Problematizing the Study of Religious Nationalism

The study of religious nationalism suffers from an interrelated threefold problem of conceptual, religious, and nationalist seriousness. First and foremost, although a large body of literature has investigated religious nationalism in different cases, most studies rely on a rhetorical employment of the concept, with little or no analytical operationalization. As such, religious nationalism turns into an empty signifier. This is especially true for the pieces of area studies, employing the concept and its correlates in the analyses of potentially fruitful cases of religious nationalism, such as India (Ahmed Reference Ahmed and Ahmed2011a; Hansen Reference Hansen1999; Varshney Reference Varshney1991), Pakistan (Ahmed Reference Ahmed and Ahmed2011b; Varshney Reference Varshney1991), Indonesia (Simandjuntak Reference Simandjuntak2021; Formichi Reference Formichi2010; Bourchier Reference Bourchier2019), Malaysia (Barr and Govindasamy Reference Barr and Govindasamy2010), Burma (Gravers Reference Gravers2015), Sri Lanka (DeVotta and Stone Reference DeVotta and Stone2008), Israel (Yadgar and Hadad Reference Yadgar and Hadad2021; Scham Reference Scham2018; Inbari Reference Inbari2012), Turkey (Haynes Reference Haynes2010; Kaplan Reference Kaplan2005), and the Balkans (Loizides Reference Loizides2009). They cite little, if any, from the literature on religious nationalism and barely offer analytical frameworks for the concept beyond the narrations and illustrations of what is considered as religious nationalism, apart from a few exceptions (e.g., Yıldız and Kizir Reference Yıldız and Kizir2022; Aghaie Reference Aghaie, Aghaie and Marashi2014; Ram Reference Ram2008).

Several political scientists and sociologists also obscure the concept when they exclusively prioritize the correlation or causation between religious nationalism and a set of variables such as globalization (Kinnvall Reference Kinnvall2004; Annavarapu Reference Annavarapu2015), democratization (Antal Reference Antal2008), anti-Muslim attitudes (Shortle and Gaddie Reference Shortle and Gaddie2015), and violence (Baber Reference Baber2000), with little in-depth engagement with the concept of religious nationalism and its literature. Among them, a particular research program on American Christian nationalism (Baker, Perry, and Whitehead Reference Baker, Perry and Whitehead2020a; Perry, Whitehead, and Grubbs Reference Perry, Whitehead and Grubbs2021; Perry, Grubbs, and Whitehead Reference Perry, Grubbs and Whitehead2020; Perry and Whitehead Reference Perry and Whitehead2015; Whitehead and Perry Reference Whitehead and Perry2015; Whitehead, Schnabel, and Perry Reference Whitehead, Schnabel and Perry2018; Whitehead, Perry, and Baker Reference Whitehead, Perry and Baker2018; Baker, Perry, and Whitehead Reference Baker, Perry and Whitehead2020b; Whitehead and Perry Reference Whitehead and Perry2020) brings some conceptual depth, building on a well-designed questionnaire to operationalize the concept.Footnote ¹ However, it should still be noted that these studies focus more on the relationship between Christian nationalism and public stance on a variety of issue areas, such as science, interracial marriage, same-sex unions, and election behavior, reducing Christian nationalism to a variable of prediction, and much less on the literature of religious nationalism, turning American Christian nationalism into a sui generis case.

In any case, the problem of conceptual seriousness refers to an underdevelopment of the concept of religious nationalism. An indiscriminate overstretching of the concept renders religious nationalism an over-loaded category mixing an arbitrarily collected set of concurrent manifestations and components concerning religion and nationalism in a specific case. In this way, the concept remains open to dispute in that its parameters remain far from being patterned beyond the empirical coexistence of religious and nationalist components. It would be a truism to say that the concept of religious nationalism cannot hinge on whether religious items are substantially available in a particular case of nationalism and vice versa. For example, as one scholar carefully observes in the Turkish case, all significant stripes of Turkish nationalism, including the radically secular Kemalist nationalism, tender “their sanitized version of Islam in the making of Turkishness” (Aytürk Reference Aytürk2014, 694). In other words, religious nationalism is neither “a nationalist movement with a few religious undertones” nor one that “may include aspects of religion in the national identity,” but rather it is “stronger than that” (Barker Reference Barker2009, 13).

It comes as no surprise that this problem of conceptual seriousness brings us to the question of what Liah Greenfeld (Reference Greenfeld1996) calls the “religious seriousness” of religious nationalism.Footnote ² This is to question the religiousness of religious nationalism, referring to an overstretching of religion and the religious. Doubting the analytical utility and ontological status of the concept, Greenfeld argues for the secular nature of nationalism, and states that what is presented as religious nationalism in a way that overstretches the concept of religion does not stand for a distinctive kind of nationalism. In her understanding, religious nationalism corresponds to the ethnic-collectivistic form of nationalism in most cases, which makes religion merely an ethnic and racial characteristic of ascription and inalterability. This is because these cases do not imply any “religious seriousness” and do not do justice to the concept of religion, with their “inattention to, and even ignorance and disregard of, basic religious (transcendental) principles” and “the commandments of the faith” (Greenfeld Reference Greenfeld1996, 186–188). She concludes that religion merely serves a function of a diacritical marker, “an outward sign and symbol of collective distinctness” and a tool for nationalist objectives in the absence of more cohesive propensities, ascribed from both within and without (Greenfeld Reference Greenfeld1996, 181–186).

