Abstract
Two Islamic actors in Turkey have transformed the state’s strict control of the religious field (laicism). While the National Outlook Movement, the “mother-movement” of the governing Justice and Development Party, did so through its “participation” in party politics, the Gülen Movement, Turkey’s most powerful Islamic movement that operates hundreds of schools and a major media network, contributed to this transformation through its “non-participation” in party politics as a social movement, providing an alternative to laicist establishments outside of institutional channels. These two movements, by following different political paths, have embodied different opportunities for and challenges to Turkish democratization. To understand their influence in Turkish politics today, this article will adapt a “method of difference” and ask what explains these two Islamic movements’ variation in regards to party politics and what the consequences of this variation are for Turkish politics. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Turkey, this article will argue that both movements have made their decisions about party politics by strategically and differently evaluating the political opportunities/threats of party politics in light of their varying ideological priorities and organizational needs, and that these strategic decisions have transformed the movements themselves and the Turkish regime altering the laicist status quo between them.
Keywords
Introduction
Turkey’s governing party, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) (JDP), and the Gülen Movement (GM), the country’s most powerful Islamic movement that operated hundreds of schools and a major media network, have been in a political conflict for the last few years, accusing each other of corruption, treason, and even terrorism. Relations between these two actors, however, were not always hostile because both actors were challenging the historical role of the laicist establishments in Turkish politics that had a strict control over the religious field. Nonetheless, both actors were also coming from two distinct Islamic trends: while the JDP was formed by the former leaders and the younger generations of the National Outlook Movement (Milli Görüş Hareketi) (NOM), an Islamic movement that had challenged Turkey’s laicism through its Islamic political parties since the late 1960s, the GM had accommodated the same laicist regime since the late 1960s by not getting involved in party politics and instead was providing an alternative to it by mobilizing a politically influential social movement through its education, media, and business networks.
To understand this simultaneous yet diverse political evolution of the JDP and the GM, this paper will adapt a “method of difference” (Skocpol and Somers, 1980) and ask (1) why two Islamic movements facing the same socio-political context have chosen varying political paths when they were subject to the same costs and benefits of participation vis-à-vis non-participation, and (2) what the political consequences of these decisions are for both actors.
By adapting a “method of difference,” in Mill’s (1970) words, “by comparing instances in which the phenomenon does occur with instances in other respects similar in which it does not,” this paper will aim to question the role of agents in explaining Islamic movement behavior. It will do so because “the inclusion of several case studies in one project forces the researcher to be more rigorous about defining specific relationships, provides the researcher with a ready-made collection of alternative explanations, and keeps the definition of terms from being so situation-specific that parallels to other situations are lost” (Lin, 1998).
By adapting such a methodology, this article will differ theoretically and empirically from extant literature. Theoretically, it will differ from the inclusion-moderation literature, which questions whether and how Islamic movements “moderate” towards the political center after their “inclusion” in the party system by (1) looking at variation in regards to “inclusion” and thus also at those Islamic movements that do not form a political party yet have a political impact on the regime as a social movement (“non-participation”), and by (2) looking at the impact of Islamic movements on the structures in which they are embedded instead of looking only at how Islamic movements themselves transform (“moderate”) in the face of an unchanging structural context (Schwedler, 2007; Wickham, 2004) and/or in response to changes in the structural context (Sokhey and Yildirim, 2013; Turam, 2007).
By diverging from the existing literature, this article will address a vital theoretical and empirical distinction between social movements and political parties. Foremost, social movements and political parties diverge in their means and goals, and thus in their political impacts. Social movements provide “collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities” (Tarrow, 1998), and work outside institutional channels to do so. In this, they aim to voice demands that are unrepresented by formal institutions. Political parties, however, are organizations that seek either to win votes, office, and/or policy (Müller and Strøm, 1999) or they seek their demands/existence to be recognized by the state (Kitschelt, 1989), and “usually consist of more than a single interest in the society and so to some degree attempt to ‘aggregate interests’” (Ware, 1996) within the institutional boundaries of the regime. As a result, social movements and political parties diverge in their means (utilizing informal versus formal channels) and goals (voicing unrepresented demands outside of institutional politics versus demanding representation within institutional politics), and thus have different impacts on the regime (actor outside the regime versus actor within the regime).
By adapting different means and goals and through their varying impact, social movements and political parties also embody different opportunities for and challenges to democratization. Although social movements represent demands not covered in the ballot box and thus bring civil society input into politics, their finances and internal leadership selection remains outside the control of public accountability. Furthermore, not all movements are pro-democratic and aim to widen the scope of political pluralism. Instead, some movements may seek the “special interests” of their constituencies and/or aim to transform the socio-political system towards illiberalism. Political parties, on the other hand, have some level of transparency and an organizational commitment to play by the rules, but like movements, do not necessarily have to represent liberal democratic demands. For instance, a religiously oriented political party, “where religious values in its manifesto are clearly identifiable [and] where explicit appeals to religious constituencies are made” (Ozzano and Cavatorta, 2013), may risk illiberalism in its electoral quest for a moral role for the state. In short, social movements and political parties adapt different means, pursue different goals, and thus have different political effects on democratization.
