And Then We Work for God

Rural Sunni Islam in Western Turkey

Kimberly Hart

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804786683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Turkey's contemporary struggles with Islam are often interpreted as a conflict between religion and secularism played out most obviously in the split between rural and urban populations. The reality, of course, is more complicated than the assumptions. Exploring religious expression in two villages, this book considers rural spiritual practices and describes a living, evolving Sunni Islam, influenced and transformed by local and national sources of religious orthodoxy.

Drawing on a decade of research, Kimberly Hart shows how religion is not an abstract set of principles, but a complex set of practices. Sunni Islam structures individual lives through rituals—birth, circumcision, marriage, military service, death—and the expression of these traditions varies between villages. Hart delves into the question of why some choose to keep alive the past, while others want to face a future unburdened by local cultural practices. Her answer speaks to global transformations in Islam, to the push and pull between those who maintain a link to the past, even when these practices challenge orthodoxy, and those who want a purified global religion.

1

SECULAR TIME AND THE INDIVIDUAL

THE REPUBLIC

An overview of the history of the Republic during the twentieth century highlights the relationship between the state and Sunni Islam. Through an examination of this relationship, I will show how Sunni Islam was contained and controlled by the state in what is referred to as laicism (government control of religion). As I trace three of the most important moments in this history, the Atatürk revolution, the 1950 election, and the post-1980 coup, I discuss how unstable and intertwined with political ideologies this relationship between the nature and meaning of secularity and Sunni Islam has been. By considering this history, I can then compare it to how villagers understand time, the nation, and Islam.

The first era under consideration is the transition between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. The Ottoman Empire fought on the side of Germany during World War I. After its defeat, its vast territories were occupied by victorious European powers, the Allies, many of whom had an interest in the religious minorities, especially in Christians, who had an emergent sense of national identity as Greek, Georgian, and Armenian. The War of Independence, led by Mustafa Kemal (who later took the last name Atatürk), was fought against this occupation by Europeans. There was widespread dread over the anticipated dismemberment of the remaining Anatolian heart of the former Empire.¹ The ensuing triumph of the national army was remarkable, considering their state of exhaustion following decades of war and epidemics.

Many Turks, like the villagers, consider this victory a miracle. They refer to the fallen as martyrs, şehitler. As is evident in descriptions of journeys that villagers make to Çanakkale, where Mustafa Kemal was a general in the battle at Gallipoli against the Allies in World War I, this location is treated as a place of pilgrimage. For instance, when asking a woman to list the important tombs one can visit in Turkey, she mentioned the cemeteries at Çanakkale alongside the Mevlana’s tomb in Konya. To further justify the sacred nature of the site, another woman explained to me that they do not visit the cemeteries of gavurs (infidels), only those of Turks. This battle, then, is understood as one between Muslim Turks and Western Christians.

Many other Muslim citizens also conceptualize this late Ottoman era in religious terms, as I realized while visiting a packed temporary museum in a tent by the New Mosque in Istanbul in 2012. People crowding over glass cases treated the artifacts of the battle excavated in Çanakkale as religious relics, viewing fragments of uniform, shoes, weaponry, and soldiers’ personal effects with hushed reverence. Interestingly, by treating this battle and its relics as sacred, they legitimize Atatürk’s leadership as an Ottoman military leader. This imbues his later leadership in the War of Independence with spiritual import, as if the nation were predestined. They thereby create a foundation of continuity between the sacred nature of the Ottoman and republican states and legitimize Atatürk’s role as a gazi, a holy warrior, who was victorious against infidels. Thus, pious people understand the state from its inception, as founded by a gazi (as the Empire was as well), in sacralizing terms. This is regardless of the fact that the Republic was founded as a secular state, one which was based on laws constructed by people (imported from the Swiss legal code), not God.² This means that for some there is either a refusal to recognize the full import of secularization, which includes the privatization of religion,³ or that this never happened and instead of experiencing a rupture with the Republic, they choose to see continuity with the Ottoman past.

