Int. J. Middle East Stud. 34 (2002), 113–127.

Printed in the United States of America

Sam Kaplan

D I N - U D E V L E T A L L OV E R A G A I N ?
T H E P O L I T I C S O F M I L I TA RY S E C U L A R I S M
A N D R E L I G I O U S M I L I TA R I S M I N T U R K E Y
F O L L OW I N G T H E 1 9 8 0 C O U P

Every Turk is born a soldier.1

Secularism is neither atheism nor animosity for religion. On the contrary it is respectful
of religious feelings. But no pressure must be made in the name of any religion over
someone’s individual conscience. The structure of Islam is secular.2
It is interesting that the front covers of all religion textbooks are adorned with a portrait
of a thirty-five year old Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, wearing a bow tie and a tuxedo, whom
the artists have depicted in the manner of a Sheikh ül-Islam. . . . Although you expect
to see the bismillah [article of faith] on the first page of the religion textbook, you
encounter a saying of Atatürk, followed by his “Speech to the Youth” and the words of
the National Anthem.3

Current discussions on the political developments in Turkey frequently frame the

struggles between the military and religious parties as a war between secularism and
Islam and draw out incommensurable differences between the two sides. Indeed, the
military establishment, which casts itself as the guardian of the secular republic, suc-
ceeded in 1997 in having the Supreme Court ban the Welfare Party, the first openly
religious party ever to form a government in the Turkish Republic. The generals
justified this seemingly undemocratic move by claiming that that this party was trying
to reinstate the sacred shari
a law.
Although political rhetoric in Turkey often assumes a sharp difference between a
secular and a religious vision of the nation, the military ideals that children learn at
school suggest a more ambiguous relationship between these two adversarial world-
views. In fact, the curriculum emphasizes that the Turkish soldier is a pious defender
of the nation. Clearly, Islamic rhetoric is used to valorize the military heritage in the
national education system, and the question is how are we to account for this when
the military establishment does its utmost to limit holders of religious worldviews
from participating actively in national politics?
At the core of the ambiguous relationship that the military maintains with the reli-
gious public have been ongoing struggles over the constitutive role of secularism in

Sam Kaplan is Assistant Professor, Department of Middle East Studies, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-sheva
84105, Israel; e-mail: skaplan@bgumail.bgu.ac.il.

 2002 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/02 $9.50

114 Sam Kaplan

Turkish society and the Turkish polity. In Turkey, where there is a strong state tradi-
tion, all interest groups, including the military, try to impose on the entire citizenry
their specific understandings of modernity, social identities, and political authority.
The controversy over secularism is most evident in the educational system. Because
schools engage a captive audience, carry the weight of official approval, and impose
specific interpretations on key social issues, they are widely perceived as defining
national experience for schoolchildren. It is this systematic intervention into children’s
subjectivities that has spurred the military to participate actively in shaping the curric-
ulum at the same time that it attempts to forge a consensual understanding of state
and society.4 After all, as the sociologist Charles Tilly has pointed out, a major activity
of a state is war-making, but conscription alone does not create soldiers who are
willing to sacrifice themselves for the state.5
By examining in detail the curriculum in the secular primary school, I will show
how neither religious nor martial ideals can be understood as centuries-old traditions
and customs; rather, they are constantly reworked within the social, political, and
cultural transformations of the country. Since the 1970s and even more so after the
1980 coup, the military leaders have most often associated themselves with the right-
of-center political spectrum—most notably, the religious sponsors of the “Turkish–
Islamic Synthesis” (Türk İslam Sentezi) ideology. As a result of this alliance, the
country’s military leadership overtly approved of greater religious instruction in the
secular-track school system. Moreover, together with the right-of-center political par-
ties, these military leaders disseminated, through reworked textbooks and pedagogical
directives, earlier myths and images to emphasize a particularly visceral collective
representation—“the Turkish soldier, defender of the Muslim faith.” In effect, through
the new curriculum they appear to have reinstituted the pre-Republican duality of
state and faith—the din-u devlet—as a viable mechanism for political consensus.
Yet, other factors show that this is not the case. The consensus over the religious
orientation of the country’s schools does not extend to the shaping of the national
elite. The highly prestigious military academies, whose graduates have become leaders
in the country’s military, financial, and political domains, refuse to admit graduates
of religious-track schools. The admissions criteria of these academies have provoked
acrimonious debates about secularism and the role of the military in fashioning the
country’s political culture and educational policies. My argument here is based both
on written “ministerial” sources (textbooks, programs, circulars) and on data I col-
lected during the course of two years of ethnographic research in the school system
of a small town in southern Turkey I will call Yayla, where I conducted fieldwork
between 1989 and 1991. My study on the politics of national education shows that
religious and martial virtues are historically constituted through the school system
and its curriculum. It also highlights the uneasy, complex relationship between the
religious public and the military.

A M A S T E R N A R R AT I V E : A N AT I O N O F S O L D I E R S

Studies about the pedagogical roles of the Turkish armed forces have confined their
scope to how the military teaches literacy and “modern” practices to conscripted sol-
diers.6 Not enough attention, however, has been given to the various ways in which
 Din-u Devlet All Over Again? 115

the state school system fosters identification with the military institution and values.
As in many other countries, the curriculum in Turkey places emphasis on the fraternal
person of the citizen-soldier, who metonymically embodies the united, sovereign na-
tional community. Not surprisingly, educational materials used in primary schools
emphasize heroic episodes of Turkish military history, self-sacrifice for the nation,
and pride in war heroes.7
Central to these martial virtues has been devotion to the national flag, whose white
crescent and five-pointed star are placed on a red background. Since 1939, two years
after the Turkish Parliament legislated the dimensions and spiritual importance of the
flag, reading primers for elementary schools have been mandated to include passages
that “inculcate feelings of respect and ties to the national flag.”8 The level of instinct
on which these feelings are supposed to operate is made evident in the third-grade
reader that was in use during the 1988–89 school year.9 In the reading passage, “For
the Flag,” children are taught that the future of the nation is contingent on retrieval
of the regiment’s flag from enemy hands. The narrated event occurred during the
Turkish War of Liberation, but the moral is for all times: the flag is more valuable
than the present-day children’s lives.
Sergeant Hasan: I am not worried that the enemy is closing in on us and will kill us. I regret
that the regiment’s flag will pass into the hands of the enemy. . . . [Corporal Turgut dies retriev-
ing the flag.] The flag wrapped tightly around him, the corporal hero lay dead. The moonlight
hitting his clean forehead was announcing news of a happy tomorrow.10

