When Islamism Marries Ultra-Nationalism

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Sep 7, 2021 Turkey
A pro-Erdogan rally in Rize (3 April 2017). Photo by Mark Lowen via Wikimedia Commons. A pro-Erdogan rally in Rize (3 April 2017). Photo by Mark Lowen via Wikimedia Commons.

When Islamism Marries Ultra-Nationalism

By : Esra Özyürek

[This article is part of a roundtable on "The Shifting Islamist Sector in Turkey." Read the other contributions to the roundtable here.]

I am reading Utku Balaban and Nihat Celik’s most helpful contributions at a time when massive fires are burning forests across the country and the AKP government is failing in its response. The Turkish Lira is on a free fall in its value, the pandemic is not under control, once almost tangible dreams of EU accession have been replaced by tense relations with Europe, and the country has recently been shaken by the revelations of a mafia boss who explained how the state apparatus is routinely utilized to expropriate property to the benefit of those close to circles of power. The economy, security, education, democracy, as well as foreign relations are in shambles. As the support for the AKP rapidly diminishes in polls, the government is becoming more authoritarian. After twenty years of Islamist rule, Turkey feels close to a failed state. Can this be explained as the failure of Islamism, or something else?

Utku Balaban argues that “Islamists in Turkey successfully purged the strongest secularist political establishment in the Muslim world without dismantling the state apparatus. Islamists now control that apparatus and deploy it, together with the language of democracy, in their own favor.” The first decade of the 2000s definitely corresponded to Balaban’s depiction. However, at the moment ultra-nationalist political actors with close ties to the mafia from the 1990s are back in the state establishment. Patronage and deep corruption seem to have made the state apparatus practically non-functional. The state is not able to respond effectively to any natural calamity, from flood to fire, or deliver many services including basic rule of law. Islamists and nationalists do control sources of power, but they no longer use the language of democracy. And at this point, it is not clear whether what unites the ruling minority is Islamism or their desire for controlling money and power. How can we explain this major change from the first to the second decade of rule by the AKP?
What has proven most durable and also most dangerous is perhaps even more important: the toxic brew that for decades has intertwined Islamism with ultra-nationalism.

Both Celik and Balaban emphasize the importance of economic relations behind the choices made by the AKP. Balaban argues that Islamism came to power in Turkey through the support of small industrialists. He rightly argues that the AKP rose on the shoulders of small industrialists “who emerged in the 1980s initially in the most industrialized regions of the country and played a pivotal role in export-led industrialization in the decades to come.” Yet as Turkey no longer plays the role it used to play in the 1990s and early 2000s and as the world is shifting to a new age of nationalism, AKP rule no longer benefits the small-scale industrialists. At the moment, the AKP government mainly provides for a very small group of construction companies. Serving the interests of such a small group cannot be maintained through democracy.

Celik emphasizes how humanitarianism is built on the global connections established since the 1980s and the accumulation of wealth from those connections. He argues: “in the last decade Turkish humanitarian NGOs witnessed a rapid growth, in part supported by the growth of conservative capitalist groups and in part due to the preferential treatment that they received in regulatory oversight and tax treatment from the AKP government.” It is important to point out that Turkey is following global trends in humanitarian aid, which are moving away from being neutral and based on international human rights and towards far more purpose-driven, interest-based relations. It is again important to point out that even though Turkey has received a large number of migrants, it is also a country where migrants are forced to live in deeply unfavorable conditions. Turkey does not follow the standards of the 1957 Refugee Convention or the 1967 protocols and does not afford migrants any rights. Furthermore, humanitarian efforts and even the goal of projecting soft power globally are inevitably hampered by the failure of the Turkish economy.

