This reading group surveys leading studies in the recent literature on Decoloniality and the Decolonization of Knowledge, which interrogates the hegemony of Eurocentric systems of thought and debates the challenges and potentials for the emergence of non-Western paradigms or knowledge and thought in the academia and beyond. The goal of DecolRG is to explore and discuss the ways in which Islamic political thought and the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey can be understood and evaluated as part of processes of decoloniality that seems to have started in Turkey as a political project as early as the 1950s.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Zeynep Önal

This reading group surveys leading studies in the recent literature on Decoloniality and the Decolonization of Knowledge, which interrogates the hegemony of Eurocentric systems of thought and debates the challenges and potentials for the emergence of non-Western paradigms or knowledge and thought in the academia and beyond. The goal of DecolRG is to explore and discuss the ways in which Islamic political thought and the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey can be understood and evaluated as part of processes of decoloniality that seems to have started in Turkey as a political project as early as the 1950s.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Zeynep Önal

This reading group surveys leading studies in the recent literature on Decoloniality and the Decolonization of Knowledge, which interrogates the hegemony of Eurocentric systems of thought and debates the challenges and potentials for the emergence of non-Western paradigms or knowledge and thought in the academia and beyond. The goal of DecolRG is to explore and discuss the ways in which Islamic political thought and the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey can be understood and evaluated as part of processes of decoloniality that seems to have started in Turkey as a political project as early as the 1950s.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Emina H. Abuannab
Zeynep Önal
Caner Hazar

This reading group surveys leading studies in the recent literature on Decoloniality and the Decolonization of Knowledge, which interrogates the hegemony of Eurocentric systems of thought and debates the challenges and potentials for the emergence of non-Western paradigms or knowledge and thought in the academia and beyond. The goal of DecolRG is to explore and discuss the ways in which Islamic political thought and the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey can be understood and evaluated as part of processes of decoloniality that seems to have started in Turkey as a political project as early as the 1950s.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Emina H. Abuannab
Ferzan İdeli
Oğuzhan Kaya
Zeynep Önal
Ayşe Durakoğlu
Esra Çaylak

This reading group surveys leading studies in the recent literature on Decoloniality and the Decolonization of Knowledge, which interrogates the hegemony of Eurocentric systems of thought and debates the challenges and potentials for the emergence of non-Western paradigms or knowledge and thought in the academia and beyond. The goal of DecolRG is to explore and discuss the ways in which Islamic political thought and the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey can be understood and evaluated as part of processes of decoloniality that seems to have started in Turkey as a political project as early as the 1950s.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Emina H. Abuannab
Ferzan İdeli
Oğuzhan Kaya
Zeynep Önal
Ayşe Durakoğlu
Esra Çaylak

This reading group surveys leading studies in the recent literature on Decoloniality and the Decolonization of Knowledge, which interrogates the hegemony of Eurocentric systems of thought and debates the challenges and potentials for the emergence of non-Western paradigms or knowledge and thought in the academia and beyond. The goal of DecolRG is to explore and discuss the ways in which Islamic political thought and the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey can be understood and evaluated as part of processes of decoloniality that seems to have started in Turkey as a political project as early as the 1950s.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Emina H. Abuannab
Ferzan İdeli
Oğuzhan Kaya
Zeynep Önal
Ayşe Durakoğlu
Esra Çaylak

This reading group surveys leading studies in the recent literature on Decoloniality and the Decolonization of Knowledge, which interrogates the hegemony of Eurocentric systems of thought and debates the challenges and potentials for the emergence of non-Western paradigms or knowledge and thought in the academia and beyond. The goal of DecolRG is to explore and discuss the ways in which Islamic political thought and the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey can be understood and evaluated as part of processes of decoloniality that seems to have started in Turkey as a political project as early as the 1950s.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Emina H. Abuannab
Ferzan İdeli
Oğuzhan Kaya
Zeynep Önal
Ayşe Durakoğlu
Esra Çaylak

This reading group surveys leading studies in the recent literature on Decoloniality and the Decolonization of Knowledge, which interrogates the hegemony of Eurocentric systems of thought and debates the challenges and potentials for the emergence of non-Western paradigms or knowledge and thought in the academia and beyond. The goal of DecolRG is to explore and discuss the ways in which Islamic political thought and the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey can be understood and evaluated as part of processes of decoloniality that seems to have started in Turkey as a political project as early as the 1950s.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Emina H. Abuannab
Ferzan İdeli
Oğuzhan Kaya
Zeynep Önal
Ayşe Durakoğlu
Esra Çaylak

One of the central and controversial issues that is common to all the different schools of thought in the Islamic intellectual field is the relationship between Islam and the West. These debates often address issues related to colonialism, imperialism, modernity, Orientalism and Occidentalism, which are topics that have been developed and addressed by Postcolonial Studies literature. This reading group has been initiated to provide a crash-course on Postcolonial Theory and Criticism to constitute a common conceptual framework in the analysis of different schools of thought in the intellectual field. One of the goals of the group is to explore Decolonial Theory and concepts such as “dewesternization” and “epistemological decolonization” with the expectation that this approach will be productive in the analysis of the Islamic intellectual field as a non-European site of political theorizing.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
Seda Baykal
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik

One of the central and controversial issues that is common to all the different schools of thought in the Islamic intellectual field is the relationship between Islam and the West. These debates often address issues related to colonialism, imperialism, modernity, Orientalism and Occidentalism, which are topics that have been developed and addressed by Postcolonial Studies literature. This reading group has been initiated to provide a crash-course on Postcolonial Theory and Criticism to constitute a common conceptual framework in the analysis of different schools of thought in the intellectual field. One of the goals of the group is to explore Decolonial Theory and concepts such as “dewesternization” and “epistemological decolonization” with the expectation that this approach will be productive in the analysis of the Islamic intellectual field as a non-European site of political theorizing.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
Seda Baykal
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Participants:
Onur Kalkan
Süleyman Gökçe
Damla Traş

One of the central and controversial issues that is common to all the different schools of thought in the Islamic intellectual field is the relationship between Islam and the West. These debates often address issues related to colonialism, imperialism, modernity, Orientalism and Occidentalism, which are topics that have been developed and addressed by Postcolonial Studies literature. This reading group has been initiated to provide a crash-course on Postcolonial Theory and Criticism to constitute a common conceptual framework in the analysis of different schools of thought in the intellectual field. One of the goals of the group is to explore Decolonial Theory and concepts such as “dewesternization” and “epistemological decolonization” with the expectation that this approach will be productive in the analysis of the Islamic intellectual field as a non-European site of political theorizing.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
Seda Baykal
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Participants:
Batıkan Bulut
Süleyman Gökçe
Onur Kalkan
Beyza Karataş

One of the central and controversial issues that is common to all the different schools of thought in the Islamic intellectual field is the relationship between Islam and the West. These debates often address issues related to colonialism, imperialism, modernity, Orientalism and Occidentalism, which are topics that have been developed and addressed by Postcolonial Studies literature. This reading group has been initiated to provide a crash-course on Postcolonial Theory and Criticism to constitute a common conceptual framework in the analysis of different schools of thought in the intellectual field. One of the goals of the group is to explore Decolonial Theory and concepts such as “dewesternization” and “epistemological decolonization” with the expectation that this approach will be productive in the analysis of the Islamic intellectual field as a non-European site of political theorizing.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
Seda Baykal
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Participants:
Burcu Sezer
Beyza Çubukçu
Süleyman Gökçe

One of the central and controversial issues that is common to all the different schools of thought in the Islamic intellectual field is the relationship between Islam and the West. These debates often address issues related to colonialism, imperialism, modernity, Orientalism and Occidentalism, which are topics that have been developed and addressed by Postcolonial Studies literature. This reading group has been initiated to provide a crash-course on Postcolonial Theory and Criticism to constitute a common conceptual framework in the analysis of different schools of thought in the intellectual field. One of the goals of the group is to explore Decolonial Theory and concepts such as “dewesternization” and “epistemological decolonization” with the expectation that this approach will be productive in the analysis of the Islamic intellectual field as a non-European site of political theorizing.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
Seda Baykal
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Participants:
Burcu Sezer
Didem İşçi

One of the central and controversial issues that is common to all the different schools of thought in the Islamic intellectual field is the relationship between Islam and the West. These debates often address issues related to colonialism, imperialism, modernity, Orientalism and Occidentalism, which are topics that have been developed and addressed by Postcolonial Studies literature. This reading group has been initiated to provide a crash-course on Postcolonial Theory and Criticism to constitute a common conceptual framework in the analysis of different schools of thought in the intellectual field. One of the goals of the group is to explore Decolonial Theory and concepts such as “dewesternization” and “epistemological decolonization” with the expectation that this approach will be productive in the analysis of the Islamic intellectual field as a non-European site of political theorizing.

Event Coordinator & Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
Seda Baykal
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik

The Civilization Study Group brings together and examines different aspects of the ongoing debate on the concept of civilization in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. We seek to explore both the genealogy of the concept of “Islamic Civilization” as it developed since the 1960s, and the emergence and evolution of the notion of civilizationism as a political ideology since the  1990s. The goal is to develop and present different aspects of this debate at the MESA 2022 conference, and later in a workshop toward the publication of a volume of collected essays.

Event Coordinator: Seda Baykal
Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Talha Köseoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Participants:
Onur Kalkan
Miraç Kulaklı
Ferzan İdeli

The Civilization Study Group brings together and examines different aspects of the ongoing debate on the concept of civilization in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. We seek to explore both the genealogy of the concept of “Islamic Civilization” as it developed since the 1960s, and the emergence and evolution of the notion of civilizationism as a political ideology since the  1990s. The goal is to develop and present different aspects of this debate at the MESA 2022 conference, and later in a workshop toward the publication of a volume of collected essays.

Event Coordinator: Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
Seda Baykal
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Talha Köseoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Participants: 
Seydi Şeker

The Civilization Study Group brings together and examines different aspects of the ongoing debate on the concept of civilization in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. We seek to explore both the genealogy of the concept of “Islamic Civilization” as it developed since the 1960s, and the emergence and evolution of the notion of civilizationism as a political ideology since the  1990s. The goal is to develop and present different aspects of this debate at the MESA 2022 conference, and later in a workshop toward the publication of a volume of collected essays.

Event Coordinator: İsmail Yazıcı
Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
Seda Baykal
Talha Köseoğlu
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Participants: 
Kadir Yavuz Emiroğlu
Buket Çatalkaya
Miraç Kulaklı

The Civilization Study Group brings together and examines different aspects of the ongoing debate on the concept of civilization in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. We seek to explore both the genealogy of the concept of “Islamic Civilization” as it developed since the 1960s, and the emergence and evolution of the notion of civilizationism as a political ideology since the  1990s. The goal is to develop and present different aspects of this debate at the MESA 2022 conference, and later in a workshop toward the publication of a volume of collected essays.

Event Coordinator: Talha Köseoğlu
Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Enes Ateş
Gizem Zencirci
Seda Baykal
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Participants: 
Elif Asude Kaplan
Kadir Yavuz Emiroğlu
Seydi Şeker
Beyza Çubukçu
Zeynep Önal
Ferzan İdeli

The Civilization Study Group brings together and examines different aspects of the ongoing debate on the concept of civilization in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. We seek to explore both the genealogy of the concept of “Islamic Civilization” as it developed since the 1960s, and the emergence and evolution of the notion of civilizationism as a political ideology since the  1990s. The goal is to develop and present different aspects of this debate at the MESA 2022 conference, and later in a workshop toward the publication of a volume of collected essays.

Event Coordinator: Enes Ateş
Moderator: Alev Çınar
Discussants:
Gizem Zencirci
Talha Köseoğlu
Seda Baykal
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak
Kadir Can Çelik
Participants: 
Elif Asude Kaplan
Kadir Yavuz Emiroğlu
Seydi Şeker
Beyza Çubukçu
Zeynep Önal
Ferzan İdeli

Panel II: Counter-Hegemonic Articulations of “Decentering the West” in the Islamic Intellectual Field in Turkey

Organizer: Gizem Zencirci
Chair/Discussant: Mohammed Bamyeh

 Abstract:

This panel examines several Islam-based intellectual currents in Turkey that voice an alternative or critical perspective vis-à-vis official conceptualizations of “decentering the West” that are prevalent in the Islamic Intellectual Field (IIF). “Decentering the West” refers to intellectual and political attempts to break free from what is perceived as the hegemony of European systems of thought that dismiss, exclude, or denigrate non-Western and particularly Islamic knowledges. The ruling AKP government has been using these claims  to justify its attempts to hegemonically establish itself as the only agent of Islam that can carry out the struggle against coloniality/modernity, end the domination of Western thought, as well as defeat domestic West-oriented secularist groups. However, there are also other movements in the IIF who seek to provide an alternative to hegemonic and authoritarian interpretations. This panel examines the ways in which these centrifugal intellectual groups challenge the authority of official conceptualizations of “decentering the West” by focusing on questions about state power, economy, nationalism, gender, and urban life. Like their dominant counterparts, these Islam-based intellectual movements see Turkey’s secular founding ideology, Kemalism, as a form of “internal colonialism” due to its adoption of Western-centric modes of modernity and criticize the oppression of Islam-based ways of thinking. But, at the same time, these intellectual movements also challenge authoritarian, patriarchal, and restrictive interpretations which are supported and disseminated by the AKP. The main goal of this panel is to examine the production of knowledge by these lesser known, yet influential, dissident groups whom the state actively tries to silence. The first paper looks at the intellectual corpus of Hamza Türkmen who has developed a Quran-based approach that departs from previous articulations of Islam-based politics in Turkey. The second paper examines the ways in which contemporary Muslim anarchist groups criticize the bureaucratization of Islam in the hands of AKP-friendly intellectual circles. The third examines Cihan Aktaş’s theorization of Islamic urbanity which questions androcentric notions of modernity and instead calls for an alternative interpretation that centers on Muslim women’s experiences of urban modernity. The fourth paper focuses on the Muslim feminist Havle Association as an example of Islamic feminism which condemns both AKP’s conservative gender ideology and Euro-centric notions of women’s empowerment. The last paper analyzes Islamic criticisms of the AKP’s “pious business” rhetoric which overemphasizes a neoliberal interpretations of Ottoman ahism (craft guilds) at the expense of concerns over economic justice.

Panelists and Abstracts:

Islamic Decoloniality and Dissident Readings of Ottoman Economic Heritage by Gizem Zencirci

One of the key claims of the AKP’s civilizational discourse in Turkey has involved an emphasis on the “revival” of Ottoman-Islamic economic institutions. Among these, ahism (Ottoman guilds) have been frequently referred to as an indigenous, authentic, and Islamic model for governing economic affairs. Reviving the Ottoman ahi heritage is argued to potentially improve a variety of issues, ranging from the organization of business associations to the management of customers, and from the delivery of economic growth to the establishment of a balance between the haves and the have-nots. In this vision, the ahi heritage has been marked as one that successfully combines Islamic values and capitalist ethics, therefore presenting a decolonial alternative to the Western economic system. Despite this portrayal, the seemingly liberatory discourse of ahism, however, has often operated to justify AKP’s politics of Islamic neoliberalism with negative implications about class relations, economic inequality, and the alleviation of poverty. In the past decade, the AKP regime and pro-government business groups, civil society organizations, think-tanks, and higher education institutions in Turkey have disseminated similar claims about ahism, promoting the view that reviving the socio-economic heritage of ahism was akin to the restoration of Ottoman-Islamic civilization. But the state-sanctioned definition of ahism has also been fiercely criticized by various actors and groups within the Islamic intellectual field. This paper maps these criticisms with an eye towards understanding the points of contestation about the economy among Islam-based perspectives in Turkey. Specifically, I focus on two dissident Islamic intellectual groups: the Labor and Justice Platform (Emek ve Adalet platformu) and Insubordinates (Itaatsiz). Both groups question AKP’s reading of Ottoman ahi heritage by pointing out its inconsistencies and power-laden assumptions. Further, they provide alternative interpretations of Ottoman-Islamic economic heritage by borrowing from leftist and anarchist currents of thought. Analyzing these alternative readings of Islamic decoloniality in relation to matters of economic governance is the paper’s primary goal. Evidence is drawn from a close-reading of Ahism-related publications of these two Islamic intellectual groups published since the early 2010s.

Decentering the West: Muslim Anarchism and Counter-Hegemonic Activism in Turkey’s Islamic Intellectual Field by Kadir Can Çelik

Looking at the Islamic Intellectual Field (IIF) in Turkey, it is possible to see how different groups conceptualize decentering the West, referring to Islam-based political and intellectual movements that promise to break the hegemony of West-centric knowledge production, which silences, excludes, and denigrates non-Western Islamic knowledge production. While the concept of decentering the West from native knowledge production initially aimed to emancipate from Western epistemic colonialism, the ruling AKP government has co-opted this narrative to establish and impose its truth regime over both Islamic and non-Islamic movements by promoting a form of nativism. Besides, the AKP positions itself as the sole agent of Islam to counter Western thought and Turkey’s secular founding ideology, Kemalism, which it portrays as a form of “internal colonialism” that suppresses Islam-based knowledge production. In contrast, Muslim anarchists oppose the AKP’s monopolistic application of native thought, which marginalizes and silences other Islamic and non-Islamic movements. They also challenge the West-centric epistemological dominance in anarchist thought, which often excludes religious anarchists. Muslim anarchists critically engage with enlightenment-based, anti-theist modern anarchism that denies spiritual and religious elements, especially Islam-based knowledge production. Their primary stance is to achieve complete autonomous emancipation of knowledge production in Turkey, opposing the AKP’s hegemonic approach and decentering Western hegemonic knowledge production by developing an independent intellectual network. This paper investigates contemporary Muslim anarchists who develop a Qur’an-based anarchist theory and movement opposing private property, the state, capitalism, and all forms of macro- and micro-authorities, institutions, and religious orders. By examining their online monthly periodical “itaatsiz” (disobedient), published since 2013, and conducting interviews with prominent figures like Dilaver Demirağ and Alişan Şahin, this paper explores how Muslim anarchists interpret Islam, the Qur’an, and Sufism, and how they associate the idea of decentering the West through them. Understanding how Muslim anarchists construct a nativist movement in today’s Turkey is essential to grasp the diverse manifestations of Islam-based intellectual activism and to unpack the relationship between Islam and politics as viewed through a counter-hegemonic lens.

A Muslim Agora: Challenging Modern Urbanity in Two Fronts in Cihan Aktaş’s Work by Fatma Murat Elmacioglu

With the rapid urbanization of Turkey starting in the 1950s, modern urban life has long been problematized in the Islamic intellectual field in terms of its compatibility with Islam. Conceptualizing Islamic urbanity in juxtaposition with the modern Western city and taking a conservative stance against urban modernity, many Islamic intellectuals have made a call for the revival of Islamic urban tradition. Despite their critical engagement with the West, the scope of these accounts was mostly limited to the built environment and architectural features, thereby not breaking away from the hegemony of earlier studies on the “Islamic city” by Western scholars. Cihan Aktaş, a prolific intellectual and architect, making her debut in the late 1980s and known for her remarks on Islam and gender, distinguishes herself from these mainstream Islamic accounts by her skeptical approach to tradition and her broader perspective on urbanity, highlighting the everyday urban experiences in her books titled The Homelesness of Modernity and the Vitality of Family (1992) and The Urban Eclipse (2016). This paper suggests that Aktaş challenges modern urbanity in two fronts. First, Aktaş states that the secular nature of modernity makes space bereft of any divine meaning, failing to respond to the moral troubles of modern humans and ailing them with a sense of homelessness. Her second criticism is based on two premises, first, she argues that modern Western urbanity views the “white man” as the norm and universalizes the Western male urban experience. Relatedly, she asserts that Muslim intellectuals perpetuate the universalization of male urban experience while also expecting Muslim women to be the agents of Islamic resistance against modernity by confining them to private sphere in the name of tradition. Finding this burden overwhelming, Aktaş calls for a change in the organization of public sphere, which she refers to as agora, a conceptualization that makes the division between public and private spheres less manifest, facilitating the move in between them. Through this change, Aktaş aims to incorporate the urban experience of Muslim women into the conceptualization of Islamic urbanity. Thus, this paper discusses Aktaş’s agora as an alternative theorization of Islamic urbanity trying to break away from the hegemony of both modern Western urbanity and the conservative intellectual accounts on Islamic urbanity.

A Muslim Feminist NGO in Turkey: The Case of Havle Women’s Association by Zeynep Önal Aytaç

This study focuses on the Islam-based feminist stance of Havle Women’s Association (HWA) and its intellectual offerings and unique place in Turkey’s feminist movement. A newcomer to Turkey’s feminist movement, HWA was founded in Istanbul in 2018 by former members of various Islamic women initiations like “Muslim Initiative Against Violence Against Women” and “Women in Mosques” and framed itself as “the first Muslim Feminist Women’s Association in Turkey”. The paper examines HWA as a case study of Islamic decolonial feminism in Turkey. By engaging with Islamic feminism and decolonial feminism literature, the study aims to investigate whether HWA produces new feminist direction in Turkey, how does HWA formulate its identity towards both authoritarian AKP rule, Western stereotyped feminism and Sunni-orthodox Islam understanding. To answer the main questions of the study, I employ qualitative research methods, which rely on textual analysis and thick description. Specifically, the paper investigates HWA’s “Localization of Feminism in Turkey” ideal by examining their case studies, reports, and policy recommendations. Also, their activities like Havle Meetings, Havle School and workshops is analyzed in addition to their postings on the official website and Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. The paper examines this empirical material around three key themes, namely LGBTI+ rights, Istanbul Convention (European Convention on Combating Violence Against Women) discussions and the indigenousness approach. By using these three themes, the paper examines how the association challenges various local and global socio-political currents while HWA perceives them as Eurocentric women & feminism illusion, which is boosted by republican ideology and hegemonic, Sunni – orthodox Islam perspective, which is mostly imposed by AKP in Turkey. Specifically, I claim that by challenging AKP’s enforced domination about gender roles and political implications. HWA produces an alternative framework for thinking about women’s issues from an Islam-based perspective. Parallel to this, the organization also serves as the first and only initiation to the practice of modern and global Muslim feminist conceptualization in Turkey. Besides, by challenging mainstream Islamic and secular interpretations of feminism in Turkey, the organization shows the possibility of bringing feminism home by resisting Islam-referenced patriarchy, AKP’s hegemonic domination on gender-related matters and embedded modernization and westernization stereotypes in Turkey. Under the light of these, this study discusses HWA as a new and alternative way to Turkey’s feminist movement.

The Making of Internationalist Islamism in Turkey: The Case of Hamza Türkmen by Ismail Yazıcı

The second half of the 1960s witnessed the emergence of a new wave of Islamism in Turkey through the proliferation of translated works of Islamist ideologues such as Sayyid Qutb and Abu Ala Mawdudi. This new wave of Islamism espoused a scripturalist/Quran-centered epistemological stance through the reinterpretation of foundational texts while advancing Islam as a comprehensive and all-embracing universal political project and worldview. The intellectual transfer of Arabic and South Indian Islamist thought to Turkey brought about the formation of a new anti-nationalist, anti-statist, revivalist, and cosmopolitan Islamist discourse. Hamza Türkmen, a leading Islamist thinker, has been the vocal exponent of this intellectual movement since the late 1980s. He is the founder of both the monthly Haksöz, an influential Islamist journal published since 1991 advocating the Qutbian perspective, and the Islamic NGO Özgür-Der one of the first faith-based organizations dedicated to human rights in Turkey. Inspired by the vanguard figures of Islamic revivalism, he calls for cleansing religion from what is perceived as the prevalence of jahiliyya—defined as the conditions related to the pre-Islamic era. He claims that Ottoman-Turkish Islamism is an extension of the system of jahiliyya and his Quran-based approach poses a direct challenge to the official orthodox conceptualizations prevalent in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. This paper examines Hamza Türkmen’s writings published in Haksöz Journal since 1991. It investigates how Hamza Türkmen takes a critical stance against the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. Based on a text-based analysis of his writings, this study focuses on Hamza Türkmen’s critical approach to three key issues: the question of genuine Islam, the limits of state power, and parameters of national identity. This study argues that Hamza Türkmen articulates an anti-systemic and internationalist Islamist stance by adapting the Qutbian perspective to questions that are central to the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. It has two interrelated dimensions. First, he depicts Kemalism as a modern form of jahiliyya. Second, he criticizes the Islamic Intellectual Field in Turkey for failing to construct a genuine Islamic revival due to its allegedly statist, nationalist, rightist, Ottomanist, and traditionalist characteristics. Thus, Hamza Türkmen’s alternative Islamic thought exemplifies how the intellectual agenda of internationalist Islamist thought provides a salient framework for contending intellectual movements in the Islamic intellectual field.

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Panel I: The Predicament Of Islamic Epistemic Delinking: Hegemony And Critique In Contemporary Islamic Thought In Turkey

Organizer:  Alev Çınar
Chair/Discussant: Nora Fisher Onar

Abstract:

This panel seeks to demonstrate how the Islamic intellectual field (IIF) in Turkey, which consists of a variety of different, sometimes adamantly clashing Islam-based intellectual movements, is marked by a common struggle that seeks to break free from what is perceived as the hegemony of European systems of thought and knowledge. This struggle is primarily directed against the secular, Westernizationist founding ideology of the Republic, Kemalism, which has been termed as “self-colonization” by some of the Muslim intellectuals. Referring to this common motivation that drives contending movements as Islamic epistemic delinking, this panel focuses on Islamic intellectual movements that build on the emancipatory promise of epistemic decolonization to develop Islam-based perspectives, theories, and political projects, which came to constitute the intellectual foundations of Islam-based politics in Turkey, including the foundational ideology of Turkey’s current governmental regime established under the ruling AKP. While most Islamic movements in the IIF seek to stand up against the hegemony of Western paradigms of knowledge, some paradoxically use this emancipatory logic to establish themselves as the only viable political power whose project and understanding of Islam is superior to and unrivalled by others. This panel seeks to demonstrate how some of these movements raise claims to epistemic delinking to authorize their own alternative Islam-based political visions and projects while at the same time use such claims to justify new hierarchies and power relations based on Islam. The first paper in the panel looks at the Sufi-based political thought of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek to show how he is one of the pioneers of Islamic epistemic delinking in Turkey that emerged in the 1940s. The second paper examines Istanbul Sehir University, which was the first academic institution to be established by Muslim intellectuals active in the IIF as a case of “obedient resistance” against the hegemony of the Western academia. The third paper studies Ibn Haldun University that was established by President Erdogan’s TURGEV foundation to demonstrate the dilemmas of Islamic decoloniality, which result from seeking to end the hegemony of the Western academia while at the same time striving for international recognition, as well as the attempt to achieve a hegemonic status in the IIF. The final paper explores the work of former Marxist poet Ismet Özel in terms of his utopian goal to create an ideal Muslim society, which involves what the author refers to as “decoloniality as a lifestyle.

Panelists and Abstracts:

Epistemic Delinking in the Islamic Intellectual Field: “The Great East” Project of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek by Alev Çınar

This paper examines the work of Turkish Muslim poet and writer Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904-1983), who developed a Sufi-based intellectual paradigm and a political project in the 1940s as one of the first attempts in establishing an Islam-based political project that stands as an alternative to Eurocentric knowledge systems and modes of modernity which were adopted as part of Turkey’s founding ideology. The paper seeks to demonstrate that Necip Fazıl is one of the pioneers of what can be referred to as epistemic delinking from Western systems of thought, which became one of the key constitutive elements of the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. My larger project seeks to demonstrate that this field emerged primarily as a reaction to Turkey’s founding ideology, Kemalism, which launched a West-oriented secular modernization project that framed the Ottoman system and Islam as inferior, backward, and uncivilized. Epistemic delinking emerged as an intellectual movement against this backdrop in the 1940s, and later branched out into diverse intellectual movements that seek to break free from what is perceived as the hegemony of European intellectual paradigms, and the Kemalist project that has been termed as “self-colonization” by some of the Muslim intellectuals. This paper focuses on Necip Fazıl’s work, who is current President Erdogan’s main ideological inspiration, and the founder and lead writer of The Great East journal (1943-1978), which is considered to be Turkey’s first Islam-based political journal that was instrumental in inspiring numerous future political and intellectual movements. In his books, Necip Fazıl provides a critical commentary on Western thought by contesting the reason-faith dichotomy that sustains Western systems of knowledge, and develops an alternative Islam-based model that he refers to as the “Great East Revolution,” which involves the creation of a totalitarian Naqshbandi-based state model and a tightly regulated social order. Based on the analysis of these sources, I argue that while Necip Fazıl seeks to dismantle the reason-faith binary by taking at the base of his political thought a conceptualization of “human” as primarily defined by a Sufi understanding of Islam, his singular and monolithic conceptualization of Islam results in generating the same power relations that are claimed to be the product of the hegemonic status of European paradigms of knowledge, and produces the same kind of totalizing politics attributed to colonialism and imperialism, which persecutes, represses, or silences voices that unsettle the authority of colonial modes of governance. The reproduction of the same binaries and hierarchies that sustain the contested colonial power relations, I argue, is the predicament of Islamic epistemic delinking.

“Muslim Society” as Resistance: İsmet Özel’s Islamism as a Form of Islamic Decolonial Thought in Turkey by Enes Ateş

The reception of the concept of civilization within the Islamic Intellectual Field (IIF) has been of various types. Critical positions that directly oppose the concept itself in contemporary Islamic thought are one of these types. If it is possible to label this critical position as “anticivilizationism”, İsmet Özel can be one of the thinkers within the IIF who approaches the concept of civilization highly critical. İsmet Özel’s interesting life story, in which he evolved from a communist poet and writer to an “Islamist” thinker as he names it, is worth examining at the intellectual level. Considering his sort of popularity in public discussions as a public intellectual figure, Özel’s political thought may locate a sui-generis line within the IIF. This presentation will be based on Özel’s book Three Problems: Technique, Civilization, Alienation – Introduction to the Muslim Way of Thinking published in 1978 as proposing that it was one of the most attentive anti-civilizationist intellectual-political objection in the Islamic Intellectual field. Through the main theses of the book, the presentation tries to explain Özel’s anti-civilizationism. As a conceptual proposal, the presentation will foreground the instrumental compatibility of Özel’s critique of civilization with the conceptualization of Islamic decolonial thought. Based on recent literature on decoloniality, this paper argues that Özel’s proposal to establish a Muslim society is offered as a form of “living decolonially,” which refers to thinking and acting in ways that break free from the hegemony of Western knowledges and perspectives where everyday practices and lifestyles are shaped in accordance with Islamic standards of morality and through conscious efforts to “delink” from such Western standards. By drawing attention to the similarities of contemporary Islamic political thought in Turkey with the approaches of “decoloniality” theory, this proposal tries to be both an instrumental contribution to the theory itself and a small introduction of a new framework to the research field on Islamism in Turkey.

Higher Education, Ideology, and Politics in Turkey: An Islamic Decolonial Turn in Academia? by Seda Baykal

This study examines Ibn Khaldun University (IHU) to understand whether the civilizational ideology of AKP (Justice and Development Party) is being manifested as a decolonial academic paradigm at IHU. Higher education has been experiencing a worldwide transformation due to the advancement of globalism, neoliberalism, and technology. This transformation of the definition and function of higher education is not only quantitative, i.e., the increasing number of universities, students, and areas of study, but also qualitative such as the replacement of the academic administration offices by professional administrations, the increasing role of bureaucracy on academic decisions and such. One of the qualitative aspects which requires urgent attention yet does not get is the relationship between the state and higher education. Like others, studies on higher education in Turkey tend to address the problems of higher education in a vacuum without analyzing the prevailing state ideology, how it transforms higher education, and at the same time, is being reinforced or challenged by it. This incuriosity is not due to the insignificance of the phenomenon. Rather, the link between the state and higher education is mainly taken for granted as the prevailing ideology is undoubtedly effective in higher education and followingly justified and reproduced institutionally. On the other hand, this study questions this assumption and analyzes the link between AKP’s civilizationism and IHU, and examines whether civilizationism is being institutionalized and reproduced in IHU. This study follows a three-level analysis. First, I examine the civilizationism of the ruling party AKP and the founding principles of IHU, which are “Open Civilization” and “Open Science,” theorized by its founder and first president Recep Şentürk and discuss how these discourses overlap and reinforce each other. Second, I analyze the decolonial character of civilizationism based on the concepts of “Open Civilization” and “Open Science” and argue and discuss the hegemonic nature of this decolonial discourse. Finally, based on the analyses of the curricula, syllabi, interviews with the academic staff, and participant observation at the IHU campus, I discuss whether IHU, as the blueprint of the civilizational political paradigm, is actually reproducing and justifying it as a decolonial academic paradigm and how.

Between Assimilation and Defiance: “Obedient Resistance” in Academia, The Example of Istanbul Şehir University by Ayşe Ayten Bakacak

Istanbul Şehir University (ISU) was founded in 2008 by a group of Muslim intellectuals with the support of the AKP government. It was celebrated by Islamic circles as a step aimed at breaking the monopoly of a West-oriented approach to higher education that took Western academic modes and standards as the universal norm. However, after a decade-long span of being seen as one of the most successful examples of alternative knowledge production in higher education and inspired several other universities, ISU was dissolved via a presidential decree of Erdoğan in 2020. This paper argues that ISU represents a case of what Mustafa Özel, one of the prominent founders of ISU, calls “obedient resistance”. Being a scholar in economics and a prolific writer, Özel means by obedient resistance a repudiation of every form of domination by not refusing to benefit from the outcomes of it while at the same time resisting its hegemony. He specifically takes the position of non-Western societies against any form of colonial domination and defines obedience in reference to the attitude of benefiting from any Western-origin thing from ideologies, quality standards, or educational institutions, to literary genres, sources of knowledge, or the organization of social life. Resistance, on the other hand, refers to a struggle to maintain one’s authenticity and distinctive features as a manifestation of a desire not to be defined by others, particularly by the West. This paper seeks to demonstrate the ways in which Özel’s notion informed the structuring of ISU, in the institutionalization of its academic departments, curricula and course contents in social science disciplines. I argue that there is double obedient resistance in the case of ISU. The first one reveals itself as an epistemic struggle against West-centric education within an academic structure that was designed as a Western-style university which cares to meet Western quality standards. The second form of obedient resistance was performed against AKP’s hegemonic interventions: ISU refrained from AKP’s attempts aimed at instrumentalizing ISU’s religious identity and putting it at the full service of political ends. Within the framework of this argument, I focus firstly on the founding principles of the university and the course contents of social sciences departments to reveal the indicators of the obedient resistance against standardized West-centric contents. Second, I examine public statements of both the founders of ISU, and AKP officials to demonstrate the ways in which ISU obediently resisted AKP’s hegemonic interventions

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In recent years, the concept of civilization has become increasingly popular with the advent of renewed official political discourses that build on civilizationism in countries like Russia, India, or China. Similarly, in Turkey, civilization has been one of the central elements of politics since the 1990s when R.T. Erdogan, who emerged as one of the leaders of the rising Islamic movement, started to refer to Turkey as an “Ottoman-Islamic civilization.” Most studies on this civilizational turn in global politics focus on it as a new ideology that is developed in relation to religious identities, nationalism or imperial restoration, such as Russian civilizationism, or Hinduism in India. In Turkey, civilization is one of the most debated concepts among contending movements in the Islamic Intellectual Field (IIF) that place discrepant emphasis on different conceptualizations of Islam, ethnicity, or the imperial past/Ottomanism. In spite of this diversity, contending parties have the common motivation to develop Islam-based political perspectives in response to what is perceived as the detrimental effects of the hegemony of European modernization, Eurocentric systems of thought, or Westernization. This panel brings together studies that draw on current debates on the decolonization of knowledge to explore the ways in which the notion of civilization is developed by different parties in the IIF as an Islamic decolonial project that attempts to produce non-Western forms of knowing and theorizing, and also to demonstrate how this debate is marked by internal antagonisms and clashing views that build on starkly different understandings of Islam. The papers examine the contemporary history of the concept of civilization in Turkey by focusing on leading Islamic journals and writers who have contributed to the development of the concept in the IIF.   The first paper focuses on the Journal of Islamic Civilization in the 1960s as one of the earliest publications that introduced the notion ‘Islamic Civilization.’ The second paper explores the writings of Sezai Karakoc, who is considered to be a pioneer in the transformation of the notion of civilization into a political ideology built around the notion of Islamic revivalism. The third examines the writings of an influential Muslim literary intellectual, Nuri Pakdil, who developed a notion of civilization based on a left-leaning criticism of Westernization. The final paper looks at the relationship between civilization and the Islamic city debated by Lutfi Bergen, who builds an ultra-traditionalist theory of civilization combined with what he refers to as “Anatolian-leftism.”

Organizer: Alev Çınar
Chair: Alev Çınar
Discussant: Cemil Aydın
Participants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu

Abstracts to be Presented:

“Cold War Origins of Civilizational Thinking in Turkey: Journal of Islamic Civilization”
by Talha Koseoglu

Analyzing the Journal of Islamic Civilization (İslam Medeniyeti-JIC), published between 1967 and 1982, this paper aims to understand debates around civilization as a key concept in Muslim intellectual responses to the discourse of modernization in Cold War Turkey (c. 1960’s-1980). The JIC is one of the first instances when the term “Islamic civilization” was publicly used in Turkey. Through a discussion on the conceptualization of civilization in the JIC, this paper seeks traces of the Muslim appropriation of the concept of civilization by adopting a genealogical approach to the concept. Building on the literature on decolonial thought, the paper argues that the JIC represents one of the earliest examples to Turkish-Muslim reactions and critique of the notion of modernization as westernization adopted by the founders of the republican regime since 1923. Although Turkey was never colonized, JIC authors perceived westernizing reforms of the republican regime as part of a process of Muslim people’s colonization. The defense of “Islamic civilization” in the JIC was a response to Turkey’s westernization as an ostensible “self-colonizing” act as well as the Western/imperial discourse on Islam, which was informed by colonialism and Orientalism. While civilization was hitherto used in singular as a universal phenomenon to refer to a series of technological developments and socio-political institutions devoid of any religious, national, or local connotations, Muslim intellectuals around the JIC started to use civilization in the plural to refer to different variations of an “Islamic civilization” that competes against or is superior to Western civilization. This paper focuses on how the JIC spearheads the emergence of civilizational thought in Turkey by adopting and re-defining the concept from an Islamic perspective, which was once an abstract Western category with claims to universality, to signify a different meaning that helps fighting with universality claims of Western modernity. How did the JIC authors define civilization? How did they conceive “the West” in relation to Islam? What kind of Islam they enunciate by adopting a notion of multiple civilizations (and modernities) in the Cold War context? While the paper acknowledges JIC authors’ effort to find their own voices qua Muslims in the modern world against Orientalist and modernist claims; the paper also aims to show how the JIC made its own boundaries by (re)defining Islam as a civilization, which disregards non-Muslim contributions to Islamic thought and excludes diverging voices within the Islamic Intellectual Field.

“Beyond Epistemic Disobedience: Şehir versus Kent in the Civilizational Thought of Lütfi Bergen”
by Fatma Murat Elmacıoglu

The concept of civilization has been widely debated in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey since the 1950s with the goal of conceptualizing civilization in Islamic terms as an alternative to the singular and Eurocentric conceptualization that has it is roots in Western epistemology and was championed by the modernizing Republican elite. The concept is closely tied to notions of urban and the city, which is evident in the Turkish version of the term medeniyet that is derived from the Arabic word medina, meaning city. In the contemporary Islamic intellectual field, many prominent names joined the debate on the relationship between civilization and city, marking a shift in civilizational thought that can be interpreted as the urban turn. In this paper, I examine how Lütfi Bergen, a prolific and controversial figure known for a heavily traditionalist-Islamic criticism of modernity, and his books such as The Moral Uprising, Underdevelopment is Superiority, or Civilization-The Construction of Muslim Communitarianism, develops his understanding of civilization in relation to the city. Bergen offers a unique contribution to this debate by making a distinction between two concepts şehir, which stands for a place where life is organized in accordance with the social, political, and economic practices of Medina at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, in short, the Sunnah, and kent, which is where Western materialist culture prevails at the expense of Islamic tradition and denotes the failure of modernity in organizing urban life. Bergen establishes an immanent connection between şehir and civilization by defining civilizationalso in relation to the Sunnah and severs its ties to Western epistemology. The literature on decoloniality describes such efforts of delinking from Western epistemology as epistemic disobedience. Further, Bergen states his aim as to create an Islamic epistemological basis through which Muslims can discuss social, political, and economic matters in their own terms, and develops an urban model for a Muslim community. By doing this, Bergen reclaims civilization as a singular Islamic concept, differentiating himself from many figures in Islamic intellectual field who are for the idea of the multiplicity of civilizations. I argue that, by studying Bergen’s work, it is possible to unravel a part of the complexity arising from clustering together the intellectual accounts criticizing the epistemic dominance of the West. The part presenting how Bergen’s understanding of civilization conflicts with his contemporaries attests to the diversity in the Islamic intellectual field.

“The Thesis of Resurrection in Islamic Decolonial Thought in Turkey: The Civilizationism of Sezai Karakoç” by Enes Ates

As one of the influential names of the Islamic Intellectual Field in Turkey after 1945, the civilizationist view of Sezai Karakoç and his Resurrection thesis (Diriliş) will be discussed. As a poet-thinker, Sezai Karakoç (1933-2021) is an Islamic idealist who put forward his Islamic-civilizationist theses in his complete works that he started at the beginning of the cold war. Placing civilizations as a unit of analysis at the center of his historical thought, Karakoç combined “Islam as a religion” with “Islam as a lifestyle and ideology” and followed the method of Islamic exceptionalism. Karakoç, dealing with the concept of Islamic civilization in line of historical philosophy, realizes his “historical-sociological” method with the thesis of Resurrection (Diriliş), which emerges as a political program. In this study in a word, the Resurrection Thesis has been put forward as the politicized program of Karakoç’s civilizationist thinking. In this sense, Karakoç is taken for granted as a political thinker.  The study focuses on the specific works of Sezai Karakoç which are only published during the 1960s. These works, in chronological order, are Islam (İslam), Columns 1-Differences(Günlük Yazılar 1-Farklar, abbr. GY1), Around Resurrection (Dirilişin Çevresinde, abbr. DÇ), the Economic Structure of Islamic Society (İslam Toplumunun Ekonomik Strüktürü, abbr. İTES), Resurrection of Islam (İslam’ın Dirilişi, abbr. İD), and Columns 2-Pillar (Günlük Yazılar 2-Sütun, abbr. GY2). These 6 books contain almost all the journal articles published by Karakoç from 1960 to 1970. His other 4 books published in the same years were not included in the research as they were not directly related to the concept of civilization and the resurrection thesis. All the articles in these books were reviewed one by one and a classification was made around the concepts of civilization (Islamic civilization, western civilization), the west (westernization, Marxism, communism, two World Wars, colonialism) and the concept of resurrection (emancipation, revivalism). With this method, the aim is to emphasize the founding character of the 1960s in Karakoç’s thought and to deal with the establishment forms of civilization-resurrection conceptualizations. In this context, the article aims to deal with the Resurrection Thesis, which proposes to realize Karakoç’s understanding of civilization as a political program, as it was fictionalized in the 1960s.

“Anti-Westernism, Internationalism, and Nativism in Islamic Civilizational Thought: Reflections on Nuri Pakdil’s Writings” by Ismail Yazıcı

Islamic literature in Turkey has become the central axis of Islamic political thought from the 1950s onwards. During this period, a newly emerging class of poets, novelists and playwrights contributed to the reinvigoration of Islamic intellectual movements in Turkey with a completely new agenda that broke away from late Ottoman thought. They formulated an influential critique of Western modernity, which eventually turned into an attack on the official Westernizationist modernization project. As the founder of one of the pioneer literary journals of the period, Edebiyat (Literature) published in 1969-84, Nuri Pakdil is one of the leading intellectuals from this group who holds sway over contemporary Islamic political thought and particularly leftleaning Islamic ideologies in Turkey. This paper scrutinizes the anti-Westernist approach in Nuri Pakdil’s literary work and investigates the intellectual genealogy of his notion of Islamic civilization as an alternative to the secular modernization project. He has been the vocal exponent of the idea of the revival of what he claims to be Islam’s authentic civilization and a fervent critic of putative Western civilization. This paper examines Pakdil’s civilizational thought and his critical conceptualization of the relation between Islam and the West to demonstrate what has been grouped under “Islamism” is in fact contending intellectual movements that have taken on different approaches to Islam and its relation to the West. By analyzing his articles that were mainly published in Edebiyat, I argue that civilizational thought promoted by Pakdil in engagement with Middle Eastern and Asian Muslim intellectual movements, was developed as a leftist-inspired Islamic alternative modernity project to Westernization, which uniquely positioned him as a bridge between the nativist and internationalist interpretations of contemporary Islamic thought in Turkey. Based on an analysis of how the concept of civilization is debated in his writings, this essay argues that Nuri Pakdil attempted the production of counter-knowledge what he framed as “nativist thought” that seeks to dismantle perceived coloniality and to open up an alternative epistemological stance. His unique approach which stands for a fusion of internationalist language of Islam and nativist aspects of Turkish-Islamic political thought articulated around the concept of Ottoman-Islamic civilization offers a new epistemic delinking in order to challenge the Westernizationist interventions of the secular state. Nuri Pakdil’s civilizational thought thus can be taken as an example of how the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey strives to move beyond the criticism of Western modernity by reconstructing subalternized knowledges

This panel seeks to examine the concept of civilization in Turkish politics as it became one of the core elements of the AKP’s (Justice and Development Party) ideology since it came to power in 2002. Under the AKP rule, civilizationism was endorsed as the glorification of the Ottoman past, referred to as neo-Ottomanism, and seen as a way to contest Turkey’s secular, ethnic-Turkish founding ideology, Kemalism. The idea that the primary task of the government is to revive this Ottoman-Islamic civilizational heritage gained force after the AKP came to power. For the past two decades, civilizationism has informed governmental policies ranging from the economy to the restructuring of the education system, from urban development or foreign affairs to heritage and cultural policies. Most of the recent studies on AKP’s civilizational/neo-Ottomanist stance understand it as an alternative to nationalism, a response against Western civilization, or a way to cover up right-wing, religion-based, and populist impulses. In contrast, in this panel, we approach civilizationism as the common theme of a larger debate in the Islamic intellectual field (IIF) among different, sometimes contrasting views that not only forms the backbone of AKP’s political ideology, but also provides insight into some of the transformations and ruptures that the AKP went through in the last two decades. We are particularly interested in exploring how the AKP uses themes drawn from postcolonial criticism to justify its own Ottoman-Islamic variant of civilizationism. These decolonial themes include a critique of Turkey’s pro-Western orientation, a disavowal of European paradigms of knowledge, and an emphasis on reviving restoring the country’s authentic and local institutions, traditions, and practices. In this panel, we examine both the dominant premises of civilizationism, while also attending to the ways in which this ideology is produced, contested, and negotiated by various actors, organizations, and intellectual formations. While some papers trace debates surrounding the concept of civilizationism in the IIF, others explore the manifestations of AKP’s civilizational ideology in various domains such as higher education policy, state-business relations, and the conduct of political authority. The findings of these papers contribute not only to debates about political Islam and Turkish politics, but also to broader conversations about the rise of civilizationism in countries like China, Russia, and India.

Organizer: Gizem Zencirci
Chair: Halil İbrahim Yenigün
Discussant: Katerina Dalacoura
Participants:
Alev Çınar
Gizem Zencirci
M. Nergiz Altınsoy
Seda Baykal
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak

Abstracts to be Presented:

“Contending Notions of Civilization in Islamic Decolonial Thought in Turkey”
by Alev Çınar

This paper compares leading journals in the Islamic Intellectual Field (IIF) in Turkey that have published special issues on civilization, to explore how the notion civilization is developed as part of what can be termed as “Islamic decolonial thought,” which refers to intellectual movements that seek to defend and empower Turkey and/or Islam against what is perceived as the hegemony of European paradigms of knowledge and what is often termed as the “self-colonizing,” Westernizing, secularist reforms of the Kemalist Republic. Examining civilization issues of two main journals (Ay Vaktiand Hece) published since 2010 from different sides of the political spectrum, this paper examines how the term civilization is used by different intellectual and political movements, including the ruling AKP, as the key element of their ideological stance. The goal is to demonstrate that the debate on civilization is marked by a motivation common to all contending parties in the IIF to develop Islam-based political perspectives that debate and develop solutions to Turkey’s domestic or international problems, most of which are defined in relation to Westernization, Eurocentric modernization or imperialism. Building on a critical reading of postcolonial theory and current debates on decoloniality and the decolonization of knowledge, I argue that civilizational discourse is part of Islamic decolonial thought, which can broadly be defined as an attempt to produce non-Western forms of knowing and theorizing that build primarily on Islamic intellectual and theological schools of thought, but also on secular-Ottoman/Turkish as well as Western intellectual traditions. Despite this common motivation that fuels civilizational discourse in the IIF, there are a variety of different and even clashing ways the concept is utilized by different intellectual movements. While some use the term as an alternative to ethnic nationalism – as in “Islamic civilization” – others contrastingly use it as a form of religious nationalism that posits a natural union between Turkishness and Islam – as in “Turkish-Islamic civilization.” The paper discusses how some of these different usages of the term pave the way for political projects that tend to aggravate different forms of ethnic or religious discrimination. For example, the term “Ottoman-Islamic civilization,” which is used as a religious alternative to secular nationalism, results in the exclusion of other religious communities, particularly the Alevite population. Whereas “Turkish-Islamic civilization,” which has increasingly become popular in the post-2016 AKP-MHP alliance, is often invoked to fuel ethnic discrimination, particularly against the Kurds.

“The Hidden Codes of Civilization:” Reviving Ottoman Ahi (Craft) Guilds and the Small Business Myth of AKP’s Civilizational Politics
by Gizem Zencirci

In 2016, praising the introduction of a new course on Ottoman ahi (craft) guilds in Karatay University in Turkey, a journalist wrote that this economic heritage gave access to the “hidden codes of our civilization,” and argued that the revival of the ahi model was as a necessary step for “solving our problems by returning to our own cultural values.” This account exemplifies, how, the revival of ahi (Ottoman craft guilds) is understood as an essential element of Turkey’s civilizational revival. In this perspective, ahi guilds are claimed to provide an indigenous, authentic, and Islamic model for governing economic affairs, ranging from the organization of business associations to the management of customers, and from pursuing economic growth to establishing a balance between the haves and the have-nots. In the past decade, the AKP regime and pro-government business groups, civil society organizations, think-tanks, and higher education institutions in Turkey have disseminated similar claims about ahism, promoting the view that reviving the ahi heritage was a form of restoring the Ottoman-Islamic civilization. This paper maps this intellectual field formed around the debate on the significance of ahi guilds and its relation to civilizationism, with an eye towards understanding the origins, claims, and themes of Ahism, and examines what these components tell us about the origins and limits of AKP’s larger civilizational politics. First, I demonstrate that attempts to revive this economic heritage are often expressed from a decolonial sensibility, often aligning reimagined features of the Ottoman-Islamic economy in opposition to the West. Ahism is promoted as a model of Islamic “small business” that combines free market principles with religious values and communitarian principles, and an alternative to Western economic institutions, practices, and theories. Second, I discuss the internal debates within this Islamic intellectual field particularly concerning disagreements about the scale of production and the proper management of class-based conflict. I substantiate this argument through a close reading of Ahism-related publications of the Turkish Trade Ministry, Chambers of Arts and Craftsman, and the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey; promotional materials printed as part of Ahi week celebrations, speeches given by AKP politicians in the past two decades, as well as publications—written by Muslim intellectuals as well as others—that criticize AKP’s discourse of Ahism from an Islamic standpoint.

“Islamist Contestation of Neo-Civilizationist Discourse: The Case of İktibas Journal”
by Ayşe Ayten Bakacak

In Turkey there is a tendency in the Islamic Intellectual Field (IIF) for staking a claim on civilizationism as a means of an anti-colonial struggle. On political level, AKP also uses an Islamic and neo-Ottomanist civilizational discourse and presents it as an indigenous alternative to Western civilization. However, there has been substantial opposition within the IIF itself against the use of the word civilization (medeniyet), among which İktibas journal, published since 1981, takes the lead. The paper examines how this prominent dissident Islamist publication has been criticizing the presentation of idea of “Islamic civilization” as a decolonial and indigenous alternative to Western civilization. Since defining both socio-political and Islamic concepts within the original ideological and historical context have been the essential concern of the journal since its inception, İktibas published several articles and even a special issue, in recent years, that addressed the debate on civilization, taking a critical stance against the use of the term civilization within an Islamic context. From the perspective of İktibas, the intellectual hegemony and epistemic colonization of the West cannot be defeated via using Western-originated concepts, which is why the journal depicts “Islamic civilization” phrase is an oxymoron at best.  The objective of this paper is to show that civilizationism has not been adopted by all Islamist intellectuals. I argue that İktibas’s contestation of the Islamic civilizationist discourse revolves around the journal’s claim of the deceptive Islamic appearance of the concept of civilization. I draw on recent debates on decoloniality to analyze Iktibas’s opposition as an example of decolonial critique due to its anti-Western and anti-Eurocentric stance on a conceptual and epistemic level. In addition, I reveal that Iktibas seeks to create an alternative non-Western paradigm based on Islam. Basically, I focus on the issues of the journal published between 2016 and 2022 to track debates around the concepts of civilization, Islamic civilization, coloniality and Western intellectual hegemony.

Panel I: The Predicament Of Islamic Epistemic Delinking: Hegemony And Critique In Contemporary Islamic Thought In Turkey

Organizer:  Alev Çınar
Chair/Discussant: Nora Fisher Onar

Abstract:

This panel seeks to demonstrate how the Islamic intellectual field (IIF) in Turkey, which consists of a variety of different, sometimes adamantly clashing Islam-based intellectual movements, is marked by a common struggle that seeks to break free from what is perceived as the hegemony of European systems of thought and knowledge. This struggle is primarily directed against the secular, Westernizationist founding ideology of the Republic, Kemalism, which has been termed as “self-colonization” by some of the Muslim intellectuals. Referring to this common motivation that drives contending movements as Islamic epistemic delinking, this panel focuses on Islamic intellectual movements that build on the emancipatory promise of epistemic decolonization to develop Islam-based perspectives, theories, and political projects, which came to constitute the intellectual foundations of Islam-based politics in Turkey, including the foundational ideology of Turkey’s current governmental regime established under the ruling AKP. While most Islamic movements in the IIF seek to stand up against the hegemony of Western paradigms of knowledge, some paradoxically use this emancipatory logic to establish themselves as the only viable political power whose project and understanding of Islam is superior to and unrivalled by others. This panel seeks to demonstrate how some of these movements raise claims to epistemic delinking to authorize their own alternative Islam-based political visions and projects while at the same time use such claims to justify new hierarchies and power relations based on Islam. The first paper in the panel looks at the Sufi-based political thought of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek to show how he is one of the pioneers of Islamic epistemic delinking in Turkey that emerged in the 1940s. The second paper examines Istanbul Sehir University, which was the first academic institution to be established by Muslim intellectuals active in the IIF as a case of “obedient resistance” against the hegemony of the Western academia. The third paper studies Ibn Haldun University that was established by President Erdogan’s TURGEV foundation to demonstrate the dilemmas of Islamic decoloniality, which result from seeking to end the hegemony of the Western academia while at the same time striving for international recognition, as well as the attempt to achieve a hegemonic status in the IIF. The final paper explores the work of former Marxist poet Ismet Özel in terms of his utopian goal to create an ideal Muslim society, which involves what the author refers to as “decoloniality as a lifestyle.

Panelists and Abstracts:

Epistemic Delinking in the Islamic Intellectual Field: “The Great East” Project of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek by Alev Çınar

This paper examines the work of Turkish Muslim poet and writer Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904-1983), who developed a Sufi-based intellectual paradigm and a political project in the 1940s as one of the first attempts in establishing an Islam-based political project that stands as an alternative to Eurocentric knowledge systems and modes of modernity which were adopted as part of Turkey’s founding ideology. The paper seeks to demonstrate that Necip Fazıl is one of the pioneers of what can be referred to as epistemic delinking from Western systems of thought, which became one of the key constitutive elements of the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey. My larger project seeks to demonstrate that this field emerged primarily as a reaction to Turkey’s founding ideology, Kemalism, which launched a West-oriented secular modernization project that framed the Ottoman system and Islam as inferior, backward, and uncivilized. Epistemic delinking emerged as an intellectual movement against this backdrop in the 1940s, and later branched out into diverse intellectual movements that seek to break free from what is perceived as the hegemony of European intellectual paradigms, and the Kemalist project that has been termed as “self-colonization” by some of the Muslim intellectuals. This paper focuses on Necip Fazıl’s work, who is current President Erdogan’s main ideological inspiration, and the founder and lead writer of The Great East journal (1943-1978), which is considered to be Turkey’s first Islam-based political journal that was instrumental in inspiring numerous future political and intellectual movements. In his books, Necip Fazıl provides a critical commentary on Western thought by contesting the reason-faith dichotomy that sustains Western systems of knowledge, and develops an alternative Islam-based model that he refers to as the “Great East Revolution,” which involves the creation of a totalitarian Naqshbandi-based state model and a tightly regulated social order. Based on the analysis of these sources, I argue that while Necip Fazıl seeks to dismantle the reason-faith binary by taking at the base of his political thought a conceptualization of “human” as primarily defined by a Sufi understanding of Islam, his singular and monolithic conceptualization of Islam results in generating the same power relations that are claimed to be the product of the hegemonic status of European paradigms of knowledge, and produces the same kind of totalizing politics attributed to colonialism and imperialism, which persecutes, represses, or silences voices that unsettle the authority of colonial modes of governance. The reproduction of the same binaries and hierarchies that sustain the contested colonial power relations, I argue, is the predicament of Islamic epistemic delinking.

“Muslim Society” as Resistance: İsmet Özel’s Islamism as a Form of Islamic Decolonial Thought in Turkey by Enes Ateş

The reception of the concept of civilization within the Islamic Intellectual Field (IIF) has been of various types. Critical positions that directly oppose the concept itself in contemporary Islamic thought are one of these types. If it is possible to label this critical position as “anticivilizationism”, İsmet Özel can be one of the thinkers within the IIF who approaches the concept of civilization highly critical. İsmet Özel’s interesting life story, in which he evolved from a communist poet and writer to an “Islamist” thinker as he names it, is worth examining at the intellectual level. Considering his sort of popularity in public discussions as a public intellectual figure, Özel’s political thought may locate a sui-generis line within the IIF. This presentation will be based on Özel’s book Three Problems: Technique, Civilization, Alienation – Introduction to the Muslim Way of Thinking published in 1978 as proposing that it was one of the most attentive anti-civilizationist intellectual-political objection in the Islamic Intellectual field. Through the main theses of the book, the presentation tries to explain Özel’s anti-civilizationism. As a conceptual proposal, the presentation will foreground the instrumental compatibility of Özel’s critique of civilization with the conceptualization of Islamic decolonial thought. Based on recent literature on decoloniality, this paper argues that Özel’s proposal to establish a Muslim society is offered as a form of “living decolonially,” which refers to thinking and acting in ways that break free from the hegemony of Western knowledges and perspectives where everyday practices and lifestyles are shaped in accordance with Islamic standards of morality and through conscious efforts to “delink” from such Western standards. By drawing attention to the similarities of contemporary Islamic political thought in Turkey with the approaches of “decoloniality” theory, this proposal tries to be both an instrumental contribution to the theory itself and a small introduction of a new framework to the research field on Islamism in Turkey.

Higher Education, Ideology, and Politics in Turkey: An Islamic Decolonial Turn in Academia? by Seda Baykal

This study examines Ibn Khaldun University (IHU) to understand whether the civilizational ideology of AKP (Justice and Development Party) is being manifested as a decolonial academic paradigm at IHU. Higher education has been experiencing a worldwide transformation due to the advancement of globalism, neoliberalism, and technology. This transformation of the definition and function of higher education is not only quantitative, i.e., the increasing number of universities, students, and areas of study, but also qualitative such as the replacement of the academic administration offices by professional administrations, the increasing role of bureaucracy on academic decisions and such. One of the qualitative aspects which requires urgent attention yet does not get is the relationship between the state and higher education. Like others, studies on higher education in Turkey tend to address the problems of higher education in a vacuum without analyzing the prevailing state ideology, how it transforms higher education, and at the same time, is being reinforced or challenged by it. This incuriosity is not due to the insignificance of the phenomenon. Rather, the link between the state and higher education is mainly taken for granted as the prevailing ideology is undoubtedly effective in higher education and followingly justified and reproduced institutionally. On the other hand, this study questions this assumption and analyzes the link between AKP’s civilizationism and IHU, and examines whether civilizationism is being institutionalized and reproduced in IHU. This study follows a three-level analysis. First, I examine the civilizationism of the ruling party AKP and the founding principles of IHU, which are “Open Civilization” and “Open Science,” theorized by its founder and first president Recep Şentürk and discuss how these discourses overlap and reinforce each other. Second, I analyze the decolonial character of civilizationism based on the concepts of “Open Civilization” and “Open Science” and argue and discuss the hegemonic nature of this decolonial discourse. Finally, based on the analyses of the curricula, syllabi, interviews with the academic staff, and participant observation at the IHU campus, I discuss whether IHU, as the blueprint of the civilizational political paradigm, is actually reproducing and justifying it as a decolonial academic paradigm and how.

Between Assimilation and Defiance: “Obedient Resistance” in Academia, The Example of Istanbul Şehir University by Ayşe Ayten Bakacak

Istanbul Şehir University (ISU) was founded in 2008 by a group of Muslim intellectuals with the support of the AKP government. It was celebrated by Islamic circles as a step aimed at breaking the monopoly of a West-oriented approach to higher education that took Western academic modes and standards as the universal norm. However, after a decade-long span of being seen as one of the most successful examples of alternative knowledge production in higher education and inspired several other universities, ISU was dissolved via a presidential decree of Erdoğan in 2020. This paper argues that ISU represents a case of what Mustafa Özel, one of the prominent founders of ISU, calls “obedient resistance”. Being a scholar in economics and a prolific writer, Özel means by obedient resistance a repudiation of every form of domination by not refusing to benefit from the outcomes of it while at the same time resisting its hegemony. He specifically takes the position of non-Western societies against any form of colonial domination and defines obedience in reference to the attitude of benefiting from any Western-origin thing from ideologies, quality standards, or educational institutions, to literary genres, sources of knowledge, or the organization of social life. Resistance, on the other hand, refers to a struggle to maintain one’s authenticity and distinctive features as a manifestation of a desire not to be defined by others, particularly by the West. This paper seeks to demonstrate the ways in which Özel’s notion informed the structuring of ISU, in the institutionalization of its academic departments, curricula and course contents in social science disciplines. I argue that there is double obedient resistance in the case of ISU. The first one reveals itself as an epistemic struggle against West-centric education within an academic structure that was designed as a Western-style university which cares to meet Western quality standards. The second form of obedient resistance was performed against AKP’s hegemonic interventions: ISU refrained from AKP’s attempts aimed at instrumentalizing ISU’s religious identity and putting it at the full service of political ends. Within the framework of this argument, I focus firstly on the founding principles of the university and the course contents of social sciences departments to reveal the indicators of the obedient resistance against standardized West-centric contents. Second, I examine public statements of both the founders of ISU, and AKP officials to demonstrate the ways in which ISU obediently resisted AKP’s hegemonic interventions

Official Link to the MESA 2024 Annual Meeting

In recent years, the concept of civilization has become increasingly popular with the advent of renewed official political discourses that build on civilizationism in countries like Russia, India, or China. Similarly, in Turkey, civilization has been one of the central elements of politics since the 1990s when R.T. Erdogan, who emerged as one of the leaders of the rising Islamic movement, started to refer to Turkey as an “Ottoman-Islamic civilization.” Most studies on this civilizational turn in global politics focus on it as a new ideology that is developed in relation to religious identities, nationalism or imperial restoration, such as Russian civilizationism, or Hinduism in India. In Turkey, civilization is one of the most debated concepts among contending movements in the Islamic Intellectual Field (IIF) that place discrepant emphasis on different conceptualizations of Islam, ethnicity, or the imperial past/Ottomanism. In spite of this diversity, contending parties have the common motivation to develop Islam-based political perspectives in response to what is perceived as the detrimental effects of the hegemony of European modernization, Eurocentric systems of thought, or Westernization. This panel brings together studies that draw on current debates on the decolonization of knowledge to explore the ways in which the notion of civilization is developed by different parties in the IIF as an Islamic decolonial project that attempts to produce non-Western forms of knowing and theorizing, and also to demonstrate how this debate is marked by internal antagonisms and clashing views that build on starkly different understandings of Islam. The papers examine the contemporary history of the concept of civilization in Turkey by focusing on leading Islamic journals and writers who have contributed to the development of the concept in the IIF.   The first paper focuses on the Journal of Islamic Civilization in the 1960s as one of the earliest publications that introduced the notion ‘Islamic Civilization.’ The second paper explores the writings of Sezai Karakoc, who is considered to be a pioneer in the transformation of the notion of civilization into a political ideology built around the notion of Islamic revivalism. The third examines the writings of an influential Muslim literary intellectual, Nuri Pakdil, who developed a notion of civilization based on a left-leaning criticism of Westernization. The final paper looks at the relationship between civilization and the Islamic city debated by Lutfi Bergen, who builds an ultra-traditionalist theory of civilization combined with what he refers to as “Anatolian-leftism.”

Organizer: Alev Çınar
Chair: Alev Çınar
Discussant: Cemil Aydın
Participants:
Talha Köseoğlu
Enes Ateş
İsmail Yazıcı
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu

Abstracts to be Presented:

“Cold War Origins of Civilizational Thinking in Turkey: Journal of Islamic Civilization”
by Talha Koseoglu

Analyzing the Journal of Islamic Civilization (İslam Medeniyeti-JIC), published between 1967 and 1982, this paper aims to understand debates around civilization as a key concept in Muslim intellectual responses to the discourse of modernization in Cold War Turkey (c. 1960’s-1980). The JIC is one of the first instances when the term “Islamic civilization” was publicly used in Turkey. Through a discussion on the conceptualization of civilization in the JIC, this paper seeks traces of the Muslim appropriation of the concept of civilization by adopting a genealogical approach to the concept. Building on the literature on decolonial thought, the paper argues that the JIC represents one of the earliest examples to Turkish-Muslim reactions and critique of the notion of modernization as westernization adopted by the founders of the republican regime since 1923. Although Turkey was never colonized, JIC authors perceived westernizing reforms of the republican regime as part of a process of Muslim people’s colonization. The defense of “Islamic civilization” in the JIC was a response to Turkey’s westernization as an ostensible “self-colonizing” act as well as the Western/imperial discourse on Islam, which was informed by colonialism and Orientalism. While civilization was hitherto used in singular as a universal phenomenon to refer to a series of technological developments and socio-political institutions devoid of any religious, national, or local connotations, Muslim intellectuals around the JIC started to use civilization in the plural to refer to different variations of an “Islamic civilization” that competes against or is superior to Western civilization. This paper focuses on how the JIC spearheads the emergence of civilizational thought in Turkey by adopting and re-defining the concept from an Islamic perspective, which was once an abstract Western category with claims to universality, to signify a different meaning that helps fighting with universality claims of Western modernity. How did the JIC authors define civilization? How did they conceive “the West” in relation to Islam? What kind of Islam they enunciate by adopting a notion of multiple civilizations (and modernities) in the Cold War context? While the paper acknowledges JIC authors’ effort to find their own voices qua Muslims in the modern world against Orientalist and modernist claims; the paper also aims to show how the JIC made its own boundaries by (re)defining Islam as a civilization, which disregards non-Muslim contributions to Islamic thought and excludes diverging voices within the Islamic Intellectual Field.

“Beyond Epistemic Disobedience: Şehir versus Kent in the Civilizational Thought of Lütfi Bergen”
by Fatma Murat Elmacıoglu

The concept of civilization has been widely debated in the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey since the 1950s with the goal of conceptualizing civilization in Islamic terms as an alternative to the singular and Eurocentric conceptualization that has it is roots in Western epistemology and was championed by the modernizing Republican elite. The concept is closely tied to notions of urban and the city, which is evident in the Turkish version of the term medeniyet that is derived from the Arabic word medina, meaning city. In the contemporary Islamic intellectual field, many prominent names joined the debate on the relationship between civilization and city, marking a shift in civilizational thought that can be interpreted as the urban turn. In this paper, I examine how Lütfi Bergen, a prolific and controversial figure known for a heavily traditionalist-Islamic criticism of modernity, and his books such as The Moral Uprising, Underdevelopment is Superiority, or Civilization-The Construction of Muslim Communitarianism, develops his understanding of civilization in relation to the city. Bergen offers a unique contribution to this debate by making a distinction between two concepts şehir, which stands for a place where life is organized in accordance with the social, political, and economic practices of Medina at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, in short, the Sunnah, and kent, which is where Western materialist culture prevails at the expense of Islamic tradition and denotes the failure of modernity in organizing urban life. Bergen establishes an immanent connection between şehir and civilization by defining civilizationalso in relation to the Sunnah and severs its ties to Western epistemology. The literature on decoloniality describes such efforts of delinking from Western epistemology as epistemic disobedience. Further, Bergen states his aim as to create an Islamic epistemological basis through which Muslims can discuss social, political, and economic matters in their own terms, and develops an urban model for a Muslim community. By doing this, Bergen reclaims civilization as a singular Islamic concept, differentiating himself from many figures in Islamic intellectual field who are for the idea of the multiplicity of civilizations. I argue that, by studying Bergen’s work, it is possible to unravel a part of the complexity arising from clustering together the intellectual accounts criticizing the epistemic dominance of the West. The part presenting how Bergen’s understanding of civilization conflicts with his contemporaries attests to the diversity in the Islamic intellectual field.

“The Thesis of Resurrection in Islamic Decolonial Thought in Turkey: The Civilizationism of Sezai Karakoç” by Enes Ates

As one of the influential names of the Islamic Intellectual Field in Turkey after 1945, the civilizationist view of Sezai Karakoç and his Resurrection thesis (Diriliş) will be discussed. As a poet-thinker, Sezai Karakoç (1933-2021) is an Islamic idealist who put forward his Islamic-civilizationist theses in his complete works that he started at the beginning of the cold war. Placing civilizations as a unit of analysis at the center of his historical thought, Karakoç combined “Islam as a religion” with “Islam as a lifestyle and ideology” and followed the method of Islamic exceptionalism. Karakoç, dealing with the concept of Islamic civilization in line of historical philosophy, realizes his “historical-sociological” method with the thesis of Resurrection (Diriliş), which emerges as a political program. In this study in a word, the Resurrection Thesis has been put forward as the politicized program of Karakoç’s civilizationist thinking. In this sense, Karakoç is taken for granted as a political thinker.  The study focuses on the specific works of Sezai Karakoç which are only published during the 1960s. These works, in chronological order, are Islam (İslam), Columns 1-Differences(Günlük Yazılar 1-Farklar, abbr. GY1), Around Resurrection (Dirilişin Çevresinde, abbr. DÇ), the Economic Structure of Islamic Society (İslam Toplumunun Ekonomik Strüktürü, abbr. İTES), Resurrection of Islam (İslam’ın Dirilişi, abbr. İD), and Columns 2-Pillar (Günlük Yazılar 2-Sütun, abbr. GY2). These 6 books contain almost all the journal articles published by Karakoç from 1960 to 1970. His other 4 books published in the same years were not included in the research as they were not directly related to the concept of civilization and the resurrection thesis. All the articles in these books were reviewed one by one and a classification was made around the concepts of civilization (Islamic civilization, western civilization), the west (westernization, Marxism, communism, two World Wars, colonialism) and the concept of resurrection (emancipation, revivalism). With this method, the aim is to emphasize the founding character of the 1960s in Karakoç’s thought and to deal with the establishment forms of civilization-resurrection conceptualizations. In this context, the article aims to deal with the Resurrection Thesis, which proposes to realize Karakoç’s understanding of civilization as a political program, as it was fictionalized in the 1960s.

“Anti-Westernism, Internationalism, and Nativism in Islamic Civilizational Thought: Reflections on Nuri Pakdil’s Writings” by Ismail Yazıcı

Islamic literature in Turkey has become the central axis of Islamic political thought from the 1950s onwards. During this period, a newly emerging class of poets, novelists and playwrights contributed to the reinvigoration of Islamic intellectual movements in Turkey with a completely new agenda that broke away from late Ottoman thought. They formulated an influential critique of Western modernity, which eventually turned into an attack on the official Westernizationist modernization project. As the founder of one of the pioneer literary journals of the period, Edebiyat (Literature) published in 1969-84, Nuri Pakdil is one of the leading intellectuals from this group who holds sway over contemporary Islamic political thought and particularly leftleaning Islamic ideologies in Turkey. This paper scrutinizes the anti-Westernist approach in Nuri Pakdil’s literary work and investigates the intellectual genealogy of his notion of Islamic civilization as an alternative to the secular modernization project. He has been the vocal exponent of the idea of the revival of what he claims to be Islam’s authentic civilization and a fervent critic of putative Western civilization. This paper examines Pakdil’s civilizational thought and his critical conceptualization of the relation between Islam and the West to demonstrate what has been grouped under “Islamism” is in fact contending intellectual movements that have taken on different approaches to Islam and its relation to the West. By analyzing his articles that were mainly published in Edebiyat, I argue that civilizational thought promoted by Pakdil in engagement with Middle Eastern and Asian Muslim intellectual movements, was developed as a leftist-inspired Islamic alternative modernity project to Westernization, which uniquely positioned him as a bridge between the nativist and internationalist interpretations of contemporary Islamic thought in Turkey. Based on an analysis of how the concept of civilization is debated in his writings, this essay argues that Nuri Pakdil attempted the production of counter-knowledge what he framed as “nativist thought” that seeks to dismantle perceived coloniality and to open up an alternative epistemological stance. His unique approach which stands for a fusion of internationalist language of Islam and nativist aspects of Turkish-Islamic political thought articulated around the concept of Ottoman-Islamic civilization offers a new epistemic delinking in order to challenge the Westernizationist interventions of the secular state. Nuri Pakdil’s civilizational thought thus can be taken as an example of how the Islamic intellectual field in Turkey strives to move beyond the criticism of Western modernity by reconstructing subalternized knowledges