The drawing that accompanies the text makes the image visually clear: a soldier
lies dead with the flag covering his chest. Both text and artwork render the flag a
metonym of the nation that is intended to induce children’s patriotic sentiments and
loyalty to the state. The curriculum further situates the flag’s colors in a symbolic
field of associations. Its crimson color is meant to evoke the blood shed by the school-
children’s warrior ancestors. The author of a currently used second-grade natural sci-
ences primer indeed stresses this dimension of the flag: “Our beautiful fatherland is
watered everywhere with the blood of our martyrs. For this reason our flag is holy.
. . . It is our national honor.”11 As evident in the passage, children are expected to
envisage the banner as the life-giving arteries of the national body.
The schoolchildren, then, are expected to feel indebted to the blood their ancestors
sacrificed on the battlefield. The textual accounts in their primers serve to bind the
present schoolchildren to earlier generations of Turkish warriors, from the medieval
epic heroes in the Book of Dede Korkut to the more recent soldiers at Çanakkale
(Gallipoli) and the War of Liberation in the 20th century. School primers belie a naive
realism in which “textual” war veterans are bestowed with an authoritative voice to
fashion the children’s collective memory. These veterans, most often portrayed as
grandfatherly figures, become spokesmen in whom children must place their faith. In
class, the children read out loud the narratives about Turkey’s military past and, in
particular, how war veterans offered their lives for the future of the Turkish nation.
Second-graders, for example, are (silent) interlocutors to the fictional amputee’s patri-
otism in the story “My Grandfather’s Arm.” The grandfather explains to his grandson
how he lost his arm during the War of Liberation: “We died, we sacrificed our arms,
we got wounded but we did not give up the hill to the enemy. We entered the war
116 Sam Kaplan

dedicating ourselves for this fatherland.”12 By mimicking the family gathering where
elders transmit their memories to the younger generations, these generic grandfathers
textualize and thus impart an authoritative voice to otherwise fictional testimonies of
the national past. Raised on these wartime narratives, every schoolchild is enjoined
to model himself after the earlier exploits of his textbook elders.
The schoolchildren’s kinship with the personal “life” of the self-sacrificing Turkish
soldier, and their fictive genealogical connection with the textbook war veteran, pro-
vides a way for children to imagine and identify with a primordial military ethos
common to all Turks. Here the association sought is that the Turkish people’s willing-
ness to sacrifice themselves can be attributed to the military origins of the Turkish
nation. Minister of Education Avni Akyol reaffirmed this position in his “Directive
on Social Sciences” in the fourth and fifth grades for the 1990–91 school year, which
circulated widely in the national education system. According to the directive, elemen-
tary-school students must learn in their social-science lessons that “they are children
of a great nation with a glorious past and will increase their confidence in the nation’s
future and acquire enough knowledge to risk their lives in order to realize the ideals
of the Turkish nation. . . . They will willingly . . . see themselves as self-sacrificing
Turkish youth.”13 That is, students should draw from their lessons that the Turks are
born to serve in the military and die for their nation.
This point is reiterated throughout their school years. Third-graders, for example,
read that “We Turks give importance to military service. We are even known by the
world nations as a nation of soldiers (asker bir millet). Military service is a holy duty
to the country, ensuring protection of fatherland and nation. Every Turkish youth
lovingly does this duty. The Glorious Turkish Army results from heroic soldiers.
When we grow up we will become soldiers and take the duty of protecting our coun-
try.”14 This passage, like many others children encounter in their school years, is meant
to socialize them for military service and allegiance to the state.
Integral to the cultivated ideal of the soldier nation is the country’s “undefeated”
battle record. Although textbooks eulogize the bravery and victory of the Turkish
forces at Çanakkale, a battle in which Mustafa Kemal Atatürk played a major com-
manding role, they never explicitly admit to the ultimate defeat of the Ottoman armies
in World War I. Rather, second-graders will have read that “our armies won victories
on many fronts. At the end of the [world] war Germany was defeated and surrendered.
Upon Germany’s surrender, we wanted peace too.”15 Victories validate the eternal
strength of the Turks’ warrior state, the present Turkish nation. As one schoolteacher
proudly told me, “[w]e are ‘the Turks who make the whole world tremble’; we’re the
best in bed and at war.” To suggest otherwise is to undermine the emotional bond
between virility and personhood, between heroic performance and national identity.
It would, however, be amiss to assume that this military discourse is directed only
at the boys, who are the future recruits of the Turkish armed forces. While men are
expected to protect the nation, women are considered responsible for upholding na-
tional honor. A major theme in school readers centers on the girl whose chastity is
threatened in wartime. Her duty is to avoid sexual contact with the enemy, even under
duress. Third-graders, for example, are taught that death is preferable to loss of virgin-
ity. In the story “Huriye’s Spring,” pupils read that French soldiers invaded a small
town in Anatolia and were intent on kidnapping the beautiful young protagonist. At
 Din-u Devlet All Over Again? 117

