Samiha Ayverdi (1905-1993) was the charismatic Sufi shaykha of the Rifai Order. However, she was more famous in Turkey as a novelist, poet, and public intellectual of the Conservative Far-Right movement of the Cold War era. She also founded several civil society associations dedicated to the preservation of the classical Turkish-Islamic heritage in literature, fine arts, music, and architecture. This paper will examine how Shaykha Ayverdi imbricated the discourses and practices of classical Sufism with the local politics of Cold War Turkey. Founded at the end of the 19th century by an Ottoman state elite named Kenan Rifai, the Turkish Rifai order is an upper-middle-class gender-mixed Sufi tradition based in Istanbul. It is currently led by an unveiled female shaykha named Cemalnur Sargut who inherited the order from Samiha Ayverdi, the female successor of Kenan Rifai. Today, Cemalnur Sargut promotes Sufism as the only global language that can unify people around the world. Likewise, her predecessor Kenan Rifai openly displayed an inclusive attitude towards the ethnoreligious minorities of the cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire by welcoming them in his personal life as close friends and in his Sufi lodge as disciples. Despite the universalist attitudes of her predecessor and successor, Samiha Ayverdi exhibited public hostility toward the Armenian, Greek, and Jewish communities of Turkey in her writings. Her nationalist far-Right politics during the Cold War period resulted in her exclusionary stance against not only the minorities but also the Leftists, the Islamists, and the positivist Kemalists of Turkey. Rather than preaching universal Sufi ethics of love, acceptance, and unity, she romanticized the “Turkish Islamic tradition” represented by the colonizing frontier dervishes of the 11th century who Islamized and Turkified Anatolia. Why did Samiha Ayverdi abandon the universalist aspirations of Sufism? How did Cold War politics in Turkey influence her reformulation of Rifai Sufism? What are the implications of the inconsistencies, if not outright contradictions, within the same lineage of the Turkish Rifai order? How can the contemporary Rifais see the Cold War period as a part of seamless continuous tradition rather than a rupture?

A key product of the Cold War was modernization theory, devised by American social scientists against the promise of rapid economic development promised to Third World nations by the socialist model. Mixed with rapid urbanization and mass participation in political discourse across the Third World, the Cold War rivalry never remained confined to the coordinating towers of great power politics but trickled down to ordinary imaginaries of modernization and assessments of rival regimes, including in popular culture. Such ‘democratized’ imaginaries of geopolitical rivalry often produced eclectic forms for discussing the tenets of global competition. Sport is one such realm of popular culture. The Cold War transformed sport from an urban pastime into a veritable international order mimicking the United Nations, fought between teams competing on behalf of nation-states and ideologies, dramatizing a cultural discourse of modernization where performance levels in international tournaments were taken to reflect the superiority of modes of political organization, as ‘modernization theory in action,’ to use Begüm Adalet’s phrase. This paper focuses on a transnational professional society of soccer coaches during the Cold War. This society gave birth to vernacular modernization theories about sport organization and performance. Through an analysis of discourses on team organization and athletic technique, formed in the transregional traffic of ideas and communication between colleagues across national and geopolitical boundaries, I discuss how soccer coaches created eclectic modernization theories in the idiom of sport, by negotiating the political boundaries of dirigisme and free initiative as they materialized in the athlete’s body and team organization. The presentation will center around one figure: Tamer Güney (1935-2020), a soccer coach and a vernacular intellectual, who went from being labeled a communist to becoming a football development expert for the Turkish Football Federation. I will argue that Güney was key in popularizing an eclectic ideology of “sportive autonomy” that was grounded in his everyday struggles of power against physical educators, who were steeped in statist ideologies as a professional group but blamed by Güney as a dirigiste bureaucratic class suppressing the free muscular plasticity of young athletes. By using the globally circulating categories of Cold War sport such as ‘autonomy,’ Güney contributed to a vernacular historical revisionism about the physical educationist foundations of Turkish nation-building.

