Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks * By JENNY WHITE

Abstract

In an interview given in July 2012 to Today’s Zaman, a Turkish English-language daily close to the Gülen movement, the anthropologist Jenny White, reflecting on Turkey’s evolution during the last forty years, maintained that ‘in the seventies, Turkey was very much like a poor Eastern European country behind the Iron Curtain in the way it treated its citizens, in the way people feared the state and the military. There are now more possibilities; people can shape their lives in many different ways. This is important, especially to the younger generation’.1 In June 2013, tens of thousands of representatives of this younger generation were protesting in Taksim Square in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey against the authoritarianism of the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Their protest was brutally suppressed, an indication that in 2013 the state has lost none of its ruthlessness when challenged by non-parliamentary opposition. In her new book Professor White certainly does not deny this. She underlined in her interview that it had become possible in recent years to explore issues and express ideas that would have been unutterable in the eighties. This was indeed reflected in the demands of the various groups present on Taksim Square that ranged from environmentalists to self-declared ‘anti-capitalist Muslims’.