Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice: Genealogy and Cases 3030374556, 9783030374556

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Seda Ünsar Özgür Ünal Eriş   Editors

Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice Genealogy and Cases

Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice

Seda Ünsar Özgür Ünal Eriş •

Editors

Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice Genealogy and Cases

123

Editors Seda Ünsar Doğuş University Acıbadem-İstanbul, Turkey

Özgür Ünal Eriş İstanbul 29 Mayıs University Ümraniye-İstanbul, Turkey

ISBN 978-3-030-37455-6 ISBN 978-3-030-37456-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3

(eBook)

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my beloved parents Sema and Fahri Ünsar For my beloved grandparents Neriman and Cemal İzmirli For my greatest treasure, my daughter Derin and my always supporting husband Rauf Eriş For my precious parents Nilgül and Ahmet Çetin Ünal

Preface

Demystifying Secularism in Theory and Practice Secularism is usually analyzed as having two basic propositions—the first of which is the strict separation of the state institutions from religious ones, while the second proposition is that people of different religions and beliefs are equal before the law. As such, secularism forms one of the basic categorical and conceptual assumptions that govern the Western world, its politics (including colonial and post-colonial power), and academic knowledge. Almost all thinkers known to Western academia seem to regard secularism as a Western phenomenon which makes the discussion center on the debates of ‘Westernization.’ As part of the Westernization debate, secularism thus is approached as a phenomenon of civilization and culture. Yet, the reason that secularism appears Western is deeply related to the emergence of the sixteenth-century Capitalist World-Economy as its epistemological and ontological basis and vice versa. Its relation to the rest of the world is embedded within the enlargement of the World-Economy to which ‘Westernization’ also belongs. Therefore, the issue of secularism is primarily an issue of development, and development, is an issue of political economy as much as it is an issue of politics and culture, or rather of the circular relationship among these interlinked phenomena. This book indeed grew out of this idea, and of the idea of questioning the almost a priori accepted assumption of secularism as categorically and solely Western. The book seeks to cover many intertwined aspects of secularism, socioeconomic and socio-political development, civilizational evolution, and political praxis as well as to remind questions on religion vs. modernity debate albeit by

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focusing on not religion but secularism itself. The chapters intend to provide theoretical outlets and hints at the praxis of secularism with the hopes of an academic space created of different perspectives. İstanbul, Turkey

Seda Ünsar

Acknowledgement We would like to thank Mr. Emre Turhan for his help in editing this book in terms of formatting and standardizing the chapters.

Contents

Confluence of Politics and Religion: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eliz Sanasarian

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Civilization as Secularization: The Transformation of European Identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bedri Gencer

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On Multiple Epistemologies of Secularism: Toward a Political Economy Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seda Ünsar

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The Westernisation of a Western Country. Between Liberalisation and the Continuity of Corporate Models: Économie Politique, Secularism and the Organisation of Industry in Eighteenth-Century Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Francisco Jorge Rodríguez Gonzálvez

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The Modern Is not Secular: Mapping the Idea of Secularism in the Works of Steve Bruce, Charles Taylor, and Talal Asad . . . . . . . . 105 Çağdaş Dedeoğlu The Sociology and Anthropology of Secularism: From Genealogy/Power to the Multiple Manifestations of the Secular . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Fabio Vicini Understanding Turkish Modernization in the Midst of Conjectural Changes in Ethics and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 A. Murat Şener The Political Economy of Secularism in Turkey: Beyond Culturalist and Ideational Explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Cemil Boyraz

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Does Religion Matter? In Search of a Secular Rationale of the EU Neighbourhood Policy: Cases of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Hikmet Kirik and Pelin Sönmez Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 Seda Ünsar and Özgür Ünal Eriş

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Seda Ünsar completed her BA degree in International Relations at Koç University, Istanbul, where she entered with a national ranking of 49th. She received MA degree from Claremont Graduate University and University of Southern California. She completed her Ph.D. with Distinction at the University of Southern California in 2008. She taught at the London School of Economics as a visiting fellow (2008– 2009) and was a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute (2009–2010). She taught at Bogaziçi University, and the University of Southern California; worked at Arel University and Yeditepe University, and is currently at Doğuş University. Her research interests include institutional theory, the political economy of Ottoman institutional modernization and secularism, the political economy of neoliberalism, Western political thought, Islamic political thought, and the Middle East. Özgür Ünal Eriş received her BA from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, her MA from the Department of European Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK, and her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at the University of Essex in the UK. During her studies, she also worked as a visiting researcher in Charles University in Prague, Free University, and Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin. Her MA dissertation thesis was specifically looking at the influence of Luxemburg Summit on Turkey-EU relations, while her Ph.D. thesis focused on German Foreign Policy’s influence on Turkey’s EU membership. Since then, her research interests mainly focus on new security threats, Turkey-EU relations, energy security, and the importance of illegal migration in Turkey-EU relations, and she has published extensively in international books and peer-reviewed journals about these issues. She recently co-authored a book on the Political Economy of

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Muslim Countries published in July 2018 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing Company. Currently, she works as an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations in İstanbul 29 Mayıs University and lectures part-time in some other universities.

Contributors Cemil Boyraz Istanbul Bilgi University, Eyup, Istanbul, Turkey Çağdaş Dedeoğlu The Center for Critical Research on Religion, Newton, MA, USA Bedri Gencer Department of Human and Social Sciences, Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey Hikmet Kirik Department of Public Relations and Political Science, Faculty of Political Sciences, Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey Francisco Jorge Rodríguez Gonzálvez London School of Economics, London, UK Eliz Sanasarian Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA A. Murat Şener Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey Pelin Sönmez Department of International Relations, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Kocaeli University, Kocaeli, Turkey Özgür Ünal Eriş İstanbul 29 Mayıs University, Istanbul, Turkey Seda Ünsar Doğuş University, Istanbul, Turkey Fabio Vicini İstanbul 29 Mayis University, Istanbul, Turkey

Confluence of Politics and Religion: An Introduction Eliz Sanasarian

It is never easy to write about the nature and processes of secularism. Many factors have come to impact consistently on its form, definition, and manifestation. The process has been multilayered, complicated, colored by internal and external forces and subtle and not so subtle nuances. In different time periods, many scholars have tried to explain and autopsy various facets of this phenomenon. This edited volume is one such attempt; it asks questions and offers various perspectives on a topic dubious yet over explored. Debates continue unresolved because the role of religion in society is misunderstood and misconstrued. It is religion and its gigantic power which continually cast doubt on the understanding and practice of secularism in human society even now in the twenty-first century. It helps to take a different route. What if we see religion, secularism, democracy, and political economy from the point of view of religious individuals who have attempted to transform society by pushing it in the direction of public good? Can they shine any light on our understanding? Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, is a persistent advocate for secular universal approach which in his view would cultivate fundamental human values. “The important thing is the promotion of secular moral ethics—simply to be a good human being, a warm-hearted person, a person with a sense of responsibility.” (Iyer 2001: 33). He was member of a commission set up by the former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in his last year in office. The panel represented different religious traditions that discussed religion and concluded: “There is nothing wrong with faiths. The problem is the faithful.” (Lama and Tutu 2016: 70) The faithful (defined as adherents to religion) are the ones responsible for distorted interpretation out of ambition, ignorance, and malice. Despite his religious status, the Dalai Lama has not disassociated his comments from the economics of world capitalism. In a volume on Buddhist perspective on the environment, he writes: “We have misplaced much of E. Sanasarian (B) Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California, 90089-0044 Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Ünsar and Ö. Ünal Eri¸s (eds.), Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_1

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our energy in self-centered material consumption, neglecting to foster the most basic human needs…” (Stanley, Loy, Dorje 2009: 22). And, after the 2008 world financial crisis, he said: “The present crisis in the world economy is the result of too much greed, speculation, hypocrisy and lies.” (Iyer 2010: 58). More than half a century earlier, Mahatma Gandhi had voiced similar sentiments. In strong critique of popular Hinduism, he wrote: “It is a tragedy that religion for us means today nothing more than restrictions on food and drink, nothing more than adherence to a sense of superiority and inferiority.” (Gandhi 2008: 60). He also focused on character development of the individual as the main solution to chaos. “Much corruption has crept into our religion. We have become lazy as a nation… Selfishness dominates our action… We are uncharitable to one another” (Fischer 1962: 256) He was so deeply disturbed by religious bigotry on all fronts as well as the status of untouchables within Hinduism that at one point he wrote: “I would far rather that Hinduism died than that untouchability lived.” (Fischer 1962: 253). For Gandhi, the religious and secular divide was a must: “If I were a dictator, religion and State would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The State has nothing to do with it. The State would look after secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody’s personal concern.” (Gandhi 2008: 5). Reverend Martin Luther King found the struggle for racial equality extremely arduous. For him, the issue was not secularism, but the abandonment of the issue of justice by both white and black churches. His criticism of both makes for an amazing read on hypocrisy within Christian Democratic society at the time. Reflecting on this issue, in famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he wrote: “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will” (Washington 1986: 91). His experiences on the ground led him to see the connections between racism, consumerism, capitalism, exploitation, and poverty. He focused on economic data listing a host of serious gaps between the have and have nots regardless of race. The “highly competitive society” makes both owners and workers of industry to live in fear of failure, unemployment, and “capriciousness of the stock market” (Washington 1986: 510). There are many others, less well-known, who have seen the connections between economics, politics, democracy, secularism, and religion. These are not unilateral lines of axis but exist in some interlude shaped by myriad of forces. The following articles attempt to show their variations by placing them in historical, sociological, and philosophical landscape. Seda Unsar argues that secularism has been approached from multiple positions since its inception in the sixteenth century. Secularism was a meta-ideology giving rise to liberalism and socialism. Historically, claims of liberalism (e.g., civil liberties) were unsubstantiated being devoid of economic equality. Integrating works of Weber, Al-Afghani, Abduh, Gazzali, and others, the author shows the evolution and integration of the ideas of democracy, world economy, and secularism. The process is ongoing in the twenty-first century acquiring different forms and new

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combinations. Today’s version has formed a union and a merger of democracyglobal capitalism-neoliberalism-neoconservatism. We may await the next stage of this evolution. Fabio Vicini argues that the secular and religious spheres were both distinct and intertwined with the bureaucratic culture of the Ottoman Empire. Distinction existed long before European expansion in the Middle East and North Africa. The work is inspired by the detailed publications of Talal Asad on secularism, and it draws on several important recent writings to explore debates on secular/religious divide. The piece recommends the existence of multiple secularities, recommends the exploration of secularity beyond European experience, and wisely recommends “endogenous ways of articulating the secular/religious distinction.” Bedri Gencer identifies three basic dimensions in the concept of secularization: theological, ontological, and epistemological. The first focuses on God, the second on the conception of the world as a realm of religion, and the third on the content of religion. Working through these, the author engages with the meaning of modernization and secularization leading to cosmopolitanism (1500–1900). Here, he explores the logic, transformation of the norm of identity from religion to civilization, transition from intra-religious to inter-religious, and from intra-civilizational to inter-civilizational struggles. He also engages with two rival dictums of Protestantism and Catholicism. Next, the author identifies different historical time periods; the last two being the eras of ideological politics (1919–1991) and hybrid politics (1992-). Ca˘gda¸s Dedeo˘glu picks three scholars of distinct backgrounds and by generating word clouds, looks at repeated words in their works. These are augmented by philosophical and historical factors in the works of Steve Bruce, Charles Taylor, and Talal Asad. In the process, the author separates “secularism” from the “secular” and puts forth a new idiom that of a “green secularism” for post-human democratic society. Cemil Boyraz explores the literature on political economy of secularism in Turkey. Whether institutional or policy oriented, the author views the struggle over religion corresponding to shifting material interests. Major socio-economic transformations were instrumental in contouring secularism. It begins with a discussion of the functional role of the assertive secularism in the early Republican years and ends with post-1980s where there is a coupling of conservatism with neoliberalism. Throughout, the role of religion in various stands of political parties and the economic factors are intertwined and analyzed with dynamic clarity. A. Murat Sener ¸ argues that the processes of modernization in Turkey should be situated in the psycho-sociology and the physical context of the rural masses of the 1920s. The founding fathers of modern Turkey and the secular evolution of society were a unique event. It was meant to rejuvenate and liberate the traditional sector that was immersed in superstition, desolation, and absence of change. Turkish modernization became a cultural revolution causing change in thought patterns and transforming passivity into an active participation in life. The author takes issue with all those who see Islamic revivalism being made of indigenous elements against secularists and Western oppressors. Modernization cannot be placed within a religiopolitical framework.

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Francisco Jorge Rodriguez Gonzalvez in an elaborate review of literature on reform in Spain makes a convincing analysis of the processes of change where fragmented and inefficient governments tried to eliminate monopolies and privileges. He concludes that the reforms were a failure due to unbalanced governmental policies. Governments were not interested in nurturing democracy and secularization. Fraternities lost their economic power, their properties transferred to religious organizations such as the boards of charity. He argues the Spanish enlightenment was not inclined towards secularism. Hikmet Kırık and Pelin Sönmez analyze the legal and practical dynamics of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) founded in 2004 by the European Union for the purpose of creating a circle of friendly countries in order to counter the illegal flow of migrants, organized crime, and terrorism. The three countries of Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt are used as comparative case studies on the application of ENP. The goal has been cultivating stability, security, and prosperity in closest neighbourhoods. Ideas of democracy, rule of law, and individual rights and freedoms were inherent in the policy prescription. The authors explore various institutional instruments in promoting the policy with focus in particular on the promotion and protection of Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB). By reviewing and dissecting detailed reports, they offer reasons as to why Lebanon and Jordan have faired better than Egypt in this particular category. While academic analysis has its place in attempts to understand complicated and contentious issues, whenever we speak of religion, it is essential to refer to its essence. It is this essence that is not understood by man which instigates ambiguity and dubiousness leaving us in a state of unresolved. No one has described essence more aptly than Mevlana Jelaleddin Rumi: Somewhere Beyond Right and Wrong There is a Garden I’ll Meet you There

References Fischer, L. (Ed.). (1962). The essential gandhi: an anthology of his writings on his life, work and ideas. New York: Vintage Books/Random House. Gandhi, M. (2008). All men are brothers: autobiographical reflections. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Iyer, P. (2001) Exclusive interview with the Dalai Lama. Shambhala Sun, November 2001, pp. 31–34, 68–73. Iyer, P. (2010) Heart of the Dalai Lama. Shambhala Sun, May 2010, pp. 51–59. Lama, D., Desmond, T., & Douglas, A. (2016). The book of joy: lasting happiness in a changing world. New York: Avery Penguin/Random House. Stanley, J., David, R. L., & Gyurme, D. (Eds.). (2009). A buddhist response to the climate emergency. Boston: Wisdom Press. Washington, J. M. (Ed.). (1986). A testament of hope: the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: HarperSanFrancisco.

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Washington, J. M. (Ed.). (1992). I have a dream: writings & speeches that changed the world. New York: HarperSanFrancisco.

Eliz Sanasarian is Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the award-winning “The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran and The Religious Minorities in Iran.” Her publications have appeared in book chapters and various academic journals such as the Journal of International Affairs, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Diaspora. She has served as a member of Committees and executive councils of various academic associations and was the founding editorial board member of the “Politics” and “Religion” journal. She has taught a variety of courses including religion and politics, ethnic politics, resources and development, and women in international development. She has won various awards including the university’s highest honor in teaching and mentoring of students and the Women’s Student Assembly award.

Civilization as Secularization: The Transformation of European Identities Bedri Gencer

The Definition and Conception of Secularization Secularization has become an almost enigmatic, unfathomable concept in regard of which immense confusion still prevails in the Western world. I think it can be treated in two interrelated ways; first, the definition of secularization, concerning the ‘what’ of change and the conception of secularization, concerning the ‘how’ of change. Thus, the definition and conception of secularization depend upon distinguishing between the unchanging and changing dimensions of religion corresponding actually to the distinction of religion and religiosity, whereas, in case of Christianity, such a distinction has become almost impossible over time. C. S. Lewis’ exposition, in Mere Christianity, of the gradual spoilage of the word, ‘Christian’ is the typical statement of this. In its original context, a Christian is expressly referred to a person who has ‘accepted the teachings of the gospel’. Over time, the word has become refined and spiritualized to refer simply to an overall religious character, placing little or no emphasis on adherence to a specific set of beliefs (Rosica 2013: VI). Then, it is apt to inquire into the source of this general failure of Christian devotion, is it basically due to the very religion or religiosity? The great contemporary scholar of comparative religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1991: 92, 291–292) revealed in his classic The Meaning and End of Religion that the word religion is not equivalent of the word d¯ın that designates in essence nomos = law as the formal legal body of religion in the Near Eastern languages. In regard to the concept d¯ın, the distinction can be drawn between ‘religion and religiosity’ vital to the definition of secularization which concerns essentially religiosity rather than the very religion. The prevailing intellectual confusion of the definition of secularization is also the case with the concept of modernization which is so used in its broader sense as to comprise secularization too. A common saying in Turkey provides a significant clue B. Gencer (B) Department of Human and Social Sciences, Yıldız Technical University, Davutpa¸sa Kampüsü, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Ünsar and Ö. Ünal Eri¸s (eds.), Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_2

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enabling us to draw a clear distinction between modernization and secularization: ‘Those who do not live as they believe, believe as they live’. According to this motto, modernization can be defined as ‘the change of the way of living’ and secularization as ‘the concomitant change of the way of believing’, and by that definition, secularization appears to be a consequence of modernization. In this light, secularization may be defined in simplest and neutral terms as ‘the change of religiosity’ or ‘of the way of believing’. But religiosity in the Western world has so much radically changed over time that the lines between ‘religion and religiosity, fact and norm’ became blurred. This came to be called normative secularization in contrast to practical secularization in the d¯ın of Islam, wherein the distinction between religion and religiosity is preserved forever. With respect to the conception of secularization, which concerns the ‘how’ of change, its three basic dimensions can be distinguished: First, theological, concerning the conception of God as the author of religion, Second, ontological, concerning the conception of world as the realm of religion, Third, epistemological, concerning the conception of the content of religion. In theological terms, secularization is quintessentially the gradual process of the shift from theism to deism or deisticization. What is meant by deism is God’s ceasing eventually to be the Author and the Provider for the beings he created, namely the discrediting of divine Authority and Providence. The invisible hand used by Adam Smith in place of the providential hand is the paradigmatic expression of deism. Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment rationalism, Newtonian mechanisticism, Kantian autonomy, Smithian the invisible hand, etc., are the subsequent stages of progressing deism in the Western world. It may be held that at the very outset, Christianity arose as a religion prone to deism through Paul’s momentous preference. He purged Christianity of its original nomos, which he deemed the characteristic of Judaism, in favour of a fugitive ethical universalism based on logos = reason meaning quintessentially objective and subjective wisdom, as the very phrase raison d’être (reason for being) implies, rather than intellect as afterwards came to mean (Jordan 2017; Martin 1989; Sanders 1983). In ontological terms, the process of secularization underwent two dialectical phases in connection with secularization on theological ground. First, the rupture in ontological relationships such as the Author (God) and Slave (Man), being and knowledge, space and time, man and nature, etc., then, second, the inversion of these relationships as dichotomies, such as Slave (Man) versus Author (God), knowledge versus being (as epitomized by the Cartesian motto of ‘cogito ergo sum’), time versus space, etc. Once a rupture and imbalance took place in the ontological relationships involved one of the poles tended to outweigh the other so as to transform dualities into dichotomies. The origin of these dichotomies can be traced to Augustine: a divine realm set over against an undivine realm, the ‘sacred’ set over against the ‘secular’, the spiritual set over against the natural, the Church set against the world, faith set in contrast to reason, the spirit pitted against the flesh, ‘the other world’ put in such light that ‘this world’ (Jones 1914: 2).

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In epistemological terms in the process of secularization, such categories as civilization and economy came to be prescribed as norms or the guiding patterns of human perfection to substitute for religion as inversions such as economy as religion in lieu of religion as economy and civilization as religion in lieu of religion as civilization. In this connection, further distinctions can be drawn for the sake of analyticity with secularization being distinguished as process and product in correspondence to the above distinction of rupture and inversion. Secularization as process is the transition ‘from civility to civilization’, and as product is the replacement of religion by civilization as ‘civilization as religion’. We can proceed from here to the distinction of modernization and secularization which still remains vague despite enormous relevant literature. In view of the above distinction, modernization concerns the ‘way of living’ and secularization the ‘way of believing’. It is natural that civilization comprises both dimensions just as religion which it replaced. The clue lying in the very definition of civilization as ‘sciences and arts’ enable us to draw a clear distinction between modernization and secularization. Modernization is the transition from civility to civilization as arts, or the bourgeois, capitalistic way of life, or from community and privacy to society and publicity, while secularization is the transition from religion to civilization as sciences, or enlightenment, or from sacrality to profanity. As the title ‘civilization as secularization’ suggests, we are more concerned here with the dimension of secularization of civilization called enlightenment as the transformation of identities than with that of modernization called the very civilization in the narrower sense of the term as the civilized-capitalistic-way of life. Modernization including secularization being the main problem with the modern man is almost impossible to be grasped as a whole mainly for two reasons, general and particular. The first general reason is that, by nature, the human mind can only grasp the reality in a partial, dialectic, discursive way, as opposites, not as a whole. The second particular reason is the over-fragmentation of the world because of the process of modernization which rendered the world more complicated than ever in human history. Accordingly, we can achieve only the explorations of several aspects of modernization by way of the parts of a puzzle to be completed gradually in an indefinite day. As a Turkish saying goes, ‘Wherever of man aches, his soul is just there’. That is to say, the whole process of modernization is ontologically folded in one of its aspects, like the modernization of the law, state, economy, sovereignty, cosmopolitanism, civility, etc., and we can unfold the process of modernization by illuminating one of its aspects involved. Here, the theme of civilization is chosen as the mainstream of secularization. Secularization as the cognitive dimension of modernization took place as the inversion of the interrelationship of religion and civilization from ‘religion as civilization’ to ‘civilization as religion’ and accordingly cosmopolitanism from evangelizing to civilizing.

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The Return of Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism may be simply defined as the project of eventually bringing all peoples under a supreme cosmopolitan identity. It regained favour in the wake of the Cold War era (1947–1991) which may be seen as an era of quasi-cosmopolitan politics fluctuating between the epochs of national and supra-national states. By the prefix ‘quasi-‘I mean the pursuit of cosmopolitanism based on ideological identities which denoted the further secularization of religious identities in the era of postWestphalian international politics as best expressed by Toynbee (1962a, b: 194–5) regarding the Russian reception of Marxism in place of Christianity as follows: The Russians have taken up a Western secular social philosophy, Marxism; you might equally well call Marxism a Christian heresy, a leaf torn out of the book of Christianity and treated as if it were the whole gospel. The Russians have taken up this Western heretical religion, transformed it into something of their own, and are now shooting it back at us.

As this point equally applies to communist China, Samuel Huntington’s (1993: 23) contention that ‘these conflicts between princes, nation-states, and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization’ remains unfounded. The point made by Toynbee further attests that cosmopolitanism has always been pursued by communities anywhere and anyway. Although the Western world in particular always held up the cosmopolitan ideal in order to achieve a peaceful world, it felt the need, due to the protracted theodicy and legitimacy crisis, to secularize over time the source of cosmopolitan identity and consequential distinctions. I intend to deal here with its main phase in the post-Westphalian era. In order to put it into perspective, the following chronology may be given as to the main phases of the process of secularization of cosmopolitan identity-formation as follows: First, the era of religious politics (1096–1555) Second, the era of civil politics (1556–1789) Third, the era of civilizational politics (1790–1918) Fourth, the era of ideological politics (1919–1991) Fifth, the era of hybrid politics (1992-) In this chart, the era of religious politics may be seen as belonging to the traditional age, the eras of civilizational and ideological politics to the modern age, and the era of hybrid politics to the postmodern age. Thus, the course of what we call hybrid politics fits the general logic of postmodernity characterized by transition, fluctuation, ambiguity, and fluidity between tradition and modernity rather than a stark disassociation from modernity and association with tradition. Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington stand out in the inauguration of this era. In his 1992 book entitled The End of History and the Last Man, expanded from the 1989 essay ‘The End of History?’, Fukuyama heralded the end of history characterized by bitter ideological struggle, by arguing that the eventual triumph of the Western liberal democracy portends the end point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution. It was thus seen as a modernistic break with modern ideological politics as the very ideology of the alleged ideologylessness. Fukuyama’s thesis marked also the

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commencement of the era of globalization as the eventual stage of cosmopolitanism; Globe emerged to be the last substitute for Eden whence Adam was expelled. In response to Fukuyama’s thesis, in a 1992 lecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The_Clash_of_Civilizations-cite_note-0, Huntington inaugurated the era of hybrid politics (1992-) which blends the eras of religious and civilizational politics. According to him, the age of ideological conflict had not just ended but had been followed by that of cultural conflict in which the primary axis of conflict was bound to be along cultural and religious lines. As an extension, he put emphasis on civilizations as the macro rival actors of international politics. In the 1993 Foreign Affairs article, Huntington (1993: 22) contended that: It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.

Huntington’s assumption proved to have failed before long as being just another case of reductionism characteristic of modernism, in that it takes civilization as the source of monolithic identity transcending nation-states. His thesis failed, apparently, to account for the contradictory trends of ethnic fragmentation on the one hand and of economic integration on the other which prevail in the post-Cold War Era and which reveal the very crippled nature of nation-states as already foreseen by Daniel Bell (1987: 14). He captures the source of the problem in a sentence now famous among theorists of globalization: ‘the national state has become too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems of life… The flow of power to a national political centre means that the national centre becomes increasingly unresponsive to the variety and diversity of local needs… In short, there is a mismatch of scale’. However, the failure of sweeping globalization theories even inspired by such a vision led to a return to the perennial theme of cosmopolitanism in historicoconceptual perspective, for, national and supra-national identities could only be reconciled through a fine-tuned cosmopolitan identity. Harvey (2000: 1) put it, ‘cosmopolitanism was back’, while Beck (2006) pointed out to the recent outburst of scholarly interest in cosmopolitanism. Yet all of these intellectual efforts may hardly be said to have procured yet a satisfying result for three major interrelated reasons. The first is the relative estrangement of modern political theory from the concept of cosmopolitanism due to its focusing on nation-state as the overarching form of modern polity. The second is that modern social science has long assumed the process of secularization as break with religion rather than its transformation, and an assumption which resulted in failure to explore the complex way cosmopolitanism was secularized came to be undermined by such scholars as Carl Schmitt with the concept of political theology. The third is that the prevailing interconnected political and intellectual hegemony of the West continued to preclude the worldwide appreciation of alternative Eastern cosmopolitan visions.

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In hope of filling this gap in current scholarship, I have taken as the subject of study the rise of civilization as the secularization of Western cosmopolitanism in the early modern world (1500–1900) around four sub-themes: First, the logic of cosmopolitanism and the way cosmopolitan identities are shaped, Second, the transformation of the norm of identity from religion to civilization, Third, the transition from intra-religious to inter-religious struggle, Fourth, the transition from intra-civilizational to inter-civilizational struggle.

From Polis to Cosmopolis The way of the genesis of cosmopolitanism is best understood by grasping the logic of identity. The collective identity which may be defined as the ‘membership of a group with a common religion’ bestows individuals with a sense of agency for meaningful social action. Particular/universal identities by a vertical (hierarchical) distinction are shaped, respectively, by a horizontal (hetarchical) distinction as identifying/othering. The need for a hierarchical identification stems from the dual reality of mankind as unity and multiplicity. Their full equality by birth notwithstanding human beings is bound by social stratification which results from the inequalities in cultural milieu and which entails a hierarchy of identities. Religions, consequently, can only achieve cosmopolis through the optimal reconciliation of particular identities with a universal identity or the achievement of the formula for ‘multiplicity in unity’ based on the belief of one God and Truth. Due to its hierarchical character, identity-formation follows a dialectical process; the ultimate goal is to render all people of ‘we’ through a gradual othering. Identities are formed by the dialectics of particular/universal, other/we, othering/identifying, because different ‘we’s’ among people in accordance with the dual reality of mankind persist until a final ‘universal we’ is attained. As such religions proceed from the intra-religious (internal) distinction of orthodox and heterodox to the inter-religious (external) distinction of believer/infidel towards attaining the universal community or cosmopolis of we, the co-believers. In regard to the pre-Christian, pagan West, this seems to have been not so much problem as with the post-Christian West due to the former’s following the progress from polis to cosmopolis in contrast to the former taking cosmopolitanism for granted. The one universal city ideal entails one single truth to bind eventually all people on the earth together and the belief of one God, namely monotheism as the source of this truth (Stark 2003). The Macedonian king Alexander (356–323 b.c.e.), Aristotle’s fellow citizen and disciple, succeeded in uniting the Eastern Mediterranean by embracing a universalistic vision for the first time in the West, transcending the Greek parochial outlook based on the Greek/Barbarian distinction. Cognizant of its relationship to the ideal of cosmopolis, Alexander was also one who first introduced the idea of monotheism into the West. In the wake of Alexander,

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Zeno, the founder of the Stoic philosophy in Rome, brought into fashion cosmopolitan ideal by grounding the one truth to bind all people together in logos representing divine reason to give order to the whole cosmos. The Roman king Constantine (280–337) before long espoused the essentially monotheistic Christianity. However, because the empire began steadily waning on account of imperial overreach and because a powerful paganism strained the original monotheistic structure of Christianity, the Roman cosmopolitan ideal, known as Pax Romana, failed to be attained. In China, Confucius, just like the Stoics, based cosmopolitan ideal stated as all under heaven (tianxia) (Toynbee 1962: 70–71) on an ethical universalism that can be viewed as a disguised monotheism. The notion of cosmopolis (universal city) as a philosophical idea may be said to have originated in Greek culture in Western civilization, as Baldry (1965) pointed out. This idea came to be conceptualized, however, by the Roman Stoic philosophers. Representing the ideal philosopher-king as being both the Roman emperor and a leading Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (121–180) clearly states in Mediations (1964) the idea of cosmopolis with such phrases as ‘supreme city, perennial city, one city, world city’ as an indication of the transformation of cosmopolis from a philosophical idea to a political ideal. Deemed universal as such, the city used to be modified by aesthetic adjectives such as ‘illuminated and protected’ as in the cases of al-mad¯ına al-munawwara (the illuminated city) or al-mad¯ına al-mahmiyya (the divinely protected city) as seen in all of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires. In the words of the German philosopher Karl Jasper, civilizations based on divine or humane religions that emerged in the Axial Age spanning the period from the eighth to the third century (b.c.e.) were marked by the ideal of cosmopolis (for elaboration, Arnason 2005).

