Ahmed & Sonn, Handbook, 2010

WHAT IS AT ISSUE?

The question that used to dominate debates about Muslim society during the Cold War, when Third World development was the focus of attention and the realm of rivalry between the superpowers, was the compatibility of Islam with capitalism. The prevailing assumption was that if Middle Eastern societies remained underdeveloped and tended to fall under Soviet influence that had to be the outcome of their religion and culture. Maxime Rodinson’s book, Islam and Capitalism (1974), which demonstrated that there was no incompatibility between the two, and that the problem lay elsewhere, was received as an icono-clastic intervention in the debate. Rodinson showed that doctrinally Islam was not opposed to capitalism, nor did it prescribe socialism. Middle Eastern under-development could not be explained in terms of religion; it resulted, rather, from the conditions of uneven global development (see, also, Turner, 1974, 1984). In fact, there was nothing surprising in Rodinson’s statement. After all, the Prophet himself was a merchant.

After the end of the Cold War, the focus of attention shifted from capitalist development to liberal democracy. Capitalism had triumphed. With the fall of the Soviet regime, the remote corners of the world had been transformed into open markets for transnational corporations. At the same moment that globalization

12Islam and Democracy: Is Turkey an Exception

or a Role Model?

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ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY: IS TURKEY AN EXCEPTION OR A ROLE MODEL? 241

took root and supranationalism began, i.e., the political sovereignty of the nation-state began to decline, individual nation-states began to be judged no longer by their degree of development but by their political regimes. Liberal democracy became the norm for individual nation-states; and here, again, the Muslim world was found lacking.

Samuel Huntington’s (1996) division of the world into clashing civilizations is well known. But even Francis Fukuyama (1992), who declared the ‘end of his-tory’, arguing that liberal democracy had become an uncontested model and would establish exclusive dominion throughout the globe, still made Islam the exception to this trend: ‘At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy. In the past, people rejected liberal democ-racy, because they believed that it was inferior to monarchy, aristocracy, theoc-racy, fascism, communist totalitarianism, or whatever ideology they happened to believe in. But now, outside the Islamic world, there appears to be a general con-sensus …’ (1992: 211).

Fukuyama is certainly not alone in treating Islam as an exception. Sociologists of an earlier generation, however, used to treat the West as unique. This was evi-dent, for example, in the writings of theorists as (otherwise) opposed to each other as Karl Marx and Max Weber. For Marx, there was the history of the West, with its class struggles and revolutions, moving inexorably toward communism, and then there was the history of the Orient (he did not specify it as Muslim; he had, rather, India in mind), which in effect had no history before British imperial-ism began to transform it (Marx and Engels, 1972). Marx was Eurocentric, but his Eurocentrism was in the paradoxical form of presenting European history (or, rather, his own version of it) as ‘universal’ history. Weber, on the other hand, was more self-confident about his belief in the unique qualities of the West. In his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1958), he made it very clear: Only Western ‘rationality’ could achieve modern capitalism.

By contrast, later in the twentieth century, after the academic reign of the uni-versalist ‘modernization’ theory (Tipps, 1973) during the 1950s and 1960s, a theory that not only promoted the US model of modernity as a model for all but also predicted that it would inevitably be followed by all (the so-called ‘conver-gence’ theories of that time brought even the communist states into the fold), Islam and Muslim societies began to be treated as the exception. The idea that Islam is unique (only, in a negative sense) has most directly and forcefully been expressed by the late Ernest Gellner, the famous anthropologist of Islam, and Bernard Lewis, the equally well-known historian, in their numerous works on the subject.

ISLAM: AN ‘EXCEPTIONAL’ CIVILIZATION?

Gellner (1994: 15) states: ‘Islam is unique among the major world civilizations or religions’. Unlike other religions, it is not conducive to secularization,


242 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ISLAMIC STUDIES

prescribes a definite social, political, and legal order, and always occupies a cen-tral place in the lives of Muslim societies. According to Gellner, Islam cannot be secularized, because it is already a ‘Protestant’ religion. Unlike (Catholic) Christianity, for example, it does not have a religious hierarchy that intervenes between God and the individual believer, who learns his/her faith from the sacred book: ‘By various obvious criteria – universalism, scripturalism, spiritual egali-tarianism, the extension of full participation in the sacred community not to one, or some, but to all, and the rational systematisation of social life – Islam is, of the three great Western monotheisms, the one closest to modernity’ (Gellner, 1981: 7). Thus, ironically, Gellner would not consider Islam to be opposed to capitalism. There is, he believes, a different problem with the religion. Islam is indifferent to modernization, and hence impervious to secularization. According to Gellner (1997: 233–234), Islam has always occupied a central place in the lives of Muslim societies, so that ‘the hold of the religion over society seems interestingly inde-pendent of other aspects of society …’

If one adds to this the more widespread and oft-stated (but false) belief, also repeated by Gellner, that Islam is unique among religions to prescribe a definite social, political, and legal order (for counterevidence and arguments, see Ayubi, 1991; Zubaida, 1991; Arkoun, 1994; Keddie, 1994; Al-‘Azm, 1997), one will readily reach the conclusion that Muslim societies have an unchanging essence. This point is best expressed by Bernard Lewis (1993a: 135): ‘If, then, we are to understand anything at all about what is happening in the Muslim world at the present time and what has happened in the past, there are two essential points that need to be grasped. One is the universality of religion as a factor in the lives of the Muslim peoples, and the other is its centrality’. As Lewis and Gellner believe that in the absence of secularism and secularization, there can be no ‘civil soci-ety’ or democracy, they agree on the improbability of a democratic regime in Muslim society. In Gellner’s words (1994: 29), Islam ‘exemplifies a social order which seems to lack much capacity to provide political countervailing institu-tions or associations, which is atomized without much individualism, and oper-ates effectively without intellectual pluralism’. Lewis (1993b) concurs: ‘Not surprisingly … the history of Islamic states is one of almost unrelieved autoc-racy’ (see also, Lewis, 2002).

