On December 23, 1979, an op-ed in appeared in the Turkish Islamist newspaper Milli Gazete, denouncing the recent celebrations held in honor of Jalāl ad-Dı̄n Muhammad Rūmı̄ (Mevlânâ).Footnote ¹ Known to most English speakers as Rumi, Mevlânâ was a thirteenth-century Persian-speaking scholar, poet, and the iconic leader of the Mevlevi Sufi order, known for their whirling (sema) rituals.Footnote ² Sufism, simply put, is Islamic mysticism: a diverse set of teachings and practices dedicated to unlocking one’s full consciousness of divine truth.Footnote ³ Born in the historical region known as Great Khorasan in what is now Afghanistan, Mevlânâ lived most of his life in a Turco-Persian sultanate in Konya, a city in modern-day Türkiye. What drew the ire of Milli Gazete about the celebrations, as author Yasin Hatiboğlu explained it, was the de-Islamization of Mevlânâ. He was used for tourism purposes and cast as a “humanist,” “bard,” and “man of the world.” The event also included what Hatiboğlu believed was a fake whirling dervish ceremony. Not concealing his disgust, Hatiboğlu estimated that three-fourths of the performers had not performed ablutions and that one-fourth was “without ṭahāra,” that is, unclean due to bodily functions. He argued that “hippie” fans of Mevlânâ had memorized only one of his lines (“Come! Come again! Whoever, whatever you may be, come! Heathen, idolatrous or fire worshiper, come!”) as if he had had nothing to say about belief and worship (“itikad ve ibadet”).

Hatiboğlu’s op-ed gave voice to many devout Turks who saw Mevlânâ’s Sufism as inseparable from Islam’s laws and ritual dictates, including daily prayers and ablutions. Despite such objections, the history of non-Muslim engagements with Sufism has been lengthy and hefty. In the nineteenth century, Rumi and other mystically inclined Persianate poets such as Hafez and Saadi inspired European Romantics like Goethe and American Transcendentalists like Emerson. The “new age” work of popularizers such as the UK-based author Idries Shah sparked renewed interest in Rumi and Sufism in the 1960s. The 1980s even saw Rumi become the United States’s best-selling poet thanks to the loose, evocative translations of Coleman Barks. Other Anglophone poets jumped on the bandwagon by dreaming up their own contributions to the Hafez canon.Footnote ⁴ Such decontextualized Western perceptions of Sufism would continue influencing local understandings of Mevlânâ, no matter how bitterly critics like Hatiboğlu complained.

Chapter 3 has examined how the logic of racial justice helped Islamism develop anti-imperialist contours by the 1970s. Chapter 4 focused on the 1980s and 1990s to trace how strategic articulations of similarity to Iran helped boost Türkiye’s headscarf ban. This final chapter takes a step back to follow the trajectory of an early Cold War ideal of a pro-American Islam that could serve US foreign policy goals. I offer a genealogy of the concept influential Egyptian Islamist idealogue Sayyid Qutb mockingly defined as “American Islam” in 1952: an Islam that would fight Communism, and could be consulted on issues such as birth control, but had nothing to say about imperialism or capitalist exploitation.Footnote ⁵ Ayatollah Khomeini would develop this critique further, much to US policymakers’ dashed hopes.Footnote ⁶

If many analysts arguing Türkiye would not become “another Iran” focused their comparativism on the Shia–Sunni binary, others labored the difference between Islamic “mysticism” and “fundamentalism.” Like “fundamentalism,” which has its etymology in early twentieth-century American Protestantism, mysticism is a constructed category, both contested and context-specific.Footnote ⁷ This chapter asks how and why Islamic mysticism generally, and Sufism specifically, came to be seen as the West-friendly “moderate Islam.” What role did transculturation and comparativism between Türkiye and Iran under US hegemony play in forming this common perception?

After noting the complex approaches Iranian and Turkish authoritarian modernizers took regarding Sufism, the first section of the chapter examines the role Islamic mysticism played in Pahlavi nation-branding of the 1960s and 1970s. Central to this development, I argue, was the malignment of Kemalist laicism as a type of “over-westernization” in both West Asian and US-based critiques. During this period, intellectuals aligned with the Pahlavi regime, as well as prominent regime opponents such as Khomeini, built on European Persophilia and closely linked Iran with Islamic mysticism (often translated as “ʿirfān” in the Iranian Islamic context). In the early phases of the revolution, Khomeini’s image blended that of a Third-World revolutionary with that of a holy mystic, generating some favorable – or at least romantically Orientalist – press for his movement in the West. However, the consolidation of the Islamic Republic and the hostage crisis overrode these connotations. US scholars and diplomats began categorizing the regime’s official Shiism as a type of “fundamentalism” – a foil to mysticism. The leaders of the 1980 coup in Türkiye also used Iran as a politico-religious foil, promoting Sufism as part of a “Turkish-Islamic synthesis” that could counter radicalism in all its forms.

In the 1990s, international polemics around American political scientist Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” theory politicized Rumi and Sufism in new ways. For many opinion leaders, Sufism’s universalism offered robust evidence against Huntington’s claims that “Islam” and “the West” were rival civilizations destined to clash. The election of reformist president Khatami in Iran in 1997 saw the second stage of Iranian institution-building on mystical Islam, with a focus on countering the idea of clash of civilizations. Meanwhile, in Türkiye, influential cleric and sect leader Fethullah Gülen also promoted himself on the rising tide of interreligious and inter-civilizational dialogue.

By 2001, dialogue ideology had gone from ascendant to dominant, as large, powerful states and international organizations, including the United States and the United Nations, incorporated the concept into their official platforms. The UN, for example, declared 2001 the “Year of Dialogue among Civilizations.” Although Khatami continued to promote the idea and Iran’s role in it, the second era of his presidency was beset by overwhelming pushback from conservative forces. After 9/11, and following the US invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), the White House set out to promote a type of “moderate Islam” that would be open to democracy and eschew anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism. It, too, turned to dialogue discourse, Rumi, and his final resting place, the Republic of Türkiye.

Connecting theology to policy, the White House’s comparativism celebrated “moderate Islam” against “Islamic fundamentalism” and Türkiye against Iran, erasing the complicated, transnational heritage of Sufism. The Bush White House linked Rumi to a supposedly tolerant and democratic Turkish Islam, promoting the country’s newly elected Islamist Prime Minister Erdoğan as a “strategic partner” and a model for “moderate Muslim democracy.” Meanwhile, the United States was busy bombing Rumi’s birthplace (Afghanistan) and labeling the country most associated with Persianate mystical poetry (Iran) as part of “an axis of evil.”

Opponents of Erdoğan, however, believed the religio-political trajectories of Türkiye and Iran were not dissimilar. In each country, “green belt” conspiracy theories flourished, accusing the United States of boosting select Islamic movements to serve its imperialist agenda. These theories troubled comparativism around the Islam versus the West and Sufism versus Fundamentalism binaries while constructing Islamism, as opposed to modernization, as the ultimate transnational export of the US empire.

Türkiye as the Anti-model: Islamicizing Persophilia and Westernization Critique

As noted in Chapter 1, Western observers have often viewed Turkish and Iranian authoritarian modernization with sneering skepticism. Worries that Türkiye and Iran were somehow modernizing incorrectly (either too much, too fast, or in all the wrong ways) manifested in comparativism targeting Atatürk and Reza Shah. They also appeared, and continue to appear, in comparisons made between Turkish and Iranian “westernization” and an imaginary, more authentic form of development. With the influence of romantic anti-modernism, many foreign observers have long participated in a kind of “imperialist nostalgia,” mourning the reduction of difference between the so-called East and West, faulting non-European states for the very developments that were prompted by Western military and economic encroachment.Footnote ⁸

From the beginning, Kemalist laicism became the target of praise and critique in US accounts. On the one hand, Kemalist reforms secured the new country considerable acclaim in the public sphere at a time when the perception of Turks as “the sword of Islam” (Chapter 3) remained fresh in many minds. In 1938, for example, LIFE magazine confidently declared Atatürk “the world’s best dictator.”Footnote ⁹ Although Kemalists blanched at the dictator label, one could easily find the seeds of postwar modernization theory, with Türkiye as a shining model, in such claims. Secularization, particularly reforms targeting women’s rights, boosted the country’s national brand.

At the same time, US representatives regularly engaged in over-westernization critique when commenting on Turkish laicism. Gardiner Howland Shaw, the chargé d’affaires of the American embassy in Türkiye between 1921 and 1936, for example, produced a 1924 report in which he argued the country was manifesting “intemperate westernization.”Footnote ¹⁰ Turkish secularization measures formed the main target of Shaw’s censure. In them, the American diplomat saw the wrong-headed copying of French anticlericalism. Shaw explained Kemalist over-westernization as the result of Turks’ racial heritage as “an essentially warlike and nomadic people,” who, lacking intellectual sophistication, uncritically absorbed foreign models, from the Iranian to the French.Footnote ¹¹ The adoption of Persian culture had benefited and enriched these simple-minded brutes. Yet since “rational” Western civilization was far too foreign for the “mystical” East, its imposition had deleterious effects.Footnote ¹²

Even as Western observers constructed the East as essentially “mystical,” by the late nineteenth century, Sufism had become the target of nationalist critique across much of West Asia and North Africa. The Salafi movement taking root in the Arabian Peninsula with British support considered Sufism to be a heretical innovation. Elsewhere, skepticism toward mysticism was spreading, boosted by the Islamic heritage of rationalism and interest in defensive development. Respect for historical Sufi figures remained, but more and more nationalists began to critique contemporary Sufi lodges as dens of ignorance and corruption.Footnote ¹³ In Iran, modernist intellectuals, along with the mystically inclined ulema, promoted the concept of ʿirfān (lit. “knowledge”) as an intellectually robust form of Shia mysticism distinct from “degenerate” Sufi sects.Footnote ¹⁴ The early Pahlavi regime repressed some Sufi dervish practices and Sufi groups in the name of centralization.Footnote ¹⁵

In 1925, the Kemalist regime banned Sufi orders across Türkiye, shutting down centuries-old dervish lodges and sacred shrines. The religiously inspired, Kurdish-led 1925 Sheikh Said rebellion provided the primary impetus; however, dominant modernist discourses had long associated mystical sects with superstition and fatalism. The Kemalists also built on the extensive precedent of various sultans regulating, co-opting, or suppressing different Sufi orders. Particularly relevant was the Ottoman state’s promotion of Mevlevi Sufism, which traced its lineage to Rumi, and its 1826 ban on the Bektashi order associated with the Janissary Corps and Shia influence. Atatürk’s words on Sufi orders were harsh, contrasting the activities of lodges with “knowledge, science, and of the whole extent of radiant civilization.”Footnote ¹⁶ At the same time, the leader continued the Ottoman tradition of valorizing the Mevlevis. His speeches were respectful toward Rumi, whom he called “a great genius, an innovator for all ages.”Footnote ¹⁷ While other shrines and lodges fell into disrepair, the regime reopened his shrine as a museum merely a year after the ban.Footnote ¹⁸

