At the closing session of a conference held in 2013 at the Foundation for Research in Islamic Sciences in Istanbul to discuss Salafism, Ali Bardakoğlu, former head of Turkey's Religious Affairs Directorate known as Diyanet, made a rather startling comment. After three days of papers and discussion, he took the podium to admonish delegates as follows: “There should have been a paper at this meeting that discussed Turkish Salafism [Türkiye Selefiliği]. Scholarly gatherings must take place in which religious movements in Turkey, including even Salafism, can be discussed extensively from different angles.”Footnote 1 Indeed, in over 700 pages of the subsequently published volume Tarihte ve Günümüzdeki (Salafism Today and in History, 2014) not one article dealt with the ideology in any Turkish manifestation. This was particularly odd given that with Syria's descent into civil war since 2011 the ideological-theological formulation “Salafism” had entered Turkish public discourse with some force. Some Turks had left to take part in a conflict they conceptualized as a war against an infidel ruler who did not apply God's law over the community of Muslims, while Salafi communities in Turkey began to attract the attention of Turkish and international mediaFootnote 2 and thousands of volunteers arrived in Turkey as a transit point for joining the fight. Yet so novel did Salafism appear that between Selefiye and Selefilik (and others) there was no consensus in media over what name to give it in Turkish.Footnote 3
This article aims to take up Bardakoğlu's challenge by examining the reception of Salafi ideas in Turkey since the 1980s. It has three broad aims: to consider the degree to which Salafi thought has become influential in mainstream religious discourse; to examine the shift in discussion of Salafism in media and scholarly circles from an ideology of marginal interest to one with more extensive impact than thought previously; and to reflect on culture-specific conditions that may color Salafism in the Turkish context. The article is broadly divided into two halves: one that gives a brief historical sketch of Salafi thought as a category, including problems in its shifting definition and the early republic's approach to religion, and another that looks at how Salafism was received in Turkish-language discourse (encompassing media, theological writing, public intellectuals, and historical-critical scholarship) in the era of transnational Salafism, when what is often termed quietist or apolitical Salafism began to emerge as a trend within what we could call Turkish Islam.
The scholarly literature on Islam in Turkey has focused predominantly on the Milli Görüş (National Outlook) movement of Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011), its intellectual origins in the Sufi-influenced thought of theologian Said Nursi (1876–1960), and its progeny, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP), which has formed governments since 2002.Footnote 4 At the same time, literature on Salafism, a burgeoning field in recent years, has been heavily tilted toward Arab countries, with some consideration of south and southeast Asia whose wider links in modern history to the Arab region have been manifest in labor migration and political and economic ties.Footnote 5 The isolation from the Arab and Islamic sphere that the early Kemalist regime sought to impose on the Turkish republic appears to have cast a long shadow over historical and political writing on the Middle East region, such that for long scholars have approached Turkey as if ontologically different.Footnote 6 Facing challenges from the left, revolutionary Iran, and the Turkish Islamist movement, the state took a new approach in the 1980s in adopting what was known as the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (Türk İslam Sentezi). The scientific positivism which had been the guiding principle of the republic since 1923 was thus modified to make room for religion as a central element of Turkish national culture, a reconciliation that created space for the emergence of new Islamic currents such as Salafism. I argue that this development long remained unanalyzed because it ran counter to understandings of the nature of Turkish Islamic culture.
SALAFISM: AN OVERVIEW
The genealogy of Salafism is both unclear and contested. The terms Salafi and Salafism derive from the Arabic term al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ (the pious predecessors),Footnote 7 a phrase understood by today's Salafis to indicate the first three generations of Muslims who are imagined to have lived in an exemplary manner since they had first-hand experience of the life of the Prophet or lived by the standards of those who did. But it is not clear at what point Salafi comes to refer to those who claim adherence to a complex of jurisprudential and theological positions deploying the Salaf as an ordering principle.Footnote 8 In brief, it could be said that three streams of thinking interacted under the label of Salafism in the early 20th century: firstly, the writings of Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) as filtered through the understandings of the Wahhabi movement regarding shirk (polytheism) and kufr (unbelief) and their Hanbali-Athari (antirationalist) critique of Ashʿari theology; secondly, a strand concerning the religious scholars influenced by figures such as Shah Waliullah (1703–62) and Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1834) who rejected the practice of taqlid (following precedent) of the four Sunni legal schools for unmediated interpretation (ijtihād) of the scriptural sources of Qurʾan and prophetic hadith;Footnote 9 and thirdly, Salafism as the Islamic modernism of intellectuals such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97) and Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905). Largely through the vehicle of his writings in al-Manar, Rashid Rida (1865–1935), a disciple of ʿAbduh, attempted a synthesis of all three as an Arab-oriented fundamentalist revivalism that would enable Islamic culture to meet the challenge of the West, with ʿAbduh configured as its godfather though he had never described himself as a “Salafi” in such terms.Footnote 10
Salafism as modernist revivalism did not survive the semantic evolution of subsequent decades, such that today's Salafis consider this earlier usage a usurpation of their ideological lexicon. While at the Muslim Brotherhood's fifth general conference in 1938 Hasan al-Banna was able to define the organization as “a Salafiyya message, a Sunni way, a Sufi truth,”Footnote 11 by the 1980s the term had become the province of Wahhabiyya. Today the Brotherhood and groups such as Palestinian Hamas or Tunisian Ennahda (al-Nahda) can be classified as movements of “political Islam” or Islamism, distinct from the Salafis, while Husam Tamam was able to write an authoritative study describing a “Salafization” of the Brotherhood that began in the 1970s.Footnote 12 In the second stage of Salafism's evolution, in the 1960s and 1970s, Saudi Arabia became the site for formulations of Salafism shorn of the modernist legacy, uniting the Wahhabis and antitaqlid faction through the figure of Ibn Taymiyya.Footnote 13 Salafism's third stage comes in the 1990s in the context of globalization, which transformed these two trends into what Olivier Roy calls a deterritorialized transnational ideology that imagines an Islamic nation “beyond ethnicity, race, language and culture.”Footnote 14 Roy argues that this ideology is not interested in fostering “Muslim culture,” local Islams, or community esprit de corps, and it easily adapts to ideas of individualization, the consumer, and the free market. Its heavily text-based methodology allows its adherents to claim better understanding of the divine law, privileging knowledge of the Arabic language while deploying other markers such as clothing, facial hair, form of prayer, and constant referencing of their canon of revealed texts to set them apart.Footnote 15
Surveying the map of Salafism today, Roel Meijer's volume Global Salafism (which does not consider Turkey) identifies three elements: jihadi Salafism, political Salafism, and quietist Salafism.Footnote 16 The first, jihadi Salafism, channels Wahhabi thinking on how to manage Muslims and Muslim-run entities that fail to meet the doctrinal test of faith and action, but is influenced by Muslim Brotherhood thinker Sayyid Qutb's ideas on the apostasy of postcolonial Muslim rulers. The second, sometimes termed al-salafiyya al-tanẓīmiyya (organized/activist Salafism), supports some level of involvement in national political processes (as seen in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Egypt). The third, sometimes called al-salafiyya al-ʿilmiyya (scholastic Salafism), is “quietist”Footnote 17 in that it rejects participation in processes of political contestation and advocates obedience to rulers as long as they ensure the writ of shariʿa through empowerment of its guardians, the ʿulamaʾ.Footnote 18 This final grouping does not capture differences over the more radical opposition to taqlid which prominent quietists in the Saudi orbit such as hadith scholar Nasir al-Din al-Albani (1914–99) embraced but which was problematic for Wahhabi scholars in the quietist mold such as Rabiʿ al-Madkhali (b. 1931) or ʿAbd al-ʿAziz bin Baz (1910–99).Footnote 19
This categorization offers a model for understanding transnational Salafism as a contemporary practice rather than as a historically shifting set of beliefs, which perhaps reflects the priorities of policy-oriented security studies that tend to dominate writing on the subject.Footnote 20 Meijer offers a model for predicting the spread of Salafism that considers its chances weak where the population is strongly embedded in local practices and engaged in an ethnic-nationalist struggle. “It can only succeed in making inroads when its quietist current can find a niche or the nationalist movement has failed and the national struggle can be linked with a larger global struggle, or it fits into the politics of identity in Western Europe,” he writes.Footnote 21 Thus it has not been successful among Palestinians, despite a stream of Wahhabi influence among Palestinian students who attended Saudi universities from the 1970s,Footnote 22 but has had varying fortunes in Yemen where there is a historical base,Footnote 23 Indonesia where it is something of a Saudi import,Footnote 24 and France where it has spoken to immigrant disaffection with the state.Footnote 25
SALAFISM AND THE LATE OTTOMANS
While the terms Salafi/Salafism and the complex of trends they first referred to—modernist reform, rejection of taqlid and Wahhabi Hanbalism—were elaborated in the early 20th century as an Arabic discursive category, the genealogy of their reception in the Ottoman/Turkish sphere is obscure. Wahhabism had not been popular in Istanbul on political or theological grounds throughout the 19th century. In his history, compiled between 1854 and 1884, Ottoman statesman Cevdet Paşa denounced the Wahhabi practice of destroying shrines and extensive condemnation of Muslims as infidels (takfīr) as hitherto unseen excess (guluv ve ifrat),Footnote 26 while many if not most Wahhabi scholars viewed the Ottoman state as illegitimate because of its tolerance of Sufi and Shiʿi practices and Hanafi-Maturidi legal-theological system.Footnote 27 The Ottoman Grand Mufti Arif Hikmet (d. 1859) engaged in debate over Ibn Taymiyya's thought with the Baghdadi scholar Mahmud al-Alusi, denouncing Ibn Taymiyya as an anthropomorphist for his literalist views on God's attributes.Footnote 28
The modernism of ʿAbduh was received positively by like-minded reformers in Istanbul grouped around the journal Sebilürreşad (Path of Guidance, 1908–25), originally titled Sırat-ı Müstakim (The Straight Path), in which poet and Muslim intellectual Mehmet Akif translated ʿAbduh's work. The modernists were one of three groups among the Ottoman Turkish ʿulamaʾ and intellectuals struggling to manage the problematization of Islam by European Orientalists, with whom many had close relations, and religion generally by scientific materialism. They were challenged by a conservative group of religious scholars writing in the journal Beyânu'l-Hak (Statement of Truth, 1908–12), whose editor Mustafa Sabri (1869–1954) was the most prominent among them. Through publications such as İslam Mecmuası (Islam Journal, 1914–18), the third group led by radicals such as Ziya Gökalp sought to find a place for Islam in a model that combined Turkish nationalism and scientific positivism. Like ʿAbduh, the modernist intellectuals were little interested in the radical critique of the shariʿa methodological tradition of the theorists against taqlid but in finding reasoning within the four jurisprudential schools for practices that would, effectively, bring Muslims closer to European norms.Footnote 29 Thus they were prepared for changes on a range of key questions including the medrese system, interpretation of scripture, the methodology of jurisprudence, and doctrinal matters of theology.
