Turkish Islamic Exceptional Ism

Turkish Studies,Vol. 6, No. 2, 145–165, June 2005

ISSN 1468-3849 Print/1743-9663 Online/05/020145-21 © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group LtdDOI: 10.1080/14683840500119478

Turkish Islamic Exceptionalism Yesterday and Today: Continuity, Rupture and Reconstruction in Operational Codes

[SCEDIL]

ERIF MARD N

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey

Taylor and Francis LtdFTUR111930.sgm10.1080/14683840500119478Turkish Studies1468-3849 Print/1743-9663 onlineOriginal Article2005Taylor & Francis Group Ltd62000000June 2005[Scedil][email protected]

A

BSTRACT

The modernization of Turkey is usually covered as a process primarily gener-ated after the foundation of the Turkish republic. This is a clearly simplistic image thatneglects to bring in the continuities between the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms andthe Republic itself. These continuities may even be traced to the earlier rise of a Turkishbureaucratic class (circa 1780). Another aspect of this simplification is that it neglects thetype of institution building policy that goes back to the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r.1876–1909) and the type of synthesis between Islam and modernity that was promoted byan intellectual elite between 1908 and 1923.

“Only one that is like us and yet distinct from us, and that can coexist with usin the proximity of likeness and the distance of otherness can authenticate trueotherness.”

1

The dramatic victory of the Justice and Development Party (

Adalet ve KalkınmaPartisi

, AKP) in the Turkish general elections of 2002 caused stupefaction that wasmost visible among the secular Turkish establishment. The fact that various surveyshad predicted this outcome really brought home the shock.

There had been precedents to the Islamization of governments since the 1970s,but the overwhelming superiority of the AKP in Parliament was new. The Welfare(

Refah

) Party, relying on support from conservative, but essentially secular, partieshad been in power for a time in 1996–97.

2

It was forced out by the restrained but, inthe end, effective influence of the Turkish armed forces.

Altogether, the political situation created by the success of the AKP was unprece-dented. An interesting aspect of the period following this victory was the dearth ofstudies investigating in depth the Islamic component in the life of Recep TayyipErdo

[gbreve]

an, the new prime minister, a former torch bearer of Islam.

Correspondence Address:

[Scedil]

erif Mardin, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University, Orhanlı-Tuzla, 34956 Istanbul, Turkey. Email: [email protected]

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No serious study of the role of Islam in the prime minister’s career emergedfrom academic circles. His effortless hobnobbing with American presidents andEurocrats between 2002 and 2003 may have, by contrast with his intellectualorigins, highlighted an unexpected cosmopolitanism that became the only focus ofspeculation.

Yet, at this very juncture, the fierce debate as to whether Islam was an organiccomponent of Turkish culture, a combat between “laics” and Islamists, continuedunabated. This age-old controversy was almost detached from issues relating toAKP success. Fears about creeping political Islam, as usual, occupied much spacein the media. What was missing was curiosity about the long-range influence ofan Islamic “voice” in Turkey, one product of which certainly was Erdo

[gbreve]

anhimself.

For social scientists—both Turkish and foreign—the issue was one of finding afoundation of laic legitimation for Turkey’s modernity rather than attempting tounderstand the AKP phenomenon. Among Islamists, on the other hand, theobverse of the laic position prevailed, namely that what had happened was anaspect of reintegration of Islam into Turkish society as part of a trend towardsgreater cultural authenticity.

3

For both groups, Durkheim, Weber, Wuthnow,Berger and Luckmann were “good” for Western religion but irrelevant for TurkishMuslims.

4

This stand was also a denial of the world-over revitalization of religion in moderntimes about which so much had been written.

5

What we still need today is a recon-stitution of the

process

that has led to the emergence of the AKP. This reconstitutionrequires a dialectical approach in which a number of opposites are recuperated in ahistorical setting.

6

One theme developed here, for instance, is that in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies, the discourse of increasingly powerful Ottoman bureaucracy alreadycarried aspects of a type of “positivism” long before the mid-nineteenth-centuryreforms of the

Tanzimat

,

7

and that Islam—both with regard to its institutions andideology—had only had scattered moments of hegemony in the history of theOttoman Empire. The ubiquity of a peculiar mix of state and religious discourse inthe Ottoman Empire promoted a modern Turkish Islamic “exceptionalism” withdistant Ottoman roots. It is the concentration of Islamic studies on the Islam of Arabs

8

that has hidden this character of Ottoman religious structure, a character thatantedates and adumbrates the secularism of the Turkish Republic.

Two levels of the theme of “exceptionalism” are developed here: first, that ofOttoman tacit, deeply embedded, shared “background understandings.”

9

The mainpoint, that secular as well as religious elites shared a space provided by the state inthe Ottoman Empire, becomes much more compelling when one introduces the tacitaspect of the sharing, as discussed by Charles Taylor. In the present case, thesupporting tacit element is the semi-ontological status of the collective good as a“hypergood” in Islam.

10

The general argument has been made by Patricia Crone,

11

the more specific treatment for the Ottoman Empire is found in a brilliant article byTahsin Görgün.

12

Both works show that in Islam, political and social structures do

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Turkish Islamic Exceptionalism Yesterday and Today

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not operate on a

foundation

of religiosity, but are considered to be made of the same“stuff.” This mode of thinking has been replaced in contemporary Islam by a post-Cartesian idea of religion and society as distinct but organically connected levels oforganization, a “modern” way of posing the problem. There was, then, a foundationof Islamic legitimation for collective organization, the form of which has beenforgotten or, at least, neglected in our times. Such a foundation would allow a prior,sophisticated culture of political organization to go on to make political organizationthe fulcrum of a society. The pre-Ottomans did have that sophisticated politicalculture and they used what amounted to an Islamic dispensation to focus on thepolitical—one may say with only a slight exaggeration—at the expense of religionin a way that was not anticipated by the original Islamic theory. These two elementsare the tacit facets of Ottoman socio-political organization. A second theme in thisessay, linked to these organizational precedents, is that of Ottoman reform andbureaucratic

practice

in the nineteenth century as well as its transformation in thelate nineteenth century.

13

The developments regarding Islam in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empirecovered here only partly overlap with the clash of

Ijtihad

and

Taklid

,

14

a founda-tional framework of studies of Islamic modernization. In the case of Turkey weshould concentrate, rather, on specific developments linked to the organizationalnovelty and proselytizing work of the Mujaddidi-Nak

[scedil]

ibendi religious order.

15

Twopoints should emerge from this essay. First, that in the Ottoman Empire the processof learning on the road to modernization was more than simply an accumulation offacts and comprises the carving of a new qualitative sphere, i.e., that of the legitima-tion of knowledge produced in the Western post-Cartesian style. Second, that thereexists an autonomous line of development of the Nak

[scedil]

ibendi “Sufi” order that takesit into that new cognitive sphere and from there into politics. Finally, another mainargument of this essay is that the somewhat diffuse story about “multiple moderni-ties” conceals the necessary attention one should accord to specific historical devel-opments.

The term “operational code,” which appears in the title to the essay, goes back toNathan Leites’ book on

The Operational Code of the Politbureau

.

16

It refers to aspecific type of

praxis

, of dealing with social reality.

17

The praxis of Ottomanbureaucrats, which, typically, focused on institution building, ultimately led to theTurkish Republic. The continuity of this praxis was “ruptured” by that of theNak

[scedil]

ibendi Sufi orders, which like all Islamic brotherhoods, used network organiz-ing for their praxis.

18

As for “reconstruction,” each of these codes changed withtime, eventually converging toward the field of politics. “Exceptionalism” is theway in which this very special dialectic has marked Islam in the Ottoman Empireand Turkey. In the most general sense this means that the Ottomans as well as themodern Turks shared the feeling that after all was said and done, despite skirmishesand rebellions against the state, they possessed a state; that the state was a life-formthrough which channels all authorities, whether secular or religious, operated toachievement and success. That sharing, however, did not mean that a variety of

practices

could not develop.