The new Turkish republic incorporated Sufi mystics, including Mevlânâ, Hacı Bektaş Veli (the founder of the Bektashi order), and the famous Bektashi bard Yunus Emre into its educational curriculum as “great Turks,” literary figures, and humanists, while controlling actual Sufi organizing. Overnight, millions-strong Sufi orders went underground. Although the law’s effects on Sufi orders that needed the lodges for their ritual practices, such as Bektashis and Mevlevis, were exceptionally dire, all mystical communities began to keep a lower profile.Footnote ¹⁹ Kurdish cleric Said Nursi, associated with the large Naqshbandi-Khalidi order, declared the era “not the era of tariqat (i.e., the mystical path), but of re-building Islamic knowledge.”Footnote ²⁰

In Iran, secularist historian Ahmad Kasravi (1890–1946) was a significant voice for anti-Sufi modernism, accusing mystical Persian literature of breeding irrationalism and fatalism. In About Islam (1944), Kasravi emphasized the necessity of keeping up with the times and pointed to Türkiye as an excellent model to follow.Footnote ²¹ He even defended the country’s alphabet reform as a solid method of countering ignorance.Footnote ²² Although Kasravi valorized reason over mysticism, he could be critical of what he saw as Western materialism and violence. Denouncing the East for its obsession with the metaphysical and the West for its amoral pursuit of profit and technology, Kasravi promoted something akin to a dialogue among civilizations.Footnote ²³

However, Kasravi was an outlier, particularly in his harsh view of mystical Persian literature and his praise for Turkish laicism. Instead, calls to resurrect and/or strengthen some ethno-religious essence endangered by Western-style modernization gained a greater hold over the public imagination across the region after World War II. For a rising cohort of postwar Iranian scholars, Shia mysticism became vital to the Iranian search for “a return to self,” coming to color nationalism and marking Turkish secularization as a distinct comparative foil.

It is hard to find a public intellectual who did not critique some aspect of “the West” and “modernization,” often in tandem, in either Türkiye or Iran between the 1950s and 1970s. While previous chapters have focused on dissidents’ mobilization of gender (Chapter 2) and race (Chapter 3) in their “westoxication” critiques, this chapter highlights the work of West Asian intellectuals who collaborated with the state in various capacities while stressing religion, particularly Islamic mysticism, as a crucial part of national identity. Of course, this is just an organizational shorthand: As always, these analytical categories intersect and overlap as religion becomes racialized, race gendered, and so on.

Three points are particularly pertinent to my summary of mystically inclined anti-westernization discourses below. First, the local calls to return to an authentic self were formed transnationally. Particularly influential were contemporary philosophies of counter-modernity, with Heidegger and (later) Sartre playing a central role in conjunction with the romantic Orientalism promulgated by Theosophy.Footnote ²⁴ Traditionalism or Perennialism, popularized by French Sufi convert René Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World (1925), also held great sway. Together, these ideologies identified an essentialized Muslim civilization that could offer lessons to heal the wreckage of modern Western materialism. Turkish and Iranian intellectuals regularly referenced these European thinkers as they advocated for a return to ethno-religious authenticity.

Second, Iranians regularly mobilized comparativism in formulating their over-westernization critiques. While Türkiye and Atatürk were positive role models in classical modernization theory, they operated as negative foils in gharbzadegi discourse. Turkish secularism was a common target of counter-westernization arguments, which increasingly pointed to Islam as the critical node of authenticity – supplementing and, for some thinkers, replacing the focus on pre-Islamic Persia.

Finally, global anti-Communism boosted Turkish and Iranian discourses emphasizing Islam as a holistic way of life. In other words, anti-westernization rhetoric promoting Islam as the solution to the modern world’s ills was transnationally formed, strategically comparativist, and supported by official and unofficial US actors in multiple ways.

As noted in the Introduction, European appreciation of Persian arts and literature stemmed from romantic Orientalism, by which authors used projections of the East to critique their post-Enlightenment societies. At the same time, Persophilia operated to “ethnicize” cultural products stemming from diverse peoples, extrapolating from linguistic differences to construct an essentialized “Aryan” Persian ethnicity to contrast with Turks and Arabs.Footnote ²⁵ Early European studies of Islamic mysticism also reflected this comparative bias, finding traces of Aryan culture in Sufi literature and considering Sufism “a typically Iranian development.”Footnote ²⁶ In an era of European hegemony in learning and ascendant ethnonationalisms, Iranian intellectuals were drawn to this comparative vision of ethnolinguistic greatness. Therefore, many progress-oriented nationalists were willing to consider a domesticated form of mysticism, often labeled “ʿirfān” and represented by literary figures such as Khayyam, Hafez, Saadi, and Rumi, as a significant part of Iranian national identity with universal appeal.Footnote ²⁷

Among the early contributors to mystically tinged westernization critique were Seyed Fakhreddin Shadman (1907–1967) and Ahmad Fardid (1909–1994). Their life and educational trajectories epitomized the transnational development of anti-westernization discourse, as both were educated in Europe and manifested the influence of Western “Persophilia” within their writings. Shadman’s book The Conquest of Western Civilization (1948), for example, urged a careful adaptation of Western progress, prioritizing the Persian language as a significant linchpin in maintaining Iranian identity. He considered Russia and Japan as positive examples of proper cultural resistance to the West and criticized alphabet reform without naming Türkiye, which had changed its alphabet in 1938.Footnote ²⁸ Shadman compared “the West” to Iran’s past opponents, the “barefooted, starving, desert-dwelling” Arabs and the “bloodthirsty” Turks and Mongols, deciding that the Europeans and Euro-Americans formed a more formidable challenge. Unlike the latter, who were soon “tamed” by the beauty of Persian culture, the West combined military superiority with pride, arrogance, and deep confidence in their own civilization. This meant learning from the West had to proceed carefully and with a great deal of conscious agency.

Far from a dissident, Shadman worked for the Pahlavi government, and in conjunction with the United States; he represented Iranian interests in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and served as the director of the United States Point Four program in Iran.Footnote ²⁹ His scholarship was apparently on the radar of American officials. In a report on Iran–Türkiye relations, the American Consulate in Tabriz referenced him to critique Turkish westernization: “The late Seyed Fakhreddin Shadman, who sought to find a philosophical basis for the westernization of Iran, felt that Turkey had thrown away the old culture without forming any new synthesis.”Footnote ³⁰ Although Shadman’s main emphasis for redemption lay on Persian language and literature, he also criticized as “enemies of our religion” those who would point to Islam as the cause of Iran’s perceived backwardness.Footnote ³¹

Casting Shiism as a type of mysticism allowed Iranian thinkers to Islamicize Persophilia. Ahmad Fardid, the Heideggerian philosopher who coined the term “gharbzadegi” (west-struckness or westoxication), was a leading figure in advocating this line of thinking.Footnote ³² Fardid’s criticism of the West built on the Orientalist mysticism–rationalism binary and claimed that revealed, eternal Truth had become eclipsed due to the influence of Greek philosophy. This mystical aversion to the valorization of reason over other modes of knowing could be found in classical Sufi texts. It was also an essential aspect of European counter-Enlightenment critique, including Theosophy and Guénonian Traditionalism, which were influenced by Western readings of Asian religious texts.Footnote ³³ Fardid argued positivism bred a technocratic ethos that undermined morality.Footnote ³⁴ Atatürk was a negative foil because, according to Fardid, he “believed that the human being should totally follow Western models.”Footnote ³⁵ Despite collaborating with the monarchy, Fardid would later throw his intellectual weight and celebrity status behind the Islamic revolution.Footnote ³⁶

Philosophers Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933) and Dariush Shayegan (1935–2018) epitomized the flourishing of gharbzadegi discourse and Islamic mysticism within the inner circle of the Pahlavi elite in the 1960s and 1970s. Nasr, the son of a distinguished family with ties to Reza Shah’s palace, was educated in the United States after finishing his primary education in Iran. While earning a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954, he discovered the Traditionalist school of philosophy. Nasr’s introduction to Traditionalism formed a significant turning point as he pivoted away from science and toward the humanities. Following a master’s degree in geology and geophysics, he earned his doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University, with a thesis focusing on Islamic science.

The Traditionalist or Perennialist school of philosophy argues that eternal, transcendent wisdom resides at the center of all major world religions. This idea of one hidden wisdom – repeatedly revealed and forgotten – coheres with dominant Muslim theology, which views the Qur’an as the perfection of past revelations. The concept of oneness also links Traditionalist philosophy to Islamic mysticism, which holds the all-encompassing oneness of God (tawhid) as the essential truth to be unlocked by the Sufi adept. Not surprisingly, among Nasr’s influences in the traditional school were European initiates to Sufism, such as René Jean-Marie-Joseph Guénon and Frithjof Schuon. Ceylonese metaphysician Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) and French scholar Louis Massignon (1883–1962), both of whom considered the East a bastion of spirituality, were also profoundly influential. This association of the West with materialism and the East with spirituality built on a binary opposition common to both Orientalist and Pan-Asianist thought.Footnote ³⁷ Traditionalist scholars, however, were not open to all forms of mysticism; they used comparative methodologies to differentiate “true” religion from “misguided” forms of spirituality.

Comparativism also saturated “the world religions paradigm,” which began to dominate the field of religious studies in the United States after World War II. The paradigm presupposes that all religions share common elements, such as beliefs, rituals, myths, and so on, which manifest in different outward forms.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, instead of contrasting, say, Islam and Christianity, the world religions paradigm begins with an assumption of similitude, generated in comparison to religion’s categorical foil, “the secular.”Footnote ³⁹ This approach has come under critique due to the formation of its analytical categories on “normative” Christianity and its implicit ranking of religions into an evolutionary lineage.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, at the time, it marked a progressive turn: Scholars following the paradigm underplayed racialized visions of religion and promoted a view of Islam as worthy of study, respect, and dialogue.

The academic emphasis on similitude among religions gained a boost from the ascendent antiracism of the postwar era. Countering the church’s history of anti-Semitism, the Vatican II document Nostra aetate (1965) emphasized similarities between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and laid the institutional groundwork for interfaith dialogue.Footnote ⁴¹ These overlapping developments made religious studies a valuable ideological ally as the United States sought to integrate newly independent nations into Pax Americana through pacts and agreements, advance Cold War cosmopolitanism, and fight “Godless” Communism.

Having reconnected with Islam through Traditionalism in the United States, Nasr returned to Iran and began work as a faculty member and later dean at Tehran University in the late 1950s. During this time, he undertook studies in Islamic mysticism (ʿirfān) under the guidance of leading Shia scholar Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai in learning circles that featured other university faculty, such as the famous French Orientalist Henry Corbin and his mentee, philosopher Dariush Shayegan.

