Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (28 page)

The ruling generals had to take care of one more task. Nursi had died two months before the coup, in the eastern city of Urfa, and he was buried there. His grave, which attracted visitors from all over the country, could prove to be a symbol of resistance to the junta and its ideals. So, on the night of June 12, 1960, a squadron entered Urfa, established a curfew, positioned tanks around the city, and headed toward Nursi’s grave. The marble tomb was broken into pieces and Nursi’s remains were removed, put on a military plane, and flown out, to be reburied at a secret location somewhere in Anatolia. His final resting place remains unknown.

The junta that staged the 1960 coup soon drafted a new constitution and allowed the return of multiparty politics. But it also took measures to ensure that the new state would be a quasi-democracy, not a real one; elected politicians would be kept under check, and, when deemed necessary, overthrown by the Kemalist establishment.

Thereafter, Turkish politics would be like a pendulum swinging between authoritarianism and democracy. And while the secularists would be the proud guardians of authoritarianism, the Islamic camp would increasingly aspire to democracy.

T
HE
M
AKING OF
“T
URKISH-
I
SLAMIC
E
XCEPTIONALISM
”

The brief history of Said Nursi helps illustrate the “exceptionalism” of Turkish Islam, which, according to Turkish sociologist S¸erif Mardin, is too often overlooked by contemporary Western scholars because of their “concentration on Arab or Salafi Islam.”
¹¹

This exceptionalism has a lot to do with the uniqueness of Turkish political history, which created conditions that other Muslim nations of the modern era did not experience. First of all, unlike most other Muslim countries, Turkey was never colonized by European powers. For Turkey’s Muslims, this meant that the “other” was not necessarily the West, as was the case for most Arab and Indian/Pakistani Muslims. The “other” for Turkish Islam was homegrown authoritarian secularism. In fact, the West would appear to Turkish Muslims, from the 1990s onward, as an ally, for it showed more respect to religious freedom than shown by Turkey’s self-styled secularism.

Second, even though Turkey’s secularists were unmistakably authoritarian, they nonetheless were more restrained and less arbitrary than others in the Muslim world, such as the two shahs of Iran and the secular dictators in the Arab world. Unlike those countries, Turkey had a tradition of constitutional and parliamentary rule that was rooted in the Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century. As a result, the Kemalists could not forestall free elections forever and had to accept multiparty politics after each period of ideological restoration.

This meant that, for a pious Muslim in Turkey who felt oppressed by the regime, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel was the ballot box, which repeatedly brought to power center-right political parties, such as the DP. But in Iran, where the shah’s absolutism left no space for democratic politics, the only way out was revolution. In Egypt and Algeria, where democracy was neither deeply rooted nor allowed to grow, the option would be, at least for some,
jihad
.

A third factor contributing to the exceptionalism of modern Turkish Islam was its strong aversion to Communism, an antipathy unparalleled in the Arab world. This had two explanations. First, from the beginning of the Cold War, Moscow proved to have designs on Turkey. The idea of a Soviet invasion, evoking vivid memories of the Ottoman-Russian enmity, became the nightmare of most Turks, including the devoutly Islamic ones. Second, the Turkish Marxist Left, which became a formidable force from the early 1960s onward, was vehemently antireligious. Therefore, throughout the Cold War, for most Muslims in Turkey, the enemy was “godless Communism,” whereas the West, especially America, looked much more acceptable. “Americans believe in God, they respect our religion,” wrote a popular Islamic pundit in 1969. “They are the People of the Book; but the Reds are infidels.”
¹²

Said Nursi was the archetype of this stance. His epistles were full of denunciations of Communism, which he regarded as the political outcome of philosophical materialism. That’s why he supported the DP government’s decision to send troops to Korea in order to fight “the Reds,” and he even encouraged one of his students to enlist as a volunteer. He also hoped to build a Muslim-Christian alliance against aggressive atheism. In 1950, he sent a collection of his works to Pope Pius XII and received, in February 1951, a personal letter of thanks. Two years later, Nursi visited Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras in Istanbul to pledge friendship among monotheistic believers and seek cooperation in facing the challenges of a secular age.

All these aspects of Nursi’s thinking—support for democracy, sympathy for the free world, and interest in interfaith cooperation—would be preserved by his millions of followers, who kept the Nur movement alive after his death.
¹³
One of them, a charismatic preacher named Fethullah Gülen, would even extend Nursi’s legacy and turn it into a global movement, with an impressive network of schools, nongovernmental organizations, and media outlets.

T
HE
R
ISE OF
T
URKISH
I
SLAMISM

The movement of Nursi (and later of Gülen) became a major branch of Islam in modern-day Turkey, but it certainly was not the only one. Another branch was official Islam, organized under the government’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (
Diyanet
, for short), which had been formed in 1924 by the Republican regime to replace the Ottoman institutions organized around the caliphate. This was one of the striking oddities of Turkey’s secularism: it was not about the separation of religion and state but rather the domination of religion by the state. Kemalism wanted the citizens to be as secular as possible but also wished to control their beliefs.

Not too surprisingly, the officially endorsed Diyanet became a dry and tedious bureaucracy that maintained mosque services and organized rituals and festivals, but it hardly inspired anyone. This would not change until the turn of the twenty-first century, when the organization became more self-confident and visionary, thanks to new leadership and the political support it received from the pro-Islamic AKP government.

