This paper explores the notion of civilization (medeniyet) as it is currently developed and discussed in select Islamic journals in Turkey such as Divan, Hece, or Anlayis in relation to the concepts of community, nation, the state, culture, identity, and religion. This study is part of a nationally funded ongoing project in Turkey that explores the current practice of knowledge production and debates of Islamic intellectuals in various publications, blogs, conferences, seminars, and other similar forums on key concepts of political theory such as justice, order, consent, the nation-state, community or the self. This paper examines the ways in which political theorizing on the notion of civilization in this Islamic intellectual field is producing new approaches and perspectives that create and cultivate a new language of politics by bringing together Islamic knowledges with Western intellectual traditions. I argue that Islamic circles are developing and using the term civilization as an alternative to the notion of nationhood and define it as a particular type of community that is bound by common intellectual traditions which permeates all fields of knowledge including political, economic, social, artistic or philosophical. I argue that based on this understanding of civilization, Islamic intellectuals are producing a theory of state and community-building toward the development of what can be referred to as a ‘civilization-state’ that is meant to replace the secular ‘nation-state.’ In terms of methodology, this paper seeks to develop an ethnographic approach to the study of political theory by focusing on the social, political, cultural and intellectual context within which the notion of civilization is debated; by investigating the educational background and intellectual formation of the intellectuals involved in these debates; and by examining the ways in which the approaches, perspectives and concepts developed in this intellectual field are connected with current political movements, ideologies and projects. To this end, the paper investigates the ways in which the notion of civilization is used by current Islamist political movements, and particularly by the ruling AKP, to develop, justify, legitimize, and empower its ideology, political projects, program, and policies.

Since the 1970s, Islamist intellectuals in Turkey have turned to the Ottoman Empire in order to find a foundation for theorizing about political, economic and social issues. For many of these intellectuals, rethinking the heritage of the Ottoman Empire was closely linked to the Islamic political project. In the past decades, various books and articles were published, conferences were organized, and seminars were held seeking to rethink, conceptualize and reimagine the Ottoman Empire as an Islamic civilization that is distinct from the West. These explorations resulted in a concerted effort towards restoring and reviving Turkey’s Ottoman heritage with its accompanying ideas, institutions and imaginations. In this paper, I argue that these explorations into the political foundations of Ottoman heritage need to be considered as a form of political theory because they are motivated by a desire to address contemporary issues that confronts Turkey such as inequality, poverty and justice as well as the state’s responsibility towards the welfare of its citizens. More specifically, by analyzing the intellectual activity of Islamist intellectuals on the issue of Ottoman heritage in general and the function and significance of Ottoman endowments in particular, I argue that these intellectuals are producing what can be referred to as a political theory of civil society. These contemporary political concerns are addressed by advocating a return to the “Ottoman civilization” in which, it is argued; welfare needs were met through the voluntary contributions of Ottoman pious endowments (vak?fs). In these writings, Islamist intellectuals reject the Euro-centric view which often blamed vak?fs for the economic backwardness of the Muslim world, and instead argue that these Ottoman institutions ought to be seen as an authentic example of “civil society” capable of addressing societal needs without the supervision or support of the state. As a result, this mode of political theorizing articulates “civil society” as a sphere of societal collaboration instead of political confrontation, thereby resulting in the depoliticization of Islamic activism in Turkey. Grassroots Islamist movements are encouraged into social service provision and are expected to work in partnership with the state in order to govern a market society. This argument is substantiated by qualitative data, primarily books and articles that have been published about Ottoman vak?fs that have been published between 1980-2013.

Based on an analysis of ongoing debates on the notions of political legitimacy and consent in leading Islamic journals in Turkey, this paper asks how Muslim intellectuals conceive of their own practices of knowledge production and whether they define their activity as part of the field of political theory as it is practiced in Western academia. Do they consider their intellectual activity as locally/Islamically relevant or as contributing to a universal body of knowledge? How do they posit themselves vis-à-vis Western political theorists? How do they qualify their intellectual activity in relation to knowledge produced within Western academia? This paper seeks to present positions of Muslim intellectuals within the field of political theory by examining their debates on the sources of political legitimacy and the idea of consent that have appeared in influential Islamic journals in Turkey since the 1980s, such as Divan, ?slamiyat and ?slami Ara?t?rmalar Dergisi. It analyzes the extent to which Islamic and secular notions and theories of the state influence the debates on political legitimacy among Muslim intellectuals. In so doing, the paper aims to map out local and universal aspects of Islamic political thought in those debates in terms of both the sources they draw on and their political theoretical conclusions. Muslim intellectuals in contemporary Turkey extensively engage in re-discovering and re-interpreting traditional sources of Islamic political thought with references to, and in light of, debates in the tradition of Western political thought. These new practices problematize not only the dichotomy of local and universal knowledge but also the classical Orientalist and Islamist positions regarding the incompatibility of the two traditions of thought. This paper argues that these new Islamic knowledge production practices are responses of Muslim intellectuals to the universalist claims of Western knowledges, and that they offer, at varying degrees, spaces for comparative type of political theorizing rather than representing a version of Islamization of knowledge that aims to isolate Islam from other knowledge traditions. The paper seeks to contribute to the emerging field of Comparative Political Theory by discussing whether political knowledge that is produced by non-Western intellectuals in general and Muslim intellectuals in particular qualifies to be political theorizing in its own terms, and whether this intellectual activity is of comparable value to political theories that are produced within Western academia.