Treating the current state of Turkish politics and the economy as a result of policies initiated by the AKP, which might end if the party leaves office, may be a mistake. The early economic success of the AKP might have benefitted industrialists but was detrimental to workers and farmers. These policies were made possible by the structural changes put in place following the 1980 military coup. It is again the same military coup that changed the constitution and built the foundations that made the contemporary turn towards authoritarianism possible. The language of Islam was effective in mobilizing votes and establishing social and political control. But it proved to be easily replaceable with ultra-nationalism when necessary. It might be useful to approach the dominant ideology in Turkey as a combination of Islamism and ultra-nationalism for which the groundwork was laid by the 1980 military coup. While this roundtable is engaged with shifts in the Islamist sector in Turkey, what has proven most durable and also most dangerous is perhaps even more important: the toxic brew that for decades has intertwined Islamism with ultra-nationalism. This combination has been astonishingly successful in enabling an increasingly smaller group of elites to accumulate exponentially larger amounts of wealth at the expense of the people who voted for them.

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Sep 7, 2021 Lebanon
Cihan Tugal By :
Cihan Tugal

Islamic Movements, Industrialists, and Aid

[This article is part of a roundtable on "The Shifting Islamist Sector in Turkey." Read the other contributions to the roundtable here.]

These explorations of the Islamic sector in Turkey take up two key constituents thereof: small businesses and aid NGOs. Much has been written on these topics, but both Utku Balaban and Nihat Çelik make novel contributions.

Small Industrialists


The strengths of Utku Balaban’s account are the parsimony and the emphasis on Islamists’ relation to the world economy. The role of small industrialists in the success of Islamist parties is crucial. They have been central to almost every major twist and turn in Turkish Islamist politics. However, this role can be overemphasized. In Balaban’s analysis, the specificity of the interests of politicians, activists, and working classes tend to be reduced to the interests of small industrialists. Even though the latter can explain a lot, they can’t explain everything. Balaban states that the exceptional strength of Turkish small industrialists (in comparison to small industrialists in other Muslim-majority countries) is the main factor that rendered their coalition with Islamists sturdier than anywhere else. Yet he doesn’t tell us who these Islamists are, what they want and why, and how their activities have metamorphosed in the last few decades.

I applaud Balaban’s attempt to deploy Capital, Volume 2 for a theorization of Islamist politics in the context of class-making. We need such bold theoretical interventions in order to break the insularity of Islamism studies. However, while enlightening in many regards (e.g. the petty-bourgeois nature of the Gezi protests), this broad framework runs into problems as it reduces current Turkish petty-bourgeois politics to secularism. A big chunk of Islamist activists come from (or are headed towards) the new petty bourgeoisie, and the movement cannot be understood without theorizing them.

In other words, the cost of Balaban’s parsimony is the neglect of historical messiness. Balaban’s analysis of Turkey’s exceptionally strong Islamist government draws attention to the role of material factors. This emphasis on the material (as a binary opposite of the theological) is not new, and comes with some problems. Do we really need a tight opposition between materialist and ideational analyses of Islamism? The first have been more prevalent among critical scholars, the latter in mainstream media and scholarship. But we can combine material and ideational approaches.

Take the Iranian regime as an example. It is impossible to understand this regime without a serious consideration of how the twentieth-century evolution of Shia jurisprudence interacted with Third Worldist thought, and how Iran’s place in the capitalist world economy shaped that interaction. Bababan mentions, in passing, that there have been no socialist Islamist governments, and he uses this as one piece of proof for his materialist approach. But the first ten years of the Islamic Republic got pretty close to a Third Worldist version of socialism. Arguably, this left traces on the regime’s institutions, even as they swung between state capitalism, corporatism, rentierism, and neoliberalism in the following decades. Although exclusively materialist or ideational monographs, essays, and articles do inform us about the details of these processes, a comprehensive understanding requires the appreciation of both kinds of dynamics. 

With these caveats in mind, I read Balaban’s account as a fresh perspective into a quite well-studied topic (the role of small businesses in Turkish Islamist success). Some of the hypotheses he puts forth (e.g. regarding the importance of small sweatshops in big cities) are novel ones. They need to be discussed and evaluated by the scholarly community and could transform the way we study Islamism.