In other words, religious seriousness means the incorporation of religion into nationalism beyond the merely identitarian and symbolic supplies of the religious – even though Greenfeld does not see such an incorporation within the realms of possibility. A cross or crescent on the flag or a reference to God in the national anthem does not stand for a religious kind of nationalism and “is seen in most types of secular nationalist discourse” (Aghaie Reference Aghaie, Aghaie and Marashi2014, 184). Therefore, one should look for a deeper engagement of nationalist actors with the public imperatives of religion to reorganize political and social life along religious lines. It would be plausible to reckon that if there is a distinction between religious identification and religious adherence (Coakley Reference Coakley and Conversi2004, 217–219), the former does not make a nationalist movement a religious nationalist one. One should also take into account Geneviève Zubrzycki’s (Reference Zubrzycki2012) operationalization of the distinction between religion and religious tradition that tries to avoid “a caricatured expansion of the concept of religion,” with more emphasis on the latter as “a material and symbolic resource for identity buildings,” although she does not discuss whether those nationalist imaginations building on their religious traditions should be considered as religious nationalism. It is equally important to draw attention to her call for the further development of the concept of religious tradition “in order to avoid conflating the religious and the sacred” (Zubrzycki Reference Zubrzycki2012, 452). In a similar vein, Gorski’s (Reference Gorski2010, 7; Reference Gorski2019a, 13–36) distinction between religious nationalism and civil religionism is also useful: “Religious nationalists wish the boundaries of the religious and political communities to be as coterminous as possible” while “civil religionists imagine the two spheres as independent but interconnected” (Gorski Reference Gorski2010, 7).

Relatedly, there is also the problem of what we prefer to call the “nationalist seriousness” of religious nationalism, a question raised by Rogers Brubaker (Reference Brubaker2012). Skeptical of the concept, Brubaker argues that religious nationalism is employed in an unhelpful way that overstretches the concept of nationalism. He usefully directs a substantial part of his criticisms at the Islamist cases of Friedland (Reference Friedland2002) and Juergensmeyer (Reference Juergensmeyer1993). Accordingly, he holds that the state-seeking agenda of the Islamist movements such as Hamas, regarded as religious nationalists, and their operation in and through the nation-state do not render them nationalist considering the inescapability of the nation-state as a modern political framework. Therefore, he concludes “If Islamism is a form of nationalism, it is a nationalism without a central role for ‘the nation’” (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2012, 14). Brubaker (Reference Brubaker2012, 14–15) also argues against the idea that “the umma constitutes a kind of nation” or so-called Islamic/Muslim nationalism as a “deterritorialized nationalism” in that it is not imagined in limited and sovereign ways without having a “polycentric or pluralist social ontology” and being the “ultimate source of political legitimacy.”

In other words, nationalist seriousness is the incorporation of nationalism into religion beyond the imperatives of the nation-state and the analogical reasoning of scholars. In the present instance, the “religiousness” of actors in question is indisputable, but their “nationalistness” is considerably doubtable. Although Brubaker does not discuss non-Islamic cases, it should be noted that the scholarly examinations of those cases are often far from falling into this trap of overstretching the concept of nationalism. This is particularly true for a group of studies on American Christian nationalism, which offer a more nuanced account of such incorporation of nationalism into religion. For instance, Gorski (Reference Gorski, Mast and Alexander2019b) identifies four elements, namely racism, sacrificialism, apocalypticism, and nostalgia, in the composition of American Christian nationalism. In a similar vein, Gorski and Perry (Reference Gorski and Perry2022) show that white Christian nationalists imagine the US and American nation as encapsulated by religion and ruled by Christians while simultaneously projecting white supremacism that “idealizes the power of white Christian Americans.” Some investigations of Buddhist nationalism (Keyes Reference Keyes2016; Berkwitz Reference Berkwitz2008; Scott Reference Scott2011; Foxeus Reference Foxeus2019; Tonsakulrungruang Reference Tonsakulrungruang2021) also show the nationalist seriousness of their cases, but they are still not immune from the problems of conceptual seriousness discussed above.

