Towards a Muslim Secularism? An Islamic 'Twin Tolerations' Understanding of Religion in the Public Sphere

TJP Turkish Journal of Politics Vol. 3 No. 2 Winter 2012 Towards a Muslim Secularism? An Islamic ‘Twin Tolerations’ Understanding of Religion in the Public Sphere Ihsan Yilmaz Fatih University, iyilmaz@fatih.edu.tr Abstract Since the mid-1920s, the top-down homogenization and secularization policies of the hegemonic Kemalist elite have aimed at socially engineering secularist nationalist Turkish citizens. he acronym LAST (Laicist, Atatürkist, Sunni, Turk) describes this ideal citizen typology. he state has also tried to monopolize Islam and has attempted to construct a state version of Islam (Lausannian Islam), marginalizing, vilifying and even criminalizing other Islamic interpretations. Nevertheless, non-state Islam and civil Muslim actors have not disappeared from the Turkish public sphere. One of these inluential actors is the counter-hegemonic Turkish Islamists. hey demand a role for Islam in the political realm, in a binary opposition to the assertively secularist Kemalists. Another inluential actor, the intellectual leader of the largest faith-based movement in Turkey, Fethullah Gülen, ofers a third way between these two extremes on state-religion-society relations. his paper endeavors to show that an interpretation of Muslim secularism that inhabits religious and secular worlds simultaneously, that is in critical engagement with them and that blurs conventional political lines on the hotly debated issue of state-religion-society relations is possible. his understanding of ‘Islamic twin tolerations’ challenges the artiicially constructed binary oppositions. It also resonates with the Habermasian (2006) ‘religion in the public sphere.’ It argues that the faithful from all religious backgrounds can legitimately have demands based on religion in the public sphere and in the inal analysis; it is the legislators’ epistemic task to translate these demands into a secular language in the legislative process. Keywords Kemalism, Secularism, Islam, Twin Tolerations, Hegemony, Rawls, Habermas, Fethullah Gülen 41 TJP Turkish Journal of Politics Vol. 3 No. 2 Winter 2012 Introduction he debate on state-religion relations is probably the most sensitive and unresolved one in social sciences. Its once staunch proponents have already declared the secularization theory passé. In the globalized world, religion has increasingly becoming part (and at certain times crucial aspect) of not only domestic politics in many countries but also in international relations (Fox 2001, Hurd 2007, Haynes 2007). Religions have not actually gone anywhere (Casanova 1994 and 2010) but have been tried to be socio-politically and also academically (Fox 2001) marginalized, viliied and suppressed. Even if it has gone, it is obvious that it is now coming back with a vengeance in some cases, i.e. al-Qaida, and ramiications of this negative resurgence have been intensiied with globalization. In some others, religion has been a basis of reconciliation and transnational and global peace building (see for instance Esposito and Yilmaz 2012). In the inal analysis, it seems that we will be discussing and debating state-religion relations and secularism for a long time to come. It is needless to say that Islamic perspectives on this issue will continue to be important part of state-religion relations and secularism debates. In this regard, this study endeavors to make a modest but constructive and optimistic contribution to this vital matter. In Turkey, the hegemonic Kemalist power elite who were the torchbearers of a civilizing mission of imagining and socially-engineering a socio-culturally homogenous secular nation has been assertively secularist, but the country’s one of the inluential Islamic actors, Fethullah Gülen, the inspiring leader of the Hizmet movement, is in favor of a passive secularist political arrangement. Gülen’s Islamic ideas have been able to survive in the face of the Kemalist project of Jacobin top-down homogenization and 42 secularization of the public sphere while peacefully navigating between religious and secular worlds. His ideas are in critical engagement with both the sacred and secular domains. his paper that draws on the author’s previous work (Yilmaz 2005, 2011 and 2012a, b, c) endeavors to show that Gülen’s ideas have actually blurred conventional political demarcations on the hotly debated issues of the state, religion, and society, challenging the stereotypical ideal types. First, the paper very briely surveys the religion in the public sphere literature, focusing