One of the first Late Ottoman thinkers to address the movement against taqlid and its critique of Ashʿari theology was İsmail Hakkı in his work Yeni İlm-i Kelam (New Theology, 1920). As M. Sait Özervarlı has shown, Hakkı tried to effect a reconciliation between Islamic thought and European science without succumbing to its radical materialist currents, but he gives space to the new discourse of Salafism. While avoiding Ibn Taymiyya's extreme views on Sufism, Shiʿism, and takfīr, he outlines a theological tradition by the name of Selefiyye (the spelling used in the first Latin script versions of his book). Distinguishing it from the Ashʿari and Maturidi traditions, he describes the Selefiyye as a group who rely on Prophetic hadith, though he does not go further into the implications of this regarding taqlid.Footnote 30 In other words, as a scholar steeped in the Ottoman Hanafi-Maturidi tradition Hakkı skirts around the antitaqlid claims of Salafism. In the figure of jurist and hadith scholar Mehmed Zahid Kevseri (1879–1952) it is explicitly rejected in an essay he wrote in his years of exile in Cairo as the “bridge to unbelief” (qanṭarat al-lādīniyya);Footnote 31 it was also rejected by theologian Said Nursi (1877–1960) and intellectual Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904–83).Footnote 32 So resistance to this strand of Salafism in Turkish Islam has been strong, which suggests possibilities in Salafism today for a dissident position on the religious establishment's Hanafi-Maturidism.Footnote 33
Salafism's rationalist critique of the legal schools and the Sufi orders—seen as unnecessary mediations between believer and divine sources (Qurʾan and Prophetic sunna)—were influential, nevertheless, in Nursi's response to the aggressive secularism of the republic. Şerif Mardin and Carter Findley have pointed to the significance of Nursi opting to establish a text-based movement that believers could follow by reading for themselves, rather than found a Sufi order of his own. In this he embodied a shift in teaching from orality to textualism, which anticipates what Bernard Haykel calls the “hyper-textuality” of today's transnational Salafism and the direct access to knowledge that it offers the Muslim.Footnote 34 Nursi accepted the critique of Sufism that was common to the various strands of reform and revival that Rida sought to unite under the Salafi rubric.Footnote 35
POLITICAL ISLAM IN TURKEY
The ideological rigidity of the Kemalist period eased up with the end of the one-party system to allow space for political trends using faith as a reference. These trends had adapted to the secular order in terms of the absence of shariʿa courts and the process of party politics through elections to a government-forming legislative chamber. Kemalist orthodoxy viewed Islamic institutions at state and popular level—through the shariʿa court and education system, or the network of Sufi orders (Tr. tarikat)—as a bar to Turkey's arrival at a state of modernity, which Kemalists and some Islamic intellectuals understood as a universal condition Europeans had reached before other civilizational blocs. Many elements of manifest faith that intermingled with popular custom such as Islamic dress codes were deemed by republican ideologues as incompatible with this effective Westernization. But Islamic thinkers and institutions were strong enough to reconfigure religion as a social and political reference point when possibilities for activism eventually opened up. Gavin Brockett argues that intellectuals succeeded in defining the nation in religious terms through the liberalized print culture of the late 1940s and the 1950s.Footnote 36 Nursi and other religious scholars were also innovative in encouraging followers to take advantage of the opportunity to move into politics in the 1950s, which at some points helped the series of parties Erbakan established from 1969 but also others such as Turgut Özal's Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi).Footnote 37 Nakshibendi Sufi orders, which had never gone away despite the republican ban on their activities, encouraged followers to infiltrate the state bureaucracy, in which a branch of Nursi supporters established by preacher Fethullah Gülen was particularly effective from the 1980s.
The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis deployed by the military junta which seized power in 1980 and which had been developed in nationalist circles a decade before was attractive as a state-controlled discourse that could assuage the violent political and social radicalization of the late 1970s and reduce the attraction of hostile Islamist and leftist trends. Constitutional changes further deployed the Diyanet administration as a vehicle of ideological policing.Footnote 38 This shift had consequences in foreign policy, in particular with regards to how the Turkish state dealt with Saudi Arabia at a critical moment of Saudi propagation of Wahhabism under the increasingly popular Salafi rubric. Driven by twin challenges from its Wahhabi core (the 1979 siege of the Mecca Grand Mosque) and revolutionary Iran, the Saudi leadership resolved to use Islamic institutions under its tutelage to disseminate Wahhabi scholarship worldwide through funding of mosques and publication of literature staking Wahhabi Salafism's hegemonic claims over Sunni belief and practice.Footnote 39 Turkey now happily engaged these institutions, in some cases for the first time. Thus General Kenan Evren transformed Turkey into one of the most active members of the Jeddah-based Organisation of the Islamic Conference.Footnote 40 In 1984, a year after the Organisation of the Islamic Conference endorsed the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and granted Turkey the observer status it had long sought for Turkish Cypriots, Evren was elected one of its three vice chairmen and took charge of its committee on commercial and economic cooperation.
The Turkish government also initiated cooperation, some of it not publicly declared, between Diyanet and the Mecca-based World Muslim League. The latter paid for the administration to send officials to Europe to develop outreach activities in Turkish migrant communities.Footnote 41 This coordination extended to a wider network of commercial and cultural ties to Saudi Arabia, involving banking and financial services, publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, and children's books.Footnote 42 During this time the military authorities oversaw an increase of more than 50 percent in the Diyanet budget, making it one of the biggest state service agencies, and it expanded from around 50,000 employees in 1979 to around 85,000 in 1989.Footnote 43 Twenty-three faculties of Islamic theology were created in Turkish universities, and by 1987 it was said there were more mosques in the country than schools.Footnote 44 The junta fostered an economically neoliberal and socially conservative environment in the hope of limiting the political trends challenging the nexus of military, judicial, and bureaucratic institutions that saw the state as their ward. Within this framework there was wide scope for Islamic activism, from the Gülen movement, whose educational and charity works eased the government's budgetary burden, to groups bearing revolutionary ideologies such as İbda-C whose anti-Iranian religious nationalism was useful in checking Khomeinist infiltration.Footnote 45
SALAFI PREACHERS IN TURKEY
In this changed political environment preachers openly adopting the Salafi designation began to find a niche in Turkish society.Footnote 46 Shaykhs who began their daʿwa works in the 1990s after studying in Saudi Arabia were able to establish charity organisations (dernek) and publishing enterprises. While they were subject to periodic harassment and arrest by security forces, particularly in the early years of AKP rule, they adopted markedly more public profiles with the AKP's ascendancy over the military following its 2007 election victory.Footnote 47 Many had studied at the Islamic University of Medina. Established in 1961 after lobbying from Pakistani Islamist ideologue Abu al-Aʿla Mawdudi (1903–79) for a Saudi-based institution with a global focus, the university became a center in which diverse schools of Islamic thought could evolve within the Salafi framework.Footnote 48 Turkish Salafis became active on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and established websites for their publishing enterprises. In their writings, Wahhabi Salafi scholars such as Bin Baz, al-Albani, Salih al-Fawzan (b. 1933), and Muhammad ibn al-ʿUthaymin (1925–2001) form the core of their references, while they avoid contemporary ʿulamaʾ from outside the Salafi tradition such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926), the Egyptian scholar based in Qatar who is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. While Turkish is the prime language of communication, Arabic is prominent in dedicated sections of websites and Saudi Salafi works sold in their bookshops, and Islamic terminology appears in published Turkish texts. They focus on Salafi theological themes regarding faith and action and engage in polemics against Shiʿi and Sufi practices. Names among these preachers include Ubeydullah Arslan,Footnote 49 Ebu Said Yarpuzi (also known as Mehmet Balcıoğlu), Huseyin Abu Emre,Footnote 50 Murat Gezenler,Footnote 51 Murat Ekinci (also known as Ebu Hafs),Footnote 52 Ebu Hanzala Hoca (also known as Halis Bayıncık), and Feyzullah Birışık.Footnote 53
The most well-established of these preachers is Abdullah Yolcu (b. 1958) whose work will be discussed in detail here. A Turkmen from Kirkuk in Iraq, Yolcu speaks fluent Arabic and publishes in Arabic and Turkish. Before issuing his books in Turkish he published extensively in Saudi Arabia using his full Arabic name ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAbd al-Hamid al-Athari, sometimes adding al-ʿIraqi, indicating Iraqi origin, while his Turkish works are published under the name Abdullah Yolcu or Abdullah b. Abdulhamid el-Eseri.Footnote 54 After settling in Turkey in 1986, Yolcu established the Guraba publishing house in Istanbul in 1992 with what Guraba says is the aim of helping to counter a century of Westernization, extreme Sufism (aşırı tasavvuf), and prevalence of Shiʿi and Christian practices.Footnote 55 Set up as an arm of an Izmir-based charity called İlim Der, Guraba publishes Turkish translations of Bin Baz, al-ʿUthaymin, al-Albani, and al-Fawzan, and from 2005 began to draw on a pool of Yolcu's work in Arabic for presentation to a Turkish audience in Turkish.Footnote 56 Yolcu is also a founding member of a group called the League of Muslims Scholars, established in Kuwait in 2010 as a rival to the International Union of Muslim Scholars founded by al-Qaradawi in 2004.
