2. Turkey’s Polarized Politics in the 1990s

“Islamist” refers to a Muslim who advocates a political agenda that applies shari’a, or Islamic law. See, for instance, Jillian Schwedler, “Islamic Identity: Myth, Menace or Mobilizer?” SAIS Review, 21.2 (2001), p. 5.

For the policies of Turkish secularism see Sect. 3 below. “Secularism” in the present study corresponds to what Ahmet Kuru calls “assertive secularism”—a position that, differing from the neutrality toward religion of “passive secularism,” offers itself as an established, activist doctrine. Ahmet T. Kuru, “Passive and Assertive Secularism: Historical Conditions, Ideological Struggles, and State Policies Toward Religion,” World Politics, 59.4 (July 2007).

Established by an amendment to the 1961 Constitution, the NSC had its tasks expanded to include recommendations to the cabinet on national security issues in 1971. Art. 118 of the 1982 Constitution directed the government to consider “with priority” decisions coming from the NSC.

Stephen Kinzer, “Turkey Bans Welfare Party,” New York Times, 17 January 1998; Dicle Kogacioglu, “Progress, Unity, and Democracy: Dissolving Political Parties in Turkey,” Law and Society Review, 38.3 (2004), p. 443; Tezcur, Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey, cit., p. 152. For the opposition against the Erbakan government see Ismail Caglar, “The Welfare Party and the February 28 Process: A Historical Analysis of Turkish Conservatives’ Move to the Center,” Turkish Journal of Politics, 3.1 (Summer 2012). Styled the “February 28 Process” and characterized in the literature as the “post-modern,” or “soft” coup, it was in fact part of a carefully orchestrated campaign of destabilization of the Refah-led government.

In 1973, NSP garnered 11.8 per cent of the vote. On the difference between the Refah (and predecessor parties) of the 1980s and the Refah of the 1990s see Ayse Bugra, “Class, Culture, and State: An Analysis of Interest Representation by Two Turkish Business Associations,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 30.4 (November 1998), pp. 111–12.

In 1991, was called Nationalist Work Party.

A third smaller party—the Reformist Democracy Party (RDP)—was also on the ticket in the attempt to pass the 10 per cent threshold. In 1989 Refah was at 9.8 per cent, with the NMP at 1 per cent. In 1994 and 1995 (municipal and parliamentary elections) NMP continued to garner low percentages suggesting that the collective 16.9 per cent of 1991 need be credited to the rise of Refah.

At the 24 December 1995 parliamentary elections, voters’ turnout was 85.2 per cent.

Ersin Kalaycioglu, “The Shaping of Political Preferences in Turkey: Coping with the Post-Cold War Era,” New Perspective on Turkey, 20 (1999), pp. 71–72. To Hakan Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 214—“[t]he result of the [1995] elections revealed a society sharply divided along secular versus Islamist sociocultural lines.”

Following the 12 March 1971 “warning” by the military, the NSC imposed a martial law in a number of provinces with thousands of arrests. In May, the Constitutional Court banned the NOP for anti-secular activities. In the 1980s and 1990s, the other threat was Kurdish “separatism,” with the pro-Kurdish People’s Labor Party dissolved by the Constitutional Court in 1993.

No leaders of the NOP or of leftist parties were arrested in 1971, and the party was banned only later. Erbakan was arrested during the September 1980 coup and accused of violating the constitutional provision upholding laicism and prohibiting the calling for an Islamic state.

Islam-based movements were labeled an “internal threat” already during the single-party regime when they could not challenge the ruling Kemalists. Among analyses recognizing the increasing polarization in the 1990s see Kogacioglu, “Progress, Unity and Democracy,” cit., pp. 439–40; Tahire Erman, “The Politics of Squatter (gecekondu) Studies in Turkey: The Changing Representation of Rural Migrants in the Academic Discourse,” Urban Studies, 38.7 (2001).

Still in 2010, in taking over the RPP leadership, Kemal Kilicdaroglu defined EU membership as a “civilizational project.” For the long-term strategy that accompanied the European choice, see Pinar Bilgin, “A Clash of Security Cultures? Differences Between Turkey and the European Union Revisited,” in A.E. Cakir (ed.), Fifty Years of EU–Turkey Relations: A Sisyphean Story (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), Chapter 4.

“Civilization means European civilization, and it must be imported with all its roses and thorns,” are the words of one of the ideologues of the Turkish nationalist revolution quoted in Mohammed Arkoun, Rethinking Islam (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), p. 25. The Westernization drive had roots in the attempts to modernize the Ottoman empire and especially in the reform period of the Tanzimat from 1839 on. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 45–46—quotes the instructions given to the new ambassador to Paris in 1719: “to make a thorough study of the means of civilization and education, and report on those capable of application in Turkey.” The adoption of the Latin alphabet had an especially high symbolism as it “cut an important link with the unwanted Ottoman past.” See Akturk Ahmet Serdar, “Arabs in Kemalist Turkish Historiography,” Middle Eastern Studies, 46.5 (September 2010), p. 646; Binnaz Toprak, “Islamist Intellectuals: Revolt Against Industry and Technology,” in Heper et al. (eds.), Turkey and the West: Changing Political and Cultural Identities (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), especially p. 229; Ertan Aydin, “The Tension Between Secularism and Democracy in Turkey: Early Origins, Current Legacy,” European View, 6 (2007).

