3 State-Formation, Statist Islam, and Regime Instability: Evidence from Turkey

Religion, and particularly the forces of political Islam and state secularism, have been central to discussions of regime stability in the Turkish case.¹ After its founding as a single-party and eventually self-declaredly secular state under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s, the country effectively transitioned to a multiparty system in 1950. Yet intense polarization, political instability, and military interventions have propelled the Turkish Republic into crisis about once every decade since. Successful military coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980, the “postmodern coup” of 1997, the 2007 military “E-memorandum,” and most recently the failed coup of 2016 have all interrupted the process of democratic deepening. In light of Turkey’s most recent bouts of political upheaval, scholars have struggled to definitively characterize Turkey’s regime “type,” alternatively labeling it “tutelary democracy” (Höjelid 2009), “elusive democracy” (Tezcür 2010), “secular democracy” (Secor 2011), “delegative democracy” (Taş 2015), “illiberal democracy” (Göl 2017), “competitive authoritarianism” (Çalışkan 2018; Esen and Gumuscu 2016), “neo-fascism” (Tuğal 2016), “spindle autocracy”(White 2017), “fragile or weak authoritarianism”(Akkoyunlu and Öktem 2016), and finally, building on Guillermo O’Donnel’s concept, a “brown country” that functionally and territorially mixes key democratic and authoritarian characteristics (Kurban 2020).

These difficulties in classifying Turkey’s regime reflect the broader absence of regime stability in Turkey’s modern history. That is to say, they reflect a lack of strong democratic or authoritarian consolidation. Scholars have attributed this instability, in part, to the cycling of one of the country’s master narratives of conflict, which allegedly pits the forces of political Islam against Kemalist secularism. Guardians of the Kemalist tradition have been depicted as “working from inside the state system” to limit expressions of religion in the public sphere and repress pious elements in society via assertive forms of state secularism (laïcité—lâiklik) (Kuru 2009). Political Islamists, by contrast, gained attention for “working from outside the system” to mobilize religious identity and contest the state’s repression of religious freedom via local politics and the grass roots (White 2002). More recently, after nearly two decades of rule by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which was first democratically elected in 2002, it is argued that the tables have been turned. Now in control of the system, political Islamists are said to be using it to flout the very democratic institutions that brought them to power, to desecularize the state, and to impose Islamic values (Cornell 2017).

To make sense of these upheavals, and to shed light on some of the reasons why both democracy and authoritarianism have “failed to stick” in the Turkish case, this chapter advocates for a more long-term historical assessment of the relationship between religion and regime. The chapter makes two interlocking arguments. First, using evidence from the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey, I argue that processes of state formation shaped the subsequent trajectory of Islamist politics in modern Turkey, which came to be dominated by statist or state-centric political Islamist currents. Power arrangements fortified during state formation imbedded elements of the dominant religion (Sunni Islam) within the state and subsequently structured “the deep rules of the game” in Turkish politics. As such, far from being a reactionary force working primarily from outside of the state system, political Islamists in Turkey learned to operate largely from within state organs and with statist prerogatives. They continue to do so.

Second, and relatedly, although Turkey’s political Islamists have indeed used grass-roots strategies to inspire and mobilize the masses (Delibas 2015; White 2002), legacies of late Ottoman and Kemalist state-building have contributed to another set of strategies at the elite level that are less visible and still poorly understood. State-centric Islamists in Turkey have wielded their moral authority to homogenize and nationalize society, as well as to build and reorient the state in their own image. They have used coalition-building, coalition-balancing, and patronage politics to expand their foothold in state institutions. They have consistently and steadily gained influence through a patient strategy of temporary bargains with the anti-democratic forces of Kemalist secularism against mutual enemies (leftists, minority groups, etc.). Finally, state-centric Islamists have aspired for institutional capture rather than protracted power sharing—much like their Kemalist counterparts. The emergence of state-centric political Islam has thus contributed to regime instability because many big political battles are fought within the critical institutional corridors of the state—security, judiciary, education, etc.—and are thereby destabilizing to it, whether in democratic or autocratic form.

Before turning toward empirics and further elaborating the arguments presented thus far, a few definitional notes are in order. First, in its approach to religion, the historical analysis in this chapter focuses on how the emerging Turkish state engaged three discrete aspects of the dominant majority religion, Sunni Islam: religious elites, religious institutions, and religious attachments. Disaggregating religion in this way shows appreciation for the fact that religious authority—which can equally be a potential challenge or supplement to state authority—is embodied in the form of individual power brokers (elites), their organizational structures (institutions), and norms regarding identity and belonging (attachments). Such an approach also restores agency to Sunni Muslim religious elites in the history of state-building, secularization, and modernization, which is key to understanding how subsequent power relations between the emergent machine of the centralized state and the traditional loci of religious authority evolved.²

My use of the term “political Islam” corresponds to the Turkish terms İslâmcılık (Islamism) or siyasal İslâmcılık (political Islamism), which are used to describe the agenda and activities of individuals and groups who claim to defend the religious sphere from various forms of encroachment and to protect the interests of the pious and religious elites (Fabbe and Balikçioglu 2019). “Secularization” is a more difficult term to pin down. As I have noted elsewhere, I harbor deep skepticism about the usefulness of secularism and secularization as face-values concepts, while also admitting that the terms are hard to avoid (Fabbe 2019). Here I contend that state formation is a kind of secularization, insomuch as it involves the expansion of state-centric norms of sovereignty and institutional hegemony over specific “disciplinary” domains (in the Foucauldian sense) of human interaction. Hence, when I write of secularization or secularizing strategies, I refer to their Jacobin orientation; that is, to a belief in the possibility of transforming society through totalistic political action designed to reorient loyalties toward the state by controlling traditional influences and generating modern/civic identities (Eisenstadt 1999; Fabbe 2019).

