The Neo-Ottomanism of the Nakşibendis and the Welfare Party

The chapter examines the Nakşibendi Sufi orders, Necmettin Erbakan, and their roles in reconstructing Islamic political identity and memories of the Ottoman Empire. The debate about the politics of identity is analyzed, as based on the experience of the Islamic parties of the National Outlook Movement (Welfare Party and the Virtue Party) between 1994 and 2001. The Welfare Party’s local election victory in 1994 resulted in its controlling nearly every municipal government in Turkey. Thus, the elected officials used the resources of the municipalities to criticize the Kemalist project by promoting Ottoman history, culture, and practices as an alternative. Rather than directly promoting Islamism due to legal constraints, they preferred to frame Ottomanism as a surrogate identity and ideology to criticize Kemalism.

The Modes of Ottomanism

This chapter examines the origins, meaning, and failure of Ottomanism as a state-centric identity. The initial questions include, What are the key causes of the longing for the Ottoman Empire? What are the social implications of nostalgia for the past? What explains the current wave of Ottoman romanticism? This chapter argues that nostalgia in this instance is a bottom-up phenomenon. It traces the changing meaning of Ottomanism by exploring its historical origins in the second half of the 19th century. The chapter follows the Tanzimat Reforms of 1839 and the inevitable decline of the Ottoman Empire. The idea of Ottomanism as a new state-centric identity to unify diverse ethnic and religious groups was promoted by a small Westernizing elite, known as the Young Ottomans. The chapter’s closing question is, What was the purpose of creating a new state-centric Ottoman identity?

The Balkan and Arab Responses to Neo-Ottomanism

The chapter summarizes reactions to neo-Ottomanism in the former Ottoman territories of the Balkans and the Middle East. After a brief recap of the region’s Ottoman legacy, the chapter traces how Balkan countries (Serbia, Greece, Albania, and Bosnia) responded to neo-Ottomanism in their respective foreign policy discourses. The chapter also reviews how Arab societies remember the Ottoman period by distilling the secular-nationalist appropriation of the Ottoman Empire as backward, alien, and defined by Turkish colonial rule. In response to this secularist-nationalist reading of the Ottomans, Islamic-oriented segments of the population consider the Ottoman Empire as part of their history. They regard it as the vanguard of anti-colonial rule protecting Muslims against European colonialism. The chapter’s final section summarizes how Erdoğan became a popular figurehead for Muslim groups in the region amid the backdrop of the Arab Spring and Turkey’s growing isolation from its traditional partners in the global community.

Erdoğan’s Neo-Ottomanism

This chapter focuses on two pillars of Erdoğan’s political identity: the Ottoman Empire, especially under Abdulhamid II, and Islam. It indicates that the dual processes of Islamicization and Ottomanization in the case of Turkey are mutually reinforcing, inclusive processes. By drawing on Necip Fazıl, the most influential intellectual figure for AKP leadership, Erdoğan has argued for the restoration of Islamic values that stress order, family, and community. Turkey’s new cultural and economic elites support Erdoğan’s vision of neo-Ottomanism as a way of life that fits into a broader Islamic worldview and sustains their positions of power. Erdoğan’s near-obsessive reverence for two Ottoman Sultans (Mehmed II and Abdulhamid II) illuminates his thinking about the state’s potential for controlling the lives of its citizens. This chapter also examines various sites of reconstructed Ottoman memory in cuisine, fine arts, urban planning, and furniture.

Turgut Özal’s Neo-Ottomanism

The chapter examines the multidimensional conceptualization of neo-Ottomanism, including its strategic deployment from the early 1980s into the post–Cold War period, and Turgut Özal’s neoliberal economic policies. The chapter follows these developments that strengthened the elite in reconstructing neo-Ottomanism to respond to the decade’s challenges. The ethnic cleansing of Bulgarian Muslims in 1989, the deportation and genocidal campaign against Bosnian Muslims, and the forced exile of Azeri Turks from Karabakh compelled the masses to confront their suppressed memories in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Meanwhile, Özal inadvertently created the space for cultivating a counter-identity and ideology. The formation of a new Anatolian bourgeoisie with its support for alternative chronicles of history played an important role in reconstructing neo-Ottoman discourse.