on the Habermasian (2006) one. Second, it looks at the Kemalist hegemony’s understanding of religion and the public sphere. hen, it proceeds to elaborate on Gülen’s ideas to see if and to what extent a Muslim secularism, as it were, possible. In this study, the term ‘counter-hegemony’ is used to mean what Pratt (2004) has described as: “a creation of an alternative hegemony on the terrain of civil society in preparation for political change”. ‘Anti-hegemony’ is also about the participant resistance to the hegemony but it does not aim to replace hegemony with its own hegemony. In other words, while the counter-hegemonic powers also envision their own hegemony, anti hegemons pursue a non-hegemonic order, such as a utopian deliberative democracy. he deinition of Islamism in this study is based on the deinition by (Denoeux 2002, 61): “a form of instrumentalization of Islam by individuals, groups and organizations that pursue political objectives. It provides political responses to today’s societal challenges by imagining a future, the foundations for which rest on reappropriated, reinvented concepts borrowed from the Islamic tradition.” I add two more elements to this TJP Turkish Journal of Politics Vol. 3 No. 2 Winter 2012 deinition to strictly deine ‘politics’: Islamists are those people who claim to represent these political objectives and responses in daily politics and who claim to be involved in daily politics in the name of Islam (Yilmaz 2011, 247-248).1 Religion in the Public Sphere: Religion-Society-State Relations he academic literature on secularism is full of diferent competing deinitions: inclusive, passive, tolerant, liberal, benevolent, moderate, evolutionary, weak, ameliorative, principled distance; laïcité plurielle, positive, de gestion and bien entendue and their opposites: strong, intolerant, statist, exclusive, assertive, aggressive, or malevolent secularism are some examples (Bader 2011; Taylor 1999). In passive secularism, the secular state plays a ‘passive’ role and while avoiding the establishment of any religions, it “allows for the public visibility of religion” (Kuru 2007, 571). In assertive secularism, the state tries to exclude religion from the public sphere in addition to playing an ‘assertive’ role as “the agent of a social engineering project that conines religion to the private domain” (Kuru 2007, 571). Until the sudden eruption of religion into the public sphere in many parts of the world in late 1970s and early 1980s, a relatively widespread consensus had existed in the sociology of religion discipline over the privatization thesis (Repstad and Furseth 2006, 97). Since then, it has been realized “that diferentiation did not necessarily mean that religion would remain in its assigned place in the private sphere and not 1 For an explanation of this qualiication and critique of loosely using the term ‘Islamism’ for every socially active practicing Muslim, see in detail Yilmaz (2009). enter the public arena” (Repstad and Furseth 2006, 97). Some scholars such as Casanova (1994) have argued that during the course of the last few decades, a process of ‘deprivatization’ of religion has taken place in the world and even though a historical process of religious diferentiation has taken place in the West, institutional diferentiation does not necessarily result in the marginalization and privatization of religion. Casanova (1994, 219) divides the modern democratic polity into three: state, political society, and civil society and argues that in principle there can be public religions at all three levels. But in his view, only public religions at the civil society level are compatible with modern principle of citizenship. By contrast, in his elaboration on John Rawls’ (1997) political theory, in particular concepts of the ‘public use of reason’ and ‘translation provisio’, Jurgen Habermas (2006) has objected to this restrictive idea of the political role of religion and argued that other than the state level, public visibility of religions could be allowed at civil society and political society levels. Rawls (1997, 777) argues that “reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons— and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines—are presented that are suicient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are said to support”. In response, (Habermas 2006, 7) underlines that “religious communities and movements provide arguments for public debates on crucial morally-loaded issues and handle tasks of political socialization by informing their members and encouraging them to take part in the political