Among the young, jet-setting Turks I’ve met who are interested in Islam, there is a common narrative. I heard it from a successful international book distributor, from a clerk at my hotel, and from a shy university student. You grow up in a family that considered itself Muslim but didn’t really pay much mind to it. You’re practical-minded and aspire to be modern—somewhere in the vast swath of ideological apathy between the die-hard secularists and Islamists who vie for power in the country. Maybe your parents moved to Istanbul from Anatolia and spent their lives struggling to provide for your future. The way the preachers talk doesn’t catch your attention. Even Turkish translations of the Qur’an are difficult to understand because they use such archaic language. You’re a Muslim without knowing quite what that means.
Then something happens, usually between 18 and 25, those ages that marketers and proselytizers alike know are critical to forming a person’s preferences in adulthood. You discover a sheikh who provides the key—maybe in person or through friends, maybe by reading his books. He is an older man who exudes sincerity. His words (in Turkish) speak to your heart, and the Qur’an begins to make sense for the first time. Suddenly it is possible to be both modern and a Muslim.
This story in Turkey reveals, with particular clarity, the ways in which today’s expressions of even the most traditional religions are in themselves new religious movements. They depend on up-to-date articulations of the tradition, which inevitably differ markedly from what went before.
The history of the past century in Turkey has produced a unique religious culture, which makes it a stranger to both of its major influences: European secularism and Ottoman-style Islam. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the Turkish Republic in 1923, he introduced a policy of secularism—most akin to French laicism—to do away with the backwardness that he associated with the rule of Islam. This was only part of Atatürk’s comprehensive nationalist reforms, which also included the transformation of Turkish language. The script was changed from Arabic to Latin letters, and Turkish was purged of the Arabic loan words that flowed freely off the Ottoman tongue.
It soon became clear that Islam would not disappear they way some modernists hoped. In order to keep it in line with the state, Turkey required that all Sunni Muslim preachers be registered with the Presidency of Religious Affairs, which pays their salaries and provides them with state-sanctioned wisdom to dispense. Turkey’s religious minorities, including Alevis and Shias, remain largely ignored by this administration.
At the same time, however, a group of charismatic Turkish Muslims stood out against the current of secularism. Among them were Said Nursi, Necip Fazil, and Mehmet Akif, and they built bridges between the Ottoman religious culture and Turkey’s new face. While they didn’t directly oppose the nationalist regime, they did offer a striking twist to its logic. Islam, they insisted, was even more modern than secularism. Nursi loved to exclaim how science reveals the splendor of God’s creation. All three were poets, drawing on the mystical aesthetics of Sufism. And they were through-and-through Turkish. Ever since, writings from the Arabic-speaking world have attracted little attention in Turkish popular religion. One bookseller told me that while Sayyid Qutb—the Egyptian Islamist thinker—might have been widely read in Turkish twenty years ago, Turks find little need to import their spirituality. Islam’s encounter with modernity there is unlike any other in the Muslim world, so Turks need interpretations of the religion that speak to their experience.
A new generation of Turkish Islamist leaders have since followed the foundational one, guiding believers through a tumultuous century of political coups and secularist backlash. The most prominent among these today is Fetullah Gülen, a preacher who has built a vast international network of schools while becoming a regular on the interreligious dialogue circuit. Because of trouble with the secularist government, he now lives in exile in Pennsylvania. But exile has probably only helped his standing, which earned him the number one slot on Foreign Affairs‘s 2008 list of the most influential public intellectuals.
Another of these inheritors, though less well known in Turkey than Gülen, is Harun Yahya, whose resplendent books revel in creationism, demonic conspiracies, and end-times predictions. Unlike Gülen, who writes in the elegant, mystical-sounding Ottoman Turkish that is common among Islamists, Yahya uses clear, colloquial language, making his ideas all the more at home in a thoroughly modern Turkish lifestyle. He wears Versace and maintains a number of expansive websites, performing an Islamic persona that is anything but a throwback.
Since November 2002, Turkey’s government has been dominated by an Islamist party, which continues to be popular. Nevertheless, even this year they narrowly avoided being shut down by the secularist courts. Aside from the occasional religion-friendly reforms, they have kept their focus on neo-liberal economic development and Turkey’s bid for membership in the European Union.
To the dismay of the secular elite, Islam is making great strides in Turkey today. The president’s wife wears a headscarf, and university students would be allowed to as well if the law permitting them to hadn’t been slapped down by the courts. The cultural tide feels much like the United States at the height of the second Bush administration, when evangelical youth movements seemed to be everywhere in the papers. When an optimistic religion enters the culture of power, it becomes all the more appealing to upwardly-mobile young people. In fact, though I myself was never a supporter of Bush, I’m not sure it was total coincidence that I became interested in Christianity the year after he took over the White House.
This resurgent Islam, like the secularism that opposes it so fiercely, is a distinctly Turkish one. Its language and spirituality show the marks of a century of strange interchanges. And, through the dramatic missionary efforts of Fetullah Gülen and Harun Yahya, both of whom have significant footholds in the West, it is going global.
The New York Times has a new article and video on young Islamist activists in Turkey, well worth checking out.