For parallel considerations see Yousef Al-Sharif and Sami Sahla, “Turkey’s European Union Membership: The Arab Perspective. Notes from the Arab Media,” in Reflections on the EU–Turkey Relations in the Muslim World (Istanbul: Open Society Foundation, July 2009), p. 5; Noah Feldman, The Fall and the Rise of the Islamic State (A Council on Foreign Relations Book, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), Introduction.

Graham Fuller, The New Turkish Republic: Turkey as a Pivotal State in the Muslim World (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2008), p. 26; Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, cit., p. 2. Ottoman sultans began to apply to themselves the title of Caliph in the Nineteenth century, claiming that the title had been passed by the last Abbasid ruler and Caliph to Sultan Selim I in the Sixteenth century.

The Turkish elites’ attitude toward the Arab world changed in the Ozal years. Instead, the Arabs’ position towards Turkey was always complex, with intellectuals looking at it as an example of modernization in Islam. See Nafi, “The Arabs and Modern Turkey,” cit.

Bengio and Ozcan, “Old Grievances, New Fears,” cit., p. 53.

Akturk, “Arabs in Kemalist Turkish Historiography,” cit., p. 650.

See Nafi, “The Arabs and Modern Turkey,” cit. Turkey was declared persona non grata in the Arab world by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. See Nicole Pope and Hugh Pope, Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey (New York: Overlook Press, 2011), pp. 223–27. In an editorial of the Muslim Brotherhood’s paper Al-Dawa, Turkey was labeled a “second Israel” with the implication that it needed be destroyed. See Kemal H. Karpat, “Turkish and Arab-Israeli Relations,” in K. Karpat (ed.), Turkey’s Foreign Policy in Transition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), p. 116.

Bengio and Ozcan, “Old Grievances, New Fears,” cit., pp. 67ff.

To Mustafa Kemal, “[a]ll nations of the world are obliged to draw on European civilization in order to survive and be respected.” Quoted in Al-Sharif and Sahla, “Turkey’s European Union Membership,” cit. As late as 2007, Turkey’s President Ahmet Necdet Sezer took issue with US president George W. Bush for his calling the country an example of “moderate Islam.” See Walter Posch, “Crisis in Turkey: Just Another Bump on the Road to Europe?” EUISS, Occasional Paper 67 (Paris, June 2007).

For instance, Jenny B. White, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), Chapter 3; Ayse Gul Altinay, The Myth of the Military Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (New York: Palgrave, 2004).

Ankara Agreement, Art. 28. Turkey was also a member of the Central Eastern Treaty Organization (CENTO), successor to the Baghdad Pact.

In 1945, President Ismet Inonu explicitly related the introduction of competitive elections to Moscow’s policies and to pressures from the US and Great Britain on the desirability of a democratic Turkey. That year, several politicians applied for the establishment of new parties and in January 1946 four members of the People’s Party founded the Democrat Party. At the signing ceremony of the Treaty of Assistance with the US (the “Marshall Plan”) in July 1947 Inonu declared that, after the first experimental phase (the municipal elections of 1946), the multi-party system would remain as a permanent feature of Turkish politics. See John M. VanderLippe, The Politics of Turkish Democracy: Ismet Inonu and the Formation of the Multi-Party System, 1938–1950 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), Chapter 6. Also, Metin Heper, Ismet Inonu: The Making of a Turkish Statesman (Boston: Brill, 1998), Chapter 5; Paul Kubicek, “Turkey’s Inclusion in the Atlantic Community: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” Turkish Studies, 9.1 (March 2008).

Cihan Tugal, Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). According to Berna Turam, Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006)—decades of unproductive confrontation were replaced by negotiations and cooperation between Islamic actors and the Turkish state, in an “engagement” that transformed both Islamic politics and the state.

Serif Mardin, “Turkish Islamic Exceptionalism Yesterday and Today: Continuity, Rupture and Reconstruction in Operational Codes,” Turkish Studies, 6.2 (June 2005). For a parallel assessment see Sami Zubaida, Law and Power in the Islamic World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003); Sena Karasipahi, Muslims in Modern Turkey: Kemalism, Modernism and the Revolt of Islamic Intellectuals (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009); Hakan Yavuz, Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). To Hakan Yilmaz, “Islam, Sovereignty, and Democracy: A Turkish View,” Middle East Journal, 61.3 (Summer 2007), p. 491—Islam adapted to modern living and became depoliticized, ending the tension with secularism.

