Islam Secularism Discourse

8/12/2019 Islam Secularism Discourse

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November, 1999] Page 93Henry J. RutzHamilton College

The Rise and Demise of Imam hatip Schools: Discourses of IslamicBelonging and Denial in the Construction of Turkish Civic Culture

Civic Culture as Public Communicative SpaceThe purpose of this paper is to explore issues of Turkish citizenship and belonging in theconte xt of religiou s educ ation and the disco urses in which it is em bed ded . An Islam icbelo ngin g in Turke y was mad e problem atic from the inception of the Rep ublic in 1923 andcontinues to be problematic as evidenced in the events recorded here. By focusing on the riseand demise of Islamic schools, referred to as imam-hatip in recognition of their original goalto train clerics (imam) and orators (hatip), abstract political discourses take on concretemeanings, and apparently non-political events are placed in a larger political context. Theissues to be explored here are religious tolerance and freedom of speech in the terrain of civicculture. For the purposes at hand, civic culture refers to communicative space between familyand state where issues such as collective tolerance toward difference and freedom to speak andassociate are negotiated between individuals and groups. Civic cultures are constrained by, butnot determined by, the normative discourses of the state. They open a space for negotiatingwhat it means to belong to the nation-state as a political community despite the laws andregulations of the state apparatus. In Turkey, the state is well aware of the dangers inherent incivic culture and has historically acted to place rather strong constraints on communicativespace referred to here as civic culture.The argument is that communicative space for religious tolerance and free speech expandedover the past decade or so, and that studying discursive practices that shape and define civicculture can provide insight into events such as the rise and demise of religious schools or theveiling and unveiling of women. In the case of religious schools, a dialogic of change was sub-verted by the anti-clerical project of the sec ular military and political estab lishm ent. One ofthe arenas for national ideological conflict was religious education, one among a number ofarenas in which ideological differences played themselves out during the same period. Thedem ise of religiou s educ ation bo des ill not only for an Islamic sense of bel on gin g but also,and more importantly, for the further influence of civic culture on the hegemonic discourse ofstrong state se cu laris m and its dialectical relationsh ip to a disco urse of orthodo x cleri-cal i sm.Discursive practices, such as those relating to secu larism and clericalism, track religiouseducation and give mean ing to belon ging in Turkish civic culture. The focus here is on ashifting sense of Islamic belonging as this played out in a recent national power strugglebetwee n the secu larist Turkish military establishment and the clericalist Welfare Party.Th e struggle culm inated in 1997 when the strongly secularist Turkish military establishmenteng inee red the dow nfall of the recalcitrant cler ical Reform Party coalition, bring ing dow nthe government. Part of the military and political strategy was to disestablish religiouseducation, specifically religious middle schools that trained clerics.


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Page 94 ^ _ [PoLAR: Vol. 22, No. 2A Tale of Belonging and I ts Denia l : Rel igious Educat ion DeniedTh is story of Islamic be lon gin g in the national life of Turkey beg ins at the end, with itsdenial. 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 forthis reform its intent to conform to the education requirements laid down by the EuropeanTrade Union, to which Turkey had become a recent signatory.But the timing of the July anno uncem ent, w ithout prior public debate or warning, was extraor-dinary, taking the public by surprise. The late announcement gave no indication of how theMinistry would solve in one month the logistical problems of the nation's schools, classrooms,and teachers before the opening of schools in September. M ore to the point, the annou ncemen twas a shock to millions of families whose well-laid education plans were suddenly disruptedby state intervention. Those who had intended that their children not continue past sixth gradewould have to be accommodated. So, also, would those whose children had been preparing forseveral years to take the national fifth grade examinations that offered an opportunity to enterelite schools. Among those most affected, however, were devout Muslim families who plannedto place their children in religious schools called Imam-hatip. Th ese schools existed in theinterstices of the state system, using the years of middle school to give religious education tochild ren prior to their enterin g public high schoo ls, religiou s high scho ols, or the work place .In the summer of 1997, meetings were held in many neighborhoods in protest over not onlythe proposed education reform but also the recent political attacks on the Islamic-leaningW elfare Party. Sev eral large rallies that attracted th ou san ds of the faithful we re staged invarious parts of the country.In effect, the education reform dealt a blow to Islamic education directed at teaching childrenthe Koran and training students to become imams or hatips (clerics or orators). It deniedMuslims access to education that trained the lower echelons of their leadership. Parents whohad their children in imam-hatip scho ols would be coerced in to placing them in state middleschools. As for the Welfare Party, the timing of the grade eight reform coincided with thesuccessful 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 1980constitution, had decided that Necmettin Erbakan, the Prime Minister and leader of the WelfareParty, would be forced to resign and a new government formed. The military had also becomeincreasingly vocal in the press and on television about Islamic religious schools as trainingsites 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, andcandidates for recruitment into higher Islamic Institutes and Faculties ofTheology, into an alternative [italics min e] educa tion system whose graduateshave entered various departments of national universities and become employedas civil servants as well as by the Directorate of Religious Affairs as imams andhatips.


