"Religious Nationalism": A Textbook Case from Turkey

A British scholar’s observation about religion in Turkish politics and a discussion about his observation offer points of entry for reflection on the language of politics in “secular” research of Islam. The issue arises as to how to analyze the relationship between modern state formation and politics in the context of religious education. To this end, I explore how state policy makers, aligned with the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, have promoted a rationalist, religious version of nationalism in the curriculum. A discursive analysis of a seventh-grade textbook provides a fruitful means to draw out the interplay between religious heritage and secularity following the 1980 military coup.

Secular Language of Politics

The 1960 electoral campaign in Turkey was one of the most divisive in its short history as a Turkish Republic. The opposition rebuked the party then in power, the Democrat Party (DP), for actively appealing to the electorate’s religious sentiments. According to John Kingsbury, a British observer of Islam, a DP member of Parliament from Konya even “called a press conference and announced that he would propose that the Turkish Constitution be amended to proclaim Turkey a ‘secular and democratic Islamic State.’”¹ Kingsbury found the statement to be fundamentally flawed, if not aberrant. To him, the parliamentarian misunderstood, misapplied, or, worse, purposely misused language. In any case, the proposal was not adopted. Infuriated by the attack on the nation’s secular foundations, army colonels overthrew the civilian government, enacted a new constitution that reaffirmed the separation of religion and state, and (ultimately) returned the opposition party, the People’s Republican Party, to power. One of the main reasons the junta gave to justify the coup was that the ruling party had undermined the secular legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Turkish Republic, and had tried to turn the republic into a theocracy.²

One cannot understand either Kingsbury’s surprise at the parliamentarian’s statement or the junta’s reaction to the DP without briefly considering the political culture in Turkey prior to the introduction of multiparty elections in 1946. During the single-party regimes of Atatürk and his successor İsmet İnönü (1924–46), Republican statesmen and policy makers did their utmost to desacralize the polity. To this effect, they disassociated themselves from the duality of state and faith (din-u devlet) that had served as a viscerally powerful mechanism for political consensus in the Ottoman Empire.³ In 1928, the clause in the constitution that declared Islam the country’s religion was removed. Moreover, in order to realize a national memory completely divorced from the religiously sanctioned dynasty, pre-Republican Islamic references were excised from the educational system.⁴ The antireligious bias came to an end in 1950 with the landslide victory of the DP, a loose coalition of the national bourgeoisie and rural notables. Claiming to represent the “national will” (millî irade), the DP actively integrated Islamic religious symbols into the political culture of the country, including the school curricula.⁵ The 1960 military coup temporally arrested this religious shift in the national educational system.⁶

Twenty years later, in 1980, the military once more intervened when it deemed that law and order was breaking down throughout the country and, in particular, in high schools and on university campuses. This time, however, the generals held Marxist-inspired political organizations responsible for much of the student unrest and, moreover, had swayed students to opt for a more universalist understanding of human history and society rather than a strictly nationalist one. Consequently, the generals set out to reinvent a more politically docile Turkish youth.

In an effort to reassert identification with the nation-state and to carry out their idea of political docility in the school system, the generals openly associated themselves with the right-of-center political spectrum, most notably...