The unequal playing field gave the incumbent an unjustified advantage

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

( Globalvoices.org) -Showing up at a polling station, as one of the two presidential candidates, in a country-wide election with a pocket full of cash may not occur to leaders of democratic countries, but in Turkey, that is what the newly re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did on May 28. The incumbent president was seen handing out TRY 200 banknotes (USD 10) to his supporters amid cheering and blessings.
In Turkey, campaigning on an election day is prohibited, but given the unequal playing field in the run-up to both elections on May 14 and May 28, it is unlikely that President Erdoğan will face any repercussions. The same applies to countless violations documented by the Turkey-based Human Rights Association (İHD). According to their report, there was violence and vote rigging observed across Turkey on May 28. In Hatay, observers documented mass voting, while in other provinces, representatives of the main opposition CHP faced violence. According to the association, there were also instances in provinces where men voted on behalf of women or pre-stamped ballots were brought from outside. The association said:

In the light of the initial data Human Rights Association (İHD) has received and those reported in the press, it has been determined that violations including mass and open voting, obstruction of observers and party representatives, and physical violence took place in the presidential election runoff. İHD calls on all public authorities, especially the Supreme Electoral Board, to fulfill their duties in accordance with human rights standards in order to ensure fair elections.

On June 1, the Supreme Electoral Board announced the official results of the second round of presidential elections. According to the results, President Erdoğan received 52.18 percent of the votes while his opponent, Kılıçdaroğlu received 47.82 percent.

Predictions for the next five years

Already, a day after the election on May 29, the country witnessed a price hike on gas and alcoholic beverages as well as reports of medical professionals looking to leave the country. According to the Turkish Medical Association (TBB), an independent medical and health professional association, data from March 2022, some 4,000 doctors have left the country in the last ten years. The new data shared by the association showed the number of medical professionals wanting to leave in the first five months of 2023 reached 1,025. But it won’t be just the doctors leaving. According to a survey by Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung conducted among Turkish youth to evaluate their social and political opinions, “a significant proportion, 63 percent of young people, expressed a desire to live in another country if given the opportunity,” citing worsening living conditions and declining freedom in Turkey as main reasons for this decision.

Already, there are signs that Turks, from all walks of life — especially those with little children — intend to seek opportunities abroad. Among those wanting to leave are those fearing persecution by the new leadership.

Supporters of the ruling party celebrate the victory on May 28. Image by Aziz Karimov. Used with permission.

There is also the economy and the slumping of the national currency, the Turkish Lira, against the dollar. According to Morgan Stanley analysts, lest President Erdoğan reverses his policy of low-interest rates, the lira could face a 29 percent slump by the end of 2023. On June 3, Erdoğan is set to announce the new cabinet. Among them, is former Minister of Finance, Mehmet Simsek, who is expected to take over all of Turkey’s economic policies, according to reporting by Bloomberg. Pundits say Simsek’s inclusion within the new cabinet is a move that could help prop up Turkey’s struggling economy:

The economy is not the only area where Turkey is likely to see further problems, according to Daron Acemoğlu, a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In a detailed thread on Twitter, Acemoğlu noted judicial independence “was very bad and probably cannot get much worse.” There is also the media environment. According to Acemoğlu while he does not anticipate “a complete ban on all dissident voices,” the conditions may worsen if the state anticipates introducing further “controls on social media.” Acemoğlu also anticipates further erosion of “autonomy and impartiality of bureaucracy and security services,” as well as challenges imposed against civil society and freedoms more broadly.

Some of the restrictions on media were quick to follow. On May 30, The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) also known as the chief censor in Turkey, launched an investigation against six opposition television channels over their coverage of the elections.

After securing another victory, President Erdoğan delivered a divisive election speech. Speaking to his supporters who gathered at the presidential palace in Ankara, he called the jailed leader of the Kurdish HDP party a terrorist and promised to keep Demirtaş behind bars. During the speech, his supporters began calling for Demirtaş’s execution. In December 2020, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey must immediately release the Kurdish politician. The politician was placed behind bars in November 2016, and if convicted, could face 142 years in prison. The charges leveled against him are being a leader of a terrorist organization, an accusation Demirtaş has denied.

