Religion, Population Exchange, and the Construction of Turkish National Identity

• In Event: 165 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Islam

Abstract

The nationalist movement that succeeded in crafting the Republic of Turkey relied upon rhetoric that defined the nation in explicitly secular, civic, and territorial terms. Modern scholarship has largely accepted this paradigm and has emphasized similar characteristics, yet the debate as presently construed does not explain the full spectrum of political maneuvering and cultural engineering utilized by the nationalist movement to construct the Turkish nation. During the 1923 negotiations that established the Turkey as an independent state, Greece and Turkey agreed to a population exchange which forcibly relocated 1.3 million Greek Orthodox Christians in Anatolia and 400,000 Muslims living in Greece in an exchange meant to homogenize both countries and remove ‘dangerous’ elements that threatened the fledgling self-constructed historical narratives and national identities of the two states. Significantly, the exchange, couched in terms of national identity, was based exclusively upon religion, ignoring the territorial, linguistic, and ethnic factors focused on by scholars and Turkish nationalists alike. This study breaks from this scholarly paradigm, utilizing the population exchange as a case study and arguing for the importance of the under analyzed religious dimension of Turkish nationalism. I argue that, despite the movement’s outward secularism, religion provided a cultural reservoir of myths and symbols, serving as a chain of memory on which nationalists could begin to build a united nation and a cohesive collective identity. With the exile of Orthodox Greeks from Turkey, religion helped create a new community, authoritative, legitimate, and homogeneous, in which the Turkish people and culture could flourish.

Author

• Greg Goalwin, University of California-Santa Barbara