shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 101 CHAPTER 8 Turkish Nationalism and Islamic Faith-Based Politics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives Ehud R. Toledano On November 24, 2012, the television station France 24 aired a documentary on Turkey covering various domestic and foreign aspects, with special reference to EU-Turkish relations.1 One of the segments, devoted to the Ataturk Memorial Day marked annually on November 10, the day of his passing in 1938, features two women and their views on the contested territory of Turkish nationalism and Islamic faith. The secular, seventy-two year-old philosophy professor Ülkü Anıl rises early in the morning and joins a friend on the boat from the Asian side of Istanbul to the square next to the Dolmabahçe Palace on the European side, where a memorial service is to take place. The other woman, Gülizar Gökçe, in her fifties, who had moved from her native village to the Asian side of Istanbul, admits she is still attached to her Muslim traditions from back home. As she goes to work, Gülizar will cross another square where people observe the two-minute silence, lay wreaths, and sing the national anthem. She wears a head scarf (Turkish, türban), explaining that she has been doing so since childhood and insisting that “it has nothing to do with [religious] extremism.” As she passes through the square, some women not wearing headscarves reproach her for wearing hers in such a gathering. “How is it possible to be so disrespectful,” she complains to the reporter, “Ataturk [Memorial Day] has not been created just for them, it was created for everyone.” Having joined the singing of the anthem, she comments at the end of the ceremony: “I feel as if I have been born again; it would be nice if every day was like this.” Still, it might be surprising to the uninitiated observer that the two women shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 102 1 0 2  ehud r. toledano actually agree that religion should not be forced on the public sphere and be left instead to individual choice. Both reject what they perceive as the Justice and Development Party (hereafter, AKP) government policy of imposing Islamic conduct on a reluctant public, while seeing no reason to interfere in private preferences of people to practice and express their faith. Both also share a sense that Ataturk would not be proud of what is happening to his legacy in today’s Turkey. To be sure, the interesting person in this story is Gülizar, who seems not at all conflicted by being both a practicing Muslim and a Turkish nationalist. The reporter further stressed that in this year’s ceremony at the presidential palace, the top military generals — for the first time — agreed to appear alongside the wives of the country’s leaders who were wearing the türban. Thus, we are in fact witnessing yet another step in the decade-long evolution of the relationship between Turkish nationalism and Islamic faith-based politics. Similar relationships are currently evolving also in the Arab countries following the recent revolutions, most notably in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, but also in Morocco, Iraq, and Jordan. Some are looking to Turkey under AKP rule as a model, or inspiration. In the following essay, I shall argue that for most of the people who support the current AKP government, no serious identity conflict exists, although the conflict is very real for members of the old secular elites, who see the growing threat to Turkey as they know it and fear what they detect to be a slow-moving but determined attempt to deconstruct Kemalism, in practice if not yet in name. Rather than expose undercurrents of belief, symbols such as the türban sometimes conceal actual sentiments and mislead outsiders. But in order to understand that, we need to delve into the history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republic of Turkey, where the basic patterns of identification and political culture were formed; these now inform contemporary views of nationalism and religion not only in Turkey, but also in the successor nation states of the Middle East and North Africa. The Ottoman Socio-Political Heritage From around the middle of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman sultans have reigned over a Muslim-majority empire — the largest Islamic state of the early modern and modern eras — serving as the undisputed leaders of Sunni Islam.2 They boasted sovereignty over Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz, where the holiest shrines of Islam rested, and consequently became protectors of the pilgrimage routes to Arabia. By then, not only the Balkans and the eastern flanks of Europe were part of the Empire, but almost the entire Middle East and North Africa too. In a major campaign during 1516 and 1517, Selim I’s forces wrested Syria and Egypt from the ailing Mamluk sultanate. Iraq and parts of Iran fell to the Ottomans under Süleyman the Magnificent in 1534, North Africa — excluding Morocco — was conquered in the mid to late shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 103 Turkish Nationalism in Islamic Faith-Based Politics  1 0 3 1530s, and Yemen in 1538. Last to come under Ottoman rule, the Arabicspeaking territories were also the last to remain within the sultans’ “well-protected domains,” ending some three hundred years under their rule. The French took over Algeria in 1830 and Tunisia in 1882, in the same year as the British occupied Egypt. At the end of World War I, European powers took control of the entire Middle East. Thus, an age of integrated, inclusive rule under the Sublime Porte, based on shared values, practices and traditions, was replaced by European imperialism and rapid, top-down modernization. The longevity of Ottoman rule and its relatively accommodating nature owed a great deal to a unique capacity to manage difference — religious, cultural, social, and economic. An emphasis on inclusion and incorporation of diverse groups in the population lay at the heart of Ottoman policy and, in fact, defined the essence of the Empire. One can hardly overstate the internal diversity of the Ottoman Empire in almost every facet of life. Terrain, climate, and modes of political, economic, social, and cultural interaction varied from region to region, from province to province. The mountains and ravines of the Balkans, the plateaus of Anatolia, the huge river beds of Iraq and Egypt, the shores of the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Perso-Arabian gulf, the ridges of the Levant, and the deserts of Arabia, Syria-Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa provided the habitat for diverse societies which spanned the entire spectrum of human social and communal organization. The Ottomans had to devise a system of government that would manage and provision the urban populations of large cities such as Istanbul, Cairo, Salonika, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Tripoli, and