¹ Kısakürek, Necip Fazıl, Hitabeler (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1985), 165Google Scholar. This is originally from a speech Kısakürek delivered at a meeting of a youth association in 1965.

² The main cathedral of the Orthodox Church in Byzantine times, Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 and served as the main mosque of the Ottoman Empire with its Turkified name “Ayasofya Camii.” It became a museum in 1934 by order of a cabinet decree signed by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) himself. This decree was repealed by the Council of State on July 10, 2020, and the building was opened to Muslim prayers on July 24, 2020.

³ For an op-ed piece on the issue, see Selim Koru, “Turkey's Islamist Dream Finally Becomes a Reality,” New York Times, 14 July 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/hagia-sophia-turkey-mosque.html. Although Turkey was never colonized by an imperial power, Islam-inspired critiques of the Turkish modernization process perceived Westernizing reforms from the 19th century onward, especially those that were carried out in the first two decades of the republican regime established in 1923, as practices of “self-colonization.” See Aktay, Yasin, “Sunuş,” in Modern Türkiye'de Siyasi Düşünce, vol. 6, İslâmcılık, ed. Aktay, Yasin (Istanbul: İletişim, 2005), 20Google Scholar; and Şentürk, Recep, “Türkiye'de Sosyoloji: Gelenekleşme, Yerlilik ve Bazı Temel Sorunlar,” in Türkiye'de Sosyolojinin Yüz Yıllık Birikimi, ed. Çav, E. and S., E. Genç (Istanbul: Ketebe Yayınları, 2020), 368-–93Google Scholar. Note that Yasin Aktay, a professor of sociology, is a deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) and served as a member of parliament from the party's ranks between 2015 and 2018. Recep Şentürk, also a professor of sociology, is the founding rector of Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul founded by an association run by President Erdoğan's son. The erstwhile status of Ayasofya as a museum rather than a Muslim sanctuary was perceived as a mark of Turkey's colonization by the agents of modernization—a source of shame for many people with Islamic and nationalistic sensibilities since the early Cold War era. Starting at the five-hundred-year anniversary of Istanbul's conquest in 1953, calls for the opening of Ayasofya for Muslim prayers became a central theme among religious conservative and nationalist circles. See Aytürk, İlker, “Nationalism and Islam in Cold War Turkey, 1944–69,” Middle Eastern Studies 50, no. 5 (2014): 693–719CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ At the first Friday prayer, the director of religious affairs, Ali Erbaş, delivered his sermon by leaning on a sword in his hands and denouncing those who decided to close down Ayasofya for Muslim prayers, that is, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his associates. Erbaş referred in his sermon to Cold War–era conservative intellectuals by citing their lines expressing aspirations to see Ayasofya as a mosque—including a line from Necip Fazıl Kısakürek's Ayasofya speech (part of which appears at the beginning of this article). For the full sermon see “Diyanet İşleri Başkanı Erbaş, yeniden ibadete açılan Ayasofya-i Kebir Cami-i Şerifi'nde ilk hutbeyi irad etti,” Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (website), https://www.diyanet.gov.tr/tr-TR/Kurumsal/Detay/29715/diyanet-isleri-baskani-erbas-yeniden-ibadete-acilan-ayasofya-i-kebir-cami-i-serifinde-ilk-hutbeyi-irad-etti (accessed 21 June 2021).

⁵ Despite controversies regarding a proper definition of populism in the existing literature, arguably the common denominator of all populist rhetoric is an emphatic antagonism between the people, in whatever terms they are defined, and the elite or the establishment. See Katsambekis, Giorgos, “Constructing ‘the People’ of Populism: A Critique of the Ideational Approach from a Discursive Perspective,” Journal of Political Ideologies 27, no. 1 (2022): 53–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Mukaddesatçı is a Turkified word derived from the Arabic root س - ق - د (q-d-s), meaning holy or sacred. Without the Turkish suffixes, mukaddesat is an Arabic word in the plural form, and refers to things and values that are sacred. Therefore, mukaddesatçı literally means defender and protector of the holy or sacred things and values, referring to adherents of this worldview that is denoted by the word mukaddesatçılık. Translating the word into English is almost impossible; there is no proper English equivalent. This linguistic concern is one of the reasons I use it in the original Turkish; terms such as Islamic conservatism or conservative nationalism do not capture all aspects of mukaddesatçılık as an ideological position.