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November, 1999] Page 95From 1970-86, the number of imam-hatip schools had grown sevenfold from 101 to 71 7.Enrollments during that period had increased sixfold, from over 42,000 to 240,000. Theperceived threat was felt most in comparisons with state schools. The ratio of imam-hatip tostate general secondary school enrollments had increased dramatically to 1 in 10, up from 1 in37.Following a well-orchestrated set of political tactics during the summer of 1997, the militaryforced Prime Minister Erbakan to resign his post. The result was a cascade of events thatincluded the legal banning of the Refah Party, banning of its leaders from political activity fora 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 commercialand political centers of the country, respectively, were not immune to accusations against themby a strong secular state apparatus. At present, both mayors are in prison for comments madeyears ago that were deemed by the State Security Court to be a threat to the State.Gen e ra l i z ing and N orm a t ive Di scou rses ' o f Sec u la r i sm and C le r i ca l i smThe Ma ster Narrative of Secularism as the Hegem onic Discourse of the StateIt is difficult to under state the rhetorical pow er of the word secu lar to the cons truction of theTurkish nation-state and its mythico-history. This is not the place to rehearse one of the greatstories of twentieth-century nation-building, but it is important to locate the rhetorical powerof secularism in the present and to acknowledge the power of this discourse to shape the lastseventy-five years of Re publica n history. Th e story of Islam ic belo ngin g. and its most recentdenial in the even ts of 1997, only make s sense within a framework that valorizes sec ular ismas a normative and generalizing discourse against which to evaluate the truth value of all otherdiscourses in Turkish political culture.One way to support the above claim is by listening in on a few of the official or public voicesof secular discourse. Take, for example, a speech made in 1996 by National EducationMinister Turhan Tayan on the occasion of the 72 n anniversary of A tat ur ks famous 4t n ofM arch, 1924, secular reform of educ ation. Minister Tayan stated that the present finds itsjustification in a historical continuity with Ataturks principles laid down at the founding of theRepublic in 1923. He continued.

In education as in all other institutions, Ataturk foresaw that nation-building andnational unity would be held back by the education that was given withinreligious societies and education institutions supported only by religiousfoundations.2

Mu stafa Ke ma l, wh o later was honored by being given the name Ataturk, or imm ortal leaderof the Tu rks , wa s one of the most imp ressive leaders of the twentieth century. He went tomilitary 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 WarI. At the end of the war, the remnants of the Ottoman empire were divided by the Great Powersin the Treaty of Sevres and made into separate states or given to existing states. Kemalresigned his post and traveled to eastern Anatolia, where he put together an army and marchedwest, successfully defeating an army assembled by the Great Pow ers. The Treaty of Sevreswas retracted and the Treaty of Lausanne was put in its place, establishing the Republic ofTurkey with its present boundaries in exchange for renouncing all claims to sovereignty over