Algiers. That system would also have to collect taxes from rural agricultural communities, control nomadic tribes, and ensure the safety of merchants and pilgrims across sea, river, and land. The Empire witnessed large population migrations; nomadic-pastoralist communities such as Turcomans, Berbers, and Bedouins are still an important part of present-day realities in these regions.3 Movement, both of groups and of individuals, was constant. Conquering, retreating, or passing armies; tribal migrations across deserts, plains, and plateaus; pilgrims and traders coming alone or with their families, staying or returning; missionaries, roaming dervishes, aspiring santons — all brought with them their languages, religions, and cultures and contributed their share to the already diversified populations and traditions within the Empire. Although the population was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, there were also sizable communities of Shi‘ites, Druze, various Christian sects, Jews, and other smaller faith-based communities. Turkish, Slavic languages, and Arabic were the dominant languages, but owing to the low level of literacy, the predominant vernaculars created a reality of much larger linguistic differentiation, which often impeded direct communication with the ruling Turcophone elites.4 Urban areas housed centers of education, learning, and cultural creativity, where riches and luxurious lifestyles coexisted alongside poverty and deprivation. Until modern urbanization from the later nineteenth shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 104 1 0 4  ehud r. toledano century, more than 80% of the population lived in rural areas; these women and men barely eked out a living from cultivation of seasonal crops, and were constantly exposed to the hazards of nature and man-made hardships. Between droughts, floods, and government officials sent to collect taxes, impose corvée service, or draft them into the military, peasants and urban workers across the empire were vulnerable, and only too often powerless to affect their own lives.5 However, when the state performed its duty to protect and nurture the sultan’s subjects — more often than not the case in Ottoman history — the countryside prospered, and the quality of life was higher than in contemporary empires in Europe and Asia. The Ottoman Empire provided for the Middle East and North Africa an effective system of government and a political culture that outlived its rule and shaped the modern history of these regions.6 Beyond their visual imprint on architecture and landscape, the Ottomans’ impact upon communal traditions was profound. As Albert Hourani rightly observed, modern travelers in the region must notice “how deep the Ottoman impress went and how lasting is the unity it has imposed on many different countries and peoples.” With special emphasis on their political culture, Hourani characterized the old Ottoman-Arab elites as “patient, cautious, carefully balancing one force against another in order to neutralize them all, giving your enemy time and scope to ruin himself, seeing how far you can go but always leaving a way of escape if you have gone too far.”7 The Ottoman style of government endured because it was embedded in flexible structures and pragmatic practices, relatively non-invasive methods of rule, and a remarkable capacity to fuse Islamic orthodoxy, popular Sufism, and components of local belief systems into a viable ethos that successfully glued together society and government. The Empire certainly had its up and down turns, a historical inevitability for such a vast and long-lived political and economic entity. In certain regions at certain times, tensions developed that turned one group against another, with the government having to step in and restore order and calm. Ottoman local households and patronage networks in the provinces display some different features from those known in the political and social patronage systems of European, Asian, and even African notabilities. Open and inclusive by definition and nature, the Ottoman system sought to bring local elites and their protégé, dependent groups into the imperial fold and to deliberately grant them a stake in the well-being of the system. Recruiting locals into the army and bureaucracy, and socially integrating them through marriage and concubinage cemented their sense of belonging to the Ottoman Empire and enhanced their loyalty to the ruling dynasty. By and large, those elites proved loyal to the Empire and reluctant to embrace newly emerging forms of Arab and local nationalisms.8 Indeed, even after the Empire’s demise and the rise of European colonial regimes, Ottoman notions and practices continued to shape much of the political culture in the shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 105 Turkish Nationalism in Islamic Faith-Based Politics  1 0 5 successor Arab nation states. These were heavily influenced by patterns that had evolved during a long imperial rule. Unlike European colonial patterns, Ottoman ones were not seen as foreign or alien, but rather as the joint product of the inclusivist interaction that welded the imperial to the local. The strong link between political and economic interaction, the belief in diversification through placement of family members into competing networks to minimize risk and increase security, the overwhelming impact of patronage politics, the lingering effect of “grandee families,” and the presence of both formal and informal dynastic orders are some of the salient features that the Ottoman system bequeathed to the modern Middle East and North Africa. From Ottomanism to Turkish and Arab Nationalisms Identification and identity politics have played a major role in the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa in the modern era; they continue to shape the ongoing struggles between nation states and ethno-religious and national minorities in the region today. Social anthropologists have argued that competition over resources like oil, water, or land tends to unite and enlarge groups to maximize chances of success, and such coalescing temporarily blurs lines drawn by categories of descent, language, religion, exchange networks, or shared history.9 However, once the contested resource is secured, such coalitions — and their accompanying identifications — tend to break up, partly at least to avoid having to share the resource among subgroups of the larger coalition. Because in the Middle East and North Africa, national boundaries were drawn around heterogeneous societies, grouping vis-à-vis the outside and regrouping internally undergirded the dynamics of integration and conflict. The “nation” was propagated as binding together different ethno-religious groups, e.g., Kurds, Shi‘ites, and Sunnis in Iraq, or tribal federations in Libya. In both these “artificial” nation states, groups came together to secure economic (oil) and socio-political resources (statehood