Is There a Turkish Islam? The Emergence of Convergence and Consensus

This paper attempts to demonstrate that it is not only the universal principles of Islam that ground our everyday actions, but also the practical and immediate issues which we confront. Although Islam provides a universal set of principles to make life meaningful, I shall argue that these principles are vernacularized and localized in specific narratives. By offering seven diverse zones of Islam, I seek to bring this critical and dynamic distance into the forefront to understand that there is no universal model or a single highway to salvation but, instead, there are multiple ways of being and becoming a Muslim. In the first part of the paper, I seek to disaggregate the concept of ‘Islamic or Muslim world’ by identifying seven diverse competing and conflicting ‘zones’ of political Islam, each characterized by their conversion pattern, colonial legacy, type of nationalism and by the state–society relations and political economy that factor into these evolving separate zones. At the same time and under certain political conditions, one also sees the emergence of consensus and similar ‘public opinion’ across zones on various issues. After identifying the features of three of the seven zones (Arab, Persian and Turkish), the paper focuses on Sufism, the frontier legacy of the Ottoman state, and on the tax-based economy and the expanding political opportunity spaces, to account for the construction of Islamic knowledge and practices in the Turkish zone. We are not here as Turkish Muslims to put ourselves in the service of Islam, but to put Islam in the service of life. (Fethullah Gülen)