3 AN EMPIRICAL CRITIQUE OF TURKEY’S LAICISM’S POWER-
3.2 Turkey’s Laicism as a “Power-Knowledge Regime”
I find it useful to rely on this literature in analyzing Turkey’s laicism as the claims that the defenders of laicism in Turkey advance to justify laicism in Turkey do not stand up to
scrutiny. Since those claims do not stand up to scrutiny, they rather appear asconstituent parts of a “power-knowledge regime” that helps a laic a minority that call themselves “laik50” maintain
their hegemony over a majority that they deem as “anti-laik.” It should be stated that by making this argument, I am not implying that defenders of laicism do not genuinely believe what they say about laicism, or that they do not sincerely espouse certain ideas about laicism. For my argument, whether they sincerely espouse certain ideas about laicism or not is not relevant. I am simply pointing out that the arguments they advance about laicism justify their hegemony in Turkish society that holds a variety of different ideas about laicism. They may or may not have
50 Again “laik” is the Turkish adjective that people who defend laicism call themselves. It can be roughly
ulterior motivations in advancing their arguments; this is not of concern to my argument. I simply point out that different definitions of laicism may substantially change power relations in Turkey, and we should realize that there is not a universal interpretation of laicism, and in the end sovereign state determines how it should be interpreted. If the sovereign changes, the interpretation of laicism may change, and then we may observe completely different relations between state and religion.
As I have shown in the first chapter in my presentation of Turkey’s Constitutional
Court’s decision about the AKP, in Turkey, defenders of laicism present laicism as the guarantee of democracy, denigrate anyone who critique Atatürk’s laicization policies, present religion as a dogmatic institution that humans need to leave behind in order to make progress, see laicism as the only path for becoming enlightened and avoiding dogmas, and conceptualize laic laws as if they are free from bias by arguing that they are developed on the basis of modern science and human reason. And despite its critical attitude towards religion, defenders of laicism in Turkey still claim that laic state in Turkey does not violate the right to freedom of religion in Turkey. In contrast to the all the positive aspects that laicists attribute to laicism, academic literature (some of which I cited in the previous chapter) that tries to be objective dispute all of these claims.
First, instead of being a guarantee of democracy, Kemalist laicists in Turkey justify Atatürk’s authoritarian rule, are suspicious of the choices of the people in the elections, and justify military interventions into politics (Davison and Parla 2004; İnsel 2009; Köker 2009; Kuru 2012; Özlem 2007; Parla 2009; Zürcher 2009). Kemalist laicism and democracy are not supportive of one another in Turkey (Axiarlis 2014).
Second, educational policies of the Kemalist laicist Turkey do not aim to cultivate “individual autonomy” (to use contemporary liberal terminology) or the “enlightened”
individuals, but rather aim to instill in students loyalty and unquestioning obedience and dedication to the official principles of the Turkish state namely “Kemalism,” or “Atatürkism” (Davison and Parla 2004; İ. Kaplan 2011; S. Kaplan 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Yayla 2014).
Third, from a sociological and anthropological perspective, Turkey’s Kemalism resembles the religions in terms of having “sacreds,51” “blasphemy laws52,” “dogmas53,” and
“rituals” all of which shed doubt on whether Turkey’s laicism can be seen as a rationalization, disenchantment, the rise of individual autonomy, or a kind of “Turkish Enlightenment” as defenders of laicism in Turkey make laicism to be. As social scientist Umut Azak writes,
“Kemalism owed its dominance, if not to hegemony, to its success in inculcating in citizens that the values of the secular nation state were sacred…the way in which the elite conveyed secularist ideas to the masses was hardly secular. It is not surprising that Kemalism, which had its roots in the earlier realm of religion as do all nationalist ideologies, carried ritualistic parallels with religion. In its search for hegemony, Kemalism built myths around historical personalities, events and concepts, reiterating narrative forms of religion. Kemalists adopted the concepts of religion and refashioned them for their secular project” (Azak 2010, 17). Or as anthropologist
51 As many foreign observers can immediately notice, Turkey has a big “cult of Ataturk” around whom
everything revolves in Turkey. For a detailed examination of how the cult of Ataturk is used in Turkey, see (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 188-203).
52 In Turkey, there is a specific law called “Crimes Against Atatürk” that Turkish Parliament passed in
1951. According to this law, “insulting the memory of Atatürk through words or actions” can be punished up to three years in prison. This law also states that damaging statues of Atatürk is punished with
confinement (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 202-203). Liberal intellectual Mustafa Akyol calls this law “Turkey’s blasphemy law” (Akyol 2011).
53 In Turkey, as the cult of Atatürk and the law passed to protect his memory, and articles of the
constitution that prohibits even proposing to remove Atatürk’s principles and reforms from the
constitution show Turkey’s Kemalism is very dogmatic, and does not allow a free discussion of different possibilities for Turkey. Liberal academic Atilla Yayla’s comments should be mentioned here. In his article, “Looking to Kemalism from a Liberal Perspective,” he states that Kemalists in Turkey often idealize rationality, science, modernity, but in reality some of them see Atatürk as a kind of Prophet, or sometimes even God that no one can question. Yayla thinks that in this regard Kemalism resembles pretty much to the religions it critiques (Yayla 2004, 15). Also, see historian of Ottoman Empire Ahmet Yaşar Ocak’s similar remarks about how Kemalism was imposed on religious Muslims in Turkey like an unquestionable religion (Ocak 2002, 137, 142-143).
Navaro-Yashin writes, “within the context of Ataturk fetishism, such terms as “modernity,” “rationality,” “discipline,” “order,” or “bureaucracy” are inadequate for the purposes of ethnographic interpretation. In other terms, the terms of secularism are not appropriate for the study of secularism. The material observed includes a peculiar phenomenon of invoking spirits in the name of secularism, employing numerology to validate it, seeing supernatural apparitions or images of Ataturk, and producing an aura around his image. “Belief,” “magic,” “mysticism”: I suggest that these terms may be more appropriate for the study of contemporary secularist cultures in Turkey, especially those implicated in statism” (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 189-190).
Fourth, Turkey’s laic state has engaged in “religion-making from above” by trying to promote its own conceptions of proper religious belief and practice through state organs, and in this sense it tried to reform religious practices of the people. The Constitutional Court’s
understanding of religion as a matter of individual conscience is an example of the “religion- making from above.” By conceptualizing religion in this way, the Court can claim that it does not violate the right to freedom of religion when it for instance bans headscarf in public sphere. An example of state’s “religion-making from above” can also be found in Kemalism’s
engagement with the Alevi minority. Religious studies scholar Markus Dressler brilliantly showed in a number of writings how the historiography of Alevism in modern Turkey was primarily shaped by the imperatives of Kemalism’s nation-building process (Dressler 2015), and how Turkey’s laic state relies instrumentally on Sunnism in its engagement with Alevis (Dressler 2011).
All of these critiques lead me to conclude that Turkey’s laicist state had all the negative characteristics (i.e. being dogmatic, being authoritarian) that it has attributed to religions. Since I observe that Turkey’s laicist state had all these negative characteristics, I do not find claims of
the defenders of Turkey’s Kemalist laicism to justify laicism as convincing. As a result, I do not see how Turkey’s laicism is superior to religion-based state of the Ottoman Empire as its
advocates claim.