The AKP and stealth Islamization in Turkey
ABSTRACT
This article argues that the AKP has dismantled secularism in Turkey through stealth Islamization. Defined as incremental and top-down Islamization of social and political life, this process entails four processes: (1) institutionalization of Turkish Islamist political imaginary; (2) redesigning the Diyanet and public education system to spread Islamic beliefs and practices (da’wa); (3) the privileging of Muslim identity at the expense of secular choices, whose costs have increased substantially; and (4) return of Islam to the public space through changes in the built environment. This article unpacks these four processes, which entails AKP’s colonization of the state to Islamize society.
Introduction
The night before Turkey’s pivotal presidential elections on 14 May 2023, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held a political rally inside Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, which he had converted to a mosque with a presidential decree in 2020. He recited verses from the Qur’an, as thousands chanted Allahu Akbar (God is great) and ‘here is the army, here is the commander.’ In his address, Erdoğan called for unity and solidarity against the enemies of Islam and urged his supporters to stay on the Qur’anic path.1 This was not the first time Erdoğan made an appearance in a mosque delivering political messages. Just a few weeks earlier he had held another rally in Sultanahmet Mosque, a historic site in Istanbul.
These rallies, I assert, are part of a larger ideological turn of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) since 2011. I also argue that the party, which was ostensibly established as a conservative democratic party, has returned to its ideological roots laid by the Milli G.rüş (National Outlook, MG) movement. This return has culminated in a process of desecularization and substantive Islamization, which has been largely incremental and within the secular institutional framework of the Turkish state. Thus, through the process of what I call stealth Islamization, the AKP has hollowed out the secular constitution and turned state institutions into vessels of Islamization.2
This article traces and unpacks this process of stealth Islamization under AKP rule, which I define as top-down and incremental changes in social and political life in an increasingly Islamic direction. The process, I argue, is motivated and inspired by the MG tradition of the 1970s and 1980s and has involved both colonization and instrumentalization of the state and its resources to Islamize society in addition to instrumentalization of Islam for political power.
I break down stealth Islamization of Turkey into four major and interrelated processes: (1) ideological return to the Turkish Islamist political imaginary and corresponding institutional changes; (2) transformation of existing public institutions into da’wa (call to Islam) infrastructure to spread Islamic beliefs and practices; (3) ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ by the privileging of Muslim identity in society coupled with increasing costs of leading a secular lifestyle; and (4) return of Islam to the public space through changes in society’s substratum.3 These four processes ultimately hollowed out Turkish secularism.
More specifically, the first process entails the AKP’s revival of the MG’s ideology, which revolves around Islamic populism, defined by democratic instrumentalism and righteous majoritarianism. In line with the MG view, the AKP did not just establish a presidential system but it also colonized the state to recruit ‘pious cadres’ into the administrative bureaucracy. The presidential system coupled with Islamization of state cadres, I argue, is the institutionalization of Islamist political imaginary in Turkey, and marks the convergence of stealth authoritarianism and stealth Islamization. Second, the AKP deployed state institutions to Islamize Turkish society in a top-down fashion, as imagined by the MG parties of the 1970s. The party transmuted the Turkish education system and the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) – both financed by the public budget – into da’wa infrastructure, which formed the basis of government’s top-down Islamization and proselytization efforts.
Third, the AKP adopted the Islamic principle of ‘commanding right, forbidding wrong’ using the state’s authority and resources to approximate Islamic public normativity. Rather than resorting to legal provisions to command right and forbid wrong, the party created a public space where ‘wrong’ is marginalized through extensive regulations of secular practices deemed bad, undesirable, and impermissible by Islam, and ‘right’ is encouraged through privileging of Muslim identity in all policy domains at the expense of secular citizens. Thus, secular choices have become socially, politically, and economically costlier over the years.
Finally, and again in line with the Islamist tradition, the AKP used state resources and authority to redesign public space to fulfill longtime Islamist dreams through the construction of large mosque complexes in secular public squares and converting museum-churches like Hagia Sophia into mosques.
The Turkish case is worth studying because, first, Turkey is one of the most industrialized countries in the Muslim world with longest history of multi-party politics (since 1950), a candidate for European Union (EU) membership, and the first middle-income democracy to collapse.4 Unpacking the ideological roots of the AKP and its Islamist pivot is key to tackling this critical case. Second, Erdoğan, as a populist leader in power for more than two decades, leads the recent autocratic wave in the world. Exploring how Erdoğan has stealthily redesigned the Turkish society is informative for other cases of religious populism including in Poland, Hungary, Russia, India, Israel, and the U.S.
The article aims to make several contributions to the study of desecularization, Islamism, and Turkish politics. First, by framing recent trends in Turkish politics as a case of desecularization the paper contributes to the larger debate on this topic and provides case-specific evidence. Second, the article aims to correct coding errors and mischaracterizations of the Turkish political system due to a fixation with direct and legal manifestations of Islamization. Just as some scholars of authoritarianism seek more direct manifestations of autocratic rule,5 the literature on Islamism is mostly focused on more direct routes to Islamization (i.e. establishment of shari’a rule and/or hudud punishments) and institutionalization of Islamic practices (i.e. banning alcohol and interest, allowing polygamy for men, changing inheritance and marriage code in line with Islamic sources).6 Scholars pay scant attention to instances of stealth Islamization where many of these practices are not formalized but placed under the cloak of secular institutions to reduce potential political costs. Such costs, as Varol suggests for stealth authoritarianism, may include international criticism, potential domestic opposition, and mobilization.7 Stealth and incremental changes thus not only help the government avoid such costs but also allow it to accuse the opposition of being against freedom of religion and Islamic practices which, they argue, do not contradict the nature of the secular state. This focus on more obvious manifestations of Islamic rule, I argue, obscures political reality, and leads to mischaracterization of political trends and therefore coding errors.
In fact, some earlier accounts of the AKP highlighted the party’s ambiguous ideological agenda and raised concerns regarding Islamization of the Turkish state and society.8 Empirical analysis around the AKP’s and Erdoğan’s pivot toward greater solidarity with Muslim countries in Turkish foreign policy proved quite robust,9 while the party’s other initiatives (i.e. lifting the headscarf ban or leveling the playing field for Imam-hatip graduates) could be interpreted either as an attempt at Islamization or expansion of religious freedoms that were denied under an illiberal secular regime. Meanwhile, the AKP’s educational policy and the position toward the Diyanet in the 2000s exhibited greater continuity with the Turkish state’s ideology of Turkish-Islamic synthesis established after 1980 rather than a clear rupture10 (the AKP’s Diyanet policy dramatically changed after 2011, as discussed below).
Perhaps the strongest empirical evidence for growing Islamization in the country in the 2000s pertained to changes in the society rather than changes in the polity. The driving force behind such social change stemming from neighborhood pressure, several studies established, was the Gülen movement along with other religious orders.11 Nation-wide surveys also confirmed the trend of growing religiosity in the country.12 Yet, these trends dated back to the 1990s and did not begin with the AKP’s rise to power in 2002. Meanwhile, other studies discovered that the support for the establishment of Islamic law in the country dropped to single digits.13 Similarly, scholars found that voters did not support the AKP for religious or ideological reasons; they voted for the party for primarily economic reasons.14 Other studies showed that the people were not particularly concerned with the headscarf ban and were supportive of leveling the playing field for Imamhatip graduates.