⁷ Mukaddesatçılık may be categorized as a “thin” ideology, which does not offer any determinate policy programs or schemes for distribution of wealth and resources. For thin ideologies, see Freeden, Michael, Ideology: A Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 97–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ For a detailed discussion of the term, see Juergensmeyer, Mark, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a rather recent use of religious nationalism to explain the contemporary rise of Islam in Turkey, see White, Jenny, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

⁹ Ressentiment, a French word translated as and sometimes used interchangeably with resentment or rancor, is a moral sentiment referring to a deep-seated feeling of envy, grievance, and hostility. It is caused by a perceived wrongdoing toward oneself that one feels powerless to act upon. See “Ressentiment,” Oxford Reference, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100416129 (accessed 14 September 2020). The concept is commonly associated with Friedrich Nietzsche, who developed this otherwise primordial human sentiment as a conceptual tool in his historical critique of Judeo-Christian civilization in On the Genealogy of Morality, originally published in 1882. Philosophers often use the original French to differentiate the concept from its English counterparts, which lack the emphasis on hatred that ressentiment in its French form carries. See Frings, Manfred S., ”Introduction,” in Ressentiment, ed. Scheler, Max (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1994), 1–18, 5Google Scholar. Since the language of hatred is so central for Kısakürek, too, in building his mukaddesatçı narrative, I prefer to use the French term instead of resentment or grievance.

¹⁰ See Singer, Sean R., “Erdogan's Muse: The School of Necip Fazil Kisakurek,” World Affairs 176, no. 4 (2013): 81–88Google Scholar; and Cornell, Svante E., “Erbakan, Kısakürek, and the Mainstreaming of Extremism in Turkey,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology 23 (2018): 5–32Google Scholar.

¹¹ The narrative of duality designates modernist political groups, including republican nationalists (ulusalcı in Turkish), liberal and social democrats, and leftists of various sorts, on the secular side, whereas conservative nationalists, religious conservatives, and Islamists are on the religious side. Both popular accounts and academic works resting on this narrative take the constitution of these camps as such for granted. For instance, the juxtaposition of a secular ultra-nationalist and a social democrat, a socialist and a liberal, or a Turkish nationalist and an Islamist is not problematized at all. For a critical evaluation of this narrative, see Hazır, Agah, “Narratives on Religion-State Relations in Turkey: Continuities and Discontinuities,” Turkish Studies 21, no. 4 (2020): 557–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² See Mardin, Şerif, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?” Daedalus 102, no. 1 (1973): 169–90Google Scholar. For a critical assessment, see Bakiner, Onur, “A Key to Turkish Politics? The Center–Periphery Framework Revisited,” Turkish Studies 19, no. 4 (2018): 503–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Although a myriad of examples of the hegemonic secular-religious duality exist in the literature, it is important to mention scholars such as Şerif Mardin, Metin Heper, Nilüfer Göle, and Binnaz Toprak. They are the early period scholars who wrote on Islamic political, intellectual, and social movements from the 1980s onward, from political scientific, sociological, and anthropological perspectives. Their work contributed immensely to the establishment of secular-religious duality in the public intellectual space and laid out a framework for scholarly analyses that have been prevalent for decades. Reification of the analytical division between the secular and religious sectors of society without any critical consideration impoverished Turkish political literature. Moreover, the identitarian instrumentalization of this otherwise analytical divide by Islamic-oriented politicians and intellectuals further diminished its value. See Aytürk, İlker, “Post–post Kemalizm: Yeni Bir Paradigmayı Beklerken,” Birikim 319 (2015): 34–48Google Scholar; and Tolga Gürakar and Behlül Özkan, Türkiye'nin Soğuk Savaş Düzeni: Ordu, Sermaye, ABD, İslamizasyon (Istanbul: Tekin Yayınevi, 2020).

¹⁴ Recent studies in revisionist history literature critically assess this narrative and debunk its vision of Turkish modernization history. See for instance, Butrus Abu-Manneh, Studies on Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century (1826–1876) (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2001); Frederick F. Anscombe, State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Yaycioglu, Ali, “Guarding Traditions and Laws—Disciplining Bodies and Souls: Tradition, Science, and Religion in the Age of Ottoman Reform,” Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 5 (2018): 1542–1603CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ In addition to the political consequences of creating a divisive polarization within Turkish society that has been utilized by the current government in populist terms, the homologous interpretation of center-periphery and secular-religious dualities has had a severely adverse outcome in social science scholarship. It precludes social scientists from clearly distinguishing social groups with religious sensibilities such as conservatives, Islamists, and nationalists, and deprives students of analytical tools for conceptualizing distinct features of these ideological orientations. It takes constitution of these ideological orientations out of perspective and de-historicizes them, together with their conflicts and cooperations with each other. People with nationalistic and religious sensibilities in the early Cold War era cooperated against the possible advent of leftist ideologies without clear ideological markers that would otherwise distinguish them. Kısakürek's mukaddesatçılık, in this context, appeared as a unifying term to keep these groups under a single umbrella against the left, which, as I shall explain, Kısakürek associated with secular modernization. Despite Kısakürek's lifelong struggle, the right-wing coalition of early Cold War context had resolved during the 1960s, as religious conservatism, Islamism, and nationalism constituted themselves as distinct ideological orientations. Although his efforts to reverse this separation have largely failed, Kısakürek's mukaddesatçılık has still been formative for all these emerging ideologies. Although today's Islamists, conservatives, and nationalists do not use the word to identify themselves, because mukaddesatçı, as a word, belonged to an era when these groups had not yet separated clearly, mukaddesatçılık still brings them together in their discontent with secularism and modernization-as-Westernization.