However, there are several problems with this assessment. First, treating Islamist politics as the manifestation of a timeless opposition between the Muslim and Western civilizations leads Lewis, for example, to lump together completely unrelated or even opposing political experiences, such as the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the Wahhabi rising against the Ottoman Empire two centuries earlier, so that both appear in the same category of religious politics (Lewis, 1993a: 39). We are thus offered a highly reductionist history, where selective and often irrel-evant examples are cited to show the persistent dominance of Islamic themes. In reality, the only thing in common between Wahhabism, still the ruling ideol-ogy in Saudi Arabia, and Khomeinism, a revolutionary populism (see Abrahamian, 1993), is their reference to Islam (or, rather, each to its own version of Islam) in



their political rhetoric. Nevertheless, this characterization is self-servingly inconsistent in yet another regard: the Wahhabi revolt was against the Ottoman Empire, which is also treated by these writers as an example of Islamic political power. Clearly, after a point, Islam no longer makes sense as an analytical cate-gory. Using the same methodology, one could easily demonstrate the centrality of Christianity in the lives of Western societies. However, more importantly, this reductionist history actually corresponds to the fantasies of a radical fringe in the Muslim world rather than to the real lives of the majority of the Muslim people. This is a history that might have been presented by an Islamic fundamentalist.

Secondly, there is not only an absence of a uniform model of secularization in what are routinely referred to as modern and secular Western societies (indeed, there is great diversity within Europe alone, as well as between Europe and America, and the Christian world in general: see, e.g., Casanova, 1994; van der Veer and Lehmann, 1999), there is also tremendous diversity of experiences with regard to democracy within what is known as the ‘Christian civilization’. There are large segments of that ‘civilization’ where democracy has been only recently and/or still incompletely developed. These include not only many nations of Latin America and Africa (how to characterize them: Christian, but not Western?), but also some of those of Southern and Eastern Europe.

Finally, and most fundamentally, these monotheistic religions have been around for many centuries, while capitalism, modernity, and liberal democracy are his-torically novel phenomena. These religions have been predominant in societies with a whole variety of socioeconomic and political systems. Although the argu-ment is often made that the separation of church and state has roots in the New Testament (‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s’ Matthew, 22: 21), how can we then account for the fact that such separation did not take place in France until 1905, more than a century after the Revolution of 1789, and has never taken place in the United Kingdom – these, the two historical pioneers of modernity, one of which gave us the paradigmatic political revolution and the other the industrial revolution? Indeed, how do we explain the long ‘dark’ ages of medieval Europe, out of which only the anti-clericalism of the Enlightenment took us (see Gay, 1966), in the standard narrative of Western modernization?

It is for the same reasons that the comparable response coming from Islamist thinkers must be taken with a grain of salt. Many Islamist thinkers have responded to the aforementioned arguments with the counterclaim that the roots of democ-racy may be found in Islam (see, e.g., Sachedina, 2001). This idea has taken a variety of forms, from the Islamic modernists of the late nineteenth century, who discovered a parliamentary system in Islam’s sacred writings (Mardin, 1962), to the Islamic postmodernists of the late twentieth century, who discovered a model of multiculturalism in the Prophet’s rule in Medina (for a critical discussion, see Gülalp, 1997; also Choueiri, 1990; Kramer, 1993). There have also been writers in the ‘West’ who have defied the prevailing trend and agreed with Islamist spokespeople about the ‘democratic essence of Islam’ (Voll and Esposito, 1994;



Esposito and Voll, 1996). Thankfully, there are also recent works that reject this fruitless framework and take the debate to the realm of socioeconomic and polit-ical history, where it properly belongs (Salame, 1994; Diamond, Plattner, and Blumberg, 2003).

TURKEY: ‘AN EXCEPTION WITHIN THE EXCEPTION’?

Turkey figures prominently in debates on Islam and democracy. If, in received wisdom, Islam is not conducive to secularization, and democracy is not possible without secularization, it follows that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Turkey then is offered as a counterexample to demonstrate the truth of this rea-soning. It is suggested that democracy in Turkey has been possible only as a result of the suppression of Islam through secularization imposed from above. Turkey is thus presented as a model of secularism and democracy in the Muslim world based on the premise that Turkey has shed its Islamic character by adopt-ing Westernization.

Again in Gellner’s (1997: 233, 236) words: ‘Islam is unique among world religions, and Turkey is unique within the Muslim world. … Turkey [is] the exception within the exception’. This is because the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), and Turkey’s Kemalist leadership adopted secularization and Westernization from above (cf. Lewis, 1994). But for the same reason, Gellner also observes (1994: 199–200), the army, regarded by all as the guardian of Kemalism, does not seem to hesitate to step in every time a demo-cratic election results in Islamist victory. Indeed, the guiding principle of the secularist regime in Turkey has been the widely shared assumption that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Paradoxically, then, Turkey is considered to be unique, because it somehow resembles Western societies, whereas Muslim societies in general could never resemble the West because of their immutable essence – hence, the repeated conflict between Kemalism and Islamic politics in Turkey.

The irony of this example is that, despite the significant place that Islam occu-pies in Turkish national identity, the founding elites (and the still dominant ideology) of the Turkish Republic actually share these reductionist assumptions about Islam and have devised a model of secularism that leads to a paradoxical outcome: The Turkish state has often been undemocratic in its pursuit of secular-ism. Thus, the unfounded belief that Islam and secularization (and Islam and democracy) are incompatible has instead made secularism and democracy incompatible.

Secularization in Turkey, then, seems to be a peculiar affair. While in the nor-mative model, secularization is supposed to be associated with enlightenment and the freedom of thought, in Turkey it is imposed from above and protected in an authoritarian manner by state institutions, primarily the military. This configu-ration leaves us in a set of dilemmas. Kemalism is either democratic or it is not.



Secularization either leads to democracy or it can only be maintained by restrict-ing democracy. Turkey is either a model for other countries in the Muslim world or it is an exception within the exception. Turkey is either a typical example of modernization by emulation or it is a unique experience.