With degrees from respected US institutions, Nasr’s rise was rapid; the shah and the empress repeatedly appointed him to important positions. Despite the opposition’s gendered attacks on Farah Pahlavi as the personification of gharbzadegi (Chapter 2), Nasr found the empress very receptive to the Traditionalist view due to her appreciation of Iranian culture and the arts.Footnote ⁴² In 1974, Nasr established the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy under the directives of the empress and transformed it into a leading organ of Perennialist philosophy. In 1978, he became director of Farah Pahlavi’s private bureau.Footnote ⁴³

Throughout his time in Iran and beyond, Nasr promoted “tradition,” defined in connection to eternal revelation, as an antidote to the evils of materialist modernity.Footnote ⁴⁴ He was deeply critical of Reza Shah, whom he considered too influenced by Atatürk.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He believed the Turkish leader formed an anti-model as an extreme modernizer who “sold himself to the West.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Nasr’s view of tradition was inclusive and ahistorical; he claimed all “true” religions shared an essence of revelation that offered significant guidelines to individual conduct and state policy. This eternal and unchanging truth of revelation, manifesting in diverse contexts, validated comparative religious studies.Footnote ⁴⁷

Countering psychological and “new age” readings of Rumi, Nasr argued Sufism was inevitably Islamic. He also considered Shiism akin to Sufism. Although Sufism was heavily associated with Sunnism, Nasr found Shiism mystical to its core: “But in matter of fact the esoteric dimension of Islam, which in the Sunni climate is almost totally connected in one way or another with Sufism, colours the whole structure of Shi’ism in both its esoteric and even exoteric aspect.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The ecumenical French Orientalist Henry Corbin, who undertook dialogues with key representatives of Shia thought while teaching in Tehran, shared this theorization of Iranian Shiism as “spiritual Islam.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Having the ear of the royal family meant Nasr could intervene in aspects of the White Revolution. Stating “long before Khomeini attacked the West, I attacked the West in Iran,” he has highlighted his role in tempering westernization – whether through promoting Islamic architecture and medicine under the sponsorship of the empress or trying to curb the shah’s technocratic impulses in a piecemeal fashion.Footnote ⁵⁰ In one anecdote, Nasr recounts how, when reforming the Persian alphabet came up during his time in Tehran, he immediately made an appointment with the shah to try to prevent it. His negative model was neighboring Türkiye, where the alphabet reform had made valuable Ottoman texts inaccessible within sixty years. Having established Kemalist Türkiye as a foil, he offered two positive examples of developing while reclaiming tradition: Japan and Israel.Footnote ⁵¹ Israeli intellectuals, he noted, had managed to revive Hebrew and now gave lectures on “nuclear physics” in the language. This point of comparison was sure to appeal to the shah, who was dedicated to building Iran’s own nuclear program.

The ascendance of Traditionalism easily led to the idea of dialogue among civilizations and religions. In 1976, when Empress Farah charged Dariush Shayegan with founding the Iranian Centre for the Study of Civilizations, the Pahlavi dynasty cemented the concept of civilizational outreach as a critical component of its soft power diplomacy.Footnote ⁵² Shayegan, who held a doctorate from Sorbonne and was a respected philosopher of Eastern traditions with deep expertise in sacred Indian texts, seemed a perfect choice to lead the center.Footnote ⁵³ Well versed in Western critics of modernity, particularly Heidegger and Carl Jung, Shayegan had attended the religious discussion circle Nasr had organized with Tabatabai and Henry Corbin. He was also a participant in the intellectual community that formed around the work of Ahmad Fardid.Footnote ⁵⁴

Representative of the dominant anti-materialist currents of the time, Shayegan’s work also pointed to mysticism as the essence and potential salvation of Eastern civilization. Like Empress Farah, Shayegan had partial roots in an Azeri Turkic-speaking family but emphasized the Persian language as the essential component of Iranianness. Shayegan’s identification of four Eastern cultural hubs as India, China, Japan, and Iran in his 1978 Asia Facing the West furthered the idea that Muslims constituted a singular civilization, albeit one in which Iran played a leading cultural role.Footnote ⁵⁵ His view of dialogue emphasized reclaiming one’s core identity and conversations within the Global South. In fact, the first conference sponsored by the Iranian Center for the Study of Civilization questioned whether Western cultural imperialism had rendered East–West dialogue impossible.Footnote ⁵⁶

Fardid, Nasr, and Shayegan were among the many intellectuals funded and sponsored by the late Pahlavi regime, who promoted Iranian Shiism as the “spiritual Islam.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Despite accusations of gharbzadegi, “an ecumenical mysticism,” rife with references to Ferdowsi, Hafez, and Rumi, pervaded the monarchs’ self-representation and guided Empress Farah’s patronage of Iranian arts, culture, and education.Footnote ⁵⁸ Of course, the couple’s valorization of Islamic–Iranian civilization as the apex of Muslim intellectual creativity and sophistication existed alongside their ethnonationalist emphasis on pre-Islamic Persia. However, regime mysticism was prevalent enough that, in 1977, the prominent dissident Reza Baraheni could mock the ruling family’s investment in “lukewarm mystical literature” even as he railed against their “Westomania.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Transnationally constructed and deeply comparativist, Iranian religious nativism nevertheless underplayed the transnational. It marked rationalistic aspects of Islamic intellectual history as inauthentic, de-emphasized the non-European heritage of Enlightenment rationalism, and subtly demonstrated the Orientalism underlying Islamist yearnings for “authenticity.”Footnote ⁶⁰ With careers boosted by the monarchy, Nasr and his colleagues shared gharbzadegi discourse with diverse regime opponents, including Ayatollah Khomeini and Ali Shariati. All pointed to Turkish laicism as the negative example of over-westernization, using comparison to shape and boost a new conservative ideology.Footnote ⁶¹

Khomeini’s Comparative Mysticism and the Islamic Revolution

As Hatiboğlu was railing against the de-Islamicized Rumi celebrations in Türkiye, the Islamic revolution was in full swing next door. The newspaper he wrote for, Milli Gazete, was associated with Islamist politician Necmettin Erbakan’s National Outlook movement and supported the firebrand revolutionary cleric Ruhollah Khomeini. However, its editors would have found a kindred soul in the leading intellectual figure associated with the deposed empress; in a 1966 book, Seyyed Hossein Nasr had argued that living by Islam’s divine law (sharia) was a prerequisite to being Muslim and, therefore, a requirement for embarking on the esoteric path (tariqa).Footnote ⁶² Ayatollah Khomeini, who complemented his studies in Islamic law with added training in Islamic mysticism and philosophy, would have agreed.

Khomeini became well versed in Islamic philosophy (hekmat) and mysticism (ʿirfān) during his seminary training in Islamic law (sharia) and jurisprudence (fiqh). This was a personal choice; many among Qum’s conservative clergy did not consider mysticism and philosophy complementary with Islamic law. Khomeini was careful not to openly antagonize established ulema by taking on too many students on these subjects. However, he still taught and published on the work of the thirteenth-century Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi and others.Footnote ⁶³ He was also willing to reference Sufi mystics to explain the finer points of fiqh: for example, he quoted fourteenth-century mystic poet Hafez in his book on the rules of prayer and Mevlânâ in his book on the dawn supplication.Footnote ⁶⁴ While Khomeini could be critical of the heretical practices of various Sufi sects, he defended ʿirfān against hardline clerics.Footnote ⁶⁵ He also wrote poetry in the style and imagery of Hafez, using wine and mystical union with “the beloved” as metaphors for the soul’s intoxication with and yearning for God.Footnote ⁶⁶

Khomeini had no patience for critics of Islamic mysticism, particularly secularists such as Kasravi. In his 1942 Discovery of Secrets, he attacked all who refused to understand and accept the value of ʿirfān using racialized language. They were, he claimed, no different from the Salafi “camel-grazers, lacking knowledge and civilization.” These “savages” of Najd, “camel drivers” of Riyaz, and “illiterate black desert dwellers” made up some of the most uncivilized and shameful groups of humans on Earth.Footnote ⁶⁷ They were certainly no models for emulation. Neither were Europeans who were “closer to wilderness than civilization,” which made following any model set by them haram (forbidden under Islamic law).Footnote ⁶⁸ The book also contained Khomeini’s invectives against the “unwise” Reza Khan, who had followed the “stupid Atatürk,” deceiving people and playing into Western plans – themes that he would develop further in future sermons.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although Khomeini would come to advocate antiracism in his sermons (Chapter 3), he was not above associating the contemporary, austere forms of Islam promoted in the Arabian peninsula, with barbarism. He could Islamicize Persophilia via mysticism, much like Nasr and Shayegan.

Khomeini’s deep training in and appreciation for ʿirfān belies the sharp binary that outside observers would soon identify between his Shia “fundamentalism” and Sufi mysticism. In the lead-up to the revolution, however, the idea that Shiism was akin to Sufism and open to ecumenical dialogue prevailed among regime insiders and opponents alike. The rift between monarchists and dissidents did not map onto simplified secular–religious or mystical–fundamentalist binaries. Nasr once knew Khomeini primarily as an interpreter of Ibn Arabi and was close with his student and representative Morteza Motahhari.Footnote ⁷⁰ Similarly, the idea of “world religions” and the potential for dialogue among them was so commonplace that, according to a CIA report, Khomeini sent a message to President John F. Kennedy emphasizing “his belief in close cooperation between Islam and other world religions, particularly Christendom” in 1963.Footnote ⁷¹

Ali Mirsepassi convincingly locates a connection between the mystical, counter-modernist yearnings of Iranian intellectuals and the eventual triumph of the Islamic revolution.Footnote ⁷² Dariush Shayegan’s 1977 interview with Les Nouvelles Littéraires, in which he described Khomeini as “Iran’s Gandhi,” epitomizes how Iranian scholars could view Khomeini through romantic Orientalist lenses.Footnote ⁷³ Shayegan soon came to regret his characterization, but Khomeini’s ascetic demeanor and his apparent challenge to secular humanism were fascinating for European intellectuals critical of the Enlightenment tradition as well. Like Michel Foucault, whose writings celebrated the revolution’s potential for eclipsing Western modernity “and the spiritless world it instituted,” many counter-establishment figures were willing to romanticize the “politics of spirituality” they identified in revolutionary Iran.Footnote ⁷⁴

Even the US embassy in Tehran produced a largely positive report of Khomeini’s movement, stating its “traditionalism” was popular, “deeply embedded” in the Iranian psyche, and would help Iran resist the foreign influence of Communism.Footnote ⁷⁵ Ambassador Sullivan’s notorious November 9, 1978 cable, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” highlighted Khomeini’s anti-Communism. According to Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Sullivan also echoed Shayegan in implying Khomeini’s eventual role in a military-religious regime might be “Gandhi-like.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Western-educated spokespeople within Khomeini’s inner circle carefully nurtured this semblance of similitude, hoping that Khomeini would primarily be a spiritual figurehead without direct executive power.Footnote ⁷⁷ Subsuming any debate regarding the negative aspects of Gandhi’s legacy in linking Indian national identity to Hinduism, the Khomeini–Gandhi analogy appealed to Western audiences weaned on romantic Orientalism.

