Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks by Jenny White Review
Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks
William Armstrong - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
'Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks' by Jenny White (Princeton University Press, 2013, 40TL, pp 241)
It'southward a reviewer's chore both to critique the book at manus and to particular and summarize its near salient points. Information technology'due south a tribute to Boston University anthropologist Jenny White's fantabulous "Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks" that it makes the latter extremely difficult to practise, simply by doing justice to the enormous complexity of Turkish society. The reader is offered no simplistic thesis, but rather a careful consideration of the forces pulling the state in multiple, often contradictory directions; this makes the book a pleasure to read but something of a nightmare to review.
The "Muslim nationalism" of the title refers to Turkey's new hegemonic grouping. In contrast to the isolationist Kemalist republicans that went before, the Muslim nationalists accept a looser, less claret-based definition of Turkishness, imagining a nation with more flexible Ottoman boundaries. They were profoundly shaped by the "Turkish-Islamic synthesis" that emerged in the years after the 1980 military machine coup, and have a powerful commonage sense of identity, sometimes reinforced and sometimes contradicted by the consumerist blast that followed the opening upwards of the state'due south economy in the 1980s. Information technology's also not possible to sympathise them without reference to what White describes every bit a "distinctly Turkish postal service-imperial sensibility" - the Ottoman past now existence "romanticized and consumed uncritically." For many Muslim nationalists, therefore, the allegorical founding moment for the Turkish nation is the conquest of Istanbul in 1453, as opposed to the announcement of the republic in 1923. Accordingly, numerous "new" public festivals and ceremonies harking dorsum to the Islamic and Ottoman past have been introduced, often unsubtly placed at the time of traditional republican holidays.
Withal, Muslim nationalism is not merely an inheritor of a post-purple Ottoman sensibility, but as well – inevitably - 80 years of the Kemalist state tradition and its associated neuroses. The Muslim nationalist vision is shaped by an imperial Ottoman past overlaid onto a Republican land framework, and at its worst it'due south is a vision that mixes the toxic anxieties of both. This is a fact clearly demonstrated by the Turkish government's embarrassing references to pernicious "foreign powers" being behind the Gezi Park protests that recently swept across the country. Indeed, the "new Turks" perhaps share more with the old Kemalist establishment than they might care to acknowledge, combining a curious mixture of ofttimes contradictory ideas: the Kemalist external threat paradigm, authoritarianism, a belief in the effectiveness of social engineering, intolerance of heterodoxy, nationalist suspicion of outsiders, Turkish exceptionalism, and the patriarchal family unit. They too largely understand republic "every bit a mandate for the winning party to impose its values."
One of White'south central and well-nigh original sections comes when she examines the Muslim nationalists' attitude to women. For both Muslim and secular nationalists, White says, at that place is a "articulate link between sexual purity and national honor … [a] discursive clan between the penetrability of national boundaries, female sexual vulnerability, and male person sexual agency." Equally the dreadful "journalist" Fatih Altaylı wrote in a 2008 column: "Maybe you are not enlightened of the fact that the Turkish regular army is likewise protecting what is between a adult female's legs. The Turkish army protects the borders of Turkey, and this border lies betwixt a adult female's legs." Ultimately, both Muslim and secular nationalists share a highly gendered understanding of the "motherland," limiting women's roles in essentially masculinist and militarist configurations of national identity.
White assuredly suggests that the two old monolithic "categories" of secular and Islamic nationalism actually have more in common than the chronic polarization in the country might suggest. Although the lines of demarcation are sharply drawn, they are frequently (unconsciously) crossed. 1 interpretation of the Gezi Park protests that have recently shaken Turkey is that their cadre is made upwards of a largely apolitical young generation, opposed to absolutism in all its forms and unmoved by the stale quondam dichotomy. The government's response may accept stuck rigidly to the sometime image - casting the demonstrators equally niggling more than antediluvian coup-cornball Kemalists - simply many of those protesting on the streets no longer consider those quondam distinctions to be relevant anymore. Nevertheless, this constituency still only makes up a tiny proportion of Turkey'south population, and probably also only a small proportion of all Turkey'south youth. Whether it will be able to take any significant effect on Turkey'southward future political direction is at present a critical question.
Notable recent release
'Constantinople' by Edmondo De Amicis
(Alma Classics, $xx, pp 352)
Source: https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/opinion/william-armstrong/muslim-nationalism-and-the-new-turks-49016
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