Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey: Chapter 5

1997

5. Projects as Methodology: Some Thoughts on Modern Turkish Social Science

J’étais convaincu qu’a leur insu ils avaient retenu de l’Ancien Régime la plupart des sentiments, des habitudes, des idées même a l’aide desquels ils avaient construits la révolution qui le détruisit, et que sans le vouloir, ils s’étaient servis de ces débris pour construire l’édifice de la société nouvelle.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The following is an attempt to study the influence of a perceptual frame inherited by a prominent group of modern Turkish scholars whose analysis of Turkish society it has continued to characterize.

In a country like Turkey, where a burning concern with foundational principles is part of a pervasive discourse in which scholarly studies overlap with journalistic work, it is difficult to draw the exact boundaries of the group I have in mind. Its membership consists of “Kemalists,” that is, promoters of the ideology of the secular Turkish republic established in 1923, secularists, or persons determined to maintain the principle of laicism introduced by the republic, and “Marxisant” scholars who have pioneered critical studies of society in Turkey. ₁ Its worldview may be followed in the writings of contributors to an otherwise solid journal of social studies, Toplum ve Bilim (Society and Science), which has gathered the best talent in Turkish social science. A source in English in which the same attitude toward the study of society may be detected is Turkey in Transition, edited by Irvin C. Schick and E. Ahmet Tonak. ₂ A prominent work with similar earmarks is Mübeccel Kiray’s Eregli. ₃ The polished and sophisticated studies of Çaglar Keyder reflect similar characteristics. ₄

I claim that the parent ideology of the mind-set I attempt to analyze was the political formula professed by members of the Ottoman bureaucracy, the governing elite of pre-republican times, who promoted an Ottoman version of raison d’état. ₅ Interestingly, the founding father of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, gave the republican elite—the intelligentsia—the similar task of functioning as wardens of the republic. That much is fairly well known, but not quite so well recognized is the vein in which this assignment was made, reminiscent as it was of the re-creation of the role of these earlier bureaucratic gatekeepers of the ci-devant Ottoman regime. This transmission may be conceptualized as the perpetuation by the founding fathers of the republic of key positions in society, as well as definitions of the role of the state. Furthermore, it may be seen as the perpetuation of a tendency to conceptualize social change as promoted by projects, that is, plans for change originating among a cohesive group of social “engineers,” as we can detect even in some of the essays in this book. Social change, seen as a self-propelling movement with an internal spring, has no place in the approach that underlies “projects,” and neither does the concept of an Aristotelian or Hegelian “unfolding.”

The secularizing policy of the Turkish republic having unraveled its Islamic moorings, after Atatürk the new wardens of the state functioned without the earlier Ottoman tacit “methodology of the social sciences,” an approach that has often been characterized as the “social engineering” bent of Ottoman statesmen. The Western, foreign source of republican reforms—that is, imitation—impeded deeper cultural moorings for the new methodology, a foundation that, in the past, had been provided by Islam as ideation. The reform movement had no identifiable philosophical foundation. Its Jacobinism, possibly its deepest root, was pragmatic and practical, that is, fleshed out as a “project.” The republic took over educational institutions and cultural practices (museums, painting and sculpture, secularism) from the West without realizing that these were just the tip of an iceberg of meanings, perceptions, and ontological positions.

An aside about Gramsci may be relevant at this point: If Gramsci had a total, three-tiered “iceberg” in mind in his definitions of organic intellectuals and culture, then his ideas may have had some universal validity. ₆ My own perception is that this is not what he had to say, that he was very cavalier about his theory of culture (which seems to have been concerned primarily with reproduction through sometimes narrowly or vaguely defined mechanisms), that Turkish modernization can be used to show that his theories have a basic flaw, and that the whole noise about the revival of his ideas is one about which political scientists (who, in any case, have a somewhat jejeune understanding of culture) should have some reservations.