process”. However, each time they have to “ind an equivalent in a universally accessible language for ev- 43 TJP Turkish Journal of Politics Vol. 3 No. 2 Winter 2012 ery religious statement they pronounce” as part of the duty of civility (Habermas 2006, 7). his epistemic burden results in a sort of self-censorship. It is obvious that “many religious citizens would not be able to undertake such an artiicial division within their own minds without jeopardizing their existence as pious persons” (Habermas 2006, 8). Habermas (2006, 8-9) concludes that “the liberal state, which expressly protects such forms of life in terms of a basic right, cannot at the same time expect of all citizens that they also justify their political statements independently of their religious convictions or world views. his strict demand can only be laid at the door of politicians, who within state institutions are subject to the obligation to remain neutral in the face of competing world views”. Citizen must agree “that only secular reasons count beyond the institutional threshold that divides the informal public sphere from parliaments, courts, ministries and administrations” (Habermas 2006, 9). Religious citizens too can agree to this ‘institutional translation proviso’ without splitting their identity into a public and a private part when they participate in public debates and discourses. hus, they should “be allowed to express and justify their convictions in a religious language if they cannot ind secular ‘translations’ for them” (Habermas 2006, 10). Kemalist Understanding of Religion and the Public Sphere he Kemalists believe that socio-political pluralism is an existential threat to their hegemony. hus, they have tried to homogenize society and assimilate the others to an ideal good citizen typology. Being a laïcist Turkish citizen is only one of the several requirements of being a good citizen. his ideal or palatable citizen is encapsulated by 44 the acronym LAST.2 LAST stands for Laïcist, Atatürkist, Sunni Muslim, and Turk.3 Laïcist does not mean a secular minded person, it refers to a person who is aggressively secularist and is not pleased with public manifestations of Islam. Below, we will elaborate on this issue in more detail. Atatürkism is usually used as a synonym for Kemalism but in this study it is used to denote a softer version of the Kemalist ideology. As long as one loves the founding father of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, deeply respects him and perceives him as infallible, one can be considered an Atatürkist (Yilmaz 2012a). An Atatürkist does not have to espouse the Kemalist ideology in its entirety. For example, while it is very diicult, almost impossible, to see a practicing Muslim Kemalist, it is not surprising to see practicing Muslim Atatürkists. As far as Islam is concerned, the main difference stems from the fact that while the Kemalists detest Islam and try to exclude it from the public sphere. Atatürkists do not have a problem with it as far as it does not 2 I am aware that the term LAST is a Weberian ideal type and thus a hypothetical construction. It may not strictly correspond to all characteristics of the mentioned individuals. It only emphasizes the certain elements common to most cases and does not disregard the factual intertwined, complex and hybrid cases. 3 Taraf newspaper columnist Rasim O. Kutahyalı (2010) used this acronym in his column. In his understanding, the LAST refers to people who have laic lifestyle, Sunni and Turk. My conceptualization is diferent. ‘L’ does not only refer to people with secular lifestyle since there are many leftist, liberal and so on ‘White Turks’ who are not laicist or assertively secularist. Laicists are hostile to public manifestations of Islam and try to marginalize and vilify Islam in the public sphere. Secondly, in my conceptualization, there is an additional element to LAST, which is “Atatürkist”. here are some leftists etc. who are also laicist but not Atatürkist. he Kemalist establishment may cooperate with them against Islam but will not accept and trust them as good citizens. TJP Turkish Journal of Politics Vol. 3 No. 2 Winter 2012 make any political demands and remains cultural and/or folkloric. Sunni Muslims who are not practicing have been the most trusted and favored citizens by the Kemalist establishment. To be a irst class citizen, a citizen must be, irst, a Muslim and, second, Sunni. However, a Sunni Muslim needs to be non-practicing (and if they are female, need to be unveiled). In other words, from the Atatürkist perspective being a Sunni Muslim only refers to a sort of secular cultural and socio-political identity not piety. Turks must be Turkish nationalist to be favored by the state. A Turk in today’s Turkey is not necessarily an ethnic and racial Turk with roots in the Central Asia. Many non-Turkish Muslims who had migrated to Anatolia have assimilated into Turkishness. his is a result of the Kemalist nation-building policies based on assimilation of non-Turkish Muslims and dissimilation of non-Muslims that started well before the Republican era in the Ottoman Young Turkish times (see Ülker 2005) and has continued in the Kemalist Republican period (see Bayır 2010). he state has worked hard to socially engineer these palatable citizens or ‘LASTmen’ by instrumentalist use of law (Yilmaz 2003a, Özman 2010), education (Zorlu-Durukan 2006), mosque (Yilmaz 2005), media (Yilmaz and Burak 2011), art, culture, and so on.4 All others that do not match all these four parameters (L, A, S, T) at the same time have not been fully trusted by the Kemal4 For a master’s thesis completed under the author’s supervision on the emergence and development of the oicial Turkish national identity and Kemalist variety of Turkish nationalism, through examining the deinitions of Turkishness and palatable citizen (LAST) type, see Çetinler (2012). ists hegemons and their state. he creators of the LAST identity have tried to exclude, marginalize, assimilate and vilify other identities such as leftists, liberals, Alevis, Kurds, non-Muslims and observant Muslims (Yilmaz 2012b). Newspapers, journals, novels, theatre plays, movies and so on that have been produced in the Kemalist hegemonic times are full of viliication examples. While the LAST types are always presented as the hero, non-LASTs are generally the villain. he non-LAST citizens have also been discriminated against by the Kemalist state whenever these identities become manifest in the public sphere (Yilmaz 2012b). hey have also been tried to be assimilated. he LAST socio-political identity has had bonding social capital but has lacked the bridging social capital (Putnam 2000) that allows a peaceful coexistence with the other existing identities. he Kemalists have resorted to several instruments and policies to secularize the society and the public sphere. here are several reasons why the Kemalists did not only focus on passive secularism that would guarantee separation of religion and state but instead spent most of their energies on secularization of society. Çarmıklı (2011, 2) gives three major reasons for this: (i) Kemalism inds the main fault for Turkey’s backwardness in Islam and the Ottoman worldview,5 (ii) Kemalism looks up to the West as the universal standard of modernity and assumes that Islam and the Ottoman Turkish 5 Kemalists believe “that Islamic Law was a dogmatic system and it was unable to provide answers to the ‘changing and evolving’ needs of the modern age. In other, later formulations of this idea, the Kemalists would disparagingly refer to the Islamic Law as ‘desert law,’ ‘the medieval darkness,’ or ‘the 1400 years-old dogmas’ (as opposed to the ‘youthfulness and vitality of Kemalism’)” (Çarmıklı 2011, 163). 45 TJP Turkish Journal of Politics Vol. 3 No. 2 Winter 2012 tradition are the barriers towards progress, and (iii) the lack of (as well as disregard for) democratic legitimation forced Kemalism to legitimise itself only through its original point of rebellion against the Ottoman government in Istanbul as well as its general rebellion against the Ottoman order. hus, while on the one hand, the Kemalists have tried to secularize society, on the other, anticipating that Islam would not simply disappear in the short term, they have worked hard to both keep it under their strict control and beneit from it for their secular nation-state building project, by modifying Islam towards a sort of civil religion through the Diyanet (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, the Presidency of Religious Affairs). he Turkish state wanted to use the already existing religion as a helping hand with a Durkheimian mentality (Yilmaz 2005, 387-389). Also, it has tried to construct an imagined top-down new version of Islam that I call ‘Lausannian Islam’. his is a state version of Turkish Islam within the borders of Turkey as deined by the Lausanne Treaty, and this version of Turkish Islam has disregarded Islam’s especially transnational, socio-economic, political and inter-religious dimensions (Yilmaz 2012a). Kemalist hegemony tried to create the Lausannian-Islam by using the Diyanet in addition to several other ideological state apparatuses such as intellectuals, the media,6 6 A PhD