The Naqshbandi-Khalidi Order and Political Islam in Turkey Svante E. Cornell & M. K. Kaya, Hudson Institute
In the past two
decades, Turkey has emerged on the global scene. It has enjoyed dramatic
economic growth that has catapulted it into the exclusive G20 club of major
economies; and under the rule of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and
Development Party (AKP), Turkey has enjoyed unprecedented
political stability. For the past fifteen years, the AKP has formed a single-party government, a remarkable
feat given Turkey’s tumultuous politics.
The AKP’s tenure was at first lauded in the West as the triumph
of democratic forces over semi-authoritarianism. The AKP inherited a system in which Turkey’s General Staff
and high judiciary often dictated terms to officials. But over time, the AKP moved to change Turkey: it steadily turned away
from Europe, focusing on Turkey as a Middle Eastern power with a growing
Islamist and Sunni sectarian ideological character. Over the past five years,
the AKP has also moved on the domestic front, infusing the
education system with Islamic themes. In scenes that would have been
unthinkable only a few years ago, President Erdoğan brandished his Quran at
public rallies during the June 2015 electoral campaign, often beginning his
remarks with Quranic citations.
This article is not a
study of the policies of the Turkish government; it is an inquiry into the
religious and ideological environment informing Turkish political Islam.
Turkish political Islam, and with it Turkish politics, is increasingly based on
powerful religious orders and brotherhoods, collectively termed tarikat and cemaat,
respectively. These communities constitute the deep structure of Turkish power,
and share a common ideological source: they belong to, or stem from, the
Khalidi branch of the Naqshbandi Sufi order. While they differ from one another
in interpretation and tone, the Naqshbandi-Khalidi groups have formed Turkish
political Islam, and through the AKP, the Khalidi
worldview has become the dominant political force in Turkey today. With only
slight exaggeration, the ruling Justice and Development Party as well as the
government it has led could be termed a coalition of religious orders—a fact
generally ignored by analysts of Turkish politics. This article discusses the
background of the religious orders in Turkey, focusing on the
Naqshbandi-Khalidi order, before studying the various offshoots that have
assumed important roles in Turkish politics today.
Religious Orders in the Late
Ottoman Empire and the Early Republic
Religious orders and
communities have played an important role in Turkish politics and society since
the Ottoman period. These are part of, or offshoots from, the mystical Sufi
tradition in Islam, called Tasavuf in
Turkish. This tradition is based on receiving spiritual guidance from masters
forming part of a chain of teachers going all the way back to the Prophet
Muhammed. As a result, various masters formed congregations, some of which
evolved into large orders (Tariqat) that span
countries and continents. In turn, these orders are subdivided into sub-orders
or branches (kol) and further into various lodges (dergah). The Naqshbandi order is among the largest such
orders in the world, and throughout history has played a critical role in the
spread of Islam. In the modern period, there have been offshoots of these
orders, which are not strictly Sufi congregations, but religious communities of
a more modern rather than mystical nature. The Nur movement and its offshoots,
the Fethullah Gülen movement, is a case in point.
The
role of these orders has undergone several phases. Prior to the nineteenth
century Western-style reforms, they were tied closely to the Ottoman
bureaucracy; importantly, however, they never played a direct political role.
In the late Ottoman period, they gradually weakened as Western educational and
secular principles gained ground. In the early years of the Turkish Republic,
they were systematically suppressed. From 1950 to 2002, they gradually
re-emerged on the political scene, effectively usurping power from 2002 onward.
The
ebb and flow of the influence of religious orders dates back to the Ottoman
defeat at Vienna, and the ensuing military losses to Western powers. This set
in motion a process of renewal and reform, which gradually led to the decline
of the influence of the Ulema, the clerical establishment. Paradoxically, the
Orthodox Naqshbandi order initially benefited because the destruction of the
Janissary corps in 1826 also led to the closure of the heterodox and moderate
Bektashi order, which had enjoyed considerable influence in the bureaucracy.
The Naqshbandi-Khalidi order filled the void left by the Bektashis in the
bureaucracy and Ottoman intellectual life.
At
the same time, the growth of schools providing Western-style secular education
negatively affected the Islamic madrassah system. This secularization
threatened the influence of the Ulema over the Ottoman Empire, motivating the
religious orders in their ideological opposition to Westernizing reforms.
The purge of the
Bektashis led the Khalidi sub-order of the Naqshbandi order, named after Khalid
al-Baghdadi, to briefly gain in importance. Baghdadi reformed this order in the
early nineteenth century, dispatching a large number of disciples—116 in all—to
spread his teachings across the Ottoman Empire and beyond, including
destinations as far away as Indonesia and Afghanistan. The impact of the order
on Turkish society and politics far surpasses what is usually assumed; its
ideas have exerted strong influence on numerous spinoff movements, including
practically all of the politically relevant Islamic social movements in the
country today. Almost all religious orders and communities in Turkey hail from
the Khalidi order. The most well-known of them is the Iskenderpaşa lodge in
Istanbul, which produced the Milli Görüş movement—the
“National Outlook” movement created in the mid-1960s which produced Turkey’s
Islamist political parties and was led by Necmettin Erbakan. But the Menzil,
Nurcu (including the Fethullah Gülen community), the Süleymancı, and Işıkçı
groupings, among others, also all trace their lineage to the order.
While the religious
orders and schools saw their influence over politics and administration decline
in the last century of the Ottoman Empire, they mostly maintained their
influence on social life. Moreover, the duality between modern schools and
madrassahs gave them a role in education. But with the creation of the Republic
of Turkey in 1923, the sultanate and the caliphate were abolished. In 1924, the
Law on Unification of Education (Tevhid-i tedrisat kanunu)
similarly abolished all schools providing religious education. Following the
1925 Sheikh Said rebellion in the east, led by a Naqshbandi sheikh, a November
1925 law closed all religious orders, lodges, and monasteries. This ended legal
recognition of all religious orders. Furthermore, the transition to the Latin
alphabet in 1927 curtailed the influence of religious figures on the state, and
especially on the education system. This was not a coincidence: Atatürk and his
followers explicitly sought to neutralize religious orders and brotherhoods, as
well as the influence of their members.