The dominant view of the Iranian revolution in the West is that it resulted in the squashing of mysticism by “religious fundamentalism.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The Hollywood hit Not Without My Daughter depicted this binary at a popular level: Gone was the good mystical Iranian Islam symbolized by gardens and the poetry of Hafez – to be replaced by a dark, stern legalism, personified by bearded mollahs and women in dark chadors (Chapter 4). However, the initial relationship between the regime, Islamic mysticism, and Iran’s Sufi orders was far more complex. The revolution meant that Khomeini’s brand of Shia Islam, making space for ʿirfān, could become institutionalized in Iran’s religious centers. The CIA noted in a 1980 report that Iran’s revolutionary leaders continued to brand the revolution as primarily sparked by “a spiritual awakening.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The ravages of the Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988) also furthered regime mysticism, particularly on the theme of martyrdom and losing one’s self in God.Footnote ⁸⁰

Khomeini continued to write and publish mystical poems, some with vivid Sufi imagery, after the revolution. “Oh, sheik (pīr), help me reach the dervish lodge (khānqāh),” he pleads in a collection published by his daughter-in-law, “Friends [other disciples] have all left; help me reach a road.”Footnote ⁸¹ In this famous outreach letter to Gorbachev, which argued the Soviets should choose the way of Islam over Western capitalism, the Ayatollah recommended the Soviet leader review not only ibn Arabi but also Suhrawardi’s illuminationism and “the transcendental philosophy of Mulla Sadra” – using mysticism as a foreign policy tool and outraging Qum’s orthodox ulema in the process.Footnote ⁸²

When Khomeini passed away in 1989, President Rafsanjani publicly recounted and celebrated his immense scholarship on ʿirfān.Footnote ⁸³ At the same time, the comparativism between ʿirfān “as the true essence of Islam’s mystical tradition” and tasavvuf (Sufism), established during the Safavid period, remained in the public imagination and could be mobilized whenever the regime found itself in conflict with established Sufi orders.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the first decade following the revolution, some Sufi sects, such as the Soltanalishahis, aligned with the new regime, while others, such as the Safialishahis, became the target of investigation and oppression.Footnote ⁸⁵ A serious crackdown connecting Sufism to Western imperialism started in 2005. As I will explain in the final section of this chapter, this development was connected to the US instrumentalization of “moderate Islam” in the War on Terror.

In sum, from Shadman to Khomeini, mid-century Iranian intellectuals mobilized comparisons with Turks and Arabs to construct Iranian Shiism as essentially mystical. The emphasis on a special Persianate connection to ʿirfān, however, did not necessarily imply a specific relationship with the so-called West. The next section examines how, around the same time, Turkish secularism was shifting in conjunction with the country’s US alignment, making Turkish leaders more likely to claim Islamic mysticism for their own country.

Cold War Comparativism and the Making of Türkiye’s “Moderate” Islam

As Iranian intellectuals were building Kemalist Türkiye into a negative foil in gharbzadegi discourse, the Turkish regime was reorganizing its secularism in response to ascendant post-World War II ideologies and political realities. The country’s newfound Western alignment, democratization, and worldwide counter-modernist trends that promoted religion as an antidote to the ravages of the West’s so-called machine civilization all led to a softening of laicist rhetoric as the Atatürk-founded CHP worked to meet the challenge of the populist Democrats. Thus, CHP leaders used increasingly religious language in promoting Atatürk as the “defender of true Islamic faith,” arguing that his secularizing reforms had freed individual conscience.Footnote ⁸⁶ The party opened prayer leader-preacher (imam-hatip) schools to train new cadres of state-approved religious leaders. Kasım Gülek, the CHP parliamentarian who met Malcolm X during his 1964 Hajj and boasted about Turks’ devoutness (Chapter 3), played a key role in these developments.

Sufism had long permeated the public’s religious sensibilities and the intellectual output of Diyanet, the Kemalist state’s Directorate of Religion. It found renewed influence under the Democratic Party (DP), which came to power in 1950. While the law banning Sufi lodges remained intact, in the early 1950s, the Mevlevi order was allowed to publicly resume the sema rituals for “touristic and cultural reasons.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In his memoirs, famous Sufi musician Ahmed Kudsı̄ Erguner claimed the United States was directly involved in this development. According to Erguner, Turkish representatives had panicked when the wife of a visiting US officer asked to see the whirling dervishes upon visiting the museum in Konya. They quickly put together a makeshift musical group, which included Erguner’s father. Mevlevi music and sema thus became centerpieces in annual Mevlânâ commemoration days.Footnote ⁸⁸

Democrats also led the way in renovating and opening other Sufi shrines. Revisiting such shrines soon became commonplace again, even for the country’s staunch secularists. I have vivid childhood memories of my family taking me to pray at this or that Sufi saint’s tomb before important exams. At the time, I had no idea they were once banned or even controversial.

The rising Islamist magazine sector marked yet another opening for postwar Islamic discourse, as a new generation of conservative writers began foregrounding Sufism as key to Türkiye’s re-flourishing. Much like their Iranian counterparts, these devout intellectuals incorporated and modified Western anti-modernisms in their publications. In the process, they identified a unique role for their country and a select version of mysticism within a larger “Islamic” civilization.Footnote ⁸⁹

As noted in Chapter 3, Türkiye’s Islamist thinkers generally promoted the nation’s alignment with the United States during the early Cold War, even as they critiqued select aspects of US culture and policy.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Sorbonne-educated poet and novelist Necip Fazıl Kısakürek epitomized this position with his influential Büyük Doğu magazine. In words reminiscent of the shah’s metaphor of the wife and the concubine, he argued the correct role for Türkiye would be that of a “coy lover” (nazlı sevgili), asking for more robust rewards from the United States in exchange for the country’s political fidelity.Footnote ⁹¹

US-based observers, by and large, welcomed these shifts in the landscape of Turkish laicism. As noted, the overwhelmingly Christian US policymakers and opinion leaders had long viewed Islam as backward – an impediment to progress – while associating irreligion with Jacobin radicalism. The post-World War II Cold War consensus, which promoted modernization even as it cast “atheistic” Communism as a world-ending evil, accentuated the paradox.Footnote ⁹² As early as 1948, a Foreign Affairs article advocating closer US collaboration with Türkiye suggested that the Kemalist regime let go of its “unreasoning fear of organized Islam.”Footnote ⁹³ In his influential 1953 article on “Communism and Islam,” famed Orientalist Bernard Lewis noted Islam had elements that could be compatible with Communism. Yet all was not lost: “Pious Muslims – and most Muslims are pious – will not long tolerate an atheist creed, nor one that violates their traditional religious moral principles.”Footnote ⁹⁴

As Graziano notes, a peculiar intellectual arrogance underlined such presumptions. Western scholars believed they “understood other traditions so well that they hoped other traditions could restore something about themselves in order to inoculate themselves against Communism.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Often, what was to be restored was a diffuse, personalized Sufism – an Islamic mysticism resembling idealized visions of the Protestant faith.

John Kingsley Birge, a missionary and a scholar of the Bektashi order, for example, told the Fifth Annual Conference on Middle East Affairs in 1951 that Western books on returning to religion, once translated, had become “the mediums through which the religious emphasis of the West is reinforcing the religious faith of Islam.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Birge believed the impact of this Eastward infusion of religiosity would be to boost “religious faith, in a spiritual sense,” which he contrasted with “religious law” and saw as “the very heart of Islam.” Comparing Islamic law and spiritual understanding had roots in classical Sufi thought but also clearly resonated with Birge’s protestant ideology.

Birge also echoed the world religions paradigm by noting that parts of the Qur’an could hold “universal religious meaning” for everyone.Footnote ⁹⁷ Thus, Birge wished for Türkiye to become more Islamic under the influence of the United States, albeit in a way that would be similar to, and inspirational for, Protestant Christianity. The sentiment was echoed in a July 26, 1960, report from the American Consulate General in Istanbul on “Religion and the New Regime,” which identified Western-educated officers as those recognizing that “religion is a necessary part of Turkish life, and should be reformed rather than excised.”Footnote ⁹⁸

By the 1960s, the scholarly debate on whether Islam would be more compatible with Communism or Capitalism had given way to a tacit understanding that collaborating with Islamic actors and movements of various stripes could aid the fight against Communism. From the pro-Western Muslim-majority block that formed at the 1955 Bandung Conference, which featured Türkiye, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Lebanon, the US State Department drew the lesson that the foil provided by Communism could soften the age-old West versus Islam dichotomy: “Islam, when face to face with the rest of Asia is likely to feel with the West; while when shut up with the West alone, it is restless.”Footnote ⁹⁹

As the rubrics shifted, so did the policies. Casting the Cold War as a conflict between Freedom and Godless evil, US elites encouraged religious discourse in the international political sphere, as they did in the domestic sphere.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This connected US diplomats, spies, and scholars to Islamists across the world in new ways. Although American scholars were inclined toward mystical and individualized forms of Islam, no such distinction muddled the actions of the newly founded CIA and President Eisenhower. Instead, the United States boosted the Muslim Brotherhood against Egypt’s Nasser and his brand of Arab nationalism, aligning with the Salafi king of Saudi Arabia in the process.Footnote ¹⁰¹ King Saud, Eisenhower wrote in his diary in March 1956, “could be built up, possibly, as a spiritual leader.”Footnote ¹⁰² The CIA reached out to disgruntled Islamic actors, such as Khomeini’s mentor Ayatollah Kashani, alongside criminal elements, in its 1953 coup against the Iranian nationalist Premier Mossadegh.Footnote ¹⁰³

US representatives also proved ready to celebrate and support the Turkish Democrats’ “more liberal interpretation of the policy of secularism” as in line with popular and global trends and apropos of the fight against Communism.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Of course, some Western Orientalists, such as Bernard Lewis, were concerned about the increasing public presence of Islam; however, he and like-minded observers still approved of Türkiye’s DP-sponsored religious revival, hoping the trend might prevent more confrontational versions of political Islam.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Throughout the 1950s, the US Consul General regularly reported on Turkish worries about reactionary religion, with a particular focus on the Nurcu movement associated with Said Nursi.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ American Council General in Istanbul noted the anti-Communism of the Nurcus but also viewed them negatively as part of “the darker corners of Islam.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ However, US diplomatic dispatches also contained disclaimers about Turkish sources the Americans saw as “maintaining an extremist position on the subject of secularism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

US officials believed that the country’s supposed reconciliation with its Islamic Ottoman heritage could make Türkiye a more helpful ally in the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ As Cemil Aydın has noted, a paradox saturated US visions of Turkish Islam in the mid-century: “American modernization theory praised the achievements of Turkish Westernization but also wanted Turkey squarely in the imagined Muslim world, where it could influence fellow Muslim societies.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Turks were willing to sing the same tune to an extent. In a discussion with Professor Thomas Lewis of Princeton, for example, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Fuad Köprülü suggested that “a peculiarly Turkish brand of Islam” could spearhead religious reform and spread it to the region, boosting unity among Muslims.Footnote ¹¹¹

Having already enlisted Islam as an ally against Mossadegh and Nasser, the United States also rewarded its Turkish coy paramours, however indirectly. A 1968 Turkish intelligence report leaked to the leftist press connected the rise of Islamism in Türkiye with the Saudi-funded Muslim World League and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood – key US allies in America’s struggle against Arab nationalism.Footnote ¹¹² Two Islamist movements, in particular, flourished and came to play critical roles in Türkiye’s Cold War politics and social life in the 1960s and 1970s. The Naqshbandi-Khalidis, Turkey’s largest Sufi sect, found strength in the politically engaged leadership of Şeyh Mehmet Zahid Kotku (1897–1980). Another group formed under the charismatic leadership of Fethullah Gülen (1941–2024). The Naqshbandi-Khalidis came to play significant roles in Turkey’s multiparty politics, sometimes in alignment with the United States and sometimes against it. An outgrowth of the Nurcu movement, the Gülenists initially focused on gaining influence in the educational sphere. Soon they proved to be rather uncoy lovers of the United States and critics of postrevolutionary Iran.

