Contesting Pluralism(s): Islamism, Liberalism, and Nationalism in Turkey and Past
By Nora Fisher-Onar
Cambridge College Press, 2025
It was throughout my first go to to Istanbul, Turkey, for a convention final 12 months that I acquired to personally expertise the existential dilemmas of a rustic at a crossroads in its everlasting quest to outline and redefine itself. The contradictions had been evident and appeared as stark binaries –– evening golf equipment serving alcohol, burqa-clad ladies strolling proper previous them, jersey-wearing teenagers cheering for the Turkish nationwide soccer group, and Syrian refugee mothers with youngsters, begging for his or her survival. However within the midst of all these obvious contradictions, there in some way was a way of mutual conciliation and concord that stored the pluralistic nature of the town alive and thriving.
It’s this puzzle that Nora Fisher-Onar makes an attempt to make sense of in her current e book, Contesting Pluralism(s) (2025). The e book challenges the traditional knowledge {that a} binary contest between ‘Islam’ vs. ‘democracy’ or ‘secularism’ is the driving power in Turkey’s politics. Declaring the restrictions of such arduous, identitarian binaries in explaining real-world outcomes, she introduces the 2 cross-camp coalitions constructed round ‘pluralizers’ (who try for larger pluralism in society) versus ‘anti-pluralists’ (who espouse the need for a extra unitary nationwide undertaking) as an analytical framework to hint the evolution of the political trajectory in Turkey and past. That is established by using wealthy empirical knowledge of the historical past of political contests, ranging from the late Ottoman interval all the way in which to the current. The e book evaluates the Turkish political narrative as a collection of cross-camp coalitions of ‘pluralizers’ that periodically tackle the ‘anti-pluralists’ –– who need the ‘Others’ to “look or converse, love or consider like they do” (Fisher-Onar 2024:1).
Fisher-Onar begins off with the story of the 2016 army coup and the cross-party coalition that got here collectively in assist of the democratically elected chief of the AK Social gathering Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Declaring the rising discontent with the frameworks espousing arduous ‘Islam’ versus ‘Western’ binaries, each Orientalism and Occidentalism alike, she proceeds to look at the three ‘waves’ of mental engagements inside inter-disciplinary Turkish research to judge these binaries and their limitations. The primary wave, which the e book phrases “pursuit of parity”, carefully aligns with the social engineering initiated through the preliminary a long time of the Turkish Republic beneath the umbrella rubric of ‘Kemalism’, which sought to transcend Orientalism by performing ‘Westernness’ and downplaying its Ottoman-Islamic inheritance. Disillusionment with this method quickly gave rise to the second wave in direction of the second half of the 20th century, termed “recognition of distinction”, which manifested within the type of ‘post-Kemalist’ makes an attempt to rediscover Turkey’s Ottoman-Islamic previous, and emphasised its ‘genuine’ cultural variations with the West, carefully resembling the ideological pressure of Occidentalism (Fisher-Onar 2024:194).
Fisher-Onar (2024:21) classifies her work beneath the third class of literature, which includes “making sense of complexity” by rejecting each the Orientalist/Occidentalist binary tropes definitive of the preliminary two waves. She re-iterates that the phrases ‘secular’ and ‘Islamic’ have more and more develop into “empty signifiers” –misappropriated in a single’s seek for hegemony and energy consolidation amidst Turkey’s turbulent political local weather (2024:23). In response to her, for the reason that late Ottoman interval, solely hardly ever have the political contests in Turkey really pitted Islamists versus secularists. Quite, political change is pushed by shifting alignments of ‘pluralizers’ and ‘anti-pluralists’ throughout inter- and intra-camp alliances, and betrayals. To make sure, Fisher-Onar (2024:35) makes use of the time period ‘pluralism’ bereft of any cultural baggage as connected to the debates inside Western political idea –– somewhat, pluralism is just outlined when it comes to a “primary willingness to share area with a number of Different(s)”. Fisher-Onar (2024:32) requires a extra “pluralistic method to pluralism”, going past the traditional theorizations constructed on the mannequin of Western liberal democracies –– a bottom-up method that strives to shut the hole between idea and follow as proponents of “new pluralism” insist.
The e book additional proceeds to delineate the dual analytical toolkits developed to assist a complete re-reading of Ottoman and Turkish politics as a story of ‘contested pluralism(s)’. The primary toolkit maps the pluralizing/anti-pluralist orientations (x-axis) vis-à-vis the function of public faith (y-axis) (see Fig 2.1, p.38). Inside this, whereas the varied strands of ethno-religious nationalism are positioned in direction of the anti-pluralist finish of the spectrum, Islamo-/secular- liberalism is positioned in direction of its pluralizing finish. Within the second toolkit, the e book adopts institutionalist approaches to map the complexities of the political system fashioned by an interplay amongst the ideational, agential, and contextual/structural parameters conceptualized (see Fig 2.2, p. 47). This framework, along with the reductionist attribution related to the causal power of concepts alone (equivalent to Islamism, liberalism, and nationalism), additionally takes under consideration the function of actors (inside establishments equivalent to political events, bureaucracies, militaries, companies, civil societies, and many others.) and the regional and international constructions (micro – equivalent to electoral rule; meso – equivalent to a rustic’s political regime; and macro –equivalent to international capitalism) that form political outcomes.