I would argue, however, that these are false dilemmas. If Turkey were indeed so exceptional, we would probably learn very little from studying it – a hardly inspiring (or even reasonable) prospect. A more reasonable perspective would indicate that both Muslim societies, in general, and Turkey, in particular, can be examined very well in terms of the universal concepts and frameworks of sociol-ogy and political science. Whether Turkey is a model that could (or should?) be emulated by other Muslim nations can only be answered in the light of such an examination.

Moreover, there is a challenging question before us: If Islam and democracy are deemed incompatible, how do we account for the fact that the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), currently in power in Turkey (since the end of 2002), has roots in political Islam and yet has become an agent of democratic reform? How do we explain this seemingly surprising outcome?

AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE

We may begin to answer this question by changing the terms of analysis and shifting to a different conceptual terrain, with the use of the following terms and related observations: (a) Social class: Generally speaking, the history of democ-racy reveals that oppressed segments of society (particularly the working class) have been the key agents in promoting democratization (Polanyi, 1944; Marshall, 1964; Therborn, 1977; Huber, Rueschmeyer, and Stephens, 1993). We need to look more closely at how this particular factor has featured in recent Turkish experience. (b) Islam: While doing so, however, we will also have to disaggre-gate the notion of Islam, as Islam has been an important medium of articulation of class-related demands and struggles. We need to distinguish carefully between religion, culture, and politics. Although often conflated, there is a difference between Islamism as a political project and Muslims’ demand for the recognition of their cultural rights.

There is a close link between class position and Islamic cultural identity in Turkey. According to the assumptions of Turkey’s Kemalist modernization proj-ect, the upward mobility, urbanization, and modernization of an individual are supposed to involve the Westernization (and de-Islamization) of his or her cul-tural tastes and practices. The assertion of Muslim cultural identity, then, can be seen as a form of class struggle. It is not one waged around economic issues necessarily, although there is some of that, but rather around the recognition of a cultural identity, an identity suppressed by secularist elites who have internalized the Eurocentric assumptions of modernization. While Islamism as a politics of identity is a potentially authoritarian movement, no democratic politics can be



successful without the cultural incorporation of the people into a participatory political system. The key to the democratic role of a political movement based on Islam lies in that movement’s transformation from an exclusionary politics of identity into an inclusionary liberal movement that recognizes and encourages cultural diversity. This, I suggest, is what characterizes the (at least, declared) politics of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party.

Islamist politics has also often been interpreted as a form of resistance to, rejection of, and withdrawal from, global trends. This widespread belief finds its best expression in the title of Benjamin Barber’s book, Jihad vs. McWorld (1995), which suggests the parallel presence of two opposing trends in the cur-rent period of globalization: On the one hand, a unifying economic trend and, on the other hand, a divisive cultural trend – particularly in the form of Islamic fundamentalism. This argument seems persuasive. If Islam is opposed to modernity, and if globalization tends to diffuse modernity globally, then it fol-lows that Islam would generate a political resistance to globalization. Hence, the seemingly puzzling coincidence of globalization and fundamentalism becomes explicable.

However, this reasoning can be easily challenged. First of all, both my own research (Gülalp, 2001) and the research of others (Önis, 1997; Bugra, 1998, 2002) on the socioeconomic foundations of political Islam in Turkey demon-strate that Islamism has served as a vehicle of accommodation to the new eco-nomic and political structures engendered by globalization. Indeed, political Islam in Turkey has been supported by those segments of society that are not opposed to globalization, but rather expect to benefit from it. No doubt, there are isolationist elements within the Islamist movement, as there are within other contemporary movements, including nationalism and variants of Marxism. However, in Turkey, they seem to be in the minority.

Secondly, Islamism in Turkey came into existence, flourished, and was subse-quently transformed in ways that paralleled global patterns of cultural change. Islamists articulated their own projects with the dominant themes of different eras: It was ‘heavy industry’ in the 1970s, ‘civil society’ in the 1980s, ‘authentic-ity’ in the 1990s, and has become ‘human rights’ in the 2000s. Political Islam in Turkey reached its peak in the 1990s with the ‘authenticity’ argument. After all, in an era when authenticity was in fashion, who could claim greater cultural authenticity than the Islamists? Thus, Islamism became popular in the 1990s as a form of ‘new social movement’, concerned with claims of authenticity and theo-retically justified through a postmodern critique of Western modernity (Gülalp, 2002).

In modern Turkey, a political movement based on Islam as political ideology first emerged in the 1970s and was continually led for several decades by Necmettin Erbakan. The movement formally appeared on the parliamentary scene in 1970 with the formation of the National Order Party (Milli Nizam Partisi) on an overtly Islamist platform. After a brief period of closure for violation of the constitution, this party was re-established as the National Salvation Party



(Milli Selamet Partisi) and almost continuously served in various coalition gov-ernments from 1973 until the military coup in 1980, which suspended parliamen-tary politics and closed down all political parties. In tune with the dominant ideological trends of the time, the distinguishing thesis of the National Salvation Party was the need for state-led heavy industry, together with ‘spiritual develop-ment’, to overcome Turkey’s economic dependence and underdevelopment.

The Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) was the post-1980 reincarnation of National Salvation. By contrast to its predecessor, however, the themes promoted by the Welfare Party included private initiative, civil society, the environment, and other anti-statist trends of the period, as well as, of course, the most important claim of ‘authenticity’, articulated especially by the theorists of Islamism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The party was founded in 1983, when the first general election following the military coup of 1980 was scheduled to take place. Starting with a 4.4 percent vote in 1984, the Welfare Party steadily increased its showing in every single election thereafter, until it reached a peak of slightly over 20 percent of the national vote in the general elections of December 1995, emerging as the largest party in the parliament. After briefly participating in a coalition govern-ment as its senior partner (from mid-1996 to mid-1997), with Erbakan in the prime minister’s seat, the Welfare Party was pushed out of power, and in 1998, closed down like its predecessors, only to be reincarnated yet again as the Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi).

