The Politics of Secularism, by Murat Akan (preface)

Murat Akan

the politics of

secularism religion, diversity, and institutional change in france and turkey

Preface

“The rise of sociology” wrote Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks, is related to the decline of the concept of political science and the art of politics which took place in the nineteenth century (to be more accurate, in the second half of that century, with the success of evolutionary and positivist theories). Everything that is of real importance in sociology is nothing other than political science. “Politics” became synonymous with parliamentary politics or the politics of personal cliques.1 In the study of secularization, either one theory of sociological determinism replaces another or Hegelian or Weberian ideational approaches present the most common alternatives to sociologism. To situate the current state of the art in researching secularism vis-à-vis Gramsci’s remarks warning against limiting politics to parliamentary politics, our current knowledge of the politics of secularism can in fact benefit from restarting with the parliament today and in the nineteenth century. With the turn to ideas, studies of the place of religion in politics and society show increased theological tendencies in method. Thus they distance themselves slowly from Niccolò Machiavelli’s simple and powerful lesson, supported by historical examples in The Prince, that even in analyzing the pope (or perhaps especially in analyzing the pope),

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we have to depart from the medieval tendency of focusing on ideas only and look also at action.2 Moreover, some approaches present themselves in thinned form; that is, disregarding fundamental aspects of their original formulations. For instance, many Weberians forget Max Weber’s cautious remarks in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism on studying the role of ideas: “We are concerned with the influence that their conduct [religious ethics of the classes which were the culture bearers of their respective countries] has had. Now it is quite true that this can only be completely known in all its details when the facts from ethnography and folklore have been compared with it. Hence we must expressly admit and emphasize that this is a gap to which the ethnographer will legitimately object.”3 Weber’s gap is often bridged with assumptions rather than filled with research material. Those who follow from Hegel with the currently popularized concept “imaginaries,”4 which in my reading is simply the new term for “intersubjective meaning,”5 often forget Judith Shklar’s important call for an “example of how one might discover an ‘intersubjective’ meaning of political practices and beliefs” and her remark that “between an authoritative act of consciousness-raising and an interpretation that simply relates two areas of understanding, there can really be no compromise.”6 This book originated with these preliminary observations, and from two concerns. Weberians, instead of taking Weber’s gap seriously, often focus on isomorphic relations between sociology and action or ideas and action. Working on secularism in France and Turkey for almost two decades now, I kept noticing certain facts falling through the theoretical approaches and analytical frameworks appropriated in describing the politics of secularism and religion in these two critical cases. The most striking examples were exactly the kind of nonisomorphic relations that became invisible with sociologism and ideationalism. For example, in both France and Turkey some proponents of religion courses in public schools emerged from the ranks of opponents of the headscarf, and in Turkey defenders of state-salaried imams could be found among both proponents and opponents of the headscarf. Such facts were either ignored or explained away, but they were repetitive enough to be taken as a starting point for reflecting back on current theoretical approaches and analytical frameworks.

My second concern was the various hermeneutical turns that critical studies on modernity kept claiming in regular cycles in response to culturalist comparative accounts in general but still without success in cracking the [x]

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codes of culturalism. What was at stake in these failed attempts was a political field that was within our reach but for some reason we just couldn’t rest our eyes on. I hope that this book will at least partially rest our eyes and bridge some of the gaps between the analytical and hermeneutical schools in the social sciences.

This comparative project started with my work under Alfred Stepan at Columbia University. I never lost touch with Al after receiving my degree from Columbia. The many conversation-walks I took with him in New York and along the Bosporus in Istanbul were always illuminating and reinforced in me the idea that finishing a research project was only a beginning, and that sitting on a manuscript until you know you are done is difficult in today’s academic environment of “publish or perish” but is still an option. By waiting I gained the opportunity to accumulate further primary sources and new conversation partners, and to appreciate the political struggles and people fighting for democracy in both France and Turkey at a depth beyond culturalist paradigms, a depth comparative research is in urgent need of.

Besides Al Stepan, I am grateful for the mentorship of Karen Barkey, Brian Barry, and Andrew Davison. I had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, and Brian directed the analytical capacity of an engineer to political philosophy. As my advisor before I met Al, Brian secured my funding at Columbia. It is still difficult for me that he passed away before I finished this book. Karen was always a meticulous reader; I still remember her entering my defense in 2005 and starting the conversation from footnote 614. Andrew Davison was always there for a good conversation and sharp comments on my work.

Anthropology and history contributed immensely to my formation. Sandrine Bertaux, a dedicated historian, taught me to appreciate history. The two anthropologists who have supported my research, writing, and thinking are Peter Geschiere of the University of Amsterdam and Peter van der Veer, director of the Department of Religious Diversity at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen.

Peter van der Veer put his confidence in me to finish this book and invited me to the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the 2012–13 academic year. The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey International Post Doctoral Research Fellowship Programme (TÜBİTAK 2219) funded that sabbatical year at the MPI. I presented parts of chapter 6 in Peter’s weekly seminar, where the critical comments by the seminar’s participants were very helpful. I thank Steven Vertovec and Fran Meissner for engaging me with P R E FAC E

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their workshop and giving me the opportunity to meet Ralph Grillo. I also thank the staff of the MPI for making the institute what it is, particularly Martin Kühn and Dagmar Recke.

