The tensions currently convulsing the Middle East—Western military offensive, Islamicized resistance, economic turbulence, demographic upheaval—have taken a peculiarly Americanized form in Turkey.footnote¹ The secular Republic of Kemal Atatürk, nato’s longstanding bulwark in the region, is now ruled by men who pray. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (akp)—the latest incarnation of a once-banned Islamist movement—has a 60 per cent majority in the Assembly, or Meclis, forming the first non-coalition government in Ankara for fifteen years. Prime Minister Erdoğan is himself a possible candidate for the presidency, a seven-year appointment in the gift of the Meclis under the Republic’s notoriously unrepresentative democracy. Predictably, perhaps, though elected primarily by the votes of the poor—above all, the young, informal proletariat now crowding Turkey’s cities—Erdoğan’s government is slashing government spending, aiming at a fiscal surplus of 6 per cent of gdp in the coming year. Though proclaiming solidarity with the Muslim world, it has dispatched Turkish troops to join the un occupation force in Southern Lebanon, and was only restrained from sending them to Iraq by the urgent pleas of the Iraqi-Kurdish President, Jalal Talabani. Yet the akp is widely expected to win the Autumn 2007 elections, and has largely retained its support among provincial capitalists, the pious small bourgeoisie, the newly urbanized poor, important fractions of the police and much of the liberal, left-leaning intelligentsia.

To grasp the paradoxical nature of the changes in Turkey, it is first necessary to consider the peculiar meaning that ‘secularism’ (laiklik) has had for the Kemalist state. Between 1919 and 1923, with the defeated Ottoman Empire effectively partitioned by the Entente powers, the founding wars for the Turkish Republic waged by Kemal’s troops had appealed not only to the national liberation ‘dream’ of fatherland and freedom, but to the Muslim duty to resist the infidel occupation. Religious homogenization was an important constituent element of national unity, with the birth of the Republic attended by the expulsion of Orthodox Greeks, as pendant to the 1915 massacres of Armenians. The question, rather, was of the relation between religion and the state. In this sense, secularization—as expanding state control over religion—was a project of the 19th-century Tanzimat reforms. In 1924, the founding Constitution of the Republic retained Islam as the state religion, even as the Caliphate, fez, religious courts and schools, et cetera, were swept away and the Latin alphabet and Western legal code introduced; the clause was removed in 1928. Secularization was formally enunciated as one of the six principles of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party’s programme in 1931, and finally incorporated into the Constitution in 1937.

In the official view, rehearsed by many Western scholars, the 1924–25 modernizations constitute categorical proof of the disestablishment of religion in Turkey.footnote² With Islam removed from every official public site, this argument runs, religious sectors of the population will eventually adapt to the ruling reality and become thoroughly secularized. Others have argued, however, that the Turkish state has controlled and institutionalized Islam, rather than disestablishing it.footnote³ Thus the (non-elected) Directorate General of Religious Affairs exercises a monopoly power over the appointment of preachers and imams throughout the country, and controls the distribution of sermons. In this view there are clear continuities between the Turkish Republic and the Ottoman system, where state and religion were deeply imbricated.

Arguably, however, Turkish secularization may best be seen as an ongoing struggle over the nature and development of an ‘official Islam’, characterized by the public use of religion for national cohesion. Rather than reproducing some universalist (or Ottoman) logic, the secularization project was continually remade, its (partially unintended) outcomes the result of a series of interventions by different social forces. This process has involved conflicts both within the ruling power bloc constituted by the reforms of the late Ottoman period and the early years of the Republic, and with social layers excluded from it. Since the 1930s, the dominant sectors within this bloc—the military leadership, the modernizing layers of the civil bureaucracy, an officially protected industrial bourgeoisie and a West-oriented intelligentsia—have favoured a more-or-less authoritarian exclusion of religion from the public sphere. The bloc’s subordinate sector—conservative elements of the bureaucracy and professional middle class, an export-oriented bourgeoisie, merchants, provincial notables—tended to advocate a larger space for Islam, albeit still under ‘secular’ control. This could also mobilize broader popular layers—workers, peasants, artisans, the unemployed, small provincial entrepreneurs, clerics—against the dominant sector, and often succeeded in extracting concessions from it.footnote⁴ Meanwhile, although excluded from the power equation, the religious groupings themselves, as well as numerous semi-clandestine Islamic communities, put up quite powerful forms of passive or active resistance around questions such as education.

At the same time, these struggles to define the secularization process were themselves in part determined by the peculiarities of Turkish socio-economic development. The overwhelmingly Greek and Armenian merchant bourgeoisie of the Ottoman period had been virtually liquidated through war, population exchange and massacre.footnote⁵ The vast majority of Turks—over 70 per cent—were peasant smallholders, scattered in innumerable relatively self-contained villages. This left the military and civil bureaucracy as the only effectively organized forces capable of undertaking the social-engineering tasks of the new nation. Inevitably they tried to ensure the import-substitute industries they created served, first and foremost, the national interest. To this end, both industrialists and factory workers were offered different forms of state protection, which for the latter included social security, collective bargaining, unionization and the right to strike. The manufacturing bourgeoisie, itself protected by heavy state subsidy against both internal and external competitors, tolerated these concessions in as much as they bolstered the development of a domestic market.footnote⁶ But by the late 1960s an increasingly self-organized working class soon threatened to break loose from state tutelage. The Turkish Workers’ Party took 15 seats in Parliament in 1965.footnote⁷ Large-scale metalworkers’ strikes led to a split in the state-sponsored union Türk-İş, culminating in the formation of the militant Confederation of Revolutionary Worker Unions, dİsk. As the left’s power grew in the 1970s, the state backed both hard-right nationalist vigilantes and Islamist groups against them. Finally, from 1980, a military coup d’état put paid to the militant left with three years of state terror, during which executions, torture and imprisonment effected a permanent alteration in the political landscape.

The military take-over of 1980 would also shift the vectors between religion, class and power. During the early 1970s, Islamist politics had mainly been the resort of small provincial entrepreneurs, on the defensive against state-industrial policies, rising labour militancy and rapid Westernization.footnote⁸ It was the lack of response of the established business organizations and parties to the needs of small enterprises, facing extinction in an import-substitution economy, that led the ex-president of the Union of Chambers, Necmettin Erbakan, to found the Milli Order Party (mnp), in 1970.footnote⁹ As well as defending the economic interests of provincial businessmen and traders, the mnp also appealed to their religious feelings and their distaste for Western consumer culture. This stance won support from conservative peasant farmers and artisans, who were also attracted by Erbakan’s rather sketchy programme of economic development based on communally owned private entreprise, shielded and regulated by the state. Closed down by the military in 1971, the mnp was refounded in 1972 as the Milli Salvation Party (msp), with virtually no change in its programme.footnote¹⁰

The msp’s most significant gain during the 1970s was increased freedom of operation for the country’s İmam-Hatip schools, whose graduates would provide the main activists and leaders of the Islamist movement in the coming decades. These were officially intended to educate prospective preachers (hatips) and prayer leaders (imams). But since it was not possible for students to observe the precepts of Islam in regular public schools, they also attracted enrollment from religious families who did not necessarily want their children to become preachers or prayer leaders. In time, this generation of İmam-Hatip graduates came to occupy important public positions, constituting a religious middle class capable of competing with the secularist intelligentsia in economic, cultural and political realms. In a country where intellectuals had previously been equated with the left, the emergence of this new avowedly Muslim intelligentsia would be a significant element in the construction of Islamism as a hegemonic alternative.