Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey

Abstract

In much of the Muslim world, secularization has proceeded through the modernizing mechanisms of the region's various states. By contrast, social movements committed to the (re)introduction of religion into public and political life have frequently functioned through appeals to the popular will. Recent political events in Turkey present a dramatic contrast to this historically established antagonism between secularization and populist politics. In the spring of 2007 a series of mass demonstrations, rallied in the name of secularism and against the elected Islamist regime, were conducted in several of Turkey's major urban centers. The figure of the secularist crowd provides an image of secularism grounded not in the coercive apparatuses of the military and the modernizing bureaucracy but in an assertion of populism. This article explores the tentative formation of a secular populism. I argue that this particular conjuncture not only displays the persistent contradictions that subtend the relationship between secularism and populist politics but also reveals the tensions that sustain the field of democratic politics in Turkey.

Making and breaking alliances: on valuation in hegemonic projects

“…However much the secular-Islamic divide was overdrawn and constructed, it informed popular politics, public life, and personal anxieties in a very pronounced way since the 1990s (Demiralp 2012;Navaro-Yashin 2002;Kandiyoti 2012). While the Kemalist state's "assertive secularism was … intrinsic to regime consolidation, making religious reaction … a clear political threat" (Kandiyoti 2012), self-ascribed Kemalists also were highly emotionally invested in valuations of the state (Tambar 2009). It shaped their relation of belonging and entitlement in the state, just as it undermined that of others.…”

Everywhere Taksim: Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi

“…1 Among the markers of the vivid, neoliberal public sphere of Turkey are: a profusion of commodities in all public spaces (Kandiyoti and Saktanber 2002); a recalibration of the relationship between statism and public space, with a particular proliferation of informal rituals of the state (Navaro-Yashin 2002;Özyürek 2006;Hart 1999); and a renaissance of pre-Republican, NeoOttoman discourses and aesthetic forms (Walton 2010). Furthermore, this newly fragmented public sphere has also witnessed a reorientation and retrenchment of Kemalist secularism, both as a congeries of commodities (Navaro-Yashin 2002;Özyürek 2006) and as a mass subject of political protest (Tambar 2009). To paraphrase an argument made by anthropologist Chris Dole (2012), neoliberal Turkish public space articulates a new 'distribution of the sensible,' in which the verities of Turkish statism, nationalism and Kemalism can no longer be taken for granted.…”

“…After all, the initial proposal to build a mosque on the square did not ignite a mass protest movement. Nor did the Gezi demonstrators constitute a mass Kemalist subject of the sort that Kabir Tambar describes in his analysis of the 2007 Republic demonstrations (Tambar 2009;see also Öktem 2011, 151-154). Much has been made of the participation of a group known as the Anti-Capitalist Muslims (Antikapitalist Müslümanlar) in the Gezi uprising; 7 as a member of an NGO affiliated to the Anti-Capitalist Muslims emphasised to me in an interview in March 2014, the definitive cleavage of Gezi was not that between Islam and secularism, but between justice and injustice (adalet ve adaletsizlik/haksızlık).…”

Atheist Secularism and its Discontents

“…Not surprisingly, a considerable amount of new critical research is focused on one of the fault-lines of Western secularism: the presence of Islam in Western Europe (Göle, 2006;Fernando, 2010;Roy, 2007;Al-Azmeh, 1993;Lewis, 1993;Goody, 2004), while the other focuses on states such as Turkey (Çınar, 2005) or India (Madan, 1998), where secular principles are perceived to have been imposed on non-secular subjects either by modernizing reformers or colonial powers (Göle, 2008;Nandy, 1988;Tambar, 2009). This work is important and extremely valuable, but it risks re-inscribing the ideological formations that underpin secularism, and paints Islam as its only "other", a particularly troubling conceptualization, because of all religious practices, Islam most clearly matches a secular definition of religion as being about belief.…”