After the closure of the Welfare Party by Turkey’s constitutional court, whose ruling also banned Erbakan from active political life for a number of years, and the creation of the Virtue Party, Islamists began to express their politi-cal struggle in a language of ‘human rights’. The Virtue Party, too, was closed down by the constitutional court in 2001, despite the efforts of its leaders to appear eager to distance themselves from the Welfare legacy, even though the party inherited Welfare’s political cadres and most of its parliamentary seats. Thus, only with the creation of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi: AKP), under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, did this new trend within Islamism gain independence from, and a complete break with, its predecessors. For, when the Virtue Party was closed in 2001, while the reform-ist wing founded the AKP, the hard-core followers of Erbakan founded the rival Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi) in order to carry on his legacy, which has subse-quently faded into obscurity (for the split in the Islamist movement, see Atacan, 2005).

The general elections of 3 November 2002 marked a new phase in the evolu-tion of both Islamist politics and democratic reform in Turkey. AKP won the elections, with roughly 35 percent of the national vote, on a platform of commit-ment to completing the political reforms demanded by the European Union (EU). The electoral system gave the party a disproportionately strong parliamentary majority, enabling the government to move rapidly with the reform program. Two years later, in the December 2004 summit, EU leaders ruled that Turkey was ready for the start of membership accession negotiations.



AKP: WHITHER POLITICAL ISLAM?

The aforementioned observations raise the following question: How is it, then, that a political movement with Islamist roots, which now pursues a politics of ‘human rights’, can garner so much electoral support? Clearly, this cannot be attributed to an increasing number of people converting to Islam in general or to political Islam in particular. Indeed, the hard-core successor of Welfare, i.e., the Felicity (Saadet) Party, won only about 2 percent of the popular vote in the November 2002 elections, likely signaling the end of the movement. Moreover, while the AKP fashioned itself as a new political party on a platform of human rights and liberal democracy, it is still recognized by voters as having links with its Islamic past. Although, unlike Welfare, the AK Party does not offer an Islamist platform or take Islam as a point of reference in its political projects, its leaders are still publicly known as practicing Muslims. Islam, then, is a social and cultural identity that they do not hide but rather carry with some pride (White, 2005, calls it Turkey’s ‘Muslimhood’ model; see also Nasr, 2005).

Hence, in order to answer the aforementioned question, we need to simultane-ously address two issues: (a) What was the source of the transformation within the movement from Islamism to liberalism (yet with an open endorsement of Muslim identity)?; and (b) What is the significance of Islamic identity in the eyes of the people who support AKP? Satisfactorily answering these two questions will give us a better understanding of the source of AKP’s appeal and success. It will help us see that AKP’s policy of combining liberal democracy with a Muslim cultural identity offers an alternative both to the Kemalist policy of state-led secularization and to the Islamist reaction to it, and more closely represents the democratic aspirations of the majority of the Turkish people.

Considering that in Turkish political history ‘secularism’ has occasionally been the source of, or at least an ideological cover for, nondemocratic practices and frequent military interventions, some scholars have suggested that political Islam, challenging authoritarian secularism, is essentially democratic and would contrib-ute to Turkey’s democratization (e.g., Göle, 1996; Yavuz, 1997; see also Mardin, 1989). I disagree and have been openly critical of the authoritarian, and even totalitarian, potential of Islamism (Gülalp, 1999). Indeed, more generally, like all other ‘politics of identity’, Islamism is (and, in Turkey, was) an essentialist, anti-individualist, antiliberal, and dogmatic movement. It is specifically a project of using state power to impose ‘Islamic principles’ (or, more correctly, a particular interpretation of them) on society from above.

The politics of Islamism, then, is not and cannot be democratic for the follow-ing reasons. First of all, it is a ‘politics of identity’, much like many other cultur-alist movements that became popular particularly in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War. These movements typically imagined, and falsely asserted, the existence of (a) an essential authenticity, claiming that communication across the imagined cultural divides was very difficult, if not impossible; (b) a fixed and immutable identity, which was therefore non-negotiable; and (c) a homogeneous



community, which necessarily ignored internal hierarchies. Although the demand expressed by these movements for the ‘right’ to claim a culture, and to be recog-nized for who they are, could be construed as a democratic demand, the move-ments themselves were intolerant toward outsiders, as well as toward those insiders who might challenge the claim of unity and homogeneity.

Granted, most of these identity movements have been defensive, originating from the urge to combat collective discrimination due to ascriptive attributes, such as race, gender, and ethnicity. But, quite unlike these defensive movements, Islamism (in Turkey, as elsewhere) has had the explicit aim of coming to power and capturing the state apparatus in order impose a particular model of society from above – often arguing falsely that this is what Muslims wanted, or that, even if Muslims were led astray by false consciousness now, they would soon realize their real interest and suppressed essence. In Turkey, it was argued that Islamism was the natural choice, given that 99 percent of the population is Muslim. (It must be noted that this idea was most articulately expressed by Erdogan, before he disengaged from the project of Islamism; see Gülalp, 1999.)

The reformist leaders of the AKP correctly diagnosed this project as a mere replication of the statist model whereby, previously, secularism was imposed from above. By contrast to both, AKP defined itself as a new political movement, endorsing an eclectic combination of liberal, conservative, and democratic values (more on this, in the following section). This shift in Islamist thinking took place more or less in response to the 28 February 1997 (indirect) military intervention that overthrew the Welfare Party-led coalition government and resulted in that party’s closure. Prominent Islamists soon thereafter began to denounce in public meetings their erstwhile project of capturing state power in order to impose an Islamic order from above (for an insider’s account of this major rethinking, see Metiner, 2004; for the political biographies of AKP leaders, see Pamuk, 2001; Yılmaz, 2001; Selim, 2002). That project, they admitted, merely mirrored the way politics is done in Turkey, as was the case in their removal from power under military pressure. It remained within the terms of the antidemocratic and absolut-ist mode of their opponents. In their own words, they came to realize the impor-tance of the ‘rights and freedoms of the individual’.