trappings), but are now threatening to break up those states. In the region, including Turkey, the nation state has come under much internal pressure due to such lack of homogeneity, and simmering ethnic and religious differences are challenging national unity. Typically, states sought in most — though not all — cases to suppress attempts at multiculturalism in favor of superimposed nationalist identities. They used all their resources, including the law and their monopoly on the means of coercion in order to achieve their goal of “national unity.” Canon cultural contents became more exclusivist, stressing a nationalist, historical ethos. Minority cultures were pushed to the margin and downgraded, becoming subversive when interest in renewed identification emerged as access to resources and public goods was being denied. Yet, in cases where marginalization was not excessive and no legal impediments were placed on shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 106 1 0 6  ehud r. toledano citizenship and property rights, minorities were integrated into the national fold. However, the Middle East entered the twenty-first century with a heightened sense of reemerging ethno-religious identities and invigorated struggles over identification politics. Things have been further complicated by the interjection of supranational identifications — i.e., various pan-ideologies — that cohered with sub-national ones and have posed an added challenge, this time from without, to the nation state. The modern study of nationalism and nationalist movements has been rife with paradoxes and internal contradictions.10 To the familiar debates about territorial and ethnic forms of nationalism were added in recent years the discussions about collective memory and identity politics. Although some of the theoretical observations have enabled deeper understanding of Middle Eastern and North African nationalisms, they have not been successful in resolving the inherent tensions within these ideologies and the movements that followed them. Chief among these is the relationship between local and specific nationalisms — such as the Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi, for example — and supranational commitments and identifications. Two such supranationalist ideologies, which seem to have diverged significantly between them as well, are pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism. Excepting Turkey and Iran, all Arab Middle Eastern and North African nation states have been with us for nearly six decades, admittedly not a very long time. The Turkish Republic is about nine decades old. Thus, whereas the region’s nation states have managed to gel and gain a fair measure of stability, recent events have challenged their position as the only legitimate focus of identification. The Arab revolutions brought down some of the authoritarian regimes that had ruled for about forty years. They were replaced by new democracies which elected Islamic parties to govern in Tunisia and Egypt, left the story unfinished in Syria and Iraq, and has allowed the monarchies of Morocco and Jordan to negotiate deals that still remain to weather the storm and prove stable. The determination and sophistication of the demonstrators on the proverbial “Arab Street,” and the speed with which the old order collapsed in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen, have caught think tank and government analysts stunned and unprepared.11 It led many of them to “shoot from the hip” explanations that barely survived the next phase of the Arab awakening. Some have pronounced the Arab nation state dead, extolled a newly-found Arab solidarity that transcended the known boundaries of Middle East states, and pronounced the beginning of the age of Islamic brotherhood in the entire region. Others, yet, are now putting forth the idea that the events of the past two years have effectively put an end to the post-World War I, Sykes-Pico arrangements. The bottom line of all these suggested interpretations of the events unfolding before our very eyes is the notion that things have fundamentally changed, and that what we are about to witness is a completely different Middle East from the one we knew. Because these processes are still unfolding, shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 107 Turkish Nationalism in Islamic Faith-Based Politics  1 0 7 and on all of them the jury is indeed out, many eyes have turned to countries in the region that seem to have undergone major, if not dramatic, changes a while back, in order to draw parallels and perhaps learn about potential directions of future development. Among these, Turkey has been the most prominent, the closest case that possibly could offer clues as to how a shift from Kemalist nationalism to Islamic-inspired rule might be regarded as the path that would be taken by other countries in the region. While Iran had its Islamic revolution in 1979, the course it has taken since and the specificity of its system have not figured high in the minds of observers as a likely track to be followed. Hence, the following section will focus on Turkey and its historical experience with the transition from autocracy to unstable Kemalist multi-party system to stable and prosperous Islamic-leaning democracy. My main argument will be that the Republic of Turkey had succeeded in nation building but failed to address the concerns of minorities. The enormous demographic transformation that has taken place in the country during the past decade and a half has fundamentally altered the makeup of the Turkish electorate, bringing in disenfranchised segments of the population. Having come of age, Turkish democracy is now faced with two main challenges: retaining its commitment to an open and pluralistic system of government, and resolving domestic pressures to include the Kurds and Alevis in the newly defined, more liberally decentralized state. Traditional historiography, operating under the Orientalist Decline Paradigm,12 ascribed to the first ten sultans empire-building and credited them with large-scale territorial expansion, all that between the early thirteenth and the late sixteenth century. The process of articulating state institutions and grounding social practices and an economic worldview culminated in the reign of Süleyman the Lawgiver or Kanuni (1520–1566), known in Europe as Süleyman the Magnificent. Following that Golden Age, according to that paradigm, the Ottoman Empire experienced a long-drawnout process of all-encompassing decline. From the early seventeenth century to the mid nineteenth, the once vigorous, ever-victorious (daima muzaffere) leader of the Sunni Islamic world, the Empire receded into a series of regressive processes that turned it into the “sick man of Europe.” In that paradigm, the Empire’s decline was seen as affecting all spheres of life — military, economic, social, political, and cultural. Attempts to reverse course and introduce major reforms were launched