Secularism and State Policies toward Religion

Secular theory and praxis, academic discourse and everyday politics, have had a symbiotic relationship in the case of Turkey. Until recently, every academic accepted the religion-politics dichotomy as paradigmatic of modern statehood and political science as an academic discipline could not articulate anything about modern politics without some explicit or implicit avowal of the legitimacy of the secularist ideology and worldview. Hence, ‘religion’ was banished from this academic discipline altogether as it was believed to have no political quotient whatsoever and destined to disappear from history. Legal scholars, philosophers and historians may study religion for mainly antiquarian purposes, but its relevance for contemporary issues was nil. History however has refused to redeem secular promises and ‘religion’, as the familiar refrain now goes, has returned to world politics with a vengeance. Secular theory, consequently, is fast going out of favour in the academy and the affinity of religion and politics is no longer a shocking postulate in political science.

Even philosophers with normative arguments for keeping the public sphere

sealed off from religion, for rejecting its language, symbols and political aspirations, have now modified their stance. They now concede that the politics of ‘overlapping consensus’ requires a coexistence of religious and secular discourses. Within the current intellectual debate on the relationship between religion and politics, then, most of the ideological hurdles against the study of religion as a political phenomenon have disappeared.Rather, the relevant question for political science today is not whether religion and politics should interact but rather how they do so. It is in the pursuance of this objective that Ahmet Kuru’s present work – ambitious, nuanced, empirically well-founded yet theoretically stringent – makes a significant contribution

The title of Kuru’s book gives a fair indication of the scope and contents of his study, if not of its distinctive features. It makes a welcome addition to the growing corpus of scholarly works on secularism that engage with it in a spirit of critical inquiry rather than championing its causes. What is distinctive about Kuru’s work is its focus on the politics of secularism in a comparative, not only trans-national but also trans-civilisational, context. Or, as the author himself points out, his book differs from ‘sociological works on societal and individual religiosity’ (Casanova et al), ‘philosophical works on secularism as a worldview’ (à la Taylor), ‘critical works on the deconstruction of secularism as a discourse and as power relations’ (Asad, Mahmood, Hurd, Scott), and ‘anthropological works on secularism as an everyday practice’ (Navaro-Yasin etc.)