VAKIFS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

In Islamic law, by declaring a property such as a bridge, road, school building, or water fountain a vakıf, the owner has essentially forfeited ownership rights, marked the property as inalienable, and promised to use its assets in the service of society. That vakıfs exist in all Muslim societies does not mean, however, that their meaning and function are cross-culturally uniform or trans-historically static.Footnote ¹¹ Across time and space, vakıfs have fulfilled a variety of economic, political, and social roles connected to religious salvation, poverty alleviation, urbanization, colonization, and new rulers' consolidation of power.Footnote ¹²

In the Ottoman context, vakıfs were primarily a medium for maintaining property, an economic function that subsumed philanthropic activities. Thus, while many Ottoman vakıfs provided education, health, and welfare services to surrounding communities, charity was not their primary function.Footnote ¹³ By transforming a property into a vakıf elites could appoint family members as vakıf trustees, giving them administrative authority over certain resources and assets. For their investments in public goods wealthy landowners received economic security.Footnote ¹⁴ Therefore most vakıf land and estates were generally in a state of “semi-private ownership” due to the hybrid political economy of land in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹⁵

During the late Ottoman era, Sultan Mahmud II created the Evkaf-i Hümayun Nezareti (Ministry of Evkaf) in 1826 with the goal of liquidating vakıf properties and land. Until the empire's dismantlement in 1923, this ministry carried out the statization of vakıf properties and was responsible for their management and administration. There were two impetuses behind this push for statization and centralization. On the one hand, European countries such as England and France often made vakıf reform a condition for loans, for they wanted their subjects to be able to acquire land in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹⁶ On the other hand, liquidating vakıf assets was attractive to Ottoman bureaucrats concerned about the imperial budget. Centralization efforts abolished the financial autonomy of vakıfs, allowing the state to collect vakıf revenues without having to pay these back to trustees. Such financial motives were hidden behind a discourse of modernization that depicted vakıfs as a barrier to economic progress. A poem by the sociologist and political activist Ziya Gökalp exemplifies this discourse:

Although certain characteristics of the vakıf system may have contributed to economic underdevelopment, the real impetus for modernizing the vakıf system in the Ottoman Empire (and elsewhereFootnote ¹⁸) was the perceived dissonance between indigenous Muslim and European economic systems.Footnote ¹⁹ As a hybrid institutional form that straddled the divide between private property and public good, vakıfs did not fit into the Eurocentric vision of modern capitalism. Beginning in the 19th century, the Ottoman state initiated efforts to resolve this dissonance by reforming the vakıf system, which steadily lost its financial and administrative independence. This loss diminished vakıfs' already limited capacity to provide care for the poor and needy.Footnote ²⁰ As the centralization of vakıf assets and properties continued, Ottoman imperial authorities increasingly became involved in poor relief by setting up hospitals and other philanthropic institutions.Footnote ²¹ These modernization efforts continued after the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, but with a slightly different focus.

ETATISM: VAKıFS AS NATIONAL TREASURES (1930S AND 1940S)

During the 1920s, the underdeveloped Turkish economy faced a series of challenges, including a lack of financial assets, loss of human capital, and debt inherited from the Ottoman Empire. The 1929 Great Depression exacerbated these difficulties, resulting in the abandonment of the state's liberal approach to the economy. Realizing the urgent need to advance domestic resources and revenues, and influenced by the Soviet Union's large-scale industrialization efforts, Turkey's elites swiftly adopted etatist developmentalism as their driving economic ideology. This new development discourse emphasized a self-sufficient national economy with the state planning economic investment and organization.Footnote ²² In addition to a statist economic ideology, the early republican era was marked by efforts to construct national identity as secular, homogenous, and ethnically Turkish.Footnote ²³ This new national consciousness undermined Islam's role in economic as well as social and political life.

These developments had a dual transformative impact on the vakıf institution: vakıfs came to be glorified as “national treasures” while their social and religious functions were devalued and dismissed. By 1937, the precipitous sale of vakıfs had contributed 41 million TL to the state budget. The VGM and other government offices were tasked with managing this “economic fortune,” which until then had allegedly been mishandled by “corrupt” Ottoman bureaucrats and other members of the imperial family.Footnote ²⁴ This latter view justified the use of vakıf assets and properties by the state for the purpose of economic advancement. For example, Turkish historian and VGM bureaucrat Halim Baki Kunter explained the utility of vakıfs in an etatist economy as follows:

Kunter justifies the state's use of vakıf resources with reference to economic nationalism. The Turkish people are expected to support the state's efforts to rebuild the economy by donating their financial resources, including vakıf properties and assets.

The ideology of etatist nationalism reshaped philanthropic practices during this era as well. While republican elites saw the state as the paramount actor in economic affairs, they paradoxically relied on private philanthropic efforts to attend to the needs of the poor.Footnote ²⁶ Seeking to replace religious charity with secular and patriotic practices of philanthropy, the state encouraged donations to regime-friendly organizations such as the Red Crescent and the Children's Protection Society. Even financial assets of charitable vakıfs were transferred to these new philanthropic organizations, which were now tasked with channeling citizens' goodwill toward patriotic ends.

These shifts were facilitated by the introduction of a clear distinction between old and new vakıfs. The 1926 Turkish civil code, for example, introduced the term tesis (institution) to describe endowments created after the law went into effect, differentiating them from Ottoman-era vakıfs now argued to belong to the past.Footnote ²⁷ Renaming endowments was part of an ongoing project to de-Islamize Turkish socioeconomic life through a rejection of the Ottoman legacy. As one author of an editorial explained,

This author criticizes the idea that the new Turkish Republic could continue to use old Islamic vakıf laws. In line with the dominant mode of thinking at the time, he also imagines a discrepancy between Western and Islamic law. In order to fix this discrepancy, the republican elite reached out to a Swiss law professor who was referred to in the press only as “Mr. Lehman.” Announcing his arrival, one newspaper proclaimed that “this person will compare and contrast old vakıfs with the rules and regulations of the new civil code. As a result, he will give a new direction to Turkish vakıfs.”Footnote ²⁹ Although it is not clear how much Lehman contributed to the new legislation, his expertise was used to portray the 1935 Vakıflar Kanunu (Law on Foundations, #2762) as akin to Westernization.

The new 1935 law replaced the previously existing Islamic vakıf law to create three distinct categories of vakıfs: appendant (mülhak), congregational (cemaat), and registered (mazbut).Footnote ³⁰ Appendant vakıfs were to be managed by their trustees, provided that within five years these trustees were able to document the legitimacy of their trusteeship. Congregational vakıfs, which were created by non-Muslim ethnic minorities (Armenian, Jewish, Catholic, and Greek Orthodox groups), were given a separate legal status. These groups retained special permission to manage their places of worship and schools but otherwise were prohibited from acquiring real estate. Registered vakıfs encompassed those already handled by the VGM; those whose trusteeship was entrusted to a government office; those no longer capable of providing charitable services; and those whose trusteeship had been entrusted to someone other than a relative of the original founder. Through these legal categories, some vakıf trustees were able to transform their status from administrator to private owner of an estate: more than 15,000 vakıfs were registered as private property between 1923 and 1933.Footnote ³¹ Although a considerable number of trustees were able to secure their property rights, many others had to forfeit such rights due to the difficulty of proving ownership over vakıf lands and estates. As a result of these legal complications, the state was able to confiscate a large number of vakıf assets, which it used to supplement the budget.

The 1935 law also allowed for changing the original intent of a vakıf. Previously existing Islamic legal regulations limited the sale of vakıf properties and banned altering their charitable purposes. The 1935 law, by contrast, initiated the dismemberment of vakıfs and mandated tenants to buy these properties for 20 percent of their value at the time. Tenants unable to complete such a purchase were forced to abandon their vakıf properties.Footnote ³² The law also allowed the VGM to redefine vakıf purposes, thereby enabling the sale of vakıf properties and the transfer of vakıf assets to various government offices.

As a result of these reforms, Ottoman vakıfs were sold to the public or to already existing renters, registered as mülhak (private) vakıfs, transferred to the VGM or to various state ministries, or designated as historical monuments. Republican ideology presented the precipitous dismantlement of vakıfs in a positive light: “the republic, which gives everyone's right to everyone, is only returning these properties back to the nation. Today vakıf buildings have been liquidated through great effort and these vakıfs have been an essential funder of the state.”Footnote ³³

The new development discourse valorized vakıfs not only for their financial worth, but also as cultural heritage. One of the VGM's key tasks was the restoration, repair, and protection of “our national monuments.”Footnote ³⁴ VGM bureaucrats redefined many vakıf buildings as examples of Turkish history that carry artistic and archeological value. During the 1930s, as part of the ongoing modernist project of constructing national identity, the Kemalist intellectual elite was actively constructing a new field of Turkish history. The transformation of vakıf buildings and deeds into historical artifacts validated the nationalist agenda of Turkification. In 1941, one VGM publication reported, “there is no doubt that the vakıf institution has greatly served the development and improvement of Turkish art. In each and every historical period, the key works of our national art were created by vakıfs.”Footnote ³⁵

The growing “recognition” of the aesthetic value of vakıf buildings meant that vakıfs came to be seen as historical remnants of a distant past. Even vakıf registers and deeds—until then used as legal documents—were now portrayed as artistic pamphlets. The chairman of the VGM, Fahri Kiper, for example, stated in 1935 that “for as long as our budget allows, we will translate the vakıf registers and deeds into the language we understand today. This way, the Turkish youth will be able to read and understand the works of art left to them by our ancestors.”Footnote ³⁶ Since vakıfs were now treated as historical artifacts, vakıf making became a practice belonging to the Ottoman past and not to the Republican present.

Republican nationalist discourse also downplayed the Islamic characteristics of vakıfs in an effort to redefine them as Turkish institutions. This shift was partially accomplished by rewriting institutional origins. In 1933, the VGM's ten-year anniversary report explained that “at first sight, vakıfs might appear to be Islamic. But it really was the Turkish people who spread this institution, which they believed to be representative of their national character. This is why Turkish lands have more vakıfs than any other Muslim nation.”Footnote ³⁷ In a similar vein, Kunter argued that “Turkish vakıfs are a social institution put in place by Buddhist Turks well before the advent of Islam.”Footnote ³⁸ The same idea was demonstrated in the special Vakıflar Galerisi (Vakıf Exhibition) of 1939, which displayed a board entitled “The History of vakıfs Begins with the History of the Turks” and enumerated twenty-four Turkic empires, including the Hittites, the Uyghurs, the Karakhanids, the Mongols, and the Ayyubids.Footnote ³⁹ Reporting on this exhibit, one journalist argued that the vakıf gallery illuminated the “national identity” of “our own vakıf history” from a “scientific, nationalist, and secularist perspective.”Footnote ⁴⁰ These statements characterize the attempt to assert not only the Turkish origins of vakıfs, but also their secular aspects.

Despite their swift implementation, vakıf reforms were fiercely criticized by a variety of actors, some of whom filed lawsuits against the VGM and other government offices. Many vakıf trustees were concerned with the fairness of liquidation procedures. Others of them lacked the documents to prove their right of inheritance, resulting in the state's wrongful appropriation of their land or estate. Inconsistent legal and administrative criteria used to classify vakıfs further complicated the sale and transfer of assets.Footnote ⁴¹ Potential buyers often criticized the sale of vakıf properties to their competitors by arguing that the sale price had been much lower than the real value.Footnote ⁴²

Government offices frequently quarreled with and sometimes even sued each other over vakıfs. While etatist developmentalism authorized the transfer of vakıf assets and properties to the state, it did not clearly specify which government offices had priority. As a result, the VGM and municipal governments often disagreed over who had the legitimate authority to demolish vakıf properties and confiscate vakıf lands. On this key debate, urban historian Osman Nuri Ergin noted in 1937 that “the purpose of vakıfs are neither religious nor otherworldly; instead vakıfs have worldly and municipal functions.”Footnote ⁴³ In other words, he supported the view that vakıf assets and properties should primarily be transferred to municipalities rather than central government offices. Municipal governments argued the same on the basis that historically vakıfs had fulfilled a public function within urban life.

Many municipal governments hastily demolished vakıf buildings in order to acquire ownership of land, thereby aggravating other state ministries and the VGM. When the conflict between municipal governments and other state ministries escalated in the mid-1930s, Prime Minister İsmet İnönü (1923–37) issued a special statement cautioning municipal governors to respect the procedures of demolition.Footnote ⁴⁴ A new government decree announced that specific investigations had to be completed by government inspectors before any additional vakıf buildings could be wrecked.Footnote ⁴⁵ When disagreements continued, İnönü intervened to convince the VGM and municipal governments to compromise in order to prevent their dispute from turning into yet another court case.Footnote ⁴⁶

In sum, during the early republican era, debates over vakıf reforms were shaped by the dominant development discourse of etatism. Perceiving vakıfs as a form of property, supporters and challengers of reforms sought to acquire vakıf buildings, lands, and assets. In the end, these reforms achieved their goal of eradicating vakıf making as a socioeconomic practice. Whereas in 1923 three-quarters of all arable land in Turkey was vakıf endowed,Footnote ⁴⁷ between 1935 and 1967 only seventy-three vakıfs were founded due to the cumbersome nature of new vakıf laws.Footnote ⁴⁸ The VGM continued to administer Ottoman vakıfs and began inspecting new ones. All remaining cash vakıfs were abolished in 1954. The state used their capital to create the new Vakıflar Bankası (VakıfBank),Footnote ⁴⁹ through which it managed vakıf assets “in line with the needs of economic development” and in a way that fit the “requirements of modern banking.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Although the creation of VakıfBank could have marked the death knell of vakıfs in modern Turkey, the transition from an etatist to a mixed economy development discourse prevented such an outcome.

