The enduring hold of Islam in Turkey
David S Tonge, Hurst, £45

IF you can stand it, this book relays a sobering and detailed analysis of the competing religious alliances behind the ascendancy of conservative nationalism in today’s Turkey — a tale that is couched in such a wealth of obscure Islamic language and names as to be almost incomprehensible. 

But it packs a punch in its introduction and concluding chapters. Here President Erdogan seals the symbolic fusion of the hitherto secular state with Islam by reopening the vast Ayasofya mosque in Istanbul as a Muslim centre of worship. Religious use of the building had been prohibited since 1935, and the days of Ataturk’s determined secularisation of the Turkish state. 

This book details the provenance of religious groups from the end of the Ottoman empire onwards, the measures taken to suppress them in the 20th century, and their re-emergence as a political force in the 21st. It’s a complex story of religious factionalism on the political right. You need a working knowledge of Turkish history to keep up with David Tonge’s account of events from this little-known perspective, and to get some sense of what Turkish democracy has evolved into since the introduction of multiparty elections in 1950. The perspective of left political organising is absent from this account, and the whole book is the weaker for it.

At the moment of modern Turkey’s appearance as a rearguard defence against multiple imperialist interests the Soviet Union was a key ally, supplying arms to the nationalist, post Sultanate leader Mustafa Kemal, or “Ataturk,” and crucial to the defeat of British, French and Greek armies in the period 1919-1923. The USSR remained a good neighbour to the fledgling state. So – where is the account of its influence?

Tonge concentrates exclusively on the various Turkish Islamic sects — such as the Naksibendi, the Suleymanci and Ismailaga communities, and latterly the Gulenists whose influence was purged following the 2016 coup. These are detailed exhaustively in their influence, persecution, and for the personalities that dominated them. They do seem, despite their doctrinal differences to follow consistent patterns of social organisation, creating religious centres and schools for Islamic education, with each one focusing on different social groups. The poorer peasantry and the Turkish diaspora, for example, fall under the sway of the Suleymanci for which there is a centre even here in Edinburgh, where I live. Just ask your barber.

Surprisingly, to me at least, they organise themselves vigorously as businesses with construction, hotel chains, shops, TV stations and publishing houses.

But the continuous and irritating drone that plays beneath the narrative is a consistent ideological opposition to socialism, something that Tonge mentions in passing but never explores. Equally painful is the lack of a class analysis of the groups themselves. Perhaps the truth is that Islamic organisations are innately class-structured, obstacles to social revolution, and in favour of the bourgeois status quo, however extreme they might be. Despite the attraction they hold and depend upon for an aspiring working class, their very structure inevitably feeds the status quo.

How can this be? Do the people of today’s Turkey really face so few options that they willingly send their sons to Islamic schools and fail to educate their daughters? For how long can such blatant inequalities persist? Neighbouring Azerbaijan, for example, has a majority “Turkic” population but also the experience of being part of the USSR, while remaining Muslim by culture. Such experience of socialism must also have purchase in Turkey.

But, it seems, the establishment of a bourgeois dictatorship by Ataturk set the dominant tone in the country. The masses simply couldn’t be trusted to stick with his vision of western modernisation, being either too Islamic and conservative, or perhaps too revolutionary, and the regular coups that followed the first elections in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and 2010s — all made in the name of defending the secular republic — are essentially made in defence of this bourgeois status quo and privilege.

Only Erdogan has experienced and defeated such a coup, and it is tempting to see his rise to power as Ataturk’s nightmare: the rise of a populist, Islamist, conservative and democratically maintained power that has reoriented the development of Ataturk’s original pro-Western state. 

Tonge is meticulous in his account, and writes in refreshingly sceptical prose, but the plethora of obscure terms makes this a difficult read. Nvertheless, it all comes into focus when he tells the story of the Gulenists. This organisation had acquired so much influence — which is to say so much economic and political heft — that in 2011, in return for votes, Gulen demanded “52 seats in electable positions” and over-reached himself.

Was the coup itself a ruse, engineered by the AKP? Who knows, but it gave the Erdogan reason to purge this influence from Turkish society, along with other troublesome oppositionists, and by 2021 more than 500,000 people had been arrested or lost their jobs. The devout president, in other words, had conducted the most extreme anti-religious persecution in the history of the country, and not in the name of secularism. 

The relation of Islam to to the Turkish state is thrown into dramatic high relief by this episode, as Islam is championed but its teachers selectively purged, and we are left with an image of Turkish democracy as a kind of pseudo-Islamic authoritarianism that presides with cynical violence over a credulous and oppressed population.

This is a dramatic narrative, but sorely in need of a class-based analysis of the same events.