Turkey: Islam, Nationalism and Modernity
Principal Investigator: Carter Findley
Turkey: Islam, Nationalism and Modernity examines Turkey’s
transition from Ottoman empire to nation-state. From 1789
to the present, Findley argues, the Turks triangulated
over time in relation to three reference points: Islam,
nationalism, and modernity.
Choices among these reference points led to the rise
of two strategies for engaging with modernity: a radical,
secular current of fast, disruptive change, and a conservative,
Islamic current of slow, adaptive change. As the Turks
negotiated their transition from a multinational, Islamic
empire to a Turkish nation-state, the two currents interacted
to shape modern Turkish society.
The radical current was closely associated with the formation
of new civil and military elites and the rise of “print
capitalism,” symbolized by the emergence in 1860
of privately owned, Turkish-language print media. The
radicals engineered the Young Turk revolution of 1908
and ruled the republic for two generations. They still
retain powerful positions and have made secularism into
a lasting “belief system.”
The conservative current was expressed in a series of
Islamic religious movements, somewhat comparable to the
“Great Awakenings” in the early United States.
Most influential were movements launched by Shaykh Khalid
al-Naqshbandi (1777-1826), Said Nursi (1873-1960), and
Fethullah Gülen (1938- ). Powerful under the Ottoman
Empire, Islamic conservatives did not again control Turkish
government until the 1980s. However, their movement had
great cultural significance throughout the 19th and 20th
centuries.
Although the radical movement has been extensively studied,
the conservative one has been less so, and the interaction
between the two has not. Findley’s book differs
from previous studies in that it sees the history of Turkey
not as an evolution from religion and autocracy toward
secularism and nationhood, but as a dialectical interaction
between two powerful forces that interacted across time
to shape Turkish history.
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Carter Findley
Professor of History
The Ohio State University
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