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Turkish-Islamic Exceptionalism

In the contemporary literature on Islam and modernity the primary—and in factoverwhelming—voice is that of a concentration on Arab or Salafi Islam. Aziz al-Azmeh’s

Islams and Modernities

, an example of an informed, philosophicallydeclamatory and sociologically aware prototype of the genre, is, despite its pluralisttitle, primarily a comment on Arab Islam. This selectiveness, which can only bedescribed as sectarianism, does not take into account—

pace

Indonesia, Pakistan andthe Balkans—the case of Ottoman and modern Turkish Islam. Possibly, at the time

Islams and Modernities

was written, Islam in Turkey did not hold out the prospectof an investigation that did not fit ready-made categories.

19

Yet it is exactly thisparticular

sui generis

aspect of Turkish Islam that today seems in need of an expla-nation. This essay will categorize this contrary

20

and non-conformist aspect of Turk-ish Islam as that of “Turkish exceptionalism,” using this adjective by example of abook by Seymour Martin Lipset, on American exceptionalism.

What Lipset was underlining were those features of American society that hadgiven it a special send-off in history, a country that had developed without thefeudal baggage that had persistently stuck to West European modern history. Thiswas, of course, an insight Lipset owed to Alexis de Tocqueville, the premier politi-cal sociologist of the transition to modernity.

21

The point made in this essay is thatthe specifics of Turkish history have endowed the Ottomans and the TurkishRepublic with characteristics that have worked cumulatively to create a specialsetting for Islam, a setting where secularism and Islam interpenetrate, which ofcourse is quite different from saying that Islam and secularism have fused. Thisinterpenetration or overlap is the real methodological obstacle that faces the investi-gator of Islamic modernism in Turkey. It establishes a field for study that showsmuch greater complexity than the research based on the essentialism of Islam, thecore of contemporary studies of “political” Islam in Turkey and elsewhere.

22

Thisessay has attempted to overcome this obstacle—at least partly—by basing itself ona specific study of social movements by Eyerman and Jamison, who concentrate onsocial movements as cognitive practice.

23

The three social forces that enter this narrative are the discourse of the Ottomanand Turkish state officials, the rise of the Mujaddidi-Khalidi Nak

[scedil]

ibendi order andthe voice of Ottoman and Turkish intellectuals trying to extract a meaning from Islamin an attempt to synchronize it with the European intellectual construction known as“civilization.”

24

As to the “Arab” Islam already mentioned as a foil to “Ottoman,” itis not a linguistic-religious category, but rather an extrinsic presence of Turkishhistory. First, in the sense of the condescension of the Ottoman bureaucratic centertowards Arabs as “Bedouins” (

bedevî

); second, in the suspicion of the Young Turksthat Arabs were seceding from the Ottoman Empire; and third, through the promotionof a

dolchstosslegende

(stab-in-the-back legend) of the “betrayal” of the Arabs duringthe First World War. This assiduously promoted Republican theme was found in allinstructional texts on the history of the Turkish Republic; works in Arabic were foundto ignore the specificity of Ottoman-Turkish-Islam. Today, in Turkey, the classical

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texts of Islam are increasingly being retrieved, while writings by Arabs, on the otherhand, served as short-lived sources of inspiration. Sayyid Kutub or Said Hawa wereinfluential in the 1960s and in the late 1970s. The writings of these two Muslim reviv-alists, written in Arabic, were translated into Turkish but, as will appear in the follow-ing pages, they were overtaken by the local productions of Nak

[scedil]

ibendis.

The Political Discourse of Ottoman Elites

There has now accumulated considerable information about the Ottoman politi-cal elite.

25

Halil

[Idot ]

nalcık was the first to indicate that while the Doctors of IslamicLaw (

ulema

) had a central role to play in the Ottoman Empire, there existed arivalry that set the

ulema

against the carriers of the Ottoman political discourseformed in the Palace and the scribal class established in bureaus of the Ottomanadministration.

26

This rivalry was in fact the rivalry of two discourses: oneclearly targeted to the preservation of the Ottoman state and the second aimed atkeeping a state of equilibrium in the complex social structure of the Empire,giving its due both to individuals and to the Ottoman equivalent of establishedsocial institution.

Although there existed an overlap between these discourses there also could bedistinguished a dividing line separating the discourse of the bureaucracy—moresecular—and that of the

ulema

—more religious. An early example of the “secular-ity” of the bureaucratic discourse may be found in the work of the seventeenth-century polymath Kâtip Çelebi. Both his organicist theories of the state and hisadoption of the Khaldunian view of the rise and demise of states differ from theargumentation of the earlier, more moralistic classical discourse of Kınalızâde thathas a more clearly Islamic foundation.

27

Kâtip Çelebi’s indictment of the nefarious effects of the religious strife of his timeas well as his critique of Ottoman Islamic religious education place him in a speciallocus even within the discourse of Ottoman scribal personnel. While we do notknow whether this seventeenth-century Ottoman critique was a harbinger of moregeneral secularist trends, it is quite clear that the eighteenth century brought about anumber of cumulative changes that promoted the “secularist” aspect of the discourseof Ottoman bureaucracy. One of these changes was the creation of a new bureau(

Amedî Odası

) through which flowed all communication with Western states.

28

Theemployees of this bureau were now increasingly exposed to information about themajor European states. Antedating this change already in the 1730s there had beenan increase in the number of bureaucrats who were sent to various European capitalsto observe Western “ways.” An innovation of the same years was the practice ofthese envoys to write reports about their missions upon their return. What is strikingabout these reports is the “materiality” of their content. The reports did not contrastthe religious or political institutions they found in the West with their Ottomanequivalents, but focused on the material elements of life. They detailed technologi-cal advances such as the construction of stone buildings, both military and civilian,and they described the splendor of Versailles, its organization of leisure activities

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and in particular the theatre. The precision of the tables of astronomical observato-ries also impressed them.

In the case of 28 Çelebi Mehmed Efendi, the envoy to France in 1720:

What he evokes—principally—and with what astonishment and wonder arethe achievements [of] science and technology and those of the different arts …But his curiosity and interest also cover natural phenomena and animal species:the tides or the early bloom of hyacinths and violets in Bordeaux … plants ofthe Jardin de Roi “unknown in Turkey,” … the animals of the new world hediscovers in the menagerie in Chantilly.

29

The most interesting part of his report, however, is Mehmet Çelebi’s summarizingof his experiences, i.e., the

hadis

to the effect that the world is the prison of thebeliever and the paradise of the infidel. This, of course, is pure irony and opensanother window on the discourse of the Ottoman bureaucrats. An aspect of theOttoman bureaucratic style in harmony with this bureaucratic irony is the stronginfluences in Ottoman state bureaus of Persian culture and its classics, an anathemato the more Orthodox

ulema

.No Doctor of Islamic Law was chosen for these foreign missions, even though the

bureaucrats that were selected had the same disadvantages of the

ulema

of notknowing the languages of the countries in which they were on mission. Suchpersonnel did however emerge increasingly from the

Amedî

Bureau with time. Amost extraordinary example of the emphasis on “materiality” is the report onAustria of Ebubekir Ratip Efendi.

30

During the 227 days he spent in Austria in1792–93 Ebubekir Ratip Efendi was able to compile an extraordinarily detaileddescription of the military, financial and economic organization of that country.Only in one instance does one encounter a statement about religions in the entirereport,

31

and that relates to Islam being a better mobilizer of the military than theWest.

In short, the reports of the envoys had a “positivistic” flavor, which recreatedanother shared tacit element, that of the bureaucrats’ discourse. No wonder, then,that the foundation of the nineteenth-century reform movement known as the

Tanzi-mat

was modeled on the theories of the Austro-German Cameralists, those reformersof state structures whose view adumbrated the later positivists and Saint-Simonians.The entire reform movement of the

Tanzimat

was based on the positivistic view ofthe social engineer.