at the end of the eighteenth century under Selim III (1789–1807), and were later renewed with intensity during the period known as the Tanzimat (1830s–1880s).13 However, despite the fact that the Empire became more centralized and better run, it continued to shrink, losing most of its European (the Balkans, including Greece, Romania) and North African (Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt) territories. The sultans retained their possessions in the Middle East, including the heartland of Anatolia, until the demise of their empire following World War I. Since we cannot enter into a detailed discussion of this narrative here, shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 108 1 0 8  ehud r. toledano suffice it to say that over the past quarter century, Ottomanist scholarship has thoroughly revised the decline paradigm. It now offers instead a far more differentiated and nuanced understanding of the processes that occurred in the Ottoman domains during the period of so-called decline, and a revised view of the Tanzimat as well. A leading alternative interpretation centers around socio-economic network analysis that bound urban elite households together, linking the imperial center and the provinces with complex economic and socio-cultural interests and sustaining the Empire’s political viability from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.14 Dual processes of Ottomanization-Localization enabled the rise of Ottoman-Local elites in the provinces who were bound by different ways and means to the imperial governing elite in Istanbul. In any event, the turn of the twentieth century saw the rise of nationalisms in the Ottoman Middle East, after it had already dealt a devastating blow to the Empire’s ability to maintain its rule over the East European domains. From the first decade of the century, the Young Turks ushered in an imperial vision that was inspired by an incipient brand of Turkish nationalism, and their political arm, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), gained power in 1908 and retained it until the end of the Empire.15 That last phase of Empire pitted the exclusive nature of Turkish nationalism against the “multi-all” (ethnic, religious, cultural, communal, national) character of the Ottoman Empire, as described above. The movement between these two poles of the inclusionexclusion continuum would shape the history of the Republic of Turkey, and to a significant extent also the histories of many of the successor states in the Middle East and North Africa. A recent contribution by Kent F. Schull is useful in illustrating the complexity of the categories involved in “identity construction and conceptualization.”16 Schull looked at how difference was constructed by the CUP government in 1912–1914, as it classified the various groups within the Empire and thereby revealed its conceptual approach. He found that, contrary to the CUP image as the Turkifiers of the Empire, the categories used by their administration did not reflect ethnic divisions — as between Turk, Arab, Kurd, or Armenian — but were rather based upon the traditional Ottoman categories of religious communities (millets) — Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The Young Turks’ concept also addressed the larger distinction between Ottoman nationality or citizenship (tabiiyet), on the one hand, and nonOttoman, foreign nationality, on the other. In a telling example, Schull shows that Ottoman subjects of Greek extraction appeared as Greek Orthodox (Rum), or Greek Catholic, whereas non-Ottoman Greeks were listed simply as Greek (Yunanlı). Hence, he concludes, categories of identification were in flux, such as the term millet itself, “ranging in meaning, depending on context, from its traditional Qur’anic sense as ‘a religious community’ to a linguistic group, a people, or even a nationality.”17 Here, too, we can see that both the terminology and contents were dynamic and malleable. shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 109 Turkish Nationalism in Islamic Faith-Based Politics  1 0 9 The Young Turk prominence in the transition from Empire to Republic shaped the new state institutions and socio-political patterns, and many of the leading figures — most notably, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk himself — retained and enhanced their political standing. In that crucial transition period, notions of governance and ideas about the nation state were articulated and imprinted in the minds of the people and the ruling elites. If the Young Turks and the CUP privileged Turkish-Muslims as a socio-political group, they also encouraged integration into “Turkish-Ottomanism.” In doing that, they laid the ground for the basic concepts of Kemalism, or the version of modern Turkish nationalism that has prevailed in Turkey for close to a century now. One of the best-known principles of Kemalism is secularism, i.e., the separation of the Turkish state and Islam. Thus, a false but nonetheless real dichotomy was set between nationalism and religion, or specifically between Kemalism and Islam. Until the death of Ataturk in November 1938, and virtually throughout the reign of his successors until 1950, Kemalism was enforced by an authoritarian rule that cleansed the public sphere of any manifestation of Islamic practice. With the introduction of a multi-party system in that year, the opposition Democratic Party gained power, and its charismatic leader, Adnan Menderes, served as prime minister until a military coup d’état deposed and had him executed in 1960.18 The Kemalist project of Turkish nation building and the concomitant suppression of religion and ethnic-communal identities were exclusivist in nature and practice. Whereas it could not drive faith and religious practices out of Turkish society, Kemalism did foster and entrench a strong ruling elite committed to the notions of Kemalism, including laïcité. The Kemalist elite successfully reproduced itself through a comprehensive education system and virtual control of the means of coercion and production. Vast resources and government contracts were transferred to the secular, Westernized, nationalist elites, and a strong military officers’ corps was made the guardian of Kemalism and entrusted with maintaining the socio-political and socio-economic Kemalist order. Having its origins in the military-bureaucratic conspiracy that brought the CUP to power in the late Empire, the Republic and its citizenry inherited a belief in the existence of the “Deep State” (Derin Devlet), a cabal of secret, de facto underground cadres within the military, the security and intelligence forces, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and the political parties, committed to the survival of the Kemalist order by all means, including illegal, non-democratic ones. The Deep State is widely believed to have been behind the three military coups that overthrew democratically elected governments which were