In the beginning, there was the Ottoman Empire—initially a small country founded by a Muslim Turkish tribe, which gradually grew into a multiethnic, multireligious entity extending from Vienna to Yemen. Lasting for about six centuries, from the early on fourteenth century to the end of World War I in the early twentieth, the empire left backside a definitive legacy with which Turks take been struggling always since, in complex ways.
The Ottoman Empire was a Sunni Islamic state. Sharia, or Islamic law, constituted its key legal system, while its sultans, after the conquest of Egypt in the early on sixteenth century, bore the Islamic title "caliph." Meanwhile, equally early as the reign of Sultan Mehmed 2 (1451–81), the Sultans causeless the authorization to issue new laws, called "kanun," which were legitimized by sharia, but also divide from it—a secularity that would not be acceptable to the rigid legalists of Islam today, who consider sharia the only legitimate source of law. Fazlur Rahman Malik, one of the well-nigh prominent reformist Muslim scholars of the past century, grasped the importance of this Ottoman duality when he noted:
Although the country-made law was basically sanctioned past certain general principles in the sharia law itself, still a dichotomy of the sources of law was unavoidable, and this process paved the way for the secularization of law in several Muslim countries most systematically in Turkey. 1
In the nineteenth century, this legislative authority of the Ottoman land grew, with the empire's decision to establish a European-way centralized bureaucracy and to import modern laws and institutions from Europe. The "Tanzimat," or "Reform," edict of 1839 was a key milestone in this process, initiating an era of modernization that would include establishing equal citizenship (ending the centuries-old "millet" system of religious bureaucracy), more rights and opportunities for women, and the annulment of some of the illiberal aspects of sharia, such as the death penalty for apostasy. I of the key results of this process was the Ottoman Constitution of 1876, which read: "All subjects of the empire are called Ottomans, without stardom whatever religion they profess… Every Ottoman enjoys personal liberty on condition of not-interfering with the liberty of others." two
The reforms were driven partly by Western and Russian pressure level—those powers assumed the right to defend the Christian minorities in the Empire. Only the reforms also arose from the Ottoman leaders' own hope to win the hearts and minds of their not-Muslim "nations" in the face of the growing threat of separatist nationalism. Equally it turns out, this was the very threat that ultimately led the empire to collapse. Every bit in other similar cases, historians and pundits have criticized the Ottomans for either doing too much reform or not doing enough.
How the reforms were justified is an interesting signal to consider. In contemporary civilisation, legal reform in an Islamic state is often imagined to be realized through "ijtihad," a concept that refers to a jurisprudential revision within Islamic law. Most of the Ottoman reforms, all the same, were established not through reforming sharia itself, but rather by rendering certain aspects of it obsolete. Betrayment was decriminalized, for example, not through reinterpretation of Islam's classical verdict on it—the death penalty—but rather through a governmental prescript guaranteeing that "the Musselman is now as free to become a Christian as the Christian is gratuitous to become a Musselman." 3
This country-driven process of reform had many achievements. By 1908, when the Ottoman Constitution was reestablished after beingness suspended for more than iii decades by the autocratic rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the empire had become a constitutional monarchy with a multiparty system—a very advanced betoken from where, say, Saudi Arabia is today. The fact that reforms were introduced with a linguistic communication of utmost respect for Islam besides helped minimize the telescopic of bourgeois reaction.
There was a downside of Ottoman modernization, however. The country-driven process of reform created an over-empowered state. As the traditional function of sharia, and the scholarly class (the "ulama") that articulated it, shrank, the limitations on the power of the bureaucracy also eroded. In that location were attempts to fill the vacuum with liberal principles, articulated by intellectual groups such equally the "New Ottomans," and they had some influence on the making of the Ottoman Constitution and other key texts of the Tanzimat era. But ultimately the over-empowered land would render such shackles ineffective, and a newborn Leviathan called the "Turkish Republic" would assert its unlimited power to recreate the society in its own prototype.
Today, Turkey finds itself at another moment in which the definitions of secularism and the relationship between the regime, faith, and the public sphere are all in flux.