32

In the 1790s, a doorway into that worldview had been the simi-larly positivistic cast of military education.

33

The prevailing conceptual set of the bureaucrats was taken over by the main archi-tects of the

Tanzimat

, headed by the Grand Vizier Mustafa Re

[scedil]

id Pa

[scedil]

a (1800–58).

34

In the succeeding generation (the 1860s), we see the members of the first Constitu-tionalist-Liberal movement, the Young Ottomans, promoting a new version of thebureaucratic style, although with a new twist: they offered a constitutional projectalbeit with an Islamic foundation. The reason for this innovation is clear: alreadythere had been protests on the part of groups of Muslims against the privileges

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granted European powers in the Empire in 1856.

35

Signs appeared of a new ideolog-ical-religious threshold: in 1859 a conspiracy by members of the Nak

[scedil]

ibendi broth-erhood aiming to assassinate the Sultan was uncovered (

Kuleli Vak’ası

, the KuleliIncident).36 Nak[scedil] ibendis did collaborate with the Young Ottomans in the sense ofusing the Friday prayers in mosques to promote constitutional reform. However, thiscollaboration was tainted by the Nak[scedil] ibendis’ dislike of and resentment against thereform policy of the Tanzimat, hostility that was expressed at great length bySarıyerli [Scedil] eyh Sadık Efendi in his Tanzir-i Telemak.37

While the Young Ottomans were wary of discussing religious themes, an impor-tant development took place within the Ottoman religious worldview in their time,namely the capture by private individuals of discussions about religion, to that dateonly a legitimate field for the ulema. This new area of discussion was introducedby Ali Suavi, an extraordinary character who, though a graduate of the secular,state-sponsored Middle School of the Tanzimat, fabricated a religious personalityfor himself. While Suavi was dismissed by the Young Ottomans as a charlatan,38

the new “private” voice of Islam, sometimes loud and sometimes more measured,was from now on a theme equally shared by secular and religious intellectuals.Members of a new intelligentsia—most of whom were no longer educated in reli-gious seminars (medrese), but in the schools established as part of the reforms ofthe Tanzimat—began to discuss Islam as a fundamental social issue. This newvenue first appeared in the 1870s. The aim, at this juncture, was the mobilizationof Muslims in order to construct a new Islamic unity; the solidarity thus gainedwas to be used against imperialism. Later, in the 1890s, part of the intelligentsiapromoted arguments that would allow Islam to be seen as the locus of progressand civilization. What is quite clear here is the overlap between the earlierdiscourse of the bureaucrats and this new utilitarian use of Islam. In the 1870s westill find Münif Pa[scedil] a, the premier organizer of knowledge in the Western mode ofthe Tanzimat, speaking of the elimination of religious fanaticism through thespread of science.

Selim Deringil has shown how the state-centered, manipulative use of Islam(diluted by elements of superstitious fears) was the real foundation of the Islamicconservation of Sultan Abdülhamid II.39 A doctoral dissertation from 2003 has alsoindicated how the Ottoman intellectuals—at first in the 1890s but more clearly afterthe Young Turks’ revolution of 1908 —were bowled over by the materialism ofBüchner and Moleschott, the two best-known leaders of nineteenth-century Germanmaterialism. The only limit to the Turks’ admiration seems to have been the poten-tial of materialism to damage the state.40 This transformation of the positivistelement in the bureaucratic discourse appears once more in the positivist worldviewof the leaders of the opposition to Sultan Abdülhamid in exile.41 No wonder thenthat it later also shows in the policies of the Young Turks in power.42

The echo among religious circles of the theories of Büchner and Moleschott maybe followed at two levels: first with regard to the slow but persistent penetration intothe provinces of the media as instruments of communication. Second, in the contin-ued interest in technology shown in the Hamidian era both by the Sultan and by the

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Ottoman press. A third, less visible but as important level was the shifting of discus-sions of the creative power of the divinity from the description of the infinite varietyof God’s creative powers to that of the autonomy of forces of nature directed by God.In another work an attempt was made to show how a Nak[scedil] ibendi, raised in thereligious seminaries of North Eastern Turkey, availed himself of that shift of focus tomake it an element of his Islamic “voice.”43 The latest versions of what I have calledhere the “private capture” of discussions about Islam were still a central discourse inthe first years of the twentieth century, the poet Mehmet Akif (1873–1936) being oneof its most prominent spokesmen.44 Mehmet Akif is the archetypal agent of the stageTurkish “exceptionalism” had reached at that time: he projected the voice of anIslamic reformer, he was an Ottoman patriot, he sat as a representative in the Repub-lic’s Grand National Assembly, and he was the author of the Republic’s anthem. Inthe meantime, one relatively silent movement, that of the Nak[scedil] ibendis, had beengaining ground since the first decades of the nineteenth century.

The media of the Republican era has identified at least two Nak[scedil] ibendi-led move-ments that emerged in the early twentieth century. One, the privates’ rebellion ofApril 1909, eventually leading to Sultan Abdülhamid’s abdication, and the second,the revolt of Sheikh Said in 1925. In the extant literature, the description of thesetwo movements spotlights their “fanaticism,” treachery and reactionary qualities.But this narrative dismisses the strength and vigorousness of the growth ofNak[scedil] ibendism, an extraordinarily resilient revivalist movement that has to be stud-ied in greater historical detail to feature its importance in Turkey.45 All of thesuccessful elements of modern Turkish Islamic politics have originated in laterbranchings of that group.

Nak[scedil] ibsendis

In the seventeenth century in India the potential for an Islamic resistance against thestate was rediscovered by an âlim (Doctor of Islamic Law), Ahmed al-Sirhindi(d.1624), who went on to reorganize the Nak[scedil] ibendi order for this very purpose.There is more here than a simple conflict of power in the sense that for him din, reli-gion, was not just an ontological position, a metaphysical theory and a criticalguideline, but in addition, revitalized Islam was an organizational means to stop itsinfiltration by creedal formulations of Hinduism, a policy he felt was encouraged bythe Mogul ruler Akbar.46 Sirhindi died in 1624 and by the early 1800s his mobiliz-ing stance had been brought to the Kurdish region of Central, North East and SouthEast Anatolia.47 Here it achieved immense success, possibly because it establishedthe foundation of Islamic civility in a mountainous region where organized Islamhad not been able to penetrate. In addition, the leader of this movement, Shaikh orMevlanâ Halid Ba[gbreve] dadi (1777–1826), was a brilliant organizer. As result, the areaof Nak[scedil] ibendi influence was enormously widened in Anatolia in the nineteenthcentury.48

No attempt is made to reach for links between this revivalist Mujaddidi-KhalidiNak[scedil] ibendism and the wider revivalism in the Islamic world of a reformist

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Turkish Islamic Exceptionalism Yesterday and Today 153

movement that has been named neo-Sufi.49 The discussion is ongoing and a consid-erable amount of material has been produced, but appears to have been ignored byTurkish social scientists.50 Nevertheless, specific studies of the Nak[scedil] ibendi move-ment show its vast extension, and its extraordinary proselytizing zeal. HamidAlgar’s description is the most apposite:

