Secularism

The issue underlying much of the Nahda debate of the last few posts is whether the Arab world’s governments can be or should be secular and/or to what extent. The nature of Arab nationalist thought was clearly secular as Arabs belong to several religious groupings and the idea of the nation required a unifying theme which thus clearly couldn’t be seen to unduly favour any particular religion. Science and education were considered important progressive forces and it was generally considered that freedom required progress. National education schemes were therefore instrumental in producing an ethos of secularism without ever fully articulating its nature.

More recently, attempts have been made to more fully do this job of articulating how secularism fits into Arab politics and society. The Arab words for secularism and secular are respectively ‘Almana and ‘Almani. Other words used include ‘Ilmaniyya, ‘Alamiyya, ‘Aqlaniyya, ‘Asrana and the French words Laïcus and Laicité. The current articulations pick up threads from the work of such major Arab thinkers and opinion formers as Tahtawi, Bustani, Kawakibi, Farah Antun, Husri, Zurayq, ‘Aflaq and Rihani. The three main secular ideas are that religious tolerance is desirable, that a secular national education is progressive and that, while religion has a valid role in politics and society, there ought to be some separation between religion and politics and between religion and the state (ad-Din wa ad-Dawla).

The secular theorists thus did things like critique political sectarianism (at-Ta’ifiyya as-Siyasiyya) and advocate civil courts (Mahakim Madaniyya), reform of some personal status laws and the principle of equality of all citizens regardless of sect or creed. Rationalism was thought to be the best approach to producing fairness and progress towards secular aims. The parlous situation in Lebanon, a system dominated by sectarianism, was an obvious focus of attention for many thinkers anxious to make a secular anti-sectarian system seem desirable. Many thinkers opposed to extremes of secularism could equally point to the alleged depredations of radically secular Kemalist Turkey.

Thus secular and anti-secular camps developed, each with examples of the extremes to which the ideas of the other camp might be expected to lead. It has been argued by thinkers such as Muhammad Arkoun (b. 1928) and Aziz al-Azmeh (b. 1947) that conservative religious ideologies are unhelpfully extreme in their anti-secular prescriptions. Such progressive Islamic thinkers have called for Islamic thought to be secularised. Azmeh, in particular, has promoted a new understanding of secularism and argued that secularism is necessary for any democratic order and that it has been misunderstood as being anti-religious. I will discuss further the debates concerning the merits or otherwise of Western liberal or other democracies later.

The idea that secularism ought to be a rational choice received further impetus from the events of 9/11. Fehmi Jadaane and Clovis Maksoud have contributed to the most recent debate. Maksoud has suggested that the role of Islam is not comparable with the role of religion in the West and that secularism is therefore a more problematical process as there is no institution of the church to be separated from the state. He also notes that Islam is a component of national identity for Arab Christians as it is for Arab Muslims and the peace treaty Anwar Sadat made with Israel following the 1967 Nakba has therefore contributed to a complex attitude to secularism which remains to be and must be resolved rationally. The debate continues.

Part 5: the Turkish Ultra Secularist Experiment - Kemalism - (and its recent relaxation?)

Turkey was of course the central land of the Ottoman Empire as discussed in earlier posts. The Empire participated to an extent in the European state system and European secularist, modernist and nationalist ideas also had a significant impact in the Turkish centre of the Empire (as they did in its Arab territories). The revered father of modern Turkey was, of course, the extreme secularist, Ataturk (Father of the Turks). I want now to outline how the state of Turkey developed from its Ottoman roots under his political model and the latest moves to relax the extreme secularism insisted upon under its aegis until quite recently.

The role of the 'ulema class in Ottoman Turkey (and in the rest of the Empire) was typically to give legitimacy to the basically secular Ottoman rulers. They were a class of state officials as has frequently been the case in the greatest Islamic empires (and also clergy have historically played a similar role in many Christian polities). The state also controlled religious endowments and built great Mosques and in return rulers were permitted occasionally to claim the legitimacy afforded by the title, Caliph. This relationship with a secular power permitted a secular power interested in modernisation of law to manipulate the law determined by the religious officials that were thus ‘in their pockets’ and importantly also alienated from their flocks. I mentioned in recent posts that various muftis had no problem with modernisation. The major modernised ‘Code of Legal Rules (Majallat-i Akham-i Adliyyah)’ conceived largely by Midhat Pasha (1822 – 1883) was already more secularist in nature than had been usual in Muslim lands.

Ataturk’s military coup led to the end of the sultanate (and then the alleged caliphate in 1924). Turkey was specifically declared a 'laic' jumhurriya (secular republic). No other system in the world is as specifically secular as this one is. Sufi orders were abolished, the Turkish script was Latinised, many Arabic loan-words were removed from the Turkish language (although many remained) and ‘Islamic’ dress (such as the fez although it actually has a European origin) in public was officially discouraged. Veiling in various public places was (and remains, I believe) actually banned and the Islamic 'call-to-prayer' was required for some time to be called in Turkish (although it returned to Arabic after a few decades). The modernised Islamic laws were essentially replaced by a completely new code based on Swiss law and the French Code Napoleon.

This total secularisation came to be called Kemalism (after Ataturk whose less honorary name was Mustapha Kemal) and successfully isolated religion from Turkish politics. MPs were nevertheless still practicing Muslims who despite the repression involved were prepared to go along with Kemalism as a nationalist movement (much as many German Christians were simultaneously going along with Hitlerism). Ataturk formally allowed multi-party democracy but secularisation was non-negotiable and supported by a Kemalist military which saw itself as the protector of secularisation. Its commitment was evident in the mid 1950s when it instituted a coup to protect early moves to remove some restrictions upon religion.

The political class has long been attached to the West. Turkey was a signatory to the ill-fated Baghdad Pact, has joined NATO and continues to seek to join the EU. Coups also occurred in 1979 and 1981 against anti-Western religiously inspired governments. From the early 90s, however, the support for religious parties continued to grow and the Refah (Welfare) Party, another Islamist party, was elected in 1995 (but was forced by the military to resign in 1997). By this time, however, the main issue was the anti-Western (the party was critical of Israel, Europe and, importantly, NATO) rather than the pro-religion flavour. The party was banned and its members soon joined the Virtue Party (the FP) which was, in turn, forced to close in 2001.

Today the AK Party (also religiously based) has now been in government led by Recip Erdogan since 2002. Having learned the lessons of earlier incarnations of Turkish political Islam, it is no longer formally anti-Western and continues the liberalising political reforms required for entry to the EU. It has been a reasonably secularist party and a good economic manager. In the long term it hopes, however, to somewhat reverse what it sees as the excesses of Kemalism. How far this will be allowed to go remains uncertain.