Mardin, “Turkish Islamic Exceptionalism Yesterday and Today,” cit., p. 152. Fethullah Gulen’s is a religious movement respectful of the boundaries of the secular state. After the 1997 military coup, Gulen accused Refah of having politicized religion. On the Naksibendi and Gulen see Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., Chapters 6 and 8; Sencer Ayata, “Patronage, Party, and the State: The Politicization of Islam in Turkey,” Middle East Journal, 50.1 (Winter 1996); White, in Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, cit., Chapters 2 and 3, discusses the importance acquired by the movement in recent decades. Some authors use the term “civil Islam” with reference to a model “that shows that it is possible to live as a pious Muslim while embracing soft secular democratic pluralism.” See Muzaffar K. Awan, “Fading Turkish Political Model and the Civil Islam for the Arab and the Muslim World,” Defence Journal, 17.9 (April 2014). The Naksibendi’s reach in the Anatolian hinterland is an important part of Mardin’s “reconciliation” thesis. On the influence of this order and of the religious communities that originated from it, see Ayata, “Patronage, Party, and the State,” cit., pp. 48–50. On Gulen see M. Hakan Yavuz and John L. Esposito (eds.), Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gulen Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003).

A parallel position is Jenny B. White’s, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), pp. 104–5; also Jeffrey Haynes, “Religion and Democratization: An Introduction,” Democratization, 16.6 (December 2009), p. 1054.

Fuller, The New Turkish Republic, cit., p. 17; Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Aspects of Modernization in Turkey and Japan,” American Journal of Sociology, 64 (1958).

Serif Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics,” Daedalus, 102 (1973). Also Mardin’s “Religion and Politics in Modern Turkey,” in J. Piscatori (ed.), Islam in the Political Process (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Arnold Leder, “Party Competition in Rural Turkey: Agent of Change or Defender of Traditional Rule?” Middle Eastern Studies, 15 (1979). Umit Cizre-Sakallioglu, “Parameters and Strategies of Islam-State Interaction in Republican Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 18 (1996)—applied the same paradigm to the experience of the 1980s.

Nur Vergin, “De-ruralization in Turkey and the Quest for Islamic Recognition,” Private View, 1.1 (Winter 1996); also Ayse Bugra, “Political Islam in Turkey in Historical Context: Strengths and Weaknesses,” in N. Balkan and S. Savran (eds.), The Politics of Permanent Crisis: Class, Ideology and State in Turkey (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2002); Leder, “Party competition in Rural Turkey,” cit., p. 82.

Serif Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Kay to Turkish Politics?” in E.D. Akarli and G. Ben-Dor (eds.), Political Participation in Turkey: Historical Background and Present Problems (Istanbul: Bogazici University Publications, 1975), p. 19. To Faruk Birtek, that of Ataturk being solely a revolution from above, a crucial implication was that “[Kemalist] secular radicalism served only to increase the center’s isolation from the already estranged periphery.” Faruk Birtet, “Prospects for a New Center or the Temporary Rise of the Peripheral Asabiyah,” in M. Heper and A. Evin (eds.), Politics in the Third Turkish Republic (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 224.

See Aysegul Komsuoglu and Gul M. Kurtoglu Eskisar, “The Rise of Political Islam and Democratic Consolidation in Turkey,” in M. Aknur (ed.), Democratic Consolidation in Turkey: State, Political Parties, Civil Society, Civil-Military Relations, Socio-Economic Development, EU, Rise of Political Islam and Separatist Kurdish Nationalism (Boca Raton, FL: Universal-Publishers, 2012).

Serdar Kaya, “The Social Psychology of the Ergenekon Case: The Collapse of the Official Narrative in Turkey,” Middle East Critique, 21.2 (Summer 2012), especially p. 149; Altinay, The Myth of the Military-Nation, cit.

A BBC journalist taped the following in a street interview during the 2007 constitutional crisis: “There are many people who are not educated, and who cannot think too much about politics. These are the people who voted for the AKP.” BBC News, “Turkey’s Urban Elite Wary of AKP,” 30 July 2008; Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations,” cit., p. 28, note 52, refers to a poll among university students in 1968–1969 in which only one in two favoured retaining universal suffrage.

See Aydin, “The Tension Between Secularism and Democracy in Turkey,” cit., p. 16.

Called People’s Party until 1924.

In 1950, RPP still carried the small villages in the most backward areas of the country, while the “periphery” that voted for DP was that of more developed towns and of urban provincial peripheries. See Ozbudun, Social Change and Political Participation in Turkey, cit., pp. 47–48. On the DP identification with the “periphery” see also Leder, “Party Competition in Rural Turkey,” cit.; Ayata, “Patronage, Party, and the State,” cit., p. 43. On the political exploitation of the religious factor see also Cizre Sakallioglu, “Parameters and Strategies of Islam-State Interaction in Republican Turkey,” cit., p. 240.