When taking leave of [his Pîr] Shah Gulâm Ali Dihlevî, Mevlanâ Halidinformed him that his supreme aim was to seek this world for the sake ofreligion … he therefore elaborated a veritable ‘politics of guidance’ (siyasatal-irshad) which led him to construct a network of no fewer than 116 khali-fas, each with a carefully delineated area of responsibility, and in the case ofsome prominent recruits to relax the devotional discipline customarilyimposed on mürîds. The sole novelty that Mevlanâ Halid contributed to thedevotional life of the Nak[scedil] ibendi order—an unprecedented emphasis on thepractice of râbita (the establishing of an imaginary link with the Shaykh)and an insistence on confining it to himself—had a political aspect: that ofunifying the Hâlidî-Naqshbandi order as a centralized, disciplined organiza-tion … The ambiguous relations between the Ottoman authorities andMevlanâ Halid, their would-be savior and guide on the path to rectitude,were most apparent in Istanbul. Mevlanâ Halid’s first representative in theOttoman capital aroused hostility because of his attempts to exclude non-initiates from a public mosque during the performance of Hâlidî rituals. Hisreplacement, Abd’ülvahhâb es-Sûsî, played a more constructive role andrecruited into the Hâlidî Naqshbandi order Mekkiz[amacr ] de Mustafa Âsım,several times [Scedil] eyhülislam; Keçecizade [Idot ] zzet Molla, qadi of Istanbul; andmembers of the bureaucracy including Gürcü Necip Pa[scedil] a and Musa SafvetiPa[scedil] a. Precisely this swift expansion of the order led to anxiety on the part ofSultan Mahmud II, resulting in a series of expulsions of prominent Hâlidîsfrom Istanbul; the most comprehensive of these came in April 1828 when allHâlidîs were banished and a ban was placed on the naming of any newHâlidî representative to the city. Hâlidî influence was nonetheless strong inthe upper echelons of the bureaucracy during most of the reign of MahmudII and it may have helped to create a favorable climate for the abolition ofthe Janissaries and the proscription of the Bekta[scedil] i order. In the early 1830sSultan Mahmud became better disposed to the Hâlidîs and in 1833 he reap-pointed Mekkizâde (sic) Asım Efendi to the office of [Scedil] eyhülislam, which hecontinued to hold in the reign of Sultan Abdülmecid.51

During the nineteenth century, all of Anatolia began to be crisscrossed byNak[scedil] ibendi networks.52 The increasing penetration of Sufi orders in this areaamounted to the implantation of elements of an Islamic civility at a time when theOttoman Empire had been unable to intervene in inter-tribal conflict and the ensuinganarchy.53 The Nak[scedil] ibendi leaders also assumed roles of political leadership in thisregion.54

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A New Sphere for the Bureaucracy

By the 1890s, the structure of the Tanzimat was itself in the process of changing. Theideological cast of the “secular” discourse of the bureaucracy had been transformedby its aim, i.e., establishing constituted bodies now regulated by a new Western-inspired administrative law.55 Among these could be counted local representativeinstitution, municipal government, state-sponsored semi-autonomous bodies such assavings trusts and the presence in the provinces of state banks, state educational insti-tutions and institutions regulating public health.56 In this perspective, the “discourse”of the reformers may be reinterpreted as now consisting of a new operational code,i.e., that of the formation of constituted bodies under a system of administrativesecular law. Already in the 1880s, the increasing “professionalization,” i.e., Westerninstitution-building activities, opened up a new phase in the secularism of the oldbureaucratic class. More than a specific discourse, what now defined the “group-ness” of the bureaucrat was his role and the public space carved by those activities.The existing literature indicates that this system had become one of the organiza-tional features of provincial life in the Ottoman Empire by 1900 and that it evenpercolated into everyday life in the Ottoman provinces, and changed it.57 Thispresence and modernization of the province is certified by the ways in which theprovincial setting of Anatolia contributed to the organization of the Turkish resis-tance to the invasion of Anatolia after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the FirstWorld War.58

The situation faced by the new Turkish Republic (est. 1923) was that of a triplechallenge: the desire of the provincial notables (or e[scedil] raf) and tribal leaders—overlapping with crypto-religious brotherhoods of all descriptions—to take part ingoverning, the anti-secularism of the religiously motivated Nak[scedil] ibendi of Anato-lia, and the ongoing “voice” of reformist Islam. The interrelation of these forcesgives us a better picture of the reality of those times than the simplified categori-zation of much of modern Turkish history, whether by Turkish or foreignauthors.59 Although it had some overlap with the provincial e[scedil] raf, the Nak[scedil] ibendioperated with their own organizational principle, that of the network. The Repub-lican regime stifled the development of both of these social-structural componentsof Anatolia. However, it also promoted their change. Between 1930 and 1980, theneed to work in the everyday and to synchronize one’s approach with the frame-work of the administrative and economic institution of the Republic (all of whichhad a tacit background of positivist rationality), introduced the Nak[scedil] ibendi andother Islamic conservatives still working through networks to a new world. Here,instrumental reason was beginning to acquire a new role. Of necessity the use ofinstrumental reason had to follow the contours of the latent rationality of Republi-can institutions and was used for personal benefit. The use of the strongly seculareducational institutions of the Republic is a prime example here. But this processworked in two directions. The process of adaptation had gradually changed thecognitive frame of the conservatives. At the same time, both the Nak[scedil] ibendi andIslamic conservatives of all descriptions were introduced into market relations

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that promoted economic-rationalistic strategies. The rise of market relations led tonew structural, class-like developments: the “bazari” (esnaf) became a business-man. Later, this group was to be part of the creation of an Anatolian businessclass that began to show its influence in the 1970s. Necmettin Erbakan, thefounder of the first successful “Islamist” party, was one person to profit from thisdevelopment.60 Another variant of the transformation of Nak[scedil] ibendi discourse inthe 1940s to the 1960s was its encounter with Turkish nationalist ideologythrough the influence of [Scedil] eyh Abdülaziz Bekkine on the eminent Turkish nation-alist Nurettin Topçu. A later development that showed the gradual integration ofthe Nak[scedil] ibendi into modernity was their embracement of one of the two mostprominent “modernist” Turkish poets of the Republican era, Necip FazılKısakürek. From the 1940s, both in his periodical (The Great East) and confer-ences that took him to provincial centers, he promoted a renewalist Islam thatwas primarily a defense of a cultural tradition. Here the line between Islam andnationalism became vague and could, therefore, attract a new generation raised inthe Republican nationalist tradition.

All of this happened in a much more diffuse way than an explanation broughthere can show but in the most general sense what has been described was the core ofa learning process. Using the media and entering politics were other componentsthat changed operational strategies throughout Turkey from the 1980s onward. Theinfluence of the moral culture of Islam, its “voice,” was still around as an autono-mous force given the lackluster ethical message of the Republic.

The creation of political parties in the 1940s liberated energies in the first ofthe two operational fields described, namely, that of persons with some skill inthe promotion of constituted bodies. Offices in local representative institutions,members of the provincial elite with responsibilities in the single party of theRepublic at the local level, officials of municipal government of the same origin,the personnel of state banks, lawyers, physicians and educators in the stateeducational system were drawn into this area. In the 1960s, the two organiza-tional principles of network organizing and institution building were beginning tooverlap, but persons with knowledge of regulation still had an advantage overthose able to mobilize fellow Muslims, friends and relatives. A characteristicfeature of this process of social change was that it involved a process of learn-ing. As shown, between 1910 and 2000 the Nak[scedil] ibendis had been graduallylearning and changing their operational code.61 This was not simply a randomoccurrence; its motive force was that Turkey had entered the era of knowledgelegitimated on the model of the Republican ideology. Its keynote was a type ofknowledge elaborated in the West, i.e., empiricism, rationalism and science. Thatwas an important step in establishing the legitimation of a new cognitive field, amuch different statement than the usual praise for the mobilization of educationby the Turkish Republic. It is the new general system of knowledge andits osmotic influence on new generations that, in the long run, changed thecognitive element in the worldview and the practice of Islamic conservatives ofall persuasions in Turkey.

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The “Voice,” the Folk and the Media

The process of de-linking the discourse of Islamic theology from the ulema was afundamental change in Ottoman Islam; it was also replicated in the Islamic world atlarge. But in the case of Turkey the contextual frame of this new Islamic discourse(the shared state ideology) propelled it into areas that only faintly appear in Pakistan,Egypt or Indonesia.