Recent research seems to indicate that hegemonic class-society linkages in fact consist of three “communication loops”: first, the state machine; second, cultural institutions; and third, the complex scheme of language as discourse, sources of self, identity markers, and tacit understandings that underlie both of the other loops and have a structuring force of their own. I study what happens when loop one is constant, loop two is taken over from a foreign culture, and loop three is missing. The extraordinary range, immense complexity, and real “hegemony” of this third loop is emerging from contemporary studies of semiotics and communication and from the “new” intellectual and social history. ₇

In this essay, I attempt to deconstruct the ideological patterning I impute to the scholars I have in mind by addressing their inability to acknowledge a “micro” component of social dynamics, an inability stemming from the fact that projects are by their very nature “macro” in form. More precisely, I dwell on their systematic neglect of one of the two main facets of social life. If those facets are characterized as, on the one hand, “people in face-to-face interaction” and, on the other, “the wider social relations... in which these activities are embedded,” ₈ then my target group considers the second facet to be the only “truly” significant one. Their approach may be described as one of selective attention to the macro dimension of social analysis, and it takes as primordial the constraints of domination, power, and coercion. These scholars offer no account of a necessary dimension of domination—the resources of the dominated, or their “discourse.” ₉ In a more general sense, they give short shrift to the whole range of microsociology. The thinkers I have in mind thus dismiss identity processes, the noninstitutional basis of religion, and personal histories as “colorings” of social processes, frothy surface events without substantive content. They would categorize many of these features as individual performances, bypassing the modern view that “performance” is itself a category for social analysis.

This approach is particularly puzzling in the Turkish setting, in which Muslims make up 98 percent of the local population: Muslims are particularly linked in their behavior to the social discourse of Islam and thus to a dimension of social dynamics that brings into focus micro-level processes such as the formation of the self. ₁₀ One could speculate that the progressivism of the group has oriented it in a positivistic direction, but this uncovers only one aspect of their methodology. Looking at the problem from the perspective of unacknowledged transmission enables further elements to emerge. These scholars have been on the lookout for the latest twists in Western social analysis and have quickly adopted them, yet they have totally neglected the pervasive concern of Western social theory for the linkage between macro and micro elements of society. ₁₁ It is this discrepancy that has to be explained.

The disempowerment resulting from such an inability to focus on micro-level analysis not only results in insensitivity to the complexity of major social processes but also, and more importantly, promotes the use of conspiracy theories where explanations focused on root-level dynamics would be more appropriate. A good example is the recent attribution by a prominent Turkish political scientist—not necessarily part of the group I have in mind but representative of its attitudes—who imputed “cheating” to the Istanbul electorate who carried the conservative religious party to victory in the Turkish municipal elections of March 1994. The citizens, this person claimed, “lied” to pollsters before the elections, thus “willfully disrupting” the predictive apparatus. A more fundamental gap in the analytical apparatus of the prevalent type of Turkish social science has been its inability to understand the power of Islam, which has caused unnecessary consternation among secular intellectuals upon the revival of Islam in Turkey.

In what follows, I approach the problem as a process of personal discovery that allowed me, in time, to focus on the lacunae I have described and that revealed the importance of micro processes for my own research.

Beginnings

My earliest conceptual frame for the study of society was simple: it consisted of a suspicion that the official Kemalist ideology propagated by my Turkish schoolteachers disguised an authoritarianism that contradicted their ubiquitous libertarian discourse. Somewhat later, I undertook a research project on origins of Kemalism, looking at it from the vantage point of the nineteenth-century Ottoman reform movement known as the Tanzimat. ₁₂ I also attempted to understand the background of the Tanzimat. The driving force behind my project was the attempt to clear up the roots of the disparity I had noticed and kept in mind.

The research yielded some interesting findings. Whether promoting their own interests or not, Ottoman officials, at various stages in the development of the empire, seemed uniformly locked into the preservation of a political principle best translated as “stateness” or “the priority of the state,” a principle known in Turkish as devlet.

It is true that without the ideology of devlet and the practice linked to it, the Ottoman Empire would never have survived the impact of nineteenth-century imperialism, and modern Turkey would hardly have achieved the successes it has scored in modernizing its institutions. The present essay is not about this successful dimension of Turkish history but about some of its negative legacies.

The ideology of devlet, which antedated the Tanzimat, provides clues to the fundamental thrust even of this early reform movement. It explains why the architects of the Tanzimat conceived of their reform scheme on the model of cameralism, a theory of government developed by professors and publicists in western Europe in the eighteenth century. Cameralists, who saw government as a science of the state to be applied by technicians and managers, included such figures as Seckendorf (1629–1692) and Schlözer (1733–1817), but also Quesnay (1694–1774). ₁₃ They represented the theoretical version of enlightened despotism and had little sympathy for democracy or representative institutions. They were planners, not revolutionaries.

Nineteenth-century Ottoman officials, regardless of their generation or specific worldview, seem to have had the salvation of devlet as a uniform goal and bent their minds to this ideal. Cameralism fitted well with this worldview. The centrality of devlet in their political ideology promoted a pervasive patriotism that can be traced in the proclamations of Sultan Mahmud II (1808–1839), in the ideas of the reformist grand vizier Mustafa Resid (circa 1840–1856), and in the ideas of the libertarian theorists of the Tanzimat, known as the Young Ottomans (circa 1865), the ideas of the sworn enemy, Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1908), those of Sultan Abdülhamid’s own sworn enemies, the Young Turks (1895–1908, 1908–1918), and those of the person the Young Turks had once groomed but who would become their sworn enemy, the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal. ₁₄ Indeed, the flow of Ottoman reform from Mustafa Resid to Mustafa Kemal followed the convolutions of the western European concept of a science of society from Auguste Comte’s positivism to the late-nineteenth-century European disillusionment with parliamentary government, and from there to Emile Durkheim’s solidarism.

Throughout, the main task as seen by Ottoman Turks—that is, by the ruling bureaucratic class—was that of improving the administration of the realm and the power of the state rather than promoting democracy. The constitutionalist Young Ottomans (1865–1876) had publicized the idea of representation as the means of saving the empire from disintegration; their eulogies of freedom were directly connected with their patriotism, which appeared even more clearly in the ideas of the less romantic Young Turks of the 1890s. The final step in this progression was the implementation by the single party in power between 1924 and 1950 of ideas—adumbrated in the Turkish Constitution of 1924—that stayed in tune with the earlier ideology of devlet but radicalized it by bringing into play a Rousseauist-Jacobin conception of the “general will.” ₁₅ This enabled the founders of the Turkish republic to promote an authoritarian theory Rousseau himself had voiced: “Every act of sovereignty, that is every authentic act of the general will, binds or favors equally all citizens so that the sovereign knows only the body of the nation and distinguishes none of those who compose it.” ₁₆

This was the latent but somewhat diffuse and unsystematic premise of the ideology of the single party that ruled the Turkish republic between 1924 and 1950. So far, so good. I had been able to trace one of the elements of Turkish history that I had set out to reconstruct. But new problems kept cropping up. What did I really mean by “radicalism”? And was there really no change from the Ottoman Empire to the republic? Impelled by a sense of fairness, I tried to answer the second question first. That was when I somewhat belatedly came across the ideas of Max Weber.

Patrimonialism-Sultanism

For Turks of my generation in the United States, Weber’s term “patrimonialism-sultanism” had a compelling appeal. ₁₇ In it we recognized the distinguishing characteristics our Kemalist mentors imputed to the Ottoman Empire. In the generation of Turkish intellectuals that succeeded us around 1960, Marx filled a similar function, fleshing out a déjà vu deriving from Kemalism. The causes of these divergences between generations need to be examined separately, but the difference between the intellectual scaffold provided by Marx—an increasingly influential model in Turkey after 1965—and that derived from Weber was important. Weber allowed one to go onto an aspect of structure that operated outside the state, the bureaucratic-rational sphere, or the economy.

For me, Weber’s concepts concerning patrimonialism-sultanism, when placed against the somewhat wooden ideological prose of Turkish textbooks, seemed a revelation, a more explicit and sophisticated explanation than my Kemalist teachers’ simplistic reconstruction of the Ottoman past. Weber did link up with what my generation had heard in school about our sultans and their empire: the land as part of the sultan’s oikos, the inability of the sultan to extend the organizational reach of the center, the slovenliness and inefficacy of the Ottoman administrator. This view was reinforced by what we remembered of Turkish literature—for instance, Refik Halit Karay’s “Peach Garden,” the story of a modernizing Ottoman bureaucrat who, on stifling summer days, abandoned starched collar, cravat, riding coat, and intolerant legalism for the delights of nightgowns worn at dusk in the peach garden of the small town to which he was assigned. ₁₈ This cultural retrogression, this backward step into the delights of an enchanted world, was chronicled by more than one modernist Ottoman writer of the early twentieth century.

