Thwarted agency and the strange afterlife of Islamismin militant laicism in Turkey

Christopher Houston

Published online: 25 January 2013# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract This article critically engages with recent theoretical writing on the anthro-pology of secularism by way of studying the perceptions and consciousness of thosewhom I name ‘militant laic actors’ in Turkey. Beginning with their key convictionthat the present Government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) possesses ahidden mission to Islamize the country, I argue that rather than relating to the actualpolicies of the AKP, such a conviction reflects the mood and emotions of laic actors.This perception is not without a social context. It relates to both the enlarged politicalpower of the AKP and to the relative thwarting of social agency experienced bymilitant laic actors. The paper concludes by noting certain insufficiencies in bothCharles Taylor’s and Talal Asad’s work as frameworks for explaining the dynamics ofsecularism while making a case for the significance of the Turkish situation incontributing to wider debates in the anthropology of secularism.

Keywords Turkey . Secularism . Kemalism . Talal Asad . Charles Taylor . Islam

Introduction

This article is intended to contribute to debates coalescing around the emerging fieldof the anthropology of secularism. However, its immediate focus is laicism in Turkey,whose development has issued in a distinct constellation of political practices, socialdistinctions, ideological rhetoric, new embodied capacities and agencies, changingaffective consciousnesses and experiences of inter-subjective conflict. In her recentAnnual Review article on that topic, Cannell argues the need for a “genuine compar-ative anthropology of secularisms based on particular historical and local studies”(2010: 86). Given its recent political history Turkey is a prime place from which towrite a version of the ‘many stories’ of secularism through which “local peoples enact

Cont Islam (2013) 7:333–351DOI 10.1007/s11562-012-0239-2

C. Houston (*)Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australiae-mail: chris.houston@mq.edu.au

their understandings of, interest in, or perhaps total indifference to the secular and thereligious” (Ibid., 97).

Since the election of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve KalkınmaPartisi—AKP) to national government in 2002 Turkish society has existed on apolitical knife-edge. Although the experience of a fragmented public and a periodi-cally violent State in Turkey is nothing new, this particular polarized politicallandscape has been aggravated by the uncovering and publication of details of anumber of aborted coups plotted by the Turkish Armed Forces against the govern-ment, one that included a plan to bomb the major mosques in Istanbul as pretext formilitary intervention.1 There is also an ongoing investigation into a secret organiza-tion Ergenekon,2 which appears to have used the networks of the State to organize themurder of political opponents and others as prelude to and as acts of provocation for amilitary coup. Reactions to both the leaks and the investigation vary wildly, fromdeepening criticism of the military’s power and ongoing calls for its de-politicizationto claims that the AKP is engaged in a political witch-hunt.

In this article I seek to explain the sources of this antagonism from the side of theseanti-AKP forces, both of its emotional tenor and of its ideological dimensions. To doso Sections 3 and 4 trace out a key strategy of those whom I call militant laic actors,which includes both the laic establishment (led by the military and connected to Stateinstitutions) and the ‘Kemalist Left’3: their efforts during this period of protractedsocial crisis to retain and accumulate political capital through representing the AKPas Islamizing society and themselves as heroically cast to prevent it. Their condem-nation of the present AKP Government as Islamist happens despite the AKP nevermentioning the term itself. These accusations have been made most vociferously bythe main opposition party (Republican People’s Party—CHP), but similar claimshave been voiced by many laic actors—academics, journalists, leftists and ordinarycitizens—with no formal ties to that organization.

In this first part of the article I focus less on the work of State institutions (like themilitary) in propagating the official political worldview and more on the appropria-tion by laic actors within Turkish civil society of those institutions’ mobilizingendeavours. In doing so this article seeks to connect its analysis to the emotionalpassions and affective fears of militant laic actors in Turkey, a legitimate project giventhat more clearly than in other places, institutional laicism there has facilitated theformation of a self-identifying, self-instituting political class. Michael Jackson notesthat what he calls a phenomenological approach in anthropology involves suspendinginquiry into the objective truth (or cause) of particular beliefs or worldviews “in orderto explore them as modalities or moments of experience, to trace out their implica-tions and uses” (1996: 13). Accordingly, a more phenomenological-influenced

1 See Taraf newspaper (23 and 26 February 2010) for details of the coup code-named Balyoz(Sledgehammer), the planning for which assembled both lists of key personnel and their responsibilitiesfor certain designated duties, and of journalists to be arrested.2 Ergenekon too has been closely associated with sections of the Turkish armed forces. The investigationhas resulted in hundreds of arrests. For an illuminating analysis of the Ergenekon case see the reportErgenekon is Our Reality, published in 2010 by the Young Civilians and Human Rights AgendaAssociation. Available on-line: http://ergenekonisourreality.wordpress.com/3 By ‘Kemalist Left’ here I mean a nationalist left that views both the AKP and all pro-Kurdish groups inTurkey as supported by and furthering the interest of ‘outside powers’, principally the imperialism of theUnited States. For a succinct presentation of this position see Perinçek (Perinçek 2010).

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account of Turkish militant laicism acknowledges the ways in which secularization as‘myth’ empowers its adherents, regardless of the truth (or falsity) of its socialevolutionary claims.

Examining this militant laic perception of Islamism charged to the AKP I concludethat rather than reflecting any objective truth about Muslim being, radical Islam inTurkey exists primarily in the consciousness of militant laic actors; and that thisperception itself is one obstacle to social peace and the democratization of civilsociety. Further I propose that this perception can be understood best as both moodand fantasy. Mimica defines mood as human attunement with the social world,articulating the “primary bodily condition of our existence” (1996: 223), whileRam notes that moods are impersonal, “a form of orientation between subjects andthe world they inhabit” (2011: 198). It may be that in the present a threatened socialprivilege, a loss of cultural capital and a waning political dominance, all experiencedas a thwarting of social efficacy, constitute the historic affective mood of laic actors.My use of the term fantasy emphasizes how experiential and perceptual modes ofengagement with the world necessarily involve processes of both screening out andfocusing in on certain aspects of social reality. The fantastical aspect of ‘things’ asthey appear to militant laic actors’ consciousness—in this case Muslims, the veil,Islam, and the AKP—reflects not just this phenomenological process, but a politi-cized version of it, related to the Republic’s project to generate particular sensibilitiesand dispositions (see Section 5 below).