A weakness of the Ottoman-Islamic revivalist voice, prominent between 1890and 1908, was its elite characteristic. A parallel feature of the social structure of theOttoman Empire that preceded this elitist cast had been the gap between the lower-level, badly-remunerated prayer leaders in mosques and the ulema. Consequently,the lower-level clerics had often been leaders of rebellions addressing socialgrievances, and this was replicated in the Nak[scedil] ibendi conspiracy of 1859. SultanAbdülhamid’s policy, by fostering a sense of citizenship among his subjects, hadalso provided a potentially activist ethic to a number of his subjects. The conse-quences of what amounted to significant social perturbation were not, however,anticipated by the ruler. The lower class ulema, the Turkish “natives,” were becom-ing restive, and began to turn up in new settings such as the one large-scale perma-nent organization of his time that was the product of the Hamidian reform, themodernized Ottoman army. This structural change of Hamidian society may be oneexplanation of the rebellion of enlisted men and non-commissioned officers of April13, 1909 that ended with the deposition of the Sultan. The rebels had demanded areturn to the rule of Islamic Law but were overcome by the Young Turks officersand their special forces. The Young Turks’ loudly proclaimed ideas about freedomand equality in the days following their advent to power undoubtedly also played arole in the inception of this new populist Islamic voice.

The problems of integrating this new audience with the ongoing discussion of therole of Islam in the modern world that had been the contribution of an intellectualelite was thus becoming a practical as well as a moral issue. Mehmet Akif was oneof the persons who repeatedly addressed this problem of the simultaneous link withmodernity and the beliefs of the folk.

Between 1908 and the defeat of Turkey at the end of the First World War a newtype of media with a populist Islamic appeal had emerged. The journal Volkan, themouthpiece for the rebels of 1909, exemplified this trend, which was nipped in thebud by the Young Turks. One man, Said Nursi, whose relation with the YoungTurks was somewhat uneven, however, could continue to write. Superficially read,his message was obscure and recondite. In fact, his work was an attempt to cometo terms with both Western materialism and an emerging Turkish nationalism. Italso was a reaffirmation of the moral imperatives of Islam and a message for thefolk.

Said Nursi had been trained in the hub of the Nak[scedil] ibendi influence in Anatolia,the province of Bitlis. However, the themes he promoted transcended these origins.He took a deliberate look at the forces of modernity and, at the same time, attemptedto keep the essentials of Mujaddidi teachings alive. The persecutions he suffered

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during the republican era did not prevent him from extending his influence from hisplace of exile to the whole of Turkey. Clandestinely distributed, handwritten andpolycopied “letters” brought together a large audience; these were the Nurcus, thebête noire of “laic” republicans.

In the 1930s, the Republic’s image of the shiftless, backward Muslim “other”must have promoted the influence of Said’s message that affirmed Islam as a civili-zational element but also provided a frame for the elaboration of a religious-ethicaluniverse for the folk. In the 1950s and 1960s, these and similar materials began to bewidely propagated and very gradually became intertwined with themes about thecultural identity of Turks that had been promoted by poets such as Necip Fazıl andnationalists influenced by the Nak[scedil] ibendi such as Nurettin Topçu.

The Islamic discourse that emerged with the general explosion of media inTurkey from the 1950s and 1960s now reached a general public that did not exist inthe 1920s.62 The gap between elite and folk had finally, one could argue, beensuccessfully closed by a new media “discourse” in which there were mixed echoesof the various stages of the Islamic voice. It is this communication “climate” thathelped the rise of Turkish Islamic political parties from the 1970s onward. Televi-sion was, of course, an extension of the means available for the propagation of theIslamic voice. But parallel developments had also taken place in the Nak[scedil] ibendiuniverse itself.

Later Nak[scedil] ibendis

The Nak[scedil] ibendi lineage that takes us to Recep Tayyip Erdo[gbreve] an begins with astudent of Mevlanâ Halid Ba[gbreve] dadi, Ziyaeddin Gümü[scedil] hanevî (–1895). One of hisdisciples, Mehmed Zahid Kotku (–1980),63 seems, once more, to have been instru-mental in changing the cognitive style of the Nak[scedil] ibendi traditions he had takenover during his years as a prayer leader in various mosques, a state-bureaucraticposition in Turkey. In the Turkey of the 1960s, when the “voice” of Islam wasbeginning to link with world representatives of a revival of Islam such as SayyidKutub and Said Hawa, a somewhat different process was also at work: theNak[scedil] ibendi became influential in the Turkish “civil” sphere. A group of Turkishuniversity students had gathered around Kotku.64 These young men had been wonover by technology, which for them represented the core of modernization andWestern power. They had acquired influence in the State Planning Organizationdue to their links with and the increasing prominence of Turgut Özal, then Head ofthe State Planning Organization (SPO), and later Prime Minister. Kotku took apersonal interest in economic, political and cultural issues and encouraged hisfollowers to do the same. We know today that the first prominent “Islamic” party inTurkey, the National Order Party (Milli Nizam Partisi, MNP) (1970–71), and theNational Salvation Party (Millî Selamet Partisi, MSP) (1972–81) were establishedthrough his promotion and support; we also know that he supervised their activi-ties.65 Here, nationalism, a primary motto of the secular Turkish Republic,promoted as it was by the National Order Party, was not an obstacle but a shared

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feeling of pride—first “Ottoman” then “Turkish”—that had been building sinceAbdülhamid II.

Kotku did not see the state as an absolute enemy and, in that sense, did not holdmuch esteem for more radical Islamists in the Islamic world. To this attitude wasadded what one author has described as “mystical environmentalism.”66 ProfessorNecmettin Erbakan, the founder of the three “Islamic” parties that attempted to keepabreast of dissolution by court decrees, the National Order (est. 1970), NationalSalvation (est. 1972) and Welfare (Refah) Party (1983–98), entered Kotku’s circle.The relation between the two men is not entirely clear. At any rate Erbakan wasinfluenced by Kotku’s recommendation to establish control over the world of mediaand industry as well as politics. His underlining of a “national” interest in the back-ground of Islamic values is one of the truly “Turkish” elements that followed his riseto power—a plus in a setting in which he had to compete with extreme nationalists.

An explanation of Mehmed Zahid Kotku’s transformation of the Nak[scedil] ibenditradition could be the following: Kotku had created a new version of the “opera-tional code” of the Nak[scedil] ibendi, synchronized with the political code promoted bythe Republic, that of constitutional legitimacy. The most interesting part of thischange is that by the 1970s Kotku probably had come to the conclusion that thisparticular political operational code had developed sufficiently deep roots in Turkeyfor Nak[scedil] ibendis to promote a second layer of legitimacy. This layer, working intandem with Islamic legitimacy, was that of politically grounded institution build-ing. This was a development showing greater originality and adaptability than thetheme of Ottoman-Turkish Islamic authenticity that had been around since thedefeat of Russia by Japan in 1905. It, no doubt, was an aspect of a positive view ofthe state as an institution, also part of the Nak[scedil] ibendi tradition from Mevlanâ Halidto Bediüzzaman Said Nursi. This time, the positivistic support of the state came as agift from the secular Turkish Republic.

When Turgut Özal, with his degree in Engineering, came to power in 1983 withthe victory of his liberal Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP), the linkbetween his Nak[scedil] ibendi supporters, technological knowledge as encouraged by thesecular Kemalist Republic and democratic politics had been brought together intothe civil, public sphere that was the very creation of the Republic. Here the “civic”aspect of this new construction was the tacit, shared element of an alliance thatcould no longer be described as clearly “Islamic.” Other developments shaping thisnew Islamic location of the “hypergood” followed.