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Page 96 [PoLAR. Vol. 22, No. 2lands outside its borders. Even more extraordinary, however, was Kemal's determination totransform an emp ire into a nation-state. He admired European, i.e. W estern, institutions andborrowed from them freely in a series of reforms undertaken between 1924-36 that madeTurkey into a m od ern nation-state. At the core of his national discou rse were principles of repu blican ism , secu larism , and reform ism. He implem ented reforms in all areas ofpolitics, economics, society, and culture. These included religion (closing Mosques andpurging Imams), language (changing the orthography from Arabic to English and purifying thelanguage by eliminating Arabic and Persian words), family names (requiring everyone to havea family surname drawn from an official list of Turkish words), and dress codes {eliminatingthe veil, fez, and oth er sym bo ls of religion and Ea ste rn cultu re), not to men tion the adoptionof m od ern legal cod es (the Swiss civil code and Italian criminal cod e). The se and otherreforms are constitutive of the mean ing of secu larism and becam e inextricably associatedwith m ode rnity as a key element in a Turkish national consc iousn ess.To belo ng to the new Turkish society, to be a Tu rk, was to be a republican, secularist,mo dern ist, reformer. Th is lexicon for a ma ster narrative of national be lon gin g rem ains at thecore of being Turkish today, despite the changes that have taken place in Turkish politicaleconomy and culture since the end of World War II. Followers of Kemal refer to themselvesas Kem alists, a synony m for secularists. While for decades Kem alism has had to com pete w ithother political ideologies, in the sense of a national consciousness of what it means to be aTurk, the normative sentiment remains Kemalist. One reason for this is that every primaryschool child is socialized into the political culture created by Ataturk and promulgated as aculture of national unity.Among the most important of Kemal's reforms was education. Kemal's formative educationwas in a military academy in which students were taught to be against the medreses, thoseancient institutions of religious learning associated with mosques and supportive of divinepower in the maintenance of the empire. The military schools continue to be bastions ofsecularism, and the military is the one national institution in Turkey today that has the esteemof the public behind it in times of domestic political crisis.Minister of National Education Tayan was merely being correct when he asserted thateducation in Turkey today maintained its continuity with Ataturk's principles. The occasionwas itself a reaffirmation of the secular educatio n reform instituted by Ataturk in 1924. Knownin Turkish as Tevhid-I Tedrisat, the Unification of Education Law was the defining momentfor Turkish national education. It brought under a single state bureaucracy all the differentkinds of autonomous or semi-autonomous education from the Ottoman period so that religiouseducation could be strictly controlled and subordinated to the Republican state 's interest innational 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, MinisterTayan re-asserted the power of the state to control and regulate religious education so thatreligious education would not be held back. For him, ideas labeled secu lar are forward-looking, those labeled cleric al are back ward , being from another time.Included in the 72nd anniversary celebrations of the 1924 education reform were many secularcivic associations whose members' public speeches were unremarkable in jheir unself-conscious expression of hegemonic discourse that left little space for other than a strongsecular delineation of civic culture. Prof. Dr. Ozer Ozankaya, a member of a panel arrangedby the Association for Ataturk's Thought {Ataturkcu Dusunce Dernegi), spoke for millions of


