The fall of the Ottoman Empire, due to the reasons mentioned in the previous article, led to the establishment of the first Turkish Republic in 1923. This was followed a year later by the abolition of the caliphate, the exile of what remained of the Ottoman family outside Turkey, and the stripping of their citizenship. Turkey transformed into a secular national state based on the 1924 constitution, with Atatürk pursuing a modernization agenda influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution and the reforms of Peter the Great, the first Emperor of Russia.
The process of change encompassed all aspects of life simultaneously and violently, as religious schools were abolished, religious attire was banned for all clergymen regardless of their faith and sect, gender equality was established in laws, the hijab was prohibited, the Arabic script used for writing Turkish was replaced with the Latin alphabet, and even the call to prayer was ordered to be translated and recited in Turkish instead of Arabic in the 1930s. Any discussion of nationalism or minorities in Turkey was forbidden, and a unique constitutional text defined Turkish identity as that of a Muslim residing within the Republic of Turkey, with minorities identified solely as non-Muslims, as stated in Article 60 of the Constitution.
Atatürk hoped that these policies would resolve the crisis of the nascent Turkish Republic. When examining the Turkish map, one finds that all its neighbors differ culturally, ethnically, religiously, and linguistically, with its territory shrinking to only 783,562 km². Despite its strategically significant location between Asia and Europe and its Mediterranean coastline towards Africa, Turkey became isolated without any strategic depth to communicate and secure its interests. To address this issue, Atatürk saw the solution in turning towards the West, renouncing the Ottoman past as an abhorrent legacy that did not represent Turkey and its people, asserting that modern Turkey is a national state for Turks with a culture and civilization that predate Islam by centuries, detaching it from Islam and Eastern civilization while linking it to Western civilization.
It’s essential to emphasize that the Atatürk model was not a secular model, but rather an extreme totalitarian model where the state used all available means of repression, violence, and force to impose its values on society against its will. Secularism, away from the ongoing debates and interpretations, is neither a doctrine nor an ideology, but rather a logic for a modern state to think through in solving its citizens’ problems and building a future according to the laws of the world it inhabits. It does not imply animosity towards religion or interference in societal beliefs and views on life; instead, it represents a way of thinking for the legal entity called the state.
The Republic of the Military
The Turkish army was the foundation upon which the modern Turkish Republic was built. It is a national liberating force that rejected the orders of the last Ottoman Sultan to abandon Turkish territories and, under Atatürk’s leadership, waged a full-scale war against the western alliance hostile to the Turkish people. This allowed for the establishment of a republic with Atatürk as its first leader, supported by a military that maintained its constitutional system. Therefore, one cannot separate the army from the first republic or speak of a separation of the army from politics, but the Turkish case has distinctive features because the army was the one that established the state; it was not a byproduct of the state like in the majority of other cases.
The army also played a crucial role in maintaining order, due to several reasons. The most important was that the majority of the Turkish people did not accept the forced transition to Atatürk’s extreme secularism. Turkey is home to a diverse ethnic and sectarian mosaic, and the constitution did not recognize this diversity nor grant minorities their rights. Additionally, Turkey’s strategic location was significant, with the Soviet Union on one side and the West represented by Europe and America on the other, along with various political factions biased toward both camps within its borders, each seeking power.
Atatürk believed that the republic, established overnight, could not withstand the test of time nor form a unifying national identity after more than six centuries of imperial rule represented by an absolute sovereign in the form of a sultan, and a spiritual identity derived from Islam. He thought the army was the backbone capable of ensuring this national unity and preserving the nascent Turkish nationalism.
The Turkish army has remained in this state since the moment the republic was established, executing four successful military coups to “protect” these values—according to its claims—alongside a failed attempt in 2016, which ended in its defeat. This long series of events gradually weakened its political role and marked the end of the era of military coups, reinforcing political decision-making’s centralization at the presidency following the 2017 constitution, which established the second Turkish Republic under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Turkey and the Christian Club
The ideas of Atatürk and his associates in the first Turkish Republic were based on the belief that Islamic civilization had failed to keep pace with the West and that this civilization—through its Ottoman leadership—could not modernize while preserving the empire’s integrity and independence. Given Turkey’s geopolitical position, it could not afford to be isolated and needed to turn outward, leading to an Atatürk preference for the “advanced” West and an endeavor to follow in its footsteps.
However, this trajectory failed to achieve the hoped-for success, with the losses incurred overshadowing any benefits. Turkey faced internal political and ethnic conflicts, particularly with the Kurds, successive military coups, and a deteriorating economic situation. The founders of the republic overlooked that the nature of Catholic France and Orthodox Russia differed fundamentally from Islam and the nature of governance within it, along with the peculiarities of its rulings and legislations, the relationship of Muslims with their faith, and their perspectives on identity and state. Additionally, this forced modernization led to cultural disfigurement in Turkey, as the Western-leaning elite in the “Rumelia” region attempted to imitate the West in appearance rather than essence, while the Anatolian East preserved its Islamic Turkish customs and traditions in a state of isolation from the West.
Turkey did everything to integrate with the West, even burying its history and denying its identity to become part of Europe. It refrained from triggering issues of Islamic identity to avoid sensitivities, hoping that, due to its location and population, it would receive sufficient Western support for its modernization and the prosperity of its people.
Through experience, the Turks have known since the early 1970s that their western orientation would not yield the results they aspired to and that all the West wanted from Turkey was to act as a geographical buffer between it and the Soviet Union, and later Russia, as well as the Arab world and its problems, to secure freedom of navigation and international trade in the straits and to serve Western interests using its strategic geography in exchange for some grants and aid, likely some good economic investments, without seeking much more than that.
Turkish politicians recognized the West’s rejection of them through various experiences and practices. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Turkey’s insistence on joining the European Union, the Western response became overtly negative. A notable lesson for the region’s peoples is that Turkey, which renounced its history and distanced itself from it, continued to be viewed by the West as a Muslim nation, the natural extension of the Ottoman Empire with an Eastern culture. This perception reached the Vatican, the highest representative of Catholics worldwide, where former Pope Benedict XVI explicitly stated in a secret telegram to the U.S. State Department, leaked by the famous WikiLeaks, his absolute rejection—both personally and as Pope—of a Muslim state’s presence within the European Union, urging American officials to advise Turkey to seek an Islamic alliance instead. Similarly, Giovanni Lajolo, Secretary of the Vatican’s foreign relations, remarked that “Turkey’s accession to the EU would put it and the Union in a very difficult political, social, and cultural predicament, as this Union is fundamentally a Christian club.” Following the backlash against these remarks, Cardinal Lajolo later denied them, claiming that “the Vatican had no relation to this matter.”
The rejection did not stop at the Vatican; Austria firmly rejected Turkey’s EU membership on the grounds that the accession of a new member requires unanimous consent from all existing members, justifying its rejection by recalling the two sieges of Vienna by Ottoman forces in 1529 and 1683. Although five centuries have passed since these wars, and despite Turkey’s distancing from its history and past, the West kept reminding it of the past it wished to forget. This is why German Chancellor Angela Merkel clearly stated during the German parliamentary elections in 2017 that she opposed Turkey’s membership in the EU, a stance echoed by France under both Sarkozy and Macron, who offered Turkey an economic partnership without EU membership.
Turkey’s Slight Shift Towards the East
Some believe that Turkey’s pivot towards the East, specifically the Arab and Islamic world and Africa, began with the Justice and Development Party’s rise to power in 2002, but this view is incorrect; Turkish secularists had previously pursued this shift in the mid-1970s by reevaluating their relationship with Israel and opening up to Arab countries. This direction became more pronounced when Turgut Özal became Prime Minister in 1983, under the slogan “We do not want grants and gifts; we want trade and investments.” He realized that there was little hope for Turkey’s integration with the West and the need to improve relations with the East alongside maintaining trade relationships with the West to enable Turkey’s revival and reconciliation with its past and present.
Turkey tried to reconcile with the Arab world, and when given the opportunity, it confirmed its sincere intentions by assisting Egypt in its international arbitration case for the recovery of Taba. Prime Minister Suleiman Demirel’s initiative at that time to provide the crucial document that settled the dispute over the ownership of Taba in favor of Egypt from the Ottoman archive of the 1906 Egyptian-Ottoman border delimitation agreement exemplified this goodwill.
Turkey did not stop at rapprochement with the Arabs; it also sought to capitalize on the Soviet Union’s openness in the 1980s, known as “perestroika,” by fostering closer ties with Turkish-speaking Central Asian countries (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan), in addition to Azerbaijan and Iran. The Turkish economy underwent significant liberal transformations that reconciled with Islamic values, along with Özal’s alliance with Fethullah Gülen, the founder of the Gülen movement.
Turkish Intellectual Islam
Some believe that the phenomenon of political Islam, whether through “peaceful” secret groups striving for power or through armed conflict, is a new development that emerged after the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate. However, examining the political history of Muslims reveals that this belief is inaccurate; the struggle began the moment the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) passed away and was evident in the famous Saqifah meeting in 632 AD, which created a vertical division in Islam from that moment onward. The Prophet died without indicating how to establish a state and made no bequest regarding statehood or adopting a political title; thus, there is no single verse in the Quran that discusses an “Islamic state” or its characteristics. Consequently, some saw it merely as an emirate managing Muslims’ religious affairs. The Ansar said, “One of us is a leader, and one of you (the Emigrants) is a leader,” while the rest of the Arabs believed that religious sovereignty ended with the completion of the message, and each human group embracing Islam could manage its affairs as it saw fit. These were mostly those referred to as the “apostates.” Others believed that Islam did not come to establish a state but was rather a religion and a prophecy, which the Prophet set the foundations for, with specific details to be managed by infallible Imams from his family, who were the most qualified to interpret and explain his message. This view was held by early Shi’a, who initially did not speak of political imamate alongside religious matters. In practice, only Ali ibn Abi Talib ruled among the Prophet’s family for a few years fraught with strife and turmoil, giving rise to various groups that cannot all be listed here. Notable among them were the Khawarij, who referred to themselves as “the people of faith,” asserting that “rulership is solely for Allah,” along with various Shi’a groups, the secret Abbasid movement, and other movements.
The Ottoman state was, from its inception, a state distinguished by secret organizations, and these organizations multiplied far beyond what we can detail unless devoted a book. Years before its fall, religious secret organizations emerged within it, or what could be termed as political Islam groups in modern terminology. These groups existed within the capital, Istanbul, and in other major cities, with the most prominent being the “Liberty National Party,” founded by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and his associate Muhammad Abduh in Cairo in 1875. Ahmad Urabi and his comrades were significantly influenced by these ideas, and the Urabi Revolution, at its core, was a “political Islamic” uprising seeking a contemporary Islamic governance. I believe that the Muslim Brotherhood, established in Egypt in 1928, was merely a culmination of these ideas, driven by Ottoman elites who emigrated to Egypt following Atatürk’s takeover of Turkey. They found in Cairo—a significant Islamic center, hosting the Fatimid and Abbasid caliphates and the prestigious Al-Azhar— a suitable location to establish this organization. This elite sought a young, articulate personality capable of mobilizing and leading the call, and Hasan al-Banna was that individual, serving merely as a front for this new Ottoman project, with Egypt being the most appropriate land for its embrace. Numerous pieces of evidence support this belief, which we might dedicate a separate article to present.
The first political and intellectual Muslim group in Turkey was that sought to be founded by Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, born in 1876 to a Kurdish-Turkish family, who sought religious knowledge and was politically invested in reviving a new spirit in the dying body of the Ottoman state. In 1911, he delivered a lengthy speech at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, presenting the essence of his political, social, and religious ideas, titled “The Syrian Sermon.” He formed a band of partisans to fight against the Russians in the Caucasus during World War I and sought to establish an Islamic university in Turkey, as there were none equivalent to Al-Azhar in Cairo, Zaytouna in Tunisia, Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, or the Nizamiyya and Mustansiriya schools in Baghdad. Despite the Ottomans’ rule over more than six centuries, Turkey lacked a major Islamic university. However, his project did not come to fruition due to the establishment of the Turkish Republic which fully banned religious education. Following this shock, a significant transformation occurred in Nursi’s ideas, where he referred to himself as the “new Nursi,” casting aside the old, and adopted the slogan “I seek refuge in Allah from the devil and politics.” He viewed the solution to the Islamic world’s crisis as impossible to achieve through political work or seizing power because the political crisis is a result, not a cause, of contemporary Islamic crises. The solution lay in reviving the spirit of this dying body through religious education grounded in renewal and distancing from inherited, rigid tradition. Nursi dedicated himself to writing his renewal-focused ideas in Islam, known as “Risale-i Nur,” through which he presented a comprehensive intellectual project titled “Saving Faith and Serving the Quran.” Nursi passed away in 1960, leaving behind a religious intellectual legacy embraced by several educational Sufi movements that do not engage in politics.
The “Gülen Movement,” led by Fethullah Gülen, born in 1941 in the eastern Turkish region of Erzurum, until recently, was the second-largest Islamic movement in Turkey. He was significantly influenced by Nursi’s ideas and revitalized them through work on the ground. His philosophy centered on the theory of “social Islam,” drawing from Nursi’s teachings in his “Risale-i Nur” and emphasizing the need for spiritual education within society. He adopted the Catholic Jesuit model of social work, establishing health and educational initiatives that included both religious and secular education, while also serving the poor and needy. He took inspiration from the Protestant Puritan movement to build a strong economic community within a disciplined closed group, penetrating government institutions, business sectors, and political parties, without transforming into a party but rather turning the movement into a pervasive idea across the state and society. His external focus has been on Turkish Muslims exclusively, seeking to establish a Turkish-Islamic nationalism and positioning Turkey as a center for Turkish nationalism worldwide, connecting Central Asian countries, Muslim communities in the Volga basin and Crimea in Russia, and Eastern Turkestan Muslims in China in this movement to develop their Islamic values and national sentiments tied to the secure homeland of Turkey. Thus, Turkey achieved external expansion that alleviated its isolation, compensating for the failure of Atatürk’s project to integrate into the Western system and obtaining strong Western support for its initiatives in strategically valued regions. Through this movement, aided by the Turkish state behind it, Turkey and the movement reached their goals of expansion without provoking the West, effectively serving its interests and striking at its two major adversaries, Russia and China, compromising the internal unity of both nations. Consequently, Turkey achieved its aims through understanding rather than contention with the West.
This movement amalgamated a strange mix of ideas and maintained an ongoing stance of leaving the Arab world to its own affairs without seeking to exert Turkish influence there, due to the differing characteristics of Turkish Islam from Arab Islam, as well as recognizing the Arab region’s significant strategic importance to the West—with Israel at its heart—and understanding that endeavoring to influence it would lead to endless problems for Turkey and the inevitable result of failure. In contrast, the movement’s project united Europe and the West in supporting Turkey and fulfilling its ambitions. Here, too, lies an important clue that elucidates why Russia and China supported Erdoğan and celebrated his victory over the Gülen Movement, as they recognized its intentions and the threat it posed to their security. Meanwhile, the United States’ relative embrace of Gülen, refusing to relinquish him until his death on October 20, 2024, despite Erdoğan’s pressing demands for his extradition, can be understood through what U.S. security and political institutions perceive as attainable advantages stemming from this group.
The primary political Islamic group is the one founded by Necmettin Erbakan, born in 1926 in Sinop Province in the far north of Turkey. Erbakan was the first to engage in politics and express his Islamic inclinations when he allied with followers of the Nursi movement in 1970 to establish the National Order Party. Two years later, he founded the National Salvation Party following the dissolution of his first party. In the 1974 parliamentary elections, he won fifty seats, enabling him to participate in a coalition government with the Republican People’s Party (CHP), founded by Atatürk and adopting secularism, where he became the Deputy Prime Minister under Bülent Ecevit. Due to legal actions against the party and perceptions within the Turkish military establishment that it threatened “secular values,” it was banned again. He later established the Welfare Party in 1993 and reached the premiership in 1996, then resigned the following year after a “soft coup” dubbed the “memorandum coup,” a memorandum presented by military leaders to the president and the National Security Council, which the parliament validated due to concerns regarding the party’s views posing a threat to state secularism. Subsequently, he founded the Virtue Party in 1998, which was also dissolved judicially. Finally, in 2001, he established the Happiness Party, which continues to operate today under the leadership of “Temel Karamollaoğlu.” Erdoğan, Gül, and Davutoğlu split from this party, founding the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001, which has been the ruling party since 2002 until now.
Conclusion
The Turkish Republic established in 1923 was founded under the belief that resolving Turkey’s crisis lay in renouncing the caliphate, Islamic values, distancing from history, and adopting a Western identity, with a peculiar interpretation of secularism based on extreme French laïcité, aiming for a complete break from the past. Ultimately, Turkish leaders realized the naïveté of these ideas—though too late—after Turkey lost much time and effort, embroiled in internal conflicts and military coups that hindered its progress.
Since the mid-1970s, Turkey has gradually sought to reconcile with its past, returning to its identity, of which these attempts faced obstacles and failures at times. With the failure of the Western project and the societal rejection of a return to a religious governance model or the defunct caliphate system, and the incapacity of either side to decisively win the conflict, a new consensus emerged on a modified version of secularism—a version closer to a correct understanding far removed from the initial extreme, coercive notion. Meanwhile, the Islamic stream became aware that Islam is a religion, not a political ideology; its application is an individual responsibility for every Muslim, provided they have complete freedom of belief. The era of coercive applications has passed, and the Turkish Islamic stream has developed its unique characteristics, evidenced by Erdoğan’s invitation to Egyptians during his visit to Egypt in 2011 to embrace secularism post-January 25 Revolution, considering it essential logic for a modern state, increasing individual freedom in religious practice contrary to common misconceptions, and subsequently advising the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt post-Mohamed Morsi’s ascension to power, denying any contradiction between Islam and secularism in his interview with Al-Arabiya in 2017, reinforcing that secularism is the Justice and Development Party’s approach and that he attempted to explain its meaning to the Brotherhood, clarifying it does not imply a lack of religiosity.
Intellectual Islam in Turkey can be categorized into four primary streams:
- Sufi Movements: Followers of these movements number in the millions, with the most prominent being the Naqshbandi order. These movements lack a political party, with their leaders and main followers abstaining from running in elections while lacking political aspirations. They merely act as a significant voting bloc, supporting Islamic-oriented parties since the 1970s to gain religious freedoms. They believe in secular governance, supporting Turkey’s secularism in the traditional sense, having suffered from the closure of their lodges and the prohibitions against their practices, with many of their leaders exiled primarily to Germany, the Netherlands, Northern Cyprus, and select Arab countries. This situation was seen as bizarre and anomalous, where peaceful clerics found freedom in non-Islamic nations while being denied it in their homeland, Turkey; thus, these movements played a significant role in voting for the Justice and Development Party.
- Social Islam: Represented by the Gülen Movement, led by Fethullah Gülen, which was allied with Erdoğan until their conflict arose after the so-called “Arab Spring” due to disagreements in foreign orientations as previously mentioned. This movement, with its business, economic, medical, and service institutions, along with its followers in every part of Turkey and employees in all state apparatuses, formed a significant voting bloc and had a broad base within Turkish society.
- Educational Islam: Represented by the Nursi movement founded by Bediüzzaman Said Nursi. Most religious leaders, fatwa issuers, religious preachers, and mosque imams in Turkey are affiliated with this movement, lacking political activity, instead focusing on educational and Islamic religious enrichment. Their priority is to safeguard religious freedoms, having experienced difficult periods of persecution during military rule; thus, their votes typically go to Islamic-oriented parties.
- Political Islam: Represented by the Justice and Development Party, Happiness Party, Future Party, and Free Calling. All these parties engage in political activities and profess their adherence to secularism as the logic governing the Turkish state, viewing secularism as non-negotiable. Necmettin Erbakan was the founder of this political phenomenon, which aims for the party to have an Islamic cultural ideology and a moral identity rooted in Islamic values, respecting the history of Turkish Islamic states, especially the Ottoman Empire, and directing foreign policy towards greater cooperation with predominantly Muslim countries while adopting Muslims’ issues in the Turkish state agenda.
National Political Islam: All Turkish political Islam parties consistently elevate the status of Turkish nationalism within Turkey and worldwide, placing nationalism before Islam, the latter serving to enhance and uplift Turkish nationalism rather than vice versa. However, some parties exhibit a tendency toward fascism in their views on Turkish nationalism, promoting a narrative of “superiority” of the Turkish race and its dominance over all Islamic peoples. These include the Great Union Party, New Welfare Party, and the Nationalist Road Party.
Final Note
There may be natural intellectual and ideological links between Turkish political Islam groups and the Muslim Brotherhood, but this does not signify they are one entity or that Turks are part of the organization. There is no relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkish Islamists in experience, context, or stages of evolution. The Turkish state does not resemble—by any means—the Arab state nor the experience of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. Therefore, claims that Erdoğan is a member of the Brotherhood or that the Justice and Development Party represents the Brotherhood in Turkey stem from the warfare of propaganda amid the ideological and political conflict from mid-2013 to 2022.
We may need to explore the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—was it an Egyptian Arab idea, or a Turkish Ottoman one expressed by a representative Egyptian such as Hasan al-Banna? Moreover, did the Brotherhood aim to exploit the successes of the Justice and Development Party to market themselves as one of their extensions, suggesting that Turkey’s achievements would await Arab nations should their peoples opt for the Brotherhood in governance? Conversely, Erdoğan might have utilized them to promote Turkish products, converting the Arab region into a large consumer market for Turkish goods and achieving economic gains. In essence, the relationship between the two parties remains one of mutual benefit and utility, besides the emotional connection, akin to those forming between communist or far-right parties in the West.
