3.1.1 Cihanşümul: Encompassing the World

For centuries, the Ottoman worldview was associated with a universalistic ideal: cihanşümul or “encompassing the world.” The principle was evident in the dynastic foundation myth according to which Osman I, reposing in the home of a holy man, experienced a vision of great conquest. In the dream, a tree sprung from Osman’s belly, sprouting branches with leaves shaped like scimitars that grew to provide shade for all the world’s cities and peoples.Footnote ⁴ The dream evoked an imperial project organized around two features – Islam and diversity – which were managed via legal pluralism.

Regarding Islam, the empire was built upon an “ideology of conquest” as a means of propagating the faith.Footnote ⁵ Since their early days as gazi frontier warriors, the Ottomans saw themselves as the vanguard of a dar al-Islam (abode of Islam) destined to engulf the dar al-harb (abode of war).Footnote ⁶ As Kafadar has shown, this vision was syncretic: a fusion of (oftentimes heterodox) Islamic beliefs with Christian, pagan, and opportunistic practices.Footnote ⁷ It nevertheless bolstered dynastic claims to the caliphate that were recognized widely across the Sunni Muslim world by the sixteenth century.

In the ensuing centuries, the symbiotic relationship between Sunni Islam and the Ottoman state was shaped by ongoing contestations between orthodox, heterodox, and ultraorthodox camps (and the interests that they represented).Footnote ⁸ In addition to institutionalized religious actors, grassroots Sufi movements shaped societal dynamics, at times clashing with state actors. Yet, while there was never a singular or static role for Islam in Ottoman political culture, for much of Ottoman history, it was enmeshed in raison d’etat.Footnote ⁹ Islam permeated public life through clerical influence (ulema), religious education (medrese), canonical law (Şeriat), and Hanefi jurisprudence that shaped much Sunni observance across the empire. Religious governance was supplemented by other jurisprudential and sectarian traditions, nonreligious customary law (yasa), and non-Muslim legal traditions. This regime for governing the empire’s many communities – who were defined by religion and referred to as millet – was hierarchical. The Muslim millet’s primacy was enshrined in its members’ formal status (e.g., primacy of Muslim witnesses in Islamic courts), prescribed roles (e.g., access to government careers), and even appearance (e.g., regulations regarding outerwear and headgear for Muslims and non-Muslims).Footnote ¹⁰

These plural sources of religiously rationalized governance helped to oversee a very diverse empire.Footnote ¹¹ The first Ottoman census was conducted in 1831 and only encompassed men. It nevertheless reveals the social plurality of Ottoman lands: Muslims comprised 67 percent of some 3.7 million subjects, while 32 percent were Christian and Jewish.Footnote ¹² Muslims, Christians, and Jews hailed, moreover, from multiple ethnic and sectarian backgrounds (as attested to by the dozens of nation-states that emerged in the post-Ottoman space).

Despite the potential for centrifugal pressures, this “empire of difference”Footnote ¹³ thrived in the pre- and early modern periods precisely because its multi-communitarian toleranceFootnote ¹⁴ was a pragmatic way to rule sprawling territories and heterogeneous peoples. A feature of all empires, in the Ottoman case, tolerance for diversity, had antecedents in the Central Asian steppe tradition of noninterference in conquered subjects’ belief systems.Footnote ¹⁵ Fused with Byzantine, Persian, and Islamic modes of managing diversity,Footnote ¹⁶ the approach was never standardized. Rather, ad hoc forms of accommodation attributed first-class subjecthood to Muslims, regardless of ethnic origin. Millet of other Abrahamic faiths were offered dhimmi (religious minority) status, enabling non-Muslims to be governed by their own religious laws and leaders. The deal, in short, was submission to the sultan’s authority and a hefty, flat tax (cizye) in exchange for “non-territorial autonomy.” Basically, diversity was tolerated by reinforcing rather than erasing intercommunal boundaries.Footnote ¹⁷ Religiously demarcated legal pluralism also served imperial ambitions. It enabled, for instance, the co-option of non-Muslim subjects. A case in point was the symbiotic if fraught relationships between the palace and non-Muslim religious leaders such as the Orthodox Patriarch and Chief Rabbi.Footnote ¹⁸

The empire’s religious diversity bolstered Ottoman claims to continuity with the Roman and Byzantine empires among internal but also external audiences. Mehmet the Conqueror, for one, invoked the connection by using “Caesar of the Roman lands” (kayser-i diyâr-i Rum) among his many accolades. This legitimization strategy appealed to some Europeans such as the Bourbon thinker Jean Bodin. Attesting to how actors invoke ideas to (re)shape structures, Bodin challenged Hapsburg’s claims to the Holy Roman Empire by naming “the Ottoman Sultan” as the only “justifiable” claimant to descend from the Roman Emperor.Footnote ¹⁹ Bodin’s admiration, to be sure, was for the efficacy of Ottoman governance rather than the empire’s pluralism. That is, he saw in the Ottoman system of patrimonial rule a model of enlightened despotism for fragmented, feudal Europe.Footnote ²⁰

By the eighteenth century, however, European powers began to eclipse the Ottomans economically and militarily. An oft-cited turning point was the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) which enabled an expansive and modernizing Russia to extract territorial, consular, and commercial concessions. Of even greater significance, the treaty designated Russia the “protector” of Ottoman Orthodox Christians. The pretext would be invoked repeatedly in later attempts to penetrate Ottoman domains (even as the Romanovs struggled, like the Ottoman dynasty, to put their own house in order vis-à-vis rising European powers).Footnote ²¹

A string of subsequent military defeats echoed developments across a Muslim-majority “world political system” comprised of the loosely adjacent Ottoman, Safavid, and Moghul empires.Footnote ²² These entities’ viability had been challenged by the “progressive capture of world trade by European nations; the rise of the capitalist economy, and European territorial expansion.”Footnote ²³ Piquing consternation, one pamphleteer asked: “Why has the world fallen into anarchy from its formerly tranquil state?”Footnote ²⁴ Responses ranged from waves of grassroots, Sufi religious mobilization,Footnote ²⁵ to elite debate and contestation.

Topal traces how Ottoman governing classes responded to perceived “dissolution” (ihtilâl) including strategies for correction (ıslah). Some called for change as a way to reinstate greatness, while others argued for reinvigorating Islamic and local “traditions” (with the notion of tradition itself an essentially contested concept whose meaning was shaped by contemporary concerns). These debates, in other words, did not simply pit reformists vs. traditionalists as anachronistic historiography often suggests.Footnote ²⁶ Instead, participants drew on the multi-vocality of Islamic tradition to make their case.Footnote ²⁷ A prominent paradigm came from the great medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun whose cyclical history of empire informed Ottoman thinking about imperial dynamism and stagnation into the early nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁸ Another enduring trope was the “circle of justice” (daire-i adâlet). Given pride of place in the work of early modern thinkers such as Kınalızâde, just governance was envisaged as a function of interdependence between the ruler, army, resources, and peasantry. Relations between the four elements were circumscribed by Islamic law. It followed that if deficits were encountered in any of the four pillars, adjustments had to be made to recalibrate the circle.

3.1.2 Age of Military Reform

These material imperatives and normative frameworks underwrote transformative attempts at “renewal of order” (tecdid-i nizam) by sultans such as Selim III (r. 1789–1807) and Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839). Priority was placed on military reform (itself only possible through fiscal reorganization). Ideas toward this end included calls for discipline and moral uprightness in response to the perceived degeneration of Ottoman ways (örf). Some reformists leveled this criticism at Janissary soldiers who, traditionally, had been an elite military corps. Selim, for one, paid for such arguments when he was assassinated by the increasingly praetorian Janissaries who (correctly) ascertained that his Nizam-ı Cedid (New Order) heralded the end of their era.Footnote ²⁹ The lesson was not lost on Mahmud, who, in turn, massacred the Janissaries in 1826, replacing them with a corps trained along Western lines.

Despite efforts to recalibrate military capacity, the Ottomans suffered setbacks on the battlefield as European penetration continued apace. Particularly problematic were the growing demands of powers such as Britain, France, and Russia for Capitulations: extraterritorial privileges in arenas like trade policy. Traditionally, such pledges had been granted (and revoked) unilaterally to non-Muslim foreigners like Italian traders seeking market access and exemptions,Footnote ³⁰ and immunity from the jurisdiction of Islamic courts.Footnote ³¹ These arrangements envisaged the Ottoman state as the superior party and were considered temporary. By the nineteenth century, however, European and American jurists began treating Capitulations as bilateral treaties that bound “Istanbul to an (unequal and stratified) international system”Footnote ³² dominated by a “European informal empire.”Footnote ³³

These practices were in sync with the nineteenth-century “standard of civilization” employed by Western jurists to designate entities deemed worthy of sovereignty. The Ottomans, with their considerable state capacity, were perceived as “semi-civilized” within this tiered international legal framework in comparison with European states’ “civilized” condition and colonized peoples’ “savage” status.Footnote ³⁴ European powers nevertheless appropriated Capitulations agreements to support protégés among Ottoman non-Muslim communities.Footnote ³⁵ One estimate suggests that Russia alone enrolled over 100,000 Greek-Orthodox Ottoman subjects.Footnote ³⁶ Sponsorship could and did culminate in secessionism – imprinting an enduring association of European pressure with non-Muslim/minority betrayal. Meanwhile, Capitulations further complexified the increasingly unwieldy system of Ottoman legal pluralism and the social diversity it sought to govern.

Internal and external intrigues contributed to two critical junctures that convinced the authorities that only more comprehensive modernization could salvage the empire. One such turning point was the 1821 Greek nationalist uprising in the Aegean region. The rebels’ motives were manifold but included a powerful set of syncretic ideas. French revolutionary notions of liberty and equality overlaid tropes of Oriental despotism. These, in turn, were informed by elements of romantic nationalism.Footnote ³⁷ For example, citing Enlightenment conceptions of tyranny, proto-nationalist Greek thinkers contrasted oppressive (Ottoman) practices with (European) modes of emancipatory governance. By thus castigating dynastic authority and the hierarchy of Muslim/non-Muslim subjects within the empire, they appealed to European sponsors. Britain, France, and Russia proved sympathetic to the Greek cause. As a result, even after a revamped Ottoman fleet suppressed the initial rebellion, European powers went on to destroy the Ottoman navy, guaranteeing Greek independence in 1830. For the Ottomans, this experience crystallized the realization that military reform alone was insufficient to confront the potent combination of liberal political ideas, minority unrest, and great power sponsorship.

Similarly instructive were the adventures of Mehmed Ali Paşa, the ambitious governor of Ottoman Egypt. His modernizing reforms generated unprecedented wealth and state capacity. The general introduced modern methods in arenas from military organization and agricultural production to education and commerce. The dynamism enabled by these practices was attested to by the ability of his son, İbrahim Paşa, to secure the initial Ottoman naval victories in the war for Greece. Ibrahim went on, however, to pursue campaigns that threatened Ottoman holdings in Anatolia. This compelled the Ottoman state to ask its long-time rival Russia for help in repelling İbrahim. Mahmud II struck back several years later, only for his forces to be routed days before the ailing monarch succumbed to tuberculosis. But while the first half of 1839 brought near disaster with the Egyptian debacle and the sultan’s passing, his son’s ascendance presented a critical juncture: an opportunity to raise the stakes in the ongoing project of Ottoman recalibration.

3.2.1 The Tanzimat Reforms: Ideas, Actors, and Structures

With the accession of Abdülmecid I (r. 1839–1861), Ottoman statesmen launched far-reaching reforms in response to the structural challenges facing the empire. Europeans called this challenge the “Eastern Question,” while the Ottomans called it the “Western Question.” But in both cases, the quandary was as follows: Who would govern the vast but receding territories under Ottoman rule, and what would happen to their peoples?

The Ottoman answer was the Tanzimat: reforms that sought to revamp imperial governance through institutional modernization and the promise of universal justice. Notably, this promise was extended to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Abdülmecid I and his advisors thus inaugurated an era of change during which the empire’s hierarchical legal pluralism would be reconfigured toward situating all subjects on the same legal plane.

Tanzimat historiography cites a multiplicity of sources, motives, and impacts of the project. Some scholars emphasize the role of Western ideas and actors. These included British and French constitutionalism, but also conservative influence via the relationship between Austrian arch-conservative Metternich and Sadık Rıfat Paşa, a key architect of the Declaration of Gülhane.Footnote ³⁸ Others foreground domestic discontent and Islamic inspiration/justification for the reforms.Footnote ³⁹ What is certain is that the project launched an Islamo-liberal framework within which to accelerate Ottoman transformation including the governance of Islam and diversity.

The Gülhane Edict was proclaimed on an autumn day in 1839 at Topkapı Palace, the administrative and residential center of the Ottoman dynasty. The audience was composed of European diplomats and Ottoman notables who had been summoned to the outer rose gardens. For Europeans, the document’s language would have resonated with the liberal ideals of the French Revolution. It explicitly guaranteed Ottoman subjects’ lives, honor, and property, promising universal justice regardless of religion or denomination. The program also amplified prior attempts at “reorganization” (Tanzimat) by promising to address problems with tax-farming and military conscription.