seen as failing to protect the Kemalist Republic. The first was staged against the Menderes government in 1960, so that the pendulum could move again to the exclusivist side, after a decade-long policy of greater inclusivity and meaningful openness toward rural, traditional, conservative, and Muslim segments of the population. The return to elections and a multi-party system produced a semblance of normalcy, but in 1971 another, “indirect” coup was staged to shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 110 1 1 0  ehud r. toledano curb the fragmentation of politics and the resulting left-right-Islamist violence and labor unrest. An unstable, fractured party system, a deteriorating economy, and increased street violence prepared the ground for yet another coup in 1980, with the Chief-of-Staff General Kenan Evren, assuming power, dissolving parliament, and banning political parties. In 1982, Evren promulgated a new constitution that enshrined the veto power of the army as protector of the Kemalist state. The country returned to civil democracy, but after another decade and a half, power would fragment again. A softer intervention by the top general in 1997 was enough to force the resignation of the first Islamist Prime Minister, Necmettin Erbakan. As the economy bogged down again, and the public lost all confidence in what was widely seen as a corrupt and incompetent political system, the ground was ripe in 2002 for a shift toward the newly established AKP, under the charismatic leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdo²an. The government elected at the end of that year has since won the two consecutive elections — in 2007 and in 2012, and with a growing share of the popular vote — and was still in power at the time of writing. Much of the change has been due to a major demographic transformation that was taking place in Turkish society from the mid-1990s on.19 Mass urbanization was occurring as large numbers of people were moving from villages in the Anatolian countryside to the cities and large urban centers. This internal migration wave has been changing the human and physical landscape of Turkish cities, as a 3:1 urban-rural ratio was reversed to almost 1:3. When that traditional, socially conservative, and Muslim-religious population was seeking better economic life for their families, they and their children were also changing and adapting in the process. Politicized by the transition, they were ready to support the AKP bid to assume power and in growing numbers participated in elections. The old Kemalist elites, disillusioned by a bankrupt political system, were also prepared to switch their loyalties and give AKP a chance. The soft manner in which Erdo²an and his allies practiced power during their first term in office (2002–2007) has made their rule a success story. With the active support of a rising, new AKP-sponsored Islamic business elite, they were able to foster economic prosperity and, consequently, enable political stability. As already mentioned above, this ensured their return to power twice with a growing share of the popular vote, though with a decreasing number of deputies in Parliament. Around 2009 and well into their second term, they refrained from pushing an overtly and blatant Islamic agenda in the public sphere, including the sensitive area of education.20 By so doing, they managed to minimize the impending conflict between nationalism and religion, making it possible for people on both sides of this porous divide to live peacefully with each other. However, the AKP failed to offer any working compromise on crucial domestic issues, most clearly the Kurdish and other minority problems. Their attempt at forging an Open Door Policy (Açılım) toward the Kurds, the Alevis, shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 111 Turkish Nationalism in Islamic Faith-Based Politics  1 1 1 and the Christians was not enough to resolve those issues, which are still a major stumbling block on the road to domestic reconciliation and cessation of violent resistance, most notably in south-east Anatolia. The Open Door Policy toward the Kurds and Alevis can be seen as an inclusive, multi-cultural posture, a continuation of the successful drive to open up Kemalist Turkey to the rural and urban down-and-out Muslim population, AKP’s natural base. However, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, thus far this has not worked, since the conservative Muslim base of AKP has internalized Turkish nationalism and has come — now more than ever before — to identify itself with Kemalism as Turkey’s national movement. So opening the door to the Kurds and Alevis now goes against their commitment to Turkish nationalism; AKP has become “the state,” some people believe even the Deep State, and its leadership now sees itself as the defenders of the “Turkish Nation.” This is especially so since they skillfully managed to achieve the removal of the military from politics, and the army is no longer the sole protector of the Kemalist constitution. To the AKP constituency, much as to Gülizar Gökçe, the traditional woman mentioned in the France 24 report above, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk is the “Father of the Turkish Nation” and a true hero, and their Islamic faith does not make that a problem. Secular, anti-Islamic Kemalism is a different thing, though, and in his September 30, 2012 speech at the AKP national convention, Prime Minister Erdo²an drew a distinction between Ataturk and his Kemalist successors.21 The young people of Turkey, he told his audience, expect the Party leadership to restore the compassionate understanding, tolerance, democracy, and freedom that had prevailed in Turkey at the beginning, during the time of Gazi Mustafa Kemal, but that his close friends suppressed thereafter. For now, Ataturk himself is being exempted from the process of de-Kemalization, but there is no guarantee that this will not change too. As the France 24 report showed, the signs carried in the Gazi’s Memorial Day ceremony proclaimed, “We are all Turk, We are all Ataturk” (Hepimiz Türk’üz, Hepimiz Atatürk’üz). But the Turkish nation is not the same nation anymore, or more accurately, it never was what the Kemalists depicted it to be. Nation-building often assumes the existence of a homogenous national entity, coercing sub-groups to erase their separate identities and merge into the dominant “nation.” Kemalism proclaimed that the Turkish nation is 98 % Turkish and Muslim, while suppressing the true realities of a rather heterogeneous society which inherited Ottoman diversity but lost Ottoman capacity to include, contain, and accommodate that diversity. Kurds and Alevis have each formed between 15 and 20% of the population, with additional 5% distributed among various other religious and ethnic minorities. Even among Muslims, it is estimated that at least half would be regarded as having “modern orientation,” or simply Westernized and moderately