Weber enabled me to take a first look at the inner spring of devlet—its nonstructural propellant beliefs, ideologies, and ideas. A second finding using Weberian lenses was the absence in the Ottoman Empire of social forces that could compare in vigor with the complex developments described by Weber in The City. ₁₉ Early Western patrimonialism had been undermined—and eventually eroded—by the necessity of monarchs to face up to the forces for change that resided in urban communities. A projection of this finding was that an autonomous civil society in the form that had taken root in the West probably did not exist in the Ottoman Empire. ₂₀ This confirmed and equilibrated my conclusions regarding devlet and the perpetuation of its ideology; devlet now seemed better understood as having been made up of three “faces”: its structure, its limitations when one looked at its patrimonial-sultanic operations, and the absence of an organized, rationally and legally legitimated, self-referential, countervailing urban movement. Underlying these, however, existed another foundation, that of religion.

The new Turkish republican regime retained elements of devlet as a political ideology while it promoted new values. Whereas the Ottoman patrimonial-sultanic scheme had defined government as underscored by the duties of rulers to provide good government for the people, the Turkish republic conceptualized its ideal of government—even though it was an ideal—as government of the people and by the people. This was a plus for the republic. Although it did not spell it outright, the new principle intimated an even more radical conceptual change: people not only made their own personal history but also were not prisoners of recurring cycles of history. This was the final version of a scheme of world history one could already find among nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectuals, but it was also a principle now asserted with much more conviction and optimism.

On the negative side, and something that was critically underscored for anyone who read Weber on religion, the new republican system broke with the old Ottoman practice of establishing bridges that linked elite and mass through the recognition of religion as discourse—as foundational of society. The new republican ideology, by denying the place of Islam as a discourse and its role as a “cement” of society, increased the distance between the educated and the uneducated. The old system tolerated social heterogeneity because it accepted the necessity of social symbiosis as premise. The new system was built on the (ultimately) Jacobin principle of a republic “une et indivisible” and had as policy the assimilation of deviant groups, who were characterized by republican ideologues as “feudal remnants.” ₂₁ The old system took existential questions seriously; the new considered these issues to be “metaphysical” and a residue of scholasticism. This latter attitude was again well illustrated by the thinking of our lycée teachers, who were imbued with the notion of irresistible progress toward a “positive” system relying on a reductionist dialectic made up of two antagonistic postulates, “science” and “reaction.”

From Sultanism to the Ottoman “Life-World”

In time it became clear to me that the old system could be understood only in the light of the function that religion had played in it. In that system, Islam made for symbiosis because it promoted a form of solidarity and sociopolitical identity known as asabiyya, even though it had no place for the type of solidarity that is emphasized in modern nationalism. ₂₂ With considerable prescience, Islam held the projection of national difference to be a form of tribalism. Islam established bridges between social groups because it functioned as a common language shared by upper and lower classes. Islam, by its very nature, answered existential questions.

Altogether, then, Islam was an important component of the old system before its gradual demise during the republican era, when secular reforms abolished the caliphate, established a state monopoly over education, disestablished the institution of the ulama (doctors of Islamic law), rejected Islamic law and adopted a modified version of the Swiss Civil Code, latinized the alphabet, and, in 1928, struck out the sentence in the Constitution of 1924 which stated that Turks were of the Islamic faith. ₂₃ This extraordinarily pervasive cultural change demanded to be explored for its social consequences, despite the outcries of my colleagues that I was wasting my time with antiquarian concerns (although they imputed most of Turkey’s ills to Islamic clerics). These colleagues were implicitly denying the role of the most important of micro structures—religion as belief and “life-world”—a further discovery, but one in which Weber and history seemed more relevant than Schutz’s critique of Weber. ₂₄

But once I began to look at Islam as a social datum, I noticed that I myself had been concentrating primarily on devlet in my studies. What emerged from this awareness and the explorations it promoted was that religion not only functioned as an institution (i.e., the corps of ulamas, medreses [seminaries], vakifs [pious foundations], and sufi orders) but also established noninstitutional links as discourse between devlet and the common folk. The nineteenth-century conservative historian Cevdet Pasa gave us a clue about how this system worked in his detailed description of the operation of Islamic public opinion on the occasion of funerals of Muslim officials. ₂₅

What I was discovering in looking at Islam as discourse was a sphere of social activity covered neither by institution nor by exercise of the power of devlet. That is, there existed, embedded in Ottoman social arrangements, a number of levels allowing for surreptitious “operativities” that took their force from the many layers of an Islamic cultural funnel. This conception of daily life as operativities has been promoted by Michel de Certeau, whose concern for the “life-world” overlaps with that of scholars such as the “later” Wittgenstein, Jürgen Habermas, Norbert Elias, and Anthony Giddens. ₂₆ All of them have been interested in finding out how the life-world and its cultural foundations acted as agent in the constitution of society.

