Islam and politics have maintained a complicated relationship since the Turkish republic was founded in 1923. As Bein rightly notes, “The debates in present-day Turkey concern contemporary issues, but their historical roots may be traced almost invariably to the late Ottoman period and the early years of the republic” (2011, 155). This chapter gives an overview of the main evolutions in the Turkish religious field in the decades since the end of the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate to present day. The two principal goals are to present the structures and mechanisms that underlie religious governance in Turkey, as well as to argue that the boundaries between “official” and “unofficial” Islam are more ambiguous and volatile than is often imagined. In order to give focus to this argument, I will consider in particular the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, hereafter Diyanet) and its relationships to non-state religious actors.
1 Early Antecedents: From Empire to Republic
The founding of the modern Turkish state had far-reaching consequences for the place of Islam in Turkish society. This new state began as a resistance movement to the occupying Allies of the Triple Entente following World War I, but also in opposition to the Ottoman government of Sultan Mehmed VI in Istanbul. The new Turkish government in Ankara rejected the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres and rallied behind the “National Pact” (Misak-i Milli) of 1920, which “advocated not Turkish national sovereignty but that of all Muslim Ottomans” (Zürcher 2004, 139). With Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s forces emerging victorious three years later, the Turkish War of Independence ended with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, by which time the Turkish Parliament had already passed a bill abolishing the Sultanate. The Ottoman Empire officially ceased to exist when the constitution was amended on 29 October 1923 and Turkey was proclaimed a republic, modelled on Enlightenment ideals and Western European notions of statehood.
The abolishment of the Ottoman Empire and the Sultanate crystallized tensions concerning the place of religion amongst the factions vying for power within the new Turkish state. For over 400 years the Ottoman sultans had also held the title of “Caliph,” 1 and when abolishing the Sultanate, Atatürk had been careful to distinguish one from the other so as not to arouse opposition from religious allies. However, in 1924 the Turkish Parliament passed three crucial laws that fundamentally altered relations between religion and the state, the first of which abolished the Caliphate. The second concerned a significant reorganization of the education system, including religious education. The third law founded the Diyanet İşleri Reisliği (i.e. the Diyanet), which replaced the Ministry for Sharia and Pious Foundations that had existed within Atatürk’s provisional government since 1920. The latter ministry had been modelled after its Ottoman predecessor, the Şeyhülislamlık, but the laws passed in 1924 led to a much greater rupture with the past.
In the Ottoman past, religious governance had been characterized by the millet system, which had divided members of the empire according to their religious affiliation, and which accorded a degree of autonomous self-government to non-Muslim minorities. 2 Beginning in the late sixteenth century, the grand mufti 3 of Istanbul had come to occupy the highest position of religious authority amongst Muslim clerics under the title Şeyhülislam. One of the most powerful figures in the Ottoman state system, he represented one of two pillars of the traditional Ottoman system—the Grand Vizier being the other—reflecting the “ruler’s dual functions as Sultan-Caliph” (Berkes 1964, 97). The Şeyhülislam was the leader of all the professors, religious administrators, and judges, meaning that he supervised all the domains of state activity that today correspond to the justice ministry, the education ministry, the Directorate of Foundations and the Diyanet (Erdem 2008). Indeed, this was all the more important, considering that by the sixteenth century “virtually all legal scholars [ulema] who presided over a medrese classroom or a şeriat court in the Turkish-speaking areas of the empire, along with imperial appointees everywhere, were ranked, graded and pensioned under central state auspices” (Zilfi 2006, 210, 213). The state’s involvement in creating and sustaining a religious bureaucracy is thus part of a long-standing tradition of religious governance that goes back many centuries.
This position of the Şeyhülislam underwent significant changes during the Tanzimat reforms of Sultan Mahmud II and all throughout the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman state moved to reform its administrative and educational structures. When the Young Turks came to power, they excluded the Şeyhülislam from the cabinet and removed numerous domains from his authority: religious courts were turned over to the ministry of justice; pious foundations (evkaf) were to be overseen by a state minister; and the medrese were placed under the authority of the ministry of education. All that was left for the Şeyhülislam was religious affairs. During the Turkish War of Independence, the Şeyhülislam continued to exist as a part of the lingering Ottoman government in Istanbul; however, its active engagement against the nationalists sealed its fate. The last representatives issued fatwas against Atatürk and the leaders of the Turkish national movement and endorsed the Treaty of Sèvres, galvanizing even further the division between the traditional figures of Ottoman religious authority and the rising nationalist leadership. The office of Şeyhülislam ceased to exist with the resignation of the last Ottoman cabinet in 1922 (Bein 2011).
Consequently, the laws of 1924 represent a milestone in the development of the modern Turkish state. This is especially the case with regard to the development of secularism , or laiklik (from the French laïcité ). In contrast to other definitions of secularism, however, for Atatürk and his Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP ), “secularism meant not so much the separation of church and state as the subjugation and integration of religion into the state bureaucracy” (Zürcher 2004, 233). Secularism was an integral element of the Turkish state’s foundational ideology, which has since come to be known by the term “Kemalism,” and which was at the heart of a vast modernization project of state and society asserting the primacy of the Turkish nation-state over the now discredited multi-ethnic and Islamic Ottoman Empire. The law abolishing the Caliphate justified itself by stating that “the meaning and notion of Caliphate is essentially inherent in that of the Government and Republic” (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti 1924a, 6). The grounds for the legitimacy of the state were no longer religious, but Republican and nationalist.
The Law on the Unification of Instruction addressed a lingering problem initially brought on by the Tanzimat reforms in the education sector. The creation of a secular current in the nineteenth century had given rise to a form of dualism with religiously oriented institutions (medrese) on the one hand, and “Western-style” secular institutions (mekteps and foreign schools) on the other (Çakır et al. 2004). The law brought all educational facilities under the control of the Ministry of Education and provided for the establishment of a theology faculty (İlahiyat Fakültesi) for training high-level religious specialists at the Darulfünun, later to become Istanbul University in 1933. Once the new republic had achieved its monopoly over all educational institutions in the country, it proceeded to close the totality of the medrese schools and gradually phased out religion classes from the national school curriculum. State schools for imams and preachers (hatips) were closed by 1930–1931, and the theology faculty at Darulfünun followed suit in 1933 (Berkes 1964; Kara 1999).
The final of the three laws founded the Diyanet as a state institution directly tied to the office of the prime minister, both administratively and financially. The law detailed its duties and organizational structure, delineating the areas of competency for the main state body concerned with religious affairs in Turkey. The first article specifies the main tasks of the Diyanet to cover the administration of all Islamic commandments (ahkam) and affairs concerning belief (itikadat) and prayer (ibadat), as well as the management of religious institutions. There is an important semantic difference between the terms “din” (religion) and “diyanet” (piety) which is not reflected in the English translation of the institution’s name. Indeed, the choice between these two words was the cause of much debate when the Diyanet was originally created. A contemporary member of the Turkish Parliament, Samih Rifat, argued that according to Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) the term “diyanet” referred to a limited number of religious domains and was in opposition to “kaza” (the non-religious judiciary), thus making it more appropriate than “din,” which in fact encompassed both notions (Kara 2008). Another perspective is given by former Diyanet president Ali Bardakoğlu , for whom the decision to use “diyanet” instead of “din” at the beginning of the Republican period can be interpreted as an “effort to provide for religiousness based on a moral foundation,” given that “diyanet expresses a higher value; the spiritual and moral aspects of life” (2008, 10–11).
From the beginning, the Diyanet was designed to administer solely the Muslim religious field, since the Treaty of Lausanne had established that non-Muslims would have the right to “establish, manage, and control at their own expense, any charitable, religious and social institutions” (Treaty of Lausanne, Article 40). Conversely, the focus on non-Muslims as the sole minorities in Turkey had the consequence that all Muslims were assumed to belong to the “same” Islam, that is to say the officially accepted Sunni Hanafi School, leaving out the very large Alevi minority.
The law that founded the Diyanet stipulated that it was to name and employ all individuals involved in the administration of religion (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti 1924b). The list of these individuals provides a who’s who of the hierarchy of Islamic religious employees at the time: “the directors of mosques, prayer spaces, Sufi lodges and religious shrines, imams, hatips, preachers, sheikhs, prayer-callers, mosque custodians, and others,” 4 while a subsequent article indicates that the competent authority for muftis is also the Diyanet. The final article specifies that religious foundations are to be managed by a different administrative body, which would later become today’s Directorate General of Foundations (Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü). In sum, while the Diyanet was given the legal state monopoly over certain aspects of the Turkish Muslim field, its field of action was significantly limited when compared with similar institutions in the past. By definitively delegating the administration of religious foundations and Islamic education to separate state bodies, the state ensured that the Diyanet would not have the resources to develop into a pole of political authority, as the Şeyhülislam had been at times during the Ottoman past. Moreover, given its institutional and financial dependency on the office of the Prime Minister, the Diyanet’s activities would henceforth be constrained by the funding it received from the state budget.
The significance of this moment is at times relativized by certain members of the Diyanet, who acknowledge the changes brought about by these laws but who argue that the Diyanet “is not an innovation of the founders of the Republic of Turkey,” and rather that it ought to be seen as a “continuation of the office of Şeyhülislām in the post-Tanzimat shape and functions” (Erdem 2008, 212). Nevertheless, the difference between Ottoman Westernization practices and the Kemalist Republican reforms is stark: whereas the former had pursued an underlying logic of preserving and reinvigorating Islam, the latter “used religion as the legitimation for its political goals and as a means to influence the population” (Kara 1999, 212). Moreover, the very fact that religious affairs were to be managed by an administrative body and not a ministry shows that “the ruling elite both took religion under their control and at the same time managed to break the potentially sacred significance of the [Diyanet]” (Gözaydın 2006, 1). Indeed, relegating the issue of religious affairs to the realm of bureaucratic administration has significant consequences for the type of authority that the Diyanet can claim to represent. Far from the figure of a charismatic Sufi sheikh, but equally distant from the traditional figures of religious authority represented by the Ottoman ulema, the Diyanet’s claim to legitimacy at the most basic level is through the institutional and legal framework that tie it to the Turkish state.
Direct control was also exercised over the religious field through the prohibition of Sufi religious orders (tarikat) in 1925. A law was passed that closed the dervish and Sufi lodges (tekke and zaviye), outlawed all activities associated with Sufi leaders, and made disobedience punishable by fines or prison sentences. The immediate explanation for this development was the involvement of Nakşibendi sheikhs in the Kurdish Rebellion (or Sheikh Said Rebellion) of 1925, as well as in other protests against the secularizing Kemalist reforms (Azak 2010). The top-down state reforms at this moment were moving forward at a dizzying pace: fundamental changes to the justice system, including the introduction of a new civil code in 1926 (based on the Swiss model) and a new penal code in 1928 (based on the Italian penal code); the change to the Western clock and Gregorian calendar in 1926; the adoption of the Latin alphabet and Western numerals in 1928, as well as the removal the same year of the constitutional article which had made Islam the state religion (Karasipahi 2009). All these changes had a direct impact on how the boundaries of the religious field were perceived, as the government moved to secularize public spaces and remove Islamic symbols from concrete aspects of daily life. The reforms were complemented by the very real loss of power and status of traditional religious figures, such as the Ottoman ulema and graduates from Islamic schools.
The prohibition of the Sufi orders and other popular expressions of religion had the largest impact on the general population. The latent hostility of the Kemalist state leaders towards such religious actors had only increased as it became apparent that they possessed a real capacity to mobilize discontented groups in a bid to challenge the state. The leaders of the early Turkish republic had developed a deep-set suspicion of all independent religious actors and voiced this suspicion by accusing these actors of following an “impure” Islam, “tainted by its entanglement in political affairs” (Parla and Davison 2004, 109). This dichotomous discourse, which distinguishes between a “pure” (and state-approved) Islam, and an “impure,” politicized Islam, was essential in tying Turkish identity to a national Islam while simultaneously delegitimizing any religiously tinged opposition aimed at the state as that of irtica (reactionary Islam). The subsequent attempts to “Turkicize” Islam, most notably by privileging the Turkish language during prayers and Turkish translations of religious texts, as well as outright banning the recitation of the call to prayer in Arabic from 1932 to 1950, serve as examples of how the Kemalist government promoted the idea that the only legitimate Islam in Turkey was one that corresponded to state-approved Turkish nationalism .
The Diyanet remained in a rather awkward situation during this initial period. On the one hand, Kemalists perceived it with a mixture of suspicion and hostility, leading occasionally to conflict with other state ministries. On the other hand, the Diyanet’s role as a source of religious legitimation for state policy was thoroughly criticized by non-state Islamic actors, who disapproved of the secular direction that modern Turkey was taking. Meanwhile, the former Ottoman ulema were forced to find new roles for themselves, often wavering somewhere in the middle between opposition and cooperation (Bein 2011). As a result, the line between “official” and “unofficial” Islam was often unclear: just as is the case today, cooperation between state institutions and non-state religious actors responded more often to political necessities than a clear theological or legal doctrine.