religious views and conduct, whereas about a quarter of the population has been described as “orthodox,” devout practicing Muslims. shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 112 1 1 2  ehud r. toledano Against the myth of a “one, indivisible nation,” with differences played down and dismissed as marginal, the reality is, and has been so since the creation of the Republic, of ethno-religious diversity and rising demands for cultural and even political recognition of those differences. Thus, the erosion of Kemalism under AKP rule has blown the lid off an imagined if not invented national unity, giving legitimacy to demands for openness, pluralism, and multiculturalism. This would also mean, at some point, allowing a measure of political-administrative autonomy in Kurdish areas, to ward off violent struggle for secession. However, over at least eight decades of dominance, Kemalism has succeeded in inculcating in the minds of Turks a strong sense of belonging to a Turkish nation. For most of them, being Turkish does not preclude being also practicing Muslims, and now more than ever before, these two commitments and identifications do not preclude but complement each other. Until the Kurdish issue is resolved, or the less acute but still present Alevi question is addressed, these minorities will find it harder to identify with Turkish nationalism. Thus, the challenge for the AKP government is how to adopt true multiculturalism and continue to uphold a strong, centralized Turkish nation state. Identification and Identity Politics in Turkey One of the several appropriate interpretative frameworks for understanding the current conflict between the nation state and ethno-religious minorities in Turkey is that of identity politics, or more broadly, identification. Social anthropologists and sociologists have provided a theoretical body of knowledge that can be of help to historians in this regard. This segment will briefly explore some of the insights in that literature that are relevant to our case study, beginning perhaps with the following statement compiled by the founders of a scholarly project on development at McGill University: Across the globe, people draw on identities that currently may involve revised configurations of ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion . . . to demand social justice from oppositional entities, which may include nation-states, legal and political institutions or even other members of civil society. Such collective identities may exacerbate struggles between groups, but they may also create linkages, both within and across nation states, to form social movements that challenge current inequalities.22 In tandem with that view, Günther Schlee and his team at the Max Planck Institute in Halle describe collective identities as “representations containing normative appeals to potential respondents and providing them with the means of understanding themselves, or being understood, as members of a shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 113 Turkish Nationalism in Islamic Faith-Based Politics  1 1 3 larger category or assemblage of persons.”23 They define responses by actors to such appeals as processes of identification, further asserting that an appropriate interpretative framework should weave together — structure and function, culture and meaning, practice and power, agency and choice. To Schlee’s team, identification is grounded in processes of socialization and acculturation (or enculturation), which “endow individuals with means that enable them to relate to each other, to orient themselves to the world, and to define their own self.” A strong sense of victimization, such as that resulting from a shared historical experience of oppression or exclusion, often can constitute a strong basis for collective identities, the argument goes. Victimization-driven identifications often include a shared sense of having limited or no access to social, economic, and political resources. The salience and commitment to markers — such as shared historical experience, common language and culture, religion, or life style — measures, in this view, the stability and endurance of any historicized and contextualized collective identity.24 In Turkish society, ethno-religious and national minorities have retained a common sense of victimhood, and a shared heritage of exploitation and discrimination. Much of that was perpetrated under the grind of the Kemalist nation-building project, which has sought — and largely succeeded — to create for them a new, Turkish national identity. Thus, a sort of oppression-liberation or deprivation-empowerment paradox has emerged in Turkey, whereby the suppression of Kurdish, Alevi, Christian, and other subgroup identities liberated and empowered them as members of a Turkish nation. Seeing themselves as “Turks,” many minority members seek greater space, legitimacy, and a measure of political expression for their origin ethno-religious identities. It is also true, however, that as the domestic conflict intensifies, demand for autonomy and secession is gaining greater traction. The Middle East and North Africa indeed offer a high degree of ethno-religious and national heterogeneity, which accounts for the many ongoing, still unresolved conflicts in the region. The dual experience of both colonialism and the rise of nationalist movements has challenged the stability of former — local, communal, ethnic, sectarian-religious — collective identities. With the establishment of modern nation states, such identities were tested by converging processes, such as nation building, state consolidation, labor migration, armed conflict, the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, the rise and suppression of civil society and local communal organizations, and the challenges of emerging global and regional economic systems. Such intense situations of conflict and change caused ethno-religiousbased collective identities to be reformulated and reoriented, as the carrier groups split internally into sub-groups, broke up entirely, or regrouped again. Finally, we need to acknowledge the presence of choice in both individual and collective identity construction, which opens the door for agency.25 Alongside other cognitive and discursive processes, choice and agency affect shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 114 1 1 4  ehud r. toledano some cases more than others. For agency and choice to be present, identification processes must be conscious, as for example in electing if and what to retain out of the baggage of origin-culture components. Thus, minorities such as the Kurds or Alevis in Turkey would choose what to stress in their agendas according to what they perceive to be the costs and benefits for their struggle. But, as already indicated above, choice and agency also mean that many of them would choose to be “Turkish,” stress their unison with the “Turkish Nation,” assign low significance to their