Islam: Between Pacification and Mobilisation

In the field of ideology, the 1980 coup invested in and systematically propagated Kemalism – the ideology that the coup perpetrators used to legitimise the suspension of multiparty democracy. This shallow version of Kemalism, premised primarily on the idolisation of Mustafa Kemal’s personality and authority, became ubiquitous throughout the country, without however interfacing with the actual challenges faced by Turkish society (Göçek 2011:31). To complement its ideological armour and to shield the country from the ‘communist menace’, which the coup leadership identified as one of the enemies of ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’, the National Security Council governing the country saw in Islam the potential to provide the legitimacy it needed, and to counter the left’s popularity among the youth who, they believed, had led the country into chaos in the second half of the 1970s. General Kenan Evren, the coup protagonist, was reported to suggest that the ‘rational’ Turkish Islam he wanted to propagate would be ‘an element in the service of the nation and nationalism’ and not in competition with either secularism or nationalism’; open to Western modernity and change and compatible to the secularism underpinning the Republic, it could buttress the Turkish state and society against Kurdish separatism and Marxism, which he considered to be the threats that his coup would eliminate (Yavuz 2003:70).

Accordingly, article 1924 of the 1982 constitution made religious education compulsory in primary and secondary schools as a means of propagating their version of a Turkish–Islamic Synthesis and instilling conservative values among the youth (Bora and Can 1999:174–5; Üstel 2004:290). The Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs) embarked on a mosque-building programme (Morris 2005:73), and was reorganised in order to play a role in a campaign to propagate the regime’s ideology and its version of Islam as a factor of societal and national cohesion especially in the southeast, where Kurdish separatism and the Kurdish left were seen as representing threats to the unity of Turkey (Yavuz 2003:70). The importance of, and new role attributed to Islam after the 1980 coup is even more obvious if one takes into account the expansion of religious television programmes, and the massive expansion of Imam Hatip schools and the recognition of their status as avenues to employment in the public sector (Baran 2010:36).