A third branch of Turkish Islam was formed by a diverse group of
tarikats
, or Sufi orders with traditional Sunni codes of belief. The largest
tarikat
was the Naqshbandis, who emphasized personal piety and communitarian morals. They shared Nursi’s focus on godliness but not necessarily his modern, rational, and even liberal bent. The difference between the two branches was apparent even at first glance. The typical Nurcu would have a mustache but not a beard, wear a suit and tie, and speak about the manifestations of God in nature as supported by modern science. The
tarikat
member would grow a long beard, avoid the Western-looking tie, and quote from twelfth-century authorities such as Imam al-Ghazali or Abd al-Qadir al-Gaylani.

In the late 1960s, the differences between the Nurcus and the
tarikats
found their political counterparts. Most of Nursi’s followers continued to support the center-right, now represented by the Justice Party (JP), which claimed to follow in the footsteps of the defunct Democrat Party. But the JP leader, Süleyman Demirel (who was rumored to be a Freemason), never gained the same trust that Menderes enjoyed. Hence the
tarikats
looked for another alternative, which they found in the
Milli Görüs¸
(National Outlook) movement led by Necmeddin Erbakan, a former engineer and a member of the Naqshbandi
tarikat
.

The “nation” to which Erbakan’s movement referred was the
umma
, the global Islamic community of believers. As a community of faith, the
umma
naturally was dear to all Muslims, but Erbakan also envisioned it as a political community. So he proposed that Turkey withdraw from the whole Western alliance in order to form an “Islamic Union” and an “Islamic NATO.” Defining the Common Market, the precursor of the European Union, as a plot by “international Zionism,” he promised an “economically independent” Turkey and a state-driven industrial leap forward.

All these ideas sounded more “Left” than “Right,” so Erbakan’s National Salvation Party (MSP) did not have much trouble forming a coalition government in 1974 with the then-Socialist Republican People’s Party, led by Bülent Ecevit. The critics of this brief Islamist-Socialist partnership jokingly called it “the watermelon coalition”: green on the outside, red on the inside.

Erbakan’s statist, anti-Western, anti-Zionist, and even anti-Semitic rhetoric was much closer to the Islamist movements of the Middle East, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, than to the line of Islamic liberals of the Ottoman era and the Nurcus who preserved traces of the latter’s legacy. So it was no accident that, besides the ultraconservative
tarikats
, the sails of Erbakan’s ship were filled by the nascent Islamist movement of the 1970s, inspired by the translated works of Islamist ideologues such as Mawdudi and Qutb. This movement dismissed Nursi’s works as “the Islam of flowers and bugs,” condemned the center-right for its “Americanism,” and either supported Erbakan or, among the most extreme, rejected any party politics, calling democracy “a system of unbelief.”

One of the young Turkish Islamists of the time, Mehmet Metiner, who years later would renounce the ideology and redefine himself as a “Muslim democrat,” explains the mindset of his comrades in the 1970s:

The generation before us believed that they had needed to side with America in the face of the communist threat. . . . But our generation was different. We saw the United States and the West as unbelievers and imperialists who colonized the Islamic world via the puppet regimes they created in Muslim lands.
¹⁴

Metiner also notes that he had become sympathetic to Socialist ideas thanks to
Islamic Socialism
, written by Mustafa Sibai, one of the theorists of the Muslim Brotherhood. He adds that he and his Islamist friends found the Ottoman legacy uninteresting and thus were never “Ottomanist.”
¹⁵

In this sense, Islamism in Turkey was at least partly an unintended consequence of Kemalism. The latter’s zeal against Ottoman tradition impoverished Islamic thought, suppressed even its most moderate proponents (such as the Nur movement), and created a vacuum that a radical Islamism of a foreign origin could fill. The 1960 coup contributed to this void by destroying the Democrat Party, whose center-right umbrella had been uniting nearly the entire Islamic camp. Had Menderes survived, politically and literally, Erbakan and his Milli Görüs¸ probably would not have found an audience. That’s why Turkish historian Ahmet Yas¸ar Ocak, a respected expert on Turkish Islam, thinks that the country’s radical Islamists can well be regarded as the “illegitimate sons” of its radical secularists. The Turkish Herodians, in other words, unintentionally helped create Turkish zealots.
¹⁶

T
HE
Ö
ZAL
R
EVOLUTION—AND THE
“T
HREE
F
REEDOMS
”

On September 12, 1980, while the center-right Justice Party was in power, Turkey faced yet another military coup, the brutal one described in the Introduction to this book. When the generals scheduled national elections again in 1983, they allowed only newcomers to run for office. Turgut Özal, a former bureaucrat and economist, stood out, and his newly formed Motherland Party came to power. The next ten years would be “the Özal decade,” a revolutionary age of liberalization during which the Islamo-liberal synthesis, almost forgotten after decades of forced amnesia, was reborn.

As a member of a Naqshbandi family, Özal was a devout believer in Islam. As a former employee of the World Bank and the private sector, he also was a genuine believer in free-market capitalism and, in a broader sense, the American idea of liberty. In the words of American journalist Robert Kaplan, Özal “loved to read the Qur’an and watch soap operas, to bang his head against the carpet in a Sufi mosque and go to Texas barbecues.”
¹⁷
That helps explain why, as the most far-reaching Turkish leader since Atatürk, he would be able to “restore religion to Turkey’s political space without threatening the country’s pro-Western orientation.”
¹⁸