Giddens, in particular, has signaled that the complex skills actors use in coordinating their day-to-day behavior assumed increasing importance during modernization. ₂₇ This insight is crucial for an understanding of modern Turkish society. The advent of universal education and mass media, the introduction of multiparty politics, and the enlarging of the sphere of public opinion have brought the Turkish public into a setting in which it has a more extensive “monitoring” role than it had fifty years ago. Where once religion was mediated “through a specialized domain of religious institutions or through other primary public institutions,” ₂₈ it has now become an organic part of highly mobilized Turkish society and works through the interstices of the “everyday.” It is this transformation the Kemalist and Marxisant intellectuals have difficulty following, and here the overwhelming stamp of devlet as a mode of thinking seems to be at fault.

In short, one of the advantages of this new “micro” view of social relations was that it enabled me to concentrate on the life activities of citizens. None of the items falling under the rubric of microsociology that went back to phenomenological analysis had been picked up by the Turkish group I study here. And yet the end of single-party rule and the greater participation of the common folk in politics made the analytical tool of devlet, already stale in the 1950s, even feebler for understanding the many-layered texture of social forces at work in Turkey after the 1950s. ₂₉

An interesting projection of this continued use of a modified avatar of the ideology of devlet is that in Turkey even modern Muslim conservative leaders and their followers conceive of Islam as centralist and hegemonic, that is, as another form of devlet that obfuscates the subtle arrangements between elite and folk culture that one observes in Islamic societies. I believe, therefore, that the concept “life-world,” which enables one to recapture the many dimensions of a subtler social analysis, sheds more light on the functioning of the Ottoman Empire and on present-day Turkish society than does a concern with macro structures. I am convinced that such an understanding will provide the lenses enabling Turkish secularists to live their daily lives without being bemused by the newly emerging religious forces in their society.

I can present what I have in mind about a new approach to the study of Turkey by drawing a rough sketch of what it would mean for Ottoman studies. One should begin to look at the way in which structures of understanding that existed in the minds of the Ottoman elites were reflected in state practice, the world of devlet, and how that world was linked to a homologous, corresponding world of folk practices—another level of the life-world operating in conjunction with Islam. The folk were buoyed by this layer of popular culture, and Ottoman bureaucrats, although they lived in a separate elite layer of culture, were nevertheless suffused with the ambient popular culture, manifestations of which they had names for, such as “janissary behavior,” “sufi extremism,” “sect formation,” and “Ottoman (i.e., strong) women.” Such a vocabulary made the ruling class sensitive to the microsociology of the Ottoman Empire.

This organic link disappeared in the republic together with its “reform” of language. The new social vocabulary relied on terms of social analysis introduced in France by proponents of solidarism in the late nineteenth century. Language, then, we are reminded, was a key component of the total set of Islamic “influences,” and the new regime was correct in revolutionizing the use of Turkish as one of its props. ₃₀ This revolution, however, created a second-order popular culture in which some of the old concepts lingered as residues unintegrated with an overarching Islamic culture, while the new republican ideology suffered from a similar lack of closure.

The extent to which Turkish society as seen from the perspective of the life-world can be revealing for modern Turkish history is illustrated by the problems faced by one segment of modern Turkey—Turkish intellectuals of republican times—as a consequence of their clean break with the past. There were two areas in which intellectuals felt disoriented in the first years of the republic. One was their role in the new devlet, the republican state, but there the difficulties encountered were not insuperable because the new devlet had taken over the earlier ideology of devlet, maintaining its broad outlines. The other was the shattering of the “everyday” world of the Ottoman intellectual, which seems to have presented more serious problems. This area involved questions relating to the severing of moorings to the Islamic cultural universe and the elaboration of the self linked to it. Questions about the social identity of the intellectual also arose in this context. I propose to examine these problems in connection with the life of Necip Fazil Kisakürek, an outstanding modernist Turkish poet.

