Contestant to Coercive Religious Groups: Transformation of Islam and Secularism

• In Event: Religion and the Study of Political Institutions

Abstract

State secularism is often described as the top-down control of religion by the state to protect and promote its own ideologies. Turkey has been one of the few countries that is seen as a modernist secularist state par excellence in world politics. Turkey's state, many accounts argue, flexed its coercive muscles to tame its religious discontents and to create a religion compatible with the state’s modernizing ideology; thus religious groups were forced to disengage from public life and politics. This research challenges this conventional idea and contends that the state’s secularism can never be practiced or conceptualized as one of full domination or disengagement; religion makes inroads to the state and state policies both accommodate and change religious theologies. Focusing on the Diyanet, the main state institution that offers religious service, the analysis questions whether and how Turkey’s system has been transformed from so called militant secularism to state endorsed enforcement of religion. The conclusions are drawn from Diyanet’s decisions on controversial issues, Friday sermons and ethnographic work that focuses on the institution's daily operations. The findings indicate that the ruling party relies on Diyanet to translate its main messages into religious idioms to maintain its base and source of legitimacy. The current state of religious practices indicates the tenuous nature of the uncritical review of Turkey's secularism that has defined it as a staunch ideology with the strong commitment to curb the power of religion. The analysis questions how the same institutions and newly invented ones are deployed now to expand the role of religion in Turkey's public and private domains.

Author

• Sultan Tepe, University of Illinois at Chicago