Bülent Şenay
Are Turks European?
Interrupted Identitites, Hybridity and Islam in Turkey
Here in this talk, I shall attempt to speak of the `contemporary Turkish Muslim identity` as an `interrupted and hybrid identity`, then leave the conclusion to you. It will not claim to present a `conclusive academic argument`, but an educated interpretation of the `in-betweenness of Turkish and Muslim identity in the context of EU-Turkey relations` as indicated in the title of this panel.
Last October, the European Commission issued a report in Brussels on Turkey's compliance with the Copenhagen criteria. At a summit in Amsterdam two months later on December 17th, Europe's 25 countries will decide whether to "give a date" (as the E.U. jargon has it) for full Turkish accession. No candidate that has "gotten a date" has ever been rejected, not even the corruption-plagued slackers of southeastern Europe. The E.U. must now ask itself whether Turkey is a rare hybrid society, possessed of the "moderate Islam" that statesmen of the world over have a duty to reward when they find it, or whether it is yet another secular state in the Islamic world that is about to tip back into theocracy. That is another myth entertained by the Western intellectuals about Islam.
The complex and enigmatic relationship between Turkey and Europe has been a source of continuous debate and controversy for many years. The debate has intensified in recent years, however, following the latest wave of the European Union's enlargement process toward the east, which incorporates the formerly communist Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) liberated from Soviet control and influence in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1989. As a Historian of World Religions, not a political scientist, I leave the analysis of this history to the experts in the field.
From what I perceive from the European Media, majorities of the public in all E.U. states oppose Turkish entry into the union. Their reasons are numerous and considerably more specific than those of Europe's political leaders. There are four main ones:
1-First are various population issues. Since passing its guest-worker laws in the early 1960s, Germany has acquired several million Turkish residents. More through Germany's fault than Turkey's, these newcomers have proved extremely endogamous and hard to assimilate. Turkey has 69 million people, and its population is growing at developing-world rates. Should Turkey get admitted, Turkish minorities in Europe will by that time be considerably larger than any of Europe's other countries. This means the possible influx of tens of millions of Turks into a Europe saddled with structural unemployment-and a voting bloc in the European parliament so enormous that no one could do anything to stop it.
2-Second are related economic questions. Turkey's per capita GNP is growing, but is still only $3,400. A banking collapse in early 2001 was contained, thanks to the largest IMF loan ever, but gigantic payments will soon come due. The current government has been rigorous in following the IMF plan, and inflation has fallen close to single digits for the first time in decades. (The Turkish lira, which 20 years ago was in the same logarithmic neighbourhood as the dollar, is now worth 1/13,000th of a cent.) ….. Turkish accession will not be cheap. Europe's leaders argue that in a global economy, it is unrealistic for Turkey to expect the billions in "development funds" that eased the accession of new members-even turning Ireland and Spain into developed economies. Turkey's leaders say they understand. But such assurances mean nothing. Once Turkey enters the E.U., the continent's voters will be offered a stark choice between paying for economic opportunity in Anatolia and welcoming a large fraction of the Turkish labor market into their cities. Wisely or not, they will probably choose the former. They will probably get both.
3-Third is the question of security in its various guises: The bombings in Istanbul last November were sobering to Europeans, who may flinch from belonging to a political union that borders on Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Europeans might also ask how they will treat the Kurdish aspiration for independence, once it becomes a domestic problem. A geostrategist might weigh these liabilities against an asset: Turkey has a vast conventional military capability that the other European states lack, including a larger battle-ready army than any on the continent. But this is not the way European publics like to think.
4-There is, finally, the question of Islam. Turkish Islam is indeed in many ways the moderate construction that people say it is. We are talking about a country where modern, communitarian, Islam with its emphasis on education and citizenship is the mainstream …. Also, a country where the current prime minister says `in the Office I am a democrat; at home I am Muslim`.
For all that, polling done by the European Values Survey and published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung finds yawning differences between Europe's basic values and Turkey's. Eighteen percent of Europeans (39 percent in Eastern Europe) agree that "politicians who do not believe in God are unfit to hold political office," a view held by 62 percent of Turks. To the question whether they would mind having a homosexual as a neighbor, 19 percent of Europeans say yes, versus 90 percent of Turks. 80 percent of Turks think women should be left to themselves to decide for themselves if they want to wear the headscarf. Because the way a woman dresses is her own business. If what she dresses, in her mind, is part of her lifestyle, who are we to tell them whether they can or cannot wear hijaab.
