Page - 123 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:1

123 | www.limina-graz.eu hande Birkalan-Gedik | muslim | martyr | masculine ity. Examples for both cases include everyday practices in Turkey: Milita- rism is ingrained in the circumcision ceremonies of boys, who used to get dressed up as “secular” lieutenants, and are now dressed up like little sul- tans, which shows that different understandings of nationalism (secular or religious) have similar claims of “nationhood” and the military. The nexus of war, militarism, and masculinities remained a consistent feature in many societies and they preserved a naturalized dimension of military masculinity (Higate/Hupton 2005). Similarly, from its inception, Turkish nationalism and militarism have worked hand in hand. As Jeffrey Hayne argued: “The armed forces long enjoyed almost total control over their own pro- cesses of recruitment, training and promotion, resulting in the creation of a specific military culture facilitating the development of a specific role within Turkish society: the ‘hyper-secular’ defender of Atatürk’s revolu- tion” (Haynes 2010, 315). The Turkish military, for a long time, declared itself the guardian of the country’s secular national identity and as a centrifugal force in the Turkish Republic, which experienced many military interventions throughout its history. Ümit Cizre’s words on the Turkish Armed Forces are illuminating: “Since the founding of the Turkish Republic, the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) has enjoyed a pervasive sense of its own prerogative to watch over the regime it created and to transcend an exclusive focus on external de- fense. If the TAP’s confidence and ability to do so was not palpable during the years of single-party rule (1923–46), Turkey’s multi-party-political system has since 1946 been characterised by the military’s capacity to control the fundamentals of the political agenda in its self-ordained role as guardian of the Republic” (Cizre 2008, 301). As outlined above, the military creates, perpetuates, and acts to shape politics (Altınay 2004). In the case of Turkish nationalism, whether talk- ing about the secular or non-secular version, militarism is embedded in discourses of martyrdom. Both in the secular and in the religious version, the common ground is the “şehitlik” (martyrdom), which has its linguis- tic roots in Arabic, originally referring to “witnessing.” This self-decided death for a cause has been praised in almost all religions (Moss 2012), and For a long time, the Turkish military declared itself the guardian of the country’s secular national identity.