the moment of abduction, rain began to fall, and the heroine beseeched Allah to “make
me into water; let me disappear with the rain.”16 Allah complied. Huriye died a virgin
and thus avoided shaming the Turkish nation.
No less important a role for national survival is motherhood. At school, boys and
girls learn to link men’s military deeds to women’s nurture. This lesson was impressed
on fourth-graders in one of their readings, “Anatolia” (Anadolu). The author of the
passage traces the etymology of the word “Anatolia” to a legend about a virtuous old
woman who serves buttermilk to mobilized Ottoman soldiers. Every time she tells the
soldiers “fill up my brave men” (doldurun yiğitlerim), they answer “Mother, it is full”
(Ana, dolu).17 What is relevant here is not the legendary etymology of the peninsula,
but the links between milk and womanhood, on the one hand, and nationhood, on the
other. In fact, in a class I attended, some seventh-graders added that mother’s milk
gives strength to Turkish soldiers.18
The military themes taught at school thus often complement local perceptions of
nature and nurture. Children at Yayla readily identify with military service and the
Turkish people’s martial values. The following example comes from a middle-school
child’s essay titled, “Our People,” and it allows one to gauge the children’s enthusiasm
for his fellow countrymen’s heroism.
Our people, the people of Turkey, are great. The Turkish people’s holy symbol is our flag. The
Turkish people’s anthem is the Independence Anthem. . . . The Turkish people are brave. They
are also courageous. They do not even flinch at the greatest dangers. No matter how powerful
the enemies are they never shirk from fighting. What comes to our mind at the mention of the
“Turkish people” is courageous people.

Such a positive response to military service resonates with those stories about soldiers
and women who in the distant and recent past fought for flag and country. Understood
is that these textbook heroes and heroines who defended national honor fell for the
future welfare of schoolchildren. In turn, the living generation must be willing to
fulfill their patriotic duty, and, need be, sacrifice their lives, too. Not surprisingly,
boys and girls overwhelmingly conceive military service as a “debt to the nation”
(vatan borcu). In any case, teachers frequently remind schoolchildren that “duty to the
fatherland is a duty of honor; martyrs do not die; the homeland will not be divided.”19

I N F L E C T E D N A R R AT I V E : T H E T U R K I S H S O L D I E R ,
D E F E N D E R O F T H E FA I T H

The master narrative, “a nation of soldiers,” has been a consistent feature of the
curriculum since the republic. What is radically new since the 1980 coup is how the
curriculum has integrated into this narrative a pre-republican concept of statecraft,
the duality of state and religion (din-u devlet). This change in pedagogy has not been
haphazard. Rather, it reflects the shift in the official cultural politics of the country
since World War II and, even more so, following the coup of 1980, when the military
junta allied itself with nationalist advocates of an Islamic social model, the Turkish–
Islamic Synthesis.
Thirty years ago, no observer of Turkish politics would have predicted such an
about-face in the national educational system. During the single-party regimes of Ata-
118 Sam Kaplan

türk and Ismet Inönü (1924–46), policy-makers either excised any pre-republican Is-
lamic references or rendered them attributes of a modern nation-state in order to
fashion a social memory that was completely divorced from the former Ottoman
state.20 In any case, the study of Islam was progressively eliminated from the curricu-
lum. By 1938, neither urban nor rural schools offered religious instruction.21 The intro-
duction of multi-party elections in 1946 altered this secular policy, however. The
newly formed Democrat Party (DP), a loose coalition of the national bourgeoisie and
rural notables, actively appealed to the electorate’s religious sentiments. As a result,
the government party, the Republican People’s Party, introduced religious classes for
the fourth and fifth grades in 1949. The following year, the DP attained power and
began to integrate Islamic religious symbols into the political culture of the country,
in addition to opening Quran courses and the religious-track İmam-Hatip junior and
senior high schools.22
The new official attitude toward religion also affected the military. This was most
evident when Turkey participated in the Korean conflict on the side of the Western
allies. This was the first time that the Turkish army fought outside the country’s
borders. The government publicly represented the bipolar Cold War as one between
Muslim gazi warriors and atheist infidels, the communist forces. As Lord Kinross,
who resided in Turkey at the time, stated, “[T]he Turkish troops in Korea fought in
the name of Islam, attended religious services before going into battle, and were led
(at least in the war posters) by officers carrying the Koran.”23
Before this religious shift gained momentum, the military overthrew the govern-
ment in 1960. As Binnaz Toprak has observed, the junta accused the DP politicians
of undermining the secular legacy of Atatürk.24 Before returning power to civilians,
they had enacted a radically liberal constitution that promoted a democratic social-
welfare state. However, the new civil freedoms went in tandem with radicalization of
the youth and labor force—and, in particular, Marxist organizations and parties that
openly opposed their country’s membership in the Western military alliances NATO
and CENTO.25 Military leaders began to reverse their attitude toward the use of reli-
gion in the official political culture; they soon found a religious turn to hold strategic
value for their own interests. In the subsequent two decades, as civil violence erupted
all over the country, the military mobilized “tradition”—and, specifically, the Islamic
faith—to foster unity among citizens.
Coincidental to this shift in the military’s attitude toward religion was the rise and
influence of religious views in national politics. In this new political climate, two
small parties emerged: Colonel Alpaslan Türkeş’s Nationalist Action Party, which
advocated the political union of all Turkic peoples within and outside Turkey, and
Necmettin Erbakan’s National Salvation Party, which championed Islamic values for
the moral and material rejuvenation of Turkey. Both parties entered into coalitions
with the more mainstream parties. They held the swing votes in the deadlock politics
between the left-of-center Republican People’s Party and the right-of-center Justice
Party. In 1977, Erbakan and Türkeş joined the Milliyetçi Cephe (Nationalist Front), a
coalition led by the Justice Party. Together, the two marginal parties successfully
staffed the Ministry of Education with their supporters, all the while promoting a
more positive assessment of the Ottoman Islamic heritage in the curriculum.
No less important was the Turkish–Islamist Synthesis, a cultural program in which
 Din-u Devlet All Over Again? 119