In brief, the complexity of the contemporary Turkish situation presents a differentmix of elements for the anthropology of secularism to consider: (1) laicism imposedby an authoritarian regime; (2) an ‘imagined community’ of Kemalists (the phrasehere acknowledges the affective dimensions of militant laicism in Turkey) and (3) adominant political party (the AKP) with mass support and disputed Islamist ancestry.In addition, two other important political processes have developed in the last decade,as I show in Section 5: (4) the emergence of non-Kemalist secularists, who are alsosubjects of intense anxiety for militant laic actors and (5) the slow development inTurkey, if always vulnerable to eclipse, of a post-laicist society, in which Stateinstitutions may for the first time become secular. It is these elements (and others)that combine to produce the contemporary ‘life-world’ of militant laic actors, under-stood here as an intersubjective and experiential field of action, agency and inten-tionality from which the political polemics investigated below emerge. Finally, a briefword about methodology in this article: the evidence that I survey in making myargument is largely discursive, sourced from intellectuals and their arguments indifferent public media. Nevertheless, my reading of this material is informed by along familiarity with the contextual ‘life-worlds’ of protagonists.

A history of laicism in Turkey

As is so often the case in anthropology, context is [nearly] everything. Beforeexamining the work of Charles Taylor and Talal Asad, perhaps the two mostprominent contemporary theorists of secularity, let me sketch out certain particular-ities of what supporters name the ‘Atatürk Cumhuriyeti’ (Atatürk Republic). As hasalready become clear, in this paper I use the words laic and laicism (rather than

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secular and secularism) to refer to the group of actors and the institutional arrange-ments in Turkey that I wish to describe. This is in keeping with anthropologicalconvention that privileges subjects’ own terms for themselves over vocabulary orcategories from other contexts that may carry a different range of meanings andassociations. The Turkish words for laic and laicism are laik and laiklik. Moreimportantly however, the use of these terms is intended to discourage obfuscatingapplications of the term secularism to Kemalist laicism. Parla and Davison in theirbrilliant book Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey note how the labelling of allnon-theocratic political systems as ‘secular’ confuses “important differences betweenvarious specific so-called secular doctrines and forms of governance” (2004: 13).More bluntly they write:

We do not equate laicism with secularism, although there are some areas ofshared meaning and practice. Kemalist laicism is most often described through-out the literature as ‘secularism’, leaving the impressions that Kemalist laicismachieves everything from a radical separation between State and tradition to theprivatization or elimination of religion in the conscience. As we argue, Kemalistlaicism is at odds with these ideas in both concept and practice (Ibid., 14).

In critical relationship with the dominant literature on Turkey, they go on toinvestigate Kemalist laicism as an integral aspect of a political ideology propagatedby what we might call the army–party–State in the single party period (1923–1950)and thereafter by select State institutions, presenting it as a variety of corporatism thatstructures their actions.

The political project of the new Republican nation State after 1923 has beendescribed in a variety of ways, including often enough by the particularly unsatisfy-ing appellations of ‘secularism’, ‘modernization’ and ‘westernization’ (see Lewis1961; Berkes 1964; Ahmad 1993). Occasionally, it has even been graced with thetitle the ‘Turkish Enlightenment,’ while often being presented as a ‘model’ for otherMuslim-majority countries to emulate. None of these terms come to grips with two ofits defining elements, the close relationship between ‘High’ Kemalism and Europeanfascism in the single-party period [1923–45], or the active economic and culturalrelations between the Kemalist State and the Soviet Communist Party in theRepublic’s first two decades [of the 1920s and 1930s].4

What did the policies of this formative single-party period encompass? One muchmore comprehensive term than ‘westernization’ etc. or ‘anti-imperialism’ for describ-ing the Kemalist reforms is Turkist Republican. The phrase draws attention to twocentral aspects of the Kemalist political programme: one, the propagating ‘fromabove’ of a radical Turkism (Türkcülük) that demanded the assimilation or oblivionof non-Turkish ethnic and economic others;5 and the other, the constructing of apolitical theology to justify the full incorporation of Islam within the institution of the

4 For example, Kolluoğlu-Kırlı (2002) discusses the 1930s construction of the monumental and belovedKültürpark in İzmir, in the ‘fire-zone’ that had been the Levantine, Frank, Armenian and Greek quarters ofthe city. She notes that the park was modelled on ‘Gorky Park of Culture and Rest’ in Moscow, and wasbegun soon after the visit of İzmir’s deputy major to that park in 1933.5 For two sobering accounts of the fate of Christian and Jewish minorities in Istanbul after 1923, seeAlexandris (1983) and Aktar (2000). For an analysis of Turkish nationalism and its relationship to Kurds inTurkey see Houston (2008).

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State. The resulting ‘Turk-Islam synthesis’ immediately led to the closing downof space for democratic struggle through and over the religious field, diminish-ing civil society’s capacity thereafter to put the conventions and forms ofKemalist society into question. The phrase ‘Turk-Islam synthesis’ has moreusually been applied to the policies of the military in the period immediatelyfollowing the 1980 coup, including for example its introduction of compulsoryreligious lessons in schools, and its sponsoring of the State’s mosque-buildingprogramme, even in non-Sunni Alevi villages. But both of these initiativesshould be contextualized by the much earlier fabricating of a nationalist Islamoverseen by the 1924 institution of the Department of Religious Affairs(Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı), whose brief then (as today) was the productionand management of Islam by the State to legitimize the State in the name ofnational unity (see Seufert 1999). Etienne Copeaux (1996) notes the longevityof certain key words that constitute the State’s Turkish–Islam synthesis: hizmet(service) is one that in school textbooks from the 1930s until the present hasattributed to the Turkish nation’s constant service to Islam, humankind and toworld civilization.6

