Alev Çınar

Reflections Upon “New Civilizationisms”

My interest in civilization is grounded in the ways in which it is used as a conceptual tool as part of theorizations of the political and the social by different Islamic intellectual and political movements in contemporary Turkey. The concept of civilization has been used as one of the key organizing concepts of the founding ideology of the Republic, Kemalism, which launched a West-oriented secular modernization project that took a Eurocentric conceptualization of civilization as the basis of a universalistic, singular model of modernity, and framed the Ottoman system and Islam as inferior, backward, and uncivilized. Soon after the formation of the Republic in 1923, this official conceptualization of civilization and the broader modernization project that it was part of started to be questioned and contested by various circles, including and especially Muslim intellectuals whose main objection was the dismissal or suppression of Islam-based intellectual and political perspectives, postulates, and positions. My current work focuses on the ways in which Islam-based intellectual and political movements in Turkey have been developing unique forms of political thought that critically debate modernity, Westernization, nationalism, and civilizationism by selectively engaging with both Western and Islamic intellectual traditions and schools of thought. Even though these movements stand on different corners of the political spectrum and are sometimes bitterly hostile against one another, they all share a similar motivation to break away from the dominant paradigm of modernity-through-Westernization, and replace it with what are deemed to be authentically local, Islam-based alternative perspectives, systems of thought and epistemic paradigms. 

Based on this framework, I am interested in the concept of civilization insofar as it has been used by different Islamic intellectual and political movements in the Islamic intellectual field (IIF) starting from the 1950s, as a constitutive part of the alternative Islam-based political and societal models developed and debated to replace the dominant West-oriented paradigms of knowledge that were established by the founders of the Republic. This debate has been vital in shaping the ruling AKP’s ideology, which has adopted an Islam-centric approach that develops the notion of “Ottoman-Islamic civilization,” sometimes also referred to as neo-Ottomanism, as the basis for a new, alternative modernization project. This project was implemented as the AKP’s main political program soon after it came to power in 2002, which not only involved a new national identity for Turkey, but also resulted in the transformation of different domains of Turkey’s formerly West-oriented secular system, ranging from politics, education and economics to cultural and ethnic policies – particularly the long-standing oppressive ethnic politics against Turkey’s Kurdish populations.

There are diverse interpretations of civilization in the IIF, which is evident in the different range of adjectives used with the term, including “Islamic” “Turkish,” “Ottoman,” or any combination of these, thereby qualifying the term in significantly different ways. While “Islamic civilization” signifies the term as a religious alternative to secular nationalism thereby excluding other religious communities, “Ottoman civilization” is commonly used as a multicultural alternative to ethnic nationalism which is more inclusive toward ethnic minorities. Whereas “Turkish-Islamic civilization” is often used by the proponents of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis view that claims a natural and historical affinity between ethnic Turkishness and Islam, thereby excluding other ethnically defined groups, such as the Kurds.