Finally, the labels of “Kemalist” and “Islamist” are not without their problems, paradoxes, or ambiguities—but both terms are used widely and self-referentially in Turkey (White 2002), and thus they are also retained here.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the emerging Turkish state made durable advances in sovereignty and hegemony by deploying the symbolic resources of Sunni Muslim identity, by leveraging religious institutions, and by imbedding individual religious elites into nascent, state-centric structures of education, law, and bureaucracy as part of the state-building process. Specifically, institutional changes in education and law that were set into motion during the reign of Sultan ʿAbdulḥamīd II (r. 1876–1909), and were continued subsequently under the rule of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) and in the early Kemalist period, demonstrate how modern Turkish state formation led religious elites to develop state-centric prerogatives and orientations. Using evidence from the periods of Hamidian, CUP, and Kemalist rule, I show how a lack of manpower for modernizing reforms led the state to expand into education and law by creating new institutional layers on the edge of traditional religious structures. Institutional layering was further undergirded by the incremental, piecemeal co-optation of a sizable number of religious elites, a process that realigned their interests and rendered them largely state-centric. As a result of this state formation process, the traditional religious institutions of Sunni Islam gradually eroded in the late Ottoman period, and the interests of Islamists increasing assumed state-centric orientations.

Sultan ʿAbdulḥamīd II, who ascended to the throne in 1876 at the age of thirty-four, came to power in the midst of a gathering political storm. Foreign (British, French, Russian) interventions had whittled away Ottoman influence. The internationally imposed autonomous provinces of the empire—Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Crete, Samos, Mt. Lebanon, Egypt—began to slip further from Ottoman control, largely as a result of European meddling (Findley 2010). By the 1870s and 1880s, Ottoman political elites and the empire’s Muslim population became increasingly unwilling to accept any kind of European interference in Ottoman affairs, with the French conquest of Tunisia (1881) and the British occupation of Egypt (1882) particularly offensive to them. Furthermore, for the empire’s Christian elite, the idea of Ottoman citizenship was beginning to lose its appeal, making way for the politics of self-determination (Rodogno 2012).

ʿAbdulḥamīd II thus inherited a host of political and fiscal problems, while also under pressure to centralize, modernize, and consolidate his power base. Despite these impediments, ʿAbdulḥamīd II ruled as an absolute monarch for some thirty years and managed to make great strides toward developing modern infrastructure, even amid the impending chaos. In large part this was because, from approximately the mid-1870s onward, he supported modernizing reforms in the fields of education and law based on a strategy of institutional layering, which continuously blurred the distinction between “state” and “religious” institutional structures and helped consolidate state authority.

For example, in the field of education, the term ibtidā‘ī mektebi, which is often used interchangeably with the terms “modern,” “secular,” or “state” schools in the secondary literature, was actually also the standard term for traditional Qurʾan schools in many official government documents during this period. The “usage of the term ibtidā‘ī mektebi both for Qurʾan schools and for government schools in official documents,” argues Akşin Somel (2001, 109), is “related to the ‘historical relict’ of considering primary education as an integral part of religious instruction.” Work by Benjamin Fortna also illustrates that during the reign of ʿAbdulḥamīd II the character and content of late Ottoman “state” education became more Islamic than it had been immediately after the first wave of Tanzimat reforms. Fortna writes that “Western subjects were de-emphasized and a considerable amount of classically Islamic content such as Quran, ḥadīth and jurisprudence were introduced into an otherwise largely secular lesson plan” (Fortna 2011, 81).

This blurring of lines between religious and state institutional structures in the field of education was born from the imperatives of state-building under constraints—especially severe shortages in civilian-trained (in this case, nonreligiously trained) teachers. This can be illustrated by figures compiled by the Ottoman statistical office for the year 1897–1898 (1313). The total number of schools is listed as 29,081, consisting of 55 “high schools” (mekātib-i ʿidādiyye), 412 “middle schools” (mekātib-i rüşdiyye), and 28,614 “primary/elementary schools” (mekātib-i ibtidāiyye). However, the same records do not indicate there being anywhere near an adequate amount of nonreligiously trained teachers to fill these schools—the total number of state-employed teaching staff and other personnel was listed as only 3,613! Furthermore, the number of students enrolled at the empire’s 14 state-created training programs for elementary school teachers (dāru’l-muʿallimīn) was only 277 that same year, meaning that a new crop of available teachers was not on the horizon (Güran 1997, 106–109). Elites at the helm of the Ottoman state were aware of this manpower predicament, as evidenced by an 1888 document issued by the Ottoman Commission for Education, which stated that, “regarding the appointment of individuals capable of teaching in the new method, because of serious concerns about empty teaching slots and the absence of teachers, recourse has to be taken by continuing [to appoint] those with traditional training in existing [religious] methods” (Kodman 1980, 240).

In the legal realm, too, centralizing reforms had not and did not ostracize the religious establishment. The Provincial Law of 1864 marked the beginning of a separation of administrative and judicial powers and paved the way for the consolidation of the Niẓāmiye³ court system as a set of institutions that was theoretically distinct from the shariʿa courts. At this stage, however, the entire judicial system (including commercial and criminal elements) was still subordinate to the Şeyḫülislām, and thus the religious establishment (Rubin 2011, 21–29). What is more, the beginning of the new Niẓāmiye system did not immediately herald the end of the traditional shariʿa courts, the ḳāḍī system, and/or religious legal order. For one, Aḥmed Cevdet Paşa, a shariʿa jurist, who can by no means be labeled a “secularist,” spearheaded the Niẓāmiye system. Between 1870 and 1877, Cevdet Paşa led an effort to codify the shariʿa based on the corpus juris of the Hanafite school. These developments culminated in the creation of the Mecelle (Mecelle-yi aḥkām-ı ʿadliye), a civil code that was a hybrid legal artifact with European structure but distinct Islamic features and content (Hallaq 2009, 409–411). The Mecelle was applied in both traditional shariʿa courts and in the new Niẓāmiye system, showing the close relationship between the two.

