Ihsan Yilmaz

Ismail Albayrak

This book explores state–religion relations under a populist authoritarian ruling party in Turkey. In doing so, it investigates how the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) instrumentalizes state-controlled religion to further, defend, legitimatize and propagate its authoritarian populist political agenda in a constitutionally secular nation-state. To exemplify this, the authors examine the Friday sermons delivered weekly in every mosque in Turkey by the Turkish State’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). By analyzing all sermons delivered between 2010-2021, the book shows how the Diyanet has enthusiastically adopted AKP’s increasingly Islamist, authoritarian, civilisationist, militarist and pro-violence populism since 2010, and how it has tried to socially engineer beliefs in line with this ideology.

The Diyanet’s Construction of Erdoğanist Islam in Turkey

Populist and Pro-Violence State Religion

This book explores how digital authoritarianism operates in India, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and how religion can be used to legitimize digital authoritarianism within democracies. In doing so, it explains how digital authoritarianism operates at various technological levels including sub-network level, proxy level, and user level, and elaborates on how governments seek to control cyberspace and social media. In each of these states, governments, in an effort to prolong – or even make permanent – their rule, seek to eliminate freedom of expression on the internet, punish dissidents, and spread pro-state propaganda. At the same time, they instrumentalize religion to justify and legitimize digital authoritarianism. Governments in these five countries, to varying degrees and at times using different methods, censor the internet, but also use digital technology to generate public support for their policies, key political figures, and at times their worldview or ideology. They also, and again to varying degrees, use digital technology to demonize religious and ethnic minorities, opposition parties, and political dissidents. An understanding of these aspects would help scholars and the public understand both the technical and social aspects of digital authoritarianism in these five countries.

The Cases of Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and India

Digital Authoritarianism and its Religious Legitimization

Erdoan Shipoli

Mustafa Demir

This book focuses on securitization and authoritarianism in Turkey with research on the country’s Islamist populist ruling party’s (AKP) oppression of different socio-political, ethnic and religious groups. In doing so, it analyzes how the AKP has securitized to oppress different socio-political groups and identities, according to the time and need for the party's political survival. Research in the book sheds light on the use of traumas, conspiracy theories, and fear as tools in the securitization and repression processes.

The AKP’s Oppression of Dissident Groups in Turkey

Securitization and Authoritarianism

The Islamisation of the State in Turkey

Authoritarianism, Informal Law, and Legal Hybridity

"In late 2008, in much more sunny times, I left the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London to take up a position at a prestigious private university in Istanbul. In the United Kingdom, I had been working on Muslim minorities and the Turkish diaspora in the UK, Islam and secularism in Turkey, and the unofficial Muslim laws in the UK and Turkey. I was very glad to finally be back in my beloved Turkey, especially at a time of great progress and optimism. At that time, the issues I cover in this book were remote from me - the Turkish state's insecurities, anxieties, fears; nation-building and homogenisation; and the creation of desired, undesired and tolerated citizens in both Kemalist and Erdoğanist eras. However, this was all to change. A few months after arriving in Turkey, I was sitting in one of my colleague's office, drinking Turkish tea and chatting. I saw Füsun Üstel's 'Makbul Vatandaşın Peşinde' (In Pursuit of the Acceptable Citizen) on his desk. I borrowed it and read it in one night. Üstel had done an excellent job in setting out in great detail how the Turkish state has been using education as an instrument of social engineering to construct its 'acceptable citizens'. I realised at once that this resonated not just with my previous scholarly endeavours, albeit from a very different perspective, but also to a considerable extent, with my lived experience since childhood. I had previously studied how nation-states, such as Pakistan and Turkey, attempted social engineering through the instrumentalist use of the law, and how the religious masses had responded by creating their own, unofficial, hybrid laws. I had studied law and was naturally drawn to examining politics and society through the perspective of the law. I had come to realise, however, that focusing on law alone provided only a limited perspective because a great diversity of nation-states around the world have been using not just the law, but also a plethora of other instruments in their nation-building endeavours. And in so doing they were committing all sorts of injustices to their minorities. Turkey was no exception. I came around to the idea of writing about Turkey's endeavours in nation-building, but was struggled to find an original angle. Something that remained clear to me, however, was that the approach that I took had to focus on Islam and the roles of Sunni Muslim Turks. This may have been simply a matter of self-centred subjectivity, or because of the trajectory onto which my PhD work had set me. Nevertheless, these were issues that had come to occupy my thinking since the early days of my adult life"--

Ideology, State and Islam in Turkey

Creating the Desired Citizen

Paul Weller

This collection deals with challenges and opportunities faced by Muslims and the wider society in Europe following the Madrid train bombings of 2004 and the London Transport attacks of 2005. The contributors explore the challenges to the concept and practice of civility in public life within a European context, and demonstrate the contributions that can be made in this regard from the thought and practice of the global movement inspired by the Turkish Muslim scholar Fethullah Gülen. The importance and distinctiveness of the teaching of Fethullah Gülen and the practice of the movement is that it is rooted in a confident Turkish Islamic heritage while being fully engaged with modernity. It offers the possibility of a contextualised renewal of Islam for Muslims in Europe while being fully rooted in the teachings of the Qu'ran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. This volume is an important contribution to the study of the movement, which advocates the freedom of religion while making an Islamic contribution to the wider society based on a commitment to service of others. The movement and initiatives inspired by the Turkish Muslim scholar Fethullah Gülen began in Turkey, but can now be found throughout the world, including in both Europe and in the 'Muslim world'. Bloomsbury have a companion volume on The Muslim World and Politics in Transition: Creative Contributions of the Gülen Movement, edited by Greg Barton, Paul Weller and Ihsan Yilmaz.

Perspectives On and From the Gülen Movement

European Muslims, Civility and Public Life

A comparative analysis of the nation-building projects in Turkey under both Ataturk and Erdogan, concentrating on the concept of the desired, undesired and tolerated citizen. This shows how resulting historical traumas, victimhood, insecurities, anxieties, and fears have had influenced both state and society throughout these different periods.

Ihsan Yilmaz

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