candidate under the author’s supervision is currently engaged in writing a thesis on this issue. She looks at the debates of who the undesired citizens in Turkey are in the eyes of the media by analyzing the media discourses regarding the undesired citizenship. he thesis will endeavor to trace how on the one hand, the notion of undesired citizen is reconstructed by the Kemalist-hegemonic media (Hürriyet 46 and schools. All other public Muslim religious manifestations that did not conform to the Lausannian Islam were demonized, viliied and even criminalized. In Lausannian Islam, Muslims practice their religion either privately at home or in strictly statecontrolled mosques, but not in the wider public sphere. Moreover, they do not base their socio-political arguments or demands on religion (Yilmaz 2012a). Similar to the Kemalists, the Turkish Islamists also have had the idea of top-down social engineering and state-centric view of religion (see in detail Yilmaz 2011). his makes them counter-hegemonic. Like many Islamists in other parts of the world, “the Turkish Islamists have also envisaged capturing the state and using it to socially engineer top-down Islamist transformation in society by adopting the centralism of the state” (Yilmaz 2011, 258).7 While the Kemalists have rejected Islam’s existence in the public sphere, let alone allowing it to inform socio-political discussions, the Islamists have envisioned to privilege Islam to have hegemony in the public sphere at the expense of the other religions and viewpoints. newspaper which is widely believed to be representing the Kemalist hegemonic elite) and on the other hand, how the anti-hegemonic media (Zaman newspaper which is ailiated with the Hizmet movement) challenges this very notion. he thesis will try to ind out if and to what extent there are not only the diferences but also similarities. It will also look at possible causes of these similarities (see Burak 2012). 7 It is telling that the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) which was formed by former Islamists resists demands of autonomization of the Diyanet. TJP Turkish Journal of Politics Vol. 3 No. 2 Winter 2012 Challenging the Binary Stereotypes: Gülen’s Understanding of Islam in the Public Sphere Gülen’s contribution has developed and matured through engagement with both hegemonic Kemalist assertive secularism and counter-hegemonic Turkish Islamism (Weller and Yilmaz 2012, xxii, see also Esposito and Yilmaz 2010). In contrast to the Kemalist and Islamist attitudes toward religion-state relations, the ultimate concern (Tillich 1951, 211) of Gülen, who is one of the several representatives of civil Islam tradition in Turkey, focuses on hereafter, spirituality and worship. He strongly argues that Islam is more than a political ideology. He puts that “(w)hen those who have adopted Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion in its true sense and function, review their activities and attitudes they claim to be based on Islam, especially political ones, will discover that they are usually moved by personal or national anger, hostility, and other similar motives” (Gülen 2005, 455). Gülen also underlines that the Qur’an is not a political book or project and warns that this “book should not be reduced to the level of political discourse, nor should it be considered a book about political theories or forms of state” (Gülen 2005, 456). Gülen stateds that there is no particular model for either the method of election or the system of administration in Islam. He explains “in Islam it is not possible to limit the concept of governance and politics into a single paradigm, unlike the principles of faith and the pillars of Islam” (Gülen 2005, 454). Gülen emphasizes, “Islam establishes fundamental principles that orient a government’s general character, leaving it to the people to choose the type and form of government according to time and circumstances” (Gülen 2006, 14). According to Gülen, fundamental Islamic political principles are social contract and election of a group of people to debate common issues (Gülen 2006, 17). He insists that: “(i)n Islam, ruling means a mutual contract between the ruler and the subject and it takes its legitimacy from the rule of law, and from the principle of the superiority of the law” (Gülen 2005, 450). He is of the opinion that “it is impossible to prove in any way that Islam opposes democracy” (Gülen 2005, 451). He does not see any contradiction between Islamic ideals and a democratic republic, as it is a system that can protect freedoms, human rights and dignity. In his view, “(a) true republic