The split in the Islamist movement first began with internal opposition to Necmettin Erbakan, who had been the uncontested leader of a string of Islamist parties, each one founded after the closure of the other either by an act of the constitutional court or a military intervention. This internal opposition united around the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister of Turkey, and founded the AKP in the summer of 2001. Thus, while most of the Muslim world was thrown into confusion and disarray after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the democratic wing of the Islamist movement in Turkey had already been organized as a new political party and was working on a plat-form of legislating reforms for EU accession. (With a touch of irony, the US reaction to September 11 was popularly dubbed in Turkey as ‘the February 28th process on a global scale’.) Coming to power in the first elections thereafter,



in November 2002, AKP was quickly able to marginalize radical elements among both the Islamists and secularists.

Thus, quite independent of, and indeed chronologically prior to, September 11 and the Iraq war, Turkey’s Islamist political movement generated a reformist wing that noted the similarity in the nondemocratic, top–down approaches of both the secularist elites of Turkey and their Islamist opponents, and rejected both in favor of a liberal and pluralistic democracy. This reformist wing of Turkey’s Islamists had moved from an intolerant politics of identity to a pluralist politics of recognizing diversity. The leaders of this wing still wanted to be pub-licly recognized as Muslims, but they were no longer Islamists.

CULTURE, IDENTITY, AND CLASS

Erbakan had been active in politics since the 1970s, albeit without a large follow-ing. His National Order Party (1970–71), soon closed down and replaced by the National Salvation Party (1972–80), was originally founded as an outcome of the conflict between the big industrial and other business interests in urban areas on the one hand and the traditional small-to-medium business sector in provincial towns on the other. The National Salvation Party’s constituency mostly repre-sented conservative followers of religious orders and these provincial small-scale business people. The Welfare Party (1983–98), in contrast, was more radical than conservative, did not exclusively rely on support from religious orders, and had most of its support in big cities. Its constituency included segments of middle class professionals and marginal workers in big cities, as well as small-scale businesses, which now constituted the most dynamic and export-oriented sectors of the economy (Gülalp, 2001).

Many recent immigrants making up the working class of Istanbul were origi-nally drawn to the Welfare Party because of Erdogan, rather than Erbakan. Erdogan had become popular as the head of the Istanbul branch of the Welfare Party and, subsequently, the successful mayor of Istanbul between 1994 and 1998, when he was prosecuted and convicted for giving a speech that was deemed to incite hatred and conflict. After serving a prison sentence in 1999, he became a legend. The contrast between the social backgrounds of Erbakan and Erdogan, briefly described in the foregoing section, seems to illustrate the difference between their bases of popularity. Parties led by Erbakan never won more than about 10 percent of the vote in any election, until the municipal elections in 1994, when Erdogan won the mayoralty of Istanbul by getting more than 25 percent of the Istanbul vote. In the parliamentary elections of 1995, Welfare won a little over 20 percent nationally and was able to emerge as the largest party, because the rest of the votes were divided among several other parties. AKP, on the other hand, won roughly 35 percent of the votes in the first elections in which it par-ticipated, only a year after its creation, while Erbakan’s Felicity Party shrunk back to a hard core of 2 percent in the same elections.



Erdogan’s charisma mostly came from his working-class background, which rather than hiding, he rather shrewdly turned into an asset. By contrast, Erbakan had a PhD in engineering from a German university and was a popular professor at the prestigious Istanbul Technical University before he entered politics. Although he appeared to be a devout Muslim and a loyal follower of the Naqshibandi order, he was known to lead an extravagant lifestyle, often making front-page news for such things as throwing an expensive party for his daughter’s wedding. Clearly, a very intelligent and knowledgeable man, Erbakan asserted his superiority to people around him. Therefore, an average follower might admire him but could not identify with him. Erdogan, on the other hand, Erbakan’s junior by nearly 30 years, was born to a migrant family in a poor neighborhood of Istanbul; went to a religious highschool, which provided a relatively good education for students of humble background; and graduated from the econom-ics department of a second-tier university in Istanbul. While Erbakan always emphasized his superior educational credentials, Erdogan always reminded you of his humble origins (this and some parts of the following paragraphs are borrowed, with minor modifications, from Gülalp, 2003).

Survey research on the social composition of supporters of different parties, conducted both before and after the elections of November 2002, confirms the overwhelming popularity of AKP among the working class, particularly in Istanbul and other big cities (TÜSES, 2002; Erdem, 2002). A situation in which the urban working class not only retains an Islamic identity, but also expresses its political demands in terms of it, presents a challenge to the standard theories of modernization and secularization. The popularity of political parties such as Welfare or AKP in urban centers are then indiscriminately explained in terms of massive immigration from the countryside. Authors in this school of thought argue that rural immigrants bring their traditional way of life into their new neighborhoods and respond to the anomie they experience in the large cities by clinging to their traditional belief system. They falsely assume that immi-grants reproduce rural conditions in these urban centers and lead an isolated, self-subsistent lifestyle in their poor neighborhoods. Because in conventional wisdom Islam is opposed to modernity, and Islamic identity is a traditionalist reaction to modernization, they argue that these Islamic parties are supported by provincial people living in the margins of the big cities (see, e.g., Alkan, 1984; Toprak, 1987; Birtek and Toprak, 1993; Yücekök, 1997). It is true that much of the success of these political parties is due to recent immigration from the coun-tryside; but the fact remains that the urbanization of these people, who now form the modern working class in Turkey, did not take the form of de-Islamization, as predicted by secularization theories. It is at this point that the Eurocentric assumption about the unique characteristics of Islam becomes useful. The argu-ment is then made that, surely, Islam constitutes an exception to the rule about secularization.

There is however, an alternative mode of explanation, one that specifically addresses the role played by Eurocentrism itself. The Eurocentric assumptions of



modernization were internalized by the Kemalist founders of the Turkish Republic and made the building blocks of the regime. Turkey’s modernization project aimed at a state-led emulation of Western social structures and cultural practices. The Kemalist leadership declared the national goal to be the ‘achievement of contemporary civilization’, a formula that equated modernization with Westernization. In this perspective, Islam was considered to represent ‘a set of traditions, values, legal rules, and norms which were intrinsically non-Western in character’ and hence an inherent obstacle to be overcome (Toprak, 1981: 40. See also Oran, 1988: 135–140).

