The Protestant Reformation as an Islamisation of Christianity in the Thought of Ziya Gökalp and Ali Shariati

Abstract

Following Ziya Gökalp and Ali Shariati’s assertion that Protestantism arose due to the influence of Islam in Europe in the Middle Ages, this study discusses the different discourses elaborated by the Turkish and Iranian authors based on this idea. The controversies surrounding modernity, westernization, colonialism, and Islam were a constant in their writings, despite the different geographical and historical circumstances. This paper discusses the logic of Gökalp and Shariati’s claim that Protestantism was Islamized Christianity. The aim is to provide a detailed perspective on how this claim illuminates their broader thinking about civilization, culture, and religion.

1. Introduction

This article draws on the work of twentieth-century Turkish and Iranian intellectuals to understand the development of the dialectics of essentialism, opposition, and hybridity regarding the Muslim world and the West. Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) and Ali Shariati (1933–1977) were among the first in the Middle East to argue that European hegemony had its roots in the Protestant Reformation, which was made possible by the influence of Islam.

Thus, one of the most seminal events in Europe, a process that effectively ended with the idea of a unified Christendom and put an end to the centuries-old unity of the Western Church, and which, in the eyes of these two intellectuals, brought modernity to the West, would not have been possible without the influence of Islamic civilization. Although some European and American scholars and writers had pointed out the similarities between Protestantism and Islam since Luther’s confrontation with Rome, Muslims had remained outside the debate (See Hasse 2016, p. xii; Gouguenheim 2008).1 Many Muslim thinkers were unfamiliar with the idea, which was a weapon used by Western polemicists to advance their particular arguments about the Renaissance, Catholicism, Protestantism, the Enlightenment, and secularisation.

The aim of this paper is not to debate the merits of the claim that Protestantism is an Islamised Christianity, nor to undertake thorough research into the origins and genealogy of the idea. Rather, the aim is to analyse why Gökalp and Shariati put this idea into writing and how it fits into their broader discourses, concerns, and intentions. Neither Gökalp nor Shariati explains in detail how Islam made Protestantism possible; they cite no authors, books, events, or processes to support their claim. Given the different contexts, trajectories, and circumstances of Gökalp and Shariati, the idea of a Reformation indebted to Islam served as the basis for two divergent narratives. As a result, the discourse had different implications and repercussions for each of them.

Gökalp and Shariati are among the most influential thinkers of the 20th century in the Middle East. Their ideas influenced their countries at critical moments. Atatürk’s Republic of Turkey and Khomeini’s Islamic Republic of Iran owed a great deal to their speeches and writings. Both lived during the sunset of two monarchies. Declining empires on the verge of becoming republics (secular in the case of Turkey, and Islamic in the case of Iran). Both belonged to proud non-Arab nations on the periphery of the Middle East. Both lived in the shadow of a global Western hegemony that threatened their countries’ autonomy. Both developed their ideas amidst a tumultuous process of rapid modernization and Westernization. Both Gökalp and Shariati were born and raised in the provinces, far from the capitals. However, there are also important differences between them. While Gökalp belongs to the period that saw the zenith of the colonial era, Shariati lived in the period of decolonization and the beginning of the post-colonial era. They belonged to different branches of Islam, and while Gökalp was born in a religiously diverse empire with significant Christian minorities (Greeks and Armenians), Shariati lived in a more religiously homogeneous country with little Christian presence. While Gökalp espoused a nationalist (and ultimately largely secular) ideology, Shariati espoused a theology of liberation that mixed Marxism with Islam.

Despite their political differences, they ‘shared the typical intellectual’s sense of political mission, and both responded to the predicament of modernity by seeking […] a revitalized and authentic collective consciousness for their respective countries’ (Arjomand 1982). Both saw the need for a vigorous self-assertion against Western hegemony, which implied a rejection of liberalism, capitalism, and liberal democracy. Both saw the need to eradicate individualism from society and embrace Durkheim’s concept of the conscience collective (Heyd 1950, p. 57). Gökalp replaced Durkheim’s concept of society with that of the nation, and Shariati with an emancipatory religion. Gökalp judged the nation to be the perfect vehicle for a new collective consciousness and communal solidarity (Arjomand 1982). The religious community was too large and dispersed, and he believed that religious identity would inevitably be eroded by modernity—not that he rejected religion altogether. He considered religion essential to his nationalist aspirations, always subordinated to the nation (Berkes 1959, pp. 73–82), but just as ethnicity or culture. Shariati saw it differently: religious nativism, infused with class consciousness, was the most powerful weapon against Western hegemony and exploitation. He was convinced that, unlike mere nationalism, it also allowed for global solidarity among non-Western nations.

As part of their analysis, what Gökalp and Shariati did was construct a narrative about the nature of the West and its relationship (and indebtedness) to the Islamic world. It was an interpretation in the service of their revolutionary projects, which they hoped to see in Turkey and Iran, respectively. This paper presents a comparison of Gökalp’s and Shariati’s ideas about modernity, Western culture, and civilization, and how they diverged after starting from the same premise. By focusing on these two intellectuals, this paper is not intended to provide a representative survey of Muslim, Turkish, or Iranian opinions on the issues discussed, although both thinkers were immensely influential in their respective countries.

The figures of Gökalp and Sharati have attracted the attention of many scholars. C.H. Dodd, Uriel Heyd, Nizayi Berkes, Andrew Davison, Alastair Bonnett, Taha Parla, and Nedim Nomer are among the scholars who have made substantial contributions to the analysis of Gökalp’s arguments (Dodd 1979; Heyd 1950; Berkes 1959; Davison 1998; Bonnett 2002; Parla 1985; Nomer 2017). In the case of Shariati, the research of Ali Rahnema, Kingshuk Chatterjee, Dustin J. Byrd Ali Mirsepassi, Hamid Dabashi, Siavash Saffari, and Seyed Javad Miri has advanced the understanding of his thought (Rahmena 2014; Chatterjee 2011; Mohomed 2017; Dabashi 2021; Saffari 2017; Miri 2021). This article, although primarily based on the writings of Gökalp and Shariati, makes extensive use of the published studies of the above and other authors. However, there is only another comparative study of the two thinkers, a study presented by Sair Amir Arjomar that focuses on the influence of Durkheim’s sociology in their writings (Arjomand 1982). Furthermore, this paper focuses on a particular question that both Gökalp and Shariati addressed and which has not been the subject of any previous book or article.

The issues raised by Gökalp and Shariati remain crucial in contemporary debates about the origins, attributes, and nature (if any) of modernity, Western identity, culture, and civilization, as well as those of Islam. The analysis of Gökalp’s and Shariati’s discursive uses will help to understand representations of the West in non-Western societies and to re-examine ideas of hybridity and essentialism regarding identity, religion, culture, and civilization that go beyond the paradigms of resistance, confrontation, and assimilation.

