![]()
1 Introduction
The Secular State and Its Three Types
Sometime in the early 14th century . . . somewhere in northwest Anatolia . . . Osman Bey, the tribal leader of a relatively weak Anatolian emirate known as the Ottomans, visits Sheikh Edebali, a local Sufi sheikh, and stays the night in his convent. In his room, Osman sees a copy of the Qur’an hanging on the wall. Out of his great respect for the Holy Book, he does not lie down on his bed; rather, he falls asleep while sitting up. In his dream, Osman sees a moon rising from the breast of Edebali and sinking into his own. Then a tree sprouts from Osman’s navel, and its shade encompasses the whole world. Osman Bey wakes up and asks Edebali for his interpretation. “Osman, my son,” says Sheikh Edebali, “congratulations, for God has given the imperial office to you and your descendants, and my daughter Malhun shall be your wife.”1 With that, Osman’s dream became the most famous and resilient founding myth of the Ottoman Empire.2
Some 600 years later in 1925 . . . in Kastamonu, a town in North Anatolia . . . the president of the newly founded Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, delivers a speech. In his speech Kemal states in no unequivocal terms his stance on Sufi convents and sheikhs: “Gentlemen and the nation, know well that the Republic of Turkey cannot be a nation of sheikhs, dervishes, disciples [müritler] and devotees [mensuplar].” Using a polysemous word “tarikat,” a word that literally means “path” but also means “Sufi order,” Kemal continues: “The truest and the most authentic path [tarikat] is that of civilization. It is enough to do what the civilization orders and demands in order to be a human. The sheikhs of Sufi Orders will understand this truth with all clarity and immediately close down their convents on their own initiatives.”3
What is the critical difference between Osman Bey and Mustafa Kemal? The obvious answer is Osman Bey was a founder of an Islamic empire while Mustafa Kemal was the founder of a modern secular state. But what does this difference really amount to? To paraphrase Charles Taylor’s opening sentence of his Secular Age, what does it mean to say that a state is secular, not religious?4 And to add another layer to Taylor’s question, what might be the possible paths out of religious states into secular ones? These are the two questions I aim to address in this book. To this end, I compare the historical experiences of Republican Turkey (1923–present), Pahlavi Iran (1925–1979), and Soviet Russia (1922–1991). It was in these respective periods that my three cases made their transitions from a religious imperial past to a secular modern present, each adopting a distinct model of state secularization in that transition.5
If “state secularity” is to be understood as a modern condition, a model derived from the experience of a single country or a single civilization or a single religion is not going to capture that condition in its entirety.6 A comparative study, therefore, is indispensable to understand and grasp the true nature of state secularity. The three cases selected in this book are ideal in the sense that they clearly exhibit a critical variation in their paths from the religious past to the secular present. Despite this variation, however, they also share a certain common feature that constitutes, in my view, the defining characteristic of state secularity.
I hope to persuade the reader that this book goes beyond such specificities and arrives at a religion- and/or civilization-free conceptualization of state secularity. I also hope to persuade the reader that the book provides a persuasive account of the variation observed across the three cases and, in doing so, avoids any essentialist claims about the cases.
There are five main sections in this chapter. In the next section I discuss what constitutes, in my view, the defining characteristic of state secularity. In the second section I discuss the alternative paths, represented by the experiences of Republican Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, and Soviet Russia, in state secularization. In the third section I discuss the methodology employed in this book, and in the fourth I explain my reasons for choosing Republican Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, and Soviet Russia as my cases. The final section provides a summary of the remaining chapters.
CONCEPTUALIZING STATE SECULARIZATION
The Problem
By comparing the “state secularization” processes in three major Eurasian countries, Republican Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, and Soviet Russia, this book seeks to make a conceptual contribution to social sciences in general and the field of comparative politics in particular.
There is a great deal of conceptual confusion around the term “secularization,” a confusion observable even among scholarly circles. The conceptual confusion is in part due to conceptual stretching of these terms and their indiscriminate application to different kinds of spheres and/or agents. As for the former, Oliver Tschannen, for example, found out that scholars attach to the term “secularization” several different meanings such as differentiation, rationalization, worldliness, autonomization, privatization, generalization, pluralization, decline in religious practice, collapse of worldviews, unbelief, scientization, and sociologization.7 Regarding the application of the term to different kinds of spheres and/or agents, one can speak of, for example, individual secularization or societal secularization or organizational secularization,8 or of public secularization9 or political secularization10 or polity secularization,11 or of international politics12 or of the state.
