Islam in Politics: The Case of Turkey

This paper attempts to demonstrate that it is not only the universal principles of Islam that ground our everyday actions, but also the practical and immediate issues which we confront. Although Islam provides a universal set of principles to make life meaningful, I shall argue that these principles are vernacularized and localized in specific narratives. By offering seven diverse zones of Islam, I seek to bring this critical and dynamic distance into the forefront to understand that there is no universal model or a single highway to salvation but, instead, there are multiple ways of being and becoming a Muslim. In the first part of the paper, I seek to disaggregate the concept of 'Islamic or Muslim world' by identifying seven diverse competing and conflicting 'zones' of political Islam, each characterized by their conversion pattern, colonial legacy, type of nationalism and by the state-society relations and political economy that factor into these evolving separate zones. At the same time and under certain political conditions, one also sees the emergence of consensus and similar 'public opinion' across zones on various issues. After identifying the features of three of the seven zones (Arab, Persian and Turkish), the paper focuses on Sufism, the frontier legacy of the Ottoman state, and on the tax-based economy and the expanding political opportunity spaces, to account for the construction of Islamic knowledge and practices in the Turkish zone.

2011

Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, 1996

While it certainly changed over its five-hundred-year existence, the Ottoman Empire was one of the most remarkable historical examples of coexistence among different religious and social groups. It has become increasingly difficult, however, for late-twentieth-century scholars in the West to imagine the kind of political system that existed in the Ottoman Empire, which can be characterized as neither absolutist rule nor secular nation-state. Research in the last twenty years has brought into question many of the commonly accepted models used to describe the organization of religious communities in the Ottoman Empire. For example, the studies compiled by Braude and Lewis in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire suggest that the juridical structure of communal organization in the Ottoman Empire was never historically stable and that the millet [an internal term of reference for the communities of Jews, Armenians, Greek Orthodox, etc.] in fact came into existence in the nineteenth century rather than, as many historians have believed, in the fifteenth. Likewise, political economists have criticized the "mosaic" model elaborated by Gibb and Bowen in Islamic Society and the West, which posits that the Ottoman Empire was composed of isolated, autonomous communities held together by the "cultural roofing" of Islam and, specifically, the shaykh al-islam. The mosaic approach has been criticized for being static and ahistorical, for not leaving any room for class or social conflict, and for not attending to the ways in which communities did, in fact, interact with each other. In the wake of these critiques, however, there has been little work that actually proposes new ways to describe Ottoman religious organization. How do you think we should conceptualize this relationship between the state, the majority, and minority communities in the Ottoman Empire before the nineteenth century? Reconceptualizing this relationship requires moving away from both the nationalist historiography of the "Ottoman yoke," which considers the Ottoman state oppressive to non-Muslims, and the historiography of an almost idyllic, harmonious coexistence in the

2020

Structural Changes in the Modern Middle East: Revolution, Constitution, Parliament or negative efforts of minor structural ones. In addition, a series of such changes, as a whole, can be believed to have originated with European penetration or rule, followed by progressive and reactionary moves in the nineteenth century. I believe that the contents of the presentations by Dr. Dundar and Mr. Tokunaga are evidently different but both are closely related with such changing processes in the Middle East. Their presentations were very helpful for us to reconsider the differences between and similarities in structural changes in the cases of the Ottoman Empire and Iran. In connection with the above, it appears that the millet system was one of the residues in the great structural change of the Ottoman Empire, which converted from an Islamic state into a multi-ethnic state, and finally the Turkish nation-state. Being different from the Ottoman Empire, which had already accomplished a pseudo-centralized or centralized system, Iran needed a state-building exercise based on centralization. I wonder whether the issue of electoral law highlighted by Mr. Tokunaga might have represented the evidence in the significant structural change from decentralized Qajar rule to the centralization of the Pahlavi dictatorship. Moreover, during Reza Shah's period, the task of centralization was certainly accomplished to some extent by means of modernization as well as policies against armed tribes and the Shi'ite religious forces. However, both the Turkish and Iranian cases seem to have scarcely realized structural change in relation to "Islam and Search for Democratization," which is this session's main theme.