Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey: Chapter 2

1997

2. Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities

In 1983, the military junta in Turkey was making preparations to hand the government over to a civilian administration. Military leaders had already agreed to hold elections in that year, but they did not want the democratic process to unfold to its full potential without supervision on their part. They were particularly sensitive to the possibility that the parties and politicians of the pre-coup era might be returned to power to undo what the military had tried to accomplish during the preceding three years.

In order to prevent this outcome, they imposed restrictions and outright bans on the activities of a large number of people and organizations, and they labeled the prominent politicians of previous decades and their parties the embittered remnants of an old order. Military officials repeatedly warned the nation that electing these old leaders would bring the country back to the edge of the precipice from which it had been delivered by the 1980 coup. Instead of returning to these “tried and failed” parties and ideas, or, in state president Evren’s colorful language, rather than “shopping at flea markets,” people in Turkey were encouraged to “walk along the new path enlightened by the floodlights of the new leaders of the new parties.” ₁

By describing the 1983 elections as a stark choice between the old and the new, the military leaders were reiterating a theme that had been central to political discourse in Turkey during most of the twentieth century. According to this theme, Turkey’s social, economic, and political problems were caused by the continuing influence of pre-republican political, economic, and social institutions and attitudes. In order to be a serious competitor in the modern world, the argument went, Turks had to free themselves from this burden and make a clean start by cutting their ties to their recent (i.e., Ottoman) history. The core policy makers and ideologues who gathered around Atatürk after the purges of 1925 repeatedly stated such views as their convictions. According to them, anything that was newly attained, acquired, adopted, or built was naturally desirable and superior to everything that was inherited from the past and hence “old.” ₂

During the early decades of the twentieth century, the tired and defeated people of Anatolia were in no position to debate or resist Atatürk’s radical message. Some were even enthusiastic in supporting the national leader in his determination to remake the Turkish state. By the 1980s, the situation had changed completely. The Turkish people, few of whom now remembered the early years of the republic, had grown extremely suspicious of, and downright cynical about, the latest incarnations of the promises of “enlightened and prosperous tomorrows.” Instead of making further sacrifices for a future that kept eluding them, they were starting to inquire about the histories, institutions, beliefs, identities, and cultures from which they had been forcefully separated. This reorientation of the social compass spread to all segments of the society, not only affecting people’s political outlook but also influencing the way they dressed, which music they created and listened to, how they built their houses and office buildings, and how they thought about the history of modern Turkey.

This shift of focus had immediate and profound consequences for Turkish politics. For one thing, as part of the general assessment of Turkey’s status in the modern world, the Kemalist program of modernization—including its economic policies, secularist tenets, and ethnonationalist foundations—came under close scrutiny and received increasingly vocal criticism. The Islamist Refah Party emerged as the standard-bearer of the anti-Kemalist opposition and within ten years transformed its shaky organization into the largest political party in Turkey.

The reshuffled political scene in Turkey got a further jolt when the Kurds, who constitute the largest non-Turkish ethnic group in the country, reclaimed and reasserted their distinct cultural and ethnic identity and used it as a basis for organizing an armed struggle against the Turkish army. In the process, not only did they test the very viability of the state but they also exposed some of the foundational weaknesses of Turkish nationalism as it had been conceived by the republican elite.

Putting together the nostalgic turn in tastes, the declining hold of secularism on everyday life and politics, and the growing precariousness of national unity, it is hard to avoid the impression that Turkish modernization reached some kind of turning point in the early eighties. The reformers, in particular Mustafa Kemal, had envisioned for Turkey an organized, well-articulated, linear process of modernization through which the whole nation was going to move simultaneously and with uniform experience. At the end of this process, there would emerge a militantly secular, ethnically homogeneous republic well on its way to catching up with the civilized nations of the West. Instead, the Turkish experience appeared to be culminating in economic backwardness and social flux, with Muslim and secularist, Turk and Kurd, reason and faith, rural and urban—in short, the old and the new—existing side by side and contending with, but more typically strengthening, each other.

Writers who approach the Turkish scene from the far corners of the new political arena have relatively simple explanations for this situation. According to Kemalists, the nation was derailed from its idealist path by reactionary forces bent on reasserting the primacy of religion in Turkish society. They claim that after 1950, under democratically elected governments, a variety of retrograde elements that included religious reactionaries, opportunist politicians, and ethnically suspect groups found ample opportunity to trick people and subvert the progressive goals of the Kemalist movement. ₃

For Muslim intellectuals, on the other hand, the problem arose not because Turkey had broken with Kemalism but because the country stayed with it as long as it did. Islamists find the goals of Kemalist modernization intrinsically antithetical to the essential qualities of Muslim culture, of which they see the people of Turkey as an integral part. They argue that under Atatürk, Muslims in Turkey were cut off from their religious tradition by force. According to them, once the restrictive cloak of Kemalist ideology is removed, Turks will rejoin the Islamic world and be perfectly capable of creating a society that is not only modern (which they take in the technological sense of the word) but also more equitable and “just” than the one created by the Kemalist elite after the Western image. ₄

When it comes to Kurdish separatism, the respective positions of the Kemalists and their critics are equally if not even more polarized. Kemalists deny the existence of a “Kurdish problem” and speak mostly in euphemisms such as “terrorism” and “underdevelopment.” They insist that the draconian methods of suppression first used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries against the Kurds and other non-Turkish ethnic groups are still the most reliable way of dealing with Kurdish insurgency. They insist on attributing the fierceness of the uprising not to any genuine and legitimate cause but to the provocation and needling of a coterie of external forces.