According to Mardin, in “Religion and Politics in Modern Turkey,” cit., pp. 47–48, the Democrats did better in the provinces, appealing “to both some urban elements and to the more developed peasantry.”

See Ayata, “Patronage, Party, and the State,” cit., pp. 44–45; Komsuoglu and Kurtoglu Eskisar, “The Rise of Political Islam and Democratic Consolidation in Turkey,” cit.

Ayata, “Patronage, Party, and the State,” cit., p. 46.

For the RPP see White, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, cit., Chapter 2. The DP government made religion courses mandatory and restored the call to prayer in Arabic. See VanderLippe, The Politics of Turkish Democracy, cit., Chapter 7.

The parties were the National Development Party (1945), Nation Party (1948) and Islamic Democracy Party (1951).

Cizre Sakallioglu, “Parameters and Strategies of Islam-State Interaction in Republican Turkey,” cit., p. 238.

Carter Vaughn Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 251.

The two parties were the Progressive Republican Party (Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Firkasi) in 1924 and the Free Republican Party (Serbest Cumhuriyet Firkasi) in 1930. Between 1924 and 1938, of eighteen revolts, sixteen were in the Kurdish provinces. See Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity, cit., p. 251.

Cited in Mardin, “Religion and Politics in Modern Turkey,” cit., p. 144. However, as Mardin has pointed out, later the DP will not resist the temptation to use religious slogans against the RPP.

See, among other authors, Ahmet T. Kuru, Secularism and State Policy Toward Religion: The United States, France and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Kogacioglu, “Progress, Unity, and Democracy,” cit, p. 437; Yilmaz, “Islam, Sovereignty, and Democracy,” cit., p. 489; Haynes, “Religion and Democratization,” cit. Pushed to resign from the leadership of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) in Summer 2017, Mehmet Gormez (targeted by hard-core Erdoganists) warned about the need to decide “whether this deep-rooted institution is a purely bureaucratic body or whether it represents the scholarship’s tradition that guides our religious-spiritual life.” Cited in Mustafa Akyol, “Why Erdogan Fired Turkey’s Top Cleric,” Al Monitor, 22 September 2017.

Responsible for making religion consistent with the Kemalist principles was the Directorate of Religious Affairs. Ayata, “Patronage, Party, and the State,” cit., pp. 41–42; James W. Warhola, “Religion and State in Contemporary Turkey: Recent Developments in Laiklik,” Journal of Church and State (July 2010). In the late Ottoman period, religion was an instrument for the legitimation of the state. See Erik Jan Zürcher, “The Importance of Being Secular: Islam in the Service of the National and Pre-National State,” in C. Kerslake, K. Oktem, and P. Robins (eds.), Turkey’s Engagement with Modernity: Conflict and Change in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Palgrave, 2010); William Hale and Ergun Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey: The Case of the AKP (London: Routledge, 2010), p. xvii.

The state management of the country’s religious affairs did not change with the AKP in power. Thus, in 2008 the Department of Religious Affairs charged a team of theologians with the task of carrying out a revision of the Hadith (especially with regard to women’s rights), the second most sacred text of Islam. See Mirela Bogdani, Turkey and the Dilemma of EU Accession (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), pp. 67–68.

The ECtHR ruling (before appeal at this writing) came in response to the application filed by some Alevis. See “Column says Turkish Ministry Likely to Appeal Court Ruling on Religion,” BBC Monitoring European, London, 19 September 2014.

Kogacioglu, “Progress, Unity, and Democracy,” cit., p. 435.

Cited in Kogacioglu, “Dissolution of Political Parties by the Constitutional Court in Turkey,” cit., p. 268.

See Samuel P. Huntington, “Social and Institutional Dynamics of One-Party Systems,” in S.P. Huntington and C.H. Moore (eds.), Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society: The Dynamics of Established One-Party Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1970), especially p. 15.

Among authors who have explored this issue, see Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), Chapter 6; Thomas Butko, “Unity Through Opposition: Islam as an Instrument of Radical Political Change,” in B. Rubin (ed.), Political Islam: Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), Volume 1, Chapter 1, and the literature cited by this author. Jeremy Jones, Negotiating Peace: The New Politics of the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), p. 50, notices how “the refusal to permit the opening up of public spaces outside the mosque is one of the most significant contributions […] made to the growth of Islamist political movements.” Additionally, Lise Storm, “The Persistence of Authoritarianism as a Source of Radicalization in North Africa,” International Affairs, 85.5 (2005); Nade Ashemi, “The Arab Revolution of 2011: Reflection on Religion and Politics,” Insight Turkey, 13.2 (2011), p. 17; Mansoor Moaddel, Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 221–22—analyzed the symbiotic relation between authoritarianism and religious radicalism in the Egyptian and Syrian cases. Charles Kurzman and Didem Turkoglu, “Do Muslims Vote Islamic Now?” Journal of Democracy, 26.4 (October 2015), especially p. 101—argue that the success of Islamists when free elections are introduced (what the authors call “breakthrough elections”) recedes when elections are routine.