religious intellectuals advocated greater integration of Islamic values into the nation’s
political culture. These nationalists worked out a cultural and social program against
those who supported an Islamic state while dissociating themselves from Western
secular humanism and individualism, which, they argued, were embedded in a lack of
moral values that disrupted state order and national unity. To counter these Westerniz-
ing tendencies, they would plant the universal Islamic community in the geopolitical
borders of the Turkish nation-state. In this schema, Islam gave the nation a powerful
element of historical legitimacy and continuity.26
In this emerging political culture, the 1980 coup provided an opportune moment to
reinvent a more religious Turkish polity. On 12 September 1980, the commander-in-
chief of the Turkish Armed Forces, Kenan Evren, and his colleagues imposed martial
law on the whole country. To justify the coup, the junta charged that the civilian
politicians were unable to govern the country and deal with the increasing breakdown
of law and order.27 The army had intervened twice before, in 1960 and 1971, but this
time the generals considerably tightened the institutional links between the armed
forces and the national education system. Thus, before returning power to civilian
politicians three years later, the military instituted a series of educational reforms that
sought to prevent at all costs the consolidation of identities that threatened to fragment
the nation into a politics of differences.
Since 1980, there has been no place for leftist groups in the imagined state of the
generals. In fact, the military held “communists” responsible for the political violence
that plagued the country throughout the 1970s. A year and a half after the coup, the
Ministry of Education’s defense secretary suggested that communists not only fostered
class conflict but, even worse, also accentuated differences of identity among the
people. As he stated, communists were “agent provocateurs” who fomented conflicts
among the different Muslim sects and between the “so-called Kurdish citizens” and
the rest of the population.28
My aim here is not to question the historical truth of these assertions. Rather, I
intend to draw attention to how the same military adviser then went on to advocate
that the best way to combat leftists was educating the youth in a nationalism predi-
cated on Atatürkism (Atatürkçülük), which he defined with reference to the principles
of the soldier-statesman Atatürk and to a nationalist interpretation of Islam. To achieve
the desired national unity, the adviser endorsed faith as the “weapon” that could re-
unite the country. In a directive on “psychological warfare,” the military adviser to
the Ministry of Education ended his list of effective “weapons” against outside provo-
cation with the tenets of Islam: “Believe in the existence of Allah. Avoid the things
forbidden in our religion and conform to its dictates.”29 And, as if to buttress his
argument, the same adviser quoted the few instances in which Atatürk had publicly
tempered his anti-religious policies:
Atatürk, speaking in 1930 on Islam, said that religion is a necessary institution. A nation with-
out religion has no chance to survive. Only that religion [Islam] is a personal relation between
Allah and the believer. The Turkish nation must be with all simplicity a religious nation. How-
ever much we place faith in the truth, so must we believe in our religion.30

In this way, the founding statesman’s words came to sanction the military leadership’s
novel syncretism of religion and nationalism.
120 Sam Kaplan

The religious orientation the military adopted for education manifested itself in the
months following the coup. The National Security Council approved the opening of
92 new (religious-track) İmam-Hatip high schools, adding to the existing 249; at the
same time, 35 more İmam-Hatip middle schools were planned. Article 24 of the
1982 military-endorsed constitution provided an even more radical concession to the
religious public: “Education and instruction in religion and ethics shall be conducted
under State supervision and control. Instruction in religious culture and moral educa-
tion shall be compulsory in the curricula of primary and secondary schools.” The
article obligates all schoolchildren, from fourth grade until graduation from high
school, to take “Religious Culture and Morals” (Din Kültürü ve Ahlâk Bilgisi). The
new course combined two previously separated subjects: the obligatory civics and
the optional religion lessons.31 Until then, religious lessons were offered only from
the fourth to seventh grades. The military’s goal was to prevent the growing polariza-
tion between youth educated in secular and religious schools by retaining children
from “traditional” backgrounds in the secular-track school system. Furthermore, oblig-
ing citizens to accept the new curriculum was intended to foster greater social cohe-
sion. As stated in a confidential report circulated among the members of the junta,
“[T]he optional [religious] lessons negatively affected the relations among the stu-
dents. . . . Fashioning a national culture was not achieved with the [previously op-
tional] religion lessons.”32
Not surprisingly, military traditions and service in the armed forces are similarly
portrayed as compatible, if not congruent, with Islam. This fit with the historical
and social views of the Turkish–Islamic Synthesis, which both the military junta and
subsequent right-of-center Motherland governments openly endorsed. Central to this
ideology is the notion that prior to the Tanzimat (the introduction of Western institu-
tions in the first half of the 19th century), the religious scholars and the Ottoman
janissaries, the “ancestors” of the modern Turkish army, had supported each other.33
Indeed, the post-1980 curriculum reflects this link between the Turkish people’s mar-
tial spirit and their Islamic heritage. This was even more apparent with the educational
reforms instituted by the ruling Motherland Party. In 1986, Minister of Education
Vehbi Dinçerler had all textbooks completely revised to conform with the tenets of
the Turkish–Islamic Synthesis. The new texts extol the alliance between the military
and religious as native to the Turks’ cultural essence. It is to this essential alliance
that the author of the eighth-grade religion textbook wants to draw the attention of
young readers:
The Turks are from birth a nation of soldiers. Islam also commands one to fight for the father-
land all the time. . . . Among the [pre-Islamic] settled Turks there were those adepts of the
Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Manichean, Jewish, and Christian religions. Yet it is seen that these
religions did not conform to the Turks’ spirit of warfare.34