In Turkish political culture, modernization, development, Westernization, and catching up with global civilization are all interchangeable concepts. The assump-tion has been that along with economic development, and the urbanization and modernization of Turkish society, cultural practices of the people would evolve towards a Western lifestyle. That is, they would dress in Western garb, develop a taste for Western music, adopt Western architectural styles, read and write using the Western alphabet, and so on. Accordingly, the history of the founding decades of the Turkish republic has been one of ‘state-led modernization’, including both an attempt at planned economic development and the hasty imposition of the aforementioned cultural practices through government legislation and control (Bozdogan and Kasaba, 1997; Atabaki and Zürcher, 2004; Parla and Davison, 2004).

Moreover, in the Kemalist perspective, what is true for the nation as a whole also applies to the individuals. The economic upward mobility, urbanization, and modernization of an individual are also expected to involve a Westernization (and de-Islamization) of his or her cultural tastes and practices. Thus, according to official dogma, the nation’s trajectory from Islamic traditionalism to Western modernity is to be replicated in the lives of individual Turks who come from rural backgrounds to the big city and aspire for upward mobility. Against this back-ground, asserting the right to an Islamic cultural identity within a context of social and economic modernity becomes a class-based democratic demand opposing a state-based elitism (cf. White, 2002).

This demand is equally valid for the newly growing provincial middle class. Taking advantage of the opportunities offered by globalization and the export ori-entation of the Turkish economy, the pious and culturally conservative business-people of the Turkish heartland, who have transformed themselves into an economically dynamic and enterprising class, are certainly upwardly mobile, yet wish to retain their cultural conservatism and religiosity (for an interesting report by the European Stability Initiative, which calls this phenomenon ‘Islamic Calvinism’, see ESI, 2005). The same thing is also true for new generations of students and professionals who wish to move into the mainstream of Turkish cul-tural life by challenging the secularist belief that Islamic and intellectual are con-tradictory terms (see Meeker, 1991; Göle, 1997). This united front of people, mostly with provincial origins and aspirations for upward mobility, are joined in their perceived oppression and/or marginalization by the secularist cultural elites.



CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRACY

Turkey experienced its own version of neoliberal opening up, i.e., began to dismantle the protections of the welfare state and opened up the economy to the whims of the world market, at the same time as those of Reagan in the United States, Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and Gorbachev in the USSR, under the leadership of Turgut Özal, whose Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi) was char-acterized by its distinctive assertion of having combined the four different ten-dencies dominant in Turkish politics (liberalism, social democracy, nationalism, and Islamism) within a single movement. The synthesis represented by the Motherland Party was briefly described as ‘conservative modernism’. Seemingly, a contradiction in terms, this phrase was meant to express a combination of modern capitalism with conservative culturalism. The ideological point was that ‘conservative’ and ‘modern’ were not necessarily irreconcilable, that it was per-fectly possible to be modern economically and technologically, while being con-servative culturally, as was presumably the case in several East Asian nations, including Japan. However, since ‘conservative modernism’ made no reference to political regime, one could easily describe Saudi Arabia by the same term.

Although Erdogan is sometimes compared to Özal, Erdogan’s AKP defines its political ideology quite differently, as ‘conservative democracy’, which appears to express a deliberate attempt to combine a specific cultural identity with a uni-versal political regime. In so far as ‘conservative’ implies the preservation of Muslim cultural identity, the aim of combining it with ‘democracy’ expresses the claim that the two are not incompatible. It further expresses the claim that Islam does not prescribe a particular political model, and therefore does not need to be shed in order to achieve democracy. Indeed, numerous times Erdogan and other leaders of the party have stated that they are out to disprove Huntington’s theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’.

‘Conservative democracy’, then, has been interpreted by many observers as a code for ‘Muslim democracy’ and AKP has been likened to the ‘Christian demo-crats’ of Europe. Still, there is an ambiguity in the concept, for a manifesto detail-ing AKP’s conservative democracy explicitly rejects the notion that conservative implies Muslim, suggesting that any reference to religion would be divisive (Akdogan, 2003). At the same time, however, the document also underlines the significance of the Muslim cultural identity within Turkey as a building block of tradition-based democracy, as opposed to radical revolutionary models of modernization imposed from above. In an extended discussion of the meaning of ‘conservative democracy’, the manifesto essentially elaborates the principles of liberal political theory (for Erdogan’s own articulation of this term in a presen-tation at the American Enterprise Institute, on 29 January 2004, see: AEI, 2004).

In fact, AKP’s normative conception of ‘secularism’, as elaborated in this manifesto, is directly parallel to the principles and precepts of liberalism. In a classical definition of ‘liberalism’, Ronald Dworkin (1978) draws a distinction



between the ‘procedural neutrality’ of the state and the pursuit of distinct ‘sub-stantive’ ideas of virtue and the good life by citizens. The liberal state, he con-cludes, cannot adopt a substantive notion of virtue (as cited in Taylor, 1994: 56–57). Likewise, the liberal theorist Brian Barry (2000: 65) argues that ‘liberal-ism is, both historically and logically, the result of generalizing the proposition that it is no business of the state to enforce the observance of the true religion – however and by whomever it is defined’. Similar to these liberal enunciations, the AKP manifesto states: ‘It is not a violation, but a requirement of secularism, that citizens live according to their religious beliefs. Secularism declares the indifference of the state to the diversity of lifestyles among the citizens. More importantly, secularism guarantees the freedom of religion and belief …. Secularism is not an ideology that takes sides’ (Akdogan, 2003: 109). This is clearly different from the Kemalist understanding of secularism.

Unlike what is commonly assumed with regard to the Kemalist model of secu-larism, the structure of state–religion relations in the Turkish Republic displays significant continuities with the Ottoman Empire, where religion was central both as a source of identity and in the legitimation of power, and where the reli-gious institution was incorporated into the state structure in a manner subordi-nate to political authority. Aiming to eradicate the political role of religion in the name of modernization, the leading cadres of the Turkish nation-state followed the Ottoman model of building institutions of state control over religion (cf. Davison, 2003). Moreover, while in the official definition Turkey was a ter-ritorial concept, both in state practices and popular cultural assumptions a ‘Turk’ preferably spoke Turkish and was a Sunni-Muslim (Kirisçi, 2000; Cagaptay, 2006). Again, this identity role of Islam was inherited by modern Turkey from the Ottoman Empire, notwithstanding the claims of the founding republican elite to having severed all ties with the past and created a new national identity.