¹⁶ Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Clark, J. C. D., “Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a ‘Grand Narrative,’” Historical Journal 55, no. 1 (2012): 161–94Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Begüm Adalet, Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

¹⁸ Cemil Aydın, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 10–11.

¹⁹ Ibid. See also Dietrich Jung, Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam (Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2011). For an analysis of continuities and ruptures between the late-imperial era Islamism and republican period Islamic thought, see Duran, Burhanettin and Aydın, Cemil, “Competing Occidentalisms of Modern Islamist Thought: Necip Fazıl Kısakürek and Nurettin Topçu on Christianity, the West and Modernity,” Muslim World 103, no. 4 (2013): 479–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ For a similar discussion relating the discourse of modernization to the search for national revival, see Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

²¹ Representing Kemalist reform process and Turkish modernization in general as self-colonization, as contemporary followers of Kısakürek's line such as Yasin Aktay and Recep Şentürk do, is inspired by this narrative. The conviction that Turkey was virtually colonized from within, by its own people, arguably resulted in limiting the scope of Islam-based political and intellectual movements to domestic concerns. The nemeses of Islamic thought in Turkey, notably Kısakürek's mukaddesatçılık, have not been the West or modernity directly, unlike Islamists in other parts of the world; rather, they targeted Turkish modernization process and its agents as well as secular political and intellectual movements within Turkey. This domestically oriented attitude dominant in Islamic thought in Turkey, especially in the early Cold War period, solidified the bonds between Muslim identity and Turkish nationalism—which distinguishes Kısakürek's position from that of Qutb, Maududi, and the like. The constitutive role of the Turkish Naqshbandiyya for Islam-based political and intellectual movements with its traditionalist and antireformist conception of Islam has supplied another distinctive feature to mukaddesatçılık and Islamic thought in Turkey in general. Kısakürek's mukaddesatçılık has a markedly antireformist attitude when compared with the ideologues of popular Islamist movements such as Qutb, Maududi, and Khomeini. Kısakürek strictly rejected their appeal to the original sources, the foundations, or the salaf, to reinterpret Islamic knowledge according to current political and social circumstances, and left the authority over Islamic knowledge to the elders of Sunni orthodoxy and Sufi shaykhs. An antireformist conception of Islam together with a sympathy toward Turkish nationalism differentiate mukaddesatçılık from other contemporaneous Islamist movements with anti-Western and transnationalist concerns.

