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The recent Indonesian Islamic wave in Indonesia appears to be inclined towards a traditionalist turn. This turn specifically denotes the ascendancy of traditional Islamic teachings as the forefront in Indonesia. The resurgence of traditionalism has consequently led to a decline in the influence of conservatives, that has dominated public preferences from the 2000s to early 2014. While these new waves are likely to persist due to strong government support for religious moderation programs. They provoke both favorable and unfavorable perspectives among urban Muslims. In light of this contentious stance, this paper seeks to explore why urban Muslims display a reluctance towards the traditionalist shift. To address this inquiry, the research employs critical discourse analysis based on literature reviews. The primary finding of this discussion is that as the traditionalist movement extends its influence into urban environments, urban Muslims communities tend to align themselves with conservative ideologies. This poses a challenge for traditionalists aiming to alter religious preferences in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates whether Turkish populism has undergone a 'civilizational turn' akin to what Brubaker, Haynes, Yilmaz, and Morieson have described occurring among populist parties in Europe and North America. The article applies Yilmaz and Morieson's definition of 'civilizational populism' to Turkey under the rule of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) in order to determine whether the party conforms to this definition. The article investigates how the AKP, an Islamist and populist political party lead by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has increasingly incorporated what we term 'civilizational populism' into its discourse. The article shows the impact of civilizational populism on Turkey's domestic and foreign policy under the AKP rule. The article finds that the AKP has increasingly, and especially since the 2013 Gezi Park protests and the mysterious coup attempt in 2016, construed opposition between the Turkish 'self' and the 'other' not in primarily nationalist terms, but in religious and civilizational terms, and as a conflict between the Ottoman-Islamic 'self' and 'Western' other. Furthermore, the article finds that the AKP's domestic and foreign policies reflect its civilizational populist division of Turkish society insofar as the party is attempting to raise a 'pious generation' that supports its Islamizing of Turkey society, and its nostalgic neo-Ottomanist power projections in the Middle East. Finally, the paper discusses how the AKP's civilizational populism has become a transnational populist phenomenon due to the party's ability to produce successful television shows that reflect its anti-Western worldview and justify its neo-Ottoman imperialism in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the use of religion by an authoritarian ruling party to delegitimize political opposition through securitization. The case study presented is the ruling AKP in Turkey, which initially promised to desecuritize the Kurdish issue to co-opt the Kurdish opposition but eventually resorted to the demonization narratives and repressive policies of the secular Turkish state; however, in addition to labeling the Kurdish opposition as terrorists, the AKP deployed religion to legitimize its repressive policies on religious grounds. The Turkish case shows that not in legitimizing (via desecuritization), but in delegitimizing opposition (via securitization) religion has been the main tool deployed by the ruling party. This finding needs to be tested in other contexts and cases. Additionally, since this paper only focuses on the narrative of the AKP's religious delegitimization, further research is needed to measure its efficacy and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the concept of 'transnational populism' this paper investigates the efforts of a religious populist regime to narratively construct 'the transnational people' and 'the transnational leader' in diasporic spaces that Sunni Muslim minorities occupy. The paper aims to show how Turkey's ruling party is constructing an Islamist civilisational populist narrative fortified with emotions and how it is disseminating it. We show that Turkey's current regime has expanded its definition of 'the people' in domestic politics to include the whole global Sunni Muslim community (the Ummah), presenting itself as the representative, protector and saviour of the Ummah that has been victimised by the Crusader West. It also expanded its definition of diaspora to include non-Turkish Sunni Muslims/Islamic communities who did not originate from Turkey. Then, similar to its propagation of this narrative and emotional rhetoric at home, it has attempted to transnationalise this Islamist civilisational populist narrative and thes emotions to the Sunni Muslim diaspora communities through state and non-state apparatuses. As a novel contribution, this paper builds a bridge between diaspora studies, religion and populism to capture this transnational aspect of populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though Turkey's ruling party's (Justice and Development Party, the AKP) nation-building and desired citizen creation policies have been studied, its use of necropolitical narratives and propaganda in education has not been investigated. This paper addresses this gap by examining how the Turkish state ruled by the AKP has propagated its religious necropolitical narrative through the national curriculum and Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) in school textbooks, and magazines and comic books for children. The paper shows that these texts and comics try to indoctrinate children into a religious cult of martyrdom in different ways by encouraging them to view tragic death and getting killed for the nation as a positive event. This paper argues that these propaganda efforts are part of a religious necropolitical indoctrination campaign that seeks to create a new Islamist and jihadist generation of lifelong supporters of the AKP, which portrays itself in the educational texts as the embodiment of Islam, the Muslim Turkish nation and even the global Muslim community (ummah). This new religious generation is expected to believe that dying for the Islamist populist authoritarian regime is the greatest honour a person can bring upon themselves. This paper contributes to the necropolitics literature by showing that not only adults but also children have been targeted by authoritarian rulers' necropolitical propaganda attempts to create desired citizens who are ready to die for the regime, believing this is a religious obligation. Further research is needed to assess if and to what extent this propaganda has an impact on children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether a 'civilizational turn' has occurred among populist movements in Indonesia. It focuses on the civilizational elements in the populist discourse of the Front Pembela Islam (Islamic Defender Front/FPI) in Indonesia. The article traces the FPI's history and growing influence on politics and society in Indonesia in the 2010s. This article argues that the FPI has instrumentalized religious discourse, and through it divided Indonesian society into three groups: the virtuous ummah, corrupt elites, and immoral internal and external non-Muslim enemies, especially the civilizational bloc 'the West'. This instrumentalization gained the group a degree of popularity in the second decade of the post-Suharto period and strengthened its political power and ability to bargain with mainstream political parties. The article uses the FPI's actions and discourse during the Ahok affair to demonstrate the civilizational turn in Indonesian populism. The article shows how the FPI grew in power during the Ahok affair, in which a Christian Chinese politician, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, was accused of blasphemy by Indonesian Islamists and later convicted on the same charge by an Indonesian court. The FPI was a leading part of a broad coalition of Islamist groups and individuals which called for Ahok to be charged with blasphemy; charges which were eventually laid and which led to Ahok being sentenced to two years imprisonment. The FPI, the article shows, framed Ahok as a non-Muslim Christian and therefore a 'foreign' enemy who was spreading moral corruption in Indonesia, governing 'elites' as complacent in combating immorality and positioned themselves as defenders of 'the people' or ummah. From the security perspective of the state, the FPI presented a critical threat that required containing. As a result of the growing power of the group, the FPI was banned in 2020 and Rizieq was imprisoned, while Ahok was politically rehabilitated by the Widodo government. Although the FPI's banning is considered the most effective nonpermanent solution for the state, there is evidence that the FPI's discourse has been adopted by mainstream political actors. This article, then, finds that the growth of the FPI during the second decade of the post-Suharto period, and their actions in leading the persecution of Ahok, demonstrates a civilizational turn in Indonesian Islamist populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blame avoidance has been one of the most applied strategies by policy makers in both democratic and non-democratic regimes to avoid responsibility and accountability in cases of failure and tragic events. It is also known that politicians have used religion for Machiavellian purposes, as exactly advised by Machiavelli. However, a systematic empirical analysis of how religion is used for blame avoidance by politicians has not been conducted. In this article, we aim to address this gap by examining the empirical data derived from the weekly Friday sermon texts produced by Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs and delivered in more than 90 thousand mosques every week to a large segment of the population in Turkey, where the majority claims to be religious. Starting with its violent response to the peaceful Gezi protests in 2013, the ruling AKP has opened up a new phase in Turkish political history by resorting to civilizational populism: it blamed the Western world for financing and masterminding the protests, using the protestors as internal pawns to attack Turkey and the Muslim World, suppressed the protests brutally and entered into a populist authoritarian regime. Our paper shows, following this turn, how the Diyanet sermons started using religion to help with the AKP's blame avoidance. The Diyanet either parroted the AKP's conspiratorial narrative or tried to convince the citizens that all negativities are works of God and with these humans are being tested by God. The AKP's use of religion to avoid blame is a text-book case of how both a religious institution and religious discourse can be used to help the incumbent avoid responsibility. Whenever, there was a problem that would the AKP votes, the Diyanet's sermons tried to shift the blame to either God or citizens or conspiratorial enemies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The founders of the secular Turkish Republic, the Kemalists used secular nationalist education to build a secular Turkish nation and to create their own version of modern pro-Western secular Turkish citizens. This paper argues that Turkey's current ruling party, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) has been using the same system of education to create its own desired citizens with Islamist Populist ideals. This has been done without changing the secular principles of the constitution and laws on national education since there are several constraints that would prevent AKP to have open and declared pro-Sharia changes to the law. Thus, unlike many other Islamists in the other parts of the world, the paper shows that the AKP has chosen to undermine the secularity of the system, constitution, and law in an ad hoc, gradual and undeclared fashion. The paper concludes by noting that no matter the change in political actors and their ideologies, education is monopolized by the state for political purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the literature on religion's relationship with populism is Eurocentric and has so far focused on European populist party discourses and, to a degree, on the United States, in particular, on the Christian identity populism of the Tea Party and the Trump movement within the Republican Party. However, across