The political and cultural dynamics of this history means that the work ofCharles Taylor and Talal Asad does not travel particularly well in explicatingcontemporary social conflict or politicized emotional registers in Turkey. A case inpoint is Taylor’s influential work A Secular Age, one of a small number of studiesin social theory that have explored the affective and existential dimensions ofsecularists’ lives. The book provides us with a rich discussion of the phenome-nology of secularism in the Western world, of the “conditions of experience of andsearch for the spiritual … [and] on the different kinds of lived experience involvedin living your life in one way or the other” (Taylor 2007: 3, 5). Yet in it there isnothing on the experiential domain of laic actors’ purposive actions, affectivestates and embodied experience in Muslim societies themselves. Indeed Taylorclaims that in Muslim societies the conditions of belief make the possibility of notbelieving non-optional and consequently that Muslims are not secular in hisphenomenological sense of the word (Taylor 2007: 3). Somewhat similarly, inprivileging the juridico-political and institutional realms as its field of inquiryTurkish social-science literature on secularism has also obscured the ‘life-world’of laic actors (Kandiyoti 1997).7 Historical accounts of secularism then (à laTaylor) assume that secular sensibilities cannot flourish in Muslim societies givenIslam’s civilizational difference. And on the other hand, in the dominant discourseon Turkish modernity the experiential and affective lives of laic actors are

6 The historian Mete Tuncay (2001) characterizes the relationship between ‘Islam’ and the Republic in itsfirst 10 years in a slightly different way, seeing it as one of indifference (umursamazlık) and not of hostility(as in the Soviet case): that is, as an indifference to the ‘traditional’ content of Islam, simultaneously re-presented as both backward and culturally Arab. As an example of this fine disregard he notes a seriousdiscussion in 1926 at a council meeting of the State Commission of Fine Arts about whether to turn SultanAhmet Camii (Istanbul’s celebrated Blue Mosque) into an art gallery (Ibid., 95).7 For a contrast to both tendencies, see Nilüfer Göle’s essay on State laicism in Turkey and what she calls itsfacilitation of a ‘voluntary secularism’ that “takes place at the level of presentation of the (civilized) self andthe phenomenology of everyday life” (2010: 248). Two other partial exceptions have been Navaro-Yashin(2002) and Özyürek’s (2006).

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subsumed and objectified within rationalist accounts of State-driven modernization,governmentality and social disenchantment.

Talal Asad’s work on secularism might appear a more promising place to begin inorder to analyse militant laicism in Turkey. Far from agreeing that modern secularismheralds the emancipation of human life from religion and error—a prime convictionpossessing laic actors in Turkey—Asad views modernity and secularism as a project,less an inevitable historical development than a political goal. Further he contextu-alizes secularism within the ambition of the modern nation-state to regulate “allaspects of individual life—even the most intimate, such as birth and death” (Asad2003: 199). Unlike Taylor, who as we have seen argues that the unique secularity ofthe North Atlantic world makes its inhabitants’ experience of moral or spiritual lifeunlike those of all other societies, Asad concedes the importance of a comparativeapproach to secularism that starts with “a curiosity about the doctrine and practice ofsecularism regardless of where they have originated … The important thing in thiscomparative analysis is not [embedded concepts’] origin (Western or non-Western),but the forms of life that articulate them, the powers they release or disable.Secularism—like religion—is such a concept” (Ibid., 17).

Yet despite this disclaimer, Asad’s own work (at least in his influential studyFormations of the Secular) is not comparative so much as genealogical, atracing out of the changed meanings of certain key West European conceptsover time, their development aided and abetted by the colonial relationshipbetween Europe and the rest of the world in the modern period. Most prob-lematic, this concentration on the West’s doctrine of secularism and the rela-tions between the West and other societies that it facilitates leads to anarrowing of the range of political relations that the anthropology of secularismin the present might encompass.8 In some contexts genealogical analysis ofconcepts is a distraction, especially when it implies (as it does for Asad) aprivileging of Western projects of modernity directed at Islam or Muslims or ofAmerican attempts to “intervene globally and to help reform local conditionsaccording to what appears to be universal values” (Asad 2003: 15).

In fact, projects of colonialism around the globe have been diverse. Secularism inthe Soviet socialist empire has taken its own unique forms in eastern orthodoxsocieties for example. More particularly for our purposes, the Ottoman Empire neverlost its sovereignty (despite the intervention of ‘great powers’), while the oncedominant view that Ottoman reform in the 18th and 19th century was a mimickingof the West by a declining imperial power has been thoroughly revised (see Abou-El-Haj 1991; Derengil 1998). One significant consequence of this history has been thatfor at least a century the defining context of secularism in Turkey has been nationalistState power and governance not colonial or post-colonial. In Turkey, it is theKemalist State’s selection, appropriation and transformation of certain concepts andpractices of ‘secularism’ (West European or otherwise), as well as their existentialmeaning and utility in the lives of militant laicists in the nationalist field thatconstitutes the pressing political issue.

8 Veena Das, cited by Cannell, politely makes a similar comment, noting that in relation to India, Asad’sconcepts reveal a “restricted notion of context” (Cannell 2010: 95). Bangstad is less restrained, arguing that“the binary of ‘the West’ and ‘the non-West’ has a constitutive status” (2009: 194) in his work.

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‘The third world war could emerge from Turkey’

To give readers a sense of both the issues and the emotions invested in the denun-ciation of the AKP, let me begin with a story. A few months ago an article byGuillaume Perrier, Le Monde reporter on Turkey, was circulated on many Turkishwebsites. The title of the article was ‘Üçüncü Dünya Savaşı Türkiye’den Çıkabilir’(The Third World War Could Emerge from Turkey). The article claimed that modernTurkish society was founded on a cultural fault line (and I quote):

On one side are those who take off their shoes at the front of the street door,whose women wear a headscarf and whose men wear baggy pants (şalvar)when they go out in the street. They have strong religious beliefs and are amajority. On the other side is a group with girls who go to high-school orcollege for education, with women who look modern, and who, when theycompare themselves to the other, feel much more developed, their educationallevels being very high, almost equal with Western standards. Since the institu-tion of the Republic the first group has been despised, put down, pushed aroundand scolded. Now this group has become politically organized. Being a major-ity, they gain political power with every election they win. The second group isa minority. They have no chance of winning another election. Thus a historicalparadox emerges: because the more western second group know that if theyagree with Western political values they will never come to power again, theyare becoming more and more hostile to the West and to its democratic values.Whereas the first group, who are hostile to the Western life style, know that theycan only come to power by conforming to Western criteria, and thus want todeepen their relations with the West and agree to democracy (quoted inMahçupyan 2010: 10).

