The pious dissidence in Turkey: Contesting religious neoliberal governmentality under the AKP

DOI10.1177/0263395719896285
Date01 November 2020
AuthorYusuf Sarfati,Umut Korkut
Published date01 November 2020
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-1736YC1YMaf1CC/input 896285POL0010.1177/0263395719896285PoliticsKorkut and Sarfati
research-article2020
Article
Politics
2020, Vol. 40(4) 413 –427
The pious dissidence in
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Turkey: Contesting religious
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395719896285
DOI: 10.1177/0263395719896285
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neoliberal governmentality
under the AKP

Umut Korkut
Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
Yusuf Sarfati
Illinois State University, USA
Abstract
Turkey under the AKP governments constitutes an exemplary case for understanding how
centralized religion, authoritarianism, and economic logic of neoliberalism interrelate. AKP uses
state-guided religion to legitimize its neoliberal economic policies and create docile, economized
citizens. This article specifically focuses on how pious Muslims resist AKP’s religious neoliberalism
by focusing on actions and deliberations of Labor and Justice Platform members. Our discussion,
which consists of face-to-face interviews with the members of this social movement, delineates the
group’s justice-oriented, egalitarian, and pluralist orientation of Islam and depicts their dialogues
with power – embodied in AKP’s domination of Islamic discourse in Turkey. We discuss how
group members reinterpret religious concepts such as kader (fate), kısmet (destiny), and sabır
(patience) that the AKP uses as micro-discursive mechanisms to create economically compliant
citizens. We also discuss the specific frames of resistance they develop in order to break out from
the resilience and adaptation that AKP has embedded in its narratives of economy and work.
These frames include a sharp criticism of market Islam, a challenge to political Islam and dissent
against state Islam. Theoretically, the article refers to neoliberal governmentality and explores its
contestation – an understudied concept in Foucauldian studies.
Keywords
AKP, neoliberal governmentality, new social movements, political Islam, Turkey
Received: 7th March 2019; Revised version received: 18th November 2019; Accepted: 19th November 2019
Introduction
There is a growing literature on the evolving relationship between neoliberal projects and
religion in various contexts (Buğra and Savaşkan, 2014; Tuğal, 2012; Gauthier and
Marikainen, 2016). Turkey under successive Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve
Corresponding author:
Umut Korkut, Glasgow School for Business and Society, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow G4 0BA,
UK.
Email: umut.korkut@gcu.ac.uk

414
Politics 40(4)
Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) governments offers an ideal opportunity to examine how reli-
gion, authoritarianism, and the economic logic of neoliberalism could interrelate. Since
its inception, AKP has promoted an ideological profile that combines neoliberalism and
Islam (Atasoy, 2009). Particularly in its third term in office, AKP’s brand of Islamism
became increasingly authoritarian while centralized religion was used as a tool for social
engineering to co-opt people into neoliberalism (Korkut and Eslen-Ziya, 2017). We are
interested in how this process triggered contestation, particularly that of the ‘pious’
Muslims, including their deliberations on adaptation and resilience to the AKP’s con-
servative neoliberalism. Their contestation unfolds as follows: first, the pious problema-
tize the frames of reference that the political system rests upon; second, they interrogate
this frame and present its inconsistencies; third, they produce their own discourse, pre-
senting the inconsistencies among the religious, political, and economic pillars of the
political system. What matters to us is not the electoral strength of this contestation, but
its capacity to question the system from within. This presents a rupture in the ‘conduct of
conduct’ foreseen by neoliberal governmentality. Therefore, we demonstrate how the
neoliberalized subject contests the social context of governmentality questioning its very
techniques. We call this contesting neoliberal governmentality. Empirically, we depict the
formulation of ‘pious dissidence’ in Turkey, follow their deliberations on Islamic identity
facing corruption, injustice, and oppression in modern Turkish politics, and finally pre-
sent the contestation of religiously informed neoliberal governmentality by the very con-
stituency, that is, the pious, that the AKP purports to represent.
The argument
In Turkey, the Kemalist state has historically used religion as a political tool to organize the
polity and the public along its own ideological tenets. This meant embracing a reformed
Islam, marginalizing Islamism in the sociopolitical realm, and creating modern, secular
citizens. Recently, AKP-led governments sought to organize religious roles and identities
to encourage human capital to serve neoliberalism and appealed to a state-controlled reli-
gion in order to entrench its domination (Korkut and Eslen-Ziya, 2017). This has forged a
highly economized idea of the common good, suggesting social identities and roles in
confluence with the neoliberal goals of the political authority. We are interested in how the
pious dissidents react towards resilience and adaptability themes embedded in the AKP’s
political narrative. This shows how pious Muslims position themselves between the polit-
ico-religious authority and their piety, and therefore, the limits of AKP’s political domi-
nance over its very constituency. To elaborate on these conceptual claims, we primarily
refer to interviews with Labor and Justice Platform (Emek ve Adalet Platformu, LJP) mem-
bers. We delineate their justice-oriented, egalitarian, and pluralist orientation of Islam and
depict their dialogues with power – embodied in AKP’s domination of Islamic discourse in
Turkey. LJP is not a mass movement, but its discourse and practices are significant in
demonstrating that the Islamic public sphere in Turkey is not univocal. LJP members pro-
mote alternative conceptions of morality, justice, authority, citizenship, and economic rela-
tions from an Islamic perspective at a time when most of the Islamic civil society is
co-opted by the AKP. The group primarily focuses on labour and urban issues in order to
highlight injustices faced by subcontractor workers, the homeless, low-income residents
facing gentrification in their neighbourhoods, and other underprivileged populations. Their
actions demonstrate that there remain pockets of resistance in the Islamic public sphere
that consciously challenge AKP’s neoliberal Islamist authoritarianism.

