Understanding Turkish secularism in the 21th century: a contextual roadmap

ABSTRACT

This paper asserts that Turkish secularism and Islamism represent two faces of one coin – contemporary Turkish politics – when one considers their goals and strategies. The two ideological movements have shaped one another and each now seeks to impose itself as superior. This article unpacks these differences and similarities in the following steps: (a) it defines the socio-historic modes of Turkish secularism and (b) examines its social and political origins; (c) it then explores Islam’s return to the public domain as an oppositional Turkish identity; (d) and thereafter considers the diverse understandings of secularism resulting from neoliberal policies that relaxed state control over Islam, which then prompted socially-acceptable reinterpretations of Islam; and finally (e) describes how the AKP’s has re-imagined secularism while (mis)using Islam as a political instrument. The comparison highlights such commonalties as a collectivist character, a desire for state control as a vehicle to realize an ideology, intolerance of diversity and criminalization of other perspectives, and the differentiation of religion as morality in the private sphere versus its cultural role in the public sphere. It concludes that, under the AKP government, Islam is used as a tool to consolidate the power of Erdoğan’s kleptocratic regime.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkish secularism
• Turkish Islam
• Kemalism
• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
• Diyanet
• kleptocratic state
• Justice and Development Party (AKP)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Still the most influential work on Turkish secularism is by Berkes 1998.

2. Even under Erdoğan today, the purpose of the Turkish Islamist movement is not to free Islam from the control of the state. On the contrary, the policies of Erdoğan put Islam tightly under the control of the state.

3. These reforms, known as Kemalism, included abolishing the institution of caliphate, closing Islamic seminaries (medreses) and other religious schools, unifying public education and dissolving the religious courts (1924), banning the activity of religious orders, the so-called tarikats as well as the banning thee wearing in public of fezes and traditional hats (1925), introducing the Gregorian calendar, enacting secular codes based on the Swiss code, penal codes following the Italian regulations, commercial ones based on the German and Italian codes (1926), removing from the constitution the regulation about Islam as the state religion and the introducing the Latin alphabet (1928), adopting the code of criminal action following the German one (1929), granting voting rights to women in local elections (1930), converting Hagia Sophia into a museum, banning Mecca pilgrimages and on wearing religious clothes and symbols in public, granting voting rights to women in the parliamentary elections and passing a law on introduction of family names in the European way, banning the use of religious and Ottoman titles (1934), announcing Sunday as holiday and setting a holiday calendar as well as introducing laicism, besides other Kemalist principles, into the constitution (1937). For more, see Genç (2005).

4. Only with the democratization and the evolution of the market conditions were the Turks gradually able to overcome these divisions.

5. Read both Turkish Constitutional Court’s rulings on the Welfare Party case on 16 January 1997, no. 1998/1.

6. Turkish Constitutional Court’s rulings on the Headscarf case on 7 March 1989; no. 1989/12.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. Hakan Yavuz

M. Hakan Yavuz is a professor of political science at the University of Utah. His current projects focus on transnational Islamic networks in Central Asia and Turkey; the role of Islam in state-building and nationalism; ethnic cleansing and genocide; and ethno-religious conflict management. He is the author of 9 books and around 60 articles on Islam, nationalism, the Kurdish question, and modern Turkish politics. He has published in Comparative Politics, Middle East Critique, Middle East Journal, Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies, SAIS Review, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Current History, Central Asian Survey, Journal of Islamic Studies, and Journal of Palestine Studies. Some of his articles are translated into Arabic and Bosnian from English. He is also an editorial member of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs and Critique.