November, 1999] Page 93

Henry J. Rutz
Hamilton College
The Rise and Demise of Imam-hatip Schools: Discourses of Islamic
Belonging and Denial in the Construction of Turkish Civic Culture
Civic Culture as Public Communicative Space
The purpose of this paper is to explore issues of Turkish citizenship and belonging in the
context of religious education and the discourses in which it is embedded. An "Islamic
belonging" in Turkey was made problematic from the inception of the Republic in 1923 and
continues to be problematic as evidenced in the events recorded here. By focusing on the rise
and demise of Islamic schools, referred to as imam-hatip in recognition of their original goal
to train clerics (imam) and orators (hatip), abstract political discourses take on concrete
meanings, and apparently non-political events are placed in a larger political context. The
issues to be explored here are religious tolerance and freedom of speech in the terrain of civic
culture. For the purposes at hand, civic culture refers to communicative space between family
and state where issues such as collective tolerance toward difference and freedom to speak and
associate are negotiated between individuals and groups. Civic cultures are constrained by, but
not determined by, the normative discourses of the state. They open a space for negotiating
what it means to belong to the nation-state as a political community despite the laws and
regulations of the state apparatus. In Turkey, the state is well aware of the dangers inherent in
civic culture and has historically acted to place rather strong constraints on communicative
space referred to here as civic culture.
The argument is that communicative space for religious tolerance and free speech expanded
over the past decade or so, and that studying discursive practices that shape and define civic
culture can provide insight into events such as the rise and demise of religious schools or the
veiling and unveiling of women. In the case of religious schools, a dialogic of change was sub-
verted by the anti-clerical project of the "secular" military and political establishment. One of
the arenas for national ideological conflict was religious education, one among a number of
arenas in which ideological differences played themselves out during the same period. The
demise of religious education bodes ill not only for an Islamic sense of "belonging" but also,
and more importantly, for the further influence of civic culture on the hegemonic discourse of
strong state "secularism" and its dialectical relationship to a discourse of orthodox "cleri-
calism."
Discursive practices, such as those relating to "secularism" and "clericalism," track religious
education and give meaning to "belonging" in Turkish civic culture. The focus here is on a
shifting sense of Islamic belonging as this played out in a recent national power struggle
between the "secularist" Turkish military establishment and the "clericalist" Welfare Party.
The struggle culminated in 1997 when the strongly "secularist" Turkish military establishment
engineered the downfall of the recalcitrant "clerical" Reform Party coalition, bringing down
the government. Part of the military and political strategy was to disestablish religious
education, specifically religious middle schools that trained clerics.
Page 94 ^ _ [PoLAR: Vol. 22, No. 2
A Tale of Belonging and Its Denial: Religious Education Denied
This story of Islamic "belonging" in the national life of Turkey begins at the end, with its
denial. In the summer of 1997, the monolithic and centralized National Education Ministry
(MEB) announced an education reform that would extend six year primary education,
universal throughout Turkey, to eight years. The ministry offered as the ostensible motive for
this reform its intent to conform to the education requirements laid down by the European
Trade Union, to which Turkey had become a recent signatory.
But the timing of the July announcement, without prior public debate or warning, was extraor-
dinary, taking the public by surprise. The late announcement gave no indication of how the
Ministry would solve in one month the logistical problems of the nation's schools, classrooms,
and teachers before the opening of schools in September. More to the point, the announcement
was a shock to millions of families whose well-laid education plans were suddenly disrupted
by state intervention. Those who had intended that their children not continue past sixth grade
would have to be accommodated. So, also, would those whose children had been preparing for
several years to take the national fifth grade examinations that offered an opportunity to enter
elite schools. Among those most affected, however, were devout Muslim families who planned
to place their children in religious schools called Imam-hatip. These schools existed in the
interstices of the state system, using the years of middle school to give religious education to
children prior to their entering public high schools, religious high schools, or the workplace.
In the summer of 1997, meetings were held in many neighborhoods in protest over not only
the proposed education reform but also the recent political attacks on the Islamic-leaning
Welfare Party. Several large rallies that attracted thousands of the faithful were staged in
various parts of the country.