Korkut and Sarfati
415
The LJP is not the only group within the larger Islamic public sphere that poses a chal-
lenge to AKP’s hegemony. For instance, Reçel Blog, an Islamic feminist online blog,
provides a platform to pious women’s voices in the intersection of gender and religious
identities. Alternative conceptions of gender relations within the Muslim community are
widely discussed and circulated in this forum. Similarly, the Muslim Initiative against
Violence against Women (Kadına Karşı Şiddete Karşı Müslümanlar İnsiyatifi) is a wom-
en’s rights group close to the LJP that highlights violence against women within the
Muslim community through various activities, including writing its own Friday sermon
(hutbe) against violence against women and circulating them in mosques in Fatih and
Üsküdar. The Right Initiative (Hak İnsiyatifi) is an Islamic human rights advocacy group
that documents abuses by the AKP governments, particularly in Turkey’s Kurdish regions.
These groups as well as others work in tandem with the LJP and constitute within the
larger Islamic public sphere a counter-public, in which feminist, liberatory, egalitarian,
and pluralist interpretations of Islam are created in sharp contrast to AKP’s authoritarian
religious neoliberal governmentality. Therefore, our focus on LJP’s activities, as a case of
pious dissidence, highlights the multivocality of Turkey’s Islamic public sphere and goes
beyond studies that solely focus on the AKP to understand Islam in Turkey. This is signifi-
cant in countering Orientalist accounts in the West that represent Islamic activism in
Turkey and elsewhere as homogeneous and authoritarian.
These pious voices oppose the AKP, which has not only used religion to promote obe-
dience to political authority but also pacified and contained identities in highly econo-
mized terms (Çalışkan and Callon, 2009) to serve a politically defined common good
(Korkut and Eslen-Ziya, 2017). Erdoğan himself notoriously foregrounds such concepts
as kader (fate), kısmet (destiny), şükür (thankfulness), and sabır (steadfastness) in his
speeches in order to shirk the responsibility to a divine being when his government fails
to deliver. Following a mining disaster in Zonguldak where 30 miners died, Erdoğan
stated that ‘[accidents] are the fate for the mining occupation and my brothers who join
this occupation, when they assume their jobs are aware that these kinds of things can hap-
pen’ (Sabah, 2015). It is typical for AKP politicians to ask [for] steadiness in the aftermath
of major disasters, such as train accidents, floods, or terror attacks in an attempt to con-
ceal their responsibilities. We take the AKP’s efforts to shift responsibility to a divine
being and attempts to cultivate public interpretations of avoidable disasters using refer-
ences imbued with religious themes as a sign of the ‘conduct of conduct’ sought by neo-
liberal governmentality with religious...

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