The claim that Islam and liberalism are incompatible remains widespread. As a recent case in point, many cite the deterioration of Turkey’s democracy under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP). To explain what happened, secularist critics in Turkey and the West often blame a small group of liberals who allied with Islamists at pivotal moments, enabling AKP state capture. Liberal “treason,” it is argued, is inadmissible given the basic irreconcilability of Islamism and liberalism. Why then, this paper asks, have liberals in Turkey aligned with Islamists circa every 35 years for the past two centuries? After all, each of the five major Islamo-liberal alliances has collapsed. In their wake, liberals have been left, at best, by the wayside, and often imprisoned, exiled, or dead. Presuming that liberals are rational, how to explain the recurring alliance? And what does the answer suggest about the overall compatibility of Islam and democracy? To answer these questions, the paper proposes an original framework at the nexus of complexity theory and historical sociology with which to assess encounters between religious and liberal political projects in Turkey and beyond. Drawing on extensive primary data, including some 90 interviews conducted over a decade of field immersion, the paper examines a series of Islamo-liberal alliances that have demonstrably changed Turkey’s trajectory. Arguing that liberals engage Islamists to access power and advance pluralism in public life, the paper shows that when an alliance collapses, the cause is no clash of ideologies, but rather the contingent appropriation of liberal, Islamist, and other ideas by savvy politicians in response to domestic and international pressures. In other words, ideas alone are a necessary, but never a sufficient condition for coalitions to collapse. Rather, outcomes are determined by the causal interplay of ideas, agents, and structures at each critical juncture. By tracing when and why at some junctures Islamo-liberal synthesis succeeds, while at other junctures ethno-nationalist or ethno-religious nationalist platforms prevail, Pathways to Pluralism challenges the prevalent but misleading reading of Turkey and the Muslim world as torn by a perineal clash between secularists and Islamists.

The defeat of the coup attempt of July 15, 2016 stands as one of the key markers in Turkey’s recent history. For some, the defeat of the coup attempt and the ensuing consolidation of power in and around President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has led to accusations that the coup was a ‘fiction,’ one managed for political benefit. For others, however, the defeat of the coup attempt has quickly become elevated to the level of epochal historical turning point, one on par with the Selçuk victory at Manzikert in 1071 and the Ottoman victory at Çanakkale in 1915. Regardless of one’s respective position on the coup attempt, one remarkable outcome has been the rapid memorialization of the coup attempt’s defeat. These sites of memory take multiple forms, ranging from renamed bridges, expensive complexes, public celebrations, YouTube videos, newspaper reports, to social media memes. This paper focuses on two such places of memory: The Martyrs’ Memorial [?ehitler Makam?] located at the Asian entrance to the recently renamed Martyrs of 15 July Bridge and a recently constructed washroom/site for ablutions [?ad?rvan] in the Istanbul district of Eyüp. While the connection of the first place to memories of the coup attempt seems obvious enough, this paper argues that focusing on the second place helps us also think about the kinds of transformations that have been necessary to forget parts of the recent past, above all the political and economic relationships between supporters of President Erdo?an and the Gülen Movement. It compares and contrasts the two sites’ forms, histories, and iconographies to shed light on the contested geographies of memory that continue to shape life in Turkey today.

Who holds religious authority in Turkey? Which political actors contest for the support of Turkish citizens for religious leadership? The results of an original online survey conducted by Yougov with 1992 Turkish respondents on matters of religious authority shed light to these questions. This paper identifies different sources of religious authority in Turkey utilizing the quantitative results of this survey, delineates Islamic left’s opposition to AKP’s authoritarian Islamism by qualitatively examining Ihsan Eliacik’s works, and assesses the social support Ihsan Eliacik and pro-AKP figures hold based on the survey results. It is easy to characterize the Islamic public sphere in Turkey as monolithic due to the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) hegemonic status in the religio-political sphere in the country. Despite this common (mis)perception, however, there are religious authorities that challenge AKP’s hegemony in the Islamic public sphere. Ihsan Eliacik is one such religious scholar who embraces pluralistic, egalitarian, and tolerant interpretations of Islam and challenges AKP’s authoritarian Islamism which recently turned more exclusionary and nationalistic. Eliacik is influential in numerous social movements, platforms, and networks that can loosely be defined as the Islamic Left (Koca 2014). As such, focus on Eliacik and more broadly the counterhegemonic discourses created and circulated by him and the Islamic Left in Turkey on numerous issues, including minority rights, women’s empowerment, religious pluralism, freedom of expression and corruption—is instrumental to understanding the nuances of Turkey’s Islamic public sphere, its multivocal character, and the ideologies of the religious opposition in Turkey, particularly in their contrast with the AKP. In what follows, the paper first summarizes the results of the YouGov survey and present how much credibility and trust Turkish citizens attribute to different public figures as sources of religious authority. The second section examines the Islamic political philosophy of Ihsan Eliacik and delineates his pluralist, egalitarian, and democratic interpretations on various issues and how these challange AKP’s authoritarian Islamism. Lastly, the survey results are utilized to map AKP sympathizers’ views on significant issues, such as religious tolerance, belief in religion’s multivocality, corruption, democracy, gender equality, and the role of religion in politics, and compare them to supporters of religious opposition in an attempt to understand whether and how Eliacik’s liberal democratic Islamic ideology resonates with his social base.

Despite Turkish general staff's significant efforts to create an ideologically cohesive officer corps through highly meticulous recruitment and promotion practices and frequent purges since the early republican period and more significantly after the 1970s, divergent views and ideological pluralism has never ceased to exist within the Turkish military behind its monolithic façade. For instance, the July 15 coup has recently unveiled that there have existed various religious groups within the ranks despite the military’s so-called secularist institutional identity. To what extent this diversity has reflected that of Turkish society? And what does this mean for the military-society relations? Despite paradoxical views on the Turkish military’s social makeup, there are few or no empirical works that examine the Turkish officers ideological, ethnic, religious, and demographic origins, whether they vary across services and branches of the military, and whether they align with those of the Turkish society. Also, literature is devoid of a work that explores the purges from the Turkish military, which could help us understand what kind of officer corps has been intended in terms of its ideological and demographic makeup and if this has changed over time. Drawing on original historical demographic and purge data on Turkish officers, collected by the author himself from the military libraries and archives in Istanbul and Ankara and from national newspapers, this paper examines the social composition of and Turkish officer corps and variations it has undergone since the early republican period but focusing on the post-1980 period. Complemented with the analysis of the changes in the military laws and regulations regarding recruitment, performance management, and discipline, my research elucidates what kind of officer been sought to be retained, promoted, favored, or excluded and dismissed within the Turkish military system. These measurable criteria for dismissals and promotions as well as for the punishments and incentives towards the military's own personnel help us understand the continuities and changes in Turkish military ethos, institutional identity, and self-conception. My research finds that the Turkish military has not been a socially representative institution in terms of ethnic, religious, socioeconomic origins as well as the geographical and urban-rural distribution of its personnel—nor has it intended to be, despite the persistent presence of some diversity within its ranks. Additionally, it finds that the demographic and cultural gap between the Turkish military and society has contributed to the long-standing civil-military troubles of Turkey.