Now, based on this sporadic introductory comments, I would like to speak of the contemporary identity of Turkish culture. As I said in the beginning, I shall attempt a brief reading of the cultural identity of Turkey as a hybrid text. Hybridity in Turkey may be located, first, in its complex, rich and culturally interactive history. Turkish identity survives with its "unrefined but still existing" faces with the examples of combining different layers of cultures (cultural, religious, etc.) with the help of theoretical search for dynamic definitions of its identity. In this context it is important focus on the ways religion has affected, and still affects, the culture and cultural attitudes of Turkish people in the making of their ‘modern-glocalised’ identity. If one can consider `globalization` as a process of hybridisation – as against homogenisation, standardization, cultural imperialism, McDonaldization etc., and as against the “clash of civilisation”. How powerful a force is Islam in determining the ‘hybrid’ identity of Turkish-Muslims in the process of globalisation? The identities of Europe's Muslim populations are also not fixed but vary in both the short term and historically. So is the Turkish-Muslim identity, a bricolage perhaps. This is where Turkey stands on now.
Turkey, the post-Ottoman modern ‘secular’ Republic, has been a land of crossroad for empires (Byzantine and Ottoman), continents (Europe and Asia), religions (Islam, Christianity, Judaism), immigrants from all neighbouring countries, capital and trade, and finally for diverse cultural interactions and productions. When one moves to urban spaces to find out the roots of ‘hybridity’, one has to start with Istanbul. If cities are crossroads for dense traffics, some cities, for geographical and historical reasons, have more potentialities for hybridity. That is what I call spaces of transition. Istanbul is a typical city of the scenes of hybridisation; it carries the cultures of societies through time and space like a river ground. So is Turkey as a country.
In modernity, the construction of identities became an individual task and responsibility, as in a lifelong project, which required a reliability of cultural contexts in which the whole was greater than the self. Cultural contexts today are extremely interconnected and entangled with each other, reflecting the process of globalization. Lifestyles and identities are constituted within a multitude of intracultural and global networks. Religion and culture have always been closely linked. Culture, understood as `all learned and shared behaviour and ideas`, refers to a learning process which by definition is open-ended. The religious attitudes and understandings inherent in our histories affect our judgments, our governments and social policies, and indeed affect the way we interpret the world outside our own culture. The religions of our histories have shaped our cultures and our worldviews, and continue to shape our interpretation of current events. Islam, in this sense, has enough experience of providing a `modus-vivendi`, `living together with the religious other`.
One can continue speaking of various examples of hybrid identities. Let us say, in Germany, for example, where there are almost 4 millions Turks, one can speak of the dilemma that the Turkish-Muslims experience of maintaining one's cultural-religious origin or roots in Germany, and of a future of hyphenization, hybridity, and syncretization. Can one suggest that a 'Euro-Islam' (as a sociological category of definition not a theological one), or European form of Islam is on the way to emerge in which case it could turn into a ‘hybrid’ form of identity juxtaposed between spaces? It is exactly here that the identity of Turkish-Muslims becomes an issue of hybridity. (And here I disagree wth what is called `Euro-Islam project` prooposed by Bassam Tibi… I f there is no Euro-Christianity or Turco-Christianity…..)
Modern Turkish identity in Turkey is a product of various negations. The Ottoman Empire had been characterised by a spirit of cosmopolitanism; by ethnic, linguistic and religious mixture and interchange. The Turkish state that emerged out of its collapse was fundamentally opposed to such pluralism of identity. The new state aimed to transform Turkish identity “through uniform incorporation, connecting the concept of citizenship with that of social-cultural-linguistic assimilation”.[1] Religious attachment was seen as a subversive force, also posing a threat to the modernization and nationalization process in Turkey. According to Richard Tapper, the secular alternative, however, was no alternative to Islam in providing identity and organising principles of life. At the public level, it was no substitute for the divine laws of Islam; at the individual level, it could not meet intellectual needs for an ethics and an eschatology, and its values were inadequate and thin.[2] So now emerges `hybrid, half-secular Muslim identity which welcomes the plurality of the other in post-modern rethoric of multiplicity of truth-claims.
In the field of post-colonial cultural studies, the term hybridity becomes very useful in the interrogation of the highly complicated webs of cultures and identities. In Homi Bhabha’s writing[3], the concept of hybridity as a descriptive term on the question of identity, is initially used to expose the conflicts in colonial discourse, then extended to address the various ways of living with difference, cultural or religious. Hybridity becomes an interpretative mode for dealing with what Bhabha calls the juxtapositions of spaces. Bhabha is referring here to the cultural and political fields in which the colonized culture takes elements of the colonizing culture. Hybridity "is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities". Turkish identity is not a product of ‘colonial’ power in the common sense of the word. However, ‘cultural colonialism’ (in a Gramscian analysis) is a category in which the Turkish-Muslim identity can be described to have moved towards a hybrid character under the statist nationalism.