In effect, the education reform dealt a blow to Islamic education directed at teaching children
the Koran and training students to become imams or hatips (clerics or orators). It denied
Muslims access to education that trained the lower echelons of their leadership. Parents who
had their children in imam-hatip schools would be coerced into placing them in state middle
schools. As for the Welfare Party, the timing of the grade eight reform coincided with the
successful attempt by Turkish military leaders to topple a pro-Islamist governing party.
By the late summer of 1997, when the National Ministry announced the education reform,
education had already become the arena in which larger political events were being played out.
The military, having given itself the role of ultimate guarantor of the secular state in a 1980
constitution, had decided that Necmettin Erbakan, the Prime Minister and leader of the Welfare
Party, would be forced to resign and a new government formed. The military had also become
increasingly vocal in the press and on television about Islamic religious schools as training
sites for people whose goal was to infiltrate and take over Turkey's state bureaucracies. Aksit
(1991:145-6) had already observed that
since the 1960s, imam-hatip schools have been transformed from vocational-
religious schools producing religious functionaries such as imams, hatips, and
candidates for recruitment into higher Islamic Institutes and Faculties of
Theology, into an alternative [italics mine] education system whose graduates
have entered various departments of national universities and become employed
as civil servants as well as by the Directorate of Religious Affairs as imams and
hatips.
November, 1999] Page 95
From 1970-86, the number of imam-hatip schools had grown sevenfold from 101 to 717.
Enrollments during that period had increased sixfold, from over 42,000 to 240,000. The
perceived threat was felt most in comparisons with state schools. The ratio of imam-hatip to
state general secondary school enrollments had increased dramatically to 1 in 10, up from 1 in
37.
Following a well-orchestrated set of political tactics during the summer of 1997, the military
forced Prime Minister Erbakan to resign his post. The result was a cascade of events that
included the legal banning of the Refah Party, banning of its leaders from political activity for
a period of years, and a purge of Islamist mayors, politicians, and intellectuals through publi-
cized Security Court appearances. Even the mayors of Istanbul and Ankara, the commercial
and political centers of the country, respectively, were not immune to accusations against them
by a strong secular state apparatus. At present, both mayors are in prison for comments made
years ago that were deemed by the State Security Court to be a threat to the State.
Generalizing and Normative Discourses' of "Secularism" and "Clericalism"
The Master Narrative of Secularism as the Hegemonic Discourse of the State
It is difficult to understate the rhetorical power of the word "secular" to the construction of the
Turkish nation-state and its mythico-history. This is not the place to rehearse one of the great
stories of twentieth-century nation-building, but it is important to locate the rhetorical power
of secularism in the present and to acknowledge the power of this discourse to shape the last
seventy-five years of Republican history. The story of "Islamic belonging." and its most recent
denial in the events of 1997, only makes sense within a framework that valorizes "secularism"
as a normative and generalizing discourse against which to evaluate the truth value of all other
discourses in Turkish political culture.
One way to support the above claim is by listening in on a few of the official or public voices
of secular discourse. Take, for example, a speech made in 1996 by National Education
Minister Turhan Tayan on the occasion of the 72
n
" anniversary of Ataturks famous 4
t n
of
March, 1924, secular reform of education. Minister Tayan stated that "the present finds its
justification in a historical continuity with Ataturks principles laid down at the founding of the
Republic in 1923." He continued.
In education as in all other institutions, Ataturk foresaw that nation-building and
national unity would be held back by the education that was given within
religious societies and education institutions supported only by religious
foundations.