²² Distinguishing different trends and orientations in Islamic intellectual movements often escapes scholarly attention. At the very best, scholars classify existing conceptions of Islam based on some criteria which are either nationality, ethnicity, culture, or attitudes vis-à-vis modernity, the West and secularism. The result is shorthand labels, such as “modern Islam,” “liberal Islam,” or “Turkish Islam.” See, for instance, Charles Kurzman, Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Marc F. Plattner and Larry Jay Diamond, “What Is Liberal Islam?” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 2 (2003): 18; and M. Hakan Yavuz, “Is There a Turkish Islam? The Emergence of Convergence and Consensus,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 24, no. 2 (2004): 213–32. These classifications may be inadequate or even misleading, because they are external to debates within Islamic intellectual movements. Instead, I suggest that distinguishing different attitudes toward the process of Islamic knowledge production would be a better way to understand the dynamics of internal divisions in Islamic intellectual movements. From this perspective, constructing ideal-typical attitudes within the Islamic intellectual movement would be made possible by answering such questions as: What is the place or weight of Islam in their political considerations? How significant or central is it? Is there any discussion about Islam itself, about the status, validity, or relevance of the sources of Islamic knowledge, or about the way this knowledge is currently practiced? Following this approach, I use Islamism, as an ideal-type, to refer to the name of a specific ideology that draws directly on Islamic sources of knowledge like the Qur'an and sunna. Islamist ideology has three basic tenets. First, political forms ought to be grounded in religious terms. Second, there is an analytical difference between the lived Islam (or tradition) and the Islam of primary sources (or “pristine” Islam). Third, Islamic sources can be interpreted, or should be reinterpreted, to offer new political forms or to justify the demands to change them. Islamism takes its political unit as the umma, the community of believers, and disregards nationalism as an alien ideology. Although this transnationalist wave of Islamism emerged in the 1960s in Turkey, Turkish Muslim intellectuals with conservative and nationalist outlooks, including Kısakürek, dominated Islamic intellectual movement until that time—and continued to be the primary actors on the scene thereafter. Characterizing the position of these intellectuals with conservatism, rather than Islamism, would be more useful. It is true that these intellectuals share the first tenet of Islamism—the building block of these intellectuals’ political thinking was no doubt Islam. Yet, beyond that, they are always at odds with Islamists concerning the second and third tenets. Conservatives regarded primary Islamic sources as sacred and untouchable by lay people. Their main concern is to preserve and improve (Ottoman Islamic or Turkish Islamic) culture and morality. Mukaddesatçılık is a distinct strand within conservatism, with its aspiration to restore values, institutions, and practices of this Turkish Islamic culture and its consideration of primary Islamic sources as sacred. For an attempt to map out diverse trends in Islamic political thought in Turkey by attending to internal intellectual contestations, see Alev Cinar, “Islamism vs. Islamic Conservatism: Civilizationism as a Constitutive Principle of Conservative Thought in Turkey,” paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, 14 October 2020.

²³ Although earlier studies offered dichotomous relations between religion and nationalism, some observers of Turkey suggest that the Turkish case, in which nationalism and Islam have been increasingly entwined since the mid-20th century, shows the shortcomings of earlier accounts. See Gokhan Cetinsaya, “Rethinking Nationalism and Islam: Some Preliminary Notes on the Roots of ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’ in Modern Turkish Political Thought,” Muslim World 89, no. 3–4 (1999): 350–76. However, the affinity between Turkish nationalism and Islam was by no means an intrinsic characteristic of these ideological positions in Turkey. See Aytürk, “Nationalism and Islam.”

²⁴ On the role of emotions in politics, see for instance G. E. Marcus, “Emotions in Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 3, no. 1 (2000): 221–50; Simon Thompson, Simon Clarke, and Paul Hoggett, Emotions, Politics and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). For a recent article on emotions in relation to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's populist politics, see Senem Aslan, “Public Tears: Populism and the Politics of Emotion in AKP's Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53, no. 1 (2021): 1–17. Although Aslan's insightful discussion of Erdoğan's public display of emotionality as “a populist performative act of legitimation and mobilization,” hers and other existing studies in the literature do not touch upon the role of emotions in the formation of the ideological baggage of Erdoğan's party.

²⁵ Michael Freeden, “Editorial: Emotions, Ideology and Politics,” Journal of Political Ideologies 18, no. 1 (2013): 4.

²⁶ For a few works on Necip Fazıl Kısakürek's life, see for instance, Burhanettin Duran, “Transformation of Islamist Political Thought in Turkey from the Empire to the Early Republic (1908–1960): Necip Fazıl Kısakürek's Political Ideas” (PhD thesis, Bilkent University, Ankara, 2001); Şerif Mardin, “Cultural Change and the Intellectual: Necip Fazıl and the Nakşibendi,” in Religion, Society, and Modernity in Turkey (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 243–59; Singer, “Erdogan's Muse”; Cornell, “Mainstreaming of Extremism”; and Umut Uzer, “Conservative Narrative: Contemporary Neo-Ottomanist Approaches in Turkish Politics,” Middle East Critique 29, no. 3 (2020): 275–90. These works offer short biographies of Kısakürek, largely depending on his autobiographies and the narratives of his followers. Existing accounts of Kısakürek's life are partial—leaving no other option than to rely on Kısakürek's autobiographical notes to illuminate especially his early years. For autobiographical books by Kısakürek, see Kafa Kağıdı (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1999); O ve Ben (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1974); and Babıali (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 2017).

²⁷ See especially his Babıali.

²⁸ Mardin, “Cultural Change,” 248. According to author and translator Mina Urgan, who was a member of the same elite circle as Kısakürek, he was an amusing character and a gifted man of literature who loved overselling himself. Urgan pointed out that Kısakürek had a tempered drinking habit, but an incorrigible gambling addiction. See Mina Urgan, Bir Dinozorun Anıları (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2016), 97–99. Note that some of Kısakürek's adversaries claim that his own lifestyle did not change much after he started preaching about Islamist ideology and an Islamic way of life.