In short, these earlier accounts rightfully captured the ambiguity in the AKP’s vision of Islam and politics and the threat posed by the Gülen movement. This ambiguity, however, also deprived accounts of the party’s Islamization agenda of robust empirical evidence in the 2000s. This paper contributes to this debate and suggests that the AKP’s ambiguity in the 2000s gave way to unambiguous Islamization in the 2010s, leaving little space for empirical or conceptual confusion. This paper, then, builds on these earlier works by tracing the AKP’s fast turn from ambiguity toward Islamization in the 2010s with greater conceptual clarity (i.e. stealth Islamization), specific mechanisms (i.e. institutionalization of Islamist imaginary, converting state agencies into da’wa networks, formulating policies to command right and forbid wrong and to increase the costs of secular lifestyles), and robust evidence from government policies, official statistics, and public statements.15
Third, many scholars have studied democratic decline in Turkey in the 2010s16 but only a few, as Adak suggests, have paid attention to the ideological underpinnings of the new political system.17 A few studies have recently unpacked ‘immoderation’ of the AKP,18 and creeping Islamization in its foreign policy,19 social and educational policies,20 and leadership style.21 More recently, scholars also studied the Diyanet’s growing and changing role in the country22 and its part in ‘desecularization.’23 These studies provide crucial insights into the AKP regime, but also remain limited in their account of the party’s Islamization efforts. This paper advances such partial accounts by offering a holistic analysis of Turkey’s stealth Islamization and its ideological roots.
Finally, this article complements existing studies that define the AKP’s Islamism as instrumentalization of Islam for political gain and consolidation of autocratic rule.24 This paper does so by demonstrating how the government instrumentalizes the state’s authority and resources to Islamize society. Specification of the Diyanet and the education system as da’wa networks and state policy as a tool of commanding right and forbidding wrong are particularly helpful in this regard.
In the rest of the article I explain AKP’s pivot to Islamism and its stealth Islamization of the country drawing on newspaper archives, party platforms, public statements of party leaders, official statistics, and participant observation in party rallies, electoral campaigns, and protests. I first unpack the AKP’s shift from conservative democracy to Islamism through a systematic analysis of the MG ideology and the AKP’s recent politics. Then I explore how Erdoğan turned both the education system and the Diyanet into da’wa networks. Next I turn to the Muslim privileges and increasing costs of secularism. I conclude with a brief discussion on the Islamization of the public space.
Islamism in Turkey: from Milli Görüş to the AKP
In this article, I adopt Hegghammer’s definition of Islamism as activism in the name of Islam.25 This definition avoids narrow conceptualizations of Islamism which often fixate on legal changes.26 As scholars of political Islam agree, Islamist movements need not strive for sharia rule.27 Indeed, Islamist movements come in different forms, and some could demand the wholesale application of sharia law, while others pursue Islamization of the society one individual at a time without formalizing Islamic injunctions into law. What they will strive for is often shaped by their local contexts.28 Turkish political Islam, like its counterparts elsewhere, is also shaped by its circumstances. Certain similarities with its ideological sisters notwithstanding – pursuing political activism in the name of Islam and standing against the threat of secularism – Islamism in Turkey has emerged and evolved in response to its unique political, social, and historical context and developed its own symbols, discourses, and policies.
The quintessential Islamist movement in Turkey is the MG movement which built the Islamist imagination in Turkey. This imagination rests on instrumentalization of democracy and state institutions to re-establish society’s Islamic identity, as discussed below, which had been weakened by the secular Republican reforms of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.29 For Turkish Islamists, therefore, the Republican era was an aberration that had to be corrected with reference to the Ottoman state (particularly the reign of Abdulhamid II [1876–1909], who was known for his pan-Islamic tendencies). Also within the larger secular framework, often for strategic reasons, MG refrained from articulating a sharia-based order but insisted on proselytization of the society through education, censorship of ‘immoral’ content in the media and literature, and dependence on ‘pious cadres’ to solve the problems of the Turkish people, including a pious leader who could make Turkey great again, as discussed below.
The AKP returned to the MG line a few years after its establishment, despite the party being founded in 2001 as a conservative democratic party by a group of reformists who had the MG movement. These reformists initially self-distanced from their Islamist roots and claimed to drop their MG outlook. In fact, the AKP platform made no references to Islam, declared commitment to universal democratic values and human rights, and subscribed to a pro-EU agenda. While some observers maintained their skepticism regarding the degree of this transformation,30 several scholars concurred that the AKP was no longer an Islamist party.31
After 20 years in power the AKP is no longer a conservative democratic party, which keeps the state at an equal distance to all faiths and religions, as Kalin claimed in 2013.32 In fact, the AKP has returned to Turkish Islamist political imaginary (at least since 2011) in three distinct ways. First, the AKP, adapted the MG movement’s majoritarian and instrumentalist understanding of democracy which rests on Islamic righteousness. Second, the party institutionalized this majoritarian understanding by establishing executive presidentialism. This transition to executive presidency and Erdoğan’s growing cult of personality stems directly from the Turkish Islamist political imaginary, which insists on the election of a pious leader as an institutional requisite of an Islamic society. Third, and most importantly, like other Islamist leaders, Erdoğan seeks solution to the pressing issues of Turkish society (ethnic tensions, poverty, domestic violence, crime, divorce, and even economy etc.) in Islam. The assumption being, echoing the Muslim Brotherhood’s motto ‘Islam is the solution,’ if Turkish society becomes more Islamic, it can overcome its economic, political, and social ills. The government’s policies, recruitment practices, and discourse therefore centers around Islamization. I now turn to the details of this ideological and institutional turn.