Fethullah Gülen, an Anatolian preacher known for his emotionally charged sermons, shared Nursi’s accommodationist stance toward the Kemalist regime and positive attitude toward the United States. In 1961, he led the way in founding a Struggle Against Communism Association (Komunizm ile Mücadele Derneği) in his hometown of Erzurum.Footnote ¹¹³ Gülen’s sermons obscured his intellectual debt to the Kurdish Nursi, whose students and followers were under constant investigation. Instead, his early life experiences in the Eastern frontier city of Erzurum and readings of conservative nationalist intellectuals gave Gülen’s version of Islam a distinctly ethnonationalist emphasis.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he amassed following and resources by founding a highly secretive, vertical organization, which grew by offering subsidized housing to underprivileged students. Although technically not a Sufi brotherhood, Gülen’s movement adopted elements of Nursi’s Naqshbandi-inspired teachings, and held Gülen at its center as a respected teacher and spiritual guide who directed the adherents’ worldly affairs.

Gülen’s pro-state, pro-army stance, his harsh critiques of anti-American Islamists, and his rapid ascent soon led to speculations of his being a CIA asset. A leading scholar of Turkish Sufism, Hakan Yavuz notes that many assume his founding of an organization of defense against Communism earned him the attention (if not the direct sponsorship) of the US spy and diplomatic networks in the 1960s.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Graham Fuller, who was a junior CIA officer based in Istanbul and served as a liaison with Turkish intelligence at the time, recalled that in the mid-1960s, American officials were in awe of Kemalism, in line with modernization theory. However, he noted in our interview that he “would not be surprised” if some developed contacts with Gülen and other Turkish Islamist leaders in their anti-Communist crusade due to the “typical American obsession with finding the enemy of your enemy.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ My comb through the relevant files at the National Archives and Records Administration failed to turn out any mention of Gülen from the 1960s and 1970s, although the case is far from closed, as I extrapolate later in this chapter.

Naqshbandis, Turkey’s largest Sufi sect, also benefited from the US-sponsored realignment of Turkish secularism. Their relationship with the United States, however, has been ambivalent, shifting throughout history. It is well known that the Naqshbandi sheikh Kotku encouraged Necmettin Erbakan to found Turkey’s first openly Islamist party in 1970. Erbakan’s Milli Görüş movement adopted deeply anti-imperialist rhetoric, openly maligning the United States. Subjected to repeated investigations and bans under laws intended to protect laicism, Erbakan found a place in the coalition government in 1974, organizing the outreach to Black Muslims detailed in Chapter 3. Yet the Naqshbandis would also find influence within conservative governments aligned with the United States, particularly after the 1980 military coup.

In addition to the transition to the multiparty period, the main turning point for Türkiye’s Islamist communities came with the 1980 coup. As noted in Chapter 4, the coup leader General Kenan Evren promoted a “Turkish-Islamic synthesis” to attack leftist radicalism and the forms of Islam he considered militant and influenced by Iran. As developed by the devout intellectuals of the 1970s, the Turkish–Islamic synthesis revised the dominant vision of Turks as “the sword of Islam.” Scholars advocating this point of view conceded that Sufi orders had played a key role in spreading Islam, including with a sword in hand when necessary. However, they argued these devout Turks had developed an open-minded frontier Islam along the borders of the empire; their experiences with different peoples had made them more open to cultural exchange, more progressive, and more obedient to worldly political authority.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This ideology proved a perfect fit for General Evren’s post-coup vision for the country; he even quoted Rumi to offer Islamic justification for his 1980 headscarf ban.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The return to multiparty democracy under Turgut Özal’s premiership brought a flow of Saudi petrodollars and emphasis on free enterprise, which allowed religious organizations and communities to gain even more capital and influence.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The neoliberal post-coup regime also established a rapprochement between the United States and Turkey’s Naqshbandis. Prime Minister Turgut Özal and his brother Korkut Özal had strong ties to the Sufi order. They had both been educated in the United States – a fact that further connected Islamization with US influence in many critics’ minds. Indeed, in his memoirs and musings on Sufism, Korkut Özal noted how the contemporary forms of religiosity he observed from Mormons during his stay in Utah (1955–1957) influenced his decision to “live Islam” properly upon his return to Türkiye. Unable to progress in his studies of the Qur’an, he gave his alliance to the Naqshbandi sheik Kotku, further connecting the order to right-wing multiparty politics.Footnote ¹²⁰

The Gülen movement also made significant gains under Özal’s privatization policies, particularly flourishing in the private education and media sectors.Footnote ¹²¹ As the movement grew through investments and charitable donations, it founded multiple nonprofit organizations with cloaked, “non-Islamic” names, such as the Turkish Teachers Organization and Turkish Journalists and Writers Organization. Through the rhetoric of “service” (hizmet), the Gülenists linked Said Nursi’s interest in education with the rising nonprofit sector. Relatively free from criminal investigation under Özal’s neoliberal regime, Gülen and his cadres worked toward forming his young followers into a “golden generation” that would shape the country’s direction.Footnote ¹²² The movement’s schools and study centers reached millions of young citizens, training a Gülenist cadre that would take up key positions in the state bureaucracy, including within the judiciary and the police.

As Gülen’s profile rose, the whispers that had developed around his pro-American Islam got louder.Footnote ¹²³ In 1990, writing in the hardline Islamist magazine Ak-Doğuş, M. Halis Turan summarized the suspicions swirling around Gülen’s American connections among Islamist radicals. Noting the United States had a policy of using “moderate and positive Muslims” (ılımlı ve olumlu Müslümanlar) against revolutionary Muslim organizations, Turan insisted Gülen could easily serve as “the chief of the CIA’s moderate and positive Muslims desk” or lead the state’s accommodationist Directorate of Religion.Footnote ¹²⁴

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gülen’s movement expanded its reach: Gülenists began opening schools in newly independent, Turkic-speaking nations, such as Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan.Footnote ¹²⁵ Russia, which sought to hold on to its hegemony in the region, protested that Türkiye was serving “as Washington’s chosen instrument” in the region.Footnote ¹²⁶ In a 1997 interview, Gülen admitted that running schools in different parts of the world would not be possible if one did not have good relations with the United States.Footnote ¹²⁷ Retired Turkish intelligence officer Osman Nuri Gündeş corroborated suspicions in his 2010 memoirs, which stated that the Turkish intelligence organization MIT believed the Gülen schools in the new Turkic republics had allowed CIA infiltration.Footnote ¹²⁸

Türkiye’s relations with Iran proved a point of divergence between the Gülenists and the Naqshbandis in the 1990s and beyond. Naqshbandi-associated leaders, such as Erbakan, were often warmer toward Iran and the regime’s anti-US stance. In fact, upon coming to power in a coalition government after the 1994 election, Erbakan made his first official state trip to Iran, followed by Qaddafi’s Libya, two key bastions of Islamic anti-Americanism. The Gülen movement, on the other hand, held a stronger ethnonationalist tint, emphasizing “Turkish Islam” in comparison to Iranian and Arab traditions. Weighing in on the post-coup “will Turkey become Iran” debates, Gülen maligned Iran and Shiism, warning against “the export of a sect and fanatical Islamic understanding in the name of religion and Islamic revolution.”Footnote ¹²⁹

True to form, Gülen was also vocally supportive of the February 28, 1997, “postmodern” coup, which forced Erbakan’s Refah Party out of government. However, his conciliatory tone did not prevent the laicist regime from viewing him and his growing network with suspicion during the February 28 Process, which involved monitoring and criminalizing non-state religious activity and networks (Chapter 4). With a trial pending against him, Gülen escaped to the United States in 1999, and settled in Pennsylvania. He soon became a significant player in the charter school movement and interfaith organizing, as explained in the next section.Footnote ¹³⁰

The fact that Türkiye’s Islamization proceeded in ways favorable to capitalism and the United States only accentuated the comparisons made between Türkiye and Iran and Shiism and Sufism in the 1980s and 1990s. In the transition from the Cold War to the War on Terror, this doctrinal mode of Türkiye–Iran comparativism would find new adherents and suffuse US and international policy documents on “Islamic radicalism” and “moderate Islam.”