is a form of rule by elevated spirits and is the most suitable for humanity’s honor… he republic can be the mother or governess of freedom” (Gülen 2000, 147). He underlines that in Islam, individuals “are free to make choices in their personal lives. hey are also free to make choices with regard to their social and political actions. Some may hold diferent types of elections to choose lawmakers and executives” (Gülen 2005, 453). While explaining the Islamic theological reasons why people are responsible for their own fate, Gülen (2001, 135) also talks about free will and freedoms: Islam considers a society to be composed of conscious individuals equipped with free will and having responsibility toward both themselves and others… he Koran (13: 11) says: “God will not change the state of a people unless they change themselves [with respect to their beliefs, worldview, and lifestyle.” In other words, each society holds the reins of its fate in its own hands. he prophetic tradition emphasizes this 47 TJP Turkish Journal of Politics Vol. 3 No. 2 Winter 2012 idea: “You will be ruled according to how you are.” his is the basic character and spirit of democracy, which does not conlict with any Islamic principle. As Islam holds individuals and societies responsible for their own fate, people must be responsible for governing themselves (Gülen 2001, 135). He is aware that Islam does not restrict itself to metaphysical considerations only and that Islam also sets out rules that systematize individual, social, political, economical, moral, and legal life (Gülen 2005, 448). Moreover, he understands the problems and challenges facing Muslims in the contemporary age and deals “with them but he does not believe that politics is the most efective way to do so in the twenty-irst century” (Abu-Rabi` 2008, xi). It appears that Gülen is not counter-hegemonic bur rather anti-hegemonic. hat is why he advocates working “in the interests of domestic social transformation by striving to outperform rivals in the market, rather than to overcome them in political confrontation” (Hendrick 2009, 343). hus, he opposes the counter-hegemonic ideology of Islamism and asserts that “(t)his vision of Islam as a totalizing ideology is totally against the spirit of Islam, which promotes the rule of law and openly rejects oppression against any segment of society” (Gülen 2005, 452). Gülen’s understanding of Ummah “is a transnational socio-cultural entity, not a Utopian politico-legal one” (Yilmaz 2003b, 235). As a matter of fact, he “does not see the world in political terms and does not draw imaginary boundaries” (Esposito and Yilmaz 2010, 4). Gülen is an advocate of Shatibi’s Maqasid al Shari’a (Major Objectives of Islamic Law): “religion, life, reproduction, the mind, and property are basic essentials that everyone must protect. In a sense, Islam approaches 48 human rights from the angle of these basic principles” (Gülen 2000, 134, see also Gülen 2001, 134-135). Gülen underlines that Islam “recognizes right, not force, as the foundation of social life” (Gülen 2001, 137). In his view, Islamic principles of equality, tolerance, and justice can help democracy to reach its peak of perfection and bring even more happiness to humanity (Gülen 2001, 137). With regards to religious freedom, he is unequivocal: “As for those who don’t believe in Islam, leave them to their own understanding and lifestyle, for Islam’s commands are obligatory only for Muslims. If there is anxiety that people will be forced to do this when Islamic principles are carried over into public life, it should be understood that such a forceful act is not Islamic” (Gülen 2000, 63-64). On the protection of minority rights, he puts that: (M)embers of minority communities should be allowed to live according to their beliefs. If these sorts of legislations are made within the norms of international law and international agreements, Islam will have no objection to any of these (Gülen 2005, 451). He argues that if human rights and religious freedoms are fully respected by the state, then, there is no need for an alternative religious state: If a state… gives the opportunity to its citizens to practice their religion and supports them in their thinking, learning, and practice, this system is not considered to be against the teaching of the Qur’an. In the presence of such a state there is no need to seek an alternative state (italics mine, I.Y.). he system should be reviewed by the lawmakers and executive institutions if human rights and freedoms are not TJP Turkish Journal of Politics Vol. 3 No. 2 Winter 2012 protected enough (Gülen 2005, 