Most importantly, Kemalist secularism is marred by a significant contradic-tion. In their attempt to displace the centrality of religion by the secular notion of the nation, the republican elites have (paradoxically) reproduced the religious modes of thinking and knowing. Kemalism aimed to move directly into the space originally occupied by Islam and, by doing so, took on some of the functional characteristics of religion. The sacred and dogmatic truths of Islam were replaced by the nationalist (i.e., Kemalist) ones. Thus, while on one hand religion has been an indispensable dimension of Turkish national identity, on the other hand Kemalism has officially been interpreted as almost a quasi-religion of ‘modern’ Turkey, vying with Islam for political and ideological primacy. Like religion, in many ways, Kemalism is authoritarian, absolutist, even textual (Turan, 1991; Gülalp, 2005).

It thus appears that AKP’s conservative democracy aims to transcend Kemalist secularism, not by inverting it as if in a mirror image, as was the case with the political Islamist project of instituting a new cultural regime from above, but by instituting a liberal pluralism. Purportedly rejecting models imposed from above, it aims to accommodate the cultural identity of the Turkish people in a new



concept of liberal democracy. If successful, this would make Turkey a model of democracy for the Muslim world in a way that it has not been before. Previously, Turkey was presented as a model not because its Islamic culture and identity were valued, but because they were suppressed. Islam and democracy were deemed incompatible by the Turkish secular establishment that followed Western assumptions. It was because of its top–down ‘secularization’ experience that Turkey was presented as an exception in the Muslim world. Now for the first time in Turkish history we see a group of leaders who are not political Islamists, yet who also do not hide their Muslim identity while they are pursuing the con-solidation of a liberal democracy.

CONCLUSION

The foregoing discussion of recent Turkish political history suggests that Islam (as religion and culture, or ‘civilization’) is not incompatible with liberal democ-racy, in the same way that Christianity has not been, although ‘Islamism’ is, again in the same way that any religious fundamentalism and/or absolutism would be. It appears that much of the heated debate of recent decades about the issue of compatibility has originated from the fear associated with the rise of political Islamism, which was then conflated with Muslim religious and cultural identity more generally. However, the same discussion also raises new questions. What are the conditions under which an Islamist political project transforms itself into one that pursues a democratic pluralism? Stating that such pluralism is inherent in Islamic culture, even if it were true, does not explain its fruition, or lack thereof, historically. Here, again, the Turkish case may provide some insights.

First of all, it is clear that the Turkish Islamists’ endorsement of liberal demo-cratic pluralism came from an urge for self-preservation. As Jenny White (2005: 109), among others, has observed, the AKP ‘supports democracy because it guar-antees freedom of individual belief and expression and, thus, religious expres-sion and its own survival’. This was not quite a new idea, either. For example, Emmanuel Sivan (2003: 23) quotes Munir Shafiq, ‘an independent radical writer of Palestinian origin, who, as early as 1992, called for unqualified acceptance of the notions of human rights and alternation of power …’ Sivan writes: ‘The resurgence of Islam, he argued, requires a free civil society, which is possible only under democracy’. There is no direct evidence that the Turkish Islamists were inspired by Shafiq; but, as already indicated, the idea itself had become self-evident among Islamist circles in Turkey after 28 February 1997, when the military issued the ultimatum that overthrew the Welfare Party government.

This, however, gives us only a partial explanation, for it was also clear that the initial efforts during the Virtue Party period to appear as a champion of human rights and freedoms were too transparently and self-servingly one-sided (see Gülalp, 1999). Thus, secondly, it was the need to complete the reforms demanded



by the EU for Turkey’s accession to membership that created the singular oppor-tunity for the AKP leaders. Sensing the potential popularity that these reforms would generate, and the deepening of democratic institutions and practices that they would engender, the AKP made a firm commitment to legislating and imple-menting these reforms, with the anticipation that they would also weaken the sovereignty-minded statist establishment while keeping the AKP in power. There is an overwhelming support for EU membership in Turkey, and the reforms have so far benefited (or, at least, held out the promise of benefiting) all liberal and democratic-minded forces in Turkey.

More generally, Turkey found itself in a conjuncture where it could take advantage of the parallel processes of economic globalization and political liber-alization. The link between globalization and the recognition of diversity has been widely noted, as has been the association between globalization and the ascen-dancy of neoliberalism (Wilmsen and Allister, 1996; Mittleman, 1996). Liberalism, in so far as it can accommodate ‘difference’, and this seems to be its claim, fits the priorities of the global period, which in turn explains the effort on the part of Turkish Islamists to promote liberal democracy, as opposed to their former rejec-tion of it, in order to find a place within its framework for the accommodation of Muslim identity. Obviously, this particular confluence of circumstances may not be replicated elsewhere in the Muslim world. But Turkey’s performance with the AKP in power has been a source of inspiration for neighboring countries, who have markedly improved their relations with and support for Turkey, a novelty in Turkey’s foreign relations, and the AKP’s performance as an example of a reformed and reformist party with roots in political Islam has likewise been a source of inspiration for Islamist movements elsewhere (see Nasr, 2005).

This is not to say, however, that no problems remain. First, even though the AKP has proclaimed a liberal manifesto, the party does not necessarily consis-tently practice what it seems to advocate on paper (see Tepe, 2005). Second, even though there has been significant progress in legislating reforms, domestic resis-tance to them, and to the AKP’s political project more generally, has not neces-sarily ended or even lost its force. There may still be reversals. Finally, the EU’s repeatedly demonstrated ambivalence about the full membership of Turkey, a Muslim-majority nation, may dampen the enthusiasm of the reform movement and generate conditions for renewed nationalism and isolationism in Turkey. The success of Turkish democracy may still depend to a significant extent on whether the EU can transcend its own Eurocentrism.