The Clash of, and Dialogue among, Civilizations: From the Cold War to the War on Terror

In a 1978 report to President Carter, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski identified “an arc of crisis” that demonstrated vulnerability in the US Cold War position: “All at once, difficulties are surfacing in Iran and Pakistan, and they are thinly below the surface in India and are very manifest in Bangladesh, and there is reason to believe that the political structure of Saudi Arabia is beginning to creak. Turkey is also becoming more wobbly.”Footnote ¹³¹

As Brzezinski’s vocabulary of structural engineering made clear, the revolutionary shifts in Iran seemed to destabilize the “Northern Tier,” the buffer zone the United States had established along the southern border of the USSR. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to support a troubled pro-Soviet government, US policymakers perceived the USSR to be truly “on a roll.”Footnote ¹³² Although Brezinski’s “arc of crisis” contained many Muslim-majority regions, his vision of trouble was not tied to Islamism. On the contrary, the fact that the Iranian revolution was “Islamic” initially heartened US officials, who attempted to use common opposition to Communism in their outreach to the new regime.Footnote ¹³³

Writing from exile, Iran’s deposed shah speculated about the CIA’s role in his demise and the Americans’ thinking: “Their strategy, if indeed they have one, appears to assume that Islam is capable of thwarting Soviet ambitions in the region.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Despite his dominant image as an over-westernizing technophile, the shah sought to personify moderate Islam in this book as he had done throughout his rule: “I am a religious man, a believer,” he wrote, “I follow the precepts of the sacred Book of Islam, precepts of balance, justice, and moderation.”Footnote ¹³⁵ He also credited himself and the empress with tempering immoderate westernization in Iran.Footnote ¹³⁶

Even when the Iranian hostage crisis demonstrated that Muslim anti-Communism did not equal pro-Americanism, the State Department and CIA analysts declared the Iranian revolution to be a special case due to Shia militancy.Footnote ¹³⁷ The CIA continued its collaborations with Islamists elsewhere, hoping “an arc of Islam” could contain “the arc of crisis,” which they read exclusively on Cold War terms.Footnote ¹³⁸ “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan made it more important to mobilize Islamic resistance against the Soviets,” recalled Brzezinski in Power and Principle (1983).Footnote ¹³⁹ He and President Reagan’s CIA director, Bill Casey, were the chief architects of this Islam strategy, which furthered precedents established during the early Cold War under Eisenhower. Thus, the CIA provided arms and training to the fighters (mujahideen) in Afghanistan as they battled the Soviets throughout the 1980s. Afghanistan, as the birthplace of Rumi, also had a legitimate claim to the heritage of Mevlevi Sufism; however, with their proxy war, the Americans empowered the most militant Islamists.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Aided by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, Muslim fighters poured into the country from across the world, forging terror networks and imbibing and exporting a modern, transnational ideology of armed jihad that would long outlive the Soviet withdrawal of 1988–1989. America’s Islam strategy embraced theological opportunism: In a 1987 presentation to the CIA, Brzezinski also cited Sufi networks as a potentially helpful challenge to the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Even as the CIA continued to prioritize the Communist versus non-Communist binary in its day-to-day operations, US policymakers sought to identify connections between Islam and anti-Americanism. The issue held popular purchase: As Edward Said noted in his 1981 book Covering Islam, the Iranian hostage crisis had reanimated racialized visions of a civilizational clash between Islam and the West.Footnote ¹⁴² The June 24–25, 1985, hearings on Islamic Fundamentalism and Islamic Radicalism before the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the Committee on Foreign Affairs featured multiple experts who were asked to comment on “the nature of Islamic fundamentalism and why it has some radical and extreme expressions,” and “about why this movement seems to be anti-American.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Fresh on the committee’s agenda was Iran’s Islamic revolution and hostage crisis, a recent slew of terror attacks and hijackings associated with Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Qaddafi’s Libya.

The scholar experts summoned before the committee primarily urged policymakers away from lumping all Islamic groups together and advocated for increased dialogue and cultural exchange. Through their testimonies, the hearings officially entered the comparison between radical and moderate Islam, interpreted on political terms, into the state lexicon.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Speaking first, Religious Studies Professor John Esposito of the College of the Holy Cross encouraged differentiating between violent movements and Islamic revivalism at large and argued for “informal contacts” with more moderate, “popular and authentically representative forces in Moslem societies.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Esposito pointed to US foreign policy in breeding resentment within specific Muslim-majority contexts. The United States’s overbearing presence in Iran and support for the shah was one example.

In addition to the radical–moderate binary, the hearings furthered comparativism around Shia versus Sunni Islam and Shiism versus Sufism. In response to the chairperson’s request for help differentiating among Islamist groups, Esposito explained that the US penchant for viewing Islam through the lenses of Roman Catholicism had led to “false conclusions.” Given the fragmented, diverse, and contentious relations between various parts of the Islamic revival, Khomeini could serve as an inspiration, but he had “no authority” over Sunnis.

Dr. Hermann F. Eilts, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University, also emphasized diversity and difference, praising Sufism in contrast to revolutionary Shiism. Sufism, he argued, was “anathema to the whole doctrine of Khomeini.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ “The Shi’ite sense of martyrdom” could help explain recent hijackings and suicide bombings.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Speaking on the second day, Johns Hopkins University’s Fouad Ajami simplified the comparison: “The Sunnis are homicidal and the Shiites are suicidal.” His Islamophobic soundbite carried the day. In an online conversation with me, Esposito recalled that “the only coverage on TV that night was Ajami’s statement.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Ultimately, members of the subcommittee proved open to comparativism based on Islamic theology in distinguishing Muslim extremists from moderates but pushed back on the experts’ recommendations that the United States rethink its foreign policies, including unconditional support for Israel.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

The liberal calls to differentiate between different Islams (Shia versus Sufi, radical versus moderate, etc.) and increase “dialogue” with Muslim reformists gained more urgency in the 1990s. The dissolution of the USSR brought increased attention to the fallout of the Afghan jihad: As the Taliban took over Afghanistan, a series of terror attacks on Western targets organized by transnational veterans of the Afghan war captured the attention of the media. Why did “they” hate “us”?

In September 1990, Bernard Lewis offered one easy answer by publishing “The Roots of Muslim Rage” in The Atlantic. His main argument was that Muslims “resent the West” due to a sense of civilizational inferiority. The Atlantic cover featured the cartoon of a frowning, turbaned, black-bearded, hooked-nosed, Asiatic Muslim man with the American flag in his eyes. Although Lewis made sure to differentiate between different Islamic doctrines and traditions in his opening caveat, his article’s personification of “the Muslim” was male and essentially violent. Having “suffered multiple stages of defeat,” including challenges to patriarchy “from emancipated women and rebellious children,” the Muslim’s rage was “inevitable.” Also inevitable was the fact that this rage would be directed at the Muslim’s primal, civilizational enemy: “the West.” This was a “Clash of Civilizations,” wrote Lewis in conclusion, unironically promoting a concept that Said had used critically in Covering Islam. The term would get picked up, simplified, and popularized again, this time by American political scientist Samuel Huntington in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article and 1996 book.

Unlike the polyglot Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington had no training in Islamic history or the main languages associated with West Asia and North Africa. This did not prevent his “Clash of Civilizations” thesis – a simplified version of Lewis’s concluding argument – from becoming hugely influential. Rejecting comparativism between “Islamic fundamentalism” and “moderate Muslims,” Huntington’s article and book laid out a contrast between “Islam” and “the West” in the simplest possible terms, resurrecting old, racialized tropes about civilization in the process. “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” he wrote, “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” Similarly, Huntington argued that the actions of “the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense” were largely irrelevant to Muslim resentment. The problem for Islam was “the West”; Muslims resented not Western policies but Western attempts to export values that were essentially incompatible with the rival civilization of Islam.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Such crude declarations helped popularize Huntington’s argument, but they also made the clash of civilizations thesis all too easy to disprove. Detractors could quickly point out social science data demonstrating how US foreign policy brewed anger and resentment, rehash instances of collaboration across so-called civilizations, and critique Huntington on theoretical grounds for his clunky use of anthropological terms like “culture” and “civilization.” To provide a counterpoint to the clash of civilizations thesis, multiple thinkers and political figures began to push for “dialogue.” Among them was Pope John Paul II, who had emphasized the necessity of “inter-religious dialogue” in the encyclical Redempteris Missio (1990). He expanded outreach to Muslims and, with the 1998 formation of the Catholic Muslim Commission, implemented a channel for dialogue.

Arguing against the West versus Islam binary, however, all too often fueled another line of comparativism Lewis had furthered in “The Roots of Muslim Rage”: the one between the “good,” moderate Muslims and “bad” militant fundamentalists.Footnote ¹⁵¹ As Mamdani has shown, the search for “the good Muslim” all too often collapsed religion and politics, implying that “fundamentalist” theologies – as opposed to political and economic grievances – were responsible for political violence committed by Muslims.Footnote ¹⁵² Thus, moderate Islam discourse, while a tempting rebuttal to more hawkish views on Islam, tended to collapse religion and politics in similar ways. Both the binary opposition “Islam vs. the West” and the dialogue formula of “Islam and the West” implied that “the West” had transcended its dominant religion (Christianity), whereas Islam had remained a totalizing force, explaining Muslim lifeways and politics.Footnote ¹⁵³ This renewed emphasis on religion as politics imposed new theological classifications (Islamic fundamentalism, moderate Islam, etc.) on Muslim-majority countries and communities from Morocco to Indonesia in the service of the US empire.

Turkish laicism proved a stumbling point for Huntington as well as his opponents. As a NATO ally and applicant for EU membership, the Muslim-majority country appeared as an inconvenient exception in Huntington’s writings. His 1993 Foreign Affairs article called Türkiye “the most obvious and prototypical torn country,” which could not decide whether it belonged within “Islamic” or “Western” civilization. His 1996 book turned prescriptive, suggesting Turkish leaders might soon be ready to stop their “frustrating and humiliating” attempts to join “Western civilization.” Instead of acting like “beggars,” he predicted, the country would do well to “resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴

A similar ambivalence toward Türkiye appeared in publications opposing Huntington’s thesis. In some ways, the country proved an excellent touch point for “moderate Islam.” In his Islam and the West (1993), Lewis promoted it as a model for Muslim democracy.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Yet, Graham Fuller argued in his 1993 book Turkey’s New Geopolitics from the Balkans to Western China that Türkiye’s current version of secularism appeared to make it a less-than-ideal model for other Muslim-majority nations.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Unsurprisingly, both Huntington and his detractors wished to see the country fit their abstract schemata better. Huntington implied Türkiye should pick a side in the clash of civilizations and, being Muslim-majority, joining “the West” would be “humiliating.” Fuller, on the other hand, wished the country to integrate with the West while being “more flexible” (but “not like Iran”) toward Islam in public life.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Ironically, as conspiracy-inclined thinkers noted with some urgency, both recommendations hinged on the country’s further Islamicization.

For a while, the Iranian regime appeared to fit dominant Western categorizations, whether one considered “Islam” to be the main problem as Huntington did or “the bad Muslims,” as more nuanced thinkers implied. In “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Lewis pointed to “Iranian mullahs and their disciples elsewhere” to mark the most “virulent” form of anti-Western hatred. Of course, this vision of “Iranian fundamentalism” was a caricature, and it became more challenging to maintain as the Iranian political scene shifted in the late twentieth century. With the election of reformist president Muhammad Khatami in 1997, the vision of dialogue became a significant part of Iran’s foreign policy, and Khatami appeared on the world stage as a new personification of the “Good Muslim.”