To recap, the problems of seriousness obscure the potentially valuable contributions of the study of religious nationalism to nationalism studies. They overshadow the meaning of religious nationalism, which is understood as an eclectic amalgam of the religious and the national. An overstretching of these concepts results in both an underdevelopment and overinterpretation in the study of religious nationalism. Although some corrective steps can be found (e.g., Gorski Reference Gorski2019a; Reference Gorski, Mast and Alexander2019b; Zubrzycki Reference Zubrzycki and Turner2010; Reference Zubrzycki2012; Aghaie Reference Aghaie, Aghaie and Marashi2014; Barker Reference Barker2009), they are still far from directly addressing these issues. Given the interrelated threefold problem of conceptual, religious, and nationalist seriousness, the question is how the concept of religious nationalism can be operationalized and how a case of nationalism can demonstrate both religious and nationalist seriousness to be counted as religious nationalist. To this end, we offer the later corpus of İsmet Özel as an emblematic case of religious nationalism. A brief biographical description of Özel would contextualize his religious nationalist ideas and signify his relevance to the subject before discussing how he presents a refined example of religious nationalism.

İsmet Özel: Socialist, Islamist, Nationalist

İsmet Özel is a prominent poet and socialist-turned-Islamist/nationalist intellectual in Turkey. Born in 1944, he has been on the map of intellectual agenda in Turkey since his early ages. In the first place, he made a name for himself within socialist circles in Turkey from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, thanks to his revolutionary poems and magazine, namely Halkın Dostları (The Friends of People), a literary review. Choosing poetry, rather than politics and militancy, as his primary “battleground,” Özel tried to promote “a progressive and revolutionary art” as part of a socialist anti-imperialist struggle (Guida Reference Guida2014, 119–120). However, having published his poem Amentü (Credo) in Sezai Karakoç’s Diriliş, one of the most prestigious Islamist journals of the time, in 1974, he announced his conversion to Islamism.

It was Özel’s 1978 book Üç Mesele: Teknik, Medeniyet, Yabancılaşma (Three Problems: Technique, Civilization, Alienation) (Reference Özel2014b) that catapulted him into the top of the Islamist intellectual agenda in Turkey. Üç Mesele offered a set of paradigm-breaking critiques of modernity in the course of the Turkish Islamist thought, and in so doing, criticized several long-standing assumptions of Islamism in Turkey, such as developmentalism and civilizationism. One can even speculate that Özel’s critique has more chronically affected the trajectory of Islamist thought in Turkey than the Iranian revolution has done. He also regularly, yet at intervals, wrote essays in Yeni Devir, Millî Gazete, and Yeni Şafak, three of the most popular newspapers of the Islamist movement in Turkey. As such, Özel became “the one Muslim intellectual” capable of appealing to “believers and secularists alike” (Meeker Reference Meeker and Tapper1991, 211), particularly in the 1990s.

His extensive publishing activity has made Özel a well-known public intellectual and prime source of reference within Islamist circles since the late 1970s. However, he has severed his ties with the mainstream Islamism in Turkey, having declared “as I have not been comfortable with where you have stood, I am departing for somewhere else” (Özel Reference Özel2018c [2003], 476). Accordingly, he has been primarily engaged with the issues of nationalism and offered his case for Turkish nationalism since the early 2000s, with a significant number of articles and books (for more on Özel, see Guida Reference Guida2014; Morrison Reference Morrison2006; Meeker Reference Meeker and Tapper1991; Toprak Reference Toprak, Heper, Öncü and Kramer1993; Karasipahi Reference Karasipahi2009; Dalacoura Reference Dalacoura2019). In this way, he has subsequently joined a significant trend of Turkish nationalism, namely a synthesis of Islam and nationalism, which has been a core theme of nationalism in Turkey since at least the 1950s.Footnote ³

The nationalist content of these later writings diverges significantly from his early corpus, written between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, but an Islamist spirit is still in effect throughout these works. This study relies on an analysis of these later pieces by Özel. As is stated, we argue that these later writings are built on six main patterns, which also help us to operationalize the concept of religious nationalism with a high level of religious and nationalist seriousness: religio-national identity, exceptionalism, religious territoriality, civilizational othering, sectarianism, and anti-secularism. The following sections examine these patterns, respectively.

Religio-National identity

Religious nationalism is more than a selective borrowing from religious symbols, myths, and histories. It is “the fusion of nationalism and religion such that they are inseparable,” as Barbara-Ann J. Rieffer (Reference Rieffer2003, 225) points out. It would be plausible to argue that at the core of this inseparability is the definition of national identity in that this definition often goes beyond a conscious selection of themes in creating a fusion between religion and nationalism. Özel offers an emblematic case of such inseparability when he defines a religio-national identity, which implies a co-representation of religious and national identities. As such, he defines “a variant of nationalism that constructs the nation, its culture, and its citizenry through Islamist symbols and concepts as the core constitutive elements” (Aghaie Reference Aghaie, Aghaie and Marashi2014, 182).

