New Islamist Architecture and Urbanism

Negotiating Nation and Islam through Built Environment in Turkey

Bülent Batuman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317358008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

New Islamist Architecture and Urbanism claims that, in today's world, a research agenda concerning the relation between Islam and space has to consider the role of Islamism rather than Islam in shaping – and in return being shaped by – the built environment. The book tackles this task through an analysis of the ongoing transformation of Turkey under the rule of the pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party. In this regard, it is a topical book: a rare description of a political regime's reshaping of urban and architectural forms whilst the process is alive.

Defining Turkey's transformation in the past two decades as a process of "new Islamist" nation-(re)building, the book investigates the role of the built environment in the making of an Islamist milieu. Drawing on political economy and cultural studies, it explores the prevailing primacy of nation and nationalism for new Islamism and the spatial negotiations between nation and Islam. It discusses the role of architecture in the deployment of history in the rewriting of nationhood and that of space in the expansion of Islamist social networks and cultural practices. Looking at examples of housing compounds, mosques, public spaces, and the new presidential residence, New Islamist Architecture and Urbanism scrutinizes the spatial making of new Islamism in Turkey through comparisons with relevant cases across the globe: urban renewal projects in Beirut and Amman, nativization of Soviet modernism in Baku and Astana, the presidential palaces of Ashgabat and Putrajaya, and the neo-Ottoman mosques built in diverse locations such as Tokyo and Washington DC.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The relationship between Islam and politics has always been controversial; yet, it has possibly never been as controversial as it is at the current moment. The twenty-first century witnessed a growing interest (and anxiety for the large part of the Western world) regarding Islam and its political influence beginning with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This attentiveness was advanced with the uprisings of 2011, which shook the Middle East and North Africa. The initial optimism created by these uprisings was soon replaced by a new surge of anxiety. Civil wars triggered waves of refugees who were met with hostility in most of the Western world as witnessed by the election results showing the rise of right-wing populism in Europe as well as the US. These fears were further fueled with the rise of transnational terrorist networks and especially the emergence of ISIS claiming to be the transnational caliphate of Sunni Islam.

This book aims to analyze the relationship between Islam and the built environment as an attempt to shed light on a particular facet of the link between politics and Islam. The relationship between Islam and the built environment first emerged as a research topic in the early nineteenth century, as Orientalist scholarship examined Islamic architecture and Muslim cities. The stereotypical image of the Islamic city as an unchanging (and inferior) social environment was only challenged in the late twentieth century with the rise of postcolonial critique following the seminal work of Edward Said (1979). After that, longstanding and formulaic representations that overlooked the variations presented by the cities in the Islamic world were overturned in the critical works of scholars such as Janet Abu-Lughod (1987), Timothy Mitchell (1988), and Nezar AlSayyad (1991). Through these works, the prevailing view based on the dichotomy between the traditional and the modern was mostly abandoned. Today, the study of the relation between Islam and the built environment presents us with a different research question in a world where the visibility – and the political influence – of Islam has considerably increased. Now, it is necessary to consider the role of Islamism rather than Islam in shaping – and in return being shaped by – the built environment.

The gradual rise of Islamism as a political force can be traced back to the 1960s. The end of that decade witnessed the decline of secular nationalist governments in the postcolonial world and the rise of what would later be called the “Islamic revival.” The disappointment of the Arab-Israeli War in 1967, disillusionment with nationalist governments, and the suppression of left-wing movements within the Cold War context led to the rise of Islam both as an oppositional movement and an instrument for right-wing governments (Mandaville 2014: 64–120). Later, after the Cold War, Islam would emerge as a political force across the Muslim world in the face of the increasing influence of neoliberalism. With the dismantling of welfare mechanisms, Islamic networks of solidarity began to be more influential than ever and generated a gradual expansion of religion at the level of everyday life (Bayat 2007). Besides this bottom-up impetus, major cities of the Muslim world have emerged under conditions of globalization as symbols as well as developmental apparatuses for their countries. They are now identified, to varying degrees, with their plural ethnicities, modernities, and Islams. Thus, the cities of the Islamic world are increasingly becoming fragmented, with religiosity influencing spaces in diverse ways. AlSayyad (2011) has defined the product of such fragmentation as the “fundamentalist city,” one that comprises “fragmented landscapes made up of spaces of exception.” Within this context, he has proposed focusing on the relationship between “Islamic religiosity, the practice of Islamic piety, and urban social and spatial processes” (AlSayyad 2015: 23).

