Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey: Chapter 13

1997

13. The Turkish Option in Comparative Perspective

My direct knowledge of Turkey is extremely limited, but I have for many years been concerned with its long-distance neighbors: the neighbors in one direction, across the Mediterranean on the northern shore of Africa, as examples of Muslim society, and equally Turkey’s neighbors to the north, as examples of Marxist ones. This is the excuse for my undertaking what I am about to do, namely, discuss the Turkish option, the Turkish path, to whatever that thing called modernity may be. My main point will be something like this: to stress the fascinating uniqueness of Turkey, or the multiple uniquenesses of Turkey, and the interconnectedness of the various unique aspects of the Turkish political and social experience. The uniqueness is found in at least four fields: in religion, in state formation, in the pattern of nationalism, and in the diverse styles of modernity. These four things overlap, of course, and are interconnected.

Let me begin with religion. Here already there is a kind of double uniqueness: Islam is unique among world religions, and Turkey is unique within the Muslim world. The uniqueness of Islam, so far as I can see, is very simple. One of the most famous theses of sociology is the secularization thesis, the idea that under conditions of modernity and industrialization and associated political changes, which one can lump together as modernity, the hold of religion over society and over the hearts and minds of men diminishes. This generalization is far from completely true: there are all kinds of countercurrents, and the patterns of secularization vary; nevertheless, by and large, if one has to say yes or no, the answer is yes, secularization on the whole does occur. But not in Islam.

In Islam, in the last hundred years, the hold of religion over society has not diminished, and by some criteria it has probably increased. Other societies may have their Bible belts, but Islam is a Koran belt; it has no particular Koran belt. And the hold of the religion over society seems interestingly independent of other aspects of society; it applies equally to societies still under traditional regimes and to those under regimes that embrace or embraced radical socialist policies. In either case, secularization has not occurred, with one interesting exception—Turkey.

Why has secularization not occurred in Islam in general? Nobody really knows the answer, but I am prepared to offer a theory. I am not sure it is true, but I think it deserves to be considered. It is a relatively simple theory, and it runs as follows. The connection, the Weberian connection, between modernity and “Protestantism,” using this as a generic concept, does indeed obtain. Modern societies, through economic growth, occupational mobility, rationale of production, and so on, have a tendency to move toward the “Protestant” features of religion, by which I mean symmetry, absence of religious hierarchy, simplicity, unitarianism, puritanism, scripturalism—the kind of syndrome that, in the European tradition, is associated with Protestantism. This is the first point.

Point two: Of the Western monotheisms, Islam is the most Protestant. That is, at least high and “proper” Islam, Islam as codified by the people who, within the religion, are treated as authoritative, has certain appropriate “Protestant” features: rule orientation, strict unitarianism, a kind of completeness, the stress on doctrine, and the finality of doctrine. It is significant that there is an actual name for the sin of pretending to mediate between a human and God; mediation, or the cult of personality and religious hierarchy, is formally proscribed, even though it is practiced. Equally significant, there is a name for the sin of innovation. And there is the completeness and equal accessibility of the message in writing, which makes for a kind of religious egalitarianism weighted slightly in favor of literate men—all this is highly significant. Now, if this is a correct sketch of Islam, and if the Weberian thesis is correct, then they already go some way toward explaining why Islam has suffered less from modernization and the impact of the modern world than have all the other major religions, not to mention the minor ones.

But there is more to it than that. The main characteristic of Muslim religious life has been the polarization between a high tradition of scholars—unitarian, puritanical, scripturalist, antimediationist—and a folk tradition oriented basically toward saint cults and therefore mediationist, ecstatic, unpuritanical, and with an ethic of loyalty rather than an ethic of rules. These two elements within the faith frequently cohabit peacefully and harmoniously, interpenetrating each other without conflict. At other times the latent stress between them comes out into the open, and hence there is a kind of oscillation in the history of Muslim societies. When we come to the modern world, however, for the first time we get, instead of an oscillation, a definite and final swing of the pendulum in the direction of the “higher” form.

In my view, this occurs basically because the social underpinning of the “lower,” or folk, variant diminishes or disappears. (When I say “high” and “low,” I am not making a value judgment but am using the terms in a kind of technical, sociological sense.) The low, or popular, form of Islam has as its underpinnings those mutual aid, mutual insurance, semiautonomous units generally appearing in the literature as “tribes,” whose internal organization is naturally inclined toward what one might call a Durkheimian style of religion—a religion that is, so to speak, the choreography of social organization, that provides the punctuation in space and time of social life. When these units are eroded by political and economic centralization, by incorporation of the local units into a well-centralized state, by the destruction of local units—their atomization—and by their inclusion in large, bureaucratic, administrative units and in a large market, then the folk variant of faith loses its underpinning and tends to wither away or become much weakened. It does not disappear completely, and it continues to have all kinds of therapeutic functions, but it is weakened. This social transformation appears at the level of consciousness as a kind of sudden rediscovery of the principles that had always been recognized in theory but had not been followed—the proscription of mediation, the technical absence of clergy, and so on.

If you accept all this, it has a further important implication that I think helps to explain the vigor of Islam throughout the twentieth century and its escape from the secularization fatality. Muslim societies, when in the position of underdevelopment—when finding themselves in a temporary economic and military inferiority vis-à-vis other societies possessed of more powerful technology—escape what might be called the classical East European dilemma, which has its supreme expression in Russian literature of the nineteenth century: the opposition between Westernizing and populism. Most undeveloped societies, confronted suddenly with an irritating and humiliating technical economic superiority on the part of some outsiders, face two options that might be expressed this way: we can imitate them so that we will be as strong as they are and can send them back where they belong, or we can reaffirm our own values. If we imitate them, we shall acquire their strength, but psychologically it is a bit unpleasant because it means expressing contempt for our own tradition. Alternatively, we can say that our own values, though they may not be materially as effective, have some deeper merits and deeper significance. You might call this the Tolstoyan answer. It is difficult to idealize the local ancien régime at the top, because it is in decline. But we can idealize or value the local folk tradition, and that is what many people in this situation have done; it is a characteristic East European reaction. This is the dilemma, and it is the basic story of East European underdevelopment.

Islam was different, and for a simple reason. In order to affirm itself against outsiders, a genuinely local tradition was available, and it had most of those modern features, at least by Weberian criteria: it was unitarian, it had a low loading of magic, and it was scripturalist and individualist and thus well adjusted to a mobile and therefore egalitarian modern society. It required discipline, and so one could blame backwardness on the folk tradition, which in any case could always be described, with some plausibility, as an aberration, as crypto-paganism. Thus one could find a genuinely local tradition, perhaps not quite so old as fundamentalist Muslims like to believe—insofar as the high tradition may not, in fact, be identical with the actual practice of the Prophet and his companions—but still, one that is genuinely old and genuinely local. There is no need either to go to the muzhik or to imitate the Westerner; one could combine both aims (self-respect and the imposition of the new self-discipline) by using a genuinely local tradition that had always been respected, though not widely followed, and that had previously been a minority accomplishment of the privileged urban stratum of society.

This is the theory I offer to explain the extraordinary vigor of Islam in the last hundred years. Turkey is an exception, because Turkey is the one important case within Islam of an elite’s turning convincingly, and with some permanence, to a semisecular tradition. Why is Turkey the exception within the exception?

In the sphere of state formation, Turkey is exceptional probably by any standard but particularly within the Muslim world. By and large, I am an enthusiastic follower of Ibn Khaldun, and I think basically he was right: his sketch of Muslim society up to the coming of the impact of the industrial world, his sketch of the mechanics of its political life, of the rise and decline of political authority, was correct. His argument is well known. It constitutes a most interesting contrast to the main theme of European or what might be called Western or Atlantic sociology.