Interregnum in the Pursuit of Cosmopolitanism The Western world has constantly taken great pains to find her internal and external ‘I and the other’ since the emergence of Christianity (Federici 1995; Patterson 1997). European civilization came to be identified traditionally as various combinations by various ethno-religious parameters as ‘Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Catholic-Protestant civilization’. The rather intricate transformations among theology, religion, civilization, culture, and ideology as the sources of identity are the consequence of the unceasing Western quest for reconciliation of particular and universal identities. With the doctrine of trinity implying a kind of concession to polytheism, Christianity attempted to reconcile the premonotheistic pagan identities with the universal, monotheistic ones. This can be seen in the very semantics of the concept catholic which means literally universal. On a closer, historical examination, however, the two divergent meanings of the term are discernible, one spelled with a capital C, the other with a lowercase c. As implied initially in the Bible, catholic had an inclusive meaning, ‘broad-minded’, to encompass diverse communities including Jews

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and Greeks alike. With the rise of a central, authoritarian church from the third and fourth century onward, however, Catholic assumed an exclusive meaning for the specific West identity as opposed to Orthodox Christianity (Briggs 1903). Since religion is the principal source of esprit de corps, national identities are configured along lines of religious cleavages, namely sectarian divisions in religions are indeed the outcomes of political cleavages. As a universal empire Rome, to which Christianity came, formed the basis of European identity. By identifying itself with the Latin Roman Empire, the Catholic Christianity became the source of the mainstream European identity in time, and following the dissolution of Rome, this mainstream Catholic Latin European identity came to be represented by France. Since the baptism of Clovis, first king of the Franks and founder of the Merovingian dynasty, at Rheims, in 496, France was hailed by the popes as “the eldest daughter of the Church (fille aînée de l’Église) as stated by Jules Michelet (1847: I/191): ‘Not without reason have the popes called France the eldest daughter of the Church. By her support the made head in every direction against the political and religious opposition which they had to encounter in the middle age’ (Jennings 2011: 239, 298,440–1494). The psychological dilemma felt by Greeks vis-à-vis Romans resulted in eventual secession from the Western Roman Empire in 330 and the foundation of the Eastern Rome called the Byzantine Empire in Istanbul. The Latin inclination of its founder Constantine notwithstanding, the Byzantine Empire assumed a Greek identity in the Justinian period after two centuries of the construction. With the eventual espousal of the Orthodox interpretation of Christianity, the Greek identity was formed against the Catholic Latin European one. Thus, the distinction of ‘Catholicism/Orthodoxy’ occurred in Christianity which corresponded to those of the ‘Greek/Latin’ and ‘Western/Eastern Rome’ and the Orthodox Greek and the Catholic West tended to shape their identities against each other. With the incorporation of Orthodox Christianity into the Eastern-Islamic world in the wake of the conquest of Constantinople by Muhammad II in 1453, the Catholic Western self-lost its Other and the Protestant German replaced it as the near Other of the Catholic Latin Europe. This loss coincided with the emergence of a new worldview. In this process, the masculine Catholic Western self tended to otherize internally Jews and Protestants, women first, and externally, the Muslims identified with the Turks (Tervahauta 2017; Kelly 2002). The outbreak of religious conflicts following the Reformation was to lead eventually to the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Indeed even before the Great Interregnum (1254–1273), a mismatch had already occurred between the religious and political authority of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire which came to be increasingly challenged by the thriving German principalities. The Protestant political tenets by Luther and Calvin in favour of secular governance constituted the coup de grâce for the plenitude potestatis, fullness of power, of Pope as international arbiter and pacificator mundi. Several powerful German Princes took the Protestant side in the emerging conflicts and soon revolted against the Catholic Empire (Beaulac 2004: 75–79). The Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which ended armed conflict between the Catholic Emperor and Protestant Princes in the Holy Roman Empire, consecrated the rule of cuius regio eius religio, which

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means, ‘whose realm, his religion’, namely the religion of the ruler dictated the religion of the ruled. This dictum had far-reaching implications. Prescribing both religious and political autonomy for the German principalities, it implied a return to a new kind of paganism in which the notions of civil power and religion merged. However, leaving out such reformed religions as Calvinism and such radical religions as Anabaptism, the Peace of Augsburg failed to respond to the emerging trend towards religious pluralism developing throughout the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire and thus to bring a lasting peace. The Westphalia Treaty of 1648, following the notorious Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) which overturned Europe, concluded this process. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 betokened initial break with the age of the cosmopolitanism based on religious identities and the Westphalia Treaty of 1648 did decisive break with it. Separated initially from ethics by Machiavelli politics was further divorced from religion with the Westphalia Treaty. Paving the way for a system of independent European countries instead of a Europe united by Christianity, this treaty became the turning point in the transition from religious to secular and from the medieval to the modern world. With the successive reformations generated by the strain put by the universally oriented Catholic Christianity on the national identities of countries such as Switzerland, England, and Germany coming late to Europe, Christianity was eventually transformed into a civil religion compatible with national identities. The introduction of the concept of tolerance by John Locke (1632–1704) and of civil religion by Jean–Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in the post-Westphalian era portended Christianity ceasing to be a source of common identity. What we call the era of civil politics (1556–1789) may thus be seen as an interregnum in the pursuit of religiously based cosmopolitanism. Yet in tune with the spirit of the Axial Age, the West had to sustain cosmopolitanism anyway to find out a new source of cosmopolitan identity called civilization in place of Christianity. The piercing question as to how the project of cosmopolis, which Catholicism literally meaning universalism ceased to sustain, would be resumed came to fester the minds of the European intellectuals. Christianity divorced definitively from politics was yet destined to mutate through increasing change in the European worldview. Toulmin (1992) revealed that cosmopolis was the ‘hidden agenda of modernity’. St. Augustine, recognized as the founder of the Christian theology, defines the universal city as divine city (de civitate dei). According to his view, reflecting ancient cosmogonic conception, the ideal human city was but the projection into the earth of divine city in which stark peace and unity reigns. Following Schmitt’s (1988) conception of political theology, Lowith (1949) revealed that all the modern, especially French, Cartesian thought was but a disguise of the Augustinian theology. The ultimate goal underlying the whole modernism termed either as humanism represented by Dante and Montaigne or as rationalism by Descartes was the reconstruction of this divine/universal city anyway. The aim is to rediscover a cosmopolis in which natural and human orders overlap with each other. The vision of mechanistic universe introduced by René Descartes (1596–1650) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was stimulated by this aim. Cosmopolis meant yet the universal social order working

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in a rational, mechanistic, spontaneous manner in accordance with the Newton’s view of nature. The same vision could be seen in Montesquieu of the Jesuit background (Gerrans 2004).

The Quest for Alternative Cosmopolitanism The ordeal of Christianity towards gradual splitting began at the dawn of the second millennium. The year 1054 has gone down in history as the year of the Great Schism between East and West, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Roman Catholicism Later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Reformation movement split the Western Christianity further into Catholicism and Protestantism. To explore the way and agent of the change through which Christianity passed is essential to get insight into the genesis of civilization as the secularization of cosmopolitanism. I think the transformation of Christianity may be divided into two main phases: Reformation and Enlightenment or post-reformation. Reformation and Enlightenment may be contrasted in many ways as overt/covert, internal/external, dogmatic/rational attempts of religious reform. Reformation was inaugurated to rejuvenate Christianity from within, organically, in terms of its dogmatic texture while Enlightenment from without with a view to refreshing Christianity by injecting the vaccine of reason (wisdom) to it. Theologians such as Luther and Calvin had laid down a new theology interpreting Christianity ‘from within’ whose established doctrines came into question for being unable adequately to respond to a rapidly changing world and a deepening sense of crisis spread throughout Europe. But when even these endeavours eventually proved scanty, the need arose for an intellectual reformation, wherein Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Kant embarked upon reinterpreting Christianity ‘from without’ so as to consummate its former reinterpretation ‘from within’ by appealing to reason for the relief of effete Christianity (Gencer 2010: 324). Looked at the religious agency of both movements, the agents of the Reformation were overt while those of the Enlightenment were covert. In the post-reformation Europe, the religious rift between Catholicism and Protestantism was translated into philosophical realm such polarizations as rationalism/romanticism. In its broader sense, Protestantism could be viewed as an inclusive, blanket term, by way of an outlook and front of dissidents including Lutherans, Calvinists, Jews, and Jesuits who stood against the dominant Catholic identity leading the way to modernism. To put it in a nutshell, Jesuitism could be seen as the hyphen between Catholicism and Protestantism, the hidden Protestant, intra-Catholic agent of modernism, notably through prominence in philosophy and science. The cardinal role taken by Jesuitism in the making of modernism was remarkable. Not so much scholarly effort had been exerted to trace the genealogy of modernism in terms of religious identities with such few exceptions as that of Olin (1994) who compared Jesuits with the Jewish and Protestant cases which are relatively better known. In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the seminal role by

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Jesuit scholars in the genesis of the modern Western science (Feingold 2003). The influence of the Jesuit outlook was visible even on some central notions of Hobbes recognized by many as the father of modernism (Leijenhorst 1996). Aristotle and Newton could be seen as the representative figures of the traditional and modern physics as well as worldviews in that the transformation of a worldview stems from a shift in cosmological outlook. Modern science is commonly said to have risen with the break with the Aristotelian physics and the Jesuits are generally credited with inaugurating the seventeenth-century mechanistic philosophy of nature that characterizes the modern Western worldview (Toulmin 1992: 145–147). The chief agents of modernism such as Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Voltaire, Mirabeau, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Erasmus, Renan, and so on, most of whom were treated in the work of Toulmin (1992) as seminal figures taking part in ‘cosmopolis’ as the ‘hidden agenda of modernity,’ were intellectuals of the Jesuit formation and outlook. Then, it would be no exaggeration to note that the Enlightenment was in essence the work of Jesuitism: Protestant Reformation versus Jesuit Enlightenment. Modernism stemmed quintessentially from the search to overcome the problem of theodicy which can be defined as the attempt to reconcile human evil with divine justice. Cosmopolis being the ultimate global city in peace and justice, cosmopolitanism may be regarded as the principal project of modernism. In the wake of the Westphalia Treaty of 1648 marking the end of religious cosmopolitanism, the quest began for inventing a new norm to ground cosmopolitanism; civilization was to prove to be the new norm forged by the Enlightenment in place of religion. Enlightenment was the era, wherein both modernity and modernism as the modern ways of living and thinking were configured, and civilization was by way of the tip of the iceberg of the Enlightenment modernism. The rise of civilization as the new secular norm of cosmopolitan identity underwent two interrelated phases which may be called normativization and essentalization. First, normativization is the transformation of the fact (what is-the particular, experience) into the norm (what ought to be-the universal), namely the elevation to a universal norm of civilization as the spatially temporally bound, particular human experience. Second, essentialization is the assignment of this universalized-secularized norm to such particular agents as the West–the East, namely the transformation of ‘the civilization’ as the universal common norm of identity into particular ‘civilizations’ (the Western, Eastern, Islamic civilizations, etc.), in correspondence to the distinction of ‘religion/religions’ (Islam, Judaism, Christianity, etc.), as the sources of contending identities. To exemplify this distinction, the expression ‘civility in fourteenth-century Venice’ implies traditionally civility as a particular civil life, human experience bound by certain spatio-temporal boundaries, namely fourteenth-century and Venice, and unrepeatable by its particular nature. The expression ‘the Christian or European civilization’ by contrast implies civilization as an essentialized (Islamic, Christian, European, etc.) and universalized (civilization), repeatable norm independent of spatiotemporal boundaries. The process of secularization went much more sophisticated with normativization being subjected to further distinctions as follows:

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1. Jesuit distinction towards normativization of civilization: civility/civilization 2. Jesuit distinction by the normative (evaluative) meaning of civilization: barbarity/civilization 3. Jesuit distinction by the descriptive (neutral) meaning of civilization like religion: right civilization/wrong civilizations 4. Protestant anthropological-chronopolitical distinction: culture/primitivism 5. Protestant antagonistic distinction: progressivism/obscurantism 6. Protestant normative hierarchical distinction: civilization/culture.

From Civility to Civilization In order to better understand the process of transition from civility to civilization, the four semantic dimensions of civility in the traditional world can be distinguished as follows:

The four dimensions of civility Social

Political

Legal

Ethical

Sedentariness (hadariya) (vs. nomadism-badawiya)

State

Civility

Humanity

Concepts such as city, citizen, and civility derived from the same root indicate that the transition from polis to cosmopolis entailed a new kind of bond. Etymologically, as the Greek/Latin equivalents, polity (politeia) = civility (citizenship) comes from polit¯es = citizen, from which polite is derived, from polis = city. As the very word politeness stemming from polit¯es = citizen denotes, polity = civility implies the moral quality of belonging to polis = city as the body of citizens. As moral and civic education were intertwined in the process of transformation from polis to cosmopolis, civility came to connote a political virtue grounded in the moral virtue called decorum (bildung) with which individuals were aimed to be endowed through education (Connolly 2007: 169–175). The cultivation by Roman Stoicism of civility into a blanket virtue called humanity (humanitas) in Rome portended the birth of the cosmopolitan ideal as Ernst Cassirer (1946: 101–102) observed: ‘If we study the classical works of Greek ethics, for instance Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, we find there a clear and systematic analysis of the different virtues, of magnanimity, temperance, justice, courage, and liberality, and we do not find the general virtue called ‘humanity’ (humanitas). Even the term seems to be missing from the Greek language and literature. The ideal of humanitas was first formed in Rome; and it was especially the aristocratic circle of the younger Scipio that gave it its firm place in Roman culture. Humanitas was no vague concept. It had a definite meaning, and it became a formative power in private and public life in Rome. It meant not only a moral but also an aesthetic ideal; it was the demand for

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a certain type of life that had to prove its influence in the whole of man’s life, in his moral conduct as well as in his language, his literary style, and his taste. Through later writers such as Cicero and Seneca, this ideal of humanitas became firmly established in Roman philosophy and Latin literature’. The combination of the moral and aesthetic ideals merged in humanitas was expressed as cosmopolitan ideal which originated with the palatial culture of such imperial regimes as Roman, Chinese, Persian, and Ottoman ones. Palace intellectuals called literati who served as the carriers of cosmopolitan ideal gave an imperial, aesthetical expression to moral-civic education called decorum by cultivating it into belles-lettres or humanities. This comprehensive meaning of humanitas reflects the way of the unfolding of the ethical potentiality of man expressed by Aristotle as ‘anthrôpos phusei politikon zoon’ (Man is by constitution a political living) (Pagden 1987: 46–47). By this definition, humanitas imports the full self-realization of man in relation to his human fellows living together in polis. As a term in which social and ethical senses called urbanity and humanity were combined, civility had been used from the thirteenth century onwards (Bryson 2004: 49–52; Boer 2005: 51–52). Khaldun (1967), for instance, uses civility (had¯ara, madaniyya) in purely sociological sense such as urbanity or sedentary versus nomadic way of life. The significant intellectual changes in history can be traced in the semantic alterations of the conventional concepts such as civility before they give rise to new terms like civilization, and thus, the new meanings of old terms assume over time the new terms of their own. In the process of modernization set in motion in Renaissance, the notions of city and civility began to change with the rise of a republican ideology called civic humanism, which aimed to create a new political society under state as a corporation and of a profane public sphere contrasted with the private one. By the dialectics of modernization-secularization, every kind of society calls for an ethos of its own; while the Roman civility had been peculiar to an agrarian aristocratic society, the Renaissance civility became the ethos of the burgeoning bourgeois society of commercial capitalism. This semantic alteration took place as discord between the inner and outer, informal and formal dimensions of civility. The ideal ethic defined as doing or speaking what is fitting, decent, and seemly is embodied, folded in the beautiful way of conduct called decorum, bienséance, bildung, adab and li in English, French, German, Arabic, and Chinese. In his Latin dictionary of 1538, Sir Thomas Elyot defined decorum as ‘a seemliness, for that which becometh the person, having respect to his nature, degree, study, office or profession, be it in doing or speaking… Sometime, it signifieth honesty’ (Thomas 2018: 49). By the classical conception of humanity, the outer decorum as civility was the manifestation of the inner decorum; there could be no discord between the two whatsoever. With the Renaissance capitalism, however, the inner and outer, informal and formal dimensions of civility began to split. Gradually emptied of its ethical core civility came to designate a public quality based on outer mannerism and conformism. Reduced to the observance of formal behavioural manners elaborated by intellectuals as the bearers of republican ideology, civility increasingly came to replace traditional

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decorum used to imply a character education based on virtue. This emergent bourgeois notion of civility signified the continuation of the traditional aristocratic ideal of courtesy in terms of social strata (Bryson 2004). In the sense of civilization, or being civilized, civility was equated with progress by such Enlightenment philosophers as Marquis de Condorcet. Civilization as the opposite of barbarity reflected the vision of infinite progress of humanity towards future (Nisbet 1980). Mirabeau paved the way for an intellectual revolution as an irony of history by coining civilization in place of civility, and he conceived to have already been emptied of its essence. In tune with the zeitgeist, the term that denoted both the direction and continuity of the transformation long aspired was received with alacrity by the then European intellectuals (Benveniste 1971: 292). Still more civilization implied both the process of change and the outcome of that process, namely the civil way of life to be reached at the end of this process. Owing to its high capacity to best express a changing world, the concept rapidly found favour. Starobinski (1993: 3) noted that, once coined, the term civilization was rapidly received because it encapsulated a broad range of terms such as ‘advancements in comfort, increased material possessions and personal luxuries, improved education techniques, cultivation of the arts and sciences and the expansion of commerce and industry’ that were already being used by the European intellectuals to describe the ongoing process of change. The process of normativization of civilization as progress relies on the dialectic of othering, namely progress as civilization can be measured so as to be normativized only in contrast to something inferior to it. Just as revealed religion was contrasted with paganism, civilization was normativized in contrast to barbarity; first in diachronic terms for othering one’s own history as ex-barbarian Europe versus now civilized Europe, and then, in synchronic terms for othering other nations as now civilized Europe versus barbarian other nations. Before the French Revolution, still retaining its descriptive, subsidiary meaning to the historico-social development driven principally by religion, civilization implied a social stage reached with an enormous aspiration and determination by the European people in contrast to a bygone assumed stage of barbarity. According to the traditional worldview, since human experience takes place basically in spatial dimension, such geopolitical units as ‘city/village’ are taken as the parameters of identification in the process of political integration called synoecism/civilization. Yet John Locke’s statement that ‘in the beginning, all the world was America’ (Swenson 1997: 325) implies that the traditional geopolitical perspective, by which the process of synoecism run, began to change. Spatial consciousness characterizing the traditional worldview was thus replaced by temporal consciousness in modernism representing the transfiguration of traditional eschatology. As Locke’s remark connotes, existent-places (topos) started turning into nonexistent (u-topia) places by virtue of the predominance of temporal consciousness in modern man. America was no longer located here but in distant past. When the traditional spatial outlook was replaced by a temporal vision marked by the image of ‘golden age’ in the Renaissance, synoecism came to be directed by a chronopolitical instead of geopolitical perspective (Levin 1969). The process of synoecism was to

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be conducted by a diachronical, periodical othering so as to estimate progress from a bygone assumed age of barbarity to forthcoming age of civility. A scheme of universal or conjectural history which prevailed in the eighteenth century and which can be seen as a unilinear development involving four stages from savagery to civility through which all peoples were assumedly bound to pass was a typical example of this chronopolitical vision.

From Religion to Civilization Intellectual innovations towards secularization never come into being as the detached, individual desk-work of thinkers. They always originate from the quest for expediency giving rise to attempts at filling the gaps that occur as failure, dysfunction, or disorder in social world reflected as semantic corrosion by concepts representing the world. By the interrelation of social and mental realm, the meanings of such traditional concepts as civility were also destined to change in a rapidly changing world. To attempt at restoring, the original meanings of these concepts were as unlikely as restoring the world they represented. Accordingly, there was the need for new concepts for a new world. For Europe, the new world emerged with the Renaissance in which modernization began with commercial capitalism and which revealed the spoilage of religion as well as of civility. In our definition, secularization as process was the transition from civility to civilization and as product was the replacement of religion by civilization as civilization as religion. The onset of the semantic erosion of civility with the Renaissance modernization paved already the way for gradual transition from civility to civilization. This process was to be accomplished with transition from religion to civilization. The spoilage of civility was destined to evoke a reaction, mainly by Mirabeau, who tended to recover it anyway. A gradual conceptual change by extending the semantic range of civility was to be followed by the coinage of the new term civilization which was first used in France in 1756 by Marquis de Mirabeau who received his early education at a Jesuit college. Discordant somehow with the mainstream Enlightenment vision of the time, Mirabeau was in search of the improvement of, rather than a break with, the tradition. He criticized as illusory the prevailing bourgeois and aristocratic-labelled formalistic conceptions of courtesy and civility on the grounds that it represents only the mask of virtue and civilization does nothing for society if it does not give it the substance as well as the form of virtue (Benveniste 1971: 290–291). He used this concept in a traditional context to explore the sociability of man expressed by Aristotle as zoon politicon. Of significance here is the two ways in which Mirabeau tended to normativize civilization so as to eventually replace religion by relating it to religion and teleology (progress). As indicated by the need to coin a new term the relationship between religion and civilization began to change with his usage. First, he, far from asserting that ‘social virtues’ and ‘natural morality’ had supplanted religion, argued that

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religion was ‘the principal source’ of civilization, which was taken as synonymous with sociability. Thus, the word civilization first appeared in a eulogy of religion, which was praised not only as a repressive force (a ‘brake’) but also as unifying and moderating influence (‘confraternity’), that is, the principal generator of esprit de corps (Mazlish 2004: 5–8, 13–29). This function of generating esprit de corps will be fulfilled by civilization springing from religion. This view spelt the fact that civilization began to replace religion to which a subsidiary rather than prescriptive function came to be assigned. Around 1775, Diderot contributed to the abbe Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes an essay on Russia in which the word civilization appears several times: ‘Emancipation, or what is the same thing by another name, civilization, is a long and difficult work’. Thus, already there were abundant signs that civilization might well become a secularized substitute for religion, an apotheosis of reason (Starobinski 1993: 3). Second, Mirabeau used civilization to designate a distinct type of society so as to give rise to the modern normative conception of the term. As a jurisprudential term, civility meant, as with the Greeks too, a society in which military law characterizing a savage society was replaced by civil law (Benn 1902: 286; Pagden 1987: 47, 58, 66). The third and most critical result of the novelty that Mirabeau inaugurated with the -zation pattern is the transformation of an individual ethical state as civility to a collective process as civilization. A world entering into an irreversible process of transformation could only be described with the dynamic concept of civilization rather than the static concept of civility, as either a moral or societal process instead of state. As Emile Benveniste (1971: 292) observed, from original barbarity to the present state of man in society, a universal and gradual development was discovered, a slow process of education and refinement, in a word, a constant progress in the order of that which civility, a static term, was no longer sufficient to express and which had to be called civilization in order to define together both its direction and its continuity. It was not only a historical view of society; it was also an optimistic and resolutely nontheological interpretation of its evolution which was stressed, sometimes without those who proclaimed it being aware of this, although some of them, Mirabeau first of all, still counted religion as the chief factor in civilization. After the French Revolution, civilization came to assume a normative meaning just as religion as the source of collective identity. In this process of normativization of civilization, Voltaire and Guizot appeared as key figures before and after the Revolution. The emergence of a European or Western versus Eastern civilization in general was attributable to the French historian François Guizot, who delivered lectures between the years 1828 and 1829 at the Sorbonne. In his L’Histoire de la Civilization en Europe (1828), civilization assumed a normative meaning as a new source of identity such as Catholicism rather than designating the last stage of the historical development of Europe. As a zealous Protestant espousing the optimistic progressive vision of the Enlightenment, Guizot’s ideas represented a combination of the philosophies of the enlightened humanism or anthropocentrism and the revolutionary radical politics for achieving this vision. Three main ideas, which had not emerged in the eighteenth century,

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were incorporated by Guizot into the French philosophy of history of the nineteenth century: world history is the history of civilization; civilization is the development of freedom; France is the leader in the March of civilization (Curtius 1932: 27). To him, the quest for freedom of the individuals in Europe proceeded by struggling against the obscurantism of the Church. The Reformation movement was inaugurated quintessentially in order to achieve a higher goal towards man’s self-fulfilment than that of simply improving the Church’s condition. In the view of Guizot (1997: 50–60), civilization was the embodiment of the Enlightenment’s anthropocentric vision that people can master their own destiny and history. Civilization means the active and voluntary progress of people pressing forward to change their condition by a bidirectional, simultaneous, and closely interconnected development of the (external) social life and the (internal) moral/intellectual development of individuals. He claimed that a truly civilized society, as epitomized by France in his view, must have a prosperous social order as well as a developed a moral and intellectual life (Also, Craiutu 2003: 63–69). Its articulation in the pattern of process as civilization instead of the pattern of state as civility was due to its conception as a self-legitimating system just as religion, a cluster of human accomplishments to generate gradually its own normativity as termed by Weber as instrumental rationality. In the West, springing especially from the transformations inspired by the millennialism associated with Lutheran Protestantism, civilization implied an earthly heaven to be reached with the unceasing progress of mankind. Resulting from the notion of linear history rising with the Renaissance, progress was formulized as a ‘law’ of human experience by Condorcet (1743–1794), and this vision maintained by Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and François Guizot (1787–1874), culminating in Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) (Nisbet 1980). Comte, the doyen of positivism, believed that he only explored the law of human progress; a basic law in which his famous motto ‘order and progress’ to much appeal to the then Eastern intellectuals would be joined. The goal is to discover universal laws to lead to ‘order and progress’ in physical as well as human world. The way taken by man in his historical March indicates that he is about to attain this goal. He schematizes the inevitable progress of human mind by the so-called law of three phases that expresses the three ways of explaining the world. This tripartite scheme symbolizes the phases of the mental evolution of a child. Human mind tends to explain the world in terms of the will of anthropomorphic gods in the first theological phase, then in terms of philosophical speculation in the second metaphysical phase, and, finally, in terms of scientific truth in the third and last positive phase. For Comte (2000), the last positive scientific phase altered drastically the case. Humanity would no longer need an external legislator once the certainty already attained in natural sciences succeeding in explaining the physical world through the universal laws they discovered is also attained in social sciences, and thus, a set of unified universal laws to explain all physical and social world are discovered. In this process of its normativization, civilization was put in a dual, singular and plural forms so as to serve as the sources of the hierarchical identification as universal/particular ones. The eventual prevailing over intellectual discourse of the concept

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of civilization with its increasing circulation in Europe (Boer 2005) betokened the definitive rise of the modern world. The Catholic West imparted a normative meaning to its own civilization bearing a historical, descriptive meaning indeed like other civilizations in history by thus turning the ‘fact’ of civilization into ‘norm’, a standard and ideal for the non-Western societies. At the end of a long process of secularization, the civilization thus replaced the religion though the former was derived from the latter. As ‘right religion’ used to be meant by the ‘religion’ when used in the absolute with article, so ‘right civilization’ came to be meant by the ‘civilization’, whereas it was a particular Western one indeed, as Gong (1984: IX) put it (Also, Bowden 2009). By the prevailing mood, one could be either for or against civilization, just as was the case with religion, a third alternative such as neutrality was no longer possible. For instance, the portrayal by the late secular Ottoman intellectual Ibrahim Shinasi of Mustafa Reshid, the architect of the nineteenth-century Ottoman reform movement, as the ‘prophet of civilization’ indicates the conception of civilization as the new, universal, secular, irresistible religion of humanity (Göçek 1996: 117–25).

Following the French Revolution from Evangelizing to Civilizing Mission The pursuit of cosmopolitanism in the West varied according to the main strains of the European civilization. The deep dialectic of the course of history, the pattern of the interplay of human forces at the bottom of history is very difficult to discern. We have attributed the two great intellectual revolutions in Europe called Reformation and Enlightenment to the two, Protestant and Jesuit, camps standing on the left side of the traditional European order and pushing the mainstream Catholic Christianity to change itself. These two intellectual revolutions were destined to later spawn the two great, political and economic, French and British industrial revolutions but in reverse order: The French Revolution taking place as the work of Jesuitism and Industrial Revolution as the work of Protestantism. A protracted and bitter campaign against the Catholic Church was terminated with the French Revolution that spelt seemingly the defeat of Catholicism in terms of religion; but indeed the mission of Catholicism remained intact in terms of civilization with traditional religious cosmopolitanism being replaced by modern civilizational one and evangelizing mission by civilizing one. Charlemagne who conducted the just war against the Saxons with evangelizing mission in the Middle Ages was succeeded by Napoléon who embarked upon the Egyptian campaign in 1798–1801 with civilizing mission. While the words ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘civilizing’ are derived, respectively, from Greek polis and Latin city which both mean city, this literal variance might lead to the oversight of their semantic identity, as in the misleading literal distinction between political and civil while they also come from the same meaning, city.

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It is significant that the English clergyman George Frederick Maclear (1833–1902) in his treatise dated 1863 depicts the struggle between Charlemagne and the Saxons as that ‘between civilization and heathenism’ (Maclear 1863: 227): ‘Three years after his death the long struggle between Charlemagne and the Saxons, between civilization and heathenism, came to a close. For thirty-one years that monarch had persevered in his policy of subjugating his restless foes, and now he had his reward’. In this contrasting of civilization with heathenism, rather than barbarity, evangelizing and civilizing missions overlap completely. Beside this identification of religion with civilization and of evangelizing mission with civilizing one, Maclear (1863: 131) contrasts somewhere civilization, as the child (fruit) of religion, with barbarity rather than heathenism as follows: ‘thus within a space of less than ninety years, the work of evangelization in this island had been accomplished. The AngloSaxons, once notorious for their fierceness and barbarity, had so far been softened by Christian influences that in no country was the new faith more manifestly the parent of civilization’. Referred to since the Middle Ages as ‘the elder daughter of the Church’, France drew from its privileged relationship to the Church its founding reputation and mission as a disseminator of a universalistic creed. Indeed, in a paradoxical fashion, the very event of the French Revolution, which did so much to destroy the power of the Gallican Church, by the same gesture, enabled French universalism to perpetuate and propagate itself. In a world entering into an ordained era of nation-states following the French Revolution, the quest for exploring a new universal bond culminated in the nineteenth-century France (Boas 1928). Accordingly, for the French intellectuals with national ardour, the cosmopolitan mission of France was now doubled, let alone interrupted, by the old evangelizing and new civilizing ones. As the eldest daughter of the Church, France was under an obligation to spread the Christian message, and as the inheritor and embodiment of the traditions of 1789, she was under a duty to save the oppressed and to export fraternity (Jennings 2011: 441, 494). Seen in this light, the French Revolution did not mark a rupture between a pre-universalist and a post-universalist France but rather drew on and gave new impetus to France’s time-honoured civilizing mission. ‘It is especially after the revolutionary upheaval that France became the missionary nation par excellence’, wrote René Rémond. The history of universalism in France is then a history of the transvaluation of a fundamental religious belief into the prime means of desacralizing society (Schor 2001: 44). This is best seen in the vision of the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874). Guizot used the language of abstract argument; Michelet expressed his message in the language of mythical-messianic vision. To him history is an everlasting struggle between man and nature, spirit and matter, freedom and fate. The subjugation of the elements, the achievement of free individuality, the spiritualization of the religious conceptions of Christianity, and finally the liberation of the nations from the domination of priests and kings, are stages in this conflict. In 1789 and 1830, France gained liberty for all the peoples of the world. This marked the close of the Christian era. For the new social world which is now arising, France will find the word of salvation. Therefore, to her belongs the ‘Pontificate of the new Civilization’ (Curtius 1932: 28).

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Progress as Sublimity and Conjecture As Starobinski (1993: 4) noted, the word civilization, which denotes a process, entered the history of ideas at the same time as the modern sense of the word progress. The two words were destined to maintain a most intimate relationship. Although both could be used in a vague, sweeping manner, they were soon eliciting reflections of a genetic order aimed at discerning successive periods: it became essential to determine the precise phases of the civilizing process, the stages of social progress. History, both speculative and empirical, set out to sketch a Esquisse d’Un Tableau Historique Des Progrès de l’Esprit Humain (or historical synopsis of the advances of the human spirit, to borrow a phrase from Condorcet)-in other words, a representation of the March of civilization through stages of gradually increasing perfection. The traditional polarization in Europe between Catholicism and Protestantism born out of the distinct theological outlooks and concerns determined the way of the semantic genesis and appropriation of the terms civilization and progress as the new alternative sources of contentious identities. With the Christian consciousness, the original sin resulting in the Fall from Eden stemmed from Adam’s failure of self-mastery due to the Satanic temptation. So, the way of salvation was conceived to be depending upon redemption from original sin through mastery over man and the three parameters of his worldly experience: nature, society, history. The modern mastery over man implied salvation from sin, namely riding man of his sinful nature (Vyverberg 1989). In the Christian subconsciousness, nature was perceived too as a fallen world caused by the sin of Adam and Eve to be redeemed through Adam’s mastery over the animals. As such, the modern mastery over nature by virtue of science and technology meant recovering Eden through redeeming the earth. The entire earth and all of its nature become an Artificial Garden corresponding to the Edenic Garden. (Merchant 2003: 45–46; Wolloch 2011; Reill 2005). As the product of the modern sustained, attempt to master society civilization denoted a novel cosmopolis. Being the attempt to master history, progress denoted the unilinear and irreversible process of approaching the goal of earthly paradise to come as a combination of the attempts to master man, nature, and society. Accordingly, progress ran, so to speak, as the tip of the iceberg consisting of a tripartite strata, man, nature, and society as follows: The degree of the mastery of man became the measure of the mastery of nature, The degree of the mastery of nature became the measure of the mastery of society, The degree of the mastery of society became the measure of the mastery of history as progress as secular redemption. As such progress implied a vision of salvation history or redemption through history as the man’s wilful, definite, convenient, total and continuous advance towards the goal of the attaining earthly paradise. But in this vision was a subtle and formidable paradox: definite progress towards indefinite goal and the finite progress of civilization versus the infinite progress of enlightenment (knowledge) as typically seen in Fichte. The process of the universe, as it appeared to Fichte, tends to a full realization

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of ‘freedom’; that is its end and goal, but a goal that always recedes. It can never be reached; for its full attainment would mean the complete suppression of nature. The process of the world, therefore, consists in an indefinite approximation to an unattainable ideal: freedom is being perpetually realized more and more; and the world, as it ascends in this direction, becomes more and more a realm of reason (Bury 1920: 140, 236). This seeming paradox sprang apparently from the gradual estrangement of the Western man from God, resulting in the despair to know him, and the attempt to compensate for the break with teleology stemming from that estrangement in two main ways, the shift from transcendence and providence to sublimity and conjecture. In onto-mystical terms progress, called tarak.k.¯ı in Arabic, meant the spiritual journey as a cyclical spiral rather than as a linear movement towards communion with the God. But the Western man’s cognizance that at the end of this journey was a God rendered unfathomable by tripartition or trinity led him to a profound puzzlement and sublimation as an inverted transcendence by magnifying and multiplying infinitely the appetites of the soul rather than quelling and transcending it. Hence that paradox was the manifestation of an abyssal transformation in the conception of God resulting in the replacement of transcendence by sublimity as summarized by John Milbank (Schwartz 2004: 208) as follows: ‘without a grasp of this process of transformation, one might easily suppose that modernity is characterized by a simple rejection of transcendence in favour of immanence, meaning the pure self-sufficiency of the finite world to itself. Yet although the shift to immanentism was certainly crucial, the reconceptualization of transcendence as sublimity was of equal importance: either in tension with, or else as a complement to this shift. What was the nature of the reconceptualization? At its heart lay a new thinking of the transcendent as the absolutely unknowable void, upon whose brink we finite beings must dizzily hover, as opposed to an older notion of a supra-hierarchical summit which we may gradually hope to scale’. In regard of progress, the Western shift from transcendence to sublimity was one aspect of the attempt to compensate for the break with teleology, and the shift from providence to conjecture was another aspect of that attempt; the divine hand of providence was yet to be replaced by the natural hand of conjecture. These shifts as the attempts to redress were not out of choice but of necessity; the Western man alienated from God had to find his own way. As Bury (1920: 5) put, the progress must be the necessary outcome of the psychical and social nature of man; it must not be at the mercy of any external will; otherwise, there would be no guarantee of its continuance and its issue, and the idea of Progress would lapse into the idea of Providence. This non-providential conception of history has been called conjectural, theoretical or speculative history. The conjectural historian does not have recourse to any force or agency outside or above nature to account for the possibility of human history. The theories of both Hobbes and Locke, as the pioneers of conjectural history, depend on speculation concerning the prehistory of human social life in times for which no documents, records, or remains survive, and they both avoid appealing to providence for an explanation of the earliest developments of society (Palmeri 2016: 30, 36).

