Content area
Full Text
Ayasofya, sealed by the hearts that were sealed by Allah, will open like the heart of the mukaddesatçı Turkish youth, which they tried to seal in the same way [they sealed Ayasofya], but could not do anything, could not stop the influx that increased day by day, and watch the day [the youth] would fall like an avalanche with horror1
In July 2020, the status of Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia), the monumental 6th-century A.D. Byzantine sanctuary in the heart of Istanbul, was transformed by presidential decree from a museum to a mosque for Muslim prayers.2 The first Friday prayer was led by the head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, the chief religious official in Turkey, and attended by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan together with thousands of his supporters in and outside the building, amid the COVID-19 outbreak. It was quite a showdown—ostensibly symbolizing Turkey's return to its Islamic roots, and Muslim Turks’ salvation from the “yoke” of Westernization.3 Not merely a message to the world declaring Turkey's priorities and orientation in the international arena, the “re-conversion” of Ayasofya was intended as a sign of victory of the “authentic” Muslim Turkish identity of the people against the Western-oriented secular elite within the country. Domestic repercussions of this issue—fueled by the sermon delivered at the Friday prayer—have largely revolved around this supposedly primordial indigenous-religious and Westernist-secular duality, with frequent references to Cold War–era intellectuals.4 With the Ayasofya event, among others, Erdoğan's government and its apparatuses aimed to mobilize deep-seated resentments between generations, which are powerfully expressed in the cited quotation written by Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904–83), the well-known poet, playwright, polemicist, and ideologue of the “Islamic revival” in Turkey (Fig. 1).Figure 1.
Necip Fazıl Kısakürek. Source: https://www.necipfazilodulleri.com/necip-fazil-fotograflari.
[Figure omitted. See PDF]
Why do Erdoğan's government and its machinery associate the prevalent populist division between the people and the elite with a division between religious and secular identities? What is the connection between current populist policies and Cold War Muslim Turkish intellectuals such as Kısakürek? On what discursive platform has this policy become pervasive, given Erdoğan's long-standing political success? I argue that a Cold War ideological position in Turkey provides the intellectual background to the current mobilization of the division between religious and...