There is also the case of Can Atalay, the newly elected member of parliament, representing the Workers Party, who remains behind bars, despite Atalay’s lawyers’ attempts to free him. All newly elected parliament members are expected to attend the swearing-in ceremony on June 2.

Journalists Union of Turkey (TGS) President Gökhan Durmuş was closely watching the President’s victory speech and released a statement expressing his concern about the divisive nature of the next government and the implications on press freedom in the country.

However, in an atmosphere where the society is divided exactly in two, it will only be possible to continue to be in power by continuing the oppressive policies. And President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has already signaled to the whole society in his balcony speech that this will be their choice.

The future of the opposition alliance

While at first, it was unclear what will happen to the opposition alliance, also known as the Table of Six, the past few days indicate divisions within the group. Uğur Poyraz, the Secretary General of the IYI Party and one of the members of the Table of Six said on June 1, “The name of this alliance is the electoral alliance; when the election is over, the alliance will also disappear. As of May 28, the electoral alliance ended.” But not all members of the alliance share the same sentiments. In a video address shared via Twitter, the leader of Gelecek Party Ahmet Davutoğlu encouraged supporters of the alliance “not to fall into despair or possible provocations,” adding, that those who supported the ruling government and its alliance did so not because they accepted the status quo but due to an environment of fear.

Other members of the alliance, such as the leader of the Felicity party Temel Karamollaoğlu took it to Twitter, where he criticized the ruling government for the polarization, asking whether it was all worth it. “Was it really worth it, declaring half of our nation ‘terrorists, enemies of religion, traitors,’ in return for this result you have achieved? Was it worth all the lies, slander, and insults,” wrote Karamollaoğlu.

The latter was also reflected in a joint statement issued by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA), and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) observers:

The second round of Türkiye’s presidential election was characterized by increasingly inflammatory and discriminatory language during the campaign period. Media bias and ongoing restrictions to freedom of expression created an unlevel playing field, and contributed to an unjustified advantage of the incumbent.

The blame game

Many blamed the opposition alliance and its leader for failing to secure victory in these elections but according to Gönül Tol, the founding director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey program and a senior fellow with the Black Sea Program it is not as simple as that and that fear factor played a significant role. In a Twitter thread, Tol alluded to a handful of complexities that determined the outcomes of these elections. From elections being unfree and unfair, to both pro-democracy and President Erdoğan’s alliance having “existential anxieties,” with both sides seeing the elections “as a war of survival.”  Tol explained:

In such polarized contexts, people do not change their voting behavior easily based on policy preferences, incumbent’s performance or opposition’s promises. Going for the other guy rather than sticking with the devil you know is too big of a risk to take, especially in the face of such dramatic uncertainty. That is why Erdoğan continues to polarize the country.

As for the fear factor, Tol noted that President Erdoğan’s victory speech, was “the most aggressive” to date, “because that is how autocrats cling to power against unfavorable odds. They stoke fear and frame elections as a war for survival. That is how they prevent defections. That is how they can still muster majorities even when they fail to deliver.”

Writing for T24, academic and journalist Haluk Şahin explained that the outcomes of these elections were “determined not by economics and sociology, but by social psychology. In other words, a choice driven by subconscious and subconscious fears, identities, denials, jealousies, desires for worship, and ambitions to dominate.”

Others like political scientist Umut Özkırımlı explained that in order to “to topple an authoritarian regime at the ballot box” two things are needed, “sizeable electoral majorities” and “populist and ethnonationalist strategies” referring to an essay by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s The New Competitive Authoritarianism. In the essay, the authors argue:

Tilting the playing field in countries such as Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, and Venezuela requires greater skill, more sophisticated strategies, and far more extensive popular mobilization … Prospective autocrats must first command sizeable electoral majorities, and then deploy plebiscitarian or hypermajoritarian strategies to change the constitutional and electoral rules of the game so as to weaken opponents. This is often achieved via polarizing populist or ethnonationalist strategies.

