Islamist intellectuals in modern Turkey

While Turkey’s Muslim intellectual scene certainly isn’t blessed with many Karl Popper-like liberals, the six conservative figures under Karasipahi’s microscope are among the most ideologically uncompromising. Though all have distinct personal approaches and diagnoses, the author focuses on what they share and describes them as a “single, coherent school.” All are preoccupied by the threat to traditional values of modernity and industrialization, and the danger that the moral cement of religion may wane in society. Karasipahi doesn’t state it, but her subjects are actually wholehearted subscribers to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” typically denouncing “the West” as the “source and reason of all the ills and problems of the contemporary world.” As Ali Bulaç has written: "[The West] is for us the destruction of our culture, denial of our personality and identity, the continuation of political society, recession of civil demands, and annihilation of fundamental rights and liberties … It is not just ‘humanism’; at the same time, it is crime, robbery, exploitation, filth, and destruction."

For the dyspeptic Dilipak, “the basis of Western civilization is colonialism,” while Westerners are “despicable colonialists, plunderers, torturers, and terrorists, who have destroyed the dignity of humanity.” Such crude simplifications do as much (self-) harm as any Western orientalist. Comparing them with more subtle foreign Muslim intellectuals such as Hossein Nasr and Mohammed Arkoun, Karasipahi concludes that none of her six are “original ideologues or deep philosophers.”

Still, while their ideas may offer little original or even interesting, it is important to understand them as a historical phenomenon emerging from a particular set of social, political and economic circumstances. Indeed, why the Muslim intellectuals have risen to prominence and struck a chord at this moment in Turkish history is as much Karasipahi’s concern as the content of their work. Alongside the exhaustion of the Kemalist modernization project, chief among the reasons suggested is the mass urban migration that has accelerated since the 1970s and affected every aspect of modern Turkey. The opening of provincial cities and swelling of the country’s metropolises with rural migrants resulted in the formation of new “mental maps”:

This process created the kind of environment that would be receptive to the Muslim intellectuals’ message, as well as fertile ground for political Islam to plant seeds (also helped by the transformed attitude of the state, which I touched on a few weeks ago). As the “ideologues of the Islamists,” it is the Muslim intellectuals, part of a similar “class of uprooted, migrated urbanized people” - despite often having secular upbringings - who have been most “successful in appealing to and shar[ing] their sufferings with a wide mass of people … who experience the same feelings of alienation and disillusionment.” Karasipahi therefore suggests that they are “organic intellectuals” in the Gramscian sense of “every social class need[ing] its own intelligentsia to shape its ideology.”

Their ideas may be clumsy, but it is Muslim intellectuals like the subjects of this book who have resonated most effectively with modern Turkey’s masses of deracinated lower-middle classes. Hurled into disorienting urban modernity over recent decades, Islam has provided a defensive identity crutch for many people to cling to in a period of rapid and sometimes alienating change. With the current Islamist government simultaneously charging ahead with huge modernizing projects but also indulging reactionary conservative reflexes in cultural and social areas, the issues explored in this book seem particularly germane. Indeed, considering Turkey’s contemporary Muslim intellectuals and their origins provides an important perspective on the country’s angry ongoing Kulturkampf.