That theme is the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from community to society, from the closed community—the integrated world in which vision of the world and social hierarchy and social life all interlock—to the mobile, open, progressive, growth-oriented, centralized society. One either likes this transition, if one is a “progressive,” or dislikes it, if one is a romantic traditionalist. But for Europeans, this is the basic direction of history, and it is the concern with this long-term secular trend that is at the heart of sociology.

Ibn Khaldun differs from this view in that, although he too is preoccupied with this very contrast, he does not for a moment think of it as a long-term trend. Each of the two elements is permanently present in his mind and in the world he knows. To him, rural communities—self-administering and unpoliced, and therefore cohesive and martial, but economically unspecialized—coexist with urban societies, which are specialized, productive, and economically essential, but for that very reason politically emasculated. This is the human condition.

Ibn Khaldun is the most wertfrei, the most neutral, of sociologists; he just “tells it like it is” and offers little in the way of a recipe for correcting. He just analyzes. And both elements are, in his view, essential for society. Interestingly, urban society is economically essential, which is not a European view. Country folk, paradoxically, need the specialists of those clustered habitations of traders and artisans protected by the citadel. They need them economically, but politically it is the other way around. Politically, the towns need the cohesion and discipline of the countryside. The townsmen are nearly powerless politically and militarily, and the only way order can be maintained is by the provision of rulers from the rural reservoir of political and military talent. So far as Ibn Khaldun is concerned, this is how it is and how it will always be.

I think he was right. Hence, one of the criticisms to which my theory, based on Ibn Khaldun’s, has often been subjected is simple: it does not apply to Turkey. The corollary of Ibn Khaldun’s position is that political power is unstable; rulers are supplied from the reservoir of virtue and political talent in the countryside, but this virtue is destroyed by its very political success, so that every few generations it has to be replaced. Thus there is a kind of permanent rotation of elites, and political instability. But if that is so, then how does one explain an empire that dominated the eastern Mediterranean, or most of it, for four or five centuries and was markedly stable? On the surface, Turkey indeed constitutes an exception.

I think my answer to this would be that under the surface, in large parts of the Ottoman Empire, the world of Ibn Khaldun was alive and well. This was so in most of Algeria and the Ottoman-dominated part of North Africa, in the Arabian peninsula, and in most of eastern Anatolia. The only areas that were more effectively centralized were parts of the Balkans and the Nile Valley, and maybe some of the sedentarized parts of the Middle East and regions lying along the routes that had to be kept open. The rest of the nominally Ottoman area was governed in the Ibn Khaldunian manner, in a tacit and varying degree of incorporation with the center. But that is not a debate I want to enter now. The fact is that at the center, there was indeed a different kind of regime, and the Ottomans perfected a different political principle in marked contrast to the Ibn Khaldunian doctrine that the only way to govern society is to accept the state as a gift from the tribe, that the only way to acquire political virtue is in the rude life of self-help in the savanna or the mountains.

As an alternative to that, there is the Platonic recipe for how to govern society—that is, how to create cohesion—not by the “natural” process of self-help in the desert but by sustained education. The first famous blueprint for this is Plato’s Republic. According to it, we can stabilize society and maintain order provided we have really virtuous rulers, and the only way of making them really virtuous is by having thorough and sustained education from the beginning, producing a kind of meritocratic elite that at the same time is safe from temptation by being communistic, free from the temptations of kin and property. Such a communistic, spartan elite owes its virtue both to its training and to its social position, which frees it from temptation.

The nearest example of, or the nearest approximation to, Plato’s recommended way of running society was Sparta, which, in Xenophon’s and Adam Ferguson’s words, made virtue the business of the state. It did have an elite trained in these ways, virtuous to an exceptional extent, and it came closer to practicing these ways than did the more relaxed neighboring societies. But on the whole, in that kind of Durkheimian society based on local kin groups and local ritual, it is difficult to impose virtue with great conviction. The Platonic recipe for running society really had a good chance of widespread application only with the coming of what Karl Jaspers called axial religions, a notion recently revived by S. N. Eisenstadt.