Both the military ethos and the Muslim faith become timeless attributes of the Turkish
people.
Current textbooks graphically and textually immerse this ideal of the Muslim war-
rior into the moral universe of the modern Turkish child. The primers constantly
appeal to narratives about the military exploits of the Anatolian Seljuks and Ottoman
Turks. In this endeavor, textbook writers draw on the tradition of the gazi and şehit—
 Din-u Devlet All Over Again? 121

that is, the warrior fighting and the martyr dying, both on behalf of Islam. The mar-
tyr’s immediate reward is entry to Cennet, the Muslims’ Paradise. Fourth-graders, for
example, vicariously relive the Seljuk Turks’ defeat of the Byzantine army at the battle
of Manzikert/Malazgirt in 1071.35 In the passage “Forever Anatolia,” the children in
the classroom are expected to take on the role of the Turkish warriors listening to
their commanding sultan on the eve of battle:
My lions! No matter how few we are and how many the enemy are we will attack. Do not
forget that right now all the Muslims are praying for us. Either we are gazi heroes or martyrs.
If there is someone who wants to separate from us let him leave immediately. I am hence
wearing the burial shroud of a martyr. I am no longer a sultan, just one of you. I pray to God
that the victory is ours.36
In reinstating the pre-republican ideal of holy warfare (the gaza) in the curriculum,
state educators are portraying commitment to the military heritage as a religious duty
that extends into the present era.
In this narrative mode, the devout Turkish mother is co-opted to the religious for-
mulation of military service. Third-graders begin their reader with the text “Hennaed
Mehmet.”37 As described in the text, a village mother smears henna on her son’s
hands before his induction into military service. Henna is often applied on auspicious
occasions—most notably, on the eve of a wedding, when the hands of groom and
bride are smeared with it. Many townspeople in Yayla do likewise and believe that
henna symbolizes the sacred soil of Paradise. The henna on the recruit’s hands visually
marks him as one willing to sacrifice himself for the Muslim faith. He shares the lot
of the religious gazi warriors and martyrs. The presumably urban/urbane officer in
the third-grade text is ignorant of the custom, and the twenty-year-old recruit cannot
explain his painted hands. The commander asks the son’s mother to explain. She
dutifully writes to the officer:
We stain the sheep for sacrifice with henna so that they be a sacrifice to Allah. Also my son,
we put henna on the young men who go to the army. We smear henna on them so that they
may be a sacrifice to the fatherland. We sacrificed your grandfather in the Balkan Wars [in
1913] and your uncle at Çanakkale. If it need be, my child, you will be a sacrifice for this
fatherland.38
The text relates that the reply so moved the officer that his eyes welled with tears.
Here, the traditional Turkish mother is the pedagogue of her son’s commander: she
teaches him the religious foundations of military service, the relationship between
Islam and self-sacrifice for the nation.
The moral of such textbook passages for the pupils is obvious: they must be pre-
pared to sacrifice themselves for their Muslim nation and state. This point is continu-
ously brought up in civics education. Thus, in their civics lessons, eighth-graders are
taught not only that national identity subsumes identification with Islam but also that
the state is a religiously sanctioned institution: “the state from the religious point of
view is an institution that Allah created for mankind’s benefit.”39 The secular polity
becomes as inviolable as the sacred realm. It goes without saying that faith in the
state includes total submission and obedience to the authorities, which in the context
of post-1980 Turkey means the representatives of the armed forces and the civilian
governments they subsequently approved. In the curriculum, state and statesmen met-
122 Sam Kaplan

onymically represent each other, and both are religiously sanctioned. As is written in
the eighth-grade reader on “Religious Culture and National Mores,” all children who
consider themselves to be Muslims are expected to accept as truth that “we, the Turk-
ish nation, love our state and our national existence in the person of the statesman.
People who sacrifice their own existence for that of the nation and state are worthy
to be loved and respected. They shoulder an important responsibility toward God in
their duties.”40 The text ends with a personal plea to the male students: “my son, let
him grow up and become a soldier. If he dies he will be a martyr for the faith; if he
lives, a holy warrior.” Here, the textbook’s author explicitly makes the connection
between patriotism and the future recruits’ religious identity.
The particular religious interpretation of nationalism attempts to strengthen the
sense of Turkish identity at the expense of one based on the universal Muslim commu-
nity, the ümmet. The ümmet, however, has not been totally eliminated; it has been
reinscribed within the Turkish national consciousness, providing for it a powerful
element of historical legitimacy. Thus, schoolchildren are expected to take pride in
how their ancestors militarily spread Islam all over the Middle East. In a worldview
pitting nation against nation, Turkey emerges as the Muslim world leader. This is the
tenor of “Directives on Basic Instruction of Atatürk’s Reforms and Principles for
Primary and Secondary Schools,” which directs teachers and textbooks to stress “how
the Turks have rendered military services throughout the history of Islam [and] how
the Turkish War of Liberation was a victory for Islam.”41 The eighth-grade history
book makes this point explicit: “[s]ince the day the Turkish nation accepted Islam it
has sacrificed itself for this religion. It had taken upon itself to promote and defend
Islam; it had established this religion in all parts of the old world and gave millions
of martyrs to this religion.”42
If the Turkish Islamists have inserted their religious agenda into a curriculum that
places heavy emphasis on the concepts of military pride and self-sacrifice to the na-
tion, it is equally evident that the leaders of the armed forces have been a willing
party in this new orientation in national education. Islam once more has become a
foundation of the state and the state army, its defender. Such a reconfiguration of the
tropes of religious-inspired military and martial religion has become central in the
cultural politics of the current school system in Turkey.