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Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand may be taken as the epitome of conjectural conception. In his thinking, price became the invisible hand, in place of the providential hand, running through market mechanism as the agent of justice. Thus, the quest for mastery of nature, society, and history culminated in the Scottish Enlightenment. The polarization between Catholicism and Protestantism could be seen in the appropriation of distinct terms as well as of the distinct meanings of the same terms. One can notice a semantic bifurcation of the term progress as rationalistic and romantic in the use of the two parties involved. The Catholic conception of progress reflected rationalism as the modern kind of teleologism and the Protestant one did romanticism as the modern kind of voluntarism. As many writers discerned, the universally oriented rationalism became both the rival and the successor of theology seemingly paradoxically; seemingly, because as Derrida criticized, both were indeed the products of the same logocentric worldview (Foster 1909; Troeltsch 1958: 20; Toulmin 1992). Generated by the thinkers of the Jesuit background such as Descartes who served as the philosophical apologists of Catholic theology, rationalism implied a disguised Catholicism and fatalism giving rise to a notion of the allegedly universal, mechanistic, self-functioning world independently of divine and human volition. Based on such a vision of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in which the Catholic outlook predominated, progress signified the secularization of the Christian concept of redemption through a teleological course of history running independently of any voluntary, divine and human, agent (Becker 1970: 268). The concepts of tolerance introduced by John Locke and pluralism by Christian von Wolff came as responses to the monistic worldview underlying the Catholic-spirited totalitarianism. In line with romanticism that allows cultural pluralism and voluntarism, the German philosophers tended to substitute progress for civilization grounded in rationalism as a disguised Catholicism. As a modern kind of voluntarism, romanticism reflected also a teleological vision accommodating rationalism in its original sense1 and voluntarism that mandates ethical responsibility and human agency as expressed by the Kantian term of autonomy. Such a romantic understanding of progress towards redemption meant the collective, deliberate, voluntary effort of the man to determine his destiny in his historical March. Of significance here in regard of the attainment of redemption was the direction of progress that varied according to the Catholic and Protestant conceptions. The rationalistic-Catholic mind would see the golden age as the age of innocence in ‘civilized age’ to come at the end of the time whereas the romantic-Protestant mind in the bygone, prelapsarian ‘primitive age’. Then, with the romantic-Protestant mind, the way of salvation lay in Regression towards the recovery of the paradise lost rather derived from the Latin reason = ratio meaning originally wisdom, designates, as used by Richard Hooker, for example, a notion of history’s following a pattern, towards a telos, set by divine wisdom not a kind of Cartesian intellectualism, i.e. taking intellect, as the human cognitive faculty, as an epistemological guide. Rationalism assumed the sense of intellectualism with imparting to reason the meaning of intellect by the French Enlightenment.

1 Rationalism,

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than Progression towards the attainment of the paradise to come. Herein, lay the Protestant aversion to the concept of civilization as typically seen in Rousseau.

The Protestant Construction: Culture Against Civilization The process of secularization in Europe was essentially that of the invention, adoption, and projection of the new norms of identity undergoing four phases as follows: A-Construction-Intention-Legitimation First, the definition-invention of civilization and progress as normativization, pride as belonging to the singular civilization, progress as universal identity, Second, the identification-adoption of civilization and progress as essentalization, pride as belonging to plural (Christian, Islamic, etc.) civilizations as particular identities, B-Destruction-Contention-Delegitimation Third, the assertion of civilization and progress as weapon of delegitimation, the struggle for survival over universal identity, blame as opposing to the universalsingular civilization, progress, Fourth, the assertion of particular civilizations and progress as weapon of delegitimation, the struggle for superiority over particular identities, blame as belonging to the backward civilization, progress. Of significance here is the way in which the traditional sub-religious and suprareligious distinctions of identity as orthodox/heterodox and believer/infidel were adjusted to the new norms of civilization and progress appropriated by the rival Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity. The alteration of the political positions of Catholicism and Protestantism in the course of modernization and secularization determined the new ways of sub-religious and supra-religious identification and contestation, the way of Kulturkampf between them and foreigners. Catholicism that came defeated seemingly out of the French Revolution tended to re-identify itself, albeit tepidly, with civilization as the new religion of secularized Europe just as Catholicism used to do with the very Christianity. What was called ‘the European Civilization’ as constructed in historical-conceptual terms by François Guizot was nothing but the disguised re-emergence of ‘the Catholic Civilization’ called formerly res Publica Christiana or the Christian Commonwealth. The concept of civilization imbued with the spirit of a disguised Catholicism had assumed in the nineteenth century an image of irresistible universality. In consequence of this universalization of civilization, the European Civilization as the disguisement of the Catholic Civilization came to pose as the new source of a common European identity. The Catholic habit of imposing his particular identity under a universal guise rather than accommodating sub-religious and supra-religious identities was no longer acceptable by Protestantism that championed the process of modernization called progress. Hence, the Protestant world counteracted against the Catholic civilizational reassertion in three ways. First, pitting culture as the norm of particular identity

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against civilization as the norm of the alleged universal identity; second, the exaltation of progress as the equivalent of or substitute for civilization; third, delegitimizing Catholicism, and then Islam, as being opposed to progress with the replacement of the traditional charge of barbarism as opposition to civilization by obscurantism as opposition to progress. In a world undergoing an accelerated process of secularization in a relatively short period of time, a critical semantic alteration occurred of such axial concepts as progress seen in their usus loquendi from the begriffsgeschichte perspective. The concept of progress that characterizes the Enlightenment worldview by denoting both a process like civilization and a product like culture performed so strategic a function as to support the Catholic-spirited concept of civilization in the eighteenth century and the Protestant-spirited concept of culture in the nineteenth century.2 The link between progress and culture as the sources of the German sense of identity was established by Hegel (1770–1831) who took the history as the process of unfolding of a transcendent spirit called Weltgeist. The pair of concepts Weltgeist (world spirit) and Volksgeist (people spirit) he used was the manifestation of his attempt to reconcile particular and universal identities for the achievement of cosmopolis. Weltgeist develops through a series of distinct stages of world history; each stage having its own Zeitgeist (the spirit of the age) is embodied as the culture of a distinct people as a Volksgeist. The stages of development attained by a people’s culture are the clearest manifestation of its progress through history. Popular spirits could achieve freedom only in so far as they can partake in the historic progress of this world spirit (Hegel 1953: 29; Grumley 2016; Brincat 2009). Furthering this attempt to reconcile the conceptions of progressive universal history and respective national histories, the German historians such as Ranke (1795–1886) argued that progress can only be explored by estimating the contribution of each nation’s history to the general history of European civilization. From Herder (1744–1803) onwards, the Germans matched the concept of culture grounded in romanticism against civilization grounded in the universally oriented rationalism. With respect to the semantical distinction between kultur and zivilisation in German, foreign students have often been left confused (Sartori 2005; Swenson 1997). In what follows a distinction is attempted to be drawn for the sake of clarification. It is observable that the Germans related culture to civilization in three ways: First, alternative, namely, the European ‘culture’ as alternative to the European ‘civilization’, second, subsidiary, as the German culture subject to the European civilization, third, complementary, as moral culture underlying material or general civilization. When used absolutely kultur was given by the Germans such a comprehensive meaning as the equivalent of civilization as understood by the British and French to 2 The nuance between the Catholic and Protestant notions of progress went almost unnoticed even in

such elaborate studies as that of Nisbet (1980). In Becker’s (1970) article, this nuance was elicited as being between two centuries instead of the two sects, the eighteenth century being the age when the Catholic notion of progress predominated and the nineteenth century that of the Protestant.

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name the degree to which some nation had progressed in overcoming their subjection to nature. Both the material dimension of human development involving science, technology, and economy and its moral dimension comprising the way of feeling, thinking and living proper to a community are included in this sense. Therefore, both the British and French translated the word Kultur as ‘civilization’ wherever the usages seemed consonant (Sartori 2005: 678; Salter 2002: 12–15). By contrast, in relative terms, the Germans drew a distinction between kultur and zivilisation by confining kultur to the moral dimension of civilization and zivilisation to its material dimension. A critical nuance was also discernible between German kultur and English culture, which are literally synonyms, in terms of their connotations. The semantic bifurcation of culture involved stemmed from the variance of historical roles of the two Protestant nations as secular-particularistic and religious-universalistic. In search of a distinct particular identity, the Germans straightforwardly held a pagan, civil, pluralistic, or particularistic notion of culture as the source of their identity.3 By contrast, upon England arising as the champion of the cause of imperialism and universalism in the nineteenth century, her intellectuals such as Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, who needed a universalistic identity as the nineteenth-century movement of ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ suggested, proposed a universalistic notion of culture at which Christianity will be cast, with a view to sustaining it in its ethical core, as observed by Edward Said (Hart, 2000; Pecora 2006). It was no coincidence that it was the nineteenth-century British anthropologists such as Edward Tylor who undertook to conceptualize religion in anthropological terms.

The Protestant Destruction: Progressivism Against Obscurantism Catholicism, which derived its power mainly from the Church as the ecclesiastical state, was the right-dominant wing, while Protestantism was the left-opponent wing of the post-reformation Europe. The power of Catholicism had been broken in large measure with the growth of commercial capitalism on one hand and with the secession from the Roman Catholic Church of the national churches of such modernizedcapitalisticized countries as Holland and Britain on the other. The rise of civilization as the new universally welcomed norm of identity served to refresh somewhat the fading Catholicism in the post-revolutionary world. Being a modified continuation of the old distinction of civility/barbarity traditionally pre-empted by Catholicism, the new distinction of civilization/barbarism ran largely in favour of Catholicism, let alone posed challenge to it. At this juncture, Catholicism was left with a very limited ideological scope for contestation. It could contend only against Islam (Turks), Orthodoxy (Russians), 3 Lepenies

(2006). In this context for a pioneering sociological, normative versus anthropological, material approach to culture, see Jaeger (1964).

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besides primitive peoples, as being opposed to civilization or barbarous waiting the civilizing mission by Catholicism. But this post-revolutionary recovery of the Catholic Church through civilization was by way of a fleeting spring breeze destined to banish with the impending onslaught by Protestantism. Their fortunes were to turn with the overturning of their political positions on right and left in the course of modernization; Protestantism was yet the right wing and Catholicism the left wing. This time the turn to indict Catholicism which fell on the left side of the secularized Europe was for the Protestantism which gained the upper hand. The middle of the nineteenth century when the process of secularization culminated in Europe witnessed the final and strident engagement between the two camps. The front of Protestant and liberal intellectuals in the ascendant saw the Catholic Church as a hazardous force of reaction and anti-modernity especially after the proclamation of papal infallibility in 1870 and the tightening control of the Vatican over the local bishops. The term Kulturkampf used by Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), member of the parliament of the Progressive Liberals, to characterize Bismarck’s repressive policies towards the Catholic Church in Germany indeed signalled the final act of the long-lasting process of secularization through which the Protestant intellectuals were to deal the coup de grâce to Catholicism (For elaboration, Clark 2003; Gross 2004; Perkins 2004; Smith 1995, 2001; Wheeler 2006). Progress, having been normativized and appropriated by Protestantism, was employed as a weapon in intra-religious and inter-religious Kulturkampf. The Protestant intellectuals’ substituting progress for civilization following the separation of culture from civilization was the first constructive stage of Kulturkampf against Catholicism. The othering of Catholicism on grounds of progress was the second destructive stage of Kulturkampf or Kulturkampf proper. It was implausible to accuse the Catholic Church, or France, which has already long championed the cause of civilization, of being ‘opposed to civilization = barbarian’, but plausible to do it of being ‘opposed to progress = obscurantist’ as the new definition of obscurantism. The Protestant intellectuals levelled a stream of accusation against Catholicism by pitting a more piercing distinction of progressivism/obscurantism against the distinction of civilization/barbarism. The Enlightenment’s discourse of obscurantism as ‘opposition to the spread of knowledge’ or anti-enlightenment was thus turned by the Protestant intellectuals into one as ‘anti-progressivism’. In the definition of the term, the Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (1871: VII/29) combines the two, old and new, semantic strains of obscurantism as follows: Obscurantists, the name given, originally in derision, to a party who are supposed to look with dislike and apprehension on the progress of knowledge, and to regard its general diffusion among men, taken as they are ordinarily found, as prejudicial to their religious welfare, and possibly injurious to their material interests. Of those who avow such a doctrine, and have written to explain and defend it, it is only just to say that they profess earnestly to desire the progress of all true knowledge as a thing good in itself; but they regard the attempt to diffuse it among men, indiscriminately, as perilous, and often hurtful, by producing presumption and discontent. They profess but to reduce to practice the motto ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’. It cannot be doubted, however, that there are fanatics of ignorance as well as fanatics of science.

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The nineteenth-century liberal, Protestant writers such as François Guizot (1787– 1874), Napoléon Roussel (1805–1878), the author of Catholic Nations and Protestant Nations Compared in Their Threefold Relation to Wealth Knowledge and Morality (1855), Émile de Laveleye (1822–1892), the author of Protestantism and Catholicism in Their Bearing upon the Liberty and Prosperity of Nations (1875) compared favourably the Protestant countries, which were freer and more restful, moral, prosperous and progressive thanks to industrialization, with the Catholic ones which were not so, concluding that the Catholic Church was opposed to freedom and progress. The Catholic intellectuals challenged these charges by resorting to two main lines of argumentation. first, a counter-attack was launched by such Catholic apologetics as Jaime Luciano Balmes (1810–1848) who propounded a historically grounded argument in response to Guizot’s Lectures on Civilization that it was Protestantism indeed that retarded the progress of civilization. Second, they responded to these accusations on the grounds that the moral opulence, which was to be provided ultimately by Catholicism, of the Protestant countries had never matched national wealth they possessed. In religious terms, Protestants emerged victorious out of this Kulturkampf by trying to accommodate the secularized sub-religious and supra-religious identities while ruling out Catholicism. But in national terms that cut across these sub-religious borderlines, another front of civilizational struggle was underway. Whereas England forcefully resisted the imposition of universally oriented identities on herself because it succeeded in fashioning her own distinct identity by virtue of her distance to the continent, Germany has always taken great pains to reconcile her particular and national identities (Patterson 1997; Hohendahl 2003; Perkins 2006). As the once barbarians occasioning the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Germans have never ceased to search for identity with a sense of ‘historical late-coming’ in Europe. Translated into the language of international politics as ‘two questions’, the Western construction of Germany as its internal and of the East as its external other culminated in the nineteenth century: the ‘German Question’ and the ‘Eastern Question’ (Case 2018; Wright 1973). By contrast, the German intellectuals continued to redefine the West as their Other, as seen after World War II (Jackson 2006). ‘Western Germany’ constructed an Other ‘East’ as the ‘Eastern Germany’ through an internal othering in the post-World War II continued to engage the West.

The Break of Inter-religious Struggle The normativization of (singular) civilization as the source of universal identity in place of religion was followed by its essentalization (plural) by the parameters of religion, race, and geography such as ‘Christian, French, Mediterranean, European, and Egyptian civilizations’ as the new sources of particular identities. In the years between 1816 and 1845 during which the work of Guizot (1828) came out, who is generally credited with the historical construction of the concept of the ‘European

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civilization’, the concept found an increasing circulation in Europe (Boer 2005: 55–58). With Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) enumerating in 1853, ten civilizations known to world history the plural use of civilization widely spread (Wescott 1970). Although not actually using the term Voltaire (1965), gave way to its normativization by comparing the mores and characters of various peoples from the perspective of philosophy of history and world history for the first time in the Western history (Mazlish 2004: 50–74; O’Brien 1997; Schlereth 1977). Two perspectives can be distinguished in the definition of civilization in this quasi-religious (normative-systemic) sense: philological and sociological. In philological perspective, civilization is defined as “unified cultural systems made up of habitual patterns of symbols and material life— as wholes—that live and progress, or die and disintegrate, in rhythm with a hidden underlying reality (Costello 1993: 3). In sociological perspective, Black (1967: 2–3) defines civilization as a cluster of ‘civilized societies’ with essential distinctiveness which combines a peculiar way of life and view of world grounded in religion. According to him, the first great transformation from pre-human to human society, the second great transformation from primitive society to civilized society, and the third great transformation from traditional civilized society to modern society. The third transformation is the process and changes of modernization: Most important of all, the civilized societies had sophisticated conceptions, expressed in religious beliefs, of the identity of man, of his relationship to his environment, and of those profound truths that experience had taught them were beyond full human comprehension (…) they have transmitted their knowledge and institutions to later societies that have intermingled and interacted over the centuries without losing their essential distinctiveness. This distinctiveness, in its broadest sense representing different conceptions of the fundamental nature of man and his environment, is reflected at its most abstract level in the great religions:: Hebrew, Greco-Roman, Iranian, Christian, in its Eastern and Western forms, and Islamic. These societies may also be perceived in various configurations as civilizations, as cultures, as linguistic groups, or as political or economic systems, depending on the interest or angle of vision of the observer.

This development portended the imminent break of the inter-religious struggle as the global Kulturkampf. As an extension of intra-religious struggle waged in the nineteenth century between the Catholic and Protestant camps over the terms civilization and progress, inter-religious struggle runs on three fronts. First, the struggle between civilized and barbarian nations, second, between the progressive and obscurantist religions, and third, between the right and wrong civilizations. Turkdom that succeeded the Saracendom as the main other of the Frankness denoting the mainstream European identity became the common target of that threefold struggle running seemingly in distinct directions. The quest for alternative cosmopolitanism had been peculiar to such dissidents as Maistre, Lamennais, and Mazzini who were discontented with the world spawned by the French Revolution. As the product of a collective millennialism, the Revolution indicated the direction of secularized cosmopolitanism. As a consequence of the eventual transformation of religion into civilization, Napoléon championed

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the cause of secularized cosmopolitanism as civilizing mission instead of traditional evangelizing mission. In the eye of civilizing missionary, the other was barbarian represented by Turks as the main other of the European civilized (Patterson 1997). The possession of ‘civilization’ justifies the conquest of ‘barbarism’ (Salter 2002: 12). As Fabian (1990) pointed out, religious and secular colonialism had a common ground in this respect. Throughout the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries worked hand-in-hand with political colonialists by the overlapping evangelizing and civilizing missions. The history of modern Christian mission overlapped heavily with the history of modern colonialism. On closer examination, it will be seen that the ways and disciplines of otherization varied according to the religious split within Europe: The Jesuit (hidden Catholic) distinction of civilization and barbarism through philology in diachronic terms versus the Protestant distinction of civility and primitivity through anthropology in synchronic terms. In the first distinction the diachronic other was the barbarian Turk and in the second one the synchronic other was the primitive African. The first stage of the nineteenth-century European Kulturkampf was intrareligious, waged between the alleged progressive and obscurantist Christianities, namely, by Protestantism against Catholicism; its second stage was inter-religious waged between the alleged progressive and obscurantist religions, namely by Protestantism this time against Islam. The Protestants intellectuals, having come victorious out of the Kulturkampf against Catholicism, came to direct this campaign to their near and distant others, especially to Islam, a struggle further exacerbated by the involvement of such racial parameters as Semitic and Turanian. With the Industrial Revolution, England became the champion of the imperious Western civilization. Having othered Catholicism as being opposed to progress vis-à-vis Protestantism they identified with material progress, the English liberal intellectuals projected this accusation to Islam. In their eyes, Islam as a religion = law which used to be identified with Turkishness throughout history was opposed to progress intrinsically. Thus, the obscurantism (opposition to progress) of Islam as religion was identified by them with the barbarism (opposition to civilization) of Turkishness as race especially after the Congress of Berlin of 1878 when England abandoned her policy of upholding the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire called the ‘sick man of Europe’ (For elaboration, Gencer 2017: 119–141). As Weber put it, orientalism as the discipline of civilizational othering, which served mainly to essentialize races through philology, emerged to complement synoecism in the process of modernization (Isin 2002: 15). Ernest Renan (1823–1892) as a leading philologist orientalist of the nineteenth century tended to other both Jews and Turks as the Semitic and Turanian peoples inferior the Western Aryan. He was also the inaugurator of the anti-Islamic Kulturkampf based on the motto of ‘Islam is opposed to progress’ which left a long-lasting shock on the Islamic conscience. Against this Jesuit–Protestant onslaught, the three main common attitudes by Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim intellectuals were held: sceptic, apologetic, assertive. By the dictum that the peak is also the moment of descent, the notions civilization and progress came under heavy and widespread questioning before long with their

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ascendancy in the nineteenth century. For example, the remark made by Margaret Oliphant (1869: 112–3) (1828–1897), Scottish novelist and historical writer, in passing, was of universal significance in articulating the early sense of crisis of a material civilization beginning to deplete the souls of the European community: A more appalling emergency has scarcely ever occurred in popular story; and it was not one of those primitive difficulties which could be solved by a change of government or even a change of dynasty. The first complex crisis of over-civilization seemed to have developed all at once in the bosom of a society still bearing many traces of its primitive character, and unacquainted with the necessary expedients to meet it.

In apologetic terms, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim intellectuals vehemently opposed to the accusation of the obscurantism of their religions through a twofold discourse. First, our religion is ‘not opposed to progress’ at all intrinsically, and second, it is rather ‘warrantor of progress’ not to say being opposed to or capable of progress. The article of Ali Suavi (1868) of Turkey entitled ‘Mohammedanism not Opposed to Civilization’ as an early instance of this Muslim apologetic attitude indicates the reaction of the Ottoman-Muslim intellectuals to both the charges of barbarism and obscurantism at once with the equation of progress with civilization. In assertive terms, they resorted to put their religion in the garb of civilization so as to pit against the marching civilization (Slaboch 2018). This was to invoke the second stage of the inter-religious Kulturkampf in nineteenth century waged between the right civilization and wrong civilizations with the traditional distinction of ‘right religion/wrong religions’ being turned into ‘Western/Eastern civilizations’ through orientalism as the discipline of civilizational othering. Unlike the Anglican attempt to cast its religion at culture along universalistic lines, the intellectuals of other, yet fringy, sects, and religions including Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam, tended to reconceptualize their religion as civilization. It was the religion’s turn yet to emulate civilization in that century when it became the dominant norm. In a rapidly secularizing world, the quest for elevating religion to the status of civilization was markedly seen in cases of Catholicism and Judaism through Mordecai Kaplan [1934] (1967). In regard to Islam, the Indian Muslim intellectuals, under the impact of English culture, often led the way in secularizing Islam with such works as ‘Islamic civilization, Islamic ideology’, etc. The Indian Muslim S. Khuda Bukhsh (1877–1931) was presumably pioneer in using the term ‘Islamic civilization’ in his translation entitled Contributions to the History of Islamic Civilization (London: Thacker, Spink & Co. 1905) from Alfred Von Kremer’s Culturgeschichtliche Streifzüge auf dem Gebiete des Islams (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus 1873) and in his subsequent works such as Essays: Indian and Islamic (London: Probsthain & Co. 1912). In the preface to his translation from Kremer entitled The Orient under the Caliphs Bukhsh assesses the significance of book as follows: ‘this book deals not with the dry and wearisome details of military operations… but lays bare before us all that was of enduring value in Islam or Islamic civilization’ (emphasis added). Later in the twentieth century, discussions as to whether Islam is a civilization or religion as seen in the Indonesian case, shows the point to which the Muslim World had also been drifted in this way (Steenbrink 2004).

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Conclusion I would conclude with a table to compare the various aspects of the two rival, Catholic and Protestant, cosmopolitan projects as follows which constitute the subject matter of another paper:

Catholicism

Protestantism

Civilization

Progress/culture

Golden age

Primitive age

Rationalism

Romanticism

Ideology

Worldview

Empire

Nation-state

Political nation

Cultural nation

Orientalism

Chronopolitics

Philology

Anthropology

Colonialism

International law

Assimilation

Acculturation

Hot war

Cold war

In this table, Catholicism comprises mainly France, and Protestantism comprises primarily Germany and secondarily England. The first two lines denote the kinds of norms and destinations of identity, and the following two do their philosophical foundations, the following two the forms of collective political identity, the following two the ways and disciplines of otherization and the last three the ways of identification. Orientalism by which the East is radically othered through philology combining traditional geopolitics and diachronic chronopolitics served to impose the Catholicspirited civilization to other cultures through war and assimilation whenever necessary. However, the meaning of chronopolitics changed after the West accomplished its process of civilization in nineteenth century. The Protestant West tended to ‘softly’ otherize other contemporary cultures with a synchronic chronopolitics in that century when the process of civilization came to maturity and anthropology arose as a distinct discipline. The living of human communities in such different cultural times as civility and primitivity in the same physical age in anthropological terms, namely coevalness, was no longer allowed as a grave anachronism and historical accident with the European mind (Fabian 1983). Therefore, as the ‘benevolent civilizer’, the Protestant intellectual aimed to elevate the ‘backward’ communities to the current level of Western development through cultural change called acculturation by delivering them from primitiveness.4 4 Regarding the difference between the concepts of acculturation and assimilation in social scientific

terms, see Teske (1974).

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The Catholic Jacobin civilizer intends to substantiate his proposed universal identity basically through colonialism while the Protestants such as Hegel through international law. Finally, while the Catholic intellectual proposes to civilize communities by means of war whenever necessary as in case of the occupation of Egypt by Napoléon after the Revolution and the following continental wars, the Protestants choose mostly the way of cultural war as the phrase Kulturkampf used for struggle against the Catholics, and then to Muslims, in Germany designates. Against this background, I hope that the ongoing discussions of cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, and the clash of civilizations can be placed in perspective.

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Bedri Gencer who was born in 7 April 1968, Konya, Turkey and received his BS (1991) from Mimar Sinan University in Sociology and his MS (1993) from Marmara University in Economic History and Ph.D. (1998) from Istanbul University in International Relations, currently works as professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Yildiz Technical University. His research fields include Social and Political Theory, Comparative Historical Sociology and research

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interests do modernization and secularization in historical, comparative and conceptual terms (religion, civilization, authority, tradition, legitimacy, identity, ideology) and The Sociology of the Islamic world (Islamic way of thought and life, patterns of socio-political and cultural change, ideological currents) and The Ottoman political philosophy and sociology (Political regime and culture, civil society, public sphere, public opinion, patterns of socio-political and cultural change, ideological currents).

On Multiple Epistemologies of Secularism: Toward a Political Economy Critique Seda Ünsar

The Nature of Secularism and Its Dyadic Category: Toward a Different Paradigm As a political ideology, doctrine or worldview, secularism has been regarded as either a colonial imposition of a materialistic worldview, an alienating, modern culture of unrestricted pleasure over an otherwise spiritual society or a rational principle, which, aiming to solve the issue of the ‘individual’s sovereignty,’ suppresses ‘religious passion’ for ‘political progress’ in terms of peace and control of intolerance. Despite the opposite positioning, the two views, in the main, share an assumption: that secularism is inherently Western as an ontology and epistemology. Secularism, as the epistemology of the Enlightenment, enabled the advent of liberalism and socialism—the, for now, failed alternative of historical capitalism (‘failed,’ because socialist trends were, by and large, marginalized as the footnote of history, if not incorporated as social democratic politics or when they took over governance through revolutions, socialist policies created totalitarian systems that eventually collapsed with a very few exceptions). The French Revolution, as the first major political expression of the Enlightenment, eradicated the aristocratic and religious institutions of the Ancién Regime by institutionalizing the very epistemology as a political doctrine. Notwithstanding the extremes of the aftermath of the revolution, the genesis of secularism or laïcité in French vernacular, as a doctrine, denoted the redefinition of the base of sovereignty as lay—as opposed to clerical, and that of ‘the people’—as opposed to that of the monarchy and aristocracy. The genesis of secularism was also visible in logos in the nineteenth-century Britain through the freethinkers who advocated an immanent worldview that was ‘here and now’ and a system of ethics that was anticlerical.

S. Ünsar (B) Do˘gu¸s University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Ünsar and Ö. Ünal Eri¸s (eds.), Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_3

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Among the triad of the nineteenth-century ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, socialism), whose epistemological and ontological groundwork was secularism, it was liberalism that emerged triumphant especially as the affinity between capitalism and colonialism proved a strong bond for providing a supportive milieu for liberalism to legitimate the institutions of world-capitalism better (than others) for the most part and for everyone involved, the ruling cadres and the masses—despite, evidently, waves of repression and resistance. Liberalism, which was born of the concern for a defense of ‘freedom’ as a value of the traditional worldview against the absolutist (Church–monarchy–aristocracy) alliance and thus appeared on the progressive-left of the political spectrum, was at the same time on the right because of its legitimization of the Lockean estate and the due property rights argument through a theory of (God-given) natural rights. With the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution, as it became a hegemonic ideology, liberalism was consolidated as the legitimization tool of ‘laissez-faire, laissez-passer’ capitalism and imperialism, especially with the Darwinism of Spencer of the Victorian Age. In the meantime, because the liberal creed became, in Wallerstein’s lexicon, ‘the geo-culture of the world-system of historical capitalism’; secularism, identified tête-à-tête with the political and economic institutions of liberal capitalism that also carried a new culture building upon the Christian legacy, was burdened, principally in the (semi)colonies where it hit the hardest, with the ‘sins’ of liberal capitalism.1 If we are to look further into the depths of secularism, Bedri Gencer argues that at its basis lies the bond of modernism–secularism–ideology, which forms the trivet of ‘the politics of Truth.’ In this trivet, modernism, as the disguised form of messianism, was the project of backdating the ‘new world order’ (novus ordo seclorum) that is the ‘Earthly Paradise’ to be founded by the Messiah at the end time of the world; it was a project of the Europe of Enlightenment that discovered the ‘realized eschatology’— as opposed to the ‘futuristic eschatology’ of John’s Testimony—to build the ‘Earthly Paradise’ ‘here and now,’ owing to secularism. While the eighteenth century was ‘the century of philosophy,’ i.e., the Republic of Letters prior to the French Revolution; the attribution of the nineteenth century as ‘the historical century’ referred to the process of universalization of secular reason (wisdom) which was transformed into ideology as secular ‘religion.’ In the Christian world, the triad model of hierarchical stratification comprising aristocracy, clergy and plebs, and the institutionalization of power liaisons of the Catholic Church accordingly led to a crisis of legitimacy. During this age of crisis, even religion itself was transformed into theology, which represented the official ideology of a political vision determined by the church. Following the reformation which harbored theologies as alternative interpretations of religion, theology secularized and turned into ideology—which is a product of politicization. While the legitimacy crisis in question had led to reformation with an internal exegesis by theologians such as Luther and Calvin, at the point where this process was insufficient, an external interpretation, the Enlightenment, came into being. As tradition is the phenomenal dimension of religion, modernization is the transformation of tradition and at its core lays secularism, whose essence is the 1 See Wallerstein (1974) on historical capitalism; Anderson (1974) on the absolutist state; Doyle (1999), Wallerstein (1989) on French Revolution.

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divergence or drifting away from the sacred. Indeed, secularization began as the loss of revealed-religion in the West (Gencer 2012, 217–219).2 It is in this sense that secularism, as a vehicle of modernism and its worldview, is a meta-ideology while ideologies such as socialism as a ‘project of society’ are paraideologies dependent on secularism. The Thomistic synthesis of reason and faith in the thirteenth century and the four categories of Law that included a space for man-made law—however subordinate to religious law it may be, with the end of the medieval unity and feudalism, eventually gave way to reason over revelation.3 While the universalization of secularism as modern reason (wisdom) required dialectically the partialization of other religions, the religion of Islam in particular met secularization as a matter of life and death (Gencer 2012, 219). We can think of this encounter in the context of two kinds of reactions to two kinds of Western imminence: one is the Ottoman and Egyptian political modernization in the 1830s as a reaction to Western colonialism which starting with Napoleon’s 1798 Egypt incursion was explicit. The other is the Ottoman and Egyptian intellectual reckoning, in the 1860s and 1880s, respectively, against the cultural war of colonialism, which was implicit (Gencer 2012, 201–210).4 The Egyptian intellectual reckoning targeted the religion of Islam in terms of its critical point and sought ways to reconcile secularism and Islam without giving up the supremacy of scripture or the Muslim Arab identity, and looking for authentic ways to initiate politics based on consultation. The Ottoman intellectual reckoning, however, under the burden of the British propaganda against the Ottoman Caliphate with the slogan of ‘Islam and Turkishness are obstacles to progress’ and the French Orientalism vilifying Turkish Islam and relegating Islam to Arab civilization, chose as its subject the political and economic institutions of the empire that were said to have caused the imperial peril and thus needed substantial reform. The intellectual questioning and resistance, which developed with a focus on the critique of tradition in Egyptian circles and of Western modernism in Ottomans, were shaped 2 For

a holistic analysis in depth, see Gencer (2012), pp. 165–248. we think of the medieval scholastic view formed by Augustinian metaphysics as a wall, the Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason, which Aquinas formulated with bringing back man’s rationality instead of his sinfulness as the origins of the state through the Aristotelian telos and his four categories of law, can be thought of as a crack in that wall for the future secularization of theology. The categories of law, which remind one of the Platonic distinction between intelligible and perceptible realms, consisted of Eternal Law (God’s Reason/Mind), Divine Law (God’s Word), Natural Law (Man’s Reason/Mind), and Human Law (Man’s Word). While eternal law and divine law obviously represented religious law, natural law that was to be found in every man’s mind and in connection to nature was obviously reminiscent of Cicero’s definition of law, which, however, in Cicero was not subordinate to an innate divine law and inherently secular. Although natural law and human law were subject and subordinated to religious law, the fact that they still existed represented an opening for future secular law—that is man-made law—which would invalidate religious—that is divine or revelation/scripture-inspired law altogether in Western political\legal system and thought. Here, the categorization of law into four layers represents a Platonic influence in that Eternal Law belongs to the intelligible realm while Divine Law belongs to the perceptible; Natural Law belongs to the intelligible realm and Human Law belongs to the perceptible realm. Or, alternatively, the Eternal Law and Divine Law may represent Plato’s theoretical world while the Natural Law and Human Law may represent the empirical world. 4 For a detailed analysis, also see ibid., pp. 277–305. 3 If

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with concerns of a posteriori legitimacy for autocratic reforms (as was the custom5 ) and dynamics of an apologetic self-defense against the perceived Western cultural war. In this colossal effort, secularization occurred as not normative but mechanical secularization since the mechanisms needed to ‘resolve’ the crisis of legitimacy in Islam had long been developed by Gazali (Gencer 2012, 796). Yet, the mechanisms of Gazali also ended the already uneven and sporadic efforts at philosophic, rational, or eclectic interpretation of the Holy Book and Islam; prevented the flourishing of rational/scientific thought set forth by such giants as Ibn Rushd (Averroes) or Ibn Sina (Avicenna) whom the Western civilization had ironically well-internalized, and more importantly, precluded its institutionalization. As the lands of Islam were not immune either from changes in the socio-economic substructure due to the expansion of world-historic capitalism, the political, social, and ideological superstructure began to follow. Though because of the preclusion of rational thought, these changes that can be dubbed as modernization did not follow as linear a progression as the Western world followed. In that context, it was the mechanisms developed by Gazali that had previously resolved the issue of legitimacy but indeed caused, in the macrohistorical evolution, even a more giant crisis of legitimacy. This new legitimacy crisis in the Islamic context thus turned into a struggle of the ‘self’ between the conservative forces of tradition (and status quo) and the reformist forces of change which repeatedly ended to the detriment of the latter. Essentially, the inconsistency of Western democracy had two bases: the first base emanated from the contradictions of classical liberalism and capitalism when ‘sovereignty,’ the political basis of democracy, as legally bestowed upon ‘the people’ (in lieu of clerics or monarchs), turned out to be biased for a particular class, that of the capital. The claim of liberalism to human rights and civil liberties against the potential arbitrariness of political authority proved to be a bogus one for the masses when divorced of concerns for (economic) equality. Indeed, such claim was already mocked by Jean Jacques Rousseau a century ago when he pointed out the systemic inequality and stalemate due to the Lockean property-leg of liberalism that was even coated with religion in the theory of natural rights—however enlightened or rationalized that religion might be. This state of affairs created a crisis of legitimacy while ‘democracy,’ as a site of resistance and emancipation, was jammed in anarchist, misarchist, radical democracy currents, and social democratic or leftist politics. The second base of the inconsistency of Western democracy was, being not unrelated to the first, due to the contradictions of classical liberalism and politics of imperialism/colonialism that rested on the total disregard of liberal values, liberties, and rights for the (semi)colonies. In a sense, this was the internationalization of the first set of contradictions for the world populace. Consequently, the disenchantment of the world which Weber describes with the words ‘iron cage’ has deepened; Raymond Williams’ inherently dominative mode, on 5 The

Ottoman Sultans, from early on, introduced a novelty into the Islamic system of governance ˝ which corresponded to the idea of secular law-making. The decisions through the use of Kanun\Orf, were pragmatically taken and applied by the sultans justified by the authority given to them through the secular Kanun, and would later be given an aposteriori legitimacy by the Seyhülislam ¸ (the Grand Mufti) on religious terms.