With his bookstore in the Sultanahmet district of Istanbul, the heart of government in the Ottoman period and location of many of its most important mosques, Yolcu has positioned himself as the face of quietist Salafism in Turkey. Guraba's publication choices indicate an intent to promote a corrective, conservative Sunni Islam taking Wahhabism as its model, something Yolcu reinforces in his writings, lectures, and even attire, often appearing in the gold-rimmed black cloak and white headdress of Saudi ʿulamaʾ.Footnote 57 His books avoid political issues such as the invasion of Iraq, the war in Syria, or direct intervention in Turkey's domestic politics, and are careful when engaging Salafi positions on questions such as takfīr and jihad: he suggests, for example, that although removal of the shariʿa system is a form of apostasy, the laws of the secular state should be disobeyed (rather than rejected).Footnote 58 This studied moderation helps further the Salafi cause in Turkey by engaging with the wider public and avoiding conflict with the state, while presenting Salafism in a consensual manner as the summation of the four schools of Sunni fiqh. At the same time his project to introduce a shariʿa sensitivity to Islamic practice in Turkey today is radical in that it implies a rejection of the entire tradition of Ottoman-Turkish Islam with its extensive Sufi networks and Hanafi-Maturidi ʿulamaʾ institutions. Indeed, he dismisses the majority of religious scholars and Islamist intellectuals and politicians for compromises to “nationalism” (Ar. qawmiyya) and “rationalism” (Ar. ʿaqlāniyya) and acceptance of the post-shariʿa state.Footnote 59
Guraba lists nine of Yolcu's Turkish-language books for sale but he has many other titles from Saudi publishers in Arabic.Footnote 60 They reflect the archetypal themes of the Wahhabi tradition: the danger to the Muslim's faith of engaging, even unwittingly, in overly friendly relations with non-Muslims, partaking in non-Muslim festivities and customs, indulging in the temptations of modern music, slipping into the laxity that is the condition of many if not most Muslims in post-shariʿa states. His concern is largely individualist, a vocation to save Muslim souls one by one, and Yolcu often states that his audience is the mass of lax Muslims who are neither loyal adherents of shariʿa nor apostates. Muslims, he says, should be ever wary to protect and maintain the integrity of their faith from the traps of materialist culture. Declaring the shahāda, the Muslim profession of faith, is not enough: to insist in the face of argumentation on forsaking the Ramadan fast, or prayer, or any other of the main commands of the shariʿa tradition is apostasy.Footnote 61 Other actions that put one's Islam (müslümanlığı) in jeopardy include use of saint figures as intermediaries (a polytheistic dilution of the focused worship of God alone), compromising the absolute authority of shariʿa, dabbling in sorcery (addressing entities other than God), denigrating any elements of Islam, or suggesting it is an incomplete system.Footnote 62 Underpinning these arguments is the theological position, a corrective to Ashʿari theology derived by the Wahhabi and antitaqlid trends from Ibn Taymiyya, which holds that faith is a continuous work in progress, liable to increase and decrease according to the believer's attention to the minutiae of word and action.
Yolcu and Guraba have made choices regarding which of Yolcu's works to translate into Turkish and which to republish in Arabic from Saudi originals, what additions to make and what to omit. Nonchalance towards rituals and disregard for doctrinal questions, on the one hand, and cultural-historical reach of Sufi practices, on the other, makes Turkey a prime target for Salafi proselytization. For example, his two keynote works Selef-i Salihin Akidesi (Belief of the Pious Ancestors) and Ehl-i Sünnet ve'l-Cemaat'e Göre İman (Faith According to the Sunni Tradition), both previously published in Arabic in Saudi Arabia, seek to define Sunnism in Wahhabi Salafi terms and press that claim to a Turkish audience. Selef-i Salihin Akidesi was published by the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs in 2002 with an endorsement from the minister.Footnote 63 It was issued in Turkish in 2013 with the addition of separate forewords by twenty scholars from a number of countries; eleven of them were based in Saudi Arabia and one is from Turkey.Footnote 64 Defining Selefilik, he says it expresses the idea that Muslims who follow the Qurʾan, the Prophet's sunna, and the example of the early Muslims are the most correct. Such Muslims are the guardians of Islam from unbelief and innovation; the Salafi way is pure tawhid (Tr. tevhid, commitment to God alone) and the furthest from shirk (polytheistic practice).Footnote 65 In the second title, first published in Saudi Arabia in 2003,Footnote 66 Yolcu acknowledges there has been an Islamic awakening (İslami uyanış) but says youth must be aware of shariʿa rules to protect their faith, in particular observing prayer.Footnote 67 If those who refuse to pray do not repent, he writes, “they should be put to death because they are apostates,” and this would have a series of consequences in terms of funeral rites, inheritance, and child custody.Footnote 68
Yolcu discusses taqlid at length, condemning the dogmatic adherence of an ʿālim to a school or an unschooled believer to a particular scholar, while warning the believer against shopping around for views that suit one's desires.Footnote 69 It is following the views of the scholars that has led Muslims towards practices that put their faith at risk, such as visiting shrines and indulging in music and singing. Music is productive of “destructive atheistic ideas” (yıkıcı ateist fikirler) such as mixing of the sexes and bodily adornment, and thus destructive to the moral fabric of the Muslim community.Footnote 70 He lists fatwas on the topic from Saudi scholars, including al-Fawzan's refutation of al-Qaradawi's view that music is forbidden only in the context of alcohol and other sins;Footnote 71 he also reproduces a fatwa from 2000 issued by the permanent fatwa committee of the Council of Senior ʿUlamaʾ in Saudi Arabia declaring music and song to be impermissible.Footnote 72 Only the voice without instrumental musical accompaniment is legitimate, while the voice heard by the believer should not be that of an unrelated adult woman (his one concession is that tambourines may be used among women at weddings).Footnote 73 It is in the context of this discussion on music and singing that Yolcu engages in his strongest criticism of Sufism by name. He faults Sufi dhikr rituals for clapping, shouting and “acrobatic movements like people who drink alcohol,” mixing of genders, singing that “alights love and desire and excites the senses,” and forms of song that have “invented new forms of invoking God [zikir],” an innovation he says is rejected by the four Sunni legal traditions and Ibn Taymiyya.Footnote 74 “Know, Muslim brother, that involving yourself in listening to these things creates an emotional reaction in that it moves the feelings and lights emotions without foresight and understanding,” Yolcu writes.Footnote 75 It was through Sufism that the Byzantine and Persian musical custom infiltrated Islamic culture, he says, but the wisdom of the shariʿa was to establish a taxonomy of the licit and the illicit to prevent the believer from going astray.Footnote 76