Furthermore, the creation of the Niẓāmiye courts did not occur at the expense of religious elites’ career advancement. Shariʿa judges instead just assumed a new duty as the chief judges of the new Niẓāmiye courts, now under the new title of nāʾib. The traditional kadıship thus evolved into something akin to “fellowship” for medrese students. Research into the personnel records of late Ottoman nāʾibs reveals that many entered the religious hierarchy of kadıship in their student years and then were promoted to the position of nāʾib in the new Niẓāmiye system, marking a high degree of fluidity between the traditional shariʿa system and the new state-centric Niẓāmiye courts, as well as new pathways for upward mobility (Akiba 2005). Similarly, analysis of the judicial personnel in the Niẓāmiye courts shows that initially many hailed from the medreses, the new Niẓāmiye law school (which itself drew from the medreses), and the School for Shariʿa Judges (Akiba 2018; Rubin 2011), established in 1855.

Sultan ʿAbdulḥamīd II’s approach to religion had, in many ways, bolstered his authority and centralization. Nonetheless, iron-fist tendencies and a penchant for the brutal suppression of potential opponents earned him a number of enemies. As discontent with the seemingly endless military campaigns and economic crises brewed among the lower ranks of the bureaucracy and military, organized opposition took shape (Karal 1962; Pekdemir 2008). Namely, the Young Turk movement (the intellectual movement from which the Committee for Union and Progress [CUP] eventually emerged) appeared on the scene in the late nineteenth century.

The movement began as a group of exiles, intellectuals, military officers, and civil servants connected by virtue of their opposition to ʿAbdulḥamīd II’s regime. The organization’s self-proclaimed goal was a return to the political structures of the First Constitutional Period—namely the reinstatement of the constitutional monarchy and revival of the Ottoman Parliament, which had been enacted by the Basic Law/Constitution (Ḳānūn-ı Esāsī) of 1876. This First Constitutional Period was short-lived, lasting only two years before being abolished by ʿAbdulḥamīd II, who then reinstated an absolute monarchy with himself at the helm in 1878. The CUP won a major victory in July 1908, when the group’s “Young Turk Revolution” succeeded in forcing ʿAbdulḥamīd II to acquiesce to their demands that the 1876 constitution and Ottoman Parliament be reinstated. Although the event was a major victory for the Young Turks, it did not provide the CUP with a free hand to systematically disenfranchise religious influence. Nonetheless, as Şükrü Hanioğlu has observed, there was also growing sentiment within CUP circles that the social position of the ulema and its role in state affairs should be substantially curtailed (Hanioğlu 1995, 2005) in the interests of state centralization and modernization.

The religious elite were more than a mere nuisance for the reform-minded CUP. As available data reveal, by virtue of size and position, the ulema was both a potential breeding ground for collective resistance to the forces of further state centralization and a reservoir of expertise and manpower that had to be taken very seriously. Approximately 3,278 upper-level ulema members (at the rank of ḳāḍī, müftü, and nāʾib) were, at least in theory, operating across the empire (Albayrak 1996, vol. 1). To this figure needs to be added the number of medrese instructors, ṭalebeler/softā (students), imamlar (prayer leaders), müezzinler (call to prayer reciters), and ḥāfıẓlar (Qurʾan reciters). Precise numbers are elusive, but some basic estimates are possible: in 1892 Ottoman authorities estimated the number of medrese students in the capital alone to be near to 12,000, a sizable number indeed (Bein 2006, 289), while another estimate put the combined number of imamlar, müezzinler, and ḥāfıẓlar empire-wide at 188,000 (Karpat 1985, 218). Finally, detailed qualitative analysis of the career trajectories of 140 randomly selected ulema members working during the final decades of the empire reveals that over two-thirds of them transferred between (or simultaneously worked in) “traditional” religious institutions and new “state-centric” institutions (Fabbe 2019). Put simply, the Sunni Muslim religious establishment was sizable and embedded.

As relations between the CUP and the Sunni Muslim religious establishment unfolded, two points became increasingly clear. First, the primary preferences of these religious elites lay not in some fundamental, religiously dictated distaste for modernization or even centralization, but in a more basic desire to preserve their own position in society, their institutions, and their livelihood. This meant that the Sunni Muslim religious establishment was largely divided regarding its attitudes toward the CUP (Ardıc̦ 2012; Bein 2011). Second, the CUP recognized the importance of religious attachments and moral authority. The organization extensively used religious language and rhetoric to broaden its mass appeal and to placate men of faith as well as the pious. In CUP publications, evidence to this effect abounds, and CUP leaders often claimed to be better Muslims than the Sultan-Caliph himself (Emil 1979; Gündüz 2008; Hanioğlu 2001; Mardin 1964).