Naturally,
this radical revolutionary secular movement generated a backlash. The religious
groups were forced underground and adapted their strategies to a long-term
struggle. Especially in the eastern parts of the country, where government writ
was weak, the Naqshbandi brotherhoods continued their activities
surreptitiously. As religious education was outlawed, many students went abroad
for religious education, primarily to Islamic centers in places such as Cairo,
Baghdad, Damascus or Medina. A significant portion of these students reimported
Salafi Islamist thinking and the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood upon their
return to Turkey. While not as strong as in the Arab world, hardcore
conservative views soon developed in Turkey, and found expression in the
political scene. Importantly, these ideas cross-fertilized with the
Naqshbandi-Khalidi order’s views, in spite of the order’s Sufi status. In
practice, the order’s orthodoxy and politicized nature made it an ally rather
than an enemy of the Salafi-influenced ideas, including those of the Muslim
Brotherhood.
The
hardcore secularist policies of Atatürk’s time, often termed Jacobin in nature,
did not outlive him: even in the period between his death in 1938 and the
introduction of democracy in 1950, pressure on religious groups eased somewhat.
With the advent of multi-party democracy, secularism surrendered its monopoly
on power. The Turkish state rapidly adjusted to both the demands of society and
those of international politics. Across society, voluntary secular associations
were weak and Islamic groups constituted the leading organized political
forces, rivaled only at times by leftist outfits and trade unions. Moreover,
given Turkey’s fear of Soviet encroachment, the state from the 1950s onward
leaned increasingly on Islam as a bulwark against communism. This trend was
true before the 1980 military coup, but it was greatly enhanced during military
rule in the early 1980s, when Sunni Islam and Turkish nationalism fused
together to form a new state ideology. The governing elites always intended to
retain control over religion; gradually, however, they lost control to the
religious brotherhoods and communities.
From
the 1950s onward, Islamic organizations re-emerged. To reduce the growing
shortage of clergy, the state created faculties of theology and Islamic
institutes. In parallel to these state-controlled organizations, the religious
brotherhoods gradually started emerging from underground. This period saw the
organization of religious communities such as the Nurcu, Süleymancı, and
Işıkçı.
The Naqshbandi-Khalidi order and the Iskenderpaşa Lodge
Sufi orders are known
for their esoteric nature, in contrast to orthodox Islam. This has often
implied an emphasis on mysticism over literalism and strict interpretation of
Sharia law. It would be a mistake, however, to view the Naqshbandi order
through this lens. It stands out among Sufi orders for its compatibility with
orthodox, official Islam. Indeed, the Naqshbandi differs from most Sufi orders,
almost all of whom trace their __silsila__—their chain of spiritual
transmission—back to Muhammad via his son-in-law Ali, who is the first imam in
the Shia branch of Islam. By contrast, the Naqshbandi is the only order to
trace its chain of transmission through the first Sunni Caliph, Abu Bakr. This
explains the order’s firm allegiance to the orthodox Sunni tradition, and its
strict adherence to Sharia, with mysticism only a second story subservient to
the fulfillment of formal Islamic duties.1
A central figure in
the order’s development is the seventeenth century Sheikh Ahmad al-Sirhindi,
who reinforced the orthodoxy of the order and its opposition to Shiism while
strictly regulating ijtihad(independent
reasoning) “within the bounds of the Quran and Sunna.”2Sirhindi advocated an
“activist Sufi practice that encouraged political and social life at the
expense of older Sufi practices of withdrawal from public affairs.”3 In the nineteenth
century, this thinking would be picked up by Khalid-i-Baghdadi, a sheikh of
Kurdish descent from present-day northern Iraq who was initiated into the
Naqshbandi in India in 1809. He developed a new branch of the order known as
the Khalidi branch, orKhalidiyya, which reinforced
Sirhindi’s ideas with a powerful rejection of foreign rule, or non-Islamic
ideas. From the North Caucasus to Indonesia, this struck a powerful chord among
Muslims subject to European colonization. In the Ottoman lands, it resonated
with a population chafing under European-imposed “capitulations,” or
preferential treaties. Soon, the Khalidi order began to eclipse others in
prominence in the Ottoman Empire. It became a public force in the 1820s, urging
“the reinstatement of Islam as a guideline for reform” and the “promotion of a
stricter use of the Sharia.”4 As the Westernizing
reforms of the Tanzimat period won the day, the Khalidi order positioned itself
firmly in the political opposition.5
In the three decades
that followed, Kotku became the informal leader of Turkish political Islam,
promoting the Khalidi doctrines in the new environment of multi-party
democracy. Kotku was influenced by anti-colonialist thinking, urging his
disciples to unshackle Turkey from foreign “economic slavery” by developing
indigenous industry. He understood the importance of modern science and
technology as much as he opposed the cultural values of the West, arguing that
by imitating the West, the Turks had “lost the core of [their] identity.” He
believed Muslims “should try to capture the higher summits of social and
political institutions and establish control over society.”6 In the bureaucracy,
Kotku’s followers successfully ensconced themselves in the State Planning
Organization, allowing them to influence economic and social policies and
municipal personnel appointments.7
It is difficult to
overstate the role of Kotku and the Iskenderpaşa lodge. He parted with his
immediate predecessor, Abdulaziz Bekkine (1895-1952), who had prohibited the
mixing of Islam and electoral politics. He encouraged a generation of pious
Muslims to take positions in the state bureaucracy, and started the process of
infiltration and takeover of state institutions that would help political Islam
dominate Turkey. As the Turkish scholar Birol Yeşilada has observed, “The
Nakşibendis always emphasized the need to conquer the state from within by
aligning themselves with powerful sources of capital and political actors.”8 More directly, Kotku
eventually formally sanctioned the split of the Islamist wing from Turkey’s
center-right, giving his blessing to Necmettin Erbakan to form the National
Order Party in 1969. A leading Islamist of the time relates that Kotku told
Erbakan that “the country has fallen into the hands of freemasons imitating the
West … for the government to fall into the hands of its true representatives
within the boundaries of laws, forming a political party is an inevitable
historical duty for us. Be part of this enterprise and lead it.”9
The
roster of Kotku disciples and Iskenderpaşa members who attained prominent
political positions include not just Erbakan, but subsequent President Turgut
Özal, his more conservative brother Korkut Özal, subsequent Prime Minister and
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, his Interior Ministers Abdülkadir Aksu and
Beşir Atalay, and close to a dozen other ministers during Erdogan’s tenure.
Erbakan’s political
ambition gradually strained the relationship to the Iskenderpaşa community,
causing the latter to recede from politics.10 As long as Kotku was
alive, this public rift was contained. But in 1978, two years before Kotku’s
death, Korkut Özal, then a senior figure within the National Salvation Party,
led a quiet rebellion against Erbakan’s style of management, claiming to have
received Kotku’s blessing for his revolt.11Following Kotku’s death,
leadership of the community passed to his son-in-law, Professor Esad Coşan.
Coşan further distanced the order from Erbakan, and for all practical purposes
severed the link between his lodge and Erbakan’s politics. The lodge itself
subsequently declined in influence; Coşan left Turkey for Australia following
the 1997 military intervention, where he died in a car accident in 2001. He was
succeeded as sheikh by his son, Nurettin Coşan, who remains in Australia. While
the religious leadership of the lodge is a thing of the past, its lay followers
constitute the core of the AKP’s leadership,
underscoring its outsized influence on Turkish politics.
The Offshoots of the
Naqshbandi-Khalidi Order
While
the Iskenderpaşa order broke ground by taking political Islam into politics as
a separate force, its potential remained unfulfilled largely because many other
religious communities declined to join forces with it. Prior to studying the
evolution of political Islam in Turkey, it is therefore relevant to briefly
review the offshoots of the Naqshbandi-Khalidi order, whose total membership
far exceeds that of Iskenderpaşa.
The Nurcu Movement
The Nurcu community
views itself not as a religious order but as a school of exegesis. It was
founded in the early twentieth century by Said-i Nursi, a preacher born in the
Kurdish-dominated areas of eastern Turkey. While Nursi would very much develop
his own ideas, his early studies were influenced greatly by Naqshbandi-Khalidi
sheikhs, in whose madrassahs he studied. He was formally initiated into the
Naqshbandi order, eventually receiving his own ijazah from
a Khalidi sheikh in Doğubeyazıt. Nursi aimed to open a madrassahs in Van, in
eastern Turkey, in which he would combine the teaching of religious subjects
with mathematics and science. To receive support for his plan, he went to
Istanbul and then on to Salonica, today’s Thessaloniki, Greece, to join the
Committee for Union and Progress. All Nurcu (literally followers of light,
since Nur means light in Turkish) communities that followed, including
Fethullah Gülen’s global movement, have pursued this ambition: to raise new
generations trained in both religious education and modern science, thereby
closing the gap between the Muslim world and the materially more advanced
Western world.
While Nursi was
persecuted in the early days of the Republic and sent into exile, he redoubled
his efforts in the 1960s, during the reign of the Democrat Party. Nursi’s
students subsequently spread all over Turkey, and began setting up circles to
study his Risale-i Nur, a multi-volume
exegesis in which Nursi expounded on the meaning of the Quran. Nursi’s writing
stood out for its organization; rather than following the Quranic organization
of longest to shortest verses, he organized his writing logically. After Nursi’s
death, however, his movement split into the Okuyucular (readers) and Yazıcılar
(writers) factions, which divided over the methods for teaching the Risale. For a variety of reasons, further splits
occurred. Today, there are approximately forty different Nurcu groups in Turkey
and abroad, a dozen of which remain influential, the largest and most important
of which is the Gülen group. 12
The Nurcu emerged as
a civil society initiative, which was even illegal from 1965 until 1985. Under
the government of Turgut Özal, himself a Naqshbandi-Khalidi follower, the
criminalization of the propagation of Sharia was abolished with changes to
Article 163 of the Turkish penal code. This legal mechanism had been used to
block most religious activities in Turkey. Its removal allowed Nurcu groups to
spread beyond informal study circles in members’ homes, or sohbet, to begin organizing foundations and associations
as well as student dormitories, known asyurt. These provided
an ideal environment for informal religious education, and made the Nurcu
perhaps the best-organized and most widespread religious movement. With some
exceptions, the Nurcus have tended to abstain from direct party politics; until
the creation of the AKP, they supported secular
center-right parties rather than the Islamists of Necmettin Erbakan.
The Fethullah Gülen Movement
While the Gülen
movement is a Nurcu group, its sheer size and influence alone means it deserves
separate treatment. Fethullah Gülen is the most prominent religious figure to
emerge from the Nurcu movement. He began his activities in Izmir in the 1960s;
at the time, a religious vacuum obtained, owing to decades of state policy. A
generally more permissive environment had crept into Turkey as well. Gülen took
advantage of this setting. His movement refers to itself as the Hizmetmovement, literally meaning “service,” a term
taken from Said Nursi’s concept of Hizmet-i imaniye ve Kur’aniye,
or service to the faith and Quran. Its aims include the creation of a “golden
generation” through education. Already in the movement’s first publication, Sızıntımagazine, Gülen urged his followers to focus on
the education sector. The Işık evleri, or
private student residences, were the first education institutions of the
movement. This is where the Risale was
taught in a programmatic and systematic manner. In 1982, as Özal facilitated
the establishment of private educational institutions, Gülen moved to turn a
student dormitory into his first school, the Yamanlar koleji in
Izmir.
The number of schools
grew rapidly over time, attracting particularly the children of conservative
and center-right elites who sought a better education than the state could
offer in a culturally conservative setting. In the early 1990s, the collapse of
the Soviet Union provided an opportunity to export this model to the
predominantly Turkic-speaking states that had just gained their independence.
Azerbaijan was the first among them, followed by Kazakhstan, where the movement
rapidly built 29 schools. Today, the Hizmet movement
runs an astounding 1,200 schools in 140 countries. Aside from schools, the
movement has operated hundreds of preparatory courses for Turkey’s university
entrance exam, as well as several universities, including the flagship Fatih
University in Istanbul. The movement controls financial institutions such as
Bank Asya and Asya Finans; a large business association, TUSKON; and a number of charitable organizations operating
both in Turkey and abroad. It also controls a considerable media empire
including Turkey’s largest-circulation newspaper, Zaman, as well as other newspapers, magazines, and
television and radio stations. Many pious followers of Fethullah Gülen, who
explicitly reject the notion of political Islam, embody the compatibility and
overlap of Islam and liberal democracy. In fact, for many of them, the former
nourishes the latter.