Turkish-Muslim identity in this context is a hybrid identity dislocated between its Muslim past and its ‘self-assumed Europeanness’. ‘Europeanness’ of Turkish-muslims appears to be an ‘imagined identity’. Turkish-Muslim identity has its own history and civilisational tradition. When, however, it attempts to redefine itself in terms of a different history and civilisational tradition, it falls into the clash of ‘interrupting identity’, interruption with the civilisational, historical and religious past. One major reason for this ‘interruption’ has been the modern Turkish statist policy of creating an idea of ‘Turkish-Islam’ in order to cut the cultural ties of people of Turkey from the so-called Arab Islamic cultural heritage’.
While Turkey has been a country of hybrid and interrupting identities, European collective identity extends from Vladivostok to San Francisco. Even Kiev and New York are included in Europeanness.[4] What is Europe then? According to Dirk Jacobs and Robert Maier from UtrechtUniversity, positively Europe can be defined as a jagged and ragged end of the Eurasian landmass. But there is no agreement at all where this part begins, and to call it a continent is certainly an abuse of language. To situate Europe geographically is therefore already problematic, but it is even more difficult to define Europe historically and culturally. For example, the question if teh Mediterranean space should be considered as European has been answered in many ways. No original founding principle for Europe can be identified. Grek and Roman origins are situated in th eperiphery and, anyway, these sources precede what can be called Europe. The Christian principle originated in Asia, and will only be developed fully after a millennium.[5] After all, if the Prophet Muhammad (pbuH) was born in Makkah, Jesus (pbuH) was not in Brussels or Rome or Paris. He was born in Jeursalem taht is al-Qudus. Aagin, according to Jacobs and Maier, at present, there are thre conflicting projects for a future Europe within the institutional framework of the European Union. The first one wants Europe to be (again) an important power factor in the world. The second one, in partial opposition to the first one, conceives a social Europe underlining human rights and democracy. A third one, in opposition to both former projects, attempts to defend the existing national states or would even prefer to strengthen them. Departing from different logics and specific projects, the policies aiming at comnstructing a sense of Europeanness start off with different objectives, and result all in hybrid entity. It is clear that Europe is a very vague notion with uncertain frontiers. This being the case, then it becomes even harder to define the Turkish identity as European.
Here therefore, I propose the term Eurasian to define Turkish identity not in racial or ethnic but cultural terms to refer to a hybrid identity that brings together thecultural elements of three geographical-cultural areas, namely Central Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean (that is the European dimension). In other words, it denotes people of mixed Central Asian (ethnic-cultural Turkish roots), Middle Eastern (Islamic-cultural roots), and European (Mediterranean connection) cultural background. I am well aware of tehfact that in order to refer to this term in terms of `identity definition`, one also has to deal with postcolonial diaspora theories. But mytalk is not ambitious. Here I am not talking about `diasporic hybridities`, but rather speaking of `cultural hybridities` only. This is where the Turkish Muslim identity fits into the European Union debate….
For example, according to Stuart Hall (the famous theorist of `diasporic hybrid identitites`), diapsoroc hybridity demonstrates that identities and cultures are not essentially located oin ethnicity or culture but are the affect of history and culture forged through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Identities cannot, therefore, be straightforwardly preserved or even lost, in processes of acculturation, assimilation, pluralism, and multiculturalism. However, Hall is aware that migration may persuade some people to question the `truth` and `certainty` of identity and culture, but it does not automatically do away with stable identities. Likewise, the hybrid identity of Turkish culture well provides tehcomfortable ground for teh Turks to both remain loyal to their `civilisational roots` and also absorb new values and cultural understandings into their `stable identities`.
Homi Bhabha's theory of cultural hybridity (on which my argument is based) recognises that all cultural relations are ambivalent, subversive, transgressive and hybrid. 'Hybridity' challenges the assumption that cultural encounters invariably establish hierarchical dominator/dominated relationships. From this perspective, Eurasian identity of Turkish Muslims does not yield in front of the Western cultural imperialism. It takes and gives at the same time. In this approach to Eurasian identity, one cansay that hybridity is not a moment of change, but a process. It does `not comprise of two original moments from which the third emerges`, but gestures to an ambivalent `third space` of cultural production and reproduction. What is important about hybridity and `third space` is not the `culture` that emerges from two original moments, but the nameless space taht is inadequately understood through received wisdom. This space displaces the dogmatic histories, allows other positions to emerge, establishs new structures of quthority and social-political inititatives. Therefore, hybridity is a useful way of conceptualising theambivalent, in-process transgressive potential of Eurasian identity. This is what the Turkish Muslim identity is all about: a Eurasian identity taht is hybrid identity combinig Central Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultural values.