2
Mustafa Kemal, who later was honored by being given the name Ataturk, or "immortal leader
of the Turks," was one of the most impressive leaders of the twentieth century. He went to
military school and began his career in the Ottoman imperial army, where he gained heroic-
stature as the general who engineered the defeat of the British navy at Gallipoli in World War
I. At the end of the war, the remnants of the Ottoman empire were divided by the Great Powers
in the Treaty of Sevres and made into separate states or given to existing states. Kemal
resigned his post and traveled to eastern Anatolia, where he put together an army and marched
west, successfully defeating an army assembled by the Great Powers. The Treaty of Sevres
was retracted and the Treaty of Lausanne was put in its place, establishing the Republic of
Turkey with its present boundaries in exchange for renouncing all claims to sovereignty over
Page 96 [PoLAR. Vol. 22, No. 2
lands outside its borders. Even more extraordinary, however, was Kemal's determination to
transform an empire into a nation-state. He admired European, i.e. "Western," institutions and
borrowed from them freely in a series of reforms undertaken between 1924-36 that made
Turkey into a "modern" nation-state. At the core of his national discourse were principles of
"republicanism," "secularism," and "reformism." He implemented reforms in all areas of
politics, economics, society, and culture. These included religion (closing Mosques and
purging Imams), language (changing the orthography from Arabic to English and purifying the
language by eliminating Arabic and Persian words), family names (requiring everyone to have
a family surname drawn from an official list of Turkish words), and dress codes {eliminating
the veil, fez, and other symbols of religion and "Eastern" culture), not to mention the adoption
of "modern" legal codes (the Swiss civil code and Italian criminal code). These and other
reforms are constitutive of the meaning of "secularism" and became inextricably associated
with "modernity" as a key element in a Turkish national consciousness.
To "belong" to the new Turkish society, to be a "Turk," was to be a republican, secularist,
modernist, reformer. This lexicon for a master narrative of national "belonging" remains at the
core of being Turkish today, despite the changes that have taken place in Turkish political
economy and culture since the end of World War II. Followers of Kemal refer to themselves
as Kemalists, a synonym for secularists. While for decades Kemalism has had to compete with
other political ideologies, in the sense of a national consciousness of what it means to be a
Turk, the normative sentiment remains Kemalist. One reason for this is that every primary
school child is socialized into the political culture created by Ataturk and promulgated as a
culture of national unity.
Among the most important of Kemal's reforms was education. Kemal's formative education
was in a military academy in which students were taught to be against the medreses, those
ancient institutions of religious learning associated with mosques and supportive of divine
power in the maintenance of the empire. The military schools continue to be bastions of
secularism, and the military is the one national institution in Turkey today that has the esteem
of the public behind it in times of domestic political crisis.
Minister of National Education Tayan was merely being correct when he asserted that
education in Turkey today maintained its continuity with Ataturk's principles. The occasion
was itself a reaffirmation of the secular education reform instituted by Ataturk in 1924. Known
in Turkish as Tevhid-I Tedrisat, the Unification of Education Law was the defining moment
for Turkish national education. It brought under a single state bureaucracy all the different
kinds of autonomous or semi-autonomous education from the Ottoman period so that religious
education could be strictly controlled and subordinated to the Republican state's interest in
national unity through universal education about what it meant to be a citizen of a secular,
modern, reform-minded society. In the midst of a growing political crisis in 1996, Minister
Tayan re-asserted the power of the state to control and regulate religious education so that
religious education would not be held back. For him, ideas labeled "secular" are forward-
looking, those labeled "clerical" are backward, being from another time.
Included in the 72nd anniversary celebrations of the 1924 education reform were many secular
civic associations whose members' public speeches were unremarkable in jheir unself-
conscious expression of hegemonic discourse that left little space for other than a strong
secular delineation of civic culture. Prof. Dr. Ozer Ozankaya, a member of a panel arranged
by the Association for Ataturk's Thought {Ataturkcu Dusunce Dernegi), spoke for millions of
November, 1999] Page 97
Turkish citizens when she said that "One of the biggest problems of national sovereignty for
Turkey today was the presence of Islamic religious education schools" (imam-hatip)?
Religious education is problematic for the project of maintaining national sovereignty in Prof.
Dr. Ozenkaya's mind. Prof. Dr. Turkan Saylan, a fellow panel member who is the General
Head of the Association for the Support of Citizen Life (CYDDCagdas Yasami Destekleme
Dernegi), added that "The people of the Turkish Republic have no intention of returning to
seriat and darkness." Seriat refers not only to Islamic canonical law, which Saylan explicitly
opposes to secular law but also to social morality and personal ethics. He was repeating a
theme that millions of Turks had come to believe: namely, that religious schools were sites of
early training for political cadres of Islamists whose only goal was to transform the secular
Republic of Turkey into a religious state. Secular continuity between past and present is
maintained through rhetorical flourish. Meanwhile, a national governing coalition was being
put together between Tansu Ciller, the head of a secularist center-right party (True Path
PartyDYP/Dogru Yol partisi) and Necmettin Erbakan, the leader of the Welfare Party (RP
Refah partisi). Erbakan's party was understood by all to be a party supporting Islamist causes.
Erbakan and other party members had made their intentions clear in numerous speeches that
later would come to be viewed by the Security Court as a threat to the Republic. While the
coalition played an insignificant role in the education reform, an Islamic-leaning Welfare Party
in power provided an ideological lightning rod for delaying or avoiding it. Instead, the party
became a symbolic target for those who could use its rise to power as proof of a strongly held
belief that the party was an instrument of a plot to turn a secular into a religious state. From
this perspective, the coalition government had the unintended consequence of hastening the
reform that would weaken its cause.
The Essentialized Dialectic of Strong State "Secularism" contra Strong Orthodox
"Clericalism"
The most politically potent discursive practices in Turkey's political culture pertain to the
master narrative of "secularism" as it is understood to be in dialectical relationship with "cleri-
calism." The narrative is "master" in two senses: its tendency is toward domination of all other
political discourses and subordinates them to its purpose, and its tendency is totalizing in
society, encompassing government, bureaucracy, civic culture, and family. "Clericalism,"
anchored in seriat, is an equally dominating and totalizing opposed cultural logic but it
remains subordinate in Turkey's politics and law. Ataturk created a strong, secular one-party
republican state that was nationalist and modernizing. The logic of secular discourse occluded
religion, but the state never succeeded in eliminating it. To anticipate the discussion in the next
section, despite state repression against religion that continued in various institutions,
including education, secularists in the 1990s found themselves in political debate with a new
brand of clericalists who were less strident and more intellectual in their approach to old antin-
omies such as Islam contra "modernity" and seriat contra "democracy" (Gole 1996:19-25).
Discourses of clericalism, for example, discovered the political value of a discourse of
"Islamic modernity" in their ideological struggle against the strong public negative perception
of Islam as anti-modern. This discovery took place in the historical context of a state that
regulated ideas about tolerance and freedom within its own logic. This logic included a strong
reluctance to expand the notion of a civil society in which individuals were free to debate the
role of the state in any aspect of their lives. The fundamental antinomy continued to be the self-
perception of a "person" as a "citizen" in relation to a sovereign nation-state, inherently
limited, as opposed to a self-perception of a "believer" and follower of the "Faith" in relation
Page 98 [PoLAR: Vol. 22, No. 2
to a universal religion without territorial borders.
4
One is present-minded and historically over-
determined to defend an idea of unity that has little official room for ethnic diversity, religious
tolerance, or freedom of speech. The other is future-oriented and historically over-determined
to defend an idea of inclusiveness within The Faith, but with little tolerance toward infidels or
free speech.
5
Generalized and normative discourse is made meaningful by a dialectical negation of each by
the other, relying on the tactics of oppositional rhetoric. Put another way, each side essen-
tialized the meanings of the other and developed "correct" responses that resulted in strong
historical continuity of discourse in which the "other" is forever perceived as a "problem." For
secularists, religious education is a perpetual "problem" because it must and will result in the
overthrow of the republican state. Islamic religion and culture came to be perceived as "essen-
tially distinctive and thus inherently incompatible with western ideals of democracy and
secularism" (Gole 1996:17). In the context of Turkish Republican history, each side is inter-
ested in state power within a vision that leaves little or no space for power sharing. The
dialectic of strong secularism and strong clericalismmutually opposed in ways that define
each other definitively in Turkish republican historyhas had the effect of shrinking the space
for a civic culture of tolerance and freedom necessary for individuals and groups to negotiate
diverse ideas about what it means to "belong" in Turkish society.
The dialectic of strong state secularism opposed to strong orthodox clericalism is figured in
the story of the resurgence and present demise of imam-hatip education. Discursive practices
on both sides are heavily imbued with talk about the need for "trust" and "mutual tolerance."
The truthfulness
6
of discursive claims on either side goes straight to motives indexed to the
antinomies of official "secularism" contra official "Islam." Underlying political discourse is
talk about state power that makes the state both more powerful and more paranoid. The
political Islamists' fear of the secular state's repression of religion is borne out by events that
are themselves understood as the secular state's fear of the Islamists' motive to infiltrate the
state's bureaucracies and introduce seriat and its laws. Mutual suspicion, intolerance, and fear
fuel parallel interests in strong state power. Both have reasons to mistrust a tolerant and
freedom-loving civic culture. Official discourse is encrusted in laws,
7
codifications, regula-
tions, surveillance (very important in Turkey), and official censorship. Civil liberties and a
generous conception of "civic culture" have been the historical victims of such powerful state-
centered discourse.
While master discourses represent the opposition between secularism and Islam as a
permanent or natural feature of Turkish Republican history and are deployed as enabling
devices for interpreting events, they are themselves the products of historical events. As
cultural constructions they need to be viewed in this light. In their negation of each other, they
set apparent limits of possibility for all other levels of discourse and practice; but they are in
and of themselves incapable of mediating or resolving those limits. Paradoxically, the survival
of each lies in the retention of discursive practices that essentialize the other.
Alternative Discourses: Deploying "Modernity' * and "Democracy"
There are discourses that are related in complex ways to the official discourse of the state and
religion (secularism vs. clericalism) but which belong more to the realm of civic culture. For
present purposes, these discourses can be labeled "secular modernism" and "Islamist
democracy" in recognition of a dialectic of discursive practices within the bounds of
November, 1999] Page 99
secularism and Islamism, but one that also raises the prospect of refiguring what otherwise are
viewed as inherent connections between "secularism," "modernity," or "democracy." In these
circumstances, there is at least a potential for mediation and resolution of a master discourse
by means of complementary or crossover discourses of "modernism" and "democracy," ones
that can be exploited to represent Islam as both modern and democratic, co-opting a part of the
hegemonic discourse of state secularism.
During the 1980s, Prime Minister (and later President) Turgut Ozal used state funds to build
mosques and supported imam-hatip schools through the National Education Ministry. Secular
discourse that previously had marginalized and contained Islamic orthodox discourse found
itself in a new dialogic, one that continued into the early 1990s and opened possibilities for an
expanding, civic culture in which renewed tolerance and freedom of speech would create the
space for negotiating Islamic belonging in Turkish society.
Without a renunciation by secular or Islamic elements of their respective claims to an
exclusive definition of the state, there could be only a reduced and narrowly construed
conceptual space for a civil society in which plurality and difference could become the basis
for public debate carried out in a spirit of trust and tolerance. Political Islamists, always on the
defensive in a strong Turkish secular state, came to associate "modernity" with secularism and
other moral evils of western institutions. They turned to what they perceived to be eastern
ideas about religion and state (din \e devlet).* These ideas were largely perceived to be incom-
patible with those of "democracy." For most of the Republican period, both strong state
"secularism" and political "Islam" problematized "democracy." Neither supported a civil
society in which there would be a marketplace of ideas with a free flow of information, where
competition for political power would not be a conflict over the definition of the state itself.
This situation changed during the last fifteen years when Turkey opened its economy to global
markets. By the early 1990s, nearly all political parties had embraced economic liberalism and
extended it to the idea that "if indiv iduals were to compete freely in the market, they could
maximize their chances only if civil liberties were guaranteed" (Toprak 1996:101). The result
was an unprecedented growth in all forms of private communication such as private book,
magazine, and newspaper publishing "[pjersonal computers, fax machines, the e-mail system,
satellite broadcasts of international television companies, cable and private television and
radio channels" (ibid., 102). These communications media required phalanxes of writers,
publishers, celebrity talk show hosts, advertising agencies, marketing consultants, opinion
researchers, celebrity academics, and an army of talking heads and experts in everything. "The
media, both electronic and written, came to occupy a powerful position in public opinion-
making" (ibid., 103).
