Read Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty Online
Authors: Mustafa Akyol
These clauses might sound like commonsense declarations to most people, but to the secularist establishment they constituted an unacceptable heresy that opened the doors of the universities to “backward-minded” conservative Muslims. Soon the Constitutional Court stepped in. It not only nullified the amendment but also levied a hefty fine on the AKP government for violating the country’s self-styled secularism. The ruling party, in fact, barely survived being disbanded and buried in Turkey’s political graveyard, where more than two dozen parties rest in peace simply for having failed to comply with some aspect of the official ideology.
In the middle of this peculiar political controversy—during which “freedom” and “secularism” had become opposing slogans—an interesting voice emerged from the headscarfed female students whose right to education was being discussed. On a website titled “We Are Not Free Yet,” three hundred of them put their signatures under the following statement:
What we have suffered since the day that the door of the university was shut in our face taught us something: Our real problem is the authoritarian mentality which assumes a right to interfere in the lives, appearances, words and thoughts of people.
Thus, as women who face discrimination because we cover our heads, we hereby declare that we won’t be happy simply by entering universities with our scarves—unless:
• The Kurds and other alienated groups in this country are given the legal and psychological basis to consider themselves first-class citizens.
• The foundations of the [non-Muslim] minorities that were shamelessly confiscated are given back.
• Or the “insulting Turkishness” cases [mostly brought against many liberal intellectuals] are brought to an end.
2
The rest of the text continued to ask for “freedoms” for all suppressed groups in Turkey, including the Alevis, an unorthodox Muslim sect, and denounced “all forms of discrimination, suppression, and imposition.” Finally, these “covered women” based their entire stance on a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: “The Heavens and the earth stand on justice.”
This genuinely liberal and Islamic message immediately became popular, making national headlines. The number of signatories quickly increased, reaching twelve hundred in just a few weeks. Soon, the three young women who started the initiative, Neslihan Akbulut, Hilal Kaplan, and Havva Yılmaz, published a book titled
We Are Not Free Yet
. In the introduction, they used the same slogan that appeared on their website: “If the matter is freedom, nothing is trivial.”
This was just one example of a phenomenon that has emerged in Turkey since the early 1990s: the growing acceptance and advocacy of liberal political ideas by the country’s practicing Muslims. In fact, the liberal and Islamic trends in the country have become so intertwined that they are now seen as allies by the radical secularists. Even some of the hate words used by the latter reflected this Islamo-liberal synthesis. While they insult covered women by calling them
karafatmalar
(cockroaches), the term they prefer for Islamic liberals is
takkeli libo
s
¸
, which literally means “liberal with a prayer cap.”
And how all this came about is a story worth examining.
T
HE
“C
ENTER
” V
ERSUS THE
“P
ERIPHERY
”
In the previous chapter, we left Turkey at the Kemalist Revolution, the effort to remove Turkey from its Ottoman past and re-create it from scratch, based on ideas derived from the radical secularism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Islam, according to this vision, would be allowed no influence whatsoever in society. “The boundary of religious consideration in Turkey,” wrote Recep Peker, the secretary general of the single-party Kemalist regime in 1936, “cannot exceed the skin of a citizen.”
3
In other words, religion could exist only on the “inside” of citizens, and not in public life. There would be no religious education, no religious communities, no religious movements—and nothing like the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to protect such public expressions of religion from the state.
In just two decades, from 1925 to 1945, the Kemalist vision successfully dominated the “center” of Turkish society, which included the bureaucracy, the military, the judiciary, and the universities. The “purification” of the latter was realized by the 1933 “university reform,” in which professors who disagreed with the Kemalist ideology—including its pseudoscientific theories about the Aryan origins of the “Turkish race”—lost their jobs. At Istanbul University, almost two-thirds of the scholars were deemed “backward-minded” and were fired.
Since the “center” of society became so dominated by the secularists, Islam would be able to survive only in its “periphery”—the rural areas, small towns, and the lower classes.
4
As a result, the more sophisticated Islamic tradition of the Ottoman elite disappeared, while religion became part of the culture of the less-educated masses. As a result, for many decades upper-class secular Turks considered that being a practicing Muslim was synonymous with being a
köylü—
a peasant.
Yet still, some of the liberal ideas developed by the Ottoman Islamic elite found their way into Republican Turkey. And no one was more influential in building this bridge than an exceptional Kurdo-Turkish scholar named Said Nursi.
S
AID
N
URSI,
“T
HE
W
ONDER OF THE
A
GE
”
Born in 1878 in a poor village in Eastern Anatolia named Nurs (whence comes his family name), the young Said was a devout and intellectually curious student. He learned the Qur’an, the Hadiths, and other Islamic sources in the
madrasas
of his region. His teachers were so impressed by his sharp memory and intellect that they called him Bediüzzaman (“the Wonder of the Age”), which soon became his nickname.
At the age of fifteen, Said was profoundly inspired by a book entitled
Rüya
(
The Dream
), an allegorical tribute to liberty written two decades earlier by Namık Kemal, the prominent Young Ottoman introduced in chapter 6. In the book, the Islamic liberal Kemal depicted freedom as a beautiful fairy coming down from the heavens, liberating all Ottoman citizens from authoritarian rule and blessing them with rights, progress, and wealth. Said was deeply impressed by this vision. “I woke up then,” he would write years later, “with
The
Dream
of Kemal.”
5
No wonder, then, that from his adolescent years to his death in 1960, opposition to authoritarian rule and commitment to freedom and democracy would be important themes for Said Nursi—and the millions of his followers who would emerge in Republican Turkey.
Another important concern for Nursi was modern science.
Madrasas
of his time had become extremely conservative and insular institutions: only “Islamic sciences” were taught, not modern ones such as physics, chemistry, and biology. The modern ones were taught in the French-style schools that the Ottoman Empire had opened early in the nineteenth century. Yet some graduates of these modern institutions were becoming the followers of not only science but also scientism—the idea that science is an ultimate guide to everything and an alternative to religion. In other words, while classical Islamic education was teaching faith without any science, modern schools were teaching science without (and even against) faith.
The solution, Nursi thought, was to open new
madrasas
with a modern curriculum; he even made plans for a modern Islamic university. In November 1907, he went all the way to Istanbul to personally talk to Sultan Abdülhamid II and seek his blessing. The sultan’s secretaries, surprised by the confidence and ambition of this rural-born Kurd, thought that he was out of his mind to request a private audience with the great caliph.
So Nursi failed to obtain the official support he sought for his project, but the next two years that he spent in the capital of the empire contributed to his thinking and his reputation. It was during this time that the Second Constitutional Period—or Hürriyet (Liberty), as it was then called—was announced, and the Ottoman parliament reconvened after three decades of suspension. Nursi quickly became famous as an Islamic supporter of the Liberty cause. He made impressive speeches in Istanbul and sent dozens of telegrams to the Kurdish elders in the East, all defending constitutionalism, representative democracy, and freedom of thought.
6
When the Ottoman Empire entered World War I, Nursi took up arms, along with his students, to protect the eastern border from the Russian Army—only to be captured as a prisoner of war. Soon after his release, he went back to Eastern Turkey to try to establish the modern
madrasa
about which he had been dreaming for decades. But fate had other plans for him.
In 1925, a Kurdish revolt broke out in the region, and the Kemalist government punished not just the perpetrators but also many other Kurdish notables, “relocating” them to western areas of Anatolia. Nursi, who had opposed the revolt, was exiled to a village in Isparta Province, in midwestern Turkey. Here, he would have time for some soul-searching and finally would define a new mission in life. This “new Said” would neglect all political matters and devote himself to saving the Islamic faith from the godless ideas and temptations of the age.
Soon Nursi started to write his famous “epistles,” which, over the next three decades, would fill more than a dozen volumes with Islamic apologetics. His whole purpose was to “bring God back by raising Muslim consciousness”—in strong contrast to the thoroughly secular
Homo kemalicus
the regime wanted to create.
7
The more Nursi wrote, the more he attracted official wrath. As a result, he spent the whole “single-party era” (1925–50) in prison, under house arrest, or in some form of exile in remote parts of Turkey. His followers, who clandestinely handwrote, distributed, and copied his works, became known as “the students of Nur” (or
Nurcu
s).
The Nur movement was not only absolutely nonviolent but also persistently apolitical. “Trying to serve religion via politics brings more harm than good,” a Nurcu text argues, and rejects the “revolutionary Islamic approach, which wants to shape society from above and which even legitimizes violence.” “The best way to serve Islam,” it concludes, “is to advocate the truths of faith.”
8
But even this was unacceptable for Kemalism. Hence, newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s often reported stories about “Nurcu retrogrades” caught by the police with such “illegal materials” as books, brochures, copy machines, and prayer caps.
The Nur movement was only able to take a deep breath in 1950, when the quarter-century-old Kemalist regime was overthrown in the first free and fair elections of the Republican era. The new prime minister was Adnan Menderes, whose Democrat Party (DP) had the famous motto, “Enough! It is the nation’s turn to speak.” The DP was an heir to some of the liberal ideas of the Progressive Republican Party (PRP), which had been closed down in 1925. It was therefore more tolerant of and respectful to religion, more lenient to the Kurds, and more favorable to free-market capitalism. Menderes, who had promised to make Turkey “a little America,” soon embraced the Marshall Plan, sent Turkish troops to the Korean War, and joined NATO. He also created an economic boom that would grant him three election victories in a row—the second one with 57 percent of the votes, an unmatched record in Turkish political history.
But the Kemalist “center”—the bureaucracy, the military, the judiciary, and the universities—despised Menderes, regarding him as the leader of a counterrevolution. Among the prime minister’s supposed misdeeds was his amicable attitude toward religious leaders, including Said Nursi. “What do you want from this ascetic man who devoted his whole life to faith?” he said in January 1960 to the Kemalists in parliament who were angrily questioning why Nursi was allowed to travel freely around the country.
9
The response came four months later, on May 27, 1960, when the Turkish military staged a coup, established martial law, and imprisoned hundreds of DP members on Yassıada, an island on the outskirts of Istanbul. The junta soon set up a show trial, which sentenced Menderes and two of his ministers to execution, for subjective crimes including “empowering religious retrogrades.” On September 17, 1961, Adnan Menderes, the most popular prime minister in Turkish history, was hung on the gallows—after, by some accounts, being beaten and abused by soldiers.
10
The rest of the DP politicians were given lengthy prison terms.