Turkey's Constitutional Zigzags

Abstract

Turkey is unique among contemporary Muslim societies. Modern Turkey emerged as a nation-state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 and has been a republic since 1923. Discarding the theological trappings of the Ottoman state, where the sultan was also the caliph, Turkey opted for the privatization of the Muslim faith, along the lines of liberalism and republican secularism ( laiklik ). The revolutionary ideology of the founders of the modern Turkish republic, Kemalism, was also a dirigiste ideology, granting the state a great deal of control over religious affairs and, for that matter, over the economy and civil society. Religion became a matter of private faith, and the state removed the theological vocabulary from its own proceedings, all the while acknowledging that Islam was the official religion of this society. The Turkish model of laïcité is unique in that the state continues to direct religious affairs: the thousands of Muslim clerics who serve in mosques are educated in state-sponsored institutions of higher learning. In the last three decades, however, this peculiar Turkish model has become destabilized, and the sociological firewalls that the Turkish republic tried to erect between state and religion have turned out not to be as thick as the Kemalist revolutionaries imagined.