Paradoxically, the ideology of neo-liberalism framed a rethinking among practitioners of
Islamist discourses that brought them from their historically marginalized citizenship to a new
enlightenment about their place in Turkish civil society. The pluralism of Islamic practices
gained currency, and public support grew, even as political Islamism gained a stronger
foothold within Turkish politics and elections. The transition in discourse and public
perception began with state elites (Islamist engineers, bureaucrats, and party politicians), who
created a new discourse termed the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, which succeeded in placing in
the 1982 Constitution a requirement that religion be taught in primary and secondary state
schools. When the state created a national examination for eleven-year-olds in 1983, there was
Page 100 [PoLAR: Vol. 22, No. 2
a section on religion. The governing party of Turgut Ozal integrated Islamists into ' Turkey' s
hierarchy of power and status" (ibid., 108). A change in Article 163 of the Turkish Criminal
Code lifted restrictions on the exercise of free speech by Islamist groups. "At present, approx-
imately 100 radical Islamist journals are openly advocating an Islamist state based on shari'a,
which earlier would have subjected them to persecution under article 163" (ibid.).
9
Despite public concern for the above events, there was a public spirit of tolerance and a
growing awareness that terrorism had to be differentiated from the right to free speech and the
free exercise of religion. This "democratic talk" is antithetical to the discourse of both "author-
itarian secularism" and "political Islam." It was the new Islamist political elites who pressured
the government in the early 1990s to increase the number of religious schools (imam-hatip).
1
"
There also emerged during the 1990s a powerful group of business-minded upper middle-class
Islamists who began to create a discourse of "Islamic modernism," arguing that Islam and
business were compatible, and that a more open society was conducive to both. This discourse
tended to distance itself from the claims of political Islamist discourse to the overturning of a
secular state and its replacement with shari'a.
The new Islamic state and market elites supported a new Islamic intelligentsia that increasingly
took on the lifestyles and trappings of modernism. They intentionally adopted the appearance
of middle and upper middle class secular Turkish dress and habits of entertainment, travel,
vacation, and suburban lifestyles."
Paradoxically, the new pluralism within Islamism, coupled with the new "belongingness" of
Islamists within the current popular desire for a more open society, has divided public opinion
and led to a new level of skepticism about the intentions of Islamists. As Gole (1996:18)
observed,
Yet, the justifiable concern of both the secular elites and the western world is the
possible hidden agenda of Islamist politics, that they might use democracy for
their own ends to implement an Islamic state and thus hijack democracy. A
crucial and eternal question for democrats is, therefore, the allowable degree of
tolerance in participatory politics of a political party and ideology whose aim is
. . . the overthrow of the democratic regime for systematic change.
As national politics have become more complex, the crossovers in discourse have blurred even
more the old antinomies. For example, in academic discourses, both Islamist and secularist
intelligentsia have looked to postmodernism, focusing on common themes of fragmentation,
ambiguity, and de-centering to debate their respective cases for pluralism and diversity. But a
common co-optation of democratic discourse into otherwise disparate intentions and meanings
may serve only to make more apparent the deeper differences that once again have surfaced to
narrow the space for a more open civic culture.
Contractions of Civic Culture
The opening of a space in civic culture for negotiation of Islamic belonging took a turn for the
worse after a national economic crisis in 1994 led to devaluation of the currency and hard times
for Turkey's working and middle classes. These events played into the hands of the Welfare
Party, which was perceived by many as the only party in touch with ordinary people through
its grass roots political organizations in villages and urban neighborhoods. Once the Welfare
November, 1999] Page 101
Party came to power, however, military leadership became increasingly alarmed at the political
ineptness of party leaders in both domestic and foreign policy. Bold public statements
espousing old Islamic positions and unorthodox actions by party leaders left more than an
impression on the public that the country was moving toward a de facto religious political
regime. By the time of the 72
nc
* Anniversary of Ataturk's education reform, its civic-minded
celebrants were publicly deploying the master narrative to sound the alarm in Turkey's civic
culture, including education. A year later, the military had engineered the Prime Ministers
resignation and the National Education Ministry announced the new grade eight education
reform that has led to the demise of iniam-hatip schools.
We are at the end of our story, which returns us to the beginning. At present, "Islamic
belonging" has been dealt a blow that sets its project back to a time when secular nationalism
left little space for religion in education or, for that matter, in the totality of civic culture.
