Turkey in transformation

The second anniversary of the resumption of Muslim liturgical prayer was recently celebrated, in the historic "Basilica Museum" of Santa Sofia, unanimously considered a world heritage site. In a recent article by Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, assistant professor of politics and international relations at London Metropolitan University (which appeared in Italian on the web pages of the Fondazione Oasis), the "case Santa Sofia” serves as a pretext for an analysis of Turkish transformations through the magnifying glass of religion.

The central idea of ​​this contribution is that in Turkey, we would be witnessing a progressive disconnect between the identity of the State and the identity of society: while religion is increasingly exploited for political purposes, the younger generations , first of all, are increasingly distancing themselves from Islam. In fact, we are probably only experiencing the last stage of the ancient dialectic between continuity and rupture typical of the relationship between religion, politics and society, established since the apogee of the Ottoman Empire (with the introduction of a civil law alongside the Islamic one) and continued in the republican era, contributing to the construction of the Turkish national identity. The Kemalist reforms, at the origin of the Turkish Republic, appear as the fulfillment of a long process of domestication of Islam by the power, first Ottoman and then Turkish, a process which becomes radicalized to the point of also putting an end to the religious legitimization of politics , when Islam was abolished as the state religion in 1928. Atatürk imposes a rewriting of history to put the idea of ​​"Turkish ethnicity" at the center. When, in 1937, the principle of secularism was enshrined in the Constitution, it was immediately clear that it cannot be understood in the French way! In Turkey, secularism does not mean the mutual autonomy of the religious and political fields, and even less the neutrality of the state in the field of religious conscience and practices. By contrast, Turkish secularism aims not to separate the state from the religion of a large part of the population, but to establish state control over a national Islam. The discourse on secularism detaches itself from any concern to guarantee the plurality of religious convictions and becomes an instrument of power and is, with nationalism, part of the republican doxa. The program is clear: to legitimize the nation as Muslim, therefore Turkish, to therefore integrate Islam as a condition of belonging to "Turkishness", to justify the direct management of the religious field by the state, suppressing any internal authority specific to the religious sphere . Here is the creation of the Diyanet, or ministry of religious affairs, today at the height of its power, if it is true that, in 2021, its budget was higher than that of 7 ministries. To a large extent, Turkish Islam as defined has been instrumentalized for the benefit of the Kemalist project of creating a territorialized and unified nation-state, in the same way as history or language.

Islam, on the other hand, has become an ideological apparatus of the state, and this is exactly how the current president Erdoğan sees it, although, unlike Atatürk, he claims his personal adherence to islam. But the head-on collision between the AKP, the President's party, and the Gülen movement (from which the "maximum leader" ideologically comes), ushered in an authoritarian degeneration of power, which also brought with it a "pollution" of its religious credentials : a government that claims to have religious sensitivity and reveals itself responsible for many reprehensible actions, would lead the younger generations to distance themselves from religion, all within a framework of accentuated secularization. But it is too early to understand whether this is an irreversible process, for example, even if the current regime were to fall (prospect for the truth not so immediate).


Claudio Monge
NP August / September 2022