In the first place, what it means to be a Turk is contingent on Islam in Özel’s account. He considers Turkishness and Muslimness as the two sides of the same coin, as there cannot be a Turkish identity without Islam as a religious identity. Building on an attempt to religiously sanctify the starting point of the nation, as Hastings (Reference Hastings1997, 187–190) puts it, Turkishness owes its place to an Islamic identity for Özel. This is because, for instance, “Arabs were already Arabs before the Qur’an, but Turks became Turks thanks to the Qur’an” (Özel Reference Özel2016a, 22) – an argument that will be elaborated in the following sections. It follows that “a non-Muslim cannot be a Turk” (Özel Reference Özel2019a, 143). For example, he banishes the Gagauzians, considered popularly as “Christian Turks,” from Turkishness: “They say that the Gagauzians are Orthodox Turks. It is not possible. There is no such thing as Christian Turk” (Özel Reference Özel2015b, 26).Footnote ⁴ It is worth quoting at length to demonstrate his understanding of the religious conditionality of “true Turkishness”:

Against this backdrop, he rejects any definition of the Turkish national identity based primarily on ethnic, cultural, or tribal traits. Turkishness corresponds to a superior moral stance (Özel Reference Özel2015a, 21; Reference Özel2017b, 161; Reference Özel2018a, 152–153, 205) or a value system, stemming from Islam (Özel Reference Özel2017b, 47). This is to say that Islam would be the true characterization of the Turkish national identity. What makes it national is the Turkish way of understanding and performing religion, which also renders Turks unique among their coreligionists (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 205). At its heart is a historical role undertaken truly by Turks for the sake of Islam: becoming and remaining “the sword of Islam” (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 192, 240; Reference Özel2015c, 21; Reference Özel2016c, 38; Reference Özel2017b, 47), and in so doing, being a faithful servant of God. Accordingly, he concludes that Turks owe the raison d’être of their national consciousness to following Islamic dogma, which provides them with unique qualities (Özel Reference Özel2016e, 107; Reference Özel2015b, 28).

If Islam is the central criterion for Turkishness, the latter also represents the highest standards of the former. This is to say that, apart from Islam’s pivotal status in the definition of national identity, Özel (Reference Özel2019a, 82) also renders Turkishness a part of Islam. To this end, Özel describes any animosity towards Turkishness as an enmity towards Islam. This is because Turks are the only genuine representatives of Islam (Özel Reference Özel2016e, 159), implying that religion and faith exist together in the same category of Turkishness. One cannot become a true Muslim without being like a Turk in that Turkishness represents the peak of the true religious adherence. When this superiority of Turks is not appreciated, the faith of Islam will be determined by non-Muslim authorities (Özel Reference Özel2015d, 20). As non-Turkish Muslims typify deviation from the real cause of Islam or its underperformance, no authentic Muslim identity can exist other than the Turkish-Muslim identity (Özel Reference Özel2016c, 16; 2021, 266). Özel even accuses those claiming Muslimness without Turkishness of “blaspheming against God” (Reference Özel2016e, 126) or argues that the denial of Turkishness is a sin (Reference Özel2017b, 29). It eventually comes as no surprise that this exclusivist understanding draws much on a myth of ethnic election.

Exceptionalism

If exceptionalism is broadly defined as a belief in the manifest destiny of one’s kind, religious nationalism is particularly advantageous for drawing on an exceptionalist discourse or a myth of ethnic election. Indeed, such myths of chosen people are widely examined in a series of Christian cases (e.g., Hastings Reference Hastings1997; Gorski, Reference Gorski2000; Smith, Reference Smith2003), though those may not necessarily correspond to a religious kind of nationalism. The “Muslim world” deserves more attention for examining religious nationalism’s myths of chosen people although some (e.g., Aktürk Reference Aktürk2022, 212) identify an absence of such myths in Islam. Islam is no less suitable to messianic tendencies than other religions are, and Özel effectively utilizes this suitability. Özel’s exceptionalism revolves mainly around the argument that the Turkish nation has represented the historical and prospective embodiment of the purity and superiority of Islam. In other words, Turks have been the only special Muslim group as the most pristine and successful representatives of religion among the believers of Islam.

It should be, in the first place, noted that Özel’s Turkish exceptionalism does not constitute a replica of neo-Ottomanism, which has remained paradigmatic within both Turkish Islamism and conservative currents of Turkish nationalism. Neo-Ottomanism presupposes a nostalgia for the perceived Ottoman grandeur, seen as the most powerful and authentic, and a prophecy of the Turkish leadership in revolt against the West, supposedly similar to the role of the Ottoman Empire (see Ongur Reference Ongur2015; Ergin and Karakaya Reference Ergin and Karakaya2017; Wastnidge Reference Wastnidge2019). Özel, in contrast, regards the epoch of the Anatolian principalities in the thirteenth century as the golden age of the Muslim and Turkish history, and offers a highly critical account of the Ottoman period in a way impossible to be found on the right of the political spectrum in Turkey. He describes the Ottoman Empire as “a culture of betrayal” (Özel Reference Özel2019b, 58; Reference Özel2018a, 118) and “a deviant order” (Özel Reference Özel2019b, 155; Reference Özel2018a, 286; Reference Özel2016e, 62; Reference Özel2016c, 43; Reference Özel2017b, 191) in that it did not represent the true Muslim and Turkish identity and instrumentalized Islam for the sake of the personal interests of the ruling elite (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 231, 395, 507; Reference Özel2016c, 27; Reference Özel2017b, 83).