By distinguishing between political parties and social movements, this paper will also differ empirically from the extant literature on the NOM/JDP and the GM. In particular, it will differ from the literature on the JDP, which either (1) addresses JDP’s transformation away from its roots in the NOM through its increasing pragmatism (Yavuz, 2009), changes in the socio-economic bases of Islamism (Gümüşçü, 2010; Öniş and Keyman, 2003; Sokhey and Yildirim, 2013), institutional constraints (Mecham, 2004; Tepe, 2012), and political learning (Çavdar, 2006; Turam, 2007; Yavuz, 2009), or (2) discusses JDP’s increasing dominance in party politics (Başlevent et al., 2009; Çarkoǧlu, 2011) and its democratic commitment (Hale and Özbudun, 2010; Öniş, 2013, 2015) during its incumbency by (1) taking a step back and looking at the ideological roots of the JDP in the NOM and by (2) analyzing JDP’s political evolution in comparison to that of the GM. In doing so, this paper will also differ from the literature on the GM that has addressed GM’s political evolution through an analysis of its history (Bulaç, 2007; Yavuz, 2013), socio-economic make-up (Hendrick, 2013; Kömeçoğlu, 2000), and democratic commitment (Gözaydın, 2009) without a comparative analysis of GM’s development to that of its counterpart in the same country yet with a varying political path. Lastly, this paper will differ from the descriptive journalistic accounts addressing both actors’ growing tensions (Çakır and Sakallı, 2014; Şener, 2014; Şık, 2014) by looking at these tensions within the theoretical framework of new social movement theory.
This paper will look at these two Islamic movements within the framework of new social movement theory because the literature on social movements builds on the experiences of liberal democracies, and thus the concept of a “social movement” does not fully capture the experiences of “Islamic movements” facing an authoritarian/semi-authoritarian regime, wherein they are forced to adapt alternative mediums for demand-making other than street politics, mass protests, and strikes. Nevertheless, Islamic movements do share a number of characteristics with their counterparts in liberal democracies, especially with “new social movements.” Foremost, like new social movements, Islamic movements “have shifted from targeting the state to targeting society and everyday life” (Tugal, 2009). Even Islamic movements that form political parties and run in elections see capturing state power as a means rather than as a goal to engage in socio-political transformation. Hence, Islamic movements, like new social movements, try to construct “new identities through self-realization and the right to autonomy rather than the assimilation of their demands into mainstream politics” (Sutton and Vertigans, 2006).
Furthermore, Islamic movements, like social movements, “encompass a loose collection of activists and followers who adhere to a certain set of rules or an ideology, identity, or platform that defines their group or organization” (Collins, 2008). In this, Islamic movements are “not solely a reaction to a given situation of class and cultural domination, but also present a counter-cultural model of modernity, and a new paradigm for self-definition that has led to the formation of Islamic counter-elites” (Göle, 1997). Hence, Islamic movements, like new social movements, are “highly dynamic entities, being in constant flow and motion” (Bayat, 2005). In this, both the NOM and the GM possess the three core elements of a new social movement that Diani (1992) proposes: they (1) have an informal organization appealing to multiple constituencies, (2) bring these constituents together to represent an alternative to existing structures, and they (3) aim to challenge the hegemony of the dominant classes.
To understand these Islamic movements, methodologically, this paper will utilize its findings from qualitative fieldwork in Turkey involving personal interviews with leading party and movement leaders and ideologues, and archival research on party/movement documents, and from the country’s main Islamic and secular political magazines. In light of such research, this article will make a twofold argument. One, it will argue that the NOM and the GM have taken varying decisions in regards to party politics when they both faced the same socio-political context of Turkey because they have evaluated the same potential benefits and risks of participation vis-à-vis non-participation in light of different ideological priorities and organizational needs. Two, it will argue that these strategic decisions have led to shifts both in the regime and the movements and thus to a transformation in the laicist status quo in Turkey today.
To discuss these arguments further, this article will be divided into three parts. The first part will discuss the decision to participate in party politics, and the second part, the consequences of these decisions. This article will conclude with a discussion on the effects of these two Islamic movements on Turkish democratization today.
To form a political party versus to stay as a social movement
The decision to participate or not is, foremost, shaped by the “political opportunity and threat structures” of the socio-political context “in which [Islamic movements] are embedded” (McCarthy et al., 1996) such as by regime type, degree of political liberalizations, the regime’s attitude towards the opposition, especially Islamic opposition, by the role of religion within the regime, and by socio-economic transformations (McAdam et al., 2001; Tilly and Tarrow, 2007). First, while participation allows movements to be part of policy-making and to gain experience in real politics, non-participation allows movements to counter the regime’s hegemony without being subject to its rules.
Second, participation brings increased public visibility in hybrid regimes like Turkey, where venues for demand-making outside the designated areas of politics, such as through mass protests, remain limited. Furthermore, participation brings access to state resources in such political contexts because political parties across the political spectrum preserve their societal base through patron-client networks (Lust-Okar, 2006). As Roberts (2006) explains, “it is only through organization that the many with few resources can leverage their weight in numbers as a countervailing power to the concentrated economic or institutional resources of elite groups.” As a result, in its access to state resources and increased public visibility, participation also offers the chance to attract new supporters.