In these discussions on Sufism, shrines, and music the subtle crafting of Arabic texts into a Turkish language discourse for Turkish audiences reveals itself most clearly. Yolcu's critique is easily understood to refer to Alevi practices in his reference to Sufi sema in Turkish, while his Arabic discussion of samāʿ does not convey Alevism at all.Footnote 77 Similarly, in discussing shrines he writes that “the Shiʿa and some Sunnis regard traveling to graves or mosques built upon them, known as türbe, as a form of pilgrimage,” but the Turkish text carries a footnote, not present in the Arabic version, which gives the example of visitors to Mevlana's tomb in Konya and the mosque of Eyüp Sultan in Istanbul.Footnote 78 While the frequent use of rawāfiḍ/rāfiḍa (a derogatory term for Shiʿa) would be understood by Arabic readers as references to Arab or Iranian Shiʿa, rafıziler can intimate Alevis to readers of the Turkish text. This becomes relevant again in his discussion of takfīr. The rules of takfīr should be followed scrupulously in order not to wrong a believer, he says; but while those who were never Muslim such as Christians, Jews, polytheists, Zoroastrians, and philosophers will go to hell, among Muslims batıniler and aşırı rafıziler (extreme Shiʿa) may suffer the same fate, according to the specific innovations they engage in.Footnote 79 Again the term batıniler, from the Arabic bāṭiniyya denoting Ismaʿili Shiʿa and others who believe in esoteric knowledge, carries the semantic hint in Turkish of Sufi/Alevi practice in Turkey. The overall message, however nuanced, is that Turkey is a nominally Muslim society on the edge of kufr because Muslims in their ignorance fail to live by the standards of the Prophet's sunna, for which the absence of the shariʿa juridical structure is no excuse.Footnote 80
Another striking aspect of Yolcu's discourse is its conformity with transnational Salafism's simplicity of message and Arabist leanings. His arguments can speak directly to Turkish experience without any call for spelling out its specificities or even citing Turkey by name. They assume what Meijer calls an “intellectual superiority of religious knowledge” that privileges the Arabic language (for which the Guraba website offers learning materials) in elaborating “correct” and “true” Islam,Footnote 81 which is consonant with Salafism's claims to greater certainty of God's law through constant referencing of revealed texts, the Qurʾan, and hadith as textual forms of authority in Arabic.Footnote 82 This offers a counterpoint to the early Kemalist effort to Turkicize Islamic ritual through the introduction in 1932 of the call to prayer (ezan) in Turkish. An interesting comparison can be made too between the quietist Salafi discourse of Yolcu and that of Konstantiniyye, the Islamic State's Turkish-language publication which began publishing in 2015. Konstantiniyye states directly what Yolcu leaves implied regarding the non-Islamic nature of the Turkish state.Footnote 83 The quietism of Turkish neo-Salafism contrasts with the Islamic State's call on believers, in propaganda materials in Turkish and other languages, to quit infidel lands (dār al-ḥarb) for the shariʿa zone of its caliphate. Like the AKP itself, the quietist Salafis risk being outflanked from the right as the jihadists introduce competition over religiosity.Footnote 84 At the same time, the Salafis exhibit a subversive élan. In their rejection of the entire Hanafi-Maturidi system it could be said that Salafis like Yolcu demonstrate what Haim Malka in a discussion of Tunisian Salafism calls “rebellion against local Islamic traditions and practices and their relationship to political systems.”Footnote 85
SALAFISM AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE
In media and academic discussion Salafism was received initially as a new phenomenon in the Muslim world extraneous to Turkey.Footnote 86 Islamist intellectuals played a critical role in the gradual process of re-Islamization that Turkey witnessed in the decades following the end of one-party rule. Ali Bulaç was one of the most important, and an analysis of his writings shows an increasing effort to deal with the repackaged ideology of Salafism and to integrate it into his thinking. In his first works published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bulaç did not discuss Salafism at all and rarely referred to the notion of exemplary early Muslims. In his 1987 study İslam Dünyasında Toplumsal Değişme (Social Change in the Islamic World) he talked of selefi akımlar (Salafi trends) in history that were opposed to the philosophers and speculative theology, but by 1994 a clear shift in his concerns had occurred.Footnote 87 His book İslam Düşüncesinde Din-Felsefe, Vahiy-Akıl İlişkisi (The Relationship between Religion-Philosophy, Revelation-Intellect in Islamic Thought), published that year, cites selefi (Salafi) nine times, selefiler (Salafis) six times, selefiye (Salafism) six times, selef (the ancestors) five times, selef-i salihin (the pious ancestors) twice, and selefi akımlar (Salafi trends), selefi düşünce (Salafi thought), and selef mezhebi (the Salafi school) once.Footnote 88
Bulaç takes this further in more recent works, advocating reconciliation between Salafism and the modernist political movements (in Kutsala, Tarihe ve Hayata Dönüş [Return to the Sacred, History and Life], 2006) and between Salafism and Sufism (in Postmodern Kaosta Kıble Arayışı [The Search for the Qibla in the Chaos of Postmodernism], 2012). What is interesting is that with Bulaç this accommodationist approach seems to derive from a desire to rebuild Turkish Islam's connections with the Arab-Islamic milieu and create a new Muslim subject through holding to scriptural sources (without stepping into antitaqlid territory). In newspaper columns published in 2013 and 2014 he warned readers against rejecting Salafism and argued that their use of takfīr was less radical than that of the early Kharijites.Footnote 89 Like the Salafists, Bulaç also promotes the use of Arabic. Although this reflects changes of the past two to three decades in Turkey's social linguistic environment (efforts to re-establish some of the Ottoman lexicon),Footnote 90 Bulaç goes further in that he not only teaches readers Arabic alternatives to the religious terminology of Kemalist High Turkish but also introduces Arabic terms with no especial Islamic function at all. Thus in one work, while he informs that the Turkish word din (religion) could be rendered ed-Din, he also gives the Arabic origin hubut as a synonym for düşmüş (collapse),Footnote 91 el-hayatü’d-dünya for dünya hayatı (the life of this world),Footnote 92 kemal for mükemmellik (wholeness),Footnote 93 hudut for sınırlar (limits),Footnote 94 and ed-Dinu'l-Kayyim for dosdoğru din (the most correct religion).Footnote 95
