From Secularization to Religious Resurgence: An Endogenous Account (original) (raw)
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Since roughly 2011, the Turkish state and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been going through a process of mutual transformation. Some of the historical apprehensions, biases and frustrations exhibited by Turkey as a middle power been absorbed by the relatively reformist AKP. Conversely, the AKP and its undisputed leader Erdoğan have seen their socio-political fears, power based conflicts and ethno-religious desires become dominant in all areas, including religion. As a consequence of this bilateral transformation, Turkey has become both an inclusionary and a hegemonic-authoritarian state, and at the same time a weak one. Within this new identity and structure of the state, Sunni Islam has become one of the regime’s key focal points, with a new logic. This article seeks to explain the transformation of the relations between the AKP’s Turkish state, religion and religious groups, by scrutinising Karrie Koesel’s logic of state-religion interaction in authoritarian regimes.
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This article is part of a special issue on the five Muslim democracies. It aims at understanding the role played by religion, and particularly by religiously oriented actors, in Turkey's democratization processes. The first section analyzes the different theoretical approaches to the role of religion in democratization. The second section analyzes the different phases of Turkey's political history since the 1980 coup, taking into account both democratization processes and the role played by religious actors in the political system, and trying to understand the possible relations between the two phenomena.
Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 2019
Since roughly 2011, the Turkish state and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been going through a process of mutual transformation. Some of the historical apprehensions, biases and frustrations exhibited by Turkey as a middle power have been absorbed by the relatively reformist AKP. Conversely, the AKP and its undisputed leader Erdoğan have seen their socio-political fears, power based conflicts and ethno-religious desires become dominant in all areas, including religion. As a consequence of this bilateral transformation, Turkey has become both an inclusionary and a hegemonic-authoritarian state, and at the same time a weak one. Within this new identity and structure of the state, Sunni Islam has become one of the regime's key focal points, with a new logic. This article seeks to explain the transformation of the relations between the AKP's Turkish state, religion and religious groups, by scrutinising Karrie Koesel's logic of state-religion interaction in authoritarian regimes.
Understanding Turkish secularism in the 21th century a contextual roadmap.pdf
Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 2019
This paper asserts that Turkish secularism and Islamism represent two faces of one coincontemporary Turkish politicswhen one considers their goals and strategies. The two ideological movements have shaped one another and each now seeks to impose itself as superior. This article unpacks these differences and similarities in the following steps: (a) it defines the socio-historic modes of Turkish secularism and (b) examines its social and political origins; (c) it then explores Islam's return to the public domain as an oppositional Turkish identity; (d) and thereafter considers the diverse understandings of secularism resulting from neoliberal policies that relaxed state control over Islam, which then prompted socially-acceptable reinterpretations of Islam; and finally (e) describes how the AKP's has re-imagined secularism while (mis) using Islam as a political instrument. The comparison highlights such commonalties as a collectivist character, a desire for state control as a vehicle to realize an ideology, intolerance of diversity and criminalization of other perspectives, and the differentiation of religion as morality in the private sphere versus its cultural role in the public sphere. It concludes that, under the AKP government, Islam is used as a tool to consolidate the power of Erdoğan's kleptocratic regime.
A confiscated trajectory of secularism: revisiting the critical case of Turkey
Politics, Religion & Ideology, 2023
One mark of the rising research field of secularism and religion is that the field itself moved from area studies towards mainstream social science. This move can be traced through the increasing significance of Turkey. Turkey’s AKP was presented as a liberal and moderate challenge to radical Kemalist secularism in Turkish Studies, then analytical pillars of research in comparative politics and political theory relied on this presentation. After AKP’s authoritarian turn, how can we reflect on its past narration as liberal and moderate? As opposed to the thesis of rupture between the early and the late AKP, this article develops the thesis of confiscation. First, I resituate Kemalist secularism vis-à-vis French secularism with comparative history. I argue that institutionally it’s a limited, not a radical, secularism. Then, I examine gradual institutional changes during the AKP with statistics, court decisions, legislation and parliamentary discussions, and demonstrate that limited Kemalist secular institutions ease the way for AKP’s will to religionize society and the state. My analysis tackles a central thesis in the literature: secular institutions can make reasonable accommodations of religion without losing their own core. I show that in Turkey, accommodations of religion turn into confiscation of secular institutions.
"Religious" and "Laik" Actors and the Question of Democracy in Turkey (Presented at APSA, 2011)
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The rise of Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been taken by many scholars as an example of a religious actor furthering democratization. Such a conclusion rests on an insufficient attention to concrete policies, their politics and context, and overemphasizes the differences between religious and laik actors in Turkey. In particular, the rampant presentation of the post 1980-coup Islamist activism as a major contribution to civil society 1) misunderstands the nature of power in the socialization mechanisms deployed by religious communities on the youth, 2) misses the state support some "supposedly" grass roots religious movements received, and 3) ignores the embezzlement cases involving religious persuasion. The article closes with an examination of the religion policy of AKP through an analysis of parliamentary discussions, daily politics and high court decisions to show that AKP is pursuing anti-democratic religion policies which are of Kemalist heritage in general and of the 1980 military coup heritage in particular.
The Secularization and Desecularization Nexus in the Turkish Context: What is Behind?
Shlykov, Pavel. The Secularization and Desecularization Nexus in the Turkish Context: What is Behind? // Politics and Religion Journal. — 2019. — Vol. 13, no. 2. — P. 199–236. , 2019
The history of Turkey provides multiple examples of intricate combination of secularization (in the Turkish tradition-laicism) and desecularizaion (under-stood as a revival of Islam and its expansion into social life) while its contemporary dynamics provides a background for a non-conventional view on the correlation between the state and religion in the Muslim societies. The desecu-larization of Turkey has been a continuous process since the late 1940s, making it increasingly convenient for Islamists to become more visible in the political and the socioeconomic spheres. This paper analyzes the inclusion and accommodation of the "Turkish Islamism" into the sociopolitical life of Turkey focusing on such important phenomena as the constantly expanding religious sphere, the emergence of economic liberal conservatism, the rising resurgence of Islamism in education and media sphere together with the "jemaatization" of the Turk-ish society. The analysis of desecularization dynamics in Turkey let one reassess the way religion and politics interconnect in the Muslim societies. The manifold manifestations of descularization in social, political and economic life, its profound impact on the Turkish party system, banking sector, education and mass media indicates the dialectic nature of secularization and desecularization nexus and reveals the flexibility of the border between religious and political spheres.
Thwarted agency and the strange afterlife of Islamism in militant laicism in Turkey
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Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey: Anthropocratic Republic
Anthropology of Religion series, 2021
This book proposes a new term to understand Turkish Republican politics, anthropocracy. For the anthropocratic Turkish Republic, and perhaps for anthropocratic regimes and political episodes elsewhere, there is no such thing as politically neutral religion. Or ironically, is it rather that for anthropocracy there should be no such thing as an autonomous religion? Thus, Sunni Islam is controlled by the state in the form of the Diyanet, both to ensure its contribution to Turkish ethnic superiority, and to regulate any potentially oppositional or subversive religious practices within it. Its publishing houses and television channels reproduce the state’s political views and thinking. Further, both Kemalist and AKP anthropocracy have officially incorporated Islam into the curriculum of schools and universities, even as they simultaneously reprove any non-authorized pretensions alternative Islams might have to truth. State Islam proffers a legalistic and positivistic theology to Turkish society with no safeguards against its own hubris; it has no use for any negative theology that modestly acknowledges its own ignorance of the divine being. In short, the anthropocratic Turkish Republic offers civil society neither freedom of religion nor freedom from it.