The Republic was founded in 1923 and Mustafa Kemal became its prime minister. He commanded immense power and was able to introduce a series of secularizing, modernizing, and westernizing programs, aimed to utterly transform society or actually re-create it, since the remnants of the former Ottoman life were in disarray. In addition to these reforms changing law, language, the way people dressed, and education, the people of Anatolia were managed through a population exchange with Greece; millions of ethnic Turks who had been living in Greece migrated to Turkey, and concomitantly millions of Ottoman Greeks migrated from Anatolia. Meanwhile, Ottoman Muslims migrated from the Balkan territories. The government settled many in villages in western Anatolia, where they continue to retain a sense of their former Balkan identities. Many millions emigrated—Armenians, Jews, and Georgians—as it became clear that the population would be reconstructed by the state as being composed of ethnically homogenous Turks. People would either have to conform to this idea, concealing their former identities, or leave. Thus, the composition of the population changed substantially from being, in contemporary language, multiethnic and multisectarian, to being composed primarily of Turkish Sunni Muslims, many of whom were immigrants.

Substantial numbers of Alevis and Kurds, indigenous to Anatolia, remained. The Alevis are a Shi‘i-related Islamic group that venerates Ali and that does not use mosques for worship, fast, or pray five times a day. They include music and dance in their key ritual of the Cem, and they do not seclude women or forbid drinking alcohol. Kurds are ethnically different from Turks, being Indo-European. They are Muslim, either Alevi or Sunni, but have been systematically discriminated against as ethnically and linguistically different.⁴

Through the founding ethno-national idea, that of being a Turk, this era ushered in a vigorous sense of national identity, creating the foundation of a new world, and fighting off divisive forces from within and without. The indivisibility of the state and the homogenous nature of its people are core concepts in Turkish nationalism. Groups which threaten the indivisibility of the state, such as religious and ethnic others, are regarded as threatening to national unity. Since the 1990s, this era has been reexamined, reinterpreted, and reprocessed by scholars and through books on minorities; in Kurdish, Sephardic, and other folk music; in films and television shows exploring the Ottoman Empire; and in museum exhibits. A new understanding of the Ottoman Empire and a notion of a reconstituted multiethnic society are being actualized, but it has been long and hard in coming.

For our purposes, of special interest is the caliphate, once the worldwide seat of Islamic authority. Atatürk disbanded this office in 1924 and the Diyanet was established, taking over some of this previous office’s roles. But because religious schools, communities, and shariat courts, which controlled domestic issues of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, were also disbanded, the role of the Diyanet was significantly modified from that of the previous Ottoman administration. Islamic practice, without courts or communities, and allowing only state-controlled training, was truncated and contained by the secular government. The aim was to restructure what it meant to be Muslim, making religion an individual private practice but one regulated by the state. Thus, a Muslim was meant to become an individual believer who practiced under the leadership of state officials who were bound by civil law. This was a radical departure from the worldview of the Empire, in which the individual Muslim was bound by laws from God interpreted and administered by Islamic legal scholars, the ulema, whose power was legitimized by their spiritual knowledge.

In the Republic, the authority to rule was secularized and the spiritual tasks of the Diyanet functioned within the secular framework of state control. Sunni Islam was thereby managed by a government office. State employees hired to lead prayer, imams, would not have the power to make legal decisions, to legally marry people, or to determine issues regarding inheritance, for instance. This institutional framework for Turkish Sunni Islam, one which produces secular law in secular time, and which encompasses what predates the state, Islam itself, is called laicism, drawing upon but not reproducing the French model. As Elizabeth Hurd argues, “Laicism insists upon a singular and universal set of relations between sacred and profane dimensions of existence that holds regardless of cultural or historical circumstances. This is achieved in part through exclusionary practices that represent Islam as antimodern, irrational, and tyrannical.”⁵

Confusingly, laicism is often translated as “secularism,” without qualification. In fact, Turkey’s legacy of state control of Sunni Islam is different from the American form of secularism, in which the government theoretically cannot establish religion, as outlined in the First Amendment, and from French laicism, in which the government claims to protect citizens from the intrusion of religion in public life in order to protect the unity of the nation.⁶ In Turkey, the government protects itself from the intrusion of Islam in its institutions, by containing and pacifying religion within one of its ministries. In so doing, the government shields itself from unruly Muslims and attempts to pacify them by making illegal forms of Islam which exist outside state controls. Thus, in Turkey, the secular state creates Sunni orthodoxy and puts a stamp of legality on it. As Jeremy Walton demonstrates, the contradictory and uneasy relationship the secular state has to the production of religious orthodoxy is not only a contradiction but a source of dispute and debate among Muslims.⁷ These debates are a subject of this book.

As Esra Özyürek argues, political debates about the meaning and purpose of a Kemalist worldview and an Islamic one are mediated through the deployment of historical eras: Ottoman, republican, Neo-Ottoman, and their conceptual foundations: Islamic, secular rationalist, and spiritual.⁸ Cultural memory, therefore, is a battleground in which political positions about the meaning of the past are used in the present and projected into an uncertain future.

If Sunni Muslims have trouble swallowing the total control of Islam by the state, what do non-Sunni Muslims and non-Muslims do? In Turkey, non-Sunni Muslims are by and large the Alevi, a Shi‘i-related, Anatolian-specific community, often dismissed by Sunni Muslims as not “really” Muslims at all. Others, minority religious communities, Jews and Christians, have a tenuous position within the state system and for this reason they are reluctant to draw too much attention to themselves.⁹

In short, the laicist state creates an official Sunni orthodoxy by funding and running mosques, disseminating sermons, and training imams. These institutional controls make Islam “into a religion,”¹⁰ marginalizing and privatizing it, codifying and controlling it. Because Sunni Islam is made by the state, it follows that Islam is de facto secularized—contained within state institutions. Through the institutionalization of religious practice, the orthodox subject is created through the discipline of the body (prayer and other actions), putting that body into a temporal and spatial frame where Mecca is the center but where the Turkish state has a shadowy presence. The Diyanet extends its jurisdiction over the meaning, role, and purpose of Turkish Sunni Islam by working among Turkish immigrants abroad. The Diyanet Işleri Türk Islam Birliği (DITIB; the Türkisch-Islamische Union der Anstalt für Religion e.V., or the Turkish Islamic Union for the Institution of Religion), for instance, in Germany, is a branch of the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs, which appoints imams from Turkey to work in mosques for four years serving Turkish migrant communities. In this way, being a Sunni Muslim is an expression of a national identity, connected to expressions of citizenship and related to the negotiation of immigrant identities abroad.

Villagers in the Yuntdağ, argue that the Diyanet is the descendant of the Ottoman office of the caliphate, thereby suggesting a connection between the republican control of Sunni Islam and the Ottoman one. Rather than seeing the laicist containment of Islam within a secular state, many praise Atatürk for replicating Ottoman structures in the Republic. They consider the authoritarian control of religion important to the maintenance of order. In a contradictory fashion, though villagers see continuity between the Ottoman administrative structures of Sunni Islam and republican ones, they are critically wary of the early republican reforms, which included disbanding the caliphate, changing the script from Arabic to Latin, transforming the calendar, replacing Ottoman and Islamic legal codes with ones imported from Europe, revolutionizing headgear for men, discouraging the wearing of headscarves for women, putting the call to prayer in Turkish (during the early decades), forbidding the teaching of the Qur’an to children during the difficult early years of the Republic, eliminating unofficial imams, closing saints’ tombs and brotherhoods, eliminating Islamic schools (medrese), and replacing these with secular education and so on.¹¹