Charitable NGOs


In Nihat Çelik’s account, we see more sustained integration of material and ideational factors, but less emphasis on the global transformations of the late twentieth century. Along with (national) political and economic realities that Balaban also discusses (such as the centrality of a new conservative business class), Çelik pays more attention to the motivations of non-business actors. But missing from his framework is the world-historical context that favors state-NGO-capital cooperation in reshaping social welfare networks and institutions. This neglect could indeed produce the false “Islamic uniqueness” perception that Balaban warns against (even if this is not Çelik’s intention). The centrality of (both religious and non-religious) aid NGOs has intensified throughout the world due to socially-oriented versions of neoliberalism, and this is certainly not unique to Islam. We need a broader theoretical framework to discuss this global turn.
A very important, and mostly neglected, part of that puzzle is how the anti-capitalist legacies of Islamism are buried, repressed, distorted, or absorbed in world-historical time, essentially reducing Islamism to capitalist Islam.

Ironically, while we do need the kind of meta-theoretical approach that Balaban uses to decipher the codes of Islamic business, that endeavor has taken my own research back to the specificities of the history of Islamic movements and position-takings (and not “Islam” as a distinct, and irreducibly unique, religion). I have come to this history not simply due to my ongoing interests in theology and ideology, but because the very relations of Islamic aid NGOs to other (Islamic, Christian, and secular) NGOs pointed me in this direction.[1] Çelik’s piece is very strong in highlighting the relations of NGOs to business interests and to the regime, but does not delve into NGOs’ relations with each other. For a full understanding of Islamic aid, we need a sustained field analysis of charitable organizations.

Nor can the mass base of the Turkish regime be understood without probing into the life trajectories and subjectivities of participants in the Islamic sector. Çelik’s essay takes cognizance of these, but mostly through references to Islamic motivations in general (which then get shaped by political and economic factors). The role of Islamist ideologies (and the way they have evolved in the last decades) does not receive scrutiny. 

A very important, and mostly neglected, part of that puzzle is how the anti-capitalist legacies of Islamism are buried, repressed, distorted, or absorbed in world-historical time, essentially reducing Islamism to capitalist Islam—which is not this religion’s fate, but the outcome of political and organizational processes. For an adequate picture of the Islamist sector in Turkey, we need to take seriously the histories of Islamic actors. Included in this is the story of each major NGO, as well as the innumerable smaller organizations they have influenced.

Top-down and/or materialist histories cannot fully capture the complexity of IHH, for instance. This organization is usually perceived by regime opponents as an obedient tool of the government. However, its cadres, leaders, and activists have had very complex relationships with the regime, as well as with other NGOs. True, they have willingly served the regime in many instances, some of them quite decisive. Nevertheless, their actions and militancy have in turn shaped the regime itself. Concomitant to consent-building through its reliance on such organizations, the Turkish regime has had to cater to their agendas, which offers a partial explanation of its drift away from the governing party’s initially more (neo)liberal and pro-Western path. 

***

In short, we have before us a very complex set of tasks that cannot be exhausted by one or two monographs or scholars. We need more histories and ethnographies of Islamic businesses, activists, workers, and charitable organizations. These should explore both the global and the grassroots, material and ideational making of these actors. Despite an abundance of scholarly work on the subject, we are only beginning to understand and explain Islamism, especially its relatively neglected economic dimensions. Since the issue is so multi-faceted, panels and roundtables such as the one you are reading have a great value in highlighting its various aspects. 

Notes


[1] Cihan Tuğal, Caring for the Poor: Islamic and Christian Benevolence in a Liberal World (London: Routledge, 2017). But curiously, most field-analytical scholarship (either of the Bourdieusian or the new institutionalist variety) ignores ideological histories, and especially the way these are connected to regime- and consent-making.