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which Foucault’s concept of governmentality referring to the technocratic logic of the modern state depends, has transformed into the disciplining power of modernity with a crisis of legitimacy for the human soul,6 just as once again Jean Jacques Rousseau had implied, two centuries prior, with his problematic of modernity and civilization. Verily, in the Islamic world, all of these contradictions and the due depressive crises were felt through or attributed to secularism, because modernization, as a universal process arising from (late and faulty) integration with the world-economy, by and large, directly or indirectly, with foreign or native cadres, occurred as part of colonialization. Hence, the generic and intrinsic crisis of legitimacy, which haunted democracy also in the West, appeared as or turned into a crisis of secularism, and ‘practice and expression of the self ’ in the East. The European world-economy—in Braudel’s lexicon, emerging c. 1500 as an intricate web of polities and cultures interlinked through the market, incorporated, at different points in time, various parts of the Ottoman world-empire, which was a redistributive system under the supervision of a state but lacking the integrative market. There, both liberalism and capitalism, as specifically internal responses to the dynamics of incorporation, were, thus, shaped under different conditions. So was the emergence of secularism, further complicated by dynamics of foreign involvement and reform. While, for the burgeoning (modern) Ottoman intelligentsia, the target of reform was the inept political institutions rather than religion per se in the sense that for instance al-Afghani or Muhammad Abduh was after; the emergence of the ‘secular’ as an epistemic category and ‘secularism’ as a political doctrine (aka laicism) had multiple endogenous roots; such as the 1858 Land Reform (the effort to develop a land regime consistent with capitalism), and the 1839 Tanzimat declaration of property rights, both of which were complicated by the processes of incorporation into the world-economy as periphery. The peripheralization in the socio-economic realm obviously meant the incursion of imperialism in the socio-political superstructure. The other endogenous base worthy of emphasis was the aforementioned inconsistent but persistent history of struggle for refinement, purification, or reform in the religion of Islam—since at least the Mu’tazilites—given as a battle between religious orthodoxy and rationality, in which the forces of the status quo were consolidated at the expense of the reformists.7 By the opening of the twentieth century though, 6 See Foucault’s lectures between 1982 and 1983. Foucault (2010), Williams (1977). Also, see Freud

(1929) on the discontents of civilization. 7 On Abduh and Afghani, see Kedourie (1966); further on Afghani, see Keddie (1966, 1968, 1970),

Unsar (2011); on Mutazilites and the battle for rationality, see Hoodbhoy (1991); on Islam, see Donohue and Esposito (2007), Hourani (1983). Rationality is a multifaceted concept: one facet is the capitalist bureaucratic meaning in a Weberian sense; the other refers to scientific thought that freed human mind from the hold of theological apriori truths. Here, it is used in the latter sense in that there is a serious strain of thought in Islam since its early days that have argued for the use of akl (reason, rational faculty) as the most important command of the sacred book. For details, information and analysis, see Öztürk (1994), Senermen ¸ (2013), Rahman (1982). On the general historical–structural features of the Ottoman Empire, see ˙Inalcik (1977), Gerber (1987), ˙Inalcik and Quataert (1994), Karpat (1968, 1972). For capital formation in the Ottoman system, see ˙Inalcik (1969); and for the commercialization of agriculture, see Quataert (1980). For Ottoman integration into world-economy, see Wallerstein et al. (1987), Sunar (1987), Kasaba (1988), and

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that balance would begin to shift to the advantage of the reformists, particularly in the aftermath of the proclamation of the 2nd Constitutional Monarchy in the lands of the Ottomans, or the said-1908 Young Turk Revolution, which was only possible due to the struggle of an earlier generation of Young Ottomans as well as the reforms of Sultan Mahmud II (reminding one of Peter the Great of Russia) who started the corporatization and modernization of the state and opened the schools of Military Academy and Medicine that produced the much needed political and intellectual cadres. The divergence between the underlying forces, consolidation processes, and other subtleties of European industrial capitalism and those pertaining to the absorption of the Ottoman world-empire into the world-economy of that capitalism, therefore, necessitates a fundamental categorical distinction for the ‘secular’ as a category of Western liberalism and that of the Eastern form. This neglected dyadic category of secularism begins apriori with the discovery of multiple epistemologies and meanings of secularism for the colonizer and the (semi)colonized or peripheralized. What is meant by the aforesaid duality is not, however, the common view, expounded by not only the liberal scholars of Islamic thought, but also the Islamic thought on the left, that takes secularism as a mere colonial imposition of a modern culture of alienation, pleasure, materialism or rationality (rather that imposition should be related to capitalism). What is meant is the fact that the use of lay authority as the basis of political sovereignty in the (Middle) East had exogenous sources does not invalidate its endogenous bases. And further, the exogenous sources were expected political consequences of the incorporation into the world-economy on unequal terms and rather late as the periphery. Thus, in the Middle East, secularism, as the theoretical and epistemic foundation of modernization compelled by immersion into the world-economy, naturally followed an authoritarian path of a sort of ‘borrowed imperialism,’ to use Deringil’s lexicon.8 The path in question, initiated by an emergent modern(izing) bureaucracy replacing the earlier one, was shaped by the institutional particularities of the Ottoman social formation, i.e., top-to-bottom structuring, as well as imperial politics, i.e., the nineteenth-century political and economic treaties with the West.9 Indeed, in the West also, capitalism, liberalism, and secularism as Salzmann (1993, 1999, 2000). On the Ottoman bureaucratic reform, see Rodison (1963), Findley (1980, 1989), Fleischer (1986), and Ahmad (2003). For the Ottoman economic system, see ˙Inalcık (1969, 1970) and Genç (2000). On the Young Ottomans, see Mardin (1962) and on Young Turks, see Ahmad (1969), and Ahmad (2008, Vol. I and Vol. II). 8 The use of ‘borrowed imperialism’ is from Deringil (2010). The political economy analysis of it is mine. 9 On the social structure of the Ottoman Empire, see Unsar, Ph.D. thesis. One of the arguments in the thesis was that the initial, productive Ottoman social structure was bottom-to-top with the characteristics of participatory decision-making. As the state transformed into an empire, this bottom-to-top structure gave way to a top-to-bottom restructuring which precluded participatory decision-making. Along the historical trajectory, with particularly the change of the socio-economic substructure in Europe with the capitalist organization of production, and the emergence of world-historic capitalism that overreached its boundaries and incorporated the eastern lands, in the jargon of institutional theory, the initially productive institutional structure became redistributive with institutional rigidities.

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the epistemic foundation of any ideology followed quite authoritarian paths undertaken by a rising bureaucracy—the difference being in the class formations and structures, and certainly in the fact that the West was the agent, not the object, of imperialism. While in the previously politically fragmented feudal West that now entered an age of central and strong states for freer trade and commerce, modernization was stamped with the onslaught of the idea of power politics behind which social segments united with economic goals—voila the emergence of classes; in the Ottoman already-centralized-but-remaining-feudal rule, it was only the rising secular bureaucrats and military officers—thanks to the reformist state policies to save the ‘sinking ship’ against an ever-strengthening Europe—that had any autonomy to create modern spaces. The main antagonism was between a constantly transforming socio-economic substructure in the Ottoman lands through further incorporation into the world-historic capitalism and the necessitated changes in the stubbornly feudal— despite reforming sultans—seat of rule in the palace. While the substructure became one of a de facto bourgeois land ownership, a capitalist system of production with capital investment and hired labor and the collection of capitalist land rent, the superstructure remained an overall feudal authority laying hands on part of the capitalist land rent for redistribution. This economic-at-root antagonism would eventually lead to, in non-Muslim communities with bourgeois class ripe in nationalist ideology, a demand for the end of Ottoman rule and the emergence of national states instead.10 Even a cursory look at the history of the emergence of Western municipalities and ‘self-rule’ in the age of capitalist transformation and the provision of public goods in the Ottoman lands provides astounding comparisons.11 Berkes (1998), in his classical Development of Secularism in Turkey, tracing the institutional transformations from the Ottoman era, notes that peculiar to Christianity and its historical evolution, the establishment of a church above, or subordinate to, or parallel with the state constituted an exception rather than the rule in relations between the state and religion. In Islam, there were no such concepts of church and state as specifically religious and political institutions, because religion and state were fused together. The church was not above, or subordinate to, or parallel with the state: the religion was (the essence of) the state, and the state was (the embodiment of) the religion (Berkes 1998, 5–20). Therefore, the conflict was not between the church and the state as it was in Europe where the modern state institutions came as a bargain on private property especially with the consolidation of the emergent capitalist mode of production. Once again, the conflict was rather between the forces of tradition or orthodoxy, which promoted and was promoted by sacred law, and the forces of change in a world-empire that had been integrated as periphery into the world-economy created by European capitalism, and lacked a comparable structure of classes, which in European society had already spearheaded successive and continuous political changes.

10 See

Unsar, Ph.D. thesis.

11 See on the provision of public goods in the Ottoman Empire, Unsar (2012a, b), on the institutional

structure and its macro-historical evolution, see Unsar (2015, 2018).

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Yet, on one hand, because the widely accepted (and Orientalist) perception of secularism is that it is a unique cognitive category of Western liberalism, the fact that secularism is imputed with what is rather the morass of capitalism is blurred, and thus, the bureaucratic path toward a secular political system in the (Middle) East is viewed as merely an alien cultural import. This perception of secularism finds favor with both liberal and socialist Arab thought also because the Ottoman rule, although a rule of Islam, was from the beginning a foreign affair for them. Even though within the package of modernization there was sufficient cultural import from the West and imposition too (art, being for the enjoyment of human soul, and science, at the disposal of human curiosity, all the same), the dialectic of change is not as simple and definitely not one-way. In this context, examining the political economy of secularism would bring forth the institutional dimension rooted in the age-old battle (of the Middle East as much as it is of the West) on the origins of political authority, sovereignty, legitimacy, and ideology shaped by constantly changing socio-economic circumstances. The writing of Mecelle to make the necessary changes in the land regime and the debates in the 1877 Ottoman Meclis-i Mebusan addressing the right to speak of economic inequalities inherently tied to political rights or the need to eradicate the religion of Islam from hurafe (‘supersition’ for lack of a better translation) in order to set scientific thought on a free path in institutions of education, and the view to reformulate aucourant educational institutions12 or later the Young Turks’ insistence on calling women to their secret meetings are some of the Eastern realities—albeit urged by Western encroachments—that shaped an Eastern epistemology and ontology of secularism. On the other hand, empires like that of China, the Ottomans and Russia, in order to speed up the process of modernization, created their internal ‘Other,’ like the east of modernizing Europe or Italy’s south or the whole of Europe when they created their internal and otherwise ‘Other’s, like the Protestants, Calvinists, Jews, or Muslims. The sharpening of this dichotomy in these empires that sought to recreate a strong center eased ‘domestic orientalism.’ The creation of the modern state depended on the creation of strong institutions which in turn depended on the universalization of political values, culture, and practices. In other words, the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century undertook, on one hand, orientalist geopolitics, and, on the other, chronopolitic otherization that refused to let communities of the same age keep their particular cultural levels. At the core of the integration of the nation (which depends on the civilization of the horizontal dimension of religion that in turn comes into being with the elimination of the vertical dimension) with the state (which has gained a corporate identity) lies this otherization.13 This task would yet rather fall on the new Turkish Republic following the imperial dismemberment in the early twentieth century. However, this integration constitutes the main dynamics

12 See

Karpat (1969, 1972) for the debates addressing these issues. For the records of the debates, see Us (1940, 1954). 13 For the chronopolitic otherization, and the civilization of the horizontal dimension of religion and the elimination of the vertical dimension, see Gencer (2012), p. 75.

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of universal secularization everywhere including its birth place of Western Europe; this is precisely why secularization is the basis of the nation-state. The end of WWI was marked by an unexpectedly successful resistance to the allocation of the Ottoman lands among the winners of the war, followed by an unusual political revolution which had been in the making during the resistance itself. The so-called (Kemalist) revolution was collectively organized by the bureaucracy which was the only autonomous group to undertake any collective action for resistance to invasion or change in the regime. In Sunar’s time-defying analysis and Mardin’s equally important work, the Turkish revolution did not have peasant insurrection, bourgeois conspiracy, violent upheavals, and a major shift in the balance of political and social forces.14 Nor could it ever have as the structural conditions due to peripheralization were of a quite different sort with no socially and politically prevalent class consciousness; and even early stages of capitalism had a different political and social process, i.e., while the clergy in the non-Muslim communities of the empire, in the nineteenth century, played a leading role in nationalist ideology backed by a rising middle class; in the Muslim social segments, along with the lack of a rising middle class, the allegiance of the men of religion was to the Islamic ummah not the Turkish nation. Therefore, the revolution was undertaken by a class bred in the bosom of society and bent on to liberate itself and the rest from an oppressive state apparatus dominated by a waning ruling class that commanded an emptied political institution—for at least half a century if not more—called the caliphate and had no real function except collaboration with the Allied Powers once the occupation began. Although it was not a usual social revolution involving class struggle and violence, in terms of the basis of legitimacy, it was a most profound ideological revolution that created a new paradigm of legitimacy, supported by not a realignment of class forces for obvious structural reasons, but the recreation of the origins and ends of state power. It is important to pause here and think for a moment as the sentences describing the new basis of legitimacy may not suffice to make the meaning of this paradigmatic shift visible. Nevertheless, in the Ottoman Empire, the legitimacy of state power rested on a pre-established, divine order, while the social order was conceived to issue from this order of being. The state institutions, suffused with a religious quality, permeated society to maintain a social structure representing the true order of things; the true order revealed in religion, and further discoveries of this pattern were possible through theological methods of religious epistemology. The republic singlehandedly substituted this religious cosmology for a nationalist ontology and a positivist epistemology. Social order would no longer issue from a religious order and its dynastic sovereigns, but from a configuration of national values by expert knowledge.15 The state power derived its legitimacy from a national order in

14 See Sunar (1987). Also, see on the analysis of the Turkish Revolution according to the parameters

of social and political revolutions, Mardin (1971), pp. 197–211. The word Kemalist (follower of Kemal) is first used by the Allied Powers occupying Istanbul to refer to those who followed Mustafa Kemal, the leader of the Resistance. For the ideas here, also see Unsar (2015). 15 See Sunar (1987: 84–88).

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whose context nationalism and laicism were intertwined: popular sovereignty simultaneously meant national sovereignty against Western mandate and the transfer of the epistemological and ontological basis of sovereignty and legitimacy to the secular assembly of citizens from a religiously ordered sultanate/caliphate. Thus, for the Islamic context, secularism—or precisely laiklik in the Turkish vernacular—is the political basis of popular (democratic) sovereignty as opposed to sultanic/caliphate rule, the counterpart of the Church–monarchy—aristocracy rule in the European context. It emerges as an institutional mechanism; a necessary condition to secure social, economic, and political spaces, not dominated by a certain sectarian interpretation, organization and use of religion for economic, political, and social purposes, and by repressive obscurantism, discrimination or denial of rights (of conscience, thought and expression and to women or minorities), or by exploitation of conscience, which, in a sense, has gained sacredness as much as religion or faith itself. Therefore, in one aspect, laicism is essential to define social justice and resource-sharing and to consolidate democracy institutionally. In another, it is a requirement to bestow individuals with free choice and authority over their body and soul, identity, lifestyle and interpretation of religion and the right to non-religion or non-faith. In both aspects, laicism is an institutional–legal mechanism to consolidate both individual and social freedom in political, economic, social, legal, and personal life; as in its absence, the legal system and the institutional system as well as all political, social existence, and personal space are based upon various orders of religious law. In other words, reminding the early liberal concern of theological absolutism, the concern of laicism in Muslim society is still the imposition of a theological worldview, which threatens scientific thought, and of a scriptural legal system delivered by self-appointed clerics, the ulema, which threatens human freedom.16

Secularism Vis-à-Vis the Neoliberal Hegemony: Toward a Different Context The above-introduced dyadic category of secularism is further complicated by the evolution of world-historic capitalism into a neoliberal creed in the last three decades 16 In theory, there is no clergy in Islam, but the ulema and the consensus of the religious community (icma-i ümmet) do amount to a class of clerics in practice. Vertigans (2003) makes a very important point when he argues that Islamist activism is not because of a fear of losing social control to the secular side—for under Islamist interpretation of history, it was lost at any rate long time ago—but toward recapturing it: in the face of such activism, none of the rights that make up the democratic system can be used to abolish the right itself or other fundamental rights. Another important point of his is the patron-client formations among Islamists and their penetration into state institutions. This is, I have argued elsewhere, directly related to the paradoxes, excursions, and failures associated with the effort of transition to the rational-legal order and its rule of law structure from a patrimonial redistributive institutional structure. And on a related note: as for Lenin, the revolution had to internationalize to survive; partly because the laïque revolution in Islam in the sense of European Enlightenment did not internationalize in the wider Islamic world, its future is also in crumble in its place of birth, modern Turkey.

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and for the foreseeable near-future. For half a century, if not more, the dynamics of world-capitalism have been configured primarily by American hegemony. This hegemony has already reshaped the tenets of the geo-culture of world-capitalism: while European classical liberalism articulated not only a distinction but also a tension among the criteria for individual moral, political and economic actions within a state tradition of a social contract; American neoliberalism has triumphed upon its extinction, which involves the reconstruction of citizens as consumers, and government as the market, while the authority, legality, and legitimacy of the nation-state—whose root is secularism—is eroded. This particular transformation takes neoliberalism from the economic plank, and, merging it with a new form of conservatism, forms a peculiar political rationality. In this way, the American-made political doctrine of neoliberalism is not only at odds with classical liberalism (or in alliance with its rival, that is conservatism albeit in a neo form),17 but also fundamentally threatening to secularism, the very basis of the liberal or social nation-state. The Islamists who make the postmodern neoconservative allies of global neoliberalism also target the secular nation-state and secular nationalism since their ideology rests upon the idea of ummah which is the idea of a transcendental social solidarity through membership in the Islamic community that invalidates nationalism—though Arab traditions and the Arabic language (and thus the Arab identity) are to be accepted by the non-Arab Muslims who happen to form the only ‘transcendental’ part here. It is in this critical juncture that Pierre Bourdieu draws attention to the dynamics of incorporation of the national elite into the global order via the notorious ‘free trade faith’ as a potent belief generated by the neoliberal utopia. The national elite in question is comprised of ‘not only among those who live from it materially such as financiers, big businessmen, etc., but also those who derive from it their justifications for existing, such as senior civil servants and politicians who deify the power of the markets in the name of economic efficiency, who demand the lifting of the administrative or political barriers that could hinder the owners of capital in their purely individual pursuit of maximum individual profit instituted as a model of rationality, who want independent central banks, who preach the subordination of national states to the demands of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of all regulations on all markets, starting with the labor market, the forbidding of deficits and inflation, generalized privatization of public services, and the reduction of public and welfare spending’ (Bourdieu 1998b, 100–101; italic added). Alas, it would not be inapt to state that liberalism, as the first vehicle of legitimacy of capitalism has created its Frankenstein. True, classical liberalism, as the first vehicle of legitimacy of capitalism and with the Lockean estate at its base, was situated more on the right than left despite the fact that it led Enlightenment in religion, sought to displace the focal seat of sovereignty (from clerical to lay, monarchical to newly emergent bourgeois), and championed the rights of man which all were once ‘revolutionary’ in and of themselves, but not quite. Yet, the way in which the conservatism in question as an ally of neoliberal utopianism is a new form is related to ‘tradition severed from reference,’ along with a 17 See

Brown (2006) for a discussion on neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and dedemocratization.

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‘feeling of history’ which postmodernism corrodes. In the analysis of Fredric Jameson—‘the pastiche is a blind statue,’ the capitalist expansion has three phases: the eighteenth century market capitalism characterized by the development of industrial capital within national markets; the nineteenth and twentieth century monopoly capitalism characterized by the imperialist age whereby markets have become world markets dependent on the basic exploitation asymmetry between the colonies and colonial nations; and the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century postmodern capitalism characterized by the erosion of national boundaries with massive and fast growth of multinational corporations (Jameson 1991). With the entrance of capital into the world of ‘sign’ (culture and representation) and collapse of modernity’s space of autonomy, postmodern traditionalism and conservatism occur in a much different way than that of the traditional world.18 The pastiche is thus a blind statue, and neoconservatism is at odds with conservatism as much as liberalism is with neoliberalism. All in all, they represent processes of unsecularization and dedemocratization. The above-mentioned situation, which is indeed to be viewed, in a way, as the West’s internal coming-to-terms with its own heritage, is at the same time not contradictory to its nature, as can be observed in conceptual distortions in the earlier processes of liberal transformation. And yet, apart from the tension between democracy and liberalism (the political ideology of capitalism), the tension between democracy and neoliberalism (the political ideology of global capitalism) is still of a different nature: while liberalism does not seek to invalidate secularism (as its ontological base-remember ‘from clerical to lay’), neoliberalism precisely nurtures political ideologies at the intersection of religion and politics seeking to invalidate secularism in two aspects: one is the natural inclination, philosophical, and theoretical propinquity of neoliberalism with neoconservatism, and the second is the demand or need of world-capitalism for such (neoliberal that is) political ideologies in order to eliminate or neutralize the resisting social and political forces of the periphery in whose view the waning state authority, secular legitimacy, sovereignty, and welfare state along with accelerating rates of debt are part of the package called ‘globalization.’ The second aspect in fact has been in the making since the dawn of Cold War. Nonetheless, it is quite observable that the societal forces in question are not solely secular forces: in effect, religious, puritan movements with concerns and discourses that could as well be labeled as socialist-that is possessing ideologically anti-capitalist tendencies- have efficaciously contested the political space cleared of left movements, especially following the crisis of social democracy in the 1970s, the failure of class-based political organization, and the active support to conservative/religious formations by politics of imperialism or their brutal suppression by—in the eyes of the many—illegitimate governments.19 One such movement, at the opening of the 18 Also

see on issues of modernity, postmodernism, capitalism and globalization, Berman (1982), Jameson (2003, 2004), Anderson (1998). 19 I would like to note that Islamic socialism or any religious socialism for that matter can be treated as an oxymoron since socialism denies religion let alone one so powerful that it could define the ideology of socialism itself. Islamic socialism, nevertheless, was a project of the Soviet Union to penetrate the region in the face of American imperialism supporting and even militarizing the religious ideologies and networks. The messages of egalitarianism, brotherhood and the like in

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neoliberal age, usurped power through a mass revolution in Iran while in Turkey the mainstream Islamist political trend, which usually maneuvered in the dividedness of secular political parties with a potential of a mere ten percent, followed, more or less, a neoliberal path in harmony with the West and ‘the New World Order’ (and in ideological hostility with the secular nation-state that was successfully veiled or wished by the liberals to not exist any more). This trend, having been blessed, seventeen years or so ago, by mainstream institutions, industry and media alike, as well as the European Union, as the new center-right to further neoliberal reforms (that is as the conservative Muslim democrats but definitely ‘not anti-systemic Islamists’), has first gained access to and subsequently consolidated power through illegal and implicit means enacted under a discourse of ‘(progressive) democracy’ within all state institutions including and foremost the judiciary, the military, and of education. In contrast, the explicit regime changes in Iran and Nicaragua which are marked by opposition to American hegemony and which correspond to the beginning years of the neoliberal age also make more sense from the side of political economy. Yet, it is more meaningful to view these developments and globalization as the contemporaneous phase -rather than a totally new phenomenon- in the development of historical capitalism, characterized by the transformation of the communication network and global economic relations along with political and social (i.e., the academe, intelligentsia, etc.) cadres that develop organic bonds with both. Once again, it is interesting to review the state as a potential vehicle of self-protection for the society, which earlier had an important role to establish the so-called natural market economy (and society). Peter Evans’, Dietrich Rueschemeyer’s and Theda Skocpol’s initiative to bring in back the state whose authority, power and legitimacy have largely eroded is one approach to locate it in the contemporary conjuncture (Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1985). Under neoliberalism, while the modern nation-state, in the peripheral parts of the world-economy, has received serious blows to its authority and power; the political ideology hostile to secular legal and political system (as well as worldview) has gained considerable authority and power to build a particularly nepotistic institutional structure which has readily been replacing the modern state. Overall, it is, without doubt, secularism—both as ontology, epistemology, and an institutional mechanism—that is under more serious threat and open attack in such institutional settings. Within this frame, Polanyi’s warning—“in order to comprehend German fascism, we must revert to Ricardian England” (Polanyi 1944, 30)—that societies in self-defense against the global onslaught of the market economy, which is an economic model truly disembedded from society, may produce countermovements that may not always come within a morally and politically acceptable package also deserves another reading.20 The countermovements of the (Middle) East appear in the religion of Islam proved quite appropriate for socialism. Pan-Arabism as a secular nationalist formation can be argued to have utilized, quite successfully, until the neoliberal age, this marriage of socialism and the secular Islam/Arab identity. 20 See Unsar (2012) for an analysis on the social movements in the Middle East as part of the systemic crisis of the world-economy since 2008 that has been agitating the global political conjuncture, Western or otherwise, with a simultaneous wave of ‘countermovements’ in many societies, which emerge in various forms of ideology, each shaped distinctly by the civilizational consciousness,

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religious coating, and neither in theory nor practice, they seem to be appreciating liberal or plural or social democracy when they consolidate power. Even devoid of ideological concerns, what is more striking is the coming back of the notorious redistributive institutional structure as opposed to productive institutional structure that treats the resources at its pleasure for redistribution in total disregard of rule of law, and quite alarmingly to religious social organizations that cover the society like a spider web through charity-economy and resource-allocation only to ideological adherents, and display open enmity toward science and constructive values of modern civilization and humanity.21

Secularism in the Imperial Logos and Its Contradistinction In the European context, it is part of ‘progressive intellectualism’ to criticize the mentality of ‘Enlightenment fundamentalism’ which was indeed a pejorative term coined for laicistic intellectuals of French origin reminiscent of the infamous excesses of the revolution. This criticism has two main foundations: one relates to a broad assessment of modernism which encompasses a poststructural reconstruction of new concepts for ethics, politics, and religion through the critique of the Hegelian theme that religion has historically been overridden as an ‘intellectual formation’ or a postmodern critique of reason. The other relates to the ‘dead albatross’ hanging around the neck of Europe: the legacy of racism and arrogance, and more so, the obsession with it.22 This legacy is precisely the consolidation, in historical and present time, of imperial politics of colonization and neocolonization under a universalistic cosmopolitanism with slogans of the usual suspects: ‘civilization,’ ‘democracy,’ and ‘human rights.’ In other words, there are two ‘Europe’s (as the nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectuals like Ahmet Rıza, who found comfort in Comte’s positivism, discovered in disappointment, not different from many other intellectuals of the Eastern lands such as India who found that comfort in Marx): one is representative of truly human values of democracy; the other, that is the dark side, representative of racism and fascism whereby all of those values lose meaning. Therefore, the critique of this legacy is a due font for progressive European intellectualism. Yet, any European intellectual taken seriously is certainly aware of the vital categorical distinction between ‘enlightened rationalism’—as the epistemic basis of humanism—and ‘militarist rationalism’—which formed an epistemic base for colonial capitalism in the past and takes on a similar role for neoliberalism in the present and lays claim to ‘enlightened rationalism,’ the secular values of humanism in terms historical experience, and institutional evolutionary path of the society in question and result in different consequences again due to the structures of each society. 21 For a treatment of the foundation of the Republic in Turkey as a final transition to a productive institutional structure from a redistributive one, see Unsar, Ph.D. thesis. 22 For the allegory of the ‘dead albatross’ which Wallerstein takes from a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge see Wallerstein (2000).

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of freedom of thought and conscience, while criticizing the ethical foundations, limits, and implications of ‘militarist rationalism.’ What she confronts is the implicit, if not direct, imperial politics behind universalistic cosmopolitan slogans, precisely because a specific interpretation of the very Enlightenment culture has also been claimed by (neo)conservatism that views it as part of Roman Catholicism or a branch of Protestantism, and by even militant Christians who ‘fight Islamist fundamentalists.’ All this is so; the epistemic category of the ‘secular,’ which, having originated from the Enlightenment for the European, still holds its castle in the European conception of democracy while the American neoliberal parlance and praxis incline ever more toward the religious context in due part to the American identity which, needless to say, has always been comparatively more ‘religious.’ In American praxis, even for the Civil rights Movement with the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., religion has had a major role, and in a very different context. The obsession of criticizing the arrogant and racist legacy, that is ‘the dead albatross,’ however, because of an innate Orientalism, further complicates matters in that what is laid claim to within universal human values for the European society can be, for some of the intellectuals, readily abandoned when it comes to the ‘Other’ (and as a surprisingly truly democratic intention). The intellectuals of the hegemonic Western world, as a reflection of the internalized Otherization (which, within its own identity toward Protestants or Jews, had lasted for centuries) to the real ‘Other’ (the world of Islam), support those intellectuals of that ‘Other’ who already see themselves in the image as created by the West. For example, evaluating the postrevolutionary Iranian Islamic identity as a romantic ‘bazgasht be khishtan’ (‘Return to Self’), like the great thinker Michel Foucault did, without paying due attention to the role of the brutally imposed nature of the revolution over Iranian society and politics; the disposal of the Iranian constitutional democracy movement due to multifaceted complexities, i.e., the destruction of the nationalist secular font by American intervention (of 1953) which collaborated with the leading adversaries of that font (the Islamists); the hijacking, by the Islamists, of a mass revolt (of 1979) that materialized against a governance which, for survival, had long become the puppet of the American hegemony, etc., is a perfect manifestation of Orientalism which the European intellectual may or may not be aware of in her Cartesian or post-Cartesian thinking.23 It is precisely the political economy of this unawareness (of the seductions of Islamism when gazing upon the ‘non-Western’ world) that we need to critically engage with. On one hand, such a critique relates to the renowned debate of ‘the role of the intellectual’ that for instance Bourdieu’s ‘defense for corporatist action’ (against neoliberalism) revives, and the divergent concerns the intellectual is burdened with (as Aijaz Ahmad once drove attention to in his critique of Orientalism) depending on the context, European or Middle Eastern.24 The contextualization is thus crucial in that while the European intellectual’s concern is more on the reconstruction of a transformational socialism, which is indubitably already secular; the concern of 23 See

for Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution, Afary and Anderson (2005); on Iran see Gasiorowski (1987), Halliday (2000), Keddie (1981, 2003), Kedourie and Haim (1980). 24 For the critique, see Ahmad (1992).