At the same time, some groups within the Kurdish insurgency find themselves in an equally untenable position because they rely on primordial identities as their main basis for political organization and movement. This approach either ignores the complexities created by centuries of cohabitation among Kurdish and non-Kurdish groups across Turkey or, more seriously, believes that these ties can be undone by force. The latter attitude is shared by many ethnically based social movements in other parts of the world as well. ₅

The Kemalist, Islamist, and Kurdish nationalist ideologies share a strong intolerance for one another. Just as Kemalists are deeply antagonistic toward both Islamists and Kurdish nationalists, those two are keen on preventing each other from infringing on their respective terrains as they separately confront their common enemy, the Turkish state. What pushes these three points of view apart is that, in the eyes of their adherents, each position holds the key to absolute and complete truth. It is the sine qua non of such fundamentalisms that their partisans reject all ambiguity, whether in their own minds or in the minds of their rivals. In Ernest Gellner’s words, they repudiate the “tolerant modernist claim that the faith in question means something much milder, far less exclusive, altogether less demanding and much more accommodating; above all something quite compatible with all other faiths.” ₆

The nature and content of these debates and conflicts show that as a monolithic force that tried to mold Turkish society and mentality, Kemalism is losing its grip. ₇ But once released from one doctrine, the people of Turkey should not inevitably be pushed toward new absolutes, either of the Islamist variety or of the ethnonationalist sort. Some of the ideas put forth by Islamists and Kurdish nationalists are no better than the Kemalist absolutisms in terms of their plausibility or capacity to provide a frame of reference for a fast-modernizing society like Turkey.

Rather than advancing another version of the “absolute truth,” in this essay I take the skepticism of recent years as an opportunity to question the suprahistorical pretensions of all absolutist ideologies. I seek to recapture some of the early indeterminate richness of Ottoman and Turkish modernization by taking it out of the iron-clad pathways into which it was forced in subsequent years. In doing so, I am trying to resituate Ottoman-Turkish modernization into its proper historical context and reestablish some of the dynamism it had by virtue of its very uncertainty. It might be worthwhile to remember that what inspired and empowered many of the thinkers, writers, and activists of the modern era was not the certainties that were later invented but the ambivalence and excitement of modernization as it unfolded as a world-historical process.

Ottoman-Turkish Modernization: Experience and Interpretation

In the usage adopted here, “modernization” refers to Marshall Berman’s “generalized images which summarize the various transformations of social life” attendant upon the rise of a market society and the nation-state. ₈ Although this usage is in line with the classical applications of the term, it differs significantly from more recent canonical formulations that identify modernity in terms of a finite and distinct set of pattern variables.

In my use of the term in this essay, modernization entails, above all, the freeing of individuals and communities from some of their traditional obligations, enabling them to take part in the expanding market society. As Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation, rather than resulting from the natural proclivities of human beings, the growth of the market society in Europe required a series of deliberate interventions. ₉ Polanyi explained this process in terms of a double movement that involved, on the one hand, the development of a series of institutions and practices without which this new form of societal organization could never have taken root. On the other hand, there was the countermovement of protection, whereby these institutions and others that developed in a parallel fashion safeguarded the interests and dignity of individuals and communities who participated, willingly or otherwise, in the new market society. Depending on the time and the place, this protective movement entailed the redefinition of families and households, the recasting of local, national, and supranational identities and alliances, and the creation of national and international networks and formal institutions. Looking back from the vantage point of the last quarter of the twentieth century, we see that of all these institutions, relationships, and organizations, the nation-state has become the most typical domain and, in some ways, the apex of this protective movement in the modern era.

In addition to the continuing expansion of markets and the spread of protective ideologies and movements, there is a third cluster of ideas and their related practices and institutions that regulate relations between people and their rulers in the modern world. These ideas revolve around the influential discourse about human and civil rights and popular sovereignty that capped the western European transformations and created an attractive frame of reference for many social movements and systems of thought around the world. Although the manner in which market relations develop in a given society and the precise form taken by protective relations and discourses on freedom and participation may vary from one context to the other, the essences of these three processes are general enough for us to consider them to be applicable in all modernizing contexts.

As it went through the changes and transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire (and subsequently Turkey) was influenced by all three of the constituent forces of modernity. Ottoman economy and markets came to be linked to and dominated by European markets, primarily through networks that branched inland from port cities. The countermovement of protection took shape as institutional reform and local rebellion, such as the rebellions of the nationalist groups in the Balkans. And the discourse of freedom and rights was germane to the entire spectrum of political opposition in the Ottoman Empire, beginning with its very early stages in the nineteenth century. Simultaneous development of these forces dotted the history of Ottoman-Turkish modernization with many uncertainties, occasional reversals, and periodic shifts in its speed and priorities. The important point is to regard these fluxes not as anomalies but as integral parts of the process of modernization itself.