To this end, Özel finds Turkish exceptionalism in the perceived pristine character and central role of the Turkish nation/people, rather than imperial grandeur. For one thing, he claims that Turks are the only ethnic community whose emergence and existence are contingent upon Islam (Özel Reference Özel2016a, 22). This is to say that, in his own words, “it is only Turks that could gain its national character through being the sword of Islam” (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 205; Reference Özel2017b, 177). It follows that Turkishness has represented the “true Islam” in his understanding (Özel Reference Özel2016e, 16). It is this religious genesis of Turkishness that has rendered them pristine. He finds a crystallization of the true Islam in this pristine character of Turks (Özel Reference Özel2021, 161). He goes on to say that “Turks’ emergence has been the completion of the process that started with the emergence of the Qur’an” (Özel Reference Özel2019b, 261). In other words, Özel considers the Turkish nation as the culmination of Islam. These arguments perfectly conform to Anthony D. Smith’s (Reference Smith1992, 365) observation that “the privilege of election is accorded only to those who are sanctified, whose life-style is an expression of sacred values.”

It is this pristine character that has made Turks central. Above all, Turkishness is the center of Islam for Özel (Reference Özel2017b, 60; Reference Özel2018c, 365) because it is the nucleus of Islam, and “history has bestowed Turks on Islam as its body (Özel Reference Özel2018c, 167). He considers Turks as the key component of the “Islamic cause,” and therefore, “if one recognizes his/her Muslim identity and ignores his/her Turkish identity, Islam is not a cause for him/her” (Özel Reference Özel2016b, 20). Furthermore, Turks have historically gained this central position as “it is only Turks that have the honor of bringing down the Crusades” (Özel Reference Özel2019b, 261) and “ended the devaluation of Islam after its initial period” (Özel Reference Özel2019a, 260). They have become the soldiers of God insomuch that “there has been no nation in the world describing its army as ‘peygamber ocağı’ [the heart of the prophet]” (Özel Reference Özel2019b, 254; Reference Özel2017a, 25). In the final analysis, Özel creates a myth of what can be called the “Turkish man’s burden” (see Lapidot-Frilla Reference Lapidot-Frilla2009). For him, “Turks became Turks by taking responsibility for the Islamic umma” (2019a, 186). Building on his historical reading, he argues that “it is only Turkey that can bring the emancipatory potential of Islam” (Özel Reference Özel2018b, 373), and therefore, it is necessary for Turkey to embark on an Islamic transformation.

Özel also presents his exceptionalist discourse as a covenant between the nation and God in a way that combines what Smith (Reference Smith2000, 804–805) calls as “missionary” and “covenantal” kinds of chosenness. While it is a given for the reasons mentioned above that “Turks were created superior to other nations” in missionary terms (Özel Reference Özel2019b, 59,69; Reference Özel2018a, 86, 295), he attaches this perceived superiority to a myth of creation. Accordingly, if Turks are superior to other nations, including fellow Muslim ones, it must be the result of God’s will. As he claims that “God has promises to the Turkish nation” (Özel Reference Özel2016c, 18), he emphasizes a “covenant” between the Turkish nation and God: Turks would have the privilege of being superior and servants of God, and in turn, they would protect Islam. This volition includes, for Özel (Reference Özel2017b, 110; 2021, 182), that “God created the Turkish nation and homeland as a measure against the domination of the infidel rule.” It follows that “the Turkish lands have constituted a guarantee for the survival of the umma” (Özel Reference Özel2016c, 10). This brings us to his conception of religious territoriality.

Religious Territoriality

An understanding of territory and territoriality occupies a central, and even constitutive, position in a multitude of nationalist projects, whether the delineated territory of each nationalism and nation corresponds to the boundaries of a state or not (e.g., Penrose Reference Penrose2002; Smith Reference Smith1998). Its immediate implication for religious nationalism can be best related to the argument of Anthony D. Smith: “Where an ethnie is also a community of believers or a ‘holy people’ adhering to a single sacred life-style, repeated performance of sacred acts in fulfilment of the mission with which the community is entrusted sanctifies the land and turns it into a reward for faithful observance of a ‘covenant’” (Reference Smith1999, 153). The homeland of his “holy people” is at the center of Özel’s nationalist ideas. Although he relies heavily on an Islamist terminology in his invention of national homeland, which also attributes a high level of religious seriousness to his ideas, this nationalist delineation of territory diverges significantly from Islamism and the so-called “deterritorialized Muslim nationalism” mentioned above.

First and foremost, Özel’s understanding of homeland revolves centrally around its constructed or invented character. In his understanding, homeland is expectedly historic, but he does not hold a conception of “immemorial homeland,” which has always been as it is in the nationalist imagination. For example, one cannot find the classical tendency of many Turkish nationalists that views the steppes of Central Asia as the original and unoriginated homeland of Turks. On the contrary, he insistently deals with the questions of how the Turkish homeland, Turkey, was born and how it has remained so. This recognition of the constructed nature of homeland may unsurprisingly dilute his nationalism; however, he still reifies and naturalizes the nation and homeland and bypasses this problem by sacralizing it in directly religious terms and rendering the traits of this constructed nature as the essence of the Turkish nationalism and identity. In this sense, what Smith (Reference Smith1999, 151) calls “territorialization of memory” goes parallel with an Islamization of territory.

At the heart of this operationalization is the concept of daru’l-İslam (the House/Land of Islam), which refers, in Muslim jurists’ classical legal doctrines, to the regions where the Islamic rule/law prevails.Footnote ⁵ Although some argue that a religious territorialization is “logically untenable in the case of proselytizing religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam” (Oommen Reference Oommen1994, 457), Özel mediates that religious concept through the nationalist notion of homeland, and vice versa. He ambiguously yet proudly describes Turkey as a historically and prospectively unique territory of daru’l-İslam (Özel Reference Özel2016d, 20; Reference Özel2019b, 159; Reference Özel2016e, 56; Reference Özel2018c, 350; Reference Özel2021, 266). Importantly, he explicitly claims that “Turkey is our homeland because it is daru’l-İslam” (Özel Reference Özel2018c, 45, 130), conditioning the essence of homeland on religious imperatives. Accordingly, homeland is sacred in a religious, not ethnic, sense, but it is still an ethnic homeland. For Özel (Reference Özel2018a, 284; Reference Özel2014a, 21), the term daru’l-İslam connotes sharia rule, conquest, Islamic superiority and domination over infidels, and a hierarchy between Muslims and non-Muslims, perfectly represented and realized by Turks.

This characterization of homeland relies on his reading of Turkish history. Özel (Reference Özel2017b, 17) attaches the Turkish homeland-making to its Islamization when he regards Turks’ homeland-making as a process of daru’l-İslam-making. In his understanding, Turks gained homeland by transforming the then foreign/infidel lands into daru’l-İslam (Özel Reference Özel2016e, 81; Reference Özel2019b, 225; Reference Özel2019a, 71; Reference Özel2018a, 142–144). It was the small Turkish principalities of the thirteenth century in Anatolia, which were eager to make jihad against the “infidels,” that invented the Turkish homeland (Özel Reference Özel2019b, 281; Reference Özel2018a, 519; Reference Özel2017b, 139; 2021, 101; Reference Özel2016c, 12). In other words, the rejection of infidel rule and the expansion against it occupied a central position in the making of Turkey (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 40). Özel considers this process so important that he argues “History was bended first by the emergence of the Qur’an, and second by the transformation of Diyar-ı RumFootnote ⁶ into the Turkish homeland” (Reference Özel2019b, 75). Following its invention, the Turkish resistance against the Crusades and the maintenance of a truly (in fact, the truest) Islamic order characterized these lands, which remained a holy and respected homeland of Islam (Özel, Reference Özel2018c, 45, 274; Reference Özel2019b, 154, 242; Reference Özel2018a, 57). In this way, “the ethnoscape becomes an intrinsic part of the character, history and destiny of the culture community” (Smith Reference Smith1999, 151).

Eventually, Özel develops an understanding of the co-constitution of Turkish identity and homeland by equating Turks’ homeland-making with their nation-building. He states that Turks did not constitute a nation before their arrival in Anatolia. There had been such ethnic groups as Turkmens, Uzbeks, and Tatars in Central Asia, but they transformed into Turks only in Anatolia thanks to the process of daru’l-İslam-making (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 194). Building on the perceived importance of “the institution of conquest in the making of Turkishness” (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 272), which rendered Anatolia a region of daru’l-İslam, he claims that “Turkishness was born in these lands,” having realized a religious role (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 153, 194; Reference Özel2016e, 14). It concludes that “Turkey made Turks, and Turks made Turkey” (Özel Reference Özel2018c, 131, 172; Reference Özel2019a, 71; Reference Özel2017b, 110). Turkish identity and homeland are so tight-knit that Turkishness cannot survive beyond the boundaries of Turkey, and Turkey cannot have meaning without the historical implications of Turkishness (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 153, 205). As such, Özel gives a territorialized meaning, which has a religious raison d’être, to Turkish nationalism. After all, this discussion on territory reasonably connotes the religious frontiers of the nation, which Özel understands in civilizational terms.

Civilizational Othering

The complex relationship between civilizationism and nationalism has generated controversial arguments. Şener Aktürk (Reference Aktürk2022, 211), for instance, considers civilizational discourses as efforts to “transcend national identities and the nation-state through supranational visions of ‘civilizational’ identities and institutions.” Rogers Brubaker (Reference Brubaker2017) offers a more nuanced and accurate account: Civilizationism can be understood as both “a new articulation of nationalism” with the content of national identity specified in civilizational language and “an alternative to it” with “the boundaries of belonging and the semantics of self and other” understood in civilizational terms (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2017, 1211). Even when it appears as an alternative, “civilizationism does not supersede nationalism; it combines with nationalism,” he concludes (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2017, 1211). Although Özel does not appeal to a civilizational solidarity of the Muslim world in pan-Islamic terms, civilizationalism works for Özel in identifying the “significant others” of the nation. In this sense, civilizationism combines with his nationalism when he seems to project what can be called a reverse civilizationism.

Philip W. Barker identifies the presence of a religious frontier, and an actual or a possible threat from that frontier as the conditions “for national identity to become solidified around religion” (Reference Barker2009, 34–36). Relatedly, Özel operationalizes Turkey’s status of “frontiersmanship” at the border of Europe in civilizational terms. Relying on a “survivalist, zero-sum security logic” (Magcamit Reference Magcamit2020, 687), he describes Western civilization as the primary other of the Turkish identity. This othering stems from a civilizational master narrative, the historical enmity between Turks and the West: “Turks constituted a power that manifested itself against infidelity. We did not take on just one nation” (Özel Reference Özel2015a, 21). As “this nation challenged the Western civilization for four hundred years” (Özel Reference Özel2019b, 147), he insistently claims that “a Turk is the one who ventures on struggling against the infidel” (Özel Reference Özel2019a, 186; Reference Özel2016c, 58; Reference Özel2018a, 63). It goes on to say that “Turkishness means the defeat of non-Muslim world” (Özel Reference Özel2019a, 71).

Mutually, Turks are also regarded as the constituting “other” of the Western civilization (Özel Reference Özel2017b, 106–107). Özel (Reference Özel2019b, 156) attributes a special place to Turks’ standing and fighting against Western powers in the making of the Western civilization and identity, apart from the latter’s impact on the making of Turkishness. For the Crusaders, the name of all their enemies was Turk (Özel Reference Özel2017b, 170–171). This enemy was so terrifying that it was “Turko-phobia” that made Europe what it has been, and that European history is one of an effort to eliminate the Turkish threat (Özel Reference Özel2019a, 84). This is to say that Western civilization was founded as a defense against Turks and Islam: “If the Western civilization is a civilization, it is thanks to its opposition to Turks” (Özel Reference Özel2017b, 107). The Turkish other was so prominent for Europeans that the Renaissance became possible due to the success of, and threat from, the Turks (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 229, 247). Similarly, the project of modernity and capitalism were also initiated to counterbalance Turks (Özel Reference Özel2016c, 37–38, 76; Reference Özel2017b, 166).

Moving from the past to the present, Özel expresses his anti-Westernism in anti-capitalist and anti-American terms. On the one hand, as Western civilization and capitalism have come to equal terms, the West has come to mean an economic domination system (Özel Reference Özel2018c, 35–37). Because the Turkish nation represented a strong resistance against this enemy for a very long time (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 298), the “other” of this exploitative system must be Turkishness with its Islamic purity (Özel Reference Özel2018c, 76). On the other hand, Özel considers the US as the final phase of Western civilization, with Europe engulfed in Americanization. If the US dominates this capitalist world-system, the dichotomy must be between Americans and Turks (Özel Reference Özel2016b, 21; Reference Özel2018a, 299). Therefore, there are only two metaphoric options in the world: Americanization or Turkification (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 82, 295; Reference Özel2018c, 171). This is why he argues that the concept of Turkishness cannot be a matter of comparison between ethnicities. The term Turk can only be compared to the term American (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 299). He goes on to say that if one is not a Turk, then he/she is an American (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 82, 546). That said, his alarmist and rejectionist approach finds its voice not only in such inter-civilizational terms but also has intra-civilizational implications.

Sectarianism

Özel’s religious nationalism is also a sectarian one. Indeed, although the term sectarianism has had an Orientalized meaning in a way that it is almost exclusively attributed to the Muslim world, not to the West, the relationship between sectarian and national identities has been much recognized (e.g., Greenfeld Reference Greenfeld1992; Zubrzycki Reference Zubrzycki2006). This is because the sectarian identification of national identities is seen as a “standard practice in much of Europe” (Aktürk Reference Aktürk2022, 209). Apart from such classical European examples, which often do not demonstrate any religious seriousness, it must be expected that religious nationalism is particularly prone to sectarianism. In this sense, Özel provides a useful case for the relationship between religious nationalism and sectarianism.

Özel stands for the Sunni branch of Islam. In his understanding, Sunnism is the system at the heart of the Islamic purity and superiority of Turks. He considers Sunnism as the core of the Turkish identity and a prime source of Turkish superiority over other nations, although he does not explain the dynamics of this source (Özel Reference Özel2019a, 258; Reference Özel2016c, 132). In other words, Özel’s nationalism is mediated not only through religion but also through a specific interpretation of it. He explicitly claims that “Turkishness equals to Muslimness, and particularly, Sunnism” (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 412). Therefore, for Özel (Reference Özel2018a, 483), any deviation from Sunnism would annihilate the Turkish nation. More to the point, he reduces the scope of his sectarianism to a school of Sunnism, namely Hanafism,Footnote ⁷ which he sees as the foundation stone of the Turkish identity (Özel Reference Özel2016e, 16). In this sense, for Özel, Hanafism represents the true practice and interpretation of Islam, which has been best and longest realized and expanded by Turks. This is also to make Hanafism the tradition of the Turkish nation.