The end of the Caliphate and the beginning of the Republic marked the end of one form of religious governance and the beginning of a new one. While the late Ottoman period had seen significant institutional reforms and a gradually diminishing role for religious actors in the administration of the state, the founding of the Turkish republic represented a watershed moment. The state’s official monopoly over religion was reinforced by the new institutional division of religious labour, which ensured that figures of religious authority would not be able to pose a threat to the government in power. The end of the traditional religious establishment and its replacement “by a more strictly bureaucratized and regulated civil administration” (Bein 2011, 106) may well have its roots in Ottoman history, but it was founded on a radical new discourse on religious authority in which legitimacy is derived from the state and loyalty to the nation. Over the next decades, this new form of religious governance would lead to the growth of numerous currents of Islamic religious opposition, which have had a significant impact on the evolution of state–religion relations within Turkey and Turkish communities abroad.
2 Unofficial Islam, Party Politics, and an Evolving Diyanet
During the first years of the republic, oppressive and authoritarian measures were taken in order to combat opposition to the new state and the Kemalist reforms. However, the prohibition of the Sufi orders and the drastic changes concerning the religious offer proposed by the state did not result in immediate changes in the religious demand, especially in rural Anatolia and outside of the main urban centres. The official nationalism of Republican Turkey, dominant from the 1930s until the 1960s, “left the ‘day-to-day’ in a limbo,” and “even in the most stringently secular times of the republic, Islam filled in the void” (Mardin 1993, 224). State oppression forced the Sufi orders to go underground, but they and several movements inspired by them took the place of state institutions in the daily activities of the religious field—most notably in the domain of Islamic education. This was especially the case for the Nakşibendi Sufi order, which adapted more successfully than the Mevlevi and the Bektaşi orders, and surreptitiously continued to train imams and other religious personnel over the coming decades (Bilici 2005).
These religious actors, who operated outside the boundaries of “official Islam,” successfully harnessed the frustration felt by large parts of the population over the state’s heavy-handed secular reforms. In doing so, they reinforced the place of Islam as a shared “sociocultural idiom” (Mardin 1989), as well as a means to mobilize segments of the population for political purposes. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that “unofficial Islam” is automatically opposed to the state just because it operates outside state boundaries. More often, the relationships between the state and such religious actors are better characterized by compromises and tacit understandings, and religious actors may at times gravitate in and out of the state religious administration.
The beginning of a democratic multiparty system in the late 1940s brought Islam into the public political arena, as many religious conservatives supported the newly founded Democratic Party (Demokrat Partisi, DP) as a way to scale back the secular Kemalist reforms of the previous decades. In turn, the secular-military establishment came to view democracy and party politics warily, stepping in to take control through coup d’états in 1960 and 1980 , and simply bringing down the government by memorandum in 1971 and 1997. Nevertheless, the perception of religion during these military interventions was not uniform. For instance, Islam was seen as an antidote to the spread of Communist ideas during the 1980 coup, which prompted the ruling generals to increase the visibility of religion in the public sphere and fuse it together with Turkish nationalism in a doctrine known as the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis .”
As a result of these shifting power relations during the second half of the twentieth century, religious movements, political parties , and state actors developed a series of fluctuating clientalist relationships, in which the line between official and unofficial Islam was frequently blurred. Moreover, the development of migrant communities abroad provided a safe haven for non-state religious groups in the event that their fortunes changed at home, leading state actors to view the diaspora as a potential source of disorder. In order to set the stage for my analysis of the Turkish transnational Muslim field, I will first provide a brief presentation of the main religious communities (cemaat) of “unofficial Islam” in Turkey: the Nurcu , the Süleymancı, Milli Görüş, and the Fethullahçı , all of which have developed from the Nakşibendi Khalidi Sufi order, and finally the non-Sunni Alevis.
The first example of “unofficial Islam” is that of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (1876–1960), a Kurdish Muslim revivalist from Eastern Anatolia whose teachings founded the Nurcu movement. Said Nursi is an enigmatic figure insofar as his relations with the Turkish state are concerned. Despite his opposition to the secularist reforms, Nursi’s philosophy was favourable to modern sciences and reinterpreting Islamic principles in accordance with the changing times. He did not engage in militant anti-government activities and had supported both the Young Turk revolution and the Republican side during the War of Independence (Özdalga 2010). Nevertheless, he was often targeted by the Republican government as a possible danger, especially following the Kurdish rebellion of 1925, when he was exiled to Western Anatolia. Though heavily influenced by the Nakşibendi order, Nursi routinely stated that he was also a follower of the Qadiri Sufi tradition, and drew on a variety of sources in order to gain support and distinguish his own approach.
His followers took the name Nurcu from their devotion to his writings, compiled in the Risale-i Nur (The Epistle of Light), and would meet in private homes or apartments where they would read and discuss his writings. Though he did not engage directly in politics himself, by the 1950s Said Nursi had called on his followers to support the new Democratic Party, providing one of the first demonstrations of how the growth of democracy permitted a more visible and active role for religious movements in Turkish politics. After his death, Nursi’s followers would continue to be important actors in the religious field in Turkey, but also abroad, where in particular the neo-Nurcu movement founded by Fethullah Gülen has grown to become a transnational religious network on a global scale.
Another movement that came into being around the same time was that of the Süleymancılar, or “followers of Süleyman,” referring to its eponymous founder, the Nakşibendi Sheikh Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan (1888–1959). Tunahan was appointed vaiz to an Istanbul mosque under the new Republican government in 1924 and in the years thereafter began to attract an important following. Faced with the Kemalist reforms of the new republic, Tunahan’s main goal was the preservation of Islam and especially traditional Islamic education, though in a way that opposed the state-controlled vision of Islamic orthodoxy (Çaymaz 2002).
The state decision to allow the opening of Qur’an seminaries in 1949 led to the end of the Süleymancılar’s period of withdrawal and Tunahan’s community began opening and running Qur’an courses across the country. The Diyanet had fought hard to save its Qur’an courses during the early years of the republic, but it still had nowhere near the means necessary to train imams for all the mosques in Turkey . As a result, a close relationship formed between the two and the Diyanet began recruiting Süleymancı preachers, who quickly became a major force within the institution (Yavuz 2003). This example of cooperation between official and unofficial Islam has been corroborated by the former Diyanet President Mehmet Görmez , who admitted that in the 1950s and 1960s it had been very difficult to find well-educated religious personnel, and that well into the 1970s many of the Diyanet’s employees had been graduates of non-state medrese (Milliyet 2006). The pendulum would swing back again after 1965, when a new law was passed that increased the Diyanet’s control over the religious field, leading it to reassert its authority over the Qur’an seminaries.