When the time came to write down and interpret the Ottoman and Turkish experience, however, the available tools and paradigms of the social sciences failed to capture this history in its full complexity. By the time Western social scientists focused on Turkey, they had abandoned the ambiguities that had shaped some of their early attitudes toward modernization and industrialization in favor of a more streamlined and unilinear interpretation. ₁₀ Especially when it came to generalizing or theorizing, these authors drew their conclusions not from the ethnographic or historical record, of which they had a masterful grasp, but by applying to that material a preconceived picture of what modernity was supposed to be like. Bernard Lewis’s classic, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, provides a good example of this kind of writing, in which historical detail is presented but then forced into what C. Wright Mills described as a “trans-historical strait-jacket” in order to support a limited number of generalizations about Turkey, Turks, Islam, and modernization. ₁₁

An ardent supporter of Ottoman-Turkish reform, Lewis began by emphasizing the “deeper affinities” between the democratic ideals of Western society and the Turkish culture. ₁₂ He saw Turks as having made two fortuitous choices in their history that helped bridge the geographical and cultural gap separating them from the West. The first choice came during the Middle Ages, when the Turks turned away from Asia and looked westward. In Lewis’s history, Turkish modernization started at this point but went through a major interruption when the institutions and practices of the Ottoman Empire fell under the influence of Arab and Islamic culture. ₁₃ In Lewis’s recounting, the Turks returned to their rightful path in the eighteenth century, when they made their second decisive choice by turning once again to the West for a model and inspiration as they struggled to reorganize their imperial institutions. Lewis regarded the Ottoman reform, the passing of the empire, and the establishment of the secular republic as having liberated the Turks from a burden that had kept them from taking their deserved place on the side of the West. ₁₄

If one sets aside these broad generalizations, one finds that The Emergence of Modern Turkey contains ample information about the complexities that underlay this long march of “progress.” Some of the information does not “fit” the sweeping panorama just summarized and may even fatally undermine it. For one example, in an off-handed way Lewis observes that, in general, “the [Islamic] brotherhoods seem to have rallied to the support of the nationalists in Anatolia.” ₁₅ This statement suggests that folk Islam, especially, proved to be far more adaptive to changing circumstances in Turkey than one would expect from the way writers have commonly portrayed it, as primarily an obscurantist force. ₁₆ For another example, Lewis’s historical data show that rather than being clear-minded visionaries, all the main reformers of the late Ottoman era seem to have entertained some ambivalence toward the idea of Westernization. Sultan Selim III, whose reign Lewis sees as pivotal in Ottoman modernization, was surrounded by influential advisers who believed that the changes introduced by the French revealed “the evil intentions in their minds.” The advisers argued that by erecting new principles and setting new laws the French were establishing what “Satan whispered to them.” ₁₇

The chronicler and reforming minister of justice Cevdet Pasa was another prominent person whose outlook and ideology did not easily fit any preconceived mold. Lewis wrote that the Turkish Civil Code, which Cevdet compiled between 1870 and 1876, was “modern in form and presentation” but also “firmly based on the seriat.” He described the result of Cevdet’s work as both a “digest of seriat Law of the Hanefi school” and “one of the greatest achievements of Turkish jurisprudence.” ₁₈ Another individual who defied easy classification was the journalist Ali Suavi, whom Lewis described as a “turbaned revolutionary.” ₁₉ Suavi was trained as a theologian but refined his ideas about the Islamic brand of Turkish nationalism while in exile in Europe. His background, orientation, fiery rhetoric, and uncompromising attitude toward the sultan’s autocracy made Ali Suavi one of the most original and enigmatic thinkers of the liberal opposition in the nineteenth century. Then there was Hizb-i Cedid, or the New Party, which was formed in 1911 with the dual goal of “preserving general religious and national ethics and morals” and making use of “the advances and products of Western civilization for the development of the Ottoman Empire.” ₂₀ Even Atatürk was careful to keep his options open. He cooperated with various religious leaders as he was organizing for the war against Greece, and he accepted the title “Ghazi” (Muslim warrior fighting for Islam) that was given to him by the National Assembly in 1921. Atatürk used this title throughout the rest of his life.

Even on the level of the ideas and motivations of the elite, then, such nuances make it difficult to reconcile the path of Turkish modernization with the clearly delineated, dichotomous categories of the literature that analyzes and explains it. If we move beyond the elite level and examine the societal underpinnings of Ottoman-Turkish modernization, the overall picture becomes even less clear. Although it has little to say about the popular classes, Lewis’s book is still helpful in revealing some of the uncertainties that underlay the reform process on this level. For example, he cites the Englishman Slade, an adviser to the Ottoman throne in the first half of the nineteenth century, who was far less than convinced that the Ottoman reforms were having a positive impact on the population:

Hitherto, the Osmanley enjoyed by custom some of the dearest privileges of freeman, for which Christian nations have so long struggled. He paid nothing to the government beyond a moderate land tax.... He traveled, where he pleased without passports; no custom-house officer intruded his eyes or dirty fingers among his baggage; no police watched his motions, or listened for his words.... For this freedom, this capability of realizing the wildest wishes, what equivalent does the Sultan offer? It may be said none.... Instead of engrafting his plans on the old system... he... prematurely disclosed his schemes of self-aggrandizement and appropriation which disgusted his subjects. ₂₁

And in 1962, almost two hundred years after the beginnings of Ottoman reform, Bernard Lewis wrote: “Religious revival in Turkey in recent years has attracted the attention of many writers.” He cited a series of books and articles spanning the years between 1947 and 1958. ₂₂

To find other instances of the profound ambiguities that affected Turkish society as it became modern, we can turn to another classic text, Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society. ₂₃ Like Lewis, Lerner stopped short of bridging the gap between his broad, confident statements about Turkish modernization and the contradictions that engulfed Turkish society as it went through this “unstoppable” transformation. Like Lewis’s book, Lerner’s is full of insightful descriptions about what was transpiring on the ground. These passages nicely reveal the complexity of Turkish modernization. Here is how Lerner describes the city: it is a modernizing landscape that

contains many varied figures. Some migrants never penetrate the urban curtain and live out their lives in a miserable daily dying. Others find the industrial discipline a full and satisfying life. Still others are infused with new dreams and glory—imagining themselves at the head of an Islamic brotherhood, or of a proletarian union... defying all the mighty. Many, perhaps most, simply try to learn a little more, get a little more, have a little more. ₂₄

Rather than characterizing the effects of modernization in such a way that anomalies like these would be seen not as curiosities but as integral parts of the process, Lerner (like Lewis) tried to maintain the orderliness of his scheme by creating new categories. For example, he argued that Turkish dynamism originated in those strategically located groups who were neither “traditional” nor “modern,” and that all this uncertainty notwithstanding, as a modernizing lot “Turks are the happiest people in the Middle East.” ₂₅

Turkish Modernization and the Modernizing Elite

It is not only strict models and narrow categories of theories of social change that constrain the analyses of twentieth-century writers. In their efforts to portray modernization as a disciplined and unambiguous process, they find plenty of support in the words and deeds of the political leaders who implemented many of the reform measures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Just like their interpreters and historians, the political elites saw themselves as the most important force for change in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. To them, Ottoman-Turkish society was a project, and the people who lived in Turkey could at most be the objects of their experiments. They freely used categories such as “old” and “new” or “traditional” and “Western” in order to reduce the dimensions of their task to manageable proportions and represent themselves as the sole bearers of progress. They regarded reform strictly as a top-down process. Accordingly, they directed a substantial part of their effort toward changing the Ottoman institutions and reshaping the physical environment in order to make it more similar to that of their European counterparts. The underlying assumption was that once the environment was altered, the behavior of individuals could be easily molded and made to fit the requirements of the newly created circumstances.

The antecedents of this approach to reform can be found in the seventeenth century, particularly in Russia’s Peter the Great, who, according to Liah Greenfeld, had “forced the awareness of the west on Russia.” ₂₆ But it was in the French Revolution that the Ottoman and republican reformers found their most direct source of inspiration. There were many similarities between the Ottoman-Turkish reformers and, especially, the Jacobins who dominated the French state between 1793 and 1794, in terms of the puritanical zeal with which each approached the task of remaking their respective state and society.

For the Jacobins, the revolution had to be an all-encompassing undertaking, affecting every aspect of life in France. They decreed that French history began in 1792, the year they came to power. They redesigned the calendar into strictly decimal units, and they renamed the days, months, and holidays, substituting for the old Roman and imperial names new ones that were either neutral or based on revolutionary events and personalities. They redrew the administrative map of France, renamed the streets, and even encouraged people to change their names if these had any links to the old regime, the royal family, or the clergy. A distinctive style of clothing that included “trousers, an open shirt, a short jacket, boots, and a liberty cap” came to be associated with the “model revolutionary,” and the Jacobins promoted it over the old uniforms of culottes, waistcoats, and powdered wigs. ₂₇

In the minds of many Ottoman, Young Turk, and Kemalist leaders, too, formal elements of change, such as the outward appearance of people, the cleanliness of streets, and the type and nature of institutions, became synonymous with modernization and consumed an inordinate amount of their time and energy. In 1829, for example, the turban was replaced with the fez as the appropriate and mandatory headgear for civilians, and “robes and slippers gave way to frock coats and capes, trousers and black leather boots,” especially in military uniforms. ₂₈ One hundred years later, in the early years of the republic, the fez became the symbol of conservatism and was outlawed by the well-known “hat law” in 1925. In Mustafa Kemal’s words, the fez “sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, and fanaticism and hatred of progress and civilization.” ₂₉ Here is how he described someone in his audience who, it appears, had made an unsuccessful effort to cope with the new dress code:

I see a man in the crowd in front of me; he has a fez on his head, a green turban on the fez, a smock on his back, and on top of that a jacket like the one I am wearing. I can’t see the other half. Now, what kind of outfit is that? Would a civilized man put on this preposterous garb and go out to hold himself up for universal ridicule? ₃₀

In another example, in 1928 the Turkish government appointed a committee to examine the problem of reform and modernization in Islamic religion. In its report, the committee stated that “religious life, like moral and economic life, must be reformed on scientific lines.” Among its recommendations were that mosques should be clean and orderly, with pews and cloakrooms, and that people should enter mosques with clean shoes. ₃₁ As late as 1960, following the military coup of May 27, the military governor of Istanbul passed an ordinance forbidding people from speaking with loud voices in public places lest this create a bad impression among Western tourists. ₃₂ It was not only what people wore but also where and how they lived, what kind of music they listened to, and even what they ate that had to conform to modern norms. ₃₃

In 1858, Mehmet Kamil Efendi, a professor in a medical school, published one of the earliest cookbooks in the Ottoman Empire, laying down, as it were, the gastronomic foundations of Ottoman reform. In the preface to The Refuge of Cooks, he wrote that because of the changes in lifestyles, the old dishes were no longer satisfactory and “we need to adopt a new cuisine from the West that would go better with our new conditions.” ₃₄

These and similar measures can be regarded as amusing, but the vision that prompted them—and the zealousness with which the bureaucratic elite carried them out—was anything but funny. This single-minded approach had some antecedents in the Ottoman approach to statecraft, but its two most important constituents lay not in the East but in the West. The first of these was a total admiration for science, not as something one engages in critically but as an omnipotent tool that can be borrowed and used for a variety of purposes, including inducing social change. To the reformers, the Ottoman-Turkish scene was a blank slate onto which they were determined to inscribe a firm signature of science and reason. According to them, this and only this could create the right conditions for the kind of social change they deemed necessary for the country. Here is “Ode to the Nineteenth Century,” written by a liberal figure in the Ottoman opposition and reflecting some of these sentiments:

The spread of science has enlightened the minds of men,

The printed press has completed what was lacking.