The Hizmet movement stands out compared to most
religious communities in Turkey for other reasons too. Generally, they take a
pro-Western worldview. Gülen himself and his entourage reside in self-imposed
exile in the United States, and their policy stances on international affairs
differ greatly from the other orders. Indeed, if the private and social lives
of Gülen followers differ little from other religious communities, their
attitude toward the West does. They are generally pro-American and support
Turkey’s European Union integration; even more uniquely, they appear largely
devoid of the anti-Semitism that is entrenched in the other orders and
movements. In this sense, they diverge considerably from the Naqshbandi-Khalidi
movement’s roots.
As noted, the Gülen
movement stayed away from electoral politics, focusing instead on increasing
its presence in the state bureaucracy. The Hizmet movement’s
considerable success in this regard would initially make it Erdoğan’s main
partner, but also his eventual nemesis.
The Süleymancı
After
the banning of religious education in 1925 a group under the leadership of
Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan vowed to continue teaching the Quran to individuals and
small groups. Tunahan received his own religious education in the
Naqshbandi-Khalidi order. This movement came to be known as the Süleymancı,
which aimed primarily at providing Quranic education and keeping the mosques
open. In a number of places where there were too few officially sanctioned
imams, the movement dispatched its own to keep mosques functioning. After
Quranic courses were permitted in 1947, students from the movement spread
across Turkey. Today, the movement stands as one of the most broadly organized
in Turkey and Europe—in Germany alone, the movement controls several hundred
mosques and Quranic schools.
Upon his death in
1959, Tunahan was succeeded by his son-in-law, Kemal Kaçar, who accelerated the
process of expanding Quranic courses and student dormitories. This was
facilitated by the movement’s support for Süleyman Demirel’s Justice Party,
through which Kaçar served as a member of parliament for three terms. Upon
Kaçar’s death in 2000, a struggle for leadership broke out between the brothers
Ahmet and Mehmet Denizolgun, Tunahan’s grandsons from his other daughter. This
led to a split in the movement, but not to its withdrawal from politics: the
brothers simply supported different parties. Mehmet became a founding member of
the AKP, while Ahmet—who controlled most of the movement’s
support—shifted political affiliations. He was elected to parliament in 1995 on
the Welfare Party ticket, but quit the party following the 1997 coup. He kept
his seat in parliament, and was briefly appointed Minister of Communications
for the Motherland Party (ANAP) under Mesut Yılmaz’s government
in 1998. The movement supported the shrinking ANAP in 1999 and
2002; in 2007, Ahmet Denizolgun ran on the ill-fated Democrat Party ticket; in
2011 and 2015, his block supported the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), with the movement’s vote purportedly a crucial factor
in helping the MHPovercome the 10 percent threshold in
2011.13 Thus, the group
stands out in that a large portion of it never supported the AKP.
The Menzil Order
The Menzil are a
Naqshbandi-Khalidi community based in Adıyaman that quickly branched out into
Ankara and Istanbul. It began to spread rapidly after the 1980 military coup,
partly because of its reputation as a religious order supportive of the state.
As a result, it spread across western Turkey as one of the fastest-growing
religious orders in the country. Like many religious communities, it tended to
support center-right parties until the creation of the AKP. In fact, many former right-wing activists whose death
sentences were commuted after the coup joined the Menzil order. Moreover, the
late founder of the National Unity Party, Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu, was close to the
order. In the AKPgovernment, two ministers have been
known to represent Menzil: Energy Minister Taner Yıldız and Health Minister
Recep Akdağ. In 2005, the movement created a business association, TÜMSIAD. In
a testament to the order’s clout, TÜMSIAD boasts 15,000 members, and in June
2015, TÜMSIAD leader Hasan Sert was elected to parliament as anAKP member.
Religious Orders and Turkish
Politics from Erbakan to Erdoğan
Turkish
political Islam has evolved based on the interrelationship of these religious
orders. While their total membership is unknown, they number in the millions;
and since members tend to take guidance from their leaders and vote as reliable
blocs, they have often played a decisive role in Turkish politics. From the
1960s to the 1990s, the Islamist parties led by Necmettin Erbakan struggled to
unite Turkey’s religious orders and communities, many of which continued to
support parties of the center-right. These parties were secular and pro-Western
in orientation, but respectful of religion and eager to court pious voters.
The Narrow Base: Necmettin
Erbakan and Milli Görüş
Necmettin Erbakan was
the person who would realize Sheikh Kotku’s ideas. Born into a religious family
in Sinop in 1926, Erbakan went on to earn a Ph.D. in engineering in Germany.
Seeking a political career, Erbakan tried to win a slot on the center-right
Justice Party’s list in the 1969 parliamentary elections, but Justice Party
leader Süleyman Demirel, his former university classmate, vetoed the move. This
personal rift mirrored a growing fissure between the Islamist wing of the
Justice Party and its leadership, which had so far maintained an uneasy “big
tent” of liberals, Islamists, and Turkish nationalists. Increasingly, Islamists
and nationalists betrayed deep frustrations with the party’s pro-Western
tendencies and ties to big business. This played a role in the break between
the Islamists and the Justice Party following a failed attempt by Islamists to
take over the party in 1968. Simultaneously, the nationalists formed their own
party, the MHP.
Erbakan
ran as an independent candidate in the 1969 elections and won a seat in
parliament. With Kotku’s blessing he then founded the National Order Party.
Upon its closure, he founded the National Salvation Party, which played a
significant role in Turkish politics throughout the 1970s. The party received
nearly 12 percent of the vote in 1973, and subsequently was a junior partner in
various coalition governments from 1973 through 1979. In the aftermath of the
1980 coup Erbakan was banned from politics, but in 1987, he began rebuilding
political Islam through the Welfare Party, which became the largest party by a
razor-thin margin in 1995 thanks to the fragmentation of the center-right.
Erbakan served as prime minister in a coalition government from 1996 to 1997,
but was removed from power after the February 28, 1997 military intervention,
which subsequently led to the party’s closure and earned Erbakan a lifetime ban
from politics.