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November, 1999] Page97Turkish citizens when she said that One of the biggest problems of national sovereignty forTurkey today was the presence of Islamic religious education schools (imam-hatip)?Religious education isproblematicfor theprojectof maintaining national sovereigntyin Prof.Dr. Ozenkaya 's mind. Prof. Dr. Turkan Saylan, a fellow panel member who is the GeneralHeadof theA ssociation for theSupportof Citizen Life (CYDD Cagdas Yasami DesteklemeDernegi), added that The people of theTurkish Repub lic have nointention of returning toseriat anddarkness . Seriat refers notonly to Islamic canonical law,wh ich Saylan explicitlyopposes to secular law but also to social morality and personal ethics. He was repeating atheme that millionsofTurkshadcome to believe: namely, that religious schools were sitesofearly training for political cadres of Islamists whose only goalwas to transform the secularRepublic of Turkey into a religious state. Secular continuity between past and present ismaintained through rhetorical flourish. Meanwhile, a national governing coalition was beingput together between Tansu Ciller, the head of a secularist center-right party (True PathParty DYP/Dogru olpartisi) andNecm ettin Erbakan, theleaderof the Welfare Party RPRefah partisi). Erbakan's partywasunderstood by all to be aparty supporting Islamist causes.Erbakan and other party members had made their intentions clear in numerous speeches thatlater would come to be viewed by the Security Court as a threat to the Republic. W hilethecoalition playedaninsignificant rolein theeducation reform,an Islamic-leaning Welfare Partyin power provided an ideological lightningrod fordelayingor avoiding it. Instead, thepartybecame a symbolic target forthose whocould use itsrisetopowerasproofof a strongly heldbelief that thepartywas an instrument of aplot to turn a secular intoa religious state. Fromthis perspective, the coalition government had the unintended consequence of hastening thereform that would weaken itscause.The Essentialized Dialectic of Strong State Secularism contra Strong Orthodox ClericalismThe most politically potent discursive practices in Turkey's political culture pertain to themaster narrativeof secularism as it isunderstood to be indialectical relationship with cleri-cal ism. Thenarrativeis master in twosenses:itstendencyistoward dom ination ofall otherpolitical discourses and subordinates them to its purpose, and its tendency is totalizing insociety, encompassing government, bureaucracy, civic culture, and family. Clericalism,anchored in seriat, is an equally dominating and totalizing opposed cultural logic but itremains subordinate in Turkey's politics and law.Ataturk created a strong, secular one-partyrepublican state thatwasnationalistandmodernizing.Thelogicof secular discourse occludedreligion,but the state never succeededineliminatingit. Toanticipatethediscussionin thenextsection, despite state repression against religion that continued in various institutions,including education, secularistsin the 1990s found themselves in political debate with a newbrandofclericalistswhowe re less stridentandmore intellectual in their approachto oldantin-omies such as Islam contra modern i ty and seriat contra dem ocracy (Gole 1996:19-25).Discourses of clericalism, for example, discovered the political value of a discourse of Islamic moderni ty in their ideological struggle against the strong public negative perceptionof Islam as anti-modern. This discovery took place in the historical context of a state thatregulated ideas about toleranceand freedom withinits own logic. This logic included a strongreluctance toexpand thenotionof a civil society in which individuals were free todebatetheroleof the statein anyaspectoftheir lives.Thefundamen tal antinomy continu ed to be the self-perception of a pe rson as a ci t izen in relation to a sovereign nation-state, inherentlylimited,as opposed to a self-perception of a bel iever andfollowerof the Fai th in relation


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Page 98 [PoLAR: Vol. 22, No. 2to a universal religion without territorial borders.4One is present-minded and historically over-determined to defend an idea of unity that has little official room for ethnic diversity, religioustolerance, or freedom of speech. The other is future-oriented and historically over-determinedto defend an idea of inclusiveness within The Faith, but with little tolerance toward infidels orfree speech.5Gen eralized and norm ative discourse is made meaningful by a dialectical negation of each bythe other, relying on the tactics of oppositional rhetoric. Put another way, each side essen-tialized the m eanin gs of the other and deve loped co rrec t respo nses that resulted in stronghistorical con tinuity of disc ours e in wh ich the oth er is forever perceive d as a pro ble m . Forsecularists, religious education is a perpetual prob lem because itmust an d will result in theoverthrow 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 andsec ularis m (Gole 1996:17). In the contex t of Turkish Re publican history, each side is inter-ested in state power within a vision that leaves little or no space for power sharing. Thedialectic of strong secularism and strong clericalismmutually opposed in ways that defineeach other definitively in Turkish repub lican h istory has had the effect of shrin king the spacefor a civic culture of tolerance and freedom necessa ry for individ uals and gro ups to neg otiatediverse ideas about what it means to belo ng in Turkish society.The dialectic of strong state secularism opposed to strong orthodox clericalism is figured inthe story of the resurgence and present demise of imam-hatip education. Discursive practiceson both sides are heavily imbu ed with talk about the need for trus t and mu tual toleran ce.The truthfulness6 of discursive claims on either side goes straight to motives indexed to theantino m ies of official sec ula rism contra official Isla m . Un derlyin g political disc ours e istalk about state power that makes the state both more powerful and more paranoid. Thepolitical Islamists' fear of the secular state's repression of religion is borne out by events thatare themselves understood as the secular state's fear of the Islamists' motive to infiltrate thestate's bureaucracies and introduce seriat and its laws. Mutual suspicion, intolerance, and fearfuel parallel interests in strong state power. Both have reasons to mistrust a tolerant andfreedom-loving civic culture. Official discourse is encrusted in laws,7 codifications, regula-tions, surveillance (very important in Turkey), and official censorship. Civil liberties and agen erou s con cep tion of civic cu lture have been the historical victims of such powerful state-centered discourse.While master discourses represent the opposition between secularism and Islam as apermanent or natural feature of Turkish Republican history and are deployed as enablingdevices for interpreting events, they are themselves the products of historical events. Ascultural constructions they need to be viewed in this light. In their negation of each other, theyse t apparent limits of possibility for all other levels of disco urse and practic e; but they are inand of themselves incapable of mediating or resolving those limits. Paradoxically, the survivalof each lies in the retention of discursive practices that essentialize the other.Alternative Discour ses : Dep loy ing M odern i ty '* and D e m o c r a c yThere are discourses that are related in complex ways to the official discourse of the state andreligion (secularism vs. clericalism) but which belong more to the realm of civic culture. Forpresent purpo ses, these discou rses can be labeled secular mo dernism and Islamistde m ocr acy in recognition of a dialectic of discursive practices within the bound s of