Axial religions are scriptural and puritanical. Their focus on written texts and their provision of institutions for preserving texts allows for sustained training. The sacred texts also externalize authority—that is, give it a kind of extra-ethnic, extra-political standing—so that sustained training of a nonreligious sort can be carried out. All this seems to have come together in the Ottoman Empire, which combined sustained training with the Mamluk principle of selecting rulers individually rather than tribally. For once, there was a strong and stable state, which lasted much longer than the Ibn Khaldunian model would allow.

There were other Mamluk societies as well, but the Ottoman Empire was the one where this kind of detached elite, systematically trained and disconnected from the productive part of society, was brought to the height of perfection, and it led to remarkable political results in terms of stability. This Platonic-axial way of running society perhaps helps to explain the first puzzle, why Turkey was an exception within an exception. It was precisely because the state was relatively strong when the predicament of underdevelopment came—when Western domination became manifest in the nineteenth century—that the local high religious tradition was less tempting as an escape than it was elsewhere. In a strong state, that religious tradition was itself compromised: it was part of the same ancien régime that was blamed for the new relative weakness and for its aggravation. There was no escape in that direction.

Roughly the following generalization holds: the better located and better placed the religious scholars were, the less they provided an option for escape from what I call the East European dilemma—for the use of the high tradition as an escape, a new identity, a means of self-discipline, a means of achieving against the outside. So the very success of this unique political experiment also stopped Turkey from moving in the direction in which most of the rest of the Muslim world has gone.

Furthermore, and connected with this, there is nationalism. In my view, nationalism is not something universal, something inherent in the human condition, as nationalists like to present it. Neither is it some kind of aberration, or a by-product of an ideological disease, as my friend the late Elie Kedourie presented it. Nor is it a revival of atavistic forces going back to the very roots of human being. It is, I think, a consequence of modernity. It is a consequence of the fact that in the kind of economy in which we live, a high culture, a literate and educationally transmitted culture, is by far the most important characteristic and possession of a person.

In agrarian society, work is physical. With us, work is semantic. In order to be employable, but also in order to be an effective citizen, two conditions are required. First, you have to be competent in the idiom employed by the surrounding educational, economic, and administrative bureaucracies. Second, your personal characteristics must be compatible with the self-image of the culture in question. If you master the idiom— and it is an abstract idiom that can be mastered only through formal education—and are also acceptable to it through your personal characteristics, then full citizenship is open to you. If not, your life is a series of humiliations.

And this dilemma, this basic situation of modern humans, forces people to be nationalists, because either they are in the satisfactory condition, having mastered the high culture of the institutions surrounding them, or they are not. If not, then they have a number of options: to assimilate, to migrate, or to become irridentist nationalists and try to change the situation. The society has similar options toward those who do not fit its local dominant characteristics: to assimilate them, to expel them, or to “ethnically cleanse” them, whether by murder, by forcible expulsion, or by intimidation. These are the processes we have been witnessing in the twentieth century.

This is the basic underlying pattern of nationalism, which requires, for a viable polity, congruence between state and culture. It is a completely new situation. It was absent in the past in the agrarian world, where, on the contrary, culture was required to be highly differentiated because its main function was to underwrite nuances of status in societies that had complex hierarchies. Vertical differences in culture were encouraged in order to mark the different statuses, and lateral differences were encouraged by the sheer fact that the majority of the people were agricultural producers living in closed communities that tended to differentiate themselves from each other by a kind of automatic cultural dialectal drift. By contrast, in the modern world, culture does not mark status; it marks the boundaries of political units and the kinds of pools within which individuals can move freely in what is inherently an unstable occupational structure.

Paths to this blessed marriage of state and culture vary a great deal, according to the availability and condition of the partners. Within Europe, there are three or four “time zones,” and the relationship of the partners to each other differs from zone to zone. In the westernmost time zone, along the Atlantic coast, the two partners have, by historical accident, been cohabiting for a long time, long before the marriage was prescribed by the new logic of the situation. The fairly strong dynastic states based in Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, and London correlated roughly with cultural zones anyway, so that come the age of nationalism, nothing much needed to be done. The only major change in West European boundaries under the impact of the nationalist principle has been the creation of the Republic of Ireland. Otherwise, the frontiers have not changed much and are really more closely related to dynastic wars of the prenationalist age than to details of the ethnographic map.

