Ali Bulaç: Political Ideas of a Leading Turkish Islamist

Abstract

Ali Bula is indeed one of the most controversial Islamists in contemporary Turkey. He is a well known writer in his country and has published more than twenty books. However, quoting his name in some Turkish academic or Islamist circles is ayip' (rude). The most common reaction when I would men tion that I was working on Ali Bula was 'You could have started your research with somebody more serious'. Nonetheless, Ali Bula is maybe the first example in post-1980's Turkey of a 'Muslim intellectual', a distinctive feature of Turkish contemporary Islamist writ ers. Muslim intellectuals left the active militancy of the 1970s shaped on the ex tra-parliamentary leftist movements because after the 12 September 1980 coup, they realized the deep changes in Turkish society. They started a more moderate and less ideological policy of influencing the masses through media and culture. To shake off their image of backwardness they had to fully immerge themselves in European humanities and its language yet they criticized it and tried to pro pose alternatives to Western style modernity. Ali Bula has been one of the pioneers of Islamist media as well. He passed from the marginalised reviews of the 1970s modelled on leftist press, to nation based newspapers. He was in fact also one of the founders of the most popular Islamist newspaper Zaman.