Abstract
The Politics of Secularism starts with a quotation from Gramsci arguing that important themes of sociology are, in fact, the themes of political science. As a political scientist, Akan focuses on one of these central themes, secularism, with two concerns. First, he aims to investigate nonisomorphic relations between ideas and political facts—in other words, what is written in books about secularism and how political actors really behave. Second, he aims to overcome this relational gap with an approach paying special attention to potential moments of institution building and change. In order to do so, he compares the political histories of French laïcité and Turkish laiklik and analyzes the political struggle for and against secularism in these two countries. Drawing from parliamentary minutes, news coverage, and interviews, Akan documents each critical moment related to the secularism debate in both countries.
In this respect, Chapter 1 begins with a dual critique of analytical schools and scholars of hermeneutics. According to Akan (3), while the former, assuming “a single atemporal model of European secularism,” treats what occurs outside of Europe as anomalies produced within specific contexts, the latter only covers these context-specific “anomalies” and explains them in an interpretive way. He thinks that this causes a dilemma which prevents researchers from making clear observations on different geographies. Therefore, he promises to challenge this approach by analyzing two distinct political fields (France and Turkey) in a comparative way, emphasizing the distinct moments of potential institutional change at which “both ideational and sociocultural arguments deny autonomy to the political field” (5). The author prefers to investigate these moments both as an interplay between three institutional political currents: anticlericalism, liberalism, and state-civil religion, and as the reflections of “four empirical puzzles” (7). First, he assumes the modernities experienced in different political geographies are “mutually interactional.” Second, he insists that some of the arguments do not stem from the philosophy of secularism but from the political struggle itself. Third, he argues that the ideas of secularism might lead to different institutional outcomes in different contexts. Lastly, he explains that anticlericals might on some occasions support state-controlled religion due to their political interests (8). In the rest of the book, the author aims to solve these puzzles.
In Chapter 2, Akan presents his alternative to the problems he raises regarding secularism scholarship. Commencing with Talal Asad’s position and progressing through various ideas proposed by Charles Taylor, Clifford Geertz, Saba Mahmood, and others, the author states that there is a crack between ideas and institutions. Therefore, he draws upon the data obtained from “history and in-depth case analysis” (18). In a sense, this chapter is a continuation of Chapter 1. Here, the author concretizes his dual critique using the example of laiklik. Turkish laiklik, according to Akan, is seen as either a deviation from European secularism (by modernists) or an idiosyncratic phenomenon (by hermeneutical scholars). In both cases, comparison has become practically impossible. He contends that intellectual discussions taking place in sociological circles do not fully explaining the institutional struggle for and against secularism. Since the debate between the secular and the religious also takes place in political fields, the author assumes that the analysis should also be undertaken from a political viewpoint, considering tactics, negotiations, and bargains. With this point in mind, Akan (29) suggests that the evaluation of “multiple institutional movements in France and Turkey,” stemmed from three political motivations: “demobilizing religion, mobilizing religion, and state neutrality toward religion.”
The following four chapters, respectively, address the politics of secularism in the French Third Republic, early twenty-first century France, Kemalist Turkey, and contemporary Turkey. The chapter on the French Third Republic explains the institutional change in the direction of state neutrality regarding religion, while the next chapter on contemporary France documents the practice of religious mobilization as an opposite tendency. There are several milestones in this almost 150 years of history, including the moderate Ferry Law of 1882, which replaced the Catholic-oriented Falloux Law of 1850 on education and the 1905 Law of Separation, which abolished Napoleon’s Concordat with the Church. These were two steps that moved the French state into a liberal, tolerant position in respect to religious matters. Obviously, socialist political parties’ strong position in the Chamber of Deputies in 1902 had a unique effect on this outcome.
