Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Essay)
By essaythe.blogspot.com
Source: Islamic Political Identity in Turkey by M. Hakan Yavuz.
Islamic political identity is a topic of discussion all over the world, not only in Turkey. The Justice and Development Party swept to victory in the Turkish parliamentary elections in November of 2002. Its electoral triumph has sparked a host of questions both in Turkey and in the west because of the party's Islamic roots. Does the party harbor a secret Islamist agenda? Will the new government seek to overturn nearly a century of secularization stemming from Kemal Ataturk's early-twentieth-century reforms? Most fundamentally, is Islam compatible with democracy?
M. Hakan Yavuz seeks to answer these questions, and to provide a comprehensive analysis of Islamic Political Identity in Turkey in this penetrating work. He begins in the early twentieth century, when Kemal Ataturk led Turkey through a process of rapid secularization and crushed Islamic opposition to his authoritarian rule. Since Ataturk's death in 1938, however, Turkey has been gradually moving away from his militant secularism and experiencing "a quiet Muslim reformation" Yavuz argues. Islamic political identity is not homogeneous, says Yavuz, but can be modern and progressive as well as conservative and potentially authoritarian. In fact the Kemalist establishment has traditionally used the "Islamic threat" as an excuse to avoid democratization and thus hold on to power while the West has traditionally seen Kemalism as an engine for reform against "reactionary" political Islam.
Yavuz offers an account of the "soft coup" of 1997, in which the Kemalist military-bureaucratic establishment overthrew the democratically elected coalition government, which was lead by the pro-Islamic Refah party. According to Yavuz, the soft coup plunged Turkey into a renewed legitimacy crisis which can only be resolved by the liberalization of the political system from Islamic fundamentalism.
The book ends with a discussion of the most recent election and its implications for Turkey and the Muslim world. Islamic social movements can be important agents for promoting a democratic and pluralistic society, and the Turkish example holds long term promise for the rest of the Muslim world according to Yavuz's views. This work offers a sophisticated new understanding of the role of political Islam in one of the world's most strategically important countries, based on extensive fieldwork and interviews.
"This is the most comprehensive book I have seen on Islam in the public sphere of Turkey in recent years. Yavuz not only provides a succinct religious map of Turkey but also examines the dynamics of religious change within social and political context. His detailed study of the content and context of Islamic movements in Turkey is a major contribution. The book provides excellent connections between the opportunity spaces and shifting boundaries between Islam and secularism, public and private, and global and local." - Umit Cizre, Bilkent University, Ankara.
"For a very long time, we were accustomed to thinking that Islam in general and political Islam in particular were fundamentally opposed to the realization of the basic aims and ideals of Turkish modernization. The social and political transformations that took place in Turkey in the 1980s and the 1990s have shown, however, that far from constituting a contrary force, Islam now plays a decisive role in the success of Turkish modernization in the broader and universal sense of the term. In this important book, Hakan Yavuz explains how Islamic identity came to occupy such a central place in modern Turkey. The first hand observations and interviews with leading intellectuals and community leaders give this book an original and engaging quality that is sure to make it an indispensable source for understanding modern Turkey." - Resat Kasaba, University of Washington; author of The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy.
"Professor Yavuz's sterling work illuminates recent republican Turkish history and society far more comprehensively and insightfully than do any recent works in either English or Turkish which have come to my attention. His impressive interdisciplinary research is likely to prove profoundly influential in its analysis of the increasingly important role of Islam in Turkey, and in its broader comparative scholarship for its more general theoretical and practical significance in the study of Islamic movements in other modernizing societies in the Muslim world." - Howard A. Reed, Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Connecticut; co-founder, Turkish Studies Society, Honorary Member, Turkish Historical Society.
By the two forces of modern media and information technologies the crisis of Muslim identity has been altered. On the national level the media as a pillar of secular force that has often reinforced a notion of the modern nation state system with all its political, economic, and cultural ramifications contributing to the rise of a national identity. The mainstream media of the world has portrayed Islam and the Muslim world often in negative and misleading terms thus contributing to the erosion of an Islamic identity on the international level, in particular since World War II. Contradictory images of national, ethnic, racial, and sectarian identities portrayed in the media not only have been the major obstacles to the formation of a cohesive Islamic identity both on national and regional levels but also have had a deteriorating impact in the mobilization and assimilation of the population in the developmental process.
It is not the changing or shifting role of the nation-state but the very existence of it, perpetuated by the media, that is responsible for fragmentation, disunity, and the ongoing crisis of identity in the Islamic world, unlike the West. Since the process of 'nation-building' has been incompatible with the cultural settings of these societies it is precisely for this reason that the crises of the modern nation-state system in the Islamic world must be analyzed in their cultural context.
Because of the emphasis they put on the analysis of formal political institutions such as the state, political parties, bureaucratic institutions, and modern parliamentary and governmental infrastructures, the crisis of identity in the Muslim world was and continues to be ignored by many writers and analysts. Yet the traditional Islamic political and social institutions, the informal political channels through which interest articulation and political demands are expressed, the deep Muslim feelings and reservations about the nation-state system that persist beneath a modernizing culture in the last two decades, and the crucial role of the media in propagating the existence of a nation state internationally and regionally have altered the balance of political forces in Turkey and other Muslim countries.
http://essaythe.blogspot.com/2011/01/islamic-political-identity-in-turkey.html