Abstract
Turkish liberalism has been ill-served in Western (and until recently, Turkish) histories of political thought in Turkey.1 This has something to do with the fact that liberalism in Turkey is generally held not to be of great consequence. But, while explicitly liberal parties are (and always were) weak, liberal patterns of political thinking and policies played a significant role in Turkey, both in what Albert Hourani called the liberal age (1798–1939) and beyond.2 Furthermore, the present chapter will try to show that, like most ideological currents in modern Turkey, and perhaps even more so, liberal thought is not isolated from that in the rest of the world, or specifically in the Middle East. Rather, it is very much in tune with ideological developments on the global scale, most of all with those in the West.
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Notes
The main reference work for political thought in modern Turkey is Murat Belge (ed.), Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce, 9 vols. (Istanbul: İletişim Yainlari, 2001). Liberalism is treated in vol. 7 (Istanbul: İletişim Yainlari, 2005).
An older study, mainly on liberal economic thought, is Tevfik Çavdar, Türkiye’de Liberalizm (Istanbul: İmge Kitabevi, 1992).
Recent textbooks that provide a good coverage of modern Turkish history generally are Carter V. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010),
and Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 3rd ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005).
This chapter owes much to the inspiring collection of interviews with Haluk Şahin, Liberaller, Ulusalcilar, İslamcilar ve ötekiler (Istanbul: Say Yainlari, 2008).
It was only in the Arab world that World War II and its aftermath marked the beginning of the era of modernizing military regimes that supplanted the rule of liberal notables all over the Middle East. In Turkey the liberal period ended not in the 1940s but rather in the period of military rule after the revolution of 1908, although there was a short resurgence of liberal influence in Istanbul after World War I. A discussion of the latter period can be found in Hasan Kayali, “Liberal Practices in the Transformation from Empire to Nation State: The Rump Ottoman Empire 1918–1923,” in Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean: Late Nineteenth Century until the 1960s, ed. Christoph Schumann (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 175–194. In Iran the decisive date for the end of the (short) liberal age there is the Pahlavi takeover of 1925.
On the “Incident of the 31st of March” see Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 73ff.
On how this idea had begun to lose ground among the Young Turks even before the revolution see M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 211;
Erik J. Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement (Leiden: Brill, 1984), p. 23.
A good short analysis of the social base of the Kemalist regime is provided by Peter Pawelka, Der Vordere Orient und die Internationale Politik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993), pp. 62–71.
On the Progressive Republican Party’s liberal/conservative stance see Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy, pp. 242–246; cf. also Erik J. Zürcher, Political Opposition in the Early Turkish Republic (Leiden: Brill, 1991).
The most comprehensive study on the The Free Republican Party (SCF) combined with a collection of relevant documents is Cemil Koçak, Belgelerle Iktidar ve serbest Cumhuriyet Firkasi (Istanbul: İletişim, 2006); see also Cem Emrence, “Serbest Cumhuriyet Firkasi,” in Belge (ed.), Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce, vol. 7, pp. 213–232.
For an analysis of this process among the national right, see Tanil Bora and Kemal Can, Devlet, Ocak, Dergâh (Istanbul: İletişim Yainlari, 2004), pp. 64ff.
On these two groups and their political roles, see Karin Vorhoff, “Businessmen and Their Organizations: Between Instrumental Solidarity, Cultural Diversity and the State,” in Civil Society in the Grip of Nationalism, ed. Stefanos Yerasimos, Günter Seufert, and Karin Vorhoff (Istanbul and Würzburg: Orient-Institut/Ergon, 2000), pp. 143–196.
Prens Sabahattin’s ideas in this respect highly influenced Ahmet Emin Yalman, the founder of the newspaper Vatan and supporter of the Progressive Republican Party: see Aliyar Demirci, “Ahmet Emin Yalman,” in Belge (ed.), Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce, vol. 7, p. 477; the cliché of the successful Anglo-Saxons and the lazy French has remained very much alive in Turkey. An example is the liberal journalist and lawyer Kâzim Berzeg whose collected articles published in 1996 by the Society for Liberal Thought (Liberals Düşünce Derneği) include titles such as “Western Civilization Is Anglo Saxon Civilization” and “The Wrong Track to Modernity: France.” See Bekir Berat Özipek, “Kâzim Berzeg,” in Belge (ed.), Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce, vol. 7, p. 608. Recently, the liberal-conservative journalist Mustafa Akyol (the son of the former Grey Wolf-turned-liberal Taha Akyol) also explained what he sees as French (and Kemalist) lack of social dynamics in the supposedly erroneous French tradition of “étatism, soldarism, passivism, and pessimism,” which for him was connected with a lack of religious sense, by contrasting this with the individualism and dynamism of religious America. See Mustafa Akyol, Beyaz Türkler, Zenci Türkler ve Dağ Türkleri (Istanbul: Ufuk Yainlari, 2011), p. 199.
Ayşe Kadioğlu, “An Oxymoron: The Origins of Civic-Republican Liberalism in Turkey,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 16 (2007), pp. 171–190.
Ağaoğlu was also one of the masterminds behind the Kemalists’ efforts to rewrite Anatolian history in order to fit the needs of the new age: see Can Erimtan, “Hittites, Ottomans and Turks: Ağaoğlu Ahmet Bey and the Kemalist Construction of Turkish Nationhood in Anatolia,” Anatolian Studies 58 (2008), pp. 141–171.
On the critical stand of the so-called National Left as regards the Kurds, see Martin Riexinger, “‘Turkey Completely Independent!’ Contemporary Turkish Left Wing Nationalism (Ulusal Sol/Ulusalcilik): Its Predecessors, Objectives and Enemies,” Oriente Moderno 90 (2010), pp. 345–387.
