Islamic Resurgence: A Permanent Source of Fear in Turkey.

This paper analyzes the widespread fear and reaction of the laicist segment of the Turkish society against the revival of certain Islamic sociocultural elements in the country. On and off, the issue has frequently been the top political agenda in Turkey since the 1950s. One stream in the literature suggests that the conflict is due to a center-periphery cleavage. Another line of thinking argues that this is by nature a fundamental conflict, because Islamic values are antithetical to Western ones. Alternatively, this paper explains this conflict with out-group and cognitive biases involved in the ways the two groups generate meaning and knowledge about themselves and one another by their experiences. This paper examines this mutually-constitutive process by looking at five major experiences in near history that correspond to five major identity-constituting steps. Findings indicate that, Islamic resurgence is a more complex process with numerous non-religious dimensions that involve change while in interaction with the Other. Yet hostile intergroup interaction involves high levels of out-group bias, and in the case of the ongoing fear of Islamic resurgence, this translates into a vilifying otherization process, which leads to an exaggerated perception of reality, eventually causing laicists to interpret all demands of free religious practice and expression as fundamentalism, if not concessions to a theocracy in the making. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]