The Knights of New Turkey

The Enduring Hold of Islam in Turkey: The Revival of the Religious Orders and the Rise of Erdoğan, by David S. Tonge. C. Hurst & Co. 376pp.

Years ago we had the church. That was only a way of saying—we had each other. The Knights of Columbus were real head-breakers; true guineas. They took over their piece of the city.

The Departed

The Knights of Columbus are a Catholic fraternal organization established in 1882 in New Haven, Connecticut, where the headquarters still resides at One Columbus Plaza, a forbidding skyscraper of dark brown brick and smoked glass. Founded for the relief of workingmen’s widows and orphans by a young Irish-American priest, Michael McGivney, the Knights became the largest, most powerful Catholic men’s group in the country. 

In the First World War, they provided hospital support and entertainment for troops on the front lines; during the Mexican Civil War, they funneled arms and money to the Cristero counterrevolutionaries; today, they underwrite churches, hospitals, and the pro-life movement. Numbered in their membership were Al Smith, Richard Daley, and John F. Kennedy. So were Conrad Hilton and Vince Lombardi. It’s fair to say that, in the 20th century (and even, to a degree, in our own less colorful era), a Catholic man of any public standing was expected to be an official devotee of the example of Fr. McGivney and the principles of charity, unity, fraternity, and patriotism, as exemplified in the secret ceremonials of the order. The funny hats, however, are optional.

There’s not much sinister going on here; if it’s a conspiracy, it’s one of the thousands of conspiracies that make up what we call civil society in a free republic. Freedoms of association and religion necessarily entail the freedom of religious associations. In America, where the live-and-let-live spirit is infectious and permeates everything from the top down, this has mostly worked out all right. The Knights of Columbus and the Holy Name Society are about as politically disruptive as the Elks or the Rotary; they have failed to establish Popish despotism by dint of not having tried.

This basically gentle secularism—a two-way street between the state and the religion-inflected elements of civil society—is one of the several ways in which These States are exceptional. Taking whiggism as a starting point has its upsides. The experience of the Old World has been uniformly less happy: Within living memory at the American independence, Catholic elements seriously contested the British crown; the motion of French politics from the Revolution is the imposition of and reaction to laicite until at least 1968; the adversarial relations of the Christian churches and the Warsaw Pact governments hardly need recital.

The experience of Turkey stands out for several reasons, foremost of which is that the Ottoman Empire—which the modern, secular republic replaced—was not only a political organ, but the world focal point of Sunni Islam. The Ottoman sultans had also been holders of the caliphate since the 16th century, when Selim I (“the Grim”) wrested the title from the last Abbasid. The Turkic peoples had been converted to Islam by the Sufi saints of Central Asia, and the Ottomans oversaw a great flowering of tarikat—communities devoted to following the example and teachings of an individual sheikh (şeyh in Turkish), who can claim some line of spiritual descent from the Prophet. These orders became wealthy and influential through the patronage of the empire’s great and good; the sultans were invariably attended by a favorite şeyh, and some orders became attached to particular state organs. (The Bektaşi order, to take one prominent example, was so intimately connected with the Janissaries that it was officially suppressed at the same time as the corps.) In turn, the tarikat provided a wide variety of social services in support of the Ottoman commonweal—education, almsgiving, hospitals, military chaplaincies, and, occasionally, espionage networks for the Sublime Porte.

The considerable influence of the House of Osman over Muslims outside Turkish lands, including through the Sufi orders, was viewed with trepidation by rival powers. Foremost of these were Russia, with its large Muslim, Turkic populations in Central Asia, and Britain, with its large Muslim population in India. Hence the eager dismemberment of the Empire following the First World War, along with the occupation of Istanbul by the Allied Powers. Hence also the Greek invasion of Turkey, encouraged by British philhellenes. Nationalist elements formed a parliament at Ankara, and the Turkish army under Mustafa Kemal Paşa expelled the invasion in what is now known as the Turkish War of Independence. 

