully employed wording captured the sense shared by people with Islamic sensibilities that their country was being taken over by an alien force, reducing them to the status of pariahs. Better still, Kısakürek finished the poem with another oft-cited line reflecting a moment of expected salvation. Likening the pious Muslim Turk to the Sakarya River of central Anatolia, he wrote, “You have crawled face down for so long, stand up Sakarya” (Yüzüstü çok süründün ayağa kalk Sakarya). Addressing mainly young people from the lower middle class who aspired to upward mobility through higher education, Kısakürek's usual audience, he referred to their Muslim identity as the cause of their suffering the sense of alienation and disempowerment.Footnote ⁶⁵ In so doing, Kısakürek diverted the socioeconomic problems of his audience into an identitarian struggle, and channeled their rage with his own ideological struggle.Footnote ⁶⁶ He called upon people with Islamic sensibilities to regain their self-confidence and reclaim their country, which was supposedly being taken away from them. These emotive emphases nourished the sense of ressentiment among the youth and the popular masses and helped Kısakürek infuse his audience with mukaddesatçı ideas.

Following Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, ressentiment has become an analytical concept used to understand various social movements, political developments, and ideologies.Footnote ⁶⁷ Notably, Max Scheler has described ressentiment as a characteristic of modern society in which equality is cherished as a value and an ideal without ever being satisfied due to existing economic and political power hierarchies.Footnote ⁶⁸ Three characteristics of ressentiment should be emphasized to connect it to Kısakürek’s mukaddesatçı ideology. First, in their relationship to the external world, resentful subjects egocentrically conceive their needs and aspirations as rights. According to Menno Ter Braak, “the distance between that right to everything and the factual possession of little is experienced more as an injustice,” which appears as a necessary condition for ressentiment.Footnote ⁶⁹ Second, the feeling of injustice or unjust humiliation leads to growing hatred in those who are unable to act upon the perceived injustice. Instead, resentful subjects exalt their grievance, which becomes the very purpose of their existence.Footnote ⁷⁰ Finally, the chronic resentment against a purportedly privileged person or a group of people responsible for the existing injustice turns into an unrelieved quest for revenge against that person or group who stands as the enemy.Footnote ⁷¹ Kısakürek’s mukaddesatçılık reflects all three characteristics of ressentiment.

Kısakürek was particularly adept at articulating a Muslim's right to everything—the first point in the analysis of ressentiment above. He referred to, for instance, “the right to stand against Communism,” which was supposed to belong to Islam instead of other ideologies, as in his above-quoted anti-communist speech. His writings abound with similar examples of incidents illustrating how the Muslim's rights have been unjustly taken away: “the right to comprehend [knowledge of] the West,” instead of Western-minded modernizers of Turkey and their followers; “the right to accomplish the Renaissance,” instead of Europeans; or “the right to lay claim to Jesus,” instead of Christians.Footnote ⁷² In these instances, Kısakürek liberally compared Islam with other religions (or Muslims with non-Muslims) as well as other political doctrines, worldviews, and identities, without explaining the terms of comparison.

A rather concrete and politically relevant example of Kısakürek's articulation of the Muslim's right to everything was his remark on the status of Cyprus during the heyday of the conflict in the 1960s, when he employed the same righteous claim without any attempt to substantiate his point. For him, despite the simple fact that “the sword of Islam once conquered Cyprus, no one [from the Turkish side during deliberations over the people of the island] could say that [Cyprus] was our soul's right; instead, everyone tried to ground their arguments on some historical facts.”Footnote ⁷³ Again, a self-ascribed right (this time to Cyprus) comes before the historical and structural factors leading to the conflict or the island's demographics. Kısakürek suggested that the right attitude regarding the Cyprus question was to claim the island in the name of Islam, because its conquest by the caliphal state in the 7th century sufficed to pronounce it a Muslim possession. He found the inability of Turkish Muslims to make this claim humiliating.