Meanwhile, for Ottomans in the audience, the Tanzimat’s liberal thrust would have overlaid referents rooted in the Hanefi school of jurisprudence to which the Ottoman dynasty subscribed.Footnote ⁴⁰ Grounded firmly in Islamic law, the Edict stated that no policy emanating from ensuing reforms would contravene the canon. This religious rationale was “symbolically confirmed”Footnote ⁴¹ by the sultan’s pledge to uphold the reforms’ Islamic character in a ceremony before high-level clerics in the Chamber of the Holy Mantle.Footnote ⁴² Similarly, a champion of the reforms, Grand Vizier Mustafa Reşid Paşa, insisted that all measures be predicated on “four pillars of the state,” namely, Islam, the Ottoman dynasty, protection of pilgrimage routes, and maintenance of Istanbul – a site of religious resonance – as the imperial capital.Footnote ⁴³ As Türesay puts it, the “sultan and his entourage deployed … Islamic rhetoric in the service of a vast reform project that aimed to atomize and disintegrate the various elements that make up the society in order to discipline, standardize, and unify them.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This two-toned, Islamo-liberal register was well received, Anscombe argues, when it was announced across the provinces.Footnote ⁴⁵

In terms of actors, a coalition of rulers, bureaucrats, and intellectuals led by Reşid Paşa mobilized around the Tanzimat transformation. A skilled statesman, he won the trust of both Mahmud II and Abdülmecid I. Reşid Paşa’s reformist vision had coalesced over ambassadorships to France and Britain, and through service during the Greek and Egyptian crises. Other key figures included Reşid Paşa’s protégées, Ali Paşa and Fuad Paşa, who were tapped from the Translation Office (Tercüme Odası). This new bureaucratic body had been established in response to the Greek independence movement. It would produce a generation of Muslim reformers with direct exposure to European languages and practices. This secular training – and a penchant for lavish Westernized lifestyles – marked the top Tanzimat pashas’ service to Abdülmecid and his successor Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861–1876). They were joined by reformist clergy although other, high-ranking clerics deplored the growing salience of Western values and fashions. Conservative factions occasionally managed to dislodge the reformists. On balance, however, the latter prevailed, controlling the posts of foreign minister and grand vizier for the better part of forty years. These elite actors sought to stem imperial contraction while managing minority demands and Muslim frustrations. They did so via functionalist modernization of the military, taxation, education, and central as well as provincial administration. Reforms included stimulation of agriculture, manufacturing, and trade exchange. The result was one of the most liberal trade regimes in the worldFootnote ⁴⁶ (an economic orientation that became a recurring feature of Islamo-liberal platforms).

Overhaul of governance informed, in turn, a need for a legal framework in fields from commercial to criminal law, which encompassed both Muslims and non-Muslims. This need was amplified by the influx of European soldiers, officials, and business interests during the Crimean War (1853–1856). Meanwhile, reformist statesmen responded to frictions generated by government encroachment on judicial matters that had been under the ulema’s purview. Reşid Paşa sought to kill both birds with one stone by recruiting a religious scholar of “superior intelligence, great learning and liberal bent.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The figure in question, Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, would generate a major work of nineteenth-century Islamo-liberal syncretism: the codification of the Şeriat in accordance with European forms. His Mecelle coded Hanefi jurisprudence into 16 volumes comprising 1,851 items formulated as in Western legal documents.Footnote ⁴⁸ The project made legal principles more accessible to ordinary people, transforming civil law. To be sure, the Mecelle left areas such as family law, hence the status of women, unchanged. It nonetheless helped women to inherit and obtain divorce via Islamo-liberal referents before such practices were possible within most Western legal frameworks. An Islamo-liberal framework was also deployed to transition toward monism in criminal law. Thus, plural legal practices were increasingly gathered under a unitary framework, enhancing state capacity.

In addition to domestic impact, the Tanzimat’s Islamo-liberal approach was a calculated response to geopolitical pressure. A major impetus on this front was European jockeying for control over the Turkish straits – waters coveted by Russia because they linked the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. To prevent Moscow from converting its claim to be the “protector” of Ottoman Orthodox Christians into leverage over the Straits, London and Paris pressured the empire to affirm its commitment to minority rights. This took the form of the 1856 Imperial Reform Edict that granted non-Muslims formal equality – a watershed in the governance of Ottoman diversity. In return, the Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War and enabled Ottoman accession to the Concert of Europe.

3.2.2 Emergent Dynamics: Disenchantment and Resentment

Mixed motives notwithstanding, the Edict and accession to European international society were transformative. A key property to emerge was what Max Weber called religious “disenchantment”: displacement of a sense of the transcendental, and the inscription, instead, of life’s meaning(s) onto a secularized plane. In addition to the impact of religious minority enfranchisement, disenchantment was stimulated by changes such as education, taxation, and conscription. Producing new “conflicts and reconciliations,” these processes “in time elided into a new mentality, new state, new styles of life, and even new types of men and women.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Cultural mediators such as İbrahim Şinasi, the father of Ottoman literary syncretism, sought to mediate the transition. He employed methods familiar to liberal, proto-nationalist elites in other European contexts, such as collecting proverbs for use in poems. Şinasi’s stamp was to combine old court forms with stylistic innovations, conveying modern concepts about the universe, rationalism, and democracy.Footnote ⁵⁰

Paradoxically, this very transformation of Ottoman sensibilities informed a second emergent feature of the new system: resentment at the eclipse of Muslim primacy. In addition to ruptured cultural codes, Muslims were concentrated in professions such as military and state service, as well as agrarian communities that disproportionately bore the costs of economic modernization and trade liberalization. By way of contrast, many, if by no means all, non-Muslims resided in urban, coastal areas and engaged in commerce. Some benefitted, moreover, from extraterritorial privileges via relationships with great powers.Footnote ⁵¹ As such, non-Muslims became the first Ottoman bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁵² Muslim resentment was exacerbated by flawed efforts to restructure finances. For example, as the empire hurtled toward bankruptcy, Abdülaziz lavished monies on a new navy and European-style palaces. Similarly – and despite the promise of military modernization – conditions for conscripted soldiers were daunting. Indicatively, official figures in 1837 cite 45,496 dead from illnesses during peacetime and 20,117 deserters out of the 161,036 soldiers who had been recruited over the previous decade.Footnote ⁵³

The “sense of foreboding” among many Muslims at the emerging order was also felt among some non-Muslims. For example, equality and universal conscription meant that non-Muslim men who had long avoided military service were now, at least in principle, called up in what was hardly a war-free time or place. Attempts to enlist Christians began in the mid-1830s, but recruits in several communities fled at the prospect. This comportment, in turn, contributed to debates regarding the loyalty of non-Muslims on the one hand and whether they would find equal treatment within the military on the other.Footnote ⁵⁴ Pervasive distrust meant that non-Muslims could obtain exemption by paying an annual tax.Footnote ⁵⁵ In short, an unintended consequence of some Tanzimat-era inclusionary policies was heightened non-Muslim ambivalence at the Ottoman project.

3.2.3 Young Ottomans: Ideas, Actors, and Structures

In response to the ongoing transformation of the legal order, economic system, and social relationships, a new generation of reformers who came of age during the Tanzimat sought to fulfill the project’s emancipatory promise. Many such figures were associated with the Translation Bureau and the middle or lower bureaucracy, often hailing from the provincial middle classes. Their endeavors spoke specifically to Ottoman challenges. At the same time, they were shaped by the broader, mid nineteenth-century context that Hourani – recognizing the interplay of situated and global structures in shaping Middle Eastern processes – called the region’s “Liberal Age.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This macro context was dominated by Britain and France’s liberal imperialism, piquing intellectual and political responses across the Islamicate Mediterranean. For the founders of a secret society in the late 1860s – the “Young Ottomans” – the answer to both the Tanzimat’s limitations and European hegemony was to fortify both the religious and the liberal substance of the era’s Islamo-liberal synthesis.

Cultural production and the burgeoning medium of mass media provided platforms via which to promote the synthesis. As Taglia documents, newspapers and journals were produced in multiple languages (e.g., Ottoman Turkish, French, Italian, Greek, Armenian, and Bulgarian). The Ottoman-Muslim press began flourishing after the 1860s, achieving a circulation of up to 150,000.Footnote ⁵⁷ The appetite for critical media mounted as commentators, defying censorship, “relentlessly insisted that government officials owed their loyalty to the people, not to their ruler and that the promulgation of a constitution would resolve most of the Empire’s problems.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Similarly, pundits sought to draw “readers in[to] discussions concerning citizens’ obligations and rights, which could not arbitrarily be taken away.”Footnote ⁵⁹

A case in point was Muhbir (Correspondent), published by Filip Efendi, a Greek-Orthodox champion of multicultural Ottomanism.Footnote ⁶⁰ One of at least ten journals generated by the Young Ottoman movement, Muhbir showcased the views of a passionate preacher, Ali Suavi, who would ultimately die for the Islamo-liberal cause.Footnote ⁶¹ Other personalities such as Namık Kemal and Ziya Paşa advanced the program via publications like Hürriyet (Liberty), which they founded during sojourns in Paris and London.Footnote ⁶² Exilic experiences affirmed for many Young Ottomans the importance of adopting not just the technical and institutional innovations from Europe that previous reformers had championed but also liberal political institutions.

The Young Ottomans agreed, however, that transformation via Western technologies and liberal political practices could not come at the cost of the Ottoman-Muslim soul. As “pious Muslims and Ottoman patriots,” they were ardent synthesizers of “liberal values with Islamic arguments.”Footnote ⁶³ A key concept in this vein was “principle/method of consultation” (usûl-ı meşveret), an umbrella term “for popular and constitutional government, a parliamentary system with separation of powers and a legal framework based on Islamic law, namely Sharia.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Namık Kemal was particularly productive under this rubric. Castigating Europeans for their distorted dualism when it came to reading the “Orient,” he declared:

Advocating a syncretic approach, he helped to popularize ideas like an Islamic foundation for democracy in the notion of consultation (shura) between the Prophet and members of the Islamic community. He also read the oath of allegiance given by leaders of the community to a new caliph (beyat) as a social contract between subjects and ruler.Footnote ⁶⁶ Words such as birthplace (vatan) began to connote “fatherland,” while “freeman” (hür, i.e., not a slave) was channeled toward the idea of “freedom.” The Young Ottomans also began using the old word for religious community (millet) in proto-nationalistic ways, while invoking the term interchangeably with notions of Islamic community (ümmet) in expressions such as İslam milleti, or İslam ümmeti).Footnote ⁶⁷

These ideas bore fruit in a constitution drafted under the stewardship of Grand Vizier Midhat Paşa. His reformist camp had been strengthened when a disgruntled military officer assassinated leaders of the conservative faction at a high-level government meeting following the deposition of Sultan Abdülaziz. The murderer was likely motivated by a combination of passion and politicking rather than ideological radicalism.Footnote ⁶⁸ His action nonetheless created a window to promulgate the first Ottoman constitution. This outcome attests to both the contingency of critical junctures and the opportunity spaces that they offer astute actors like Midhat Paşa and his pluralizing coalition. Kocunyan describes the constitutional commission as “a heterogeneous group” in terms of

The upshot was a document that enshrined the Young Ottoman fusion of Islamic and liberal themes: multicultural citizenship under a unified, territorially bounded Ottoman state. The project, it was hoped, would “democratize” the Tanzimat while advancing the centralization of the state and modernization of the polity. The document affirmed the equal rights of all citizens, abolished slavery,Footnote ⁷⁰ and established civil law and universal elementary education. In keeping with the proposals of Namık Kemal, who participated in the drafting process, a bicameral parliament was established, made up of a directly elected lower house and a senate appointed by the sultan. The impact on the governance of religious, among other forms of diversity in public life, was evidenced by the first popularly elected Chamber of Deputies: its circa 60 percent Muslim and 40 percent non-Muslim delegates hailed from across the empire.Footnote ⁷¹ Young Ottoman constitutionalism marked a crowning moment in the evolution of Islamo-liberalism since the Gülhane Proclamation almost four decades earlier. The first constitutional period (I. Meşrutiyet) lived up “to the spirit of constitutional representative government” enabling “vigorous contestation.”Footnote ⁷²

The moment, however, proved short-lived. Change, after all, is never linear or monocausal. Rather, as shown throughout this book, it is driven by the dynamic interaction of agential, ideational, and structural parameters. Ironically, the catalyzing cause of constitutional collapse was a major unintended consequence of the Tanzimat and Young Ottoman eras, namely, the fact that these projects had empowered the sultanate vis-à-vis the other arms of government. The enhanced executive was a product of decades of administrative centralization, powers enshrined in Mithat Paşa’s new charter. A lack of checks and balances – and specific constitutional articles that authorized the sultan to dismiss officials, dissolve parliament, and suspend the constitution when confronted with a major crisis – enabled the astute Abdülhamid to seize absolutist control of the Ottoman project.