In tune with AlSayyad’s proposal, the book focuses on a particular case, that of Turkey; a secular republic which has been ruled by a democratically elected, pro-Islamic government for more than fourteen years. Following its first electoral success in 2002, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) attracted much attention and was pointed at by many as an illustration of the compatibility of Islam and liberal values such as freedom, democracy, and individual choice. Here, I shall point out that this book is not about how to define the Turkish case in political science terms. It is rather about the role of the built environment and the urban realm as major mediums in the making of an Islamist rule that sustained successive electoral victories. The main argument of the book is that the AKP has built its hegemony particularly through its success in urban politics and the new kind of Islamic urbanism it generated. The urban realm opened up new channels between the state and the urban society, which the Turkish Islamists successfully used in maintaining their political influence. It is even possible to say that the AKP itself was the product of this new urbanism initiated by the Islamists’ performance in local administrations throughout the 1990s.

These new channels refute the simple explanations of the AKP’s success as either an illustration of a paradigmatic coexistence of “secular state and Islamic society” or the idea that this is merely a neoliberal conservative party instrumentalizing Islam. I argue that the reign of the AKP in Turkey was a process of hegemony-building in the face of constant threat from the secularist establishment, which has to be understood as a nation-(re)building project. This project, on the one hand, has defined itself as the antithesis of the secular nation-building of the early republican period (roughly corresponding to the period between the two World Wars) and sought to redefine the nation in Islamic terms. On the other hand, Islamic nation-building under the AKP appropriated much of the tropes defined by its adversary.¹

The AKP’s definition of “nation” departs equally from the rejection of nation(alism) by traditional Islamists in favor of a global ummah and its secular conception by the Turkish nation-state. It presents Turkishness and Islam as qualities of the same entity, which is significantly different than the republican definition referring to a secular and ethnically homogeneous body. While the Kemalist state invented the term “ulus” in the 1930s to define the secular nation, the ideologues of the AKP use “millet,” a term of Arabic origin which was used to denote religious communities in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman millet system allowed for limited autonomy for the non-Muslim communities to conduct their internal affairs. The term assumed the meaning of “nation” in the nineteenth century; emergent nationalisms of ethnic groups within the Empire drew essence from their religious-communal experience in the millet system (Karpat 2002: 611). It has been used in the twentieth century, especially by conservative intellectuals, as a reaction to linguistic Turkification; yet, the reference to millet by the AKP is significantly different. The millet is now envisaged through self-Othering; a majority which had been oppressed by the elite minority throughout republican history. Defining this approach as “Muslim nationalism,” White (2014: 188) points out the global implications of this postimperial vision based on Ottoman past: “For Muslim nationalists, the emblematic founding moment for the Turkish nation is a moment of conquest [of Constantinople], and their image of the future is of regional Turkish-led economic and political unions, not an Islamic umma in which Turkey will take equal place beside other Muslim nations.”

The AKP has expanded its hegemonic control through a constant struggle with the secular establishment, represented by the military and the state bureaucracy. It has strengthened its position through the zealous fulfillment of neoliberal market demands and an urban welfare system utilizing Islamic social networks and municipalities. In this way, the AKP’s new Islamism has emerged as an original synthesis, blending economic neoliberalism and political Islam. In its battle with the status quo, the AKP and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have utilized Islam as a populist reference, reimagining the (Islamic) nation as struggling for emancipation from an oppressive power (the state elite) that had imposed secularism as a form of colonial subjugation.

The key to the AKP’s success owed very much to the party’s ideological flexibility – no doubt a contingent feature resulting from the constant threat of the military in the early years – which successfully facilitated negotiations and hybridizations. The party succeeded in simultaneously representing the Islamist cause and getting along with the state; consolidating the conservative right-wing electoral base and expanding Kurdish freedoms (at least until 2015). What allowed the AKP to do these seemingly irreconcilable things was its success in facilitating negotiations resulting in hybrid forms around two main themes. The first of these was the promotion of a new national identity negotiating nation and Islam; and the other was a negotiation between Islam as dissent and its deployment for social control by the state. The urban realm – with its social milieu and the political economy of its physical production – provided venues for these negotiations and their hybrid forms.

Within this framework, the book sets to explore the Turkish Islamists’ quest in nation-building through the spatial strategies it has deployed and the urban forms it has produced. An important aspect of this inquiry is to look at this nation-building process not as a pre-conceived scheme executed smoothly, but rather one shaped through struggles among multiple agents. This process was one of urbanization from the beginning; it witnessed not only a new phase in the urban development of Turkish cities but also the gradual urbanization of political action for both Islamists and their opponents. In this regard, new Islamist nation-building in Turkey has been a contingent process with diverse dynamics. The book discusses these dynamics in the urban realm with particular attention to class and gender.

