Secularism

Abstract

No idea better epitomizes the ethos of modern Turkey than the doctrine of secularism. None of the principles set out to define Kemalism in 1931-republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism, statism, and revolutionism (Zürcher, 1993: 189)—has been more persistently and stubbornly referred to in defense of the Republican regime than secularism. As the authoritarianism of the one-party period was superseded by more liberal and democratic ideas after the end of WorldWar II, secularism continued to serve as the hub around which the Kemalist state elite (the military, the judiciary, and the higher echelons of the civil bureaucracy) guarded its hegemony. Secularism upholds a reduced role for religion in the political sphere. Political scientists usually agree that this doctrine dates back to the European religious wars. A widely held contention has been that the Peace of Westphalia (1648) marked a new era in which secularism was recognized as a guiding principle in international politics. Common agreement had thus been reached that it was better for state and religion to be separated at the interstate level.1 Later, secularism also became a leading principle in national affairs. How this principle was given effect in specific cases differed. In post-revolutionary France, for example, secularism came to mean rigorous state control of the church, a specific trajectory in the development of state-church relations referred to as laicism. The manner in which secularism developed in Republican Turkey was similar to (or partly modeled on) this kind of forced secularism, hence the “Turkish” expression laik (laic). Secularism has different meanings in different contexts. However, secularism is also the expression of a universal principle. This complication is pointed out by Joan Wallach Scott in her insightful analysis of the veiling issue in France, a debate prompted by the prohibition of this mode of dress in the country’s public schools.