Politics as sedition and the headscarved candidate question

These days, Etyen Mahçupyan's very important articles on the intellectuals of the Islamic segment have not yet started the debates I was expecting, but in my view, they hold up a priceless mirror to this segment, among whom I of course count myself. In his last article, Mahçupyan puts the summary of five consecutive articles thus: "The intellectuals of the Islamic segment have not yet experienced a confrontation with their own mentality and their communities, and indeed shy away from it."

According to him, "until recently the Islamic segment was under the siege of the secular intelligentsia. For that reason criticism turned, on one hand, to the West and modernity and, on the other, to Kemalism and secularism... We can say that today that point has been passed... Yet the constricting effect of communitarianism on Islamic intellectuals continues. These intellectuals use one another's thoughts only as occasions for mutual praise. We can read very little about the points on which they disagree, which divide them. Thus, while the possibility of issues maturing is blocked, we also understand that the Islamic community is still quite far from a democratic mentality that would imply self-criticism."

It is impossible not to agree with these criticisms. First of all, I should state that I made a similar criticism much earlier in an article of mine, with the observation that a mentality besieges, in Turkey, the other segments as well, beginning with the Islamic one. The language Ali Bulaç has used these days in his criticisms of headscarved women (though he softened this language somewhat in his next article) presupposes the Islamic segment to be a monolithic community arranged hierarchically from top to bottom. Within this structure no gap has been left that would allow the political to emerge. Because society functions as a perfect organic body, and within this understanding any will to politicality can only be met as a fitna (sedition).

"The political molds that for years united Turkish politics under the ideal of one society, one state, one nation, one people, one education, one religion, one sect, and that took everything under their influence by condemning every kind of social difference as fitna, have imbued a whole society with the traces of a kind of archi-politics. At the archi-political level, that is, at the most basic level of politics, criticism is perceived as fitna. For individuals, or groups within the general whole, to confront the whole by looking after their own interests is a fitna that disrupts the indivisible unity. The notion of the peace of society is very important at this level.

The basic level of politics does not mean that this politics is applied in a society that is primitive in every respect. On the contrary, however much society grows, the reception of political searchings as a threat to the conception of a society within such a homogeneous, indivisible whole presupposes a social order in which politics is suppressed, or at least in which everyone is prevented from entering politics, politics is conducted only by those who rule, and obedience falls on all levels of the people of the community.

Such a society may well be found in a highly modern society too. Indeed, the roles that Ziya Gökalp, whose ideological or theoretical contributions to the shaping of the Turkish Republic are very well known, designed for social actors, together with his conception of organic society inspired by Durkheimian sociology, required the suppression of the political at the archi-political level. The approach that says "There is no you, no me, there is 'we'!" ignores the reality of different demands, different dreams, different interests within society. The conception of a nation, classless, privilege-free, undifferentiated, even almost genderless, on which the Republic rests, while preventing the production of any thought about the real nature of society, rests on a metaphysical conception of society, in function no different from a community, determined by constants. Moreover, strangely, it is interesting that no tradition of political thought in Turkey presents a different situation from another with regard to this denial of the political at the archi-political level. From the Kemalist to the Socialist, from the nationalist to the Islamist, this kind of denial of the political has been a widespread and common approach in nearly all community structures. The higher interests of the community are an obstacle to the emergence of particular interests within the community. One who tries to present a difference is already awakening fitna, and one who voices a separate interest of his own is playing to himself, acting selfishly, and falling in value by preferring his own interests over the community's lofty interests.

Among the many justifications for the suspension of the political within the community is, especially, the imagination of the time, calendar and road map of the specific missions that communities see themselves as bound to. Probably at some later time there will be a period in which everyone's right, share and portion will be given abundantly, and moreover given without anyone's needing to ask. But that place is this place, that time is not now. In the critical times being passed through, in these times when unity and solidarity are most needed, whoever raises his voice is a traitor, a source of fitna."

I apologize for filling my article with a long quotation from an old piece of mine.* But I could not find a better statement to provide a ground for what I want to say here. Headscarved women's entering Parliament is their most natural right, indeed perhaps, beyond a right, a matter of bearing a responsibility regarding a symbol. Even if that were not so, their waging the struggle for it is a result of the functioning of a healthy politicality. In the light of these lines we can make sense of what it amounts to to try to suppress these demands with a super-communitarian discourse.

While it is possible to condemn the headscarf ban as a typical act of Islamophobia, one must avoid every attitude that would imply accepting it as a fate. Indeed, if possible, beginning by apologizing to Merve Kavakçı, whose right was usurped by an open injustice, and inviting her to Parliament would have been a perfect opportunity for our social restoration.

Within the context of this particular problem, it is of course not possible to do justice to what Mahçupyan has said. Without closing the way to his criticism, one can also touch on its aspects that are not accurate or could be explained otherwise, perhaps later, but in any case I would like to salute his criticism as a reasonable, wise and high level of understanding.

*A Missing Link in Turkish Political Thought: The Political, Divan Journal, issue 19, 2005 (This article was later included in my book A Critical Contribution to the History of Turkish Sociology, 2010, Küre Publications)