The views underlying
Erbakan’s long political career have been remarkably consistent and deeply
influenced by the Khalidi order’s teachings, as well as global political
Islamic movements of the Muslim Brotherhood tradition. The movement rests on an
urge to build a powerful, industrialized Turkey that serves as the natural
leader of the Muslim world. While accepting the contributions of modern
science, and even arguing that modern Western science was based on Islamic knowledge,
Erbakan vigorously opposed Western culture. Erbakan also viewed international
politics from an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist perspective: Turkey and the
Islamic world were being exploited by the West, which in turn was controlled by
a global Zionist world conspiracy. In Erbakan’s posthumously published memoirs,
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories occupy a central place, just as they play a
crucial role in the movement’s ideology. Erbakan believed that Turkey needed to
build its own heavy industrial base, yet the Western powers had prevented this
at every step. Instead of seeking an alliance with the West, therefore, Turkey
should form and lead an Islamic union of states.14
Erbakan was a
divisive figure. When he set out, he sought to build a coalition with the Nurcu
and Qadiri brotherhoods, but this fell apart in the mid-1970s owing to his
domineering personality. Eventually, significant figures from the Iskenderpaşa
community itself left the movement. They looked elsewhere, and eventually lent
their support to Turkey’s center-right parties. In the 1990s, the ANAP, led by Turgut Özal and later Mesut Yılmaz, but also
the True Path Party (DYP), led by Süleyman Demirel and later
Tansu Çiller, profited most from these defections. The aversion toward Erbakan
and Milli Görüş was so pronounced that when the two
center-right parties gradually collapsed under mismanagement and corruption in
the late 1990s, many religious communities in the 1999 elections instead
preferred to lend support to either center-left leader Bülent Ecevit and his
Democratic Left Party, or the MHP.
A Coalition of Religious
Orders: Erdoğan’s AKP
The fragmentation of
the religious orders ended with the formation of the AKP. Even though the leaders of the newly formed
party—Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül—were Iskenderpaşa members, they broke with
Erbakan over his leadership style and his unwillingness to compromise. Most
importantly, they realized that in order to achieve power and defeat Turkey’s
secular establishment, they needed to broaden the movement’s base. The nascent AKP also benefited from a series of developments.
First, Turkey’s center-right had fragmented into two parties, the DYP and ANAP, whose programs
were practically identical, but whose leaders were prone to infighting. Since
their leadership was also susceptible to corruption, the two parties gradually
destroyed one another, leaving an enormous void in the traditional center of
Turkish politics. Second, the 2000-01 financial crisis, which included a
currency devaluation of nearly 40 percent, led to a “throw them all out”
sentiment among the Turkish people. And finally, in the environment following
the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, Western leaders, and in
particular the United States, eagerly sought to cultivate “moderate Islam.” The AKP became the main beneficiary of this realignment,
which favored the party over the increasingly stagnant and unelected secular
establishment.
The AKP actively and purposefully sought to build a
big-tent party that could capture the different constituencies that had
supported the center-right. This included outreach to non-religious voters,
especially in the initial phases. But more than anything else, Erdoğan’s power
rested on a coalition of religious orders and communities. Erdoğan’s tactics
did not differ from those earlier center-right parties who had eagerly courted
religious communities. The difference was that now a core elite from theMilli Görüş tradition did the courting, urging all
religious communities to unite under one roof. By skillfully handing out favors
including political appointments and a share of the economic pie (in
particular, government contracts in construction), Erdoğan built a model of
political leadership that was strongly dependent on the support of religious
orders and communities.
The Milli Görüş, the Naqshbandi
and the Muslim Brotherhood
The emergence of
political Islam on the Turkish scene derives from the Naqshbandi-Khalidi order;
but it is also closely connected to the emergence of political Islam elsewhere
in the Muslim world, particularly the rise of the Egyptian Ikhwan al-Muslimeen,
the Muslim Brotherhood. Numerous scholars have noted the influence of
Brotherhood thinkers Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, as well as Abu Ala
al-Mawdudi, founder of the South Asian Jamaat-e Islami, on Erbakan and the Milli Görüş movement.15
This
connection may seem contradictory, since the Ikhwan—which in many ways leans
toward the purist Salafi Islam—is in principle opposed to Sufi orders and their
esoteric nature. However, this mutual hostility between Sufism and the
Brotherhood does not appear to apply to the Naqshbandi-Khalidi order. Indeed,
the Khalidi order’s deep Sunni roots, its strong attachment to Orthodoxy and
the Sharia, and the movement’s heavy politicization make it highly compatible
with the views of the Brotherhood. In many parts of the Middle East there is
cross-fertilization between the two organizations.
This connection is
visible especially in Germany, where both the Brotherhood and the __Milli
Görüş__—forced into exile by their respective governments—developed intricate
links, including intermarriage between the Erbakan family and Brotherhood
leader Ibrahim al-Zayat. Through close practical cooperation, these
organizations took on a dominant role in German Islamic organizations.16 In this sense,
Erbakan became what one scholar called “a crucial conduit of the Muslim
Brotherhood into Turkey.”17 The effect of this
was to make “Turkish Islamic thought more universally oriented despite its
inward-oriented nationalist-local leanings … thus the understanding that Islam
is not something limited to personal life but also has public claims, took root
in the Turkish form of Islamism.”18
Erbakan developed connections
with Brotherhood organizations all over the Middle East and North Africa, and
Erdoğan continued to develop these linkages.19 Thus, leading
Brotherhood figures began appearing at the Welfare Party’s conventions in the
1990s.20 Attendees at Erbakan’s
2011 funeral reads like a “who’s who” of the global Muslim Brotherhood,
including Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and the Brotherhood’s former spiritual
guide, Mohamed Mahdi Akef.21 The ideological
continuity between the Brotherhood and the AKP is demonstrated
by the fact that leading representatives of the various branches of the
Brotherhood, including Hamas, have been honored guests at AKP conventions.
The Milli Görüş was never an integral part of the
Muslim Brotherhood, but the Brotherhood certainly considered it something akin
to the Turkish version of the Brotherhood, much as it viewed the Jamaat-e
Islami of Pakistan. Thus, despite its nominally Sufi origins, the
Naqshbandi-Khalidi character of the AKP’s leadership in no
way insulates it from the radicalization of political Islam in the Middle East.