Today, Turkey finds itself at another moment in which the definitions of secularism and the relationship betwixt the government, religion, and the public sphere are all in flux. Just every bit in the Ottoman era, Turkish leaders' arroyo to these changes volition have repercussions for the greater region and the Muslim world more generally. A review of the history of secularism in Turkey—including its successes, failures, and unintended consequences—informs our agreement of the current moment. Farther, putting Turkey'due south gimmicky transition into historical context can reveal paths to a hereafter where secularism and republic tin can coexist—a remainder that has and so far eluded the republic.
The Revolutionary Republic
The Ottoman Empire entered World War I in 1915 on the side of the Central Powers (led past Frg and Austro-hungarian empire), with the hope of reconquering some of its former territories. In the cease, nevertheless, the opposite happened, and with the infamous Treaty of Sevres of 1920, the once mighty empire was reduced to a fiefdom in Anatolia—less than ane-fifth of the electric current size of modern Turkey. This scheme was ultimately averted thanks to the War of Liberation (1919–22), fought mainly confronting the invading Greek army. When the war ended with Turkey's victory, its key military leader, Mustafa Kemal, became a national hero. A twelvemonth later on, he appear the Turkish Republic and became its uncontested president until his death in 1938, having forth the way adopted the surname "Atatürk," or "Father of Turks."
A mother hugs her kid near a poster of Ataturk, founder of mod Turkey, during a anti-goverment rally, in western Turkish metropolis of Manisa. Source: Burak Kara/Getty Images
The Atatürk era in Turkey amounted to a single-political party authorities dominated past Atatürk's People's Republican Party, or CHP. It was non merely an autocratic regime that forbade dissent; it was too a revolutionary regime that wanted to transform society. Atatürk'southward ideological blueprint, which came to be known equally "Kemalism," rested on two main pillars: Turkish nationalism and secularism. Both represented a clean break from the Ottoman past. Nationalism implied a nation-state congenital for Turks, in contrast to the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. And secularism unsaid that Islam would not be immune to have any significant public role in this new, modern, Western-oriented republic.
Atatürk'south "revolutions," equally they are still praised in Turkish textbooks, were sweeping. The caliphate, an institution that symbolized Muslim political leadership since the Prophet Mohammed, was abolished in 1924, a year after the declaration of the republic. The "Ministry building of Sharia" was disbanded, and Sufi orders and traditional madrasas (Islamic schools) were banned, leaving backside lilliputian trace of organized faith, while mosques were placed nether government control. The Ottoman fez was banned and the European-fashion brimmed hat was imposed by law for government officials. The Islamic calendar was replaced with the Gregorian one, and the Arabic alphabet with the Latin. The teaching of Standard arabic was banned, as was, for a while in the 1930s, the performance of Turkish music. The goal was to make everyone bask "modern" (in other words, Western) tunes. Finally, the principle of "laiklik" (adopted from the French "laïcité") was established in the Constitution every bit a key feature of the Turkish Republic, forth with other "principles of Atatürk."
These "revolutions" were driven by a conviction shared by the Kemalists: religion, and in detail Islam, was an "obstacle to progress." Although they did non explicitly define themselves equally antireligious, the Kemalists insisted that religion belonged in the "conscience of individuals" and not in the public sphere. 4 "For Mustafa Kemal and his associates, the function of Islam in Ottoman society and politics was responsible for the failure to modernize," notes Binnaz Toprak, a Turkish political scientist.
The new commonwealth would undertake a serial of reforms both to emancipate the women and to destroy the influence of Islam in education, law, and public administration. At the same time, all religious brotherhoods of unorthodox Islam, the folk Islam—which they found to be the force backside the pop ignorance of rational thought—had to exist banned in the effort to create a new nation of men and women who would be guided by positivist ideas of reason. 5
Still this ambitious endeavour to create the New Turk would prove to be just a half-success, leaving backside not a fully transformed Turkish society, simply rather a bitterly divided 1.
The Religious Opposition
Between the two main pillars of Kemalism, nationalism, and secularism, the old has gained about universal acceptance in Turkish society—with the notable exception of the largest indigenous minority, which is the Kurds. (While other non-Turkish Muslim ethnic minorities—such equally Bosnians, Albanians, Circassians, the Laz, and the Arabs—assimilated into the larger Turkish body, about Kurds retained a separate indigenous identity, and reacted to its suppression by the land.) Likewise that Kurdish exception, whose political expression oftentimes claims some 10 percent of the electorate, nationalism in Turkey is today notwithstanding the near powerful political idea and sentiment, cutting beyond political party lines, including the Correct-versus-Left or secular-versus-religious divide. It is an assimilationist nationalism that considers all indigenous groups in the nation as "Turks," except the officially recognized not-Muslim minorities such every bit Christians and Jews, despite the fact that not all of those ethnic groups necessarily cocky-identify equally Turks.
The influence of Kemalist secularism, still, has been more limited. Certain parts of Turkish society, generally the urban population, welcomed the Kemalist cultural revolution and became its self-appointed guardians, to go on the Kemalist revolution intact, generation after generation. The armed services, and other primal elements of the Turkish bureaucracy such as the judiciary, became their bastions.
However, the majority of Turks opposed Kemalist secularism. This was repeatedly shown by election results, from the time of the first costless and fair elections in 1950. The majority of Turks voted over and over over again against staunchly secularist candidates. This bulk was largely made upwards of either rural or newly urbanized citizens, who demanded more than respect for religion and tradition than the Kemalists were willing to grant. Oftentimes dubbed as "conservatives," these more traditional Turks repeatedly brought Center-Correct parties to power—the Democrat Party in the 1950s, the Justice Party in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Homeland Political party in the 1980s and 1990s. These parties never challenged secularism as such. They but advocated, and tried to implement, a more than religion-friendly secularism.
Meanwhile, outright opposition to secularism has been a radical and even illegal concept. The only place the thought found a home, oft implicitly rather than explicitly, was amongst Turkish Islamists, who appealed to some 10–15 percent of Turkish society, as indicated by election results and surveys. These Islamists consisted of Sufi orders; the pop "Nur" motility led by Said Nursi (1877–1960), forth with its various offshoots, including the Gulen Motion; intellectuals, some of whom got inspired by the Iranian Revolution of 1979; and ordinary pious Turks who felt humiliated by a Westernized aristocracy. 6
Islamist poet Necip Fazıl powerfully expressed the Islamists' feelings in his 1949 poem, "Sakarya." "You are a stranger in your own abode, a pariah in your own land," Fazıl called on to the Anatolian river Sakarya, which stood equally a metaphor for the traditional Turk. And at the end he made a powerful telephone call: "You have crawled too long on your face; go up on your feet, Sakarya!" For decades this line would be reiterated in Islamic rallies by those who longed for the mean solar day they would really "get up on their feet," and go their land dorsum.
The term "national" was a euphemism for "Islamic," as Kemalism and all its secular content was seen every bit a despicable import from the alien W.
Politically, the Islamist energy found its mainstream expression in the move led past Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011), who get-go appeared in the late 1960s with his National Social club Party. 7 The term "national" was a euphemism for "Islamic," as Kemalism and all its secular content was seen as a despicable import from the alien West.
Erbakan's political parties were repeatedly closed down past the draconian country security courts, only to be reopened with a new name. In 1996, he became Turkey's prime government minister for the first fourth dimension, thank you to a coalition regime with a Center-Right political party, simply this only triggered what's commonly referred to as Turkey's "post-modern coup," which began in February 1997 with the military's ultimatum to the regime. The staunchly secular generals who soon forced Erbakan to resign aimed at getting rid of an Islamist authorities. But they as well aimed at cracking down on "irtica"—a loaded Turkish term that literally means "going backwards" and which had become the official term for religious movements that challenged the Kemalist vision of a thoroughly secular society.
Erdogan'due south supporters celebrate exterior the AK political party headquarters on in Istanbul, Turkey. Source: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
The Headscarf Controversy
During the "postal service-mod coup," i of the central aims of the generals was to ban the Islamic headscarf in all schools and public buildings. Their concept followed the French notion of laïcité—French secularism—but took it to even more extreme levels. Accordingly, the presence of religious symbols in the public square had to be banned, for otherwise religion would have over and suffocate the secular citizens. It was, one could say, a doctrine of preemptive absolutism, since it was reacting to a speculative time to come threat, not i that had really yet emerged.
The headscarf controversy began in the 1980s, when Turkish universities started experiencing something unprecedented: female students who wore the Islamic headscarf. The new phenomenon was caused by Turkey's social transformation. In earlier decades, the families who would send their daughters to college were almost universally urban secular ones whose culture had little place for a dress code as bourgeois as the headscarf. Meanwhile, the traditional families whose civilization did include the headscarf had little interest in giving college education to their daughters, whose typical pattern was to become married soon after mandatory education.
With the growing urbanization and modernization of the bourgeois class, however, there emerged a new type of conservative family that sought college education for its daughters. The more these "turbanites," as the secularists dismissively chosen them, became more numerous and visible, the more the secularists felt uncomfortable. Every bit a event, in 1982, under a war machine regime, the newly founded Higher Educational activity Council (YOK), whose task was to oversee all universities, passed a round lodge declaring, "All staff and students of institutions of higher education are required to have wearing apparel and attire that accord with the revolutions and principles of Atatürk and are of a civilized and modest shape." 8
To brand it clearer what "civilized and pocket-sized shape" meant, the YOK further explained that female students had to "have their head uncovered and will not wear a headscarf while in the edifice of the institution."
Thus the "headscarf war" began. Eventually, the conflict would go a fundamental symbol of Turkey'southward culture state of war, akin to the controversy over ballgame in the United States. In the adjacent 3 decades, secularists tried to impose the ban on the headscarf, which extended from the universities to other public buildings, including sometimes fifty-fifty hospitals. Meanwhile, Islamists, conservatives, and even secular liberals defended the right to wear a headscarf.
A key moment in this battle was the 1989 decision by the Turkish Constitutional Court, which annulled a law passed by parliament a year earlier stating that in universities the "hair and neck may be covered with headscarf or turban considering of religious beliefs." The court found in this law a violation of the constitutional principle of secularism, which it emphatically defined equally non separation of land and religion, but rather "a style of life," and a campaign against the "dogmatism of the Eye Ages." The landmark decision read:
Laiklik is a way of life, which bases nationalization, independence, national sovereignty, and the ideal of humanity upon the prevalence of reason, liberty, and commonwealth that developed through the scientific Enlightenment by destroying the dogmatism of the Middle Ages.… Although, in a narrow sense, [laiklik] is defined as the separation of state diplomacy from those of religion, it is, indeed, widely accepted in the literature that it signifies the final stage of the intellectual and organizational evolution that societies have experienced. Laiklik is a social breakthrough based on sovereignty, democracy, freedom and information likewise as a contemporary regulator of political, social and cultural life… 9
This was a articulate statement that Turkish secularism wasn't about the separation of church and state. Instead, it was about the country'south duty to secularize society by imposing a "mode of life" that had no visible trace of traditional faith.
In 1991, the same constitutional court further explained why Turkish secularism "has a historical particularity" and that information technology must be practiced "in a different way from the West." It also warned that whatever legal attempt by Parliament to set the headscarf free in the public square "bases public regulation upon religious provisions and, thus, is against the principle of laiklik." 10
The main concern of Turkish secularists was freedom from religion, and nearly never freedom of religion.
Turkey'south authoritarian secularists purported to accept faith equally long as it remained in its place, in the conscience of individuals, but they found headscarf-wearing a bridge also far. So too, when religious individuals tried to create civil society organizations based on their faith, secularists intervened to supposedly protect "freedom." The main business organization of Turkish secularists was liberty from organized religion, and almost never liberty of religion.
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A Way Out: Soft Secularism
For any serious Muslim with a commitment to practice his faith and manifest information technology in society, Kemalist secularism was difficult to accept. It was identified with humiliating bans, and also constant harassment of Islamic communities and their opinion leaders. Therefore, overthrowing the secular club and enacting in its place an Islamic regime became a kind of utopian goal amidst the Islamists.
However, the larger conservative majority plant a more than pragmatic solution: supporting the forces that advocated a softer, more liberal, more religion-friendly secularism. These forces included Center-Right political parties, and, particularly in the 1990s and onward, "the liberals" every bit a new intellectual strength that defied both the secularism and the nationalism of the Kemalist establishment as oppressive doctrines. Among these anti-Kemalist circles, the differences between American (or "Anglo-Saxon") and French versions of secularism became an oft-repeated theme.