2. Ziya Gökalp

Mehmed Ziya Gökalp is considered the founder of sociology in Turkey, and one of the fathers of Turkish nationalism. Born in Diyarbakir, a Kurdish-populated city in eastern Anatolia, Gökalp was a major influence on nationalist movements among the non-Muslim and non-Turkish communities of the declining Ottoman Empire. The encroachment of Western nations was the other major issue that Gökalp would be forced to confront in his writings. Amid the empire’s shrinking frontiers, economic bankruptcy, industrial and technological backwardness, political repression, and intellectual confusion, Gökalp belonged to a generation of Turks who firmly believed in the urgent need to transform the state and society to save what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Enemies at home and abroad had to be confronted, and the whole system of government had to be turned upside down. Like Shariati, he was convinced that the ills and challenges threatening the nation were so great that a mere change of government would not suffice; a socio-cultural revolution was needed. In Gökalp’s time, supporting these ideals in Turkey meant joining the Young Turk movement.

The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) was the strongest political organization in the Young Turk movement. Raised in a traditional religious environment, Gökalp first came into contact with the CUP through Abdullah Cevdet—a co-founder of the organization—in Diyarbekir in the mid-1890s (Kieser 2018, p. 100). He moved to Istanbul in 1896 after enrolling at the Imperial Veterinary School. He was soon arrested for his involvement with the CUP and returned to Diyarbekir without completing his studies. After marrying a woman chosen for him by his family, he devoted his life to spreading the ideas of the Young Turk movement. In 1908, he opened the first CUP office in his hometown, and the following year he moved to Salonica, where he joined the CUP Central Committee in 1910. Thus began his most productive years as a writer in journals and magazines (using the pseudonym Gökalp for the first time), while establishing a close relationship with the prominent figures of the CUP such as Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha. In 1912, he moved to Istanbul with the rest of the leaders of the CUP. He became the ideological master of the movement, the brain behind the triumvirate that would take the reins of the Ottoman Empire after the 1913 coup. Although he did not join the government, Gökalp provided the intellectual basis and justification for the actions of the three Pashas, who revered him as a man of vision and wisdom (ibid., p. 98).

Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, the CUP was dissolved in 1918, and Gökalp was arrested and sent into exile in Malta. He returned in 1921 to serve Mustafa Kemal’s project of national rejuvenation, and to resist the partition of Turkey under the Western-imposed Treaty of Sèvres. He was invited to the Grand National Assembly in Ankara where he headed the Education Committee that created a new school system, curriculum, and textbooks. Before his death, he also helped to draft the 1924 constitution. Gökalp had been the official ideologue of the CUP and had become the unofficial ideologue of Kemalism as he had provided the ‘conceptual framework and political terminology’ for both movements (Parla 1985, p. 15).

Although he held the first chair of sociology at Istanbul University, like Shariati, Gökalp tried to avoid being just a passive observer. He was a militant sociologist who, like a doctor who has diagnosed a disease, prescribed the remedy to cure the nation. ‘The people are the garden, we are its gardener’, he declared (Kieser 2018, p. 22). In this view, the problem was how to apply reforms based on modern European thought, industrialization, and scientific development without sacrificing their cultural and religious heritage (Özervarli 2017). This defensive modernization had been imposed on the Ottoman state since the beginning of the 19th century to put an end to a series of military defeats and territorial losses (Parla 1985, p. 1). They had to become like the West to be able to resist it (ibid., p. 2). The questions that remained unanswered were whether this modernization was possible, and to what extent the Turks should be Westernized.

Gökalp’s interest in the Protestant Reformation stemmed from his desire to prove that the religion and culture of the Turks were not an obstacle to the modernization and incorporation of Turkey into modern Western civilization. For Gökalp, the Reformation meant the creation of the nation-state, which was his main project for post-Ottoman Turkey (Gökalp 1959j, p. 131). Luther represented a national reaction against Catholicism and Latin civilization. By emphasizing the nation, non-Catholic countries such as Britain and Germany created national education and national institutions with a strong emphasis on the ideas of community, collective, and state. Gökalp complained that in the late Ottoman Empire, education was either French, Latin, or classical; that is, education was civilizational rather than cultural or national. This meant that the individual was not adapted to the national culture, and that education was not collectivist (Gökalp 1959f, pp. 244–45).

Gökalp’s Turkism intended to bridge the two irreconcilable paradigms that had dominated the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century: Islam and Westernization (the spirit behind Tanzimat). All the turmoil of the late Ottoman Empire was due to this split.

There are two possible ways of testing this thesis: the first is to compare directly the foundations of Islam with those of modern civilization; the second is to ask whether the points of incompatibility or agreement between Christianity and modern civilization have favourable or unfavorable implications for Islam. Here we shall first follow the second course because it will show us that Christianity has not been able to reconcile itself with modern civilization to the extent that it has remained distant from the principles of Islam and that it has been able to reconcile itself with modern civilization only to the extent that it has approached [the principles of] Islam.

(Gökalp 1959d, p. 214)

The idea was to show that Islam, far from being a remora, was ‘the most modern religion’, uniquely suited to coexist with modern science (ibid., p. 214). On the question of the separation of state and religion, Gökalp wrote that the differences between Muslims and Christians were merely the result of historical circumstances. ‘Christianity arose in a community that was under the domination of a powerful state and had no hope of political independence. Islam, on the other hand, flourished among a people free from external domination and capable of creating an independent state’ (ibid., p. 214). For the early Christians, the state was thus conceived as a sphere ‘outside religion’ and relegated to a ‘non-sacred realm’ while ‘looking down on it‘. This attitude would not disappear completely, even after the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. Had Christianity ‘not found an existing state order at the time of its birth, it would undoubtedly have tried to create one, and then it would have regarded it as a sacred being of its own creation’ (ibid., p. 215). Islam was not defective; it just came into being under different geographical and historical circumstances. Eventually, Christianity came to see the need for ‘a spiritual government [that] would not be satisfied with a mere spiritual sanction but would also demand a material sanction’ (ibid., p. 216). Moreover, unlike Islam, whose sharia only sanctioned ‘outward appearances’ and actions, Christianity in the Middle Ages sought to control and sanction ‘the realm of man’s inner private conscience and sought to measure the faith of men’ through the Inquisition (ibid., p. 216). Gökalp presented a religion focused on orthopraxis as opposed to a religion focused on orthodoxy. In this context, things were not as they first appeared. Even with its sharia and caliphs, Islam was less intrusive and socially destabilizing than Christianity, leaving each individual to his faith and conscience. The papacy issued binding decrees and eventually declared itself infallible so that Rome could ‘set aside all the opinions of the learned’ (ibid., pp. 216–7). This has never happened in Islam, where there has always been a plurality of fatwas and where each mufti or ayatollah has been able to maintain his autonomy, regardless of the opinion of the others (ibid., pp. 216–7). If Islam had declared the state secular and profane, ‘councils, holy synods, inquisitions, and ecclesiastical courts’ would have sprung up in the Muslim world. However, permanent anarchy was prevented by bringing ‘state, law and court into the realm of the sacred’ (ibid., pp. 217–8).