Under successive AKP governments, the easing of the secular state’s restrictions on Islamic civic life has led to a burst of activism in Turkey. Various networks of activist-intellectuals working through publishing houses and associations have produced a plethora of Islamist readings of contemporary political life. This paper explores one such “community of argument” congregated around the Islamist NGO Ozgur-der and engaged in shared debates through its monthly Haksoz. Specifically, I aim to outline the contemporary making and dissemination of an Islamist canon in Turkey by Ozgur-der activist-intellectuals through textual analysis of Haksoz issues, other relevant Ozgur-der publications, and public events (eg. educational seminars) organized by the NGO in recent years. This canon composes a past intellectual heritage that sanctions particular practices of knowledge production in the present, and emerges from a collective intellectual effort to search back through time and space and select texts/practitioners of islah, ihya and tajdid (the cornerstones of Islamist revivalist thought). I argue that understanding the construction of a genealogy of knowledge is imperative to a more rigorous, reflexive engagement with Islamist intellectual discourses insofar as that canon contains the historical precedents that spur Islamist readings of contemporary political developments in Turkey. To that end, I ask: what sorts of discursive strategies and argumentative standards are deployed in an Islamist hermeneutics of past thinkers, perceived to make up a continuous genealogy of Islamic thought despite significant methodological and doctrinal variations? Moreover, through what reading practices do contemporary Islamist intellectuals construct and relate to a canon of Islamic revivalism understood to be stretching from Ibn Taymiyya to Ali Shari’ati? Relatedly, in what ways does this past discipline, authorize, extend, or transform Islamist knowledge-production in the present? Increasingly since the 1990s, a growing literature has interrogated the historical marginalization of non-Euro-American thought traditions in the field of political theory and begun to treat such thought as productive of methodological and political-theoretic inquiry. In an effort to contribute to ongoing debates about how to engage non-western texts, I finally explore the implications that an Islamic mode of engagement with canonical texts (that is embodied in action) present for political theory and its methods of inquiry. Specifically, I probe the question: What sorts of methodological insights can be gained from a study of Islamist reading practices? Can they help us rethink the frames of inquiry and sets of criteria used in understanding and evaluating the activity called political theory?

One of the most persisting assumptions informing the historiograpgy of political thought from the late Ottoman Empire to the Turkish republic is the definitive role attributed to the impact of Western ideas. Reflecting both persistent Orientalistic trends and lack of due methodological reflection, the literature prioritizes Western impact and ascribe only a passive role to the Islamic tradition in political thought. The pervasive argument is that references to Islamic tradition merely serve the purpose of legitimizing whatever is borrowed from the Western tradition; the problems involved in the interaction of these two traditions are not addressed. However, a careful comparative reading of political texts reveals the active persistence of classical Islamic sources, concepts and definitions into the modern era. Based on my research on Ziya Gökalp, I argue that late Ottoman political thought drew on Islamic tradition as much as Western tradition and interaction of the two cannot be reduced to a simple case of translation. Indeed, one has to consider the fact that political thinkers encounter Western languages and canon later in their lives, after their education in classical Islamic texts. Hence, their understanding of the Western texts was conditioned by their reading of Islamic classics. For instance, in Ottoman political writing one can observe a long standing engagement with the work of Ibn Khaldun in an effort to explain the decline and demise of the empire. With Ziya Gökalp, this engagement defines his famous twin concepts civilization and culture as much as the influence of Emile Durkheim, which, in the literature, has been emphasized as the most definitive source of his thought. I propose to suspend the role of Western influence, if only for analytical purposes, and I argue that such an approach would be illuminating not only for the late Ottoman period but also for contemporary Turkish Islamic political thought. From 1980s onwards, we can observe a revitalization of Islamic political thought around themes such as revivalism, restoration and civilization. These recent debates draw on similar classical sources, including but not limited to Ibn Khaldun and Ottoman literature, and publicize them. While the attitude towards and appropriation of Western thought in current intellectual debates may follow somewhat different patterns compared to late Ottoman debates, the central problems, sources referred to and the definitions and solutions suggested demonstrate a striking resemblance and continuity.