Alas, the Western lands have become the daysprings of knowledge,

Nothing remains of the fame of Rum and Arab, of Egypt and Herat.

The time is time of progress, the world is a world of science,

Is the survival of societies compatible with ignorance? ₃₅

In the writings of leading intellectuals of the period, such as Ziya Gökalp, the idea of progress through science came to occupy such a central place that sometimes even the passage of time did not seem fast enough: “On progress we shall set our heart,” Gökalp said; “We shall skip five hundred years and not stand still.” ₃₆ According to Mustafa Kemal, in measuring progress “our standards should be based not on the lethargic mentality of the past centuries but on the concepts of speed and movement that define our century.” ₃₇ In 1925, Mustafa Kemal wrote of civilization almost as if it were a supernatural force that should be worshipped:

It is futile to try to resist the thunderous advance of civilization, for it has no pity on those who are ignorant or rebellious. The sublime force of civilization pierces mountains, crosses the skies, enlightens and explores everything from the smallest particle of dust to stars.... When faced with this, those nations who try to follow the superstitions of the Middle Ages are condemned to be destroyed or at least to become enslaved and debased. ₃₈

The second constituent element of the modern approach to Ottoman and Turkish reform derived from a peculiar inversion of Enlightenment thought that took place not in Turkey but in Europe. Originally, the European philosophers who are identified with the Enlightenment did not think of “human progress” as the preserve of any one culture, people, or geographical place but as something attainable by all of humanity, so long as people learned not to put obstacles in front of it. ₃₉ By the end the nineteenth century, discussions of progress in Europe had lost most of their universalistic pretensions. In the hands of frustrated political leaders and the intelligentsia, this unifying ideal was transformed into its opposite and used as a marker to describe the inherent qualities of different groups of people. Now certain cultures were judged to be unsuitable to take part in progress unless they abandoned their identity. The progressive tenets of the Enlightenment had become an excuse for dividing people into rigid groups and categories.

To put it another way, the universalistic ideals of the eighteenth century were turned on their heads and used as weapons by the leaders of ethnic and official nationalisms to promote their particularistic goals. These leaders and their intellectual patrons had no liking for inclusive liberal ideologies and no tolerance for ambiguity or indeterminacy. ₄₀ In their repertoire, progress ceased to be a universal and somewhat abstract ideal and became a vehicle for describing and justifying the desired and deserved upward movement of their ethnically defined “solid community” in history. ₄₁

At the close of the nineteenth century, as they were confronted by mounting political difficulties, military defeats, and economic problems, powerful groups among the Ottoman bureaucratic elite found a useful platform in these rigid reformulations of Enlightenment thought and moved in a similar direction by rigidifying their own ideology. ₄₂ The reformers decided that their survival (which in their minds was synonymous with survival of the state and the nation) was contingent upon defining a homogeneous and unified community as the basis of their rule and legitimacy. ₄₃ They discarded the ambiguities and the relative inclusiveness that had characterized the earlier reform measures and movements in favor of a more sharply drawn prescription for the creation of a national community of Turks. The creation and protection of such a community were deemed indispensable in order for the new nation and the state to catch up with the West. “We lived through pain,” said Mustafa Kemal,

because we did not understand the conditions of the world. Our thinking and our mentality will have to become civilized. And we will be proud of this civilization. Take a look at the entire Turkish and Islamic world. Because they failed to adapt to the conditions and rise, they found themselves in such a catastrophe and suffering. We cannot afford to hesitate any more. We have to move forward.... Civilization is such a fire that it burns and destroys those who ignore it. ₄₄

There were two groups who found their status in the late Ottoman and early republican society to be in fundamental conflict with the new nationalist ethos. One of these was the leaders of some of the popular religious orders (tarikats) and those intellectuals who advocated an Islamist version of reform and reorganization. The nationalist elites defined the thoughts and deeds of this group as inherently and categorically opposed to their civilizing mission. In their discourse, Islam became an all-purpose bogey representing everything that reform, progress, and civilization were not. Consequently, Islamists were harassed, persecuted, and generally shunned as being fundamentally obscurantist and reactionary throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

The other group who suffered directly and immediately from the ideological shift of the Young Turk and early republican periods was the non-Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire. The Greek, Armenian, and Jewish subjects of the empire, especially, had always exercised their preferences and priorities on a basis that was much larger than the narrowly defined boundaries of the new national communities. For example, the Greeks had found themselves at odds with the earlier nationalism of their brethren in the Balkans. But the measures that followed the articulation of the new Turkish nationalism were infinitely more serious and consequential. In particular, several radical steps were followed in the forceful nationalization of the “Turkish” middle class during the first half of the twentieth century. These were, first, the deportation and massacre of large numbers of Armenians in 1914–1915, followed by the exchange of populations with Greece between 1923 and 1930. Then came the imposition of a special wealth tax of up to 75 percent on the properties of non-Muslim entrepreneurs in 1942. The whole process culminated in the government-instigated riots of September 6–7, 1955, when the businesses of Greeks and other non-Muslims in Istanbul were ransacked by mobs.

