Islam and Turkish Nationalism in Nacip Fazil Kisakurek and Nurettin Topçu.

Since the emergence of Albanian and Arab nationalisms in the 1910s, Turkish Islamists have reflected on the relations between Islam and nationalism. Nationalism was seen initially incompatible with religion, but all the political and military events that brought to the Turkish War of independence inevitably had an impact on Islamist ideas. Islamists gradually accepted the idea of nation and nationalism, an idea that departs from the Islamic concept of Ummah and Islamic solidarity. After the 1940s, with the rise of a new generation of Islamist thinkers, Turkish nationalism became an inalienable new element of Islamist political thought. In Arab countries there has been speaking of khususiyyah and Islamist movements modelled themselves along national identities. For instance, Muslim Brotherhood refers strongly to Egyptian national feelings and Hamas is shaped on the Palestinian independence struggle. However, a systematic theory of nationalism is a peculiarity of Turkish Islam and, probably, the main reason of contrast and incompatibility between Turkish and Arab Islamism political thought. My paper will briefly present the emergence of the idea of nationalism in Turkish Islamist political ideas and will focus more extensively on two authors who represent one of the main sources of inspiration of contemporary Islamism: Nacip Fazil Kisakurek (1905-1985) and Nurettin Topçu (1909-1975). Both intellectuals lived in post-Kemalist era and were deeply influenced by the events that brought to the emergence of modern Turkey. Kisakurek and Topçu, though, represent two different understanding of Turkish nationalism and explained differently the relation between nationalism and Islam. However, both authors successfully influenced the emergence of new and more conscious generation of Islamist thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s. Examining the relation between Islam and nationalism in the two authors, I will argue that the main peculiarity of Turkish Islam is its approach to nationalism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]