The Turkish Dilemma: How Should Islam Relate To Republican Era Collective Memory?

This paper scrutinizes the ways in which the secular Republican collective memory clashes with Islamist collective memory in Turkey drawing upon insights from political sociology and political history. Among others, the ascendance of political Islam in Turkey for the past decade also illustrated cleavages in society regarding the basic tenets of collective memory. Relentlessly, the supporters of secular Republicanism retained the ethos that made “Turkish people a singular nation with ancient roots in Central Asia as well as Mesopotamia and racially not different than the Westerners” (Inan 1968). In a denigratory mode, this ethos rejected any connection between Turks and Arabs and recently went as far as appropriating to the Prophet Mohammet Turkic origins thanks to his families “mythical” connection to the “ancient Turkic” population of Sumerians. While not fully ridiculing this ethos, the supporters of political Islam in response vied to emphasize Islam and its Turkish martyrs as a predominant character of collective memory. In other words, Turk’s gallantry, statecraft superior to its neighbors, and finally tolerance to the weak became the underlying theme of such collective memory. It is puzzling to see that while both ideologies underline superiority, history, and continuation in Turkish historiography, but they diverge on how to fit in Islam in this composition. In the end, we face a very pious and conservative nation who call themselves defensively as the “real” Muslims vis-à-vis each other, but not certain about how to fit in the heritage of Islam in the making of their collective memory as a nation. This paper investigates the roots and effects of this dilemma on the relation between politics and religion in Turkey.