Islamic Political Identity in Turkey by M. Hakan Yavuz
By Michael M. Gunter
Review of:Islamic Political Identity in Turkey by M. Hakan Yavuz
Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2003
Pages: xiv + 328. $49.95
Reviewed By:Michael M. Gunter
Reviewed in:Middle East Policy
Date accepted online:27/07/2004
Published in print:Volume 11, Issue 2, Pages 169-184
Book Reviews
In recent years, Islamic revivalism in Turkey specifically and the Middle East in general has challenged (and for some, seemingly threatened) modernization and nationalist models for the future. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States focused the broader lay public's mind throughout the world on the reputed "Islamic threat." Many began to ask whether Islam was even compatible with democracy.
M. Hakan Yavuz, a leading scholar of Turkish politics, has written a richly documented and valuable comprehensive analysis of Islamic social movements in Turkey. He argues that, far from being reactionary opponents of secular Kemalist modernization, Islamic social movements in Turkey offer important agents for promoting pluralism and democracy and "are not fueled by a deep-seated rage and frustration with the authoritarian policies of the secular elites, as is the case in Algeria and Egypt" (p. 4).
He aptly terms this situation "the vernacularization of modernity and the internal secularization of Islam" (p. 5). In other words, Islamic norms and traditions are being simultaneously preserved yet substantially altered to assimilate and participate in the discourses on nationalism, secularism, democracy, human rights, the liberal market and personal autonomy. The stunning victory of the AKP (Justice and Development party) in the Turkish general elections on November 3, 2002, offers a real-life laboratory in which to test Yavuz's thesis.
Yavuz's first four chapters seek to define the theoretical terrain. He proposes a new conceptual framework, a typology of Turkey's diverse Islamic movements, and identifies the conditions under which these movements have become more democratic and pluralistic. In addition, he argues that the history of post-1980 Turkey is about the formation of opportunity spaces and their sociopolitical implications. His deductive typology becomes a dynamic map of social movements that have resulted from the opening and shrinking of the opportunity spaces and have led to neoliberal economic policies, the expansion of the public sphere, and the opening of political participation. These opportunity spaces have enabled the conscious agents - Naksibendi Sufi brotherhoods, new prototypes of politicians, the Anatolian bourgeoisie and intellectuals - to take an assertive stance and move into the available spaces to assert their identity and rights in the evolving domestic market, civil society, and public and political spheres.
Yavuz begins with the premise that Islamic movements can be "Janus-faced," in that they seek to "express yearnings for democracy and economic development," but also remain "conservative ... in calling for a strict moral-religious code in society" (p. 15). He then argues that since the secular Turkish state began conceding new liberal political openings in the 1960s, Islamic groups subsequently were able to appropriate them. The late Turkish president Turgut Ozal's policies of political and market liberalization in the 1980s helped create a "new class of Muslim entrepreneurs ... able to circumvent state controls by creating its own alternative schools, printing presses, newspapers, journals, and radio and television stations" (p. 10).
Subsequent chapters analyze the historical background of state and societal relations in Turkey. Here Yavuz further explains how Islamic political consciousness and identity have come to articulate issues of justice and identity by imagining a Muslim community. The author demonstrates how the Naksibendi Sufi order served as the matrix for contemporary Turkish Islamic political and social movements. The Nurcu movement of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi and its offshoot, headed most prominently by Fethullah Gulen, exhibited this. Overt Islamist parties, led first by Necmettin Erbakan (the first Islamic prime minister of modern Turkey, 1996-97) and his successor, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (AKP prime minister of Turkey since March 2003), followed.
This "vernacularization of modernity and internal secularization of Islam," of course, has not been one steady line of success; all four Islamist leaders just mentioned have at one time or another run afoul of the secular Kemalist state. The Turkish military, for example, forced Erbakan to resign in June 1997 after only a little more than a year in office, while his eventual successor, Erdogan, only assumed his present position as prime minister after serving a brief prison term for reciting an Islamist poem deemed inflammatory to the secular order.
Yavuz's analysis ably demonstrates how the contemporary Turkish state is simultaneously experiencing political democratization as well as economic liberalization and development within the context of Islamic-identity resurgence. In so doing, Yavuz's study provides the best analytical and empirical study of modern Turkish politics of the last 20 years. His typology and introduction of the concept of opportunity spaces are his two major contributions to the study of the Middle East and social-movement theory. Turkish studies have been dominated for a long time by Serif Mardin's "center-periphery" thesis. Yavuz's concept of opportunity spaces marks a major shift from Mardin's thesis to a more dynamic reading of the state-society relationship in Turkey. This book will become must reading for both scholars and students of contemporary Islamic democratization in Turkey and the rest of the Islamic world.