ethno-religious origin-identities, and even actively oppose demands for greater autonomy or secession put forth by their brethren. Conclusion Several types of dynamics have been examined in the previous pages: the vacillation between exclusivism and inclusivism; the oscillation between looking inward and venturing outward; the cleavage between identification as Turk and identification as a member of an ethno-religious group; the contest in the public sphere between secularist and Islamic manifestation; and, perhaps most pertinent to this volume, the tension between Turkish nationalism and Islamic or pan-Turkic supra-nationalist outlooks. Throughout this essay, my argument has been that on all these levels, the predicament is not an either-or, black-or-white situation. Rather, as in all facets of human practice, we are always dealing with complex, manifold, shades-of-grey resolutions of the challenges posed by socio-political situations. Kemalism was avowedly secular and in many instances anti-religion, which in Turkey of the twentieth century meant anti-Islam. Yet, despite all its efforts, Kemalism failed to squeeze Islam out of Turkish society. Suppressed and publicly excluded, it remained the most widely-shared system of meaning for the majority of Turkish nationals. The seeming and theoretically-tenable conflict between being a Turkish nationalist and a believing Muslim was not a real issue. As frequently seen in many societies, people successfully negotiate these and other identities without causing them “cognitive dissonance” or impeding their ability in their daily life to braid seamlessly identity categories. It is therefore not surprising to see how Turkish nationalism is woven together with Islamic faith to create — under AKP tutelage — what has become the current form of Turkish-Islamic nationalism. In a way, Turkish nationalism has come full circle, joining the common admixture of nationalism and Islam familiar in the Arabic-speaking world. In the relatively brief emergent phase of Arab nationalism at the turn of the century, Christian thinkers and activists played an important role.26 They were the carriers of European ideas of nationhood and effectively applied those ideas to Arab aspirations for sovereignty and independence. They were hoping then that a relatively secular, non-Islamic ideology would allow them to be part of those Arab nations in an equal, non-subservient role. It would shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 115 Turkish Nationalism in Islamic Faith-Based Politics  1 1 5 not be for long, however, before Muslims assumed the leadership and shaped Arab nationalism in terms that did not contradict but rather complemented the prevailing Islamic belief systems in the Middle East and North Africa. Arab nationalism soon began to incorporate Islamic symbolism and a religious spirit, allocating to non-Muslim minorities and their leaders their traditional place in Muslim-majority societies. The authoritarian, military-based regimes that came to power throughout the region from the mid-twentieth century until the recent Arab revolutions were the bearers of that brand of Arab nationalism, and in many cases, fought and repressed the challenge mounted against them by Islamist opposition factions, such as the Muslim Brothers and various Salafist and Jihadist militant groups. Many observers of the Arab awakening stress the Islamic and even Islamist nature of the movements that replaced the military-backed dictatorships, but they often failed to realize the intensely nationalist and anti-colonial motivations that undergird these revolutions. The Muslim Brothers of Egypt are strongly committed Egyptian nationalists, and they see no contradiction between that strong sentiment and their Islamic faith. Being Islamic does not make you less of an Egyptian nationalist, despite the expected supra-nationalist commitment to the Islamic umma. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, and thus far also in the twentyfirst, supra-nationalist identifications have failed to shake the resiliency of the nation state, certainly in the Middle East and North Africa and, arguably, globally as well. This is true about organic, endogenic ideologies such as those espoused by various “pan” movements — pan-Arabism, pan-Turkism, panTuranism. But perhaps more surprisingly, and given the more religion-friendly climate in the region and beyond, pan-Islam has also failed to make inroads beyond the loose Organization of Islamic Countries, or the various marginal extremist Caliphate (Khilafa) movements. Inorganic, exogenic supra-nationalist identifications, such as socialism-communism, have also failed to replace or even weaken post-World War I nation state loyalties. All regional and subregional alliances, such as the Arab League, have only managed to achieve a certain measure of cooperation without realizing even a modicum of formal unification among member states. In fact, the only redrawing of the Sykes-Pico border lines that might result from the quagmire of the New Middle East is the formation of a Kurdish independent or largely autonomous state. Although even such an eventuality is still shrouded in much doubt, should it come to be, it would only reaffirm the strength and vitality of the nation state, not invalidate it. For all its internal divisions and legitimacy challenges, Kurdish nationalism is a classic fusion of both the ethnic and the territorial brands, and attempts to break it up are based on claims of nation states such as Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran to their own patrimonial integrity. But Turkey — and specifically its AKP ruling party — is perhaps the only one using Islamic rhetoric to stifle Kurdish nationalist militancy, such as represented by the secular, leftist PKK. Be that as it may, the fusion of nationalism and Islam, rather than a shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 116 1 1 6  ehud r. toledano confrontation between them, seems to be the dominant trend in both Turkey and the nascent, post-Arab Spring democracies, especially Egypt and Tunisia, but also, in their own way, Libya, Yemen, the longer struggling Iraq, and the still uncertain Syria. Paradoxically, this fusion does not erode the supremacy of the nation state, but rather enhances mobilization under its flag and symbols — a crescent and a star, the color green, or the words Allah hu akbar might be added, while the framing is still the nationalist one. Thus, whereas the national is reinforced by the fusion, the super-national Islamic option remains soft, a sentiment hovering out and above. But why has the Middle Eastern nation state survived the Islamic supranationalist challenge for close to a century now, despite the contention that it is, more often than not, an “artificial imperialist creation”? This may have to do with atavistic, primordial loyalties to proto-nationalist identities, as in Egypt, for example; the successful entrenchment and reproduction of nation states by strong, centralized, authoritarian regimes, as in the case of Iraq and Syria, and to a lesser degree, Turkey; and also by the fragility of supra-nationalist identities and their failure to create and sustain viable supra-nationalist entities, as in the case of pan-Islam, pan-Arabism, or pan-Turanism. Obviously, further research and reflection are required for a more comprehensive explanation to emerge. Notes 1 http://www.france24.com/en/20121124-europe-district-turkey-eu-europe-akperdogan-secularism-islam-freedom-of-speech-press. 