Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft

11. The Body Corporate and the Social Body

279 11 The Body Corporate and the Social Body Ş e r i f M a r d i n Today, the leader of the Turkish Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, often refers to his legislative initiatives as legitimized by the party’s control of a large majority in Parliament and the popular support he detects behind it. He thereafter goes on to state that his policies are based on the will of the people, or millet, the populus an ambiguous concept that is also used in Turkish for “nation.” Opponents see this type of legitimation as taking its strength from a tacit compact with the mass of the voters as an undemocratic use of the majority postulate to steamroll issues through Parliament. Notwithstanding Erdoğan’s often needlessly defensive swagger, his outrage at such accusations seems to have an element of sincerity that needs explanation. I think what we can detect here is a real misunderstanding: Erdoğan refers to millet as representing a society composed of Islamic bonding and sociability among Muslims;1 his opponents see millet as a corporate entity. The confusion is understandable when one recollects the means by which, in Turkey, the republican, Jacobin corporate understanding of the nation has been repeatedly forced into a different “nation” operating on the basis of what in the most general sense can be named a sociality made up of “Islamic Postscript: This paper was written in 2008. 1. On bonding, see Shils 1957. 280 • Şerif Mardin solidarity groups.”2 The difference is that in the latter case the central social “cement” consists of a series of social bonds rather than a single, large corporate legal framework. Although the contrast is important, it is usually not spelled out and is kept a tacit, unexplained component of Turkish politics. The recurring salience of this tacit element of Turkish political ideologies reminds me that long ago I had already encountered another version of such conceptual ambiguity in my study of the Young Ottoman movement. In fact, one conclusion of my book The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (Mardin 1962) has never attracted the importance I gave it personally , namely, that the Young Ottoman democratic theory lacked a key political instrument, which I described at the time as the “corporate nature of the state” (Mardin 1962, 399). In the book I elaborated the idea as follows: Paradoxically enough, while the Young Ottomans ran into difficulties because they had no room for atomistic individualism, they also ran into difficulties because they did not dispose of a theory as to the corporate nature of the state. For in some respects liberal thought rested on non-individualistic conceptions. This is particularly true of the theory of representation. Otto von Gierke traced the theory to Roman conceptions which were taken over in Europe in the Middle Ages, specifically to the Roman theory of corporate personality. [That] thesis was advanced by Gierke as part of the general theory that the medieval world was on the way to, but never quite achieved, an organic theory of society. (Mardin 1962, 400) What Gierke saw as a missing link in medieval history did, however, develop in the field of private and commercial law but also, beginning in the sixteenth century, in the European theory of politics. 2. See Roy 2002, 126. According to Presnjit Duara, these solidarity groups perpetuated themselves through traces left in history by large-scale communities (Duara 1995, 72). For solidarity groups, see also Ritter 1948. See also Fustel De Coulanges 1956 for “fraternal associations.” The Body Corporate and the Social Body • 281 In modern Turkey, the difference between Islamic bonding and kamu, the corporate staatsrecht, a product of the nineteenth-century Ottoman reform policy, has had at least two consequences: one related to private law and the second related to conceptualizations of state authority, political representation, and constitutionalism. The problem is made even more difficult by the hybrid nature of Ottoman state practice. We may place my argument about corporateness into the contemporary Turkish everyday environment by referring to a point made by Ayşe Saktanber (2006) in an article. The major issue underlined in that article is the current proscription of the headscarf in the Turkish “public domain.” Saktanber shows a caricature of a woman wearing a scarf and riding in a minibus anxiously asking the driver to let her off because the bus is entering the...