Yet in the official rhetoric there has never been any room for a full accounting of these deeds. The triumphalist rendering of the accepted versions of this history leaves out not only the Greeks and Armenians but also the majority of those who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of Turkish modernization. Its claims of populism notwithstanding, the reforming elite has always been deeply suspicious of anything smacking of individual initiative, including the notions of civil rights and personal freedoms. Liberal ideas that had been widely represented and even organized in the early phases of reform were eventually marginalized and committed to a perpetual slate of opposition. All ideas and institutions that originated outside the ruling elite and its regulations were perceived with suspicion and deemed dangerous if they could not be shaped and goaded according to the requirements of the political program at hand. ₄₅ In short, in their quest to reorganize Ottoman-Turkish society, the reforming elite ended up isolating itself from society at large and became a close-minded and inward-looking ruling class. ₄₆

This outlook found its full expression in the First Historical Congress convened in July 1932 under Atatürk’s direction in Ankara. The purpose of this gathering was to draw a framework for rewriting history textbooks for elementary and secondary schools. In their papers and comments, professors and teachers from across the country described how the new Turkish nation was to perceive itself and present its history to future generations. The participants generally agreed that Turks had created a rich civilization in Central Asia in prehistorical times, and this was the fount of all subsequent civilizations in human history. According to the participants, Turks had made the most significant contribution to the development and spread of Islamic civilization, but their services were not adequately appreciated. In fact, conservative interpretation of Islam had kept the Ottomans from participating in the European Renaissance and caused the Turks to fall behind Europe after the sixteenth century. In ten days the conference heard no mention of the ethnic diversity of the Ottoman Empire and no discussion of what had happened to its Christian subjects. The only non-Muslim presenter was a Jew, Avram Galanti, who was a professor of “Ancient Eastern Tribes” in the Department of Literature at Istanbul University. He gave a brief commentary on proper transliteration to be used in the writing of the textbooks. ₄₇

The narrow and sterile path of modernization that emerges from the deeds and discourses of the political elite agrees well with the way the major historians of Turkish modernization have represented the process retrospectively. Lewis, for example, commented on but overlooked the consequences of the blatant illiberalism that characterized most of the leaders “from Mahmud II (1784–1839) to Ismet Inönü (1884–1973).” ₄₈ In the 1950s and 1960s, most such authors regarded the breaking of traditional ties as so urgent a task that it seemed not to matter what methods were used to achieve that end. So long as those methods were directed against institutions and practices portrayed as intrinsically antithetical to progress and modernization (meaning, in most cases, Islamic), they could be justified. Lewis echoed a common way of thinking about Turkish politics in these years when he wrote that “the Young Turks may have failed to give Turkey constitutional government. They did, however, give Istanbul drains.” ₄₉

Modernizing Society: Then and Now

That in both theory and practice there was such an emphasis on institutional reform and its outward manifestations often leads us to forget that these reforms touched a relatively small part of Ottoman and Turkish society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Outside the privileged domain of the political elite stood large numbers of people whose visions and voices were rarely acknowledged during the initial years of the republic. Even though the top-down formulations of reform and the state-centered analyses of the reform process make it difficult to focus on social forces as distinct from the state, through some innovative use of sources we can break through these limitations and start to “bring the society back” into our framework. Directly or indirectly, social forces had an impact on the shape and effectiveness of many of the reform policies, even if that impact is not always recognized. ₅₀

One source we can use to get an idea about what was going on beyond the capital city is stories told in the Turkish vernacular that describe the early years of the twentieth century from the perspective of peasants. In addition to abject poverty resulting from decades of war and shortages, such stories reveal a profound crisis of identity. When pressured, the heroes of these stories and epic poems end up declaring their loyalty to an entity that had no fixed temporal point of reference whatsoever. In their speech, the sultan-caliph, Young Turk leaders, Mustafa Kemal, the Prophet Muhammed, and his nephew Ali often melt into one amorphous being who claims their allegiance. ₅₁

The antagonistic nature of the subtle links between state forces and the nonstate arena was thrust into the forefront of the Turkish political scene only in 1950, when Mustafa Kemal’s party was soundly defeated and voted out of office in elections held that year. In the years leading up to and following the 1950 elections, the rural population created, at the grass roots level, one of the most developed and widespread systems of political organization and participation in the world. To many this was a surprising development, for it went against the general descriptions found in many social science texts. After all, the peasantry was thought to be far removed from the advances of recent years; it had been described by some as “virtually unaffected by limited modernization.” ₅₂ In this respect, Daniel Lerner’s observation is insightful, if somewhat condescending: in 1954, impressed by the degree of politicization in Turkey, he wrote that “the villagers have learned the basic lesson of democratic politics.” On this occasion, they had just explained to him that it would be better to have a small margin between the major parties because then they would “heed our voices.” ₅₃

Today, with the declining hold of Kemalist restrictions and other state-centered ideologies, we are better able to see most men and women living in Turkey not merely as objects of a project but also as subjects of their history. They are able to affect their own lives through the choices they make in villages, small towns, and the neighborhoods of big cities. They have “the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own.” ₅₄ They live in a modern world that Lerner described as “expansive... populated more actively with imaginings and fantasies—hungering for whatever is different and unfamiliar.” ₅₅ Lerner describes a similar state of restlessness and adventurism that characterizes the modern person when he says, “In the perceptual apparatus of Modern men, all scales are in principle infinite until proved otherwise. [A modern man] locates himself not at some fixed point in the rank-order of things known, but at some moving point of desire in a scale of things imagined.” ₅₆

For some, the conflicting voices and visions that have dominated the Turkish scene since the early 1980s signal not just a turn in but a complete collapse of the Turkish experiment with modernity. According to this perspective, the fruits of progress in Turkey have been not a rational and universally progressive middle-class society but an economically polarized, politically contentious, and ethnically divided people. Instead of well-informed and politically conscious actors, increasing literacy and media awareness have created a youthful and growing population addicted to the technological marvels of modernity but not quite equipped with adequate means to master them.