While the CUP struggled to formalize its political influence with ʿAbdulḥamīd II still on the throne, opposition to the CUP began to rear its head. Political factions opposed to a CUP takeover consolidated. On September 14, 1908, the Liberal Union (ʿOsmānlı Aḥrār Fırḳası) was founded, a liberal group popular with minorities and in favor of decentralization—as opposed to the CUP’s centralization policies. This group was headed by Prince Ṣabāḥaddīn, nephew and fierce opponent of ʿAbdulḥamīd II (Kuran 1948, 229).⁴ Furthermore, the İttiḥād-ı Muḥammedī Fırḳası (Society of Muhammadan/Moslem Union), a religiously conservative Islamic faction demanding the full implementation of the shariʿa, also appeared on April 5, 1909 (Tunaya 1984, 1, 182–200). Less than a week prior, this faction’s leader had led a large uprising in the capital, demanding a full implementation of the shariʿa while the Liberal Union stood by in tacit support (Albayrak 1987; Atilhan 1956; İrtem 2003; Kutay 1977). Despite the ostensibly Islamic aims of the uprising, it seems that, at its core, the real subject of dispute was whether state-centric expansion should proceed or not. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain the strange merging of political bedfellows that led the Liberal Union—a vociferous opponent of Sultan ʿAbdulḥamīd II that was backed by Christian and Jewish minorities—to support a group of pious, Sunni Muslim, anti-CUP demonstrators protesting for the full implementation of the shariʿa.

More interestingly, for our purposes here, despite the emergence of an “Islamic party” and the existence of a “religious uprising” at this juncture in 1909, the Sunni Muslim religious establishment itself did not fully coalesce behind either; rather, it fractured further still. And, while exceptions certainly did exist, the lines of these fractures began to take a clearer form. Upper-level ulema members with a secure position in the religious establishment’s hierarchy often tended to view themselves as better off defending the CUP’s state centralization efforts and the constitution (Ṭanīn 1908; İ. Kara 1994, 2005; Kuran 1948; Tunaya 2003; Unat 1960). They wanted to maintain their social status and position, which was still possible in the contemporary political climate as a result of the incentives being offered by the CUP leadership in return for compliance. Low-level religious functionaries and students of religion, on the other hand, had much less to gain by siding with the CUP and tended to support the protestors (Farhi 1971). Religious students and low-level functionaries saw the very institutions that were supposed to afford them upward mobility being neglected, as upper-level ulema joined new state-centric institutions of education and law, not to mention entered the political fray. Lower-level members of the Sunni Muslim religious establishment had no place in the new centralized state system from the outset, and they thus attempted to resist as the CUP tightened its grip on power.

The CUP’s response to the uprising was as swift as it was brutal, replete with arrests, public hangings, and widespread general repression. It also, however, included deferential gestures toward those members of the Sunni Muslim religious establishment that had supported it. First, the CUP institutionalized an ulema branch of its organization in order to demonstrate the seriousness of its commitment to religion (Hanioğlu 2001, 306). Second, it maneuvered to acquire a fatwa providing an official religious justification for ʿAbdulḥamīd II’s dismissal, thus sealing his fate (Hür 2008). Finally, even though the 1876 constitution had been reinstated, the reforms of 1909 made the document substantially more “Islamic” in both tone and content than the 1876 original. An alteration to Article 10, for example, added a reference to the shariʿa in connection with the lawful reasons for arrest, and a change in Article 118 made Ḥanafī jurisprudence (fiqh) a major source for new legislation (Hanioğlu 2008, 160). The constitution thus earned the praise of many influential Sunni Muslim religious elites (Berkes 1964, 368–370).

What is shocking is that certain members of the Sunni Muslim religious establishment continued to back and legitimate the CUP’s next set of moves, which made it clear that the CUP sought to decrease the administrative and spiritual influence of a key religious institution, the Meşīḫat (the office of the Şeyḫülislām). The CUP let its motives toward the office of the Şeyḫülislām be known early in 1909, when one of its key activists began publicly advocating that all judicial and educational institutions should be transferred to the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Education, respectively (Bein 2011, 20). Key ulema came to the CUP’s defense, providing religious justifications for treating the Meşīḫat as a subordinate arm of the state completely devoid of autonomous spiritual authority (Ardıc̦ 2012, 40). The CUP won an additional victory in 1910 when an ulema member who was sympathetic to reorganizing the administrative, judicial, and educational functions of the religious establishment was appointed to the role of Şeyḫülislām (Bein 2011, 40). By 1912 political maneuvering and rhetorical battling within the religious establishment’s ranks, centering on control of the office of the Şeyḫülislām, had fractured the Sunni Muslim religious establishment into three main groups: those who supported the CUP and bolstered its religious credentials, those who mounted defensive opposition to CUP endeavors, and those who kept their heads down in an attempt to remain apolitical while maintaining their careers (Bein 2011, 101). From 1912 through the First World War, these groups jockeyed for influence, undermining one another in the process.

The religious establishment, for its part, was certainly not looking to forfeit authority and autonomy to state-centric control. Nor were members of the religious establishment entirely ignorant of the fact that reformers were being strategic in their appropriation of religious rhetoric. At this point, however, the divisions within the religious establishment were so acute that its collective defenses had been greatly weakened. Furthermore, the continued availability of new professional avenues for Sunni Muslim religious elites in this crucial reform period aligned a significant portion of their interests with those of the emerging state, especially as religious institutions themselves languished. This gradual shifting of allegiances paved the way for the Kemalists’ final push to completely subordinate Sunni Muslim religious institutions to state-centric purposes. Later in the chapter I provide examples of this phenomenon in education, law, and the creation of the bureaucratic institution that eventually became Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyānet İşleri Re’īsliği, later to become the Diyânet İşleri Başkanlığı, and from now on referred to herein simply as “the Diyanet.”

From the aforementioned qualitative analysis of 140 ulema biographies (Fabbe 2019), I find that approximately fifteen ulema members taught in the new primary education system at some point, and forty additional ulema members fulfilled some sort of educational role in connection with the state as the medrese system was reformed and brought under the state mantle prior to being “abolished” in 1924. Local records paint a similar picture. For example, records from the Annual Education Yearbooks (Maʿārif Sālnāmesi) from the Diyarbekir vilayet from 1898 to 1903 show that the vast majority of teachers at all levels came from the learned religious class (Şimşek 2006). Beyond attempts to expand modern teacher-training programs, which ulema members were encouraged to join, I have found no evidence to suggest that the CUP made any effort to rid the state educational system of its religiously trained personnel.

Notably, even as religious teachers were co-opted and became a mainstay in the primary schools for the time being, religious instruction itself was on the decline. More specifically, the religious content of official primary-school curricula was not immediately eradicated—even with the Kemalist revolution—but rather slowly phased out over the course of thirty to forty years. Tracing staffing figures, changes in textbook content and class scheduling, and the observations of primary-school students all emphasize that religious messages and morality actually began to be stripped away from educational texts long before schools were stripped of their “religious” teachers (Doğan 1994; Somel 2001; Ünal 2008). In other words, the Second Constitutional Period is characterized by a cadre of religious functionaries teaching on the basis of materials that were slowly moving away from traditional Islamic doctrine and toward a modern synthesis that fused a nominal version of Sunni Islam with an emergent state-centric nationalism.

Finally, the gradual decline and concomitant nationalization of the late Ottoman medrese education system shows that, although the medreses were indeed formally abolished by the Kemalist government in 1924, the gradual processes of change leading up to that point had weakened these religious institutions to such a degree that abolition and usurpation of the system’s resources was a viable policy. Two newly fashioned “medreses” that focused on the professional preparation of religious functionaries were opened in late 1912, the Medresetü‘l-vā‘izīn and the Medresetü‘l-eimme ve’l-ḫuṭebā (Akiba 2003). This trend toward professionalization culminated in the “Reform of the Medreses” bill (Iṣlāḥāt-ı Medāris Niẓāmnāmesi) in 1914. This sweeping reform program centralized, regularized, and effectively “nationalized” medrese education in Istanbul (similar changes were later made outside the capital), organizing it into a three-tiered system (primary, secondary, higher) modeled on the structure of the state school system. New curricular changes were also slowly introduced in an effort to blend the content of the medrese and state systems closer together (Kütükoğlu 1978; Ürgüplü 2015).⁵ Finally, and most significantly, with the 1914 reforms, caps were placed on medrese enrollment. In 1914 enrollment in the capital was limited to 2,880, and in 1917 it was further reduced to 1,350 (Bein 2011, 66). Interestingly, senior representatives from the medrese system fully endorsed these caps, arguing that it helped to maintain student quality and weed out free riders.

Thus, when the republican regime passed the Unification of Education Law (Tevḥīd-i Tedrīsāt Ḳānūnu) on March 3, 1924, which effectively transferred all medreses to the control of the state Ministry of Education (Ayhan 1999), the medrese system itself had been substantially weakened. Even as the medreses were forced to shutter their doors, most of the ulema members who worked in them were not left out in the cold. The Kemalists softened the blow by adding Article 4 to the Unification of Education Law, which provided for the opening of a network of so-called Imam Hatip schools, which were designated with training prayer leaders and preachers who would comply with principles of the new republic. These schools continue to exist to this very day and enroll a substantial portion of secondary and high school students in Turkey (Öcal 2007; Ünsür 2005).

In the legal realm, similar dynamics played out as reformers slowly phased out shariʿa courts and grew the system of centralized Niẓāmiye courts described earlier in this chapter by co-opting Sunni Muslim religious elites. Data derived from the catalog of Ottoman court records (Akgündüz and Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Vakfı 1988) show that in 1908, the year of the Young Turk Revolution, 121 of the 166 established judicial centers for shariʿa law (73 percent) were still producing bound volumes of witness testimony and judicial verdicts, meaning, of course, that they were still active and hearing cases. By 1922, however, that number appears to have dropped to 32, meaning that only 19 percent of these centers were still active. The interesting question, then, is not how Mustafa Kemal closed the shariʿa courts in 1924, but rather how these courts were successfully phased out in the period before he rose to power. Evidence suggests that the layering of modern and traditional legal institutions (combined with the gradual co-optation of judicial personnel from the religious establishment) created a situation in which many ulema became tightly enmeshed with the emerging state’s legal apparatus in the late Ottoman period, even after the Young Turk Revolution. Although this layering took numerous forms, particularly important in this respect was the fluidity with which personnel flowed between the two systems for decades.

In the 1870s the Ministry of Justice had assumed the role as the administrative headquarters for the Niẓāmiye court system, while the shariʿa courts remained under the direction of the Meşīḫat (office of the Şeyḫülislām). As historians have observed, however, the structure of the Niẓāmiye court system actually created a sort of “special partnership” between the Ministry of Justice and the office of the Şeyḫülislām in the domain of civil law that endured through the Second Constitutional Period. This was because the civil sections increasingly operated in accordance with Niẓāmiye procedure, but were presided over by judges from the religious establishment (Akiba 2018; Rubin 2011). For example, Rubin (2011, 78) finds that the majority of judges who presided over the Niẓāmiye courts of first instance—or the civil sections thereof, to the extent that any distinction was maintained—were nāʾibs. That is, they were shariʿa judges from the ranks of the ulema and employed by the office of the Şeyḫülislām. Rubin also finds that, according to Ottoman statistical yearbooks (sālnāmeler), these were the same individuals who served as ḳāḍīs in the local shariʿa courts (147). There is no evidence to suggest that the Ministry of Justice made any effort to expel nāʾibs from the civil section of the Niẓāmiye system or rid the court of members of the religious elite, even after the Young Turk Revolution, unless they resisted reform very directly (Akiba 2018, 234).

Qualitative analysis from the aforementioned 140 randomly selected ulema biographies corroborates these findings. Fifty-nine of these ulema members worked as nāʾibs in the Niẓāmiye court system. Of these fifty-nine individuals, twenty-seven simultaneously served as both a nāʾib in the Niẓāmiye system and a ḳāḍī in a shariʿa court. Furthermore, an additional eleven individuals did some sort of clerkship or scribal work in the Niẓāmiye courts over the course of their lifetime (Fabbe 2019).

Given the high degree of fluidity and overlap between the Niẓāmiye and shariʿa systems for decades, it is perhaps not surprising that the religious establishment offered little protest in 1917 when two important laws were passed that fused the institutions further. The first law, which was actually even signed by the Şeyḫülislām, subordinated the shariʿa courts to the Ministry of Justice. This law stripped the office of the Şeyḫülislām of some of its most critical administrative assets without actually threatening the existence of the shariʿa courts or the jobs of those who worked in them. The second law was the Law of the Shariʿa Court Procedure, which further formalized the unification of judicial procedure across the various courts and thereby made a significant step toward formally centralizing the judiciary under an ordered set of regulations devised by the state (Rubin 2011, 26–50).

One final piece of evidence from the Turkish ulema biographies and career trajectories helps to summarize the data presented here about religious co-optation into new state-centric institutions for law and schooling. Of a sample of seventy-eight biographies of ulema members (Miller 2005, 103) that extend directly into the Republican period, we see the following trajectory for members of the religious establishment:

In other words, these biographies depict a situation in which a large segment of active ulema members were given the opportunity to incorporate themselves into the nascent institutional framework of the centralized state and, as a result, opted for cooperation with, rather than active resistance to, policies to completely subordinate and dismantle religious institutions once the Kemalists seized power.

As the above examples demonstrate, work in the state’s judiciary and education systems was a popular alternative to obsolescence or resistance for religious elites. So too was serving as a bureaucrat in the predecessor of Turkey’s ministry for religious affairs. The creation of this bureaucracy, its objectives, its exclusion of non-Sunni Muslims, and its subsequent growth and entrenchment stand as perhaps the best examples that the “secular” Turkish state created institutional conduits for religious elites and future Islamists that flowed within and through the arteries of the state.

The immediate roots of Turkey’s Diyanet and its religious bureaucrats can be traced to 1920, when the Şerʿiye ve Evḳāf Vekāleti (Ministry of Islamic Affairs and Religious Endowments) was established after the opening of the Turkish Grand National Assembly by Mustafa Kemal’s newly established shadow government in Ankara. Amit Bein’s excellent history of the late Ottoman ulema shows that this short-lived ministry “served as a de facto alternative to the Şeyḫülislām and was primarily staffed by reform-minded ulema” (Bein 2011, 71–72). In 1922 the Grand National Assembly also moved to strip Sultan Vaḥīdeddīn of his role as caliph on the basis of treachery, transferring the position instead to the more pliable ʿAbdülmecīd Efendi and sending out a circular to inform all local imams and ḫatībs about this change.⁶ Soon thereafter, close on the heels of the Treaty of Lausanne, in August 1923 the Kemalist assembly approved a resolution to make Ankara the capital of the new state while retaining Istanbul as the seat of the actual Caliphate (Ahmad 2003, 87). With these moves, the Ankara assembly managed to temporarily preserve the symbolic authority of Islamic leaders and the Caliphate while isolating them ever further from the inner workings of the new government in the Republic’s first crucial months.

Finally, in March 1924, Kemal abolished the Caliphate completely in a demonstration of national authority and state sovereignty. Interestingly, the actual proposal to abolish the Caliphate was presented by the religious scholar and Sufi leader Sheikh Ṣafvet Efendi, who rationalized that, “because the Caliphate is essentially intrinsic to the concept and purview of the government and republic, the office of the Caliphate is abolished” (Ardıc̦ 2012, 296–297). A telegraph was sent to müftülüḳs (mufti offices) announcing the abolition and further instructing them that Friday sermons should emphasize prayers for the well-being (selāmet) and prosperity (saʿādet) of the religious community, whereas any other sermon or message that would instigate chaos should be avoided.⁷ Simultaneously, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and Religious Endowments was shuttered and replaced by the even more “domesticated” Diyānet İşleri Re’īsliği (Presidency of Religious Affairs, later to become the Diyânet İşleri Başkanlığı). From now on, all cadres of preachers—vā‘iz, mü‘ezzin, imam, and/or ḫatīb—would be civil servants working for the Diyanet. They would be required to send in their documents, including the information on their identity cards, so as to monitor their compliance with the state. Local müftülüḳs were turned into representatives of the Diyanet in their respective jurisdictions, sometimes making decisions on behalf of the Diyanet as needed. ⁸ Simultaneously, the resources and property of the religious establishment—and especially the former Ministry of Islamic Affairs and Religious Endowments—were dismantled and conferred to other departments such as the Ministry of Education.⁹

Strikingly, between 1920 and 1925, Mustafa Kemal and his allies did not take many hostile actions against the Sufi orders or tekkes. With the abolition of the Caliphate and the creation of the Diyanet, however, a Rubicon had been crossed. Soon thereafter the Kemalist government abolished the shariʿa courts,¹⁰ forced medreses to close their doors, and imposed a number of other decrees that demonstrated the hegemony of state sovereignty over the religious realm. With respect to the Sufi orders, the Sheikh Saʿīd Rebellion in the predominantly Kurdish southeast in February 1925 marked a critical turning point, for it provided direct evidence that tekkes and tarikats (especially in non-ethnically Turkish areas) could still potentially serve as reservoirs of resistance to state consolidation and modernization. The next fall, with the passage of law 677v, the religious orders were formally abolished and their tekkes closed. In the debate over the passage of the law, almost no one, not even those with medrese educations and Sufi backgrounds, defended the tekkes (M. Kara 2001, 19–34; Silverstein 2011, 84–88). By the 1930s the term ulema itself was even banished from the official lexicon (Bein 2011, 103).

The Diyanet, however, remained. With an official budget and state protection, it created something akin to a bureaucratic shelter for those religious elites who were, if not entirely comfortable, then at least somewhat secure working in the service of the state. The Diyanet also quickly went about a general process of granting those members of the religious establishment who were sympathetic to the Kemalist cause with official papers certifying their affiliation with the Diyanet, so that they could circulate freely.¹¹ The Diyanet also continued to pay out salaries to a number of religious teachers and officials whose status was questionable.¹² That said, the Diyanet was only viable as a stable bureaucratic institution because the religious establishment that staffed it had grown collectively weak as a result of educational and legal reforms based on strategies of co-optation, internal divisions within the establishment, and reformers’ ability to instrumentalize religious rhetoric and attachments for nationalist purposes. The Diyanet’s position relative to the government was made even weaker over the course of the next decade. At its absolute nadir in 1931, the Diyanet even lost effective administrative authority over mosque officials and employees for a significant period of time (Aytür, Çelik, and Şahinaslan 1989; Bein 2011, 143).

Although largely powerless back then, what remained of the Diyanet was not without purpose. The Kemalists (and subsequent governments) used the Diyanet in a “productive” capacity to help forge a bridge between traditional Sunni Muslim religious attachments and modern nationalist loyalties. Now at the almost complete behest of the Republic, religious administrators and civil servants were given a clear new mission: to help finish the job of transforming the masses into loyal citizens of the state through state-sponsored and religiously grounded Turkification and nationalization initiatives (Fabbe 2019; Lord 2018). Immediately after the Caliphate’s demise in March 1924, the Kemalist government released a circular requiring all religious elites to use the occasion as an opportunity to proselytize on the virtues of the nation-state in public prayers and sermons.¹³ In the 1920s and 1930s, the government tasked religious elites in the Diyanet with producing modern Turkish translations of the Qurʾan and other sacred texts, as well as publishing sermons for use in mosques across the country (Bein 2011, 121). Remarkably, in 1925 Ḥamdī Aḳseki, who would later serve as the Diyanet president between 1947 and 1951, even wrote and published an instructional guide to teach Islam to privates in the military, titled ʿAskere dīn kitābı (The book of religion for soldiers). The book was reprinted several times and depicts military service as both a civic and a religious duty (Gürpinar and Kenar 2016, 66–67).

It was not until 1928 that the Turkish Constitution substituted the line declaring Islam as the religion of the state with the pronouncement that Turkey was a secular (lâik) republic. And even then, it did not abolish the Diyanet. The triumph of the Kemalists was therefore not the separation of religion and state, but the usurpation and domestication of the Sunni Muslim religious establishment by the state. This was achieved gradually and largely before the Kemalists came to power by the co-optation of religious elites, the gradual undermining of religious institutions, and the repurposing of religious attachments. Weak and diminished though they were as a group, many members of the ulema had not been ostracized by the state but retained a steady foothold as civil servants. This form of institutionalization not only cemented the peculiar synergies between Kemalism and Islam (and thus religion and state), but set the stage for Islamists’ eventual renaissance and re-emergence as a state-centric force for change in subsequent decades.

Turkey’s religious bureaucracy was at its weakest in the 1930s. In the Republican Era, Islamist critics who remained outside the institutional framework of the Diyanet or the state were stigmatized (by the state and its Islamist cadres alike) as pro-shariʿa (şeriâtçılık), backward, and/or reactionaries (mürteci or irticâ yanlısı). Some were sanctioned by the Kemalist state accordingly, whereas others broke rank with the Kemalists in favor of other emerging political factions or apoliticism (Fabbe 2019, 123–125; Fabbe and Balikçioglu 2019). Regardless, by the 1940s Islamists were exerting influence on the state and on politics. Members of parliament began debating the role of religion in primary education, with many wishing for a greater inclusion of religious curriculum. Optional religion courses were placed in public schools in 1949, Qurʾan seminaries/courses were given permission to function, and a Faculty of Divinity was established at Ankara University that same year. By 1950 the abolition on using Arabic instead of Turkish for the called to prayer (ezân) was also lifted (Gözaydın 2008, 222).

All of these moves signified a growing space for religious activity, albeit mostly under the mantle of the state. Space limitations do not allow for a detailed analysis of subsequent state-centric patterns in Islamist behavior in the post-Kemalist era, which could easily warrant a chapter (or two) on their own. Nonetheless, I offer here some very brief pieces of suggestive evidence revolving around key Islamist actors in contemporary Turkish politics to illustrate this point. Key Islamist figures emerged from within the state and have worked through it—despite their allegiances to informal (and ostensibly illegal) cemaats (religious brotherhoods) and tarikats (religious orders). Although many have been vehement critics of Kemalist policies, they have also partnered with Kemalists at various points over the last seven decades.

One example is Mehmet Zahid Kotku, who had been initiated into the influential Khālidī branch of the Naqshbandī Order in 1918, took over leadership of the cemaat in 1952, and became an influential, state-sponsored prayer leader at the İskender Paşa Mosque. Kotku became increasingly popular among student circles, growing a community of followers. In his sohbets (religious conversations) and teachings, Kotku encouraged his disciples to be active in worldly and state affairs, and he and his cemaat quickly emerged as one of the most influential leaders of Turkish political Islam. Kotku and his followers did not shun the state, nor did Kotku “hold esteem for more radical Islamists” who viewed state sovereignty with scorn (Mardin 2005, 158). Rather, he and his movement embraced a synthesis of Turkish nationalism and Islam, positioning his cemaat to help establish, support, and promote political, economic, and press activities (153–155). By the 1960s, Naqshbandī-Khālidī Sheikh Kotku’s sohbets began to take place in important state institutions, including the State Planning Organization (Devlet Planlama Teşkilatı), thereby signaling this cemaat’s willingness to participate in institutionalized politics. Preeminent figures that later came to dominate Islamists politics in Turkey—and contributed to major regime ruptures in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s—including Necmettin Erbakan and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, both participated in Kotku’s sohbets in the 1970s (Silverstein 2011, 102–103) and subsequently followed his statist approach.

Similarly, an offshoot of Said Nursî’s Nurcu cemaat call Hizmet (Service) emerged around the popular preacher Fethullah Gülen, who also worked for the Diyanet and followed a statist agenda—although not always openly. Gülen worked as a Diyanet-appointed imam from the late 1950s to the 1980s, during which time he learned how to position himself with other state actors and avoid restrictions on his community of followers (Lord 2018, 221). His movement grew in popularity as a result of his oratory skills and his writings, and recordings of his preaching began circulating widely in the 1980s. To further build its base, the movement typically established individual charitable foundations with no official link to one another, although they were all tacitly and ideologically connected to Gülen’s teachings. In this manner, the group developed a formidable network of subsidized private educational institutions, preparatory schools, and dormitories, which filled widening gaps in the state’s developmental capabilities (White 2002, 207). Gülenists also used charitable trusts, nongovernmental organizations, firms, business associations, media outlets, and certain arms of the state bureaucracy to expand their influence and support (Lord 2018, 219–225). The police schools, the military schools, the judiciary, the Ministry of Education, the Diyanet, and the human resource arms of all of these state institutions were all targeted by movement members to increase their influence in the state. In the wake of the 1980 coup, especially, Fethullah Gülen worked directly with the Turkish junta government, demanding that the religious community comply with military directives and even providing a religio-legal opinion in favor of the coup d’état (Çakır 1994; Yavuz 2005).

Many additional examples—the long string of Islamist parties influenced by Erbakan and Erdogan and their unlikely coalition partners over the last six decades, the role of Islamists in the recent Ergenekon and KCK trials, and the intra-Islamist splits within the Turkish state and Diyanet that recently came to a head with the failed coup of 2016—could be provided, but space does not allow. In the interests of brevity, suffice it to say that modern Turkish politics has been characterized by existential power struggles for the control of state institutions that involve Islamists and are largely invisible to the general public as they unfold. These often paranoid and obsessive elite efforts to maintain hegemony within state institutions have destabilized both democracy and autocracy. They birth acute periods of crisis in which elite actors (Kemalist and Islamist alike) turn against the perceived “enemies within” the state to shift balances of power—causing repeated democratic and autocratic ruptures.

Instead of centering the story of religion-state relations in Turkey on the Kemalist phenomenon and its accoutrements, I have shown that it can be illuminating to focus on the critical historical antecedents that structured the nascent state’s expansion into education and law from roughly 1870 to 1928. When set in this broader historical perspective, the supposedly miraculous story of Turkey’s Kemalist secularization, as well as its more recent (and, to some, disappointing) “reversal,” begins to seem much less surprising. The Kemalists could relegate religion by decree because they were confronting a gradually but greatly weakened religious establishment, many members of which already had a vested interest in the triumph of the state and state-centric institutions. Furthermore, state formation in Turkey forged institutional and ideational links between the pious and the national, and it drew on Sunni Muslim religious resources, networks, and privilege to help create state-centric loyalties. The eventual counterpart to the Kemalist’s secularizing achievements was the emergence of Islamists with statist characteristics and prerogatives. Thus, this chapter contributes to a growing body of work that has increasingly, and in my view rightfully, questioned the validity of viewing political Islam as diametrically opposed to the forces of state secularism (Baskan 2014; Fabbe 2019; Lord 2018; Tepe 2008; Tuğal 2009; Turam 2007; White 2013, 2017).

Some of the reasons behind Turkey’s failures of democratic maintenance are related to religion, but not in the way political science scholars deductively theorize (Islamic values in conflict with democracy, competing overarching doctrines of shariʿa versus sovereignty, etc.). From the outset, the Turkish state relied on religion as much as it repressed it, and the nature of this reliance has contributed to regime instability. Democracy in Turkey was not derailed by a group of outsider Islamists seeking to overthrow the state and impose a new religious order or an Islamic state. Turkey’s political Islamists have long been a fixture in the state apparatus, they tend to value the state as a valid social ordering principle, and they have gradually worked through state arteries and institutions to promote their agenda. Many contemporary observers of Turkish politics have therefore inadvertently gotten things backward: it is not the rise of Islamist party politics that is reshaping the state from the outside; rather, the gradual and ever-closer intertwining of Islamist movements and the state has recently culminated in its ultimate political expression with the AKP—though the failed 2016 coup and the subsequent purge of Gülenists from the state led to yet another outbreak of instability. Scholars that seek to understand if and how religion impacts regime type in Muslim majority societies are thus urged to shine a light on how the historical foundations of state secularism have shaped the evolution of political Islam.