Religious Politics in Turkey: From the Birth of the Republic
to the AKP by Ceren Lord
europenowjournal.org/2019/09/09/religious-politics-in-turkey-from-the-birth-of-the-republic-to-the-akpby-ceren-lord/
Once regarded as the poster child of Islam’s
compatibility with democracy, Turkey is now
drawing attention to itself for different
reasons. The country’s rapid and unexpected
authoritarian turn in recent years has
unsettled many observers both at home and
abroad. Turkey’s nearly century-old “Kemalist
Republic” has been declared dead in the wake
of the April 2017 constitutional referendum.
With that death, so the argument goes, the
potential for a “secular” Turkey has also faded.
The conventional wisdom holds that these
developments reflect the triumph of the socalled “religious masses” over an authoritarian
secularist state. Religious Politics in Turkey: From
the Birth of the Republic to the AKP takes issue
with this essentializing narrative, contending
that it assumes an unchanging reality and
monolithic institutions. The book instead casts
a light on the enduring contestation within the
state over the meaning and place of religion in
the Turkish Republic since its foundation in 1923.
Analytically sophisticated and empirically rich, Religious Politics in Turkey is a welcome
contribution to a growing corpus of critical scholarship on secularism and secularization
in Turkey. Going beyond the rather tired “center–periphery” paradigm and the standard
narrative that the authoritarian secularist state co-opted Islamists, Ceren Lord focuses on
actors and their choices at critical junctures. “Integration of Islamic authority” into the
government through the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), she argues,
“embedded a religious majoritarian logic within the state” that persisted over time (124).
The expansion of religion into the realms of economy, education, and welfare provision
under the influence of Cold War politics and neoliberal restructuring of economy in the
1980s further advanced the institutionalization of Sunni Muslim Turkish supremacy. The
increasing salience and visibility of religious politics under the current AKP government is
thus cast—quite rightly—as a continuation of a long-standing pattern of Islamization (of
state and society) in Turkey.
1/4
The chief merit of Lord’s argumentis its careful avoidance of determinism. She takes
contingency seriously in explaining the inception and expansion of religious politics after
1923, against the backdrop of a growing struggle among various actors over ownership
of the state apparatus. In developing her argument, Lord rightly foregrounds the
persistence of Ottoman institutions and categorizations in shaping the republican state.
In particular, she stresses antecedent conditions like the “intertwined nature of religious
institutions and the state” and the strengthening of socio-religious boundaries (46),
particularly in the context of the institutional, political, and social changes during the
long nineteenth century.
Confronted in the late eighteenth century with European incursions—alongside
territorial losses and increasing ethnicization of confessional identity across the empire
—imperial elites responded with a series of reforms. These, it was thought, would solve
the growing challenges in governing ethno-religious diversity and the organizational
crisis within the state. However, they were not unique to the Ottoman Empire. Instead,
they were part of a worldwide interest in refashioning the contoursof legitimate
statehood, particularly through constitutionalism and legal codification. This period also
marks the beginning of a battle within the state apparatus over the place of religion
within the political order. The Ottoman loss in World War I, and the subsequent
independence war against Allied Forces led by Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk), catalyzed a
broad coalition of factions within the state, despite their opposing views regarding the
proper scope of state–religion relations. Faced with a choice between two competing
global socio-political projects in the aftermath of the World War I, the founders of the
Turkish Republic plumped for the Wilsonian principle of nationalist self-determination
over the anti-imperialist internationalism of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Lord hits the nail on the head when she asserts that “the emergence of laicism had been
reflective of a power struggle within the state, which involved the elevation of one faction
of the independence struggle coalition over others” (53). Signed in July 1923, the
Lausanne Treaty between the representatives of Ankara government and the Allied
Forces became the founding document of the Turkish Republic. By signing, Turkey was
finally admitted as a full member of the league of Westphalian sovereign states premised
on the congruence between territory, sovereignty, and population. The very principle of
religious majoritarianism was thus as much due to the Ottoman legacies as it was a
product of contemporary global trends—a point that is largely bypassed in the book’s
main argument even if it is hinted in the empirical discussion.