2 The most recent comprehensive assessment of various aspects of Ottoman history is The Ottoman World, ed. Christine Woodhead (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). 3 On nomads in the Empire, see Re¹at Kasaba, “Nomads and Tribes in the Ottoman Empire,” in ibid., 11–24. 4 On this, see Woodhead, “Ottoman Languages,” in The Ottoman World (above n. 2), 143–158. 5 See, for example, in the case of Egypt, Mine Ener, Managing Egypt’s Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kenneth M. Cuno, The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 6 On the Middle East under the Ottomans, see Ehud R. Toledano, “The ArabicSpeaking World in the Ottoman Period: A Socio-Political Analysis,” in The Ottoman World (above n. 2), 453–466. 7 Albert Hourani, “The Ottoman Background of the Modern Middle East,” in Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), 2. 8 On the transition from imperial rule to Arab nationalism, still relevant is Ernest Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); more recent studies include Rashid I. Khalidi, British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906–1914 (London: Ithaca Press, 1980); and Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 117 Turkish Nationalism in Islamic Faith-Based Politics  1 1 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See, for example, Günther Schlee, How Enemies Are Made: Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflicts, vol. 3 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 103 ff. The literature on this is immense and writers fall into distinct schools of thought. While Anthony D. Smith is the leading figure in one such school, his two recent books give a fairly broad survey of the main debates in the field: The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); and Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998). Beyond this, the interested reader should explore directly writings by Gellner, Geertz, Hobsbaum, Kedourie, and others mentioned in Smith’s surveys. For my own take on that, see Ehud R. Toledano, “Middle East Historians and the Arab Spring: Early-Days Assessment,” Sharqiyya, Special Issue: The Arab Spring (2011): 4–11. For a discussion of that debate, see Toledano, “Socio-Political Analysis” (above n. 6), 455–459 and the literature cited therein (especially notes 24 and 25). Classical depictions of nineteenth-century Ottoman history are cited in ibid., note 23. See, for example Ehud R. Toledano, “The Emergence of Ottoman-Local Elites (1700–1800): A Framework for Research,” in Middle Eastern Politics and Ideas: A History from Within, eds. Ilan Pappé and Moshe Ma’oz (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997), 145–162; Ariel Salzmann, “An Ancien Régime Revisited: “Privatization” and Political Economy in the EighteenthCentury Ottoman Empire,” Politics & Society 21/4 (1993): 393–423. The classic account of that period is Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010; originally published in 1969 by Oxford University Press); but see also my review of this book and the suggestions for updating it contained therein, in Bustan: The Middle East Book Review 2/1 (2011): 36–38. For more current writing on the Young Turks and the CUP, see Eric J. Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement (1905–1926) (Leiden: Brill, 1984), and Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). Kent F. Schull, “Identity in the Ottoman Prison Surveys of 1912 and 1914,” IJMES 41 (2009): 365–367. Ibid., 367. The following account of events is based on the best and most comprehensive survey of Republican history provided by Eric Zürcher’s Turkey: A Modern History, third fully revised and annotated edition (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003). (Twenty-five editions of this leading textbook have been published between 1997 and 2012.) The socio-economic data used in the following sections are based on Güven Sak, “Turkey’s Regional Integration: Is It Economic Transformation or Shift of Axis?” Lecture delivered by the Director of TEPAV (Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey), May 6, 2010, Tel Aviv. shapira - vol 2 - r3 - index__ 12/06/2013 16:42 Page 118 1 1 8  ehud r. toledano 20 Analysis in this and the following section draws on my “AKP’s New Turkey,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology 11 (2011): 40–61. 21 http://www.akparti.org.tr/site/haberler/basbakan-erdoganin-ak-parti-4.-olaganbuyuk-kongresi-konusmasinin-tam-metni/31771. 22 “Proposal to Create an Institute for the Study of Development” (McGill University, March 2006). 23 Brian Donahoe et al., “The Formation and Mobilization of Collective Identities in Situations of Conflict and Integration,” Working Paper No. 116, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, MPI Series, 2009. The following references to the theoretical perspective of Schlee and his team also draw on Günther Schlee, How Enemies Are Made: Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflicts, Vol. 3 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 103, and Schlee et al., “Choice and Identity,” Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Report 2008–2009, Vol. 1: 9–28. 24 See, for example, Herbert J. Gans, “Toward a Reconciliation of ‘Assimilation’ and ‘Pluralism’: The Interplay of Acculturation and Ethnic Retention,” International Migration Review 31/4 (1997): 875–892; and Rakefet Sela-Sheffy, “Integration through Distinction: German-Jewish Immigrants, the Legal Profession and Patterns of Bourgeois Culture in British-ruled Jewish Palestine,” Journal of Historical Sociology 19/1 (2006): 34–59. 25 For a critical discussion of the concept, see Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37/1 (2003): 113–123. On this, see also Schlee’s analysis, “Integration and Conflict: Introduction,” Max Planck Institute Report 2004–2005: 79 ff. 26 There is a fairly large body of knowledge on this issue, rife with disputes and controversies. As an introduction to some of these, see Rashid Khalidi, The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Youssef Choueiri, Arab Nationalism – A History: Nation and State in the Arab World (Oxford and Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000); Adeed Dawisha, “Requiem for Arab Nationalism,” Middle East Quarterly 10/1 (2003): 25–41; Martin Kramer, “Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity,” Daedalus 22/3(1993): 171–206.