I suggest, as a summary of what follows, that although Necip Fazil could fit himself into the frame of the new devlet, he was thrown off balance by the secular republic’s abrogation of what a modified Gramscian scheme would call the cultural organism underlying Ottoman state practice—that is, not only the educational and cultural institutions but also the deeper cultural process. The old Ottoman class of guardians and literati was integrated with both the machine and the organism. The new transitional intellectual of the 1930s and 1940s functioned with only one of these frames, the devlet. Eventually, the new intellectuals did acquire some confidence, but they never made up for the loss of the less salient cultural elements in the functioning of Ottoman intellectuals. This caused anxiety at the personal level and shallowness in their conceptual apparatus. Some of the quandaries may be followed in the life of Kisakürek.

Necip Fazil Kisakürek (1905–1983) is one of the puzzles of modern Turkish literature. Although his style is thoroughly modern, he has been an icon for religious conservatives, and he himself assumed the position of someone who systematically attacked Turkey’s modern secular culture. ₃₁

Necip Fazil did not receive his education in medreses but in a series of modern schools including the naval academy in Heybeliada (Istanbul). He studied literature in Paris; he was one of the rare Turkish litterateurs to have understood Western theories of poetics. His language was consciously the direct, unadorned “modern” Turkish of the twentieth century. Yet in 1934, a Nakshibendi sheikh, Abdulhakim Arvasi, changed his life. Under Arvasi’s influence, Kisakürek began the publication of Great East, a periodical that took up the defense of the “East” in general and of Ottoman Islamic culture in particular, a stance for which he was jailed a number of times between 1943 and the year of his death.

One explanation of Kisakürek’s popularity with conservative Muslims might be that his stance was a lever for acquiring a wide audience, and with it, power, in a country with rising literacy. But the usefulness of such an explanation disintegrates when one remembers that he was popular enough among the secular intelligentsia in his early years to have been asked to rewrite the republic’s national anthem (1938). Neither does it explain his attempt to “convert” at a time when it alienated his friends and brought the wrath of the Turkish state upon him. There was no organized Islamic movement at the time he took the plunge. A detailed study of his case shows that a number of subtler microprocesses were involved in his alienation from the mainstream ideology of the Turkish republic. Rather than explaining his conversion as caused by opportunism, we should focus on the pervasive angst that his writings show from the earliest time onward.

Conceptualized in terms of tiers, for the sake of brevity, we can distinguish two levels of Kisakürek’s disenchantment and re-Islamization. The first, that of the elaboration of the self, shows two dimensions in turn: on the one hand, an attempt to recapture the “embeddedness” of certain values from his childhood, and on the other, an attempt to elaborate a narrative background for his personal and social memory. The second level was his frustration with the fragility and diffuseness of the available space for intellectuals in Turkey. Elsewhere I have attempted to relate the ways in which these gaps were filled by our poet. ₃₂ A summary would cover the following points.

Kisakürek’s work shows the pervasive changes in the “places,” the spatial arrangements, of modern Turkey. (One of his most famous poems is titled “Sidewalks.”) These spaces are empty for him because they lack the values—sympathy, affection—that prevailed in his foundational space, the mansion (konak) where he spent his childhood. Even there, these values were on the wane; his grandmother, a main influence in his childhood, was thoroughly modernist. Consequently, he could perceive only the shadow of a more complete set of “Ottoman” relations. One may notice in his later life a constant effort to reconstruct a whole of which only wisps have been apprehended. The loss of konak life, with its intricate interconnections, meant loss not only of the affective background but also of the way in which this affective element was linked by intricate layers of perception related to Turkish society in its functioning both inside and outside the konak.

Another element in Kisakürek’s alienation was his inability to construct a coherent personal narrative that would integrate the history of the growth of his own self with the history of his family and its glorious feats in the town of Maras, as well as with the history of the Ottoman Empire. The absence of such a remembered frame of knowledge was, according to him, what had created the superficiality of all modern Turkish literature, a literature that imitated Western form but had never been able to fill it with content. To me, Kisakürek’s explanation does make more intelligible some of the remarks made by Muslim fundamentalists of the Arab sphere, such as Sayyid Qutb, concerning the diffuseness of the self of modern Muslims. ₃₃ Jerome Bruner’s (and the narrativists’) conception of the “narrative construction of reality” seems to explain more of Necip Fazil’s Baudelarian “spleen.” ₃₄ The absence of a narrative canon impeded the use of a time-frame and the construction of a coherent memory, leaving him anguished and lost.

