For centuries, Islamic logics of charity mostly shaped along two lines: communitarian and state-making. Drawing on fieldwork in Egypt and Turkey, I demonstrate the rise of a new logic of care, which can be called entrepreneurial. Nevertheless, communitarian and state-making charity persist vigorously, even if unevenly. Contrary to what “world society” scholars would predict, entrepreneurial charity is highly circumscribed. Moreover, redistributive charity – an occasionally robust challenge to established religion throughout the history of Islam – has gained new force in response to neoliberalization. Counterintuitively, the melding of redistributive and entrepreneurial charitable practices has precipitated the end of neoliberal Islam. Fields of charitable organizations, as well as the state and other political forces, will determine which logics survive and thrive as the neoliberal era comes to an end.
Welcome everyone, uh my name's Kevan Harris. I'm a Professor
in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. I'm also a
member of the faculty advisory board for
the Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Um and it's under the auspices of the
Center of Near Eastern Studies at UCLA that
we're uh honored to have professor Cihan Tuğal from
the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley
here with us today uh, to give a talk
in an ongoing speaker series that we're
having here in uh at the Center.
Cihan Tuğal is uh has been an inspiration for many
uh sociologists uh with interest in the Middle East.
He's known for many of his publications.
I'll run through his major works
in case uh audience members are not aware.
He's the author of "Passive Revolution:
Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to
Capitalism" in 2009.
Then "The Fall of the Turkish Model"
in 2016. "How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down
Islamic Liberalism" uh and most recently
uh his third monograph "Caring for the Poor:
Islamic and Christian Benevolence in a
Liberal World" from which I believe some
of the talk today will draw from. And he's a prolific essayist,
uh political commentator, um
uh and scholar and so without further
ado, I'm gonna mute my screen
and uh welcome Professor Tuğal and
thanks to everyone who's attending and
watching from, you know,
California, United States, and around the world.
Okay, thank you very much for that generous
introduction, Kevan and thank you for the invitation.
I'll share my screen.
Okay, so um I'm going to talk about
charity and neoliberalism today but
charity very widely
understood. Um, so all kinds of
good works and we will, we can get into
the etymology of these terms in
uh in both English and in uh
Turkish, Arabic, etc. later. But uh I'm
uh casting the net
a little wide to include all kinds of good works.
And my primary question is how has the logic of charity
changed during neoliberalization. Okay that that's the
main question and I, let me give you a
map of the talk before I
define Neo-liberal because it's a very contested
uh and hard to pin down term.
Basically, what I will do is after a very short
theoretical and methodological introduction,
I will mostly focus on
some exemplar institutions of
uh what I call communitarian charity in Egypt
and uh well, in Egypt.
Then neoliberal institutions in Egypt and then uh coming to Turkey,
a one redistributed association
and then a very interesting combo
institution. And I'll conclude the talk, maybe last 10
minutes focusing on one organization
and a discussion of how a merger of neoliberalism
with redistributed politics and charity
has precipitated the end of liberal
Islam. Okay, so in one sense, I'm combining the theme of my
two uh recent books, the Verso book and
the Routledge book but I'll
come to how I'm doing that. But let's first define
the meaning of these terms. So before I
define neoliberal, I need to define what it is against, what
it is trying to replace. And that is communitarian
charity. Again, a very problematic term
but everything I'm going to be doing and
talking about is problematic. I mean all
of these concepts have some blind spots and issues. But what I
mean by communitarian charity
is a logic of benevolence based on interdependence between
god, providers, and beneficiaries.
And this is mostly based on uh [...],
a scholar whom I will problematize a little
in the middle of the talk after I
present my empirical material on a
communitarian and neoliberal charities and before coming to
Turkey. So what is neoliberalism then?
New actors of charity whom I call neoliberal
in both Egypt and Turkey are critical of
what they call traditional charity. They don't call this
uh communitarian, they call it
traditional charity and because of reasons I
will only lightly touch, I'm not
calling what they are attacking traditional charity. So these
neoliberal actors argue that an irregular
distribution of funds by these traditional
charities reproduces laziness.