²⁹ Kısakürek, O ve Ben, 70–72. Note that this self-reported depressed condition was prevalent among the early republican intellectuals who experienced identity crises in the cultural turmoil of the transition from empire to republic. See İrem, Nazim, “Turkish Conservative Modernism: Birth of a Nationalist Quest for Cultural Renewal,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34, no. 1 (2002): 87–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mardin, “Cultural Change,” 252–53.

³⁰ The sufi shaykh who offered guidance to Kısakürek was Abdülhakim Arvasi (1865–1943), a member of the Khalidi branch of the Naqshbandi order. The Khalidi branch is distinguished from other sufi movements by its adherents’ strong emphasis on orthodox principles of Islamic shariʿa and their call for upholding these principles to combat modern Western influences in Muslim-populated lands. See Abu-Manneh, Studies on Islam; Cornell, Svante E. and Kaya, M. K., “Political Islam in Turkey and the Naqshbandi-Khalidi Order,” Current Trends in Islamist Ideology 19 (2015): 39–62Google Scholar; and Wilson, M. Brett, “Binding with a Perfect Sufi Master: Naqshbandī Defenses of Rābiṭa from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic,” Die Welt des Islams 60, no. 1 (2020): 56–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ See for instance, Mardin, “Cultural Change”; and Michelangelo Guida, “Nurettin Topçu and Necip Fazıl Kısakürek: Stories of ‘Conversion’ and Activism in Republican Turkey,” Journal for Islamic Studies 34, no. 1 (2014): 98–117.

³² Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Yolumuz, Halimiz, Çaremiz (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1977), 58.

³³ Most of these speeches are collected in his Hitabeler. Kısakürek was indeed a skillful orator who knew how to play with words and speak confidently. The usual audience for Kısakürek's speeches were the youth from different parts of Anatolia. The youth organization called the National Turkish Student Association (Milli Türk Talebe Birliği, MTTB) in particular organized several panels and conferences that hosted Kısakürek. In a MTTB event to celebrate Kısakürek's fiftieth anniversary as a reporter in 1975, current President Erdoğan introduced Kısakürek to the audience, which marked the first personal encounter between the two. According to the newspaper Yeni Şafak, the unofficial mouthpiece of the government, Erdoğan gained Kısakürek's favor with his oratory skills. See “Necip Fazıl’ın 50. yıl jübilesindeki o genç: İşte Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan'ın büyük üstad ile olan anıları,” Yeni Şafak, 23 August 2020, https://www.yenisafak.com/hayat/cumhurbaskani-erdoganin-buyuk-ustad-necip-fazil-kisakurek-ile-olan-tum-anilari-3554247. Note that MTTB was swarmed by important figures of the Turkish political scene in the 1960s and 1970s, including not only Erdoğan but also former president Abdullah Gül and former speaker of the parliament İsmail Kahraman, who in fact was the president of the association in the 1970s.

³⁴ In the late 1940s, Kısakürek seemed to be close to the conservative nationalist Nation Party, positioned against the secular Republican People's Party (RPP). It was understood after the 1950 elections that the strongest alternative to the RPP would be the Democrat Party; Kısakürek, then, extended his support to the Democrats and the ousted leader Adnan Menderes (1899–1961). Later, in the early 1970s, Kısakürek approached the National Salvation Party, which he saw as an agent that could finally satisfy his political ambitions, given the party's Islamic orientation. Finally, in the late 1970s, Kısakürek aligned himself with the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party and established links with the party leader Alparslan Türkeş (1917–1997). He hoped that Türkeş and his party would follow his intellectual lead, and that the dynamic youth branch of the party could be the paramilitary force that Kısakürek saw necessary to combat communism and other “destructive” ideologies on the street. As far as I can tell, in this tumultuous story neither Kısakürek's political stance nor the contours of his worldview have changed much. He gave support to political parties he thought would do the best against the RPP, and approached the parties he thought he could manipulate ideologically. For Kısakürek's own narrative on his political engagements, see Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Benim Gözümde Menderes (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 2016); and Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Rapor 3, (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1977).

