Politics and Islam in Turkey

Abstract

Since 1937, Turkey has been officially defined as a secular state, albeit with a Muslim-majority population. However, secularism in the Turkish context is distinctive, a product of its particular historical experience and development. Both the Ottoman heritage and contemporary Turkey’s Kemalist founding fathers’ apprehension were decisive factors in the evolution of Turkish secularism (laiklik) and set Turkey’s experience apart from that of other modern secular states. Turkish understanding of secularism itself has never had one single, unambiguous interpretation in Turkey, but in general it is widely understood that it reflects a sense that the state should not be totally blind to religious issues, but also should never favor one particular religion over another. Thus, Islamic practice was carried over in the society from the Ottoman state to the new Turkish Republic and allowed republican elites to declare a new structural order, without losing hegemonic power over religion. At the same time, the older Ottoman tradition of state management of religion was retained. For this reason and as a continuation of a social and political heritage from the Byzantium Empire, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (hereinafter the Diyanet) was established in March 1924 in the wake of the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate and its associated institutions, including the Şeriye Vekaleti (Ministry of Religious Affairs) and the Evkaf (Pious Foundations). Even though the Diyanet started its journey as a protector of both religion (read the Oxford Bibliographies article “Sunni Islam”) and secularism, it started as a promoter of raison d’etat’s Islamic understanding, and afterward it was instrumentalized by dominant political structures. In this regard, Turkey’s attitudes and the Diyanet’s different positions regarding Islamic issues, as well as various sociological phenomena in Turkish society, have always played a determinant role in the political arena. Under these circumstances, Islam in Turkey, and its status in the political arena, has been contentious in different areas, such as the historical heritage of Islam’s role in politics, Alevism and other Islamic sects, non-Muslim others and minorities, Islamic communities and cults, institutional Islam, and women and LGBT rights. Furthermore, Turkey has been coming face to face with a new experience over the second decade of the new millennium: the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) and its authoritarian shift through instrumentalizing the religion. The party’s leadership, mostly coming from an Islamist background, recast itself as conservative democrats. They promised a new social contract between the state and society and called for a series of liberal reforms that would enhance the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, the freedom of the press, and the rule of law. Yet since 2011, the AKP has opened discussions advocating for a change from parliamentary democracy to establish an executive presidential system to consolidate its power, and Islam is one of the prominent pillars of this new process. In this respect, political Islam has been the subject of various studies in such diverse disciplines as political science, international relations, sociology, history, anthropology, religious studies, and gender studies. The sources cited here serve as a guide to the politics of Islam in Turkey, and they broadly offer an introduction to a deeper engagement with the literature.