However, participation also risks fragmentation because in a political party relations become bureaucratized as membership grows, proximity between supporters decreases, and as relationships are forced into a hierarchical order (Panebianco, 1988). Meanwhile, non-participation protects a movement’s existing supporter base by creating personal relations of solidarity between members. Hence, exiting a movement is harder because of peer pressure, but in a party such pressures do not exist (Panebianco, 1988). As a result, internal bonds are stronger between members and their leaders in a movement that is choosing non-participation.
Lastly, both participation and non-participation risk repression, albeit for different reasons. While participation risks regime repressions unless the political actor in question accommodates the regime by co-opting its oppositional stance in hybrid regimes like that of Turkey where liberal democracy remains unconsolidated, non-participation risks regime repression as an illegal threat and thus being marginalized into political stagnation.
Given such political opportunities and threats of participation vis-à-vis non-participation, why do Islamic movements make different political choices in regard to party politics? They do so because these political opportunity and threats are “subjective” in that they can be seized as well as ignored by Islamic movements (McAdam et al., 2001). In this, an “opportunity not recognized is no opportunity at all” (Gamson and Meyer, 1996). And Islamic movements recognize or dismiss an opportunity/threat based on future expectations, which they form in light of their ideological priorities and organizational needs.
Foremost, the religious field is not univocal—monolithic and uniform—but multivocal (Stepan, 2000), where Islamic movements differ in how they interpret Islam and its texts, what strategies they see fit to realize Islam’s call, and what organizations they use to achieve these calls. Hence, “Islamic” serves as umbrella category to heterogeneous worldviews wherein Islamic movements differ on how to revive Islam, and thus in their “ideological priorities.” Whereas some Islamic movements anticipate an Islamic revival that will result “from taking political power and affecting broad reforms from the top down” (Nasr, n.d.), and see themselves as the “vanguards” bringing such top-down “Islamic truth” to the people (Erbakan, n.d.), others do not simply aim “at capturing state power […] but focus on the gradual capture and possession of the society by exerting moral and intellectual leadership over civil institutions and processes” (Bayat, 1998), and instead believe that “cultural and ideological change can pave the way for change in relations of power by undermining the legitimacy of ruling institutions and elites” (Wickham, 2002).
For the former “vanguard movements,” participation not only offers the opportunity to engage in top-down influence through its role in policy-making but also to do so under their vanguards who train and guide the masses hierarchically through a party organization (Roy, 1994). Meanwhile, for the latter “grassroots movements,” non-participation allows them to start the bottom-up transformation they are seeking independently outside the rules and regulations of the hegemonic regime.
In addition to a movement’s ideological priorities, a movement’s prior organization, its “organizational needs,” creates a path dependency in that the way a movement is organized influences its cost-benefit calculations (Sinno and Khanani, 2009). While a movement that has a small vanguard organization is more likely to see strategic benefits in shifting to party politics because the chance to reach new constituents through party politics will help this small vanguard organization to build a wider popular base, a movement that has a mass following as a result of years of grassroots activism is more likely to see the prospects of shifting to party politics as much too costly because the very same benefits of political participation (widening popular base) are not so beneficial given that the movement already has a large mass base and thus it is more important to protect the movement’s base from the fragmenting climate of party politics.
Ideological priorities and organizational needs also co-exist with the strategic interests of a movement defined by the movement’s socio-economic and political relations with its constituency and its patrons. On the one hand, vanguard movements, which are composed of a few leaders aiming to build a constituency and patron-client relations with these new constituencies, may choose to go into party politics with the belief that having connections to the state and its institutions will yield political and economic access to “pursue” such strategic interests. On the other hand, grassroots movements, which have built an Islamic counter-hegemony over the years with their own economic enterprises, media, and services, may choose to stay out of party politics in order to remain autonomous of state intervention thereby “protecting” their strategic interests.
Islamic movements also evaluate the costs of participation vis-à-vis non-participation differently. Vanguard movements neither fear regime repressions nor co-optation. They do not fear regime repressions because they see themselves as the representatives of a marginalized majority against an elitist/minority regime. Hence, they believe they have an obligation to challenge the regime despite its costs. They also do not fear co-optation because they believe their small and exclusive vanguards are impenetrable and thus immune to co-optation. Grassroots movements also do not fear repression and the political stagnation thereof because they see “political stagnancy” as part of their long-term plan to gradually transform the society. And repression in this long-term plan is not a new cost but rather is expected.
Thus, this article expects vanguard movements to be more likely to participate in party politics and grassroots movements to be more likely to stay as social movements because they will evaluate the same potential benefits and risks of participation vis-à-vis non-participation taking into account different ideological priorities and organizational needs and thus arriving at different strategic decisions in regards to party politics—an expectation that will be empirically discussed in the next section.
Political opportunities and threats of participation versus non-participation in Turkey
Historically, the Turkish regime was defined by laicism, where the Turkish state, composed of the military, the judiciary and the bureaucracy as “the guardians of laicism,” saw themselves as the carriers of a “civilizing mission” to modernize Turkish politics and society top-down, and proactively supervised religious activity throughout the country by bringing all mosques and religious education under its roof (Shambayati and Kirdiş, 2009). Within this arrangement, religious organizations were legally banned but informally allowed to work as apolitical religious foundations under the surveillance of the Directorate of Religious Affairs.