Between 2009 and 2012 the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research of the University of Amsterdam offered me a nonresidential postdoctoral research fellowship with the project on Culturalization of Citizenship. I learned immensely from all the participants in this project, particularly Francio Guadeloupe and Peter Geschiere, director of the subgroup View from the South. I aired and discussed some of the ideas in this book in various workshops. I co-organized “Contextualizing Multiculturalism: Realities and Pitfalls” with Peter Geschiere at the 13th Mediterranean Research Meeting (MRM) in Florence in 2012 and “Secularization, Secularism, Secular: Democracy and Religious Minorities” with Sandrine Bertaux in 2008, again at the MRM. Under the Culturalization of Citizenship program, Peter, Sandrine, and I organized the workshop and conference series “Citizenship, Democracy and Diversity: Comparisons” at Boğaziçi University in 2012. Francesco Ragazzi and Frank de Zwart invited me to their workshop on State Categories/Social Identities at Leiden University in 2014. Ji Zhe invited me to the CNRS in 2015 for a workshop with Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités. Mirjam Künkler and Hanna Lerner, the two other participants in Alfred Stepan’s first seminar on religion, have invited me to many conferences and workshops since I left Columbia in 2005. I thank them all. I also thank all the student participants and guests of my seminar at Boğaziçi University on Secularism, Democracy, and Religion.

Three of my projects funded by the Boğaziçi University Research Fund were crucial in providing me the opportunity to gather research material for this book: “The Politics of Secularism in France and Turkey” (project no.

12668),“Politics, Religion and Society Before and Through the 1980 Military Takeover in Turkey, 1975–1987” (project no. 6732), and “The Politics of Laiklik in the Writing of the 1961 Turkish Constitution” (project no. 5523).

I advance a special thank you to my research assistants who worked on these projects, Ekin Kurtiç (now a PhD candidate at Harvard), Sumru Atuk (now a PhD candidate at CUNY), and Ezgi Murat (now a PhD candidate at Boğaziçi).

I conducted research at various libraries in France, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and Turkey. I thank all the librarians for making the research life pleasant. Special thanks to Richard at Columbia’s Lehman Library,

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and Hatice, Sema, Zeynep, Mustafa, Seyfi, and Kamber at Boğaziçi Library.

Many thanks also to Cuma, Nevzat, Serap and Halil for all the tea-chats we had.

I thank Boğaziçi University dean Ayşegül Toker for taking the initiative to create and institutionalize a faculty book-editing fund for this book and for all future faculty books to come. I thank Boğaziçi University rector Gülay Barbarosoğlu for her exemplary dedication to an autonomous research university in changing and hard times.

I am grateful to the Akan family, Fügen Akan, Engin Akan, and Burcu Akan, for always being there, and to the Parla family for launching me on my academic path in the social sciences.

My wife, Sandrine Bertaux, and my kids, Dylan and Luka, were with me all through the research and writing of this book. They continuously supported, encouraged, and comforted me in difficult times. I would not have been able to finish without them. And their presence assures me that this book is just another beginning.

Turkey witnessed a radical escalation of police violence during the writing of this book. I live in a neighborhood that is considered to be one of the bastions of Turkey’s democratic movements. I cannot count the times I had to rush to close my windows before police tear gas reached my sleeping kids. Late one evening I was walking to a friend’s house when I was stampeded by a crowd of youth running from the police. As a reflex I also started a sprint but after five seconds remembered to ask myself, “Why am I running?” I stopped because dignity did not allow me to set an example to those youth to run; I stopped and sat on a bench while I watched the police on my left approaching the youth crossing in front of me. I thought of my grandfather, who was a respected police officer, and I am sure if he were alive today he would have resigned or picked a fight with the institution. He was ninety when he described to me how, right after the 1960 coup, when he was in his early forties, a high-ranking military officer told him “the neighborhood likes you” and offered to promote him into the regime. My grandfather said to me, “I told him, Officer, you lean against a wall, the wall one day crumbles; you trust a person, the person dies one day; thank you, but I prefer to stay in the square.” Granddad started his police career in the street and ended in the street; to avoid corruption he refused to climb the ladder of state bureaucracy. This Turkish man who grew up in a diverse neighborhood apparently had a sense of institutional boundaries and duty. Today the

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police substitute for the military in Turkey. As I sat on the bench, a few young men stopped right in front of me. One of them turn to the other and asked, “Why are we running?” They looked at each other in silence and then sat near me while I embraced my seat, the gang of police on the left slowly approaching. This book is for those who are willing to sit and stay on their benches.

Kadıköy May 2016

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PRAISE FOR

The Politics of Secularism

“Murat Akan has given us an incredibly thorough account of how ideas about secularism have traveled between France and Turkey and how to relate these ideas to broader understandings of the relation between religion and society. His sophisticated theoretical approach is deeply informed by his empirical research. This book will clarify many misunderstandings in the comparative study of secularism and multiple modernities. It is a must-read for scholars from a wide range of social sciences as well as for an informed public.”

—Peter van der Veer, author of The Value of Comparison “Comparative studies on France and Turkey often emphasize the opposition between rigid anticlerical secularism and moderate liberal secularism. This brilliant and incisive work demonstrates that a binary approach ignores the central problem of political constructions of secularism: the civil religion of the state. With the meticulous erudition of a historian and theoretical mastery of a sociologist, Akan shows how liberal secularism won under the Third French Republic and how Kemalism in Turkey set the path for the hegemony of the AKP. Akan’s is the best book I have read on the subject and will significantly refresh global conceptions of secularism.”

—Jean Baubérot, École pratique des hautes etudes (Sorbonne) “Akan makes significant contributions to the study of religion and secularism, especially (but not only) in France and Turkey. The book also offers deep archival engagement; with his native knowledge of Turkish and fluency in French, Akan makes an original contribution to Turkey-France comparisons. The Politics of Secularism is comparative history at its best.” ˘ University of California, Berkeley —Cihan Tugal,

religion, culture, and public life

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