Building upon this foundation, Perrier goes on to note that the first group isbecoming more prosperous, while the second group appears to be losing theirinfluence. Further

an important part of the judiciary, army and bureaucracy now signal that theysupport that second group and its turning of a blind eye to solutions outside ofthe democratic process … In brief, the second group with the support of themilitary no longer want elections, and rumours of a military coup increasinglyabound. They begin to talk of a junta. Very good, what will happen if a couphappens? (Ibid.)

Perrier concludes that the tension and conflict that this would produce coulddevelop into a world war.

Now, to cut to the chase, sometime after the article was published it was shown tobe a forgery, written not by a reporter from Le Monde or ever published in thatnewspaper but circulated on laic-Turkist or ulusalcı websites [sometimes translatedproblematically into English as ultra-nationalists, but also describable as leftistKemalists], along with other articles purporting to originate from Europe. For exam-ple, another article claimed that if Turkey splits in two then the present AKPGovernment has agreed that the Turkish and Kurdish parts could each apply forEuropean membership (Ibid.). This disinformation campaign then, calculated to make

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people fear that the division between two supposedly radically different culturalcamps in Turkey (Muslims and secularists) is so great as to bring the country to thevery brink of civil war, is in the present propagated by those whom we have called,very deliberately as we will see below, militant laic actors. The unstated premise ofthis scenario is that the AKP, the supposed representative of the first group, is seekingto Islamize Turkey, its apparent Western sympathies simply instrumental in its driveto power.

I have already claimed that this perception or belief is both a fantasy and enacts anaffective mood, unlike some of the other claims in the article.9 It is historically adurable fantasy too, circulating anxiously amongst laic actors in their discourse on theRefah Party, the AKP’s predecessor, since at least the mid-1990s. Its propagation inthe present however requires deafness to two decades of research on the so-calledIslamist movement in Turkey and on the very heterogeneous ways that people withinit have lived out their religious commitments politically. In the main this is researchthat bases its claims on the modest principles of fieldwork—that is, on participating insocial practices and political events with believers; of talking and listening to themand of not assuming them to be lying (see for example Çakır 1990, 1994; Göle 1999;Navaro-Yashin 2002; White 2002; Çayır 2007; Henkel 2007).

Significantly this fantasy does not appear to be shared by the majority of people inTurkey today. Perhaps the clearest sign of this is the recent 12th September referen-dum (2010) on a constitutional amendment package, which was bitterly opposed bythe Republican People’s Party (CHP) amidst warnings that it heralded the consoli-dation of the AKP’s Islamist programme. Turkish voters passed the package with a58 % majority, despite a successful boycott of the referendum organized by the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) in several large Kurdish provinces. [Evenmore recently the AKP has won the 2011 June general election with 50 % of thepopular vote] Aslı Balı (2010: 1) makes the point that in most other countries, the 26constitutional amendments would have been interpreted as “liberalizing improve-ments to a flawed [military-drafted] constitution.” Among other changes they “em-power civilian courts while reducing the jurisdiction of military courts; strengthengender equality and protections for children, the elderly, veterans and the disabled;improve privacy rights and access to government records; expand collective bargain-ing rights; afford individuals standing to bring constitutional challenges; and removeimmunities long afforded to those responsible for the 1980 military coup” (Ibid.).

Indeed it is precisely because this mood is not felt by the majority of the populationthat some militant laic actors (in the state bureaucracy, as well as amongst profes-sionals and intellectuals) seem intent on inciting the military to action. Their desire isfor the declaration of a new state of emergency, already a half-presence in the presentdue to the constricting elements of the authoritarian 1982 constitution. More cyni-cally, because many militant laic actors have close links with the military, it appearsthat it is sections of the military itself that have been assiduously preparing the groundfor its own political intervention. A leaked document published in the newspaper

9 For example, it seems clear enough that a small but powerful minority in Turkey do indeed support amilitary intervention to overthrow the Government. In her interviews with those she terms ‘Kemalist elites’,Berna Turam (2008: 40) reports that many “made radical statements expressing alienation from the idea ofdemocracy.”

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Taraf in 2009 showed that the General Staff prepared an Action Plan in 2008proposing to “bring the public opinion to the same level of agreement with theGeneral Staff on issues to which the General Staff is sensitive and to preventincorrect impressions from being formed about the Turkish Armed Forces”,through the recruiting of “civil associations that are fully controllable, can beinfluenced and activated; or suitable media organs; or those sharing the sameapproaches as the Turkish Armed Forces” (quoted in Cizre and Walker 2010:94). More recently, it has emerged that 35 different websites posting in bothEnglish and Turkish—including armenianreality.com; greekmurderers.net; irtica.-net; nursi.info; naksilik.com; pkkapo.com; pontuslu.com; turkatak.com; turkish-massacre.com; turkuz.info—were all organized from a single office, managedby a retired navy officer in collaboration with staff in the Turkish armedforces.10 The ex-officer has now been arrested for involvement in Ergenekon(see footnote 2).

Ironically then, in Turkey it is militant laic actors that most resemble the older,imagined portrait of radical Muslims. Militant laic actors are in search of a revolution;they are interested in a take-over of State power for the sake of rolling out theirdesired program from above. Further much of their rhetoric suggests that they are notimmune to the seduction of political violence/terror; and most of all that they feelthreatened by ‘democracy’ and legal reform, because they fear it may dilute theirpolitical and economic domination. Their desire for military intervention is justifiedby an argument that claims that a coup is legitimate if it pre-empts and prevents anelected political party from changing the laws so that it no longer has to submit itselfto the ballot-box. This view is maintained despite the AKP showing no sign ofabolishing the mandate or of changing the existing system of representativedemocracy.