During the 1991 electoral campaign, Erbakan’s increasing emphasis on the politicalprocess as such, i.e., his immersion into a new discourse, appeared in television presen-tations where he appealed to “everyday people” and avoided a “readily recognizableIslamic idiom, symbols and Koranic quotations.”67 This shift to populism was an antic-ipation of the much-expanded political persona of Recep Tayyip Erdo[gbreve] an. Organi-zationally, however, Erbakan was still lagging in the formation of a mass party.68

When Kotku, after his death (1980), was succeeded by his son-in-law, ProfessorEsat Co[scedil] an, the latter had the accusation of “excessive” politicization ready to behurled against Erbakan. It is true that even though Co[scedil] an was also changing his

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operational code or style—once again with inputs of civil society—he had beendoing it somewhat differently than Erbakan. In 1983, Co[scedil] an began publishing aperiodical, Islam, which took up the discussion of the appropriate strategy forTurkish Muslims but also promoted a more general ideological line emphasizing thestrength of Islam as a culture. Islam was followed by three more periodicals, Scienceand Art, Women and the Family and the Roseflower Child. All these publicationswere targeting issues that were, indeed, aspects of the current discussions in Turkeyand had titles that were strikingly modern. In other words, while Erbakan was busywith politics, the Nak[scedil] ibendi operational code had been made redundant and, in away, replaced by a discourse modeled on current discussions taking place in civilsociety. This discourse soon began to displace the more radical expostulation of theIslamist magazines of the 1970s.

At least one memoir covering the 1980s indicates that the Iranian Islamic revolu-tion played an important role in changes of attitude among Turkish “Islamists” ofthe time. Abandoning the pro-Iranian position appears to have been the result ofjudging the Iranian regime by criteria that these Turkish appraisers did not realizethey held. These were the criteria of citizenship and civil society that were part ofthe values promoted by a discourse prominent in the schoolbooks of the single partyera (1923–46).69

Enter Recep Tayyip Erdo[gbreve] an

Recep Tayyip Erdo[gbreve] an began his political career early as a successful organizerfor the youth movements of the National Salvation Party. His links with the partywere reinforced by his allegiance to Kotku’s circle and to his successor, Kotku’sson-in-law Esat Co[scedil] an. His Islamist credentials were clear, but his early fieryspeeches, when carefully studied, reveal a foundation of activism that seems tohave transcended the specifically Islamist content of his message as a youth orga-nizer. One of his speeches of 1980, for instance, seems an anticipation of his laterpersona: “Our mission is not one of simple-minded fight or world conquest; it is tospread and promote the rule of the religion of Allah. The first condition of thismission is peace and concord.”70 This may have been a cautiousness that related tothe banning of Islamist organizations by the military regime established after thecoup of 1980.

But there were other indications to Erdo[gbreve] an’s specificity as an organizer. TurgutÖzal’s brother, Korkut Özal, was also a Nak[scedil] ibendi. The scattering of the Nak[scedil] iben-dis’ strength after many left the Welfare Party to join the Motherland Party had notdiscouraged Korkut Özal. Together with leaders of the Motherland Party he craftedan organization that would bring the religious and other conservative forces, as wellas bureaucrats of the same persuasion, under the same roof. This extra-politicalorganization created by members of the Motherland Party harnessing shared culturalideologies for the promotion of conservative policies was the so-called “UnityFoundation” (Birlik Vakfı). It was behind the scenes throughout the career of R. T.Erdo[gbreve] an and replicated the well-known institution of the political action group.71

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This was still another level of the politicization of the Islamist discourse and itsinclusion into the games played in “civil society.”

When Recep Tayyip Erdo[gbreve] an won the mayoralty of Istanbul in 1994, “exception-alism” assumed a new form: the forces of political power as structuring elements ofbehavior took over. This new structuration and the constraints that were part of it, aswell as the history of Nak[scedil] ibendi change over two centuries, provide one key to therise of the Adalet and Kalkınma Partisi. Researchers who have analyzed theprograms of the set of parties that followed upon the creation of the IslamistNational Order Party in 1970 have found an interesting dichotomy in these organi-zations. On the one hand, one notices a set of foundational Islamic parties, theNational Order, National Salvation and Welfare Parties. Here, the inspiration is oneof capturing the state and using it to bring about changes in society by adopting thecentralism of the Republic. The subsequently formed “Islamic” parties, Virtue(1997–2001), Felicity (2001–) and AKP, have abandoned this stance and adopted aposition much more synchronized with the world economy and liberalism—achange which has often been stated to have proceeded since the 1990s.72 Here,finally was the area of the modern structuring force of organization and institutionbuilding, and world economy that had taken over (rather than “been taken over by”)the Nak[scedil] ibendi.73 Of course, the AKP has not exhausted the potential for Islamicsocio-political movements in Turkey. But any rival to the AKP in the future willhave to use similar venues based on knowledge, media technology and politics.

Conclusion

The history of modern Turkey is not that of a conflict between republicanism andSultanism, nor is it a history of the strife framed by Islam and secularism. It is acomplex, many-tiered encounter between “traditional” forces and modernity thathave interpenetrated and been transformed over time due to their propinquity. It isalso a story of the constitution of new spaces where these forces have met andchanged. While it is easy to digress in a diffuse, periphrastic way about the pluralityof “modernities,” it is the specificity of the historical processes that sets the characterof the social and political circumstances with which we have to deal on an everydaybasis. Vague, general statements about the “modernities” of Islam do not offer a clueas to the meaning we should draw out of the AKP’s victory. The study of the conti-nuities, ruptures and restructuring of “background” elements in Turkish history maybe one small step in that direction.

The appearance of the Islamic Voice among a new brand of Islamic intellectualsis a point that emerges from the data of this essay. The contemporary version of thisdiscourse has been studied.74 However, this is not simply a present-day development.Its roots are in the late nineteenth century and one may speak of a further floweringbetween 1910 and 1920. One important difference between the earlier trend and itscontemporary appearance is that the earlier discourse is one of an intellectual eliteoperating as part of the establishment whereas the contemporary group is one ofpersons of modest origins whose position in society is less assured.

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There have been many explanations of the survival of an Islamic voice in Turkey:culture, institution, faith and identity are some of the poles around which suchexplanations have been offered. The point, however, is not the survival of the voicebut its ability to work within the lineaments of the state. Charles Taylor’s underlin-ing of the tacit dispensation of shared beliefs is absolutely essential at this point. Inthe Islamic cultural frame this sharing had an ontological legitimation, whose work-ings have been brought to light by Crone and Görgün. There was more, however, tothe primacy of the state in the Islamic voice.

The pre-Ottomans came to the Anatolian region already set on ruling over andorganizing the disparate ethnic elements of the area. They received the authorizationto use the title of “sultan” from the Abbasid Caliphate in 1085. The message of Islam,however, gave the pre-Ottomans a deeper-lying political dispensation in the sensethat God’s message enjoined the Muslims to establish a collectivity, even before itgave a template for personal ethics. These two layers made up the tacit understand-ings that brought “secular” and “religious” forces together in the Ottoman Empire.

In the long run, the imbrications of Islam with civil society—despite all obstaclesto this appropriation—suggests something that goes beyond structural characteris-tics as useful explanatory variables. We may describe that characteristic as a founda-tion deeper than episodic social or political frames. Taking, once more, one’sinspiration from Taylor’s Sources of the Self one could ask whether what we havehere is the history of the emergence of a “self” still bearing some marks of its collec-tivistic origins. And, in this very emergence of the self, bringing religion and the selfinto the same ambit, does one notice the necessary reappearance of the “One”75 as atruth validator in a society where it has been replaced by the many? And, finally, isthat the real core of the issue regarding “multiple” modernities?

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Ay[scedil] e Saktanber, Martin van Bruinessen, ArmandoSalvatore, Nedim Nomer and Ha[scedil] im Koç for a critique that has enabled theimprovement of this essay.

Notes

1. eyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p.11.2. Ali Akel, Erbakan ve Generaller, 2nd edn. [Erbakan and Generals] ([Idot ]Istanbul: [Scedil] ura, 1999); Necmettin

Erbakan, Milli Görü[scedil] [National View] ([Idot ]Istanbul: Dergah, 1975); Nuray Mert, [Idot ] slam ve Demokrasi[Islam and Democracy] (Istanbul: [Idot ] z, 1998); Ergin Yıldırım, [Idot ] ktidar Mücadelesi ve Din [The Strugglefor Power and Religion] (Istanbul: Bilge, 1999).

3. For one exception, see Ali Ya[scedil] ar Sarıbay, Postmodernite, Sivil Toplum ve Islam, 3rd edn. [Postmo-dernity, Civil Society and Islam] ([Idot ]Istanbul and Bursa: Alfa, 2001).

4. Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Robert Wuthnow, Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann.5. See, for instance, Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000). For a challenge to the idea that religion is on the decline, see Peter Berger,“Secularism in Retreat,” in John L. Esposito and Azzam Tamimi (eds.), Islam and Secularism in theMiddle East (London: Hurst, 2000).

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6. The author’s theme of dialectical interpenetration of religion and secularism differs from OlivierRoy’s “delinking of Islam as a religion from a given culture”. See Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam(London: Hurst, 2004).

7. “Tanzimat,” in Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edn. (Leiden: Brill,). For information about politicalparties this essay used Ali E[scedil] ref Turan, Türkiye’de Seçmen Davranı[scedil] ı [Electoral Behavior in Turkey](Istanbul: Bilgi Üniversitesi, 2004).

8. For instance, Aziz al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso, 1995).9. See Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” in Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative

Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p.186, where “background” is used as“tacit” with references among others to Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY:Doubleday, 1966).

10. About “hypergood,” see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1989), p.91.

11. See Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,2004), pp.393–4.

12. Tahsin Görgün, “Osmanlı Nizâm-ı Âlem Fikri ve Kaynakları Üzerinde Bazı Notlar” [A Few Noteson the Sources of the Idea of “Nizam-i Alem” in Ottoman Thought], [Idot ] slâmi Ara[scedil] tırmalar Dergisi,Vol.13, No.2 (2000), pp.180–8.

13. Carter Vaughn Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).14. See Rudolf Peters, “Ijtihad and Taqlid in 18th and 19th Century Islam,” Die Welt des Islams, Vol.20

(1980), pp.131–45.15. For Nak[scedil] ibendis, see Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic and Thierry Zarcone (eds.), Naqshbandis

([Idot ]Istanbul and Paris: ISIS, 1990).16. Nathan Leites, The Operational Code of the Politbureau (New York: Greenwood Press, 1972).17. For instance, see “social practice” in Teun A. van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach

(London, Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 1998), p.191. For the interpenetration of praxis as an elabora-tion of knowledge, see Eyerman and Jamison (1991), p.55.

18. As typical of non-state Islamic organization, see Roman Loimeier and Stefan Reichmuth, “ZurDynamik Religiös-Politischer Netzwerke in Muslimischen Gesellschaften,” Die Welt des Islams,Vol.36, No.2 (1996), pp.145–85.

19. For an important exception, see Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social andPolitical Structure of Kurdistan (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1992).

20. In the sense of “perverse.”21. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York and London:

W. W. Norton, 1996, 1997).22. See John L. Esposito (ed.), Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism or Reform? (Boulder, CO: Lynne

Rienner, 1997). For an exception, see John Obert Voll, Islam: Continuity and Change in the ModernWorld, 2nd edn. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994). Ottoman Islam itself showedspecial characteristics such as fiqh (Islamic Law), derived from the Rationalist School (of AbuHanifa), and gave a role to local custom (örf). The author thanks Professor Recep [Scedil] entürk for thisclarification.

23. A latent structuring of the author’s thought has been Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, SocialMovements: A Cognitive Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), esp. chs.2 and 3, pp.45–93, i.e.,“Social Movements as Cognitive Practice” and “Dimension of Cognitive Practice,” esp. pp.55–6.See also Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representa-tion (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), for another view of“background.” As for “structuration” as an aspect of praxis, see Anthony Giddens, The Constitutionof Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984); and the description of the field in Ira J. Cohen, “Theoriesof Action and Praxis,” in Bryan Turner (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, 2nd edn.(London: Blackwell, 2000), pp.73–111.

24. For which see the nineteenth-century best seller, François Guizot, The History of Civilization inEurope, trans. William Harrlitt, ed. with an introduction by Larry Siedentop (London: Penguin

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Books, [1846] 1977); and Tuncer Baykara, Osmanlılar’da Medeniyet Kavramı, 2nd edn. [TheConcept of Civilization in Ottomans] ([Idot ] zmir: Akademi Kitabevi, 1999).

25. Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom.26. See, for instance, Halil [Idot ] nalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600, trans. Norman

Itzkowitz and Colin Imber (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), pp.100–3.27. For Kâtip Çelebi, see Hilmi Ziya Ülken, “Kâtip Çelebi ve Fikir Hayatımız” [Kâtip Çelebi and our

Thought], in Kâtip Çelebi Hayatı ve Eserleri Hakkında [Idot ] ncelemeler [A Research on Kâtip Çelebi’sLife and Works] (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1991), pp.177–96; and for Kınalızâde, see BakiTezcan, “The Definition of Sultanic Legitimacy in the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” Masterof Arts Thesis, Program in Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, 1996.

28. Halil [Idot ] nalcık, “Reis-ül-Küttab,” in [Idot ] slam Ansiklopedisi, Vol.9, pp.671–83.29. Mehmed Efendi, Le Paradis des Infidèles, trans., notes and annexed texts by Gilles Veinstein (Paris:

Maspero, 1981), p.21.30. For the text, see Sema Arıkan, “Nizâm-i Cedit Kaynaklarından Ebubekir Ratip Efendi’nin Büyük

Layihası” [The Report of Ebubekir Ratip Efendi from Nizam Cedit Sources], unpublished Ph.D.Thesis, Institute of Social Science, Istanbul University, 1996.

31. Arıkan (1996), p.36.32. One of the first works that attempted to show how the newly established Ottoman engineering school

had kept up with the times was a book by one of the graduates where the author described all thebooks he had read by French experts on military science, Diatribe de l’ingenieur Mustafa sur l’étatactuel de l’art militaire du Genie et des Sciences a Constantinople (Üsküdar, 1218/1803).

33. Kemal Beydilli, Türk Bilim ve Matbaacılık Tarihinde Mühendishâne Matbaası ve Kütüphanesi (1776–1826) [Engineering Press and Library in the History of Turkish Science and Printing] (Istanbul: ErenYayınları, 1995).

34. [Scedil] erif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of TurkishPolitical Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp.196–251.

35. Ibid., p.18, quoting Ahmed Cevdet Pa[scedil] a, Tezâkir: 1–12, ed. by Cavit Baysun (Ankara: Türk TarihKurumu, 1953), p.68.

36. Ulu[gbreve] [Idot ] [gbreve] degmir, Kuleli Vakası Hakkında Bir Ara[scedil] tırma [A Research on the Kuleli Incident] (Ankara:Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1937), which is on the wrong track. See the correct assessment by NamıkKemal in his Letters. Namık Kemal, Hususi Mektupları, Vol.I: [Idot ]Istanbul, Avrupa ve Magosa Mektu-pları [Private Letters: [Idot ]Istanbul, Europe and Magosa] ed. by Fevziye Abdullah Tansel (Ankara: TürkTarih Kurumu, 1967), p.240.

37. Süleymaniye Library, Ali Nihat Tarlan, no.96.38. See Hüseyin Çelik, Ali Suavi ve Dönemi [Suavi and His Era] (Istanbul: [Idot ] leti[scedil] im Yayınları, 1994), for

a positive view of Ali Suavi and compare with Mardin (1962), p.365.39. Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman

Empire 1876–1909 (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998).40. Atilla Do[gbreve] an, “Sosyal Darwinizm ve Osmanlı Aydınları Üzerindeki Etkileri” [Social Darwinism and

its Effect on Ottoman Intellectuals], unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Marmara University Institute ofSocial Sciences, [Idot ]Istanbul, 2003.

41. [Scedil] erif Mardin, Jön Türkler’in Siyasi Fikirleri: 1895–1908 [The Political Ideas of Young Ottomans:1895–1908], 2nd ed. (Istanbul: [Idot ] leti[scedil] im Yayınları, 1983).

