This paper focuses on the notion of 'civilization' to examine the ways in which political theorizing in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey is producing new concepts, views and perspectives that became the building blocks of the AKP's ideology and language. I speculate that the immense electoral success and popularity of the AKP is partly due to this unique ideology that is rooted in and draws from the hybrid political theory produced in the Islamic intellectual field, which made it much easier for diverse groups to relate to the party's ideology, program, and language. I argue that the intellectual discourse produced in the Islamic intellectual field is what can be referred to as “hybrid political theory,” or rather, "re-hybridized political theory," which is the product of the merging of Western intellectual traditions with Islamic, Ottoman, and Turkish political thought, which are hybrid categories themselves. This study expands the criticism of Eurocentricism into the field of political theory, by provincializing, or rather, locating political thought, not necessarily in its historical or political context, but rather in its intellectual context, by looking at the intellectual milieu within which new forms of political theorizing is emerging in Turkey. My research locates - and localizes - political theorizing particularly in two institutions, which have become two of the hubs of intellectual activity in Turkey during the past decade. One of these, BISAV, is an independent research and teaching institute that was founded in 1986 but exponentially expanded its activities after the AKP came to power in 2002. The other, SETA Foundation, is a think tank based in Ankara, which was founded in 2006 but has already produced two chief advisors to the AKP government and established a branch in Washington D.C. In this vast intellectual field, Western intellectual traditions are being brought together with Islamic and Turkish knowledges to create a new, ambitious, and hybrid school of political thought that aspires to become the foundation of not only a globally recognized new national identity for Turkey, but also a new world-view that inspires other countries, and particularly countries of the ‘Arab Spring’. I argue that this hybrid school of political theory subverts the dominance of Eurocentric perspectives in the field, but at the same time gives rise to essentialist perspectives and totalizing tendencies which eventually result in new hierarchies, power relations, and forms of subjugation as confirmed by the Gezi Park incident in 2013.

Traditionally, the media has acted as the main mechanism in the intellectual field whereby intellectuals establish themselves as public figures. However, studies in the sociology of intellectuals tend to take the intellectual’s media capital as an unproblematized constant. This paper argues that the media not only plays a significant role in the formation of the intellectual subject but also shapes, directs, and constrains the space of the intellectual and knowledge produced in the intellectual field. In order to highlight this interventionist role played by the media that confines the voice of the intellectual within a narrow discursive space, this paper visits the discussions on the Armenian Genocide in Turkey. The historical narrative of the Turkish state on the issue rejects that the mass killings of Armenians during the last years of the Ottoman Empire amount to a genocide. This narrative has been challenged by scholarly works of a group of ‘revisionist’ Turkish historians since the beginning of 1990s. This challenge took an ‘intellectualist turn’ when a group of highly renowned intellectuals took up the cause to revise the hegemonic discourse on history in mid-2000s, in a series of events (such as the 2005 conference in İstanbul, the 2008 apology campaign, and the activism related to the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007) that were awarded immense coverage in the national media. By analyzing the discourses conveyed by the intellectuals over the print media throughout these events, it will be demonstrated that in the Turkish case, the consequence of the dependency to the national media has been the transposition of the discourses into a pragmatic, quasi-nationalistic tone that presents the recognition of the Genocide and reconciliation with Armenians as advantageous for the nation for this or that reason. Co-existence of such discourses with more universalistic and detached ones created an ambiguity in the content, which has not been helpful in a setting in which intellectuals have also failed to create new forms to by-pass their dependence to the media. All in all, the argument will be that the media is the answer to the question of why the scholars and intellectuals’ project to replace the hegemonic discourse in Turkey remained a story of limited success.

Aydinlar Ocagi (The Intellectuals’ Hearth) was founded in the 1960s as an association of right-wing intellectuals in Turkey to fight against the rising tide of the Turkish left and also to break the left’s monopoly over Turkish intellectual life and debates. It reached the peak of its influence in the 1970s and the 1980s: The Ocak leadership played the most important role in convincing right-wing political leaders to form the National Front governments from 1975 to 1978; the party program of the Motherland Party grew out of a paper Turgut Ozal read at an Ocak meeting; and, although the Ocak’s political clout diminished from the late 1980s onward, its most important intellectual achievement, the so called Turkish-Islamic synthesis was adopted as the official cultural and educational policy of all right-wing governments since the 1980 coup. Surprisingly, in spite of its importance, the Ocak received attention neither in the English nor in the Turkish academic literature. In this paper, I am mainly interested in the following questions: First, what do we learn from prosopographic research on the founders of the Ocak? If we can construct a collective biography of the founders, what does this tell us about right-wing intellectuals in Cold War Turkey? Second, how can we explain the elitism of the Ocak and its elitist policies in the face of a very strong anti-elitist discourse developed by the Turkish right since the beginning of the republic? Third, what shall we make of the Ocak’s frantic anti-communism, bordering on the obsessive? Was Turkish anti-communism a homegrown phenomenon, as many right-wing ideologues wanted to have us believe? Or, was anti-communism partly—maybe principally—galvanized by American-led and funded propaganda efforts, as recent studies have shown it to be in many other cases? Do we have any evidence for contacts between the Ocak and actors across the border?