The critical juncture that made this move possible arose when the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 culminated in the Treaty of San Stefano. In one fell swoop, the empire was faced with the formal or de facto secession of large swathes of territory – Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bulgaria – and the defection of millions of its Christians. This massive loss of land and peoples, and the concomitant surge of Balkan Muslim refugees into the empire, shattered the legitimacy of multicultural Ottoman patriotism.Footnote ⁷³

3.3.1 Hamidian (Pan-)Islamism: Ideas, Actors, and Structures

The newly installed Sultan Abdülhamid II seized the opportunity presented by San Stefano with an acumen that would shape his reign for over three decades. Declaring that reform through “persuasion and by liberal institutions”Footnote ⁷⁴ was misguided, he invoked the sultan’s constitutional right to suspend the document. By leveraging this microlevel structure – a veritable loophole – the sultan ended a two-generation, Islamo-liberal experiment. The project nevertheless had generated a robust reservoir of syncretic norms and practices that transformed, for better or for worse, the governance of religious and ethnic diversity.

By way of contrast, the Hamidian era would advance an ethnically plural but religiously more narrow approach to the empire’s diversity. The groundwork had been laid by earlier movements. Antecedents included Sufi mobilization since the eighteenth century, seeking “renewal” (tecdid or Tajdid) across an Islamicate world embarked upon perturbing encounters with European capitalism and colonialism.Footnote ⁷⁵ Building on readings of the Ottoman sultan as a religious leader, Abdülhamid’s invigoration of the caliphate channeled early modern invocation by Selim III and Mahmud II of the title müceddid (“restorer” of the faith) to infuse their military and fiscal reforms with religious legitimacy.Footnote ⁷⁶ Hamidian Islamism further built on the Young Ottomans’ religiously informed critique of the ostentatiously Westernized Tanzimat bureaucrats (e.g., Young Ottoman invocation of Şeriat – albeit in support of constitutional government which was hardly the Hamidian priority).Footnote ⁷⁷

Abdülhamid’s invocation of Islam was a bid to preserve the Ottoman state – a cause to which most critics of his absolutism were likewise devoted. Combining new tools for political mobilization with suspicion of liberalism, he reimagined Muslim primacy as a modern ideological program. The goal was to galvanize Ottoman subjects for whom “Muslimness” was slowly becoming an ethnic and cultural as well as a religious property. The intended audience included Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Albanians, Circassians, Laz from the Black Sea region, and Muslim refugees from across the Balkans and Caucasus. The hope was that the empire’s remaining, ethnically diverse Muslims would rally under the banner of the caliph-sultan’s Ottoman Islam

Promoted via illiberal technologies of governance, Abdülhamid suppressed the once vibrant press and lslamo-liberal ideational repertoire. Banned terms included “constitution,” “revolution,” “freedom,” “anarchy,” “tyranny,” “people’s rights,” “equality,” “fraternity,” “fatherland,” “republic,” “deputies,” “senators,” “reforms,” and – in testimony to the transformative agency of individuals and fears thereof – “Mithat Paşa,” the liberal architect of the suspended constitution.Footnote ⁷⁸

But if Abdülhamid’s project was authoritarian, it was no revolt against modernity. Rather, the sultan was responding strategically to emergent conditions in the neo-traditional idiom of Muslim authenticity.Footnote ⁷⁹ At one level, this involved engagement of revivalist ideas about early Islamic law and practices. The strategy also involved elaborate displays of piety like lavish processionals to attend Friday prayers. Such practices might have been moved by faith, but they also helped the sultan-caliph to cultivate a sense of his “might, wealth, and proximity to his people.” The strategy resembled what Cannadine has called “Ornamentalism” in the context of British imperialism: the leveraging of pomp and circumstance to impress the Crown’s authority upon subjects in and beyond India.Footnote ⁸⁰ Meanwhile, Abdülhamid was committed to the reconciliation of Islam and science and devoted much of his rule to advancing education, engineering, and technology. Railroads were envisaged as conveyors of “civilization” to the empire’s periphery, a reading in sync with contemporary European views. The sultan documented such reforms meticulously. His purpose was to curate a (not very well received) image of the Ottoman state’s modernizing progress to Westerners.Footnote ⁸¹ Meanwhile, privately, the sultan-caliph enjoyed elements of Western culture like the occasional sip of champagne.Footnote ⁸² He also indulged in the Victorian equivalent of the miniseries, enjoying the Sherlock Holmes stories that were read to him in the evenings. According to his Hungarian confidant Vámbéry, an atheist of Jewish origin, the sultan was “the very personification of the bourgeois monarch.”Footnote ⁸³

Other actors who shaped Abdülhamid’s (pan-)Islamist project and legacy included state functionaries, religious figures, and lay intellectuals from across and beyond the empire. Among their ranks was the bureaucrat Küçük Said Paşa who promoted Muslim unity as a governance strategy while promoting modernization of education and the military along Western lines (for the paradoxical purpose of fortifying Muslims from Western power).Footnote ⁸⁴ Abdülhamid also recruited Arab religious leaders and bureaucrats whose influence in Istanbul simultaneously served Ottoman imperial agendas among communities back home.Footnote ⁸⁵ At several junctures, the prominent Islamist intellectual Jamal al-Din al-Afghani sought Abdülhamid’s support for pan-Muslim mobilization against European imperialism. The pragmatic sultan, however, was wary of the firebrand Islamic modernist. Instead, he turned often to a senior figure from the Tanzimat, Islamo-liberal coalition, Ahmet Cevdet Paşa, who gave counsel on the “politics of Islam” in general and investing the caliphate with pan-Islamic traction in particular.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ahmet Cevdet Paşa’s contributions to religious reform under both Islamo-liberal and proto-Islamist/authoritarian regimes, attest to how actors evolve in response to shifting internal and external structures – and the zeitgeists that they inform.

Hamidian autocracy nevertheless frustrated many Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Dissidents gathered in the European diaspora, and violent outbreaks occurred across the empire. In the case of eastern Anatolian Armenians, Abdülhamid responded by deputizing mostly Kurdish militias to suppress unrest that broke out in 1894 and more extensively in 1896. The massacres killed tens of thousands, at a very minimum, establishing an ominous precedent for management of the empire’s dwindling non-Muslim diversity.

Covered widely in the international press at the dawn of mass media, the violence affirmed in Western public opinion the equation of “Islam” and the Ottoman sultanate with despotic brutality. Many a liberal in Europe, like the British statesman William Gladstone, were vociferous on this point, using racist language to describe Ottoman Turks as the “great anti-human specimen of humanity … wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization vanished from view.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Such statements ignored the simultaneous suffering of Muslim victims of intercommunal conflict. Infuriated by this lack of empathy, the publisher Ebüzziya described European coverage as filled with “defect and exaggeration.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Hamidian revitalization of the caliphate tried to tap this sense of geo-cultural injustice. In this regard, the project not only sought the loyalty of the empire’s Muslim subjects but also linked the Ottoman cause to an emergent, global Muslim consciousness. Worldwide Muslim consternation during this period, according to Aydın, was a response to the racialization of Muslims within European colonial imaginaries. Pushing back, Islamic thinkers and leaders idealized an imagined, pan-Islamic past as a counter-civilizational project. Hamidian Islamism was an early expression of this dialectical exercise. Its legacy for modern geopolitics is the fiction of a monolithic “Muslim world.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Meanwhile, in practice, Hamidian autocracy obstructed meaningful Islamist mobilization, at least in Ottoman territories. And far from fostering anti-colonial movements abroad, the sultan sought to emphasize the compatibility of his pan-Islamism with Anglo-Ottoman alliance. For instance, he viewed the caliphate’s appeal to Britain’s Muslim subjects as a resource for London and Istanbul’s common cause against expansive Moscow. Abdülhamid, in other words, sought not a “clash of civilizations,” but a world safe for empires. His Islamism was a tool toward this conservative, not revolutionary end. An innovative platform for internal and external power projection, Hamidian Islamism helped the paranoid sultan consolidate power at home. Simultaneously, it played on colonial British, French, and Russian fears that their millions of Muslim subjects might mobilize on behalf of the caliphate. The upshot was an anti-pluralist framework for authoritarian modernization that rejected Islamo-liberalism as ineffective, seeking instead to manage diversity by championing a religiously more homogeneous but ethnically plural body politic.

3.3.2 Positivism and Liberalism

As with all political systems, the complex interplay of actors, ideas, and structures during the Hamidian period generated properties that further transformed the governance of Islam and social diversity. Hamidian repression, for its part, engendered resistance from a new generation of political thinkers and activists.

Stifled by autocracy, a significant number of these “Young Turks” went to Europe as students or exiles. These journeys often followed sojourns in elite Istanbul academies where Hamidian modernization, ironically, informed an educational “atmosphere” permeated with “French and German scientific materialism, Social Darwinism, and Positivism.”Footnote ⁹⁰ For figures such as Abdullah Cevdet, these experiences amplified the sense of religious disenchantment stimulated by the century’s reforms. Cevdet argued that Islam had stagnated, abandoning its foundational rationality for “imitation” (taklid). To flourish in a science-driven, European-led world, he and others embraced positivismFootnote ⁹¹ – a nascent secularist (and Orientalist) set of answers to the empire’s predicaments.

In Auguste Comte’s mid nineteenth-century “religion of science,” positivism claimed to reject all forms of social organization that were not based on scientific knowledge. Part of its appeal may have been because, by ostensibly rejecting all religions equally, positivism leveled the geo-cultural playing field, making it as flat for Muslim-born positivists as it was for Christian-born.Footnote ⁹² Nevertheless, to resonate within pious Ottoman society, the positivist call to science was often articulated in religious idiom. This hybrid discursive strategy was evident in journals such as İçtihâd (critical interpretation) that invoked relevant hadith or the Islamic Golden Age when Muslims led the world in math and medicine, and the gates of critical engagement of the canon were open.

The grafting of Ottoman-Islamic normative resources onto secular ontological foundations did not prevent positivists from resenting European double standards toward Ottoman Muslims. Ahmet Rıza was a positivist and organizer of dissident groups that would coalesce into the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Like Abdullah Cevdet and others, he decried the “strong Christian bias”Footnote ⁹³ that, in practice, informed great power behavior toward the Ottomans. Describing discrimination as a betrayal of the Enlightenment’s emancipatory promise, he declared: “Only positivism” can save “in the eyes of Oriental peoples, the prestige of European civilization and the honor of the great French Revolution.”Footnote ⁹⁴ In this regard, Ahmet Rıza resembled other liberal nationalists across Europe who believed in the “importance of unity” and the need to “acquire … strength.”Footnote ⁹⁵ He sought, in short, self-determination for the primary political community: Ottoman Muslims. In Ahmet Rıza’s work with the journal Mechveret (Consultation), he synthesized these conflicted impulses – positivism, liberalism, and the proto-nationalist call for Muslim unification – asserting that all could be achieved by restoring the Ottoman constitution.

Other Young Turks called for constitutional restoration via an alternative reading of liberalism. Prince Sabahattin of the Ottoman dynasty – who is often described as the father of secular liberalism in Turkey – was deeply influenced by Demolins’ treatise “A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons” (“What Accounts for the Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons?”). Like Abdullah Cevdet, but with as much emphasis on liberalism as science, he argued that European ideas need to be internalized even if the process was painful. The empire’s ills, Sabahattin claimed, were due to its overbearing state and communitarian society. As a remedy, he called for small government and educational reform to imbue individual citizens with entrepreneurial initiative.Footnote ⁹⁶

This unreconstructed, secular liberalism was of a different ilk than the syncretic Islamo-liberalism of both the Tanzimat pashas and Young Ottoman ideologues. It also differed from Ahmet Rıza’s proto-nationalism. The latter, after all, sought to strengthen rather than minimalize the state, favoring military participation in anti-Hamidian mobilization. Sabahattin’s anti-militarist liberals, by way of contrast, aimed for decentralization. Sabahattin’s ideas were well received by Ottoman non-Muslims (a pattern of secular liberal alliance with religious and ethnic minorities that would recur for years to come). But he alienated the proto-nationalist camp when he argued, with Armenian factions, that foreign intervention was a legitimate strategy of resistance to Abdülhamid.Footnote ⁹⁷ The nationalists accused liberals of seeking to replace Hamidian tyranny with British rule (engendering another staple of the emergent nationalist repertoire – the perception of secular liberals as minions of the West). Practically, these differences translated into different alliances within Ottoman lands. Proto-nationalists strategically recruited soldiers across the Ottoman Balkans. By way of contrast, Prince Sabahattin’s “League of Private Initiative and Decentralization” sought links with provincial leaders in Anatolia, including Armenian groups.

The result was that positivists – that is, nascent secularists – among the Young Turks split between a more unitary, militarist, and proto-nationalist wing, and factions that called for decentralization and multicultural pluralism. That said, the split was hardly binary or immutable. As with any intra- or inter-camp alignment, there were moderates and hardliners in each camp, including individuals who switched sides out of evolving conviction and/or opportunism.

3.3.3 The Young Turk Revolution(s)

Tensions notwithstanding, the “revolutionary agency” of this oddball, anti-Hamidian coalition was primed by its participants’ intellectual, political, and other “entanglements” at the “conjecture … of transnational, imperial and local factors.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Therefore, its members were ready to seize the opportunity opened by a series of revolts in eastern Anatolian and Balkan provinces over new taxes – and the empire’s overall economic malaise. Capturing these energies, Young Turk revolutionaries demanded the reinstatement of the suspended Ottoman constitution. Officers in the Macedonian provinces led the charge, restoring the Constitution on July 24, 1908.

Supporters of beleaguered Abdülhamid mounted a counterrevolution aimed at preserving the caliph-sultan, if not necessarily his authoritarianism. The CUP suppressed the counterrevolution via its mobilized military wing. More than three decades after Abdülhamid shut down the Ottoman parliament, the body was reopened. The Second Constitutional Era (II. Meşrutiyet, 1908/9–1918) was a momentary triumph for the pluralizing coalition that had sidelined the authoritarian sultan (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Lithograph celebrating the Ottoman constitution.

(Wikimedia Commons)

The ideal of patriotism to a constitutional Ottoman state was celebrated. In the honeymoon period, wide-ranging causes and voices found expression in flourishing public spaces, from the Ottoman suffragette movement to patriotic, civic initiatives that evolved in symbiosis with the state.Footnote ⁹⁹ Anti-Hamidian Islamic factions, for instance, welcomed the revolution as an opportunity for “evolutionary progress combining modernism and religiosity;” according to thinkers like Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, such progress had been obstructed by Hamidian repression and traditionalist elements within the ulema.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These diverse stakeholders participated in a series of elections (1908, 1912, and 1914) that, Kayalı contends, “provided precedents and standards” that have hardly been “equaled in the Middle East and many other parts of the world; introduc[ing] fundamental norms of political participation and mobilization” (which to this day remain highly salient in Turkey’s electoralist political culture). That said, as a visiting Chinese thinker who bore witness to the revolution observed, “the majority of those who support the ratification of the Constitution today are soldiers.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

In this vibrant but contentious context, “the main contours of political contestation”Footnote ¹⁰² emerged as “the politicization of Islam and ethnic difference”Footnote ¹⁰³ – the same contours that coalitions of more and less pluralistic actors had been contesting since the Tanzimat. During the Second Constitutional Era, contestation pitted the CUP’s military wing (which sought to centralize governance), against liberal Young Turks and their allies (who sought decentralization).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The former proved willing to use electoral malpractice and outright violence to retain control of parliament. Liberals, for their part, failed to create a mass following.

The growing dissonance between the CUP’s emancipatory agenda and repressive practices was informed by the Committee’s functionalist understanding of constitutionalism, gleaned from observing other “liberal” revolutions in historical and contemporary perspective (e.g., France 1789, Russia 1905, and Iran 1905). These precedents, Sohrabi argues, instilled a statist reading of constitutionalism. Essentially, constitutionalism was seen as a technique for managing intercommunal tensions. It also offered a “doctrine of political, administrative, and legal rationality” with which “the Ottoman state was to rebuild strength, prevent disintegration, and recover lost glory.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Ultimately, driven by these statist concerns, and not a pluralistic interest in “citizens’ rights and liberties, or the correct implementation of every article of the constitution,” Unionists seized definitive control in 1913. A triumvirate of particularly illiberal individuals proceeded to purge liberal and other rivals,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ “shattering” the dream of a more pluralist, post-Hamidian era.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

3.4.1 (Pan-)Turkism: Ideas, Actors, and Structures

During this period of constant political crisis and “hemorrhaging territory,”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ a third set of proto-nationalist ideas coalesced. Until this point, ethnicity had not featured prominently in Ottoman-Islamic thought. Muslims were still seen as members of the dominant millet-i hakime, and minorities were defined in religious terms. The ethnicization of Turkish-speaking Muslims had begun with the literary revival of the Tanzimat. It was fueled internally by Christian minority secessionism and the influx of displaced Muslims from former Ottoman domains. Nascent pan-Turkism was further informed by French and Hungarian Orientalists’ vision of “Turan,” the mythical Central Asian homeland of Ural-Altaic peoples like Turks. It drew also on European projections, which had long imputed ethnic or ethno-religious content to the label “Turk” (even though few Ottomans thought of themselves as such until the early twentieth century). After 1908, however, “electoral politics” and CUP ascendance “animated and politicized proto-nationalist movements among the [empire’s remaining] Muslims.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For example, the rise of Albanian and Arab nationalisms – endeavors in which the Ottoman authorities increasingly figured as “Others” – stimulated in some native Turkish speakers a sense of collective purpose.

In terms of agents, Yusuf Akçura, a Tatar émigré from the Russian-controlled Black Sea region, drew on these forces to make the case for pan-Turkism: unity among Turkic-language speakers across Eurasia. The project acquired political salience in an early twentieth-century context of rising, Russian pan-Slavism. Pan-Turkism also should be read in transatlantic context where the view of race as a biological category was widely accepted from New York to Berlin.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Akçura, for his part, acknowledged that ethnicity had little mobilizing traction in Ottoman political culture. He nevertheless believed it was the only option. A multinational Ottoman polity, he argued, was an illusory dream,Footnote ¹¹¹ while pan-Islamism would be blocked by European powers. Pan-Turkism, however, offered the Ottoman state a framework for preservation and greatness, as it would be supported by Turkic peoples across Eurasia and opposed only by Russia.

Pan-Turkism offered a new – and anti-pluralist – reading of how to manage religion and diversity in public life. First, it acknowledged Islam as an intrinsic component of collective identity while downplaying its public role. Instead, Islam was reinscribed as a marker of cultural identity alongside linguistic – and, for some, racial – Turkic-ness as constitutive of collective identity. The move homogenized the body politic, restricting membership to ethnic Turks, albeit, in principle, to millions of ethnic Turks across Eurasia.

In this geopolitical sense, pan-Turkism provided a formula with which to play the long nineteenth-century game of great power politics. It had affinities, as such, with rising Germany’s fusion of ethno-nationalism and geopolitics. Relations with Berlin provided the CUP triumvirate with leverage against Moscow, but also London and Paris, to whom the empire had long been beholden in its need to stave off Russian incursions. The relationship also had antecedents in Abdülhamid’s ties with the Kaiser who had helped to balance English and French influence and to legitimize neoconservative, authoritarian modernization.

A key actor linking the empire with Germany was Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, who during and after Abdülhamid’s reign oversaw the reorganization of the army and military education. The author of multiple military textbooks, Goltz Paşa, was initially dismissive of the empire’s chances of survival. He came to believe, however, that the Turkish people possessed a special moral energy. With inflections of Herder – but also Social Darwinism – this energy, he argued, could thrust Turks into Europe’s illustrious civilization. Goltz Paşa’s ideas, including his elitist view of military officers as the vanguard of national-cum-civilizational transformation, influenced a generation, including many within the CUP.

Proto-nationalist ideologues like Ziya Gökalp also developed platforms that engaged with debates salient in German sociology. They did so via long-standing Ottoman-Islamic polemics regarding the relationship between “civilization” (medeniyet) and “culture” (hars).Footnote ¹¹² According to Gökalp’s influential reading, civilization was associated with scientific and technical achievement, hence universally attainable; culture was the organic force residing within a people. The task then was to appropriate the empowering technologies of the era’s dominant civilization – Europe – while remaining true to Turco-Muslim culture. Gökalp’s views sowed the seeds of an ethnicized Turkish/Muslim collective identity that would coalesce into at least two strands of nationalism – one more civic, the other more ethnic – in the post-Ottoman period.

Meanwhile, pan-Turkist excision of non-Muslims and non-Turks had major implications for cohabitation as the empire, convulsed by an almost permanent crisis, lurched from the Balkan Wars to – unnecessarily – joining World War I on the German side in 1914. In another disastrous decision, the triumvirate responded to Armenian agitation and mounting intercommunal conflict along the fluid border with Russia by expelling the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia in 1915. The forced marches under intolerable conditions, with massacres along the way, depopulated Anatolia of much of its indigenous Christian population (with some surviving orphans adopted into Muslim families – a trauma that reverberates across family histories to this day). Much of the violence was perpetrated by Kurdish irregulars, in keeping with the pattern established by Hamidian regiments during the 1894 and 1896 massacres.Footnote ¹¹³ Because, however, the policies were coordinated by the central government, many historians place ultimate responsibility on the triumvirate, especially Talat Paşa.Footnote ¹¹⁴

In the same period, an Arab nationalist “revival”Footnote ¹¹⁵ that had been underway in the Ottoman Levant contributed to Arab defection – at Britain’s behest – in the Levant. With the CUP’s collapse and defeat and occupation by Allied forces, proto-nationalist resistance gathered in Anatolia. Invoking religious referents to rally the remaining Muslims of the disintegrating Ottoman space, Turks, Kurds, and refugees from the Caucasus and Balkans battled Allied occupation.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Fierce fighting culminated in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) that established a nation-state and new political system, the Republic of Turkey, on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

4.2.1 Kemalism: Ideas, Actors, and Structures

World War I was a “singularity” or critical juncture of monumental proportions that changed the trajectory of the entire international system. Gone were the dynastic empires of the Habsburgs, Romanovs, and Ottomans with their multiethnic and multi-confessional formations. Fledging nation-states sought to supplant imperial governance across Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Meanwhile, victorious – if exhausted – Allied powers such as Britain and France projected power across much of the post-Ottoman Middle East.

In the face of these initial conditions, the territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire were heavily partitioned, occupied, and slated for colonization by Allied Greek, British, French, and Italian forces under the Treaty of Sèvres. Mustafa Kemal Paşa, the charismatic general who had secured the Ottomans a rare WWI victory with the Battle of Gallipoli, led the nationalist war effort against occupying Allied forces.Footnote ⁶ He was aided in this endeavor – and the subsequent launch of the Republic – by bureaucratic and military figures who were products of the late Ottoman era.Footnote ⁷ Many followed in Mustafa Kemal’s footsteps by resigning from the army to take on civilian leadership roles, establishing an important precedent. But firm loyalty was expected, and on numerous occasions, the “Great Leader” (Büyük Önder) turned on former comrades-in-arms whose political visions did not fully match his own.

Having secured sovereignty, the nation-builders turned to the new global order’s geocultural challenges. Faced with an international system dominated by secularized Christian nation-states, they sought a formula for inclusion in the European-dominated “family of nations.” Access was provided via notions like “contemporary civilization” (muasır medeniyet), a concept that late Ottoman/early republican thinkers such as Gökalp had used to open an a-cultural pathway to technological, scientific, and material modernity. However, Kemalism – as a doctrine, if not always in practice – upped the ante, rejecting much of the Ottoman heritage including its religious and social pluralism.

4.2.2 Reaching “Contemporary Civilization”

When it came to the material dimensions of Gökalp’s “civilization,” Kemalists sought to achieve European levels of economic development. The project, however, faced significant structural challenges in an underpopulated, war-weary, debt-ridden, infrastructurally underdeveloped, overwhelmingly agrarian country where over 75 percent of the population was rural and circa 90 percent illiterate after years of continuous war.Footnote ⁸

This weak industrial base was worsened by the loss of millions of Ottoman Christians who, along with Jews, had comprised much of the Ottoman commercial classes.Footnote ⁹ The Young Turk triumvirate had annihilated most of Anatolia’s Armenians,Footnote ¹⁰ while the international community had mandated a 1923 compulsory exchange between Greek Muslim and Anatolian Orthodox communities.Footnote ¹¹ Non-Muslims’ economic role was to be replaced by fostering a “national,” namely, Turkish-Muslim bourgeoisieFootnote ¹² in light of Western science and technology. In this way, Turkey would become “prosperous and happy” with “many millionaires, even billionaires.”Footnote ¹³

Just as the economy could be (re-)engineered, so too republican nation-builders sought to reconfigure religious codes. Echoing late Ottoman positivists and contemporary Europeans, they believed that Europeans’ success emanated from the rejection of religious dogma and acceptance of secular reason as the basis of being and action. According to this logic, if European achievements were due to post-Christian, enlightened secularism, then a nation that embraced secularism would likewise thrive, regardless of its Muslim culture. By way of contrast, nations that insisted on religious “medievalism” in their laws and social relations were doomed to exploitation by rational Europe.Footnote ¹⁴

Yet, as with capitalist advancement, rejecting Islam was easier said than done in a country exhausted by World War I and the War of Liberation. After all, the will to fight European invaders had been sustained by the language of religious unity and struggle (jihad).Footnote ¹⁵ Throughout the national resistance (milli mücadele), the term “national” (milli) was used, in keeping with the late Ottoman practice, to refer to Muslim peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Time and again, “Defense of Rights” societies declared their opposition to the Allied occupation in the name of Ottoman-Muslim solidarity, the sultanate, and the caliphate.Footnote ¹⁶ Even the 1919 National Pact – which broke with the imperial principle, upholding the new ideal of a national, territorial state based on popular sovereignty – did not specify that the “nation” in question was Turkish, much less secular. And while Ottoman reforms had established the foundations for a disenchanted public order, especially among elites, most people continued to find meaning in life plotted around a Muslim canon.Footnote ¹⁷