R. Hrair Dekmejan, Islam in Revolution: Fundamentalism in the Arab World (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1985), p. 176. Also FrédéricVolpi and Ewan Stein, “Islamism and the State After the Arab Uprising: Between People Power and State Power,” Democratization, 22.2 (2015), p. 279: “[D]uring the 1990s, Islamism grew to constitute the principle (if not sole) viable alternative to secular authoritarianism in much of the region.”

“Islamism for us is what pan-Arabism was for our parents,” a Jordanian businessman stated to a journalist. Michael Slackman, “Jordanian Students Rebel, Embracing Conservative Islam,” New York Times, 24 December 2008; Renzo Guolo, L’Islam è compatibile con la democrazia? (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2007) [Is Islam Compatible with Democracy?], p. 54 talks of Islam as a “legitimation code” which is not eliminated by nationalist regimes. Also Yilmaz, “Islam, Sovereignty, and Democracy,” cit., p. 488. On the failure of other ideologies in the context of a rising Islamism see Mahammed Ayoob, The Many Faces of Political Islam (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 2008); Volpi and Stein, “Islamism and the State After the Arab Uprising,” cit.

As amended in 1980, Article 2 of the Egyptian Constitution established Islam as religion of the Egyptian state and “the principles of Islamic shari’a as the basic source of legislation.” Nathan J. Brown and Amr Hamzawy, Between Religion and Politics (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010), Chapter 2. Gamal Abdel Nasser built mosques and made religion compulsory in school examinations (while persecuting the Muslim Brothers). Anwar Sadat tried to lift the ban on the Muslim Brotherhood and named himself “Upholder of the Faith.” Djafar Nimayri’s regime in Sudan in 1983 declared shari’a to be law of the land. More recently, the Syrian Ba’athists re-branded themselves as “patrons of Islamic revivalism,” while Bashar Al-Assad has intensified the process of religious liberalization, eliminated the requirement that schoolchildren salute the Baath Party flag, and allowed public festivals celebrating Muhammad’s birthday. See Sami Moubayed, “The Islamic Revival in Syria,” Mideast Monitor, 1.3 (2006). The early 1980s were a period of extraordinary construction of mosques in Jordan, in a few years doubling the ratio of mosques to population. See Shadi Hamid, Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in the New Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 64–65.

Tolerance of Islamist parties (to buttress the regimes’ legitimacy) is easier in monarchies (Jordan or Morocco), as a monarch feels less threated by the Islamist opposition than a president in power through a military coup. See Chapter 1, footnote 74.

For instance, Olivier Roy, “The Transformation of the Arab World,” Journal of Democracy, 23.3 (July 2012)—looks at the post-2011 role of Islamism focusing on the leaders’ position and using an approach parallel to the inclusion/moderation hypothesis. Based on public opinion surveys, Steven Kull, in “Political Islam in the Arab Awakening,” Middle East Policy, 19.2 (Summer 2012), shows how the same Arab public is highly favorable to democracy while, in equal proportions, wants shari’a as foundation of the legal system—in an understanding of democracy limited to its procedural aspect.

Mardin, “Religion and Politics in Modern Turkey,” cit., pp. 150ff. Founded in 1970 with an openly (if mild) Islamist program, the NOP was closed following the 1971 coup. It reappeared as NSP, to be closed down, with all other parties, when the military carried out the next coup in September 1980. The latter party’s reincarnation, Refah, appeared in 1983. See Haldun Gulalp, “Political Islam in Turkey: The Rise and Fall of the Refah Party,” Muslim World, 89.1 (1999). Also Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity, cit. Chapter 6. In the Senate—that existed between 1961 and 1982 alongside the Grand N—in 1973 the NSP reached 12.3 per cent of the vote.

The economic liberalization and the inability of the system to adapt to changing political dynamics led to increasing support for the Islamist parties to same analyses. See Meliha Altunisik, “The Turkish Model and Democratization in the Middle East,” Arab Studies Quarterly, 27.1 and 2 (Winter and Spring 2005), pp. 48–49; Tezcur, Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey, cit., Chapter 7—explains the rise of political Islam mostly in terms of “party’s adaptation” and broadening electoral appeal.

Heath Lowry, “Betwixt and Between: Turkey’s Political Structure on the Cusp of the Twentieth First Century,” in M. Abramowitz (ed.), Turkey’s Transformation and American Policy (New York: The Century Foundation Press, 2000). A similar analysis on the emergence of “political movements organized on the basis of extreme nationalism or religious fundamentalism,” in the vacuum left by the failure of social democracy, is offered by Ziya Onis, “The Political Economy of Islamic Resurgence in Turkey: The Rise of the Welfare Party in Perspective,” Third World Quarterly, 18.4 (1997).

