Bringing secularism back in
IS SECULARISM back after the CHP victory? It certainly is not, at least not yet. The opposition won thanks to a thinly veiled individual rationality that finally found its way through a thick cloud of ideology. We call that economic voting. Economists and engineers, or like-minded people, are happy about that because economic voting is a measurable hypothesis and it complies with the canons of rationality. Explanations that border the irrational do not please economists. The electoral outcome indirectly conveys the sentiment that secularism is not dead if not back. At the very least we saw that some people could vote for radically different parties despite deep ideological and cultural differences if their economic interests are hurt. Politics is not only ideology or religion after all; it is about self-interest. However, secularism has an altogether different scope.
SECULARISM
Secularism is an historic phenomenon of utmost importance. It is about almost everything that rendered the modern world enjoyable and understandable. It is also part of the bourgeois dignity that may have caused science and innovation and is the sine qua non of any conceivable democracy. It is the cradle of enlightened industrialisation. It goes back to the “two swords”, to ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’ but more to the point for the modern eye to Dante, Ockham, Marsilio da Padova and many others. There cannot and could not be modern science without it.
DAVISON AT WORK
What exactly is –or was- Turkish secularism? In the 1990s, Andrew Davison provided a subtle classification of the existing accounts of Republican laicism and a more telling interpretation of the sequence of events, and I pick up from there: Andrew Davison, Türkiye’de Sekülarizm ve Modernlik, Istanbul 2006, pp. 213-302. Davison discerns at least three interpretations of Kemalist laicism. The first strand sees the essence of laicism in the separation of state and religion, which renders Kemalist laicism akin to western-style secularism. On the contrary, the control explanation construes Kemalism as a more or less direct continuation of Ottoman practices vis-à-vis religion, whereby religion exists in an organic symbiosis with the state. Nevertheless, it is definitely subdued to étatic needs and wills. Finally yet importantly, a current of thought sees laicism as an attempt to destroy the institutional power of Islam as political, social, and cultural a phenomenon. Accordingly, religion would cease to exist as a pillar of the public realm and could only prevail as a private matter, possibly in the psychological inner world of the pious or of the true believer. The Turkish laicism invites all three explanations and none of them is wrong, nor do they provide the answer standing alone.
MODERNITY
Construing the Turkish Renaissance as accompanied by a separate Reform or secularism is not conducive to a genuine understanding of the advent of modernity in this part of the world. The Turkish Reformation was not a phenomenon of secularity and, clearly, laicism was not secularism. Instead, it involved both the control of religion by the state and a good dose of interpretation of what a useful, modernised, and docile Islam would be. The interpretation was not so much confined to religious matters, or to fixing the inner meaning of Islamic teachings, or as to how Islam should show itself in the public sphere and vis-à-vis the nascent Republic’s words and deeds. A certain dose of anti-clericalism was certainly involved, but it did not go far at least to the extent the vast arrays of clerics accepted the new procedural and legal rationalities that confined Islam to the realm of secondary links, on a par with a flagrancy of the Turkish lore. There was no irrational exuberance on that front and certainly the excesses of the French Revolution of 1789 as regards clergy were definitely absent. In addition, at the early stage the Kurdish revolt of 1925 conditioned Ankara’s response to a politicised Islam since the Kurdish proto-nationalist insurgencies mustered quite pronounced religious overtones at that time.
AN ACADEMIC OVERTONE
Be this as it may, it is of course possible to conjecture that even Kemalism in its prime was infatuated with a singular lack, the lack of the governing diagram of ideas that should have come along with the adaptation of western institutions. The idea that Turkish republicans
had adopted western institutions wholesale – institutions that were in essence alien to their culture- is an aberration of reality as much as an oversimplification. In its caricatured propaganda form, Islamism would rather have it that way but Kemalism was a historical phenomenon. True, institutions can be seen both as ideas in their incarnation and games in their reduced forms. The genuine Kantian discursion of referring to ideas as real if only they take the forms of institutions at a distance and measure the veracity of ideas in their relation with the institutions they are purported to unravel may have been absent in the Turkish enlightenment. It is legitimate to claim that where the knowledge of their production and the diagram of their intellectual incarnation are absent, the very presence of republican institutions lacks authenticity to some degree. Kemalism did neither reincarnate the articulation of the knowledge that made possible the design of republican institutions, nor inherit the immanent criticality of these very ideas as a constellation of a diagrammatic Foucaultean episteme. In short, republican institutions were very real and republicanism was also a genuine political belief in the minds and hearts of many, but the whole project was not authentic enough to generate the very criticism through which republicanism had originally set sail in the west.