Kemalists, however, were not interested in creating the sociological conditions for change. Rather, history and national consciousness could be rewritten from scratch to ensure a quick transition from “an uncivilized period to a civilized one.”Footnote ¹⁸ According to Sayyid, it was this self-Orientalizing view – namely, that only through secularization could Muslim culture be reconciled with Western technology – that set Kemalism apart from other attempts at defensive modernization in Muslim-majority settings.Footnote ¹⁹

Mustafa Kemal launched the cultural revolution shortly after the nationalist victory with a campaign to abolish the caliphate. In so doing, he overrode moderates like war hero Kâzım Karabekir who argued that religious reforms should be incremental so as to keep pious elements – including Kurds – on board the nation-building train. Mustafa Kemal, by way of contrast, argued that privatizing piety would rescue it from corruption.Footnote ²⁰ The sultanate and caliphate were abolished in 1922 and 1924, respectively. This was followed by the elimination of the clergy (ulema), religious law (şeriat),Footnote ²¹ traditional seminaries (medrese), and the heterodox Sufi brotherhoods (tarikat) whose lodges were the lifeline of Anatolian Islam. A new form of religious governance accountable to the prime minister was created in the form of a Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Turkey’s secularism thus entailed the subordination – and control – of religion, not its separation from the state.Footnote ²²

An officially sanctioned “enlightened Islam” was promulgated in sync with Westernist nationalism. The Gregorian calendar and Latin script replaced Arabic usage, blocking direct access to the Islamic philosophical and literary canon. The cultural revolution also had a performative dimension. Garb and practices associated with the Ottoman past, like wearing the fez or veiling, were discouraged due to their association – in the Western gaze – with the Orient. The goal, in keeping with earlier Young Turk positivism, was to engineer a Comtean leap from what the French philosopher had deemed “metaphysical” pre-modernity to “positive” modernity toward achieving “contemporary civilization” (muasır medeniyet).Footnote ²³ By reproducing the geo-cultural frames of contemporary Europe, the cultural revolution proved a “very successful legitimation strategy,” helping to mobilize support for Turkey’s inclusion in the “family of nations.” But the cultural revolution was a strategy “to make Turks ‘civilised’ – to transform them in that sense – not to make them politically freer.”Footnote ²⁴

4.2.3 Embedded Liberalism

The pursuit of economic modernity and top-down secularization was accompanied by the engagement of prevailing European conceptions of rights and governance. Civil and commercial law was adopted almost ad verbatim from extant European codes (which themselves mixed liberal and illiberal elements). Some features of this new legal order entailed civic notions of rights compatible with political liberalism. Negating dynastic and imperial governance, sovereignty was declared to derive unconditionally from the people. Universal citizenship and its attendant rights such as freedom of religion, conscience, and expression were enshrined.Footnote ²⁵ Non-Muslims’ universal rights as citizens were supplemented, at least formally, by collective cultural, education, and language rights under the foundational Treaty of Lausanne (which simultaneously established modern Turkey).Footnote ²⁶ Women acquired full political rights.Footnote ²⁷ Significantly, assimilation to the emergent Turkish identity was voluntaristic according to Article 88 of the 1924 Constitution:

This civic definition of national belonging was incorporated into the program of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi [CHP]).Footnote ²⁹ Liberal democracy was flagged as a long-term goal. And, at least in principle, Mustafa Kemal accepted liberal institutions such as political parties, trade unions, and press freedoms.Footnote ³⁰ Establishing precedents for an eventual transition to pluralist politics, two short-lived experiments in multiparty politics were attempted: the Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası (Progressive Republican Party in 1924) and the Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası (Free Republican Party in 1930). Foreign policy, moreover, was based on the non-irridentistFootnote ³¹ slogan “peace at home, peace in the world” (yurta suhl, cihanda suhl) – a frame that informed significant rapprochement with recent nemesis Greece.Footnote ³²

On balance, however, the normative benchmark was not the liberal, democratic West whose agents, after all, had occupied and sought to dismantle the country at the end of World War I. Rather, and attesting to the power of geo-cultural structures in shaping domestic agendas, the referent was the “nationalist-corporatist-laicist West” of the interwar twentieth century.Footnote ³³ Anti-pluralist factions stressed the supremacy of society over the individual and social solidarism over identity or class conflict. The CHP proclaimed that “the interests of all members of society are not and should not … be in conflict.”Footnote ³⁴ Citizens were exhorted in the language of duty and sacrifice to “unity and togetherness” in order to “construct a national identity compatible with the will to civilization.”Footnote ³⁵ A case in point was state feminism. The approach emphasized women’s duty to embody the new ideal, secularized (Sunni Muslim) citizen, rather than individual empowerment. Meanwhile, vibrant, late Ottoman women’s initiatives were shuttered.Footnote ³⁶

In short, early promotion of popular sovereignty was less about pluralistic empowerment of Turkey’s citizens than about ensuring the inviolability of institutions designated as receptacles of popular sovereignty – an anti-pluralist project. Potential challengers to the regime’s illiberality could be criminalized. This was evident in the trial and execution of figures such as Cavit Bey , a late Ottoman statesman with Jewish roots who had been among the few core figures of the Young Turk regime to favor economic liberalism and multiculturalism.Footnote ³⁷ Other “political, religious and literary” prisoners were incarcerated in Ankara’s Ulucanlar Prison.Footnote ³⁸ Rival political parties rooted in civil society were shut down, and the two experiments with loyal opposition nipped in the bud when their more liberal – and pro-religious – platforms attracted genuine opposition.

4.2.4 Religious, Liberal, and Nationalist Responses

Kemalist nationalism with its endorsement of capitalist modernity, its civic (in principle) but corporatist (in practice) conception of rights, and its top-down secularism was relatively successful in urban areas that the state could most easily penetrate. Yet, even in cities, and especially in the provinces, the project generated resistance.

The most intense defiance came from Sufi and Kurdish groups, sometimes one and the same, who had enjoyed relative autonomy under the Ottoman Empire. Having fought for the Ottoman-Muslim, proto-nationalist cause during the War of Independence, some felt betrayed by the policies of secularization and Turkification. In 1925, a Kurdish rebellion was launched by the Nakşibendi Sheik Said.Footnote ³⁹ Crushed with a heavy hand, it presaged a pattern of zero tolerance for religious and ethnic challenges to the unitary order. That being said, other Kurdish groups worked with the government in return for local and regional power – a pattern that also would persist (attesting to intragroup heterogeneity and the power of intergroup collaboration).Footnote ⁴⁰ Meanwhile, the fact that the rebellion occurred during the brief tenure of a liberal government (re-)activated the late Ottoman impression that political pluralism leads to minority secessionism.Footnote ⁴¹

With the abolition of the tarikat in 1925, Sufi orders went underground where they administered informal networks whose members were alienated by state-imposed secularism. For these cadres, the era and its perceived injustices were traumatic. A coping strategy proposed by the text-based Nurcu movement was to embark on an “inner hijra”Footnote ⁴² – that is, to push Islamic consciousness into private spaces until it would again become permissible to externalize an Islamic political identity.Footnote ⁴³ The movement’s founder, Said Nursi, objected, like many Kurds of the era, to Kemalism on religious rather than ethnic grounds. Nursi faced trial, imprisonment, and exile on numerous occasions. His writings sought in the Islamic modernist tradition to reconcile Muslim subjectivity with the material features of modernity. For example, he encouraged followers to read the Koran through the lens of scientific discoveries, emphasizing “the significance of reason over miracles in religious understanding.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Another source of resistance came from figures from within the establishment who had reservations about the “scientistic-positivist obsession … of republican factions.” Flagging an “Other West” of romanticism, spiritualism, and Bergsonism, they sought a “middle way.”Footnote ⁴⁵ A champion of this view was Ahmet Ağaoğlu. A rare public figure to espouse Islamo-liberalism in the early republican period, Ağaoğlu was an eclectic liberal nationalist,Footnote ⁴⁶ who argued that Islamic idiom represented a “set of ideological symbolic resources”Footnote ⁴⁷ that could be mobilized for nationalist consolidation. He believed the fault line between East and West was due, not to religion, but to a lack of a “national principle” in Eastern societies.Footnote ⁴⁸ As a source of solidaristic, proto-national sentiment, Islam therefore was reconcilable with both Western civilization and a nationalized, hence Westernized Turkish culture. Ağaoğlu was associated with figures such as Fethi Okyar, who founded the Free Party at Atatürk’s instigation, in a short-lived attempt to expand on the Republic’s embedded liberalism. Nevertheless, Ağaoğlu’s Islamo-liberal synthesis – and its laissez-faire attitude toward religion – would acquire a mass following under the banner of the center-right with the transition to multiparty politics.

Other pro-religious elites challenged the cultural revolution in the language of poetry, generating ideas that would reverberate across sundry strands of Islamist revisionism. A prominent case in point was Mehmet Akif Ersoy whose verses resonated sufficiently with wider audiences that they were enshrined in the national anthem. The song declares – contrary to Kemalist claims – that Western civilization is a decrepit “one-toothed monster.” Similarly, Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, the son of a wealthy Istanbul family, decried the disenchantment that accompanied the march toward (Western) civilization. Embracing the Nakşibendi brotherhood, he generated tropes of a vital East destined to prevail over a West doomed by its own instrumental reason. These ideas continue to resonate with adepts of Nakşibendi-inspired political Islam.

Kemalist secularism thus succeeded not so much in eliminating the Islamic pillar of identity as in displacing it to underground networks on the one hand and to the Turkish pillar of national identity on the other. If this experience marked a moment of pronounced “secularist vs. Islamist” tension, the solution that government actors brought to bear also entailed co-option. By the 1930s, as it became clear that Islamic commitments retained resonance, the unitary state and its intelligentsia increasingly flagged a secularized Sunni Muslim identity as a marker of Turkishness (much like “Jewishness” is an ethnic rather than religious trait for secular Jews). The elision was well received in a post-Ottoman society that continued to view Muslim subjects as first-class citizens.Footnote ⁴⁹ This emergent ethno(-religious) streak in national identity jarred, however, with the official, voluntaristic definition of Turkishness enshrined in the constitution. As such, a mixed vision of national belonging crystallized at the interstices of the official narrative based on linguistic, cultural, and geographic Turkishness, but also an unofficial view of Turkishness as ethnic Muslim-ness.

Attesting to the way that contests over (anti-)pluralism are nested in macro-level, geo-cultural structures as well as domestic contexts, this ethnicized conception of Muslimness was fueled by “scientific” racism in the liberal as well as illiberal West.Footnote ⁵⁰ Racism, however, was a double-edged sword for republican Turkey. It legitimized ethno-nationalism – a pro for ruling cadres in the late 1930s. But it also coded “Oriental” peoples like Turks as congenitally inferior. Atatürk, for one, was piqued by this tension in a French book shown to him by his adopted daughter, Afet İnan, who was an historian. The book described Turks as a “yellow skinned … secondary human type.” This provoked Atatürk to enjoin İnan and her colleagues to investigate and negate the claim.Footnote ⁵¹ The result was the Turkish History Thesis. It sought to “scientifically” demonstrate that the Turkish race – the spirit of which was encoded in the Turkish language – was the progenitor of the world’s languages, peoples, and civilizations.Footnote ⁵² Although Atatürk died in 1938, the Thesis was disseminated via a series of conferences and served as the basis of history textbooks for almost two decades.Footnote ⁵³

Not all members of the Kemalist elite endorsed the Thesis with its linguistic overtone and racialized subtext as a strategy for managing diversity.Footnote ⁵⁴ Renowned historian Fuat Köprülü was among the challengers (albeit on methodological rather than substantive or normative grounds). Advocates, however, included Recep Peker, who would serve as CHP secretary general and minister of finance, public works, defense, the interior, and prime minister. Peker envisaged a territorially delimited republic in which all Muslim ethnicities including his own Circassian community, Kurds, Laz, and Pomaks (of Bulgarian Muslim origin) should be incorporated. On non-Muslims, however, he stipulated that only Christians and Jews who spoke Turkish in private as well as in public could be considered “full Turks.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Peker’s lifework demonstrated how a linguistic approach to nationalism could elide into an emphasis on racial purity, especially in the late 1930s and 1940s. Such views were shared by fellow fascist sympathizer, prime minister Şükrü Saraçoğlu (1942–1946). Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, a former minister of the economy and of justice, also advocated for an authoritarian, one-party state and Turkification of the economy and society. He declared, for instance, that “[t]hose who are not of pure Turkish stock can have only one right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves.”Footnote ⁵⁶

A policy reflecting this aggressively unitary strand of ethno-nationalism was the Wealth Tax of 1942. The process began with a coordinated media campaign accusing Jews and other non-Muslims of “chicanery,” “black-marketeering,” “price-gouging,” “speculation,” and “profiteering” among other egregious practices (and anti-Semitic tropes).Footnote ⁵⁷ A tax then authorized confiscation of up to 50 percent of the wealth of non-Muslims. Proscribing forced labor for nonpayment, 1,400 people – mostly Jews – were deported to work camps in bitterly cold eastern Turkey. Twenty-one perished.Footnote ⁵⁸ A decade later, shortly after the transition to multiparty democracy, the treasurer of Istanbul responsible for the implementation of the tax wrote a book drenched in regret. “The Wealth Tax,” he declared, “had the stamp of chauvinist nationalism, the stamp of racism … This character of the Wealth Tax alienated the non-Muslims who we had slowly been winning [over] after [the] Lausanne [Treaty].”Footnote ⁵⁹

In short, over the 1930s and early 1940s, an exclusionary ethno-nationalism that privileged secularized Sunni Muslim Turkish speakers prevailed. For hardline champions of the unitary state, this stance computed with broader developments, namely, the apparent “demise of liberalism in Europe and universal triumph of statism.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet, embedded liberalism also persisted, a latent resource that more moderate actors harnessed as internal and external dynamics shifted.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany on the horizon – and ascendence of both the liberal, democratic West and communist USSR – Atatürk’s successor, İsmet İnönü, made a series of critical choices. Cracking down on a small but vocal group of racist intellectuals and military officers who had been emboldened by the likes of Saraçoğlu, İnönü signaled to Washington that fascist sympathies would not be tolerated. Ever the savvy diplomat, İnönü’s move also signaled to expansive Moscow that Ankara would not countenance pan-Turkic provocations. Launching a show trial of hardline (pan-)Turkists (in the context of which the defendants were tortured), Inönü compelled extreme anti-pluralists within the regime to distance themselves from blood racism. Instead, he positioned to reaffirm the more civic and linguistic elements of the country’s foundational ideology.