the Asia-Pacific region, religion has become an important component of populist discourses. It has been instrumentalised by populists in many nations in the region, including some of the most populous countries in the world, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Moreover, the relationship between religions other than Christianity and populism has all too rarely been studied, except for Turkey. This paper therefore surveys the Asia-Pacific region to comprehend how populists in the region incorporate religion into their discourses and the impact religious populism has on Asia-Pacific societies. It asks two questions: "What role does religion play in populist discourses?" and "How has religion's incorporation into populist discourse impacted society?" To answer these questions, the paper examines four nations which have recently been ruled by governments espousing, to different degrees and in different ways, religious populism: India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. By choosing these nations, we can examine the relationship between populism and Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and between religion and populism within a variety of religious, ethnic, and political contexts. The paper argues that religion is instrumentalised in populist discourses across the Asia-Pacific region in a variety of ways. First, religion is used to construct ingroups and outgroups, which serve a populist narrative in which the religion of the ingroup is superior yet threatened by the religion(s) of the outgroup(s). Second, religion is used to empower religious authorities, which support populist parties and movements. Third, religion is instrumentalised by populists in order to frame themselves, and in particular their leader, as a sacred or holy figure. The paper also argues that religion's incorporation into populist discourse has impacted society by legitimising authoritarianism, increasing religious divisions, and justifying the oppression of religious minorities. The paper concludes by noting some differences between populists in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-1920s, the Kemalist power elite has been trying to consolidate their nationalist and secularist status quo by employing a sort of Gramscian consent fabrication. They have also attempted to build a monolithic Turkish nation. This study coins and conceptualizes two new analytical terms to better comprehend what, how and why the Kemalist hegemony has tried to achieve on this issue: 'Homo LASTus' and 'Lausannian Muslim.' The acronym LAST denotes Laïcist, Atatürkist, Sunni Muslim, and Turk. The best citizen, LAST, meets all of these four parameters at the same time. The conventional understanding has been that the Kemalist nation-building project has focused on transforming individuals in Turkey to construct identical secularized Turkish citizens, aiming at a monolithic nation. Nevertheless, this study asserts that this top-down social engineering has actually been two tiered. While on the one hand, the Kemalist state tried to create the best citizen (LAST) and even human (Homo LASTus), on the other, the state tried also to construct the good citizen (Lausannian Muslim). To protect their hegemony, the Kemalist elite has also resorted to a 'Bureaucracy Watch' to prevent 'infiltration' of the strategic state institutions by subaltern non-LAST citizens who have constituted about 80 per cent of Turkey's total population. Especially for the bureaucrats, the country has been transformed into a Kemalist Panopticon. The study also analyzes why the repressive secularist state has endeavored to construct a religious citizen identity (Lausannian Muslim) in addition to the LAST and Homo LASTus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-1920s, the top-down homogenization and secularization policies of the hegemonic Kemalist elite have aimed at socially engineering secularist nationalist Turkish citizens. The acronym LAST (Laicist, Atatürkist, Sunni, Turk) describes this ideal citizen typology. The state has also tried to monopolize Islam and has attempted to construct a state version of Islam (Lausannian Islam), marginalizing, vilifying and even criminalizing other Islamic interpretations. Nevertheless, non-state Islam and civil Muslim actors have not disappeared from the Turkish public sphere. One of these influential actors is the counter-hegemonic Turkish Islamists. They demand a role for Islam in the political realm, in a binary opposition to the assertively secularist Kemalists. Another influential actor, the intellectual leader of the largest faith-based movement in Turkey, Fethullah Gülen, offers a third way between these two extremes on state-religion-society relations. This paper endeavors to show that an interpretation of Muslim secularism that inhabits religious and secular worlds simultaneously, that is in critical engagement with them and that blurs conventional political lines on the hotly debated issue of state-religion-society relations is possible. This understanding of 'Islamic twin tolerations' challenges the artificially constructed binary oppositions. It also resonates with the Habermasian (2006) 'religion in the public sphere.' It argues that the faithful from all religious backgrounds can legitimately have demands based on religion in the public sphere and in the final analysis; it is the legislators' epistemic task to translate these demands into a secular language in the legislative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Partial and limited opening of authoritarian political systems in Turkey and Egypt created new democratic opportunities for Islamists to participate in public life. It also fostered democratic learning by permitting Islamists to compete for power and popular legitimacy. In the process of democratic opening, Islamists have had to address and represent the interests of a group much larger than their own ideological constituency. They have also had to endure repression and party closures in a semi-democratic political framework. However, the democratic learning process coupled with the establishment's constraints has paved the way for the transformation of Islamists to Muslim democrats. While the process in Turkey is almost complete, in Egypt there are still heated debates on the transformation among the Islamists. This study highlights the importance of the democratic opportunities given to Turkish Islamists and argues that if given similar opportunities, Egyptian Islamism will also transform to a post-Islamist phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the different types of co-existing unofficial and official Islams in Turkey from a sociological perspective. Overview of the secularization of Turkey; Emergence of unofficial civil Islam in the public sphere; Changes in political Islam.

