Gizem Zencirci

Reflections Upon “New Civilizationisms”

In my work, I study civilizationism as a political project with both symbolic and material consequences. Hence, my approach differs from existing literature which understands civilizationism as a foreign policy orientation, a re-assertion of national identity, or as a form of cultural heritagization. In my book The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Poverty and Charity in Turkey (Syracuse University Press, 2024) I have analyzed how claims about Turkey’s civilizational heritage alter governance arrangements in the field of social service provision. For instance, I examined how the reimagination of Ottoman waqfs as NGOs served to depoliticize Islamic civil society and reconfigured Turkey’s welfare regime. I am now working on a new project that focuses on the reproduction of Ottoman-Islamic economic heritage in an attempt to create a distinctive “Islamic” variant of capitalism in Turkey. This new line of research focuses on the uses and abuses of decoloniality by political actors who seek to revive Ottoman-Islamic economic governance. In 2024, I will be a fellow at the InHerit-Heritage in Transformation, Kate Hamburger Research Centre, Humboldt University, Berlin to embark on this new project. 

My interest in civilizationism began when I noticed a growing fascination with Ottoman-Islamic charitable practices, traditions, and institutions in the field of social service provision in Turkey. 

Nostalgia toward Ottoman-Islamic charity fits squarely within the rising trend of neo-Ottomanism—one of the key features of contemporary Turkish public life since the 1980s. 

In Turkey, the production of civilizational heritage has unfolded in conjunction with neoliberal economic reforms and the rise of political Islam. This new civilizational discourse departs from Kemalism’s official history thesis, which portrayed Central Asia as the ancestral land of a pre-Islamic, Turkish civilization. The political project of civilizational revival argues that Kemalism, by eradicating Ottoman cultural, economic, social, and political institutions, distanced the Turkish people from their true essence. The glorification of the imperial past thus serves as a critique of the Turkish state establishment. In this view, the Kemalist notion of civilization was ill-conceived, as it portrayed the Ottoman Empire as economically backward, defined Islamic cultural values as inferior, and, in doing so, posited that Turkey’s “contemporarization” could only be achieved by mimicking the West. In contrast, adherents of the Islamic project of civilizational revival claim that Kemalism’s focus on implanting European institutions in the name of modernization pushed the country backward instead of propelling it forward.

Today, Ottoman nostalgia works on and across a variety of additional scales: reconfiguring the spatial parameters of urban life, altering the temporal logic of national commemorations, and shaping the thematic universe of tourist attractions and expanding the transnational reach of television dramas. At the same time, contested narratives of Ottoman heritage abound, with different understandings of the Ottoman Empire playing a key role in the construction of the Turkish national identity and orientations toward modernity.

While Ottoman nostalgia has diverse origins and multiple manifestations, its political power became more pronounced after the AKP came to power in 2002. Since then, the idea that the Ottoman Empire was, first and foremost, the cornerstone of a distinctive civilization was gradually produced and disseminated by a variety of public institutions, namely, bureaus, offices, ministries, and directorates; meanwhile, other organizations, including Islamic NGOs, conservative think tanks, local associations, and universities, contributed to the process from outside of mainstream politics. 

The AKP’s political vision marks the spatial borders of the Ottoman-Islamic civilization as the lands ruled by the Ottoman Empire during the height of its power (i.e., the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), encompassing present-day Turkey, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. Civilizational revival calls for a restoration of imperial arrangements, connections, and identifications that were presumably shared across time and space. Turkey, seen as the heir of the Ottoman-Islamic civilization, is tasked with both protecting and reviving this cultural and political heritage. Such a nostalgic portrayal frames Turkey’s troubles as a consequence of the mismatch between the country’s civilizational “essence” and its leading institutions. Civilizational revival further evokes a notion of religion that is less about individual devotion or public morality, but that provides the institutional backbone of the polity. Islam is understood to provide a blueprint for good governance that has been erased, forgotten, or distorted during the modern nation-state era. In this perspective, many, if not all, political, economic, and social problems faced by Turkish Muslims as well as Muslims elsewhere—such as crime, poverty, or violence—are caused by abandoning their civilizational identity and adopting European ways of living, thinking, and governing. 

While decolonial discourses of civilizational revival are often portrayed in a positive light, these discourses have a wide range of political, economic, and cultural consequences that are neither emancipatory nor necessarily progressive. Understanding how civilizationism underpins the Islamic-conservative political ideology of the AKP, and how it is contested, negotiated, and reimagined by other Islam-based groups is the primary purpose of my work.