With local elections months away (Turkey is to hold mayoral elections in March 2024) academic Orçun Selçuk said the opposition should stick to “playing the long game”:

Calls for solidarity

On the night of election, as Erdoğan supporters, roamed the streets of Turkey, celebrating into the early hours of the morning, the other half of the country, did not hesitate in shaking off the outcome and calling to keep on fighting.

 

Acclaimed musician, Fazil Say, tweeted on May 29, “No demoralizing, friends, let’s embrace life. Keep up the goodness. Life goes on, music goes on, the world goes on, endless continuation to create and produce beauty.”

 

Well-known entrepreneur Selçuk Gerger, posted on his Instagram, that despite all the struggle, things did not change. “As of today, I will continue to live as I was living in Istanbul in the previous months and years, without regrets or stepping aside. I will not give up even for a moment. We won’t hide. The majority of people born and who grew up in this country are on our side. And yes, today we are really just starting our fight. Let’s not get hide!”

Via Globalvoices.org

Tuebingen (Special to Informed Comment) – In 2009, US President Barack Obama advised Europe to welcome what was then called Turkey into its fold and benefit from the country’s “diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith.” In the current context, marked by the growing mutual disenchantment between the European Union and Türkiye (the country’s new name), and President Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian practices, political analysts would be surprised to see a Western leader make a similar statement. But the late 2000s and early 2010s were a very different period for Türkiye. That was a time when “revolutions in the Middle East prompted many commentators to point to Turkey as a model for democracy in the region.”

In her book “Religion, Nationalism and Foreign Policy,” Filiz Çoban Oran, an Associate Professor of International Relations at Türkiye’s Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, sheds light on this specific period. Resorting to discourse analysis, she studies the (re-)conceptualizations of Turkish state-identity during the second term in power (2007-2011) of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) with Recep Tayyip Erdogan as prime minister. On the one hand, Islamist nationalism – mainly represented by the AKP – constructed its discourse “on Ottoman history and Islamic heritage.” On the other hand, the secular Kemalists – mainly represented by the Republican People’s Party (CHP) – resorted to their decades-old nationalist discourse, based on “the Republican times, M. Kemal Ataturk’s principles and heritage.”[1]

The author deploys a smart discourse analytic strategy. She studies four Turkish newspapers of different ideological currents (from the Muslim conservative Zaman to the Kemalist Cumhuriyet) regarding three key moments within the AKP’s second term: Türkiye’s presidential election in 2007, the ‘Kurdish Initiative’ in 2009, and the changes in Türkiye’s foreign policy in 2010. At that time, the country was immersed in what Professor Joshua D. Hendrick called a “media war” between Islamist and secular elites.[2] By now, one can confidently say that the AKP emerged victorious from this war. In fact, it is a testament to Erdogan’s repression of press freedom during the last decade that a study like Çoban Oran’s, which traces the diverse voices of different Turkish daily newspapers, would be almost undoable nowadays. As Professor Jenny White has remarked, the AKP now “uses the largely cowed and co-opted media to target new enemies and scapegoats for its failures.”

“Religion, Nationalism and Foreign Policy” is based on the author’s doctoral research at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. The very academic context in which the research project was born is probably a bit too present in the final text of the book. The introduction to Türkiye’s modern history and the ensuing discussion of the discourse analytical approach of the researcher are certainly welcome, yet both parts could have been presented in a less extensive way. In addition, a more prominent role for the actual discourse analysis and its results would probably have resulted in making the book more appealing for readers beyond the academic community.

Filiz Çoban Oran, Religion, Nationalism and Foreign Policy: Discursive Construction of New Turkey’s Identity. Click here.