Finally, Necip Fazil encountered difficulties in his self-positioning as an intellectual. During the Renaissance, such a frame for intellectuals had been elaborated in the West in the form of the Republic of Letters, a network of intellectuals linked not only to each other but also to an imagined audience, the European book-and-pamphlet-reading public. The ideational frame of this social network was what Ernest Gellner has named a common intellectual currency, ₃₅ which increasingly took the form of mechanistic atomism, the Hobbesian equivalent of Newton’s physics. It also toyed with the idea that cultures across the globe were on a footing of equality. This last feature, already observable in Montaigne, gained further salience in Europe during the eighteenth century.

This was a far cry from the group identity of the literati of the Ottoman Empire. For them, printed books became widely available only in the nineteenth century, traditional cultural forms prevailed until the 1850s, and philosophy was primarily centered in the mystical tradition. As to the variety of cultures, for Muslims, cultures were arranged in a hierarchical scale with Islam on top. The attempts of the Jesuits to legitimate Chinese culture as a superior one would have seemed quite inappropriate to Ottomans. Furthermore, Ottoman intellectuals and their modern Turkish successors sat comfortably in the ideology of devlet and were tied to it by their purse strings. As a result, in the majority they were unable to “float free,” something even the earliest members of the Republic of Letters had been able to do because of the real clientele of book readers that arose with the enormous diffusion of the book in Europe. This had not happened yet in Turkey.

Walter Andrews’s description of Ottoman literature of all levels as suffused by an ideology of closeness and familiarity is an additional element one must bring into play to understand the inability of the modern Turkish intellectual to fit into the new frame of anonymity. ₃₆ By rejecting Islam as an element of social life, the Turkish republic created a void in the setting and practice of intellectual production, and it also undermined aspects of micro-layers of self-definition and intersubjectivity. In short, a class of literati secure in its group identity was replaced by a class of persons confused about their identity as intellectuals and also as persons. This may well be the reason why many modern Turkish intellectuals adopted a crude sycophantic attitude toward the new devlet, an attitude quite different from that of the prominent ulamas in the Ottoman Empire. Marxism was one frame that, in the 1960s, resolved this structural dilemma of the place of Turkish intellectuals by openly making their role a conflictual one. But Islam was a more natural venue in which to dissipate one’s fears as a human being and as an intellectual, and that was the road chosen by Necip Fazil Kisakürek.

The methodological lesson to draw from my explorations is that the exclusively Western mechanistic-positivistic or functionalist view of society used by the inheritors of the tradition of devlet can be enriched by an approach that takes the life-world and the “everyday” into account. Today, for studies of Turkey, Mikhail Bakhtin seems more appropriate than Durkheim or Marx in his description of the components of dialogics or in his view of ritual inversions of hierarchy—but it will take some time before the level of Bakhtin’s cultural history is tapped by Turkish researchers. ₃₇

While the Turkish intellectuals of the 1980s and 1990s have mastered a superficial social analysis lacking the many layered depths of earlier Ottoman conceptualizations of society, they are stymied in their analysis of the dynamics of a society where cultural givens—that is, Islam—have acquired a new force.

Endnotes

Note 1: On Kemalism, see Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, London: I. B. Tauris, 1993, 189ff. On laicism in Turkey, see Zürcher, Turkey, and Cogito (Istanbul), vol. 1, no. 1, 1994, an issue on laicism that promotes the republican view. Regarding Marxisant scholars, it is interesting to note that for all their attempts to keep up with more fashionable versions of Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s, Turkish Marxians have been unaware of the contributions of Soviet social scientists such as Vygotsky and Bakhtin. See L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978; and Katerina Clarke and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1984. Back.

Note 2: Irvin C. Schick and E. Ahmet Tonak, eds., Turkey in Transition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Back.

Note 3: Mübeccel Kiray, Eregli: Agir Sanyiden önce Bir Sahil Kasabasi, Ankara: T. C. Basbakanlik Devlet Planlama Teskilati, 1964. Back.

Note 4: Çaglar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development, London: Verso, 1987. Back.

Note 5: For which see Metin Heper, “Extremely Strong State and Democracy: The Turkish Case in Comparative and Historical Perspective,” in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Democracy and Modernity, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992. Back.

Note 6: See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971; and N. Babbio, “Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society,” in John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State, London: Verso, 1988, 73–99. Back.

Note 7: For these approaches, see Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1986. And for cultural history, see Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982; and Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Back.

Note 8: Derek Layder, Understanding Social Theory, London: Sage, 1994, 5. Back.

Note 9: For which see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1990. Back.

Note 10: For which seen Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991. Back.