Ideological turn toward Islamic populism A comparative analysis of the MG parties’ platforms and the AKP’s recent practices, reveals striking similarities. First, the Milli G.rüş perception of democracy was quite instrumental. The various MG parties saw democracy as a means to elect the most worthy, virtuous, and just individual to serve the people, a position common among prominent Islamist ideologues. As the MG’s iconic leader Erbakan bluntly stated, ‘One should not forget that democracy is not an end in itself, instead it is a means to a greater end. That end is the establishment of the Order of Happiness,’ a reference to the time of Prophet Mohammed.33
The MG’s perception of democracy was also deeply majoritarian and populist. Accordingly, the moral Muslim masses – the true people – were suffering under and exploited by the repressive, corrupt, and ‘heathen’ elite. Since the real people were moral and upright, whatever they demanded would be inherently good and democratic.34 Such populist majoritarianism inherently threatened pluralism and the rights of the minorities who did not identify with Muslim masses. The approach of the National Order Party (Millî Nizam Partisi, MNP), the first MG party established in 1970, toward human rights and freedoms is illustrative of this instrumental and majoritarian understanding of democracy. The MNP, like its successors, was mostly concerned with freedom of belief and conscience which are critical for the advancement of the movement’s agenda. Its leaders did not mention any other rights or freedoms or note violations of human rights targeting other parts of society beyond the MG constituency. This instrumentalist understanding of democracy and civil liberties is quite evident in the MNP’s take on freedom of the press. According to the party program, the media is an educational institution and a key component of the MNP’s mission to achieve its cultural and moral objectives, i.e. Islamization. To that effect, the party called for legal provisions proscribing immoral media coverage while reducing the media to an ideological instrument for the government in its fight against ‘destructive’ political movements.35
Although the initial AKP program saw democracy as an end in itself and adopted a holistic and liberal approach to political freedoms and rights,36 the AKP’s recent practices display a drastic departure from these ideals and a return to an instrumentalist and narrow perception of democracy and civil liberties, reminiscent of the MG ideology.37 For President Erdoğan, democracy reflects the will of the majority (which happens to be Muslim), and lends legitimacy to all government policies, even if they violate certain civil liberties and democratic norms.38 Erdoğan’s following statement reveals this quite narrow perception of civil liberties informed by Islamic populism:
We freed our education system from tutelary policies. Our children are no more discriminated on the basis of their belief, attire, [or] outlook and [we] established freedom in our country…In the past 16 years only the terrorists’ and their supporters’ scope of activity has narrowed…. We will continue to develop democracy and expand freedoms and rights.39 [Emphasis added] Erdoğan’s polarized view pitches the ‘real people’ against the enemies of the people, i.e. ‘terrorists,’ and developing democracy means enhancing the rights of the ‘real people.’
As Tuğal asserts and the quote affirms, Islam actively shapes the AKP’s populism and defines the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. In Tuğal’s words, ‘Islam is not an instrument utilized once a populism emerges …Islam actively shapes this populism and imposes a certain form on it.’40 This ideological framework not only informs the AKP’s policies and discourse but also defines the privileged as well as who should be sanctioned: Power is taken from the ‘rabid minority’ and handed over to the voiceless authentic people41; Islamic constituencies receive better services and more investment than those who support secular parties42; Islamic foundations receive tax relief and greater share from public resources43; protests against the government are depicted as attacks against Islam and Muslims44 while the opposition is labeled kuffar (infidels)45; and dissent is treated as atheism, treason, or terrorism.
Institutional turn
The AKP’s ideological turn to Islamism and the MG line has informed its institutional choices in the past decade, including the transition to presidentialism, weakening of the state, centralization of power in the person of Erdoğan, and his rising cult of personality. Turkey’s political transformation in the past decade is thus an extension of this ideological shift.
It is noteworthy that the idea of an Islamic government lacks an institutional blueprint and rests upon the centrality of a pious leader who embodies religion and the society in his person. As Roy underlines,46 Islamist political imaginary can therefore be reduced to individual virtue instead of offering a sophisticated system of accountability. The Turkish Islamist imaginary is no exception. For instance, the political system envisioned by the MNP in its platform was a presidential system with high degree of centralization for a strong and effective executive. The MNP’s preference for a strong executive echoes the primacy of a virtuous leader in broader Islamist thought. Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, the chief ideologue of Turkish Islamism, also rested all political power in the hands of a virtuous and pious leader, who he called başyüce (the exalted one). For Kısakürek, başyüce is not simply a president; he is a symbol and embodiment of the nation, and the most virtuous, most knowledgeable, and reasoned member of his nation. His decrees serve as the law while all branches of the government, including the judiciary, operate and serves justice in his name. For Kısakürek, başyüce is indeed what Islamic traditional sources refer to as ‘ululemr,’ the executive and social authority for Muslims (ictimai irade ve icra makamı).47
The new presidential system passed in the 2017 referendum with weak checks and balances is in fact a manifestation and institutionalization of this Islamist imaginary that rests on a majoritarian and populist view of democracy. Although the AKP platform originally subscribed to a strong parliamentary system with limited role for the president, Erdoğan passed a popular referendum with a narrow margin in 2017 and the country switched to executive presidency. Soon after his election in June 2018, Erdoğan issued several decrees restructuring the state apparatus, establishing new branches while tying the entire executive to his office. Now all decisions, big and small, are made by the president. He is not accountable to parliament, which is eclipsed by several groups of unelected presidential consultants who are solely accountable to Erdoğan. The resemblance of this system to Kısakürek’s utopia is striking, as already recognized by a few scholars.48
Erdoğan’s growing personality cult as the embodiment of the nation with an increasingly Islamic quality has further reinforced this resemblance. To cultivate the image of a pious leader, Erdoğan has frequently displayed his religious credentials. The president regularly attends Friday prayers, teaches the Qur’an to his grandkids,49 and publicly recites original verses from the Qur’an during funerals, mosque openings and visits,50 Friday prayers, cemetery visits,51 commemorations,52 school visits,53 and even in his foreign trips.54 Pro-government media widely covers such stories to build Erdoğan’s Islamic cult of personality as the leader of all Muslims.
This personality cult has further gained a semi-messianic quality in the wake of the coup attempt in July 2016. To invoke emotional reactions among AKP supporters and to appeal their religious sentiments, the party’s PR team even deployed Sezai Karakoç’s famous poem ‘Ne yapsalar boş, göklerden gelen bir karar vardır…’ [Their efforts are futile; there is a decree coming from heavens], implying divine intervention in favor of Erdoğan during the attempted coup.
More recently, pro-AKP intellectuals and religious leaders evoked the concept of ulu-l-emr to lend Islamic legitimacy to Erdoğan’s rule.55 In Islamic tradition, ululemr refers to ‘believer ruler,’ and Muslims should obey ululemr’s orders as they should obey God’s and Prophet’s commands.56 The implication being, as ululemr of Muslims, Erdoğan deserves almost total obedience. As a result, he is now donned with Islamic legitimacy and qualities, and his personality cult revolves around the myth of a virtuous and pious semi-messianic leader, whose rule is sanctioned by the Qur’an. Indeed, Erdoğan reinforced this impression on the campaign trail of the 2023 election. In one of his rallies he claimed to receive his commands from God, whereas the opposition received theirs from the leaders of the Kurdish insurgency.57
In the end, Erdoğan became the embodiment of the nation and Islam, as obedience to God and the ruler (ululemr) have become increasingly synonymous. In this framework, political dissent turned into an expression of unfaithfulness, and Islam and the ruling party has become one and the Colonizing the state bureaucracy
In addition to having a pious leader with semi-messianic qualities, an Islamic state also requires Islamic cadres. According to the MNP, the best solution to the ills of the country come from pious civil servants with merit, a sense of justice, and virtue. These individuals should replace leftists in the civil service.59 Following this reasoning, the AKP has aimed to conquer the state through bureaucratic recruitment.60 At first, the party relied on the Gülen movement and its ‘pious’ cadres to replace the secular bureaucratic corps. Following its fallout with the Gülen movement after 2013, the AKP turned to other religious orders to replace Gülenists.61 Several reports from bureaucratic recruitment processes reveal that the AKP seeks religious signifiers or connection to religious orders as hiring criteria in job interviews.62
It must be noted though, this ‘institutional turn’ in line with the Islamist imaginary and cult of leadership in Erdoğan’s person, did not include formal annulment of secularism. The system remained nominally secular with no formal changes introduced to secular constitutional principles. This was a function of incrementalism – what I call stealth Islamization – that was largely justified by Erdoğan’s spiritual guide and mentor Hayrettin Karaman.63
The state as an instrument of Islamization
The MG leaders, as noted earlier, argued that return to Islam would solve Turkey’s problems. In practice, this did not only mean the election of a pious leader as the head of the executive and recruitment of pious cadres to state bureaucracy, as already discussed, but also deployment of state capacity to enact Islamizing reforms in society through educational, cultural, and religious policies and broad societal reform.64 Because this reform entailed Islamic education to raise pious, hardworking, and virtuous generations, who are devoted to morality, family values, and discipline, the educational system and extensive and expansive use of the Diyanet proved essential.65
While in its earlier years the AKP distanced itself from the ideal of Islamization of society and adopted a liberal yet a vague vision with respect to education, the AKP government after 2011 reverted to the MNP line with respect to Islamization of Turkish society. Profound Islamization of the state and society has been marked by top-down imposition of Islamic morality through the state apparatus. This consists of (1) unprecedented expansion of the Diyanet’s scope of activities; and (2) placing Imam Hatip schools at the center of the education system with the aspiration of raising ‘pious generations.’ Rest of this section studies the details of these two mechanisms.
