Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics

Preface

I became interested in questions of political process when I returned in 1994 to the working-class neighborhood of Ümraniye in Istanbul, Turkey, after having spent considerable time there over the preceding eight years in the course of a different research project. During that time I had noticed that, while Ümraniye’s residents seemed quite informed about the platforms of political parties (and on occasion organized themselves to protest an issue or demand assistance from the local government), there was little evidence of what the literature would call civil society: participation in formal civic organizations. This impression was confirmed by surveys that showed little or no participation in civic organizations in Turkey’s poorer urban areas, particularly among women. Yet, at the same time, scholars of civil society were pointing to the large and rapidly increasing numbers of civic organizations in Turkey. This lack of fit between civil society and participation caused me to wonder who belonged to these many civic groups, if large parts of the population of Turkey’s cities did not. It also placed into puzzling relief the civic activism and political engagement I had observed in Ümraniye. How did people organize themselves, around what issues, and why? Spurred by curiosity, I began to investigate civic and political activism over two months in the summer of 1994 and again in 1995, with funding from the Institute of Turkish Studies and the University PREFACE of Nebraska at Omaha. Initially, I studied secularist activists involved in setting up voluntary schools that taught skills and literacy to lowincome women. Soon after the 1994 elections that brought the Islamists to power in Ümraniye, I turned my attention to local Islamist activists. In 1997, a Social Science Research Council grant allowed me to spend seven months in Istanbul to take a closer and more sustained look at the activities of both groups. What I learned led me to reconsider the categories of knowledge that I had brought with me into the field and that had guided my original questions, including the much debated concept of civil society. In order to grasp the multiple levels and unexpected convergences of what otherwise would be artificially distinguished as civic, political, and cultural/religious phenomena, a new conceptualization—and a new term—was needed. The term, vernacular politics, makes an argument for looking at political process as a hybrid form. This makes possible a new vision of “politics” in societies, like those in the Middle East, that generally have been examined using a precut yardstick that measures the degree to which democratic institutions have been instituted and civil society developed. The hybrid political movement in Turkey raises theoretical issues of import not only for understanding mass mobilization in Islamic societies, but also in the United States where the new megachurches also cross lines between civic, political, and cultural realms. The book as a whole makes an argument for rethinking the terms we use to understand how people are mobilized to be active participants in public life. In Turkey, I interviewed and observed activists and officials at the local and national levels, including the Islamist mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and attended rallies and other organized events. The staff at the popular Islamist television station Kanal 7 kindly allowed me to sit in on internal discussions and strategy sessions and offered insights into the Islamist movement and the Welfare Party, with which the station had an ambivalent relationship. I did not live in Ümraniye during this time, since my research necessitated moving between two ideologically opposed groups of residents. In addition to the obvious problem of a perceived division of loyalties, my visits to the secularist group sometimes called for a different style of clothing, not quite as modest, with a bit of makeup . Since these things have important resonances within the groups, it would have been exceedingly difficult to live with, say, a more devout family and explain why I was dressing in short sleeves and x · Preface putting on lipstick—taboo in that environment—to visit others in the neighborhood. Consequently, I set out mornings for Ümraniye from my rented room in European Istanbul. On a good day, the trip took around forty minutes. On a bad day, it could take up to two hours. On occasion I spent the night there; some families would not allow me to take public transportation alone at night. My introduction to the people of...