Christopher Houston

Civilizing Islam, Islamist Civilizing? Turkey's Islamist Movement and the Problem of Ethnic Difference

The Islamist critique of the post-1923 regime in Turkey centres around the deconstruction of the Republics civilizing mission. Here the modernization of the rump of the Ottoman Empire undertaken in the name of the universality of western civilization (with the consequent attributing of backwardness to Islam) is problematized: Islamist discourse converges with other postmodern critiques in proclaiming the exhaustion of modernity as a project of emancipation. Islamist politics celebrate the return of the Muslim actor and identity. And yet the making of an Islamist movement is threatened by the mobilization of other political identities similarly suppressed by the Turkish states modernizing project. This includes in particular Kurdish subjectivity, long a target of assimilation in the name of the universality of the greater Turkish nation. This paper examines the fragmenting of the Islamist movement in Turkey, as well as Islamist attempts to head off Kurdish nationalism. The Islamist suppression of difference within its own ranks in the name of an Islamic universalism betrays it too as a descendant of Enlightenment discourses and a modernizing movement in its own right.

Islamism, Castoriadis and Autonomy

In the context of nationalizing, secularizing or Kemalist states, analyses of Islamist movements are often thrown back on notions of traditionalism or atavism. In a related vein, for certain social theorists writing on modernity, the uniqueness of the West is clarified through an imaginative [mis]interpretation of other cultures or civilizations. Too often, however, the apparent gains in Western self-insight reflect an ‘inability to constitute oneself without excluding the other’ (Cornelius Castoriadis). Ironically Castoriadis himself, in a project we might term an ethnography of the West (see his writings on ecology, capitalism, rationality, contemporary culture, racism, Greek philosophy/history, and the environment) is prone to the same vice, especially in his identification of the West as the sole autonomous society. This article argues that in the shariainstitution of a legal autonomy, Islam and Islamism alike demonstrate an affinity with modernity as defined by Castoriadis. In the light of this Islamist autonomy, it concludes that Castoriadis’ vision of modernity as a struggle between opposed imaginaries of autonomy and rational mastery needs reformulating.

Islamic Solutions to the Kurdish Problem: Late Rendezvous or Illegitimate Shortcut?

In a recent book detailing the massive war migration in the South-East of Turkey, Kemal Ozturk questions: “Has an Islamic position been made clear on the Kurdish problem, which for the last ten years has assumed the highest place on the national agenda?” and goes on to ask: “In the fifteen reports suggesting solutions to the Kurdish problem is there one representing muslims?” He concludes by saying, “Unfortunately the answer to both questions must be ‘no’” (Ozturk 1996, p. 104). Ozturks comments are interesting for three reasons: first, is his assumption that a distinct Islamic stance is possible regarding the Kurdish problem. Second is his deploring of the fact that such a position has not been enunciated. And third is the rather disingenuous claim that the lack of a clear response in the name of Islam is synonymous with no position at all by the religious camia (community), as if the ‘de facto’ positions of muslims, i.e. their actual practice, could be dismissed quite so unproblematically.

The Iranian diaspora in Sydney : migration experience of recent Iranian immigrants

Recent research has found that discrimination against Islam and Muslims is deeply rooted in Australia. This report explores whether or how recent Iranian migrants have experienced racism, discrimination, or Islamaphobia in Sydney. These questions are explored by focusing on their experiences and issues regarding their making of new lives in Australia. This article suggests that recent Iranian migrants are experiencing far less discrimination than other Muslim diasporas in Sydney. Concluding that despite recent reports by some researchers grouping various Muslim populations together as regards Islamaphobia, there is a necessity for investigating discrimination, stereotyping, and Islamaphobia against particular diasporas to determine the needs of the Muslim population at large.

Ankara, Tehran, Baghdad Three varieties of Kemalist urbanism

Kemalism has been the guiding and justifying ideology of the Turkish Republic since its institution in 1923. That Kemalism is exclusive to Turkey is a mainstay of Kemalist self-perception. But was (or is) Kemalism as political practice pursued by other regimes in the region? This paper argues that Kemalism should also be understood as a project of urbanism, and that urban interventions into Ankara, Tehran and Baghdad in the 20th century transformed all three into Kemalist cities. To illustrate, I describe certain features of their spatial, symbolic and sensory re-organization. My concluding remarks address the radically divergent fate of Kemalist urbanism in the contemporary cities of Baghdad, Tehran and Ankara.