³⁵ Apart from a certain cluster, Muslim intellectuals in Turkey tied their genealogy to Kısakürek and his Büyük Doğu magazine. See Rasim Özdenören, “Necip Fazıl Kısakürek,” in Modern Türkiye'de Siyasi Düşünce Cilt VI: İslamcılık, ed. Yasin Aktay (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2006), 136–49; and Metin Önal Mengüşoğlu, Mağrur Öfke: Necip Fazıl - Alelade Figür Değil Resmin Tamamı (İstanbul: Okur Kitaplığı, 2013). Scholars have been well aware of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek's influence on contemporary political actors, most notably President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. See Singer, “Erdogan's Muse”; Fırat Mollaer, Tekno Muhafazakarlığın Eleştirisi: Politik Denemeler (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2016), 144; and Svante E. Cornell, “Mainstreaming of Extremism.” In the early years of his tenure as prime minister, Erdoğan suggested that the single most important figure who influenced and inspired him was Necip Fazıl Kısakürek. For him, “Master [üstad] Necip Fazıl was a school to hundreds of youngsters in his lifetime and he still is a school to hundreds of thousands today.” See “Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan’ın büyük üstad Necip Fazıl Kısakürek ile olan tüm anıları.” Erdoğan delivered a speech at the Necip Fazıl Kısakürek Awards organized by a media outlet close to his government, where he talked extensively about Kısakürek and his legacy. See “Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan: Üstat Necip Fazıl son nefesini verinceye kadar statüko ve kalemşorlarının hedefi olmuştu,” NTV, 21 December 2018, https://www.ntv.com.tr/turkiye/son-dakikacumhurbaskani-erdogan-ustat-necip-fazil-son-nefesini-verinceye-kadar,kZ4R2LItZECAwbTuI6dWQQ. Erdoğan has commemorated the date of Kısakürek's death every year by citing from his lines or passages. The minister of health, Fahrettin Koca, whose popularity in Turkey increased tremendously because of the unfortunate outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, joined Erdoğan last year by sharing a Twitter post on the same day, saying, “Necip Fazıl was an intellectual and literary pioneer who raised generations. What he referred to as Büyük Doğu was in fact a renaissance [‘yeniden doğuştu’].” See Dr. Fahrettin Koca (@drfahrettinkoca), “NECİP FAZIL, fikir ve sanatta çığır açıcı, nesillerin hazırlayıcısıydı,” Twitter, 25 May 2020, https://twitter.com/drfahrettinkoca/status/1265015124756238336. Appreciating Kısakürek's legacy was almost a race for current or former AKP politicians, including former President Abdullah Gül and former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. See for instance, “Demokrasiyle Yüzleşmedeki Başarı Üstad’ın Sayesindedir,” Anadolu Ajansı, 22 May 2013, https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/kultur-sanat/demokrasiyle-yuzlesmedeki-basari-ustadin-sayesindedir/243919; and Ahmet Davutoğlu (@Ahmet_Davutoglu), “Fikir çilesini şiir diline nakış gibi işleyen üstat Necip Fazıl Kısakürek'i 38,” Twitter, 25 May 2021, https://twitter.com/Ahmet_Davutoglu/status/1397262570210402304. In addition to mainstream politicians and intellectuals, Kısakürek inspired radical groups such as the Islamic Great East Raiders (İslami Büyük Doğu Akıncıları, IBDA), who did not refrain from appealing to violence.

³⁶ Lewis, Bernard, “Islamic Revival in Turkey,” International Affairs 28, no. 1 (1952): 38–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Heyd, Uriel, “Islam in Modern Turkey,” Journal of The Royal Central Asian Society 34, no. 3–4 (1947): 299–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, Lewis V., “Turkish Islam,” Muslim World 44, no. 3–4 (1954): 181–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stirling, Paul, “Religious Change in Republican Turkey,” Middle East Journal 12, no. 4 (1958): 395–408Google Scholar.

³⁷ Among the policies and reforms carried out by the RPP to that end were appointing of a prime minister who had an Islamist background, opening religious middle schools, instituting a theology faculty at Ankara University, and closing down village institutes (“köy enstitüleri”) that were known for their secular, pro-Western curricula. For a detailed account of the trajectory of Turkey in the 1940s and 1950s, see Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004): 206–40; Carter Vaughn Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010): 262–310; and Mete Kaan Kaynar, ed., Türkiye'nin 1950’li Yılları (Istanbul: İletişim, 2015). It is possible that the RPP strategy might have encouraged the Democrat Party to be more tolerant toward Islam and to have a close relationship with religious groups and communities during the party's reign from 1950 to 1960.

³⁸ Philip E. Muehlenbeck, Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012); Stéphanie Roulin, Giles Scott-Smith, and Luc Van Dongen, Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

³⁹ Kısakürek's first prison sentence, for example, was for charges of assaulting the memory of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in a piece he published in Büyük Doğu in 1947. Again, in 1953, he was tried for his alleged involvement in the assassination of Ahmet Emin Yalman, a liberal journalist Kısakürek sometimes targeted in his writings. Kısakürek was tried and sentenced for his writings several times before his death in 1983. For his prison memories, see Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Cinnet Mustatili (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1977).