A ‘Dismantling of secular Turkey’?11

Is there any prima facie evidence that the AKP has Islamist inclinations? Andif there is not, what constitutes proof for militant laic actors’ perception that theAKP is embracing such an agenda? On the surface, the lack of AKP actionupon ‘hidden’ inclinations is striking. Since coming to office in 2002 the AKPhas not passed a single ‘Islamic’ law, despite legislating as the Government onhundreds of issues, from meat importation, rubbish collection, disability stand-ards to IVF regulation. There is no indication either—but how would such acase be established?—that the AKP, as many militant laic actors claim, isdeceiving the population, passing laws enabling the opening of nightclubs inBeyoğlu while planning for an opportunity to do the opposite. That claimseems unsustainable: certainly in the first instance research needs to examinethe laws that the AKP has made rather than obsess about the non-existentlegislation that they purportedly harbour to enforce by stealth.

10 ‘İnternetteki Ergenekon’, Taraf, 4 February 2009.11 The claim is made in Birol Yeşilada and Barry Rubin’s introduction to a recent issue on the AKP inTurkish Studies (2010: 5).

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The same argument is used to disbelieve the publicity material produced by theAKP. For militant laic actors it is mere deceit that none of their policy documentsmention the word Islam. The most explicit self-description of AKP’s own politicalposition is ‘Conservative Democracy’ (Muhafazakar Demokrasi). In that long docu-ment, written by Yalçın Akdoğan and first published in 2003, party chairman andPrime Minister of Turkey Tayyip Erdoğan states in his foreword that the book shouldbe seen both as a vital contribution to the political identity of the AKP and as bringinga new perspective to politics in Turkey (“Muhafazakar Demokrasi…yeni bir soluk veaçılım getirir”). The new perspective is democracy: according to the document,AKPARTi conceives politics as an “arena of compromise” (“siyaset bir uzlaşıalanıdır”) (Akdoğan 2003: 113), and democracy as a “system [or procedure] thatenables different or even opposed styles of life, as shaped by different goals andvalues scales, to live in the same place together in peace” (“Demokrasi…farklı amaçve değer skalalarına göre şekillendirilmiş, değişik hatta zıt hayat tarzlarının barışiçinde bir arada yaşamasına zemin hazırlayan bir yöntemdir.”) (Ibid., 76).Accordingly, Muhafazakar Demokrasi redefines secularism (laiklik) to mean stateimpartiality towards religions and between denominations of Islam (mezhep), as wellas freedom for individuals to live their lives in accordance with their irreligious orreligious beliefs. In the process the document seeks to shift the focus from the oft-asserted a priori of laicism as a necessary pre-condition for democracy to the questionof how laicism should be developed in order for democracy to operate in its broadestfreedom. In other words, how might laicism itself be made to conform to forms ofdemocratic practice? (Ibid., 94).

Further ‘proof’ of the AKP’s Islamist inclinations inheres in laic actors’strong emotional apperception of the ‘life-world’ of AKP supporters. As seenin the forged article’s description above, laic actors’ sociological description ofthe social class that the AKP is said to represent focuses on their embodieddifference, their clothes that signify rural origin, their comportment and theiretiquette: despite being neither modern, urbane or middle-class they haveillegitimately gained power over prestigious State institutions. By contrast awealth of sociological and anthropological analyses of the relatively recentlyformed ‘Muslim’ middle classes in Istanbul and other Turkish cities show thatMuslims there have constructed their own practices of consumption, leisure,aesthetics and self-presentation in reference to, but also to signify their differ-ences from a laic middle-class public. They do not wear loose trousers (şalvar),nor do they disdain education, professional qualifications or work. Indeed, it isa measure of the strength of militant laic actors’ fantasy that Muslim women’spresence in professional and business organizations all over the country seemsnot to confound their social perceptions. One might have thought that the neathomology between the public sphere and laicism, sketched out clearly enoughby Göle in her study of veiled students back in 1991, has been sufficientlytransgressed by Muslim women since then that their visibility in it would nolonger be imagined or stigmatized as [rural] matter out of place.

Equally importantly, the education of Muslims has meant that emerging class andgender divisions amongst ‘Islamists’ themselves have retarded their ability to orga-nize around a unified political identity or programme. Çayır’s (2007) analysis of thecollapse of confidence and changing modes of political consciousness of religious

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characters in Islamic fiction between the 1980s and 1990s reveals a dramatictransformation in the issues and concerns of religious novels. SimilarlyKömeçoğlu’s recent research on young Muslims in the new micro and hybridpublic spaces of ‘Islamic identity’ in Istanbul (cafes, tea gardens, parks, seminarrooms etc.) also reveals a clash of Islams (rather than of civilizations). Inparticular a growing divergence in social ideals and expectations betweenyoung male and female Muslim actors has led to the “embodied transformationof gender relations [amongst Muslim youth], relations that are imbued withconflicts and disorder” (2009: 118). Inter-generationally, younger Muslims’present reluctance to countenance a gendered spatial segregation in new‘Islamic’ public spaces has a long history, as research on people’s use of theshowpiece restaurants and tea gardens redeveloped in Istanbul’s parks by RefahParty in the mid-1990s showed (see Çınar 1997; Houston 2001).

Further and surely equally significantly, according to their own accounts, manyMuslims in Turkey are now consciously post-Islamist. Perhaps the most strikinganalysis is found in the recently published autobiography of Mehmet Metiner (2008),former advisor to both Tayyip Erdoğan (when Mayor of Istanbul) and later to RecaiKutan (Leader of the Fazilet Party). In it he describes his political evolution, from hisyears as an active member of the Islamist youth movement Aknıcılar in the Istanbulsuburb of Fatih in the late 1970s to his rejection in the mid-1990s of the foundationaltenets or paradigm of political or ‘Jacobin’ Islam (including the fantasy of forcingshariah law on the population through establishment of an Islamic State). Heproceeds to justify his reasons for embracing democracy and secularism.12 Metinerexplicitly rejects the claim that his memoir constitutes a confession, as if he hadsomething to be ashamed of. Instead he traces out his change of mind—and byimplication the change of mind of a generation of activists. Explaining his motivationfor writing the book Metiner says:

Given that my only aim in writing this book is to explain a change of mentality,I chose to include only the memories and anecdotes that are relevant for thispurpose. By adding my observations and analysis I wanted to open the door toan intellectual discussion. I confronted myself more than anyone else. I soughtnot to flee from a ruthless self-criticism. I didn’t refrain from documenting, witha theoretical explanation, why I abandoned the ideas that I had supported in thepast, or why I rejected the foundational paradigms of political Islam that I hadlong made my own (2008: 22–23) (my translation).