In the first decade of the new millennium, the two fundamental main actors of pro-Islamic politics—the ruling Justice and Evolution Party (AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and its best ally at the time, the Gulen Movement—both championed the American fashion versus the French ane. Every bit late every bit 2014, the pundit Hilal Kaplan, i of the staunchest supporters of Erdogan, was proudly noting that "the majority of Islamist actors and movements in Turkey," including Erdogan'southward AKP, "have patterned themselves on the Anglo-Saxon democracies" with the appetite to "establish private rights and freedoms." xi
A deeper and more theoretical arroyo was offered past the United states-based Turkish academic Ahmet Kuru with his 2009 book, Secularism and Country Policies toward Religion: The The states, France, and Turkey. 12 Kuru argued that in France and Turkey the dominant credo is "believing secularism," which aims to exclude faith from the public sphere, whereas in the United States, it is "passive secularism," which tolerates the public visibility of religion. He too argued for the merits of the latter model. The book was published in English but was also reproduced in Turkish, and supplied the bourgeois media with helpful intellectual ammunition confronting the secularists.
The redefinition of secularism every bit the guarantee of religious freedom has allowed the AKP to actualize all the major demands of its religious base without ever challenging the constitutional principle of laiklik. In the early 2010s the headscarf ban gradually vanished in all state institutions. Sufi orders and other Islamic communities found more freedom—and in fact, privilege—than e'er before, at least as long as they supported the government. In Apr 2017, Erdogan oversaw a major amendment to the Turkish Constitution, transforming the century-old parliamentary system into a presidential i—but he did not touch the place of laiklik in the Constitution. After all, the mode that laiklik was being interpreted made it increasingly defanged, and information technology no longer created a major problem for Turkey's pro-Islamic majority.
Notwithstanding, any objective observer can see that laiklik nevertheless creates many bug for other segments of Turkish society. The Sunni majority keeps enjoying the blessings of state support for their faith—evident everywhere from the huge budget of the Directorate of Religious Diplomacy, which finances all mosques with taxpayer coin, to the education system, which includes compulsory pro-Sunni religious education. Minorities tin easily feel excluded. Turkey'southward largest religious minority, the Alevis, do not enjoy any support for their houses of worship. thirteen Turkey's tiny not-Muslim communities—Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Syriac Christians—take seen some progress in their rights during the AKP era, just nearly of them yet have rightful demands that accept not been met yet.
Volition Turkish Secularism Survive under the AKP?
For virtually Turkish observers, in that location is a stark gap between the AKP of the starting time decade of this millennium and that of the 2010s. In the former era, the AKP had a widely appreciated record of liberal political reforms and economic success. That is why the party was supported by a broad range of Turkish and European liberals and was seen by Western capitals or the media as the iconic model of Islamists' capacity to turn into Muslim democrats.
This positive image, however, gradually turned into a grim one in the 2010s. As the AKP consolidated power and became the very establishment it used to struggle with, it lost interest in liberal reforms. The political party tilted toward abuse, nepotism, and ultimately authoritarianism. All this happened in tandem with the concentration of all power in the easily of Erdogan and the ascension of a cult of personality venerating "The Chief." Every bit of 2018, Turkey had get a example study of how democracies can devolve into authoritarian regimes.
Tens of thousands of Turks wave Turkish flags as they attend the anti-goverment rally, in western Turkish urban center of Manis. Source: Burak Kara/Getty Images
There is one irony in this story, though: While the AKP'southward struggle with laiklik had marked the first decade of the new century, laiklik turned into a not-issue in the following decade. Neither the main opposition party, the CHP, nor other opposition forces blamed the AKP for undermining laiklik any longer. Instead, they blamed the party, and specially Erdogan, for other misdeeds, such every bit not bad downward on opposition, silencing the press, making the judiciary subservient, and other themes related to authoritarianism. As for "secularism and religiosity," they have get "not an consequence anymore," as Speaker of the Parliament Binali Yildirim said in November 2018. 14
These developments, equally we have noted, are partly due to the fact that the AKP got from laiklik what it wanted: a reinterpretation of the principle as only a basis for the religious liberty of the party's conservative voters. Meanwhile, the CHP realized that the disciplinarian secularism that it had championed for decades had but alienated information technology from the conservative majority. The "new CHP" that began to take form nether the leadership of Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu, who has led the political party since 2010, toned down the rhetoric on secularism and focused on other issues. (This has led to some increase in the CHP'south votes, but not enough to win elections.)