T H E L A S T S E C U L A R R E F U G E : T H E M I L I TA R Y A C A D E M I E S

Despite this symbiosis, the relationship that the military has established with religious
nationalists remains ambiguous. Consensus over cultural politics in the secular-track
school system has not meant sharing the political space on an equal footing. The
military is wary of the religious public infringing on its turf. In 1990, the struggle
between the two camps revolved around admission to the highly prestigious, autono-
mous military academies. These elite institutions have yet to welcome religious stu-
dents or their beliefs. Since 1983, graduates of the religious-track İmam-Hatip high
schools have been eligible to enroll in all higher-education institutions, except military
academies, which fall under the jurisdiction of the armed forces. Only graduates of
the secular-track teachers’ colleges, high schools, and magnet Anatolian high schools
have been permitted to apply. The academies provide some of the finest academic
 Din-u Devlet All Over Again? 123

training available in the country and, most important, admission is free for capable
children from very modest households. One cadet on leave in Yayla showed off to
me his annual yearbook. It was an exact replica of a glossy-paged, American prepara-
tory yearbook, including photos of modern computer and language laboratories. He
boasted of his school’s television and film programs. Its Olympic sports facilities are
unmatched in the nation’s universities. Moreover, a close-knit social network exists
among graduates of the different military academies, many of whom have taken im-
portant posts in the military and elsewhere. Among the graduates are the military
commanders who staged the 1980 coup.
Staunch defenders of what they consider to be Atatürk’s secular policies, the mili-
tary regents do not welcome religious students in their academic institutions. Religious
parliamentarians have been trying to finesse the entrance requirements via legal means
so that graduates of the religious-track İmam-Hatip high schools can enroll in these
prestigious and powerful academies. In the fifth five-year government plan (1985–89),
these parliamentarians established the magnet “Anatolian İmam-Hatip” high schools.
Its graduates can theoretically enroll in military academies, like their counterparts
from the secular-track Anatolian high schools.43 The military has successfully coun-
tered this move by periodically identifying and expelling students with religious
beliefs.
As a result, religious statesmen and intellectuals have taken the issue directly to the
public. One widely publicized example of such criticism appeared in the religious
newspaper Zaman.44 Ömer Okçu, better known as Hekimoğlu İsmail, a journalist and
the author of the religious best-seller Abdullah of Miniye, criticized the entrance re-
quirements of military academies and suggested that the military elite pursues a life
of loose morals. The journalist, who had served as a tank officer, implied that the
members of the armed forces were sinners. He wrote, “Take, take my son to the
Military Academy. Take just a few who don’t drink alcohol, don’t gamble; take just
a few who pray and fast” (see n. 44). Given the military’s attempts to disseminate a
more religious cultural agenda in national education, Hekimoğlu’s accusations were
not taken lightly. The author and his newspaper editor were fined for defamation.
Journalists are not alone in questioning the military academies’ entrance policies.
At the youth coffee house in Yayla, a local graduate of an İmam-Hatip high school,
who had applied to the academies, bitterly vented about the rejection of his candidacy.
As he put it, “Aren’t we, the graduates of the İmam-Hatip high schools, children of
this country? Didn’t God create us, too? If there’s a topic that warrants debate, it’s that
us graduates of İmam-Hatip high schools are not admitted into military academies. All
those leftists who cry out for more freedoms keep mum on this topic. They don’t
believe in equal opportunities in education.” To this embittered youth, the military
not only fails at redressing social wrongs; it also upholds the country’s inequalities.
Equally problematic for the religiously observant public is what they perceive to be
the military’s pro-Western, secular stance in the national culture. Ironically, the gener-
als’ self-professed “progressive” identity is depicted as senility. The same youth
showed me a cartoon that had appeared in the militant religious satirical journal
Cıngar and illustrated the religious sector’s perceptions of the military.45 The visual
puns play on multiple verbal references that validate subaltern readings of society. In
the cartoon, a tottering general bedecked with medals and a young soldier are strolling
124 Sam Kaplan

in an apple orchard as the former says, “Soldier, come with me. Let’s walk a bit in
the garden. . . . Look at those pear trees. Who knows what they would say if they had
tongues.” The soldier thinks, “Most likely, they would say we’re not pear trees; we’re
apple trees.” The cartoonist plays on a common Turkish expression, “A pear tree does
not bear apples” (armut ağacı elma vermez), which means that one cannot expect a
person to do what is not natural to him. Drawing on the cartoon, the youth suggested
that the military was out of touch with the public’s religious values and compared the
generals to bears, popularly understood as slow-witted creatures who cannot distin-
guish between right and wrong. Rather, as he put it, they constantly push secular
modernization at the expense of the country’s Islamic heritage. Clearly, the youth was
associating the military with leftists in his portrayal of both groups as those who
contradict national interest.