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the latter originates in the survival of the very epistemology and ontology for the reconstruction of any secular ideology. The engaged intellectual, however, in both cases, still holds a claim to mobilize tools of reason in order to fight against the abuses of reason. The difference is in the way in which the abuses of reason come into play: while the European context may necessitate a critique of the modern moral principles of a supposedly ‘postreligious’ world imposed with hegemonic tones and concurrently abused by the individualistic culture of capitalism; the Middle Eastern context fights against the disposal of the very principles for a secular political order now supported by hegemonic politics of neoliberalism, unnoticed by many an intellectual in Europe. For the latter context, it is the exigency of the threat to the base of any democratic ethos—if that ethos will not be satisfied with merely a concept of individualistic market freedom as freedom and a ballot box as democracy. In that case, the issue for the intellectual is, like walking on the thin rope of an acrobat, not to develop an unsought shield for destructive ideologies formed on certain sectarian interpretations of religion, while striving to engage with the critique of capitalism and modernism without falling into the nationalist backyard necessitated by resistance against imperial domination. The critique we have to engage with, on the other hand, relates also to the available discourse, even of the critical European intellectual and precisely because of ‘the dead albatross’—of obsession rather than the fact of guilt, which has developed on and is therefore pervaded by a hegemonic territory. This terrain surely relates to the emergence of social sciences in the West in interaction with the processes of the capitalist organization of world-economy in early modern epoch determining the very hegemonic discourse. This is why Habermas’ critique of secularism does not transcend the antinomies of the obsession in question while Bourdieu appears to get stuck with the corporatist tradition as opposed to revolutionary Marxism.25 A side track of the question of interest here is the line of critique of secularism, for example, by the skeptical anthropology of Talal Asad and his interlocutors. Secularism, in his vein, is seen as an alienating, colonial imposition of a materialistic worldview, as defined at the beginning of the chapter. In the context of such critique, the imperialism inherent to the coercive and disciplinary—in the Foucauldian sense—cosmopolitan secular(ist) creed, and its ideology which is argued to become a ‘faith,’ in and of, itself is out there on the table—although the more important leg of that imperialism is the junction of the world-capitalism and liberalism which is what indeed is intertwined as a ‘faith’ (of consumerism). And yet, the place of Said’s secondary argument that is the objects of Orientalism (Orientals themselves) partake in Orientalism (even and foremost unconsciously) permeating this critique is not on the table. In other words, the Orientalism—even as partaken by the objects of Orientalism themselves—this time pervading the critique of secularism is not addressed. Or rather, Orientalism is understood and presented differently, as the very imposition

25 For a limited survey on the critique of neoliberalism and secularism, I would recommend to skim Bourdieu (1989, 1998a, b, 2005; Bourdieu and Wacquant (1996, 1999) and Habermas (2004, 2005, 2008) among their many other writings. Also, see Wallerstein (1996).

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of secularism. And this takes us back to the beginning of this chapter: that secularism is always treated consciously and unconsciously as merely a Western cognitive category. Here, obviously, the other definition of secularism that is a rational principle, which, aiming to solve the issue of the ‘individual’s sovereignty,’ suppresses ‘religious passion’ for ‘political progress’ in terms of peace and control of intolerance is employed because once scientific thought is learned (and it was—at least from Ibn Rushd (Averroes) or even Al-Kindi on), it cannot be unlearned. Hence, what is meant by ‘the Orientalist effect’ is precisely the view approaching secularism merely as a colonial imposition at the sole disposal of the West and as only a Western category. In this context, Hoodbhoy’s argument that modernity is not only a goal to be struggled for that is intrinsic to man’s rational nature (which is universal that is for all mankind regardless of race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, or other social constructions) but also the way to end the very colonial import of inequality and underdevelopment gains meaning.26 When modernity and secularism as its ontological requisite (for without secularism, science cannot be triggered; and without science, modern development cannot be achieved) are defined or implied to be defined tautologically as something inherently “cultural” inappropriate for the ‘Muslim culture’, then human development is trapped in the epiphenomenon of yet another social construction. Further, the heavy price of economic dependency due to economic peripheralization devoid of production power is loaded upon modernity and secularism without which indeed production capacity cannot be triggered at all. This situation creates a vicious cycle in which the potential for scientific development with production cannot be realized, since as the idea that ‘material things can be taken from the West but not its culture’ gains currency, the necessary scientific thinking (secularism) as the basis for those ‘material things’ remains rejected outright as a ‘cultural alien imposition.’ That indeed is the more important and subtle triumph of Orientalism that goes unnoticed. And yet, the reason that secularism is treated as a Western category even in strains of Arabic thought that define themselves as socialist, progressive, or liberal is perhaps due to a deficiency of epistemological and ontological revolution in Arabic Islamic thought on its own terms by which the (legacy of) national–cultural domination in its intellect (argued by Ibn Khaldun as the intensity of ‘asabiyyah’ seven centuries ago) is still prevalent. While the modernists of the Islamic world superficially preferred the view of secularism as a rational principle necessitated by the need of modernization or development, the Islamists obviously defended the view of secularism as an alien and alienating colonial import; the socialists due to their version of the dead albatross (more than the critique itself of the colonial impositions, the obsession with it) felt a certain obligated sympathy for the latter view, which complicated issues even

26 See

Hoodbhoy (1991) for an analysis on science and religion in the Islamic context. Hoodbhoy writes as a physicist first-hand experiencing the resistance to scientific thinking in the domain of the religion of Islam, and traces it in the historical context. Also see Gökalp and Unsar (2008), for a similar view in the discussion of ‘modernization’ and ‘modernity’ in the Turkish-EU accession context.

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further.27 That is due to the lack of a universal revolution, in Lenin’s sense, of Enlightenment in the religion of Islam in its Arab origins (akin to one orchestrated by Kemal Atatürk limited to the Turkish Republic) in a world-historical sense, and for Arabs, the presence of first a long history of Ottoman (non-Arab) political rule and another one of Western colonialism. In an interview that demands the attention of everyone interested in the genealogy and formations of secularism, the highly influential thinker Talal Asad says (for Islamic currents) (and one is tempted to remember Afghani con Renan): ‘…it is much more likely that there is going to be a replay of the way in which the Catholic Church has gradually adjusted itself over the years to secular democratic politics’ (Scott and Charles 2006, 294). Notwithstanding the apparent contradiction of applying the dynamics of Western political path to non-Western societies for which the modernization theorists have amply been criticized (and Asad’s scholarship should logically be on the critical side in that respect), what is more urgent to critique here is this: the political nature of the Catholic Church in history was related to several peculiar historical developments such as the transformation of Christianity due to a crisis of legitimacy and divine-justice; the European feudal class formations that emergent industrial structures changed and the participation of these social formations in Machiavellian power politics with different alliances at different times. As a result, contemporarily, the Catholic Church does not seek to regain political authority—long lost to the secular side—in the form of a political party, movement, or revolution. More importantly, the institutional nature of Christianity and the history of relations between the Church and lay authority, wars of religion, inquisition as well as the purges of the churches in secularizing Europe tell an entirely different story typical to Western history. Also, within this story, while initially the existence of the Ottomans as a military threat cannot be ignored, the explicit threat of Western capitalism on the world of Islam since the nineteenth century (if not earlier) and its hegemonic domination are of a very different nature in terms of both quality and proportion. The difference in the nature of dominance is surely related to the emergence of a new world-production system, that of capitalism, which involved much more sophisticated and much faster developing economic relations to reach the globe compared to feudalism. Indeed, this not-so-pessimistic expectation of ‘adjustment to secular democratic politics,’ propounded by Asad and many others, if it is so desirable, is rather to be confronted on the political economy proper, that is the issues of distinctive historical paths of institutions (of economics, religion, politics, and ideology), of privatization, the waning of social welfare state and emergence of ‘charity-economy,’ and the advance of redistributive institutional structure (let alone the historical failure of building a productive institutional structure in the first place), and of the retreating state authority, sovereignty, and legitimacy due to the ineptness to withstand in the hegemonic world order, etc. Asad also states that it is simply unhelpful to categorize Islamic or Islamist movements as reactionary adding that his point is not to argue that they are headed in a 27 See

for a detailed analysis of Islamic thought in the modern age Hourani (1983). Also see, Tibi (1998).

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progressive direction, but that ‘we ought to ask whether some of them might not be trying to think about things that have not been thought about before, ways of existing’ (Scott and Charles 2006, 293). Asking that question, he announces his ‘sympathy for some of these movements some of the time’ albeit being ‘pessimistic about the possibility of their being able to construct something really new and interesting’ as ‘…the powers of modern capitalist hegemony are such that it is very difficult for new things to arise’ (Scott and Charles 2006, 294). A highly regarded and worthy effort that it is, one should also ask what constitutes progressive or reactionary and for whom, and directly address the very urgent issues of concepts of democracy, civil rights and liberties, women rights, rights of minorities, freedom of thought, conscience, association, and the press as part of the worldview, ethos, and political disposition as well as the very enacted policies of these movements in order to correctly assess their ‘ways of existing’ and how these ways already interact with or undermine ‘secular democratic politics.’ This requires the combination of the critical analysis of secularism on historical and philosophical grounds with the political economy angle proper to it. On the topic of ‘progressive-regressive,’ one is reminded of a fundamental argument by Bedri Gencer: the right represents the process whereby traditionalism, which itself was the transformation of nomisizm (the sacredness), splits into ‘conservatism and traditionalism’ while the left represents the process whereby modernism, which was the transformation of messianism, splits into ‘fundamentalism and modernism’; and thus, fundamentalism and modernism have common origins or affinity. Having divided the ideological way as right and left according to the conflict in styles of perception and living, we can state that nomisizm upon which traditionalism rests reflects the idea that man can be saved with the continuous, collective legitimation (cihad) in history owing to the sacred law, which forms the body of religion called s¸eriat (nomos) in the dialectic of an examination. Among the Ibrahimi religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), which are s¸er’ici (following the sacred law) in essence, especially Judaism and Christianity became messianistic, having been influenced by Zoroastrianism; while, in Islam, the way to overcome the crisis of legitimacy was possible with Gazali’s shift to the nomo-centric from the theo-centric perception. The eschatological mentality called messianism reflects the psychology of waiting for the paradise on earth to be brought by the savior at the end of time, suspending history (reminding strangely one of Samuel Beckett’s Godot). This psychology may appear as explicit as in Shiite Iran or implicit as in the Europe of Enlightenment or Sunni Arab world. The implicit is the one that has secularized; and secularization in this sense is not drifting away from religion; on the contrary it is a sophisticated transformative process of religion. Fundamentalism, seemingly conservative, is modernist in the context of refusing the continuity of ‘sünnet’ as ‘authentic tradition.’ Thus and so, fundamentalism and modernism, which, yearning for the ‘Golden Age,’ meet in the refusal of ‘sünnet,’ differ from each other in terms of the direction of this refusal due to a conflict in the vision of the golden age: fundamentalism is retrospective longing

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for ‘the primitive age’ with romanticism behind it; modernism is prospective longing for ‘the future civilized age’ with rationalism behind it (Gencer 2012, 210–217).28

In Lieu of a Conclusion In contemporary debates on the axis of modernism and religion, rationalism has had the upper hand over romanticism because of the power of the capitalist worldeconomy and the capitalist geo-culture that ascended on top of Weber’s instrumental rationality which overrode his value-rationality. This situation put the ongoing ‘progressive-regressive’ conceptualizations under the monopoly of rationalism. Further yet, in the European context a romanticist political movement does not rise upon the reenactment of a Christianist worldview, society, and scriptural politics with serious assaults on civil rights and liberties under the authority of the Church or a similar council of clergy, while for the Islamic world it most explicitly does, i.e., Hamas, Hizbullah, Muslim Brotherhood, Taliban, and recently ISIS, etc. The reason is that even romanticism in the European context (as represented by Rousseau for example) emerges, because of normative secularization, as not fundamentalist but modernist (notwithstanding Rousseau’s intense critique of ‘civilization’ and the coming age of modernity). And thus, even when it emphasizes Passion (transforming into Conscience) over Reason, it does not reject Reason; in other words, and to state it more clearly, it does not (seek to) replace rational thought with scholastic/revelation-based thought. One can say, in lieu of a conclusion, that as a dynamic topic of interest to political scientists, sociologists, historians, and even anthropologists—who are typically interested more in religion than secularism—secularism has been approached from multiple positions and directions. What is concomitantly missing is the political economy proper also revealing the inherently orientalist bias residing in betweenlines in conceptions and critiques of secularism. It was not the purpose to develop that proper in one chapter due to the complexity such project demands. However, the purpose was to state that secularism was inherently related to the emergence of the world-economy, the incorporation of the Islamic world into this structure, the democracy–capitalism–liberalism connection, and the reflection of this connection to

28 Incidentally and as an example, for Western political thought, Bedri Gencer argues that Marx would be the rationalist messianist with the anticipation of a communist society as the last stage of humanity. Similarly, I would argue that Rousseau would represent the romantic but not the messianistic as he claimed that the innocence of the noble savage was lost once civilization was founded, and that it would be foolish of man to expect to go back to a similar phase of existence at any future time in history. Also, to clarify, my interpretation of Gencer’s referral to both the Europe of Enlightenment and the Sunni Arab world as having an implicit psychology of messianism as opposed to his referral to Shiite Iran as having an explicit messianistic psychology does not mean that the first two have secularized in the same way or to a similar extent but draws attention to the expectation of a Twelfth Imam in Shiism which Sunni Islam does not have.

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the periphery during the incorporation processes, creating different dynamics interwoven with peculiar socio-economic factors. And all of this is naturally an ongoing process. With this statement, what is particularly emphasized is (the renowned debate of) ‘the role of the intellectual’ and the intrinsic theoretical-ideological dilemmas. The process that has begun roughly in the sixteenth century is passing through the twenty-first century at the axis of democracy–global capitalism–neoliberalism–neoconservatism. The awareness of these processes as outlined in this chapter will be a first stage of eventually forming an économie politique critique.

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Fleischer, C. (1986). Bureaucrat and intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The historian Mustafa Ali (1541–1600). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Foucault, M. (2010). The government of self and others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982– 1983. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Freud, S. (1929). Civilization and its discontents. Chrysoma Associates Ltd. Gasiorowski, M. J. (1987). The 1953 Coup D’etat in Iran. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 19(3), 261–286. Gencer, B. (2012). Islam’da Modernle¸sme: 1839-1939. Do˘gu Batı Yayınları. Genç, Mt. (2000). Osmanli Imparatorlugu’nda Devlet ve Ekonomi. ˙Istanbul: Ötüken Ne¸sriyat. Gerber, H. (1987). The social origins of the modern middle east. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Gökalp, D., & Unsar, Seda. (2008). From the myth of European Union accession to disillusion: Implications for religious and ethnic politicization in Turkey. Middle East Journal, 62(1), 93–116. Habermas, Jurgen. (2004). Religious tolerance: The pacemaker for cultural rights. Philosophy, 79(307), 5–18. Habermas, J. (2005). On the relation between the secular liberal state and religion. In Eduardo Mendieta (Ed.), The Frankfurt school on religion: Key writings by the major thinkers. New York: Routledge. Habermas, J. (2008). Secularism’s crisis of faith: Notes on post-secular society. New Perspectives Quarterly, 25, 17–29. Halliday, F. (2000). Iran: Dictatorship and development. Penguin. Hoodbhoy, P. (1991). Islam and science: Religious orthodoxy and the battle for rationality. Zed Books Ltd. Hourani, A. (1983). Arabic thought in the liberal age, 1798–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ˙Inalcık, H. (1969). Capital formation in the Ottoman Empire. Journal of Economic History, 29(1), 97–140. ˙Inalcık, H. (1970). The Ottoman economic mind and aspects of the Ottoman Economy. In M. A. Cook (Ed.), Studies in the economic history of the middle east. University of London. ˙Inalcık, H. (1977). Centralization and decentralization in Ottoman administration. In T. Naff & R. Owen (Eds.), Studies in 18th century Islamic History (pp. 27–52). Southern Illinois University Press. ˙Inalcık, H., & Donald, Q. (1994). An economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire: Volume I-II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism: The cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (2003). Fear and Loathing in Globalization. New left Review, 23, (September–October) 105–114. Jameson, F. (2004). The politics of Utopia. New left Review, 25 (January–February), 35–54. Karpat, K. H. (1968). The land regime, social structure, and modernization in the Ottoman Empire. In R. L. Chambers & W. R. Polk (Eds.), Beginnings of modernization in the middle east: The nineteenth century (pp. 69–90). University of Chicago Press. Karpat, K. H. (1969). The Ottoman parliament of 1876 and its social significance. In Proceedings of the International Association of South East European Studies, 247–57. Karpat, H. K. (1972). The transformation of the Ottoman State, 1789–1908. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 3, 243–281. Kasaba, R. (1988). The Ottoman Empire and the world economy: The nineteenth century. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Keddie, N. (1966). The Pan-Islamic appeal: Afghani and Abdulhamid II. Middle Eastern Studies, 3(1), 46–67. Keddie, N. (1968). An Islamic response to imperialism: Political and religious writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Keddie, N. (1970). Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani: A case of Posthumous Charisma. In D. A. Rustow (Ed.), Philosophers and kings: Studies in leadership (pp. 148–180). George Braziller Inc. Keddie, N. (1981). Roots of revolution: An interpretive history of modern Iran. New Haven: Yale University Press. Keddie, N. (2003). Modern Iran: Roots and results of revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kedourie, E. (1966). Afghani and Abduh: An essay on religious unbelief and political activism in modern Islam. Frank Cass. Kedourie, E., & Haim, S. G. (Eds.). (1980). Towards a modern Iran: Studies in thought, politics and society. London, Totowa, N.J.: F. Cass. Mardin, S. ¸ (1962). The genesis of Young Ottoman thought: A study in the modernization of Turkish political ideas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mardin, S. ¸ (1971). Ideology and religion in the Turkish revolution. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2(3), 197–221. ˙ Öztürk, Y. N. (1994). Kur’an’daki Islam (The Islam of the Qur’an) ˙Istanbul. Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston: Beacon Press. Quataert, D. (1980). The commercialization of agriculture in Ottoman Turkey, 1800–1914. International Journal of Turkish Studies, 1(2), 38–55. Rahman, F. (1982). Islam and modernity: Transformation of an intellectual tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rodison, D. H. (1963). Reforms in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Salzmann, A. (1993). An Ancien Régime revisited: “Privatization” and political economy in the 18th Century Ottoman Empire. Politics and Society, 21(4), 393–423. Salzmann, A. (1999). Citizens in search of a state: The limits of political participation in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808–1914.” In M. Hanagan & C. Tilly (Eds.), Extending citizenship, reconfiguring states (pp. 37–66). Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Salzmann, A. (2000). Privatizing the empire: Pashas and gentry during the Ottoman 18th century.” In K. Çiçek, E. Kuran, N. Göyünç, & ˙I. Ortaylı (Eds.), The great Ottoman-Turkish civilization: Vol. II (pp. 132–139) Ankara: Semih Ofset. Scott, D., & Charles H. (2006). Powers of the secular modern: Talal Asad and his interlocutor. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Sunar, ˙I. (1987). State and economy. In H. ˙Islamo˘glu-˙Inan (Ed.), The Ottoman Empire and the world economy (pp. 63–88). Cambridge University Press. Senermen, ¸ S. (2013). Akıl, Bilim ve Kur’an I¸sıgında Dinler ve Dünya Egemenli˘gi. ˙Istanbul: Togan Yayıncılık. Tibi, B. (1998). The challenge of fundamentalism: Political Islam and the new world disorder. Berkeley: University of California Press. Unsar, S. (2011). On Jamal Ad-din Al-Afghani and the 19th Century Islamic political thought. Gazi ˙ ˙ University Iktisadi ve Idari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi, 13(3), 79–96. Unsar, S. (2012a). A study on institutional change: Ottoman social structure and the provision of public goods. Gazi Akademik Bakı¸s, 11 (Winter), 177–200. Unsar, S. (2012b). Ortado˘gu’da Dönü¸süm: Demokrasinin Çıkmazı. Finans Politik ve Ekonomik Yorumlar (April), 63–71. Unsar, S. (2015). Patrimonyal Yeniden-Da˘gıtımcı (Redistributive) Yapıdan Rasyonel-Yasal (Rational-Legal) Yapıya Geçi¸s. Political Science (Leges- International Peer-Reviewed Academic Journal), 1(1), 137–153. Unsar, S. (2018). On the political economy of Ottoman institutional change: A macro-historical perspective. In Political economy of Muslim countries (pp. 102–121). Cambridge Scholars. Us, T. H. (1940, 1954). Meclis-i Mebusan 1293–1877, Zabıt Ceredesi, Vol. I and II. ˙Istanbul. Vertigans, Sn. (2003). Islamic roots and resurgence in Turkey: Understanding and explaining the Muslim resurgence. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers.

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Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world system. New York: Academic Press. Wallerstein, I., Hale, D., & Re¸sat, K. (1987). The incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the world-economy. In H. ˙Islamo˘glu-˙Inan (Ed.), The Ottoman Empire and the world economy (pp. 88– 101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1989). The French Revolution as a world-historical event. Social Research, 56(1), 33–52. Wallerstein, I. (1996). Open the social sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian commission on the restructuring of the social sciences. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Wallerstein, I. (2000). The racist albatross: Social science, Jörg Haider, and Widerstand.” Eurozine, September 14, http://www.eurozine.com/authors/Wallerstein.html. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Seda Ünsar completed her BA degree in International Relations at Koç University, Istanbul, where she entered with a national ranking of 49th. She received MA degree from Claremont Graduate University and University of Southern California. She completed her Ph.D. with Distinction at the University of Southern California in 2008. She taught at the London School of Economics as a visiting fellow (2008–2009) and was a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute (2009–2010). She taught at Bogaziçi University, and the University of Southern California; worked at Arel University and Yeditepe University, and is currently at Do˘gu¸s University. Her research interests include institutional theory, the political economy of Ottoman institutional modernization and secularism, the political economy of neoliberalism, Western political thought, Islamic political thought, and the Middle East.

The Westernisation of a Western Country. Between Liberalisation and the Continuity of Corporate Models: Économie Politique, Secularism and the Organisation of Industry in Eighteenth-Century Spain Francisco Jorge Rodríguez Gonzálvez

On 8 June 1813, the Spanish Parliament met in the city of Cadiz under the threat of the invading Napoleonic army, which had already occupied most of the country. The Spanish Assembly declared the freedom to establish industries and the freedom to exercise any craft. Any compulsory corporate membership required for plying a trade in Spain, including guild examinations, was removed (Colección 1820: 86). It was an unprecedented decision, not far from the measures adopted by the French revolutionary assembly. It seemed that Spain had crossed a decisive threshold towards its modernisation. A few years earlier, in 1798, the government expropriated the assets of the religious corporations, fraternities and chantries, in what appeared to be the second pillar of the westernisation of a country in the West of Europe. However, the features of the Spanish transition were more complex. During the eighteenth century, a seminal debate took place both in Spain and in Europe, revolving around the need for the liberalisation of industrial production and trade or the preservation of traditional corporations of artisans, which were frequently linked to religious associations. In most European countries, the objective was to ensure economic development and industrial growth. The goal was expected to be attained through the reform of the industrial structures of production and labour, including the abolition of all monopolies (which affected the free market and competition) and the suppression of the organisations of religious nature linked to trade corporations (because they diverted resources from other more productive areas). The case of Spain is paradigmatic. The ideas of the European économistes politiques were favourably received, although adapted to the specific needs of the country. The Spanish option combined the need for economic efficiency and the continuation of the traditional expressions of the associative organisations, while the route of

F. J. Rodríguez Gonzálvez (B) London School of Economics, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Ünsar and Ö. Ünal Eri¸s (eds.), Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_4

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secularism was not taken. Contrary to what happened in France, the Spanish government did not completely abolish the corporate system. Like in Britain, step by step the enlightened reforms tried to eliminate the obstacles to free competition in the industrial sector. Brotherhoods related to craft corporations were also the target of the government, in a country where the overwhelming majority of the population was deeply religious, and the governmental elite was accused of impiety because of the reforms it was carrying out. Therefore, in France the model chosen was more consistent with the prevalent stream of the intellectual elite, and the government took their reasoning to the abolitionist extreme. However, the model followed in the rest of Europe, including Spain, was more fragmented, and moulded to the circumstances of the case.

The Enlightened Debate on Industry: Liberalisation Versus Corporate Organisation of Production and Labour In the eighteenth-century Europe, the industrial structure of production and labour was multifaceted, although it seemed to oscillate between two poles—free competition and corporate regulation. As a result of the choice of a particular and eclectic strategy which fitted the needs of a particular sector, industry presented multiple combinations of different systems.1 In the city of Paris, a variety of possibilities of production were open, ranging from a scarcely integrated set of enterprises (the ‘economy of the bazaar’), to the networks of artisans participating in the different phases of the production process, with different groups of tens of journeymen working in what seems to be a ‘proto-factory’ (Sonenscher 1989: 130–1; Farr 2008: 81). This complexity also affected the great variability of wage systems beyond the simple opposition between fluctuant market-related wages and the invariable custom followed by guild artisans (Sonenscher 1989: 147ff). Examples of a dynamic coexistence between the market and guild systems were common from Spain (Nieto 2006: 118, 243ff, 327ff) and Italy (Moioli 1998: 409–22) to France (Bossenga 1988: 693–73; Reddy 1984: 30–1), including the most advanced Lyon silk industries (Poni 1997: 37–74). Ambiguity appears to be key to understand the complexity of the economic relationships based on a dynamic tension between different conceptions of industrial relations, including the privileges associated to them, with various economic results (Horn 2015: 38–9). Well before Adam Smith, different économistes politiques developed their theories, not only in France, but also in Italy, Germany and Spain, trying to prove that the continuity of the production systems based on associative or corporate expressions 1 If the guild corporations of Antwerp chose during the sixteenth century a strategy based on quality

products and the strengthening of mastership and apprenticeship as the key institutions to maintain quality, it was not due to their resistance to the free market. These guilds were not opposed to the putting-out system or the hiring of more workers for the same workshop; they sought to serve markets with a high purchasing power (De Munck 2007: 116–44).

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had a negative impact on the development of industry. The resulting barriers to free competition had two consequences: on the one hand, an increase of prices and the fall in production. On the other, an organisation of labour that disregarded the actual skills of the artisans, due to long and rigidly established periods of apprenticeship and journeymanship, as well as to formal examinations imposed to become a master craftsman. In the first half of the eighteenth century, however, the abolition of the corporate system was not yet an option. In 1734, Jean François Melon clearly distinguished trade corporations from the monopolies to which guilds were entitled: ‘Ce n’est pas que les Maîtrises ne soient utiles, et même nécessaires dans bien des professions. Il ne s’agît que de l’abus’ (Melon 1735: 117–8). Criticism was focused on the monopolistic elements of trade corporations that affected the labour market and industrial production. Privileges had to be suppressed in order to promote trade and manufactures, while the organisation of trades remained as a pillar of industry. One of the first to develop a systematic approach was the Italian Giuseppe Antonio Costantini, who, under the pseudonym of Giovanni Sappetti Cosentino, published in 1749 his Massime generali intorno al commercio. He condemned the corporate monopolistic practices and the privileges established in their regulations (Statuti), which led to economic stagnation. Craft guild organisations were in need of a State reform to do away with monopolies, above all those related to the rigidities of the guild labour structure (Sappetti 1784: 47–9). In the same vein, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, who wrote in 1755 his Staatswirtschaft, was also in favour of the intervention of the State in order to eliminate guild monopolies (Adam 2006: 201–2). Free competition was the best way to meet a changing demand at the best price, and to attain the multiplication of production, since different producers would engage in a race to serve the preferences of the consumers or to improve the quality of manufactures (Clicquot 1758: 68–9, 72, 109–10; Sappetti 1784: 48). The ideas of Vincent de Gournay (1712–1759), French intendant de commerce, are seen as fundamentally contrary to craft corporations. De Gournay deserves further attention, since he inspired subsequent thinkers until the French Revolution (Malbranque 2016: 94). He is even credited with being the first to request the abolition of all craft corporations (Meyssonnier 1990: 93). However, the honour was inappropriately awarded. In the Mémoire adressé à la Chambre de Commerce de Lyon, written in 1753, de Gournay was opposed to the rigidities of corporate labour, as well as to the privileges granted to them in exchange of financial transfers to the State (Tsuda 1993: 13ff).2 Instead of regulations that hampered industry, he advocated for the freedom of choice of producers (Tsuda 1993: 39ff).3 Following the ideas of de Gournay, Simon Clicquot de Blervache (1723–1796) advocated in his Considérations sur le commerce for the suppression of journeymanships, as well as of guild inspections and the specific technical regulations designed to ensure the quality of manufactures (Clicquot 1758: 71–72, 83, 106–9, 157, 159–69). However, neither of them drew a general abolitionist conclusion.

2 ‘Mémoire 3 ‘Mémoire

adressé à la Chambre de Commerce de Lyon’. (sans titre)’.

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The last quarter of the century witnessed a polarisation of the perspectives held by the économistes politiques on craft corporations, and a radicalisation of the arguments raised by some of those who were against them. Nevertheless, this radicalisation rarely led to abolitionist proposals. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith reconsidered the ideas previously shared by the most advanced minds of Europe in terms of economic theory. Corporate guilds introduced an unacceptable distortion in the natural determination of prices, due to the implementation of their quality regulations (which erroneously substituted the freedom of choice of both the producer and the buyer) and the artificial distortion of the labour market (through the application of the principles of exclusivity and exclusion) (Smith 1793: i.ii.x, 184ff, 188, 210ff). However, Smith did not advocate for the abolition of guilds themselves. Instead, he was in favour of the suppression of the monopolies associated to them, because it would be contrary to the principles of liberty to eradicate the corporate organisations of trades (Smith 1793: i, x, 200).4 Interestingly, Great Britain did not abolish corporate guilds, but absolutist France. In the same year as Smith published his causes of the wealth of nations, Louis XVI’s minister A.J. Turgot decided to suppress guild corporations, in order to improve industrial growth through economic liberalisation. One year before, Louis-Claude Bigot de Sainte-Croix had made clear the identification between trade corporations and their privileges. Craft guilds used their monopolies to exclude from the labour market those workers who were not members. Their rights of exclusive selling reduced drastically the consumers’ ability to choose. As a consequence of the restrictions imposed on the economy, guild regulations, and guilds themselves, should disappear (Bigot 1775: 119, 149–61). Nevertheless, the suppression stated in Bigot’s Essai is somehow confusing. On the one hand, he admits that general regulations should not be affected by the abolition of guilds, insofar technical regulations guarantee the quality of production (Bigot 1775: 100, 102). He even defends the need to come back to an original version of craft guilds, ‘simples aggregations sans attributions de privilèges, sans lesquelles tout Citoyen avoit droit d’entrer’ (mere aggregations without privileges attached, in whose absence every citizen has a right of free entry) (Bigot 1775: 79). On the other hand, he underlines somewhere else that regulations should be suppressed at the same time as corporations. Any activity of craft guilds, any kind of agreement or association (ralliement) has to be formally forbidden (Bigot 1775: 83–4). It seems that Sainte-Croix is rather opposed to the Jurandes, the system arising from the corruption of the corporate system and based on the sale of thousands of guild ruling and administrative positions or Jurés. As Smith, Bigot de Sainte-Croix and Turgot underlined the existence of natural rights that were being violated by corporate activities (Édit 1776: 2). Corporations had subverted the natural order of competition through the imposition of rules designed to place the control of production and workforce in the hands of guild masters. For the contrôleur général des finances, though, there was no alternative but the promotion of national industry, even if the suppression offered no option for the organisation 4 ‘But

though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary’.

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of interests beyond the individual. As a matter of fact, Turgot was defeated by the interests he was fighting against. In spite of his higher ideals, the king re-established the corporate system three months after the suppression and dismissed his minister. The French case was but an isolated attempt. In most countries of Europe, the number of the systematised objections against the corporate structure increased, but they did not culminate in a general abolitionist move. Two of the most conspicuous Spanish enlightened thinkers, the high government official Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes (1723–1802) and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744–1811) blamed guild corporations for disregarding the common good in order to defend selfishly their corporate interests. Traditional arguments were repeated against them, particularly the abusive control of labour markets through the hierarchical organisation of workers, and the manipulation of industrial production using regulations and technical inspections. Jovellanos went further, and defined the industrial relations dominated by craft organisations as a situation of slavery (Jovellanos 1840: 233–4), which needed to be substituted by the liberalisation of work and production. Although Jovellanos is traditionally considered as a champion of liberalism in Spain, he believed that certain useful activities performed by corporations deserved to be safeguarded, such as the support of vocational training and some register functions (Jovellanos 1840: 239ff).5 His perspective concerning the organisations of trades became increasingly tempered as a reaction against what he considered the excesses of the French Revolution. The intervention of the State in order to homogenise and monitor the industrial activities was a constant of his thinking. In the early 1780s, the Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri (who died in 1788) criticised the effects of corporate intervention in the industrial work organisation, particularly through the matricole, or entry fees. The system of payed entries regardless of the skills and merits of the candidate was particularly harmful for the quality of corporate products (Filangieri 1784: 189). For Giambattista Vasco (1733–1796), the ‘utilità generale’ could be attained through the intervention of the public authorities and not through guild regulations, which follow particular interests (Vasco 1793: 21ff, 56ff). Notwithstanding, the State should refrain from any regulatory intervention in the industrial sector and protect the interests of the entrepreneurs (Vasco 1793: 34, 41ff). Both Filangieri and Vasco advocated for the elimination of all obstacles to competition (corporate monopolies, privileges or quality rules) in order to let the market determine what was to be produced and acquired, and to allow the consumer to freely decide about quality standards (Vasco 1793: 34, 41ff, 94; Filangieri 1784: 194).6 Not everybody was in favour of the abolition of corporate guilds. After the suppression decree of 1776, twenty-four corporations of Paris sent particular reports to the Parlement, where they warned against the dangers of unrestricted freedom. The poor training of the new artisans and the lack of corporate controls would adversely affect the quality of manufactures, which could be acquired without guarantees by 5 However,

it is not easy to establish the influence of Smith on Jovellanos (Almenar 2002). reveals a certain influence of A. Smith, although only Vasco explicitly mentions him (Lai 2003: xxv).