The AKP got from laiklik what information technology wanted: a reinterpretation of the principle as but a ground for the religious freedom of the party's conservative voters.
But does this hateful that laiklik has permanently become a non-issue in Turkey, and that pro-Erdogan conservatives are content with a soft secular state that gives them all the religious liberty they want?
It may exist too early on to reply this question. First, the Erdogan authorities may accept many years ahead. Second, we have seen that Erdogan has been capable of using unlike narratives and having different allies in the different phases of his political career. A more than explicitly Islamist Erdogan regime thus cannot be ruled out.
An Islamist Roadmap
To get a ameliorate sense of what Turkey's new ruling elites recollect of secularism, information technology may be helpful to listen to their stance leaders, one of whom is Hayretin Karaman. Equally a professor emeritus of Islamic police force and a longtime columnist of the Islamist daily Yeni Şafak, he is a prominent authority in Turkey's bourgeois Islamic circles. He is also a staunch supporter of the Erdogan regime.
In his column, Karaman has repeatedly addressed the upshot of whether living under a secular regime is preferable for Muslims, and, if not, what they are supposed to do. In i of his near notable pieces, "Living as a Muslim in the Secular Order," he argued that while information technology is nice that a autonomous–secular system allows Muslims to freely practise their religion, information technology is not enough. Islam also demands "Islamization," Karaman wrote, and that in plow requires that the "flaws" in religious exercise "are kept hugger-mugger, and good morals are manifest." Therefore, Karaman argued, "it is very difficult for Muslims who alive in the laic-secular systems to protect their religion and culture." Sins cannot be banned and "they tin can even be advertised in the media." fifteen Kahraman does not run into the practical incrementalism of Turkey's contempo leaders every bit the way to achieve these goals. "No uncertainty, the primal duty is to change the social club," he wrote. But he also acknowledged that such full reform "is non easily done" and requires "post-obit a long and narrow route." In the meantime, he added, governments with a "religious and ideological inclination" can "tilt" toward Islam, while Islamic civil society works hard to win hearts and minds. 16
In the Turkey of 2018, one tin can observe that the soft Islamization Karaman envisioned is already in progress. The AKP government is indeed trying to "tilt" social club toward its own agreement of Islam through various measures. These include increasing the number of country-sponsored religious schools; sanitizing the national education organization by excluding themes similar the Darwinian theory of development; discouraging booze consumption with extremely high taxes on alcoholic beverages and banning their advertising and promotion; and imposing "national and spiritual values" on mass media through the grip of the "Radio and Television Supreme Council." Meanwhile, Islamic ceremonious society, with the full back up of the government, is thriving in terms of resources and outreach.
This suggests that if the political dominance of Turkey'southward Islamic camp continues in the years and perhaps decades to come, the "long and narrow road" that Karaman mentioned could and then exist taken, and secularism tin can further be eroded to open the way for an explicitly Islamic guild.
The efforts of Turkish Islamists who promise to see a more Islamized Turkey are now having an unforeseen consequence: a powerful secular backlash.
People have photographs in forepart of the Hagia Sofia during celebrations for Eid al-Fitr at Eminonu in Istanbul, Turkey. Source: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
However, the efforts of Karaman and other Turkish Islamists who hope to run across a more Islamized Turkey are too having an unforeseen outcome: a powerful secular reaction. Similar to the conservatives' reaction to Kemalism, many Turks are developing a reaction to the disciplinarian, corrupt, and rough expressions of Islam that take become associated with Erdogan'south "New Turkey."
Every bit a result, every bit I recently explained in an article, "Why And then Many Turks Are Losing Faith in Islam," worldviews alternative to Islam, such as deism, are spreading fast in Turkish society. Turkey's conservatives, with their usual belief in foreign conspiracies, try to explicate this away as yet some other foreign plot to weaken the nation's spiritual ground. But fifty-fifty some exceptionally cocky-critical conservatives admit the reality: what has fabricated Islam quite unpopular in the past decade is primarily the behavior of those who claim to human action in the organized religion's name. This includes scandalously archaic, irrational, narrow-minded, or misogynist views of some of the religious scholars who have found much more conviction—and air fourth dimension—than e'er earlier. It also includes the unabashed exploitation of Islam by politicians—especially those from the ruling AKP. Islamists' ain beliefs in positions of power is pushing people away from the religion they claim to uphold. 17
Even some conservatives admit that Islam's growing unpopularity is due to the scandalously archaic, irrational, bigoted, or misogynist views of some Turkish religious scholars.
