Republican Epistemology and Islamic Discourses in Turkey in the 1990s*

In the course of the past decade, the question of identity in the Turkish context has acquired an increasing significance. With the emergence of trends which placed the question of identity outside of the official realm, the people who live on this land began to stagger between local and national as well as traditional and modern identities. This has paved the way for the explosion of multiple identities which were stifled earlier by way of attachment to an official, monolithic, absolute Turkish identity that was engineered during the early Republican years. The increasing significance of Islamic discourses accelerated the process of the decentring of the official Turkish identity during this time. It is interesting to note that such a crisis of the official ideology in Turkey coincides with the weakening of the foundations of modernity in the West. With the decentring of the West and the dissolution of universalism and cultural essentialism of modernity, the European identity has acquired some relativism as well. Accordingly, it is possible to witness the emergence of what Umberto Eco has aptly called “neomedieval” identities. The weakening of the foundations of modernity had an impact on the modernizing contexts and especially put into question the certainties of Kemalism in Turkey. The following text maintains that the ensuing fragmentation of identities in Turkey is surrounded by motifs of a Republican epistemology. Epistemology refers to theory that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge. Republican epistemology