451). As these quotations imply, Gülen is supportive of human rights discourse and the participation of individuals in decision-making institutions. Gülen does not oppose the idea of mutual autonomy of state and Islam (Yilmaz 2011, 262). He asserts that if secularity could function as it is in the West nobody would reject it (Gülen 1996, 133). He “advocates a total separation between the religious and political in contemporary Muslim societies. He thinks that the domination of the state over religious afairs has greatly harmed the cause of Islam in the present time and thus advocates the freedom of the religious realm from political authority” (Abu-Rabi` 2008, xi). On secular law-making, Gülen makes it clear that “(i)n Islam, the legislative and executive institutions have always been allowed to make laws. hese are based on the needs and betterment of society and within the frame of general norms of law. On domestic issues in the Islamic community and its relationship with other nations, including economic, political and cultural relations, Muslims have always developed laws” (Gülen 2005, 450). In Gülen’s thinking, religion is not reduced to a private or personal afair, but should be freely practiced in society. his conforms to the Habermasian understanding of religion in the public sphere. One can also ind traces of what Alfred Stepan calls ‘twin tolerations’ in Gülen’s deliberations. First of all, he makes it clear that “Islam has nothing to do with theocracy” (Gülen 2000, 65). hen, he puts that “one can practice authentic Islam without needing to live in an Islamic political system” (Abu-Rabi` 2008, x). With regards to religious demands in the public sphere, he advises self-sacriice: “If the religious people are thinking of living peacefully in this country, they should not contribute to the expansion of the conlict by challenging the fragile issues. Peace in a society can be achieved by mutual self-sacriice. It seems better to leave some issues to the interpretation of time” (Armağan and Ünal 1999, 76 quoted in Altınoğlu 1999, 69). It is obvious that in such an understanding, there is room for Stepan’s conception of twin tolerations: religious authorities must ‘tolerate’ the autonomy of democratic parliaments without claiming any constitutionally privileged prerogatives to mandate or veto legislation and public policy (Stepan 2001, 213-217). As a matter of fact, without labeling it as such, he seems to talk about twin tolerations in a speech that he made many years ago: If secularism means that state is not based on any religion, hence it does not interfere with religion or religious life and the state is neural towards all religions, then there is not a problem (Armağan and Ünal 1999, 108 quoted in Altınoğlu 1999, 103). Conclusion Anti-hegemonic Fethullah Gülen’s conception of Islam-friendly democracy is a key to understand his approach to sacred and secular relations. Gülen does not see a contradiction between Islam and democracy. With regards to state-society-religion issues, unlike the counter-hegemonic Islamists, he has argued that passive secularism that guarantees human rights and freedoms including freedom of religion could provide a wider framework to Muslims to practice their religion comfortably where other religious minorities also beneit from human rights. In his view, the faithful can comfortably live in secular environments if secularism is religion-friendly and understood 49 TJP Turkish Journal of Politics Vol. 3 No. 2 Winter 2012 as the state not being founded on religion, hence it does not interfere with religion or religious life; and the state is in equidistance to all religions in a neutral manner. It can be argued that Gülen’s approach to sacred-secular relations is similar to the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” since he has highlighted that Islam does not need a state to survive and civil society or civilian realm in liberal-democratic settings is suficient for its individual and social practice. his Muslim understanding of secularism or ‘twin tolerations’ (Stepan 2001) resonates with the Habermasian (2006) ‘religion in the public sphere’ which argues that the faithful can have demands based on religion in the public sphere and it is the legislators’ epistemic duty to translate these religious demands into a secular language when legislating. Obviously, this is more advanced than many current liberal secular democratic political settings. References Abu-Rabi, Ibrahim. M. 2008. Editor’s Introduction to Nevval Sevindi, Contemporary Islamic Conversations: M. 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