Humanism in Ruins by Aslı Iğsız

Author:Aslı Iğsız [Iğsız, Aslı]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis and Coexistence after the 1980 Military Coup

If, therefore, conclusions can be drawn from military violence, as being primordial and paradigmatic of all violence used for natural ends, there is inherent in all such violence a lawmaking character.

Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 1921

THE TURKISH-ISLAMIC SYNTHESIS is a political paradigm that has marked modern Turkey’s history. Demographically and discursively, it has informed a variety of policies such as segregative biopolitics, assimilation, absorption, and dispossession. As a discourse, it draws from paradigms of historicist humanism in an attempt to trace the origins and genealogies of peoples in Turkey, with differing emphases on Islam and Turkishness depending on the context. For example, the First Turkish National History Congress, organized in 1932, is commonly referred to as an important platform where Turkish national history was propounded.95 The conference presentations also included papers on the contributions of the Turks to Islamic civilization—a move that is very much on par with the dominant paradigms of historicist humanism—in which Léon Cahun, the nineteenth-century French Orientalist who wrote on the subject, was also cited.96

The efforts to generate a Muslim majority and then Turkify—i.e., assimilate—them and secularize them were very salient. Those who could not be assimilated were killed or subjected to a discipline-and-punish campaign of violence on the one hand and segregative biopolitics on the other. The 1923 exchange embodied such policies par excellence. Further, as sociologist Ayhan Aktar has demonstrated, the Turkification of the economy was closely related to the 1923 population exchange.97 The interpretations of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis differed depending on the context, and the paradigm itself took different forms across time and space. Today, however, it is commonly associated with the 1980 military coup.

The Turkish-Islamic synthesis was officially included in the 1983 National Cultural Policy Report prepared in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup98—an era which also marks the last decade of the Cold War. The coup d’état mainly targeted what the military called “degenerate” or “deviant” ideologies—which implied Marxism or any faction associated with it.99 The 1983 report opens with a message by the minister of state and deputy prime minister of the military junta government, Turgut Özal.100 A former World Bank employee (1971–1973), Özal implemented the IMF’s policies in Turkey; he would later become the first elected civilian prime minister after the coup and, in 1989, the president of Turkey.101 In his June 9, 1982, message to the Special Committee of Experts who prepared the report, Özal states that development must proceed through a consideration not only of the economy but also of the human (beşerî mülahazalar).102 This is why, he states, culture is important and needs to be incorporated into education: to ensure development. In referring to what he calls UNESCO’s definition of culture, Özal also identifies culture as the consciousness of the historical development of a group. This identification is embedded the 1983 Turkish National Cultural Policy Report.103

The emphasis on culture as integral to economic development was not Özal’s invention. It was previously articulated in a UNESCO document entitled Cultural Policy: A Preliminary Study.

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