Turkish social scientist Volkan Ertit has written that "God is dying Turkey," in line with most modern Western societies. In his view, despite the "clear Islamic sensitivities" of the party that has ruled Turkey since 2002, data shows that "praying rates have decreased, extramarital sexual [relationships have] go prevalent… the conventionalities in virginity is a bespeak of award for fewer people… [and] traditional family structures have been shattered." He argues that "the classical theory of secularization, which claims that modernization leads to secularization, tin withal explain not merely the social transformation seen in historically Christian and Western European countries and their offshoots, merely also the social transformation of Turkey." 18
In other words, merely as Kemalism'southward effort to de-Islamize Turkey only proved to be a half success, Erdoganism'due south nascent try to re-Islamize Turkey will most likely evidence to exist a one-half-success also—and, similarly, will only aid further carve up Turkish society, rather than fully transform it.
Toward Evolutionary Secularism
In the late Ottoman Empire, de facto secularization aimed to create a non-confessional Ottoman identity that could embrace all Ottoman citizens. This liberal attempt achieved a lot for its time, though it was relatively brusk-lived. In contrast, the revolutionary efforts at secularization in Turkey in the modern era produced a whiplash effect, and proved unable to sustain without disciplinarian command. This suggests that the all-time path to secularization may well be evolutionary, in the mold of the Great britain, rather than the revolutionary path, as exemplified by France. Constitutional monarchies in the Arab world today, such as Jordan and Kingdom of morocco, which are considerably freer than near Arab states, can be seen equally Ottoman-similar models of gradual modernization. 19
Turkey's story, however, also serves every bit a warning. Secularization achieved past the wrong means may not give nascency to a liberal country, simply rather to a draconian ane unchecked by all traditional constraints as well every bit modern ones. The main secular regimes in the Arab world—the republican dictatorships in Egypt, Syrian arab republic, and pre-2003 Republic of iraq—are testimonies to this jumbo trouble.
The secularism of the young Turkish Democracy was just too radical and illiberal to be accustomed by pious segments of Turkish order. It did introduce some beauteous reforms in a top-down fashion, such as advancing women's rights, but its authoritarianism created opposition—an opposition that manifested not simply equally resistance to the absolutism but besides to the secularism that came forth with it. This opposition may yet prove to be Turkish secularism'south demise. It is unfortunate that this is the main model of secularism the Muslim earth has been exposed too, whereas the more benign models of the secular state are largely unknown.
Protesters clash with riot police during a demonstration most Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey. Source: Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images
Admittedly, there is a counterargument to the proffer above: that a top-down secularism is necessary to push a securely religious society into a secular future. That is how modernistic values take root in society, the argument goes, while suppressing some freedoms for the greater practiced. (This is the argument of "chivalrous authoritarianism," ofttimes made by the Kemalists.) Since the alternative of liberal secularism in a securely religious guild has never been tried in the Muslim earth, information technology is hard to counterbalance this argument. Ultimately, one's subjective preference may depend on what ane prioritizes: liberalism or secularism. (This author prioritizes the former.)
The Turkish conservatives' longtime preference for an American-type liberal secularism provides a promising lesson, showing how Islam tin can be compatible with a secular guild. The literature produced in Turkey about this Islamic-liberal synthesis is worth exploring and expanding. However, it is also truthful that no matter how Islam-friendly a secular model is, information technology will not be enough for Islamists who believe that religion—and its "morals"—should dominate the public space. For liberal secularism to thrive, mainstream classical Islam, as articulated by jurists such as Karaman, must take reformist steps to carelessness this deep-seated triumphalism, and to accept being only one of the competing value systems in an open up society.