Given these sociological and personal developments, it is clear that the evidencefor the belief among militant laic actors that the AKP is conducting an Islamization ofTurkey by stealth is problematic. Yet militant laic actors draw upon the work ofscholars who for whatever reasons also claim that the AKP constitutes Islamic actors.For example, in the burgeoning global literature on Muslim radicalization the

12 I actually interviewed Mehmet Metiner in 1995, when he was an influential intellectual figure in theRefah Party. Even then, being conscious of his Kurdish background, he was critical of religious politicalparties and groups for their Turkish nationalism. This is the cause of another fundamental tension within‘Islamist’ groups that militant laic actors, given their own refusal to acknowledge a Kurdish reality, arehappy to ignore. On this division see Houston (2001).

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assertion that the AKP has ‘Islamist’ orientations is made often enough by journalistsof some Western newspapers or by academics employed in certain (neo-conservative)US-based think-tanks. Often here the evidence is centred on the perception of a shiftin Turkey’s foreign policy, in particular regarding Israel.13

Other political science accounts attempt to use contradictory and methodologicallyvery problematic quantitative surveys of Turkish voters’ attitudes as evidence ofAKP’s responsibility for apparent rising social conservatism, ignoring as a causethe increasingly chauvinistic or xenophobic nationalism of militant laicism itself. Infact, many of these surveys show no change or even a significant decrease in supportfor shariah law since the AKP came to government. Karaveli (2010: 94) makes thepoint that the proportion of the Turkish population that believes in evolution on theone hand, or who believe religion to be a more accurate guide than science tounderstanding the world on the other, has scarcely changed since 1990. Still otheraccounts appear to give a heavy weight to hearsay or to personal anecdote as evidencefor their arguments. For example, in a short article in ISIM Review Turam (2008: 41)writes—while presenting no proof—that the electoral victories of the AKP haveaccompanied “increasing religious conservatism in everyday life as a package deal,”and that in certain [unnamed] cities “women who are dressed revealingly complainincreasingly about judgemental looks (Ibid.).”14 By identifying the AKP with polit-ical Islam (and not, as the AKP do themselves, with conservative democracy), Turamcreates a counter-category of ‘ordinary’ and ‘secular’ citizens who she says arecaught “between Islamists and Kemalists.” According to her, it is these liberaldemocratic citizens who, unlike the AKP, “unconditionally defend the rights andfreedom of others and not just for themselves” (Ibid.) despite, as we have seen, anidentical claim made by the AKP regarding their own understanding of politics inMuhafazakar Demokrasi.

Militant laic actors in academia argue more exaggerated versions of this. Forexample, in a recent edition of Turkish Studies, Nur Bilge Criss (2010) claims theAKP is sponsoring the ‘Arabization of Turkey’ (reciting an old line from CHP[Republican People’s Party] ideology that distinguished between real Islam andArab culture, and thus justified Islam’s Turkification). She also makes the claim thatthose whom she identifies as ‘mainstream republicans’ are “caught between liberals,nationalists, and Islamists, who are engaged in a vicious struggle to dominate” (Ibid.,55–56). Her positioning of ‘mainstream republicans’ as strangers to the politics ofdomination is, to put it bluntly, historically not credible, nor is her arbitrary differen-tiation between republicans and nationalists. Not surprisingly she does not considerthe identical policies of each on the Kurdish issue. She is correct however in

13 These charges against the AKP are somewhat ironic, considering that the mass emigration of Istanbul’sJews occurred almost immediately after Israel’s founding in 1948, when 30,000 Jewish inhabitants left thecity, most of them impoverished or alienated by the laicist Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) 1942/1943extraordinary tax on profits aimed at bankrupting non-Muslims (Aktar 2000: 207). Alexandris (1983: 218)provides a number of striking comparisons between the tax as levied on non-Muslims and Turks. One of themost extreme was the difference in the treatment of the ‘general merchants’ Isaac Modiano (Jewish) andVehbi Koç (Muslim Turk). Koç was levied 60,000 on his estimated capital of 2,000,000 lira; Modiano wastaxed 2 million lira on an estimated capital of 97,000 lira, leading to his deportation to a labour camp fornon-payment.14 This complaint would appear particularly amenable to phenomenological analysis, since it pertains tolaic actors’ perceptions.

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identifying a tension between mainstream republicans and liberals, partially rooted inthe historic antagonism of republican ideology for democracy in the single-partyperiod (1923–1950). Keyder (1987: 99ff) amongst many others notes that the author-itarian repression of Turkish civil society was achieved most fully in those years, withthe closing down or forced incorporation of all quasi-independent groups into theruling party (CHP), leading to the declaration of ‘full congruency’ between Stateadministration and party organization in 1936. To give just two examples, in 1931 thenationalist association Turkish Hearths was ordered to transfer all its property to theCHP, while the Turkish Women’s Association was closed in 1935.15

In sum, in perceiving the AKP as Islamist and through their conviction thatthe party’s implicit aim is Turkey’s Islamization, militant laic actors bestowupon themselves a political programme and identity. Antagonistic towardsdemocracy and free speech, socially intolerant and flirtatious with provocativeviolence, they attribute to ‘Islamists’ some of the very characteristics that theythemselves possess. This is seen particularly clearly in their use of the research(and discourse) on mahalle baskısı (conservative suburban control), researchwhich claims to survey the pressure exerted by religious people upon laicactors—supposedly encouraged by the dominance of the AKP—to modify theirappearance, codes of conduct or performative styles. Such discourse is unsym-pathetic to religious people in Turkey and to their experience of mahalle baskısıby militant laic actors in turn, as well as uninterested in the laic surveillance ofthe public sphere in Turkey, which reinforces a much greater social exclusionof ‘Muslims’ (and others). In brief, the charged assertion of militant laic actorsthat the AKP is ‘dismantling secular Turkey’ is unproven.