Popes used to claim authority over political matters, and rulers refused to accept such claims because just as religion cannot recognize a power above itself, neither can the state. In the Orthodox Church, religion was sacrificed to the state. In Roman Catholicism, on the other hand, the popes wanted to sacrifice the state for the sake of religion.

(ibid., p. 219)

Spheres of influence had to be demarcated in a constant struggle between the Pope and the European monarchs. Eventually, countries like France adopted a complete separation of state and church, disappearing thus the idea of an official or national religion. It was Catholicism, not Islam, that had been an obstacle to progress and modernity.

Islam is a religion compatible with the modern state. In Christianity, there is a spiritual sovereignty, headed by popes, which is incompatible with the modern state, because this spiritual sovereignty also has a political authority. In this system, called papalism, spiritual and temporal authorities compete for independence and preponderance […] This led France to […] abolish the official status of religion and thus to secularise the state. This means that Catholicism is an obstacle to the foundation of a modern state […] Turkish culture, therefore, is based on a social structure that is democratic, and on a religion that is modern. This religion knows no holy synods, popes, or religious councils. In Islam, truth is that which is held by the majority. Islam is not an obstacle to the foundation of a modern state. As long as Christianity wanted people to conform to the Church on everything, religion proved to be an obstacle to the development of science and the state in Europe.

(Gökalp 1959c, p. 142)

Gökalp considered France’s path a mistake, although he blamed the intransigence of the Catholic Church. A laicized state was not yet a solution he could contemplate, considering it a ‘source of sickness for the French nation’ (Gökalp 1959d, p. 220). However, it would be very similar to what Atatürk would eventually create. Although Gökalp died before he could see the full extent of Atatürk’s reforms, his political and intellectual collaboration in the last months of his life helped to make Atatürk’s vision a reality.

Laicism was the logical consequence of the political ambitions of the Popes, and the only place where such ambitions had been successful was Tibet, which explains the ‘present state of backwardness’ of that country (ibid., p. 220). Therefore, it was Catholicism, not Islam, that was incompatible with a modern state. Islam had avoided such problems by placing both state and law within the boundaries of religion. Piety was the domain of the autonomous muftis, but their opinions did not have legal force. Justice was in the hands of the caliph and his delegates, who followed the caliph’s orders over their judgment (which the muftis did not do in matters of piety). The caliph had no authority over matters of piety and did not interfere in them, but neither did the muftis, because their opinions were not binding, and they had no administration to enforce their dictates. The only government that existed was that of the caliph. Both the caliph and the mufti were independent, but only one had real and effective power (ibid., p. 221).

The narrative had been set out to conclude that, contrary to what it might appear, Islam was not an obstacle to the creation of a modern state, ‘but on the contrary, the Islamic state means a modern state’ (ibid., p. 222). A modern state in a Muslim country was not only possible but desirable. A modern state was not a threat to Islamic teachings, but their fulfilment. However then, ‘how did it happen that modern states came into existence only in Christendom?’ (ibid., p. 222)

‘Throughout the Middle Ages’, writes Gökalp, ‘Eastern and Western civilizations were not much differentiated from each other. As Muslims could not effect any appreciable transformations within Eastern civilization, so the Christians failed in bringing perfection within Western civilization’ (Gökalp 1959m, pp. 273–74). The Crusades enabled Europe to become acquainted with the Islamic world. Then, a ‘movement’ began to imitate ‘Islamic civilization and religion’ (Gökalp 1959d, pp. 222–23). It took time, but eventually it ‘culminated in Protestantism as a new religion entirely in contradistinction to the traditional principles of Christianity. This new religion rejected the priesthood, and the existence of two kinds of government, spiritual and temporal. It also rejected the Papacy, the Councils, and the Inquisition; in short, all institutions which had existed in Christianity as contrary to the principles of Islam. Are we not justified if we look at this religion as a more or less Islamicized form of Christianity?’ (ibid., pp. 222–23)

The modern state was born in Protestant countries, and Protestantism was the product of Islamic cultural penetration in Europe. ‘Racial sociologists’ had pointed to Germanic and Anglo-Saxon genes to explain this, but ‘sociologists of religion’ had shown that the backwardness of Latin nations was due to Catholicism, not their race. The Nordic countries had succeeded because of Protestantism, which had brought them ‘closer to the principles of Islam’ (ibid., pp. 222–23).

If these principles taken by Protestantism from Islam were factors in this progress, do they not also constitute an experimental proof that Islam is the most modern and most reasonable religion? […] Free nations and free states can reconcile themselves only with the institutions of Islam because Islam originated in a free people who wanted to create an independent state.

(ibid., pp. 222–23)

Gökalp stated that Europe had adopted Islamic social principles through Protestantism (ibid., pp. 214–23). He also explained that this adoption had helped overcome the ‘inherent dualistic tension’ between the profane and the sacred in Protestant countries (ibid., p. 220). In Islam, there is no dualism and no friction, because, as a religion, it embraces both law and state, while at the same time, it distinguishes between the two. Harmony meant neither a state that existed entirely outside religion, nor a religious government from outside that tried to encroach on the state (Chun 2015, pp. 43–44).

Certainly, Gökalp was not the first Turk to confront European prejudices and argue against the notion that Islam was a ballast holding back the development of civilization. Numan Kamil had already declared at the Tenth Orientalist Congress in Geneva in 1894 that, contrary to the views of Constantin Volney, Ernest Renan, or William Gladstone, Islam was the ‘servant of civilization’ rather than its ‘destroyer’ (Bey 1894). Meanwhile, Namik Kemal argued that there was no fundamental contradiction between Islam and the basic tenets of Western civilization, and that a synthesis could be achieved in which Islam provided ‘the moral and legal bases of society’ while Western civilization provided ‘the material and practical methods and techniques’ necessary to achieve power and economic progress (Berkes 1959, p. 18). However, Gökalp would go beyond what previous thinkers had written by declaring that Islam was present at the moment of the birth of modern European civilization.

Gökalp claimed that the modern state (and modernity itself) came from a Protestant Reformation that had borrowed many principles from Islamic civilization. However, he was not just trying to instil a sense of renewed pride in the Turks. His motivation was not just to reassure his countrymen that their culture and religion were not hopeless against Western hegemony. First, he wanted to make it clear that Islam and Turkish heritage did not have to be abandoned to become fully Westernized and survive the European onslaught. Then, he sent the message that the strength of the European nations came mainly from Islam. Modernity was, therefore, more than compatible with Islam. There was nothing to fear in terms of the core Islamic beliefs and its historical traditions. This assuaged social anxieties about how they ‘as a nation and Islam as their religion would look like under the conditions of contemporary civilization’, while at the same time paving the way for Turkey’s modernization (ibid., p. 13).

The Turkish Nation, the Islamic Religion, and Western Civilization

Gökalp’s reference to the Islamic roots of the Protestant Reformation was intended to convey two messages: (1) that civilizations are hybrid (an attack on essentialism and exceptionalism) so Turks could join Western civilization without betraying their culture and tradition; and (2) that Muslim Turks were uniquely prepared to embrace the nation-state and enter modernity because their faith, properly understood, was one of the causes that led to the creation of nation-states and modernity in Europe.

‘Can’t we accept Western civilization definitely and still be Turks and Muslims?’ (Gökalp 1959m, pp. 276–77). Gökalp himself answered that every civilization was built on the adoption of ideas, manners, and customs from other civilizations. The Ottoman Empire owed a great deal to the Byzantines and the Persians. In turn, modern Europe was indebted to ideas borrowed from Islam. Beyond the hybridity of civilizations, Gökalp insisted on keeping the concepts of culture, religion, and civilization separate. Culture and civilization were two different categories. Civilizations are international groupings that encompass ‘cultural/national groupings to which the latter belong’ (Gökalp 1959b, p. 283). He called civilization a ‘society above societies’ or ‘the whole that is common to various nations’ (ibid., p. 283). Culture, on the other hand, encompasses a nation’s ethos, its mores, something ‘unique’ to each nation and transmitted over time (ibid., p. 283). Neither civilization nor culture was determined by religion. He rejected the use of the term Islamic civilization because it undermined his argument in favour of modernization and Westernization. Religion was strictly limited to beliefs and ceremonies and could never be linked to a particular civilization. The West was not completely the other, and an Islamic society could be incorporated into modern European civilization (Heyd 1950, p. 97).

Moreover, not only was Western civilization not synonymous with Christianity, but the modern West, ‘arising out of the victory of the rational mind and positive science’, was destined to become ‘more secular’ and eventually fully incorporate non-Christian societies such as the Turks and the Japanese (Berkes 1959, p. 28). Echoing Comte, he commented that ‘a true internationality based on science is taking the place of the internationality based on religion’ (Gökalp 1959k, pp. 76–77; Gökalp 1959l, pp. 279–80; Gökalp 1959g, pp. 265–68; Gökalp 1959b, p. 281).

Islamism or gullible Westernization were deviations that resulted from the confusion of civilization with religion and had to be avoided (Davison 2006, pp. 377–90). Within the CUP, Gökalp had to contend with schools of thought arguing that Islam could not be reconciled with modern civilization. This assumption led to different conclusions. Gökalp spoke of ‘the zealots of Europeanism’ and ‘the zealots of scholasticism’ (Gökalp 1959h, p. 202). The first were convinced that the Turks had to embrace aggressive secularism in the face of Islam’s problems of adaptation. The second group, sharing the same starting point, believed that Western civilization ‘ought to be rejected in toto’ (ibid., p. 202). For Gökalp, both groups were equally wrong. Neither the soulless Western-imitators, nor the mindless Western-rejectionists offered a viable solution to the Turkish conundrum. Turks could not abandon their culture and identity any more than they should abandon the reality of modernity. ‘Reason demands, not that one be sacrificed at the expense of the other, but that an attempt be made to reconcile the two’. (ibid., p. 202)

While acknowledging that Western civilization was superior to Oriental civilizations, and that Turkey needed to catch up, he also made it clear that ‘we cannot regard any nation as culturally superior to us. For us, our own culture is the best of all cultures imaginable’. (Berkes 1959, p. 23). The problem with the Turks was that there had been a ‘lack of adjustment ‘. The problem with the Turks was that there had been a ‘lack of adaptation’ between their culture and civilization (ibid., p. 23). There was nothing wrong with the culture (ethos) of the Turks, but by the end of the 19th century, the Oriental civilization (tradition) imposed on them was not serving their culture. ‘Civilization had come to be a mere skeleton corroding and annihilating all cultural flesh and blood of the social body’. They could not remain stuck in a civilization devoid of ‘all meaning and creativity’. Rather, they should embrace one (the Western) that could reconnect them with their culture and help them revive the nation (ibid., p. 23).

Furthermore, when a nation advances to the higher stages of its evolution, it finds it necessary to change its civilization too. The Japanese, for example, dropped the civilization of the Far East and took over Western civilization. A striking example of this connection is given by the Turks. The Turks have adopted three distinct and dissimilar civilizations during the course of their social evolution. When they were in the stage of ethnic-state organization, they belonged to the civilization of the Far East. When they passed to the stage of the sultanistic state, they entered into the area of Eastern civilization. And today, in their transition to the stage of nation-state, we see the rise among them of a strong movement which is determined to accept Western civilization.

(Gökalp 1959m, pp. 270–72)

Civilization, then, was not just something acquired or learned, but a matter of comfort. It did not reveal the personality of a society. Rather, it was a question of survival: ‘How can the Islamic world ultimately survive under such conditions? How can we maintain our religious and national independence? There is only one road to salvation: To advance to reach, that is, in order to be equal to Europeans in the sciences and industry as well as in military and judicial institutions. And there is only one means to achieve this: to adapt ourselves to Western civilization completely!’ (ibid., p. 275)

If the Turks had to break away from their present civilization, they could not break away from their culture and religion. Gökalp was at pains to point out that embracing Western civilization should not be understood as ceasing to be Turkish or Muslim. Turkey’s entry into Western civilization through modernization should not be confused with notions of Europeanisation or Westernization (Gökalp 1959i, p. 180). ‘We have to be disciples of Europe in civilization but entirely independent of it in culture’ (Gökalp 1959e, pp. 250–51). Being modern implied the assimilation of the ‘theoretical and practical sciences and techniques of Europe’, but nothing else. Western civilization was ‘the product of the positive sciences, their methods and techniques’ (Gökalp 1959b, p. 283). These were the things that the Turks had to assimilate. Morality, ideals, or faith were not to be imported from Europe (Gökalp 1959k, p. 76). ‘The Japanese have been able to take the Western civilization without losing their religion and national identity; they have been able to reach the level of Europeans in every respect. Did they lose their religion and national culture? Not at all! Why, then, should we hesitate? Can’t we accept Western civilization definitively and still be Turks and Muslims?’ (Gökalp 1959m, p. 277) Turkish language and art, Muslim faith and cosmovision had to be preserved. They were the ‘national treasure […] of our own people’ (Gökalp 1959g, pp. 267–68). Ultimately, it was an issue of identity that had to be preserved. ‘A nation does not become civilized if it has not attained cultural consciousness’. (Gökalp 1959n, pp. 288–89; Gökalp 1959a, pp. 108–9)

Part of this cultural consciousness was the recognition that the ancestors of the Turkish nation (Sumerians, Phoenicians, Hittites) were also those of the West. The recognition also that Islam and the Turks themselves ‘improved’ Western civilization ‘and became the teachers of the uncivilized Europeans […] We are connected with Western civilization through several contributions, and thus have a share in it’. (Gökalp 1959g, p. 267). The fluidity of civilizational transmission also meant that some of Turkey’s ‘oriental’ traits were adopted from Persian Byzantium. ‘We had already taken our old sciences from Byzantium. By merely replacing them with those taken from Europe, what can we lose in religion and culture?’ (Gökalp 1959m, p. 278). What had been borrowed from other civilizations in the past could now be discarded without losing one’s identity.

3. Ali Shariati

Ali Shariati was born in the village of Kahak in northeast Iran. His father, a teacher at the local school who had studied theology, would have a strong influence on Shariati: he was a reformist Muslim who sought to reconcile religion with the socialist teachings of the communist Tudeh Party. He was arrested twice for his political activism (Chatterjee 2011, p. 75). Following in his father’s footsteps, Shariati soon embraced an anti-imperialist worldview that sought a religion more concerned with this world and the oppressed than with rituals and the afterlife. His early political involvement was in anti-monarchist and anti-capitalist organizations. In 1952 Shariati became a teacher paid by the Ministry of Education, but he never gave up his political activism, and in 1953 he joined Mossadegh’s National Front. In 1955, he began his postgraduate studies at the University of Mashhad and, despite several arrests, was able to obtain a scholarship that allowed him to leave the country and continue his studies at the Sorbonne. It was in France that Shariati became a revolutionary thinker (Rahmena 2014, pp. 120–26).

In Paris, he joined the Algerian National Liberation Front and discovered Frantz Fanon (he eventually translated some of Fanon’s writings into Persian). As in Iran, Shariati was arrested in Paris in 1961 after taking part in a demonstration in defence of Patrice Lumumba. He returned to Iran in 1964 after completing his doctorate, only to be imprisoned again for his dissident activities in France. The following year, however, he was able to obtain a professorship at the University of Mashhad. Shariati then moved to Tehran, where his lectures at the Hosseiniye Ershad Institute attracted the attention of students, political dissidents, left-wing intellectuals, and Islamic reformists. He met leading dissidents such as Morteza Motahhari, Mehdi Bazargan, and Nasser Minachi, and his name became one to be reckoned with. After a packed conference in 1973, Shariati was arrested for the last time. He was released from prison in 1975 but was not allowed to teach, publish his writings, or give any lectures ever again. Followed closely by SAVAK and unable to continue his work, Shariati moved to England, where he would die in June 1977, less than two years before the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty and the triumph of the Islamic Revolution.

Shariati has been called the Rousseau or Voltaire of the Iranian revolution (Mahdavi 2014, pp. 25–52). He was undoubtedly one of its ideological fathers. Trained as a sociologist in the Western social sciences, Shariati sought to integrate what he had learned in Paris with the principles of Islam. This led him to reinterpret Shiite Islam and develop a new emancipatory language that bridged the terminology of left-wing revolutionaries with that of pious Shiites (Mushtaq and Haider 2019, pp. 30–42). Like Gökalp, he never contented himself with being just a neutral observer of society. Reflection had to be followed by decisive action. Studying society was not enough: you had to change it (ibid.). He became an intellectuel engagé, like those he had followed in France. Shariati’s approach to religion was the same: he scourged a quietist or reactionary approach to Islam and attacked the clergy who had created a fossilized religion of empty prayers and rituals. This activist approach often led to accusations that he was not a ‘mature academician’ (Celarent 2012, pp. 1288–94), that he lacked scholarly refinement, or that he rushed through the ‘intellectual dimension’ of the issues he confronted (Sachedina 1983, pp. 191–214).

Shariati was interested in establishing a direct link between real Islam and the Protestant Reformation, which provides us with a new and illuminating angle to understand his thinking. He stated unequivocally that the ‘Islamisation of Christianity […] created Protestantism’. Thus, after the Reformation, Christianity, ‘which throughout centuries was the cause of retardation’, became ‘the builder and energizer of Europe’ after the Reformation.

Unlike what we are told it was not the negation of religion which created modern Western civilization but the transformation of a corrupt and ascetic religion into a critical, protesting, and mundane Christianity. That is, Protestantism was the creator of modern Western civilization, rather than materialism or anti-religious sentiments which did not exist in the Renaissance.

(Shariati n.d.d)

Shariati’s argumentative line follows closely that of Gökalp. Both thinkers were concerned with the possibility that many people were drawing the wrong lessons from the prosperity and power of Western civilization. For Shariati, it was important to dissociate material prosperity, social development, and national power from the idea of secularisation and the Enlightenment. What rescued Europe from its backwardness was not an ideology that rejected religion altogether. Materialism and secularism were not the secret recipe for Western hegemony. On the contrary, it was religion, properly understood, that paved the way for a European Renaissance—not the renunciation of God, but a proper and transformative understanding of God, and this religious engine was ignited by Islam.

The transformation of Catholic to Protestant meant changing a corrupt religious spirit to a social religious spirit, one which built today’s grand civilization upon centuries of Western retardation and inertia. What I am about to mention happens to be the biggest Renaissance experience; no cultural assets (including religion) were negated in the Renaissance. […] What was Renaissance? It was a revival of the Greek cultural elements which were unknown in the Middle Ages. Therefore, today’s great Western civilization is the product of 15th, 16th, and 17th-century thinkers who decided to extract the Greek and Roman cultural resources (along with their own vast reservoir of faith and feeling) in order to consciously ‘know’ Christianity, so that they could convert this opiate to energy and awareness generating force. And they successfully did it. Why are we not told the truth? We are told these thinkers threw religion […], marched forward and suddenly embraced a new civilization! But how could they march forward empty-handed? With an empty hand you must start from zero and a primitive condition. Rather, they returned to the past consciously from the right direction, and instead of knowing Plato and Aristotle through the Arabs, they decided to do it their own way.

(ibid.)

Here Shariati echoes the discourse on the Middle Ages presented by the Enlightenment, declaring it a period that brought only stagnation ‘for a thousand years’ (Shariati n.d.a). Then came the Renaissance and the Reformation, and revolution followed stagnation. Suddenly, everything flourished in Europe: ‘science, art and literature, that is, all human and social areas’ (ibid.). Something was wrong. How could Europe, in such a short space of time, move from a thousand years of torpor to an era of dynamism and prosperity? ‘Drowsy Europe [had been] suddenly awakened [thanks to the fall of the] well-guarded walls between the Islamic East and the Christian West, in particular, through the Crusades’. (ibid.).