A third milestone from the recent past is Nicholas Sarkozy’s attempt to mobilize religion. Although Sarkozy conceptualizes laïcité positive and argues for “a laïcité which guarantees the right to live one’s religion,” this political démarche resulted in a conflict, which the author calls “triple movement” (98). On the one hand, wearing religious symbols in French public schools was legally banned; on the other hand, Catholicism and Islam were separately mobilized, especially in the education sector. Akan refers to Jean Baubérot to explain the transformation of laïcité as “turning into a matter of identity and way of life rather than a principle that is articulated at the level of general institutions of society” (101). Again, drawing from Baubérot, he states that the undermining of public education in the name of religion has continued since the Debré Law of 1959 and the headscarf ban only constituted a new stage (115). Almost fifty years later, the government, well-known members of the Stasi Commission (a research group that was established to work on subject of laïcité), and even the French Muslim Council have agreed to transform the public education system. Their acts were first and foremost a disregard to young women’s educational rights.
In a similar fashion, Chapters 5 and 6 scrutinize the institutional change in the Turkish Republic, again, in respect to anticlericalism, liberalism, and state-civil religion. The author demonstrates that liberalism has never been a strong alternative in Turkey’s political approach to religion, and in accordance with these circumstances, state neutrality toward religion has never been feasible. These two chapters show that the founding Republican People’s Party (CHP) took similar actions to secure the political scene from religious influence as the French Républicains opportunistes initially did, but the CHP did not or could not stay away from the idea of state-civil religion as its French equivalent did against the Catholic Church. Moreover, while the French republicans decided to get rid of the Concordat, the Turkish republicans preferred to control society through religious means and invested much in the Directorate of Religious Affairs (DRA). With ideological motives (to struggle against socialism) and political concerns (to stay ahead of the game against Democrat Party—DP), CHP played the cards of the DRA focusing on the curriculum about religion in public schools during the multiparty transition of Turkey in post-WWII atmosphere. It is important to note that there was a “shared antisocialism of the CHP and DP” (137), which created a different context for the politics of secularism in Turkey compared to the French Third Republic.
The contextual distinctness of Turkey was reinforced beginning in 1970s and even more so after the 1980 coup, which left the socialists without representation. In other words, there has never been a strong voice in the Turkish parliamentary system that argues for state neutrality in religious (and ethnic) matters. While the republicans initially tried to de-mobilize religion during their single party regime, they shared a similar conservative tendency with the democrats after the multiparty system was initiated and instead tried to mobilize religion as “the cement of society” (207). And when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002 as a counterpart to the Kemalist republican establishment, it continued to mobilize religion for ideological, political, and even economic purposes. Although this mobilization triggered constitutional efforts to stop the AKP in its first term in power, it maintained state-civil religionist vision by strengthening the already existing institutional structure. As a result, the promising efforts such as the Alevi Initiative have not resulted in a satisfactory outcome for this non-Sunni religious minority (242). Meanwhile, the DRA’s budget has dramatically increased (214) without any positive contribution to the religious lives of non-Sunni citizens. Additionally, two optional courses, namely “Qur’an” and “the life of the Prophet” have been placed in the public school curriculum (210) and the teaching of evolution in biology classes was banned due to religious concerns.
Consequently, Murat Akan presents a careful analysis and constructive criticism in his book within the limits of political science in search of a future based on religious neutrality. Taken in its entirety, this book demonstrates that political contestation concerning religion and secularism has more or less followed a balanced route in the French experience, with noteworthy exceptions in the nineteenth and decreasingly so in the current era. However, the hegemonic political vision in Turkey has dominated its politics of secularism, and the institutional change has never been in the direction of state neutrality. Although Akan clearly shows the domestic factors contributing to the politics of secularism in both countries—i.e., the lack of a strong socialist opposition in Turkey—it might be better to consider the impact of international developments, such as NATO membership, on Turkey’s domestic politics and how they affected Turkish state’s ideological positioning. But still, this book, with its objective approach and impressive methodology, constitutes an important contribution to the study of religion and secularism. Its rigorous engagement with the French and Turkish cases surpasses the limits of the secularism debate and encourages the social science community to rethink the categories of religion, both religious and secular, as well as of state and society.