42. Zafer Toprak, [Idot ] ttihad-Terakki ve Cihan Harbi [The Union and Progress Party and the First WorldWar] (Istanbul: Homer, 2003), pp.xv, 68–9.

43. [Scedil] erif Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey (Albany, NY: State University of NewYork Press, 1989).

44. These ideas may be found in a three-volume anthology by [Idot ] smail Kara, Türkiye’de [Idot ] slamcılıkDü[scedil] üncesi: Metinler-Ki[scedil] iler [The Idea of Islamism in Turkey: Texts and Personalities], Vol.3:(Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1997).

45. For world developments, see Gaborieau et al. (1990).46. See “Akbar,” EI2, I, pp. 316–17; “Ahmad Sirhindi,” EI2, I, pp. 297–8.

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47. Hamid Algar, “A Brief History of the Nak[scedil] ibendi Order,” in Gaborieau et al. (1990), pp.3–44.48. See Marie Luise Bremer, Die Memoiren des Türkischen Derwisches A[scedil] çı Dede [Idot ] brahim (Walldorf

and Hessen: Verlag für Orientkunde, 1959); and Bruinessen (1992), passim.49. See John Obert Voll, Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World, 2nd ed., (Syracuse: Syra-

cuse University Press, 1994), pp. 293–4. For a general study of the Sufi tradition, see AlexandrePopovic and Gilles Veinstein (eds.), Les Voies d’Allah: Les Ordres Mystiques dans l’Islam des Orig-ines a Aujourd’hui (Paris: Fayard, 1996). For Africa, see Knut S. Vikor, “Sufi Brotherhoods inAfrica,” in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds.), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens,OH: Ohio University Press, 2000), pp.441–76. See also Irene Melikoff, Hadji Bektach: un Mythe etses Avatars (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998).

50. Bernd Radtke, “Sufism in the 18th Century: An Attempt at a Provisional Appraisal,” Die Welt desIslams, Vol.36, No.3 (1996), pp.326–64; Rex Sean O’Fahey, “Neo-Sufism Reconsidered,” DerIslam, LXX (1993), pp.52–87; and Bernd Radtke, “Kritik am Neo-Sufismus,” in Frederick de Jongand Bernd Radtke (eds.), Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies andPolemics (Leiden, Boston and Köln: E. J. Brill, 1999), pp.162–73.

51. Hamid Algar, “Political Aspects of Naqshbandi History,” in Gaborieau et al. (1990), pp.139–40.52. See Marie Luise Bremer (1959); and Abdurrahman Memi[scedil] , Hâlidî Ba[gbreve] dâdî ve Anadolu’da Hâlidîlik

([Idot ]Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2000).53. For which see Wadie Jwaideh, Kürt Milliyetçili[gbreve] inin Tarihi Kökenleri ve Geli[scedil] imi [The Historical

Roots and Development of Kurdish Nationalism] (Istanbul: [Idot ] leti[scedil] im Yayınları, 1999), pp.144–5.54. Bruinessen (1992), pp.222–30, who also explains the assuming of roles of political leadership by the

Nak[scedil] ibendi.55. Halil Cin, “Tanzimat Döneminde Osmanlı Hukuku” in Hakkı Dursun Yıldız (ed.), 150. Yılında

Tanzimat (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1992), pp. 11–32.56. See, for the similar activities of Midhat Pa[scedil] a, the papers presented in Uluslararası Midhat Pa[scedil] a

Semineri: Bildiriler ve Tartı[scedil] malar [International Seminar on Midhat Pa[scedil] a: Statements and Debates]8-10 Mayıs 1984 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1986).

57. A good picture of this change can be followed in the memoirs of Mahir [Idot ] z, whose father was Kadı ofAnkara but enclosed in the new state institutions of the post-Tanzimat. Mahir [Idot ] z, Yılların [Idot ] zi [TheTraces of Years] (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1990).

58. See, for instance, Ilhan Tekeli and Selim Ilkin, Ege’deki Sivil Direni[scedil] ten Kurtulu[scedil] Sava[scedil] ınaGeçerken [Civil Resistance to Independence War in the Aegean Region] (Ankara: Türk TarihKurumu, 1989).

59. For the latter, see Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd edn. (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1968).

60. Ru en Çakir, Ne eriat Ne Demokrasi: Refah Partisini Anlamak (Istanbul: Metis, 1994), passim.Ay[scedil] e Saktanber, in a remarkable work focusing on living an “Islamic life” in a Muslim community,has studied their integration into the contemporary Turkish middle class in terms of consumptionpatterns and ideals of daily life. Ay[scedil] e Saktanber, Living Islam (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002).

61. This would seem to summarize the life experience of an Islamist who has no known connection tothe Nak[scedil] ibendi but who shows how some of the forces examined by the author worked to bringbelievers into new cognitive and political spheres. See Mehmet Metiner, Yemye[scedil] il [Scedil] eriat, BembeyazDemokrasi [All Green Shari’a, All White Democracy] (Istanbul: Do[gbreve] an Kitap, 2004), and forR. T. Erdo[gbreve] an’s “learning” process, pp.414–15.

62. For a somewhat different approach to media, see Michael Meeker, “The Turkish intellectual and hisAudience: A New Configuration Writer and Reader among the Believers in the Republic ofTurkey,” in Social Practice and Political Culture in the Turkish Republic (Istanbul: ISIS Press,2004), pp.271–302; Analecta Isisiana, LXVIII; and also “Oral Culture, Media Culture and theIslamic Resurgence in Turkey,” in Meeker (2004), pp.243–56.

63. Through Ömer Ziyaeddin Da[gbreve] ıstanî and at Da[gbreve] ıstanî’s death Mustafa Fevzi Efendi. A student ofMustafa Fevzi Efendi Abdülaziz Bekkine was the Shaikh of Nureddin Topçu, the theoretician of aTurkish, culturally founded nationalism.

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64. Ersin Gürdo[gbreve] an, Görünmeyen Üniversite [The Unseen University] ([Idot ]Istanbul: Seha Ne[scedil] riyat, 1989).65. Ru[scedil] en Çakır, Ayet ve Slogan [The Verse and The Slogan] ([Idot ]Istanbul: Metis, 1994), p.22.66. Ibid., p.23.67. Ay[scedil] e Öncü, “Packaging Islam: Cultural Politics on the Landscape of Turkish Commercial Televi-

sion,” New Perspectives on Turkey, No.10 (Spring 1994), p.24.68. Tanıl Bora and Kemal Can, “Bunalım Dönemine Girerken,” Birikim (Jan. 1996), pp.36–42.69. Metiner (2004), pp.367–86.70. See Ru[scedil] en Çakır and Fehmi Çalmuk, Recep Tayyip Erdo[gbreve] an: Bir Dönü[scedil] ümün Öyküsü [Recep

Tayyip Erdo[gbreve] an: A Story of Transformation] ([Idot ]Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2001), p.29.71. Ibid., pp.47–8.72. See Serdar [Scedil] en, Parti Programlarında Millî Görü[scedil] : AK Parti Millî Görü[scedil] çü mü? [National View in

Party Programs: Is The AKP a National View Party?] (Istanbul: Noktakitap, 2004), pp.12–13.73. For Erdo[gbreve] an’s view on secularism/laicism, see three foundational documents of the AKP in Çakır

and Çalmuk (2001), pp.236–44. For a description of the ways in which Islamic ideology was beingloosened in the “Islamic” parties of Turkey simply through the overwhelming focus on parliamentarytactics, see Yavuz Selim, Milli Görü[scedil] Hareketinden Ayrı[scedil] manın Perde Arkası Yol Ayrımı [TheCrossroads of Deviation from The National View] (Ankara: Hiler Yayınları, 2002), based on inter-views of persons involved in the politics of Adalet, Refah and Fazilet Parties.

74. Meeker (2004), pp. 243–56.75. For which see Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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