Note 11: For this problem, see George Ritzer, Contemporary Sociological Theory, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992, 81–82, 397–98, 428–29. Back.

Note 12: For works covering the Tanzimat and the era, see Roderic H. Davison, “Western Publications on the Tanzimat,” in Hakki Dursun Yildiz, ed., 150. Yilinda Tanzimat, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1992, 511–32. Back.

Note 13: On cameralism, see William Doyle, The Old European Order, 1660–1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, 235. Back.

Note 14: On Sultan Mahmud II, see Ahmet Cevdet, Tarih... Tertib-i Cedid, Istanbul: Matba-i Osmaniye, 1309AH/1893–94, 300. On Mustafa Resid, see Bayram Kodaman, “Mustafa Resid Pasanin Paris Sefirlikleri Esnasinda Takip Ettigi Genel Politika,” in Mustafa Resid Pasa ve Dönemi Semineri: Bildiriler, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1927, 73. On the Young Ottomans and the Young Turks, see my Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962, passim; and my Jön Türklerin Siyasi Fikirleri, Istanbul: iletisim, 1985. On Mustafa Kemal, see Sevket Süreyya Aydemir, Tek Adam: Mustafa Kemal, 1881–1919, 3 vols., Istanbul: Remzi, 1976. Back.

Note 15: On the link between these ideas and the ideology of devlet, see Levent Köker, Modernlesme, Kemalizm ve Demokrasi, Istanbul: iletisim, 1990, 71, 81, 96. Back.

Note 16: Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and the Discourses on the Origin of Inequality, edited by Lester G. Crocker, New York: Pocket Books, 1967, 167. Back.

Note 17: Weber used “patrimonialism” to refer to any type of Governmental Organized as a direct extension of the royal household, and “sultanism” to describe extreme forms of personal despotism. According to Weber, “patrimonialism/sultanism,” coupled, described best the type of government that developed in the “Orient,” whereas “patrimonialism/feudalism” was appropriate for the West. See Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, 100, 344–60. Back.

Note 18: Refik Halit Karay, Memleket Hikâyeleri, Istanbul: Semih Lutfi Kitabevi, 1939 Back.

Note 19: Max Weber, The City, New York: The Free Press, 1958. Back.

Note 20: ee my “Civil Society and Islam,” in John A. Hall, ed., Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995, 278–300. Back.

Note 21: Nasit Hakki (Ulug), Derebeyi ve Dersim, Ankara: Hakimiyeti Milliye Matbaasi, 1932. Back.

Note 22: On asabiyya, see Ira H. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 14. I was reminded of the importance of the term by my colleague Faruk Birtek of Bogaziçi University. Back.

Note 23: Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 194. Back.

Note 24: A. Schutz, The Phenomology of the Social World, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Back.

Note 25: Ahmet-Cevdet, Tezakir 40-Tetimme, edited by Cavid Baysun, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1967, 212. Back.

Note 26: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Also see Layder, Understanding Social Theory: for Habermas, 186ff., for Elias, 114–26, and for Giddens, 125–49. Back.

Note 27: Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, 285. Back.

Note 28: Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion, New York: Macmillan, 1967, 103 Back.

Note 29: Turkish Marxists, for instance, have never risen to E. P. Thompson’s richer analysis of social texture. Back.

Note 30: For a reminder of the complex and reciprocal relations between language and social tiers, see Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1969, 225–39. This is a subject that still needs study in the context of modern Turkey. Back.

Note 31: For a biography, see M. Orhan Okay, Necip Fazil Kisakürek, Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanligi, 1987. Back.

Note 32: Serif Mardin, “Culture Change and the Intellectual, a Study of the Effects of Secularization in Turkey: Necip Fazil and the Naksibendi,” in Serif Mardin, ed., Cultural Transitions in the Middle East, Leiden: Brill, 1994, 190–213. Back.

Note 33: On Sayyid Qutb, see William E. Shepard, “Islam as a ‘System’ in the Later Writings of Sayyid Qutb,” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 25, 1989, 31–50. Back.

Note 34: See Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 18, 1990, 1–21. Back.

Note 35: See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983, 21. Back.

Note 36: Walter Andrews, Poetry’s Voice, Society’s Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985. Back.

Note 37: A rare exception is the work of Ayse Saktanber in the Department of Sociology of the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. See her “Islamic Revitalization in Turkey: An Urban Model of a ‘Counter Society,’” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ankara: METU, 1995. Back.