Shariati does not elaborate, nor does he answer, how this influence came about, how it permeated European society, how the process evolved, and who were the key transmitters of this Islamic knowledge to Europe. He writes that, in the economic sphere, feudalism gave way to the ‘bourgeoisie’ thanks to ‘East–West relations’ and ‘the Crusaders’ (Shariati n.d.e). Furthermore, he mentions, in passing, other factors such as the discovery of America and Australia, mercantilism, and the exploitation of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In the intellectual sphere, however, the rise of the bourgeoisie was made possible by ‘the change from Catholicism to Protestantism’ (ibid.). The key was not the sceptical philosophers of the Enlightenment, but a religious revolution led by Martin Luther. The men who led this revolution ‘did not negate religion’, but changed people’s ‘inclination from the hereafter to this world; from tendency towards spirit, nature, ethics, and asceticism to work and effort; from Sufism to objection and from self-centeredness to society-centeredness’. (ibid.). In short, Europe was awakening a dynamic Christianity that had much more in common with true Islam (because Islam also had erroneous tendencies, such as Sufism and Quietism, which Shariati compared to Catholicism and judged negative for society).

‘What is important to us now are Luther’s and Calvin’s works, since they transformed the Catholic ethics (which had imprisoned Europe in tradition for centuries) to a moving and creative force’. (ibid.). Shariati then briefly mentions Max Weber, explaining how the German sociologist demonstrated the correlation between the wealth and industriousness of northern European countries and the Protestant ethic. ‘He argued that those predominantly Catholic Countries such as Spain, France, and Italy were less progressive than England, Germany, and the United States which were predominantly Protestant’. (ibid.). Protestantism was the key to understanding modernity, and Protestantism was Islamised Christianity.

Shariati’s mention of Weber is puzzling. Gökalp never quoted him. Shariati had most likely discovered Weber through other authors, or perhaps he had read some excerpts from Weber’s works. Although one of the cornerstones of Weber’s thesis was the idea of predestination in Protestantism, Shariati rejected any comparison with ideas of predestination in Islam (which he preferred to call ‘predetermination’). Predestination in Islam did not lead to ‘ a methodical ordering of the believer’s life’, but to a ‘fatalistic’ attitude reflected in the ‘ the warrior’s fearlessness’. (Weber 2012, p. 198). For Weber, Islam was a ‘warrior religion’ in which ‘ any rational system of ascetic control of everyday life was alien […] from the outset, […] the doctrine produced no planned procedure for the control of the workaday world, as did the Puritan doctrine of predestination’.(Weber 1965, p. 204). While Shariati and Gökalp argued that the Islamisation of Christianity had led to Protestantism, which had made possible the destruction of the feudal system of the Middle Ages, Weber, considered Islam a very feudal religion.

The role played by wealth accruing from spoils of war and from political aggrandizement in Islam is diametrically opposed to the role played by wealth in the Puritan religion. The Muslim tradition depicts with pleasure the luxurious raiment, perfume, and meticulous beard-coiffure of the pious. The saying that ‘when god blesses a man with prosperity he likes to see the signs thereof visible upon him’—made by Muhammad, […] stands in extreme opposition to any Puritan economic ethic and thoroughly corresponds with feudal conceptions of status.

(ibid., p. 263)

The dialectic between Christianity and Islam abounds in Weber: Islam was a religion of law and Christianity was a religion of ethics. Christianity was a religion of salvation and Islam a religion of war. Christianity was an urban religion whereas Islam was not… In general, Weber presents Islam as ‘the antithesis of modernity’ (Djedi 2011, pp. 35–67). and the ‘polar opposite of the Protestant ethic’ (Sukidi 2006, pp. 195–205) in which ‘pre-requisites of rational capitalism could not emerge’. (Turner 1998, p. 13).

However, that does not stop Shariati from following Weber’s line of argument, always assuming that Islam is behind (and makes possible) Protestantism. ‘We notice that those countries which have changed the Catholic religion from its reactionary form to a creative and protesting force have made headway. On the other hand, those countries which have kept Catholicism have remained in the condition of the Middle Ages’. (Shariati n.d.e). Shariati describes how Italy and Spain were ‘geographically’ and ‘historically’ best placed to be the most ‘progressive’ and powerful countries in Europe. Italy was the birthplace of the Renaissance, and Spain ‘from the 8th to 12th centuries […] had the greatest Islamic civilization, and thereafter she played the role of transmitter of Islamic Culture to Europe’. (ibid.). However ‘these two vanguards of civilization are the two most backwards in Europe now’. Why this underdevelopment despite all the advantages? ‘Religious factors and religious differences’ were the answer. Unlike the countries of northern Europe, they refused to destroy ‘their old faith’ and moved from Catholicism to ‘a protesting, world-minded, political, and materialist Protestantism. Such a mission is also available to the religious East which is living at the end of the Medieval period’. (ibid.)

It is ironic that Shariati, who set out to discredit Eurocentrism and the discourse of subalternity as it applied to the Third World and Iran in particular, chose to adhere so closely to the dialectic that sustained it. Shariati embraces the figurative antithesis of Northern Europe—Southern Europe (Protestant Europe—Catholic Europe), which was added to the antithesis of Europe—Islam. In the nineteenth century, the European identity was defined not only by its opposition to the Orient but also to Southern Europe, which was considered to be semi-Oriental (Bolufer-Peruga and Xavier 2023). The idea of the superiority of Protestant or Northern Europe not only produced a discourse of subalternity against Catholic or Southern Europe, but also sustained the narrative of a backward, despotic, and atavistic Orient, incapable of adapting to modernity. The stereotypes applied to southern Europe were reinforced in North Africa and the Middle East. Moreover, explanations of backwardness often included the argument that it was partly the result of the penetration of their culture by Judaism and Islam, of their genetic proximity to the Arab world. Shariati, attempting to combat the Western discourse of the external other, had internalized its variant of the internal other (the southern European) (Dainotto 2007).

Nativism and Islamic Protestantism

Shariati insisted that there was little to learn from the West and that the ideas of justice, freedom, equality, and brotherhood were already present in the Qur’an. The West, inspired by these ideas from Islam, had appropriated them: the concepts that the West had so proudly preached to the world for the past five hundred years were nothing more than a degraded version of ideas stolen from the Orient (Gil Guerrero 2023, pp. 375–99). The West’s trick was to trade in these ideas as if they were its invention, erasing the fact that Europe had been a ‘cultural colony’ of the Islamic world until the late Middle Ages (Shariati 2009, p. 66). Europe became ready to confront Islamic civilization only after learning and adopting its knowledge and techniques, which made possible a more dynamic Christianity and a revitalised Western society (Mohomed 2017, pp. 21–63).

In this respect, Shariati’s approach is similar to that of other radical intellectuals from the Global South, like the anti-colonialist activist Julius Nyerere, who declared as early as 1962 that ‘we, in Africa, have no more need of being converted to socialism than we have of being taught democracy. Both are rooted in our own past—in the traditional society which produced us. Modern African socialism can draw from its traditional heritage the recognition of society as an extension of the basic family unit’. (Bayat 1990, pp. 19–41)

The West was a civilization of spolia; it owed its power and might to the natural and cultural resources it had taken from other societies. Just as Islam, properly understood, had helped Europe to escape the political and spiritual imprisonment of Catholicism and to flourish, so the gold, oil, textiles, spices, and other resources unjustly exploited from other lands had made the West rich. What could prevent this continued exploitation was a nation in full control of its natural and cultural resources. For Shariati, the West is the enemy of the concepts of belonging, naturalness, and authenticity. It favours constant change, which undermines the identity of communities and individuals. Cultural and economic exploitation go hand in hand, leaving non-Western societies without the ability to think, act and imagine on their own, according to their tradition and cosmovision. Instead, these societies are taught to see and think according to the narrative imposed by the West. The West becomes the arbiter and the narrator. The rest are passive listeners and consumers of Western material and cultural products. They end up understanding and explaining themselves in the way the West sees and judges them (Gil Guerrero 2022, pp. 449–67). Consequently, the West wanted to uproot the people it colonised, because then it would be easier to exploit their wealth.

In the case of Iran, the culprit, the middleman in this exploitation, was the Pahlavi dynasty. The Shah had been seduced by the West into ‘to deny his own past and desecrate and destroy with his own hands the constituents of his own unique culture, religion, and personality’ in exchange for an illusory Europeanisation and modernization (Shariati n.d.c). The result was the promotion of an artificial and inorganic culture designed to hide the exploitation of Iran’s natural and spiritual resources. Deprived of their past, traditions, and religious beliefs, Iranians were left without weapons to fight against oppression. To add insult to injury, the West then proceeded to resell what it had previously robbed: the petrol made from the oil taken from the Middle East, the clothes made from the silk taken from East Asia, or the ideas of freedom and democracy taken from Islam (Esposito 1999, p. 111).

Iranians were becoming ‘a modern but formless society with no aim or goal […] a shapeless, aimless society’. (Shariati n.d.c). They had become the frivolous fokoli of Fakhroddin Shadman or the ‘soulless consumers’ described by Ahmad Fardid (Mirsepassi 2017, p. 149). The task of the intellectual was to stop this process of societal depersonalization and dispossession of ‘all the I’s he feels within’ (Shariati n.d.c) and rescue the individual from his alienation from his ‘history and religion’, so that he was no longer a stranger to himself and his ancestors (ibid.). This meant concentrating first and foremost on fighting the cultural colonialism of the West. The conditions for political and economic independence could only be created once ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘mental independence’ had been achieved through the ‘cultural production’ that would come after a stop had put on the regurgitation of European ideas and views (Shariati n.d.e).

Like Durkheim, whom he admired, Shariati sought a social reconstruction of society through the study of religion. Unlike Durkheim, he saw religion as the source of society (Shariati 1979). Thus, the return to the self he advocated, although derived from his readings of foreign authors such as Heidegger, Sartre, Fanon, or Roger Garaudy, could only mean a return to the principles of Islam. A perspective on Islam that had been strongly influenced by his foreign professors in Paris, such as Louis Massignon, George Gurvitch, or Jacques Berque (Gil Guerrero 2023, pp. 375–99). Shariati’s Islam was thus as much a product of his Western education as of his Iranian heritage. His stay in France was not like that of Khomeini, who refused to intermingle with French intellectuals and remained conspicuously absent from Parisian social and activist life as if to avoid intoxication (ibid.).

Shariati compared the religion he had in mind to a kind of Islamic Protestantism, similar to the Christian Protestantism that had destroyed the degenerating factors of Christianity in the Middle Ages. The Islam of the twentieth century was like the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, which blocked and stupefied the process of thought and anticipated the emancipation of society. However ‘unlike Christian Protestantism, which was empty-handed and had to justify its liberationist presentation of Jesus’ Islamic Protestantism could unleash great energies simply by recovering the true nature of Islam, a religion of ‘life and motion, power and justice’ (Shariati n.d.f).

Religion had been petrified, and the rituals intended to empower the individual had been used to ‘narcotize’ them. A spirit of ‘imitation and obedience’ had prevailed (ibid.). Quietism had anticipated a renaissance in Muslim societies. Here Shariati compares the current situation with past predicaments in Judaism and Christianity: ‘As Jesus says, it was the Jewish priests who corrupted the Jewish faith. It was Papism that caused Christianity to diverge. In the case of Islam, we ourselves have led the faith astray’. (Shariati n.d.b). In the Middle Ages, Christianity was the ossified religion, and Islam was the living one. Consequently, Shariati readily accepted the notion of the Middle East as a region still living in the Middle Ages (Shariati n.d.f).

The dilemma for Shariati was that those who had controlled Shīʿa Islam for several centuries were responsible for its ‘static form’ because they could not understand the age and its threats, while the enlightened intellectuals (socialists, one assumes), who were fully aware of the age and its threats, ‘do not understand religion’. Thus, the emancipatory potential of Islam was not realized. Whereas Catholicism or Buddhism, which Shariati judged to be ‘individualistic schools of thought’ that ‘divert people’s feelings from this life’ to the hereafter, Shi’ite Islam was ‘completely the antithesis’. (ibid.)

What was an enlightened Christian, a Protestant, doing during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries? He was pointing out that by ignoring and neglecting the progressive elements of Christianity, the established church and priesthood had caused malice and misery. Moreover, they had encouraged monasticism, introversion, individualism and metaphysical beliefs and prayers. Thus, the enlightened knew that, in order to implement religious reform and Christian Protestantism, he should revitalize and revive the awakening and motivating elements of his religion. In Islam, however, such is not the case. Islam has never ignored the progressive, awakening and motivating elements. In a very clear manner, the two slogans of blood and sword and leadership and justice, which embody all the relevant dimensions of the process of generating movement and awareness, have been adopted as the symbolic essence of Shi’ism.

(ibid.)

Islam had to become a ‘religion of protest’ again. ‘Shi’ism begins with ‘No’, as does Islam’, he once declared (Arjomand 1982). Islam was the religion of breaking idols, and the idols now were those of tyranny, capitalism, or Westernization. Islam was also the monotheistic religion par excellence, and for Shariati, Tawhid meant complete equality before God, a classless society. Social stratification was a sign of shirk, polytheism, and thus a corruption of the purity of Islam (ibid.). Protestantism had been inspired by Islam; now Islam had to be inspired by the Reformation: ‘If we imitate Europe, it is their good experiences which must be imitated. The following is one such experience: what destroyed the Middle Ages and engendered the modern centuries was the new religion [Protestantism]. It [Reformation] was the (revolutionary) change in religious thought, not anti-religious struggle’. (ibid.). A religiously inspired revolution in Europe had produced an era of dynamism and power; the same had to be replicated in the Middle East.

