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BEDRİ GENCER
The historic dynamics of laicity in Turkey
In this paper, it is pointed out that the concepts ‘nation’ and ‘state’ signify the
underlying dynamics of the process of Turkish laicization. Unlike the Anglo-
Saxon concept of secularization involving a transformation in weltanschauung,
Turkish laicization means the official disestablishment of religion, i.e. the exclusion
of Islam from state affairs. This process of laicization was rooted in two
concepts that run parallel to that which took place in the West. Roughly stating,
nation, as opposed to community, denotes a modern, fictitious political entity.
At this point, the Haldunian conception of esprit de corps (‘asabiyah) provides
us a conceptual tool to explain this transformation. But, in the modern era
what defied the Haldunian conception of ‘asabiyah, so far as the quasi-nationalistic
sentiment was concerned, was its novel ideological character.
The nationalistic ideas of French Revolution affected the multi-ethnic
empires like the Ottoman Empire. The replacing of ‘community’ by ‘nation’ was
the main shift in the ideological map of the Young Turks. Turkey was forced
inescapably to slant toward nationalism by stripping of its secondary loyalties
determined by the historic zeal for Islamic cause. The Turkish nationalism displayed
a critical difference from its Western counterpart: rather than a process
of ‘nation-building’ based upon a cultural-civil-historic nationalism, the republican
cadres led by Mustafa Kemal tried to form a new political identity, driven
by the secular, Kantian ‘duty ethics’.
In the Turkish case, state, rather than nation, was considered to be the main
actor of laicization. In the course of the Western history, a modern, fictitious
subject, corporate body called State, emerged as an apparatus of power against
the Church. During this process the search for natural law as an embodiment of
the ontological conception of justice had already disappeared. Accordingly,
man-made, positive law that emerged as a result of the triumph of the state
over the church appeared to be the ‘law of state’.
This was the very case with the process of Turkish laicization, given the traditional
top priority of the state. The Islamic law, being essentially a civil (quintessentially,
belonging to the city) law, has nothing to do with such a corporate
body as state. Given this fact, the justification for a drastic movement of laiciza-