The Süleymancılar were amongst the very first to realize the potential of expanding their activities to the Turkish worker communities in Western Europe and have also been active in Turkish party politics. Many of the movement’s leaders have served as elected officials and have generally supported centre-right parties, while displaying open hostility to the Islamist parties of the Milli Görüş movement, who they argue instrumentalize Islam for their own political gains. Tunahan’s successor Kemal Kaçar was a member of the Turkish parliament as part of Süleyman Demirel’s Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, AP) during the 1970s and steered support to Turgut Özal’s Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP) and Demirel’s True Path Party (Doğru Yol Partisi, DYP) thereafter. Kaçar’s death in 2000 led to a split between two of Tunahan’s grandsons, which also reflected growing tensions concerning the political stance of the movement. While the elder Mehmet Beyazıt Denizolgun was a founding member of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP ) the majority of the community decided to follow his younger brother Ahmet Arif Denizolgun, who generally continued the tradition of supporting centre-right parties until his death in 2016. Over the last years, it seems that Süleymancılar vote has increasingly become split between the far-right nationalist Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP ), the Islamist Felicity Party, and the AKP .
Next in line is the Nakşibendi Sheikh, Mehmet Zaid Kotku , perhaps the best example of a politically engaged religious actor operating both inside and outside the parameters of “official Islam” who has had a major and lasting influence on modern Turkey. Kotku was the spiritual father of the Milli Görüş (National Outlook) movement, one of the most influential currents of Turkish Islam both inside and outside of the country. The movement takes its name from a manifesto written by one of Kotku’s main disciples, Necmettin Erbakan , who would go on to found all the main Islamist political parties of the twentieth century in Turkey. In 2001, however, a group of his former supporters broke off to form the AKP , which won the elections the following year and has governed the country ever since.
Kotku had become a member of the Gümüşhanevi branch of the Nakşibendi order in the early 1920s and had received his permission to guide and teach within the order (hilâfetname) in 1924. After over twenty years as an imam in Bursa and the village of Izvat, Mehmet Zaid Kotku returned to Istanbul in 1952. It was the beginning of the Democratic Party’s decade in power, a period marked by a new liberalism and openness, but also a different relationship to Islam: the ban on the call to prayer in Arabic was lifted; religious classes for school children became mandatory (though with an opt-out option); and new imam hatip schools were opened, overseen by the Ministry of Education (Bein 2011; Çakır et al. 2004).
Kotku emerged as the most significant Sufi leader of his time, with many of his followers becoming government ministers, prime ministers, and presidents. While Nursi promoted education and modern sciences and Tunahan emphasized traditional Islamic education, Kotku “stressed economic progress and industrialization as the best ways to develop society and ease the iron grip of Kemalist authoritarianism” (Yavuz 2003, 142). As in the case of the Nurcular and Süleymancılar, Kotku openly supported the Democratic Party during the 1950s and shifted this support to the centre-right Justice Party following the 1960 military coup. Nevertheless, many of those who identified with Islamist currents gradually became dissatisfied with the Justice Party during the 1960s. Riding on this wave of dissatisfaction, Erbakan founded the National Order Party (Milli Nizam Partisi, MNP), the first party that truly represented political Islam in Turkey. 5 Aside from its significant base linked to Kotku and his followers, support for the MNP came from movements such as the Nurcu and certain Justice Party parliamentarians. The foundation of this party was part and parcel of a larger strategy put in motion by Kotku, which included branching out into different sectors of the economy and civil society to create organizations capable of furthering the movement’s goals.
Though dissolved only one year later by the constitutional court during the military intervention of 1971, the MNP was founded again in 1972 as the National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi, MSP) and came to power twice as part of coalition governments during the 1970s. During both these periods in power, the MSP obtained the portfolio for the Diyanet and was instrumental in removing secular-minded presidents and officials. Indeed, the quick turnover rate of Diyanet presidents during the 1970s shows to what extent party politics had a direct effect on the personalities controlling the main institution of “official Islam” in the country. The antagonism was not simply between the secular centre-left CHP and one party representing conservative religious currents; these currents themselves were divided between the political Islam of the MSP (supported by conservative Islamists of all stripes, as well as by Nakşibendi groups and some branches of the Nurcu movement); the far-right nationalist MHP (which could on the support of the Süleymancılar at times); and Demirel’s conservative Justice Party, following in the tradition of the Democratic Party (supported by most Nurcular and Süleymancılar, as well as the nascent Gülen movement).
The last of the Nakşibendi Khalidi groups that I will mention here is the neo-Nurcu “Gülen movement” (Gülen Hareketi, or Fethullahçıs), led by Fethullah Gülen. The Gülen movement similarly arose in the 1960s atmosphere of generational change “with the gradual passing away of the last generation of Ottoman ulema” (Bein 2011, 152), and the rise of new strategies, influenced by party politics and modernizing tendencies, such as Kotku’s emphasis on branching out into media, business, and economic development. Originally from the region around Erzurum in Eastern Anatolia, Gülen had been introduced to the Nurcu movement already as a teenager. He began preaching in 1958 on the other side of the country in the city of Edirne and was officially appointed to Izmir as a preacher (vaiz) for the Diyanet in 1966. Gülen gradually attracted a following, giving public lectures in the surrounding region and organizing summer camps, and increasingly became focused on educational activities and “community service” (hizmet) (Ebaugh 2010). During the 1971 military intervention, Gülen was arrested and imprisoned for seven months for his links to the Nurcu movement, an experience that taught him to keep a low profile and develop a seemingly secular discourse, “suggesting that building a school is more virtuous than building a mosque” (Özdalga 2010, 84–85).
Gülen retired from the Diyanet in 1981, but stood out as a prominent supporter of the 1980 military coup and the new constitution of 1982 (Yavuz 2003). His close connections with the government of Turgut Özal and the majority of governments thereafter helped in the expansion of his movement at home and abroad. Starting in the 1980s, the Gülen movement began establishing a vast network of private preparatory schools, media outlets (Zaman newspaper, Samanyolu television, magazines, and publishing houses), and extensive business and professional associations in Turkey. In the 1990s, the movement went international and by the mid-2000s it had founded over a thousand schools and organizations in over 120 countries (Ebaugh 2010; Hendrick 2013). While the Gülen movement is an example of Turkish “unofficial Islam,” similar to the other examples discussed above, its relationship with “official Islam” is by no means straightforward. Gülen began as a rank and file imam employed by the Diyanet, a position he held for over twenty years, and his movement has maintained an ambiguous relationship with Turkish state authorities ever since, going from supporter of the 1980 coup and the 1997 intervention to enemy of the secular-military establishment a few years later, and from key ally of the AKP to the current situation of being officially designated a terrorist group. “Official Islam” is thus not static, and depending on the political forces in power the ties between “official” and “unofficial” Islam can vary greatly.