Diyanet’s da’wa
The Diyanet was established in 1924 to meet the demand for religious clerical personnel after the new Republican elite abolished the Islamic institutions inherited from the Ottoman State. The Diyanet has always played an important role in serving the Republican regime and its secular principles in a nonpartisan manner.66 However, keeping in line with the MNP mission, the AKP transformed the Diyanet into a da’wa (proselytization) instrument to Islamize society by commanding right and forbidding wrong.67 As such, the Diyanet has become the tool for the re-Islamization of society.68
Along this line, the AKP took three major steps to transform the Diyanet. First, it increased the scope of its activities and expanded its resources after 2010. Second, the party redefined the Diyanet’s mission as preaching a total and all-encompassing Islam instead of confining its activities to the mosque and providing religious services to individuals in case of need. Third, the AKP politicized the Diyanet’s mission, turning it into a political ally for the AKP regime.
The Diyanet’s budget, resources, personnel, and scope of activities rapidly expanded, particularly after 2010. In 2010 the AKP replaced more prosecular Ali Bardakoğlu with revisionist Mehmet Görmez as the head of the Diyanet and expanded the mission of the organization and strengthened its administrative capacity with a new legislative framework.69 This transformative legislation allowed the Diyanet to perform religious services outside of mosques, establish a new network station, and expand its operations abroad.70 To finance its activities, the AKP government increased the Diyanet’s budget ten-fold from 3.5 billion Turkish Lira in 2010 to 35.9 billion in 2023.71 Its cadres also increased by more than 30% from 2011 to 2022. While there were 107,000 personnel working at the Directorate in 2011, this figure reached 137,000 in 2022.72 Such expansion in its fiscal and human resources brought ‘unprecedented visibility’ to the Diyanet.73 Its president has also become increasingly visible in high-level state functions, lending Islamic legitimacy to them. In clear contrast to the secular nature of the state, the Diyanet’s president leads prayers in these functions where the top-brass or presidents of higher courts are also present.
This expansion in the Diyanet’s prerogatives and operations, according to Şen, turned it into an all-encompassing institution that devours all aspects of life and all ages.74 Indeed, the current head of the Diyanet, Ali Erbaş, often asserted the aim to ‘touch every field of human life’ and rebuffed secular calls from different groups in Turkey.75 The repurposing of the Diyanet, I argue, is in fact informed by a hegemonic Islamist understanding of Islam. As Erdoğan summed up in 2019,
Islam is a collection of rules and prohibitions which encapsulates and embraces all aspects of life…We believe in a religion that regulates all parts of human life from commerce to civic relations, from education to marriage, from personal hygiene to attire.76
The Diyanet was tasked to preach this religion and hence perform the da’wa function for the AKP regime.77 Erdoğan continued,
Qur’an and Siyeri Nebi courses as well as pre-school Qur’an courses offers you [Diyanet personnel] important opportunities…There are now no obstacles before Diyanet’s preaching and Islamic guidance missions. This positive environment places extra responsibility on you. Our expectation is that you fully take on this responsibility.78
A key target group for the Diyanet, as Erdoğan’s statement attests, is children. Erdoğan often underlined the urgency in putting children back into the mosques: ‘If we are to build the future, we have to strongly encourage a life centered around the mosque.’79 That’s why the AKP opened hundreds of Qur’an courses for preschoolers. The family is also central to the Diyanet’s da’wa mission. In Family Guidance Bureaus established after 2003, the Diyanet aimed to ‘strengthen the family through religious and moral guidance’ and deploy ‘its institutional capacity to penetrate the private sphere and to reshape family relations along religious lines.’80
Finally, the Diyanet under the AKP has become deeply political. As Öztürk contends, the repurposed Diyanet ‘advance[s] a much more explicitly ideological political agenda at the best of the ruling party…[and] synchronized with the ruling party’s discourses and actions.’81 The sermons delivered in mosques often refer to political issues and rally support for AKP’s politics. Scholars have identified emerging trends in these weekly sermons written and distributed by the Diyanet to more than 90,000 mosques. Their content reveals a clear shift toward religious nationalism82 that carries heavy populist undertones83 and is increasingly supportive of committing violence in the name of religion.84 In the most recent election cycle, several reports pointed to pro-Erdoğan messages regularly delivered by imams in local mosques during their sermons.85
The Diyanet, however, has done more than support the AKP in its sermons. A striking instance of explicit political support occurred during and in the aftermath of the coup attempt in July 2016.86 The Diyanet mobilized its personnel in over 90,000 mosques, recited the sala87 throughout the night all over the country, and invited civilians to resist the putsch. These calls lent Islamic legitimacy to pro-government resistance and evoked people’s religious sentiments in a domestic political conflict. After the coup failed, the Diyanet continued its support for the government. Religious personnel regularly attended pro-AKP rallies labeled ‘democracy vigils’ in the weeks following the failed putsch. Below is an excerpt from a sermon given in Kısıklı, Istanbul (the vicinity of Erdoğan’s residence) on 24 July 2016:
We dedicate our prayers to our martyrs who lost their lives for democracy, the nation, Islam, and the flag on the night of July 15. Dear God, do not let those traitors hurt our homeland; eliminate the threats and traps posed against our commander in chief, our ululemr, our nation’s and Muslim world’s source of pride Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Dear God, we believe and have complete faith that Erdoğan is the hope of our nation and region, and of the entire Islamic world. Dear God, do not disappoint the hope of the ummah. Damn those who set traps and who divide the ummah and the infidel of Pennsylvania [referring to F. Gülen], who is a traitor, who lacks honor and who has no faith or religion…he has no land, no nationality, no faith or religion…in the past, coups would silence the call to prayers and salas. Thanks to the will of God, the orders of our commander in chief and the chairman of the Diyanet, salas and calls to prayer silenced the coup. There is no greater honor…And I want you to continue attending the democracy vigils until our commander in chief ends it. [emphasis added]
As this instance shows, Diyanet personnel have become a party to a political conflict between the ruling party and its former ally, both of which hold an Islamist orientation. The Diyanet has lent Islamic legitimacy to the AKP government and President Erdoğan by calling him ululemr and the leader of the Muslim world, while excommunicating (takfir) Erdoğan’s enemy Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic preacher by profession.