In the next time zone to the east, the bride was beautifully tarted up and ready at the altar, but the bridegroom was missing. In other words, a high culture, codified and staatsfähig, ready for the modern world, was available to both the Italians and the Germans. Italians had had it since roughly the time of Dante, and the Germans since Luther or perhaps even earlier. There was a fairly compact catchment area of peasants speaking dialects not too distant from the language of the high culture in question. The cultural bride was ready; the political groom was missing. But in the nineteenth century, he was found in Piedmont and Prussia, and the marriage was in due course arranged without excessive violence. The amount of violence and manipulation practiced by Cavour and Bismarck was not all that much greater than that which was customary in dynastic wars, not to mention religious wars, which had been much worse.

It was in the eastern part of Europe, where neither bride nor groom was present, that nationalism was bound to create the greatest havoc because it required both political and cultural engineering. Here there were no national states but only dynastic political units and religious ones. And where you have a mass of variegated dialects, most of them not staatsfähig, uncodified, and not immediately eligible for a modern, centralized, bureaucratic, single-market state, you are in trouble. Moreover, East Europe could be subdivided into two further time zones according to whether there was, for forty or seventy years after the collapse of the old dynastic religious system, a new secular ideocracy.

Again, none of this applies to the Muslim world. If my diagnoses of Muslim fundamentalism and nationalism are correct, then the two have the same root: the switch from a society based on food production and storage, with a stable technology, a majority of peasants, and no expectation of growth, to a modern society in which work is no longer physical, agriculture is just one profession among others, growth is expected, occupational instability is inherent, and semantic standardization is required. This is the underlying force, which for some reason manifests itself primarily as nationalism in Europe and primarily as fundamentalism in the world of Islam. I say primarily because, of course, fundamentalism and nationalism are intertwined in Europe: nationalism uses religion in cases where the nation happens to be religiously defined and contrasted with its neighbors. Still, the stress in Europe clearly is on nationalism rather than fundamentalism, and in Islam it is the other way around.

The difference between the two is that nationalism consists of the worship of a differentiated high culture without the religious doctrine once linked to it. The doctrine has been shed. In early modern times, the two were linked. Bernard Shaw comments on this eloquently in Saint Joan, where he requires Joan to be burned as a Protestant heretic by the church and as a nationalist by the English. There are other examples of the linkage of the two themes, but all in all, the two elements usually became separated, and modern European nationalists are committed to an apotheosis of a national culture without linking it to a doctrine. In the Muslim world, the linkage of faith and high culture has remained firm. It is not clear why this should have happened.

Once again, the Turkish case is profoundly eccentric. If you take my parable of the bride and bridegroom, the Turkish case seems to be the opposite of that of the two great nations of the erstwhile Holy Roman Empire, where the bride was there but the groom was missing, where political organization was fragmented but cultural homogeneity was considerable, and where the cultural machinery was present. The Turkish Ottoman case seems to be one in which, on the contrary, the groom was present. There was a state elite, but so far as I know, it was not deeply identified with Turkish ethnicity. The elite spoke Turkish, but it did not single out the Anatolian peasantry as its favored object. It was a state elite, linked to the state, and it just happened to speak Turkish. It was in the past identified with Islam, but it controlled an ethnically and religiously variegated population.

Whereas in Italy and Germany, a self-conscious culture had to look for its political patron (Prussia and Piedmont were available), in Turkey it was the other way around: a political elite was looking for a way out of relative decline and needed to find an ethnic group. The way to religion was blocked because the religion was too closely linked with the declining ancien régime, so the elite had to look for an ethnic bride. The Anatolian peasantry was available. The bride hardly knew what was happening to her and continued to think for some time in religious rather than political terms. But again, the pattern contrasts interestingly both with the rest of Islam and with the three or four different patterns of relationship in Europe.

