Naqshbandīs and the Muslim Brotherhood: Diaspora and the Rise of the Political Islam in Modern Turkey

Abstract The secularizing reforms of the republican elites in modern Turkey encountered Islamic resistance orchestrated by Naqshbandīs, who were declared enemies of the regime, repressed, and banned. The literature on how Turkish Islamists and the Naqshbandiyya have responded to republicans predominantly deals with either how they withdrew into a sort of diaspora or how they submitted and/or adapted to the republican regime. The consensus has been that Naqshbandīs played a role in inhibiting the infiltration of radical Islamic ideologies in modern Turkey. However, there is a lacuna in the literature on the Naqshbandī diaspora outside Turkey and its cooperation with transnational Islamic movements in building networks of resistance to secularism. Addressing this gap, this paper argues that some Naqshbandīs evaded republican surveillance and bans by creating an Egypt-based diasporic community, developing an Islamic cadre intended to eventually re-Islamize the Turkish state, its politics and society. Based on the memoirs and biographies of the prominent figures of the diaspora in Cairo, the study uncovers the connection between the Naqshbandiyya and other Islamic transnational movements, principally the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, at the ideological and institutional levels from the 1920s to the 1980s, to show how this cadre emerged and subsequently shaped the character of Islamism in modern Turkey.