The two parties had run in a joint ticket already at the 1991 parliamentary elections.

Vergin, “De-ruralization in Turkey and the Quest for Islamic Recognition,” cit.

See especially Onis, “The Political Economy of the Islamic Resurgence in Turkey,” cit.

Besides the authors mentioned, see also, White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey, cit.; Ayse Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” New Perspectives on Turkey (Fall 1997).

Onis, “The Political Economy of the Islamic Resurgence in Turkey,” cit. Other observers and politicians saw Refah replacing the social democrats, even defining it as “a Muslim social democratic party.” See Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., p. 233.

Gulalp, “Globalization and Political Islam,” cit., p. 442.

On different aspects of that identity politics, see Ergun Ozbudun, Contemporary Turkish Politics: Challenges to Democratic Consolidation (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000). See also Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit.; Onis, “The Political Economy of Islamic Resurgence in Turkey,” cit.; S. Bezdogan and R. Kasaba (eds.), Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). An exploration of the Islamic identity and politics is in Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit.; White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey, cit. Yavuz centers his analysis of the evolution of political Islam on the concept of “historical compromise” between the Kemalist, secular state and the country’s Islamic culture.

Onis, “The Political Economy of Islamic Resurgence in Turkey,” cit., pp. 746–47.

Gulalp, “Globalization and Political Islam,” cit., p. 435.

On this and similar understanding of “identity politics” see Onis, “The Political Economy of the Islamic Resurgence in Turkey,” cit.; Ozbudun, Contemporary Turkish Politics, cit.; Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit.; Bezdogan and Kasaba (eds.), Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, cit.; Bugra, “Political Islam in Turkey in Historical Context,” cit., pp. 113ff.; Hale and Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey, cit., Chapter 1.

Gulalp, “Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 23.

Onis, “The Political Economy of the Islamic resurgence in Turkey,” cit., p. 744. Interviews by this author with Turkish academics found that same expectation of a transitory phenomenon also after the 2002 AKP’s victory.

Gulalp, “Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., pp. 23–24: “The postmodern condition has allowed for the popularity of a movement which was hitherto unable to gain a widespread following by questioning the unquestionable truth of the Westernization project of Turkey.”

Figures from Statistical Yearbook cited in Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit. Figures from the TUSIAD study above indicate the same strong trend. Overall, similar data and implications are found in Ozcan and Turunc, “Economic Liberalization and Class Dynamic in Turkey,” cit.

Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit., p. 62.

See, among others, Erman, “The Politics of Squatter (gecekondu) Studies in Turkey,” cit., p. 988. Declared for the first time in 1987 in two Kurdish provinces, the state of emergency was renewed 46 times and in up to 14 provinces. See Turkuler Isiksel, “Between Text and Context: Turkey’s Tradition of Authoritarian Constitutionalism,” International Journal of Constitutional Law, 11.3 (2013), p. 718.

About 3550 villages and hamlets were evacuated in the early 1990s. Also, large portions of the mountain regions were denied access for security reasons drastically limiting the local people’s main economic activity, animal herding. Only a small minority went later back to their villages. For an assessment of the conditions of the Kurds in the 1990s, see Mario Zucconi, “The Kurdish Question and Migration in Turkey,” CSS-CEMES Ethnobarometer, Working Paper 4 (Rome, May 1999). See also Ertugrul Kurkcu, “The Crisis of the Turkish State,” Middle East Report, 26 (Summer 1996); Muge Aknur, Civil-Military Relations in Turkey: An Analysis of Civilian Leaders (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008), pp. 168ff.

Kemal Kirisci and Gareth M. Winrow, The Kurdish Question and Turkey: An Example of a Trans-State Ethnic Conflict (London: Frank Cass, 1997), p. 134.

The thesis of a Refah substituting for social-democracy in the cities compares the shrinking “social-democratic” vote with the increasing success of Refah without accounting for the growth of population in the cities. For instance, Gulalp, “Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 30.

For the debate on this point see Gulalp, “Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., pp. 34–35.

Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 223. If based on somewhat different factual premises, Eugene Weber’s classical work—Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976)—looks at the development of a national consciousness among French peasants as a political modernization process. Rural and small town dwellers in France, Weber found, did not consider themselves members of a common French nation before 1870 and, in some cases, until World War One.

Also see the public opinion survey cited in Yilmaz, “Islam, Sovereignty, and Democracy,” p. 490.

With reference to the early years of multiparty politics, Arnold Leder, “Party Competition in Rural Turkey,” cit., p. 97—showed how parties in Eastern Anatolian villages were becoming instruments of traditional elites.

Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations,” cit., p. 24.

Ozbudun, “Political Participation in Rural Turkey,” cit., p. 35. Emphasis added.

See Ozbudun, “Political Participation in Rural Turkey,” cit., pp. 51–52.

