The Great East Ideology as a Non-Western Modernity Approach

The conception of non-Western modernities identifies the attempt to understand the modernity understanding of non-Western societies from the perspective of their own language and cultural structures. In other words, it is an effort to introduce a new perspective in the social sciences by bringing a new reading of modernity itself through a paradigm in which the West is shifted from the center. In this study, Necip Faz？l K？sakürek’s ideology of great east (Büyük Do？u) is analyzed as a non-Western modernization project. The great eastern ideology has been one of the renowned examples of Islamist / conservative thought shaped by locality, dissimilarity and property emphasis which are one of the main issues of Turkish modernization experience. The fact that K？sakürek provided an approach for every field that concerns the modernization process from politics to the economic and cultural structure has made the great east a good example. The analysis framework was established on the basis of studies done on the general characteristics of non-Western societies' modernization projects under the scope of the studies which are known as multiple modernities in political science and sociology literature. Nevertheless, instead of the concept of multiple modernities, the concept of non-Western modernity which was presented by Nilüfer G？le as an alternative concept to this approach is used. Peculiar concepts and methodology of the Islamism thought constituted the other parameters of the analysis frame