As Istanbul rejects Erdoğan, its recent history of dissent, where poets, draft refusers and post-theist Muslims perch.
In Turkïye’s municipal elections in March this year, for the first time since 2001, the Islamic-friendly Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by President Tayyip Erdoğan lost the popular vote. For decades the party has been an electoral monster, but the sheen has finally worn off. Numerous cities that had been controlled by the AKP for more than two decades changed hands. Kurdish-majority cities in the country’s south-east voted for the pro-Kurdish Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), despite the high probability that their new mayors will be arrested on fake claims of supporting separatist terrorism.
Does electoral defeat signal the dissipation of Tayyip Erdoğan’s electoral magic? May it even indicate the unravelling of Islamic politics in Turkïye? In 1994, the pro-Muslim Refah (Welfare) Party won control of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (Greater Istanbul) in local elections, the first time a so-called Islamist party came to power in Turkïye’s most significant city. For Muslim activists, Refah’s election heralded new political and economic opportunities. By contrast, many of Istanbul’s laic citizens felt panic and shock. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became city mayor—the beginning of his brilliant career, although he had been active in Muslim youth politics since the late 1970s.
It was in 1994, too, that I arrived in Istanbul to do my doctoral fieldwork research, possessed by vague ideas about studying the burgeoning Islamist social movement that had both spawned the Refah party and thereafter been further stimulated by it. Islamic meetings, symposiums, lectures, journals, bookshops, cafes, protests and piety were everywhere in the city, except for in its richest suburbs. There, in the name of defending ‘contemporary’ life, middle-class residents began to organise their own associations, doubtful, suddenly, whether the state would continue to protect their social distinction.
Today, in an AKP dominated by religiously conservative Turkish nationalists and inspired by neoliberal governance, it is worthwhile remembering this 1990s decade of wild Islamist activism. It attests to the richness of civil society activism in Istanbul in those years, as well as to the growth of a major political faultline: the conflict between pro-Kemalist and pro-Islamic cultural camps (kulturkampf). And of course there were other activists with their social visions organising alongside and against Muslims and Kemalists too. Small and rival socialist parties sought to build relationships with a fractured trade-union movement. Liberal opposition centred itself around the newspaper Taraf (Side). Most significantly, a pro-Kurdish movement, both civil and armed, rallied against the Turkish chauvinism of the Republic, although to little effect in terms of policy modification.
Amidst all this turmoil and strife, the ‘repressive apparatuses’ of the Atatürk Republic rumbled on, enabled by the authoritarian constitution introduced by the junta in 1982 after its 1980 military coup. Without legal reforms, the gap between burgeoning civil society activism and repressive Republican state became too great. The Turkish Armed Forces intervened in parliamentary politics in 1997, forcing the Welfare Party to resign from national government and closing it down in 1999. Tayyip Erdoğan was jailed that same year, ironically for reciting a poem by Ziya Gökalp, the Turkish translator of Émile Durkheim and one of the Republic’s foremost nationalist intellectuals in its founding years. In Turkïye’s Kurdish regions a state of emergency was declared, although that was hardly novel.
Muslim Redux
It took five years for the pro-Muslim social movement to recuperate. Sidelining an older generation of Islamic politicians, in 2002 the newly formed Justice and Development Party (AKP), the symbol of which is a shining light bulb, swept to victory in national elections. Tayyip Erdoğan became Prime Minister.
The AKP government’s first decade (2002–13) at the centre of Turkish politics involved a self-protective project of democratisation. As it sought to de-fang the military, it also expanded political and economic opportunities for its religious and (mainly) working-class voters, including lifting the ban on headscarves that prevented pious female students from studying at state universities. Its 2004 manifesto, Conservative Democracy, claimed that the AKP conceived politics as an ‘arena of compromise’ and democracy as a ‘system that enables different or even opposed styles of life, as shaped by different goals and values scales, to live in the same place together in peace’. Given the rancorous history of state-sponsored ‘cultural revolution’ in Turkïye, it was not surprising that a Muslim-friendly government stressed equality between religious and irreligious ‘lifestyles’, justifying their coexistence as modes of everyday distinction and reflexive public performance.
