Easy nationalism

That 99 percent of Turkey's population is Muslim is one of the most unquestioned, most eternally accepted formulas we have. This 99 percent, for as long as we can remember, neither increases nor decreases.

Whether everyone counted within this figure counts himself in that 99 percent with peace of mind or not, we probably do not even wonder. Let alone that, however it has remained, the minority of one percent; and even though it is known that many people counted as Muslims have a not at all pleasant relationship with Islam, even their situation does not affect this figure. Still, how policies so alien, so hostile to Islamic values find ground for implementation in a country where 99 percent of the people are Muslim is a separate question, but if we accept the figure as correct, how this 99 percent was reached is a far more interesting event.

It is estimated that until 1915 more than 30 percent of Turkey's population was probably non-Muslim. The country, cleansed of its Armenian population with the Deportation of 1915, became fully Muslim after the war, that is, after the exchange agreement implemented between Republican Turkey and Greece.

That is, Turkey's reaching an almost homogeneous Muslim population took place under the Republican administration, which would later adopt secularism as a basic principle and begin an open struggle against the social manifestations of Islam. Until then, under the Ottoman administration, whose religious-Islamic emphasis was extremely strong, there was an environment of complete ethnic and religious pluralism. Indeed, in this pluralistic environment Muslims continued for centuries to be almost a minority population of the empire, and no serious discomfort was shown about it. We know that, contrary to the Republican regime whose course would turn toward secularism, making this contribution to the Muslimization of Turkey's demography was not its own choice. We also know that Britain used a great deal of persuasion at Lausanne to convince Turkey of this exchange...

In the end, although with the exchange Turkey was cleansed of its Greek population, what may be more important is that in return the Balkans experienced a process of being cleansed of a Muslim population. In the process of nation-forming, while Turkey was cleansing itself of populations it regarded as deviant, the same was being aimed at in Greece and the other Balkan countries.

The idea of creating a pure, clear nation is the easy idea that all nation-building processes first fall for. Since creating a nation out of a certain diversity, a difference, seemed laborious, the facile option of creating a nation by pruning the differences, by flattening them instead of producing a richness out of diversities, proved more tempting.

What Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül said in his speech in Brussels on 10 November is actually nothing more than a declaration of what is already known about practices in Turkey's own nation-forming process. Indeed, not only Turkey: for a period many nation-states imagined that they could not create a nation without pruning the differences within themselves. It is clear that this has to do with a thoroughgoing modernist crudeness. Crude modernity has a tendency to flatten everything, to make an appearance of equality by eliminating differences. Its crudeness comes from the fact that it regards differences as laborious to deal with: "Who will bother with so many differences!"

With this view it reduces the state to the aridity of a standard devoid of every kind of subtlety and neglectful of every detail. That the whole of society is Muslim is comforting and makes governing easier. That all of these Muslims are Sunni-Hanafi is also the desire of this facility. Even regarding the dress reform, recall the justifications engraved into our brains from primary school on: so many different garments in society create an image of chaos, a headgear made to be worn by everyone removes this variety of appearance... We are not even getting into the headscarf issue here...

To establish a national state in a country with Greek and Armenian elements would indeed have been very, very laborious for this mindset. This is a country where the saying "If it weren't for the schools, I would run National Education very well" was not said in vain.

This crudeness, this facility has unfortunately permeated all our affairs. Apparently a process may have taken place, such as "Muslimizing 99 percent," that perhaps flatters the ears of devout people, but those who know also know that this process ended up charging a very bitter, very heavy price to the quality of that Islam itself. At the simplest, Islam has been reduced to an element of national identity and has therefore lost much of its religious character. Moreover, Islam has also been affected excessively by the facility and crudeness of this national identity. Adherents of a religion that in every period of history was a master of producing, with endless self-confidence and subtle cultural patterns of behavior, relations with all kinds of non-Muslims would never have coveted the cheap and deadly benefits of a religious-ethnic cleansing.

Yet today they bear on themselves all the barrenness of a national identity produced only on this covetousness.