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Chapter  Secularism, Turkish Islam, and Identity Led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923, Turkey was the first secular state in the Muslim world that placed all educational institutions under government jurisdiction. By 1929, Turkish secular ruling elites, known as Kemalists, had succeeded in eliminating Islam from political and public life. A Swiss-based civil code supplanted Islamic legal codes.1 In recent times, however, this secularism from above, backed by the military, has increasingly come into conflict with the aspirations of practicing Turkish Muslims. Today, Turkey exhibits the complexity of political life in a Muslim country caught between competing forces of change and continuity, trying to strike a balance between maintaining its cultural identity and participating in global politics. Atatürk failed to create a Turkish nationalism that would also embrace Kurdish nationalism. Kemalism has clearly failed to create either a mass secular culture or a monolithic Turkish identity in a diversified and complex society such as Turkey. Instead, the political developments of the past half century point to the growth of multiple identities.2 The grassroots appeal of the Islamist movement across existing social and class divisions continues to call into question the conventional view that regards Turkey as a quintessential model of secular modernization in the Muslim world. From 1923 onward, Ayse Kadioglu writes, the new Turks were in a mental state best described as ‘‘voluntary amnesia,’’ which reflected a desire to break with the past.3 The state under the republic was bent on elevating people to a new level of civilization. Any opposition against this modern order was construed as an effort to revive the old religious order. This ideological stance was shallowly held and not espoused by all the classes; what is more, it was founded primarily on tenets constructed and imposed from above. This so-called Kemalist ideology could not substitute for Islam in the daily lives of the people, in large part because it was internalized only by the intelligentsia.4 The new republic under Atatürk focused on a broad-based Westernization of the country. The ensuing political, cultural, and socioeconomic  Chapter  reforms even after Atatürk’s death in 1938 intensified the ongoing debate about secularism, nationalism, and modernization. Turkey entered World War II on the Allied side in 1945 and became a charter member of the United Nations in the following year. Uncertainties faced by Greece in the postwar period in stifling a communist rebellion and demands by the Soviet Union for military bases in the Turkish straits led to the declaration of the Truman Doctrine by U.S. president Harry Truman in 1947. The doctrine pledged to guarantee the security of Turkey and to shore up Greece’s crumbling economic and political conditions, culminating in large-scale U.S. military and economic aid. Subsequently, in 1952, Turkey joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). From 1960 to 1980, the country was particularly marked by cycles of political instability, as several military coups (1960, 1971, and 1980) characterized these uncertain times. The 1980s and 1990s unleashed new internal political dynamics that underscored the importance of Islamic identity for the Turks. The new discourse of the state elites was laden with references to the significance of religious values. Islam had finally been pushed to the forefront of Turkish politics as the antidote of communism.5 Elements of civil society increased in number, Kadioglu notes, along with the new mission of the technocratic elites of the 1980s, who saw their goal mainly as ‘‘synthesizing Islamic values and pragmatic rationality’’; this created a political atmosphere that allowed the search for a more historically rooted Turkish identity.6 For the first time since the republic’s inception, a pro-Islamic party came to power in 2003 without coalition. To better understand secularism, Islam, and identity politics in Turkey , from both a chronological and thematic standpoint, I begin by presenting a historical background and structural setting for the reconstruction of modern Islamic identity in Turkey, followed by a discussion of the triumph of pragmatic politics in recent years. I next focus on the headscarf issue, which continues to be divisive, attesting to the lingering tensions between Islamists and secularists. In the following sections, I argue that Turkey’s ties with the West and its attempts to join the European Union (EU) render it a unique case. The challenges facing the country’s prospects for entry into the EU, including human rights conditions and the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities (Kurds and Aleviler), will...

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