Quite the contrary, the Khalidi order’s Arab and Kurdish roots explain the AKP’s more radical currents, including its foreign policy
toward Hamas, Syria and Egypt.
The Rise and Fall of the AKP-Gülen
Alliance
Among the various
religious groups that underpin Erdoğan’s rule, the Gülen movement has played a
unique role. It stayed out of politics and at a distance from Erbakan. But from
the 1970s onward, the movement built a significant following in the bureaucracy,
not least because its members had received a high-quality secular education,
unlike many in the other orders. The movement was especially well represented
in the judiciary and police. In the 2002 elections, the Gülen movement lent its
support to the AKP, but continued to maintain its
distance. The movement’s politicization began in earnest after 2007, when a
confrontation occurred between the AKP and the Turkish
military. This solidified the informal alliance between the AKP and the followers of Fethullah Gülen, who harbored
strong resentments against the military and judiciary for persecutions launched
in the aftermath of the 1997 military intervention. The Gülen movement made
common cause with the AKP’s leadership, and
deployed its assets in the bureaucracy, particularly in the judicial system and
police, to stage a counter-attack on the secularist elites that sought to bring
down the AKP government, including through an effort to have
the courts close the party down.
As a result, the AKP and the Gülen movement jointly developed the
massive Ergenekon and Balyoz court cases, which landed hundreds of military
officers, bureaucrats, journalists and academics in jail on charges of seeking
to overthrow the government.22 It now appears that
the Gülen movement, which was able to mobilize hundreds, if not thousands, of
followers in the government bureaucracy, used this opportunity to seek an
ever-growing level of influence over state institutions. After the 2010
constitutional referendum, the movement was able to capitalize on the changes
in the judicial sector to effectively take control of both the police and the
judiciary. This conflicted with Prime Minister Erdogan’s increasingly bold
efforts to centralize power: he had decided that Turkey needed a
super-presidential system of government in order to turn himself into an
elected sultan. Clearly, in such a scheme, he saw the Gülen movement as just
another religious community he could subordinate to his interests. The Gülen
movement, it seems, had other ideas. Its representatives say they objected to
Erdoğan’s undemocratic aspirations on principle; critics would retort, with considerable
evidence, that they wanted to be co-owners of the state, effectively exercising
a veto power on government policy. The former explanation is undoubtedly true
for many of the movement’s more democratic followers. But judging by the abuses
committed in the Ergenekon and Balyoz trials, it is clear that the movement’s
representatives in the bureaucracy were more interested in power than
democracy.
This tension
ultimately led to a prolonged power struggle. It began when prosecutors
affiliated with the Hizmet movement
attempted to detain the head of Turkish intelligence, Hakan Fidan, one of
Erdoğan’s closest confidantes. In response to this challenge, Erdoğan
methodically worked to break down the movement’s influence by transferring,
demoting, and firing many officials. At the same time, Erdoğan took on the
movement’s educational institutions. This confrontation turned ugly in December
2013, after the Hizmet-affiliated prosecutors
accused four government ministers of large-scale corruption and arrested many
of their associates and family members, and prepared to strike against
Erdoğan’s family, a move that the latter narrowly prevented. This led the
government to seek a tactical alliance with secular and nationalist forces in
the judiciary.
Erdogan had not
expected this Hizmet attack, but moved on
the offensive at home and abroad. Abroad, he tried to convince foreign leaders
from Central Asia to Africa to close the same Hizmet schools
he had only recently urged them to open. At home, he forged an unlikely and
unholy alliance with the same army he had only recently undermined with the
help of the Hizmet. In the process, hundreds of
civilians and officers that had been sentenced to long jail terms in the
Ergenekon and Balyoz cases were freed. Erdoğan went as far as openly admitting
his mistake and implicitly apologizing to the military in a speech at the
Turkish Military Academy. However, Erdoğan’s claim to have been misled by the Hizmet is disingenuous given the determination
with which he supported the purges of the military establishment. At the time
of writing, dozens of alleged followers of Fethullah Gülen had been thrown in
jail by special courts set up for that purpose.
This
internecine struggle in the Islamic conservative milieu is important because it
is unique: it is by far the biggest fight ever to occur between Islamic groups
in Turkey. Never before had competition between religious groups led to a total
breakdown in relations; but then again, never before had religious groups
enjoyed practically unchecked power in the country. The impact of this struggle
will be felt for decades to come. And while the byzantine shifts of political
alliances are bewildering to the outside observer, one thing seems certain:
Turkish politics is now defined by the relationships among and between
religious orders and communities.
Controlling Official Islam and
Islamizing Education
In
this context, an important and often underrated element is the Erdoğan
government’s attempt to take control of the institutions of official Islam in
Turkey, and to ensure religious dominance of Turkey’s education system. Given
the dominance of the Naqshbandi-Khalidi movements over Turkey’s ruling party,
this has major implications.
Whether in Ottoman
times or during the Republic, the Turkish state has made control of religious
affairs a priority. In Ottoman times, this function was fulfilled by the Ulema
under the leadership of the Sheikh ul-Islam; following the creation of the
Republic, the Diyanet Işleri Başkanlığı, or
Directorate for Religious Affairs, fulfilled this role. While the Diyanet only recently became a powerful
institution in Turkey, it has long kept control over the religious sphere. All
imams in every mosque across Turkey were appointed by the Diyanet, which sanctioned their Friday sermons. This
provided an important counter-balance to the lack of hierarchy within Sunni
Islam, which has led to the often chaotic proliferation of more or less radical
religious groups across the Muslim world. Whereas Muslim youths in Europe are
often subject to radicalization in mosques run by radical imams, the role of
the Diyanetin Turkey considerably reduced this risk. But as
noted, the cadres of theDiyanet were
often insufficient to man all the mosques in the country, and the Diyanet itself was the subject of infiltration by
various religious communities. On the whole, however, the hierarchical nature
of the organization fulfilled an important function of moderating and
controlling religion in Turkey, and state authorities always ensured that
religious communities did not achieve total control over the Diyanet.
