Enlightenment by Fiat: Secularization and Democracy in Turkey

Abstract

Although secularization is often considered to be an inevitable and universal phenomenon closely tied to modernization in general, it is arguably a peculiarly Western European experience. State–religion relations have taken a variety of divergent forms in different social and historical contexts. The secularization problematic, as we know it, however, arose out of a specific geography and a specific historical period, only to be then generalized to the whole world as if it were a universal problem. This article argues that, like the modernization theory of development, the theory of secularization is not only a eurocentric way of knowing; it is also a Eurocentric mode of exerting power globally. Despite the diversity even within the western experience itself, particularly non-western (post-colonial) societies have been held against, or actually forced to conform to, an imaginary standard of secularization. In the modernization theory of development, the history of the Third World is never understood in its own right, but only judged in terms of whether the Third World has succeeded or failed in its efforts to replicate the ‘accomplishments’ of the First World. Just as development theory has begun to be dismantled, 1 the same needs to be done with secularization theory, which is not only based on a false projection about the ‘West’ itself, but often also involves a political imposition on the ‘nonwest’. The dividing line between the West and non-West is always vaguely defined, but Islam tends to feature quite prominently in popular conceptions of the non-West. Turkey, however, which is often portrayed as an exemplary model of secularization for other Muslim societies, tends to occupy a special place in these accounts, and hence provides a good example to illustrate the arguments of this article. Turkey’s national revolution is generally considered to have constituted a definite break with its Islamic past, both politically and epistemologically. Most forcefully stated by Turkey’s Kemalist elite, this assessment is also shared by scholarly analysts of Turkey’s modernization. 2 Rejecting the received wisdom on secularization in Turkey and, by implication, secularization in general, however, this article offers the following arguments. First, state–religion relations in Republican Turkey display revealing similarities and continuities with the Ottoman Empire. Second, unlike those Western European societies where ‘secularization’ in the classic sense took place (and from where unwarranted generalizations have been made), religion in Turkey still occupied a central political space at the time of the creation of the nation-state. Hence, third, in its efforts to suppress the political role of religion in the