Following a military coup on 27 May 1960 that led to the DP’s removal from power and the execution of its leader and two other ministers, the organic link between the government and its intellectual base was broken. The military-bureaucratic elite increased the level of oppression of Ottoman-Islamists on the grounds of retreating from the reforms and other achievements of the Republic. As connection channels between Ottoman-Islamist figures and the rest of civil society were weakened, a new opposition emerged among Turkey’s political left and became increasingly popular at Turkish universities and youth organizations. This rising leftist opposition boosted concerns over the survival of the government in power, which publicly associated itself with the Right. As a consequence, political Islam was revisited by the governing Justice Party (Adalet Partisi / AP) in terms of how the military understood the religion, that is, ‘as a respectful form of personal piety’. In ‘reviving’ its particular version of Islam to deter Turks from the Left, the AP government openly supported anti-leftist movements from the extreme right as well as from religious orders. The cleavage between the Right and the Left produced a new and unexpected juxtaposition between the Republican state and Ottoman- Islamist thought, liberating the latter to reclaim their position in society. Led by the Association for Fighting Communism (Komünizmle Mücadele Dernegi / KMD), the National Turkish Students Union (Milli Türk Talebe Birligi MTTB), the Fighting Union (Mücadele Birligi / MB), the Intellectuals’ Heart (Aydınlar Ocağı / AO) and the Free Thought Club (Hür Düşünce Kulübü / HDK) served as critically important fora for rightist Turkish youth in which they could have fellowship and prepare for counter-protests against leftist groups. Figures of Ottoman-Islamist thought were actively involved with a plethora of journals and newspapers that were supported as centres of anti-communist propaganda such as Milli Düşünce, Milli Gençlik, Mücadele, Yeniden Milli Mücadele, Yeni İstiklal, Bugün, Diriliş, Büyük Dogu, Hilal, İttihad and Milli Gazete and formed the intellectual foundation of rightist movements in the 1960s. The ‘threat’ of communism, understood as anything that was against the sacred ideals of nationalism and religion and the objective of protecting the Turkish nation from ‘Moscow agents’, appeared to become a significant dimension of this strain of thought. Kısakürek associated the communist ideal with ‘no God, no religion, no spirit, no land or national ideal, no spiritual morality, no philosophy or history, no tradition or manner, no family, no property or saving rights, no nothing, not even a vision of nothingness’. Aiming to pick a quarrel among classes, Safa viewed communists as hostile to ‘any concept expressing the organic superiority of a nation, such as unity, solidarity, fraternity’. In order to suppress the Left, the military wanted to ensure a controlled relationship with political Islam. The period between the coups of 1971 and 1980 thus involved attempts by the military to find common ground with its former enemy. The political rise of leading pro-Islamist figure and founder of the National Outlook (Milli Görüş) Movement Necmettin Erbakan and his National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi / MSP) well exemplifies such attempts. The Islamic discourse of Erbakan’s associates worried the military, however, raising its concerns over the secular structure of the Republic. Even Kısakürek warned Erbakan against his frequent use of the word ‘sharia’, but stated that ‘this mission needed a camouflage, a play of disguise, to capture the castle, as the valiant who conquered the Tekfur Palace did’. The subsequent 12 September 1980 coup ultimately indicated that military elites did not trust the rightist/pro-Islamist coalition governments to keep the country stable politically, economically and socially even though this coalition had succeeded in impugning the Left.
from Identifying Ottomanisms: The Discursive Evolution of Ottoman Pasts in the Turkish Presents by Hakan Övünç Ongur