Under the AKP, however, the Diyanet has
undergone a process of rapid change. The most obvious is the exponential growth
of the institution. In less than a decade, its budget has quadrupled, amounting
to slightly more than $2 billion while employing over 120,000 people. That
makes it one of Turkey’s largest state institutions, bigger even than the Ministry
of Interior.23
As the Diyanet has grown, the proportion of its personnel
that were regular government bureaucrats has decreased, and it is increasingly
staffed by graduates of Imam-Hatip schools (imam and preacher schools
originally created to provide manpower to Turkey’s mosques) and the theological
faculties. Unsurprisingly, these have come under the influence of the Naqshbandi-Khalidi
order and its offshoots.
The Diyanet has also come to be used as a political
instrument. Until late 2010, led by a secularist-appointed chairman, the Diyanet largely stayed out of politics. But this
chairman responded to Erdoğan’s efforts to involve the organization in the
legislative process by saying that “consulting the Diyanet on legislation is counter to the principle
of secularism.”24 As a result, Erdoğan
appointed his own handpicked candidate, Mehmet Görmez, who has been
considerably more pliant toward the AKP leadership’s
wishes.
As the size of Diyanet grew, so did its social role. In 2011, the Diyanetbegan issuing halal certificates for food
products; the next year, it opened a television station. The Diyanet now produces fatwas, including on demand:
it established a free telephone hotline that provides Islamic guidance on
everyday matters.25 Unsurprisingly, the
number of fatwas being issued is rising rapidly. Legally speaking, the Diyanet’s rulings carry no weight. Following them
is entirely voluntary. However, it certainly has an effect on the conservative
masses.
Imam-Hatip schools
have in recent years even come under the direct influence of President Erdoğan
through the Foundation of Youth and Education in Turkey, which is run by his
son, Bilal. This foundation accepts donations (including a $99 million donation
from a likely Saudi source) and has been remarkably successful at obtaining,
often through cut-rate leases, land owned by government institutions for
educational purposes.26
In
2002, 65,000 students were enrolled in Imam-Hatip schools; today, the figure is
over one million, a dramatic increase that occurred especially after
legislative amendments in 2010 and 2012 made it possible to transform secular
high schools and middle schools into Imam-Hatip schools. Meanwhile, reforms
introduced in 2012 have increased the required amount of religious content
taught in secular schools. Courses on Islamic history and the life of the
Prophet have been added to the curriculum.
While some of these
religious courses remain elective rather than compulsory, it is easy to
imagine—especially outside the secular enclaves of western Turkey—how pressure
from peers and school officials is likely to ensure that few students abstain
from them. These religious reforms have been both offensive and defensive in
nature: offensive, since they aim to shape and mold the views of the population
in the AKP’s favor; but also defensive, because they coincide with
efforts to curtail the Gülen movement’s schools. Indeed, these reforms were
prompted by the realization that the Gülen movement’s schools were producing
individuals with superior education and capability, but who lacked loyalty to
Erdoğan and the AKP.
Under the AKP, official Islam and the education system as a whole has
undergone monumental changes with far-reaching consequences. These changes,
from the mosque to the classroom, are intended to enable Erdoğan and his
entourage to shape and mold the worldview of generations of Turks. And that
worldview, with some idiosyncratic twists, is based on the heavily anti-Western
Naqshbandi-Khalidi tradition. In other words, Turkish official Islam and its
education system are gradually being taken over by the Khalidi worldview, both
in terms of political control and through newly indoctrinated cadres. Moreover,
under the AKP, the Diyanet has
become increasingly politicized. In numerous mosques, reports surface of
sermons given by imams that support and glorify AKP and President
Erdoğan.
In sum, recent
education reforms have increased the religious content of the education system,
leading many schools to be transformed into Imam-Hatip schools, to the point
that 10-15 percent of Turkey’s middle and high school students now study in
such schools. Their education, as well as the sermons of the mosque imams, have
come to be increasingly marked by the beliefs of the Naqshbandi-Khalidi order,
and politically aligned with the AKP. It is obvious that
this will have profound consequences of a political as well as socio-cultural
nature for decades to come.
Conclusions
Following the
creation of the AKP, practically all Islamic orders and
communities for the first time lent their support to a single party. This
party’s core leadership has its roots in the Milli Görüş movement,
itself a creation of the Iskenderpaşa branch of the Naqshbandi-Khalidi order.
But whereas the parties of the Milli Görüş tradition
remained centered on the order, the AKP evolved into
what is now essentially a coalition of religious orders and communities.
Secular and liberal elements in the party—many of which were opportunistic
fellow travelers to begin with, or made common cause with the AKP because of their common enemy in the military
establishment—have been purged as they grow obsolete. The danger of politics
constructed on religious orders was illustrated by the intra-Islamic conflict
between the AKP leadership and the Fethullah Gülen movement. While
there are clear ideological differences between the AKP and the Gülen movement, the struggle between them
should not be mistaken for an ideological one. The competition is primarily
over power.
The rise of the AKP has been paralleled by the rise of religious
communities as political forces. These groups have played the role of voluntary
associations in a Tocquevillean sense, filling the vacuum arising from the
weakness of secular voluntary associations in Turkey. But unlike most voluntary
associations in the West, these groups are motivated by a strong political
agenda, which includes reshaping society in their own image.
In
this regard, an important paradox should be noted. Traditionally, Turks have
tended toward relatively liberal schools of thought in Islam, such as the
Hanafi school of jurisprudence, which grants considerable space to the
interpretation of religious law. By contrast, Arab and Kurdish Islam has tended
toward the more Orthodox schools of thought—the Hanbali and Shafi’i schools of
thought, based on the Ashari tradition, which are much stricter and allow
considerably less room for interpretation.
Secularization
efforts since the mid-nineteenth century have had an effect on Turkish Islam
exactly contrary to their intent. They occurred in parallel with the rapid
spread of the Naqshbandi-Khalidi order and its offshoots across Turkey, which
brought an understanding of religion deeply colored by Arab and Kurdish
traditions to the country. The creation of the Republic of Turkey and the
radical policies of secularization in the field of education led to a breach
with the more liberal religious approach that had formed the core of official
Ottoman Islam. With the introduction of electoral democracy in the 1950s, the
religious vacuum came to be filled by social movements that were almost without
exception products of the Naqshbandi-Khalidi tradition, and thus brought Turkey
more in line with Middle Eastern interpretations of Islam. Indeed, to a
considerable degree, this explains the foreign policies of the AKP government, whose ideological character is
radically different from the Ottomans. The Ottomans were seldom if ever
motivated by religious zeal. What this suggests is that if Turkey’s religious,
educational and political space comes to be controlled entirely by
Naqshbandi-Khalidi ideology, Turkey will irrevocably become a Middle Eastern
country.