Militant laicism and its secular others

Of course, not all secularists in Turkey are militant. Indeed, our survey of thediscourse of militant laic actors has indicated their special dislike of non-militant ornon-Kemalist secularists, negatively dismissed as liberals. Halil Karaveli explains theemerging conflict between Kemalists and liberals as a challenge to Kemalism fromwithin, with liberal secularists “calling the very claim of Kemalism to embodymodernity into question” (2010: 86). Unconvincingly, Karaveli attributes this rift tosimple generational conflict between Kemalist parents and children in the present.More fruitful however is his second suggestion that the liberal critique of Kemalismoriginates in the “generation that came of age during the military rule of the 1980s”when “the junta used Atatürk as a symbol in order to reinstate the authority of theState and forced Atatürk on everyone” (Ibid.).

15 Despite this, Criss begins her article with the following sentences:Since the promulgation of the Republic, Turkey’s Grand National Assembly meeting hall carries the

maxim ‘Sovereignty Belongs to the People—Unconditionally and Without Reservation’ on its wall. Fiftyyears hence, from the 1970s onward, some radical parliamentarians … voiced a different motto, that‘Sovereignty belongs to God’ (2010: 45).

She omits to add that there were no elections in Turkey until 1950; or that the elected Government in1960 was deposed in a military coup, although she does write oxymoronically that “civilian coups, in thename of further democratization, remain a serious challenge” (Ibid., 49).

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My feeling is that Karaveli identifies the wrong generation, and it should beconnected much more closely with the generation of activists politicized in the1970s in the years before the September 12th military intervention, many of whomwere arrested and tortured after the coup. Recall the autobiography of MehmetMetiner, his description of his political roots in radical Islam in the late 1970s andhis long march to democracy since then. One recent comparative account by a leftistof a similar personal transition via reflexive self-criticism from militancy to some-thing else is that of Hasan Cemal’s, a former revolutionary activist (devrimci) in thelate 1970s. Cemal also writes the foreword to Metiner’s book. Indexing in it his ownchanges with those of Metiner’s, he also describes his own book:

It is never easy to come to terms with the past nor to confront yourself. I toocould no longer escape my past. Indeed this is what I tried to explain in mybook Let No One be Angry, I Write about Myself. I endeavoured to explainhow my political identity developed, where my political ideas derived from andwhich mistakes I made (quoted in Metiner 2008: 16).16

If ‘post-Islamist’ is the most accurate term to describe people like MehmetMetiner, ‘post-laicist’ (or post-Kemalist) are equally good terms to describe peoplelike Hasan Cemal. My current research on the generation of political militants activein Istanbul in the late 1970s reveals that there are many ‘post-laicists’ in Istanbul,non-Kemalist leftists or liberals who if not supporters of the AKP are acutely aware ofand critical of Turkist-Republicanism, its ambiguous history and its ongoing politicalinfluence. Nearly all have disengaged from the attempt of militant laic actors tomobilize support around a laic-Islamist polarization.

Given this diversity of secularists—militant, post-laic or non-Kemalist, and con-servative—it would be wise to step back from the aggravating polemics of dailypolitics and present a less personal account of the affective commitments, politicalhopes and perceptions of militant laic actors in Turkey. The affinity between laicactors’ perception of the AKP, Islam and Muslims on the one hand and the laicism ofthe Republican State on the other must be attributed partly to the work of ‘perception-constituting’ (that is, mood, fantasy and experience-constituting) State institutions,which seek to influence both the pre-conceptual cognition of laic experience and themodes of discourse that facilitate reflection upon it. Here we encounter (contra Asad)the proper genealogical antecedents (or horizons) of militant laic subjectivity. Thecontinuity of these institutions explicitly provides a link between the Kemalism of thesingle-party period (1923–50) and of the emotional perceptions of militant secularistsin the present. Paramount in their linking is the activism of the Turkish military andits powerful influence over key aspects of both the education system and of demo-cratic process, both enabled by the 1982 military constitution.

Nevertheless, the really-existing ‘varieties of secularism in a secular age’ (to coin aphrase17) indicates a crisis in the political efficacy of those perception-constitutingState institutions, what Kaya calls a collapse of the ‘official narrative’ in Turkey. Forthose who subscribe to it Kaya diagnoses the existence of a ‘meaning threat’, leading

16 Foreword to Metiner’s Yemyeşil Şeriat.17 See Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age edited by M. Warner, J. Vanantwerpen, & C. Calhoun(Warner et al. 2010), a volume responding to many of the issues raised by Taylor’s work.

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to a denial of all of the “expectancy-violating experiences, and [a striving] to revertback and maintain the status quo” (2012: 154). Further, the rise to political power ofthe AKP has resulted in the partial thwarting of the agency (social and economic) ofthat class of people. It has also brought into the open its ways of cultural distinguish-ing itself. A true hegemony, we might hypothesise, is never justified. However in thepresent post-Islamist context in Turkey laic living, just like everyday life lived as a‘Muslim’, has become both a reflexive performance and a mode of social distinction.In particular the visibility of embodied Islamic difference in public, say in theselective wearing of the headscarf, transforms the living of laicism into a mode ofsimilarly conscious self-creation. Suddenly, living a laic life too has to be chosen, onepossibility amongst other alternatives.

This presents as a significant contradiction of Taylor’s claim in A Secular Age thatWestern and Muslim societies exhibit titanic differences in the lived experience ofbelief and unbelief in God. Taylor argues that it is the conditions of belief that definesecularism in the West, because there “belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There arealternatives” (Taylor 2007: 3). Taylor thinks this milieu is unlike that of Muslimsocieties, in which belief in God is assumed and unchallenged. By contrast histori-cally in Republican Turkey, as in the Western case, it was religious belief that hadbeen an “embattled option” (Ibid.) and until recently it was laicism that had beenfavoured by political and social conditions (comprising the lived conditions of belief)so as to make its living out for many people an easy, perhaps even unexamined, norm.In Republican Turkey then, as in the West, it was a religious life that became anachieved status, and an ascribed laic life that became many people’s ‘default option.’

Militant laic actors’ fierce hostility to the AKP on the grounds of its supposedIslamist intentions contradicts a second assumption of Taylor’s. This is his claim thatthe contemporary impossibility of ‘naïve’ believing in secular societies (for bothbelievers and unbelievers) necessarily issues in a kind of tolerant or even respectfulattitude towards the ways of living of others. “We live in a condition where we cannothelp but be aware that there are a number of different construals, views whichintelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good-will, can and do disagree on”(Ibid., 11). And yet as Joel Kahn (2011: 2) points out, in such circumstances thereis no necessary reason why the outcome of such awareness may not be conflict ratherthan mutual respect. Indeed, militant laicism in Turkey clearly fosters an animosityfor alternative, religious ways of living one’s life.