And therefore they say if we reorganize charity and philanthropy
as a business, we can transform the poor into
independent entrepreneurs.
So that that's what I define as a neoliberalism.
And I'll play around with this term a little
in the bulk of the talk, but the basic
theoretical assumption just for the purposes of this talk.
So I mean this is not not a theoretical
talk on neoliberalism.
So I'm uh setting the theoretical by a little
law here. So just for the purposes of
this talk, neoliberalism for me is this, you know, restructuring of
charity as a business and the will to transform uh the poor,
but also the beneficiaries, the providers, and the volunteers too
into entrepreneurs.
So that is the project and I am largely talking about how
this is severely limited despite this understanding that we
are now in a neo-liberal age and we would
uh you know, expect the victory of this.
But uh I will underline that has been really
circumscribed, neoliberal charity has
been really circumscribed, by the heaviness of communitarianism
especially in Egypt, but by counter
neoliberal responses to the deeper neoliberalism in Turkey.
So that's where the talk gets a little convoluted. It's
easier to understand why communitarianism would be
restricting neoliberalism but when I come to Turkey,
I'll point out how the success of
neoliberalism uh prepares the end of neoliberalism.
And I'm not saying we are there yet, so
I'm not saying you know, neoliberalism has ended but uh I'll talk
more about that when the time comes.
So uh as for my theoretical framework of
how I am studying this, I am mostly arguing against
this literature called new institutionalism, sometimes called world
society scholarship. And I propose a field and hegemony based
theoretical alternative against that. So
new institutionalists argue that the charity model,
philanthropy model born in the United States and Britain
has traveled throughout the world and is now predominant
thanks to normative, coercive, and
mimetic pressures. And in
contrast to that, I argue
by focusing on these different
organizations in Egypt and Turkey
that charity organization
each charity organization develops its unique
neoliberalism or anti-neoliberalism or
neoliberalism and anti-neoliberalism
combo through first
distinction from other organizations.
That's the Bourdieusian angle.
And secondly, but not secondarily, second
as importantly, through links with the state
and Islamic politics. So that's the
integral state as [...] understands it.
And how did I study all of this? Uh first
uh at the very end of the Mubarak era,
I went to Egypt and focused on 17 organizations,
mostly through interviews and document studies
with mostly top and middle level
managers as well as staff and volunteers and less so
uh beneficiaries because I was trying to
understand how the logic of provision is changing. And in
Turkey, I studied 12 organizations through 35 interviews
in 2011, 2012. And this was
right before the government took its anti-new liberal
turn. Um and then I've did a follow-up study
uh to look at how charity is
changing or whether it is changing after uh the
government's– I shouldn't say anti Neo-
liberal, maybe counter neoliberal,
counter Neo-liberal turn after 2013,
and I conducted interviews with 33 additional
people from the same organizations. And
I also talked to the people I interviewed uh before
uh in in the earlier stage of the
study. And I attempted to do this
a similar kind of follow-up study right
after the Egyptian revolution,
but I went there in the middle of the
revolution and nobody was willing to
talk about charity. I mean all the
charity actors were talking about
politics. So it's just, you know,
the follow-up study didn't happen. I
ended up studying uh the uprising itself
uh for the other book. And then
afterwards, after the coup,
it became just impossible to do field
work. So I, because of all of these difficulties,
I couldn't do the same kind of follow-up study
in Egypt. But overall, all of these
different field visits resulted in 120 interviews.
Okay, and there's a lot also on a Christian
uh and secular charities and philanthropies
in the United States and in Britain, but
I won't have time to talk about these. So if you're
curious about what's happening in the US and in
Britain, uh especially in the US, less so Britain, you
can you can check out my book.