In June 2015, the AKP received a major blow, when it lost its majority
in parliament and saw its voter base cut by one fifth, to slightly over 40
percent of the electorate. The election was more a referendum on Erdoğan’s
ambitions than an ideological contest, since it served as a referendum on his
design to create a presidential system. Sixty percent of Turks oppose Erdoğan
and the AKP; however, the sharp divisions between the three
opposition parties—particularly between the Turkish nationalist MHP and the Kurdish nationalist HDP—render the
prospect of a non-AKP government unworkable.
Therefore, the AKP remains the dominant political
force in Turkey, and looks set to remain the senior partner in any coalition
government in the near term. Turkish politics are once again raucous and
unpredictable, and even if the AKP manages to form
a coalition government, either with the Nationalist MHP or with the center-left CHP, the life expectancy of such a government is short. Be
that as it may, the AKP’s electoral setback is unlikely to
generate a process that unravels its reforms. Any coalition government in which
the AKP is a senior partner will be unlikely to revise the
changes the party has introduced in education and in the Directorate of
Religious Affairs. In the absence of such reforms, the question is when Turkey
will pass a point of no return, when the worldview and outlook of its
population will be fundamentally changed.
1 Albert Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Oakland, CA: University of California
Press, 1981), p. 78. ↝
3 Dina Rizk Houry, "Who is a True Muslim? Exclusion and
Inclusion among Polemicists of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Baghdad," The Early Modern Ottomans, ed. Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 266. ↝
4 Şerif Mardin, "The Nakshibendi Order of Turkey," Fundamentalisms and the State, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appelby
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 213. ↝
5 Ibid., p. 214-215; Itzchak Weismann, The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy
and Activisim in a worldwide Sufi Tradition (London: Routledge Press, 2007). ↝
6 Şerif Mardin, "The Nakshibendi Order of Turkey", Fundamentalisms and the State, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appelby.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 222-223; Birol Yeşilada,
"The Refah Party Phenomenon in Turkey," in Birol Yeşilada, ed.Comparative Political Parties
and Party Elites: Essays in Honor of Samuel J. Eldersveld (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1999), p. 137. ↝
7 Esen Kirdiş, Between Movement and Party: Islamic Political
Party Formation in Morocco, Turkey and Jordan (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 129. ↝
8 Birol Yeşilada, "The Refah Party Phenomenon in Turkey,"
in Birol Yeşilada, ed.Comparative Political Parties and Party
Elites: Essays in Honor of Samuel J. Eldersveld (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1999), p. 137. ↝
9 Esen Kirdiş quoting Suleyman Arif Emre, p. 140. Suleyman Arif Emre, Siyasette 35 Yil. (35 Years in Politics) (Istanbul: Kesif
Yayinlari Press, 2002), p. 173. ↝
10 Fulya Atacan, "Explaining Religious Politics at the
Crossroad: AKP-SP," Turkish Studies, Vol. 6, no. 2 (June 2005), p. 191. ↝
12 Prominent groups include: The Yazıcılar Group (led by Ahmet Hüsrev
Altınbaşak); the Kurdoğlu Group (Mehmet Kurdoğlu); the Sözler Group (Mustafa
Sungur); the şura Group (Mehmet Kırkıncı); the Zehra Group (İzzettin Yıldırım);
the Nesil Group (Mehmet Fırıncı); the İstanbul Group (Abdullah Yeğin, Hüsnü
Bayram, Ahmet Aytimur); the İhlas Nur Group (M. Said Özdemir); the Med-Zehra
Group (Muhammed Sıddık Dursun); the Yeni Asya (New Asia) Group (Yeni Asya
Gazetesi, Mehmet Kutlular); and the Gülen movement. ↝
14 For further detail on Erbakan's ideology, see Svante E. Cornell,
Eric S. Edelman, Halil Karaveli, Aaron Lobel and Blaise Misztal's forthcoming
study of Turkish politics, to be published by the Bipartisan Policy Center in
September 2015. ↝
15 Jenny White, "Turkish Coup by Court," Social Science
Research Council, Rethinking Secularism Blog, July
30, 2008. ↝
16 Lorenzo Vidino, "The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest of
Europe," Middle East Quarterly,
Vol. 12, no. 1 (2005); Udo Ulfkotte, Der Krieg in Unseren Städten: Wie Radikale
Islamisten Deutschland Unterwandern (Frankfurt:
Eichborn AG, 2003), p. 35-36, PDF available. ↝
17 Zeyno Baran, Torn Country: Turkey Between Secularism and
Islamism (Palo Alto: Hoover
Institution Press, 2010). ↝
18 Ahmet Yıldız, "Transformation of Islamic Thought in Turkey
Since the 1950s,", in Ibrahim Abu-Rabi, ed. The Blackwell Companion to
Contemporary Islamic Thought(Hoboken,
NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2006), p. 44-45. ↝
19 Steven Merley, Turkey, the Global Muslim Brotherhood, and the
Gaza Flotilla (Jerusalem Center for
Public Affairs, 2011), p. 31, PDF available. ↝
20 Soner Yalçın, Milli Nizam'dan Fazilet'e Hangi Erbakan (Istanbul: Şu Yayınları, 1999). An
excerpt on the matter is available online. ↝
21 "Global Muslim Brotherhood Leadership Gathers at Erbakan
Funeral," The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Watch,
March 20, 2011. ↝
22 Gareth Jenkins, "Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon
Investigation," Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies
Program Silk Road Paper, August 2009. PDF available. ↝
23 "Iste Diyanet'in Bütçesi," Odatv.com, February 19,
2014; "Diyanet'te kaç personel çalışıyor?" Bedir haber, November 11,
2014. ↝
25 Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, "Turkey's Diyanet: the Revival of
Sheikh al-Islam," Moshe Dayan Center, Tel Aviv Notes, Vol. 9 no.
3, February 10, 2015. ↝
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