Demographic features of the population of Turkey include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
Religious nationalism can be understood in a number of ways, such as nationalism as a religion itself, a position articulated by Carlton Hayes in his text Nationalism: A Religion, or as the relationship of nationalism to a particular religious belief, dogma, ideology, or affiliation. This relationship can be broken down into two aspects: the politicisation of religion and the influence of religion on politics.
The Justice and Development Party, abbreviated officially as AK Party in English, is a political party in Turkey self-describing as conservative-democratic. It has been the ruling party of Turkey since 2002. Third-party sources often refer to the party as national conservative, social conservative, right-wing populist and as espousing neo-Ottomanism. The party is generally regarded as being right-wing on the political spectrum, although some sources have described it as far-right since 2011. It is one of the two major parties of contemporary Turkey along with the Republican People's Party (CHP).
Islam is the most practiced religion in Turkey. Most Turkish Sunni Muslims belong to the Hanafi school of jurisprudence. The established presence of Islam in the region that now constitutes modern Turkey dates back to the later half of the 11th century, when the Seljuks started expanding into eastern Anatolia.
İnce Minareli Medrese is a 13th-century madrasa located in Konya, Turkey, now housing the Museum of Stone and Wood Art, noted for its ornate entrance, domed courtyard, ornamentally bricked minaret, partially destroyed in 1901, and exemplar Anatolian Seljuk architecture.
Kemalism or Atatürkism is a political ideology based on the ideas of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. Its symbol is the Six Arrows.
The Republic of Türkiye Presidency of Religious Affairs is a state institution established in 1924 by the founding president of Republic of Türkiye Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Initially created to manage religious duties previously overseen by the abolished Shaykh al-Islām during the Ottoman Empire, it later gained formal recognition under Article 136 of the Turkish constitution. The President of The Religious Affairs is appointed by The President of Türkiye, effectively serves as the Grand Mufti of Türkiye. This role is supported by a 16-member council elected from among clerics and university theology faculty.
Millî Görüş or Erbakanism is a religious-political movement and the ideology of a series of Islamist parties inspired by Necmettin Erbakan. It argues that Turkey can develop with its own human and economic power by protecting its core Islamic values and combating European imperialism. Multiple political parties in Turkey adopted the ideology, such as New Welfare Party, Felicity Party, Virtue Party, Welfare Party, National Salvation Party and National Order Party. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a lieutenant of Erbakan, founded the Justice and Development Party, which has governed Turkey since 2002.
In Turkey, secularism or laicism was first introduced with the 1928 amendment of the Constitution of 1924, which removed the provision declaring that the "Religion of the State is Islam", and with the later reforms of Turkey's first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which set the administrative and political requirements to create a modern, democratic, secular state, aligned with Kemalism.
While Turkey is officially a secular state, numerous surveys all show that Islam is the country's most common religion. Published data on the proportion of people in Turkey who follow Islam vary. Because the government registers everyone as Muslim at birth by default, the official statistics can be misleading. There are many people who follow other religions or do not adhere to any religion, but they are officially classified as 'Muslim' in official records unless they make a contrary claim. These records can be changed or even blanked out on the request of the citizen using a valid electronic signature to sign the electronic application. According to the state, 99.8% of the population is initially registered as Muslim. The remaining 0.2% are Christians and adherents of other officially recognised religions such as Judaism. As much as 90% of the population follows Sunni Islam. Most Turkish Sunni Muslims belong to the Hanafi school of jurisprudence.
Secularism—that is, the separation of religion from civic affairs and the state—has been a controversial concept in Islamic political thought, owing in part to historical factors and in part to the ambiguity of the concept itself. In the Muslim world, the notion has acquired strong negative connotations due to its association with removal of Islamic influences from the legal and political spheres under foreign colonial domination, as well as attempts to restrict public religious expression by some secularist nation states. Thus, secularism has often been perceived as a foreign ideology imposed by invaders and perpetuated by post-colonial ruling elites, and is frequently understood to be equivalent to irreligion or anti-religion.
The headscarf controversy in Turkey was a 20th and early 21st century controversy about women wearing Islamic headscarves. The Republic of Turkey had been a secular state since the constitutional amendment of 1937. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk introduced the secularization of the state in the Turkish Constitution of 1924, alongside his reforms. Over 90% of Turkey's population is Muslim, and the suppression of hijab/headscarves and other prominent religious symbols in government institutions and public schools, led to heated controversy at times in Turkey. Specifically, it resulted in a clash between those favoring the secular principles of the state, such as the Turkish Armed Forces, and religious conservatives, including Islamists. In the early 21st century, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reversed this, and worked to "raise a pious generation" in Turkey.
White Turks is a term used in Turkey for the urban population that embraced or directly benefited from Turkey’s modernization. They are often generalized as embracing values such as secularism, Western enlightenment, positivism and republicanism. White Turks are in contrast to the so-called Black Turks, a name for the conservative, Islamic, and typically less privileged among the originally rural Anatolian population. The two terms are related to the emergence of a middle class since the end of the 20th century, and is an expression of elite consciousness and also a contempt for a section of the population which is seen as backwards. Civilizing efforts had been part of the imagination of all Turkish elites since the Tanzimat reforms.
In Turkey, xenophobia and discrimination are present in its society and throughout its history, including ethnic discrimination, religious discrimination and institutional racism against non-Muslim and non-Sunni minorities. This appears mainly in the form of negative attitudes and actions by some people towards people who are not considered ethnically Turkish, notably Kurds, Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, and peripatetic groups like Romani people, Domari, Abdals and Lom.
Conservative democracy is a label coined by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Turkey to describe Islamic democracy. Forming as a modernist breakaway party from former Islamist movements, the AKP's conservative democratic ideology has been described as a departure from or moderation of Islamic democracy and the endorsement of more secular and democratic values. The electoral success and the neo-Ottoman foreign policy of the AKP that aims to broaden Turkey's regional influence has led to the party's conservative democratic ideals to be mirrored in other countries, such as by the Justice and Development Party in Morocco and the Ennahda Movement in Tunisia.
Conservatism in Turkey is a national variant of conservatism throughout Turkey reflected in the agendas of many of the country's political parties, most notably the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), which describes its prevailing ideology as conservative democracy. Elements of Turkish conservatism are also reflected in most parties situated on the political right, including the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). In Turkey, it is often referred to as Türk tipi muhafazakârlık.
Erdoğanism refers to the political ideals and agenda of Turkish president and former prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who became prime minister in 2003 and served until his election to the Presidency in 2014. With support significantly derived from charismatic authority, Erdoğanism has been described as the "strongest phenomenon in Turkey since Kemalism" and used to enjoy broad support throughout the country until the 2018 Turkish economic crisis which caused a significant decline in Erdoğan's popularity. Its ideological roots originate from Turkish conservatism and its most predominant political adherent is the governing Justice and Development Party, a party that Erdoğan himself founded in 2001.
Kurdish-Islamic synthesis, or Kurdish-Islamic nationalism, is a form of Kurdish nationalism which is Islamist in nature, unlike mainstream Kurdish nationalism, which is secularist in nature.
Turkish–Islamic synthesis is a type of Turkish nationalism which has an Islamist leaning instead of secular.
Süleyman Yalçın [sylæjman jaltʃɯn] (1926–2016) was a Turkish physician, academic, conservative political figure and journalist who headed a conservative and nationalist think-tank called the Aydınlar Ocağı in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a faculty member at Istanbul University between 1952 and 1988. He is known for his active role in the formulation of the Turkish–Islamic synthesis which has been an influential perspective in the Turkish politics since the 1970s.
