Necip Fazıl Kısakürek's Copernican Revolution

Abstract

Abstract

Necip Fazıl Kısakürek is one of the most important, historical, epic and founding figures of Republican-era Islamism. Necip Fazıl is an intellectual, writer and poet who made the greatest contributions to the conservative imagination by assuming subversive and founding roles at a time when the established political, social and ideological order was fundamentally shaken and tradition was left in ruins. Kısakürek is the founding figure of Islamist idealism in the Republican era. His critical discourse on Kemalist modernization shaped the Islamist view of Turkish modernization, modernization itself and the West. Necip Fazıl personally experienced the existential crisis in the modern world and proposed a new order of life, a new living space (the Great East) centered on Islamic values to overcome this existential crisis. By validating the narratives of corruption, decay, collapse and decline against the narratives of modernization, modernization, progress and salvation, he questioned the legitimacy of the regime in the process of establishment. By targeting the official discourse's narrative of progress, he constructed an Islamist narrative of regression and this narrative determined the evaluations of Turkish modernization. In this article, we will focus on Necip Fazıl's aesthetic and intellectual revolt, his anti-modernist anti-Westernism and his search for spiritual renewal.

Keywords: Modernism, anti-modernism, metapolitics, cultural revolution, westernism, islamism.