CONCLUSION

Thus, through the curriculum, military and civilian officials in Turkey set out to forge
powerful emotional bonds between the army and the civilian population, to persuade
the youth to defend and, if need be, die for the Turkish nation. Moreover, the military
consciously reformulated devotion to the armed forces according to new social contin-
gencies. Three years after the 1980 coup, the generals handed over state institutions
to civilian politicians; however, they made sure to remain major cultural brokers of
the national polity, including mass education. Intent on structuring their conception of
the ideal citizenry—an obedient “civilian” population that totally identifies with the
armed forces—the generals co-opted the citizens’ Islamic heritage to foster national
unity. By forging an alliance with the religious sponsors of the Turkish–Islamic Syn-
thesis, the military set about reinventing a more politically docile Turkish polity.46 In
turn, the civilian governments led by the Motherland Party pursued this policy further
and recycled, as it were, the formerly Ottoman dyad of din-u devlet, “state and reli-
gion,” in which each citizen-child learns to identify himself or herself as the defender
of the faith. Although the military—self-proclaimed champion of Atatürk’s secular
republicanism—continues to oppose overtly religious political parties, it has spon-
sored the reintegration of Islamic religious studies into the national educational
system.
What is less clear is the extent to which the religious nationalists and the military
will work out their differences in the public sphere. In 1910, Captain Townshend,
British Vice-Consul at Mersin, asserted that “‘Ben asker im’ [I am a soldier] is, next
to the statement that he has made his pilgrimage to Mecca, the proudest remark that
a Turk can make.”47 Today, still, many citizens of the secular Turkish Republic readily
identify themselves as Muslims and Turkey as a nation of warriors. These two identi-
ties are evident in an essay on “My People” I assigned while teaching local school-
children in Yayla in 1990. Orhan, then thirteen years old, wrote, “My people are a
very good people. They came from Central Asia and began to settle in Anatolia after
the victory at Malazgirt. My people’s religion is Islam. . . . My people are very much
devoted to the fatherland. At war, women, children and men fight together.”
The religious and martial values Orhan juxtaposed in his essay cannot be under-
stood as simply perpetuating centuries-old ideals. The relationship between “secular-
 Din-u Devlet All Over Again? 125

ist” and “religious” political agendas and their dissemination through the national
education system, which I have traced here, reveals a radically different context from
that summarized by Captain Townshend almost a century ago. In fact, the military
elites and the religious nationalists battle over the political culture of the country.
Each side is trying to persuade the public to ratify and participate in its proposed
national community. In this ongoing war of positions, the Turkish people’s Islamic
heritage has been presented as a source of unity in the school system. Nevertheless,
it remains most contested.

