What is changing in the conservative neighbourhood?

Society by its nature is not a fixed structure but a dynamic one that is constantly changing and transforming. Turkish society is, of course, no exception.

When sociologists speak of the Social Structure of Turkey, they generally think, almost as if, that they are revealing Turkey's essential qualities that never change and that resist history. In doing so they do not refrain from presenting a picture they have drawn of Turkey, or at best a photograph they have taken, as a characteristic of Turkey valid for all times.

Yet no reality remains where it was frozen in the photograph frame. A photograph may perhaps say something about certain periods and places, but it tells us little about the reality of today.

A good sociology must therefore keep up with the speed of social change and respond to it by constantly updating its view of reality, changing its perspective and even its concepts.

In fact, it is by no means an idea to be dismissed that novels offer a better sociological perspective on reality than theoretical perspectives. Theories and doctrines freeze reality; the novel sets it free. A good reading that captures that freedom produces a stronger common-sense knowledge of reality. A better way of working, of course, lies in being able to build the bridge between the novel and theory, in being able to use the novel as a metaphor for understanding society better instead of serving theory.

Peyami Safa's famous novel Fatih Harbiye, for example, has since the time it was written been an important metaphor for the tension, the conflict, or the comparison between Turkey's Western-oriented, secular, imitative segment and its conservative, traditionalist segment. The qualities attributed to the two social segments through the districts of Fatih and Harbiye have undoubtedly developed in very different directions today. Under the influence of very different dynamics, Istanbul in general now carries far more, or something quite different, than what this metaphorical cliché expresses. Moreover, traditionalism or conservatism is itself undergoing changes.

I have noted here from time to time that the most important strength of the AK Parti as a political movement compared with others has been, from the start, that it has listened closely to all the data directed at sociology and at understanding society. Indeed, both when it was founded in 2001, in building its own program and discourse, and later throughout all its undertakings and electoral processes, this was one of the AK Parti's most distinguishing features.

Especially after election periods, although it focused on the question "where did we go wrong?", following the traces of the change taking place in society in general has constituted the most important secret of what they have achieved in politics so far.

Lately, however, we hear and see quite a lot about sociology in this form being neglected. There is really no need even for a warning about where this neglect may lead the political movement. Ibn Khaldun needs to be read much more attentively and carefully these days. History is full of lessons that will shed light on the present. The successes achieved today are by no means successes achieved for the first time by people of today, and the mistakes are likewise not mistakes made by being discovered for the first time today.

History repeats itself, naturally, because no lesson is taken, and to the extent that it repeats, the likelihood that what was first lived as tragedy turns into a comedy also becomes very high.

I have in my hands a very illuminating sociological study on Fatih, where the AK Parti felt strongest in the picture of society it drew in its early days, in the traditional sense, and on Başakşehir, which the AK Parti's own urban politics built. İrfan Özet's book, in which he examines "power and the transforming habitus" in Fatih and Başakşehir, which he describes as two important examples of the Conservative Neighborhood, has in a sense been a mirror for the AK Parti base's own self-reflexivity, that is, for its being able to see and understand itself.

It is important that such studies be done not only on Fatih and Başakşehir but perhaps on certain places where the AK Parti feels strong and weak, not merely as a measure for sustaining power but in order to develop politics that are more fitting and that better take into account the distances between principles and realities.

Although Fatih and Başakşehir house the subaltern, immigrant, class-climbing, small and middle-class segments of society, their politically articulated ties with power over the last 17 years have given these two urban spaces a very different air. The processes followed by the segments that, in this period or earlier, came from different parts of Anatolia and looked for opportunities to hold on and rise, the problems and tensions they encountered on entering these urban spaces, and the scene that emerged after 17 years... This time, the stories of how migrations from Syria or other countries were received only by those who had themselves just arrived and settled...

While the book recounts the stories of conservative, Islamist NGOs receiving and managing this migration and developing policies about it, the observations about the change that has over time taken place in the habitus of the NGOs also deserve to be dwelt on at length. The phrase "NGO networks turning into an apparatus of power," for example, says a great deal. Membership in NGOs, in their form articulated with conservative power, has become a step for a career rather than a fully voluntary activity. An NGO representative suffering from this puts the situation thus: "I am looking for a man of the cause. They say, 'what about my means?'" (p. 107).

Undoubtedly both Başakşehir and Fatih are like a veritable laboratory for following Turkey's sociological development, but they are also places that must be watched carefully for the sake of sound politics, for updating politics.

As I read Özet's study, I thought that, had it not been done by him for his own doctoral work, it should have been commissioned institutionally by the AK Parti. And of course similar ones too...

(İrfan Özet, Fatih Başakşehir: Muhafazakar Mahallede İktidar ve Dönüşen Habitus, İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2019).