4. Conclusions

Gökalp and Shariati appealed to the authority of history to support their arguments against Orientalist discourses and the idea of Western indispensability. In doing so, they inadvertently validated one of the most famous theories of Western supremacy and exceptionalism: that of the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, and Germanic path to hegemonic power. The Weberian narrative of a Protestant Reformation that set northern Europe on the path to prosperity and hegemony has been repeatedly used to sustain the discourse of subalternity of southern Europe and to reinforce the binarism of Latin/Anglo-Saxon, Catholic/Protestant. By reinforcing this discourse, Gökalp and Shariati did not undermine Western discourses of hierarchization, but they merely linked Islam to the supremacist narrative of Protestant Northern Europe.

It is also noteworthy that by insisting on Protestantism as the Islamisation of Christianity that gave the West the dynamism and energy to achieve hegemony, Gökalp and Shariati framed the Middle East in the same way as the Orientalist discourse. In this narrative, the greatness of Islamic civilization was recognized, as was its past contribution to the renaissance of European civilization. However, the caveat was that, despite its greatness, Islamic civilization was an immobile civilization, with little room for growth and progress. Therefore, it reached its zenith rather quickly, and then remained in a state of slow decline that has lasted for centuries. Western civilization, on the other hand, has been a civilization of progress, of constant transformation. Thus, the merits of the Orient or Islam belonged to the past and were always concerning the West: they provided the spark for the Renaissance of the West, but then the West carried the fire to unimaginable limits, leaving the Orient behind. In other words, the Orient is considered something that belongs to the past of the West, which, in turn, is the only owner of the future.

At the same time, by pointing to the Islamic roots of the European Reformation, Gökalp and Shariati laid the foundations for a provincialisation of Europe as well as relativized the notion of European indispensability and inevitability in world history. This provincialisation of Europe is understood as a confrontation to the idea of Europe as a reference point for the history of every country, culture, and religion without any meaningful reciprocity. The end of Western normativity, used as a canon that relegates non-Western histories, traditions, and ideas to a subaltern position, or the ‘dominance of Europe as the subject of all histories’ (Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 27–30), as Dipesh Chakrabarty argued.

Gökalp and Shariati undermined the mythical image of Europe as the original site of modernity when they argued that Protestantism was the Islamisation of Christianity. By demonstrating the hybridity of Western civilization, they also challenged the idea of uniquely Western standards against which non-Western societies should be measured. An anti-essentialist approach to civilization permeates the discourse of both thinkers. As Nedim Nomer has noted, Gökalp’s ‘theory regarded social culture not as a self-contained and self-sustaining entity, but rather as a constantly evolving hybrid or eclectic’. (Nomer 2017, pp. 408–28). The boundaries of civilization are not fixed, but permeable and malleable. If this were so, no civilization could claim exceptionalism and supremacy (Gökalp 1992, pp. 75, 81–84).

However, such claims need some nuance. Gökalp’s defence of civilizational hybridity, and the distinction between civilization, religion, and culture, could be understood as a way ‘to mark and resist European ideals for modernity’ (Davison 2006, pp. 377–90), but rather he constructed this discourse to justify the Turkish nation’s ascension to Western civilization.

Andrew Davidson has written that Gökalp ‘sounded the international echo that European social scientific positivism wished to hear, but he did so in a way that rejected the normative applicability of European thought and practice everywhere and anywhere’. (ibid.). He certainly defended a Japanese-style modernization that simultaneously adopted and resisted the West, but this was the result of a naivete that overlooked the ‘strong ties linking the humanities with natural sciences generally and the spiritual culture of the West with its material achievements’. (Heyd 1950, p. 81). You cannot just import technology and science without changing society’s education, lifestyle, and cosmovision. What Gökalp, and Shariati as well, wanted to resist was the liberal–democratic system, but this was only one of the different systems that had emerged in the West since the French Revolution. When Gökalp showed ‘resistance to being European culturally’ (Davison 2006, pp. 377–90), he meant liberal culture, not the other (authoritarian, corporatist, statist) cultures offered by the West, which were as Western as liberalism.

For Gökalp, the West was the future and the East the past. The Turks and the Muslims had the misfortune to remain attached to Oriental civilization for many centuries, to the point of confusing it with their own cultural and religious identity. If he exhibited ‘a crucial anticolonial element of rejecting […] the normative applicability of European cultural norms as universally applicable in modernity’ (ibid.), he did so with other countries in mind rather than Turkey—countries that he judged to be too underdeveloped and comatose to reach the next stage of civilization (the West). For Gökalp, the Orient was the Other. He repeatedly employed ‘a form of Orientalism in which Asia is cast as a separate and primitive realm, to be distinguished from both the West and his own nation’. (Bonnett 2002, pp. 165–82). Gökalp embraced the Orientalist discourse and only challenged it to remove Turkey from the idea of the Orient, so that Turkey could ‘join the ranks of the contemporary nations’.(Gökalp 1959l, p. 279)

On the other hand, Shariati never addressed the possible link between Islam and the Reformation. Rather, his thinking was a clearer example of the ‘cross-contamination of ideas between the Muslim and European intellectual worlds’. (Buck-Morss 2003). More than the perspectives of Persian writers or Muslim thinkers, Shariati’s cosmovision reflected the critique that the European Left had made of global capitalism. Unlike Mahmoud Taleghani, Morteza Motahhari, or Allameh Tabataba’i, Shariati interpreted his faith through the lens of socialism (Akhavi 1988, pp. 404–31). Moreover, Shariati’s deconstruction of Western exceptionalism, supremacy, and Orientalism was not entirely coherent. Firstly, why did he point out with pride that Islam was responsible for the European Renaissance and Reformation if these processes led to the Western capitalist, exploitative, and individualist he condemned? Why did he call for an Islamic Protestantism when Protestantism had led to the privatization of faith and secularisation that he abhorred? Furthermore, his revisionist approach of the Eurocentric nature of global modernity was not followed by a thorough deconstruction of all the essentialism regarding culture and civilization, but rather by a reverse Orientalist binary discourse that pitted the materialist West against the spiritual East. Thus, instead of transcending the Western binary discourse, Shariati’s teachings continued to define Islamic civilization ‘in relation to its Western other’ (Aydin 2006, pp. 446–61).

Ultimately, Gökalp’s and Shariati’s idea of Protestantism as an Islamisation of Christianity complicates, but does not fundamentally contradict, the narrative of Western exceptionalism and subalternity. Instead of transcending Eurocentric histories in favour of a clear analysis of plurality and diversity with voices ‘from and for the margins’ (Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 4–5), their thesis remained anchored in a Weberian conception of history.