Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

6 8Islam i n World Cult u r e sgious instruction and exposing them to exploiters of religion. (Quoted inSakallioglu 1996, 246).By the 1990s, a new Islamic force had successfully entered Turkish politics.The Refah (Welfare) Party, founded in 1983, gained enough electoral strengthto win the plurality of votes in general elections in 1995, allowing a coalitiongovernment that, for the first time, placed an Islamic activist, Necmettin Erbekan,in the prime minister’s office. The party was abolished by the Tu r k i s hcourts in 1998 as an illegitimate intrusion of religion into politics, but its victorieswere part of a long-term change in the basis of support for Islamic politics.As Tu r k e y ’s economy has globalized, its earlier-established political and economicelites have lost ground relative to the small entrepreneurs, professionals,and new urban workers who have no links or loyalty to standing powerstructures (Gulalp 2001). These groups have tended to support the We l f a r eParty and its successor, the Virtue Party, in part because of its Islamic message,but also in part due to these parties’ skillful use of newly deregulated televisionmarkets and other mass media. Working with a professional marketing firm,they portrayed themselves in campaign advertisements as modern, broadbased,issue-oriented movements seeking unity in diversity and justice in an atmosphereof economic exploitation and corruption (Oncu 1995).But the Welfare Party’s victory hardened the secular establishment’s resistanceto the growing public interest in discussing contemporary social issuesin Islamic terms. When a number of young female Turkish medical studentswore scarves on their hair to examinations in January 1998, they were turnedaway and prevented from attending further classes. The rector of IstanbulUniversity reiterated its long-standing ban on head scarves for women, and aneconomics professor and administrator of the university remarked, “Thehead scarf is a symbol which represents an ideology. . . . Many people wholike to see the scarves would also like to see a regime like the one in Iran.That suggests a totalitarian approach which does not recognize any alternative”(quoted in Kinzer 1998). The university’s own restriction on choice is intendedto mark the line between legitimate and illegitimate religious activityin a country that tries ever harder to merge political secularism with its heritageas the last caliphal state of Islam (Kaplan 2002). In an age where individualparticipation in the interpretation of history, scripture, and identity isbecoming ever more important, the drawing of these sorts of official lines becomesincreasingly difficult.In a broader sense, the drawing of any sorts of lines at all, any way to distinguishbetween authentic values and counterfeit ones, is beginning to seemlike a utopian dream. Karl Marx ’s characterization of the modern world asone in which “all that is solid melts into air” has never seemed more appropriatethan now. The conceptual lines between technology, science, religion,