The National outlook and its youth in the 1970s

Abstract

This thesis examines the Islamist politics of the 1970s in Turkey in the light of the historical evidence about the National Outlook movement and its affiliate youth organization, the Raiders. In this thesis I argue that the debate on the relation between modernity and Islam has a temptation to ahistoricize the phenomenon of political Islam as “essentially anti-modern or not” while what determines the political nature of Islamist movements is not Islam per se but the very socio-historical contexts in which they find themselves. From the center-periphery paradigm, it is argued that “the secular centre” in Turkey has to integrate “the Islamic periphery” to the regime by tolerating Islamist politics. This thesis challenges this argument in a number of ways and argues that the injection of Islam to “the central political culture” of Turkey does not necessarily ensure social reintegration between the elites and the masses. In fact, as this thesis strives to expose, historically the official attitude toward Islamist politics have vacillated as a strategy of power. The centre-periphery paradigm asserts that the National Outlook movement has assumed the role of “conveying the peripheral Islamic groups” to “the center,” thus contributing to democratic development. On the one hand, in my view, this paradigm generally neglects that the elites of the movement have already established close ties to “the secular center” and integrated themselves to the very targets of “modernizing society and creating a homogenous nation.” The analysis on the narrative of the Raiders shows that their objective was not to selfintegrate to “the center,” which resulted in the controversies between them and the headquarters of the National Outlook.