On structural parallels between Turkish “leftism” and other ideologies, see also Lutz Berger, “Türkische Nation erzittere und werde wieder ‘Du selbst!’ Der Außenseiter und Historiker Osman Turan und ein Topos des türkischen Nationalismus,” in Differenz und Dynamik im Islam: Festschrift für Heinz Halm zum 70.Geburtstag/Difference and Dynamics in Islam: Festschrift for Heinz Halm on his 70th Birthday, ed. Verena Klemm et al. (Würzburg: Ergon, 2012), pp. 285–296.
On the national left see Riexinger, “‘Turkey Completely Independent!’.” This does not mean that indirectly threatening an internal enemy with military intervention had completely gone out of fashion (cf. above note 25). This change has to do with the international scene where, outside the Islamic world, the age of Western support for military dictatorships had finally come to an end after 1989. According to Roy Karadag the most important factor in this respect is not so much international trends as the way the military played their cards during the last 20 years: see Roy Karadag, “Islam und Politik in der neuen Türkei,” Zeitschrift für Politik 59/3 (2012), pp. 332–352.
The number of studies published on the Nurcus has deservedly increased in the last years; suffice it to mention here the groundbreaking study by Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 151–206. Cf. Also his Towards an Islamic Enlightenment: The Gülen Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The most comprehensive study on Nurcu thinking to date is Martin Riexinger, “Die verinnerlichte Schöpfungsordnung: Weltbild und normative Konzepte in den Werken Said Nursis (gest. 1960) und der Nur Cemaati” (habilitation thesis, Göttingen 2009, unfortunately not published yet).
The best overview is Thierry Zarcone, La Turquie moderne (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), passim.
The Islam both of the Millî Görüş movement and of the official Directorate of Religious Affairs (as regards the latter at least until very recently) is better described not as modernist but rather as traditionalist; on this, see Lutz Berger, “Religionsbehörde und Millî Görüş,” in Hadithstudien: Die Überlieferungen des Propheten im Gespräch: Festschrift für Tilman Nagel, ed. Rüdiger Lohlker (Hamburg: Kovač, 2009), pp. 41–76.
I would not agree with Hakan Yavuz’s analysis in his Islamic Identity on this point (pp. 133–150). There are several points in his depiction of the traditional Nakşibendi way that paint a liberal picture which, as far as I can see, does not exist in the Nakşibendi tradition of a strict shari’a-minded Sufism. Thus, he defines for example, an ijaza as a licence for “independent reasoning” (p. 136) rather than as a certificate that declares a person competent to perpetuate a certain tradition unchanged, as it is traditionally understood. It does not seem to me that within the Nakşibendi tradition, as Yavuz writes, “the understanding of Islam is conditional on a person’s own spiritual quest. For this reason, Turkish Islamic movements generally have tended to be liberal, open, and ready to reconcile differences within a democratic context” (p. 149). The understanding of Islam in the Nakşibendi tradition is determined not by personal choice, but by the understanding of a person’s spiritual master, whose personal authority is even greater than in other Sufi orders; on the role of the master in the Nakşibendiye see Fritz Meier, Zwei Abhandlungen über die Naqšbandiyya (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994). The fact that Turkish Islamists are more ready to work within a democratic process than comparative movements in other countries (although some, such as the Nakşibendi poet Necip Fazil Kisakürek, would be rather critical of this) in my view is not so much a product of the Sufi origins of Turkish Islamism as of the sheer necessity to do so within at least basic democratic structures. Until very recently this was impossible in most Arab countries. Where there was such a possibility, as in Kuwait or Jordan, mainstream non-Sufi Arab Islamists were just as happy to be part of the system as their Turkish brethren. On the other hand, the Turkish Islamists’ participation in the game of parliamentary politics did not prevent them from rejecting democracy (see note 33). In my view, it is not only or specifically the Nakşibendis who “have managed to reconceptualize the processes of modernity by reimagining Islam” (Yavuz, Islamic Identity, p. 150). This is done by all religious groups (i.e., those apart from the lunatic fringe, who opt out of reality) if they want to be meaningful for people living in the modern world. But what is more to our context, the way the Nakşibendis in Turkey have done, can’t generally be seen as conducive to a liberal understanding of processes in the modern world, but rather as an authoritarian reaction to the loss of moral orientation that is the consequence of liberal outlooks or practices. This holds true also for Mehmed Zahid Kotku and the Millî Görüş movement he had inspired. Things really changed only after the breakup of that movement after the 1997 coup d’état, which showed that Erbakan’s ways of conducting politics would come to nothing. The period after 1997 then is intellectually more influenced by Fethullah Gülen than by people of a strictly Nakşibendi background. Even Özal in the 1980s can’t be taken as an example of a liberal strand within the Nakşibendi tradition, as Özal’s liberalism was not something he had learned in Mehmed Zahid Kotku’s lodge but in the United States. It was not his liberalism as such, but his success in promoting liberalism that was connected with his closeness to the order. Because of his liminal position between the world of Nakşibendi shari’a-mindedness and Westernized (in his case, Americanized) liberalism, he was able to sell this liberalism to a conservative constituency, just as his whiskey-drinking and cigar-smoking wife Semra sold his Islamic side to the liberals.
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© 2015 Meir Hatina and Christoph Schumann
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Berger, L. (2015). Making Sense of Turkish Liberalism. In: Hatina, M., Schumann, C. (eds) Arab Liberal Thought after 1967. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137551412_5
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