State secularization has obvious affinities with several of these different kinds of secularization, especially public, polity, and political secularization. Interested readers may find it enlightening to further investigate how different scholars define these related terms.13 I am not going to delve into this discussion. Fortunately there are more direct definitions of the term “secular state,” and scholars seem to agree on its basic features as Donald E. Smith explicitly stated them fifty years ago. According to Smith, the secular state is a state that guarantees individual and corporate religious freedom, that does not discriminate individuals or groups on the basis of their religion, and that neither promotes nor intervenes with religion.14
Four decades later, Silvio Ferrari, Charles Taylor, and Ahmet Kuru defined the secular state in more or less similar ways. Ferrari, for example, defines the secular state as a state that grants all political and civil rights to individuals irrespective of their religion, that does not intervene in religious organizations’ internal organization and doctrines, and that does not legitimate its power on the basis of religion.15 Charles Taylor’s definition is not much different. For him the secular state is a state that is not officially and substantively linked to a religion, that acknowledges and guarantees full religious liberty, that grants full equality between people of different faiths, and that allows for full political participation of people of all faiths.16 Ahmet Kuru’s definition is more restrictive. For him the secular state is a state whose legislative and judicial processes are not under any institutional religious control and that declares constitutional neutrality toward religions, which means it does not establish either official religion or atheism.17
These definitions have serious limitations of employment in other contexts. This can be readily seen in that, according to these definitions, none of my cases in fact should be considered genuinely “secular.” This is because neither Republican Turkey nor Soviet Russia nor Pahlavi Iran developed the kind of neutrality toward any religion that these authors speak of. Soviet Russia was suppressive of all religions. Republican Turkey was not neutral, as it has not only supported Sunni Islam but also denied that support to the Alawites and severely restricted the religious freedoms of many Sunnis and Alawites alike. Among the three, Pahlavi Iran was probably the most neutral, even though that neutrality was introduced and implemented by force.
The definitions proposed by various scholars are limited because they rather conceive a “liberal democratic secular state,” not simply a “secular state.” In fact, Smith explicitly acknowledges that his definition is derived from the liberal democratic tradition of the West.18
In order to overcome this limitation, one might simply suggest dropping the liberal component in the aforementioned definitions. If we follow this suggestion, we in fact end up with the most basic definition of the secular state. That is, the secular state is a state that is disconnected or separated from religion. This definition has certain appeal, but it also has a major problem. Namely, the difficulty of determining what constitutes “disconnection” or “separation” between the two.19
If we follow this definition, we should first specify those spaces that belong to the state only and those spaces that belong to religion. Then, we must check whether the state and religion are properly separated and in their proper places. But how are we going to specify a priori such spaces? What are, for example, those spaces that belong to the state? Any such specification is going to be necessarily ideological. The same is also true for religion. Any specification of spaces for religion is going to be inescapably ideological and theological.
Defining “the secular state” based on empirical data has its own problem. Let us consider a hypothetical country that is undergoing state secularization. The process is supposed to separate respective spaces for the state and religion. What factors are going to determine the institutional outcome of state secularization? Certain ideologies and many other factors might indeed play a role. However, the process is also going to be a highly a contested one. In other words, the respective spaces of the state and religion are going to be determined politically. This makes the process, to a large extent, unpredictable. The process is, therefore, most likely to produce quite diverse institutional relations between the state and religion.20 This basically means that any definition of the term “secular state” based on empirical data will suffer from institution bias. Conceptualizing state secularization as separation between the state and religion is a case in point.
The challenge is then to conceptualize state secularization in such way that, as much as possible, the term will be free from these constraints. In other words, the term should not be defined according to a particular idealized institutional relationship and should not reflect the particular dictates of any civilization/religion/ideology. By and large scholars avoided this challenge. Therefore, scholars have generally ended up with using the old definition as we have already seen. Another option is not to stick to any definition of the secular state. For example, Alfred Stepan follows this option. “Despite my general reservation about the term ‘secularism,’ in my current research, I use the concept of ‘multiple secularisms’ to get around some of the difficulties of a single meaning of ‘secular’ and to help me identify and analyze the great variations in state-religion relations that can and do exist in modern democracies.”21
In the face of extremely diverse institutional relations between the state and religion, this latter option is, in this author’s view, better than sticking to the old definition, which assumes one particular institutional relationship. However, I also believe that we should take up the challenge of reconceptualizing the secular state, not escape from it. To do this I propose to approach “state secularity” from an alternative angle.
An Alternative Perspective: State Secularization as a By-Product
Secularization, however defined, is obviously about religion. As such it is also about religious community and religious institutions. Let me first simply define “religion.” A religion is a set of beliefs and practices believed to have descended from a transcendental being, God. Religious community is the community of individuals who perform, by virtue of formal or informal education or some other spiritual qualities, certain tasks, deemed religious, for adherents of that religion. Religious institutions are such buildings and places where religious community reproduces its ranks and undertakes its religious tasks.22 For the convenience of simplicity, my discussion will refer to religion only but, unless otherwise stated, will apply to religious community and institutions as well.
Religion might exist in a variety of relations with a ...