This policy study is role of Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Struggle for Rights, Pluralism, and Inclusion in the Eye East, a TCF project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Cover Photo: Anti-government protestors ride a ferry boat from the Asian to the European side of Istanbul in order to get to Taksim Foursquare on in Istanbul, Turkey. Source: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
Notes
Fazlur Rahman, Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 156.
"The Ottoman Constitution (23 December 1876)," Türk Anayasa Hukuku Sitesi (Turkish Ramble Constabulary Website), accessed December three, 2018, http://www.anayasa.gen.tr/1876constitution.htm,
Run across Selim Deringil, "'There Is No Compulsion in Organized religion': On Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire: 1839–1856," Comparative Studies in Gild and History 42, no. iii (July 2000): 547–75. The quote uses a mutual English term for "Muslim" from the nineteenth century
More than literally, Recep Peker, the general secretarial assistant of Atatürk's CHP, said in 1936: "In Turkey, religious considerations cannot go beyond the skin of the body of the citizen… It has no place in social club, administration or politics." (Recep Peker, "Uluslaşma-Devletleşme," Ülkü Halkevleri Mecmuası 7, no. 41 (July 1936): 3. Over the decades, the thought that religion tin exist "just in the censor of individuals" became common parlance in Kemalist Turkey.
Binnaz Toprak, "Secularism and Islam: The Building of Modernistic Turkey," Macalester International 15, fine art. 9 (2005), http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/macintl/vol15/iss1/ix.
The Gulen Motility became a decisive political role player in the 2010s, with its immense power in the bureaucracy, as first the best ally and then the worst enemy of the Justice and Development Party governments led past Erdogan. The group's credible interest in the failed coup attempt in 2016 totally criminalized and delegitimized it inside Turkey, leaving information technology with room to maneuver but away, especially in the Westward.
Known in Turkish as "Milli Nizam Partisi."
Dilek Cindoğlu, "Headscarf Ban and Bigotry: Professional Headscarved Women in The Labor Market," Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (Istanbul: TESEV Publications, 2011), 34, http://tesev.org.tr/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Headscarf_Ban_And_Discrimination.pdf.
"The Changing View of the Turkish Constitutional Court in Defining the Laiklik," Political and Social Research Institute of Europe, accessed December 7, 2018, http://ps-europe.org/the-irresolute-view-of-the-turkish-constitutional-courtroom-in-defining-the-laiklik/. Some grammatical corrections have been made to the quoted translation.
"The Irresolute View of the Turkish Constitutional Court."
Hilal Kaplan, "'Secularist' Erdoğan," Daily Sabah, July 16, 2014, https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/hilal_kaplan/2014/07/16/secularist-erdogan.
Ahmet Kuru, Secularism and State Policies toward Faith: The United States, French republic, and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Alevis share many beliefs with Shia Islam, though near do non identify as Shias. They follow a less legalist interpretation of Islam, where strict rules and rituals are replaced with moral preaching and unorthodox rituals such equally the "cem," which brings men and women together for a folkloric dance.
"Laik-dindar çatışması geride kaldı" (The Religious-Secular Conflict Is a Affair of the Past), Yeni Şafak, Nov 16, 2018, https://www.yenisafak.com/gundem/laik-dindar-catismasi-geride-kaldi-3409096.
"Laik Düzende Müslümanca Yaşamak" (Living as a Muslim in the Secular Club), Yeni Şafak, June iii, 2016, https://www.yenisafak.com/yazarlar/hayrettinkaraman/laik-duzende-muslumanca-yaamak-2030153.
"Living every bit a Muslim in the Secular Order."
"Why So Many Turks Are Losing Faith in Islam," Al-Monitor, April 16, 2018, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/04/turkey-why-so-many-turks-are-losing-faith-in-islam.html.
Ertit, "God Is Dying in Turkey likewise: Application of Secularization Theory to a Not-Christian Society," Open Theology iv, no. one (2014): 192–211.
That Morocco and Jordan are freer than about Arab states (with the single exception of Tunisia) is suggested by the "Freedom in the Globe" map by Liberty Business firm, (accessed December 7, 2018), https://freedomhouse.org/report/liberty-globe/freedom-globe-2018, as well as the Cato Institute'southward Human being Freedom Index (accessed December seven, 2018), https://world wide web.cato.org/human-freedom-index.
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