The two-pillared laicism of the Turkish Constitutional Court: from the 1970s to the 1990s

Abstract

ABSTRACT The dominant scholarly view on Turkish political history, namely the ‘centre-periphery’ approach, has vociferously put forward the judicial and military elites as anchors of an entrenched unitary historical bloc, bequeathed by the Ottoman bureaucratic cadre, which had relentlessly defended a conspicuously definite Kemalist-assertive secularism in the republican period. Diverging from this mainstream historiography, an interrogation of the period from the 1970s to the 1990s shows that (1) the Turkish judges and military did not always act in a unified bloc; at times, they could not exactly agree on the practices and meanings of secularism. Thus, especially at the height of the Cold War, the judges did not only stand in opposition to the societal religious demands but also to some of the pro-Islamic tendencies in the army; (2) the linchpin of the laicism that the judges pursued did not stand in opposition solely with the Islamic religiosity but also impeded certain secularist societal demands. By investigating a selection of court decisions, judicial opinions, and other documents following the congruence method, the article shows that actors’ strategic preferences should be deemed relevant. A revision seems necessary concerning the mainstream academic lens for understanding Turkish laicism in the past and present.