If this Sunni-centrism constitutes the internal boundaries of his sectarianism, there is a rejection of the legitimacy of other sects at its external borders. Özel mainly develops his sectarian animosity toward two non-Sunni communities: Shias, the historical counterpart of Sunnis throughout the world, and Alevis,Footnote ⁸ the minority side of Turkey’s main sectarian cleavage. Özel makes no room for these communities in the Turkish nation. Instead, he openly excommunicates Shias and Alevis when he declares that “they are not Muslims” (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 154, 189, 383, 505). When they are excluded from Islam, it follows that they cannot be a member of the Turkish nation. It is in this context that Özel criminally proposes a campaign for the Sunnification of Turkey’s Alevis, which he views as a matter of life and death for Turkey (Timetürk 2009). In this way, he openly formulates a sectarian other for the imagination of Turkish nationalism.

Özel’s emphasis on Sunnism and his anti-Shiism and -Alevism cannot be reduced to a discourse of identity. Instead, it attributes a high level of religious seriousness to Özel’s nationalism in that he regards Sunnism in fundamentalist terms, which corresponds to the classical Islamist formulation of the return to the sources. This is to say that Özel operationalizes not only “religion-as-identity” but also “religion-as-doctrine” if we borrow the distinction of Fanar Haddad (Reference Haddad2020, 128), a careful observer of sectarianism in the Middle East. In other words, both Shias and Alevis represent a high level of deviation from the original sources of Islam, while Sunnism stands for their protection in their original forms. This fundamentalism is a particularly good turning point to discuss his anti-secularism.

Anti-Secularism

Religious nationalism is an attempt to revitalize the religious through the national, and vice versa. As Roger Friedland (Reference Friedland2001, 139) argues, it is “a form of politicized religion, one in which religion is the basis of political judgment and identity, indeed in which politics take on the quality of a religious obligation.” Özel operationalizes “a religious master cleavage between the religious and the secular” (Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu Reference Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu2013, 204) in his politicization of religion and formulation of nationalism. Nationality and religion are rendered inseparable not only in identity terms but also through an adherence to Islamic principles in such a way that Turkishness is devoid of meaning and existence beyond religious imperatives. When he shows a considerable amount of enmity towards secularism, “religiosity becomes a marker of who belongs to the nation and who is a ‘true’ member of the national community” (Grzymala-Busse Reference Grzymala-Busse2019). This is to make “ideological correctness” a national trait (Zubrzycki Reference Zubrzycki2012, 446; see also Reference Zubrzycki2016).

For Özel (Reference Özel2019b, 64), Turkishness owes its existence to anti-secularism. The historical experience of Turkish states shows the central status of Islam in state affairs, with the Turkish nation living by the standards of religion and assuring the pure presence of Islam (Özel Reference Özel2021, 239). This is also true even in the case of the Ottoman Empire, of which Özel is highly critical, as mentioned above. Although he does not regard the Ottoman Empire as a truly Islamic state in its economic and political order, he still asserts that the Empire was a theocratic state because, “without putting Islam as the defining characteristic of the state, there remained no definition for what the Ottoman Empire was” (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 395). No matter how deviant it was, the Empire had to rely on the popular religiosity of the Turkish nation and the public visibility of Islam to survive.

That said, there are two elementary issues in which this enmity towards secularism becomes particularly visible: a critique of government policies deviating the state from Islam, and a related belief in an international conspiracy that has alienated Turks from religion. For one thing, Özel believes that the Republic of Turkey was established as a “Qur’anic state” in that it reassured the superiority of Islam in the face of infidels after a long period of decadence. However, the republican reforms and coup d’états distracted the Republic from its true path (Özel Reference Özel2016c, 107). The founding elites’ reform agenda “made the creation of a high culture impossible and destroyed any opportunity one by one” in this direction by drifting apart from Islam (Özel Reference Özel2018a, 511). To this end, Özel accentuates a “chasm between the illegitimate state and the ‘real’ religious nation” (Grzymala-Busse, Reference Grzymala-Busse2019).

In fact, those secular reforms were part of a broader international conspiracy for Özel. What he calls the “lords of the world-system,” the hegemons of international system, charged the Republican elites with deviating Turks from Islam (Özel 2021, 225). One of the most crucial interventions of these lords of the world-system was the coup d’état of May 27, 1960, until when the Republic was still a “Qur’anic state” in Özel’s account. Although one might excuse the secularist reforms of the founding elite for countering the penetration of international actors, the coup d’état constituted a real turning point in the trajectory of secularism in Turkey. This is because it “turned everything inside out” and launched the process of the full integration of Turkey with the imperatives of the world-system and a secular lifestyle (Özel Reference Özel2016c, 107). In this sense, anti-secularism also functions in the same way of what Gorski (Reference Gorski, Mast and Alexander2019b) calls the apocalypticism of American Christian nationalism. As such, secularism is not only a disaster for the Turkish nation but also a plot to destroy it.