The e book proceeds to retell Turkey’s story from the late Ottoman interval to the current as a story of competing pluralizing versus anti-pluralist coalitions. It begins off with what it phrases the “lengthy nineteenth century”, which noticed pluralizing coalitions of Islamo-liberalism in its Tanzimat and Younger Ottoman expressions between 1839 till 1868, adopted by a 3rd pluralizing coalition of disparate Younger Turks who tried to revive constitutionalism and multicultural Ottoman patriotism from 1908 till 1913 (Fisher-Onar 2024:61). This was interspersed with durations of anti-pluralist tendencies within the type of Hamidian pan-Islamism between 1878 to 1908, and the Younger Turk triumvirate’s pan-Turkism between 1913 and 1918. The part of the “brief twentieth century” quickly adopted with the institution of the Turkish republic in 1924, which initially noticed the emergence of an ethno-nationalist regime beneath the banner of Ataturkism. Whereas the shift in direction of a multi-party democracy within the Fifties paved the way in which for the doable emergence of a pluralizing coalition, Turkey’s politics was thenceforth interspaced with intermittent phases of anti-pluralist coalitions fashioned beneath numerous strands of ethno-religious nationalism or Turkish-Islamic Synthesis.
Quick forwarding to the twenty-first century, the e book traces preliminary makes an attempt at forging an Islamo-liberal pluralizing alignment through the AKP’s first time period in authorities between 2002-2007, by gathering average non secular and secular actors with the overlapping aim to align Turkey with financial globalism and the EU’s undertaking of political liberalization. In direction of the tip of the preliminary decade nevertheless, the extra anti-pluralist faction throughout the AKP gained prominence –culminating in Erdogan’s pivot from a ‘EU-niversalist’ body of reference to that of ‘neo-Ottomanism’ round 2013 (Fisher-Onar 2024:178). Whereas the preliminary developments of non secular populism nonetheless supplied average areas for realizing ethnic plurality, a collection of occasions such because the intra-Islamist conflict of the early 2010s, and the collapse of peace processes with the Kurds, led to an evident shift in direction of ethno-religious nationalism by 2016. This alliance of Islamist and secular nationalists, which Fisher-Onar (2024:254) cash “Turkish-Islamist Synthesis 2.0”, has entrenched Turkey’s intolerant flip in direction of an anti-pluralist incumbency on the time of writing. Nevertheless, she asserts hope within the e book’s framework by implying that beneath the proper situations, concepts and actors might coalesce into renewed coalitions for pluralism.
That being mentioned, you will need to word that makes an attempt to find the so-called ‘pluralizing’ coalition between ‘Islamo-liberals’ and ‘secular-liberals’ throughout the identical ontological aircraft beneath the ambit of pluralism would inevitably result in the re-invention of hegemonies of the ‘one-world’ assumptions of Western modernity –– in stark distinction with the a long time of decolonial ‘many worlds’ critique which have come about. This was exactly what Ahmet Davutoglu talks about in his 1993 conceptualization of the variations between Western and Islamic Weltanschauungs as being paradigmatic in nature, somewhat than merely historic or institutional, with the ‘ontological proximity’ of the previous contrasted with the ‘ontological differentiation’ of the latter. Equally, due warning must be taken when making use of the conceptual framework of ‘pluralism’ to an Islamic context. As an alternative, it’s extra applicable to acknowledge an alternate logic of pluralism rooted throughout the Islamic custom as traced by its hermeneutical interpretations when questioning with the “Different”, as famous by SherAli Tareen (2023: 35).
With these caveats, I consider that Contesting Pluralism(s) is a well timed intervention in dismantling each the hegemonic Oriental and Occidental binaries which have pitted Islamists versus secularists in Turkey, in addition to within the Muslim world usually –– which has, in flip, facilitated misappropriation by actors throughout each camps in their very own makes an attempt at energy consolidation centred round a unitary political id. As an alternative, Fisher-Onar’s framework of cross-camp coalitions constructed round ‘pluralizers’ versus ‘anti-pluralists’ affords a way more nuanced conceptual lens to seize the complexities surrounding the operation of political outcomes by an interaction between ideational, agential, and structural parameters within the case of Turkey and past. That is notably important, on condition that Turkey is ready to play a larger function in regional politics with the current overthrow of the Iran-backed Assad regime in Syria by the Turkish-backed fighters belonging to the Syrian Nationwide Military and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) –– throwing open the debates surrounding ethno-religious nationalism in Turkey to an entire new dynamic.
References
Davutoglu, A. (1993). Various Paradigms: The Impression of Islamic and Western Weltanschauungs on Political Concept (1st ed.). College Press of America.
Tareen, S. (2023). Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (1st ed.). Columbia College Press.
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