Under President Khatami, Iran began an outreach program to end the country’s political and economic isolation. A learned, revolutionary cleric with a background in philosophy, Khatami had worked as the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, overseeing a policy of relaxed censorship and a boost in publications and the film industry.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ His lectures and interviews in Western media showcased a calm, scholarly demeanor and connected this self-presentation to Iran’s rich literary and artistic heritage. In his January 7, 1998, interview with Christian Amanpour, Khatami called out the clash of civilizations thesis and critiqued attempts to find a new global enemy in “Islam” following the end of the Cold War. Painting a picture of “peace and moderation,” according to the New York Times, Khatami personified the wise, mystical Eastern philosopher at the United Nations, as well. His opening words echoed Traditionalist philosophy and the world religions paradigm: “Allow me to speak here as a man from the East, the origin of brilliant civilizations and the birthplace of Divine Prophets: Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, peace be upon them all.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Institutionalizing his vision for dialogue, Khatami founded the Iranian Foundation for Dialogue among Civilizations in 1998, effectively resurrecting the Pahlavis’ soft power program. The two eras were linked by the continuing influence of key figures and ideologies as well. According to Seyyed Hussein Nasr, Khatami told him he had been inspired to pursue life as a cleric by Nasr’s work.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Regardless of the extent of Nasr’s individual influence, the Traditionalist paradigm, which identified the presence of the same divine truth at the heart of all “true” world religions, appeared regularly in Khatami’s speeches. In his 2000 lecture to UNESCO, for example, the Iranian president claimed mysticism could be a foundation for a dialogue among civilizations because of how it connected the world’s religious traditions:

In 1999, Khatami met with Pope John Paul II, with both leaders emphasizing similarities and connections between Islam and Christianity in their statements.Footnote ¹⁶² In 2001, Khatami’s efforts led to the United Nations declaring “the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations,” marking international consensus around dialogue ideology.

In contrast to the caricature of the enraged Muslim man found in “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” the figure of the Good Muslim was soft-spoken, tolerant, open to dialogue, and mystically inclined. Khatami’s chocolate-colored robe, instead of the usual clerical black, became a symbol of this approachable, warm persona.Footnote ¹⁶³ Turkish sect leader Fethullah Gülen was also ready to embody the reformed masculinity promoted by moderate Islam discourse. In an ethnonationalist twist, however, he mobilized comparativism to sideline Iran and claim mysticism for Türkiye.

In a 1997 interview from New York City, Gülen argued against Huntington’s thesis as well as Iranian “extremism.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ “Iranian Islam is fundamentalist,” read a pull quote from the published interview, “Turkish Islam is tolerant.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ According to Gülen, Iranian Shiism was kept alive through the hatred of the Sunni caliph Omar. The interviewer concurred and added that Iranian mysticism was “death-facing,” echoing dominant Western discourses about the supposed Shia will to martyrdom, as opposed to the “life-loving” Turkish Islam. Weighing on the “Will Türkiye become Iran” debates of the 1990s, Gülen and the interviewer agreed that the country would not “become Iran” because they had different theological traditions. Mobilizing what Mamdani calls “culture talk,” Türkiye’s signature “Good Muslim” Gülen thus drew political conjectures from newly sharpened ethno-sectarian differences.

Interreligious dialogue proved another area for growth for Gülen. According to documents revealed by Wikileaks, he developed a “beneficial” relationship with Turkey’s Jewish community and the Ecumenical Patriarch in the 1990s.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Gülen also met the Pope in 1998. The latter public relations coup helped promote him as a critical Islamic representative, analogous to the status of the Pope, although he had little popularity among non-Turkish-speaking Muslims. Similarly, he remained deeply controversial in his home country among laicists and Islamists alike.

While Gülen appeared as a leading player in dialogue talk with his “Turkish Islam” in the late 1990s, Türkiye itself was still under the sway of the neo-republican February 28 Process. Prickly about anything challenging the prevailing configuration of secularism, the country’s leaders were not ready to serve the cause of “moderate Islam” in any official capacity. As for the Islamist opponents of the laicist regime, Gülen’s brand of so-called moderate, civil, tolerant Islam appeared “castrated.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Many Turkish Islamists claimed “interreligious dialogue” itself to be a missionary plot, citing Redempteris Missio, in which the Pope justified dialogue among religions as “a part of the Church’s evangelizing mission.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Thus, while agreeing on little else, Türkiye’s hardline laicists and Islamists condemned Gülen as part of an American plot to push “moderate Islam” onto the Middle East and thus reduce resistance to US goals for the region. Collectively, these arguments came to be known as the green belt (yeşil kuşak) theory in the country.

Despite broadly shared mistrust regarding his motives among Muslims hostile to his movement, Gülen’s role in interfaith dialogue only increased after 1999, when a judicial investigation led to his exile in the United States. The same year, Gülen founded the Rumi Forum for Interfaith Dialogue and Intercultural Understanding in Washington, DC. Thus, when the 9/11 terror attacks put Islamic “fundamentalism” irrevocably on the political map, launching a seemingly boundless “War on Terror,” Gülen was poised to play an even more prominent role as the personification of moderate Islam in the West, this time alongside Turkey’s newly elected Naqshbandi Islamists.

After 9/11: AKP, Moderate Islam, and “Green Belt” Theories

To many, the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on US soil confirmed Huntington’s thesis of an inevitable war between “Islam” and “the West.” They also initiated a “never-ending war on terror,” which led to the US invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) and the increased employment of extrajudicial drone assassinations across multiple countries.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while,” noted Bush on September 16, 2001.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ As the government instituted a new form of racial profiling by selectively registering, interviewing, fingerprinting, and deporting Muslim men who were in the United States on visas, some individuals took anti-Muslim racism into their own hands by committing hate crimes against people they perceived to be Muslim.

Seeking to expand the War on Terror into Iraq, Bush’s 2002 State of the Union speech leaned further into Manichean language as he declared that “Iran, Iraq, and North Korea” formed “an axis of evil,” threatening humanity. The statement shocked the State Department as well as Iranian officials, who had been collaborating with the United States in the fight against Afghanistan’s Taliban.Footnote ¹⁷¹

At the same time, the Bush administration took pains to establish that the United States was not at war with Islam itself.Footnote ¹⁷² His speeches were full of praise for Islam, which he characterized as a religion of peace that “made brothers and sisters out of every race.”Footnote ¹⁷³ Under these conditions, moderate Islam discourse not only flourished in academia and the media but also became institutionalized within US foreign policy.

Comparativism allowed policy-oriented scholars and think tanks to generate theologically tinted recommendations for the War on Terror era. The emerging consensus echoed one of the suggestions Professor Esposito and others had put forth at the 1985 Congressional hearings: Moderate Muslims were to be supported by US foreign policymakers instead of being lumped together with radicals.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ A series of RAND Corporation studies, such as “Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies” (2003) and “The Muslim World after 9.11” (2004), recommended outreach and dialogue with “moderate Muslims” to increase democratization. “Civil Democratic Islam” identified an ally in Fethullah Gülen, described as a “modernist” who “puts forward a version of Islamic modernity that is strongly influenced by Sufism and stresses diversity, tolerance, and nonviolence.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ While the Iranian regime appeared as a negative example as usual, the author Cheryl Benard also supported highlighting the activities of “modernist” dissidents. Another recommendation was to “build up the stature of Sufism” by encouraging cultural exchange and education.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ RAND’s “The Muslim World After 9.11” booklet similarly called on the US government to “foster madrassa and mosque reform,” support “Muslim civil society groups that advocate moderation and modernity,” and promote “moderate Muslim networks.”

Such recommendations implied that US foreign policy had to have a religious dimension when it came to Muslim-majority states and non-state actors. While the CIA had long-practiced theological interventions into Islam and other religions, the suggestion that the White House and the State Department boost “moderate Islam” meant the United States government would come to “espouse a particular religious position” about a specific religion, in clear violation of the first amendment.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

This could have been President Khatami’s moment – arguably, no world politician had done more to counter the clash of civilizations ideology and personify moderation, tolerance, and dialogue. However, Iran’s president was beleaguered by the conservative opposition within his country, and, with US hawks classifying the country as part of an “axis of evil,” collaborations with the United States appeared increasingly unlikely. Meanwhile, in Türkiye, a reformed wing of Erbakan’s deposed Fazilet (Virtue) Party, called the Justice and Development Party (AKP), won the general elections of 2002. With connections to Turkey’s Khalidi-Naqshbandi order, AKP’s cadres were visibly devout. Yet, in a remarkable change from Erbakan’s thundering anti-Western approach, the new government adopted neoliberal policies, seeking integration with the European Union and friendly relations with the United States.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

AKP’s leading cadres formed an alliance of convenience with Gülen’s followers to weaken Kemalist laicism and end the February 28 Process. Pushing through the democratization and liberalization criteria needed for membership in the EU increased civilian control over the military and also gained the new regime Western goodwill. Mainstream US and European media outlets began promoting Türkiye as a model for all Muslim-majority countries. Even when their reporting expressed uncertainty about the AKP rule, Türkiye–Iran comparisons, using the Iranian revolutions’ “bad Muslims” as foil, helped subsume concerns. From the beginning, as Cihan Tugal explains, “Turkey was offered as the path to follow not in abstract terms, but in subtle contradistinction to Iran.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹

The vision of Turkish Sufi Islam, at peace with the West and operating as a positive influence for other Muslim-majority countries, was not one-sided. Dialogue discourse appeared as an AKP foreign policy plank as well. In his writings and speeches, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu promoted a doctrine of “strategic depth,” which sought to improve the country’s relations with the West and Muslim-majority countries and build upon historical connections dating back to the Ottoman Era.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ AKP’s founding member, interim Prime Minister (2002–2003), and later President Abdullah Gül (2007–2011) explained, “At a time that people are talking of a clash of civilizations, Turkey is a natural bridge of civilizations. All we are trying to do is to use our position to bring Islam and the West closer.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ On May 28, 2003, Gül also gave a speech advocating for religious reform at the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers meeting in Tehran, drawing further attention as the face of liberal Turkish Islam.Footnote ¹⁸²

Although AKP had declared its foreign policy motto would be “zero problems with neighbors,” 2003 was a year of many problems in foreign relations, as the invading US army became an unwanted neighbor in Iraq. The Turkish parliament refused US demands to open a new front against Saddam Hussein from Turkish soil, frustrating the Bush administration. On July 4, 2003, US soldiers in Iraq arrested and hooded Turkish soldiers – accidentally, according to some, and as retribution, according to others. Anti-Americanism became the status quo across all political leanings. Thus, as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan prepared to visit the United States for a series of high-profile meetings and engagements in late January 2004, he had a tough job. He was getting ready to become an active agent in improving US–Türkiye relations at a time when Turkish public opinion, laicist and otherwise, had thoroughly soured against the United States.

In the United States, Erdoğan sought assurances that the Iraq War would not lead to an independent Kurdistan threatening Türkiye’s established boundaries and would not impede continued US support for the country’s EU bid.Footnote ¹⁸³ While courting the goodwill of US policymakers and opinion leaders, he became the face of the United States’s moderate Islam. In particular, Erdoğan was recruited into an ambitious, underfunded, and largely defunct project, which came to be known as the “Greater Middle East Initiative (GMEI).”