Perhaps, for Kısakürek and other mukaddesatçı intellectuals, no other example could better demonstrate the feeling of injustice and humiliation than the case of Ayasofya. For Kısakürek, changing the status of Ayasofya to a museum in 1934 was an appalling decision taken by “a coterie of infidels” who were only ostensibly Turkish (adı Türk, küfür tip ve zümreleri). The conversion of Ayasofya into a mosque in the 15th century was the conqueror's (Mehmed II) rightful decision and his single most important legacy; after all, it had been a symbol of Muslim sovereignty over Istanbul and Turkey at large.Footnote ⁷⁴ Ayasofya's new status as a museum was a source of humiliation and alienation, because it was a sign of outright rejection of Ottoman Islamic heritage and Muslim identity, which for mukaddesatçı intellectuals were the defining characteristics of Turkey.

Kısakürek's 1965 speech delivered at a meeting of the National Turkish Students Union (Milli Türk Talebe Birliği) addressed the sense of humiliation caused by the decision to convert Ayasofya into a museum. Although his efforts to draw his audience's attention to the status of Ayasofya frequently recurred in his corpus, this speech was exclusively about the issue. He incited the grievance of his audience against the perpetrators of the decision and finished his speech with a prophecy of revenge. Kısakürek maintained that

Kısakürek foretold a time when Ayasofya would be wide open for Muslim prayer, made possible by the effort of mukaddesatçı Turkish youth. He emphasized the hatred that complemented the sense of ressentiment to channel feelings of injustice and humiliation that would lead to mobilization of the youth. Until the day he prophesied would arrive, Kısakürek asked the youth to protect and cultivate this hatred against those who were responsible for this supposedly treacherous and humiliating act.

The emphasis on hatred and the accompanying quest for revenge in Kısakürek's writings were the culmination of the sense of ressentiment in mukaddesatçılık. Kısakürek glorified the hatred against perceived enemies of the Islamic cause as the building block of mukaddesatçı youth that Kısakürek expected to rise up. The youth of his vision would “stand up for their religion, language, reason, knowledge, honor, country, hatred, and heart” (Dininin, dilinin, beyninin, ilminin, ırzının, evinin, kininin, kalbinin davacısı bir gençlik).Footnote ⁷⁶ The juxtaposition of hatred with concepts Kısakürek obviously deemed to be sublime was no coincidence. When directed toward the right target, cultivation of the hatred would motivate the youth toward the revenge that Kısakürek expected. The targets of the mukaddesatçı hatred, according to Kısakürek, should be, unsurprisingly, the RPP and other secular and Western-minded groups who were considered enemies of Islam.Footnote ⁷⁷

Kısakürek's appeal to the sense of ressentiment to draw popular support for his mukaddesatçılık and his formulation of this ideology against the elite ideology of Turkish modernization was quite unique in the context of the mid-20th century. At the time, Turkey was experiencing a rapid urbanization process that was accompanied by political mobilization of the masses and dissemination of different ideologies among newly urbanized people. Conservatism in the mid-20th century still had markedly elitist undertones, defended by intellectuals with elite family backgrounds or an elite education, such as Samiha Ayverdi, Nurettin Topçu, and Mümtaz Turhan, who never aimed to penetrate the hearts and minds of popular masses to propagate their political and ideological concerns. Although Kısakürek himself shared a similar elite background with conservative intellectuals of the time, he addressed the popular masses and translated his own sense of ressentiment against the intellectual and political elite into an ideological tool for the formation of mukaddesatçılık. In so doing, he constructed an Islam-based populist ideology with a dichotomous rendition of (Muslim) people versus the (secular) elite. Formulating mukaddesatçılık as an ideology of Muslim Turkish ressentiment against secularism and modernization-as-Westernization made Kısakürek the harbinger of today's Islamic nationalist populism, as performed by Erdoğan and the politicians around him.