The fusion of religion and populism has paved the way for civilisationism. However, this significant issue is still unresearched. This paper attempts to address this gap by investigating the Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan's Islamist populism and civilisationism as an empirical case study. While Islamism has been explored in the context of Pakistan, this paper goes beyond and investigates the amalgamation of Islamist ideals with populism. Using discourse analysis, the paper traces the horizontal and vertical dimensions of Imran Khan's religious populism. The paper provides an understanding of how "the people", "the elite", and "the others" are defined at present in Pakistan from an antagonistic and anti-Western civilisationist perspective. The paper finds that "New Pakistan" is indeed a "homeland" or an idolized society defined by Islamist civilisationism to which extreme emotions, sentimentality and victimhood are attached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since independence, Islamic civil society groups and intellectuals have played a vital role in Indonesian politics. This paper seeks to chart the contestation of Islamic religious ideas in Indonesian politics and society throughout the 20th Century, from the declaration of independence in 1945 up until 2001. This paper discusses the social and political influence of, and relationships between, three major Indonesian Islamic intellectual streams: Modernists, Traditionalists, and neo-Modernists. It describes the intellectual roots of each of these Islamic movements, their relationships with the civil Islamic groups Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), their influence upon Indonesian politics, and their interactions with the state. The paper examines the ways in which mainstream Islamic politics in Indonesia, the world's largest majority Muslim nation, has been shaped by disagreements between modernists and traditionalists, beginning in the early 1950s. Disagreements resulted in a schism within Masyumi, the dominant Islamic party, that saw the traditionalists affiliated with NU leave to establish a separate NU party. Not only did this prevent Masyumi from coming close to garnering a majority of the votes in the 1955 election, but it also contributed to Masyumi veering into Islamism. This conservative turn coincided with elite contestation to define Indonesia as an Islamic state and was a factor in the party antagonizing President Sukarno to the point that he moved to ban it. The banning of Masyumi came as Sukarno imposed 'guided democracy' as a soft-authoritarian alternative to democracy and set in train dynamics that facilitated the emergence of military-backed authoritarianism under Suharto. During the four decades in which democracy was suppressed in Indonesia, Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama, and associated NGOs, activists, and intellectuals were the backbones of civil society. They provided critical support for the non-sectarian principles at the heart of the Indonesian constitution, known as Pancasila. This found the strongest and clearest articulation in the neo-Modernist movement that emerged in the 1980s and synthesized key elements of traditionalist Islamic scholarship and Modernist reformism. Neo-Modernism, which was articulated by leading Islamic intellectual Nurcholish Madjid and Nahdlatul Ulama Chairman Abdurrahman Wahid, presents an open, inclusive, progressive understanding of Islam that is affirming of social pluralism, comfortable with modernity, and stresses the need for tolerance and harmony in inter-communal relations. Its articulation by Wahid, who later became president of Indonesia, contributed to Indonesia's transition from authoritarianism to democracy. The vital contribution of neo-Modernist Islam to democracy and reform in Indonesia serves to refute the notion that Islam is incompatible with democracy and pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of populism around the world. While it is widespread it manifests in its own unique ways in each society, nation, and region. Religious populism, once rarely discussed, has come to take a more prominent role in the politics of a diverse range of societies and countries, as religious discourse is increasingly used by mainstream and peripheral populist actors alike. This paper examines the rise of religious populism in Indonesia through a study of the widely talked about, but little understood, Islamic Defenders Front (FPI—Front Pembela Islam). The case study method used to examine the FPI provides a unique insight into a liminal organization which, through populist and pro-violence Islamist discourse and political lobbying, has had an outsized impact on Indonesian politics. In this paper, we identify the FPI as an Islamist civilizationist populist group and show how the group frames Indonesian domestic political events within a larger cosmic battle between faithful and righteous Muslims and the forces that stand against Islam, whether they be "unfaithful Muslims" or non-Muslims. We also show how the case of the FPI demonstrates the manner in which smaller, liminal, political actors can instrumentalise religion and leverage religious rhetoric to reshape political discourse, and in doing so, drive demand for religious populism. The paper makes two arguments: First, the FPI is an example of a civilizationist populist movement which instrumentalises religion in order to create demand for its populist solutions. Second, that as Islamic groups and organisations in Indonesia increasingly rely on religio-civilizational concepts of national identity, they become more transnational in outlook, rhetoric, and organisation and more closely aligned with religious developments in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]