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November, 1999] Page 99secularism and Islamism, but one that also raises the prospect of refiguring what otherwise areviewed as inherent conne ctions between secularism , mo dernity, or dem ocracy. In thesecircumstances, there is at least a potential for mediation and resolution of a master discourseby mean s of com pleme ntary or crossover discourses of mo dern ism and dem ocracy, onesthat can be exploited to represent Islam as both modern and democratic, co-opting a part of thehegemonic discourse of state secularism.During the 1980s, Prime Minister (and later President) Turgut Ozal used state funds to buildmosques and supported imam-hatip schools through the National Education Ministry. Seculardiscourse that previously had marginalized and contained Islamic orthodox discourse founditself in a new dialogic, one that continued into the early 1990s and opened possibilities for anexpand ing, civic culture in which renew ed toleranc e and freedom of speech wou ld create thespace for negotiating Islamic belonging in Turkish society.Without a renunciation by secular or Islamic elements of their respective claims to anexclusive definition of the state, there could be only a reduced and narrowly construedconce ptual space for a civil society in which plurality and difference could b ecom e the basisfor public debate carried out in a spirit of trust and tolerance. Political Islamists, always on thedefensive in a strong Turkish secular state, cam e to associate m od ern ity with secularism andother moral evils of western institutions. They turned to what they perceived to be easternideas about religion and state (din \e devlet).*Th ese ideas w ere largely perceived to be inco m-patible with those of dem ocra cy. For most of the Repu blican period, both strong state secula rism and political Islam problematized dem ocracy. Neither supported a civilsociety in which there would be a marketplace of ideas with a free flow of information, wherecompetition 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 globalmarkets. By the early 1990s, nearly all political parties had embraced economic liberalism andexte nd ed it to the idea that if indiv idua ls were to com pete freely in the marke t, they c ouldma xim ize their chan ces only if civil liberties were gu aran teed (Toprak 1996:101). Th e resultwas an unprecedented growth in all forms of private communication such as private book,mag azine, and newspape r publishing [pjersonal compu ters, fax machines, the e-mail system,satellite broadcasts of international television companies, cable and private television andradio ch ann els (ibid., 102). These comm unications m edia required phalanxes of writers,publishers, celebrity talk show hosts, advertising agencies, marketing consultants, opinionrese arch ers, celebrity aca dem ics, and an army of talking heads and expe rts in every thing. Themedia, both electronic and written, came to occupy a powerful position in public opinion-m akin g (ibid., 103).Parad oxica lly, the ideolog y of neo-liberalism framed a rethinking am ong practitioners ofIslamist discourses that brought them from their historically marginalized citizenship to a newenlightenment about their place in Turkish civil society. The pluralism of Islamic practicesgained currency, and public support grew, even as political Islamism gained a strongerfoothold within Turkish politics and elections. The transition in discourse and publicperception began with state elites (Islamist engineers, bureaucrats, and party politicians), whocreated a new discourse termed the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, which succeeded in placing inthe 1982 Constitution a requirement that religion be taught in primary and secondary statescho ols. Wh en the state created a national exam ination for eleven-year-olds in 1983, there was


