Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey

In November 2002 Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP, or Justice and Development Party), a political movement with roots in Islamic thought and piety, came into government in Turkey, which in its modern form is a state shaped by the overt secular policies and ideologies of its founder Kemal Ataturk.

This AKP success was then advanced further over determined military and Kemalist opposition in another and greater electoral victory in July 2007. In the general elections held on June 12, 2011, the AKP again increased its share of the popular vote to 49.9% and secured 327 parliamentary seats to form a third-consecutive majority government.

How did all this happen and what are its implications for secularism, modernity, democracy and Islam in Turkey and the larger Islamic world? Having studied this subject both broadly and deeply, Professor Yavuz offers us an original analysis along theoretical and empirical lines. He notes, for example, that ‘a slow institutional and behavioral Islamisation process has been going on in Turkey since the mid–1980s’ (p. 262), but that ‘it would be a mistake to read this Islamisation as purely negative. It has played an important role in the ongoing economic development of the country and, as a result, many Muslims have become more moderate’ (p. 263). Yavuz further comments, ‘The AKP is an outcome of the transformation of liberal Islam, directed by four socio-political factors: the new Anatolian bourgeoisie, the expansion of the public sphere and the new Muslim intellectuals, the [EU’s] Copenhagen criteria, and the February 28 soft coup’ (p. 78). Throughout his study, the author incisively illustrates how these four factors have become significant determining factors in Turkey’s economic success and its increasing prominence in regional affairs with an assertive foreign policy over Middle Eastern issues, the Palestinian – Israeli impasse, and also how it was able to maintain relations with both the EU, the USA, and Iran.