SPACE AND REASON
The late, and very much regretted, Ulus Baker would have it put in terms of a confrontation between what delineates a political space and a political reason, however non-instrumental that reason could be (Ulus Baker, Siyasal alanın oluşumu üzerine bir deneme, Ankara 2005, pp. 104-108). The Kantian discursion, on the other hand, cannot be abusively interplead in order to shore up a very banal repetition of yesteryears’ religious conservatism, which turns more towards open reaction as times go by and as political opportunities to so behave pile up. We should note, in passing, that with all its modernity and imperial decadence of the last decades (say 1877-1918), the empire was never colonised and we never see characters displaying even the remotest resemblance to Elisée Reclus or Errico Malatesta, or even to a José Rizal. It would be a big mistake to look for ideological kinship between the rebels of colonial white-settler empires and those of the Ottoman realm, even when they are non-Turkish and/or non-Islamic subjects advocating separatist causes.
A DIFFERENT IDEOLOGICAL CONFIGURATION
No reading of Benedict Anderson’s Under Three Flags, however close may it be, especially when accompanied with a reading of José Rizal’s two books, gives a sense of kinship or similarity to a Turk. Wonderful in some respects can one find Noli Me Tangere indeed. Yet one cannot help thinking that the world it embraces is alien to any period of Turkish and Ottoman history. This observation is not trivial in the sense that it is possible to find resemblances with the French, Russian, Greek, Japanese histories, at times. If the non-colonial –and never colonised- nature of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish state is one reason, the cultural distance between the Hispanic world and the Ottoman Europe and Asia is another. It is also true that despite the existence of socialist and Marxist currents in Turkey, Turks never ventured with anarchism of any sort. Some ex-Marxists re-discovered anarchism in the 1980s. It suffices to read Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags, London 2005; José Rizal, Noli Me Tangere, London 2006 and El Filibusterismo, Hawai 1996 and compare them, e.g. with Mithat Cemal Kuntay, Üç Istanbul, Istanbul 1983; Nahid Sırrı Örik, Abdülhamit Düşerken, Istanbul 1981; Kemal Tahir, Esir Şehrin İnsanları, Istanbul 2005, inter alia.
AN IMPORTANT INTERPRETATION
In 1927 Count Leon Ostrorog had already grasped the historical importance of what was going on in Turkey. Even though he suggested in his last lecture on Turkey –three in a row- that Mustafa Kemal’s legal revolution could be conducive to a revitalised Islam that is younger and wider in its world vision, he also gave credence to what was done already. In his second speech he had already distinguished between Turkish and Arabic psyches. Having worked as consultant to the Ottoman State after 1908 on legal matters, and knew how difficult was the co-existence of modern secular law and the Şar’iyyah. Nevertheless he had given thought to the perspective of a legal debate within the Islamic law itself because he also thought religious Reform could only come from within. Yet he simultaneously referred to a “return to an Islam of younger and broader views” and the conception of Islam uncontaminated by the “subtlety of scholastic logicians”, which suggests he didn’t think a reform in Islamic Law would be the outcome of a theological debate alone: Ostrorog, 1927: 97–98. Paulina Dominik claims that Ostrorog ’s expectations weren’t borne out by events, but she also thinks his previous comments are not to be sidestepped. After all Ostrorog was in close touch with the Ottoman World for 20 years and as he was delivering the three lectures on Kemalism he was actually teaching Islamic Public Law (Şar’iyyah) in London: Dominik, P. (2017: 12-14). Pour la réforme de la justice ottomane: Count Leon Walerian Ostroróg (1867–1932) and His Activities in the Final Decades of the Ottoman Empire. Slavia Meridionalis, 17.
A WELTANSCHAAUNG
In 1928, after secularism was rendered constitutional, he saw this as a world-historic event. Ostrorog (1927: 14): “One of the most considerable events that has happened in the history of the East since fourteen centuries”; “a revolution that the World of Islam had never seen”. This is a critical remark. He did not vulgarize the problem at hand by obliquely referring to feudal lords, bourgeois groups, ethnic minorities, identities etc. but has seen it as legal revolution. It is a sea-change, a secular trend formation leading to an altogether different Weltanschaaung.