1980 saw the occurrence of the third coup in the history of the Turkish Republic. Interfering in the struggles between the right wing ultra nationalists and Marxist-Leninists that dominated the 1970s, the Turkish Army took control of the government for roughly three years. An important act of the junta was the adoption of a new cultural program, called the “Turkish Islamic Synthesis.” Promoted by a group of conservative intellectuals – “Intellectual Hearts”– and advocating the integration of Sunni Islamic values into national culture, the project was officially endorsed in the National Culture Report of the State Planning Organization in 1983 (Bozkurt 1991). This transformation materialized in a pedagogical initiative to promote a new understanding of the Turkish citizenry as a people not only of distinguished military fervor, but also religious piety (Kaplan 2006). Tracing the impact of this transformation on Turkish national defense, this paper explores an emergent Islamist opposition to it. Firstly, it demonstrates the increased invocation of religious traditions of martyrdom in military education after 1980. Analyzing military education textbooks and relevant political documents and speeches, the paper illustrates the ways in which an intimate relationship between Islam and Turkish national defense has been forged on the basis of Islamic teachings, poetry, and the story of the Prophet’s life. Secondly, the paper turns attention to an emergent Islamist resistance to this association of Islam with Turkish militarism. A group of Muslim activists have recently organized peace initiatives and nonviolent campaigns to challenge the secular state’s invocation of religion in the military. Organized under several organizations including the Initiative for the Revolutionary Islamist Youth, Anticapitalist Muslims, and Conscientious Objection for Peace Platform, these activists collaborate with the broader antimilitarist movement and, at times, refuse compulsory military service. Using Islamic teachings and ethics, they oppose the Turkish state’s militaristic interpretation of Islam. While the movement’s critique of nation-state violence is universalistic in nature, activists have a specific target: military violence against Kurdish Muslims in Turkey. On the basis of interviews conducted with these activists, the paper examines the primary parameters of this new movement. Exploring the implications of its development for dominant trends in Turkish Islamism, the paper questions to what extent Turkish activists’ stance could be theorized as Islamist antimilitarism.

This paper focuses on the role of Islam in the Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey. More specifically, it compares Islam as a tool of assimilation in the hands of the Turkish state with Islam as a tool of resistance in the hands of Kurdish Muslim clergymen. Because Kurdish separatism is mainly based on ethnicity and because the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) originated as an atheist Marxist-Leninist movement that has been aloof to religion since its foundation in 1978, most works on the Kurdish movement tend to ignore religion in their analyses. They assume that Islam has no role to play in this ethno-nationalist conflict other than being employed by the state for manipulative purposes. This paper argues that such an approach is incomplete and misleading. It is true that the piety of Kurdish people has historically been exploited by the state to soothe the discomfort among Kurds. Especially since Justice and Government Party (AKP)’s ascend to power in 2002, the official state discourse that portrays the Kurdish and Turkish people as “religious brethren” has gained full momentum. The idea that Islam, by acting as a bridge between Sunni Muslim Kurds and Turks, could be a remedy for the thirty-year-long conflict has been promoted vigorously by the AKP. However, this rhetoric has lately been challenged by the formation of an alternative Islamic discourse by Kurdish clergymen. Concentrating on “Civil Friday Prayers” carried out as an act of civil disobedience in major Kurdish cities in Turkey since 2011, this paper will scrutinize the details of this pro-Kurdish Islamic discourse. Building on interviews conducted with Kurdish Muslim clergymen in Southeastern Turkey, it will display how these clergymen justify their support for the Kurdish movement on the basis of Islamic teachings. Exploring the deployment of Qur’anic verses and hadiths to challenge the assimilationist Islamic discourse of the state, the paper will highlight the ways in which religion could be employed as a “weapon of the weak” (Scott 2010) rather than “an opium of the masses” (Marx 1978).

At first glance, the idea of a "Moroccan Secularity" seems a complete oxymoron: Islam is constitutionally recognized as the state religion and the Alawite monarchy, as "Commander of the Faithful," fuses temporal and spiritual authority in actively infusing the public sphere with a state controlled discourse of religious nationalism. This paper argues various forms of secularity, or their potential, have nevertheless been present within this political field and are directly relevant to current struggles for reform. It traces the negotiation of the relationship between religion and politics in three critical periods of state and nation formation in the past century: the French protectorate (1912-56), post-independence Morocco to the death of Hassan II (1956-99), and the contemporary period under King Mohamed VI. Under the Treaty of Fes, the French constructed a bifurcated colonial state, creating a de facto separation between a “modern” apparatus of ministries staffed by European functionaries and the “traditional” ministries of Islamic Affairs (overseeing awqaf/habous, the shari’a courts, and Islamic educational institutions) under the more direct supervision of the Moroccan sultan. No overt laicization was carried out in this state building process (in contrast to Turkey or Iran), as the preservation of Morocco’s “traditional” Islamic social and political framework constituted a major feature of the protectorate’s legitimacy. This status quo remained unchanged after independence, as the monarchy consolidated its monopoly of control over the religious and political spheres, fusing religious legitimation and national identity. By cultivating their role as Commander of the Faithful, a special imamate form of politico-religious authority, Mohamed V and Hassan II permeated the public sphere with Islam while prohibiting any use of religion or secularism to frame political opposition. After working through this genealogy of the relationship between religion and politics, the paper focuses on the current stakes of secularity in the Moroccan political field from the spring 2011 protests mobilized in the wake of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Focusing on print and online media sources and interviews with key actors in the February 20th movement (both secular and Islamist), I analyze the nuances of debates about secularism and Islam in Morocco as they intersect with contentious social and political issues including women’s rights, Amazigh identity and rights, corruption, economic justice, and democratization. These debates expose the struggle to renegotiate the fundamental religio-political settlement, as both secularists and Islamists try to challenge the monarchy’s monopolization of Islam in the public sphere.

This paper examines the educational writings and practices of Sayyid Qutb and Fethullah Gülen, finding within both of them a communitarian emphasis on subject formation that will lead to a certain form of Islamic Utopia. While these scholars are extremely different in terms of time periods, explicit politics, and educational achievements, they are similar in noteworthy ways. Both men studied education extensively and have described themselves as teachers. Both viewed Islam as a necessary answer to the problems of modernity, putting Islamic subject formation, politics, and eschatology in direct contrast to the secular states in which they lived. Both were punished by the state for their commitments, and both gained a worldwide following for their academic work. While Qutb’s writings on education have not created the extensive network of schools that Gülen’s have, the former’s extremely influential intellectual work—particularly his emphasis on the relation between the individual and the community—is strikingly similar to the communitarian focus of the Gülen schools. Indeed, both men’s intellectual projects challenge the established relationship between the state and Islam by proposing (1) an Islamic counter-public that takes on characteristics of a nation (if not specifically a state) and (2) insisting that the utopian vision often accorded to a secular state can only be achieved within and through Islam on a communal level. It is this insistence on community that differentiates the secular commitment to individual faith that does not intrude upon others from both scholars’ focus on Islamic utopia via communal accountability. The paper ends by situating both Qutb and Gülen in the contemporary secularism debates, which—I argue—are basically continuations of the liberalism/communitarianism debates of the 1980’s and 1990’s. While Gülen’s work is demonstrably more “moderate” in terms of its relationship to other religions and secular governments, its implicit critique of the secular state as well as its communitarian focus on the nature of Islam as the primary means of education makes it much more similar to Qutb’s work than others might acknowledge. However, this also means that Qutb—far from being the “terrorist intellectual” others might accuse him of being—can be understood as a communitarian religious intellectual along the lines of John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas.