Creating the Desired Citizen Ideology, State and Islam in Turkey

"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"--