Islamist views on foreign policy: Examples of Turkish Pan-Islamism in the writings of Sezai Karakoc and Necmettin Erbakan.

• Author: Calabro, Alessio
• Position: ARTICLE

ABSTRACT In the case of Turkey, competing foreign policy perspectives have always represented a central issue in the ideological clash between Kemalism and Islamism, revolving around the definition of Turkey's identity and its future in the international arena. This paper analyzes the foreign policy writings of two dissimilar figures of Turkey's political Islam, namely Necmettin Erbakan and Sezai Karakoc, both considered central for the development of the Islamist ideology in Turkey. This study explores their texts and detects similitudes revealing their common connection with Turkey's expression of the Pan-Islamist trend that reemerged during the Cold War. The analysis of these two authors concludes by pointing out the nationalist element characterizing Turkish Islamism--and Turkish Pan-Islamism--in comparison with analogous non-Turkish expressions of this ideology.

Introduction

The National Outlook movement (NO, Milli Gorus), to which several political parties were affiliated throughout Turkey's political history, stood for decades as the main representative of Islamism in the country. The national identity envisioned by Milli Gorus had very important implications for the field of foreign relations. During the two decades between the 1960 and the 1980 coups, for the first time in Turkish republican history, new circumstances allowed a free debate on foreign policy issues to emerge. (1) The 1961 Constitution allowed a "liberalization of the political spectrum," (2) and the translation of many foreign ideological texts, including the Islamist ones, affected the Turkish context. (3) Religion became more visible and important within the country's political process. (4)

For most Turkish Islamists, both inside and outside the NO, belonging to the Turkish nation was ideologically subordinate to their belonging within the transnational Islamic community, glorifying Turkey's leading role due to its Ottoman legacy notwithstanding. The Kemalist project of cutting ties with the Muslim world to bolster the Republic's Western orientation was for the Islamists a violence inflicted on the genuine identity of the Turks as members of the umma (the community of Muslim believers), forerunners of the Muslim world and heirs to the Ottoman State. Therefore, foreign policy became a crucial symbol of the divergence between Kemalists and Islamists in Turkey. Foreign policy became one of the most evident examples of the clash between the two camps, (5) sometimes emerging as tension among different institutions. (6) The transnational integrity of the umma, the theoretical prerequisite of political Islam's approach to international relations, (7) whether it projects a unified Islamic state or just enhanced cooperation among Muslim countries, is also the precondition for the elaboration and the spread of the ideal of Pan-Islamism throughout the history of Islamist thought.

This paper demonstrates, through the writings of Turkish Islamists Sezai Karakoc and Necmettin Erbakan, the two authors' belonging within a neo-Pan-Islamist trend. By finding the elements of this trend in their texts, it attempts to show how Turkey's Islamists elaborated their vision of the world order and their approach to foreign affairs in light of the new Pan-Islamism of the 1960s, whose major exponents outside of Turkey were the Pakistani Abul A'la Maududi and the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb. This analysis detects in Karakoc and Erbakan's articles the West-Islam dichotomy that underlies the new Pan-Islamism that emerged during the Cold War, as did a new conceptualization of umma. Together with the reference to the umma, this dichotomy is both a link with the old Pan-Islamism and a constant point of emphasis for these authors. Consequently, I observe the ideology expressed in the authors' texts as constructed in opposition to other ideologies and "outgroups" that were present in Turkey and which they labeled "Western-made." This opposition is explicitly revealed not only through their choice of topics and the specific meanings they attach to them, but also by the discursive strategies they used to mark their distinctions from the others. (8)

