Turkey's Religion, Political Party And Politics

The core issue of this thesis is to explore the rise and development of Turkey's Islamic political parties, and in essence the interaction of religion, political party and politics in the context of Turkey. More clearly speaking, the thesis aims to clarify the relationship between Islamic political party and the religion, Islamic political party and the State, as well as the relationship between religion and secularism.The rise of Islamic political party is closely related to Turkey's historical development,political transformation and religious policies, changes. In the Kemalist era, the role of religion in society has been severely weakened by radical secular reform. Since the opening of democratization process in the late 1940s, the religion used to be repressed started to gain political space to express itself.In the 1950s, when the democratization process was officially launched, people's religious sentiment has gotten a wide range of release in the Democratic Party's era.However, the increase of religion's status and the release of popular religious sentiment are still necessary, but not sufficient conditions for the establishment of Islamic political party. In reality, it faced with the challenges posed by a strong military in the 1960s so that those Islamists needed to be hidden in the right political parties and waited for the changes of Turkey's political situation.Since the early 1970s, Islamic political party began to emerge in Turkey 's political landscape, but the National Order Party and the National Salvation Party were banned very soon. In fact, the political Islam movement (National Outlook Movement)is not a rural, traditional and anti-modem phenomenon as many people understood, but a product of modernization and rapid urbanization with specific political, economic, social and ideological conditions.It was under the influence of Islamic political party, Islamic capital and Muslim intellectuals that the marginalized Anatolian population began to challenge the secular forces and propelled the periphery to move towards the center. In 1995, the Welfare Party won the general election with high votes of conservative people and formed the coalition government. This indicated that the marginal forces have become an important player in the political arena.After the "soft coup" in 1997, the escalation of the conflict between the Welfare Party and the Secularists represented by the military ultimately triggered the banning of Welfare Party. Later, the Felicity Party was established by the traditionalists but its influence gradually faded in Turkey's contemporary political landscape,while the Justice and Development Party (JDP) established by the reformist began to hold the banner of "Conservative Democracy" and become the ruling party for so many years by continually winning elections. In essence, the JDP has become a post-Islamist or neo-Islamist political party which has achieved the transcendence of political Islam.As a matter of fact, there are three forms of Islamic movement in Turkey, namely the political Islam movement which established a series of Islamic political parties,the post-Islamist or neo-Islamist movementwith the JDP as the representative and Gulen movement which claims to be a civil society organization. From a comparative perspective, we can clarify the routes of Political Islam of political Islam movement,the Social Islam of the JDP and the Civil Islam of Gulen movement, and by this way to grasp the overal landscape of Turkish Islamic movement.The appearance of political Islam movement in Turkey is also a part of the world-wide religious renaissance movement. However, in the imagination of the Western world, most of these Islamic movements and Islamic political parties have been given the labels like "extremism","terrorism" and "fundamentalism" and those activists were also seen as "irrational","narrow-minded" and "fanatical" "green menaces" who wished to bring the clock back to the period when Islam was created.However, this ideological interpretation of the movement is too simple and one-sided,let alone not to understand the reasons behind it. Therefore, it is necessary to dig into the roots of Turkey's history, politics, society and culture to figure out the true answer.