⁴⁰ As early as December 1945, for instance, the left-wing newspaper Tan was raided by a violent protest movement allegedly backed by state officials. Cangül Örnek, Türkiye'nin Soğuk Savaş Düşünce Hayatı: Antikomünizm ve Amerikan Etkisi (Istanbul: Can Yayınları, 2015); Behlül Özkan, “Soğuk Savaşta Türkiye Müesses Nizamı ile Siyasal İslam’ın Kutsal İttifakı,” in Türkiye'nin Soğuk Savaş Düzeni: Ordu, Sermaye, ABD, İslamizasyon, ed. Tolga Gürakar and Behlül Özkan (Istanbul: Tekin Yayınevi, 2020).

⁴¹ Kısakürek, Hitabeler, 47–48.

⁴² Örnek, Soğuk Savaş Düşünce Hayatı, 326.

⁴³ Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, İdeolocya Örgüsü (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1976), 190.

⁴⁴ Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Sahte Kahramanlar (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1977), 46.

⁴⁵ See for instance, Marc David Baer, “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic,” Jewish Quarterly Review 103, no. 4 (2013): 523–55; and Tanıl Bora, “Narrating the Enemy: Image and Perception of the ‘Communists’ among the Radical Right,” in Turkey in Turmoil: Social Change and Political Radicalization during the 1960s, ed. Berna Pekesen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 137–51.

⁴⁶ See Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Son Devrin Din Mazlumları (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1976); and Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Tarih Boyunca Büyük Mazlumlar (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1977).

⁴⁷ See Murat Kılıç, “Allah, Vatan, Soy, Milli Mukaddesat”: Türk Milliyetçiler Derneği (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2016); and Ertuğrul Meşe, Komünizmle Mücadele Dernekleri: Türk Sağında Antikomünizmin İnşası (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2017).

⁴⁸ Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Tanrıkulundan Dinlediklerim (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1984), 100–1.

⁴⁹ Kısakürek, Hitabeler, 257.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Doğru Yolun Sapık Kolları: Arınma Çağında İslam (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1978), 161–62.

⁵² Kısakürek, Yolumuz, Halimiz, Çaremiz, 37.

⁵³ Örnek, Soğuk Savaş Düşünce Hayatı, 319–20.

⁵⁴ Aytürk, “Nationalism and Islam.”

⁵⁵ See Hale Yılmaz, Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey 1923–1945 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013).

⁵⁶ It is important to note that the official historical narrative of the republican regime was as inconsistent and problematic as Kısakürek's. The newly found republic declared itself as an independent nation–state that had no links with the Ottoman Empire, while adopting its political and social institutions. In its attempt to detach itself from its Ottoman past and to create a secular nation, the regime also highlighted pre-Ottoman and pre–Islamic Turkish history, while, as described, identifying with Turkishness and Muslimness. These inconsistencies arguably served Kısakürek's desire to find supporters for his own narrative. For a detailed analysis of the early republican narrative of Turkish history, see Murat Ergin, Is the Turk a White Man? Race and Modernity in the Making of Turkish Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

⁵⁷ Kısakürek, İdeolocya Örgüsü, 191; Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Dünya Bir İnkilap Bekliyor (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1985), 97–98.

⁵⁸ Kısakürek, Doğru Yolun Sapık Kolları, 98.

⁵⁹ Kısakürek persistently criticized both groups for their alleged misconception of Islam and degenerating effect on the faith in different writings, most notably in Doğru Yolun Sapık Kolları (Deviant Branches of the Right Path). The book elucidates Kısakürek's charges against non–Turkish Islamists, including Qutb, Maududi, and Muhammad Hamidullah, as well as new generations of ʿulama’ who graduated from religious schools of the republic. Note that traditionalists shared the same discontent with the state-founded Islamic higher education institutions, notably the divinity school in Ankara. These institutions had eclectic curricula, including social science classes in addition to classical Islamic sciences such as fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), hadith, and tafsir (Qur'anic exegesis). For many traditionalists like Kısakürek, these schools raised reform-minded modernist religious personnel to destroy Islam from within—which was purportedly the project of the state establishment. See Seda Baykal, “Faith and Reason in Higher Education: Social Scientific Study of Islam at Ankara University School of Divinity” (MA thesis, Bilkent University, Ankara, 2019); and Philip Dorroll, Islamic Theology in the Turkish Republic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