Kudat, “Patron-Client Relations,” cit., pp. 83–84.

See Onis, “The Political Economy of the Islamic Resurgence in Turkey,” cit., p. 752.

Vergin, “De-ruralization in Turkey and the Quest for Islamic Recognition,” cit.

The position is from the “modernist” school of the study of nationalism. To Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, Second Edition, 2006)—the nation is a modern phenomenon that emerged at a point in history due to precise causes, such as the transition from agrarian societies, when literacy was an elite characteristic, to modern, industrial society that is to an environment characterized by information and communication. See also Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998); Brendan O’Leary, “On the Nature of Nationalism: An Appraisal of Ernest Gellner’s Writings on Nationalism,” British Journal of Political Science, 27.2 (April 1997).

Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit., p. 63.

Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit., p. 65.

Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit., p. 65. Istanbul is often referred to as the largest Kurdish city in the world.

See Michael N. Danielson and Rusen Keles, The Politics of Rapid Urbanization: Government and Growth in Modern Turkey (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985); Abdulkadir Yildirim, “Muslim Democratic Parties: Economic Liberalization and Islamist Moderation in the Middle East,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Graduate School, Ohio State University (2010), p. 119. See also Butko, “Unity Through Opposition,” cit. “The socio-economic variables are all significant and confirm that fundamentalism is associated with socio-economic marginalization,” according to Ruud Coopmans, “Religious Fundamentalism and Hostility Against Out-groups: A Comparison of Muslim and Christians in Western Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41.1 (January 2015). With regard to Turkey and consistently with the finding presented in this study, Delibas, The Rise of Political Islam in Turkey, cit., p. 105—stresses how religion offered a sense of identity and community to the newcomers to the city.

Zucconi, “The Kurdish Question and Migration in Turkey,” cit.; Kirisci and Windrow, The Kurdish Question, cit., p. 112; Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., pp. 231–34.

Parallel findings are presented by Karpat, “The Politics of Transition,” cit.

Ozbudun, “Political Participation in Rural Turkey,” cit., pp. 38, 53.

There was an evolution of the party program from NSP to Refah. The question is whether that evolution is sufficient to explain—as in Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., pp. 225–27—the party’s electoral surge of the 1990s.

See Sevret Pamuk, “Political Economy of Industrialization in Turkey,” MERIP Report, 93 (1981). The reforms package was introduced in January 1980 under the Demirel government, but it will take the military regime to implement it.

See Bugra, “Political Islam in Turkey in Historical Context,” cit. See Yildirim, “Muslim Democratic Parties,” cit., Chapter 2. Already in the 1970s, owners of small and medium enterprises tended to identify with the religious party. See Yildirim, “Muslim Democratic Parties,” cit., p. 118. Also, according to Gulalp, “Globalization and Political Islam,” cit., p. 437, the SME absorbed many people recently immigrated to the cities. One businessman interviewed by Yildirim, in “Muslim Democratic Parties,” cit., pp. 123–24, explained that, prior to 1980, “Turkey was being governed by state favoritism and a statist policy. The quotas [for imports and exports] were allocated based on the proximity of firms to particular political parties and bureaucrats.”

MUSIAD complained that “its constituency has traditionally received unfair treatment from the state authorities in terms of the possibility of access to investment funds and other privileges hitherto allocated mainly to large enterprises situated in big cities.” Cited in Bugra, “Class, Culture, and State,” cit., p. 525. Also Hakan Yavuz, “Political Islam and Welfare (Refah) Party in Turkey,” Comparative Politics, 30.1 (1997), p. 72.

More active internationally than TUSIAD, MUSIAD played a major role in the pro-European evolution of the cadres coming from political Islam. See Ozcan and Turunc, “Economic Liberalization and Class Dynamic in Turkey,” cit., especially p. 72; also Ergun Ozbudun and Fuat Keyman, “Cultural Globalization in Turkey,” in P.L. Berger and S. Huntington (eds.), Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Hasan Kosebalaban, “The Rise of Anatolian Cities and the Failure of the Modernization Paradigm,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 16.3 (Fall 2007), pp. 234–36.

See also Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 206; White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey, cit., pp. 42–43.

Kurkcu, “The Crisis of the Turkish State,” cit., p. 6.

Kurkcu, “The Crisis of the Turkish State,” cit., p. 7. Also Gulalp, “Globalization and Political Islam,” cit., p. 441; Ozcan and Turunc, “Economic Liberalization and Class Dynamic in Turkey,” cit.; Gulalp, “Globalization and Political Islam,” cit., p. 441; Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit., pp. 59–60.

Lowry, “Betwixt and Between,” cit., pp. 25–26. Also Onis, “The Political Economy of the Islamic Resurgence in Turkey,” cit.; Bugra, “Political Islam in Turkey in Historical Context,” cit., p. 120; Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit., pp. 59–60.

Onis, “The Political Economy of Islamic Resurgence in Turkey,” cit., p. 752.