In this context, recognition of the multiplicity or varieties of secularism in Turkey—minimally militant, post-Kemalist, conservative—is one strategy whereby thebinary polarization of contemporary social forces and ideological alternatives createdby militant laic actors may be tempered. Militant laicism is not the only way thatsecularism is understood, lived out and acted upon in Turkey. On the other hand manymilitant laic actors appear too fundamentalist to consider the task of constructing forthemselves a revised laicism, one that might respond in some less antagonistic way toMehmet Metiner and others in their emerging post-Islamism.

The secularism of the AKP18 and others gives onto to a number of importantissues. If militant laicism is not seen as synonymous with secularism but as one mode

18 The evolution and policies of the AKP has been studied in a number of publications, most recently in theedited collection of Cizre (2008).

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of it, the discourse and practices of militant laic actors do not circumscribe the field orpossibilities of secularity in Turkey. Judgement is suspended on the truth of theirnormalizing narrative about themselves vis-à-vis Muslims, which posits the institut-ing of Kemalist laicism to be an episode in the inevitable evolution of modernizingsocieties and themselves to be that society’s modernist vanguard. Recognition of thevarieties of secularism here might help us conclude that in the present situation inTurkey, post-Islamist and post-Kemalist secularists (damned as ‘liberal’ by militantlaic actors) may indeed acknowledge a more fulsome recognition of minority (inparticular Kurdish) rights, a stricter constitutionalism and a greater respect fordemocratic process than militant laicism has allowed for. In this light, Asad’s critiqueof ‘liberal’ modes of secularism for their typically compromised relationship withWestern power and models of agency seriously simplifies the complexity of politicalcontext and existential angst in which such modes are championed or rejected. Moregenerally, Asad’s genealogical investigation may even imply that ‘liberal’ Muslimsare somehow ‘westernized’, or at least in-authentically Islamic. By contrast, thespecificity of the Turkish case attests to the virtues of a comparative approach tothe study of secularism, involving not only different regional contexts of secularismbut also examining rival variants of secularism in any given locale.

In sum, the present political stand-off in Turkey reflects a ‘crisis’ in the intersub-jective and embodied character of militant laicism in Turkey, as well as in the self-conceptualization of laic actors. If one symptom of this crisis has been a constantrecourse to violence, the slow reform of certain defining institutional features ofTurkist-Republican corporatism also indicates the changing of the conditions of laicbelief, and thus the possibility of a post-laic, secular age in Turkey.

Conclusion

Given this striking situation in Turkey, how more generally might anthropologicalresearch on secularism proceed? I will conclude the paper by proposing in a ratherabrupt form a number of principles that I think should inform such research. I claimtoo that these tenets are useful in contributing at a methodological level to theanthropological study of secularism beyond Turkey. First, anthropological researchshould not seek to identify, represent and account for some archetypical secularsociety or history. Rather it should be concerned to analyze the multiplicity of sourcesgenerating a plethora of ways of organizing secularism and of being secular. Second,contemporary anthropology should historically and socially contextualize secularistpractices, a contextualization that results in an awareness of the variety of ‘secular-isms’, both within and between nation states, and over time. Third, research shoulddirect its analytic energies to describing diverse processes of knowledge productionabout living as a secular actor that generates these ‘secularisms’ in any particularplace. Fourthly and following on from this, research needs to politicize the institu-tional forces through which these fragile or well-attested secular habits, perceptions,emotions and practices are made, sustained and transformed. This includes analysisof the interests involved in their production. And fifthly anthropological research onsecularism should also investigate secular actors’ own affective perceptions of Islamand Muslims, being attentive to the evolving meanings that individuals or groups give

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to their own and others’ religious practices (including in present circumstances inTurkey to the decision to veil or not to veil). This leads anthropology to the explorationof embodied secular subjectivities. Again, these experiences and perceptions should berelated to the disputed production of knowledge about secularism created by Stateinstitutions, and to the ways these partially constitute secular actors’ perspectives.

In Turkey, as well as in a number of other contexts (e.g. in Pahlavi Iran), thesetenets are extremely useful for informing the study of laicism. They direct ourattention to certain key issues. The first is the difference between a laicism institutedand underpinned by an authoritarian State, and the ongoing assumption of modern-ization theory that secularity occurs inevitably and automatically in tandem with otherforms of social change, in particular with the development of science and in theemergence of rationalized and autonomous social spheres of activity. All of thesespheres—economic, political, cultural or educational—supposedly operate withoutrecourse to religious explanations or ends. Yet by contrast laicism in RepublicanTurkey is a heavily nationalized project, in which the practices and principles ofpublic space, education, cultural aesthetics, the economy and even religion are orhave been regulated by a nationalist rationality.

There is a second issue here too, the immense political efficacy granted to laicactors through their propagation of the modernization narrative or myth. In Turkeybureaucratic and military elites have long indexed their authority to control andrestructure society to the conformity of their reforms to a supposed universal andnecessary progress. Kalpana Ram argues for a similar identification between intel-lectuals and the State in India. There she writes that the State itself “could fall intothat special category of tools which, by virtue of acting as direct prosthetic extensionsof bodily agency, becomes thoroughly incorporated into the body image of the user”(2011: 188). A stress on the lived experience of laicism directs us to a third andrelated issue then, the complex relationship between the authoritarian State’s impo-sition of public laicism, and individuals’ or groups’ own relation to or appropriationof it. Precisely because the project of laicism is identified with and grasped by a broadclass of persons it is also intimately connected with the power, privilege and embod-ied agency of that class.

None of these tenets necessarily presume the genealogical relevance of ‘Euro-American’ colonial power and history for understanding “the ways that the doctrineof secularism has been conceived and implemented in the rest of the modernizingworld” (Asad 2003: 25). Nor of course do they show that the conditions of belief inMuslim societies preclude their members’ taking any disengaged standpoint on theirown immediate realities. For that reason alone they add another dimension to themany stories of secularism that anthropology might tell.

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