As the Lausanne Treaty went into effect, the non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire
became the minority citizens of the Turkish Republic. Religious difference in the republic
defined the majority–minority distinctionas the new conceptualization, rather than
continuation, of inter-ethnic and political relations. At the same time, religious difference
became inconsequential in the governance of family law as a unified secular civil law was
passed in 1926. This was, however, not because of a promise, as Lord notes (56), that the
Turkish delegation gave during the Lausanne negotiations. After heated discussions,
Article 42 of the Treaty stipulated a return to the organizational structure that was in
2/4
place before the enactment of the 1917 Ottoman Law of Family Rights, which had
significantly limited the non-Muslim millets’ legal autonomy. Even though the Turkish
delegation opposed the suggestion—they asserted that pre-1917 pluralism in family law
would produce a “state within a state” and that the new Turkish state would in any case
enact a secular civil law ensuring equal treatment of its citizens regardless of religious
affiliation—the final version of Article 42 left family matters to the jurisdiction of religious
law without institutionalizing a deadline for the enactment of a secular code (Adar, 2019).
Legislation of the 1926 secular civil law only became possible after the non-Muslim
communities were convinced to renounce their right to Article 42 in 1925.
A radical secularization program was rolled out after 1925. The primary aim, as Lord
points out, was to strip the ulema (but also non-Muslim religious authorities) of their
power in order to consolidate the secularists’ position within the state. The program also
sought, however, to weaken the salience of religious justifications in everyday social
sphere as well as in the domestic sphere—a point that does not receive much attention
in the book. For instance, the adoption during the Lausanne negotiations over Article 42
of wording that drew a clear distinction between “secular” and “religious”—had not
existed before the collapse of the empire. Such secular understanding of social and
domestic life was different from, and in fact, at odds with an ethno-religious
understanding of nationhood (what Lord identifies as “religious majoritarianism”) that
was shared by a broad coalition of actors. The foundational paradox that arose from
these two competing understandings of religious difference left the state apparatus in
the following decades open simultaneously to contestation and consensus (Adar, 2019).
The increasing Islamization of state and society in the post-1946 era emerged from the
tensions of this foundational paradox, rather than merely from the tradition of “religious
majoritarianism.” The outcome might have been different, however, if not for the
catalyzing effects of various factors over time. Lord particularly draws attention to the
contingent effects of political liberalization, Cold War geopolitical concerns, and a
neoliberal restructuring of the economy in 1980s. Equally important but relatively
underdeveloped are two other factors. The first is an increasingly prominent KurdishTurkish conflict starting in the 1970s and culminating in the eruption of a violent conflict
in the 1990s between the Kurdish guerrilla and the Turkish army. The second is the
eruption of the Arab Spring in 2011 and the subsequent de facto disintegration of Saudi
Arabia’s decades-long coalition with Sunni Islamists through the Muslim World League
initiative.
Policies are never neutral with respect to politics, which invariably shape and are shaped
by alliances and cleavages among actors. What happens at any key historical moment is
not inevitable. It is instead an outcome contingent on historical processes and actors’
decisions. Lord’s book is a valuable contribution in this respect. A captivating book and a
welcome addition to a growing genre of critical scholarship on secularism in Turkey,
Religious Politics in Turkey would nevertheless have benefited from a discussion over what
other paths might have been taken in the long and contested process of state formation,
consolidation, and perhaps now even disintegration. What would have happened if
3/4
Turkey had transitioned to multiparty elections later (or sooner)? How would history
have unfolded had political actors responded differently to the Kurdish–Turkish conflict?
Where would be we had the Arab Spring not erupted or ended differently? Questions
that interrogate and historicize the trajectory leading to our current conjuncture are
better able to shed light on the present predicament than hand-wringing over the
demise of a romanticized and much overstated secular past.
Sinem Adar is currently an Einstein Fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin. As a comparative
historical sociologist, Dr. Adar’s research focuses on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in
religiously diverse societies, and their implications for identification processes. Her academic
publications have appeared at Sociological Forum, Political Power and Social Theory, The
History of the Family, and peer-reviewed edited volumes. She is also a supporter of public
sociology, and occasionally writes for broader audiences in online magazines such as
Jadaliyya, Open Democracy, ResetDoc, Muftah and Al Jazeera.
Religious Politics in Turkey: From the Birth of the Republic to the AKP
By Ceren Lord
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Hardcover / 363 pages / 2018
ISBN: 9781108472005
To read more book reviews click here.
Published on September 10, 2019.
References
Adar, Sinem. 2019. “Religious Difference, Nationhood and Citizenship in Turkey: Public
Reactions to an Interreligious Marriage in 1962.” The History of the Family. Accessible at
the link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1081602X.2019.1633380.
4/4