They note backpedaling on some policies before the first democratic election in 1950, twelve years after Atatürk’s death, including the reopening of saints’ tombs, the introduction of religion classes in public schools, training for imams, the return to the call to prayer in Arabic, and support for making the pilgrimage. Villagers’ assessment of this early history is contradictory, based as it is on a primary understanding of continuity rather than disjuncture between the two governments. Many are quick to assert the legitimacy of the state, but also make critical note of past actions, which controlled the role of Islam in daily life. On the other hand, though villagers critique some early reforms, they praise Atatürk for controlling unruly Islam. That is, Islam, from their view, should be purified by state control but not to the extent that Islam itself is changed. This means that there is an essence of Islam, orthodoxy, which many expect the state should protect, such as certifying that Qur’ans are “real” via a Diyanet stamp in each book. They therefore do not always interpret laicism as the state production of orthodoxy, as Walton argued, but as the governmental protection of orthodoxy.

The fact that it is illegal to criticize Atatürk makes it difficult for people to say that Atatürk’s secularizing policies were detrimental to Islam itself. Instead, many look to Inönü, Atatürk’s successor, as the one who caused problems. Atatürk died in 1938. The law protecting speech about Atatürk was passed in 1951, after the 1950 first multiparty election, a time when Atatürk’s legacy was being reevaluated, especially in the provinces.¹² Rather than open a space for discussion and reflection, the state nervously closed the lid on this discourse. Villagers demonstrate their fear of voicing illegal or “wrong” (yanlış) opinions. Many of the contradictory statements people make about their view of secularizing reforms and the role of the state in controlling Sunni Islam come from a fear that they will be interpreted as having said something against the state or against Atatürk’s legacy.

Why was Sunni Islam regarded as such a threat that it needed to be controlled by a state institution? Islam in the Empire, in both its official capacity within the institutions and in its decentralized, mystical form among brotherhoods (tarikats), had posed a threat in the newly laicized, nation-state of the Republic. In the Ottoman era, Islamic brotherhoods and other Islamic orders were not only powerful, but they had important roles in provincial cities and towns less tied to the imperial center, Istanbul. They decentralized religious authority. Furthermore, brotherhoods were involved in revolts and uprisings before and after the establishment of the Republic, creating alternative networks of political power.¹³ The main fear was of alternative political organizations, which would undermine the state, as well as pluralistic sources of religious authority which would decentralize Islam.

Though Atatürk successfully changed social, governmental, legal, and linguistic life in the Anatolian remnant of the former Empire, the political power of Muslim leaders and Islamic brotherhoods never completely vanished. Most went underground.¹⁴ Despite the closure of all religious orders, tarikats, new groups, the exact definition of which is now contested, variously called tarikats (brotherhoods) or neo-tarikats, Islamically oriented civil-society associations (dernek), or Islamic communities (cemaat), developed within the Republic, often building on former Ottoman communities. Some, like the Nurcus, reformulated themselves within the context of the Republic, where the state project of modernity with its emphasis on positivistic science, rationality, and progressive modernity inspired them to argue that Islam was a source of modern science. An offshoot of the Nurcus, the Gülen movement, led by Fethullah Gülen, who is in semi-exile in the United States, is a global religious community that uses schools, dormitories, media outlets, and businesses as platforms for the dissemination of its ideological interpretation of Turkish Sunni Islam. Others, like the Süleymancı community, emerged during the early years of the Republic in reaction to secularization policies. The Süleymancı community is important in the villages I study, more so than Gülen, although Gülen is admir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Competing Claims to Religious Authority
• 1. Secular Time and the Individual
• 2. Islamic Time and the Village
• 3. Good Deeds and the Moral Economy
• 4. Constructing Islam: Mosques, Men, and the State
• 5. Women’s Traditions and Innovations
• Photographs
• 6. Ritual Purification and the Pernicious Danger of Culture
• 7. Secular and Spiritual Routes to Knowledge
• 8. An Entrepreneurial “Neo-Tarikat” and Islamic Education
• 9. Dealing with the Secular World: A Trip to the Beach
• Reference Matter
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index