Nostalgia for the Empire by Yavuz M. Hakan;

Author:Yavuz, M. Hakan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Ottoman Islamic Heritage as the Foundation of the Nation

The heritage of the Ottoman Islamic civilization for Erdoğan is not an unconditional set of values but rather a logos that orients the daily life of a community and provides meaning to actions, decisions, and relationships. Moreover, it is an emancipating force against oppression and foreign domination that determines a community’s core values. It is a religious tradition that gives coherence, unity, and solidarity to social practices. Erdoğan’s understanding of Islam is deeply shaped by his idealized Ottoman memories, the aggregate of secular versus Islamic political rivalry, Islamic intellectual traditions and movements, and the economic and political development of Turkey. The cultural as well as dogmatic aspects of Islam are critical in comprehending Erdoğan’s worldview. By culture, I mean a set of values, myths, and beliefs that shape one’s everyday life practices. The oppositional history of Turkish Islam in the Kemalist Republic is also a part of Erdoğan’s political personality. Mustafa Kemal and his colleagues worked strenuously to fence out the social and political manifestations of Islam in the public square with the idea of ultimately having it disappear. These founding fathers regarded Islam as a foreign relic of the Arabian past and the cause of economic and social backwardness, which prevented Turkey from assuming its rightful place as a “civilized” Western nation. The historical backdrop against which Erdoğan’s personality and his understanding of politics were formed was the kulturkampf between the Ottoman Islamic legacies and the militantly secular Kemalist ideology which sought to displace them.

In Turkey, the rise of Islamism and nationalism are mutually inclusive processes. This Islamo-Turkish revival is usually carried out through a reconfiguration of Ottoman memory. There is always the potential for a dormant nationalist rejuvenation within the Islamic revival, as Turkish nationalism is ultimately closely knitted within an Ottoman-Islamic framework. Thus, in the most critical times of Erdoğan’s tenure, Turkish nationalists always have supported him. Erdoğan’s nine consecutive electoral victories could be seen as the revenge of a suppressed Islamic periphery against Turkey’s secularized and Western-oriented elite. He seeks to redefine the sense of community in terms of the core—Islamic/Ottoman—values of who is “in” or “out.” Erdoğan has used his power to “de-ethnicize” the population from its narrow ethnic-nationalism (Turkish/Kurdish) but also to “re-Islamicize” it by stressing Islamic values as a unifying reference point and the Ottoman Empire as a shared history. Erdoğan’s educational and social policies are consciously designed to weaken secular identity and to strengthen subnational (e.g., Albaian, Bosniak, Torbes, Pomak, Kurd, and Georgian) identities under an overarching Ottoman Turkish/Muslim one.

For Erdoğan, being a Turk stems neither from blood ties nor from formal legal citizenship in the Western sense. Instead, it is a commitment to Islam and the Ottoman heritage to protect and perpetuate the faith with the goal of maintaining social integration and restoring the greatness of the Ottoman Turks. Of course, what it means to be a Turk will never be a settled question.34 Turkishness, for Atatürk, was based on a “we feeling,” explained later by Karl W.

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