Completing this summary panorama of “unofficial” Turkish Islam are the Alevis. Alevism refers to a heterodox and diverse religious group, related to Shiism through its focus on Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, and which is estimated to represent between 15 and 20% of the Turkish population today. In terms of religious practice, Alevi communities are guided by male religious leaders named dedes, who trace their lineage back to the Prophet and who are the only individuals capable of leading the Alevi prayer ritual, known as the cem (Shankland 2003). The definition of Alevism is all the more difficult as there is no one particular orthodox version: it transcends ethnic boundaries (both Turks and Kurds are Alevis), and the belief system can reveal pre-Islamic Turkic shamanistic characteristics, as well as Zoroastrian and Christian influences; the “ambiguous nature” of Alevism in fact constitutes one of its essential variables (Massicard 2005).
On the other hand, Alevism as a political and identitarian movement has a much more recent history. Alevism has never been officially recognized, neither by the Ottoman Empire, nor by the Turkish republic, which explains the difficulty of finding precise statistics, as well as the absence of any inclusion of Alevism within the Diyanet . Following the coup d’état of 1960, the new constitution officially included the Diyanet as a body of the state administration; however, there was still no specific directive outlining its organization, so the Turkish parliament began working on a draft bill. Debates dragged on for years, during which time the Turkish President Cemal Gürsel raised the idea of creating a “directorate of mezhep (creeds)” within the Diyanet , in order to better represent the different Islamic currents in the country. This suggestion was sharply criticized by the Islamic press, provoking in turn a public declaration by fifty students in Ankara concerning their “Aleviness,” and followed soon after by the creation of Alevi associations, magazines, and the Unity Party of Turkey (Türkiye Birlik Partisi, TBP) in 1966 (Massicard 2005).
In 1965, the size of the Diyanet and the scope of its activities were significantly expanded with law 633 on “The Creation and Duties of the Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı.” The law was the result of four years of discussions, six draft proposals, and the work of a government draft committee (Gözaydın 2009); needless to say, it had given rise to much debate on the role of the Diyanet within the Turkish state and society. The question of reforming the Diyanet had already been raised during the initial period of democratization following World War II, with certain groups advocating the full separation of the Diyanet from the state, while others proposed instead to keep the Diyanet within the state structure, but to grant it “broader jurisdiction and significantly higher levels of administrative and financial autonomy” (Bein 2011, 144). Law 633 followed this latter position. The most significant change was to be seen in the expansion of the Diyanet’s organizational structure, which was enlarged to include a greater number of departments, top officials, and the creation for the first time of a “High Council for Religious Affairs” (Din İşleri Yüksek Kurulu). However, the “directorate of mezhep,” which had been proposed by President Gürsel and which had been included in the draft bill in 1963, was eventually dropped as a result of fierce criticism that portrayed it as a danger to national and religious unity (Gözaydın 2009).
The Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı is not a religious organization, but an administrative organ, which according to constitutional article 154 is a part of the general state administration. […] There is no doubt, that the Diyanet’s inclusion in the constitution and the status of its employees as public servants […] are necessary consequences born of the numerous historical causes, realities, and specific needs tied to the circumstances of this country […].
State oversight of religion is founded on reasons such as preventing religious fanaticism through the training of competent religious personnel and ensuring that religion is a source of moral and spiritual discipline for society, and in this fashion achieving the ultimate aim of sublimating the Turkish nation and elevating it to the level of modern civilization […]. State support within this domain and the fact that employees of the Diyanet are considered public servants are not to be understood as state control of religious affairs, but as an appropriate solution to certain obligatory needs due to the circumstances of the country. (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti 1972, 5)
This understanding of the Diyanet is highly revealing: if the Diyanet is not a religious organization, its actions are to be understood as those of any other state department providing a public service, which exists in order to fulfill two mains goals: preventing “religious fanaticism” (represented by religious actors operating outside the boundaries of official Islam), and guiding and “civilizing” the Turkish nation. It is, however, a viewpoint that seeks to speak for the entire “Turkish nation” while remaining officially blind (or hostile) to the pluralism that exists within Turkish society.
The transition to multiparty democracy created new possibilities to influence official Islam through the politicization of the Diyanet’s leadership. Alongside the ambiguous relationships that the Diyanet had already maintained with various movements of unofficial Islam throughout the early Republican period and thereafter, party politics became an instrument for different movements of unofficial Islam, all of which tended to support centre-right parties, though not always the same one. At the same time, despite the official discourse concerning the character of state-sponsored official Islam, every example of unofficial Islam which I have given here (other than the Alevis) has also operated within the boundaries of official Islam. Said Nursi, Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan, Mehmed Zaid Kotku , and Fethullah Gülen were all employed by the Diyanet during their careers. Consequently, the reality of “official Islam” in practice is much more ambiguous than might be assumed from official discourse or from analyses that propose a black and white vision pitting “official” against “unofficial” Islam in Turkey.
3 The AKP and State Religious Governance in Turkey Today
If multiparty democracy has led to the politicization of the Diyanet in the past, what does that mean today after 16 years of uninterrupted AKP governments? The answer requires a brief recap of how Turkish society has changed since the 1980 military intervention, as well as a more in-depth nuts and bolts look at the Diyanet itself.
Following the 1980 coup, the ruling generals viewed Islam and nationalism as effective instruments to counter the spread of Communist ideas. As a result, they introduced compulsory religious education in public schools and enabled graduates of the imam hatip schools to attend university, while showing outright hostility to challenges from Alevi and Kurdish citizens. This heavy-handed promotion of Sunni Islam and Turkish nationalism at the beginning of the 1980s set the tone for the rest of the decade. When democracy was restored in 1983, it was another former disciple of Kotku, Turgut Özal, who became prime minister as head of the centre-right Motherland Party. Özal’s economic reforms led to the rise of the so-called Anatolian tigers, a socially conservative yet economically liberal class of provincial business leaders who would come to form a new “Islamic bourgeoisie” (Yankaya 2013), as well as one of the main electoral bases for the AKP in the years thereafter.
The Milli Görüş movement had returned by the end of the decade, led by Erbakan at the head of the newly founded Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP). They would go on to record a number of electoral victories at the local and thereafter national level, leading Erbakan to become prime minister in a coalition government in 1996. For the majority of the secular-military establishment in Turkey, the arrival of an Islamist party to power meant a direct threat to the Kemalist Turkish state and in 1997 Erbakan’s coalition government was brought down by military decree in the so-called post-modern coup; a year later his party was banned by the constitutional court.