6 This

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a public considered ignorant. In other words, fraud would grow steadily. In terms of labour relations, workers would be free from the control of masters. Salaries and other costs would rise, which would adversely affect prices (Piwnica 1993: 35ff). The French experiment and its temporary effects could have had an influence on the Catalan writer Francisco Romà i Rossell, who vehemently defended the existence and continuity of the guild system in the city of Barcelona in 1766 (Romà 1766). Two years later, another Catalan author, Antonio Capmany, made a mythological allusion concerning the dangers associated to the elimination of craft corporations. He predicted that the end of guilds would liberate incontrollable forces, with catastrophic results. Guild abolition was tantamount to sow the dragon of Cadmus’ teeth (Palacio 1778: 36), suggesting the liberation of forces of a tremendous power, which would eventually result in the spreading of anarchy and destruction. Both Capmany and Romà agreed on the positive effects of craft corporations. Craft guilds provided craftsmen with the protection of an organisation that ensured the appropriate transmission of skills through apprenticeship, and a higher quality of manufactures. The alternative would mean confusion, unskillfulness and licence. The work of Francisco Romà is appealing for the cause of corporate trade because he does not grant validity to any liberal argument whereas Capmany follows the traditional perspective that identifies corporate trade with guild monopolies (although the structured organisation of guilds is anyhow preferable to the chaotic situation associated to the free market), for Romà there is no such a thing as a guild monopoly. If a trade were limited to a short number of privileged persons, they would control the prices of manufactures, which, according to him, was not happening in the case of corporate guilds. On the contrary, corporations were constrained to a moderate earning, so prices were kept relatively low (Romà 1766: 26). There was no labour market monopoly either, since every worker had the possibility of becoming a member of the guild (Romà 1766: 24).7 In 1767, the Piedmontese writer Carlo Denina (1731–1813) added another calamitous consequence of unbridled freedom. In his Dell’impiego delle persone, he feared that freedom could bring about an increase of poverty and the number of unemployed (Rota 1917: 170). Worries about the social destabilisation caused by the abolition of guilds were shared by the Baden Karl von Rotteck (1775–1840), who supported a kind of limited or regulated market—a combination of economic freedom and freely accessible craft organisations (Haupt 2004: 94–5). Romà also justified the application of corporate regulations under the guidance of the State, which was in line with the opinions of other European thinkers. In a traditional Christian sense of morality, according to Romà, the worst enemy of human society was what he called ‘insatiable greed’. However, if greed was limited by the State, it would lead to progress in industry and agriculture. Consequently, a well-governed society required good regulations (Romà 1766: 18). More pragmatic, Ignazio Donaudi delle Mallere (1774–1794) stood up for ‘una onesta e conveniente libertà’ together with the end of the privileges that implied monopolies or were 7 Candidates

could not be rejected without a fair reason; public authorities could compel the corporation to admit an unfairly rejected candidate.

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opposed to the quality of manufactures (Donaudi 1776: 50). Count delle Mallere advocated nevertheless for the intervention of the State in economic matters (Donaudi 1776: 118–9, 124, 126).8 The traditional German emphasis on the State role concerning industrial organisation is observed in the work of one of the most conspicuous thinkers who lived between two socio-economic systems and had an opinion on them. G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) considered in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821) that corporations needed to be supervised by the State, because otherwise they would ‘become ossified and set in its ways, and decline into a miserable guild system’ (Hegel 1991: 273, §255). The role of the State as a barrier against social instability was a feature of a sector of the German early liberal thought during the first half of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the German philosopher refers to an important element within the guild culture, which constitutes the third group of arguments in favour of the corporate system. Since the Middle Ages, guild ethos was related to certain linkage between the artisans working in the same craft. Actually, the moral element was also present in the different reports sent by the corporations to the Parlement in France after the abolition of February 1776. Guilds provided society with values within a well-ordered social structure, where everyone found his/her place. The moral element of the corporations supported order, decency and good practices, assets that would disappear if a liberal society prevailed (Piwnica 1993: 42ff). For Hegel, craft corporations were especially necessary for businessmen because corporate membership provided a sense of morality that constituted the link between the subjectivity of economic goals and the universality of the common good (Black 1984: 12ff, 204). In the context of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel considered corporations as legally recognised communities able to provide their members with a sense of ethics and universality, and to supersede the narrowness of private, selfish interests (Hegel 1991: 272–3, §253, §255). Without the philosophical approach of Hegel, Antonio Capmany also considers guild ethics as an individual and social foundation: It is therefore appropriate to respect the artisans and to appreciate the crafts. The wise institution of guilds, which provides the artisans with a permanent and visible status, at the same time gives them respectability (…) On the other hand, corporations constitute a society ruled by its economic code, where all individuals can obtain any position or honour available (Palacio 1778: 7–8).

8 The author examines the particular case of the silk industry in Piedmont, which he sees as a pillar of

trade. Taking into account that a slight imperfection in the product may lead the manufacture to fall into disrepute (which would unfavourably affect trade), State regulations, governmental inspections, and official sealing are required to guarantee the quality of production.

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Two Patterns of Associative Organisations: The Continuity and Adaptation Model Versus the Rupture Model With respect to associative organisations, the main concerns of government during the eighteenth century were social peace and economic success, rather than religion. Particularly in France, Spain or Austria the enlightened governments were willing to encourage economic growth, while secularisation and democracy were out of question as political objectives. Economic improvement was an urgent goal, and economic reforms were seriously considered and developed. There were important differences between the countries of Europe. Since the sixteenth century, the Reformation paved the way for the expropriation of brotherhood property, although craft associations were allowed to continue their activities, including some of religious nature. The European pattern was based on the continuity of corporations, especially if they got rid of factors contrary to free competition, as well as their non-economic elements. The French case constitutes a unique development, resulting in the rupture of the European paradigm. The abolition of both craft corporations and religious associations in 1776 (and again during the French Revolution) implied the implementation of a model designed by the économistes politiques that led to a rupture policy which was apparently in line with their theoretical approaches. In the rest of Europe, the pattern followed was rather fragmented and flexible, less consistent with the enlightened theories on which it was based.

The Roots of Associative Expressions: Religious and Economic Elements Intertwined Brotherhoods and fraternities with a religious purpose were common all over Europe since the Middle Ages, which represented a continuity (Paravy 1993: 494–501) that concealed evolutionary changes. They reflected the collaborative or associative expressions that were not always accepted by the public authorities. The associations for economic purposes were looked on with suspicion, so that the best way to guarantee the permanence of such organisations was to found a fraternity that combined religious activities and functions related to labour, production or mutual assistance (Vincent 1994: 168ff). Bringing both sets of activities together facilitated the internal cohesion of the organisation (Richardson 2005), above all those of recent creation. It is traditionally admitted that the confraternity of the silversmiths, blacksmiths and veterinaries of Valencia, in Spain, was created in 1298 under the patronage of Saint Eligius, after the conquest of the Muslim kingdom, and when there was a need to reorganise the entire economic life of the capital. The new organisation combined different functions, even when new ordinances were separately granted to the different trades during the following century (García Cantús 1985: 14–17). Since the fifteenth century, the traders’ brotherhood of St. Mary of Toledo amalgamated economic, religious and mutual assistance activities in order to avoid prohibitions against the

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associations of political and labour nature. Its main goal was the veneration of the Virgin, as a means to achieving personal salvation. Compulsory assistance to different celebrations was established, as well as the distribution of the costs related to the ceremonies, funerals, alms and other charities. Nevertheless, the new organisation tried to consolidate jurisdictional functions in the field of trade (González Arce 2008: 177–216). There was great diversity in the objectives and nature of the different brotherhoods. In principle, their aims were related to spiritual and piety functions, which were directly linked to the sense of belonging to the community. For Étienne Martin de Saint-Léon, who wrote a history of the craft corporations in France in 1922, religious fraternities were older than the occupational ones, although the confraternities of trades appeared in the twelfth century in Northern France, alongside the trades organisations themselves (Martin Saint-Léon 1922: 190–1). It is nevertheless difficult to find out whether the religious aspect preceded the economic corporation as a rule (Coornaert 1968: 223). In the seventeenth century, the confrérie du SaintSacrement of Coësmes in Bretagne underlined the fraternity bonds that linked their members.9 Although in the Catholic regions the spread of brotherhoods was part of a Counter-Reformation strategy aimed to homogenise the religious practice since the sixteenth century, this kind of fraternal bonds within the framework of a corporation devoted to trade or manufactures was not limited to the Catholic world. In England, the same vocabulary of brotherly love appeared in the context of the adaptation of the Livery Companies of London to Protestantism during the sixteenth century (Branch 2017: Chap. 2). Not every craft corporation derived from a fraternity, and conversely, not all brotherhoods developed industrial or trade activities. However, in many cases craft or trade organisations performed devotional functions, and some fraternities were exclusively composed of members of a single trade. One of the first examples of brotherhood-craft corporations in Spain was the grocers’ fraternity of St. Michael in Soria, whose origins dated back to a twelfth-century confraternity. Its ordinances included mutual assistance and devotional provisions, together with technical or administrative elements. This kind of organisations expanded and diversified during the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries (Rumeu 1944: 51, 55ff). In France, the Livre des métiers of Boileau (thirteenth century) mentions assistance purposes10 in the ordinances of certain trades, which are mainly related to occupational matters. The confraternities of Florence established a clear connection between both aspects of the associative phenomenon, and combined the participation of the fraternities in multiple rituals and activities according to the principles of CounterReformation, with the elements of social hierarchy and control introduced by the newly created Grand Duchy of Tuscany since the sixteenth century. Corporate solidarity was watered down as a result of the ducal intervention and the stress on 9 ‘[qui]

sont par elle assemblées et réunies dans ces liens de direction fraternelle, mais qui doit être d’autant plus forte que celle des frères naturels’ (Jamet 1980: 484). 10 For instance, certain amount of money reserved ‘pour les povres de leur conflarie soutenir’ (Lespinasse and Bonardot 1879: Titre LXXXVIII (Gantiers), XIII, 194).

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the vertical notions of social relations. The old associations became increasingly aristocratic, and artisans and traders were organised in new parish and craft fraternities, while workers were expected to join confraternities as a form of social control (Weissman 1982: Chap. 2). Although in a less comprehensive way, when in the fourteenth century the tailors of Exeter were granted the organisation of a fraternity, its ordinances mentioned certain devotional and assistance obligations for its members (e.g. to attend an annual feast in honour of St. John the Baptist), as well as different labour and production regulations related to the craft (Smith 1870: 312ff). The same applied in the following century to the bakers of the same city, who established a meeting in the monastery and church of St. Nicholas to celebrate the feast of the Nativity ‘of our blessed Lady, for the welfare and good prosperity of all our brothers’ (Smith 1870: 335). In the same vein, the English or Spanish occupational corporations combined their secular, economic functions with religious activities. Before 1547, devotional aspects (processions, common prayers, charities, funerals, lights, feasts, masses and other ceremonies) were common in England, not only in exclusively religious brotherhoods, but also in occupational guilds (Duffy 2005: 142–6). In Norwich, as in many other places of England, several brotherhoods were founded in the fourteenth century, namely the furriers under the patronage of St. William, tailors, carpenters, or saddlers and spurriers, whose ordinances described the religious duties of their members (Smith 1870: 28–39, 42–4), some of which survived the impact of Reformation. In the Spanish city of Murcia, guild ordinances from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century show that trades organisations, mainly engaged in manufacture and services activities, had specific regulations concerning the patron saint and the religious celebrations linked to the cohesion of the corporation, as well as certain elements related to charity and mutual assistance (Rodríguez Gonzálvez 2011, 506–536). In the eighteenth-century Malaga, most masters belonged to a fraternity, although their craft corporations maintained at the same time religious features, such as the corporate processions, organised on the occasion of relevant religious festivals (Villas Tinoco 1982: 176). Not just in Spain, but all over Europe till the Reformation, the Corpus Christi procession was a particularly relevant opportunity to establish the social rank of each corporation. Every craft guild was placed in a strict hierarchical order according to its status, in what could be called a representation of all social sectors of the city, led by the ecclesiastical and civil authorities (Muir 1981: 224ff; Rubin 1991: 257ff; Weissengruber 1997: 117–38; Martínez and Rodríguez 2002: 151–75). The impact of Reformation on associative organisations. In An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, written in 1527, Martin Luther criticised the brotherhoods because of the excesses of their feasts and the celebrations of their patron saints. He equated fraternities and letters of indulgences as spurious creations that did not guarantee personal salvation. Believers did not need instruments to make it easier a direct contact with God, or the superstitions associated to religious organisations. Organisations themselves were deemed unnecessary. Therefore, the Reform movement promoted the extinction of fraternities in Protestant countries, as it happened in England in 1547 or in Geneva in 1535. In other places, such as

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Augsburg, brotherhoods were suppressed, just to reappear once the Catholic cult was restored (Heal 2007: 161). In England, although the process was initiated by Henry VIII, the Act of 1547 abolished religious corporations (‘corporations, guyldes, fraternities, companies and felowshipps of mysteries or craftes’) and confiscated their properties.11 The question that arises is whether the suppression of fraternities and the removal of the religious elements from craft corporations implied a process of secularisation (Sommerville 1992; Branch 2017). The question is appropriate, taking into account the previous popularity of fraternities,12 the political and/or economic nature of some of the expropriations (Duffy 2005: 142), and the continuity of certain religious functions performed after 1547.13 That does not mean that the use of fraternities for purposes established by the political power was a restricted domain of Protestantism. In 1462, the duke of Savoy asked a number of brotherhoods to transfer the money usually spent on corporate feasts to the reconstruction of a bridge; in 1528, the commune of Geneva demanded them financial assistance for the acquisition of artillery regarding an imminent war (Binz 1987: 253–4, 256). Even though there were religious references within the framework of the English craft corporations after the Edwardian suppression, it seems that a clear differentiation between sacred and profane functions was being established (Phillips 1999: 59–60). However, the emergence of secular motivations and objectives was not specific of Protestant societies. In Renaissance Italy, examples of fraternities that stand between the sacred and the secular could be observed (Henderson 1994). From a theoretical and practical point of view, a jurist of Valduggia in Piedmont wrote in 1651 a report trying to prove the secular character of the Saint-Esprit fraternity of Borgosesia, mainly devoted to charity activities. He defended that the brotherhood was rather a community led by lay persons, without the interference of the ecclesiastical authorities, and stressed that its features were essentially not devotional. Their members did not wear distinctive habits, they did not meet to practise the sacraments, or to participate in processions or funerals. The community was described as a lay institution (Torre 2007: 118–21). In Cologne, traditional brotherhoods were not linked to the ecclesiastical Catholic authorities or to a religious order. They ‘remained more interested in social cohesion than in outreach and pedagogy’, which was common in Counter-Reformation communities (Heal 2007: 260). Reformation had an impact on the multi-faceted character of fraternities, mainly concerning their religious functions. Religious fraternities might survive as secular corporations, discharged of their devotional tasks, as well as occupational organisations. Their assistance elements seemed to be more problematic. It is worth keeping in mind that the government of Edward VI was concerned about providing help to the poor, and decided to continue the use of the resources of the dissolved religious

11 Chantries

Act 1547, 1 Ed VI, c 14 (The Statutes 1819: 24–33). for instance, the case of Geneva (Binz 1987). 13 There are mentions of ceremonies and banquets to honor the deceased members of the saddlers Company of London during the seventeenth century (Sherwell 1889: 173–8). 12 See,

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corporations for charitable purposes. Again, the rationalisation of poor relief according to the principles of Humanism was not specific of the Protestant world. Instead, various alternatives emerged all over Europe. In spite of the differences between the Catholic and Protestant approaches, or within the manifold Christian branches (Geremek 1994: 147ff),14 the religious aspect of assistance did not disappeared, which also applied to brotherhoods (Woolf 1986: 41–2; Flynn 1989). Nevertheless, the final result of the suppression acts in England implied that the resources traditionally used by local institutions in support of relief activities were eventually no longer available, and the final beneficiaries of the operation were not the poor. The financial needs of the government were responsible for a flagrant deviation from the original objectives of the law (Kreider 1979: 189–93).

The Continuity of Craft Corporations in England and the Model of Dissociation Associative organisations did not disappear in England, where trade corporations were not affected by any secularisation process. However, the trajectory of trade corporations in England indicates that a comprehensive economic liberalisation did not take place. The organisational mutation of trades depended on the case, within a process that lasted till the nineteenth century. It is important to underline the fact that the coexistence between new systems of production and labour organisation and the presence of craft corporations and regulated institutions was longer in England than somewhere else. As a consequence of this continuity, a formal abolition of the guild system never took place. The continuity of corporations was based on a notion that dissociated the organisation of trades and their monopolies concerning labour and the production or distribution of manufactures. As a matter of fact, according to Edward Coke, at the common law a monopoly was not allowed, as far as it implied ‘an Institution, or allowance by the king by his Grant, Commission, or otherwise, to any person or persons, bodies politick or corporate’, with the result of restrictions on the production or commercialisation of a product (Coke 1669: 181). There were exceptions to this rule, which seem to have been conceived rather as a limitation of the royal power, but the concept of differentiation was clear. Coke clearly distinguished between monopoly and corporation. When, in April 1624, the Statute of Monopolies was under discussion at the Parliament, the judge stressed in a conference with the Lords: ‘if a corporation for the better government of the town, not contrary to the law; but if any a sole restrain, then gone’ (HC Jour 770, Apr 19, 1624). Coke was not against corporations, but against the privileges associated to them; actually, the final writing of the Statute

14 Cf.

Kahl 2005.

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established an exception for the application of the Act to the craft corporations.15 Two legal cases related to monopolies and guilds are worth to be mentioned. The first one, Davenant v. Hurdis,16 was decided in 1599, and concerned the legality of a guild ordinance that might establish a monopoly. In order to favour its poor members, the corporation of merchant tailors of London, by virtue of charter, had established the obligation for the members who put cloths to be dressed, to employ brothers of the guild at least for half of the cloth. The court ruled that the ordinance was against the common law, since it restricted economic freedom and constituted a monopoly. On the other hand, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the case of the tailors of Ipswich v. Sheninge,17 the court ruled against the plaintiff, the corporation of tailors of London, which had approved, by virtue of royal charter, an ordinance to exclude from the exercise of the trade those who had not been admitted by the guild. In both cases, the ground against the guild was upheld, not because the corporate system itself was wrong, or guild regulations would have needed to be derogated, but because one specific regulation created a monopoly in favour of the guild, and this was forbidden at the common law: …no Man could be prohibited from working in any lawful Trade, for the Law abhors Idleness… and… the Common Law abhors all Monopolies, which prohibit any from working in any lawful Trade…. But Ordinances for the good Order and Government of Men of Trades and Mysteries are good, but not to restrain any one in his lawful Mystery.18

Thus, monopolies were an (illegal) accident, not the essence of a trade corporation. It seems that jurisprudence reflected the general view according to which monopolies and corporate crafts were two different things, whereas monopolies were in decadence, corporations, and even guild restrictions, continued to exist (Letwin 2011: 94, 104–6). England did not follow the radical path of identification between monopoly and corporation that characterised the French revolutionaries. However, there were radical groups that could have developed elements of rupture with respect to guild organisations. For John Lilburne, leader of the Levellers, using parallelisms that would be frequent almost one century and a half later, the liberties of the free-born Englishmen were incompatible with the subjection to an arbitrary power. In the pamphlet entitled Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered, written in 1646, the association between the ‘arbitrary power’ and the corporate monopolies seems to appear. Lilburne mentions ‘The Patentee-Monopolizing Companies, Corporations and Fraternities. So that to speak properly, really and truly, their Brotherhoods are so many conspiracies to 15 ‘…this act or anything therein contained shall not in any wise extend (…) unto any corporations, companies or fellowships of any art, trade, occupation or mystery’ (‘The Statute of Monopolies 1624’, in Smith 1848: iii, section IX). 16 Davenant v Hurdis (1699), quoted by Coke in the case of Monopolies, 11 Co Rep 86, 77 Eng Rep 1263. 17 Ipswich tailors v Sheninge (1614) 11 Co Rep 53, 77 Eng Rep 1218. 18 Ipswich tailors v Sheninge (1614) 11 Co Rep 53, 77 Eng Rep 1218: 53v-54r. The idea according to which Edward Coke would be in favour of economic liberalism avant la lettre appears to be dubious (Noell 1989: 20–21).

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destroy and overthrow the laws and liberties of England…’ (Foxley 2013: 94). In The Legall Fundamental Liberties (1649), he expressly identifies corporations with monopolies. According to him, both are but ‘sons of one father’ (Foxley 2013: 95). Even before the civil war, monopolies were not granted solely by the Crown. It was a question of fighting for financial resources, which implied that the awarding of monopolies was an activity that did not contradict the political role that the Parliament was playing. Since the Statute of Monopolies in 1624, and the subsequent parliamentary control of royal privileges (Nachbar 2005: 1353), the Parliament did not refrain from granting them. During the Commonwealth and Protectorate period, corporate regulations were not derogated or reformed; on the contrary, new corporations were created (Ramsay 1973: 144ff). Within this context, the differentiation between guilds and monopolies remains unchanged. According to William Sheppard, who wrote Of Corporations, Fraternities, and Guilds under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the essence of a corporation was the concept of an aggregate of persons authorised by the competent authority to create their own organisation, and ‘to sue and be sued…, to support the common charge each of other, and to live under such laws as they shall agree upon to make, to be governed by for their mutual good’ (Sheppheard 2009: 4–5), although a guild is a particular form of corporation that might receive ‘special franchises… for the better ordering of their trade’ (Sheppheard 2009: 5). Sheppard and the politicians of his time made the differentiation between corporate trades, which were considered a pillar of English industry (some of whose regulations needed to be reinforced), and the privileges that were against the law (Ramsay 1973: 142). The English pattern concerning economic or occupational corporations is therefore based on a unique mixture of continuities and modifications, which avoided extreme solutions. The economic changes brought about by the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) were related to the need to develop financial and tax policies able to strengthen the State (Pincus 2009: 399), rather than to a radical transformation of the industrial structure based on the elimination of corporate guilds. The True English Interest, written by Carew Reynel in 1674, illustrates this moderate approach. Reynel stressed the importance of domestic industry, and the need to encourage the production of manufactures to create employment and to increase national wealth. Leaving apart the mercantilist notions of import substitutions,19 his observations on the liberalisation of trades present a new aspect: ‘It would advance Trade much, that who was Free and had served his time in one Corporation, should have liberty to set up in any’ things’ (Reynel 1674: 48). Poor ‘manufacturing men of all trades’ should be exempted of taxes; apprenticeship time should be reduced in some trades, ‘as also allowance for ingenious persons to set up themselves, without being Apprentice, if they have a mind to it’ things’ (Reynel 1674: 50). However, this does not mean that Reynel is a champion of liberalism. He is in favour of banning or restricting the 19 ‘It

would be a great advantage to the Nation, for the more we consume of Foreign Commodities, the more we strengthen Foreigners, and weaken our selves, without we over balance it by our own Exportation’. This is what the Spanish were doing, i.e., spending the silver of America ‘on foreign things’ (Reynel 1674: 47).

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import of foreign manufactures through custom fees, which eventually would lead to the virtual extinction of poverty among ‘manufacturing men’. In England, guild privileges disappeared gradually, since ‘the story of the shift to a legally free market society in Britain depends upon imperceptible trends’ (Biernacki 1997: 260). Liberalisation measures frequently involved a tug-of-war between evolving regulations and market pressures. In London, since the eighteenth century some guilds lost their regulatory powers as a result of the lack of interest of industry and trade leaders in their continuation (Berlin 2008: 331). The example of the framework-knitters is illustrative. They were formally included in the regulatory framework of the Elizabethan laws; moreover, in 1663 the craft was incorporated, and its new powers comprised the regulation of its own activities through by-laws. In spite of this, masters generally employed apprentices instead of the required number of journeymen, whose salaries were higher. During the first half of the eighteenth century, several attempts to reinforce legal restrictions concerning apprentices failed, and corporate regulations did not apply (Brentano 1870: clxxix–clxxxi).20 While in continental Europe the debate revolved around the need to liberalise trades with or without the existence of corporate structures, in Britain there were exemptions to the rules of the market, which in other Western countries would have been called privileges and monopolies. One of the most persistent regulatory aspects concerned formal apprenticeship and the fixation of wage rates for workers, which were regulated in the famous sixteenth-century Elizabethan Statute of Apprentices or Artificers and subsequent laws, so severely criticised by Adam Smith. The Spitalfields Acts, which promoted the State intervention on silk industry since 1773, provided another example of the continuity of traditional restrictions to the free market.21

Enlightened Reforms and Associative Expressions in Spain In eighteenth-century Spain, politicians and économistes politiques were reluctant to condemn in toto the corporate system, in spite of the fact that it was subject to criticism. The outstanding shortcomings of corporations, particularly those related to the restrictions of free competition and the obstacles imposed on the release of the resources necessary for economic improvement, were expected to be remedied through governmental reforms. The objective was to successfully compete against foreign manufactures, which necessarily involved liberalisation measures. In sum, the Spanish choice tried to combine a gradual economic liberalisation with the reform of corporations. Reforms reached hybrid corporations, especially those which combined 20 This

process during the seventeenth century has been discussed (Cf. Ramsay 1973: 151ff, and Carlin 1994: 244–5). 21 As opposed to what happened in the Continent, the Spitalfields Acts exemplified a distortion of the free market without the institutionalisation of craft corporations as such. The Parliament allowed the silk weavers of certain districts of London to negotiate their salaries with their employers; when no agreement was reached, a magistrate fixed the wages. On the other hand, the employer could not give jobs to workers from outside the protected districts.

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economic and religious functions. However, the secularisation of fraternities was never a political goal, but the rationalisation of a myriad of organisations that retained useful resources. The foundations of the Spanish governmental activity were shared by most of the countries of Western and Central Europe. On the one hand, the French pattern of rupture included the identification between corporate trades and the privileged exceptions to free competition. On the other, the British model of continuity and adaptation was based on the dissociation between monopolies and organised trades. Except for the suppression of the fraternities, the Spanish enlightened rules had a preference for the second option. The political line taken in Spain was perfected by minister Campomanes, and continued for most of the nineteenth century. In general terms, the Spanish model avoided the complete abolition of corporations and was formulated in terms of continuity and dissociation. The Spanish governmental elite seemed to oscillate between being congruent with the approach developed out of the readings from French économistes, or following the pragmatic British example. France had failed to suppress both religious and craft corporations in 1776. Vincent de Gournay, in his 1755 Sixième Mémoire, provided a comprehensive proposal on the course of action to be taken regarding associative expressions. Although de Gournay dealt with the resources of the religious orders, which were outside the market, his suggestions were applicable to other corporations. Religious orders, full of inactive persons, had become a hindrance for the economy of the country, so that, instead of suppressing them, they should be allowed to invest in trade and manufacture activities,22 in such a way that they would be useful to society without harm to the economy. The injury caused to industry by the inefficient management of resources, the ubiquity and the various operations of brotherhoods, including those related to craft guilds, together with their charitable activities, was what concerned the Spanish reformist ministers.

Religious Feelings and Fraternities in Eighteenth-Century Spain It seems that in France the more radical opinions of the économistes politiques were a direct consequence of the situation of corporations. With respect to the religious organisations, since the 1730s the decline of the confréries became evident. There were difficulties to appoint the board members of the corporations, and the number of brothers was clearly decreasing. In the parishes of Champagne, both symptoms appeared within a framework of disinterest and neglect (Simiz 2001: 253–5). The

22 ‘Question:

si le travail des gens de mainmorte et la faculté qui leur serait accordée d’en mettre les productions dans le commerce serait utile ou préjudiciable à l’État’ (Tsuda 1993: 64–80).

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same applies to the rest of France, where a general atmosphere of laxity was prevalent in monasteries, which saw the falling of vocations, and the monastic discipline vanishing (Cragg 1974: 204–5). It was not the case of Spain. Brotherhoods and fraternities played an important role in the organisation of religious practices, common all over the country. A relation of fraternities presented to the Council of Castile in 1775 shows the extent of the phenomenon, with more than 25,500 active brotherhoods of all kinds (Rumeu 1944: 405; Arias and López 1994: 34). In 1772, more than 1500 fraternities were established in the province of León (in the North-west of the country), a territory inhabited by around 600,000 people (Martín 2006: 148). In a relatively modest province as the kingdom of Murcia (in the Southeast), with a similar surface but half the population, there were 670 brotherhoods in 1771. Fraternities were present in almost all localities, and some of them comprised 500 or even 1000 members, which gives an idea of how firmly they were established (Arias and López 1995: 75, 83). The distribution of the brotherhoods varied across the kingdom, but it could be said that almost every small town had one. The cities of Seville, Madrid and Toledo hosted more than 200 each, and in Valladolid there was one fraternity for every 200 inhabitants (Arias and López 1998: 201; Arias 1999: 7–8). Figures are similar, if not superior, to other Catholic countries. In Milan, there were 200 brotherhoods for a population of 120,000 in the last quarter of the century (Garrioch 2005: 51), which is comparable to Madrid, but not so much to Toledo or Valladolid (around 20,000 each). Not every enlightened thinker or politician who criticised brotherhoods was in favour of their abolition. In the Spanish Enlightenment, which was not prone to secularism, there were opinions that tried to keep certain compatibility between free reason and revealed truth. Less widely known is that this approach was also followed in France. In 1784, a Traité des confrairies recognised the abuses of the fraternities, as a lever for their change and enhancement, ‘bien éloignés de seconder cet esprit destructeur qui ne respire que l’anéantissement du bien dont il voit faire quelque abus’ (Collin 1784). None of those authors could have written a moderate sceptical argument similar to the one formulated by the speech of Cleanthes: These sceptics, therefore, are obliged, in every question, to consider each particular evidence apart, and proportion their assent to the precise degree of evidence which occurs. This is their practice in all natural, mathematical, moral, and political science. And why not the same, I ask, in the theological and religious? (Hume 1779: 31)

The ruling class of Spain seemed to have an ambiguous conception concerning the religious associative phenomenon. The Spanish kings of the Bourbon dynasty were well known for their religious piety, although their policies frequently defended the royal prerogatives against the interests of the Catholic Church (Hermann, 1988: Chap. 6), especially the most pious and reformist of them, Charles III (Martí 2004: 18–20). However, reforms were implemented wherever economic needs required it. It is interesting to note that, although the Spanish Enlightenment did not attack the established Catholic religion, the works of the French philosophes were acquired and read, even if they were prohibited by the ecclesiastical authorities, including the Inquisition. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert was indeed introduced in

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Spain, in spite of the fact that it was outlawed by the Inquisition in 1759; its second version had more than 300 subscribers (Domínguez 2005: 283–4). However, there was an increasing gap between the religiosity of the upper, educated class, and that of ordinary people. The enlightened elite censured certain religious orders, the influence of the Church on the education system, and certain common religious expressions, regarded as superstitions. Criticism on religious matters could be found across the pages of El Censor, a weekly newspaper published in Madrid between 1781 and 1787. What was being scrutinised there was not religion itself, but the external manifestation of religion, perhaps sumptuous or magnificent, but emptied of its profound meaning. Rather than formal religion, a true, inner religiosity was preferred, accompanied by charity actions aimed to correct social inequalities (Caso 1989: 793). Popular devotions were seen with suspicion. Ordinary people participated in traditional rites and public celebrations related to the need of moral support at crucial moments in their lives, the succession of the seasons, or some extraordinary events. Popular religiosity was also linked to certain expressions of associations that combined devotional and assistance goals with amusements that could go well beyond the strict limits of religion. Even the solemnity of the Corpus Christi procession was frequently tarnished by the introduction of profane and popular elements, such as dances, giants and monsters.23 Therefore, the prohibition of dances and giants inside the churches and during the religious processions, decided in 1780, was not a surprise (Novísima Recopilación, I, I, XII). In strictly economic terms, the government was concerned about the inefficient use of wealth by fraternities, and the manner in which they diverted resources from productive economy. Their hybrid nature was also a problem. It was mainly the heterogenous nature of the functions performed by the fraternities that generated their detractors. That happened not only in Spain, but also in other Catholic countries during the eighteenth century. In the duchy of Milan, under the Austrian empire, the intervention of the governmental and ecclesiastical authorities led to the differentiation between the profane and sacred features of the corporations, and the preponderance of the latter (Garrioch 2005: 51). Accusations of wasting resources were not uncommon. In 1778, a set of operating instructions approved by the Crown for the Charity Board of Madrid recommended the abolition of certain fraternities, because of the feasts and superfluous expenditures incurred, for reasons of vanity rather than devotion (Instrucción 1778: 347). A 1796 manual prepared for the local governors (corregidores) stressed the need to monitor compliance with the rules established for brotherhoods and to prevent excessive expenditures and costs outside the pious goals of the organisations (Guardiola 1796: 164). Expenses of devotional character incurred by occupational corporations were especially criticised. According to Campomanes, expenditure on lights, gunpowder, feasts and luxuries was ruining their members and reducing the devotion of the faithful. Brotherhoods were responsible for the disbursements that impoverished the artisans, and introduced distractions and time for idleness (Campomanes 1776: 23 Martínez

and Rodríguez, ’Del Barroco a la Ilustración’, pp. 162–3.