National and religious education
Education forms another key component of AKP’s efforts to Islamize society. In defiance of the AKP program, Erdoğan proclaimed in 2012 that the primary goal of the party is to raise ‘pious generations’ who carry computers in one hand and the Qur’an on the other.88 In Lüküslü’s words, the new generations would defend Islam: ‘Following Erdoğan’s guidance, the mission of AK Gençlik [party’s youth branch] is in fact to become the militant vanguards of a new Turkey where the party, ideology, and society become enmeshed with each other.’89
To raise pious generations, the AKP has heavily invested in the expansion of Imam Hatip schools, which the MG treated as its backyard. As a result, the number of Imam Hatip high schools under AKP rule increased fourfold between 2002 and 2022, displaying a pronounced uptick after 2011 (see Figure 1). The number of students enrolled in these schools increased tenfold from sixty thousand to more than six hundred thousand.90 The government also opened Imam Hatip middle schools in 2012 with a new education reform. Their numbers rose to a thousand in a single year and increased by 300% in 10 years.
The government also converted secular public schools to Imam Hatips in several locations and forced students to enroll in the closest school in their neighborhood, practically pushing them into religious schools. High school students with better academic performance could still enroll in distant schools listed by the Ministry of Education through a national placement test. The Ministry made sure to place Imam Hatip high schools at the top of these ‘elite schools’ list in 61 cities (out of total of 81) and thus refer successful students to religious schools.91 The government also significantly improved the quality of Imam Hatip facilities by spending twice as much per student compared to regular schools.92 As Reuters reported in 2018, the government allocated 23% of its education budget to Imam Hatip schools, which hosted only 11% of the high school student cohort.93 By 2022 the party allocated 70% more resources from its overall budget to Imam Hatips at the expense of regular high schools.94
Efforts at Islamization do not end with Imam Hatips’ expansion. The AKP government also altered the educational curriculum in all public schools to increase the number of courses on Islam and the Prophet’s life and changed the content of secular subjects by removing Darwin’s theory of evolution from the curriculum.95 In addition, Islamist foundations partnered up with the Ministry of Education in several projects targeting school kids. For instance, the Turkish Youth Foundation, controlled by Erdoğan’s son, has established student clubs in middle schools, namely ‘Civilizations and Figure 1. Number of Imam Hatip high schools in Turkey. Source: Compiled by the author from Ministry of National Education Official Statistics, 2002–2022.
Morals Club’ (Medeniyet ve Değerler Kulübü), and designed extra-curriculars centered on the Prophet’s life and sayings, Islamic morality and behavior, and the ideas and teachings of Islamist ideologues, such as Sayyid Qutb.96 More recently, the Diyanet and Ministry of Education started a project that employs imams as moral guides in elementary schools. The protocol has allowed religious personnel with no pedagogical training to run extracurricular activities with students and teach them morality.97
In the end, the Turkish educational curriculum was largely Islamized and secular education was mostly marginalized. If families sought a more secular education for their children, they had to opt for private schools, substantially increasing the costs of secular education for middle-class families. Commanding right, forbidding wrong: increasing costs of secular lifestyles
Like many Islamist movements, the AKP desires to establish Islamic normativity98 through ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ in public space by using the state’s authority.99 This principle, however, takes different forms in different contexts. In Turkey ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ does not entail legal enforcement of Islamic practices and bans on unIslamic practices. 100 Instead it takes two distinct forms: (a) commanding right through privileging of Muslim identity over secular identities (as well as the Diyanet’s and education system’s transformation into da’wa infrastructure as discussed earlier); and (b) forbidding wrong by extensive regulation and increasing the costs of secular practices. By increasing the social, political, and economic costs of ‘evils and wrongs’ associated with secular lifestyles, the party could achieve stealth Islamization while avoiding accusations of adopting non-secular policies.
One key area that illustrates this mechanism is the regulation of alcohol consumption. Islam forbids consumption of alcohol. Erdoğan has portrayed alcohol consumption as a major evil in Muslims’ lifes, but rather than completely banning it, he has passed several regulations to make it costly and difficult to access. For instance, the AKP government in 2005 severely restricted advertising and sales of alcohol beyond a very delimited space. Based on such regulations, local governments forced many alcohol-serving establishments out of business or pushed them toward urban peripheries by withholding sales permits.101 In the meantime, state-owned and operated establishments stopped serving alcohol. Then in 2013, another regulation limited alcohol sales to certain hours and prohibited companies that produce alcoholic beverages to sponsor cultural activities such as festivals or concerts. During COVID, the government used the pandemic as a pretext to prohibit all alcohol consumption and closed all bars and clubs for public health concerns. In the meantime, mosques were kept open as thousands gathered to pray in proximity. Once normalization started, the government has maintained severe restrictions over establishments serving alcohol. Finally, the government has used heavy sales tax to inflate the price of alcoholic beverages and make its consumption increasingly costly. These taxes approached 300% in 2023 in certain products and the overall increase in some prices reached almost 600% over twenty years. In short, the AKP prioritized Muslim identity and sensitivities over secular practices of alcohol consumption in public spaces and enterprises as well as private establishments.
The AKP also regulated other entertainment to bring its content more in line with Islamic principles and Muslim sensitivities. The Radio and Television Supreme Council (Radyo ve Televizyon Üst Kurulu, RTÜK) and Directorate of Communications (Cumhurbaşkanlığı İletişim Merkez, CİMER) have played a key role in the process of censoring the content of TV shows aired on Turkish televisions. The government has encouraged its supporters to submit complaints to RTÜK through CİMER when they witnessed ‘inappropriate’ content on TV. Thousands regularly submit their complaints of TV shows which supposedly harm society’s moral and religious values and sanctity of the family.102 RTÜK administrators have used these complaints to sanction ‘unIslamic’ broadcasting.103 As such, RTÜK has informally incorporated Islamic moral principles into its professional decisions.104 These regulations have prioritized Muslim sensitivities and encouraged self-censorship among secular-oriented producers.
Music events and concerts geared toward secular youth have also been subject to sanctions, and many have been canceled in recent years.105 It is often the local authorities that cancel these events, citing the sensitivities of their Muslim constituencies or security concerns as excuses. Similarly, music artists who are singled out for their progressive statements and activism are also sanctioned from concerts, often with local pressure from Islamic circles. In some rare instances these sanctions have even turned into prison sentences, as when a popular singer was placed under house arrest for making an offensive joke about a member of her band, who was an Imam Hatip graduate.106
The urge to ‘forbid wrong’ reached particularly new heights with the government’s measures targeting the LGBTQ community. While the party refrained from criminalizing homosexuality (like other Islamic states), it still injected homophobia and infringed on LGBTQ rights by securitizing their activism. On several occasions, both the Diyanet and AKP officials made homophobic statements, including calling homosexuality a biological disorder and an illness that needs to be treated.107 These statements informed later policies that prioritized Muslim identity over other identities. For instance, the government imposed a ban on the Pride Parade for the first time in 2015 – and has maintained the ban since then – claiming that the parade hurt Muslim sensitivities in the month of Ramadan.108
More recently, AKP officials have directly targeted LGBTQ community as perverts, foreign agents, and a dire threat to the society. In an incident in 2021, four college students who drew an LGBTQ flag on a picture of the Ka’ba (holiest site of Islam) were detained. They, along with other activists, were targeted with hate speech by the Minister of Interior Süleyman Soylu, Director of Presidential Communication Fahrettin Altun, Vice-President Fuat Oktay, and AKP spokesperson Ömer Çelik. Altun, for instance, called the LBGTQ activists a rabid minority who veil their perversion behind the cloak of freedoms and human rights, while Soylu stated on several occasions that the government would never let immorality, de-sanctification of Islam, and terror take over.109 Emboldened by this official discourse, thousands of government supporters held an anti-LGBTQ rally to defend the family and to ban LGBTQ rights groups in 2021. They declared LGBTQ activism to be a national security issue.110 Soon after, an association formed by Diyanet officials petitioned to close LGBTQ organizations. The legal process is still underway at the time of writing. However, recent signs are not promising, as Erdoğan on the campaign trail in 2023 frequently targeted ‘LGBT’ and accused the entire opposition of being pro-LGBTQ rights to demean and vilify them.111 Furthermore, the AKP took as allies for the 2023 elections two fringe Islamist parties which campaigned to ban all LGBTQ groups, criminalize adultery, restrict women’s rights and pursue gender segregation. 112 These fringe Islamist parties – Hüda-Par and New Welfare Party – won seats in parliament and have already started pressuring the AKP to sideline relatively more progressive figures in the party in favor of more explicitly Islamic ones.
Islamization of the public space
The AKP’s Islamization does not end with ideological, institutional, and regulatory shifts. It has also expanded into the public space via the party’s spatial politics, also inspired by the MG tradition of injecting Islamic symbols into public space to prioritize Muslim identity. Because ‘place is a repository of a group’s memory and an extension of its identity’113 and is essentially political,114 the AKP has made monumental changes to the urban landscape. Perhaps the most noteworthy step the AKP has taken was to convert museum-cum-churches to mosques in Istanbul and other cities. These churches, including Hagia Sophia and Chora Kirke in Istanbul and Hagia Sophia in Trabzon, were maintained as museums by the secular Republican regime. The most symbolically significant of these conversions is Hagia Sophia Museum in Istanbul. It was Mehmed II who had converted the historic church into a mosque in the wake of Istanbul’s conquest in 1453 to display the power of the Islamic empire. In 1935, as part of his secularizing reforms, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rescinded Mehmet II’s decree and turned the edifice into a museum. Erdoğan issued a new decree in 2020 and revived a key symbol of the Ottoman legacy and thus reversed a major secular symbolic gesture. He hence fulfilled a long-lasting Islamist dream, as thousands celebrated the conversion as a major victory for Islam in the first Friday communal prayer amid the COVID pandemic.
Islamization of the public space also continued with building of huge mosque complexes in Istanbul and other cities.115 The Çamlıca Mosque on the Anatolian side of Istanbul now defines the silhouette of the city, and the Levent and Taksim mosques built in two major secular quarters on the European side dominate the urban landscape. It is noteworthy that the Taksim mosque was another long-time dream of Islamists who had desired to reclaim the heart of the city, Taksim square, and overwhelm its Republican symbols.
The AKP has also aimed to dominate the urban landscape in Ankara by building the Presidential Compound, known as Külliye. Külliye as an architectural design, according to Ghulyan, is an Islamic choice since it takes the mosque as its center.116 Külliye also means ‘whole, totality, entirety,’ which makes it a good fit with the AKP’s holistic and all-encompassing understanding of Islam.117 That is also why the AKP government replaced the word ‘campus’ in college campuses with külliye and started to build mosques in all public universities across Turkey.118
One final Islamic touch that is equally if not more visible in the public space is the change of countless street and square names all around the country. The AKP government replaced numerous secular and republican toponyms with their Islamic or Ottoman counterparts and colored major cities with Islamic symbols.
Conclusion
Erdoğan’s rule in the past decade has hollowed out Turkish secularism by pursuing Islamization without instating an explicitly Islamic legal framework. Incremental changes in multiple domains have amounted to stealth Islamization, paralleling the party’s stealth authoritarianism. This has created an uneven playing field between secular and Islamic tendencies, increasing the social, political, and economic costs of secular practices, while privileging Islamic identities. This privilege is observable in all aspects of life including the urban space, as securitization and criminalization of non-Islamic identities gain momentum. The 2023 election results show that this trend is likely to continue with increased intensity. Erdoğan’s ruling coalition now includes fringe Islamist parties and he is likely to pursue more explicitly Islamist politics going forward partly due to growing electoral weakness of the AKP.
The stealthy nature of Islamization in the country, coupled with assertive secularism that had restricted religious rights in the past, like stealth authoritarianism, has also divided the opposition, and made it harder to detect thanks to its incremental nature. This in turn has facilitated deeper Islamization. This article traced this trajectory and complemented existing analyses of Turkey’s incremental regime change by adding an ideological transformation manifest in stealth Islamization.
The study of stealth desecularization in the Turkish context is also a cautionary tale for other cases where religious populist parties incrementally erode secular norms while simultaneously subverting democracy. This stealthy process should be examined and considered in cases such as India, Russia, Hungary, Israel, Poland and even the U.S. in future studies.
Notes 1. Anadolu Ajansi, “Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan Ayasofya-i Kebir Cami-i Şerifi’nde namaz kıldı, Kur’an okudu.” May 13, 2023. https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/politika/ cumhurbaskani-erdogan-ayasofya-i-kebir-cami-i-serifinde-namaz-kildikuran- okudu/2896796.
2. This paper adapts Varol and Przeworksi’s concept of stealth authoritarianism, defined as incremental changes that subvert democracy through legal means, to Islamization in the Turkish context. For details see Varol, “Stealth Authoritarianism” and Przeworski, Crises of Democracy.
3. For a discussion on social substratum see Karpov, “Desecularization.”
4. Brownlee, “Why Turkey Shakes Up the Democratic Theory.”
5. Varol, “Stealth Authoritarianism.”
6. For example, see Mandaville, Islam and Politics.
7. Varol, “Stealth Authoritarianism.”
8. Criss, “Dismantling Turkey”; Yesilada and Rubin, “Introduction”; Duran, “The Justice and Development Party’s ‘New Politics’”; and Rasaba and Larabee “The Rise of Political Islam in Turkey.”
