ABSTRACT
Although Turkey was once touted as the only secular democracy in the Muslim world, the version of secularism introduced by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the modern republic in 1923, was authoritarian and imposed from the top down by the political elite, rather than arising out of Turkish society. Through the late twentieth century, and particularly after the Justice and Development Party (AKP) took office in November 2002, Islamists gradually began to reshape the public sphere – building on the networks of the traditional Sufi networks known as tariqah, which Ataturk had unsuccessfully tried to eradicate, and more recent formations such as the Gulen Movement. Nevertheless, the Turkish Islamist movement includes a range of diverging, and sometimes conflicting, opinions and goals, ranging from those who prioritize the preservation of sufficient social and political space to practice their beliefs to a radical fringe who advocate the creation of an Islamic state based on sharia law. In recent years, Islam has also increasingly informed Turkey’s foreign policy as President Tayyip Erdogan has vigorously supported the Muslim Brotherhood in the hope of establishing a network of client states in the Middle East and reviving the preeminence once enjoyed by the Ottoman Empire.
