Between Islamism and Human Rights: Mazlumder as a Third Way within Turkish Islamism?

Scholarly literature on Islamism in Turkey has generally focused on the two main drives of the Islamic revival of the last twenty years, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, henceforth AKP) on the one hand and what today has become its fiercest nemesis, the Gülen community, on the other. By operating in the two distinct but complementary domains of party-politics and society respectively, these two actors have reconfigured the face of Turkey from a country still under the grasp of secular forces to one now promoting a religious outlook. Especially in the last ten years, they have been able to overturn the socio-political balance to their advantage by undermining the hold that the secularists had historically maintained on institutions (in particular the judiciary and the military) since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. While this scholarship has offered an important contribution, it has overshadowed parallel underground developments within Turkish Islamism, which have thus received relatively limited attention. New Islamic organizations have emerged and developed in the same period which can be seen as offering an alternative “third way” within Turkish Islamism with regard to the organization of the relationship between politics and society. These actors, indeed, often see themselves as distinct from and opposed to the theological views and patterns of social, civic and political transformation proposed by mainstream Islamic forces. This chapter explores the particular case of Mazlumder (the Organization for Human Rights and Solidarity for Oppressed People), an Islamist Human Rights organization that began operating in the country in 1991. Mazlumder is one of the first of its kind. It operates within the framework of civil-society organizations by gathering younger and older Muslims around the common goal of improving human rights standards in the country.