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By Jan-Markus Vömel In 1974, a short piece of vivid prose entitled “Green was the Name of my Civilization” appeared in the Milli Gazete (National Gazette), the main organ of Turkish Islamism at the time. It immediately took the reader into a dream world. “You are walking through lush green paths with the spirit of an empire,” it stated. In the houses along that path, children wake up to the sounds of birds and “the warmth of psalms whispered into their ears are the first drops in the heart’s ocean.” A harmonious family life takes place in those homes. The adhan would herald the Sultanate of the heavens five times a day. The children of these homes would be born as children of great faith. As “children of green,” their futures were bright, and they were capable of achieving greatness. As they grew old and their lives came to an end, their caskets would be wrapped in green flags and they would again be committed “to the bosom of green […] A life starting with green and ending with green”. But then the dream ends, followed by a cruel awakening: Green was wiped out and the Green civilization banished. The day will come, though, the author ensured his readers, when it would rise to its former glory again.[1]  “Sedat Yenigün. One of the greatest Islam-Mujahidin martyred in Turkey since 50 years. The unbelievers will be called to account.”, from İslami Hareket [Islamic Movement], special issue, 7 Temmuz 1980. (Source)Masterfully employing anemotive, idiosyncratic language that was characteristic of Turkish Islamism, theauthor, Sedat Yenigün, an Islamist activist and a gifted writer, had conjuredup powerful images: Nostalgia for a lost civilization in harmony and wholeness,and longing for a simple, frugal life with a strong sense of authenticity and anoverarching devotion to community, nation, and faith. “Green civilization” was housingand architecture, nature, a people’s historical experience, faith, family life;“Green” was meaning and soul, a state of mind, the heritage of generations anda historical mission. In a very small space, Yenigün managed to bring together themost prominent motifs of Turkish Islamist discourse: the cultural authenticity ofAnatolian folk culture, the Turkish-Islamic historical experience, nostalgicvisions of Ottoman everyday life, imperial prowess and self-assuredness, and determinedsubjects with a soldier-like spirit. The piece struck a chord with Islamists atthe time and was still quoted years later when Islamist intellectuals held asymposium to honor its author. Yet, towards the end of the1970s, something had changed. The same author seemed far from such Turkistsensibilities and became fully emerged in Muslim world politics. Dissecting theproblems of the global Ummah, Yenigünwrote with the same verve about Western imperialism, global capitalism, the Iranianrevolution, Khomeini’s thought, and the historical mission of Islamistmovements. With this transfer from traditional Turkish Islamism, often self-referentiallytermed national-mukaddesatçı (aTurkish form derived from Arabic mukaddes= “someone loyal to the holy and sacred”) towards the radical thought of transnationalIslamism, Yenigün was a typical exponent of Turkish Islamism during the late1970s and 1980s. Earlier Turkish Islamists had rejected Qutb, Mawdudi and thelike as rootless innovators trying to form an illegitimate new Islamic creed on their own. In the secondhalf of the 1970s, however, a new generation of young Islamist activists hademerged that embodied both traditionalist Turkish Islamism and radicaltransnational Islamism without having qualms over contradicting themselves. Thelate 1970s moment in Turkish Islamism lay exactly in this convergence of twoschools of Islamist thought, with young activists injecting the dynamism of theglobal Islamic upsurge into conservative Turkish Islamism. During the 1970s, Turkey had gone through a period of continuous crisis. Two military interventions marked the beginning and the end of the decade. Politicization went to new heights and captured entirely new sections of the population. Ever-changing coalition governments and early elections marked the political volatility of these years, and violent struggles between left- and right-wing factions escalated towards the end of the decade. In the economic realm, the Turkish economy suffered a major breakdown in 1979. Internal and external migration sped up and uprooted masses of people and left them in urban squatter settlements. This political fragmentation, though, was accompanied by cultural liberalism. The 1970s was an extraordinarily productive decade for Turkish cinema, literature, and arts. In this fecund and dynamic environment, Islamism flourished and transformed. While the first generationof Islamist thinkers had hailed from urban elites, many names in the new 1970sgeneration were rural migrants, who usually came to cities in pursuit ofeducation. They often had contact with traditionalist-conservative Turkish mukaddesatçı Islamism in their homeregions and later joined circles of eminent figures like Necip Fazıl Kısakürek,who emulated the model of charismatic leadership of the small Sufi circles thathad inspired their political stances and activism decades earlier. The secondgeneration, however, emancipated themselves from the mukaddesatçı heritage without fully renouncing it. One catalyst forthis transformative process was the influx of internationalist radical thought,which left its mark on the Turkish Islamist community via texts translated intoTurkish from the mid-1960s onwards. Exposure to Muslim world politics also rosetowards the end of the decade: The Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasionof Afghanistan both had energizing repercussions in Turkey. Followinginternational Islamist thought, young Turkish Islamists more and more saw Islamas a perfect system and holistic order competing with the global capitalist andsocialist systems. For this generation, Islam was the true global force againstWestern imperialism, while earlier Islamists had mostly stressed anti-communismand even favored alignment with the Western bloc. Against this backdrop, a newplurality of schools, ideas, and media emerged from the late 1970s until theend of the 1980s. A new generation of Islamist intellectuals began to make itsmark: Sedat Yenigün and others quit writing for the establishednational-conservative Islamist organs and founded their own magazines. With theliterary-political magazine Mavera (founded1976) another influential group of writers pushed to the fore, expressing theirIslamists sentiments through poetry, literature and essays. A key text of newTurkish Islamism appeared two years later: Ismet Özel’s Üç Mesele (Three Issues, 1978). The 1970s also saw the firstIslamist attempts at mass mobilization which became so crucial in the nextdecade: The National Turkish Student Union (MTTB– Milli Türk Talebe Birliği) had become an Islamist organizational hotbed thatset many key figures of later years on a lifelong path of Islamist activism. Withthe Akıncılar groups (named afterOttoman cavalry) this student activism took even more action-oriented and street-protestingforms. Islamists at the time mostly refrained from political violence but werestill caught up in it at times. Sedat Yenigün’s activism was cut short whenunknown assailants assassinated the young writer in the summer of 1980. With their youthful utopist activism and dynamism, the late 1970s’ generation ofTurkish Islamists also left theirimprint on the more mundane views of traditional Turkish mukaddesatçı Islamists in the MilliGörüş (National View) parties and elsewhere. The “1979 moment” ofTurkish Islamism was one of self-confident youth activism energized by thefeeling that that everything was possible and that they themselves were theavantgarde at the dawning of a new age. In contrast to the leftist andultranationalist groups after the decisive military coup of September 1980, thisdynamism helped Islamists take this momentum well into the 1990s, during whichtime Islamism would evolve into themost dynamic political, social, and cultural force in the country.References[1] Sedat Yenigün: Yeşildi Medeniyetimin Adı, Milli Gazete, 27 July 1974, 6; also in the later anthology of Yenigün’s writings: Bir Şehidin Notları. Sedat Yenigün 1950-1980, İstanbul: İnkilab Yayınları, 1990, 13-15I am grateful to Halil Ibrahim Yenigün for providing additional information and commentary on this blog post. Jan-Markus Vömel is a PhD student at the Universität Konstanz researching the history of the Islamic movement in Turkey. He studied history in Rostock, Konstanz and Istanbul. He earned his MA with a thesis on Sri Lankan colonial history in summer 2013. From December 2013 to March 2018 he was a member of the Leibnizpreis-Research Group ‘Global Processes’.&#160;Citation:&#160;Jan-Markus Vömel, Green was the Name of my Civilization: Turkish Islamism in the Late 1970s, in:&#160;TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 13.06.2019, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/18818Further articles in the series “The ‘1979 Moment’ in the Middle East” on TRAFO:Amir Moosavi (2018),&#160;Looking Back at the “1979 Moment” in the Middle EastBehrooz Moazami (2018),&#160;The Making and Unmaking of the Moments: From the 1979 Revolution to the Arab SpringYvonne Albers (2018),&#160;Turning the Page: Reading 1979 in and through the Cultural Journal&#160;MawaqifJihane Sfeir (2018),&#160;The Disenchantment of the Left: Two Memories of the Palestinian StruggleShervin Malekzadeh (2018),&#160;The Forlorn Arab as Foil in the Curriculum of Postrevolutionary IranJoseph Ben Prestel (2018), When Threads Wear Thin: The West German Radical Left and Palestinian Groups at the End of the 1970s 