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Page 100 [PoLAR: Vol. 22 , No. 2a section on religion. The governing party of Turgut Ozal integrated Islamists into 'Turkey'shierarchy of pow er and statu s (ibid., 108). A cha nge in Article 163 of the Turkish C riminalC od e lifted restrictions on the exe rcise of free speech by Islamist grou ps. A t prese nt, app rox-imately 100 radical Islamist journ als are openly advo cating an Islamist state based on shari'a,which earlier would have subjected them to persecution under article 163 (ibid.). 9Despite public concern for the above events, there was a public spirit of tolerance and agrowing awareness that terrorism had to be differentiated from the right to free speech and thefree exercise of religion. This dem ocratic talk is antithetical to the disco urse of both author-itarian secu larism and political Islam . It was the new Islamist political elites who pressuredthe government in the early 1990s to increase the number of religious schools (imam-hatip).1There also emerged during the 1990s a powerful group of business-minded upper middle-classIslamists who began to create a discourse of Islamic m ode rnism , arguing that Islam andbusiness were compatible, and that a more open society was conducive to both. This discoursetended to distance itself from the claims of political Islamist discourse to the overturning of asecular state and its replacement with shari'a.The new Islamic state and m arket elites supported a new Islamic intelligentsia that increasinglytook on the lifestyles and trappings of modernism. They intentionally adopted the appearanceof 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 belo ngin gne ss ofIslamists within the current popular desire for a more open society, has divided public opinionand led to a new level of skepticism about the intentions of Islamists. As Gole (1996:18)observed,

Yet, the justifiable conc ern of both the secular elites and the western world is thepossible hidden agenda of Islamist politics, that they might use democracy fortheir own ends to implement an Islamic state and thus hijack democracy. Acrucial and eternal question for democrats is, therefore, the allowable degree oftolerance 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 evenmore the old antinomies. For example, in academic discourses, both Islamist and secularistintelligentsia have looked to postmodernism, focusing on common themes of fragmentation,ambiguity, and de-centering to debate their respective cases for pluralism and diversity. But acommon co-optation of democratic discourse into otherwise disparate intentions and meaningsmay serve only to make more apparent the deeper differences that once again have surfaced tonarrow the space for a more open civic culture.Co n t r a c t i o n s o f C i v i c Cu l t u r eThe opening of a space in civic culture for negotiation of Islamic belonging took a turn for thewo rse after a national econo m ic crisis in 1994 led to deva luation of the currency and h ard timesfor Turkey's working and middle classes. These events played into the hands of the WelfareParty, which was perceived by many as the only party in touch with ordinary people throughits grass roots political organizations in villages and urban neighborhoods. Once the Welfare


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November, 1999] Page 101Party came to power, however, military leadership became increasingly alarmed at the politicalineptness of party leaders in both domestic and foreign policy. Bold public statementsespousing old Islamic positions and unorthodox actions by party leaders left more than animpression on the public that the country was moving toward a de facto religious politicalregime. By the time of the 72nc* Anniversary of Ataturk's education reform, its civic-mindedcelebrants were publicly deploying the master narrative to sound the alarm in Turkey's civicculture, including education. A year later, the military had engineered the Prime Ministersresignation and the National Education Ministry announced the new grade eight educationreform that has led to the demise of iniam-hatip schools.We are at the end of our story, which returns us to the begin ning. At presen t, Islam icbelo ng ing has been dealt a blow that sets its project back to a time when se cular nationa lismleft 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 firsthalf of the nineties. The loyalty of Islamists to the founding principles of the Republic has notonly 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 thestate and jailed. In the aftermath of political crisis during the summer of 1997, Islamists aredeemed officially less acceptable citizens now than they were only a few years ago. TodayIslamists are not as free as they were to associate in parliament, state bureaucracy, or civilsociety. And their freedom of religious education (imam-hatip sch ools ) for their child ren is. atleast for the moment, lost in history. This is not the first setback for religious education in asociety dominated by strong state secularism, nor is it likely to be the last.