So let me first clarify what I mean by communitarian
charity through some sustained discussion of
one association I will call
the Piety Association. So this is a huge organization and
according to the documents of the
organization, they take care of 600 000 orphans.
And other than that, they have clinics,
you know hundreds of health clinics. They have
6 000 mosques, they have 1 000
Quranic schools, and along with all of
these you know Dawah activities,
they are also focusing on medical
services. And most of these services are rationalized,
very uh very you know, strict medical provision, perfectly rationalized.
And because of that reason, you know, by no means traditional.
So this is a very, you know, fully modernized
operation but I don't want to call it
modern either because of reasons I might not have
time to talk about. But you know, again we
can talk about these terms maybe in the Q & A
session. And as different from neoliberal
organizations though, so this is where the neoliberal
criticism is you know quote unquote, justified,
there is no differentiation between
deserving and undeserving
poor. And this is very, very conscious. So
neoliberal charity is defined by differentiating
between the deserving and
undeserving poor. And this association
was emphasizing that, you know, anybody
who comes to us, any Muslim, any Muslim who comes to us,
deserves aid. Now even if we see them
driving a Mercedes,
we don't ask for proof of poverty. If you
say you need these free
medical services, then you need them
okay. But communitarianism is
something broader for me and it's
this communal obligation not just you
know, lack of differentiation between the
deserving and undeserving poor,
it's a communal, obligatory understanding
of charity. And here is what the director
told me. I think this is a perfect exemplar
of communitarianism. He's saying you know, in the first three lines
that you know, zakat will just you know take care of
hunger if it was properly administered.
Then he says there's an other Islamic
obligation than zakat, which is, and
zakat is an individual worship. There is
a communal worship called fard kifaya and this is a
concept that has been lost and obscured
by the community. So he's saying
uh it's not you know, my perhaps individual
obligation, I cannot be forced to do this.
But as a community, we are,
Islam necessitates us to take, as he's saying here,
all kinds of needs of Muslims. Medicine,
food, drink, blockade.
So the money that is left with me, he
says, has the duty
to relieve the anguish of all. So just to
underline what's happening here, um so if you
have grown up in an Islamic context,
probably they must have made you know
memorize this. Zakat is obligatory,
Sadaqah is not. It's voluntary.
Well, of course that's official Islam, so
I'm not saying that you know that that is not
a valid understanding of Islam. That's
the official understanding of Islam, but
these communitarian charities, they're
saying this is not accurate
because you you can collect zakat by
force and you cannot forcefully collect Sadaqah.
But despite that, we
are obliged to relieve
all needs of the community.
Okay and in that sense, Sadaqah is not,
it cannot be forced on the individual
but it is an obligation. It is not
voluntary and therefore this
association, which was the biggest provider of aid
in Egypt, argued that
we cannot call ourselves volunteers [...].
And they they use the another Arabic
word for themselves [...], which
I can get into. It's a very
interesting word but uh for the purposes of uh time you know
time management, speaking of rationalization,
I need to move on.
So it is important, very important that
neoliberalism, neoliberal charities are
much more at home with the idea of
as Sadaqah being something voluntary.
I mean it cannot be forced on the
community or anybody else,
definitely not only individual. And what
are these neoliberal associations uh doing other than
trying to restructure everything as a business?
Well, they depend on volunteers.
Volunteering is very very important.
Okay so volunteer time, volunteer money, volunteer labor.
And uh they not only rationalize
each uh each branch each activity,
but the idea is that you rationalize it along the lines of
business management. Like very is
self-consciously and openly,
they talk about that. And they of course
have funds coming from mostly
new businesses, the new Muslim rich of
Egypt. and they are not Dawah
organizations. So that this is all also
very very important.
As I say here, they claim to religious capital. You know they
call what they're doing [...], they call what
they're doing [...], and they collect zakat and sadhaqah, but
they they say we are not Dawah
organizations, the major ones. I'll come to
important exceptions, but the biggest
neoliberal organizations say they are not
Dawah organizations. And they also
explicitly discuss the privatization
of welfare as their explicit rationale.
So the state shouldn't do this provision,
we should do this provision. This is what
they say, this is what they define as their agenda,
but they cooperate with both the
giant existing communitarian
associations I have just covered including
this association I have called Piety Association,
but they also cooperate with
the Egyptian bureaucracy, the welfare bureaucracy.
And they reinforce both. So even these you know,
puritan neoliberal charity organizations
in Egypt reinforce communitarian charity associations.
Not the logic of communitarianism itself
but they are reinforcing other actors who
operate with the logic of
communitarianism. And they reinforce the bureaucracy. How so?
I'll exemplify this through another
association I call the Generosity Fund,
one of the three biggest neoliberal organizations in Egypt.
So uh, again you know, I got all the usual stuff
from them about you know laziness and
how communitarians reproduce laziness.
And instead they say you know, we are like a
business oriented association. But
they worked with not only private
institutions but also Ministry of Tourism
to collect all the unused food
in hotels. And they had to work with
Egyptian bureaucracy again and again. And they said, they
reassured me, oh you know
the ministers are very good people.
Mubarak's ministers are very good people.
Their staff is not uh good though
because they're bureaucrats.
There's a lot of bureaucracy. And uh you
know, in field work, you always have to
play stupid. So I was like, oh there's
bureaucracy. Why is there bureaucracy?
You have to ask these questions if
you're a field worker, whatever you might think, you know.
Even if you think you might have the
answers because you get different answers, right.
So of course, he was he was shocked. Like
you know what what kind of an
idiot would be asking this question? Why
is there bureaucracy in Egypt?
This is a 7 000 year old civilization, he exclaimed.
It is 7 000 years of bureaucracy.
So he's not talking about Nasser, Arab socialism.
It's our culture. Egypt is a very strong country
my friend, he said. Sorry. Egypt is a very strong country my friend,
and bureaucracy here is
very well established. But then you know, he's winking now.
There are many ways to deal with the bureaucracy.
So what I want to emphasize here is a
multi-layered complexity. So
the, you know, much of the neoliberalism literature,
maybe not less so the critical
literature, but uh the mainstream literature and the
mainstream literature on organizations in general,
they expect philanthropies, NGOs to limit the bureaucracy,
right. And that could have worked in a,
you know, quote unquote, "ideal
liberal and neoliberal situation" where people
don't have these ingrained assumptions
about what bureaucracy is, what Egypt is,
and how you should operate.
Here the growth of neoliberal charities
only reinforced and reproduced
the notion that bureaucracy is inevitable.
You work with it, you don't seek to limit
it, you don't seek to demolish it.
Neoliberalism is not against the state.
Okay it works with the state
to fulfill its purposes. But as I'm
saying you know,
this is this is the biggest one of the biggest uh
organizations and on the margins of this
neoliberal trend, we see many uh differences
and uh wow, I'm going
much slower than i thought. Let me try to
pick up pace a little. Uh so it contrasts
how they're operating with
what I have called the Loyalty
Association, a much smaller
neoliberal organization, which is
more puritan in its operation in terms of you know this,
cooperating with communitarians and
the state. It just doesn't, it doesn't
cooperate with the bureaucracy
and it doesn't cooperate with the
communitarian associations.
And I had another quote here but I will just
skip that to save time. And
um, I'll just move on to say
that he was very, the director
of this association was very critical
of the other neoliberals because they
were still dependent on the
bureaucracy and communitarian associations.
But the reason they stopped working with
the communitarian associations
was not out of neoliberal puritanism.
They stopped working with
the Piety Association because when they
did, and they were also
working with the Muslim Brotherhood to
to be able to reach
poor people because they themselves
don't have the networks with the poor,
the Muslim Brotherhood does.
So the reason they stopped doing that
was because the security forces
were giving them a lot of trouble.
Okay so what they what what made their operation
more purely neoliberal was actually
quite a political reason. Nothing to do
with you know these mimetic isomorphic forces, the new institutionalists
talk about. You know it's not an
imitation of the center that is causing
this. It is the political
particularity of the context. And
here is where I sharply disagree then
with the new institutionalists
who say, who argue that it is easy to predict
the organization of a newly emerging
nation's administration without
knowing anything about the nation itself
because they're just assuming you know, these
good business practices will be imitated
everywhere, always. Of course, they they do have a lot of
caveats which come comes through the
concept of decoupling and I can open up further in the Q&A
session perhaps how I disagree with that kind of analysis too.
But I'll just hear you know,
rather than going more deeply into my
criticism, I'll just point out what's
happening here from my own
perspective. All of this you know cynicism
and the dependence on the state and the
communitarian associations
uh is basically a Bourdieusian distinction
from other you know,
all of these associations are, that they
feel the need to distinguish
their activities from each other. And all
of this distinction
in a way Bourdieusians do not notice, is
shaped by the logic of the state
and by the logic of the social movements which are
challenging the state. Okay,
what we see in Turkey by contrast is an
inclusive uh neo-liberalism.
So the top associations
are both more neoliberal than the
associations in Egypt in ways that I
will have to specify though.
So give me a minute to do that. But
they're also more
proselytization oriented, so they
did not have,
you know the top neoliberal
organizations in Turkey did not have this anti-dawah
stance that the organizations in Egypt had.
And this is happening again because of the
regime type which allows a blending
of neoliberalization and Dawah. And you
know, in Egypt, it's called Dawah and even though this
same word exists in Turkey.
The counterpart of that, which is not you
know, which is not an exact translation or
exact counterpart, but most of them call theirs
themselves [...] organizations, so
of course that's another Arabic word. But
uh it has traveled in a different way and
means something slightly different in the Turkish context.
So they have these top
organizations are uh less reliant on the
state. Well they are reliant in a broader
sense, but in in terms of you know
their day-to-day operations, they don't
summon as many uh bureaucrats and
bureaucratic activities. Uh they are much more piety
based and they are much more openly political
you know in a way neither the neoliberal nor the communitarian,
associations with the exception of the
Muslim Brotherhood and a couple of others
were in Egypt. So what do I mean by inclusive neoliberalism?
So two things were happening in Turkey.
The neoliberalism went both deeper and it was much more
generous. So unlike in Egypt,
the neoliberal organizations in Turkey
did not think that welfare should be privatized wholesale.
They said oh we need the state, we need
the state to take care of poor people. We
come in only when the state fails. We need a
strong generous state.
So what do I mean when I say they are more neoliberal.
Well their tentacles were much
deeper into the lives of the poor than in
Egypt. So as I was emphasizing, the neoliberal organizations
in Egypt relied a lot on the state and
on the existing communitarian
organizations to reach out to the poor.
They didn't have their
own networks. By contrast the neoliberal
organizations in Turkey did
and they had this much more excessive
control and monitoring of the lives of the poor
unlike their Egyptian counterparts which
you know appeared and then disappeared.
They were in the lives of the poor and they were
you know, controlling them, punishing them,
and monitoring them all the time. And you know, punishing
their laziness and you know, preaching them hard work
uh and uh checking uh their
deservingness all the time. So the Egyptian
associations also had the
idea that they should be doing this
but they were not doing it unlike the Turkish organizations.
Now uh here comes the twist in the talk.
So I was, this is the part I was not
expecting to see. So
such deep neoliberalization also
produced a lot of counter
neoliberalization. Not always
anti, there there is some anti, but it's
more like, you know counter.
And this requires some,
a little theological uh discussion again.
Not nothing too deep but I have to do this here.
Uh this, what's happening resonates strongly with
what scholars have called return and uh
you know several scholars have analyzed this. I will
rely more on a Bonner than Kochuyt here
because Kochuyt's idea of
interdependence between God,
beneficiaries, and providers–
this balanced circle of justice– is
very medieval and it doesn't exactly
capture what was happening in the first decades of Islam. So in,
no later, in the, after the first century of Islam especially,
the result of wealth accumulation and
there's this understanding that you know
it has to be just. So there's a circle of
justice, which you know
combines, with Persian traditions [...],
then gets Turkified but then
travels back to Egypt during the Fatimid and Mamluk
empires et cetera et cetera. And that's what
Kochuyt mostly bases his account on and I think he,
that misleads him uh in his reading of
the original uh sources, the Hadith and the Quran. So
Michael Bonner points out that
this concept of return is much more
complex. It's not exactly a circle of
justice. It's rather an attack
on wealth accumulation but not against
wealth itself. So you know,
I'm not reading any revolutionary
socialism into this.
But it is an attack against wealth
accumulation, so it's this idea
that yes, the prophet was a merchant and
he came from within the merchant class. But he
attacked that as a class, not the activity of trade itself
but the classness of the class itself.
So he mobilized zakat and sadaqah
and other means to prevent
the formation of monopolies and
oligopolies in the market's place.
And this is done through conquest, war,
and redistribution.
So this is the idea of return of [...]
that Shariati also use
and of course they read some
revolutionary socialism into this. So
when we come to the 1960s and 1970s,
these original sources are now combined
with a structural Marxist influenced
criticism of the system. And
in what I call the Companions Association,
we see a pure version of this
sort of you know war mobilization kind of
combination of one variety of Marxism
and one variety of Islam. So in
a small association, so this is
what I call the pure version of
redistributive politics and charity. Then I'll come to
the more interesting impure version but
in this pure version. the idea
is very straightforward. You know, charity
has to be political
and it needs to build collective
self-reliance. Not the poor as entrepreneurs
but the poor as self-reliant activists.
So this has led to what I call a
charismatic egalitarian management structure
in the shelters and other provisional
institutions of the Companions Association
and one example I will very shortly discuss here
is homeless shelters. And the homeless shelters
are run, operated, managed by
people who used to be homeless themselves.
Okay, so they they take the homeless,
they don't turn them into
uh entrepreneurs, or you know
rational neoliberal managers, but
activist managers
who shelter the poor and then mobilize
the poor uh to fight uh the government. Not
necessarily in a revolutionary way but
definitely in a like a critical way,
to push the government in a more
redistributive direction. And the reason I'm calling
this a charismatic egalitarian
management structure
is because these ex-homeless
people, the new managers of these shelters,
they they do not run the whole operation.
At the top of the whole operation
is a a rich merchant
from uh well, someone from merchant
background who has mostly stopped trade
activity, trading activities. So
just like [...] I mean he's like he is uh
modeling himself after the
prophet. So he comes from within this
conservative merchant milieu but he is rebuilding as the conservative
milieu and he still goes uh door-to-door collecting
zakat and sadaqah and uses that
in a way that is critical of government
and in this egalitarian
way. And then you see these managers,
these ex-homeless people,
not only use Islamic language, but also
you know this structural analysis. They
cite numbers, they you know,
they provide you with charts. They talk
talk about charity and poverty in a global
structural context okay, even though you know this
is still an Islamic operation and organization.
So okay now now to the punch line of the whole talk.
Uh IHH: İnsani Yardım Vakfı;
or Humanitarian Relief Foundation
which merges imperial or sub-imperialist
redistributive and neoliberal charity.
And I've been talking about for 32 minutes,
uh so how quick can I do this um?
So yeah, I'll be uh as quick as
possible. So I'll give you a very short
history of IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation.
So before they became anything like
neoliberal, uh they they were a strong
combo of redistributive and
communitarian uh charity. So just like this Companions
Association uh I covered. So the IHH is the only non pseudonym in this book by the way.
IHH was very much like the Companions
Association in that it was
non-neoliberal. Maybe it was not purely
redistributive. It had a very
strong communitarian tendencies too. But
they were more redistributed and they
were thinking globally,
but unlike the Companions Association,
their I was always on jihad at least at
least partially. I mean,
I'm not calling this a Jihad
organization. It's not but you know, I mean they are
they are very sympathetic to Jihadis and
uh the secular suspicion or accusation
is always that you know, some some of their funds always
go to Jihad. And you know,
there are many court cases about this
and you know, I won't go into the details of that.
Um but that was IHH in the 1990s.
Uh afterwards, you know as
Turkish Islamism became more and more
neoliberal, they joined forces with the neoliberal organizations.
So they're not against them unlike the
Companions Association, they're not
against all of the neoliberal
organizations. At least they're
against some of them. um
but operationally structurally speaking,
institutionally speaking,
what's happening is that they are
applying neoliberalism at home.
okay so in Turkey, with the exception
of Syrian refugees,
uh so when when they are providing for
Turks and Kurds,
their operational structure, their
organizational structure,
and their logic of charity is very much
along the lines of
neoliberalism. But when it comes to
Bosnia, uh to the Middle East, North Africa,
they take a politicized and redistributive
approach. And uh in the beginning they were very
hands off of politics, not because they
were not political, but because they were
trying to combine all Islamic forces under one roof, but
as the AKP emerged as the unquestionable
leader of Islam, in their eyes and in the
eyes of the majority, in Turkey then they started to side with
the AKP. But they still have a very complex
relation and I don't have the time to
cover that complexity here but
I'll say certain things about that. But
I won't, you know give you the whole
picture, again maybe something
that's something I can do in the Q & A.
But what I want to really emphasize is that
their combination of neoliberalism and redistributivism
brought about the end of liberal Islam
in Turkey, or it's it's one of the forces
that brought about the end of neoliberal
Islam. And the Mavi Marmara
affair uh is very central to this
whole story. So many of you probably know what
Mavi Marmara is but just maybe there are a couple of people
who don't know, so I have to very shortly
explain what's going on here.
So Mavi Marmara is
a ship operated run by IHH, not owned by them, but you know they, I think
they later bought the ship too but
at that point it was rented. They were
running the ship, they were controlling the ship.
it was leading this freedom flotilla that
aimed to break the blockade, the
Gaza blockade.
And you know, they they fought with the Israelis.
Not the other seven ships in the
flotilla but Mavi Marmara
activists fought with the soldiers and uh
eight of them were killed. So the, you know,
this is a huge, again international
issue that's you know,
part of court proceedings. Again that's
not the part I will go into
but uh what interests me here
is the relation they see
between this incident, uh that you know, this
uh failed attempt to break the Gaza blockade
and the regime change in Turkey. The change
of the regime from liberal islam to
something else and what we can discuss what that
something else is, but there definitely
was a regime change. And they they uh
give themselves credit for this regime
change. So it's a different twist to what I'm doing or
what I have done in my
Verso book in 2016 where I traced this regime change back to
contracting world markets. So you know,
global capitalist dynamics.
And the government's overblown imperial
desires during the time of the Arab
Spring. So there's some, you know, there was some
miscalculation there
due to the structure of political
society as I argue in the book.
And then as a third factor, the Kurdish uprising.
So these three factors in my book
explain the end of neoliberal Islam in Turkey.
But they argue, you know they say we brought,
uh in my 2014 2015 interviews,
they said, they told me. And of
course, you know that some of them know my work, so
we are discussing my framework basically
with them. They were saying "No,
I mean you're not getting this, we did
this" was their
argument. And uh here is
one example, one entry into this debate.
They're saying uh this is one of the top managers of
the association.
Uh, so these relations, talking about
Israeli-Turkish relations, were
established in the Cold War era under
American control.
They were never based on the will of the
peoples' relations, so I mean, this is you know
classical radical left language.
Relations further developed in the 1990s after
uh the 1997 coup. Turkish-Israeli
relations reached their peak when
Turkey's unhappy
majority was under the highest duress.
The AK Party came to power by the votes
of these dissatisfied people.
These people were expecting certain
things regarding Israel,
Islamic covering, material needs,
education, and civic rights.
and this this is an important package. I
mean, it's really an interesting way of you know, summing
up the grievances of the
Turkish sunni population. When Turkey was
going through its most difficult financial times,
the Israeli regime was reaping the
benefits through special
military deals. Now I mean, we really
need to understand the mindset here. Uh
that they are holding and they say that, IHH
activists and managers say, the reason of
poverty worldwide and in Turkey elsewhere, well
not not in Turkey, worldwide in the Middle East and North
Africa, the reason of poverty
is corporate domination and the wars
incited by corporate domination you know.
It's a typical world system kind
explanation okay or even like maybe
Leninist uh rather than world system or maybe a
commonwealth or like,
I mean they're not that theoretical, but
it's basically in that genre. Uh in Turkey, it's
different but worldwide poverty is caused by corporate
domination and the wars they incite.
And uh up until the AK party government,
Turkey was that, a part of that global capital structure.
And the AK party voters wanted these
favors, this you know, this blending of
imperialist and capitalist domination to stop.
And he went on. "We never decide policy
based on the state's priorities, it
is rather the reverse. The state follows,
the AK Party followed us," he's arguing.
Uh one example before the Mavi Marmara affair,
we brought aid to Africa,
we organized conferences on Africa in the 1990s
2000s. Then the state declared, then the
government declared 2007 the year of Africa. And in the same way
he argues, when the Mavi Marmara incident occurred in
2010, the AK party had to claim it as its own
since its citizens were killed. So state follows
civil society and popular mobilization and
afterwards and neoliberal
Islam. And there's a lot to discuss there
but I'm running out of time. So I'm
almost at 45 minutes. So I'll just wrap
up with this slide. So then what does studying charity
teach us about organizational
dynamics? I tried to highlight some of this through
the differences I have discussed between
what I call the Loyalty Association in
Egypt and the Generosity Fund in Egypt
as well as a party
association. And through the example of IHH,
I want to further emphasize uh
what we what we see is neither isomorphism
as world society's scholars would claim, nor
an Islamic uniqueness. I mean, of course
like, we have to understand Islam to understand
any of this. Like, I mean we have to read
our uh Kochuyt and we have to
read our Michael Bonner and we have to
read our Hadith and Quran to understand any of this,
but the Quran on its own, or the Hadith
are not dictating the terms here.
Okay, so they are getting blended
very creatively and depending on each
context. So it's different in the 90s,
different in the 2000s, different
in the 2010s. All of these islamic
terms ideas are getting reinterpreted
in creative but not completely arbitrary ways
by neoliberal actors by redistributive actors
and then by actors such as the IHH
who combine neoliberalism with radical leftist
ideas. And uh, so we need to uh, I don't have a lot of
time here now for a deep theoretical discussion but
what I am arguing is that all of these different
creative interpretations of Islam and
neoliberalism and Marxism emerge out of a
field dynamic so that these associations
differentiating themselves from each
other but also within the context
of a broader hegemonic structure
in each nation-state context.
And I will stop there uh and uh thank you
for listening. So uh I'd like to thank
you again, Professor Tuğal uh and on behalf of the
Center for Near Eastern Studies
here at UCLA. Uh thank you very much.
Thank you for the great questions.
Uh for those who are interested in more
talks like this, if you
you know ended up here serendipitously,
uh you can check out our website and sign up for
uh listservs on more talks.
Professor Behdad, do you have anything else to
add? Thank you, no I just wanted to thank
both uh Professor Tuğal and you Kevan
for such a wonderful and stimulating
event. I learned a lot myself. I actually was
more curious to hear about Iran, but on
another occasion, we will have a conversation.
Thank you so much and thank you all for
joining us this afternoon.