The relationship between built environment and politics is a complex one which cannot be reduced to the instrumentalization of the former for the operations of the latter. In brief terms, the book rests on two basic premises. The first of these is to conceive of the built environment as constitutive of the social. Departing from this point, it sets to uncover the spatial making of politics. The second one is the specificity of the urban. Demands, challenges, and struggles embedded within the city and defined by spatial forms and scales require careful analysis of interplays between the spatial and the social. Based on these two propositions, the book investigates different components of the politics of built environment. Of the four chapters comprising the main body, two deal with architecture, which is a particularly powerful milieu for representing – real or manufactured – history. The other two focus on the urban: its transformations and those it has triggered through the recent political processes that took place in Turkey.

The general approach developed here can be deployed for the study of other cases where Islam – and religion for that matter – is not a dominant factor. Nevertheless, the relevance of the book’s general framework for the politics of built environment at large should not lead us to miss the specificities of Islam and Islamism as political dynamics. Even though architectural and urban forms of Islamist politics cannot be essentialized as distinct from other ideological formations, they are nonetheless defined by particularities resulting from the cultural power of Islam in the societies it predominates. Moreover, it would be a methodological error to essentialize Islam and Islamism as well; they have to be studied with regard to the specificities of the society under scrutiny. Hence, the place of Islam requires contextual definition.

New Islamism(s): some notes on terminology

Islamism as political power has to be understood not as the manifestation of a religious power unchanged in time but as a contemporary ideology compatible with historical circumstances. Throughout the book, I use the term “Islamism” interchangeably with “political Islam” to refer to a political ideology. In this respect, it is different from Islam as a religion and its “Islamic” cultural manifestations. Some scholars have argued that the rise of Islamic groups to power necessarily ends up in their moderation and that, in the case of Turkey, the Islamic movement ceased to be Islamist as the result of a compromise with the secularist state (Yavuz 2009: 5–13). Rather than essentializing the relation between Islamic movements and the state in the form of an inevitable moderation, I propose to consider the particular forms of interaction between Islamist politics and the historical dynamics that give way to the Islamists’ rise to power. Viewed in this way, the establishment of a government by Islamist cadres does not necessarily end up in either the existence of an (hidden or overt) agenda to transform the state structure into a theocratic one or the total abandonment of Islamist political views. The issue is rather the mutual influence between state and society mediated through social and cultural forms defined with reference to Islam.

There is an ongoing debate among scholars of political science on how to define the Islamist politics of the recent decades. The debate began with the decline of groups seeking an Islamist revolution to establish a theocratic state. This process was famously defined as “the failure of political Islam” by Olivier Roy (1994). Accordingly, the Islamist cause was being incorporated into pluralistic political systems. This observation soon gave way to a new interpretation, emphasizing not failure but success of a new form of Islamism. Here, a new type of Islamist groups pursuing new political strategies came to the fore. Among various terms used for these groups abandoning revolutionary strategies and choosing to participate in existing political systems were “new Islamists” (Baker 2003), “moderate Islamists” (Hamzawy 2005), “Muslim democrats” (á la European Christian democrats) (Nasr 2005), and recently “neo-Islamists” (Wright 2012). The new condition defined by the decline of traditional (militant) Islamism was labeled “post-Islamism” within the political science literature (Schulze 2000; Kepel 2000; Roy 2004).

It was Asef Bayat (1996) who for the first time used the term “post-Islamism” to define this trend that abandoned the idea to seize and transform the state and was rather content with Islamization of everyday life. He later expanded the definition of the term to refer to a project that was “neither anti-Islamic nor secular.” It rather represented “an endeavor to fuse religiosity and rights, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty” (Bayat 2007: 11). According to him, Turkey’s AKP was a prime example of post-Islamism as a project (2007: 189). The significance of Bayat’s work, in contrast to the rather totalizing approach of political science scholars, was his sociological empiricism scrutinizing the grassroots performances of (post-)Islamism in Egypt and post-revolutionary Iran in their relation to everyday life (Bayat 1997, 2007).

The Arab revolts of 2011 significantly affected the debates on post-Islamism: the term itself gained wide currency.² For Bayat (2011), for instance, the uprisings were “post-Islamist revolutions.” For those looking at the uprisings optimistically and using the term “post-Islamism” with a progressive connotation, the events supported the post-Islamism thesis and its optimism regarding the incorporation of I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Politics of mosque building: negotiating Islam and nation
• 3 Housing subjects of new Islamism
• 4 From the urban revolution of new Islamism to the revolution of the urban: public space and architectures of resistance
• 5 Building (the) national: the public architecture of millet
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Index