The choice of Karakoc and Erbakan for this analysis is intended to observe the presence of renewed Pan-Islamist ideas in Turkey both inside and outside the NO parties. The paper suggests the importance of Karakoc's ideas for Turkey's Islamism, especially in terms of international vision. In this regard, comparing his thoughts to those of Erbakan can confirm the impact of this thinker on the political activity that emerged from Turkey's Islamist environment. Moreover, the two figures are here taken as the two champions of those ideas during the Cold War era in Turkey. The different roles played by the two, Karakoc being an intellectual--though also founder of a small party--and Erbakan a politician, delineate the differences in the emphasis they give to certain aspects of the Islamist discourse. Nevertheless, the comparison remains valuable as they represent two different but linked areas of Turkey's Islamist sphere. Erbakan was a policy-maker and a party leader, whose action was necessarily dependent on the practice of politics stricto sensu. In contrast, the figure of Karakoc is rather that of an independent ideologue who contributed over time to the shaping of Islamism in Turkey, moving from the sphere of literature into the broader political sphere, with the less pragmatic, but certainly unrestrained attitude of a political thinker. This article identifies Karakoc as a key thinker for the elaboration of foreign policy-related views in contemporary Turkish Islamism. For this reason, and because they have been less studied than those of other Turkish Islamist authors, Sezai Karakoc's political works are here chosen for a comparison with the texts produced by Erbakan on similar issues. Analyzing these two different figures jointly allows for a comprehensive look into Turkish political Islam's approach to foreign affairs and its Pan-Islamist tradition.

More importantly, by considering the writings of the two authors in question, this paper aims to show how Turkish Islamism, as demonstrated in particular by the study of Turkish Pan-Islamism, has been characterized by a nationalist element that differentiates it from analogous expressions of political Islam around the world. Even if Turkish Islamists recognized the umma as the supreme nation of all Muslims, the abovementioned glorification of Turkey's Ottoman legacy was often linked to a claim for Turkish leadership in the Muslim world. Consequently, despite the various Pan-Islamist initiatives built by Saudi Arabia between the 1960s and the 1980s--from the establishment of international organizations to financial support to Muslims in conflict against non-Muslims (9)--Turkey's Islamist authors have tended to build a distinct discourse, in which Turkey is to emerge as the sole suitable leader of the Muslim umma, and there is no reference to any existing state-led initiative. According to some Turkish scholars like Menderes Cinar and Burhanettin Duran, Turkey's political Islam has never been completely separate from nationalism. (10) This could be a reason why Turkish Islamist discourse, exemplified by the views developed by the two figures analyzed here, developed foreign policy ambitions that included Turkey's predestination as leader country. This "Islamic nationalism" emerged in Turkey in the period between the first and the third coup of the Republican era (1960-1980) and continues to characterize Turkey's political Islam.

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In conclusion, this article includes Karakoc and Erbakan in the camp of Cold War Pan-Islamism, utilizes the analysis of their writings to demonstrate the distinctiveness of Turkish Islamism and Pan-Islamism in relation to others, and identifies the effects of nationalism on the communication of the Pan-Islamist message in Turkey.

Pan-Islamism and Its Incarnations in the Turkish Context

The concept of Pan-Islamism has been usefully defined by Sheikh as: "the ideational subscription to a unification, or integration, of Muslim peoples, regardless of divisive antecedents such as language, ethnicity, geography and polity."11 For Landau,12 the need for a central authority--possibly the Caliph--and obedience to this authority, have historically been among the crucial elements of the Pan-Islamist doctrine. Accordingly, Pan-Islamism has been considered a fundament of the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph Abdulhamid II's policies13 in the late 19th century. To be sure, the idea of the umma, born at the beginning of Islam's history, returns to be key to Muslim political discourse during the colonial era of the nineteenth century, "in the face of the challenge posed to Islam by the West."14 Describing disunity as the main weakness of the Muslim world,15 the Pan-Islamism that emerged during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire generally promoted the mobilization of a unified Muslim world and loyalty to the Caliph, with the intention of a final political integration to face the Western powers as one entity. After the abolition of the Caliphate, any idea of a political integration or a unified Muslim state--the latter being already considered unrealistic by influential Ottoman Pan-Islamists16--was abandoned as a tactical goal, although the idea remained as a remote utopia not officially rejected by Islamist thinkers.17 The first, Caliphate-centered Pan-Islamism lost strength and Islamist writers started giving more emphasis to a call for religious solidarity among Muslim communities, both before and after WWII. However, within the framework of the Cold War, that call for solidarity started growing into a call for "an alternative form of non-alignment,"18 as Mandaville notices in the 1960s works of the internationally known Pakistani Islamist Abul A'la Maududi. This adaptation of Pan-Islamism to the Cold-War context, though maintaining or...