THE MIXED ECONOMY: VAKIFS AS PRIVATE PHILANTHROPIC FOUNDATIONS (1960S AND 1970S)

After 1945, Turkey's domestic politics gradually began to be shaped by the global dynamics of the Cold War. In 1947, in an attempt to prevent Turkey from becoming a Soviet satellite, the United States provided it a significant amount of financial aid. Increasing American influence was a key factor in the reorganization of domestic Turkish political dynamics and Turkey's adoption of a new development discourse: the mixed economy. The victory of the Demokrat Parti (Democracy Party [DP]) in Turkey's first multiparty elections in 1950 is illustrative of Turkey's transformation. The DP criticized the economic etatism of the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People's Party [CHP]), and instead promoted a more liberal approach to economic affairs. Further, the DP positioned itself as an alternative to the CHP's elitist secularism and advocated a greater public presence of Islam. Although the DP was ousted from power in a military coup in 1961, its program of political and economic liberalization continued. On the economic front, this period saw tensions between leftist and liberal approaches to development even as the economy grew. The late 1960s and the 1970s were also marked by the radicalization of popular dissent among diverse groups, such as university students and workers, the rise of the Islamist movement, and the re-emergence of Kurdish political mobilization.

The discourse of a mixed economy emerged in this transformative yet tumultuous political and economic conjuncture. Starting in the 1950s, Turkish intellectuals who had been trained in the United States and Western Europe began advocating a mixed economic policy, which they considered to be superior to both liberalism and etatism.Footnote ⁵¹ This policy was based on the notion that economic development was best achieved by combining state planning with private entrepreneurship. During the mixed economy period, vakıfs were tasked with supporting the state's pursuit of development by channeling private funds to domains such as the arts, education, and health. The vakıfs created after the year 1960 were thus inspired by the American model of private philanthropy and were fundamentally different kinds of institutions than their predecessors. The reconfiguration of vakıfs into philanthropic foundations was both a product of the mixed economy as well as a constitutive element of this new development discourse.

Debates over economic development and vakıf reforms in the mixed economy era were refracted through the binary of capitalism versus socialism. For example, while serving as a member of the Justice Party in 1965, Aydın Yalçın, a professor of political science, promoted a mixed approach to economic development in the following terms:

Yalçın's remarks are illustrative of how Turkish intellectuals sought to reconcile capitalism and communism in an era marked by a clear dichotomy between the two. The mixed economy was argued to generate development by combining import substitution, central planning, and private enterprise. A key advocate of this new economic approach was the emerging bourgeoisie, which enjoyed state support and was assigned a greater responsibility in the economic development of the country.Footnote ⁵³ Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, frequent meetings were held between politicians, intellectuals, and businessmen to discuss Turkey's economic prospects.Footnote ⁵⁴ Business organizations such as the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen Association (TÜSİAD) and the Economic and Social Studies Conference Board operated as venues for burgeoning Turkish capitalists to advance their own economic interests.Footnote ⁵⁵

These two decades also saw a number of influential businessmen, including Vehbi Koç, Nejat Eczacıbaşı, and Ahmet Aydın Bolak, begin to engage in a variety of well-publicized philanthropic and charitable activities. Their public expressions of benevolence reinforced the notion that they were partners in economic development and that private wealth acquisition was an act not of self-interest but rather of selfless service to Turkey. Many of these businessmen were also important supporters of vakıf reforms, though Vehbi Koç emerged as the key advocate. One of the first successful businessmen in the new Turkish Republic, by the 1960s Koç was considered the “leading prototype of national wealth.”Footnote ⁵⁶ He owed much of his success to his ties to CHP and DP government officials and to his position as the representative agent for the Ford Motor Company in Turkey.Footnote ⁵⁷ Koç argued that Turkish businessmen had a patriotic duty to serve the country through philanthropy. He began lobbying for vakıf reform in the early 1950s but it took more than a decade to initiate legal and institutional changes.

Eventually the persistent efforts of these businessmen led the government to announce The New Vakıf Law in 1967, which introduced a number of key changes.Footnote ⁵⁸ For one, the term tesis was abandoned and vakıf was reintroduced into legal terminology. The linguistic shift from tesis back to vakıf was symbolic of religion's “return” to the public sphere in the 1960s. Despite early republican efforts, the word tesis had actually never achieved widespread public circulation. But beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, the religious underpinnings of vakıfs were reemphasized by politicians, VGM bureaucrats, intellectuals, and other influential public figures. As one VGM publication explained in 1969, “it is known that philanthropic institutions had a certain role in the social life of the Turks during the pre-Islamic period . . . The great progress in charity services, however, came after the emergence of Islam because of the great importance this religion gave to social assistance and mutual dependence.”Footnote ⁵⁹Vakıfs were now primarily depicted not as secular Turkish institutions but rather as religious ones.

Moreover, the 1967 law redefined vakıfs from a type of property to a kind of private philanthropic foundation that resembled but did not imitate Western cultures of generosity. Koç, for instance, frequently explained that his interest in vakıfs developed during his visits to the West:

In various other speeches, Koç juxtaposed his impressions of the Ford Foundation with stories about his grandfather's vakıf, thus equating the Turkish-Islamic vakıf with American-style philanthropic foundations while marking this new charitable model as culturally authentic.Footnote ⁶¹ Although Turkish-Islamic vakıfs had very little in common with the American model of philanthropy, Koç argued that legal-institutional reforms would restore the cultural essence of vakıfs so that they might contribute to economic development just like their American counterparts.

The representation of philanthropic giving as an authentic Turkish cultural trait was also evident in various discussions about the role businessmen should play in the new mixed economy. For example, in his speech on capitalism at a conference organized by the Economic Research Institution in 1965, Aydın Yalçın explained that the new developmental era would be one of “voluntary donations and service,” invoking the example of wealthy businessmen in the West who donated millions to universities and hospitals. In response, Koç, who was in the audience, elaborated on the figure of the businessman-philanthropist by highlighting his important role in “creating many employment opportunities” and “providing various donations” for Turkish economic development. Even Ahmed Emin Yalman, a renowned journalist who was disliked by Islamist and rightwing groups for his socialist views, reported positively on the conference:

Apprehensive that some readers might think that private philanthropy is foreign to Turkish culture, Ahmed Emin Yalman argued that throughout Turkish history vakıfs had allowed the wealthy to serve the needs of the poor. He thus portrayed what appeared to be foreign as an authentic, indigenous cultural practice.

During the 1960s, vakıfs were expected to support the state's pursuit of economic development by focusing their philanthropic investment on domains such as “health, education, and cultural arts.”Footnote ⁶³ The primary function of business-led philanthropy was to create “human capital” in the form of a skilled labor force. This understanding further contributed to the view that the pursuit of private gain was ultimately beneficial to the Turkish economy, thereby justifying private philanthropy as a form of national service. As Koç put it in a 1967 speech to Turkish businessmen, developing human capital was important for economic development because of the need for skilled workers and professionals:

Not coincidentally, it was during this decade that many Turkish businessmen began to establish clinics, dormitories, hospitals, museums, schools, and universities. Such philanthropic activity emphasized the secondary role of private entrepreneurship vis-à-vis the state. Even in a mixed economy, the philanthropic activities of the private sector were not to intrude into domains considered to be under the purview of the state. As the legal scholar Hasan Güneri explained, most vakıfs created after 1967 “should either adopt the purposes of the state or choose purposes that are very much in line with state purposes.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Health, education, and cultural arts were respectable domains where private philanthropic activity could legitimately support the state-led project of economic development by enhancing human capital.

The 1967 law also introduced a legal framework for eligible vakıfs to become tax-exempt. Neither during the Ottoman era nor in pre-1967 republican Turkey was vakıf making associated with tax benefits.Footnote ⁶⁶ But after 1967, vakıfs with 80 percent of their income dedicated to a social service ordinarily included within the state budget were allowed to apply for tax-exempt status.Footnote ⁶⁷ The pioneers were Vehbi Koç Vakfı (Vehbi Koç Foundation) and Türk Eğitim Vakfı (Turkish Education Foundation), both of which gained tax-exempt status in 1968. Between 1967 and 1980, a total of twenty-six vakıfs were granted the same status. Over the next three decades this number increased exponentially. Today a total of 256 vakıfs in Turkey are exempt from paying taxes.Footnote ⁶⁸ Such exemptions are generally granted by cabinet-level decisions on an individual basis, meaning that they are subject to political manipulation.

Debates over the tax status of vakıfs were tied to the question of whether the state should grant tax benefits to private entrepreneurs. In one of the first meetings organized in 1962 to discuss the economic trajectory of Turkey, Koç and other businessmen asked the government to suspend taxations on private investments and to offer tax cuts to certain business firms as a way of encouraging exports.Footnote ⁶⁹ Requests for granting tax exemptions to businesses were initially rejected, but eventually politicians began to look favorably toward granting certain tax benefits to private entrepreneurs in exchange for their contribution to Turkey's economic growth. The reconfiguration of vakıfs into potentially tax-exempt institutions was part of the larger shift from etatism to a mixed approach to economic advancement.

This new discourse of development not only changed how vakıfs were understood but also reshaped how vakıf reforms were contested. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was mostly leftists who criticized the reconfiguration of vakıfs into private philanthropic foundations. One leftwing journalist, for example, accused businessmen in Turkey of trying to brainwash youth with education-related philanthropy. He explained: “The problem of education in Turkey cannot be solved by capitalist delusions. Tax justice, equality of opportunity, planned education, and an honorable state only exists in socialism.”Footnote ⁷⁰ For this journalist, vakıfs were problematic institutions because they represented a “capitalist delusion” that the socialist revolution could be prevented by measures aimed to improve the welfare of the population. This line of critique was the product of the ideological fault lines of the times: just like any other political issue, vakıfs were seen within a binary of capitalism versus socialism.