This iteration of the National Assembly was a conspicuously pious operation—several şeyh were members, and its operations were accompanied by much religious fanfare, including readings from the Kuran, sacrifices, and the display of relics of the Prophet. After the expulsion of foreign forces and the conclusion of the Treaty of Lausanne, which set Turkish borders as they exist today, Kemal turned his attention to the modernization of Turkey and the consolidation of his control over the postwar Turkish state. A republic was established, with Kemal at its head. He soon turned against institutional religion, which both rivaled his own power base and prevented Turkish progress into modernity. 

Kemal’s generation of nationalists appealed to the distant, pre-Islamic past of the Turkic peoples, reviving the ideology of Turanism, named after the mythical pan-Turkic homeland of Turan. (We need not dwell on the similarities to contemporary political ideologies in Europe.) The republican government abolished the caliphate and struck the official status of Islam from the constitution. Islam, while accepted as a part of Turkish heritage, was to be modernized, Turkicized, and subjected to state control. Independent madrasas were shuttered, and higher religious instruction was consigned to an underfunded state institution. Abortive efforts were made to force müezzin to use Turkish translations of the call to prayer. The tarikat were formally banned. Resistance from religious leaders—including as part of a Kurdish uprising of 1925, the Şeyh Said rebellion—drew harsher enforcement still.

Kemal himself, though on occasion he could display the scrupulous ritual correctness of an old Ottoman paşa, was in practice a deist. (The testament to his regard for orthodox Muslim practice is his death by liver failure in 1938.) Secularism became one of the seven official points of Kemalism, the official ideology of the Çümhüriyetçi Halk Partisi (CHP), the Republican People’s Party. CHP ruled without serious rival, and, indeed, sometimes as the official party of state, until 1949. Widespread dissatisfaction with secularization, particularly the shortage of imams, sent the Demokrat Parti (DP) of Adnan Menderes to power on a platform of relaxing the persecution of organized religion. The tarikat began their return to public life from the underground.

The elite-secular-nationalist, popular–Islamist dialectic has continued to dominate Turkish public life in the decades since. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was jailed in the 1990s for violating secularism laws, has made his project to synthesize the nationalist and Islamist strains in what he has termed Yeni Türkiye, the New Turkey. David S. Tonge, a journalist and long-time resident of Turkey, has given what will be regarded as the magisterial English treatment of the history and current configuration of this dialectic in The Enduring Hold of Islam in Turkey: The Revival of the Religious Orders and Rise of Erdoğan. 

A great strength of the book is that Tonge assumes little prior knowledge of Islam or Turkish history. (Despite nearly 25 years of constant American meddling in the Middle East, little understanding of Islam has entered into Anglophone general knowledge.) The result is, however, somewhat sprawling; a mix of chronological and topical organization makes the many threads occasionally difficult to follow. Yet completeness seems to be the more important virtue. A glossary and thorough index allows the reader to refamiliarize himself as necessary. 

Tonge gives particular attention to the large and influential Nakşibendi family of tarikat, whose historical influence stretches from Turkey proper to northern India, where it influenced the Deobandi school, from which Afghanistan’s Taliban draws its intellectual tradition. (A significant point often elided, even a quarter-century on from the inauguration of the Global War on Terror, is that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are radically different sorts of Muslim, naturally only allies of convenience at best.) It is from the Nurcu group of this family that Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet movement grew; Erdoğan has relied on the Menzil tarikat of the same family to replace Gülenists in state offices following the 2016 coup attempt. 

As Turkey emerges as a regional leader after backing the successful final campaign against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, Islam’s prominence in Turkish politics seems only to be growing. Among the most high-profile diplomatic episodes following Assad’s ouster, was the Turkish intelligence director’s visit to Damascus’ Umayyad mosque. The Enduring Hold of Islam in Turkey will be an invaluable guide to the long, surprisingly troubled history of one of the world’s largest, most powerful Muslim nations and the dynamics that continue to govern its public life.