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ccxxviii-ccxxix). Eugenio Larruga (1747–1803), a prominent public servant linked to the Board of Commerce, considered that craft guilds were ‘oppressed’ by brotherhoods, which did not lead to the improvement of manufactures (Larruga 1789: 122). Campomanes considered in 1769 that there were too many fraternities, especially those linked to craft guilds, which were responsible for social and economic disorders. Brotherhoods diverted resources from the parishes and were in competition with the functions of priests. They had been acting illegally, since they intended to promote a separate community of religious nature and tried to avoid a proper implementation of the law (Alonso 1842: 101–2). In France, the government had the same opinion on the number of confréries. In 1760, a report sent to the Parlement of Paris shows that in the town of Sainte Ménéhould in Argonne, where thirteen brotherhoods were operating, ten were considered harmful and not useful by the authorities, and among the other three (strictly devoted to pious functions), only one was found admissible (Simiz 2001: 255). It is interesting to note that most of the high civil servants who seemed to attack the heterogeneity of the functions implemented by the brotherhoods were not against religion per se. As a matter of fact, criticism concerning fraternities was also common among the clergy. In 1769, the archbishop of Burgos responded to a request made by the Council of Castile, underlining the fact that the main goal [of brotherhoods] was greed, with dire consequences. I tried to remedy the situation in three villages, and they had the nerve to tell me that there was no brotherhood without wine (Rumeu 1944: 402–3)

Campomanes defended the presence of religious teachings as part of the training program of apprentices, in spite of the accusations of laicism made by some historians (Menéndez 2018: 152). Such a Christian-based moral knowledge would be useful to behave with integrity and discretion throughout life (Campomanes 1775: 117–8). The count of Aranda, president of the Council of Castile (1766–1773) before his appointment as ambassador in Paris, was considered impious and encyclopédiste, a friend of Voltaire, D’Alembert and the abbé Raynal; he was a despotic reformist, and a furious supporter of the royal authority. He welcomed nevertheless the French Revolution in his last years, just because of its irreligious side (Menéndez 2018: 158)

However, the count was not a friend of Voltaire, nor irreligious. He was just praised by certain French philosophes, Voltaire and Condorcet among them, and supported the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1767 (Ferrer 1971–1974: 23–52). It seems that his views and political activities were misrepresented, both by his enemies and by those who wanted to use his figure for their own purposes. Within the context of the Expediente General de Cofradías, which comprised a large number of reports and opinions written by local and ecclesiastical authorities concerning the situation of the fraternities, the count of Aranda wrote a preliminary assessment that was submitted to the consideration of the other members in 1773. The count suggested to maintain brotherhoods devoted to purely religious (sacramentales), or assistance functions,

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while any other fraternity was to be suppressed. He was especially opposed to the confraternities linked to a specific craft, of guild brotherhoods. His moderate position in the framework of eighteenth-century Spain was interpreted as a hypocrite defence of religious principles that concealed his underlying intention—the destruction of brotherhoods (Rumeu 1944: 403). On the other hand, although not all the members of the high clergy shared the point of view of the government concerning brotherhoods or the policy of the Crown related to the Church, the process of reforms started on the occasion of an ecclesiastical initiative. In 1768, Cayetano Cuadrillero, bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo, sent a report to the Council of Castile on the behaviour of the brotherhoods in his diocese. The bishop was seeking the governmental intervention, which reveals the common understanding between the ecclesiastical and governmental authorities. As a matter of fact, as a result of this initiative, the following year all the archbishops of the country were required to send information to the Council about the brotherhoods under their jurisdiction. Some of the archbishops were firmly opposed to the brotherhoods, although some others defended the ecclesiastical right to deal with them independently. The link between economic and industrial goals, the reorganisation of national assistance schemes, and the corporate element was originally suggested by Bernardo Ward in his Obra Pía, first published in 1750. Ward provided the guidelines for subsequent governmental action, mainly followed and developed by Campomanes. He underlined the need to bring the different institutions of charity in a district, including the fraternities, together into one single organisation. His plan made provision for measures aimed to address the problem of poverty. His solution was based on the creation of an institutional body in charge of the implementation of the new policy, a general brotherhood (Hermandad) with a broad, diverse membership, present throughout the country, and supported by the State (Ward 1787: 21–2). The new organisation would develop new approaches for the improvement of industry, particularly through the implementation of a public works plan financed by a credit system supported and managed by the Catholic Church (Ward 1787: Chap. IV).

Economic Liberalisation and the Model of Dissociation in Spain: The Question of Guild Monopolies The liberalising policy extended gradually during the second half of the eighteenth century, and intensified since the reign of Charles III, the Spanish enlightened king par excellence. In 1777–1778, the government allowed silk manufacturers to change manufacturing standards in order to imitate the fashionable fabrics of Lyon (Novísima Recopilación, VIII, XXIV, V), which was an intermediate measure between the protection of the quality of fabrics through old regulations, and the need to adapt to the requirements of the market. In 1784, the government granted the freedom of production of flax and hemp linen, including the derogation of the technical regulations applicable (Novísima Recopilación, VIII, XXIV, VII). In 1787, at the end of the reign

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of Charles III, the government eliminated the restrictions to the number of looms that a single master or producer (fabricante) was allowed to manage (Novísima Recopilación, VIII, XXIV, IX). Two years later, the Crown allowed the fabricantes ‘to freely invent, imitate, or modify’ any kind of fabric (Novísima Recopilación, VIII, XXIV, X). Despite appearances, governmental liberalising measures did not imply a complete freedom of production. New freedoms were monitorised by State agents in the provinces, and the structure of corporate guilds remained intact. The Spanish government started a process of gradual liberalisation of production and labour market without recourse to a general abolition of the guild system. As a consequence, the tension between liberalisation and regulation implied that the political action was far from being drastic. Concerning industrial monopolies, in 1724 Jerónimo de Ustáriz believed that in general terms it was not possible to assess the impact of privileges and exemptions on industry. Instead, a case-by-case assessment was needed, a solution that was in line with what it was considered a consolidated custom in England. However, Ustáriz was not in favour of the multiplication of such exemptions or exclusions, which should be given only after a cautious weighting (Uztáriz 1742: 331). In Spain, as in England, there was no clear identification between monopoly and guild corporation. Nicolás Joaquín de Adame criticised in 1759 the privileges and monopolies granted to new companies against the interests of traditional producers, including corporate guilds. According to Adame, such a policy involved shortages of goods and a drop in quality. It was necessary to change the perspective and to take measures designed to favour common producers. Corporate regulations were in need of reform, in order to render them more flexible (Adame 1788: 97–8, 92). In the Disertación of Romà i Rossell, written in 1766, special emphasis was made on the distinction between corporations and privileges (privativas). He strongly supported the guild system of the city of Barcelona, since it preserved the quality of manufactures and the tranquility of artisans. However, monopolies or estancos are censured, insofar as privileged producers would have an absolute power to set prices, with serious consequences for the public good (Romà 1766: 25–6). The identification between corporations and monopolies in France, as it was described by the French économistes, did not appear with the same severity in Spain, according to their Spanish contemporaries. The impression that one of the most important reformist ministers of the Spanish Enlightenment, Pedro Rodríguez, count of Campomanes, had about the situation in France was that ‘Son en verdad más exclusivas todavía en ciertos puntos las Ordenanzas gremiales de Francia, y más inductivas de estanco’ (In some aspects, guild ordinances in France are truly more exclusive and more prone to monopoly) (Campomanes 1766: clxxxvii). This does not mean that there were no similarities between them. Simon Clicquot de Blervache put clearly the structure of privileges on a par with an old-fashioned and ineffective socio-economic system. Privileges were related to the artificial reduction of the number of workers, the arbitrary tax system and the quality requirements established by guild corporations for their own gain. The result was a drastic reduction of free competition and a general increase of prices (Clicquot 1758: 24, 31).

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For Bigot de Sainte-Croix, monopolies in France forced the consumers to acquire corporate manufactures, and deprived them of every possibility of free choice. These arguments are shared by the Spanish enlightened rulers. In his Discurso sobre la educación popular de los artesanos, the count of Campomanes indicated the tendency of corporations to restrict competition, in line with the ideas of Bigot de Sainte-Croix or Smith (Campomanes 1775: 284). Particularly the monopolies were an obstacle for the growth of industry, and the fair trade of manufactures (Campomanes 1775: 285). It is nothing different from the ideas of Clicquot de Blervache,24 whom he did not quote. However, for Sainte-Croix monopolies were embedded in the structure of French guild corporations, which led to the identification between a guild and its monopolies, with the support of the State (Bigot 1775: 159). At the time, Campomanes and Clicquot wrote their respective works, the system of privileges had been fully identified with the corporate structure itself in France, but not in Spain. For Campomanes, guild organisation itself was not detrimental to the industrial interests of the country: ‘Los gremios mal ordenados con privilegios exclusivos, fueros, restricciones… pueden causar en un reyno notables monopolios y daños públicos, en menoscabo conocido de los oficios’ (guilds weakly organised with exclusive privileges, special jurisdictions, restrictions… are likely to lead to significant monopolies and to be a cause of injury of the community, which adversely affects trades) (Campomanes 1776: clxix). Campomanes blamed guild regulations of the industrial stagnation of certain areas. Above all technical regulations, which describe in detail the specific manner in which a manufacture is to be made, impeded the progress of a given trade. Any other way of making it outside the formal regulation was forbidden, although changing fashions and technical improvements and inventions facilitated changes (Campomanes 1776: cxxx, xci, ccxi–ccxii, ccxxxv). In spite of his quotations of Bigot de Sainte-Croix, Campomanes did not cross the line of the complete abolition of guilds and regulations, although the nature of the suppression was not clear in Bigot’s writings. Campomanes, on the contrary, accepted the existence of the guild system. He was not willing to abolish corporations, which clearly distanced his perspective from Turgot’s edict of suppression,25 although a process of reform aimed to the removal of all monopolistic elements had to be initiated. In Spain, according to Campomanes, corporate guilds held monopolies that obstructed industrial development. The members of the corporations, protected by the principles of exclusion and exclusivity, made little effort to move the industry forward (Campomanes 1776: cxvii). The Spanish minister praised Great Britain and the prevailing dissociation between monopolies and trade corporations. His library included Hume’s Political Discourses, as well as a translation of the Wealth of Nations of Adam Smith (Soubeyroux 1982:

24 ‘Loin

donc que les corporations tendent à la propagation du commerce, elles tendront toujours à la diminution et au monopole’ (Cliquot 1758: 35). 25 A translation of the edict was found in his personal files (Llombart 1992: 271).

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1002). In the third part of the Apéndice a la educación popular, the count of Campomanes stressed the fact that in England guild corporations were composed of ‘particulares que no adquieren derecho exclusivo respecto al público’ (private persons who do not acquire an exclusive right with respect to the community). In other words, in England corporations could not harm the prosperity of trades, insofar it was not possible for someone to obtain an exclusive privilege, and the existing ones were not detrimental to industry or the freedom of trade (Campomanes 1776: cxlvii–cxlix). If in England all obstacles to export and to the introduction of raw materials had been suppressed (Campomanes 1774: 180, 187–8), without resort to abolition measures, for Campomanes the solution was not the abolition of guilds, but the elimination of monopolies and restrictions to free competition (Campomanes 1776: cxix). Without their privileges, guilds could be considered as associations, useful for professional training (including examinations), and for mutual assistance purposes.26 Although the Spanish model was mainly based on the dissociation between the corporate organisations of trades and the monopolies that had been granted by the State throughout time, not everybody agreed with Campomanes. One of the champions of liberalism in Spain, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, was closer to the model of identification. Jovellanos focused on the rigidity of guild regulations, unable to adapt themselves to the changes of demand. The whole system was ‘oppressive and invariable’ (Jovellanos 1840: 229) and had to be replaced by the freedom of production and work. Regulations should therefore be suppressed. In 1785, Jovellanos wrote a report to the General Board of Commerce, where he suggested a change of direction with respect to the political strategy outlined by Campomanes. He hinted that it could be advisable to make stronger decisions against craft corporations, instead of a gradual process of transformation of the system. The author of the report was aware that it would be wise to adopt a moderate position when dealing with governmental institutions. As a matter of fact, the French revolutionary process strengthened his aversion to drastic and radical changes concerning the political and economic transformations he sought. Instead, he referred the British policy related to guild corporations for a model, not because guilds were suppressed, but because in that kingdom ‘lograron la milagrosa conciliación de la libertad de las artes con las corporaciones de los artistas’ (Jovellanos 1840: 238) (the freedom to ply a trade and guild corporations were miraculously reconciled). In sum, Jovellanos shows at the same time an abolitionist position (somehow confusing), in line with the ideas of Bigot the Sainte-Croix, although he is far from defending a complete liberalisation without any governmental monitoring (Jovellanos 1840: 239).

26 ‘enseñar y examinar a los que aspiran a ser maestros, como también para socorrerse en sus enfermedades y a sus viudas y huérfanos’ (Campomanes 1776: cxlii); ‘El socorro de enfermos, impedidos, viudas y huérfanos de los gremios, es útil al estado; porque no perezcan, ni mendiguen. Las ordenanzas que sin gravar al público se dirigen a este socorro son dignas de aprobación’ (Campomanes 1776: ccxxxvi (XXXIII).

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Enlightened Political Action. The Longue Durée Implementation of Campomanes’ Ideas Political decisions on corporations. Pedro Rodríguez, count of Campomanes (1723– 1802) was the enlightened minister who created and began to implement the reform of the corporate system in Spain, firstly as advocate-general (fiscal), later chair (presidente) of the Council of Castile (the supreme political and administrative body of the kingdom, from 1762 to 1791). Reader of the British and French économistes, and in line with the ideas of Clicquot de Blervache, as mentioned above, he adapted the reformist views that prevailed in Europe to the Spanish situation. Campomanes’ perspective of continuity and dissociation, with different variations, dominated the governmental political activity during the second half of the eighteenth century, and had a direct impact on the Spanish policy concerning corporations since the legislative activity of the Cortes de Cádiz until the second half of the nineteenth century. The enlightened government avoided radical policies and adopted instead a moderate position, according to the framework considered acceptable in eighteenth-century Spain. The model of Campomanes implied the support of certain elements related to free competition, although the final goal was not the establishment of a full market economy. The ideal scenario would be a flourishing, rural, non-centralised industry, able to raise the standard of living of the peasantry (Campomanes 1774: VI, XIV). The minister had little faith in the corporate system of trades, not only because of the monopolistic and exclusive obstacles they imposed on the development of rural industry, but also as a result of the lack of a genuine training system. There was no corporate formal program for the training of new artisans, accompanied by measures guaranteeing an effective learning (Campomanes 1776: cxvi). According to the count, the core features of trade guilds should be mutual assistance and learning; additional functions would only hamper manufacturing. Furthermore, associations engaged on commerce were not considered beneficial for the economy, and only corporations involved in manufacturing activities of certain complexity could be tolerated. Simple activities, such as milling grains or chocolate, or making cakes and pastries, did not need to be formally organised as corporations (Campomanes 1775: 259, 266, 270, 294). The plan of Campomanes proposed to correct or to derogate the elements of the corporate regulations that conflicted with free competition. It was necessary to carry out a general revision of guild regulations, under the direction of the Council of Castile and with the cooperation of the Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País in the process of evaluation and correction of the regulations. This kind of societies was created throughout the country for the advancement of industry and agriculture. They were not part of the institutions of the State, although they usually cooperated with them and were used by the government as instruments of national progress. These associations named economic, agricultural, patriotic or development societies spread from Ireland and Scotland to Russia, of from Finland (under the Swedish rule) to Italy (Stapelbroek and Marjanen 2012: 1–25). The first Spanish association

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was the Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del País, created in 1765. However, the expansion of the model in the provinces came after the foundation of the Society of Madrid (Sociedad Matritense) in 1775, an expansion that was closely linked to the wider political and economic project of Campomanes (Anes 1966; Recio 2010). Concerning brotherhoods, any kind of hybridisation between religion and trades had to be suppressed, including all craft fraternities. The Spanish common law prohibited craft brotherhoods (cofradías de oficiales) since the sixteenth century, which seemed a governmental attempt to control trade corporations. The members of the guild could not elect their own officers, who were instead appointed by the local authorities. Craft regulations were to be sent to the Council of Castile for revision (Nueva Recopilación: VIII, XIV, IV). Two hundred years later, Campomanes interpreted this as meaning that only the internal regulations of the corporations were permitted. By contrast, technical rules and craft brotherhoods had no place in the Spanish legal system (Campomanes 1776: lxii–lxvii). The opportunity for governmental action appeared in 1768, when the bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo protested to the Council of Castile against the behaviour of brotherhoods in his diocese. Almost at the same time that the archbishops were required to send their opinions on the issue, the provincial authorities (intendentes and corregidores) were instructed to elaborate a comprehensive listing of the existing fraternities, including their annual expenditure, advocation, saint celebrations, and whether or not they were formally approved by the Crown. All the informations and reports were received by the Council, and compiled in what is called the Expediente General de Cofradías (Rumeu 1944: 401–403; Arias and de Luis 1997: 433). The charity roles played by the fraternities were also considered inefficient, and, in the mind of the enlightened government, there was a need to reorganise the assistance of the unemployed workers, the sick, the members of the craft corporations and other people in need. It was also necessary to restructure alms and charity funds. Not every suggestion of Bernardo Ward’s Obra Pía was enacted by the government, but the main elements of his proposal found an echo in the abolitionist decision of 25 June 1783, on the final report of Campomanes. The decree declared the extinction of all brotherhoods that did not receive the approval of the authorities, as well as those confraternities linked to a specific craft or trade. Purely religious fraternities and those approved by both the ecclesiastical authorities and the Crown were allowed to continue their activities, although their regulations had to be revised by the Council of Castile. Therefore, the State gained control over an associative expression that had an impact on the economic development of the country. However, the religious aspects of the associations were not suppressed, but refined and kept under the same control. On the other hand, the properties of the suppressed corporations were to be transferred to the boards of charity, institutions created to organise public assistance, according to the ideas of Ward. The resolution linked the suppression of fraternities to the restructuring of the entire assistance system of the country, as well as to the corporate organisation of trades. The establishment of a new network of charity boards was one of the pillars of the new piece of legislation. The boards would be in charge of the administration of the economic assets of the suppressed organisations

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(including the craft guild fraternities) and their application into new charity bodies (Resolución 1786). The implementation of the reforms was not easy. The revision of craft corporations began in the last quarter of the century. Campomanes directly intervened in the activities of the Sociedad Económica Matritense through different reports containing instructions for the activities of the Society (Exposición 1780: 62ff (nº VII). In accordance with them, the Society formed three commissions (named Clases), dedicated to agriculture, industry and trades. The last one was responsible for collecting the ordinances of the guilds of Madrid, where one or two members of the Society were in charge of assessing the regulations (Memorias 1775: 2). The revision of the regulations actually took place, and several reports were sent to the Council of Castile containing recommendations related to the need to revise or suppress the restrictions imposed by craft corporations. The Society of Madrid received 50 sets of ordinances from different corporations till 1788, with an average of 4 per year, although only a smaller number was sent to the Council. Delays were frequent, and sometimes they amounted up to quite a few years. However, above all after 1779, the reports made their way to the hands of the Council in one or two years (Moral 1998: 230–4). Further Societies were added to the task of revising corporate regulations in the provinces. The result of the activity of the Societies was ambiguous. Their reports followed the liberalising laws and the model of Campomanes. Every skilled artisan should be admitted to a corporation, even if he was a foreign national. Guild examinations had to be open to everyone, after payment of the required and moderate fees. Masters could ply their trade in every part of the kingdom, and employ an unlimited number of apprentices or journeymen. They would be allowed to use more than one workshop, or to freely seek partnerships with commercial companies or traders. Nevertheless, there were boundaries that were not crossed. The fundamental pillars of the guild structure were not put into question. Access to the corporation was indeed open, but the skilled artisan needed to furnish proof of their mastership. Whenever an artisan plied a trade without being a member of the corporation, he was punished for disobeying a guild regulation. Only the passing masters were permitted to open a workshop. The system of guild labour organisation remained almost intact. Journeymen were to work under the direction of his master for a fixed term, and no employed journeyman could be received by another master. In spite of criticism on guild quality controls, inspections were kept as part of the system. Two specific assessments of the Societies showed the influence of the ideas of Campomanes. One of them concerned apprenticeship. In several cases, the commissioners pointed out the need of a period of training. However, even though they agreed that the duration of apprenticeship should change according to the complexity, difficulty and variety of different trades, eventually a fixed general period was specified, which was in line with the suggestions of Campomanes (Plan de Ordenanzas 1780: Tít. I, Chap. 1). A positive element of the enlightened alternative to the guild traditional structure was perhaps the possibility to consolidate a corporate apprenticeship on a contractual basis, under certain regulations guaranteeing the quality of the training (Plan de Ordenanzas 1780: Tít. III). The second aspect was related to

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the creation of a fund devoted to the mutual assistance of guild members in case of sickness, old age or accident (Montepío). However, these moderated innovations intended to lead to the preservation of a balance between freedom, regulation and State control, were not implemented. The political action resulting from this compromise, which could have created a kind of ‘third way’ between complete liberalisation and guild traditionalism, was not consolidated in the long term. In some cases, regulations were not revised according to the suggestions of the Societies. In spite of the work done, the ordinances so sharply criticised were not abolished. The production of silk fabrics in Valencia continued to be regulated by the guild standards approved in 1738, against the opinion of the Society of that city, written in 1780 (ARSEAPV: Caja 9, leg. III, sig. 3.2; Franch 1996: 215–26). The same applied for the unified ordinances draft of the ten woodbased guilds of Madrid. After a long negotiation process, the Society of Madrid sent a final report to the Council of Castile for approval in 1780, although the new ordinances were never implemented, due to the refusal of certain guilds to challenge their acquired rights. In 1790, the ten guilds continued to exist (López 1989: 160–1; Moral 1998: 255). Not all societies followed the instructions given. The Society of Segovia had originally advocated the freedom of production. In 1781, the secretary of the Society, Vicente Alcalá Galiano, warned against craft corporations, which, according to him, served only to destroy the crafts (Alcalá-Galiano 1785: 83). He recommended the Society to revise the ordinances and to eliminate all technical regulations. However, in 1782 two of its members wrote a report on the causes for the decline of hat industry. According to them, the stagnation of the industrial sector was due to the poor quality of hats, because of the failure to comply with guild standards (Alcalá-Galiano 1785: 158–9). The regulations of the silk twisters of the city of Murcia were a prime example of the governmental hesitations concerning the guild reform process. The participation of the Society of the city is not known, but instead two sets of ordinances, one approved in 1735 and the other in 1781, have been preserved. The latter, validated by the General Board of Commerce, should have highlighted the changes introduced by the governmental policy. However, this happened in certain cases, but not in others. The government seems to be more worried about the quality of silk manufactures than about the revision of an old-fashioned regulation, and consequently, the reformed ordinances of 1781 tried to support the corporate organisation which had underpinned a strong manufacturing sector. In line with the law, foreign masters were accepted as members of the guild, provided that they produce a proof of the exam successfully passed, among other things (Real Cédula 1782: ord. XXVII). Technical regulations did not disappear. On the contrary, there were a large number of them in the ordinances (Real Cédula 1782: ords. XLI-XLV, XLVII-LI, LV-LVI). Guild inspections also remained, and the silk twisters of the city controlled all the workshops of the kingdom of Murcia, as well as other crafts, such as the silk waivers and dyers (although these corporations have the same right in turn) (Real Cédula 1782: ords. XXXV, XXXVI, XLVIII). Furthermore, there was a detailed description of the duties and rights of apprenticeships and journeymen (Real Cédula 1782: ords.

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XV–XVII and XIX). In sum, the case of Murcia shows the ambiguity of the reforms. On the one hand, certain improvements were introduced; on the other, corporate structures remained unchallenged. It is interesting to note that for the first time, the reformed ordinances did not include the traditional principle of exclusion for nonmembers, which was particularly restrictive in 1735. In practice, nevertheless, this apparent liberalisation was neutralised by the need to pass the journeyman and master exams (Real Cédula 1782: ord. XXIV), including the payment of a number of fees, which had been heavily criticised by some Societies. Variations of the model of Campomanes at the end of the eighteenth century. The accession to the throne of Charles IV after the death of his father in December 1788 implied a redefinition of the process of reform led by Campomanes. It is important to take into account the impact of the revolutionary movements in France, not because of its expansion, but rather because of the reaction against it. Concerning craft corporations, in 1789 the Crown decided to entrust the General Board of Commerce with the initiative to lead the process of revision of guild regulations, instead of the Council of Castile. The Board was well known for a significant activity against the continuation of guild privileges. At the same time, the government implemented a policy of liberalisation of the textile sector. Manufacturers were further free to produce without submitting to the guild rules (Cédula 1794: 74–5). The Societies were now required to deal directly with the General Board, and, in order to avoid undue delays, guild corporations had to suggest the reform of their own ordinances, removing all shortcomings and legal violations, and to send the draft report to the provincial authorities, which would refer the draft, together with an attached evaluation to the Board. The revision process appeared to have entered a phase of slowdown. The formerly busy Society of Madrid received only six sets of ordinances between 1787 and 1791, and submitted only two to the Council of Castile. The ideas of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos concerning guild corporations were no stranger to the change of perspective within the Society of Madrid. He was appointed deputy director of the institution in November 1783, and director a year later. In 1785, his Informe sobre el libre ejercicio de las Artes was sent to the General Board of Commerce and published. In this report, Jovellanos assessed the Spanish corporate system and emphasised the freedom of work and production, which was restrained by the guilds against the general interest through regulations, technical inspections and the hierarchical organisation of workers (Jovellanos 1840: 233–4, 225). In the context of the implementation of the new policy, new divisions appeared. In the Society of Madrid, some of its members were in favour of the suppression of all corporations, since the results of the previous policy were discouraging. However, not all the members of the Society of Madrid were against the continuation of the traditional policy, particularly after the beginning of the revolution in France. Some of them rejected the French abolitionist model and opted for the British pattern, which eliminated the obstacles to promoting industry, and at the same time preserved certain elements of the corporate structure considered useful, such as the examination system and the organisation of work (Moral 1997: 266–70). Therefore, they preferred to continue with a prudent policy, and to follow the political initiatives of Campomanes

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(Moral 1997: 244–5). In the city of Valencia, the Society also revised a number of ordinances of different corporations, trying to suppress monopolies, or to correct the distortions of competition established by guild regulations (ARSEAPV, Caja 23, leg. II, nº 6). At the same time, though, certain of its members defended the corporate system, and even the re-establishment of the corporation of silk twisters, which had been abolished in 1793, was suggested in order to improve the quality of the manufactures. It was a surprising move, through which the institution shared the views of the corporations and edged away from the policy initiated by Campomanes (ARSEAPV, Caja 24, leg. II, sig. 4; Franch 2010: 90–1). In Catalonia, the institutional body acting under delegation from the General Board of Commerce was the Particular Board of the Principality, created in 1758 (Ord. III. Junta Particular 1763: 8), which was composed of powerful traders. It took a critical line of corporate guilds, while other institutions, such as the provincial High Court of Justice (Audiencia) were rather in favour of corporations (Molas 1970: 224–5). However, the revision activity was below the level achieved elsewhere in Spain. In some cases, it resulted in the consolidation of the corporate system, in a region that was one of the few Spanish centres of early industrial development. With respect to religious corporations, definitive measures were taken at the end of the century, which linked the assets of the brotherhoods, the assistance policy and the economic needs of the country. In September 1798, the Crown decided to expropriate all the lands of hospitals, hospices, charity houses, fraternities and chantries, among other goods (Cédula 1805: 201–3). However, the governmental activity was not the result of a highly considered decision on the right direction of the economy. It was due to the financial needs of the State in the critical moment of the war against the French Convention first (1793–1795), and later against Great Britain (1796–1802). As in the case of the English Chantries Act of 1547, religious-based ideals were surpassed by materialistic goals. The government had tried to solve its financial emergencies through debt issuance. The securities issued were accepted by the royal treasure as paper money (vales reales). The problem was that the successive emissions, linked to the military urgent needs, led to rampant inflation, and eventually did not solve the increasing debt. The government then had to resort to the disposal of available properties, which were mostly of ecclesiastical origin. The royal decree ordered to sell in official public auction the lands mentioned, whose proceeds would go to a fund that would pay back an annual interest of 3%. The final outcome of the operation was not successful. The assistance system of the country disappeared with no alternative offered, and the financial collapse of the State was not far (Herr 1971. 37–100; Artola 1991: 147–50; Friera 2007: 190–5). It is worth considering the secularising intentions of the government when dealing with suppressed corporations. The comparison of the Spanish case with the Edwardian acts three hundred years before is astonishing. In spite of the fact that some historians define the suppression laws as a ‘revolutionary process which was transforming England into a secular, modern society’ (Kreider 1979: 200), the question arises as to whether the pieces of legislation in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries were conceived to pave the way of the differentiation between the secular and the

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sacred, or it was rather the outcome of an urgent need to meet the economic requirements of a government persistently short of resources. In Spain, as in England, the process of secularisation was the result of the consolidation of a sphere different from the theological world, with their own logic and rules (Tietz 1992: VII–XV). This sphere was strengthened by the economic needs of the government, although not necessarily built against religion.

Conclusions: The Westernisation of a Western Country The économistes politiques created a theoretical system where the free play of market forces would result in a stronger economic structure, within a framework of modernisation, development and growth. Particularly since the eighteenth century, the successful example of Great Britain in economic terms alarmed the rest of the countries of Europe and opened a period of reflection. The British model was generally considered worthy of imitation in the countries of Western Europe, and at the same time, regarded with suspicion, since it implied a radical change in the traditional patterns of organising labour and production. Allegedly, the old parameters of production had to be substituted by new patterns based on the experience of Great Britain, as a means of avoiding the risk of falling behind. However, the new paradigm was limited to suppress those corporate elements considered incompatible with a system of undistorted competition, although corporate associative expressions themselves continued to exist alongside varying market structures. The British model of dissociation between corporations and the monopolies traditionally associated to them was common in Europe. Except in France, economic thinkers and politicians were reluctant to cut ties with the past. Spain formed part of this trend, which implied the continuity of the religious and industrial corporations, without their anti-competitive elements. The Spanish pattern of reform and continuity tried to eliminate all privileges and monopolies related to production and labour associated to craft corporations. Brotherhoods and fraternities lost their economic features, and their properties were eventually expropriated, in order to be converted into organisations of a purely religious nature. Therefore, in Spain the theoretical approaches of enlightened rationalism did not end in a radical reorganisation of corporate associative expressions. Corporations preserved most of their former characteristics, in return of the adaptation to the market conditions, according to the governmental objectives of flexibilisation. The results of the implementation of the new policy in Spain were not as efficient as might have been expected from an enlightened point of view. The adaptation of corporations encountered obstacles that hampered governmental reforms. However, the moderate model designed by Campomanes and implemented since the last quarter of the eighteenth century had a direct influence on the first formal expressions of the freedom of production and work after the fall of absolutism. Craft corporations eventually disappeared, not because of abolitionist measures, but because of the general economic evolution of the country, and the lack of an alternative solution

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offered by the authorities to the triumphant liberalising model. If corporate strength weakened in the long run, it was because of the particularities of the Spanish economic development, which diluted the element perceived as contrary to the free market. In the best enlightened tradition, a royal decree issued by the government on 20 January 1834 (Decretos 1835: 26–8) declared (again) the suppression of guild privileges, and the monopolies related to the labour market. Apprenticeship was no longer necessary to exercise a craft, nor to become a candidate for journeymanship or mastership, although it was not abolished. Organised crafts formally remained in place, and their regulations were to be reformed according to a number of guidelines provided by the decree. The guidelines created, in fact, a number of freedoms, such as the freedom to ply different trades at the same time without becoming a member of the corresponding guilds (Decretos 1835: base 8), the general freedom of production, not subject to guild regulations, as well as the ‘unconditional competition in the capital and labor markets’, the free circulation of manufactures (Decretos 1835: base 5) and the freedom of establishment linked to the exercise of a guild trade (Decretos 1835: base 7). The reform was a failure, because of the lack of governmental interest to preserve certain positive elements of the declining corporations. Corporate regulations were still valid wherever they did not contradict the free circulation of goods and workers, or the ‘freedom of production’. The solution provided by the Spanish liberal government in this and subsequent pieces of legislation was pragmatic, but unbalanced. The government expected the guilds to subsist as organisations of mutual support (Escriche 1839: 239–40), in line with the old ideas of Campomanes, but the formal and legal support to decaying guilds did not imply the strengthening of an alternative to liberal trends. Concerning the other element of westernisation, the secularisation of ecclesiastical goods must not be equated with a certain degree of secularism reached in a society. It was the result of a political action designed to provide the State with resources that it needed in order to fulfil its ever-higher requirements. Secularism was not the consequence of a revolutionary move, but the result of a process of definition of distinctive domains of action. The Spanish case shows that the government had no interest in the secularisation of society, in opposition to any form of religiosity. The expropriation of religious corporations fell within the scope of the rationalisation of the economy, which tried to release the frozen resources of the corporations.

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Francisco Jorge Rodríguez Gonzálvez is currently pursuing research on the comparative aspects of trade corporations at the London School of Economics. He previously was a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute (RSCAS, Florence) and has taught political and social history at the University of Murcia (Spain). With a Ph.D. in Law (University of Murcia) and a MA in Political and Administrative European Studies (College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium), his research interests include the comparative evolution of socio-economic institutions, with particular attention to the period of transformations leading to our contemporary structure. He is also interested in the historical analysis of the link between poverty and work, as well as in the origins of the European Social Model. Among his publications are Seda y Lógica Comunitaria (Editum 2011), on the evolution of silk corporations in South East Spain, or ‘The dynamics of the European social model: an evolving polarisation?’, in The European Social Model Adrift: Europe, Social Cohesion and the Economic Crisis (Ashgate 2015).

The Modern Is not Secular: Mapping the Idea of Secularism in the Works of Steve Bruce, Charles Taylor, and Talal Asad Ça˘gda¸s Dedeo˘glu

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. (Jonathan Swift 1706) or We have just enough secularism to make us hate, but not enough to make us love another.

Introduction Different political regions of the world have continuously been engulfed by issues linked to debates over secularism. To name but a few, there are the timeless debate on the symbolic meaning of ‘In God We Trust’ in the USA, persistent religiosity or anti-religious sentiment in various ideological forms—i.e., Islamist fundamentalism and Islamophobia—the banning of the wearing of religious symbols in French public schools or the allowing of them in Turkish public schools, the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs’ treatment of non-Muslim and non-Sunni citizens, Pope Francis’s recent inclusive discourse toward different sects of society including homosexuals, the increasing attractiveness of New Age spiritualities for millions, and a dramatic rise in the number of people who prefer to call themselves “unaffiliated.” Obviously, some of these examples are controversial from a secularist perspective and many other controversies could easily be added to the list. So how do they all fit within the secularism debate? Social scientific thinking has always been interested in social controversies. This interest both led to the emergence of sociology as a distinct discipline and to its increased diversification in the decades that followed. While the division of labor in academia gave researchers the chance to analyze societal issues in a detailed way, it also led to the adoption of certain disciplinary assumptions and the shunning of some Ç. Dedeo˘glu (B) The Center for Critical Research on Religion, Newton, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Ünsar and Ö. Ünal Eri¸s (eds.), Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_5

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others, which sometimes led to holes in these detailed analyses. More recently, the problems stemming from some of these assumptions have been subject to critiques of modern liberal politics and the nation-state (Asad 2003), of imperial projects (Mahmood 2006), and of liberal principles of universality and freedom from a gender perspective (Braidotti 2008; Butler 2008). Some have even argued that there is a mismatch between secularist approaches to democracy and the sociopolitical realities of European societies (Casanova 2009). Although there is a vast literature on secularism-related issues, there have been few attempts at mapping this literature (Schultz 2006). Moreover, these rare attempts are still positioned within rigid disciplinary categories. In this chapter, I share the concern about the purpose of conducting a new research: “As each generation of scholars seeks fame in novelty, previously influential figures are forgotten or caricatured into epitomes of all that is ill-informed, inept, or biased” (Bruce 2016: vi). Bruce made this critique in his editorial introduction to the reprint of Bryan R. Wilson’s Religion in Secular Society after fifty years (2016). I think this fame-seeking attitude is today correlated with the career-oriented attitudes of scholars, which are a side effect of universities’ transformation into corporate analogs. But the other side of the coin is that overreliance on a scholarly tradition while guaranteeing a comfort zone could lead scholars to be blind to conceptual possibilities generated from other disciplinary perspectives or from critical stances within these perspectives. Keeping the critique of Steve Bruce in mind but also avoiding overreliance on it, this chapter seeks to create a conceptual mapping supported by visualizations of critical understandings of secularism. This mapping will be primarily based on word clouds obtained from the works of Steve Bruce, Talal Asad, and Charles Taylor.1 That is, I will investigate Steve Bruce’s Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (2011), Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), and Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003). Although I will mostly concentrate on Formations of the Secular, I will also pay some attention to Genealogies of Religion (1993) to show the changing themes in Asad’s vocabulary over the course of a decade.2 To interpret the word clouds, I will also benefit from the rich literature dealing with secularism, including critiques of the works of Talal Asad and Charles Taylor. In the following sections, I will briefly discuss the literature on secularization and secularism. Then, I will selectively scrutinize secularism and related themes that have appeared in the aforementioned sociological, anthropological, and philosophical works. My aim here will be to portray a dialogical relationship between these different epistemologies of secularism. Comparing different ontological positions, I will try to define the limits of the relationship between secularization and secularism as two separate constructed categories within the social sciences and lay out the wider political implications of the two definitions. 1I

created word clouds for each author’s book from its index. The bigger a word is, the more frequently it is used throughout the book. 2 Talal Asad published a new book, Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason (Columbia University Press, 2019), after the completion of this chapter.

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The Secularization Paradigm and Its Critics For centuries, scholars have been trying to understand patterns of societal change. These efforts have largely been performed within two sets of categories: macro versus micro trends; and Western versus non-Western perspectives. The debate on secularism initially focused on macro trends such as rationalization, individualization, and so on, all of which are labeled with the term modernization in Western societies. The ideal types produced in Western sociological circles are deemed by some to be generalizable and universal. In later periods, some researchers within these circles reached out and adopted new findings challenging explanations previously thought to be generalizable and universal. In line with the rise of post-structuralism and postcolonialism in the social sciences, non-Western cases have also become a part of the puzzle regarding the concept of the secular. In this puzzle, the primary issue has been the changing status and role of religion in modern society. Scholars until recently have defined this question independently from their concepts of change, status, role, religion, modernity, society, and so on (Shiner 1967; Martin 1978; Wilson 1982; Berger 1999; Asad 2003; Casanova 2006; Bruce 2011). Questions related to secularization have been occupying minds since at least Weber wrote about the process that they3 called “enchantment.” Secularization was considered a major component of being modern alongside other phenomena such as bureaucratization, rationalization, and urbanization (Schultz 2006, 171). It seems such a consideration stemmed mostly from the usage of the term secularis before 1648. In that already-Christianized period, mundane referred to “worldly affairs” and secularis referred to “priests dealing with worldly affairs” (Lechner n.d.). After this time, secularization came essentially to be understood as a universal change in the direction of worldly affairs. In classical definitions of secularization, sociologists followed either a Weberian or a Durkheimian approach. While the former preferred to focus on the inescapable changes in Europe that had emerged with scientific rationalization, the latter showed a tendency to a functionalist understanding of societal change and analyzed the institutional transformation behind it. Both explanations relied on the assumption of an evolutionary change in societies (Schultz 2006, 171) toward a somewhat Comteian positivism. From the 1960s onwards, alternative voices were also raised in the field, although they remained weak. For instance, Shiner (1967) explored the multiple meanings of secularization by identifying its six different usages: “a decline of religion,” “a conformity with the world,” “a disengagement with the social world,” “a transposition of religious beliefs and institutions,” “a desacralization of the world,” and “a movement from a sacred to a secular society.” I attach a special importance to “conformity” because it gives a specific perspective on how religious movements and institutions have synchronized their goals with this world’s realities. Also, this implies the gray areas compose reality, emphasizing an understanding comparable to the religious dualism of this world and ‘the other world’. In a similar way, Martin (1978) presented the data proving two peculiar versions of secularization, the 3 In

this work, I use they instead of s/he/she for the sake of gender-neutral language.

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Latin-Catholic idea in continental Europe and the Anglo-Protestant idea in the USA. While the European secularization appeared as a “collision” between ‘pre-modern religious’ and ‘modern secular circles’, secularization took a form of “collusion” of these circles in the USA (Casanova 2006, 21, 22). The motto “In God We Trust” can be read as a reflection of this collusion. Still, its political outcome is not clear for either the USA or the rest of the world. This classical understanding of secularization dominated scholarship until the end of the Cold War. Echoing this, Bryan R. Wilson interpreted secularization as the lessening of religion’s societal importance. Besides this thin definition, they also focused on a thick one, looking at different dimensions of the social reality that the term seeks to reflect. Among these, they counted the institutional corrosion of religious structures; the rearrangement of religious norms guiding people’s individual and societal roles; the confiscation of the property and amenities of religious organs; the transformation of mindsets in a positivist scientific direction; changes of authority in the handling of social life; and a lessening of people’s devotion to unobservable phenomena (Wilson 1982, 149; Bruce 2011). Here, the rearrangement of religious norms reminds us of Shiner’s “conformity” as a key dimension of social change, which also finds its reflection in the law. This connection to legality is scrutinized in Asadian insights on secularism, as well. On the other hand, a collective work edited by Berger (1999) announced its authors’ abandonment of their previous position in support of secularization theory. They insisted that ‘the theory’ cannot explain societal change and is, therefore, inaccurate. Scholars such as Stark (1999) have also declared the death of the secularization thesis. Stark’s argument was based on surveys showing that the US case challenges the thesis. However, according to Schultz (2006, 174), they and other skeptical scholars only paid attention to individual secularization and did not consider the wider institutional, cultural, and social changes involved. Moreover, in the collective work, Religion and Modernization (1992, 1, 2), Steve Bruce asserted that Bryan Wilson, David Martin, and Peter Berger, all in their own terms, had conservative attitudes toward secular modernity. This indicates how sociological knowledge is dependent on ideologies in its most general sense. Bruce has widely contributed to the secularization debate from the perspective of the sociology of religion since the 1990s. In an article, they coauthored with Wallis, but which was published after Wallis’ death, they named three features of modernization: social differentiation, societalization, and rationalization (Wallis and Bruce 1992, 12–14). Relying on the existing literature in the sociology of religion, they argued that modernization with these three patterns resulted in a secular world. In this secularized world, “religious belief and practice” were supposed to be “more individualized, fragmented, and privatized” (ibid., 22). Moreover, the nation-state does not have sufficient capacity to respond to these patterns. In the 2000s, reflecting on these critiques, Bruce (2006, 35) insisted that secularization paradigm (they did not want to call it a theory) is neither evolutionary nor simple; it is still helpful for showing macro trends of change in European history, they claimed. Therefore, they reminded readers of the 21-box-diagram given in their book, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (2002, 4), showing the very complex

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nature of these trends. According to Bruce, in all its complexity, there is no doubt that the West has been secularized. In about 150 years, church attendance among Britons has dropped from 50 to about 8%. Similarly, the ratio of religious marriages has declined from 60 to less than 30%. The USA, often seen as an exception to the European model of secularization, also shows lessening numbers of churchgoers (Bruce 2006, 37). While the above-mentioned diagram manifests itself as an updated version of Weberian approach to the sociology of religion in Europe and Bruce’s examples clearly highlight the process of secularization, the depiction of a transformation from the religious feudal Middle Ages to secular modern liberal societies was based on some questionable assumptions. Moreover, the world they pictured was the Western world. This picture, with all the assumptions that go along with it, has been subjected to deep critique by Talal Asad and other social theorists. It must be noted that these critics have primarily targeted the Western idea of the modern nation-state and its democratic principles. The details of Asadian criticism will be discussed in the following section, but in a nutshell, the anthropology of Islam allowed them to test the sociological assumptions of Western modernization and secularization.

A Comparison of Perspectives on Secularization and Secularism The focus in this section is the words that haunt any researcher’s ontology as well as epistemology. These words are demarcated in an ever-changing process affected by family, friends, teachers, etc., in different and diverse ways. No social scientist is exempt from this life cycle. Therefore, I tend to think the objectivity of any social scientific work as remaining within its own limits. As Asad put it, “all that language does is, after all, a part of reality” and this works as both an outer and an inner binding mechanism for authority (Scott 2006, 271). In this chapter, I discuss the words of Steve Bruce, Charles Taylor, and Talal Asad—three scholars with distinct backgrounds—in detail. In doing so, I expect to create a conceptual toolkit for a political analysis of secularism. The word clouds I generated from the books of Bruce and Asad indicate the words mentioned at least 7 times. Since Taylor’s book is much longer than the other two books, I generated two separate word clouds from their book, one about concepts and the other about people the author engaged with. The concept cloud indicates the words repeated at least 13 times in the 851-page book. Since word frequency might have alone a limited explanation power, I also pay attention to the historical and philosophical dynamics that have allowed for the publication of such works.

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Secularization: A Sociology of Religion Perspective My investigation starts with an analysis of Steve Bruce’s words obtained from their recent book, Secularization. The longer title of the book indicates its aim: “in defence of an unfashionable theory” (2011).4 Although this chapter focuses on secularism as a political concept rather than secularization as a sociological concept, it assumes that the hegemonic understanding of secularism has a close link with the history of sociological knowledge on secularization. And Bruce, as I briefly mentioned in the previous section, presented the foundations of the secularization paradigm from a sociology of religion perspective. In a sense, I do here what they did for Bryan Wilson’s book before me (Bruce 2016): read between the lines of their book defending secularization. Although Bruce published Secularization after the publications of Asad’s Formation of the Secular (2003) and Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), its epistemology is rooted in an old sociological tradition of secularization analysis. Understanding the updated version of this tradition would aid us in bridging the gap between secularization as a process and secularism as a worldview cultivating a modernist project. As can be seen from the word cloud, Bruce’s sociology of religion dealt with the problem of secularization from a neoclassical perspective. That is, they revisited the arguments that derived in the first place from the classics of the field and then reached out more comprehensive conclusions. In their revision, they endured the criticisms about the secularization paradigm. These include questions about the inevitability of secularization, partisan support for the paradigm, the teleological approach to history, the unwillingness to distinguish natural change from engineered change and the determination of the date secularization started, as well as secularization approach’s disregarding of unorganized religiosity and Stark and Iannaccone’s (1994) supplyside approach. Responding to each criticism arguing for the failure or disutility of the secularization paradigm to explain and clarify what secularization is, they also paid attention to regions outside of the Western world. Still, the basic themes remained in line with their earlier works (Fig. 1). Apart from the word “secularization,” which is the central theme of the book, the most repeated term is “Catholic Church” (freq. 46). Bruce documented the internal and external changes the Catholic Church has undergone for centuries. In their explanation, they mentioned the Westphalian transformation of governmental systems and the decline of single church domination in Europe as well as the continuation of the popularity of the Catholic Church in Mediterranean countries such as Italy. In the meantime, the Vatican has succeeded in maintaining its position as a universally organized religious body, rather than becoming primarily a state institution (2011, 7). In the post-1945 period, while the churches in Western Europe pretended to support representative democracy through Christian Democrats, those in countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece went hand in hand with dictatorial regimes (ibid., 8). Both church attendance (freq. 21) and membership (freq. 11) continued to decrease 4 Elsewhere Bruce insists on using the term paradigm, not theory, to define the scientific sociological

approach to secularization but published a book with a title that called it a theory.

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Fig. 1 Word cloud for Bruce’s vocabulary in Secularization

and as Scot Cardinal Thomas Winning said: “Catholics are becoming more and more like Protestants: they pick and choose” (ibid., 13). In a sense, this signals a loss of authority for the Catholic Church. Based on this, Pope Francis’s promising discourse and actions seem to be a necessity. Their worldly and democratic acts aim to allow people to ‘pick and choose’ Catholic beliefs and principles again. “Diversity” (freq. 34) and “modernization” (freq. 30) are the other most frequently used concepts in the book. This is quite understandable, since Bruce explained the secularization of the (European) societies through a diagram employing the concepts of rationalization, economy, society, religious organization, and polity, all of which they say have undergone ‘extraordinary change’ as part of a process called modernization. According to Bruce (ibid., 27), diversity is one of the key words to understanding this change. That is, both social differentiation (S1) and structural differentiation (S2) have led to social and cultural diversity (S3) and religious diversity (RO4). They also warned about the misperception that diversity automatically results in toleration. Although this has been the case for some religious minorities, most religious sects, i.e., the Scottish Covenanters, were subject to some form of coercion (ibid., 36). “Muslims” follows “modernization” as the fourth most repeated word in the cloud (freq. 29). In the first place, they mentioned Muslims’ mosque attendance to respond to the critique of using church attendance as the proof of religious commitment. They emphasized that such a correlation is still generalizable since surveys about Muslim religiosity also find a connection between mosque attendance and individual religiosity (ibid., 16). Also, in the chapter called secularization elsewhere, they gave insights into various Islamic societies. Here, they underscored the role of non-Arabic Islam, a

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term which encapsulates 85% of Muslims today (ibid., 185). In addition, they drew on Berger’s5 concept of the sacred canopy (1967) to illustrate how Pancasila, a product of state-religionism, and Islam, the majority religion, have been located in Indonesia as contrary positions in a way that has led to violence. Moreover, their explanations regarding religion in sub-Saharan Africa are also worth taking into consideration. Bruce implied that the continuing socio-economic network composing people and churches, mosques, or Sufi orders in Africa can be read as an example of social differentiation (S1) and structural differentiation (S2) having not yet been completed in a way that changed the religious characteristics of socio-economic networks (ibid., 189). Finally, they touched upon international politics through the situation in the Middle East. They insisted that fundamentalism has stemmed from the dramatic changes produced by the lack of emergent (largely unintended) secularization (ibid., 191) and contrary to the mainstream assumptions, “the imams and ayatollahs had been the losers in, not the promoters of, social change” (ibid., 193) in the (Middle) East. That is, while secularization used to be an end (or at least a parallel process) of modernization in Europe, it has been an instrument of catch-up modernization in the Middle East. This is an implication of what makes “religion newsworthy again” (ibid., 217). Today, nation-states have not been able to effectively respond at the domestic or international level to growing problems of governance due to the migration of people, ideas, and products. Under these circumstances, religion serves as a hub, not an actor but a milieu, for the two phenomena Bruce called cultural transition and cultural defense (ibid., 50). At this point, the sociological issue of secularization intersects with the political issue of secularism and identity politics reflects related controversies. The secularization paradigm still lacks a healthy relationship with secularism as a political ideal, they say. Although the paradigm as a sociological category explains historical transformations in Europe as well as those in some other parts of the world, it cannot guide researchers and practitioners focusing on how perpetual peace among people can be sustained.

Taylor’s A Secular Age In an interview published in Philosophy Now, Taylor (2009) stated humbly that their interdisciplinary attitudes had led them to make mistakes. They also added that working with social scientists from other disciplines would prevent them from making bigger mistakes. Taylor’s interest in ‘the modern self’ might have led to the maturation of their interdisciplinary approach, but they are still a Hegelian hermeneuticist influenced mostly by Heidegger and Gadamer. They try to understand how the modern perception of self has changed over time and space. In this respect, the voluminous

5 Bruce used the term “Peter Berger” 13 times: that That is, Berger is the second most frequent name

after “Bryan Wilson.”

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Fig. 2 Word cloud for Taylor’s concepts in A Secular Age

A Secular Age (2007) was an investigation of what Taylor calls ‘modern social imaginary’ and how it has emerged throughout history. Assuming that modern social imaginary is secular, they suggested that there is a need for ‘transcendence’ in any forms available. This suggestion reflects Taylor’s own religious identity, intellectual development, and interdisciplinary approach. As can be seen below, the vocabulary of A Secular Age is much more intense and relatively equally distributed than Bruce’s Secularization. (Fig. 2) The most frequently used concepts are those that help the reader follow up the historical journey of the modern (European) self. While some of those enable Taylor to explain the emergence and transformation of modern self, some others deal with its future in a so-called secular age. One concept primarily stands for the explanation of what modern self has experienced: “disenchantment” (freq. 40). According to Taylor, Western societies have experienced two disenchantments, one of which has influenced every individual in the last few centuries and changed conditions of belief and reason tremendously, while the other one illuminated “the educated minority” (Taylor 2016, 370). In this book, the frequency of the word “secularity” is 32. In addition, Taylor mentioned “secular time” (freq. 44) and “secularization theory” (freq. 32) to deepen the debate about secularization. Taylor first scrutinized the two different meanings of secularity and conceptualized a third meaning on which these two rest. While the first possible definition of secularity focuses on structural entities including state entities, the second considers it with regard to changing societal functions. Yet, Taylor also defined secularity in a third sense which focuses mostly on an individual dimension. This is dependent on other meanings for sure, but it still regards secularity as a

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substance of a modern world where a belief in God, or faith in general, is one “human possibility among others” (2007, 3). This possibility also welcomes a worldview called “exclusive humanism” (freq. 40) elsewhere in the book. They agreed with the secularization theorists that there is an obvious relationship between modernities and secularities; however, they denied the assertion that ‘God is dead.’ For them, there is a room for the “transcendent” (freq. 40) beyond the immanent, which is the definitive feature of religion (ibid., 20). Taylor’s take on secularization paradigm seemed to dignify Steve Bruce’s. They welcomed “Bruce’s intent” that the declining phenomenon be mostly explained through religion and asserted that Bruce’s “impersonal powers” and Taylor’s “moral forces” are in the same line of thought. Thus, they supported Bruce’s interpretation of discrepancy among societies regarding religious beliefs’ influence on people (ibid., 429, 430). However, since it is not clear what Bruce had in mind while using the term ‘influenced by religious belief’, Taylor’s position also remained ambiguous. This ambiguity created an opportunity for Taylor to establish their own world ethics based on the idea of transcendence. As will be seen below, Talal Asad, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, has argued against this naïve ethical understanding from a perspective of anthropological epistemology. Still, ontologically, they preserved the idea of Islamic transcendence in their approach to knowledge. Accordingly, Taylor’s usage of secular time partially clarified their argument. In this respect, they reminded readers of the origin of the term, saeculum, meaning a century or age, and considered secular time as ordinary time. Then, they insisted that “higher times” (freq. 31) turn secular times into “special moments” (ibid., 54). These moments give individuals the perception of eternity. In a sense, higher times make people feel special. It’s no accident that Taylor chose the word “embedded” (ibid., 55) to define the situation of people who live in secular times. This choice implies that those people are stuck in the ordinariness of life, and nothing special is happening to them. Taylor also challenged Walter Benjamin’s understanding of “homogenous, empty time.” Instead, they stated that secular time is not homogenous and differs according to its relationship to higher times (ibid., 58). I believe the concepts of “modern social imaginary” (freq. 26), “modern moral order” (freq. 32), “moralism” (freq. 16), and “moral sources” (freq. 13) as well as of “universe” (freq. 38) and “cosmos” (freq. 12) serve to further clarify Taylor’s position. They have befittingly considered the modern social imaginary as a distinct phenomenon which has seized the domination of theological (and teleological) cosmology and its reflection on vertical societal structures. Instead, horizontality and direct access are the definitive features of new social imaginary which is not independent of the new image of the universe and nature (ibid., 392). In addition, Taylor juxtaposed the components of the immanent frame as modern science, “the buffered identity, and its disciplines, modern individualism and its connection with instrumental reason and action in secular time”: those which are constituted via nation-state laws (ibid., 566). Such a depiction of the social imaginary with the nation-state as its end-product, which is nourished by a liberal Catholic ideology, is again encountered in the Asadian depiction of history. According to this, the new social imaginary is neither horizontal nor open to direct access, but is still teleological.

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While Taylor has considered the dissolution of hegemonic cosmology to be derived from the Christian idea of the “great chain of being” (freq. 13), one of the biggest changes, they also emphasized “unbundlings” as the second major change witnessed over the last two centuries (2016, 371). Indeed, these two changes, according to Taylor, created the “buffered self” (freq. 30). The self is “buffered” because it is excluded from the older ontological, epistemological and axiological bundlings. The updated forms of belongingness have started to replace older religious packages, and most people have been educated within the nation-state system as modern identities. What modern citizenship offers is an updated package. I use updated with reference to Taylor’s thought that exclusive humanism has emerged from a metamorphosis of Christianity. In a sense, it is still religious but in a different sense. Keeping in mind that one of the meanings of religion refers to (official) gathering, exclusive humanism has offered an alternative form of gathering and mode of living in ever-transforming modern societies. Finally, I find a correlation between Taylor’s word preferences and their ontologies. Taylor (2008) expressed in another interview that their religious background was not homogenous since their mother was a Catholic, their father was an Anglican, and their grandfather was a Voltairean. Their personal journey led them to meet the new French theology of 1950–2, which later became the official theology of Vatican II. Therefore, their Platonic vocabulary is not surprising; many concepts in this vocabulary also underlie Roman Catholicism. As Fig. 3 indicates, they mostly interacted with Nietzsche (freq. 64), Jesus Christ (freq. 54), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (freq. 43), and Plato (freq. 40). In the historical journey from Jesus Christ to Rousseau, there

Fig. 3 Word cloud for Taylor’s people in A Secular Age

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stand benevolence and agape, which must be supported by the idea of the transcendent. Therefore, they reject both exclusive humanism and Nietzcheanism; instead, they offer “re-enchantment,” that is “new ways of living in attunement with the world and universe (in which) we exist” (2016, 375).

The Asadian Critique of the Liberal Modern State In the previous sections, I have attempted to show that Bruce took the liberal modern state that emerged within a Western historical context for granted and Taylor reinterpreted it from a Roman Catholic ethical perspective. Asad also reinterpreted the Western idea of the secular state. But Asad’s critique was closer to what Taylor did from an ethical–philosophical perspective than Bruce did from a neoclassical sociological one, with their understanding of the anthropology of religion being key to explaining this critique (Fig. 4). The subtitle of Genealogies of Religion (1993), “Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam,” shows us Asad’s aim: an investigation of the European enlightenment as derived from a Christian tradition, toward its disciplining powers, and a comparison of the Western tradition with the non-Western, Islamic tradition. Therefore, it is no coincidence that “rites and rituals” (freq. 62) were the most frequently used group of concepts in this book, together with “religion” (freq. 52) and

Fig. 4 Word cloud for Asad’s vocabulary in Genealogies of Religion

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“monastic life” (freq. 51). As an extension of their 1986 work, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, Asad distanced themselves in this book from a universal understanding of religion (and of the secular), an understanding caricaturized by Clifford Geertz. For Asad, European history witnessed a complicated set of changes which some have sought to analyze by using the equally complicated categories of the religious and the secular. Therefore, Asad preferred to approach history through changing forms of “sensibilities, knowledges and behaviors” (Scott and Hirschkind 2006, 10) which created a different context from non-Western societies. In this respect, Genealogies did not deal mainly with the idea of secularism, but Formations of the Secular (2003) did. Asad’s approach to the construction of Formations stemmed basically from two motives, namely a methodological one and a conjectural one. Methodologically, Asad was inclined toward constructing a new understanding of the secular through an indirect genealogy. This was a critical intervention into the idea of the modern state and its institutions through the concepts of “pain” (freq. 40), “punishment” (freq. 19), “agency” (freq. 34), and so on. This methodology enabled Asad to focus on the structural problems of the nation-state. On the other hand, the post-9/11 atmosphere in the West triggered efforts to protect Islam and Muslims against potential hate speech and assaults. In other words, this was another moment where (identity) politics and social sciences converged. Therefore, the focus of Formations shifted to themes such as “human rights” (freq. 33), “morality” and “immorality” (freq. 55), and the “law” (freq. 32) together with the related concepts of “family law” (freq. 15), “Egyptian law” (freq. 17), “Islamic law” (freq. 17), “Shari’a” (freq. 40) and “fiqh,” or Islamic jurisprudence (freq. 9). This work comes to contain a prominent non-Western critique of the Western conceptualization of the state. As can be seen from Fig. 5, Formations focused on the caveats in the established understanding of being modern and liberal. In this sense, Asad had a very limited interaction with Bruce and dissented from Taylor’s ideas on the merits of the modern nation-state. While Taylor assumed that horizontality and direct accessibility, alongside a homogenous secular time, were the two characteristics of the state, Asad propounded (2003, 5, 6) that direct access is not an easy task for minorities and depends on spatiotemporal context. Therefore, the notions of toleration and participation were not equally visible to all in countries experiencing different secular modernities. Asad built this critique on their cautious understanding of modernity. They considered modernity as a project or a group of projects governed by actors in power, not by res publica. Therefore, it corresponded to a different set of experiences with respect to “space and time,” “cruelty and health,” and “consumption and knowledge” (ibid., 13). This initialized a new, or at least updated, vocabulary with new ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ in every field, including law. Focusing on Taylor’s second characteristic of the modern state, Asad also assumed that labeling our time as secular might be to take the easy way out. Instead, they reinterpreted secular with respect to the religious rather than in contrast to it. They gave the example of reading the Bible as literature. It is important to note that Asad (ibid., 11) differentiated the religious text and reader. While dogmatism is apparent in the former, normative meaning construction becomes prominent in the latter, which

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Fig. 5 Word cloud for Asad’s vocabulary in Formations of the Secular

points to the problem of agency. That is, the person who reads the text—i.e., the state or individual—gains significance from a human rights perspective. In this sense, the agency problem may link up with the problem of minorities in modern nationstates. Here, starting the conversation through a re-interpretation of the religious helps Asad’s understanding of the secular. Since the meaning of the religious has changed throughout history and this has not been a ‘natural’ change, they say that the meaning of the secular must also be revisited. This change can be observed through the mismatch between secularism as an all-inclusive term and secularism as a definitive feature of the modern state today. To unmask the non-secular character of the modern, liberal nation-state, besides the central concepts of “religion” (freq. 55), “secularism” and the “secular” (freq. 36), Asad also employed the concepts of “myth” (freq. 18), the “sacred” and “sacredness” (freq. 34), “liberal democracies” (freq. 40), “authority” (freq. 24), “sovereignty” (freq. 32), “sovereign states” (freq. 16), “nation-states” (freq. 30) and “violence” (freq. 22) as well as “capitalism” (freq. 13) and “colonialism” (freq. 14). In their conceptual intervention, Asad assumed that the “ontological and epistemological” secular preceded “political” secularism (ibid., 21), and without a true questioning of these foundations, the character of the modern state could not be understood. In this respect, they insisted that modern notions of disenchantment, progress, etc., work as secular myths to set up new sanctities: that the idea of citizenship is based on a self-disciplining practice which generally operates against (religious) minorities; that what causes violence is primarily the nationalistic features (not the religious identities) of the modern state. After this, they concluded that the definitive features

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of a secular state are not religious indifference, rational ethics or political toleration, but “legal reasoning, moral practice, and political authority” (Asad 2003, 255). Obviously, these legalities, moralities, and authorities are historically dependent on power configurations. Linking the trio of state, law, and violence, Asad challenged the mainstream understanding that a secular state would also be an automatic guarantor of individual rights including the right to be protected from violence. Instead, secularism is instrumentalized by political power seeking to maintain its hegemony at all costs. Although “the modern state describes itself as the … state (of law)” as Asad said (Scott 2006, 294), this universal and generalizable ‘lawfulness’ maintains the secularization of the system but does not guarantee the rightful visibility of each citizen. Carrying this one step further, I insist that no state is totally secular. The modern nation-state is alienated from being secular as at every historical moment it is governed by the unethical norms of political competition. Showing respect to individuals’ religious beliefs and practices and guaranteeing their rights can be possible only if the state is governed by secular individuals. Secular, here, means the opposite of neither religious nor pious. It is the basic principle that must govern the relationship between an individual’s religious identity and the state system. This relationship includes both theoretical and practical aspects. Theoretically, any individual should be free to believe anything, and practically, this should not affect the implementation of their citizenship rights nor should it create any advantage to any individual within the system. However, Asad did not make such a constructive move, which would have been comparable to what Taylor attempted from a Roman Catholic perspective, possibly due to an anthropological avoidance of politics. It appears that Asad’s vocabulary was shaped through the readings of Marx, Hobbes, and Foucault. Therefore, Asad’s vocabulary at first includes the Marxist idea of ideology, Hobbesian idea of consent and violence, and the Foucauldian idea of discipline. Therefore, they regard modernity as a project created and initialized by various actors against minorities. But if the modernity as a project assumption is correct, religion, any version of it can be equally seen as a project or a group of projects. In this sense, such a critique does not seem appropriate. More importantly, it is not very helpful to social scientific analysis about modernity and religion. Finally, I would like to revisit Asad’s views regarding the secularization paradigm. They entered a conversation with Jose Casanova for the further investigation of their views on secularization and the secular. Casanova (1994) had reevaluated the thesis from three different aspects: the differentiation of social spheres and separation of religion from other spheres, the privatization of religion and the lessening of the social importance of religious faith, and devotion and establishment. They argued that the differentiation and the lessening of social importance are still definitive features of modern society; privatization is today no longer the case in the same way. They further announced that deprivatization does not automatically lead to negative outcomes for the modern liberal state. Instead, Casanova insisted that religion’s public manifestations are dependent on its relationships with the modern state, its institutions and social life. However, Asad disagreed with Casanova concerning the

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relationship between deprivatization and the other two aspects, differentiation and social importance. Asad argued that once religion becomes publicly and politically visible, it cannot be distinguished from other spheres anymore and its social influence increases, too. These, all together, invalidate the paradigm for Asad. I agree with this Asadian assertion. Still, I think that religion has not, at any stage of history, become a private matter. If it was so, there would no longer be a concept called religion in today’s vocabulary; instead, people would only talk about and through the concept of belief. Here, I consider the Latin origin of religion, re-ligare, which literally means reconnect. If there exists a reconnection, one cannot consider this a private matter. Therefore, there must be at least two agencies, using an Asadian term, which connect with each other. Religion has always been a twin phenomenon in politics, but modern political powers have aimed to shelter politics from any one specific religious attitude. The so-called opposition between the secular and the religious thus stems from this deep type of power struggle. If there were just one type of community, which is religious in its relations and dogmatic in its perceptions of reality, there would be no need to call it religious. But when a new type of community, which is called society, has developed, it becomes distinguishable from the previous understanding of community through the concept of secularity, and a transformation from community to society can be explained via the concept of secularization. Yet, this new community also appeared to be a dogmatic one from various perspectives. Therefore, Asad (2003, 200) is right to assert that the idea of secularity is closely related to the idea of religion. Starting from this point, I suggest that the secularization paradigm does not explain modern political societies in and of themselves, not because the categories of politics and religion are not clearly separated—this was Asad’s claim—but because the dominant power framework has never been secular in secularized societies. That is, individuals are not as secular as scholars have assumed so far. Living in accordance with modern liberal laws and market principles cannot be enough to be considered as living in accordance with secularism. But in that case, what should secularism mean?

Toward an Inclusive Understanding of Secularism This chapter dealt mostly with the limits of the link between secularization and secularism. In order to investigate this, I considered the works of Bruce, Taylor, and Asad as representatives of different ontological and epistemological traditions. They all reflected on different perceptions of the secular in their imaginations. This attitude always includes a robust normative aspect. Even Asad, questioning the objectivity of studies of secularism, included a normative dimension in their works. Maybe this is the nature of studying the social science concepts into which we, modern individuals, are born. Therefore, such a normativity can and should be interfered with through a conceptual intervention. In this respect, there stand three ways of defining secularism: employing either a thick description, a thin one, or totally ignoring it. