Turkish and Middle East Studies

This article covers how Turkish nationalists approached the Ottoman imperial legacy from the early republican period to the end of the Cold War. In order not to discredit the secular Turkish nation-state, the Kemalist republic did not rely on the Ottoman imperial legacy in its national construction. Led by Riza Nur and Nihal Atsiz, chauvinist nationalists outside the grip of the state targeted the multiculturalism of the Ottomans as its weakness. Nevertheless, all nationalists Turkified the empire in their narratives and belittled the contributions of the non-Turkish ruling elite (devshirme). Only after the republic was solidified, did the Kemalist state use the Ottoman imperial legacy cautiously against the rising threat of socialism. Pro-Islamic nationalists found the imperial legacy as a useful political tool to boost up nationalism and combined it with its Islamic legacy paving the road for the reconciliation of Islam and nationalism. The religious Ottoman Muslim image nationali...

ABSTRACT This article argues that Russia and Turkey radically reframed their projects of nation-building around the turn of the twenty-first century, and the migration patterns between the Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East, Russia, and Turkey reinforce these new projects of nationhood, aimed at reshaping society and building a new collective identity. By focusing on the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, most studies of nationalism and nation-building overlook the decisive transformations nation-building projects have been going through, particularly in Eurasia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is an observable and major change in the definition of the nation not just in post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus where it is somewhat less surprising but also in Russia and even in Turkey which was not part of the Soviet Union. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Russia and Turkey embarked on different nation-building projects. This article argues that despite, or perhaps because of, the stark differences in the policies adopted by various states in post-Soviet Eurasia, the patterns of emigration and immigration reinforced the new nation-building projects underway in Russia and Turkey.

How do state policies that regulate the relationship between ethnicity and nationality change? This article examines the dynamics of persistence and change in state policies toward ethnicity. In order to better comprehend the nature of political contestation over these state policies, the author first develops a new typology, “regimes of ethnicity,” and categorizes states as having monoethnic, multiethnic, and antiethnic regimes. These regimes are defined along dimensions of membership and expression. Second, he develops a theory of ethnic regime change. He explains the persistence and change in policies related to ethnicity and nationality in Germany, the Soviet Union/post-Soviet Russia, and Turkey since the 1950s by reference to the presence or absence of three independent variables: counterelites, new discourses, and hegemonic majority. He argues that if counterelites representing constituencies with ethnically specific grievances come to power equipped with a new discourse on et...

This essay looks at Turkish-EU relations with a specific focus on identity narratives from the Turkish point of view. It outlines Turkey's official national narrative in its Ottoman, Turkic, and Islamic supra-national contexts and compares it with the supranational framework of EU member states' national narratives. According to the official Turkish historiography, Turkey is not part of a European family of nations. Turkey's non-European post-imperial identity is found to be comparable to that of Britain.

Islamophobia and Puritanical Islamist Extremism are closely related, self-referential, mutually reinforcing phenomena. While these opposite ideological camps consistently and symbiotically reinforce each other at the expense of Islam, Muslims and peaceful co-existence, they are perpetuated in the absence of knowledge, practice and interaction that positively disrupts the confluence between and within them. The Hizmet Movement does not aim to defeat Islamophobia or Puritanical Islamist Extremism head on. Rather, it is our contention that the core Islamic teachings that underpin the movement’s values and practice undermine the ideology and mindset of these two mutually reinforcing camps as a natural by-product and default outcome of its positive work. Accordingly, the goal of defeating extremism is made to ensue without being directly pursued. By doing so, this process helps to complexify matters pertaining to religious interpretation and representation while also promoting critical thinking, self-reflexivity, proactivism, empathy, openness to the other and intercultural exchange.

This article examines visits to local pilgrimage sites in Hatay, Turkey for the purpose of understanding forms of saint veneration in a context of interreligious culture. Visits to pilgrimage sites are shared by different religions and they extend and challenge the margins of religious traditions held by site visitors or administrators. Therefore, it is important to study the dynamics of interreligious exchange and encounter from the local perspective of religious practitioners. The aim of this article is to study these visits as an exchange of indexes of agency, which means that the visits to these sites can transform the way that visitors interact. These exchanges of indexes of agencies are analyzed in terms of seduction, the act of being led astray. This will create a better understanding for why members of differing religious traditions are drawn to visit these sites. In order to address the practitioner’s experience of the interaction with the saint, the term indexicality is employed to emphasize the unique spatial and temporal dimensions of these visits. In conjunction, the concepts of seduction and indexicality are utilized to explicate the dynamics in the transformation of agency established by ritual acts. Analyzing these dynamics as a ‘ritual transformation of agency’ further helps to facilitate conceptualizing of the impact that ritual acts of worship have on visitors’ experiences of these sites. A cross-examination of saints such Hızır and Mar Corcus will be conducted to explain the seductive nature of ritual saint veneration for practitioners at local pilgrimage sites. It will also indicate the ritual transformation of agency that occurs within and between religious groups to contextualize the culture of interreligious coexistence in Hatay.

The continued production and distribution of Qur'ans that included unaltered ultra-conservative interpretations sits uneasily with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman's effort to emphasize nationalism rather than religion as the core of Saudi identity and project a more moderate and tolerant image of the kingdom's Islam.

The chapter is structured as follows. Section two briefly sketches Thomas Hill Green’s early attitudes to Russia. Section three analyses Green’s mature conception of “the state” and considers its influence on his mature attitude towards Czarism. Section four expands on that analysis by examining the contrasts that Green drew between that conception, the ancient polis and Hegel’s conception of the state. It will be shown that Green regarded the polis and the Hegelian state as highly imperfect entities. With this mind, section five explores the ways in which Green’s conception of the ideal state entailed an analysis of “true” and “false” patriotism. Section six explores the enabling role that the state should play for its citizens. The chapter concludes in section seven with an overview of the argument.