Dogu Ergil, “Attitudinal Survey Among the Kurds of Turkey,” paper in English from the original essay for the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (Türkiye Odalar ve Borsalar Birliği, or TOBB) in 1995. See Nathalie Tocci, The EU and Conflict Resolution: Promoting Peace in the Backyard (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 60. Polls in more recent years indicate that no more than 6 per cent of Turkish Kurds have separatist aspirations. See Senem Aydin-Duzgit and E. Fuat Keyman, “EU–Turkey Relations and the Stagnation of Turkish Democracy,” IAI/IPC, Global Turkey in Europe, Working Paper 2 (2012), p. 14. Also Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit., pp. 63ff.

See Gulalp, “Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., pp. 29–30.

Another group coming from the land, the Alevis traditionally aligned themselves with Kemalist secularism to counter the resurgence of the Sunni hegemony. See Ayata, “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey,” cit.; Vergin, “De-ruralization in Turkey,” cit. At the November 2002 election, the Alevis voted for the RPP and in 1999 had voted for Bulent Ecevit’s DSP.

See Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey, cit., p. 221. Marie Jégo, “L’ombre pesante de l’armée,” Le Monde, 15–16 December 2002; Ayata, “Patronage, Party, and the State,” cit., p. 47.

See Komsuoglu and Kurtoglu Eskisar, “The Rise of Political Islam and Democratic Consolidation in Turkey,” cit.

Ayata, “Patronage, Party, and the State,” cit.; Hale and Ozbudun, Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism in Turkey, cit., p. 18; Delibas, The Rise of Political Islam in Turkey, cit.—stresses the importance of the Islamist networks and solidarity, their offering a sense of identity and community to the new immigrant, in the surge of Refah.

Still, Refah never intervened with regard to lack of Kurdish rights. Of the 158 parliamentary seats obtained by Refah in 1995, 35 were Kurdish deputies. See Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., p. 231.

White, “The Islamist Movement in Turkey,” cit.; White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey, cit., p. 7. Also, R. Quinn Mecham, “From the Ashes of Virtue, a Promise of Light: The Transformation of Political Islam in Turkey,” Third World Quarterly, 25.2 (2004), pp. 342–43; Vergin, “De-ruralization in Turkey,” cit.; Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., p. 223—cites a 1997 interview with a Refah’s supporter who, while qualifying the other parties as patronage-based, characterised Refah as “something more than that. It is an expression of our identity.”

See Sultan Tepe, Beyond Sacred and Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 185; Simon V. Mayall, Turkey: Thwarted Ambition (Washington, DC: Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, 1997), Chapter 6.

See Yildirim, “Muslim Democratic Parties,” cit., p. 130.

See especially Frederick Frey, The Turkish Political Elite (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965); Ozbudun, Social Change and Political Participation in Turkey, cit., Chapter 2.

The different appeal of Refah vis-à-vis its predecessor parties is offered as explanation, for instance, by Gulalp, “Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 26; also Tezcur, Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey, cit., p. 151.

For instance, MUSIAD members were skeptical of many of Erbakan’s policies and especially of his anti-EU rhetoric.

See Chapter 1, footnote 74.

See, among others, Kurkcu, “The Crisis of the Turkish State,” cit., p. 4.

White, “The Islamist Movement in Turkey,” cit., p. 18. Emphasis added. Also, Vergin, “De-ruralization in Turkey,” cit.

In interviews by Yavuz, Refah leaders presented their mobilization as a response to the growing Islamization of the squatter towns and a conscious decision to channel that into mainstream politics. Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, cit., p. 218. Yavuz, ibidem, p. 234, is among the few authors recognizing the importance of that politically integrating development.

For a similar conclusion see Gulalp, “Political Islam in Turkey,” cit., p. 25.

Altunisik, “The Turkish Model and Democratization in the Middle East,” cit.; Turam, Between Islam and the State, cit., and others—emphasize historical developments supporting the “reconciliation” thesis but disregard other ones, such as the elimination of religion-inspired parties, and the warnings by the military, from the 1990s on, regarding Islamism as a “threat” to the survival of the secular state. The same authors acknowledge that Refah “radicalized its discourse and framed itself as an anti-system party and got the protest votes in the turbulent 1990s.”

See Jay Ulfelder and Michael Lustik, “Modeling Transition to and from Democracy,” Democratization, 14.3 (June 2007), especially p. 371. Reaching back to Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 10, the authors conclude that “[w]hen most political participation is channeled through factional organizations, the resulting ‘do-or-die’ approach to politics often produces a tense standoff that can encourage the incumbent executive to usurp legislative authority in an effort to end the stalemate, to avert violence, or simply to defeat the opposition. Alternatively it can prompt a military or personalistic coup toward that same end.” On the stalemate produced by polarized politics also see Kai Hafez, Radicalism and Political Reforms in the Islamic and Western Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Chapter 4.