Jenny White is associate professor of anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of Islamist Mobilization in Turkey and Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey.

Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks

By Jenny White

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15517-3

Contents

Illustrations……………………………………………………….xiAbbreviations……………………………………………………….xiiiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………..xvChapter 1 Introduction………………………………………………1Chapter 2 Islam and the Nation……………………………………….24Chapter 3 The Republic of Fear……………………………………….54Chapter 4 The Missionary and the Headscarf…………………………….80Chapter 5 No Mixing…………………………………………………102Chapter 6 Sex and the Nation: Veiled Identity………………………….136Chapter 7 Choice and Community: The Girl with Blue Hair…………………163Chapter 8 Conclusion………………………………………………..181Notes………………………………………………………………197References………………………………………………………….217Index………………………………………………………………229

Chapter One

Introduction

Soon after my arrival in Turkey in January 2008 for a year’s research stay, the country was abuzz about a group of twenty high school students from the city of Kirsehir in central Anatolia that had painted a Turkish flag with their own blood—a broad red field about eighteen inches wide, with a white sickle moon and star at center. The students had presented it to Turkey’s top military chief, General Yasar Büyükanit, as a gift to commemorate the deaths of twelve soldiers killed in clashes with Kurdish separatist PKK guerrillas two months earlier. The general displayed the flag to journalists and praised the students, pointing out that not only had they made a flag of their blood but had also given him a petition to “please take us immediately as soldiers.” “This is the kind of nation we are,” he said, visibly moved. “We are a great nation. Truly our martyrs have died for a holy purpose. That holy purpose is to protect the country we live in as one and undivided.” The young people, boys and girls, posed with the framed flag for an adoring media, and the right-wing newspaper Tercüman distributed promotional copies of the blood-flag to its readers.

Some voices in the media expressed qualms about the potential health risks—the children, after all, had injured themselves, drawing blood from their fingers with pins. A few protested on moral grounds. Psychologist Serdar Degirmencioglu pointed out that “in countries where militarism is intense, blood is not seen as something to be treated carefully, but something to be spilt.” Political scientist Baskin Oran argued that it was dangerous to condition children in primary school to believe that the Turkish nation is based on bloodlines. “We saw the recent attacks by young people directed at Christian priests,” he added, drawing a parallel between Turkish blood and Muslim identity. In her column in the centrist newspaper Radikal, journalist and writer Perihan Magden condemned the general’s approval of the blood-flag and the “militarist, war-mongering and violent atmosphere” that had inspired the children’s act. Another journalist, Ece Temelkuran, wrote in Milliyet, “If only this noise, which makes flags out of children and dead children out of flags, would end.”

Public reaction was swift against those critical of the blood-flag. Both Magden and Temelkuran were attacked in the media, with Tercüman calling Magden a “flag-enemy” whose “ugly words” are remote from a Turkish identity, and accusing Temelkuran of committing a crime. The journalists took Tercüman to court for insulting them, and the paper’s editor was fined. But by April 2009 Magden faced at least ten other cases against her in court, mostly insult cases, including one brought by two Turks who made a YouTube video Magden had criticized that praised the murderer of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink.

Dink was assassinated in front of his office in 2007 by a young nationalist who had accused the journalist of insulting Turkish blood in a news article he had written. Dink had been tried in court for that crime in 2005 under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it illegal to insult “Turkishness” (Türklük), a concept so vaguely defined in legal terms that it has encouraged hundreds of prosecutions against journalists, authors, publishers, and others. Despite an expert report that Dink had not insulted or denigrated anyone in his article, four months later the court found Dink guilty and sentenced him to six months in jail, suspended. Arguing that his words had been taken out of context, Dink was preparing to appeal his case before the European Court of Human Rights when he was assassinated. Ironically, in the original text, he had been urging the Armenian diaspora to rid themselves of their enmity (“poisoned blood”) against the Turks.

For the young killer, Ogün Samast, it was enough that Dink was Armenian and Christian, making him an enemy of Turkishness and the Turkish nation. As Samast was running away he reportedly shouted, “I killed the non-Muslim.” His crime was met with some sympathy in nationalist circles. In a photo that police officers had taken with Samast while he was in custody, the suspect is holding a Turkish flag, and on the wall behind them are the words “Our country is sacred—its future cannot be left to chance.” In 2008, under pressure from the European Union (EU), the Turkish parliament (Grand National Assembly) reformed Article 301 of the Penal Code, replacing “denigrating Turkishness” with a more specific term, “denigrating the Turkish nation.” This does not appreciably change the nature of the crime, however, since the concept of nation, as we shall discuss later, itself is premised upon a racial understanding of Turkishness and Muslim identity. In his introduction to a collection of essays comparing race and ethnic systems around the world, Paul Spickard writes that race in the context of nationalism is always about power. It is “written on the body” as a product of culture, not as a self-evident biological fact.

