Localizing Islam in Europe: Turkish Islamic Communities in Germany and the Netherlands

6. The Kaplan Community: A Revolutionary Form of Islam

222 The Kaplan Community A Revolutionary Form of Islam The Turkish Islamic field in Europe has moderate as well as radical Islamic communities . Moderate Islamic communities do not incite hatred or justify violence, and their goal is to raise Islamic consciousness from the bottom up (e.g., the Süleymanlı and Gülen communities) or from top to bottom (e.g., Milli Görüş). Chapter 5 examines how their Islamic knowledge and activism promote Muslim integration (e.g., North Milli Görüş and the Gülen community) but not without reservations (e.g., the Süleymanlı and South Milli Görüş). Radical Islamic communities, however, incite hatred and justify violence, and their goal is to replace the secular democratic political system with a theocratic regime based on Islamic law, or sharia. This chapter examines how revolutionary Islamic communities construct Islamic knowledge to isolate their followers from other Muslims and from non-Muslims through the case study of the Kaplan community, or Kaplancılar. The Kaplan community advocates a revolutionary Islam based on a militant course of action to replace the democratic and secular regime in Turkey with a caliphate based on sharia (Atacan 1993; Schiffauer 2000). A former leading member of the political Islamic Milli Görüş movement, Cemaleddin Kaplan (1926–95) split from Milli Görüş and set up a revolutionary community under the organization called The Union of Islamic Communities and Associations (İslami Cemaatler ve Cemiyetler Birliği [İCCB]). In 1992, he declared this community to be the caliphate state and himself its only leader, who united religious and political authority in Cologne. In 1995, he died, and his son Metin Kaplan took his place, but the son’s leadership was challenged within the community. After March 1999, the Kaplan community’s activities became severely limited, because Metin Kaplan was arrested for inciting the murder of The Kaplan Community • 223 his rival, İbrahim Sofu, and sentenced to three years of imprisonment in Germany . In December 2001, German authorities banned the Kaplan community, and on October 12, 2004, they extradited Metin Kaplan to Turkey, where he was charged with and sentenced to life imprisonment for plotting against the Turkish state to replace it with an Islamic-law based theocracy. In this chapter, I draw on the publications of the Kaplan community and my personal observations of ex-Kaplan community members in Germany, where they have 800 followers (German Interior Ministry 2003). According to a Dutch security services (BVD) report, the Kaplan community does not control any mosques in the Netherlands, but in 1998 they had 9 mosques and 200 followers active there (Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken 1998, 15). The Kaplan community is still a significant example, despite the currently small size of its followers, because there are other Islamic communities, such as Hizb-ut Tahrir, with the same revolutionary Islamic message—to re-establish a caliphate—that are active among Turkish Muslims in Europe (Wiktorowitz 2005). There are various approaches to explain the radicalization among Muslims in Europe, one of which is social-structural. There is some evidence that Turkish Muslims, and especially the youths among them, turn to their religious identity in response to social discrimination and low socioeconomic status (Heitmeyer et al. 1997). Islamic communities and organizations take advantage of this demand and comfort them through the reinvigorated religious identity and solidarity of isolated religious communities. Atacan emphasizes social discrimination against Turkish immigrants living in poor neighborhoods as the source of religious extremism such as that found in the Kaplan community (1993). Although socioeconomic factors provide the basis for seeking religious identification, they do not account for the development of revolutionary Islamic communities such as the Kaplan community. This chapter examines the way in which the Kaplan community used Islamic knowledge and authority to produce religious radicalization. I analyze the process of Islamic radicalization at the level of the Islamic community and the Islamic field. On the first level, I analyze how Kaplan-community leaders claim Islamic authority and produce Islamic knowledge that justifies isolation and violence. On the second level, I address the development of the Kaplan community and its relations to other Islamic communities. I argue that it is the loss of the Kaplan community in the Turkish Islamic field that led to its shrinking 224 • Localizing Islam in Europe from an estimated 12,000 followers in the early 1980s to 800 by 2003 (Frantz 2002). The initial number of followers is high...