9. Cağaptay, “AKP’s Foreign Policy.”
10. Şen, “The AKP Rule.”
11. Toprak et al., Türkiye’de Farklı Olmak and Criss, “Dismantling Turkey.”
12. Çarkoglu and Kalaycioglu, Fragile but Resilient?.
13. Çarkoglu and Toprak, Religion, Society and Politics in a Changing Turkey.
14. Kalaycıoğlu, “Justice and Development Party.”
15. The causes of this shift are beyond the scope of this paper. For more on this shift see Yeşilada and Rubin, “Introduction”; Çınar, “Moderation to De-Moderation”; Gumuscu, Democracy or Authoritarianism; and Kirdiş, “Wolves in Sheep Clothing.”
16. Esen and Gumuscu “Why Did Turkish Democracy Fail?”; Somer “Understanding Turkey’s Democratic Breakdown”; Akkoyunlu and Öktem, “Exit from Democracy”; Kubicek, “Faulty Assumptions”; and Çalışkan, “Toward a New Political Regime.”
17. Adak, “Expansion of the Diyanet.”
18. Kirdiş, “Wolves in Sheep Clothing”; Bashirov and Lancaster, “End of Moderation”; Çınar “From Moderation to De-Moderation”; and Gumuscu, Democracy or Authoritarianism.
19. Başkan, “Islamism and Turkey’s Foreign Policy”; Criss, “Dismantling Turkey”; and Sözen “A Paradigm Shift.”
20. Kaya, “Islamisation of Turkey”; Lüküslü, “Creating a Pious Generation”; and Eroler, Dindar Nesil Yetistirmek.
21. Yavuz, “A Framework.”
22. Şen, “The AKP Rule” and Ozturk, “Turkey’s Diyanet.”
23. Adak, “Expansion of the Diyanet.”
24. Yılmaz and Bashirov, “The AKP after 15 Years” and Yavuz, “Understanding Turkish secularism.”
25. Hegghammer, “Should I Stay.”
26. Tezcür, “The Moderation Theory.”
27. Hegghammer, “Should I Stay” and Masoud, Counting Islam.
28. Ayoob and Lussier, The Many Faces.
29. Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity.
30. Baran, “Turkey Divided” and Sezal and Sezal, “Dark Taints.”
31. İnsel, “The AKP and Normalizing Democracy” and Özbudun and Hale, Islamism, Liberalism, and Democracy.
32. How and why the party had this sharp turn is beyond the scope of this paper. See Gumuscu, Democracy or Authoritarianism; Çınar, “From Moderation to De-Moderation”; Yabancı and Taleski, “Co-Opting Religion”; and Kubicek “Majoritarian Democracy” for this debate.
33. Erbakan, Türkiye’nin Meseleleri, 46.
34. Mudde and Kaltwasser, Populism.
35. MNP, Program, Art. 96–7.
36. AKP Program, 14–16.
37. While the AKP returned to a more traditional MG line, the last political party established by the movement, Saadet (Felicity, SP), took a more democratic turn and opposed the AKP’s authoritarian practices. Saadet’s critique against the government concerned the erosion of the rule of law, human rights abuses, violation of civil liberties, and centralization of power. This critical attitude led to a split among Erbakan’s followers when his son Fatih Erbakan formed the New Welfare Party.
38. For Erdoğan’s majoritarianism see Özbudun, “AKP at the Crossroads”; Öniş, “Monopolising the Centre”; and Kubicek, “Majoritarian Democracy.”
39. Erdoğan’s Speech at TÜGVA Headquarters Opening.
40. Tuğal, “Islamism in Turkey,” 97.
41. “Vakıflara milyarlar yağdı.” BirGün, February 9, 2022. https://www.birgun.net/ haber/vakiflara-milyarlar-yagdi-412969.
42. Ibid., as well as Cammett and Luca, “Unfair Play.”
43. “Erdoğan’dan 6 yılda 43 vakfa vergi muafiyeti.”BirGün, July 25, 2020. https:// www.birgun.net/haber/erdogan-dan-6-yilda-43-vakfa-vergi-muafiyeti- 309572, and “Vakıflara milyarlar yağdı.” BirGün, December 9, 2022. https:// www.birgun.net/haber/vakiflara-milyarlar-yagdi-412969.
44. For instance, during the Gezi park protests, pro-government media – and Erdoğan – circulated fabricated news of naked men harassing a veiled woman and her baby in day light and protesters drinking alcohol in a mosque.
45. “Aksakal, Cumhur İttifakı’na çabuk uyum sağladı: Muhalefete ‘kafir’ dedi!.” BirGün, April 14, 2023. https://www.birgun.net/haber/aksakal-cumhurittifaki- na-cabuk-uyum-sagladi-muhalefete-kafir-dedi-429153.
46. Roy, The Failure of Political Islam.
47. Kara, Türkiye’de İslamcılık Düşüncesi.
48. Aybak, “Sultan is Dead,” and Yavuz, “A Framework.”
49. “Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan torununa Kur’an öğretiyor.” Yeni Şafak, April 7, 2017.
50. “Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan, Orgeneral Hulusi Akar Camii’nde Kur’an okudu.” HaberTürk, October 13, 2018. http://tinyurl.com/y2cbvjtu.
51. “Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan, Erol Olçok’un mezarı başında Kur’an okudu.” Milliyet, July 11, 2017.
52. “Başkan Erdoğan şehitler için Kur’an-ı Kerim okudu.”IHA, July 15, 2018. http://www.iha.com.tr/video-baskan-erdogan-sehitler-icin-kuran-i-kerimokudu- 119195/.
53. “Erdoğan Mezun Olduğu Okulda 44 Yıl Sonra Öğrencilerle Kur’an Okudu.” Haberler, September 29, 2017. https://www.haberler.com/recep-tayyiperdogan- anadolu-imam-hatip-lisesi-10080306-haberi/.
54. “Başkan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Köln’de Kur’an-ı Kerim okudu.” AHaber, October 2, 2018. https://www.ahaber.com.tr/webtv/gundem/baskan-receptayyip- erdogan-kolnde-kuran-i-kerim-okudu.
55. Karaman, “Itaat” and Hatipoğlu, “Ululemr’e itaat nedir.”
56. While this verse is open to different interpretations, the orthodox view requires total obedience to ulu-l-emr.
57. “Erdoğan’dan muhalefete ağır suçlama: Onlar Kandil’den biz Allah’tan emir alıyoruz.” Cumhuriyet, May 2, 2023.
58. Çaylak, “Islamci siyasette iktidar ve itikat.”
59. MNP, Program, Art. 12.
60. Somer, “Conquering Versus Democratizing.”
61. Pehlivan and Terkoğlu, Metastaz, and Omer Sahin, “Erdoğan-Gülen kavga ediyor peki ya diğer dini gruplar?” Al-Monitor, December 30, 2014. http:// tinyurl.com/jbkr6vzk.
62. “İşte Gülenciler sonrası ülkeyi saran tarikat ağları.” BirGün, October 29, 2016. https://www.birgun.net/haber-detay/iste-gulenciler-sonrasi-ulkeyi-sarantarikat- aglari-133401.html.
63. Karaman is a columnist for Yeni Şafak, a leading Islamist newspaper in Turkey.
64. MNP, Program.
65. Sarıbay, “Milli Nizam Partisinin Kuruluşu.”
66. .ztürk, “Turkey’s Diyanet” and Gözaydin, Diyanet.
67. Commanding right (good) and forbidding wrong (evil) has been a central principle informing Islamist political imaginary. Islamists define it as a duty given to all Muslims. For more on the place of these principles in the Islamic tradition see Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong.
68. Ozzano and Maritato, “Patterns of Political Secularism,” 472, and Adak, “Expansion of the Diyanet.”
69. .ztürk, “Turkey’s Diyanet,” 628.
70. See “Kurumsal Tarihçe.” May 28, 2013. https://diyanet.gov.tr/tr-TR/ Kurumsal/Detay/1.
71. See report from Doğrulukpayı, October 22, 2022. http://tinyurl.com/ ymazw2uy.
72. Diyanet, “Istatistikler,” and “Diyanet personeli sayısı dudak uçuklattı: Uzman hekimleri ikiye katladı.” BirGün, February 3, 2023. http://tinyurl.com/ 5e5ehztf.
73. Adak, “Expansion of the Diyanet,” 200.
74. Şen, “The AKP Rule.”
75. “‘Adli yıl’ eleştirilerine yanıt Verdi.” Hürriyet, September 6, 2021.
76. “Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan, ‘6. Din Şûrası’nın kapanış programında konuştu.” November 28, 2019. https://diyanet.gov.tr/tr-TR/Kurumsal/Detay/26147/ cumhurbaskani-erdogan-6-din-srasinin-kapanis-programinda-konustu.
77. See “Diyanet İşleri Başkanı Erbaş, ‘6. Din Şûrası’ kararlarını açıkladı.” November 28, 2019. https://www.diyanet.gov.tr/tr-TR/Kurumsal/Detay/ 26146/diyanet-isleri-baskani-erbas-6-din-srasi-kararlarini-acikladi.
78. See note 76.
79. “Artık bu yanlış tabuları yıkalım.” Yeni Şafak, October 4, 2018.
80. Adak, “Expansion of the Diyanet,” 202.
81. .ztürk “Turkey’s Diyanet,” 620.
82. Ongur, “Performing Through Friday khutbas.”
83. Yabancı and Taleski “Co-Opting Religion.”
84. Yılmaz and Ertürk, “Populism, Violence and Authoritarian Stability.”
85. “Diyanet’ten seçim uyarısı: ‘İktidara destek verin’.” Cumhuriyet, February 28, 2023.
86. Esen and Gumuscu, “Turkey: How the Coup Failed.”
87. Sala is traditionally recited before Friday prayers and funerals.
88. “Dindar gençlik yetiştireceğiz.” Hürriyet, February 2, 2012.
89. Lüküslü, “Creating a Pious Generation,” 640.
90. Ministry of National Education (Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı, MEB) Statistics.
91. “Her yer imam, her yer hatip! MEB imam hatipleri kılavuzda ‘nitelikli’ yaptı.” Cumhuriyet, April 11, 2018.
92. Eğitim-Sen, Egitimin Durumu Raporu.
93. “With more Islamic Schooling, Erdogan Aims to Reshape Turkey.” Reuters, January 25, 2018. http://tinyurl.com/y6pfrnuf.
94. Ministry of National Education Statistics.
95. “Turkey Rolls Out New School Curriculum – Without Darwin.” Reuters, July 18, 2017. http://tinyurl.com/ymh6ffzy.
96. TÜGVA, “Medeniyet ve Değerler Kulubu.”
97. “Turkey’s Top Religious Body Given Authority to Conduct Workshops on ‘Morals, Values’ for Students.” Duvar (English), April 7, 2023. http://tinyurl. com/5378bkw9.
98. Mandaville, Islam and Politics, 74.
99. Çınar argues that the AKP uses this principle to justify its policies to regulate secular lifestyles. See Çınar, “From Moderation to De-Moderation.”
100. This is also what separates the AKP’s stealth Islamization (in a secular framework) from direct imposition of Islamic normativity observed in Iran after the Iranian Revolution, in Saudi Arabia under the Saudi-Wahhabi ruling pact, and in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
101. Furman, “Battling.”
102. “RTÜK’e 1 yılda 44 bin 176 şikayet.” Bianet, April 11, 2022. https://m.bianet. org/bianet/medya/260320-rtuk-e-1-yilda-44-bin-176-sikayet.
103. “RTÜK | 2021’in ilk yarısında cezalar sadece eleştirel kanallara.” Bianet, July 5, 2021. https://m.bianet.org/bianet/medya/246764-rtuk-2021-in-ilk-yarisindacezalar- sadece-elestirel-kanallara, and Anadolu Ajansi, RTÜK’ten kurallara uymayan televizyonlara en üst seviyeden ceza.” August 23, 2017. https:// www.aa.com.tr/tr/turkiye/rtukten-kurallara-uymayan-televizyonlara-en-ustseviyeden- ceza/892289. For an example, see 2021 report at https://www.rtuk. gov.tr/UstKurulKarar/Detay/15269.
104. Bacık, “Informal Application.”
105. “Concert Bans Continue in Turkey ‘to Protect Public Safety, Morality’.” Bianet, May 26, 2022. https://bianet.org/english/society/262428-concert-banscontinue- in-turkey-to-protect-public-safety-morality.
106. “Turkish Pop Star Placed Under House Arrest Over Joke About Religious Schools.” CNN, August 29, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/29/europe/ turkey-gulsen-colakoglu-house-arrest-intl/index.html.
107. Şansal, “LGBTQ Rights.”
108. “Turkish Police Crack Down on Gay Pride in Istanbul.” Hürriyet Daily News, June 19, 2015.
109. “Altun: Boğaziçili azgın azınlık.” Articerek, January 30, 2021. https://artigercek. com/haberler/altun-bogazicili-azgin-azinlik.
110. “Thousands March in Turkey to Demand Ban on LGBTQ Groups.” Associated Press, September 18, 2022. http://tinyurl.com/yc492yzr.
111. “‘We’re Against LGBT’: Erdoğan Targets Gay and Trans People Ahead of Critical Turkish Election.” The Guardian, May 12, 2023.
112. See Andrew Wilks, “Turkey’s Ruling Alliance Welcomes Islamist Parties with Misogynist Agendas.” Al-Monitor, March 27, 2023. http://tinyurl.com/ muz5ywv.
113. Mayer, “How Stateless Nations.”
114. Elden, “There Is a Politics of Space.”
115. For an excellent study of Islamist urbanization under the AKP, see Batuman, New Islamist Architecture.
116. Ghulyan, “The Spatialization.”
117. Ibid.
118. Ibid.