At the same time, it continued earlier governments’ restructuring of the economy, including a huge increase in the privatisation of publicly owned assets. One result was high rates of economic growth during the 2000s, which facilitated the rise of a non-Kemalist middle class, as well as more equitable patterns of development. According to a World Bank report, Turkïye had become an upper-middle income economy by 2014.
Nevertheless, for a range of reasons, the second decade of AKP rule has been much less successful. The years of ‘easy’ budgetary repair through massive transfers of money to government via the sale of profitable state enterprises came to an end, and since 2013, evidence of a democratic crisis in Turkïye has become overwhelming. With the government’s violent repression of urban demonstrators protesting the environmental destruction of Istanbul’s Gezi Park in 2013 and its urban warfare in cities in the southeast in 2015–16, political constriction structures have become widespread in many arenas of Turkish political life.
Like all previous military insurrections, the (failed) coup d’état in July 2016 was disastrous for Turkish democracy. Opportunistically shutting down the parliament in response, President Erdoğan’s first judicial act was to suspend human rights, precluding individuals from seeking legal redress against arrest. Within a year more than 150,000 people were removed from state employ, with another 50,000 imprisoned. The AKP government also pressed ahead with a referendum on major constitutional reform in the state of emergency, which severely restricted active campaigning against it. Confirmed by a slim majority (51 per cent voted yes), the changes abolished the parliamentary system in favour of a new executive presidential one that granted extraordinary powers to the elected president. Constitutionally, Turkïye now lacks a clear separation of powers, as well as having one of the least free media in the world.
What is the significance of these anti-democratic developments?
In claiming a regime crisis, many accounts of contemporary Turkish politics minimise resemblances between the politics of the AKP present and the corporatism of Republican politics that dominated the past. Some accuse the current government of threatening Turkish secularism and of pursuing a long-term goal to re-Islamise the political system. Yet on a range of central issues, it is important to note the continuities of AKP politics with Turkïye’s longer history of democratic deficits, chauvinistic nationalism and limited laicism.
For example, despite claiming since 2001 that it was better able to solve the Kurdish issue than the Republican ‘secularists’, the AKP has been violently assimilationist towards non-Turkish ethnic minorities in the south-east of Turkïye. Similarly, its anti-labour policies mimic the Republic’s history of political and constitutional constraints on union organising. The AKP has expanded the budget of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (the Diyanet)—the core Republican institution established by Mustafa Kemal in 1924 to control and propagate Sunni Islam—despite earlier promises to abolish it. It has continued, too, the authorised version of Kemalist Islam that seeks to inculcate citizens with a religious militarism the morality of which includes obedience to the state. In short, and like Kemalism, its political ‘system’ is best understood as reflecting a dual project: a cultural mission intended to inspire people via propagation of certain ideals, significations and moods connected to a good society and an authoritarian politics.
Practising citizenship
What is to be done? Regardless of the continuity between AKP actions and historical features of Turkïye’s foundational social order, today a more significant issue concerns the contemporary response to the AKP’s part-social movement, part-coercive hybrid politics from the ‘side’. Returning more recently to Istanbul for fieldwork, I have become interested in people’s everyday existential politics there, including insurgent, alternative and furtive experiments in new ways of practising citizenship. All of them involve people refusing to be mobilised by the government, turning their backs on its charisma and interesting themselves in other practices and purposes.
Critically, at least for the religious claims of the AKP, many Muslims are also exploring non-AKP ways of being political and anti-Diyanet ways of living one’s religious life. During the massive Istanbul protests in 2013 against the government proposal to redevelop Gezi Park, I remember a remarkable iftar meal celebrated on the first night of Ramazan (9 July) that brought together thousands of Gezi Park protesters in all their diversity—Muslims, Liberals, Kurds, socialists, LGBTs, environmentalists and so on. We sat down cross-legged on the famous paving stones of Istiklal Avenue to break the fast, a long ribbon of sheet laden with shared food stretching for kilometres down the street. Five hundred metres away, blockaded by police at the entrance to Taksim Square, the AKP held its own official iftar meal, provisioned by the Greater Istanbul Council.
Equally revealing has been the recent anxiety amongst Diyanet officials about an apparent crisis of faith amongst pious young people, spurred on by sensational media coverage of the emergence of ‘hijabi atheists’ and the turn to ‘deism’ by religious youth. In response, the Diyanet convened a consultative body in 2018 to address the problem, resulting in a decision to ‘declare war on deism’. Although the meaning of deism for pious youth in the Turkish context is not clear, the Diyanet interpreted this drift away from religion as a threat not just to God but to the Republic. As the head of the Diyanet said, decrying the foreignness of the ideas: ‘No member of our nation can be interested in such a perverse, false notion’. For the Diyanet, atheism is also perceived as endangering the state—a fear that drives its constant policing of spiritual or pacifist trends amongst young Muslims.
Over the last year or so I have met with pro-union and anti-capitalist pious Muslims; with Muslim art practitioners taking interpretive liberties with Ottoman music and visual arts (Sufi music, calligraphy, water marbling, textual ornamentation and so on); with self-directed connoisseurs of Ottoman Islamic built environments and building complexes, who craft a different present by establishing alternative relationships with the objects and places created by previous generations; and with Muslim conscientious objectors, who reject both public manifestations of official Islam and the Turkish state’s affective politics of national security.
Indeed, religious refusers radically undermine the affective ideologies of the AKP central government and the Kemalist opposition alike. In 2007 Enver Aydemir became the first explicit Muslim conscientious objector, exposing himself to character assassination from both pro-government newspapers and AKP-aligned intellectuals. Since then, scores of brave young men have followed. One shared strategy of Muslim refusers involves their fierce deconstruction of the military’s use of the term cihat (jihad) to dignify military service for a non-Islamic and nationalist state. Another is their common accusation that the Turkish army’s suppression of Kurdish civil society and its concomitant militarisation of the Kurdish issue contravenes Koranic injunctions against waging war on fellow Muslims. None accept the Diyanet’s fatva that conscientious objection to military training is prohibited in Islam. Most ‘shocking’ in the Turkish context is their denial that soldiers who die in the course of military duty for the Turkish nation-state are martyrs (şehitler): on the contrary, Muslim objector İnan Aru asserts that slain conscripts are ‘sacrificial victims of national sovereignty’.
Aru is a writer as well. He weaves these critical threads together in a poem uploaded to the conscientious objectors webpage. ‘In the name of God, the Merciful and the Compassionate’, declares its first line. Its final verse asserts that
No army that surrounds the world can nullify the Owner of All Possessions [Malik-ül Mülkü].
I will not pick up a weapon.
There will be flowers in my hair, earrings on my ears, rings on my fingers.
I will not wear degrading ranks on my shoulders
that taint the beauty of the wild child within me.
I will not march in step,
my feet will guide me in all the winding paths to truth.
And oh, my Sultan, my Lord, my General,
don’t tire your lovely mouth by giving me orders.
From now on I will not be subject to any command
other than the word of truth.
A more merciful Istanbul
How common is this active resistance to or fluid evasion of the AKP regime? As indicated by electoral results in Istanbul, my feeling is that today many people are seeking to make their lives meaningful through alternative engagements with Islam, Ottoman practices and places, Republican history, political institutions like military service and the Diyanet, and the urban environment itself. To do so, they must ignore the insistent invitation to orient themselves to the existential meanings of being Turkish and Muslim provided by an authoritarian and mobilising party-state. Desirous of something else, people pursue a diverse range of overlapping citizenly strategies and practices, participating in various methods of living differently in Istanbul. Attending to and constituting with others a more merciful Istanbul for themselves, their lives are small and rich.
Last year a friend took to me to his favourite Ottoman mosque. He showed me the finely carved stone bird-houses seamlessly attached to its walls and gates. Centuries later, free birds still flit in and out of their holes. Together we marvelled at the hospitality they received from their miniature medreses, designed with tiny Islamic cupolas, latticed windows, minarets and domes crowned with crescents.
Muslim homes for irreligious birds, I thought. It seemed in keeping with the Islam of many of my friends in Istanbul, in which they interpret and adapt religious actions and beliefs for themselves, challenging the assimilationist styles of religious-nationalist solidarity authorised by the AKP’s Diyanet. We can call these religious acts secular, because in them people seek to de-link their own religious insights from AKP state processes, not conjoin them. So, ironically, in the end it may be the practices of non-AKP Muslims that finally separate state and religion in Turkïye, uncoupling what the projects of Tayyip Erdoğan and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk alike have long held together.