⁶⁰ Wilson, “Binding,” 75. Sufism at the outset offers a spiritual and mystical experience of Islam as opposed to material or formal understandings and practices of Islam, which people usually associated with orthodoxy. As a Sufi movement, unlike many others, the Khalidi branch of the Naqshbandiyya that Kısakürek was deeply attached to was known for its members’ strong emphasis on the material aspect of Islam, that is, the shariʿa. During the 19th century, the Khalidiyya had become one of the most dominant religious groups in the Ottoman Empire, exploiting the opportunity created by the sidelining of the Bektashi order with the abolishment of the Janissary corps. See Abu-Manneh, Studies on Islam. Although the republican policies banishing the Sufi tariqas, seminaries, and lodges in the 1920s led to dissociation or marginalization of many Sufi orders, the Khalidi branch of the Naqshbandiyya managed to survive underground. The unofficial lodges of the order became a magnet for individuals with Islamic sensibilities. Starting in the 1950s, the Khalidiyya played a crucial role in the reawakening of Islam in republican Turkey. See Mardin, Şerif, “Turkish Islamic Exceptionalism Yesterday and Today: Continuity, Rupture and Reconstruction in Operational Codes,” Turkish Studies 6, no. 2 (2005): 145–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ For one of the most influential of these publications see Seyyid Kutub, İslam'da Sosyal Adalet, trans. Yaşar Tunagür and Adnan Mansur (Istanbul: Cağaloğlu Yayınları, 1964). İslam'da Sosyal Adalet (Social Justice in Islam) was the first ever translation of a book by Sayyid Qutb, which was allegedly translated at the request of the Turkish intelligence service to prevent youth with Islamic sensibilities from being drawn toward leftist ideologies. See Özkan, “Soğuk Savaşta Türkiye,” 142–43.

⁶² Note that Kısakürek purposefully attributed to non–Turkish Islamists a socialistic outlook, although Qutb and Maududi themselves would never have accepted this. Kısakürek characterized them as socialists to undermine their influence among Turkish Muslims and emphasize that his version of Islam was pure—although he himself arguably merged Islam with another ideology, namely nationalism, which Qutb, for instance, found alien to Islam.

⁶³ Kısakürek, İdeolocya Örgüsü, 96–98.

⁶⁴ Açıkel, Fethi, “‘Kutsal Mazlumluğun’ Psikopatolojisi,” Toplum ve Bilim 70 (1996): 153–98Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Kısakürek, Hitabeler, 181.

⁶⁶ For a similar note, see Yilmaz, Zafer, “The AKP and the Spirit of the ‘New’ Turkey: Imagined Victim, Reactionary Mood, and Resentful Sovereign, Turkish Studies 18, no. 3 (2017): 487–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁷ See, for instance, Brown, Wendy, “Wounded Attachments,” Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993): 390–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scheler, Ressentiment; Fassin, Didier, “On Resentment and Ressentiment: The Politics and Ethics of Moral Emotions,” Current Anthropology 54, no. 3 (2013): 249–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ure, Michael, “Resentment/Ressentiment,” Constellations 22, no. 4 (2015): 599–613CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Recently, ressentiment has increasingly been associated with perversion of democracy and the advent of populist and far-right regimes. See Nicolas Demertzis, “Emotions and Populism,” in Emotions, Politics and Society, ed. S. Thompson, S. Clarke, and P. Hoggett (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 103–22; Krieken, Robert van, “Menno Ter Braak on Democracy, Populism and Fascism: Ressentiment and Its Vicissitudes,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 3 (2019): 87–103Google Scholar; and Kelly, Casey R., “Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of Ressentiment,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 1 (2020): 2–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁸ Van Krieken, “Menno Ter Braak,” 94.

⁶⁹ ter Braak, Menno, “National Socialism as a Doctrine of Rancour (1937),” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 3 (2019): 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ Fassin, “On Resentment and Ressentiment,” 252.

⁷¹ Kelly, “Rhetoric of Ressentiment,” 5.

⁷² See Kısakürek, Hitabeler, 47; Kısakürek, İdeolocya Örgüsü, 72; Kısakürek, Yolumuz, Halimiz, Çaremiz, 12; and Kısakürek, Dünya Bir İnkilap Bekliyor, 26. Emphases are mine.

⁷³ Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Batı Tefekkürü ve İslam Tasavvufu (Istanbul: Büyük Doğu Yayınları, 1982), 192.

⁷⁴ Kısakürek, Hitabeler, 158.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 162.

⁷⁶ Ibid., Hitabeler, 251.

⁷⁷ Kısakürek, İdeolocya Örgüsü, 190.

⁷⁸ See Örnek, Soğuk Savaş Düşünce Hayatı; and Gürakar and Özkan, Türkiye'nin Soğuk Savaş Düzeni.

⁷⁹ Koru, “Turkey's Islamist Dream.”