NOTES

Author’s note: I thank in particular the editor for encouraging me to rethink some early ideas and for
generous comments and assistance on the present version. Yeşim Arat, Nathan J. Brown, Tania Forte,
Alejandro Paz, Haggay Ram, Dror Ze’evi, and the anonymous reviewers commented helpfully on the
penultimate draft; I am grateful to them all. The research on which the essay is based was supported by
a Fulbright-Hays fellowship (1989–90). None of these persons or agencies would necessarily endorse the
views presented here.
1
“Every Turk is born a soldier” is a commonly used saying.
2
İsmet Parmaksızoğlu, Ortaokul Türkiye Cumhuriyeti İnkılâp Tarihi ve Atatürkçülük (Istanbul: Millı̂
Eğitim Basımevi, 1987), 168.
3
Abdurrahman Dilipak, Bu din benim dinim değil: “resmi din” öğretisine eleştirel bir yaklaşım (Istanbul:
İşaret-Ferşat Ortak Yayınları, 1990), 54–55.
4
Elsewhere, I show that other social groupings that identify with secularism—most notably, liberal indus-
trialists and state socialists—advance their own pedagogical ideals in the school system, as do those who
espouse a religious worldview: see Samuel W. Kaplan, Education and the Politics of National Culture in
a Turkish Community, circa 1990 (unpublished diss., University of Chicago, 1996).
5
Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed.
Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), 169–87. In Turkey, military service is obligatory for all men who turn twenty; they serve eighteen
months.
6
See Daniel Lerner and Richard D. Robinson, “Swords and Ploughshares: The Turkish Army as a Mod-
ernizing Force,” World Politics 13 (1960): 19–44; Paul Dumont, “Islam as a Factor of Change and Revival
in Modern Turkey,” in Turkic Culture: Continuity and Change, ed. Sabri M. Akural (Bloomington: Indiana
University Turkish Studies, 1987), 3–5; Mehmet Ali Birand, Shirts of Steel: An Anatomy of the Turkish
Armed Forces, trans. Saliha Paker and Ruth Christie (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991), 122–23; and Emma
Sinclair-Webb, “Our Bülent is Now a Commando: Military Service and Manhood in Turkey,” in Imagined
Masculinities: Male Identity in the Modern Middle East, ed. Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb
(London: Saqi Books, 2000), 65–92.
7
For example, in the fourth-grade reader İlkokul Türkçe Ders Kitabı 4 (Istanbul: Millı̂ Eğitim Bakanlığı
Yayınları, 1990), eight texts in a total of fifty-one refer to soldiers’ exploits and self-sacrificing deeds.
8
“Directive on Composition of Reading Primers for Elementary Pupils, School Years 1939–1940, 1940–
1941, 1941–1942,” Tebliğler Dergisi (Communications Journal; hereafter, TD) 1, no. 7 (February 1939):
19. See also “Directives for the School Year 1981–1982, 14 August 1981, #2224-81,” TD 44, no. 2093:
293. Since 1939, the biweekly TD has reported all of the decisions of the Ministry of Education. These
reports reveal the range and type of discourses existing at different socio-historical moments: ministers’
speeches, national education conferences, organization of different school programs, criteria for selection
of curricula, staff, and primers.
9
My point is to bring out the ways in which textbooks are composed to constitute their audience as an
ideal Turkish citizen and soldier. Obviously, reception of these narratives is a far more complex and con-
tested process.
10
İsmail Aydoğdu, ed., Türkçe İlkokul 3 (Ankara: Öğün Yayınları, 1986), 106–7.
11
Hayat Bilgisi 2 (Istanbul: Millı̂ Eğitim Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1992), 63.
12
İsmail Aydoğdu, ed., Türkçe İlkokul 2 (Ankara: Öğün Yayınları, 1986), 232.
126 Sam Kaplan
13
TD 53, 2315 (25 June 1990): 457–58.
14
Hayat Bilgisi İlkokul 3 (Istanbul: Millı̂ Eğitim Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1991), 63.
15
Hayat Bilgisi 2, 52.
16
İlkokul Türkçe Ders Kitabı 3 (Istanbul: Media Print, 1990), 44.
17
İlkokul Türkçe Ders Kitabı 4, 12.
18
Townspeople of Yayla associate male virility with abundance of blood and semen and, moreover, be-
lieve that a man’s semen originates in the mother’s breast milk, which is assumed to be derived from the
menstrual blood that is not shed during pregnancy. See Orhan Türkdoğan, “Doğu Anadolu’da tıbbı̂ folklor
açısından sağlık-hastalık sistemi üzerine bir araştırma,” Türk dünyası araştırmaları 52 (1988): 25.
19
Vatan borcu namus borcu, şehitler ölmez, vatan ölmez.
20
Henry Elisha Allen, The Turkish Transformation: A Study in Social and Religious Development (unpub-
lished diss., University of Chicago, 1930); Kirby Page, “Nationalism Interprets Islam,” Christian Century,
vol. 47 (1930), 113–14.
21
Howard Reed, “Secularism and Islam in Turkish Politics,” Current History 32 (1957): 333–38; P.
Xavier Jacob, L’enseignement religieux dans la Turquie moderne (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1982),
116.
22
Idem, “Turkey’s new Imam-Hatip schools,” Welt des Islam 4 (1956): 152.
23
John Patrick Kinross, Within the Taurus (London: John Murray, 1954), 21.
24
Binnaz Toprak, “The State, Politics, and Religion in Turkey,” in State, Democracy and the Military:
Turkey in the 1980s, ed. Metin Heper and Ahmet Evin (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 123.
25
Feroz Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment in Democracy 1950–1975 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,
1977), 294–95.
26
Bozkurt Güvenç et al., Türk-İslam sentezi (Istanbul: Sarmal Yayınevi, 1991); for a good analysis of
the Turkish–Islamic Synthesis in English, see Paul J. Magnarella, “State Politics: Desecularization, State
Corporatism, and Elite Behavior in Turkey,” in Human Materialism: A Model of Sociocultural Systems and
a Strategy for Analysis (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 87–113.
27
Between 1971 and 1980, there had been no fewer than nine coalition governments, and civil violence—
first in the cities and university campuses, and later in villages and public schools—had claimed thousands
of lives. In the two years preceding the coup, more than 5,000 people were killed, an average of twenty
deaths daily. Not surprisingly, most citizens welcomed the military intervention.
28
“From Defense Secretariat of Ministry of Education: Public Institutions and National Unity,” TD 45,
2105 (1 February 1982): 69.
29
“Memo from Defense Secretariat Attached to the Ministry of Education: Psychological Warfare and
Psychological Defense,” TD 45, 2105 (1 February 1982): 77.
30
Ibid., 76.
31
Morals lessons (ahlâk dersi) were made mandatory in 1974, following a coalition agreement between
the left-of-center Republican People’s Party and the religious National Salvation Party.
32
Nokta, 26 March 1989.
33
Güvenç et al., Türk-Islam sentezi, 210.
34
Cihad Tunç, Ortaokullar için Din Kültürü ve Ahlâk Bilgisi 3 (Istanbul: Millı̂ Eğitim Basımevi, 1987),
115.
35
The Seljuks’ victory heralded the Turkish tribesmen’s settlement of Anatolia.
36
İlkokul Türkçe Ders Kitabı 4, 132.
37
The generic name for soldier in Turkey is Memetçik, which derives from Mehmet. “Mehmet” here
metonymically refers to all soldiers.
38
İlkokul Türkçe Ders Kitabı 3 (Istanbul: Millı̂ Eğitim Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1990), 15; the text uses the
term “kurban verdik,” which literally means “we gave as sacrifice [the male family members].” On the
Feast of Sacrifice, an animal (usually a sheep) is sacrificed in commemoration of the prophet Ibrahim, who
had been ready to sacrifice his son Ishmail for Allah.
39
Vatandaşlık Bilgisi orta 3 (Istanbul: Millı̂ Eğitim Basımevi, 1987), 72.
40
Tunç, Ortaokullar için Din Kültürü , 89.
41
“Directives on Basic Instruction of Atatürk’s Reforms and Principles for Primary and Secondary
Schools”; TD 45, no. 2104 (18 January 1982): 38.
42
Parmaksızoğlu, İnkılâp, 145. Emphasis on how Turks contributed to world and Islamic civilization has
been standard practice since the beginning of the Republic. What is novel here is bringing up Turkish
 Din-u Devlet All Over Again? 127

martyrdom for Islam without considering the historical context. See, for example, “On Composition of
History Textbooks for Elementary Schools, 1939–1940, 1940–1941, 1941–1942 School Years,” TD 1, no.
7 (13 February 1939): 19; “Social Sciences Program in Middle School,” TD 37, no. 1806 (16 September
1974): 360.
43
Güneş, 21 November 1990.
44
Zaman, 30 January 1990.
45
Cıngar, 28 December 1990. In 1990, the religious press came out with several militant satirical journals
to compete with the long-established Gırgır, which often attacks the growing influence of the religious
public in education and national politics. The name Cıngar, which means “a noisy dispute,” suggests its
polemical stance.
46
In effect, the Turkish armed forces’ interventions in the country’s cultural politics aptly corresponds to
Foucault’s episteme of the “military dream of society” whose “fundamental reference [is] to permanent
coercions, . . . to automatic docility”: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 169.
47
A. F. Townshend, A Military Consul in Turkey: The Experiences and Impressions of a British Represen-
tative in Asia Minor (London: Seeley, 1910), 161.