Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State
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Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State Christopher Houston BERG Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State This Page Intentionally Left Blank Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State Christopher Houston Oxford • New York First published in 2001 by Berg Editorial offices: 150 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JJ, UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA © Christopher Houston 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 85973 472 3 (Cloth) ISBN 1 85973 477 4 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants. Printed in the United Kingdom by Antony Rowe. Contents Acknowledgements vii Prologue ix Introduction 1 Part I 1 Global Cities, National Projects, Local Identities 7 2 Suburban Sequestration and the Making of Alternative Localities in Kuzguncuk 17 3 Civilizing Islam and Uncivil Laicism 35 4 Islamist Populism, Social Distinction and Class 49 5 Carnival and the Staging of History 65 Part II 6 Turkish Republicanism and its Islamist Interrogator 85 7 The Kurdish Problem: Assimilation as a Legislative Practice and Narrative Ideal 95 8 Profane Knowledge: Kurdish Diaspora in the Turkish City 113 Part III 9 Islamist Politics and Ethnic Cleansing 135 10 Islamist Responses to the Kurdish Problem: Statist Islamism 147 –v– Contents 11 A Plague on Both Your Houses! The Kurdish Problem According to Islamist Discourse 157 12 Allah Delights in Diversity: Kurdish Islamism on the Kurdish Question 171 13 Conclusion: Islamist Politics and the Superseding of Ethnicity 191 Epilogue 199 References 201 Index 209 – vi – Acknowledgements It is a genuine pleasure to thank so many people for their collaboration in the long process of researching and writing a book. Writing of any kind is a collective activity, and the collective – disunited, rowdy and dispersed as it is – involved in the producing of this book is rather large. First I wish to express my gratitude to neighbours and friends in Kuzguncuk, who made living there for the most part a truly happy experience. Second I would like to thank my interviewees, many of whom became close friends, for their patience and forbearance at my leading questions, repetitive confusions and muddle-headed presumptions. They tried to set me aright, with varying success. Third I wish to offer special thanks to ªeyhmus and his family, whose door (and fridge) were permanently open to their Australian guest. And to Suheyla abla in particular for treating me as warmly as a son. Fourth I wish to thank the staff at Boðazici University for their kind advice and support, especially Ayþe Hanim, who let me share her study, at considerable inconvenience to her daily programme. Without the insights, friendship and helpfulness of them all Istanbul would not be the second home it so happily became. I acknowledge here too the support of the Commonwealth Government of Australia, whose research scholarship enabled me to pursue my academic interests in Turkey. The Turkish Consul in Melbourne agreed to my request for a research visa, for which I am grateful. I am deeply grateful too for the intellectual inspiration of my colleagues, Joel Kahn, Rowan Ireland and Chris Eipper, whose sage comments made the decisions of composition so much clearer. And let me not forget Charlie Ambrose, computer trouble- shooter extraordinaire, who pulled me out of more crashes than I care to remember. Last I wish to name my family, to thank them for their support during the period of the research. Here of course I include my partner Esma. You are as much a part of the book as its punctuation. – vii – This Page Intentionally Left Blank Prologue Republic Day, 29 October 1994, Istanbul Red flags filing into Taksim Square: teeming on the flagpoles outside the five-star hotels, draped over the balconies of offices, promenading down the boulevards. Shaking the hands of children sitting on their fathers’ shoulders, swishing like snappy red butterflies across the face of the Atatürk Cultural Centre, as fearless as acrobats high over the unfinished hole of the Istanbul Metro. Flags pinning up the sky. Slogans pasted around the square: ‘What happiness to be living in Atatürk’s Turkey.’ ‘Today think of Mustafa Kemal and the Republic.’ ‘Without ceasing we will protect Turkish independence and the Turkish Republic.’ ‘The Republic is the future.’ Music, popstars, celebrities, personalities! Pledges prancing on the stage. ‘We love Atatürk and the Republic.’ Banks of howling speakers, spotlights, cameras, cheers. Brackets of songs stitched together with the compère’s prattle. ‘Republic Day, our greatest celebration!’ The voice of the crowd, the voice of the singer, echoes bouncing off the buildings. Fireworks, oohs, aahs, whistles, roars. Silence. The national anthem. ‘What Happiness to say, “I am a Turk”’, in huge flaming letters on the roof of the Concert Hall. Green laser light shooting across the dark of the Metro hole to play on the glass backdrop of the Marmara Hotel, ‘Independence or Death!’ Atatürk’s famous silhouette trudging up the building, forever establishing the Republic. Music spraying the crowd, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with bass drums booming, ‘Next stop the Aegean’ flickering on the wall. Fireworks. More fireworks! Acrid smoke drifting over the nation, to be taken home with the children and thrown over the chair with the clothes to be worn all of the 30th of October. – ix – This Page Intentionally Left Blank Introduction Introduction During the two years of my research in Istanbul (October 1994–December 1996) I lived, more by chance than design, in the small suburb of Kuzguncuk, a district squashed up hard against the Bosphorus by the Muslim, Jewish and Christian cemeteries on its surrounding slopes. In Turkish Kuzguncuk means the ‘grille in the prison door’, and Kuzguncuk did seem to peer out on the broad expanse of the sea channel from its narrow neighbour- hood beneath the hills. I had wanted to live in Fatih, an ancient suburb within the historic peninsula on one of Istanbul’s seven hills, noted for its religious affectations. But the price and poor quality of housing was a deterrent and Kuzguncuk, which falls within the electoral boundaries of the Üsküdar Council, seemed on first reconnaissance as good a base as any from which to pursue research. For Üsküdar (on the other side of the Bosphorus from Fatih) had been won by the ‘Islamist’ Refah (Welfare) Party in the 1994 Istanbul local government elections, and thus appeared a propitious place from which to examine the workings of the Islamist movement. Ironically, Fatih was won by Refah, only to be lost in a re-election, and so was controlled by the Motherland Party. As it turned out, Kuzguncuk itself probably did not deliver many votes to the Refah Party in either the local elections of 1994 or the general election of 1996: party meetings at a local coffee-house during the campaign for the 1996 election were not well attended, and on one particularly dis- appointing occasion had to be cancelled when only the convener and I turned up. Refah’s women’s section in Kuzguncuk was more successful, organizing meetings over a meal at various women’s houses to publicize the programme and recruit members. In Istanbul alone, the Refah Party claims to have over 300,000 women members. ‘We are organized in every county of Istanbul province, down to individual neighbourhoods. Each member’s name is on our computers,’ says the head of Refah’s Istanbul Women’s Commission (Turkish Daily News, 15 Dec., 1995). The Islamist movement does not exist in a vacuum though, and its dimensions, ambiguities and self-constitution are explicable only in relation to state or other oppositionary discourses. Kuzguncuk proved an –1– Introduction extremely fertile neighbourhood in which to encounter people’s embellish- ment of these discourses. Further, there was a small, unpopular but active group of ‘Islamists’ living in Kuzguncuk. They refused to perform the daily prayer ritual (namaz) in the mosque, and were also extremely cynical about the Islamic pedigree of the Refah Party, which was supposed to be pursuing their political vision. Like most suburbs of Istanbul, Kuzguncuk was far from being impervious to the siren appeal of Islamist politics. For most of the two years of my fieldwork in Istanbul I attended the Koran study organized by this group, whose members took turns to host our twice-weekly readings. Not all were convinced of my sincerity when I told Ahmet aðabey, their enthusiastic leader, that I wanted to learn about Islam. But my ignorance and status was on the whole forgiven as we worked our way through the text with the aid of various tefsir (commentaries). Still, I probably disappointed those who had hoped that our labour might result in my Islamic enlightenment. I confess that I remained a Christian, if not a particularly pious one, throughout my fieldwork. Other participants were nonplussed when I said I wished to understand what an Islamist movement does. Perhaps because not all of them inter- preted their earnest study of the Koran as contributing to the wider enlivening of Islam in Istanbul. Yet by contrast with Paul Stirling’s experience as an object of suspicion in rural Turkey – as recounted by his research assistant Emine Inciroglu (1994) – in nearly all my many interviews with Islamist journalists, activists and scholars, my being a non-Muslim did not present itself as a problem.