POSTSCRIPT

In March 2008, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, who caused the closure of the Refah (Welfare) and Fazilet (Virtue) Parties in 1998 and 2001, respectively, the Chief Prosecutor of the Turkish Republic filed a case with the Constitutional Court for the closure of the AK Party for violating Turkey’s



secular constitution. This time, however, the Constitutional Court did not rule for closure but, in a deeply ambivalent verdict, condemned the party to pay a sig-nificant fine, presumably having found some convincing evidence that supported the prosecutor’s case. The 11-member court voted 6 to 5 in favor of closure; but this was one vote short of the necessary three-fifths majority to effect closure. The court then agreed to fine the party instead. Although this particular outcome was seemingly due to a technicality introduced into the constitution back in 2001, after the closure of the Fazilet Party, designed to make it more difficult to close down political parties (something that the Turkish Constitutional Court appears to do in excess), it is better understood as being due to political circumstances.

This postscript offers a brief update, as of early August 2008, to the foregoing paper, completed in early 2006. It sketches the events leading up to the Constitutional Court case.

As indicated in the preceding section, the AKP, following its commitments declared before and after the 2002 general election, energetically pursued eco-nomic and political reform in order to qualify for EU membership, and was awarded a date for the beginning of accession negotiations in the EU summit of December 2004. This outcome gave a further boost to the rapidly growing econ-omy and, with increased inflow of direct foreign capital, Turkey sustained high rates of growth in the following years. Politically speaking, however, 2005 and 2006 marked first a slowdown and then a serious decline in AKP’s performance. Suffering, after the 2004 summit, from what was then described as ‘reform fatigue’, the AKP began to falter in its legislative efforts, partly because of the increased pressure of the state establishment, buoyed by the nationalist backlash to what were perceived as ‘concessions’ to the EU on Cyprus, the Kurdish issue, the role of the military in politics, and so on, and partly because of the lack of enthusiasm on the part of EU leaders who got caught unawares by AKP’s urgency in legislating reform and began to find new excuses to keep Turkey at a distance. In other words, pro-status quo forces in Turkey and in the EU collaborated in an undeclared alliance.

The pressure on the AKP government became particularly intense during the first half of 2007 and peaked in April, while the election of a new President was underway. Turkey is governed by a parliamentary system; the president is elected for a 7-year period by parliament and occupies mostly a symbolic position, but also has some real powers in vetoing bills and appointing officials to some key positions. As such, the president’s office has always been viewed by the estab-lishment as a bastion that could easily limit the political power of a straying elected government. The AKP put up Abdullah Gül, the highly popular Minister of Foreign Affairs, as the candidate for President, ringing alarm bells for hard-core secularists, because of his Islamist past and headscarf wearing wife and daughter. Huge rallies of protest were organized around the country, and the military issued an ultimatum reiterating its commitment to secularism. Regardless, the AKP-dominated parliament voted Gül to the presidency; but the voting result was taken by the main opposition party to the Constitutional Court on a technicality



and, defying all reasonable expectations, finally declared null and void. In response, the parliament called for immediate general elections, which was due to take place later in the year anyway.

Unexpectedly for the establishment and its radical secularist supporters, the AKP emerged from the elections of 22 July 2007, with nearly 47 percent of the votes, a gain of nearly 15 percent over its votes in 2002. The opposition had mis-calculated. For, in addition to large segments of the working class, the AKP had won, during its years in power, the support of the liberal public opinion among professional middle classes, due to its democratic reform program, and the con-fidence of the business class, due to its neoliberal economic program. Economic growth had remained high, and inflation low. The opposition, in contrast, had nothing to offer but to instill the fear of an impending Islamist regime.

The argument thus won, and the deadlock seemingly ended, Gül was handily elected President, and the AKP set about rewriting from scratch the extant con-stitution that was originally written by the generals of the 1980 coup. The consti-tution had been amended numerous times since then, but some of its essentially nondemocratic elements remained. Emboldened by its electoral victory, yet still frustrated by stiff resistance from those who believed that it had the concealed intention of turning Turkey into an Islamist state by changing the constitution wholesale, the AKP then took the unwise step of trying to at least solve a long-festering problem and appease hard-core supporters. With backing from some other parties in parliament, it passed constitutional amendments that would allow for the liberalization of the headscarf on university campuses. This was an unwise move, because, although understandable considering the needs of AKP’s com-mitted supporters, it was a losing proposition for its (contingent) liberal support-ers, who were looking forward to a new and democratic constitution and yet ended up with this sectional amendment. One could easily find in this move some evidence confirming the fears of hard-core secularists.

The establishment took the opportunity to make its final countermove. The legislation that aimed to liberalize the headscarf was taken to the Constitutional Court, where it was overturned, and the Chief Prosecutor filed the case for AKP’s closure. The case was widely regarded as being based on flimsy evidence, con-sisting more of hearsay about AKP leaders’ concealed intentions than on any indication of their concerted efforts to destroy or weaken secularism. Yet, it took up several months of anxiety-filled time for all concerned.

The Constitutional Court announced its decision at the end of July 2008. The stock market immediately responded to the news with a strong recovery, as is to be expected in a globalized economy seeking political stability; interest rates went down and the value of Turkish currency went up. The EU and US leaders greeted the outcome with relief, as did the liberal and democratic public opinion within the country. One Turkish newspaper’s headline read: ‘The Jurists’ Coup was Barely Averted’. Still, it remains to be seen whether this shaky resolution of the crisis, based on the ambivalent verdict of the Constitutional Court, will generate long term stability.



To return to the main theme of this paper, there is little, if any, in the narrated set of events that defies the logic of a modern state and society competing to survive within the global capitalist economy, and all apparent anomalies seem to originate not from the characteristics of a Muslim society, but rather from the preconceived notion that capitalism and democracy are incompatible with it. It seems, in other words, that democracy in Muslim societies may suffer more in the hands of those who believe that Muslims are incapable of practicing democ-racy than in the hands of the Muslims themselves.

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