Ultimately, I argue that the relationship between Kemalism and political Islam is characterised by reciprocal influence and complex interaction, rather than a dichotomous opposition such a relationship can be better understood in the light of the substantial continuity of authoritarianism in the post-1980 Turkish regimes. I use these two terms in a broad sense, to label the political actors who have framed their experiences, discourses, practices and regimes with reference to the Kemalist or rather to the Islamic principles. The aim is to explain the background, motivations and dynamics underlying the rise of political Islam and the decline of Kemalism. Briefly, my study relies on a historical reconstruction and a theoretical comment on the main political events occurred in Turkey between 19. It is obviously impossible to summarise satisfactorily in a few pages all the issues raised in my work most of the topics sketched out here might be unclear and require further discussion, since they assume some prior knowledge of contemporary Turkey’s history.

The present paper is a synopsis of my PhD research, started in November 2015 and currently (summer 2018) at the dissertation stage. We will pay close attention to the rise and fall of “national developmentalism” as a framework to understand the crisis of Turkish democracy in this period. The course will conclude by looking at the major political and socio-economic developments that the republican regime underwent over the course of the period 1945-1980. In particular, we will examine the radicalization of the Young Turks movement along the ideological lines of Turkish nationalism, as well as the political and demographic consequences of this radicalization for the passage from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. The second part of the course will focus on the traumatic and revolutionary developments of the period 1908-1945. As a background for this inquiry, we will first outline the major patterns of the nineteenth century Ottoman modernization and reform movements. This course aims to investigate the political, socio-economic, and demographic processes that culminated in the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of Turkey as a new nation state.

İsyan Günlerinde Aşk by Ahmet Altan