In conjunction with showing how leaders can contribute to systemic recalibrations, the episode attested to the role of microlevel, institutional mechanisms. This was because Article 88 of the constitution – with its civic definition of citizenship – was invoked in the indictment. The prosecution’s argument: Racism and Turanism were in violation of the constitution’s voluntaristic definition of citizenship. The defendants countered by flagging the salience of ethno-nationalism in the preceding years, arguing “that their very nationalism was inspired by the educational system and political statements of Kemalist Turkey.”Footnote ⁶¹ This constitutive – and evolving – tension between more pluralistic and unitary visions of national identity would continue to characterize political contestation. Meanwhile, the trial’s marginalization of anti-pluralist extremists – albeit via anti-pluralist methods – revealed how agile leaders respond to shifting contextual forces by harnessing ideational resources toward navigating, or indeed generating, transformative junctures.

4.3.1 From Democrat Party to Illiberal Populism: Ideas, Actors, and Structures

A (re)vitalized Islamo-liberal alignment of diverse actors initially supported the DP. The party’s ranks included Celal Bayar, who succeeded İnönü as president; Adnan Menderes, the charismatic new prime minister; and the historian Köprülü, scion of an old Ottoman family who had challenged the Turkish History Thesis.Footnote ⁶³ Also from the early republican era was Ali Fuat Cebesoy – who had established the “Progressive Republican Party” back in the 1920s. Constituents included the Istanbul business community, farmers big and small, and rural elements drawn to DP legitimization of religious values as they underwent the tempestuous transition to economic modernity. The coalition further gathered people of many stripes – including Islamists – who had personal or family memories of repression during and after the cultural revolution.Footnote ⁶⁴

The party carried 53 percent of the vote, garnering 408 out of a possible 487 seats due to a winner-takes-all electoral rule (which would prove a critical, microlevel mechanism in the subsequent DP turn to majoritarianism). Improving on this performance in the 1954 elections, the DP in its first years populated an Islamo-liberal space which would become the golden goose of electoral politics in the twentieth century.

Programmatically, the party fused economic and political liberalism with pro-religious conservatism under the banner of religious freedom. The platform was legitimized with reference to an “authentic” Ottoman-Islamic heritage of multiculturalism and public Islam, but also Anglo-American secularism. After all, a laissez-faire approach to religion in civil society challenged the French-inspired laicism (laïcité) that informed Kemalist laiklik. The fusion of a religious ethos and secular political system in the US, it was argued, could better reconcile conservative society to the secular state than the early republicans’ top-heavy approach.Footnote ⁶⁵ The rehabilitation of public religion, as such, was rationalized via the “will of the people,” not Islamic law. This legitimizing principle channeled the regime’s embedded liberalism and conservative society’s democratic aspirations, “involving both a general broadening of political freedoms and an expanded role for Islam in public life.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The DP’s initial synthesis of social conservatism with economic and political liberalism bolstered the pro-Western turn in foreign policy. Initiated during the transitional period to multiparty politics, the DP enthusiastically carried the Western turn forward for geostrategic, economic, and ideological reasons. In an above-and-beyond commitment to the Western alliance, Turkey sent some 5,000 soldiers to the faraway Korean War front. Signaling awareness of Turkey’s own precarity vis-à-vis an expansive Soviet bloc, the move eased access to Western assistance in arenas such as defense and development, paving the road to NATO membership.Footnote ⁶⁷ At the same time, it was animated by intense, anti-communist sentiment across both the Kemalist establishment and the revisionist right – a fear they fanned among the general public. Such sentiments would be encouraged by US support throughout the Cold War for “moderate” religious actors across the world as perceived bulwarks against “godless communism.”

At the international systemic level, initial conditions also favored the DP’s economic project as Turkey thrived in tandem with the broader postwar boom and cheap Marshall credit. Trusting “implicitly in the workings of the market,” the aspiration was to turn Turkey into a “little America” with a millionaire in every neighborhood.Footnote ⁶⁸ The refrain echoed earlier Kemalist formulations but emphasized a liberal, not an etatist economic approach. In this context, Ankara increasingly touted Turkey as a “bridge” between Western interests and Eastern neighbors. The frame had both economic and geostrategic implications.Footnote ⁶⁹ It marked what Mufti reads as a swing from a cautious, early republican strategic culture of autonomy toward a daring approach vis-à-vis the former imperial neighborhood.Footnote ⁷⁰ Fusing Western security commitments with a reading of Turkey’s multi-region position as an asset, Ankara joined the 1955 Baghdad Pact. An offshoot of the transatlantic security framework, the Pact similarly marshaled Hashemite Iraq, Pahlavi Iran, and Pakistan to defend the “free world.”

Meanwhile, on the home front, excitement at the opening of political and economic spaces – and concomitant opportunities to express religious identities – was evident in the flourishing press and associational life. According to Brockett, such debates were “predicated upon a civil and inclusive approach to nationalism that allowed the expression of diverse opinions and other identities than those promoted by the secular Kemalist elite during the single party period.”Footnote ⁷¹ To be sure, the emphasis was on renegotiations of Sunni Muslim identity in public life – and not on, say, non-Muslim, non-Sunni, or non-Turkish alterity. Also, as Danforth argues, much of the material in the provincial press was reprinted from Ankara-based journals such as Ulus and Zafer, while the strongest revisionist arguments about topics like Ottoman-Islamic inheritance emanated from Istanbul-based Islamist publications.Footnote ⁷² Nevertheless, debates about imperial legacies and Islamic religiosity were now a possible – and vital – element of public life.

Having achieved power on a pluralizing platform, the DP leadership found itself caught between the demands of a modernist but authoritarian state and a conservative society seeking greater voice. To manage this tension, Sunar suggests, the party initially sought “to underplay cultural” transformation and “emphasize economic development,” hitching the hitherto “frustrated energies of social groups to the party so as to take on the bureaucracy…”Footnote ⁷³ In time, however, the DP also pursued cultural revisionism. Reinstating the Arabic-language call to prayer, the party opened İmam Hatip schools for training religious personnel. The de facto existence of autonomous religious sects and orders was acknowledged. Public works such as mosques began to be constructed in Ottoman-Islamic architectural idiom.Footnote ⁷⁴ The DP argued that by thus liberalizing matters of religious conscience, it advanced democracy.

By the middle of the decade, however, cracks showed. The economy, for one, staggered in tandem with a global dip. This macro challenge exacerbated the redistributive impact of the DP’s free market policies and associated corruption. Inflationary growth hurt wage earners including segments of the intelligentsia, bureaucracy, and military who upheld republican values of duty and sacrifice. Deploring the Democrats’ “free-market philosophy … [as] crass materialism that glorified wealth and ostentation,”Footnote ⁷⁵ concern also mounted that the DP’s pro-religious revivalism threatened secularism. These fears spiked when a radical sect vandalized busts of Atatürk. DP policies also harmed labor, an emergent constituency in a Turkey undergoing rapid urbanization and industrialization. Workers lambasted, for instance, the DP’s claim to represent “the people” when it banned them from unionizing and tarred most activities with a leftist tilt as seditious.Footnote ⁷⁶

In response to the increasingly resistant bureaucracy and mounting economic and political frustration, Menderes used majoritarian electoral and legislative rules to retain control.Footnote ⁷⁷ Attesting to the way that leadership – for better and for worse – shapes system trajectories in conjunction with institutional features of a political system, he expelled moderates from the party fold, keeping control of parliament and party while curbing critical media. This turn to anti-pluralist populism silenced “the real plurality of the people in favor of a fictitious notion of a unified nation,” embodied by the charismatic leader (see Figure 4.1).Footnote ⁷⁸

Figure 4.1 Populist center-right leader Adnan Menderes engaging with mesmerized crowds.

(Alamy).

Attacks on political and media pluralism were echoed in attempts to harness popular passions at the regional scale over intensifying conflict between Turkish and Greek Cypriots. In another populist frame, the narrative pitted a national “us” (Turkish Muslims) against an alien “them” (Rum or Greek/OrthodoxFootnote ⁷⁹). As the media turned on Turkey’s Rum community, Menderes lent his voice to rumors of Rum involvement in the massacre of ethnic Turks in Cyprus.Footnote ⁸⁰ Within weeks, on September 6–7, 1955, elements within the state organized a pogrom against non-Muslim minorities.Footnote ⁸¹ In four hours, seventy-three churches were burned, two cemeteries destroyed, thousands of businesses and homes damaged, dozens of women raped, and a priest burnt alive. The pogrom was a watershed, precipitating an exodus of Rum and other non-Muslims from the country.

Taken together, these developments meant that by the decade’s end, the Menderes-led DP abandoned its earlier program of political and religious pluralization. The country returned to de facto single-party rule in ethno(-religious) idiom. Tensions over these economic, political, and social tensions came to a head when troops turned on student demonstrators. The clash led to one death, but rumors of more. Cadets from the War Academy joined the protestors, catalyzing a critical juncture on May 27, 1960, when officers seized power in multiparty Turkey’s first coup d’etat. Banning the DP, some 5,000 military officers and 150 teachers were purged, and at least three dozen landowners banished, their holdings confiscated. Most dramatically, Menderes and two of his ministers were sent to the gallows. Yet, in testimony to the kairotic power of political spectacle, the execution of Menderes – and haunting photographic images thereof – made an indelible imprint onto the collective consciousness. In his admirers’ eyes, the slain populist became a martyr to conservative democracy.

4.3.2 Between Pluralization and Radicalization: Ideas, Actors, and Structures, 1960–1980

In the aftermath of the coup, and despite the army’s heavy-hand, moderate senior officers who favored a “promissory” intervention prevailed over radical, junior counterparts who wished to retain power in the name of national unity (an intra-army negotiation of relatively more pluralist vs. anti-pluralist preferences). The army then tasked an assembly of professors, jurists, trade unionists, and journalists with drafting a new constitution that confronted the specter of majoritarian populism.

The result was mixed. On the one hand, as Arat and Pamuk put it, the 1961 Constitution was “liberal in spirit … redefin[ing] the relationship between state and society in Turkey, and empower[ing] citizens and civil society vis-à-vis the state.”Footnote ⁸² This was evidenced in expanded civil liberties, personal, social, media, and political freedoms, as well as labor rights. The new framework permitted political movements – from the religious right to the socialist left – that previously had not been tolerated. And it introduced new checks and balances like a Constitutional Court.

At the same time, the postcoup framework reflected the anti-pluralist impetus to its creation. Notably, the officers who had overseen the constitutional drafting process established a reserve domain – the National Security Council (Milli Güvenlik Kurulu [MGK]) – which would later be activated to monitor civilian politics.Footnote ⁸³ As with the Constitutional Court, the MGK embedded the military into governance structures. As such, the coup’s legacy was Janus-faced. On the one hand – and ironically – it enabled a diverse parliament and a boom in public expressions of diverse political identities; on the other, it institutionalized a tutelary army that would flex its muscles moving forward.

On the civilian front, Süleyman Demirel took up the mantle of Menderes and the DP by leading the new Justice Party (Adalet Partisi [AP]). Embittered by the postcoup fallout for the center-right, he pivoted back to Islamo-liberal frames regarding democracy, free markets, and religious freedom (norms that were interpreted by the AP to support big business and expand İmam Hatip education). Trailing behind a galvanized CHP in the first postcoup elections, Demirel leveraged his skills as an “exceptional orator” whose “idiom,” alongside his peasant roots, made the leader an appealing “man of the people.”Footnote ⁸⁴ By the end of the decade, this performance enabled Demirel to claim circa half the electorate.Footnote ⁸⁵ However, either due to his disposition, and/or due to contextual reasons – such as the era’s political fragmentation, the proportional rather than winner-takes-all electoral law, and the military’s Damocles sword – Demirel did not pursue a majoritarian path.

