This is partly due to the government’s attempts at revising, on some points, the official identity and secularism policies formulated in the 1920s by the Kemalist, that is secular nationalist founders of the republic. The government’s efforts towards recognizing certain linguistic and cultural rights of the Kurds and softening some of the restrictions on religious rights are meeting with stiff resistance from the higher military and judiciary bureaucracy.State elites, committed to a highly authoritarian concept of secularism, insist on the imposition of the headscarf ban on public premises, including university campuses, stand firm on discriminatory practices in university entrance examinations against vocational school graduates, including the publicly run prayer leader and preacher schools, and demonize faith-based social movements. Two years ago the Constitutional Court fell only one vote short of closing down the AKP and declared it to be a focus of anti-secular activities.
The Turkish state’s authoritarian secularist policies inspired by 19th century conceptions of modernity and positivistic philosophy are based on the following assumptions: Religion, and in particular Islam, is an obstacle to modernization. The state, therefore, should help privatize religion and replace religious thinking with scientific. Since it is not possible to abolish religion altogether, the state must monopolize and fully control it and restrict religious freedoms.
The authoritarian secularism of the Turkish state is incompatible not only with a free society, but also with the contemporary conceptions of social science. A democratic state must respect, in principle, the religious freedoms of its citizens as long as they do not conflict with basic human rights. The 19th century theories that held religion to be in conflict with modernity and expected religion to wither away with modernization have been falsified. Contemporary social science generally agrees that the world today is as fervently religious as ever and that religious beliefs are coexistent with human life, mainly because human beings are genetically averse to the idea of a chaotic universe run by chance and have not only material needs such as food and shelter but also spiritual needs.
Religious beliefs continue to be widely and strongly held even in the most modernized societies. The case of the United States is well known to all. It is true that in Western Europe, with decreasing church membership and attendance, the influence of institutional religion has sharply declined, but it is debated whether the same is true for religious beliefs as such. A distinguished British sociologist of religion, Grace Davie, has advanced the concept of “believing without belonging” to explain what is really taking place. The basic question before the sociologists of religion today is why modernization has not led to the decline of religion as expected. Some explain this by the growing “demand,” and some by expanding “supply” in “religious markets.”
Contrary to what was the case in most of the 20th century, most social scientists in the 21st century do not expect science to replace religion. Most may be said to subscribe to the view that science and religion are not rivals, are concerned with different issues, and that it is necessary that they respect each other. Most social scientists agree that the relative underdevelopment of the Muslim world today is not due to Islam but other factors, when Muslim societies have in past centuries proven to be the forerunners of civilization. The lack of democracy in most of the Muslim world today surely cannot be blamed on Islam, when most of these societies are ruled by secular nationalist autocracies. Turkey is perhaps the country that best demonstrates that a Muslim society can achieve both substantial socioeconomic development and democratization when provided with the necessary leadership.
What is inimical to individual freedom and democracy is not religion or Islam per se, but religious or secular, authoritarian or totalitarian, political ideologies of the communist, nationalist or Islamist kind that reject human rights and popular sovereignty. It is true that there are interpretations of religion in general and Islam in particular that do not respect human rights and democracy. Such fundamentalist interpretations of religion and of Islam are surely marginal, compared to other, traditionalist and modernist interpretations that do not conflict with and even promote human rights and democracy. Those who truly value freedom and democracy must be able to differentiate between different interpretations of religion and Islam and respect rather than demonize and suppress those faith-based social movements that foster socioeconomic development and democratization. They need to understand that religious as well as political pluralism promotes moderation and curbs radicalism.