Alternative Modernities: Islamism and Secularism on Charles Taylor

In his short article ’Two Theories of Modernity’ Charles Taylor makes a distinction between what he calls ’cultural’ and ’acultural’ ways of understanding the rise of modernity. For Taylor the cultural theory of modernity conceives of the changes separating Western moderns from their medieval forebears mainly ’in terms of the rise of a new culture’ (Taylor, 1995: 24). Here the focus is on the transition to modernity ’in terms of the specific cultures it carries us from and to’ (1995: 24), Western modernity being thus powered by its own original ’visions of the good’ (1995: 26). Correspondingly, in cultural theories the notion of progress is problematized. The acultural theory by contrast understands the transformations that have produced the modern West ’in terms of some culture-neutral operation’ (1995: 24). Here modernity may be conceived of as the growth of reason for example, issuing in a set of changes that any and every culture can go through as its members begin, or are forced to see, that previously held beliefs are erroneous or even self-deluding. Alternatively, social and economic developments may themselves be held responsible for the possibility of this freeing of rationality, which in time shines its light back on the conditions of its own liberation, in order to transform them in turn. However conceived, acultural theories of modernity read these changes as the result or cause of the dissipation of certain beliefs in the light of new, truer claims. Correspondingly, in this model the notion of cultural equality is problematized. Taylor’s displeasure with the acultural theory of modernity may seem to implicate him in a form of cultural relativism. For any particular culture is taken to encompass an ensemble of practices and ideas regarding ’personhood, social relations, states of mind/soul, goods and bads, virtues and vices, etc.’ (1995: 24), and is unified to the extent that it is viewed as a single constellation among others, as a member of the plurality of human cultures. Yet Taylor is concerned to trace whether and in what ways the changes named ’modernity’ can be understood as a progressive gain for the ’contemporary Atlantic world’ (i.e. the modern West) over and above the ideals and culture of its predecessors in medieval Europe. Of course such a claim may be presumed to extend potentially to other pre-modern cultures as

Generating Kemalism in the antipodes: The Turkish state, AKP, and cultural politics in Australia

In both Europe and Australia, certain key institutions of the Turkish State have for decades been producers of what we call long-distance Kemalism — the propagation outside of Turkey of the core political ideology informing the nation-building project of the Turkish Republic since its institution in 1923. From the late 1970s onwards, when Turkish State authorities realized that most ‘guest-workers’ were now permanent settlers in the destination countries, a shift in policy occurred, encouraging Turkey-born migrants abroad not to return home but to contribute to the political and economic affairs of their country of origin from their new places of residence. Accompanying this strategic change, State efforts to inculcate a nationalist subjectivity in Turkish emigrants and a political project to secularize Turkish ‘civil society’ abroad became key components of its transnational policy, a task that was carried out, in the main, by its consular institutions and by the offices of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Alongside activities aimed at mobilizing the (Turkish) diaspora, a second important component of the Republic’s ‘trans-Kemalism’ had been ‘diaspora dis-integration’, aimed at combating the perceived anti-Turkish influence of political or cultural ‘lobby-groups’ of non-Muslim or non-Turkish emigrants from Turkey, in particular those testifying to the traumatic experiences of the Greek, Armenian, and Kurdish communities there.

Anthropology, autonomy and the art of cultural revolution

Anthropologists (amongst others) have noted how some theorists of the Occident, in order to explicate their analyses of Western modernity, have conceptualized an oppositional category of non-Western, pre-modern or traditional societies, understood to be negatively unified by their lack of particular social capacities (despite other vast dissimilarities between them). One such absent elemental capacity is reflexivity, whose existence or nonexistence is posited as defining Western European and non-Western formations respectively. This article explores one expression of the reflexivity/naivety dichotomy, the distinction between autonomous and heteronomous societies, worked out as a central feature in the social theory of Cornelius Castoriadis (and as a sub-theme in the writings of Charles Taylor and Louis Dumont). My core argument is that Castoriadis’ reservation of the project of autonomy to the West is empirically wrong, and I use the example of the cultural revolution in Turkey in the early 1930s to demonstrate why. Nevertheless, I argue also that Castoriadis’ work not only casts a revealing light on the experience and project of modernity in Turkey, but also provides a suggestive comparative programme for the discipline of anthropology.

Reproducing and Contesting Social Norms and Forms in Turkey

Why a special issue on Turkey? What does learning about Turkey have to offer those readers of the Journal of Intercultural Studies who are not particularly familiar with its amazing history in the twentieth century? Let me seduce you by presenting three public announcements that made the rounds of Turkish universities in quick succession in early 2008, in response to the Government’s attempt to change the constitution so as to make it possible for headscarved women to enter the public space of Turkish universities. Taken together the petitions give readers a sense of the vital polemics animating cultural practice in Turkey, as well as the range of social issues activating political life. The first petition, sent to all Turkish academics via email (and published in the newspapers) allowed petitioners to add their name to an ever-growing public document. It read: