ABSTRACT
Islamophobia was central to the construction and reproduction of a modern nation-state in Turkey. The politics of Islamophobia was specifically used for that purpose, constructing Islam and Muslims as the enemy of the newly established secular regime and keeping religion and the religious outside of the state. First, the politics of Islamophobia served to replace the Ottoman Empire with the secular–nationalist Turkish Republic. Second, it was deployed to produce a secular–nationalist reality, which included the forming of a secular–nationalist society in its domestic realm, backing a Westphalian regional order and a Western-centric global order in its outside. However, this produced an autocratic and alienated political order, which was opposed by the democratic bloc that included the conservative–religious masses and the notables in the aftermath of the 1940s. This century-long political struggle ended with the victory of the democratic forces and the dismantlement of the Kemalist bureaucratic tutelage in Turkey in the 2000s. Consequently, the heydays of the politics of Islamophobia in the country have come to an end, although its repercussions still persist in contemporary Turkey.