What were the consequences? So far as I can see, what crystallized was a distinctive new political system. The Kemalist revolution adopted the Western path and was lucky in that, unlike Turkey’s northern neighbors, the Russians, it did so without adopting an overspecific sociopolitical doctrine, something that in the Russian case turned out to be economically and politically catastrophic. What the Kemalists chose was a relatively nebulous emulation of Western political principles: nationalism, constitutionalism, and whichever other features Western societies possessed that were, by association, rightly or wrongly credited with being the sources of their strength. These principles were taken up by the old political elite, by the groom in my parable, and applied in the spirit to which the elite was accustomed. So Westernization was carried out in the spirit of high Islam.

My first experience of Turkey was a fascinating occasion that I owe to the patronage of Serif Mardin. It took place sometime in the 1960s, when members of the first generation of the Kemalist elite were still alive. I was able to observe their state of mind when I was invited to a conference on society and religion. The invitation said something quite innocuous like “religion is a terribly important phenomenon and ought to be studied”—nothing one could possibly contest. When I came, I found that the real content of the conference was far more specific: how do we stop the peasants and the small towns from voting for parties which then flirt with religion?

The basic dilemma was, so far as I could see, that the Kemalist heritage was committed to the Western sociopolitical system, but if that system was implemented, then sooner or later people who flirted with religion and betrayed the Kemalist tradition would win the elections. Either you give up democracy and in doing so contradict the principles you are supposed to be applying, or else you implement it, in which case you allow people to win who will, in turn, betray it. Under the impact of this dilemma, a new cyclical political system emerged, which for a time seemed to be institutionalized. It was quite different from the Ibn Khaldunian cycle. First, the army, the guardian of this new democratic tradition, allows free elections to take place. A party wins that would betray the Kemalist tradition, so the army steps in and hangs its leader. Then, after a time, it hands the government back again, and so on. I think it was Mark Twain who said, “Giving up smoking is easy, I’ve done it so many times.” The Turkish army could say, “Reestablishing democracy is easy, we have done it so many times.” And so this cycle appeared as if it were institutionalized.

At that conference it was very interesting to watch these Kemalist ulamas. They discussed, for instance, an advertisement that had appeared in a newspaper, endorsing one of the coups. The advertisement said the coup was legitimate for certain reasons. And somebody at the conference said, this clearly was the Kemalist fatwa (in its usual sense, a Koranic legal ruling). Then someone else stood up and said, this wasn’t a fatwa for reasons A, B, C, D, and E. This man was clearly an excellent alim (Koranic scholar); he knew exactly the theological principles concerning what was and was not a fatwa. And he was not only an alim of Kemalism, he was also an alim sans phrase. He knew his stuff. And it was clear that he was practicing Kemalism in this kind of ulama spirit.

It is interesting to contrast this spirit with that of the next generation, including people such as Serif Mardin and Nur Yalman, who are no longer so committed to a Kemalist secularism but, on the contrary, are trying to find a way out of the dilemma that led to this circle in politics. The argument is, we were wrong to identify Islam with the rigid, administrative ulamas, linked to the central power. Out there in Anatolia, one can find a more liberal, more humane, more elastic, more pliable, and perhaps more modernizable Islam to which we can turn and which will enable us to escape from that dilemma.

It is not for me to say how plausible and effective these alternatives are. All I can say is that I am pleased that the new circle, the new rotation that I thought I was observing—this periodic return to purification by the army and then a return to democratization—now seems to have ended. At least, the last cycle seems to be going on for quite a long time, and one may hope that the spell is broken. This, then, is the manner in which I see the uniqueness of the Turkish experience, vis-à-vis Europe, vis-à-vis its northern and now tragic neighbor, Russia, and also vis-à-vis the Muslim worlds to the south, in which, for better or worse, the fundamentalists seem to be winning.