At its core, GMEI was a public diplomacy effort to present the Iraq War as part of a more extensive program to bring democracy to a Muslim-majority region sloppily defined as “the Greater Middle East.” This attempt to insert ideals into a controversial war and its chaotic aftermath intended to counter critics who noted the war had been launched based on lies regarding weapons of mass destruction and for oil, profiteering, and revenge. Although the Bush–Cheney administration’s concept of “the Greater Middle East” looked a lot like Huntington’s map of “Islam,” the administration’s claim that this region could and should embrace Western liberalism was deeply informed by Lewis and contemporary figurations of the Good Muslim.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

The administration workshopped and launched GMEI in a series of high-profile international meetings in 2004, which confirmed that the White House considered a key role for Erdoğan and Türkiye in this endeavor. The ground was set at the January 21–25, 2004, DAVOS meeting. Iran’s Khatami gave the opening keynote speech on January 21. As usual, he “projected a genial, reasonable image” and offered scholarly thoughts on dialogue and cross-disciplinary approaches to knowledge production.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ However, Dick Cheney’s speech three days later unequivocally vilified Iran, using comparativism with Türkiye. Iran’s leaders, the US vice president claimed, “must follow the example being set by others throughout the greater Middle East.” Türkiye was “the premier example” of Muslim democracy.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Further hinting at the fact that the White House was betting on Türkiye and Erdoğan to personify reformist, democratic, Sufi Islam, American Ambassador to Türkiye, Eric Edelman, visited the Mevlânâ Museum, giving a speech about the increased need for Mevlânâ’s ideas in the contemporary world on the same day as Cheney’s speech.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Erdoğan, for his part, underlined Türkiye’s EU bid at DAVOS and also referenced the peace- and tolerance-oriented teachings of Mevlânâ and Yunus Emre in his January 29 speech at the American Enterprise for Public Policy Research (AEI).

DAVOS was followed by a June 2004 G-8 meeting and a June 28–29 NATO summit in Istanbul, where the United States again promoted Türkiye as its preferred model. By then, the April 2004 revelations about US prisoner abuse and torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison had spent whatever moral capital the White House still claimed to hold. In addition, Türkiye’s laicists were seething over Colin Powell’s characterization of the country as a moderate “Republic of Islam,” as opposed to a secular republic as stated by its constitution.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Even AKP supporters were skeptical. “There is a paradox,” noted conservative author Ahmet Taşgetiren in the pro-AKP newspaper Yeni Şafak on January 22, 2004: “[the United States] does not want Turkey to be ‘an Islamist regime’ but also wants it to be ‘an Islamist regime’ to take on the role of changing Islam and the world of Islam.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ This was a familiar paradox, echoing a long-standing American ambivalence about Kemalist laicism. US politicians and opinion leaders now sought to resolve the paradox with the idea of moderate Islam, sometimes coded as “Liberal Islam,” “Turkish Sufi Islam,” or “Islamic liberalism,” with limited success.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

Still seeking to consolidate power within the country by pointing to Western support, the young AKP regime was warm to collaborating with the United States on this pet project. Sure, AKP’s leaders did voice concerns: Uncomfortable with the terms of comparativism, Davutoğlu claimed “example country” would be a more fitting designation than “model country.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ Erdoğan spoke out against the terms “moderate Islam” and “Islamist terror” at a meeting featuring Bernard Lewis and argued that the United States must first stop Israel’s “politics of violence” and stabilize Iraq to realize Middle East reform.Footnote ¹⁹² In addition, AKP cadres were largely sympathetic to Iran, marking another ideological distinction between them and the United States.Footnote ¹⁹³ However, at the 2004 G-8 meeting, Erdoğan accepted the position of “democratic partner” and GMEI co-chair, thus becoming permanently linked to the United States’s questionable project of bringing “democracy” to the world’s Muslims.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

Whereas once the intellectual cadres associated with the Pahlavi regime had sought to cast Iran as the home of mystical Islam, now the Turkish government was taking steps to link Türkiye, Rumi, and Sufism irrevocably. In 2005, Erdoğan became the co-sponsor of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) initiative.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Khatami, who had set intercivilizational dialogue on the UN agenda, was one of the advisors of the new initiative, but it was clear Iran’s ex-president had lost the spotlight to Türkiye’s charismatic rising star. The same year, Türkiye secured the UNESCO “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” designation for the Mevlevi whirling ritual.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ When UNESCO declared 2007 as the international year of Rumi, the country took the lead in organizing multiple cultural events and whirling dervish performances worldwide, labeling Rumi “Turkish” in the process.Footnote ¹⁹⁷

Although the US-led GMEI was hard to stomach, some Iranian progressives seemed open to considering Erdoğan and AKP as good models for the region. In his August 2007 editorial for the reformist Sharvand-e Emruz, Mohammad Ghoochani credited Atatürk with founding a solid party system despite being a dictator, mobilizing a standard Atatürk–Reza Shah comparison explored in Chapter 1. Instead of contrasting Atatürk and Erdoğan, however, he connected the two as Türkiye’s two founding fathers. According to Ghoochani, the electoral victory of Erdoğan showed that “in developed societies like Türkiye, Islamism can appear even more liberal than laicism.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Erdoğan’s revision of Kemalist laicism into “true secularism” meant Türkiye could now lead the way for other Muslim-majority countries to transition from state Islamism to civic Islam. Ghoochani’s editorial ended in a deeply optimistic tone, revising Mohammad Reza Shah’s famous words to Cyrus the Great: “Atatürk, rest easy because Erdoğan is awake.”

Not everyone was as optimistic. In his criticism of the editorial, Babak Mehdizadeh highlighted Shia–Sunni differences and emphasized that Erdoğan’s “Islamism” was just another form of secularism that could not be compared to Iranian reformism.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Veteran journalist Masoud Behnoud, on the other hand, noted the similarities and connections between the AKP’s political language and the thoughts of Iranian Islamic reformist and Rumi scholar Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945) but did not weigh in on the implications of the Türkiye model for Iran.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Arab-speaking intelligentsia and lay people, according to fieldwork and opinion polls conducted around the same time, were also intrigued by the applicability of the so-called Turkish model to their own countries.Footnote ²⁰¹

The debates proved largely moot in Iran as the tide turned against dialog and reform with the election of regime hardliner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in 2005. In 2006, Tehran University honored Coleman Barks, the American poet whose loose translations of Rumi had drawn much criticism for de-Islamicizing Sufism, with an honorary doctorate in Persian literature. However, the regime responded to the US promotion of Islamic mysticism as the West-friendly moderate Islam with a renewed crackdown on Iran’s own Sufi networks, arguing that the “creation of deviant sects” was a long-standing tool for imperialist penetration.Footnote ²⁰² Leading religious voices combed through Khomeini’s sermons, resurrecting anything that smacked of anti-mysticism, and issued anti-Sufi fatwas.Footnote ²⁰³ As Radio Free Europe reported on Iranian crackdowns on Sufism and the Council on Foreign Relations organ Foreign Affairs dubbed Fethullah Gülen “the Muslim Martin Luther,” Türkiye and Iran again found themselves compared and ranked, this time with the United States operating as the arbiter of true Islam.Footnote ²⁰⁴

Categories of comparison, however, were different for those who promoted green belt conspiracy theories, among them Turkish laicists, many Turkish Islamists, and Iranian opponents of the Islamic Republic. The latter blamed the Islamization of Iran and the removal of the shah on the United States, citing Mohammad Reza Shah’s 1980 memoirs and the CIA outreach to high-profile clerics in the 1953 coup.Footnote ²⁰⁵ For Turkish critics, the story involved the promotion of “a moderate Islam” in Türkiye to counter the USSR and, later, Iranian radicalism, with Gülen and Erdoğan appearing as leading agents. In an interview on the late Pahlavi regime, Brzezinski denied ever having heard of a “green belt” of Islam, but the theory was clearly an extrapolation from his “arc of crisis” formula and real-world examples of US collaboration with Islamists.Footnote ²⁰⁶

Was there ever a widespread conspiracy on the part of the US government to Islamicize Türkiye? There is no doubt that the United States government under Bush and Cheney promoted Erdoğan’s AKP, at least until the party had a falling out with the Gülenists and increased its criticism of Israel. While it is challenging to prove that supporting Gülen was official US policy, his pro-Western and pro-Israeli stance – helpfully sanitized of his history of anti-Semitic utterances – made the elderly cleric a popular candidate for US officials and scholars seeking a real-life personification of moderate Islam.Footnote ²⁰⁷ When the US Citizenship and Immigration Service rejected Gülen’s green card application in 2008, a who-is-who slate of experts on Türkiye, Islam, and interfaith dialogue wrote letters of support contesting the ruling. Among them were Morton Abramowitz, United States Ambassador to Turkey (1989–1991), and ex-CIA officers Graham Fuller and George Fidas. In our interview and elsewhere, Graham Fuller argued that he only met Gülen while researching his book on political Islam and wrote the letter as an independent researcher familiar with Gülen’s peace- and service-oriented teachings.Footnote ²⁰⁸ If true, he would not be the first or only American observer to search for an authentic antidote to Muslim militancy and find a perfectly crafted model of “moderate Islam” in the Gülenists and early AKP cadres.

Like moderate Islam discourse, green belt conspiracy theories resonated due to the power of gendered personification and comparison. Although the Qur’an describes believers as “the community of the middle way” (2:143) and urges restraint and moderation in multiple passages, “moderate Islam” is a neologism. Its most common Turkish translation has been “ılımlı Islam,” with an adjective that means “mild” as well as “compliant.” These connotations have led to a negative gendering of the term as weak and docile and have connected it to the loss of national autonomy and power.

In the early 2000s Türkiye, a whole cottage industry of political paperbacks flourished, making connections between the United States and Türkiye’s new Islamists and their “capitalism with ablutions.”Footnote ²⁰⁹ Collectively, the books argued that the United States, in alliance with Israel, had sought to undermine Turkish nationalism and independence by pushing “moderate” Islam onto the secular country through the leadership of the AKP and Gülen, thus making Türkiye a perverse “model” for the rest of the Middle East. Their evocative covers and provocative titles depicted Gülen and Erdoğan as America’s “coy lovers.”Footnote ²¹⁰ If gendered personification gave the theory fuel, its plausibility rested on the fact that, as this chapter has argued, Islamism was born of East–West encounters and shaped by US Cold War policy, as opposed to springing wholesale from ancient religious texts.

The road from the Cold War to the War on Terror saw Iran and Türkiye compared multiple times in revised and often contradictory rubrics. US opinion leaders, diplomats, and politicians did not just promote “modernization” in the region; they also critiqued perceived “over-westernization,” whether by Turkish Kemalists or the Pahlavis. The categories of “Islamic fundamentalism” and “moderate Islam” were, likewise, transnationally constructed through Türkiye–Iran comparisons and fueled by international power differentials. With Iran and Türkiye both able to claim the legacy of Rumi and Islamic mysticism, the United States picked sides and promoted models and foils. In the epilogue, I examine what the twilight of the US empire and the rise of regionalism might mean for the triangulated politics of comparison.