In reaction to the despair and cynicism that underlie many such descriptions, it is hard not to be sympathetic toward those who see a multiplication of possibilities in the detotalized, decentered world of the eighties and nineties. But one should be careful not to let the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction and celebrate each and every break in the Kemalist framework as another step in liberation. The extreme relativism that underlies such a point of view sees each position and action as having its own truth and meaning and ignores the fundamental requirement that people communicate across the divides by which they find themselves separated.

Modernity makes it possible for people to imagine for themselves a common context beyond their most immediate, personal experience. In order to avoid the disorienting world of extreme relativism that Gellner has so forcefully criticized, ₅₇ we need to remember the universal tenets of modernization as a world historical process. The widening and deepening of the market society, the protective impulses of human beings, and the assertion of human and civil rights are all aspects of modernization, and as such they are not the preserves of any one group, point of view, tradition, or culture. As students of and participants in this drama, we can insist on the universality of these elements and thereby have a way of comparing, assessing, and evaluating the multiplying visions, stands, and protests that surround us. Such a position finds its most compelling explanation in Weber, who believed that in modern culture “there [are] no perfect answers, but by accepting the historical world as it has become and striving to understand it, and by resisting the temptations of inwardness and subjectivism, one may make possible the emergence of ‘contingently hopeful futures.’” ₅₈

As we approach the twenty-first century, and as the constraints of the post–World War II settlement vanish, Turkey once again comes into focus as both a pivot of the new world order and a successful example of modernization. The Economist calls it “the Star of Islam”; Samuel Huntington sees it as a torn country and hence potentially a decisive case in the coming clash “between the west and the rest”:

Having rejected Mecca, and then being rejected by Brussels, where does Turkey look? Tashkent may be the answer. The end of the Soviet Union gives Turkey the opportunity to become the leader of a revived Turkic civilization involving seven countries from the borders of Greece to those of China. ₅₉

Robert Kaplan, in a devastating prognosis of the possible place of the Third World in the coming century, admires the “formidable fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made.” He continues: “A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again.... Those people whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners.” ₆₀

It might be comforting to some that Huntington situates Turkey in a gray zone in his “clash of civilizations,” or that Kaplan is impressed by Turks because they are able to live in slums without decomposing. But it would be wrong to give credence to such confusing and disorienting generalizations. Above all, we should not conclude that in the 1980s and 1990s, the “modern public has shattered into a multitude of fragments speaking incommensurable private languages and modernity has lost its power to give meaning to people’s lives.” ₆₁ Equating the collapse of state-centered models of modernization with the collapse of modernity itself would mean that we are still reading history through the lens of a very restrictive model. Far from extinguishing the promise of modernity, the ongoing eclipse of these models releases, in theory and in practice, the liberating and enabling dynamics of modernization. Stripped of the artificial certainties and uniformities of yesteryear, the world appears not chaotic and insecure but full of possibilities.

In Lerner’s well-known ethnography, the grocer of Balgat says he prefers American movies because they are exciting; they make people “ask what is going to happen next.” ₆₂ Perhaps the film is still running, and we don’t know what will happen next.

Endnotes

Note 1: Hasan Cemal, 12 Eylül Günlügü: Demokrasi Korkusu, Ankara: Bilgi, 1986, 267. Back.

Note 2: On 1925 and its aftermath, see Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, London: I. B. Tauris, 1993, 180–92. Back.

Note 3: A. Taner Kislali, Atatürk’e Saldirmanin Dayanilmaz Hafifligi, Ankara: Imge, 1993. Back.

Note 4: A. Bulaç, Din ve Modernizm, Istanbul: Beyan, 1992. See also Michael Meeker, “The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey,” in Richard Tapper, ed., Islam in Modern Turkey, London: I. B. Tauris, 1991, 189–222. Back.

Note 5: See, for example, Amir Hassanpour, “The Kurdish Experience,” Middle East Report, vol. 189, 1994, 2–7. Back.

Note 6: Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, London: Routledge, 1992, 3. Back.

Note 7: For an optimistic assessment of the 1980s, see M. Heper and A. Evin, eds., Politics in the Third Turkish Republic, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994. Back.

Note 8: The discussion and definitions in this section are based largely on the following works: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, New York: Beacon Press, 1956; Reinhard Bendix, Nation Building and Citizenship, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977; Dean Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 15, March 1973, 196–226; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Routes to Modernity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Penguin, 1982; Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy, London: Verso, 1992. Back.

Note 9: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957, 76. Back.

Note 10: Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies,” 204. See also S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Kemalist Regime and Modernization: Some Comparative and Analytical Remarks,” in J. Landau, ed., Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984, 3–16. Back.

Note 11: C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Back.

Note 12: Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968, 17. Back.

Note 13: It is interesting to note that in a recent essay Bülent Ecevit makes the same point. See his “Prospects and Difficulties of Democratization in the Middle East,” in E. Goldberg, R. Kasaba, and J. Migdal, eds., Rules and Rights in the Middle East, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993, 141–63. Back.

Note 14: Lewis, Emergence, 353. Back.

Note 15: Lewis, Emergence, 409. Back.

Note 16: Lewis, Emergence, 404–12. Back.

Note 17: Lewis, Emergence, 57. See also Bernard Lewis, “The Impact of the French Revolution on Turkey,” Journal of World History, vol. 1, 1953, 105–25. Back.

Note 18: Lewis, Emergence, 23. Back.

Note 19: Lewis, Emergence, 154. Back.

Note 20: Lewis, Emergence, 220. Back.

Note 21: Lewis, Emergence, 125–26. Back.

Note 22: Lewis, Emergence, 416n32. Back.

Note 23: Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, New York: Free Press, 1958. Back.

Note 24: Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, 77. Back.

Note 25: Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, 101. To be sure, Turkey was not the only country to exhibit conflicting evidence that did not quite fit into the dichotomous ideal types of tradition and modernity. In response to growing evidence for complexity, the modernization literature began to elaborate theories of “post-traditional” (yet premodern) societies. See, for example, the essays in Daedalus, vol. 120, no. 1, 1973. This was a significant step in recognizing the difficulties of simplified schemes. But in some of its versions, this step ended up creating yet another ideal type, leaving the reader wondering how a society moves from a traditional to a post-traditional or transitional stage. See, for example, Joseph Gusfield, “Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change,” in J. Finkle and R. Gable, eds., Political Development and Social Change, New York: John Wiley, 1966, 15–26. Back.

Note 26: Greenfeld, Nationalism, 235. Back.

Note 27: Robert Darnton, The Kiss of the Lamourette, New York: Norton, 1990, 9. Back.

Note 28: Lewis, Emergence, 102. Back.

Note 29: Lewis, Emergence, 268. Back.

Note 30: Lewis, Emergence, 269. Back.

Note 31: Lewis, Emergence, 414. Back.

Note 32: Cumhuriyet, 25 July 1961. Back.

Note 33: See the chapters by Bozdogan, Nalbantoglu, and Özbek in this volume. Back.

Note 34: Hilmi Ziya Ülken, Turkiye’de Çagdas Düsünce Tarihi, Istanbul: Ülken, 1966, 40. Back.

Note 35: Quoted in Lewis, Emergence, 133–34. Back.

Note 36: Cited in Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, 136. Back.

Note 37: Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, II, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1959, 277. Back.

Note 38: Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, II, 212. Back.

Note 39: In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon wrote that “it may safely be presumed that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.” Cited in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment. Back.

Note 40: On this point, see Daniel Chirot, “Modernism without Liberalism: The Ideological Roots of Modern Tyranny,” Contention, vol. 13, 1995, 141–66; Greenfeld, Nationalism, 1–26, 189–274, 222–34; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991 [1983]. Back.

Note 41: Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26. Back.

Note 42: It is important to note that a parallel development was taking place in the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire, especially in the Balkans. See Fikret Adanir, “The National Question and the Genesis and Development of Socialism in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Macedonia,” in M. Tunçay and E. Zürcher, eds., Socialism and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1923, London: British Academic Press, 1994, 27–48. Back.

Note 43: nterestingly, Abdülhak Adnan Adivar found the republican norms of education as dogmatic as the Islamic ones they replaced. He paraphrased H. Gibb in saying that, with the reforms of the new regime, “Turkey became a positivistic mausoleum.” A. Adivar, “Interaction of Islamic and Western Thought in Turkey,” in T. C. Young, ed., Near Eastern Culture and Society, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1951, 128. Back.

Note 44: Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, II, 207. Back.

Note 45: See Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 115–16, 175–76. Back.

Note 46: Serif Mardin, “Just and Unjust,” Daedalus, vol. 120, no. 3, 1991, 117–29. See also Ergun Özbudun, “State Elites and Democratic Political Culture in Turkey,” in L. Diamond, ed., Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reiner, 1993, 247–68. Back.

Note 47: The full texts of some of the papers presented and discussions held at this conference were published in T. C. Maarif Vekaleti, Birinci Türk Tarih Kongresi, Istanbul: Matbaacilik ve Nesriyat Anonim sirketi, 1932. Back.

Note 48: 48. Lewis, Emergence, 369. Back.

Note 49: Lewis, Emergence, 228. Back.

Note 50: For a number of insightful essays that probe the link between state forces and nonstate actors, see A. Finkel and N. Sirman, eds., Turkish State, Turkish Society, London: Routledge, 1990. Back.

Note 51: The epic poem Memleketimden Insan Manzaralari, by Nazim Hikmet, contains a series of sharply drawn characters in Anatolia who exhibit many of these characteristics. Back.

Note 52: Cyril Black, The Dynamics of Modernization, New York: Harper and Row, 1966, 121. See also Robert Ward and Dankwart Rustow, Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1964, 456. Back.

Note 53: erner, The Passing of Traditional Society, 41. Back.

Note 54: Berman, All That Is Solid, 16. Back.

Note 55: Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, 23. Back.

Note 56: Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, 134. Back.

Note 57: Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, 40–72. Back.

Note 58: As paraphrased by Gordon Craig, “Demonic Democracy,” New York Review of Books, 13 February 1992, 41. See also David Harvey, “Class Relations, Social Justice and the Politics of Difference,” in M. Keith and S. Pile, eds., Place and Politics of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1993, 41–66. Back.

Note 59: Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, 22–49. Back.

Note 60: Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1994, 44–76. Back.

Note 61: Berman, All That Is Solid, 17. Back.

Note 62: Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, 28. Back.