Yet, despite these criticisms (and the ongoing political violence that marked the 1970s), 600 new vakıfs were created between 1967 and 1980.Footnote ⁷¹ In addition to cultural, educational, and health-related vakıfs, religiously oriented vakıfs were also established. Although not all of these vakıfs were modeled on American philanthropic foundations, the 1967 law certainly paved the way for a renaissance in vakıf making that began in the 1970s and accelerated after the 1980s.

NEOLIBERALISM: VAKıFS AS WELFARE ORGANIZATIONS (1980S–2000S)

The 1980s were marked by the ascendancy of neoliberal ideology, which posited that the economy is best governed by limited state control over the market. This neoliberal model of development was adopted in Turkey as a result of the financial crisis caused by the collapse of the import-substitution model of industrialization and with the support of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. After the 1980 military coup, Turkey began its neoliberal transformation under the leadership of Prime Minister Turgut Özal (1983–89) and the Anavatan Partisi (Motherland Party [ANAP]). Market reforms such as the dismantlement of tariffs, the privatization of state industries, and the introduction of export subsidies were swiftly implemented. In addition to changes in the economic sphere, Özal (with the support of the Turkish military establishment) introduced a new national ethos: the “Turkish-Islamic synthesis.” The state now embraced Turkey's Ottoman-Islamic past in hopes that it would serve as a cultural glue against the political violence and social fragmentation of the 1970s.

With the adoption of free-market capitalism, vakıfs were slowly reconfigured into welfare organizations focused on poverty alleviation. In the 1980s, new ideas about vakıfs were introduced in both intellectual and political circles. A new genre of scholarship began to examine the role of vakıfs in welfare policy.Footnote ⁷² For example, in his 1985 book aptly titled Vakıf as an Institution of Social Policy, Erol Kozak, a scholar of Islamic Law, claimed that the Ottoman state had always had a minimal role in the provision of welfare services and that such services were largely provided by vakıfs, which “embodied values such as social solidarity.”Footnote ⁷³ In a similar vein, in 1984, scholar and VGM bureaucrat Nazif Öztürk argued that “throughout our history, vakıfs have delivered a number of welfare services that today are ordinarily performed by the state.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In this new discourse, vakıfs were portrayed as if they were replicas of Ottoman welfare organizations.

The creation of the semipublic, semiprivate Sosyal Yardımlaşma ve Dayanışma Fonu (Social Solidarity and Mutual Assistance Fund [SYD Fund]) in 1986 illustrates this transformation.Footnote ⁷⁵ The SYD Fund was tasked with transferring “a steady flow of income from the rich towards the poor.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Prime Minister Özal presented the “Benevolent Fund”Footnote ⁷⁷ as a manifestation of Turkish solidarity: “I find that our historical understanding of solidarity, one founded upon the institutions of our own society, is better than the mechanical understanding of social solidarity found in the West. In our society, we understand welfare as a matter of family values and social love.”Footnote ⁷⁸

The 1986 law also created 750 new SYD Fund vakıfs. Funded by a combination of public funds and private donations including religiously motivated charity such as fitre and zekat, these were expected to ease Turkey's transition to a free market economy by assisting the poor and were argued to embody Turkish-Islamic values of “social solidarity.” Although they were managed by representatives of the state at the district and neighborhood levels, the SYD Fund vakıfs had boards of directors that included prominent members of the local population. Thus, in terms of both their management and their funding structure, these vakıfs could be considered early representatives of neoliberal public-private partnerships.

During the mid- to late 1980s, dissenting voices were preoccupied with the place of religious charity in state welfare policy. Some politicians argued that the Turkish state had become a “charity state” since it now partially relied on private donations to finance its welfare services.Footnote ⁷⁹ Distributing social assistance as if it were a “handout” was argued to be insulting to the honor of the Turkish poor.Footnote ⁸⁰ Others suggested that modeling the welfare regime after “vakıfs, soup kitchens, and almshouses” would reverse Turkey's progress by taking the country “backwards.”Footnote ⁸¹ In addition to growing concerns about the inefficiency of public welfare vakıfs, there was concern about corrupt politicians exploiting available funds.Footnote ⁸² A last group of politicians was concerned with the religious significance of vakıfs, arguing that the creation of the SYD Fund undermined the secularist principles of the Turkish Republic.Footnote ⁸³ For example, one politician argued that “the Fund confuses religion and state and weakens the modern institutions put in place by Ataturk by transforming zakat into a form of state revenue.”Footnote ⁸⁴

A number of additional legal and political developments impacted the trajectory of vakıfs during the late 1980s and the 1990s. The 1982 constitution's restriction of associational activity prevented activists from creating derneks (political associations). But the liberal nature of the 1967 vakıf law was attractive to these activist groups, which sought to organize themselves despite the repressive political atmosphere. As a result, a variety of hybrid vakıfs combining political and philanthropic goals were created during the 1980s. Later, when the 1995 constitutional revisions lifted restrictions on associational activity, the number of vakıfs and derneks claiming to represent Turkish “civil society” exploded.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1996 alone, 439 new vakıfs (almost one-tenth of all new vakıfs in Turkey) were established.Footnote ⁸⁶ Many of these new private vakıfs were associated with the rise of political Islam. Islamic vakıfs faced political repression after the 1997 military coup that ousted the coalition government of the conservative-Islamic Refah Partisi (Welfare Party [RP]) and the center-right ANAP in the name of restoring the secular nature of the Turkish Republic.Footnote ⁸⁷

Although the 1997 military coup momentarily interrupted the reconfiguration of vakıfs into welfare organizations under neoliberalism, the AKP's electoral success in 2002 restored this process. In contrast to previous Islamic parties, the AKP adopted a proglobalization and free market ideology without abandoning its Islamic appeal. Similar to religious neoliberalism elsewhere, the AKP's version of “neoliberal Islam” sought to reconcile free market economics with conservative social values.Footnote ⁸⁸ What distinguished the AKP was its portrayal of neoliberal development as a revival of Turkey's Ottoman-Islamic heritage and the idea that channeling religious charitable sentiments toward state-mediated social service provision was the best way to alleviate poverty. The AKP's neoliberal-Islamic development discourse expanded both the reach of public welfare schemes and the role of private faith-based organizations, thereby reconfiguring the contours of the state-welfare relationship.Footnote ⁸⁹

After 2002, the AKP government sought to address the immediate needs of the urban poor, who were a key element of its electoral basis, while not giving up its neoliberal economic policy—a key part of AKP ideology. The outcome was the introduction of a series of welfare reforms. The 2004 “Social Security Reform” package integrated previously existing pension and social insurance programs under a new institutional umbrella. Although these changes curtailed public workers' benefits, they also overcame some of the endemic problems of the development welfare regime, such as inadequate funding, overcrowding, and lack of adequate capacity.Footnote ⁹⁰ Perhaps more importantly, the AKP made social grants for low-income individuals a priority. In 2004, the SYD Fund, which had been established in 1986, was expanded to form the Social Solidarity and General Assistance Ministry. The budget allotted for social assistance increased from 1 billion TL in 2001 to 11 billion TL in 2010.Footnote ⁹¹ By 2013, the number of public SYD Fund vakıfs had gone up to 975.Footnote ⁹² The AKP also encouraged the creation of private SYD Fund derneks and vakıfs, which were expected to provide social services to the needy.

Moreover, other new laws were introduced to allow these private derneks and vakıfs to operate more freely. The 2004 Law of Derneks and the 2008 Vakıf Law, for example, allowed them to collect donations from the public without prior government authorization, engage in transnational activities, and receive funding from international organizations.Footnote ⁹³ These legal changes further blurred the line between vakıfs and derneks, thereby effectively transforming both into NGOs with a social service mission.Footnote ⁹⁴

The AKP validated these welfare- and civil society-related reforms and encouraged charitable giving among the Muslim bourgeoisie by invoking a presumed Ottoman-Islamic heritage of compassion, generosity, and philanthropy. A series of conferences such as the Vakıf Civilization Symposium (12–13 May 2003) and the International Vakıf Symposium (15–17 December 2003) were organized by the AKP in Ankara after it came to power. These conferences brought together conservative politicians, intellectuals, and representatives from Islamic civil society organizations to discuss the potential role of vakıfs in contemporary Turkey. A key innovation was the portrayal of the Ottoman Empire as a “vakıf civilization.” At one of the conferences, for example, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated that “the civilization we belong to is a vakıf civilization . . . Our culture possesses a culture of humanitarian love, a morality of compassion. With God's permission, we will all together reinvigorate our civilization and use it to address the problems of our contemporary age.”Footnote ⁹⁵ This remark illustrates that the vakıf civilization rhetoric relied on a nostalgic vision of the Ottoman past that had become legitimized, indeed popularized (especially after 2002), in unprecedented ways in Turkish public discourse.Footnote ⁹⁶ As a result, pious Muslims in neoliberal Turkey began to romanticize Ottoman vakıfs as a philanthropic solution to poverty.Footnote ⁹⁷ The emergence of this nostalgic vision was not a natural manifestation of already existing charitable tendencies among Muslims. Rather, the AKP cultivated a new culture of generosity that adhered to a neoliberal-Islamic model of development.

This development discourse had three key components: the portrayal of the Ottoman Empire as a welfare state; the claim that vakıfs had always been NGOs; and the representation of the state–civil society relationship as one of collaborative partnership. In July 2009, I met with Yusuf Bayezit, the head manager of the VGM, to discuss these components. I began our conversation by explaining that I wanted to understand the difference between vakıfs and civil society organizations. Bayezit responded by asserting that even asking whether vakıfs could be compared to civil society organizations was strange because “vakıfs were the first examples of civil initiatives in our history.” As he explained,

This brief account communicates a number of interrelated ideas: that vakıfs were civil society organizations authentic to the Turkish-Ottoman civilization; that they have existed for centuries without any historical rupture; and that they had always performed a civic-charitable function working in partnership with the Ottoman state. In short, the Ottoman vakıf system was presented as a model welfare state that the AKP was trying to resuscitate—a theme echoed in many other similar accounts.

One of the other key elements of the AKP's new political rhetoric was the redefinition of vakıfs as NGOs. Over the past decade, the Islamic intellectual-political elite began to portray civil society as an Ottoman-Islamic institution instead of treating it as a Western political model. For example, in one journal article the theologian Osman Güner explained that vakıfs were “peculiar civil society organizations that are authentic to the East” and have always been central to “balancing income inequality in our civilization.”Footnote ⁹⁹ In a similar vein, Tourism Minister Erkan Mumcu argued that “the vakıf concept, the vakıf model, is our utmost contribution to humanity; it is our most humanitarian value. This is because our vakıf civilization is founded upon hearts, upon conscience, upon charity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In these and other articulations, the Ottoman vakıf was redefined as a humanitarian NGO focused on poverty alleviation and emergency relief.

Moreover, such a depiction of Ottoman vakıfs downplayed the democratic potential of CSOs by portraying them as cooperative institutions instead of venues for political contestation. Sangeeta Kamat has noted that neoliberal NGO discourse often relies on an antipolitical notion of civil society.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the case of Turkey, the representation of the third sector as an antipolitical domain was partially achieved by portraying vakıfs as model NGOs that partnered with the Ottoman state. For example, Ahmet Tabakoğlu, a scholar of Islamic economics, has argued that “even though the Ottoman vakıf system was an independent, and democratic form of civil society, it was really not outside of the state.”Footnote ¹⁰² Here vakıfs are paradoxically presented as civil society organizations that are part of the state apparatus. Their primary function is argued to be to support the state by providing social services to the poor, but they are not expected to engage in rights-based activism on behalf of the oppressed.

As a result of these shifts, during the 2000s vakıfs became implicated in disputes about social policy, state–civil society relations, and transnational politics of Islamic humanitarianism. Politicians from the opposition argued that the state's increasing reliance on private philanthropy eroded “welfare rights.” Some secularist Kemalists claimed that social assistance provision through vakıfs was a manifestation of “sadaka culture”—a type of welfare culture deemed religious, backwards, and likely to create dependency among recipients.Footnote ¹⁰³ These culture wars were accompanied by concerns about corruption and perpetuation of patron-client relationships, especially since AKP politicians often encouraged members of their political base to donate to government-friendly charitable organizations. Although only 148 new vakıfs were created between 2002 (when the AKP was first elected into office) and 2013, this was also the decade in which sixty new vakıfs acquired tax-exempt status.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In fact, these close political ties were implicated in a series of corruption scandals. In 2009, the Deniz Feneri (Light House) organization was accused of illegally using charitable donations to support AKP electoral campaigns.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In 2014, when a series of recordings were released accusing the AKP of corruption and bribery, one of the key debates at the center of the scandal was the donations collected by the Türkiye Gençlik ve Eğitime Hizmet Vakfı (Turkish Youth and Educational Service Vakıf [TÜRGEV]), whose board of trustees was mostly populated by Prime Minister Erdoğan's close relatives.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Erdoğan defended these financial relationships by referencing Hayrettin Karaman, a progovernment theologian who allegedly said that encouraging donations among businessmen who have received government contracts is permissible from a religious point of view. Whether or not such donations to government-friendly vakıfs constitutes bribery or corruption is an ongoing debate in Turkish politics.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Additionally, a number of Islamic humanitarian organizations, including the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, which organized the 2010 Gaza Flotilla, have recently been criticized for their assumed financial and logistical support of radical movements in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These ongoing political debates about welfare policy, corruption, and the scope of Islamic humanitarianism are products of the neoliberal conjuncture, which has been reshaping how vakıfs are understood, discussed, and criticized in ways significantly different than before.