Growing intolerance and diminution of free speech have wiped out the gains made in the first
half of the nineties. The loyalty of Islamists to the founding principles of the Republic has not
only been called into question but has come under direct attack by the military, the judiciarv.
and the media. Prominent Islamic political leaders have been prosecuted for crimes against the
state and jailed. In the aftermath of political crisis during the summer of 1997, Islamists are
deemed officially less acceptable citizens now than they were only a few years ago. Today
Islamists are not as free as they were to associate in parliament, state bureaucracy, or civil
society. And their freedom of religious education (imam-hatip schools) for their children is. at
least for the moment, lost in history. This is not the first setback for religious education in a
society dominated by strong state secularism, nor is it likely to be the last.
Notes
Research for this article is based in part on fieldwork conducted in Istanbul during the
Spring and early Summer of 1997. Funding was provided by Hamilton College and NSF
grant no. 9506123. I am grateful to Nukhet Sirman and Ley la Neyzi for specific comments
that improved this paper. Conversations with Erol Balkan, Ayse Oncu and Haldun Gulalp
have helped me to reduce at least some of the complexity of Turkish politics and culture to
manageable proportions. I owe a special thanks to anonymous reviewers and to Doris Rutz
for w hatever clarity of exposition appears here. None of the above are responsible for
flawed arguments, factual errors, or lack of clarity.
1. I use the term "generalizing" to refer to discourses in which the central terms are known,
agreed upon, shared, and deployed by a large majority of practitioners in Turkish society.
This stands in contradistinction to specific discourse, in which lexicons are more narrouly
construed and shared within particular parties, groups, organizations, or associations.
"Normative" refers to discourse that carries moral force through implicit or explicit evalu-
ations of good or bad, right or wrong. The discourses in this article are both generalizing
and normative because they have the force of having been inscribed in the language of the
founding generation of the Turkish Republic and have since entered into Turkish politics
and literature as well as public life for over seventy-five years.
2. Yeni vuzvil. 29 March, 1996.
Page 102 [PoLAR: Vol. 22, No. 2
3. The rhetorical allusion to "millions of Turkish citizens" can perhaps be justified by the
overwhelming public support behind the military during the episode reported here and the
subsequent outpouring of secular national sentiment occasioned by the capture of the
guerilla leader of the Kurdish Worker's Party.
4. The allusion is to Benedict Anderson's plea to understand nations as a particular kind of
political community that emerges out of empires and great religious systems.
5. See Innis (1951) for a stimulating treatment of cultural systems in terms of their compar-
ative ability to govern within different scales of time and space.
6. See Habermas (1979) for a discussion of truthfulness, which refers to the credibility if a
spoken "truth." Is it spoken sincerely? Does one trust the speaker?
7. See Toprak (1996) for examples of the extremity of laws that restrict civil rights and state
bureaucracy as an impediment to "individual autonomy" and the creation of a strong civil
society.
8. See Mardin (1989) for a good discussion of Turkish Islamic pluralism and a more open
civil society.
9. Shari'a is synonymous with seriat, or Koranic law.
10. The graduates of these schools have entered the universities in large numbers and now
"exceed the numbers needed for religious personnel" (Toprak 1996: 109). Ordinary
people in the street often rehearse this refrain as a thinly veiled allusion to the growing
presence of Islamists in areas of media and urban intellectual life that are "normatively"
associated with secular elites.
12. Ayse Oncu (untitled and unpublished manuscript) has recently documented the growing
sophistication of Islamists in their use of most "modern" techniques of mass persuasion,
promotion, marketing, and advertising to convince "secular" Turks that they, the Islamic
middle class, live lifestyles similar to the secular Turkish middle class. These include new
suburban luxury dwellings, frequenting expensive restaurants, enjoying the pursuit of
leisure activities such as health clubs and golf courses, and participating fully in both the
commercial and high profile consumption of the "modern" Turkish upper middle class.
13. The allusion is to laws that limit participatory democracy, such as Articles 141 and 142 of
the Criminal Code, which outlaw politics on the basis of class (i.e. socialist and com-
munist parties). Article 163 outlaws parties on the basis of religion (Toprak 1996:111).
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