NotesResearch for this article is based in part on fieldwork conducted in Istanbul during theSpring and early Summer of 1997. Funding was provided by Hamilton College and NSFgrant no. 95 06 12 3. I am grateful to Nuk het Sirman and Ley la Neyzi for specific com m entsthat imp roved this paper. Co nve rsatio ns with Erol Balkan, Ayse Oncu and Haldun G ulalphave helped me to reduce at least some of the complexity of Turkish politics and culture toma nageab le propo rtions. I owe a special thanks to anonym ous reviewers and to Doris Rutzfor hateve r clarity of exp osition appea rs here. Non e of the above are respo nsible forflawed arguments, factual errors, or lack of clarity.1. I use the term ge ne raliz ing to refer to discou rses in which the central terms are kno wn ,

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 narroulyconstrued and shared within particular parties, groups, organizations, or associations. N orm ati ve refers to disco urse that carries moral force through implicit or explicit evalu-ations of good or bad, right or wrong . The discou rses in this article are both gen eralizingand normative because they have the force of having been inscribed in the language of thefounding generation of the Turkish Republic and have since entered into Turkish politicsand literature as well as pub lic life for over seventy-five y ears.

2. Yeni vuzvil. 29 March, 1996.


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Page 102 [PoLAR: Vol. 22, No. 23. The rhetorical allusion to millio ns of Turkish citiz en s can perhap s be justified by the

overwhelming public support behind the military during the episode reported here and thesubsequent outpouring of secular national sentiment occasioned by the capture of theguerilla leader of the Kurdish Worker's Party.

4. The allusion is to Bene dict An der son 's plea to unde rstand nations as a particular kind ofpolitical community that emerges out of empires and great religious systems.

5. See Innis (195 1) for a stimu lating treatmen t of cultural system s in terms of their compa r-ative ability to govern within different scales of time and space.

6. See Habe rma s (1979 ) for a discus sion of truthfulness, wh ich refers to the credibility if aspoken truth . Is it spok en since rely? Does one trust the spea ker?

7. See Toprak (199 6) for exa m ples of the extremity of laws that restrict civil rights and stateburea ucracy as an impe dime nt to individu al auto no m y and the creation of a strong civilsociety.

8. See Mardin (1989 ) for a good discussion of Turkish Islamic pluralism and a mo re opencivil society.

9. Shari'a is synon ym ous withseriat, or Koranic law.10. The graduates of these schools have entered the universities in large numbers and now

exce ed the num bers needed for religious perso nne l (Toprak 1996: 109). Ordinarypeople in the street often rehearse this refrain as a thinly veiled allusion to the growingprese nce of Islam ists in areas of m edia and urban intellectual life that are no rm ative lyassociated with secular elites.

12. Ayse Oncu (untitled and unpublished manuscript) has recently documented the growingsophistication of Islamists in their use of most m od ern techn iques of mas s persu asion,prom otion, marketing, and advertising to convince secu lar Turks that they, the Islamicmiddle class, live lifestyles similar to the secular Turkish middle class. These include newsuburban luxury dwellings, frequenting expensive restaurants, enjoying the pursuit ofleisure activities such as health clubs and golf courses, and participating fully in both thecom mercial and high profile consum ption of the m ode rn Turkish upper middle class.

13 . The allusion is to laws that limit participato ry dem ocracy , such as Articles 141 and 142 ofthe Criminal Code, which outlaw politics on the basis of class (i.e. socialist and com-mu nist parties). Article 163 outlaw s parties on the basis of religion (Toprak 1996:111).

References Ci tedAksit, Bahattin

1991 Islamic Education in Turkey : Medrese Reform in Late Ottoman Timesan d lmam-Hatip Schoo ls in the Re pub lic. In Islam in Modern Turkey:Religion, Politics and Literature in a Secular State. Richard Tapper, ed.Pp. 145-170. New York: I.B. Touris and Co., Ltd.


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Novem ber, 1999] Page 103Anderson, Benedict

1983 Imagined Comm unities. New York: Verso Press.Gole, Nilufer

1996 A uthor itarian Secu larism and Islamist Politics: Th e case of Tu rkey . InCivil Society in the Middle East. Augustus Richard Norto, ed. Pp. 17-43.Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Habermas, Jurgen1979 Com munication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press.

Innis, Harold1951 A Plea for T im e. In Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of

Toronto Press.Mardin, Sherif

1989 Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey. Albany: State University ofNew York Press.Toprak, Binaz

1996 Civil Society in Turk ey. In Civil Society in the Middle East. AugustusRichard Norton, ed. Pp. 86-112. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

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