In scholarly discussion, led by professors in Turkish religious studies departments, Salafism was at first rarely treated as a question relevant to Turkey. In 2009 the journal Marife (Knowledge), published by Necmettin Erbakan University in Konya's theology faculty, devoted an issue to Salafism (selefilik) with articles on refutations of Wahhabism, jihadi Salafism in Saudi Arabia, Nursi's view of the salaf, the thought of Qutb and Ibn Taymiyya, and the Salafism of the modernists.Footnote 96 Other publications took as their focus an attempt to challenge Salafism's claims to represent normative Sunni Islam,Footnote 97 or offered discussions of Salafism as a contemporary Arab phenomenon, associated with the mujahidin fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan and the emergence of al-Qaʿida.Footnote 98 Mehmet Zeki İşcan does not discuss Turkish Salafism in his study Selefilik: İslami Köktenciliğin Tarihi Temelleri (Salafism: The Historical Roots of Islamic Radicalism, 2006), yet in his 2012 article “Türk Basınında Matüridi ve Matürıdilik” (Maturidi and Maturidism in Turkish Media) he touches indirectly on a tendency among secular writers to denigrate any Islamist challenge to republican secularism by using the Salafi epithet.Footnote 99 İşcan cites writings by economics and philosophy professor Bünyamin Duran,Footnote 100 historian Sait Başir,Footnote 101 former diplomat and National People's Party parliamentarian Gündüz Aktan,Footnote 102 and newspaper columnists Avni Özgürel (writing in Radikal)Footnote 103 and Atılgan Bayar (Haber Türk and Yeni Asır)Footnote 104 that fetishize the Hanafi-Maturidi nature of the Ottoman Islamic system as the essence of republican Islam while depicting it as under threat. Aktan, for example, writes: “Our pain will end the day that the religious understand that the republic is the model best suited to Islam and that religion lies in Hanafi-Maturidism not Salafism.”Footnote 105
More substantively, Hilmi Demir, a professor at Hitit University, argues that “Salafization” is taking place at the level of theological creed (akide). Reviewing writings since 1990 of scholars in the Nakshibendi Sufi tradition, the most extensive in Turkey historically, he describes a shift in positions regarding questions of faith and action in accordance with the Salafi critique of Ashʿarism (action as proof of faith, faith as something that rises and falls, the invalidity of reason alone for judging good and bad, prayer led by an imam of questionable faith, etc.).Footnote 106 Accordingly, the Diyanet administration and Nakshibendi publications have begun to cite selefiyye as a theological position in Sunni Islam (as İsmail Hakkı had done in 1920). In an official ilmihal (summary of doctrine) first published in 1999, and on its twenty-second print run in 2015, selefiyye is listed alongside Ashʿarism and Maturidism as the first of three Sunni theological schools (itikadi fırkaları), despite the fact that the theological position referred to only began to acquire the name Salafi, in some circles, in the late 19th and early 20th century.Footnote 107 Demir also notes that since the 1990s Turkish-language refutations of Salafism have almost all gone out of print. He points to Ehl-i Sünnet İtikadı (Sunni Belief), a translation into modern Turkish of an Arabic work by Halidi Nakshibendi shaykh Ahmed Ziyauddin Gümüşhanevi (d. 1893). Published in 1994 and 1996, it was last issued by the same publisher (Bedir) in 2002. He also cites a Turkish translation published in 1994 of Abu Hamid ibn Marzuq's Baraʾat al-Ashaʿira min ʿAqaʾid al-Mukhalifin (Defending Ashʿaris from the Beliefs of the Dissenters, 1968); it has not been reprinted. It should be noted, however, that in 2009 Syrian religious scholar Saʿid Ramadan al-Buti's refutation al-Salafiyya: Marhala Zamaniyya Mubaraka La Madhhab Islami (Salafism: A Blessed Historical Phase, Not a School, 1988) was finally published in Turkish.Footnote 108
A recent study by Feriha Perekli makes similar arguments concerning a Salafization of religious discourse that accompanied the rise of the Islamist movement and which was effected through use of the term tevhid (Ar. tawhid, oneness of God). Perekli points to what she calls tawhidi discourse in the Milli Görüş newspaper Milli Gazete and recent works by Islamist writers such as Hamza Türkmen that attempt to align the Turkish Islamist movement with the Salafi genealogy of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab.Footnote 109 Political Islam in Turkey is thus reconfigured as a tevhidi uyanış (tawhid awakening), which Türkmen even attempts to connect to the Kadizadelis, the movement of 17th-century preachers from outside the prestigious medrese-trained corps of ʿulamaʾ who criticized the Sufi orders.Footnote 110 Kadizadeli's links to Ibn Taymiyya are far from established,Footnote 111 and it is notable that Yolcu makes no attempt to claim the movement as an Ottoman Salafi forebear.Footnote 112 “Although Turkish tawhidi Islamists have not called themselves ‘Salafis,’ they are representative of Salafi thought in that they refer only to the Qurʾan and Sunnah, they refuse heterodox Islam/Sufism, and call for a return to the pure faith of the Prophet and his companions,” Perekli writes.Footnote 113
Multiple meanings of Salafism can thus be found in Turkish public discourse, evidencing a degree of semantic confusion not found in its Arabic usage. In the hands of defenders of the secular republic Salafism is a catch-all term for demonizing the entire Islamist movement; for some public intellectuals it is part of the modern landscape of Islamic politics that should be embraced; for some Islamist politicians it more accurately describes the nature of the revivalism they are engaged in. The lack of orthographic stability is revealing of the range of meanings deployed: when discussed in positive or neutral terms selefilik, selefiye, or selefiyye are usually preferred, but selefiyyecilik, selefçilik,Footnote 114 and others often indicate disapproval. While Diyanet chose selefiyye for its catechism of 1999, a report it issued in 2015 in refutation of Islamic State ideology shifted to selefilik to denote quietist engagement in the theological and methodological preoccupations of the Salafi movement and selefizm for “violence and terror-based political Salafism.”Footnote 115 The Islamic State, it says, has veered from a “trend known in history as scholastic Salafism [ilmi selefilik] and which could be described as the most elementary and authentic effort to understand and live Islam.”
