#MEHMET ZEKI ISCAN SERIES#

Mehmet Zeki İşcan has noted a trend since the mid-1990s among republic secularists of essentializing the Hanafi law and Maturidi theology of the Ottoman-Turkish tradition as the core of a liberal approach to set Turkey apart from other Muslim societies. While Salafism’s infiltration of Turkish religious discourse has gone largely unacknowledged, concern in media and academia over the fate of the Hanafi-Maturidi tradition of Ottoman/Turkish Islam appears as one form of recognition of the changes taking place.

And a well-known modern refutation by Syrian scholar Said Ramadan al-Buti (1929-2013), first published in Arabic as Al-Salafiyya: Marhala Zamaniyya Mubaraka La Madhab Islami (Salafism: A Blessed Historical Phase, Not a School, 1988), was only published in Turkish in 2009. The Bedir publishing house published a translation in 1994 of Syrian scholar Abu Hamid Ibn Marzuq’s Ehl-i Sünnet Müdafaası: Bera’atü’l-Eş’ariyyin min ‘Aka’idi’l-Muhalifin (Defense of the Sunnis: The Innocence of the Ash‘aris Regarding the Beliefs of the Dissenters), first published in 1968, but it is no longer available.

Refutations of Salafism and other anti-Salafi material have gone out of print and out of favor. A summary of doctrine first published by the Diyanet in 1999 lists Selefiyye as a separate Sunni theological school alongside the traditionally recognized Ash‘ari and Maturidi systems indeed, it lists Salafism first among the three.

Hilmi Demir, a theology professor at Hitit University, has noted how this internalization of Salafism as a respected Sunni tradition was also adopted by the Turkish state. He discussed Salafism as a legitimate school within Sunni Islam. His index contains nine mentions of Selefi (Salafi), six for Selefiler (Salafis/Salafists), six for Selefiye (Salafism), five for Selef (the ancestors), two for Selef-i Salihin (the pious ancestors), and one each for Selefi akımlar (Salafi trends), Selefi düşünce (Salafi thought), and Selef mezhebi (the Salafi school). In his first works published in the late 1970s, Ali Bulaç did not discuss the notion of “Salafism,” but by 1994 when he published İslam Düşüncesinde Din-Felsefe, Vahiy-Akıl İlişkisi (The Relationship between Religion-Philosophy, Revelation-Intellect in Islamic Thought) a clear shift had occurred. Yet Islamic public intellectuals who became influential voices in this period began to engage with Salafism. As such, Selefilik or Selefiye (the lack of stability in the terminology indicates the recent nature of the trend) was discussed as a phenomenon alien to Turkey. As it became better known and received attention from Turkish scholars of religion from the 1990s, it was associated more with the jihadi movement that began in Afghanistan. The material was not framed in terms of Salafism, a term that was only beginning to make its way into the public sphere. This opened the way for cooperation between the Saudi-based World Muslim League and Turkey’s religious affairs administration-the Diyanet-and the education ministry in propagating religious material. These ties led to a state promotion of Islam―embodied in the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, the ideological framework that reconciled Turkish nationalism with religion―that also aimed to undercut the opposition Islamist movement of Necmettin Erbakan. Although the military coup in 1980 was carried out by those who saw themselves as the guardians of Kemalist secularism, the junta forged closer ties with Saudi Arabia, viewing it as a conservative force interested in maintaining the regional political order. Salafi discourse has made considerable inroads in Turkey over the past 30 years, making contributions to sectarianism in ways that have yet to be fully studied and understood.

#MEHMET ZEKI ISCAN SERIES#

Are religious doctrinal differences primarily responsible for stoking intercommunal fear and hatred? What roles have state, sub-state and transnational actors played in fomenting sectarian discord? And what could to foster tolerance and peaceful coexistence? The essays in this series tackle these and other salient questions pertaining to sectarianism in the MENA and Asia Pacific regions.

Mehmet zeki iscan