In this context, Islamic movements posed not only a threat to the Turkish state’s laicism, but also were contenders to its civilizing mission because the new Republic’s civilizing mission and its top-down approach of rapid social transformation had “left the ‘day-to-day’ in limbo. Even in the most stringently secular times of the Republic, Islam [had] filled in the void” (Mardin, 1993). Thus, Islamic movements were offering an “alternative atmosphere of socialization within the secular Republican context” (Inalcık, 2000).
In the face of such ambiguous regime-Islamic movement relations, participation in party politics provided an ideological influence over the society. Specifically, the Turkish state’s use of laicism and thus control over the religious field through the Directorate of Religious Affairs and through religious education meant that working from within through participation would allow an Islamic movement to access these laicist institutions and thereby influence society through them.
However, this was not a consolidated liberal democracy. For decades, politics was based on a duality between “the center” and “the periphery” (Mardin, 2006). While the latter, composed of political parties and civil society organizations dealt with everyday political issues, the former, composed of the “the guardians of laicism,” guarded the Turkish state and its institutions from the latter in case they engaged in activities outside the scope of designated areas of politics. As a result, the “guardians of the state” intervened into Turkish politics at different times and for various reasons. For instance, the military intervened and suspended democratic life twice (in 1960 and 1980) in order to “save” democracy from politicians and political polarizations, and the Turkish Constitutional Court banned multiple political parties for their opposition to laicism (Shambayati and Kirdiş, 2009). In such a context, although participation would allow political access, such influence would also remain limited.
Nonetheless, because Islamic movements were officially banned by the laicist establishments and were forced to operate “informally” as “apolitical” organizations under the surveillance of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, participation had the advantage of eliciting a more public appeal and thus new supporters. However, non-participation in a system heavily monitored by the “guardians of laicism” had the advantage of protecting a movement’s organizational solidarity against such heavy state interventions.
In all of this, neither participation nor non-participation was cost-free. Participation risked repression if Islamic movements chose not to abandon their openly Islamic demands, and non-participation risked political stagnation because movements outside party politics were always subject to suspicion for having a hidden Islamist agenda to replace the current laicist order. Hence, venues for political mobilization inside and outside the party system risked regime repressions.
In such a political context, Islamic movements faced a strategic dilemma: they could either participate within the regime, thereby widening their political influence and societal appeal through state institutions yet risking co-optation within the process of avoiding regime repressions, or they could remain outside of party politics thereby mobilizing on the alienation of the masses from state institutions while protecting their organizational solidarity but risking political stagnation as unrecognized and thus illegal political actors. While the GM chose the latter, the NOM chose the former.
National Outlook Movement
The NOM was established as an umbrella organization of the Nakşibendi Order and of Islamic parliamentarians, who came together in the late 1960s over their common disappointment with governing center-right parties. Foremost, the then-leader of the Iskenderpaşa Lodge of the Nakşibendi Order, Mehmed Zahid Kotku, had started a new era for the Order attracting new recruits from urban and educated segments of society (Yavuz, 2005), and aimed to turn the Order from “a mosque-based community into a semi-political movement” (Kumbaracıbaşı, 2009) by encouraging his followers “to capture the higher summits of social and political institutions in the country and establish control over the society” (Mardin, 1993).
To permeate state institutions, Kotku had supported center-right parties (Toprak, 1981). This arrangement had worked perfectly under the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti). However, under the Justice Party (Adalet Partisi), the successor to the Democrat Party, which adapted a liberal pro-Western agenda, Islamic demands were increasingly neglected and marginalized. Hence, the Nakşibendi Order was searching for an alternative medium.
Around the same time, Islamic parliamentarians were also increasingly marginalized by the Justice Party, and thus were searching for an alternative to it, according to Süleyman Arif Emre (2010, interview with author), one of the founders of the NOM. For instance, when mass protests took place in 1968 in response to theology student Hatice Babacan’s suspension from the university on grounds that she was taking her classes with a veil, the Justice Party had done nothing to ease Islamic tensions (Emre, 2010, interview with author). Hence, Kotku and his followers and the Islamic parliamentarians, the “Islamic vanguards,” were finding a natural draw to each other in their political marginalization. In the words of a veteran politician from the NOM, they all were realizing that “[their] split and decentralized stance had no benefit for [their] cause at all.”
Throughout these developments, in 1969, a new political figure, Necmettin Erbakan, a young mechanical engineer and a pupil of Kotku, was on his way to becoming a public figure when he was elected the head of the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges, the highest legal entity representing the private sector in Turkey—a development that had led to Erbakan’s ousting by the governing Justice Party and to his increasing public visibility. This new public visibility had led to Erbakan’s “appointment” as the leader of the NOM. The idea was that Erbakan would be the young charismatic leader and the public face of this new Islamic movement, while Kotku, who was the de facto leader, would remain the decision-maker behind the curtains. This way, the NOM would be able to overcome the legal (laicist) barriers to the Nakşibendi Order’s politicization (Çakır, 2002). In the late 1980s, the then-leader of the Iskenderpaşa Lodge, Esad Coşan, in response to being sidelined by Erbakan after Kotku’s death, would recount this hidden and untold story of the NOM’s early years by stating that the NOM had “started as an action of [the Nakşibendi] Order,” and that they had “supported them [the NOM] from head to toe” giving them “people for their central administration, presidencies, vice-presidencies, youth branches” (Çakır, 2002).
This new movement was built around a religious critique of laicism claiming that Westernization and thus an alienation from Turkey’s traditional Islamic culture was leading to moral decay. In its place, the NOM advocated a new system called the “Just Order” (Adil Düzen) (Erbakan, 1991). In this, NOM leaders’ mission would be to awaken an Islamic “truth” in them (Çınar, 2005). According to Taha Akyol (2010, interview with author), a prominent journalist, the NOM, by engaging in such a call, was adapting an engineering mentality where the strategy was not to bring order to the society, but to reconstruct/redesign/re-engineer society. Hence, their aim was not to gradually Islamize society, but to “make” society Islamic top-down (Bulaç, 2009).
For such a vanguard movement aiming for top-down influence, party formation was an ideological fit because participation would allow the NOM to influence the state (Çalmuk, 2004) without endorsing regime change (Yaşar, 2004). Instead, party formation, as desired by Kotku, would help these Islamic vanguards to transform Turkish society’s moral and cultural composition through party politics (Yaşar, 2004). In NOM leader Erbakan’s (n.d.) vision, despite the lack of mass support for the NOM, almost everyone in Turkey believed in the NOM because the majority of Turks were practicing Muslims. Thus, the NOM’s role was to “bring awareness from the top” to larger segments of society (Bulaç, 2009). In line with this, the NOM’s first party, the National Order Party (Milli Nizam Partisi), programme (1970) described the aim of their participation in party politics as “to uncover the existing high moral standards and virtues in the society at the ideational level and to turn them into reality,” and “to enlighten humanity by establishing a higher civilization model by calling upon citizens for this duty.”
Party formation was also an organizational necessity for the NOM. Although religious orders like the Nakşibendi Order were established centuries ago and were supported by a loyal base, their numbers were decreasing under the strict laicist laws of the country. Hence, a political party was expected to introduce them to a wider audience while reserving the party itself for the Islamic vanguards. In this, NOM leaders believed they would swipe elections immediately through a political party. In almost all of my interviews with the leaders of the NOM a common theory for why the NOM never attained great power was that elections were fixed by Western forces who were afraid of the rise of an Islamic party into power in a geo-strategic country like Turkey. The accuracy of these claims about Western powers is less important than the fact that the leaders of the NOM genuinely believed they could win elections and thus come into power immediately if they were not “stopped” by foreign forces. Moreover, forming a political party and having access to the state by becoming part of the parliament and even the government would serve NOM’s strategic interest of connecting their vanguards with new constituents.
The biggest cost of participation, co-optation as a result of repression, was not seen as a risk either according to Süleyman Arif Emre (2010, interview with author), one of the founders of the NOM, because this was a movement of a few idealists who had decided to start from scratch instead of acting like an orphan looking for shelter with the mission to stop moral decay in the country. Thus, those who were susceptible to co-optation already had bailed out and had joined other parties (Emre, 2002). Consequently, these remaining vanguards would be able to overcome the limitations of the laicist system together in solidarity.
As a result of all these ideological and organizational considerations, in 1970, Kotku commissioned Erbakan to form the National Order Party stating that “for the government to fall into the hands of its true representatives […] forming a political party [was] an inevitable historical duty” (Emre, 2002). Since then, NOM parties have become a stable in Turkish party politics.
The Gülen Movement
The GM started its activities in the late 1960s facing the same political opportunity and threats that the NOM faced. It was established by Fethullah Gülen, a religious scholar who worked for more than 20 years as a state preacher under the Directorate of Religious Affairs. Inspired by Said Nursi (1878–1960), the founder of the Nurcu Movement who believed in the “inherent harmony between Islam and modern science, together with an emphatic plea for Muslims to become educated in modern knowledge, albeit with a grounding in Islamic morality” (Hendrick, n.d.), Gülen’s guiding principle was that “founding a school is better than a mosque” (Gözaydın, 2009). In this, although the GM evolved out of the larger Nurcu movement, it also was independent from its Nurcu roots as it formed a separate organization.
This separate organization emerged when Gülen started lecturing in Izmir, where he was appointed as a state preacher. To engage with the locals, he arranged meetings in coffee houses, organized student summer camps, and set up study and boarding-halls in the region with the financial help of the locals (Gülen Institute, 2010). One particular medium influential in this new Movement’s further expansion were “lighthouses:” flats rented or purchased by the GM where students, usually from poor rural families, were allowed to stay during their studies in the city under the guidance of an older brother or sister. Later on, these students would become activists themselves returning to their hometowns and visiting surrounding towns to spread the Movement into rural areas (Hermansen, 2007).
The underlying objective behind these engagements, unlike NOM’s aim to challenge laicism, was individual and societal transformation by constructing a new Turkish Islam. In the words of the head of the Gülen Institute, Alp Aslandoğan, the Movement aimed to reach every Turkish citizen (Özyurt, 2009). This required the strengthening of communal ties at the local level by fostering volunteering and service (himmet), and thus by “working for some higher common good” (hizmet) in the society (Yavuz, 2013). Gülen envisioned that “knowledge via education, public consensus via the media and economic power through building competitive companies and financial institutions” (Yavuz, 2013) would be essential to such bottom-up transformation.
For this purpose, the GM adapted a grassroots organization that remained both hierarchical and decentralized. Hierarchically, GM’s organization consisted of three “circles” coordinating and carrying out the grassroots activities of the Movement: the “core” close to Fethullah Gülen led movement activities, the “affiliates” acted as leaders in the Movement’s local foundations, and the “sympathizers” did not “share Gülen’s goals but […] participate[d] in their realization” (Yavuz, 2013). However, because there was no “formal membership” to the GM (Yavuz, 2013), its organization remained decentralized in that it was defined by a model of common principles and beliefs, according to a leading GM member from the Gülen-linked Journalists and Writers Foundation (Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakfı) (2010, interview with author). According to a researcher at the same Foundation (2010, interview with author), this model resembled the concept of a car, which basically is a vehicle for transportation with four wheels and an engine yet with thousands of models ranging from luxurious sports cars to family station-wagons: the GM had established a generic car model which was modified according to local circumstances. As a result, according to another leading member at the same Foundation (2010, interview with author), a centralized organization was impossible and thus rather there was common ground on principles and values.
For such a grassroots organization engaged in bottom-up transformation, non-participation was an ideological fit because the GM, in its non-participation, was adapting a more pragmatic and cautious strategy than the NOM in its aim to escape the prosecutions of laicist establishments by staying out of their control and by not challenging them directly. In this, Gülen believed that expecting socio-political transformation without educating the individual was an easy exit (Yavuz, 2004). Thus, the GM believed the Movement’s energy should not be “wasted” on party politics but instead be channeled towards increasing mass belief through education, according to a journalist at the GM-affiliated Zaman newspaper (2010, interview with author). This also would allow the Movement to mobilize those marginalized by the laicist establishments by providing an alternative education channel for them.
Non-participation was also an organizational fit as it was allowing the GM to protect its organization from the disruptive forces of party politics in a political context like Turkey where politics was not fully institutionalized (Kömeçoğlu, 2000). For instance, during the initial steps of party formation, Erbakan, the leader of the NOM, had asked Gülen to join forces with him under the NOM umbrella saying that Gülen should stop bothering with educating kids and instead enter party politics with him in order to change Turkish politics. Gülen had rejected such an offer saying that he wanted to protect his students from the distracting forces of a polarized party system (Mercan, 2009). Hence, while Erbakan was trying to unite Islamic vanguards, Gülen was trying to foster a new generation. Moreover, staying out of the volatile and polarizing world of party politics would allow the GM to protect its strategic interests, namely to protect the economic assets and societal networks it built over the years from state intervention while remaining autonomous.
Furthermore, Nursi, the Movement’s ideological forefather, had advised his pupils never to enter politics as he, as a former politician, had observed firsthand how the community of believers ended up in factions after entering formal politics. He saw politics as power games, expedience, and hierarchical mobilization—things he advised his pupils to avoid in order to protect their organizational integrity (Yavuz, 2004). In a now famous quote, Nursi, in stark contrast to Kotku, the leader of the Nakşibendi Order, who advocated increased involvement in political activism for his pupils, stated: “I take shelter only in God from the devil and from politics” (Yavuz, 2004). In this line of thought, for Gülen, who aimed to transform the individual and the society through education, formal politics presented only one route for change while non-participation would offer a more wholesome transformation (Gülen, 2004).
Most importantly, GM’s non-participation did not risk political stagnation because the Movement was positioning itself “above politics,” staying out of everyday politics and occasionally supporting governing parties, and thus was positioning itself as an alternative to the NOM. In this, the GM was hoping to avoid regime repressions. Thus, while the NOM was limited by the rules of the party system, the GM, according to Turam (2007), was growing stronger by not resisting the Turkish regime. Furthermore, co-optation was another worry, as Gülen (2004) explains:
Try to imagine a religion which has been sought to be made into a vehicle for the interests of some political or non-political parties; then, the temple becomes the fortress of that party, and the prayers that take place there become some sort of political ritual. In this case there is no doubt that both religion and the holiness of religion have been sacrificed.
Instead, he was proposing to put “aside politics and direct political involvement.” (Gülen, 2004).
As a result of these ideological and organizational considerations, the GM did not value party formation and running in elections as a strategic option and instead opted for mobilization as a social movement, as GM leader Gülen (2005) announced:
As for the movement; neither now, nor in the future should our friends have any ambition for government, they should not be engaged in politics, even if all the power and pomp of the world is laid at their feet.
Strategic decisions and their consequences
The strategic decision to form a party and to run in elections (“participation”) versus staying as a social movement and influencing politics informally (“non-participation”) is one based on future expectations. However, reality does not always meet expectations. For instance, participation might lead to political marginalization within party politics as an ideological niche party instead of electoral success, or non-participation might lead to apoliticization outside institutional politics instead of a powerful counter-hegemony. Furthermore, sometimes the costs of a chosen behavior are heavier than expected, wherein the regime does not leave any breathing room for Islamic movements to engage in top-down or bottom-up influence. Thus, Islamic movements continuously strategize to minimize the costs and maximize the benefits of their chosen behavior.
Islamic movements strategize to minimize the costs and to maximize the benefits of their chosen behavior while also adjusting to a shifting menu of options. Foremost, the menu of options might shift as a result of external shocks. According to Harmel and Janda (1994), “the most dramatic and broadest changes will occur only when the [political actor] has experienced an external ‘shock’” to the actor’s “primary goal,” in this case to the Islamic movement’s ideological priorities and organizational needs, such as the introduction of new political liberalization measures or a dramatic rise in regime repressions. Furthermore, it is not only Islamic movements that learn from and adapt their behavior. The regimes also learn from and adapt their behavior, for instance by emphasizing their Islamic character more or by becoming more religiously intolerant, to counterbalance the Islamic challenge and thus to preserve their own hegemony (Volpi, 2010).
However, these shifts do not have the same meaning to all actors within the same context (Harmel and Janda, 1994). For instance, changes in the electoral system might have a shock effect on those Islamic movements participating in elections; it would have no effect on those staying as social movements. Instead, the failure of grassroots mobilization may serve as an external shock for Islamic movements eschewing party politics, as it would challenge their expectations of a bottom-up Islamic revival.
Hence, in what Brown (2012) calls a “cat-and-mouse game,” regimes strategize in response to Islamic movement behavior leading to shifts in political opportunity and threat structures, and Islamic movements strategize to accommodate these shifts leading to a quest over dominance between the movements and the regime. As a result, this article expects the strategic decision to participate (or not) in party politics to lead to strategic shifts both in the movements and in the regime and thus to a transformation in the status quo between them.
The transformation of the laicist status quo in Turkey
NOM’s participation and GM’s non-participation was organizationally a success. The NOM connected its vanguards with new constituencies and its parties became a staple of Turkish politics. Meanwhile, the GM became Turkey’s most powerful Islamic movement operating “hundreds of dormitories, preparatory schools, and high schools, in addition to six universities in Turkey and abroad” (Kuru, 2005) together with one of the most powerful media and business networks in the country.
Ideologically, however, neither actor achieved its expectations given the deep distrust between the laicist Turkish regime and Islamic actors. Although NOM-parties participated in and even led coalition governments, they also were limited by the laicist regime’s control over party politics and thus multiple NOM-parties were closed down by the Turkish Constitutional Court on grounds of un-secular activity. Similarly, the GM remained under suspicion by the same establishments wherein state prosecutors examined GM’s intentions and finances as the Movement became more public (Yavuz, 2013). Hence, the GM’s political influence remained limited as questions remained over the political intentions of such a successful Islamic movement that chose not to turn its social capital into votes for its own political party.
In 1997, the Turkish regime’s distrust of Islamic movements entered a critical phase with the “February 28 Process,” when the military in a memorandum dubbed a “post-modern coup” designated political Islam as a fundamental threat to the state. As a result, NOM’s Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) was closed down and Gülen was tried for a taped sermon he gave in which he was accused of making anti-secular remarks about the Turkish regime. These increasing regime pressures led to shifting political opportunities and threats wherein the costs of posing a political challenge to laicist establishments grew higher.
In this new political climate, both actors paid a great price for their chosen political behavior. For the GM, political stagnation became the norm in the face of such rising regime repressions against them as Gülen relocated to the US to avoid claims of Islamism, 1 and the Movement tried to keep a low political profile. Meanwhile, co-optation became a reality for the NOM. In particular, “moderates within the [NOM] realized that they could also win national elections if they lowered their ideological commitments and stressed pragmatic policy solutions” (Yavuz, 2009). These internal debates reached their peak in 2001 when some younger leaders within the NOM, who were barred from taking up leadership in the NOM hierarchy, decided to split from the NOM in order to establish a new center-right party, the JDP, with a less ideological (Islamic) focus and a more pragmatic focus. Ironically, by co-opting their strict ideological stance on laicism and by organizationally divorcing from the NOM vanguards, NOM’s successor, the JDP, achieved NOM’s twin goals of widening its supporter base and becoming a “dominant party” as the governing party of Turkey with top-down influence over policymaking (Çarkoǧlu, 2011). Meanwhile, NOM and its new parties have failed in both regards after this split. Since it is the JDP that has overtaken NOM’s role and constituency in party politics, this article will talk about the JDP as the NOM successor from here on.
Despite accommodating the regime, both actors continued to face increasing regime pressures. First, on April 27, 2007, the military made an “e-memorandum” and protested the candidacy of Abdullah Gül from the JDP to the position of the president. The next year, in 2008, the Turkish Constitutional Court discussed charges against JDP’s secular commitment and debated whether it was necessary to close down the party. Although the decision dismissed demands for JDP’s closure, that the decision was made with one vote difference is very telling in itself. Meanwhile, “a series of secret military plans were leaked to the public” that accused the GM of having links to illegal activities (Yavuz, 2013).
These developments led to realizations for both actors. From JDP’s vanguard view, although their vanguards had finally achieved a position with top-down influence as the governing party, they were unable to translate these achievements into practice given the control of laicist establishments. Similarly, from GM’s grassroots view, although the Movement had built the most powerful Islamic network in the country through years of grassroots activism, it still could not engage in the bottom-up transformation it was seeking, as it remained under the thumb of the laicist establishments in its occasional designation as an Islamic threat to the state.
In light of such realizations, both actors changed their course away from accommodating the laicist establishments and started proactively to challenge them. To do so, each actor used the resources it had built over the years through participation and non-participation respectively. While the JDP used its top-down influence through its vanguard role in the party system as the governing party and started to change a series of laws and regulations to limit the influence of laicist establishments, especially that of the military, over civilian institutions, and to have more civilian voice within the judiciary (AKP, 2015), the GM used its bottom-up influence to form public opinion through its grassroots activities in the fields of education, business, and media to support the JDP in this quest. For instance, in the 2010 referendum, the JDP used its top-down influence and proposed a change in the structure of the judiciary, a vital laicist institution, through a series of constitutional amendments that would allow the parliament to have a greater role in judicial appointments (CNN, 2010), and Gülen, to support these structural changes, appealed to his grassroots influence by making a video that aired in popular media announcing his “personal” support to a yes vote (Cumhuriyet, 2010).
As a result, the JDP and the GM were able to transform the structure of the laicist establishments by limiting the power of these institutions vis-à-vis civilian control, thereby altering the laicist status quo between themselves and the Turkish regime. The democratic effects of this transformation are addressed in the conclusion.
Conclusion: Prospects for democratization
The first part of this article discussed how the NOM and the GM strategically decided on the same potential benefits and risks of participation vis-à-vis non-participation differently in light of their varying ideological priorities and organizational needs, and the second part how these strategic decisions have led to shifts both in the Turkish regime and the movements and thus to a transformation in the laicist status quo in Turkey. But what do these findings mean for democratization in Turkey today?
Foremost, both Islamic movements have brought the pious masses, “the periphery” (Mardin, 2006), back to politics, representing their repressed demands for a less strict version of laicism. Thus, the “mainstreaming” of political Islam and the diversification of the political field has been a vital development in favor of pluralism and thus democratization in Turkey. On the other hand, however, both Islamic movements have also risked polarizations and illiberalism.
Historically, both actors’ default setting was to protect their organization against laicist establishments, but now that their former adversaries have lost their strength in Turkish politics, the debate seems to have turned into who is going to fill the void left by the laicist status quo (Çakır and Sakallı, 2014). Hence, both actors have started seeing each other as a hindrance to their vanguard versus grassroots missions.
The clash over the staffing of the bureaucracy is a good one to illustrate these tensions. Under JDP’s incumbency, the GM had become more involved in policy-making and staffing of the bureaucracy (Çakır and Sakallı, 2014). In JDP’s vanguard view, this was undesirable since it was JDP’s vanguards that had the electoral support of the majority as the ruling party and thus the right to engage in top-down influence (Çakır and Sakallı, 2014). In contrast to JDP’s vanguard view, however, in GM’s grassroots vision, the GM’s involvement in policy-making and staffing was a form of bottom-up civil society involvement and an example of lobbying by a social movement (Yavuz, 2013).
Furthermore, both actors started disagreeing on policies. For instance, they disagreed over how the JDP government handled the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 in which nine Turkish citizens were killed by the Israeli forces while carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza without seeking Israeli approval. Whereas the JDP, following in the footsteps of its predecessor NOM, which believed that the West causes the problems of Muslims, adapted a confrontational rhetoric towards Israel, the GM, which believes that the problems of the Muslim world are caused by the absence of self-reflection, criticized the JDP government’s confrontational behavior (Çakır and Sakallı, 2014). Thus, in essence both movements were seeing each other as the new threat to their ideological priorities and organizational goals, and thus were clashing over how to restructure a new socio-political system in the aftermath of the changes in the laicist status quo.
These disagreements over staffing and policies have reached a new level today as each side started accusing the other of corruption, treason, and even terrorism, thus creating further political polarizations. The increasing tensions between the JDP and the GM have turned into an open confrontation with the December 17, 2013 corruption raids, in which police and judiciary personnel allegedly close to the GM took JDP-linked individuals into custody for alleged corruption. Tensions intensified since then with the release of tapes allegedly 2 incriminating the JDP government (Çakır, 2014a) as well as with the arrest of various police personnel allegedly close to the GM (Çakır, 2014b) and the closure of GM’s Zaman newspaper (Yackley and Butler, 2016).
During such political polarizations both actors have also risked illiberalism. While the JDP has turned back to NOM’s top-down vanguard-led social engineering agenda after becoming the dominant player within party politics and has increasingly started voicing a moral role for the state under a heavily controlled vanguard party organization (Lancaster, 2014), the GM has remained unaccountable towards Turkish citizens despite its critical political influence in politics as a grassroots organization with bottom-up influence as its organizational finances and internal decision-making procedures have remained outside the scope of democratic oversight. 3 As a result, the debate over democratization in Turkey today has been an old one about how to strengthen liberal democratic institutions so that the system neither turns into a tyranny of the minority nor into a tyranny of the majority.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.