Center-right politics, however, did not satisfy more revisionist elements on the religious right. By the 1970s, Necmettin Erbakan had emerged as the leader of the Islamist Milli Görüş (National View [MG]) movement. Rooted in the Nakşibendi religious brotherhood and its cross-pollination with Sunni, political Islamist movements across the greater Middle East, the MG would field a series of parties in the face of government closures. Aligned, like the DP, with provincial business interests, Erbakan emphasized industrialization and development as pathways to an empowered Islamic political community. This approach rejected both Islamo-liberalism’s pro-Western thrust and the ethnicized, secular Muslim identity of establishment nationalism. That said, the MG was unambiguously nationalist, with Islam as the essence of the Turkish nation. In this regard, its use of “milli” to designate the nation recalled Ottoman-Muslim proto-nationalism during the War of Liberation and its antecedents in the primacy of the Muslim millet.

Erbakan founded the National Salvation Party (Milli Selâmet Partisi [MSP]) in 1972. Its nationalism notwithstanding, the MSP’s Sunni Islamic focus appealed to conservative Kurds, as well as to traditionalist, rural elements who were unmoved by and/or did not benefit from the center-right’s bourgeois thrust. With intensive rural migration to the cities underway in this period, Erbakan used Islamic frames to promise social justice to newly urban discontents. Oscillating between robust and modest electoral outcomes,Footnote ⁸⁶ he secured junior partner status in several coalition governments. Thus, religious nationalism was established as an alternative to Kemalist and other forms of nationalism.

A third “ism” emerged on the far right. The movement had antecedents in explicitly racist strands of Turkism articulated in the single-party period. However, in earlier versions associated with figures such as the atheist Nihal AtsızFootnote ⁸⁷ and agnostic Reha Oğuz Türkkan, the emphasis had been on Turkish blood (the literal meaning of Türkkan’s name).Footnote ⁸⁸ Both had deplored the linguistic thrust and embedded liberalism of Kemalist nationalism, rejecting Atatürk’s explicit dismissal of pan-Turkism in seminal speeches like Nutuk.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a flurry of journals, novels, and academic publications during the one-party period, they generated key elements of the far-right symbolic repertoire. Memorable tropes included the “Grey Wolves” (Bozkurtler) said to have accompanied early Turkic warriors in their journey from a mythical Central Asian homeland (Ergenekon) to conquer Anatolia through “blood” and “great and auspicious war” (ulu ve kutlu savaş).Footnote ⁹⁰

Given the permissive constitutional regime, an ultranationalist political party was formed to channel these ideas.Footnote ⁹¹ It barely registered, however, with the voting public – a performance Alparslan Türkeş was determined to change. In his youth, Türkeş had been a defendant in the same show trial of blood nationalists that had swept up figures such as Atsız and Türkkan. As a member of the radical army faction behind the 1960 coup, it had been Türkeş’ voice on national radio that had announced the intervention. Following abysmal electoral results in the mid and late 1960s,Footnote ⁹² Türkeş rebranded in 1969 as the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi [MHP]). Seeking religious votes, he decided – out of conviction and/or opportunism – to abandon the Atsız generation’s depredation of Islam as an Arab import. Instead, he argued that Islamic principles were a font of morality along with the pre-Islamic Central Asian heritage. Turkish identity, as such, was “not based on a conflict between Islam and ethnic-nationalism … rather it include[d] an historic synthesis of Islamic and Turkish ethnic values.”Footnote ⁹³ By claiming that the party’s corporate, Turkish-Muslim synthesis conformed “in all spheres to the Turkish spirit and tradition,”Footnote ⁹⁴ Türkeş’s ethno(-religious) nationalism was less threatening to the authorities than Erbakan’s political Islam. It would thus find uptake among anti-pluralist elements within the state.

The CHP likewise responded to the opportunities and challenges of the postcoup era. Endorsing a more pluralistic agenda, the party moved cautiously left-of-center under İnönü in the 1960s, and definitively when Bülent Ecevit took over as party chairman in 1972. With his signature worker’s jacket and peasant’s cap, Ecevit propagated a reading of Kemalism based on social justice, economic development, “democratic etatism,” education, secularism, and nationalism.Footnote ⁹⁵ In successive elections, this social democratic take on Kemalism – and Ecevit’s own populist charisma – carried a plurality of the electorate (and Ecevit himself to the office of prime minister four times in his long career). With its nationalist and secularist overtones, but relatively greater openness to Turkey’s diversity, Ecevit’s program differed from both highly statist earlier strands of leftist-Kemalist synthesis,Footnote ⁹⁶ and the concurrent Turkish Communist Party. As a result, Ecevit’s CHP appealed to constituencies beyond the republican elite. These included heterodox Alevis who were anxious about Sunni Muslim assertiveness in public life.Footnote ⁹⁷ That being said, Ecevit and Erbakan exhibited some overlap in their calls for social justice – articulated in center-left and religious-right idiom, respectively. The two figures also intermittently cooperated. For example, and attesting to political actors’ pragmatic willingness to work across ideological lines, the CHP and MSP formed a coalition government in 1973.Footnote ⁹⁸ The short-lived alliance proved to be one of the multiple, cross-camp governments that shaped the decade as factions jockeyed in a tumultuous context.

Domestically, instability was fueled by forces like massive migration. Over 20 percent of Turkey’s population moved from rural areas to cities between 1950 and 1980 alone (with 73.2 percent of the population urbanized by the end of the century in contrast to some 25 percent at the dawn of the Republic).Footnote ⁹⁹ If the impetus was economic and educational opportunities, the result was “rapid transformation of both rural and urban economies” from migrants’ “life styles to the structure of Turkish society.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ By the mid-1970s, 45 percent of Istanbul’s population and 60 percent of Ankara’s resided in new shantytowns (gecekondu).Footnote ¹⁰¹ Erected overnight through community mobilization, gecekondu were viewed by “rural-to-urban” migrants as a way to demand “citizenship rights.”Footnote ¹⁰²

These internal energies intersected explosively with the external context. As with import-substitution-based economies the world over, Turkey incurred major debt when Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) yanked up prices in the context of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and its aftermath. Turkey’s politics also steamed in the “hothouse atmosphere” of youth activism and decolonial mobilization across the globe. These movements, in effect, sought to pluralize national – and the international – political system(s), even as activism fueled fragmentation and violence. The result, a former leftist militant observed, was that events like “the [US army’s] Tet offensive [in Vietnam] in February, the dramatic French student rising in May [1968], and the [Soviet] invasion of Czechoslovakia in August [in response to the Prague spring] … had an even greater impact” on Turkey “than in most countries.”Footnote ¹⁰³

This fraught overlay of internal and external context meant that the era’s heady freedoms turned public spaces into a battleground between “various shades of socialism to conservatism, racism, ethnic nationalism, and religious extremism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Yet, the proliferation of groups did not translate into a more pluralistic playing field. Group organization was hierarchical, and members were expected to unquestioningly obey their leader – and calls to violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Radical groups on the left and right – galvanized by the first freely circulated translations of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Hitler – clashed in sprawling gecekondu and university campuses. On the left, youth groups such as Dev-Genç (Revolutionary Youth) attacked Kemalist complicity in bourgeois hegemony. Assassinating American servicemen, the Israeli ambassador, and a former Turkish president,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ they called for the overthrow of “cute democracy”; two decades of free elections, they argued, had only furthered bourgeois interests.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Violence notwithstanding, leftist groups were connected only loosely. By way of comparison, MHP street fighters known as Ülküculer (Idealists) or Bozkurtlar (Grey Wolves) commanded cohesive resources, organizational tactics, and connections with established political formations.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Numbering some 100,000 by the 1970s, they were affiliated with approximately 1,300 “hearths” (ocaklar) across the country.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The “ideal” in question was the restoration of Turan – the ancestral Eurasian homeland – by launching a new “universal order under the leadership of the Turkish world.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The MHP and other ultraright wing groups targeted leftists, Kurds, and Alevis (often one and the same), who were collectively cast as “the nation’s antithetical villain … epitomiz[ing] enslavement, femininity, weakness, immorality, degeneration, and treachery.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Radical Islamist groups also contributed to these attacks.

Clashes between right-wing Sunni and leftist Alevi radicals were compounded when the separatist Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan [PKK] or Kurdistan Workers’ Party joined the fray in the 1970s. Rejecting the religious idiom of earlier forms of Kurdish protest in favor of an ethnicized, Marxist identity, the PKK also targeted rival Kurdish activists. Intra and intergroup conflict on the left notwithstanding, the overall thrust of left-wing radicalism was revolution. Right-wing radicalism, on the other hand, sought to create such insecurity that a military takeover would be welcomed. In this respect, MHP militants believed their violence to be in the service of a unitary state. It was to this vision of the state as the repository of the Turkish(-Muslim) nation that they pledged absolute loyalty.

The military, for its part, responded to the era’s proliferation of movements and violence via two interventions. The “quasi coup by ultimatum”Footnote ¹¹² of 1971 curtailed many of the freedoms provided by the constitution in a major defeat for political and media pluralism. Shuttering organizations across the political spectrum – with particular vehemence vis-à-vis the left – the putschists ended radio, television, and university autonomy. Thousands of academics, journalists, writers, and trade unionists were arrested. Torture was used to break victims’ will.Footnote ¹¹³

Yet unrest only mounted. By the end of the decade, some 5,000 fatalities had occurred, including circa 2,100 left-wing and 1,300 right-wing deaths.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the late 1970s, moreover, right-wing extremists perpetrated a series of massacres against Alevis – traumas that were amplified by the authorities’ apparent indifference or complicity.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The army, for its part, likewise was consumed with the perceived communist threat given mounting PKK violence at home, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan overseas. On a fateful September day in 1980, General Kenan Evren led a coup against ideological conflict in general, and the left in particular. During and after this critical juncture, the military sought to overhaul state and society in a unitary fashion. In the process, it incorporated significant elements of right-wing ethno(-religious) nationalism into the new constitutional order.

4.4.1 Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS) Triumphant

Following the coup, all political parties were banned and the leaders of the pre-coup era barred from politics for five to ten years. A total of 650,000 people were arrested and legal proceedings prepared against 1,683,000. Of 517 people sentenced to death, 49 were executed. Thirty thousand lost their jobs for their political views. Fourteen thousand lost Turkish citizenship, while 667 associations and foundations were banned.Footnote ¹¹⁶ A new constitution was drafted “to render the Turkish political system stable, while keeping a façade of democracy.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The national security opinions of the nonelected, military-dominated National Security Council – nested in the constitutional framework since 1960 – were given “priority consideration” in all cabinet decisions. Civic and political rights were dramatically curtailed. All forms of left-of-center politics were targeted from extremists to “social democrats, unionists … including the very elite of Turkish society.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ This pattern amplified the long-standing overlap in establishment and right-wing readings of leftist politics. Ironically, however, for those within this centrist space who favored secularism, to crush the left was also to crush those children of the republic who were culturally most disposed to infusing the secularist project with sociological traction.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The ultranationalist right also was treated as a polarizing force in a society upon which the army wished to impose unity. Right-wing leaders were imprisoned, and street fighters were subjected to similar treatment as their leftist counterparts. They may have been consoled, however, by the army’s appropriation of significant elements of their ideology. This marked the crystallization of the pattern that had been coalescing since the installation of army tutelage in the 1960s. It was attested to by the contributions to the new constitutional committee of two members of the right-wing, Hearth of the Enlightened (Aydınlar Ocağı) – a group of ultranationalist intellectuals who had contributed significantly to MHP programming and mobilization.Footnote ¹²⁰

In effect, the authors of the postcoup constitution ignored the embedded liberalism that had long been a subtext – muted but persistent – of Kemalism. Amplifying the ethno(-religious) thrust of the national project, they played up a corporate and ethnicized Muslim identity to counteract perceived communist threats and promote “unity” in the face of factionalism. This approach enshrined an ethnicized Islam in the official ideology while retaining the primacy of state and nation over religion.

In short, at this juncture in the Republic’s ongoing dance between ethno(-religious) nationalism and embedded liberalism, the TIS emerged triumphant.Footnote ¹²¹ In stark contrast to the civic thrust of the 1924 constitution, the 1982 preamble declared that no activities would be protected, which ran contrary to “Turkish national interests, Turkish existence and the principle of its indivisibility with state and territory” or the “historical and moral values of Turkishness” (Türklük).Footnote ¹²² Article 3, moreover, asserted that the “Turkish State, country and nation are an indivisible whole. Its language is Turkish.” Any changes or even proposals to change this anti-pluralist article were prohibited. The use of “Turkishness” was notable in its strong ethnic, even pan-Turkist connotations. If stretched, the concept could apply to Cypriot or Azeri Turks, but not to, say, openly Kurdish or non-Muslim citizens of the Turkish Republic. The presumption that Turkishness involved “sacred [Muslim] religious feelings” was explicit in the document (even as it stipulated that such feelings be categorically separate from “state affairs and politics as required by the principle of secularism”).Footnote ¹²³

In terms of enabling international structures, the generals’ belief that their restrictive TIS was compatible with Turkey’s Western vocation correlated with the American neoconservatives’ willingness, especially in the 1980s, to support conservative, religious, and illiberal but doggedly anti-communist forces. Support for “moderate” pro-religious movements in the face of communist and other threats had been a feature of US policy throughout the Cold War. It was amplified, at this juncture, by anxieties about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution. In short, Washington felt that it did not matter whether “the religion in question [was] Islam, Christianity or Hinduism, so long as it [was] stripped of its revolutionary and anti-imperialist content.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Concurrently, and as will be unpacked below, the junta paved the way for a neoliberal economic overhaul in keeping with the neoliberal Washington Consensus – policies that were easier to pursue under the cover of the coup.Footnote ¹²⁵

The TIS permeated public spaces through compulsory religious education for Muslim citizens.Footnote ¹²⁶ Still more Koran courses and İmam Hatip schools were opened to train religious personnel. All such measures privileged Sunnis. Yet, the ethnicized Islam of the TIS was not the religious nationalism of Erbakan, nor the transnational Islamism of those who embraced the ümmet ideal (universal Islamic community) over national affinities.Footnote ¹²⁷ On the contrary, pro-religious actors in civil society were repressed via measures like a new ban on veiling in public institutions.Footnote ¹²⁸ A ban also was passed on speaking languages such as Kurdish in public as Ankara insisted that Kurds (or rather “mountain Turks”) did not actually exist as an ethnic group.

The generals did not anticipate, however, the degree to which their anti-pluralist regime would jar with trends in Europe. Far from supporting neoconservative authoritarianism in the name of stability, bodies such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, today OSCE),Footnote ¹²⁹ the Council of Europe (CoE), and the European Economic Community’s (EEC) European Parliament (EP) increasingly upheld liberal multiculturalism as a framework for collective identity and action. Thus, while the TIS was compatible with Washington’s goals, it failed to compute with what constituted “Europeanness” in the final decade of the Cold War.

4.4.2 Islamo-Liberalism Embodied: Turgut Özal

At the dawn of the 1980s, anti-pluralist, ethno(-religious) nationalism appeared triumphant. Yet, conditions at the dawn of the new era also favored following the Western-dominated liberal order as the US exerted increasingly unrivaled military, economic, and ideological power, eclipsing the Soviet bloc by the end of the decade.

This macro-level, geo-cultural context corresponded with the persistence of embedded liberalism within Turkey’s political system. When the military returned day-to-day management of the country to civilians, Turgut Özal, a pious politician, and his Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi [ANAP]) swept the 1983 elections.Footnote ¹³⁰ As prime minister, and later as president, he would prove an impactful agent of pluralization via the skilled articulation of syncretic ideas and brokering of cross-camp alliances in response to the shifting structures of the late Cold War and 1990s.

In echoes of the DP and AP, the leader touted a politically liberal but socially conservative agenda via his own larger-than-life personality and coalition-building skills. At the intersection of the agential and contextual parameters that shape political systems, Özal’s profile also was well suited to the rise of neoliberal globalization – a force he appears to have grasped earlier than most within the bureaucratic elite. A former World Bank consultant, he was eager to abandon Turkey’s troubled import substitution model of growth for structural reforms like wide-scale privatization. The professed goal was to transform the economy and empower society while transcending habits of top-down governance (vesayetçilik). This agenda reflected the classic Islamo-liberal strategy of combining, as Öniş puts it, “the role of a technocrat in a largely authoritarian” state with the “role of a reformist politician in a broadly democratic environment.”Footnote ¹³¹ Walking this tightrope via inclusive coalition-building, Özal leveraged his larger-than-life personality without devolving into populism.

Instead, Özal pitched the project to actors across political camps. On the one hand, he spoke to moderate followers of Sheikh Mehmed Zahid KotkuFootnote ¹³² (who also had “blessed” Erbakan’s Milli Görüş movement). Kotku – a passionate advocate for the reinstatement of Ottoman-Islamic referents – was no political liberal. He nevertheless championed a syncretic Islamo-liberal vision of economic modernity as a pathway to Muslim empowerment. The sheik argued, for example, that the “invisible hand” of markets was in fact the hand of God. He similarly modified an old axiom that exhorted the Sufi derviş (mystic) to be content with a “morsel” of food and a humble “cloak.” Kotku’s claim that the derviş must develop sufficient capitalist skills to add a “Mazda” to his possessions. By tapping into these sensibilities, Özal sought to harness the commercial energies and incipient global orientation of Anatolia’s “genuine Muslims” who were incorrectly perceived, he argued, as reactionaries by Turkey’s Western-oriented elites.Footnote ¹³³

Özal’s economic policies appealed, moreover, to broader, centrist constituencies attracted to his “projects aimed at modernization and economic reform through closer integration” with the global economy including “the Western world.”Footnote ¹³⁴ For example, through Thatcher-esque measures such as mass housing projects and financial instruments designed to benefit small investors, he co-opted the “middle strata” – pious and secular alike – “of the Turkish public as key stakeholders … in the project of popular capitalism.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Generating a broad-based, Islamo-liberal alignment of stakeholders, Özal sought convergence with the European and global economies. This led to Turkey’s application for membership to the then EEC in 1987 and establishment of a Customs Union between Turkey and the European Union (EU) in 1996. Turkey appeared closer than ever to achieving the goal of economic modernity, now envisaged in (neo)liberal terms. The economy expanded with improved performance in regional and global markets, albeit via boom-and-bust cycles that brought macroeconomic turbulence. Civil society began to thrive again, both in major cities and in provincial spaces. Room for public debate and the expression of diverse opinions opened further when the media landscape was transformed by economic privatization.Footnote ¹³⁶

4.4.3 Nascent Neo-Ottomanism

In this increasingly open environment, figures from Özal’s coalition began to channel the memory of the Ottoman past into arguments for domestic multiculturalism. Since at least the cultural revolution of the 1920s, neo-Ottoman nostalgia – albeit for differentiated aspects of the empireFootnote ¹³⁷ – had vividly informed the worldview of cadres now empowered by Özal’s widening of the capitalist net. In tandem with the rise of the pro-religious Anatolian bourgeoisie, Islamist intellectuals began to argue that religiously defined multi-communitarianism offered an “authentic” pathway to pluralism. Some did so by fusing Ottoman and/or Islamist cultural resources with postmodern deconstruction of the grand narrative of (Western) progress and civilization. This approach was intelligible to critical secular intellectuals. Gülalp summarizes the neo-millet argument:

The framework furnished a space for dialogue with secular liberal and liberal-leftistFootnote ¹³⁹ counterparts, some of whom penned editorial columns in pro-religious dailies.

A case in point was the journalist Cengiz Çandar – a lapsed leftist who became Özal’s advisor – who saw in neo-Ottomanism a foreign policy project. The argument was that newfound economic wherewithal would enable Turkey to serve as a stabilizing force in its turbulent region while embedding the country in the West more meaningfully than a “circumstantial military alliance.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Özal touted this nonbinary view of Turkey as both a (multi-)regional and a pro-Western power on visits, after the Cold War, to the newly postcommunist Turkic world. At the same time, he exhorted “Muslim brothers” in the Middle East to embrace a pro-Western posture, secularism, and liberal democracy. Özal’s “neo-Ottomanism,” in this regard, marked the coming of age of the 1950s “bridge” narrative with Turkey now cast as a secular, democratic, and rapidly developing “model” for Muslim countries in the Middle East and beyond.

Neo-Ottoman paternalism toward Turkey’s east and south received a mixed reception at best. Nevertheless, in addition to domestic resonance, it aligned with the liberal spirit of the European peace project. Özal’s 1987 application for full membership, in turn, provided European actors with a legal and political basis from which to demand improvements in Turkey’s democracy. Thus, another significant outcome of the Özal era’s Islamo-liberal coalition was the possibility of pursuing pluralism with reference to European integration.

European pressure offered a mechanism via which to induce change in Turkey. For example, after repeated criticism of Ankara’s human rights performance by the EP and other bodies, Turkey placed a moratorium on the death penalty – ceasing executions after 1984. Mass trials were discontinued and restrictions on political activity removed. Rolling back General Evren’s anti-pluralist regime, by the end of the decade, Turkey had signed the International Convention on the Prevention of Torture and ratified the Ninth Additional Protocol of the European Convention. Doing so allowed for individual right of petition to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR ). As a result, pan-European legal bodies acquired final say in Turkey’s human rights jurisprudence. Such developments further opened the door to individual and group defiance of the still hegemonic TIS in the political and legal system.

Concern for democratization and human rights in keeping with the EEC/EU’s normative agenda also furnished an Islamo-liberal rejoinder to geo-cultural arguments for Turkey’s exclusion. Özal, for one, argued that Turkey had a rightful place in Europe and the West. This was due to the commitment displayed by generations of OttomanFootnote ¹⁴¹ and Turkish reformers to the “universal values of Western civilization”; it gestured, moreover, to the growing association, during this period, of “Europeanness” with “individual rights, civilianization, pluralism, and [the] equality of minorities.”Footnote ¹⁴²

European insistence on ethnic pluralism was perhaps the hardest pill that Özal asked the defenders of unitary nationalism to swallow. Under the Turkish-Islamist synthesis, public expressions of Kurdishness were patrolled, whereas the EU’s minority rights regime bolstered Kurdish demands for political and cultural rights. Özal pushed the envelope in a multicultural direction. He overturned the postcoup ban on the Kurdish language and permitted celebrations of a major holiday, Nevroz. By publicly acknowledging his own partly Kurdish ancestry, he broke yet another taboo in a society where assimilated Kurds could rise to the highest levels of government but never spoke publicly of their Kurdish origins. Özal even tentatively reached out to the separatist PKK, which had been engaged in a bloody war with the Turkish military since the 1980s, hinting at autonomy and the possibility of federalism. While such moves had more symbolic than policy resonance because Özal undertook them after becoming president in 1989, they presented a normative challenge to the TIS’s unitary nationalism.

4.4.4 The “Lost” 1990s

Özal died in office in 1993, just as the world around Turkey was shifting in the liberal direction that he had anticipated. Echoing the perception of Menderes as a martyr to pluralism, Özal’s untimely passing piqued suspicion among some supporters that the gregarious center-right leader had been murdered.

More compliant politicians endorsed the army’s military solution to the Kurdish question. Framed in existential terms as a battle for the integrity of the unitary nation-state, violence mounted. At the end of the century, over 30,000 had perished, thousands of villages had been destroyed, and some three million people displaced.Footnote ¹⁴³ In this bitter context, European criticism of Turkey’s human rights abuses and support for Kurdish minority rights piqued a defensive reaction dubbed the “Sèvres syndrome.” Named for the 1920 treaty that prescribed Ottoman partition after World War I,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ “Sèvres” evokes memories of great powers and their secessionist protégés weaponizing language rights to divide the empire. This recurring trope in Turkish nationalism had long been inculcated through school curricula, commemorative practices, and the cultural industries, informing resistance to external pressure on matters of human and minority rights.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Sèvres sensitivities were especially salient among self-proclaimed “Atatürkists”: neo-Kemalist cadres in civil society who allied with hegemonic forces within the post-1980 security state. Propagating a unitary vision of national identity, they filtered “Mustafa Kemal’s views … through the sieve of the military junta.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ This approach downplayed historical Kemalism’s embedded liberalism. The paradoxical – but consequential – result was a coalition of hardline secularists and ethno(-religious) nationalists lining up to support the army’s ethnicized TIS. Meanwhile, other forms of religious revivalism continued to be suppressed.

In terms of the broader context, turbulence was exacerbated by boom-and-bust economic cycles. The pattern was due in part to ANAP’s replication of DP deregulatory excess, in tandem with the corruption of other center-right parties like the AP’s successor, the Doğru Yol Partisi (DYP – True Path Party). Military and economic insecurity, in turn, hamstrung a series of coalition governments with weak popular mandates. When one such coalition between the center and religious right resulted in Erbakan’s accession to the prime ministry, alarm bells sounded.

Resistance to Erbakan’s unreconstructed brand of Islamism came to a critical juncture: the “post-modern” coup of February 28, 1997.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ At this time, the army compelled Erbakan’s resignation. Pro-secular civil society of most stripes contributed to this process. In a legacy of Özal’s Islamo-liberal alliance though, a handful of secular liberals defended the democratically elected party. They also decried the blacklisting of pro-religious intelligentsia, business, and civil society that ensued. However, most secularists – moderate and hardline alike – evinced little empathy. The moment marked only the second juncture in republican history when a system-impacting outcome can be explained by “secularist/Islamist” cleavage. The upshot was the collapse of the Özal era alliance between moderate, pro-secularist, and pietist factions, that is, of the fifth, major pluralizing alignment since the Tanzimat.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Several trajectory-changing outcomes nevertheless emerged from this transformative moment in 1997. For one, even Erbakan felt compelled to file a case with the ECHR. This meant accepting the European human rights regime. Even more consequential was younger Islamists’ use of the language of political liberalism to contest the fallout of “28 February.” This group went on to split from the old Milli Görüş guard. The stage was thus set for a redoubled, pluralizing coalition of diverse actors. Then, on the eve of the new millennium, the EU made a game-changing announcement that appeared to affirm Özal’s vision: Turkey was offered official candidate status for membership to the Union.