This being said, Çoban Oran presents key findings to understand the political struggle over the definition and future of Turkishness. As Professor Neophytos Loizides has remarked, “unlike its Ottoman predecessor, modern Turkey was apprehensive of expressions of ethnic particularism, and it aspired to full homogenization (Turkification) of its citizens.”[3] After Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established the Turkish republic in 1923, the official Kemalist discourse revolved around the idea of a nation that is “culturally and ethnically homogenous.”[4] Çoban Oran notes that Islam and the Kurds were seen as the “traditional others of Kemalist nation-state identity.”[5] This is why profound changes in the way the state – which after 2003 was in the hands of the Islamist AKP – related to religion and the Kurds produced a massive backlash from the Kemalist opposition. In 2007, Abdullah Gül was elected president of Türkiye by the country’s parliament, where the AKP held a majority. The fact that Gül’s wife wore a headscarf was seen as proof of the ‘Islamist danger’ looming over the Republic of Türkiye. A columnist for the Cumhuriyet newspaper stressed the need to “protect the modernity of the country, secular regime of the state and the unity of the nation.”[6] When interviewed, one of the organizers of demonstrations against Gül remarked: “We are the enlightened future of Turkey, the real children of the country.”[7] The Kemalist opposition was not only displaying a very obvious ‘we versus them’ mentality, but also a certain disregard to democracy. After all, it was the AKP’s landslide victory in the 2007 parliamentary elections – where they gained a majority of seats and 47% of the vote – that allowed the party to appoint Gül as president in Türkiye’s National Assembly. At the same time, it is important to note that the AKP’s rhetoric did little to ease tensions. As Çoban Oran explains, the AKP claimed that before they came to government “Turkey was governed by a Kemalist elitist minority who were not aware of the Turkish people’s demands and sentiments.”[8]

AKP’s outreach to Kurdish nationalists in the so-called ‘Kurdish Initiative’, launched in 2009, was another major cause of concern for the Kemalists. The ‘Kurdish Initiative’ revolved around the granting of cultural rights and some devolution of power to Türkiye’s Kurds, while aiming to reach an agreement with the Kurdish militant group Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been battling the central state since the 1980s. A columnist for the newspaper Sabah defended that the AKP was the only party “both for Turks and Kurds.”[9] Although the ‘Kurdish Initiative’ soon collapsed under the weight of renewed conflict in South-eastern Türkiye, the Kemalists saw this limited opening as the prelude to the country’s fragmentation.

After exploring the 2007 presidential election and the 2009 ‘Kurdish Initiative’, Çoban Oran delves into what she calls the “axis shift in Turkish foreign policy,” that is, the AKP’s increasing engagement with the Middle East in its foreign policy. Even though it is obvious that Türkiye’s foreign policy underwent a significant change around 2010, it is not clear why the author chooses this particular year as a reference point. It might be related to the May 2010 breakoff in Turkish-Israeli diplomatic ties after the Mavi Marmara incident, in which Israeli commandos killed Turkish nationals attempting to deliver aid to Gaza. The confrontation followed the verbal clash between Erdogan and Israeli President Shimon Peres at the Davos World Economic Forum the previous year. The changes in Türkiye’s foreign policy implied a closer interaction with the Arab world, something that drew the ire of the Kemalists. Whereas then foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu presented his ‘Strategic Depth’ doctrine as an embrace of Türkiye’s key position at the crossroads of civilizations and inheritor of the Ottoman Empire’s legacy, a columnist for Cumhurriyet interpreted the changes as “leaving Ataturk’s honourable foreign policy.”[10] The opposition to the AKP government’s foreign policy often manifested itself in anti-Arab feelings. Thus, another columnist for the same newspaper expressed his resistance to the AKP’s intention “to transform ‘beautiful Istanbul into Arabia.’”[11]

Çoban Oran’s analysis finds its chronological end in the early 2010s. And Türkiye has changed in many aspects since then. The Turkish economy, which was growing at an annual rate of 11% in 2011, is now in deep crisis. Davutoglu, Erdogan’s foreign and then prime minister, founded the Future Party in 2019 and is now siding with the Nation Alliance that will try to defeat the AKP in the next presidential and parliamentary elections, which will most likely take place in 2023. Gül also parted ways with AKP after the end of his presidential mandate in 2014. Anti-Arab xenophobia has spread, permeating the AKP’s electoral base. Erdogan appears to be aware that his initial welcoming policy towards Syrian refugees could imply considerable electoral costs this time. With this in mind, he has recently been pressing for the return of Syrian refugees living in Türkiye to their home country, however unsafe such a return would be. As we have seen, key political heavyweights from the Islamist camp such as Davutoglu and Gül have deserted to the opposition forces. This, together with Erdogan’s move to team up with the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP) in the People’s Alliance since the 2018 presidential election, might have attenuated the salience of the cleavages around Türkiye’s state-identity identified in “Religion, Nationalism and Foreign Policy.” Nevertheless, it would be unwise to disregard Çoban Oran’s main findings. She concludes that her research shows that the power struggle in Türkiye is about “more than the secular-Islamic dichotomy; it is the clash of different national imaginations.”[12] It is true that this clash might be less visible today that it was a decade ago, but Çoban Oran’s conclusion continues to hold in the present day.

[1] Filiz Çoban Oran, Religion, Nationalism and Foreign Policy: Discursive Construction of New Turkey’s Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2022), p. 141.

[2] Joshua D. Hendrick, “Media Wars and the Gülen Factor in the New Turkey,” Middle East Report Information Project (MERIP), no. 260 (2011): 43-44.

[3] Neophytos G. Loizides, “State Ideology and the Kurds in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 46, no. 4 (2010): 516.

[4] Marcie J. Patton, “Turkey’s Tug of War,” Middle East Report Information Project (MERIP) no. 239 (2006): 42.

[5] Çoban Oran, Religion, Nationalism and Foreign Policy: Discursive Construction of New Turkey’s Identity, p. 72.

[6] Ibid., p. 93.

[7] Ibid., p. 94.

[8] Ibid., p. 90.

[9] Ibid., p. 114.

[10] Ibid., p. 123.

[11] Ibid., p. 126.

[12] Ibid., p. 140.

There is a new brand of Muslim religious orthodoxy on the rise in places like Turkey, which seeks to engage modernity through the sincere religious belief of individuals. Neslihan Cevik uses the term “Muslimism” to set it apart from other trends.

Neslihan Cevik's new book, Muslimism in Turkey and Beyond:  Religion in the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), identifies an important and fertile middle ground between fundamentalism and secularism. She discusses her research with STI in this interview.

Tell us about the book

For centuries, social theory on religion, informed by a divide between religion and modernity, prescribed that religion would either reject modernity to preserve authenticity or secularize tradition to accommodate it. Expressed through the “fundamentalist versus liberal religion” dichotomy, this categorical thinking is then used to enforce another binary, especially for Islam: political versus cultural. Islam enters into the political arena to capture the state for submission of society to religion. Hence, if a movement engages politics, it must be after the state and it must be fundamentalist. If it is not state-centered, it must be apolitical and cultural.

The book empirically identifies the rise of a new religious orthodoxy at the turn of the century in Turkey, Muslimism, which defies these binaries. Neither fundamentalist rejection of modernity nor liberal translation of religion, Muslimism embraces aspects of modern life while submitting that life back to a sacred, moral order, creating as such hybrid institutions, discourses, lifestyles and spaces, and practices.

This hybrid framework is not after a top-down (state-centered) or a bottom-up (society-centered) Islamization. Rather, Muslimism is individual-oriented. It is in a quest to formulate a lifestyle in which the individual believer can be incorporated into modern life while holding passionately onto religion. This quest, however, is not a mere cultural expression but involves political mobilization. Muslimism in fact has generated a distinct political ethos, and it views political action as legitimate and necessary.

In the book, I tell the story of this emerging form and its main architects, “Muslimists.” I examine the historical conditions that generated it and survey its key values, and attitudes across the 3d’s of Islam, din (theology), dunya (world/culture), and dawla (political sphere and the state) based on empirical research. I then discuss its political and practical implications for Turkey and Islamic world, for our understanding of Islam and democracy, and for social theory on religion.

Why did you coin the term Muslimism to define this new form?

For one, by using a new term, I try to describe a new form that cannot be captured by the term Islamism. Despite its generous use, Islamism is not a neutral term; it refers to certain orientations including, most notably, a rejection of modernity for being evil (puritanism), authoritarian communalism, a militant intolerance of moral diversity, state-centeredness, and a tendency to violence. Muslimism does not fit with and indeed challenges those assumptions.

Others, too, have recognized how the term Islamism limits our capacity and have employed the term ‘moderate Islamism’ to define Muslim orientations that deviate from Islamism. Nonetheless, the adjective ‘moderate’ still enforces the assumed divide of Islam versus modernity: moderate happens when Islam, putatively radical, is softened; the practice of moderate must be then less Islamic and more secular. This marginalizes any deeply held religion and maintains that moderate Muslims may at any given time turn radical, if angered enough.

Finally, conditions for moderate Islam are generally seen to come from political expediency. Hence, when political actors fail, this is interpreted as Islam’s failure to engage contemporary life. Debates on the “Turkish Model,” its vitality or failure, as well as interpretations following the Arab Awakening are illuminating examples. The failure of political actors in consolidating democracy in the region has reenergized the normative judgment that Islam itself is simply incompatible with universal notions. By using a new term, I try to move beyond such normative divides and an excessive focus on political strategies.

More than making a clear distinction from Islamist expressions, the term “Muslim[ism]” also aims to reflect the content of this new form; namely, its strong orientation to the individual. An orientation to the individual is not same as individualism.

My fieldwork has shown that Muslimist individual-orientation is filtered through theological notions. Muslimists understand true piety as iman, a heartfelt submission to Allah. Neither the heart nor, therefore, true piety as something located in the heart can be compelled by any external authority (state or community). Moral action is Islamically meaningful and valuable when it flows from volitional choice not from compulsions of an external authority.

When faith is an individual choice, it also becomes a conscious choice. For Muslimists, one has to think through and investigate, (tahqiq) “what is it that I believe and why?” rather than blindly submitting to traditional authority and norms (taqlid). Muslimist individual orientation then presents not atomistic individualism, but the theological importance and validation of the individual and the self with respect to moral decisions and behavior.

Individual-orientation has concrete implications politically and as related to community. Politically, or with regard to state and religion relations, Muslimists tend toward rejection both of Islamist and secularist states, as they each equally violate the moral imperative for individual choice and a conscious faith— for instance, either by enforcing or banning hijab.

  Relative to social relations, Muslimists are averse to traditional conceptions of community (sufi orders and cemaat formations) that view religious identity as collective identity and associate one’s faith with the level of her conformity to community and its religious and cultural norms. This is not a rejection of religious communal life, but a conservative transformation of it, where people are still strongly committed to a moral community (Ummah), while requiring that community to open up space for individual moral agency, religious self-identity, and self-expression.

Where can we observe Muslimism in society?

We can locate Muslimism in “cultural sites of hybridity,” where Muslims articulate Islam with modern values, practices, and discourses. These sites first emerged in the markets in the form of Islamic vacations, restaurants, Islamic fashion companies, or business associations. Going beyond the confines of a market orientation, however, these institutions have altered the boundaries that used to strictly separate religious and secular (Kemalist) lifestyles, spaces, and codes. They showed that it was possible for Muslims to take part in modernity while preserving religious commitments.

By the mid-1990s, the sites of hybridity became prevalent across sectors of society, becoming manifest in civil organizations and subsequently in politics. These include, for example, human rights organizations, which refer both to the UN Human Rights Convention and Islamic theological sources to define human rights, and women’s organizations that claim both a pious and democratic identity. These women attempt a new Islamic gender politics; they retrieve progressive Islamic concepts to question both secular-modern sources of gender discrimination and traditional and male-dominant exegesis of theological sources, which, they claim, have distorted, over centuries, especially Islam’s teachings on women and gender. They view the global arena as an area of action, and claim that their public service, while inspired by Islamic moral notions, is not filtered through religion.

Muslimists have also generated a new Islamic political ethos that uses Islam to embrace modern political values; especially individual rights and pluralism. For example, the emphasis on iman and moral agency produce affirmative attitudes about separation of the state and religion, as such relativizing the state. Yet, while Muslimists limit the state’s role for moral action, they are still suspicious of the secular state for its tendency to co-opt religion. They overcome this tension by framing secularism within a liberal polity that heightens individual moral freedoms and rights. Importantly, by balancing religion and state relations an around individual freedoms, Muslimism may provide the most viable option to achieve twin tolerations in the region,

Muslimists, nevertheless, assign the state an array of pivotal roles and take public law seriously. Muslimists push for policies in line with their moral commitments and to further their interests, but they explicitly try to distinguish such action from a desire to establish religious law. They, for example, reject a ban on alcohol, but press for regulations. The extent and content of such regulation, importantly resembles alcohol regulations found in the USA or UK, not in Saudi Arabia or Iran.

               In a nutshell, whether in markets or as articulated in a political ethos, the sites of hybridity are spaces where Islamist and secularist definitions of Islamic and modern identities are transcended and replaced with new definitions. Importantly, rather than secularizing Muslims, hybridity makes Islamic identity more salient. It introduces Islam into everyday life and public spaces in new forms, making it possible for passionate religion to take part in modern life and institutions.

Can you explain how Islamic fashion works as a site of hybridity?

Many have rushed to interpret Muslim engagements of markets, and especially fashion, as a newfangled Islamic consumerism. My fieldwork points to a different story.

To begin with, rather than being stylish, pious women understand fashion as the ability to ‘self-style’ or ‘personalize’ the tesettur wear (Islamic clothing). More specifically, women assert that the rise of hijabi fashion has coincided with an end of era in Turkey; ‘the uniform era,’ in which the pious, particularly women, were not able act or think independently of authoritarian religious communities (cemaat). This included the veil: religious circles tried to format the veil almost turning it into a uniform. Authoritative prescriptions also coalesced with patriarchal relations: men defining tesettur formats and policing women’s moral action.

The emergence of the self-styled tesettur meant getting out of the ‘uniform era,’ and the start of a new one, in which women could dress in expression of who they are —age, body type, personality, life inspirations, and likes or dislikes. This new freedom speaks into the broader Muslimist individual orientation and attempts for a style of religious community that recognizes and gives space to the self and its potent moral agency, as this agency is embedded in and legitimized through Islamic notions of iman and tahqiq. On the other hand, self-styled tesettur has become a channel for women to demand and exercise their own moral agency and autonomy vis-à-vis patriarchal codes.

There is more. The blend of fashion and tesettur undermines the monotone divide of Islam and modernity, a divide that delineated how a Muslim female body can (and should) live, what public spaces she can enter, and in what activities she can engage. Take swimming and sports. These activities have been dominated by secularist aesthetics and norms: ‘the normal way’ to swim is to uncover, and ‘to run the normal way’ you have to wear shorts. These standards are not just discursive; they turn into binding regulations; e.g., the ban on hijab at a girls’ football league or the recent ban on the burqini in France.

But innovative articles of fashion, such as the burqini, undermine both the secularist standards and Islamist prescriptions that reject modern practices as corrupt. They revolutionize what a Muslim female body rightfully can do, where it belongs, what it can enjoy, and how it can live. Can a hijabi Muslim woman choose sports as her professional career, for example? Can she dream of the Olympics? The hybrid, innovative products that emerged out of halal markets affirm these questions, and alter, as such, the boundaries that had strictly separated Islamic versus secular life spaces, practices, and cultural codes.

There is yet a caveat. The blending of tesettur and fashion is not free of tension. It has to work out charges against its being impure, as well as its being strictly moralistic. It also has to explicitly work out internal tensions: how many outfits are ‘too many’? When does self-fashioning start to breach moral boundaries? What is important, however, is that these tensions also coincide with a robust religious sensibility to remain within the correct moral limits.

Why should these issues be of interest to Western readers?

For one, the Muslimist type of religious engagement is not unique to Turkey or to Islam, but is manifest globally and across traditions. In fact, Muslimism is an example of a broader category to which we refer as “new religious orthodoxies” (NRO)*; prominent examples of which are found within Christianity, Pentecostalism and contemporary American Evangelicalism.

Second, Muslimist-like sentiments are present among Western Muslims too. One noticeable example is the rapidly growing Mipsterz, Muslim Hipster, movement and fashion in the US and in Europe. The Mipsterz movement reflects young Muslims’ attempts to reintroduce themselves as actors who are passionately Muslim but, at the very same time, already and rightfully British, Spanish, or American. This proudly Muslim and rightfully modern identity rejects both the Western stereotypes (e.g. Muslim as the terrorist other or the oppressed-other) and Islamism. Fashion is not the only channel through which this identity is put at work; youth also discuss such issues as sources of Islamic authority, belonging and community, inclusiveness, and gender equality. Understanding Muslimism will help the Western reader to make sense of this new blend, which the categories of liberal versus fundamentalist religion cannot explain.

At a broader level, Muslimism presents a genuine challenge from within against fundamentalist Islamism. The cultural sites of hybridity carve out an alternative not only to secularist codes, but also to Islamism, its discourse, practice, and way of life. Muslimism illustrates what possibilities beyond Islamism Islam can offer to the region and world, especially with regard to its contribution to peace, tolerance, democratization, and freedoms.

So you hope this new term can help Westerners better understand the breadth of Islam…

Islamism (violent or not) distorted the notions and language of the Quran—those notions are ironically ones that indeed outright reject the type of religion Islamism has produced. This grotesque version has come to dominate not only the public representation of Islam but also our global conversation about it. We constantly discuss Islam in connection to doings and sayings of Islamism and in turn we construct Islam around false issues.  As a practical implication, this prevents us from recognizing Muslim expressions that are more consistent with Islamic theology and retrieving notions of Islam that not only endorse such universal notions as tolerance of moral diversity and human rights, but that can also stimulate innovative solutions to contemporary problems.

For instance, as we continue to judge Islam’s attitude towards women through the misogynist attitudes of Islamism, we forget to talk about Islam’s progressive and possibly problem-solving attitude on female unpaid housework, one of thorniest issues of gender and development, even in Western societies that score high on gender equality. The classical jurists contend that the Muslim wife is not required to do housework and housework can be financially compensable upon divorce.

Or similarly, in the economy, while we continue to discuss whether Islam is compatible with capitalism, we ignore the conceptual resemblance between the multiple partnership model advised in Islam and the ‘start-up business model,’ a model that has democratized capital ownership and proved to generate billion dollar businesses in just a matter of few years (consider, Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb).

My recent post at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, SESRIC, and work on development has made me realize that one way to steer the conversation on Islam to a new a direction is development work. Development work, by seeking to find alternative paths to progress can help us to dig out progressive and philosophically rich aspects of Islam that can offer solutions to contemporary problems. It could lead Muslim communities to ask the question of how to better act upon moral requirements for justice, equality, and human progress. This new conversation, by allowing us to transcend false limits put on Islam by Islamism, would help us to counter extremism and combat Islam’s ongoing distortion.

Neslihan Cevik is a Turkish sociologist of religion. Cevik completed her PhD at Arizona State University (2010). She then joined the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia for her post-doctoral research. She is the author of Muslimism in Turkey and Beyond: Religion in the Modern World (November-2015,Palgrave MacMillan). Currently, Cevik is a senior researcher at SESRIC, Organization of the Islamic Cooperation. Her work on religion appears in CNN-Arabic, Daily Sabah, OrientXXI, Informed Comment, and Political Theology Today, and is translated into Arabic, French, and Turkish. Cevik helped found the firstpostcolonial studies research center in Turkey, PAMER, Uskudar University. An engaged social entrepreneur, Cevik also is the founder of Mline Fashion, a modest wear and lifestyle start-up company that seeks to encourage Muslim women’s economic and public integration.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Socialtrendsinstitute.org