What makes turkey secular

Unencumbered by religion, Ataturk promoted ancient Turkish traditions and cultures as part of a series of reforms with the intent that nationalism would overcome the idea of an Islamic Ummah, or global Muslim community.

Building a state around a cadre of secularised elites, his ideas — known as Kemalism — blamed the demise of the Ottoman Empire on religion and altered virtually every aspect of Turkish life for the next eight decades.

Under several regimes, the political and legal system he founded prevented Muslims from exerting any significant influence in temporal affairs, with laws and the threat of force silencing pro-Islamic politicians.

Ataturk outlawed men from wearing the fez, and famously adopted a Panama hat to accent his Western suit and tie; a sample of the many ideas Benli says, which marginalised the predominantly Muslim population.

Over the 16 years that it has since been in power, the AK Party has been mostly pragmatic on the issue of religion and insists the country will remain secular, even if the country switches to an executive presidency. And this illustrates how divided Turkish society is. Should this happen it will clearly defeat this notion that Turkey is an Islamist State. But the process has opened old wounds, with heated debate on the role of religion in politics and the increasingly conservative nature of public life.

Turkey is constitutionally a secular state, but secularism seems to have taken a unique shape, because of "historical and geographical circumstances in the country".

For example, while there are clear examples of the symbolic application of secularism in daily life, such as the ban on headscarves in public institutions, there are other aspects of the Turkish state that do not sit with secularism. Some critics have pointed to the Directorate of Religious Affairs, and question its existence in a supposedly secular state. The directorate is staffed by public officials and funded from state coffers; but it only offers services to Sunni Muslims - the majority of Turks.

Minorities such as Christians and Jews, non-Orthodox Alevi Muslims and non-believers do not receive any services from the directorate. The public consultation process kicked off discussions on whether Turkey's current form of secularism should be reformed or redefined. This debate is highly significant since it will decide the level at which religion will be able to influence public and political life in the country. On this matter, many non-governmental organisations have been vocal. The Turkish Industry and Business Association Tusiad , a leading NGO, has suggested "secularism in Turkey is different from its version in the West because the state has not distanced itself equally from all religions, beliefs and non-belief.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has never shied away from controversy. For example, Mr Erdogan and his party refused to continue the strict ban on religion from all public domains and its limitation to private life.

Moreover, the prime minister has said again and again that "only states can be secular, not individuals". Most of the Ottoman reforms, however, were established not through reforming sharia itself, but rather by rendering certain aspects of it obsolete. This state-driven process of reform had many achievements. By , when the Ottoman Constitution was reestablished after being suspended for more than three decades by the autocratic rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the empire had become a constitutional monarchy with a multiparty system—a very advanced point from where, say, Saudi Arabia is today.

The fact that reforms were introduced with a language of utmost respect for Islam also helped minimize the scope of conservative reaction. There was a downside of Ottoman modernization, however. The state-driven process of reform created an over-empowered state. Today, Turkey finds itself at another moment in which the definitions of secularism and the relationship between the government, religion, and the public sphere are all in flux.

A review of the history of secularism in Turkey—including its successes, failures, and unintended consequences—informs our understanding of the current moment. In the end, however, the opposite happened, and with the infamous Treaty of Sevres of , the once mighty empire was reduced to a fiefdom in Anatolia—less than one-fifth of the current size of modern Turkey. This scheme was ultimately averted thanks to the War of Liberation —22 , fought mainly against the invading Greek army.

It was not merely an autocratic regime that forbade dissent; it was also a revolutionary regime that wanted to transform society. Both represented a clean break from the Ottoman past.

Nationalism implied a nation-state built for Turks, in contrast to the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. And secularism implied that Islam would not be allowed to have any significant public role in this new, modern, Western-oriented republic.

The caliphate, an institution that symbolized Muslim political leadership since the Prophet Mohammed, was abolished in , a year after the declaration of the republic. The Ottoman fez was banned and the European-style brimmed hat was imposed by law for government officials. The Islamic calendar was replaced with the Gregorian one, and the Arabic alphabet with the Latin.

The teaching of Arabic was banned, as was, for a while in the s, the performance of Turkish music. The new republic would undertake a series of reforms both to emancipate the women and to destroy the influence of Islam in education, law, and public administration. At the same time, all religious brotherhoods of unorthodox Islam, the folk Islam—which they found to be the force behind the popular ignorance of rational thought—had to be banned in the effort to create a new nation of men and women who would be guided by positivist ideas of reason.

Yet this ambitious effort to create the New Turk would prove to be only a half-success, leaving behind not a fully transformed Turkish society, but rather a bitterly divided one. Between the two main pillars of Kemalism, nationalism, and secularism, the former has gained almost universal acceptance in Turkish society—with the notable exception of the largest ethnic minority, which is the Kurds.

While other non-Turkish Muslim ethnic minorities—such as Bosnians, Albanians, Circassians, the Laz, and the Arabs—assimilated into the larger Turkish body, most Kurds retained a separate ethnic identity, and reacted to its suppression by the state. Besides that Kurdish exception, whose political expression often claims some 10 percent of the electorate, nationalism in Turkey is today still the most powerful political idea and sentiment, cutting across party lines, including the Right-versus-Left or secular-versus-religious divide.

The influence of Kemalist secularism, however, has been more limited. Certain parts of Turkish society, mostly the urban population, welcomed the Kemalist cultural revolution and became its self-appointed guardians, to keep the Kemalist revolution intact, generation after generation. The military, and other key elements of the Turkish bureaucracy such as the judiciary, became their bastions. However, the majority of Turks opposed Kemalist secularism.

This was repeatedly shown by election results, from the time of the first free and fair elections in The majority of Turks voted over and over again against staunchly secularist candidates. This majority was largely made up of either rural or newly urbanized citizens, who demanded more respect for religion and tradition than the Kemalists were willing to grant.

These parties never challenged secularism as such. They only advocated, and tried to implement, a more religion-friendly secularism. Meanwhile, outright opposition to secularism has been a radical and even illegal concept. The only place the idea found a home, often implicitly rather than explicitly, was among Turkish Islamists, who appealed to some 10—15 percent of Turkish society, as indicated by election results and surveys.

Politically, the Islamist energy found its mainstream expression in the movement led by Necmettin Erbakan — , who first appeared in the late s with his National Order Party. The staunchly secular generals who soon forced Erbakan to resign aimed at getting rid of an Islamist government.

Accordingly, the presence of religious symbols in the public square had to be banned, for otherwise religion would take over and suffocate the secular citizens. It was, one could say, a doctrine of preemptive authoritarianism, since it was reacting to a speculative future threat, not one that had actually yet emerged.