A houseman who followed American troops from one installation to another for over two decades, Sermet leaned as if to whisper: ‘They stored nuclear weapons down the airfield. It was a secret. None of our business. I was just supposed to do my laundry, get my Salems, and wait for my yellow papers [checks].’ Imparted during our interview with a furtive pleasure still alive more than thirty years into his retirement, Sermet’s words to describe his longest stint with an American detachment in Corlu echo the mixed emotions that many civilians who worked on US military bases in Turkey went through: confusion, uncertainty, material expectation, the pleasure of access, the sting of infantilization, the burden of secrecy, and the paradoxical experience of fulfilling chores at the geopolitical seams of the Cold War which could burst anytime. Moreover, his reference to the airfield and foreign cigarettes signals how US overseas bases, and the Cold War at large, have transformed the communities and geographies adjacent to them. Corlu is one of these places bearing the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and spatial imprints of the Cold War in Turkey. Still home to an army corps HQ, it was already a critical garrison town before the establishment of a new base for US soldiers. As Turkey joined NATO, Corlu and the larger Thrace region became incorporated into the collective security architecture against the USSR. The deployment of a US detachment, along with nuclear-capable Honest John missiles in the 1960s, remolded Corlu as a stronghold in a vulnerable Cold War frontier of great geopolitical importance, adding an international layer to the town’s significance for domestic defense purposes. Yet, the Cold War brought to Corlu and its inhabitants more than just imported troops and armaments. Based on written and oral accounts of locals and soldiers who served on the base from the late 1950s through the 1980s, this study seeks to reconstruct the daily life in and around a moderately sized US base in Turkey. It explores how the Cold War precipitated unexpected encounters between the host town inhabitants and guest American soldiers, introduced new goods and patterns of consumption, sparked political debates, brought new forms of spatial organization and infrastructures, offered new sources of income to a select few, and enabled licit and illicit flows that the Cold War elite had not foreseen.

Lloyd A. Fallers (1925-1974) was a leading Chicago University anthropologist specialized in East African legal and political systems. Almost completely forgotten today is that he later chose Turkey as his second geographical area of study and worked on Turkish political and religious lifeworld from the early 1960s until he died in 1974. His illness and untimely death at a very young age prevented Fallers from publishing his findings based on two semesters of living and teaching in Konya and Ankara, a year-long ethnography in Edremit, and several short visits. Apart from largely unnoticed two articles and a book chapter, Fallers’ Turkey work has so far remained untouched in the special collection archives of the University of Chicago Library. Based on his unpublished letters, speeches and articles in the archives as well as my oral history interviews, this paper unearths behind-the-scene politics of ethnography in Turkey in 1965-70 through the experiences of Fallers and his students. Fallers conducted fieldwork in exceptional times. The world turned upside down between his three-month stay in Konya in the fall of 1964 and his fieldwork in Edremit in 1968-69. At home, Chicago University was shaken by student mobilization, on the one hand, and the discipline of anthropology was coming under critique for its involvement in Western imperialist policies, on the other. In his new field site, Turkish-American relationship almost suddenly retrogressed from its golden age into an atmosphere of distrust, while the Leftist movement powerfully came in sight on university campuses and streets, with its strong anti-American dimension. In this conjecture, Fallers struggled on many fronts. Along with his student Michael Meeker, he strove against the Turkish bureaucracy for fieldwork permissions while also criticizing American policy in Turkey which he even disputed with Ambassador Robert Komer. He wrote on the futility of Vietnam War yet disapproved the radical student movements. He was impressed by the sophistication of Turkish social scientists but stood aloof from their Marxist tendencies. He was deeply sensitive about fieldwork ethics; however, he never took seriously the reflexive discussions in anthropology about its imperialist complicity. Finally, in his non-academic speeches, he tried to accommodate his passion for modern science with his devotion to Christianity. He was simultaneously progressive and conservative, patriotic and universalist, modernist and traditionalist. Fallers’ story challenges ideological oppositions in Cold War narratives and underlines instead paradoxes and uncertainties in the heart of Cold War imaginaries.