In the wake of RP’s rise and closure, and following the ban of its successor party, the Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi, FP) in 2001, the conservative Islamist movement underwent a significant evolution. Frustrated with Erbakan’s intransigent attitude, many of its high-profile members such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdüllah Gül broke away and formed the AKP in 2001. The AKP’s conscious decision to abandon Erbakan’s Islamist rhetoric and promote a discourse axed on business, human rights, democracy, and social conservativatism succeeded in attracting a vast and diverse electorate. For the first time since Özal’s Motherland Party, practically all political conservatives and Sunni Islamic movements found common ground with one party thanks to its conservative Muslim values and liberal economic platform.
Since the AKP came to power, Turkey has experienced steady economic growth and increasing confidence in international politics. During its first period of government, the AKP government initially adopted a pragmatic attitude to calm tensions with its opponents, many of whom openly speculated about the party’s purported hidden Islamist agenda. However, it would become increasingly assertive concerning social and religious issues by the time of its second electoral victory (Sunier et al. 2011). Over the last decade, the country has gone through waves of high-profile trials and political battles that have seen the AKP prevail over its secularist opponents in the military, the judiciary, and the state bureaucracy. Former Prime Minister and now President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken increasingly authoritarian stances concerning press freedom and social lifestyle choices considered contrary to Islamic principles, and his party has presided over vast changes to the electoral and political system of the country.
The Gezi Park demonstrations of 2013 were in large part a response to this heavy-handed style of governing and offered hope of change; however, elections in 2015 showed that support for the AKP remained quite strong. A failed coup by elements of the military in 2016 further strengthened the AKP’s hand and has been seized upon to reshape state institutions through massive personnel changes and greater centralized oversight, as well as target in particular the Gülen movement and its supporters, who have been singled out as the instigators of the failed coup. Indeed, the Gülen movement has been declared a terrorist organization and is now known by the acronym “FETÖ/PDY,” or “Fethullahçı Terror Organization/Parallel State Structure.” In 2017, while still under an official state of emergency, the government enacted significant reforms through a constitutional referendum, moving the country towards a presidential regime with power largely centralized in the executive branch. Though the general elections of 2018 showed a degree of new-found backing for opposition parties, the AKP and Erdoğan once again emerged as the dominant figures of Turkish politics.
With this backdrop in mind, I will now turn my focus to the Diyanet. Though the Diyanet is the main actor of religious governance in the country, it also coordinates with other institutions, such as the Directorate General of Foundations; the Directorate for Religious Education of the Ministry of National Education; and the Turkish Diyanet Foundation (Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, TDV). The first is a specialized state agency that is entrusted with the management of religious foundations and contributes to the restoration of mosques both in Turkey and in a number of Balkan countries. The second, a subdepartment of the education ministry, is in charge of elaborating the curriculum and supervising the religious studies courses taught in Turkish public schools. Finally, the TDV is a parapublic institution that presents itself as a non-governmental charitable organization but was founded by the president and vice-presidents of the Diyanet in 1975 and is intimately connected to the Diyanet and the Turkish state. The TDV generally provides the financial support for many of the Diyanet’s social, educational, and religious activities both in Turkey and abroad and has been instrumental in solidifying the Diyanet’s presence in Turkish academia. In 1988, the TDV founded the Centre for Islamic Studies (İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi, İSAM) in Istanbul, which since 2010 has become the seat of the TDV’s private May 29th University.
When it comes to the place of the Diyanet in Turkey and the Turkish religious field abroad, AKP rule has had noticeable effects. Nevertheless, they are still far from resembling the fears of those who suspect the AKP of wanting to turn Turkey into an Islamic state. As Gözaydın (2009) has shown, while the Diyanet’s budget has risen under the AKP government, when considered relative to its share of the overall budget it has not increased significantly more than in the preceding decades. The largest increases have been during the last years, bringing it to a current high of 1.0–1.1% of the annual budget, while the overall category of “religious services” (din hizmetleri) has increased from 0.8% of the budget in 2006 to 1.1% in 2017 (Turkey Ministry of Finance 2018). “Religious services” constitute a separate class in the Turkish state administrative system for salary and benefit issues (just as health, legal, education, or security services do) and applies to the vast majority of the Diyanet’s religious personnel. However, this amount is still relatively below what it was when the Diyanet received its highest-ever share of the budget during the rule of the centre-right AP (1.89% in 1966) and ANAP (1.23% in 1990) (Gözaydın 2009; Sunier et al. 2011).
At 6.8 billion Turkish lira ($1.38 billion euros) in 2017, the Diyanet’s budget is nevertheless immense, and consistently ranks above that of the foreign affairs ministry or the interior ministry; indeed, its enormous budget is frequently criticized by opposition politicians and commentators who see it as an affront or even a threat to Turkey’s secular character. The explanation for the Diyanet’s remarkably large share of public funding when compared with other state institutions lies in its personnel. In general, over 90% of the Diyanet’s budget is used to pay for the salaries and social security benefits of its employees, while the rest is used for the maintenance and upkeep of the country’s mosques—in 2016, that meant 112,725 employees and 87,381 mosques (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı 2017). The fact that two former Diyanet presidents, Tayyar Altıkulaç and Sait Yazıcıoğlu, have also been AKP members of parliament (especially the latter, who served as state minister for the Diyanet from 2002–2009) has undoubtedly played a role in the government’s heightened attention to the Diyanet’s needs, such as enlargening its already enormous personnel.
After only small rises during the 2000s, recent budget increases have led to wave of new hirings beginning in 2010. As an AKP government spokesperson mentioned in 2007, “a large number of mosques in Turkey, especially in rural areas, do not have enough religious personnel. A different kind of religious services are given there, which has obvious drawbacks” (Yeni Şafak 2007). Far from promoting an Islamic state, the rationale for this raising the Diyanet’s funding continues to be the desire to maintain and reinforce state control of religious services. On the one hand, this echoes the religious policies adopted by past Turkish governments; on the other, there is an obvious qualitative difference in the AKP’s policies, which aim at increasing the presence of Islam in the public sphere.
The significant growth in the Diyanet’s personnel since 2010 has led to criticism in parliament, in particular during the yearly commission hearings concerning the Diyanet’s budget. During my own attendance of one of these hearings in 2011, the subject of the Diyanet’s budget led to heated debates between government and opposition members, as issues such as the state’s role concerning religion and the place of Alevis in society were brought up during hours of discussion. In a similar budgetary hearing in 2013, the state minister for the Diyanet responded to opposition members that the real problem had been that during many years no new personnel had been hired. This was especially the case in the 1990s, during which “people couldn’t find imams to perform funerals” (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi 2013, 53). Moreover, since 2003 the Diyanet has actively sought to increase the number of its female religious personnel in the form of vaize, or female preachers (Maritato 2016).
The Diyanet’s fortunes have clearly improved since the AKP came to power; however, the conflicts within the Turkish religious field have also taken their toll. Beginning in 2013, the year that the falling out between the AKP and the Gülen movement began in earnest, the Diyanet’s personnel began to fall significantly for the first time in years. The failed coup of 2016 marked a watershed moment that was followed by waves of internal purges, and only one month after the coup attempt, the Diyanet dismissed thousands of employees for their connections to the Gülen movement. Now that this internal shake-up has been concluded, the Diyanet has announced that it will be hiring close to 10,000 new employees for 2018.
The Diyanet’s personnel are divided into different categories that correspond to the function that they fulfill in the provision of religious services. The Diyanet is composed of its central organization in Ankara (merkez teşkilatı), its organizations in the provinces (taşra teşkilatı), its branches in foreign countries (yurt dışı teşkilatı), and those working in its training centres (eğitim merkezleri). The central organization includes all the top administrators, decision-makers, as well as auxiliary employees, coming to 1092 individuals in 2017. After decades of being located next to the largest mosque in Ankara in the central district of Kocatepe, the Diyanet’s continuous growth required a larger building. Construction of the new headquarters was completed in 2001 on Eskişehir yolu—a long highway in Ankara, along which numerous ministries and state agencies succeed one another. In recent years a large mosque has been built next to it, while other additional buildings are planned for construction. Religious personnel sent abroad are not included in the “foreign branches” category, which only takes into account the religious counsellors and attachés who coordinate the Diyanet’s activities abroad (43 individuals in 2017).
The provincial organizations of the Diyanet follow the general administrative divisions of the Turkish state, meaning that the religious affairs of Turkey’s 81 provinces (il) and 957 districts (ilçe) are each governed by a separate religious official who is given the name of “müftü.” The müftü themselves generally all begin their careers as imam hatips or preachers, and then work their way up the ranks after having completed higher education degrees at Islamic institutes or university-level theology faculties. The provincial and district müftülük (müftü departments) are responsible for organizing and overseeing the Diyanet’s activities at the local level throughout the country, which includes all individuals who serve in mosques (there are no legally recognized independent or private mosques in Turkey ). These provincial branches account for 98% of the Diyanet’s personnel and include 19 educational institutes (eğitim merkezi) located around the country, which are used for professional development and in-service training.
The vast majority of the Diyanet’s personnel belongs to one of four categories of religious officials: imam hatips (58%), Qur’an course teachers (18%); prayer caller-mosque custodians (müezzin-kayyım) (11%), and preachers (vaiz) (2%) (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı 2018). A Diyanet directive issued in 2011 established the administrative framework for these positions, including educational prerequisites, expected duties, and conditions regulating career advancement. Official religious governance in Turkey is thus entirely integrated into the administrative structures of the state, meaning that aside from the political issues under consideration here, it responds to the same mundane political policy and bureaucratic processes that affect other state agencies.
Along with the increases in personnel size, the Diyanet has also focused on greater professionalization, specifically in the form of higher educational standards for religious personnel. In 2003, Ali Bardakoğlu , a professor of Islamic law at Marmara University’s Faculty of Theology was appointed president of the Diyanet. Bardakoğlu was not the first academic to become president of the Diyanet—indeed, Kara (1999) mentions a tradition of appointing professors to this position. However, an important difference is that Bardakoğlu could rely on an institutional academic network that had not existed in the past. Since the 1980s, when the Turkish state adopted the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis as its guiding principle for social and religious policies, not only had the number of imam hatip schools around the country greatly increased, but also the number of theology faculties at Turkish universities. From a mere nine faculties at the end of the 1980s, this had increased to 23 by the end of the 1990s (Paçacı and Aktay 1999) and is currently reaching one hundred. As a result, over the last 20 years there has been a massive rise in terms of educational qualification for both the upper cadres, and the rank and file personnel.
Members of the Diyanet invariably highlight the importance of this academic training when discussing the religious authority of their personnel, especially with regard to competing Islamic currents of “unofficial Islam.” As former Diyanet President Bardakoğlu writes: “Muslims do not derive their power, authority or dignity from sacred men and institutions. Then where do these come from? From scientific knowledge that overlaps with the main sources of religion which are derived from tradition and interpreted according to the needs of the time” (2008, 16). The legitimacy of state religious authorities in Turkey is based on both their official status as state employees, and their professional and scholarly education in religious sciences.
This mix recalls the Weberian concept of “office charisma” ( Amtscharisma ), within which religious authority has been separated from “the person, and [is linked] with the institution and, particularly, with the office (Amt)” (Weber 1968, 1164). It also echoes Weber’s legal-rational category of authority, considering the role played by laws and learning in legitimizing state authority in religious affairs. Bardakoğlu continues by saying that “sound knowledge means a struggle against superstition, error, ignorance, injustice and religious abuse,” and that “in Turkey , the Presidency of Religious Affairs and the theology faculties are responsible for this near-impossible task” (2008, 17). By determining the content of “sound knowledge,” the Diyanet seeks to define Islamic orthodoxy and choose who represents legitimate religious authority in the Turkish Muslim field at home and abroad.
However, the choice of who leads the Diyanet similarly affects the institution’s vision of religious orthodoxy and authority. Bardakoğlu had originally been appointed by a fervently secular president, Necdet Sezer, and was generally less receptive to the AKP’s desire to heighten religiosity in the public sphere. Most notably, ahead of changing the law on headscarves in 2010, Erdoğan suggested that the Diyanet must offer an opinion on the matter; Bardakoğlu , who had commented in other moments that he did not consider the headscarf to be obligatory for Muslim women, contradicted the then prime minister and declined to use his religious authority to intervene in the debate. Not long thereafter, he was replaced by his vice-president Mehmet Görmez , who generally echoed the AKP’s position over the next years until his retirement in 2017, while presiding over a Diyanet that was better funded, better staffed, and more inclined to be heard in public debates.
