Between Occidentalism and the Global Left: Islamist Critiques of the West in Turkey

In recent years, Turkey has been presented as a model for the whole Muslim world by both the European Union and the United States. Advocates of Turkey's membership in the European Union often refer to the symbolic meaning of this event as a disproof of the clash of civilizations thesis and as a positive message of the West to the entire Muslim world. Some conservative circles in the United States seem to even be hoping for a kind of Ottoman caliphate type of leadership for Turkey in order to then promote it as a model of a pro-Western, democratic, moderate Muslim nation.¹ Yet this idea of a pro-Western Turkey, in contrast to an ambivalent and ill-defined image of an anti-Western Muslim world, is paradoxical. After all, in opinion polls on anti-American sentiments, the Turkish public ranks consistently in the top percentiles.² Moreover, since the November 2002 electoral victory of the Justice and Development Party, the Turkish government has been led by politicians who have some kind of Islamist background and religious electoral base. Given the long legacy of Islamist critiques of the West, it behooves us to ask about the impact of the legacy of Islamist thinking on the West in contemporary Turkish politics and foreign policy making. What has been the nature of Islamist critiques of the West in modern Turkish history? How does it relate to contemporary Turkish politics? In other words, is there a legacy of historical Islamist critiques of the West in contemporary Turkish politics?

Before analyzing anti-Western critiques of Turkey's Islamist thinkers, there is a need to clarify the three different approaches to the topic of Muslims' critiques of the West, which in this article will be referred to as the "clash of civilizations," "occidentalism," and "global left" paradigms. According to the first approach, which was popularized by Bernard Lewis's writings, the "Muslim rage" against the West is shaped by the centuries-long conflict between Islamic and Christian civilizations. According to Lewis, as Christian civilization produced and embodied modernity during the past three hundred years, Muslim civilization first rejected modernity because of its Christian nature and then failed to emulate the same Christian modernity when it recognized its superiority. This paradigm concludes that Muslim discontent with the international order and the Western world stems from Muslims' inability to harmonize Islam and modernity.³ Lewis's explanation of Muslim critiques of the West, which posits a sharp distinction between Islamic civilization and the modern West, is no longer endorsed in established scholarly literature on the Middle East, yet it has been reproduced in Turkish intellectual history and has been embraced by various Islamist and secular thinkers, a topic that is discussed below. The sharp dichotomy between Muslim Orient and Western modernity was a product of colonial-era orientalism, yet it has been internalized and redefined during the intellectual conflicts among Muslims throughout the twentieth century, leading one group to blame the others either as mindless West-imitationist or conservative West-rejectionist.

The second approach to the question of Muslim critiques of the West, defined here as the occidentalism paradigm, was inspired by the fact that some of the debates on the "West" that one sees in the Muslim world can be traced, in very similar forms, in the intellectual history of highly modernized non-Muslim societies such as Russia and Japan. Historical scholarship shows that antimodern and anti-Western ideas one usually associates with Muslim extremists have surfaced in other societies in similar forms, such as among European romantics, Hindu revivalists, Russian Slavophiles, or pre–World War II era Japanese Asianists. Emphasizing this fact, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit have formulated a comparative analysis of anti-Westernism that overcomes the orientalist dichotomy of essential Muslim hatred of the West. If the failure of modernity led to anti-Westernism in the Muslim world, as Lewis argues, why does one see the strongest antimodern and anti-Western intellectual trends in Japan, Russia, and even Germany, all of which were prime examples of successful modern societies in the twentieth...