Sites of Ottoman Memory

This chapter presents Turkish literature as an incubator for the rise of counter-identity, exploring literature not merely as an instrument for exploring memories but, more important, as a site for storing and reconstituting them. The counterpoint of fictional writers and poets against professional historians and scholars is examined. In the case of Ottoman history, early Republican novels and poems were turned into texts of collective memory that offered a basis for reimagining the self simultaneously as Ottoman/Muslim and Turk. Literature stimulated interest and desire in Turkish readers to learn more about the past. The chapter also examines the Sufi orders and their role in preserving and reviving Ottoman memory.

The Neo-Ottoman Foreign Policy of the AKP

This chapter explores the extent of contemporary neo-Ottomanism’s influence in Turkey’s foreign policy and the political infrastructure for implementing it. It examines the dynamic of the mutually constitutive relationship between Islamization and Ottomanization within three stages of Turkish foreign policy: Europeanization (2002–2010); Arab Spring and Islamicization (2010–2013); “Splendid Isolation” (2013–present). The focus of the chapter is Ahmet Davutoğlu, who provided the ideological framework for neo-Ottoman foreign policy. The analysis probes Davutoğlu’s understanding of Ottomanism as Islamist, anti-Western, adventurist, and ideological. This leads to exploring why many pundits and critics of Turkey’s foreign and domestic politics use this specific term as an epithet to signal the gradual Islamicization of domestic politics and the growing presence of Islamic irredentism in foreign policy.

The Social Origins of Nostalgia for Ottomanism

This chapter outlines six social factors that augmented a rise in Ottoman nostalgia as a countering identity and ideology against the Turkish Republic’s Westernizing reforms: the demographic makeup of Turkey as a republic of refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homes in the Balkans and Caucasus; the Westernization project of Turkey’s founding fathers for creating a European nation-state by suppressing the legacy of the Ottoman Empire; the process of democratization (i.e., mobilization of masses to move into political domains and bringing a multiplicity of identities to redefine state identity and policies); the expansion of the public sphere with newspapers, journals, and digital media to accommodate discussions of various identities and formerly taboo subjects; the introduction of market forces aligned with Turgut Özal’s neoliberal economic policies and the rise of the new Anatolian bourgeoisie; and finally, the shift from factual history to imagined memory.

Conclusion: Implications of Ottoman Nostalgia for Twenty-first Century Turkey

The multireligious and multinational Ottoman Empire did accommodate diverse identities more adeptly than the modern nation-states, which have converged on the notion of homogenization. In order to understand state-society relations in Turkey, one must realize there are two simultaneous processes in force since the Tanzimat Reform of 1839: the nationalization of the Ottoman Empire and the Ottomanization of Turkish nationalism. This demonstrates how deeply concepts of empire and nation are entangled. The shift from nationalizing the Ottoman Empire to an imperialized Turkish nation has become modern Turkey’s predominant historical narrative. Turkey’s identity is reconstituted from historical memory of the Ottoman Empire, conservative norms and Islamic values, and republican reforms and achievements. In domestic policies, government officials have stressed with greater frequency the Ottoman model of Muslim fraternity to address concerns about Kurdish secessionism.

Introduction

This chapter sets the book’s main issues by defining key concepts including nostalgia, memory, identity, nationalism, Ottomanism, variants of the Ottoman term, neo-Ottomanism, and nationalism versus patriotism. It identifies the most critical factors in the struggle to resurrect the Ottoman ideal and explains the importance of studying the rise of nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire, especially in Turkey’s political environment desiring to restore the country’s greatness as a geopolitical power. The second part examines the connection between nostalgia and contemporary Ottomanism in Turkey. After identifying diverse modes of nostalgia, the chapter focuses on the politics of identity, explaining the set of structural conditions that facilitated the reconstruction of the Ottoman memory.