CONCLUSION
While Arabic religious discourse elaborated the notion of Salafiyya in the early 20th century, the secular nationalist ideology of the early republic truncated such discussion in the Turkish sphere. Reengagement with Salafi ideology in its Saudi-inflected modern iteration in the enabling environment of post-1980 Turkey had several consequences: production of a wide range of understandings of what the term denoted, the internalization of some Salafi ideas, and the evolution of a quietist Turkish Salafism bearing a rejectionist approach to the wider Islamic culture supporting it. The direction of local and regional politics, with the AKP's successes against the military “deep state” and Turkey's involvement in Syria's civil war, created an opening for an enterprise such as Guraba to turn its attention to publishing Salafi material in Turkish and raising its profile in social media. If Salafism were to be understood as a new religious movement, it would be, according to J. Gordon Melton's classification, as a sect. While movements lacking legitimacy in the eyes of an existing religious establishment tend to be defined as cults or even new religions, sects are perceived as operating within the recognized tradition, with perhaps stricter positions on belief and practice.Footnote 116 Reminiscent of other geographical contexts, as a marginal sect the Turkish Salafis not only address the center with claims to represent normative Sunnism but are met with some degree of indulgence of those claims from the mainstream itself.
Meijer's observation that Salafism may succeed “when its quietist current can find a niche or the nationalist movement has failed” seems then to speak surprisingly well to the Turkish case.Footnote 117 In figures such as Yolcu this current found a place from which to attempt the production of a Turkish Salafism from Arabic texts. Translation, as theorists Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere argue, is never innocent. “There is always a context in which the translation takes place, always a history from which a text emerges and into which a text is transposed,”Footnote 118 they write; it is a form of rewriting that involves “the shaping power of one culture upon another in which the source language can wield a force of authority in the translated context.”Footnote 119 Yolcu does this in taking Arabic-language texts from Saudi Arabia and feeding them into the Turkish ecumene where their impact is to speak through articulation in Turkish to the historical experience of secular materialism and its production of a post-shariʿa society. Although Yolcu says he believes it would take many years for Salafism to make significant inroads in Turkey, that question is now brooked in public debate in the context of the Syrian war and its repercussions.Footnote 120 It is perhaps worth noting the conclusions of one recent study of Salafi groups in Lebanon: what started as a small movement of quietist Salafis during the mid-1970s evolved in time into an extensive network of quietist, political, and jihadi elements in which actors manage to shift between categories.Footnote 121
No less than other Muslim societies, Turkey evidences the kind of minimalist, individuated Muslim subjectivity that Roy and Meijer identify as an important element in the diffusion and reception of transnational Salafism. This speaks to the success of Said Nursi's project to sublimate the charisma of the Sufi shaykh into the text, as Şerif Mardin put it, reducing a rich tradition to a Spartan textuality.Footnote 122 He was prompted to follow this course by the republic, with its banning of the orders and championing of what he saw as dark materialist currents that had seized Europe. If the Hanafi-Maturidi system is under threat, as some scholars and media commentators have suggested, it could be argued that decades of state-sponsored positivism helped create an environment in which transnational neo-Salafism could develop. Scholars of political Islam seem to have accepted too readily the assumption that Turkey's Sufi traditions form a protective wall against Salafi ideas.Footnote 123 Hakan Yavuz, for example, talks of Nakshibendism as the “incubator” of a Turkish Islam that is “more liberal, open, and ready to reconcile differences within a democratic environment.”Footnote 124 While this notion of a detached Turkish Islam has not gone unchallenged,Footnote 125 it would appear that continued emphasis on Sufism and the Milli Görüş line of political Islam, as well as a lingering sense of Turkish exceptionalism, have acted to hamper scholarly consideration of Salafism as a new form of religiosity in Turkey, allowing essentialist notions of the impenetrable cultural fortress to obscure important mutations in religious discourse.
