[Discussion] bk. rev. Jenny B. White's _Islamist Mobilization in Turkey_ by Lale Yalcin-Heckmann

[sule tarakcioglu]

Jenny B. White. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular
Politics. Studies in Modernity and National Identity Series. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2002. xi + 299 pp. Illustrations, maps,
notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-295-98223-3 $22.50
(paper), ISBN 0-295-98291-8 .
*Reviewed by:* Lale Yalcin-Heckmann, Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology, Halle.
*Published by:* H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/>
(June, 2004)
Vernacular Politics

In the eyes of many western observers, the Turkish Republic's experience
with democracy has been surprisingly fluctuating and enigmatic. The fact
that democracy has been interrupted several times by military coups and
that the polity still seems to be under strict control of the military
and Kemalist elites has been seen as weaknesses of Turkish democracy,
hindering the development of civil society. Yet when existing civic
organizations seem to be at their strongest, when they are mobilizing
urbanites around Muslim ideals and values and support for an Islamic
form of polity, the same critical western observers are uneasy about
identifying this civil mobilization as "civil society." Islamic
mobilization in a country with western democracy as the ideal seems to
be a contradiction in itself. Jenny White's study of the vernacular
politics and Islamist mobilization in Istanbul, the most cosmopolitan
city of modern Turkey, is an important contribution to understanding
this crucial political element of Turkish society, namely understanding
how and why urban people in modern Turkey are mobilized around Islamic
ideals. This book is the third volume of the University of Washington
Press's Studies in Modernity and National Identity series, which
examines "the relationships among modernity, the nation-state, and
nationalism as these have evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries." Accordingly, the book has an interdisciplinary framework,
even if the author's expertise derives from her anthropological
research. In fact, it is Jenny White's second book on urban Istanbul; in
her first study she examined urban home production and gender in a
neighborhood of Istanbul.[1] For her second book, she returns to the
same neighborhood some ten years later and examines the texture and
processes of political mobilization and the meaning of Islam in it. Such
a research strategy, needless to say, requires the development of a deep
knowledge of the background of families, persons, institutions,
landscapes and discourses, which White skilfully uses to underline or
challenge the new and old personal and political knowledge and
understanding of social processes.

Jenny White's knowledge and experience with Turkish society and politics
is richly demonstrated with episodes from a period of twenty-five years
of visits and longer stays in Turkey. She reminisces about her
university years in Ankara in the 1970s and her experience of the
violence of political conflicts at that time (pp. 38-40). She then takes
the reader to another time and context, a visit to the families of two
wealthy business partners in Istanbul in 1991, one a new elite nouveau
riche family, the other a member of the old elites, and describes
plastically how class differences were displayed through different
styles and modes of appropriating social capital (pp. 45-47). She then
describes a political interview with Receb Tayyib Erdogan, the then
mayor of Istanbul and later Turkish prime minister, on an Islamist
television channel, and describes how Erdogan hijacked the program
despite the preparations made by the host, a left-wing Turkish woman
journalist. White participates in the preparation as well as in the
debriefing after the TV program (pp. 139-142). At another place in the
book, the author shares her impressions and assessment of Erdogan's
political views, whom she interviewed during his term as mayor of
Istanbul, asking him about women's participation in political and
economic life (pp. 235-236). Apart from such episodic descriptions of
the author's encounters and engagements with various sections and
personalities of Turkish society and Istanbul's urban population, she
also offers a more systematic study of urban institutions, civic
associations, women's organizations, administrative bodies and
individuals and different types of families from =DCmraniye, the
neighborhood under study. On the whole, the depth and breadth of her
study is indeed impressive.

The main arguments of the book are related to understanding social and
political processes in modern urban Turkey, and more specifically in
Istanbul, through the lens of "vernacular politics," a term she defines
as "a new vision of 'politics' in societies" and a rethinking of "the
terms we use to understand how people are mobilized to be active
participants in public life" (p. x). The concept of vernacular politics
is developed throughout the book: to begin with, White states that the
term allows "us to grasp the hybrid nature of modern urban-based
political processes" (p. 6). Somewhat later she defines the basis of
vernacular politics in Turkey as "local networks of people united within
a complex set of norms of mutual obligation. These widely shared norms
require people to assist one another in open-ended relations of
reciprocity, without calculating immediate return" (pp. 20ff). The form
of mobilization in this network producing trust is through action,
through "cells" (h=FCcreler): "Cells are based on preexisting networks.
Linked to one another, clusters of cells easily constitute a mass
movement" (p. 21). The interesting aspect of this type of mobilization
is that "people involved in local network politics perceive themselves
as practising community, not just doing politics" (p. 22). This aspect
seems to be the strength but also the weakness of vernacular politics.
The strength and perhaps the freshness of this process are in its
challenge to "the authoritarian, centralised, top-down paternalism of
the political system" (p. 22). The existing paternalistic style of
politics works through party institutions and civic organizations, which
was a common characteristic not only of the Kemalist, social democratic
and liberal conservative parties but also of earlier Islamist parties.
The new generation of politicians using the vernacular political forms
manage to establish a more populist and egalitarian type of relationship
between the party and constituency. Yet, as White points out, this
process entails its own endemic dangers as well. "This autonomy from
institutional mediation comes at a price: party leaders must allow
community politics to lead, not follow [which] means pulling the
sometimes unruly local groups with their contradictory positions and
goals to an effective national political agenda" (p. 22). A key point of
argument White refers to throughout the book is the use of vernacular
politics for a successful political mobilization for the Islamist
politics as exemplified in local and national elections in the last
decade, and its absence from and lack of success in the politics of the
Kemalists and the secularists. Although she cites her informants and
acknowledges that vernacular politics have been very well used by social
democratic politicians in the early 1970s, she cannot satisfactorily
explain why they are now missing from contemporary social democratic and
other secularist politics. Jenny White is indeed aware of the complexity
and fluidity of social and political structures and texture; the
overlapping of personnel, relationships and even attitudes of the
secularists and Islamists are amply demonstrated. Yet, given this
fluidity and hybridism, it is still not easy to grasp the uniqueness or
permanence of the relationship between norms and values (hence culture)
and the successful political mobilization by Islamist forces. One is
tempted to ask if similar methods have been used by other political
forces (e.g. Ecevit's social democrats in the 1970s) and if norms and
values in poor, urban quarters of Istanbul have been taken into
consideration by these other political forces at other times as well.
The particular success of Islamist mobilization may be less due to their
use of vernacular politics but simply to a historical coincidence at a
very particular political, economic and social juncture. Such an
interpretation of White's material would furthermore suggest that the
junction between Islam and vernacular politics is neither unique nor
permanent and would be open to challenges and to the pressures of
institutionalized politics, as it seems to be the case with AK (Justice
and Development Party) politics which have been ruling Turkey since 1999.

The strength of White's work lies in her rich and multi-sited
ethnography, her sensitive approach in reflecting people's voices as
well as embedding them in their economic and social settings, plastic
descriptions of complex social and institutional formations in
Istanbul's and modern Turkey's urban setting. The analytical power of
the book, however, suffers from the multiple structural switches between
the local, national, ethnographic, literary and historical dimensions of
the complex relationship between Islam and secularism in Turkey. There
seem to be quite a few repetitive passages and questionable analytical
passages on Turkey's various historical episodes, such as the 1950s or
the 1980s, where the author, perhaps due to the difficulty of giving a
fair description of contested political eras, seems to rely on too few
authors, hence missing the contested nature of the political events of
these eras. Finally, a reference to a study of urban Islam and a
community of "conscious Muslims" in Ankara, which could have been very
fruitfully compared to her community of migrants in Istanbul, is
curiously missing.[2] Even if Saktanber's seminal work also appeared in
2002, her study has been carried out during the 1990s, and White seems
to have been aware of it, since she contributed to the volume edited by
Kandiyoti and Saktanber.[3]

Nevertheless, Jenny White's book is a must-read for anyone interested
in--and ready to accept no simple solution or analysis of--urban modern
Turkey's contested space for and processes of Islamist politics. It is
an inspiring and enjoyable book, also recommended to readers of civil
society and civil political movements in the Middle East and relevant
for countries with similar political struggles of modernization and
fundamentalism. Jenny White's comparative framework and broad view takes
her to similar political processes and civic movements such as the
Protestant mega-churches in the United States, and this is rightly so.

Notes

[1]. Jenny B. White, Money Makes us Relatives: Women's Labor in Urban
Turkey (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).

[2]. Ayse Saktanber, Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politization
of Culture in Turkey (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002).

[3]. Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayse Saktanber, eds. Fragments of Culture: The
Everyday of Modern Turkey (London and New York: I. B.Tauris, 2002).