I relate the incidents of the blood-flag and Hrant Dink’s murder in some detail because they exemplify a number of the issues I discuss in this book—the physicality of Turkish national identity with its emphasis on blood, purity, boundaries, and honor—and the cultural work that underlies them; the gendered nature of nationalism; its sharply contested profile; the link between being Turkish and being Muslim; a substratum of militarism, hostility, suspicion, and authoritarianism; and a heightened discourse of fear and the polarization of society. This polarization, I suggest, is in part a consequence of the vacuum created by the weakening of the state Kemalist project over recent years and the increasing inability of the state—despite prosecutions under Article 301, and the banning of websites like YouTube—to control the definition of Turkishness and thereby shape the identity of Turkish youth. Kemalist national identity has been challenged by new heterodox forms of nationalism emerging from increasingly powerful and self-confident Muslim networks rooted in economic and political life that privilege Muslim identity and culture over race.

Kemalism refers to the vision of Turkey’s founding figure and first president, Mustafa Kemal (later given the honorific Ataturk, meaning Father/Ancestor of the Turks), of a culturally unitary, Westernized, secular society in which state institutions and the military play a special tutelary role as guarantors of Kemalist democracy. The orthodox Kemalist vision of the nation imagines solidarity as unity of blood and race in which being Muslim is considered to be an essential component of having Turkish blood. This vision is accompanied by intense fear of dissolution of racial unity and thereby of national unity. Community is thus a product of a sense of continual threat, and a strong state and military are presented as crucial guarantors of the health and safety of the national family. When asked what being Turkish means, many men across the nation will respond, “Hepimiz askeriz.” (“We are all soldiers.”) These words also appear on banners during national holidays and other occasions. The militarism and emphasis on the masculine nature of national identity that is indicated by this slogan make it difficult for women to define their place as national subjects, an issue to which I will return.

Just over half of Turkey’s population is under age thirty. Young people are increasingly expressing themselves through new media, civic activism, and consumerism, searching for arenas of belonging, of which the nation is but one. While subjective freedom of choice may have expanded with globalization, individualism tends to be framed within a collective logic. Belonging to a group, whether family, community or nation, continues to be essential for social survival, as well as social identity. 14 Muslim networks, especially those surrounding the Islam-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi), which has been in power since 2002, and the ubiquitous Fethullah Gülen Islamic movement, are beneficiaries of this search for alternative collectivities. Against Kemalism’s message of continual embattlement, Islam appeals to youth with its rootedness in networks that promise to help them gain education, skills, and connections needed to succeed economically, and that give meaning to individual lives within a distinctly Muslim brand of national community.

As new forms of nationalism emerge and identities and loyalties become contested, people struggle to maintain the physical and metaphorical boundaries that mark their territories of belonging. But the process of change is far advanced. Turkey is now a vastly different place than it was when I first visited in 1975, a time when Kemalism was embattled by leftist ideas but retained a powerful appeal across classes and generations. That challenge was met by the military with a coup in 1980 that was meant to reset the republic on the Kemalist path but, as I explain in chapter 2, ultimately sowed the seeds of its own diminishment. Today, it is not so much Islam that has challenged the status quo, I suggest, but rather what Islam has become in the postcoup urban, modern, globalized environment where, for many, religious and national identities, like commodities, have become objects of choice and forms of personal expression.

Turkey’s Third Republic

Turkey has entered an era of social and political revolution. Indeed, scholars and pundits refer to the period after the 1980 coup as the Third Republic, a time during which something entirely new was being created in Turkish society and politics. (The period after the 1960 coup so transformed Turkey that it is called the Second Republic.) Yet, in a puzzling counterpoint, it seems that Third Republican Turks also are firmly patrolling the boundaries that define their membership in familiar social and political categories, and attributing to others membership in demonized groups. Society appears to be divided into militantly opposed secular and Muslim forces, and this division tends to be valorized by observers who bring to bear preconceived ideas about what secularism and Islam mean.

I define secularism and religion in historically and culturally specific terms. José Casanova has pointed out that while modern secularism posits that religion in the abstract is a transcultural phenomenon against which secularism can set itself, in reality, non-European practices of both religion and secularity are highly culturally specific. Furthermore, secularism is not necessarily modern, nor is religion marginal or superfluous to a modern life. Instead, religion itself can become secularized (individualized, privatized) while the secular sphere becomes sacralized as profane images and practices are imbued with attributes of the sacred, and religious meanings and legitimacy are extended to new practices. Turkey’s tense confrontations, then, might not be examples of secularism versus religion, as these terms are generally understood, but might better be described as struggles over blasphemy of the sacred, with secularists and the pious fighting over the designation of what is sacred, what is intrinsic to tradition and inviolable, and what lies outside the boundaries of identity sacralized by tradition. Adam Seligman observed that what scholars gloss as religion and secularism, and even identity, are really “traditions of practices” that as nation-states emerged in Europe, were subsumed within national identities. People, he pointed out, do not “do” religion, secularism, or identity, but rather, they follow a tradition of specific practices. This means that traditions (and, thus, what is glossed as religion, secularism, and identity) are open to transformation in practice, as when religion in the modern context becomes a form of self-expression or a touchstone of national identity. Religion may be forced to redefine itself in competition with other faiths and ideologies.

As a result of their encounters with global cosmopolitan secular modernity, Casanova writes, religious traditions are reinterpreted not as accommodations to the West or as fundamentalist reactions, much less in a triumph of modernity over tradition, but as what he calls aggiornamentos, practical adjustments of tradition that blur the line between sacred and secular. As an example, Casanova cites the sacralization of the discourse of human rights by the Second Vatican Council, a reinterpretation of tradition that in effect allowed Catholic resources around the world to be mobilized for democratization. He suggests that in countries like Turkey and Indonesia, democratization is unlikely to thrive until political actors are able to “frame” their discourse in a publicly recognizable Islamic idiom, rather than insisting on the privatization of Islam as a precondition to modernity as the Kemalists did, a stance that Casanova argues elicits only antidemocratic responses. In other words, in responding to the challenges of global modernism, Islamic publics may elaborate their normative traditions to generate new forms of public civil Islam that are conducive to democratization. In a sense, the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011 set up a living laboratory to examine the process of Islamic aggiornamento as a path to democratization in a variety of political and cultural settings. The experience of Turkey described in this book suggests that reinterpretations of modernity as much as of tradition have led to public interpellations of piety and democratization previously unimagined.

Religion in Turkey has become secularized and the secular sphere sacralized, resulting in a struggle over the definition of what is sacred, accompanied by accusations of blasphemy (phrased as disloyalty to the nation and even treason). Individual choice—the choice to be suurlu, a “consciously” believing Muslim, as opposed to blindly following tradition—has become highly valued as a sign of Muslim modernity. Islamic practice increasingly has come to be expressed as participation in economic networks and through a commodified lifestyle of self-consciously Muslim fashion and leisure. Meanwhile, Kemalist secularism has taken on aspects of the sacred. Turkish blood represents the nation and is surrounded by taboos. In Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s speeches, the earth of Anatolia is sacred “because it is drenched in the blood of those who gave their lives for the country.” Busts and statues of Ataturk mark sacred ground and may not be moved or destroyed. It is against the law even to criticize Ataturk. A shadow that resembles his silhouette thrown by one hillside onto another in the remote village of Ardahan every summer draws thousands of viewers and representatives of the army and media.

Turkey is riven by disputes over what is sacred to the nation and where the boundaries of national identity are drawn. While the categories of secular and Islamic have a long history in Turkey, their specific meanings and how they are experienced have developed in response to particular events and societal changes. What they represent today in practice arguably is new. The secularists and pious Muslims of the Third Republic are not the secularists and Muslims of the Second or First Republics, nor do their words and costumes signify what they did in the past.

I will suggest in this book that much of the tension and anxiety that has come to dominate daily life and discourse in the Third Republic arises from a radical revision of the most basic category of all—what does it mean to be Turkish, to be a member of this nation? Popular answers have been naturalized through decades of Kemalist Republican education: We are a Turkish race, of Turkish blood, of Muslim faith; we are all soldiers; our historical roots lie in Turkic Central Asia; we believe in Ataturk’s project of modernization; we are laicist (laicism in Turkey means a secular lifestyle within a system of state-sponsored Sunni Islam). Many of these elements are felt to be under siege as a result of changes occurring in Turkish society. This view occasions fear and, in consequence, intensifies the perceived need for tests of belonging and loyalty.

Community membership these days is often accompanied by an increased search for enemies and monitoring of members’ conceptual purity. As an anthropologist, I generally have tried to examine issues from many sides, rather than take a stand about right and wrong. In years past I had the opportunity to think through contentious issues with Turkish friends and colleagues who were willing to examine the causes and consequences of a variety of social and cultural practices and political events. But by the late 2000s, the number of people willing to entertain that middle ground had shrunk. Even many of my liberal friends expected me to take a stand—with them or against them. As a result, I lost a friend of thirty years because I had written an article about the headscarf for the Islamic news daily Zaman, a theoretical piece that, to my mind, took no sides. But my friend, a fervent Kemalist, claimed that simply by writing for an Islamic newspaper, I had demonstrated that I supported “the Islamists.” She has not spoken to me since. One secular colleague at a major Turkish university forbade the discussion of politics at his dinner table because he too had lost a friend to the face-offs that ensued. The most incendiary issue is the headscarf, which acts as a key marker of identity for those who wear it and for those who despise it. A brother and sister, both liberal academics, reportedly argued about whether the headscarf should be allowed on campus (it was banned at the time). Thereafter the siblings shunned each other, the brother not even telling his sister when he contracted a fatal illness.

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