A final area in which the AKP government has been much more attentive to the Diyanet’s concerns has been in the legal domain. A constitutional court ruling of 1980 had fundamentally challenged the Diyanet’s legal basis, but no government since had made any substantial moves to address the issue until 2010, when the Turkish parliament passed a new law that finally put the issue to rest. The new law brought about an across-the-board rise in administrative status for all of the Diyanet’s employees: for instance, the president of the Diyanet is now at the very top of the ladder for employees of the Turkish public service. In addition, it gave the Diyanet the ability to found its own television and radio stations, enabling it to compete with those that had already been created by unofficial Islamic currents (Kanal 7 for Milli Görüş, Samanyolu for the Gülen movement, etc.). Recently, this public presence has been complemented by an increasingly sophisticated social media presence, ranging from its Internet sites, to its Facebook and Twitter accounts, and to a wide variety of Diyanet “apps.”
Since 2010, the Diyanet has come to occupy a much more visible presence in Turkish society and has used its religious authority to legitimize the positions taken by the AKP in general and Erdoğan in particular (Öztürk 2016). This heightened presence has been due to former President Görmez’s penchant for commenting on public debates initiated by Erdoğan , ranging from gender relations to abortion, as well as the Diyanet’s foray in issuing non-legally binding religious opinions on daily issues through its fatwa hotline, “Alo Fetva,” created in 2012. Moreover, new educational reforms have given the Diyanet sole oversight over Qur’an courses, which it had previously shared with the education ministry. The Diyanet’s current role in Turkish society and politics was perhaps most clearly reflected after the 2016 failed coup: a few weeks thereafter, the Diyanet echoed the AKP government and essentially excommunicated the Fethullahçı from “official Islam,” calling them a terrorist organization that cannot be “characterized as a religious movement,” but rather a “fake mahdi movement” of “power and interest” and “religious exploitation” that is “tearing apart the unity of Islam’s Ummah” (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı 2016). While the Diyanet remains an institution regulated by laws and regulations, its current role in Turkish society has increasingly moved towards being a source of religious legitimation for AKP government policy.
4 Conclusion
This chapter has focused on the elements of continuity and change in the governance of the religious field that have resulted from the establishment of the modern Turkish republic, as well as the ambiguous relationships between “official” and “unofficial” Islam in Turkey that have developed in the decades thereafter.
The Diyanet represents the Turkish state’s principal institution for governing Islamic affairs and has grown over the years into an enormous organization with a presence at every administrative level across the country. Similar to its Ottoman ancestor, it represents a system of religious governance in which the state plays a decisive political role as an arbitrator of the religious field, determining which actors constitute legitimate religious authorities and which are deviant radicals. At the same time, its institutionalization as part of a modern state bureaucracy gives it the discursive possibility to depoliticize its dominant position in the religious field by emphasizing its character as a neutral state agency and presenting the governance of religious affairs as a public service. Yet the Diyanet’s technocratic view of the religious field is not a deceptive ploy: it reflects the framing of the religious field as a domain of state public policy and its integration into the administrative apparatus of the state.
The function of academia within this system of religious governance is to reinforce a model of religious authority that emphasizes training and professionalization as fundamental qualities for religious actors. On the one hand, the central role of university professors and higher education within the ranks of the Diyanet highlights the importance of modern academic training as a form of religious capital in the Turkish Muslim field. On the other hand, the continuing claim that the Diyanet’s religious officials are politically neutral serves to establish the legitimacy of state religious actors over any and all non-state religious currents. These two elements can be understood by the fact that the Diyanet promotes a legal-rational form of authority based an ostensibly objective knowledge of Islam—which it incidentally has the power to define—as well as a form of “office charisma” ( Amtscharisma ), in which religious authority is anchored through its relationship with a state institution.
The Diyanet represents an essential tool in the AKP’s goal to broaden the scope and reach of Sunni Islamic values within the Turkish public sphere. However, the AKP’s time in government has not changed the fact that Islamic religious activities are highly regulated and controlled by state authorities, or the fact that they take place within a detailed and extensive administrative legal framework. Rather, they have simply made ample use of this system to support their own ideological positions. Nevertheless, the state’s assertion that Diyanet is above all political or sectarian (mezhep) differences remains highly contested due to its exclusive Sunni and Hanafi character. The rise to power of the AKP over the last years has exacerbated tensions not only with secularists, but also minorities such as Alevis, which remain highly skeptical towards state religious policies. Finally, despite the fact that the electoral victories of the AKP have demonstrated that it is capable of appealing to a large majority of Sunni Turkish voters, the recent conflict with the Gülen movement is evidence that this apparent unity conceals numerous fault lines.
A former Turkish state minister has written that the Diyanet currently has a “global vision” that goes well beyond the borders of the Turkish state (Aydın 2008). As Chapter 4 shows, the expansion of the Turkish religious field to Western Europe in the 1970s has led to the transnationalization of the Diyanet’s activities and institutional framework. Before turning to this subject, however, the next chapter will present the specificities and historical evolution of the Moroccan state’s model of religious governance. The similarities and differences between these two states’ religious public policies at home and abroad—in particular in France and Germany—will provide the foundation for the subsequent analysis in this book.
Notes
- 1.
“Khalīfah” is an Islamic spiritual title referring to the head of the Muslim community (ummah) in Sunni Islam, and means “successor,” as in the successor of the Prophet Muhammad. The term is to be contrasted with sulṭān, a title which referred to the highest non-religious political authority. The title of “Caliph” was taken from the last Abbasid ruler by the Ottoman Sultan Selim I during his conquest of Egypt in 1517.
- 2.
Understanding the semantic shifts of the Turkish words millet and milliyet, both derived from the Arabic millah, can go a long way in understanding modern Turkey. The difficulty in recognizing different ethnic groups such as Kurds, Laz, and Turkmen in modern Turkey has come in part from their religious affiliation as Muslims, and thus members of the same “Muslim nation” (millet).
- 3.
A mufti (Turkish müftü, Arabic muftī) is an individual capable of giving a fatwa (Turkish fetva), in other words a legal opinion based on Islamic jurisprudence. The term mufti frequently refers to high-ranking Islamic scholars and officials, such as the Grand Muftis of Egypt or Saudi Arabia , though the forms of religious governance differ from country to country.
- 4.
Hatip (Arabic khaṭīb) is a title given to individuals who recite the hutbe (Arabic khuṭbah), the sermon that takes place during the Friday prayer. This individual may at times be the same as the imam who leads the five daily prayers (ṣalāt), in which case the term “imam hatip” is frequently used.
- 5.
“Political Islam” refers to Islamic-inspired movements that have opted to promote their causes in the form of political parties in democratic elections. These actors consider active social and political engagement along with the possibility of gaining control over the state through elections as the means to Islamicizing society. For the purposes of this book, the term is largely synonymous with “Islamism” and “political Islamism” (for more, see Burgat 1988; Roy 1992).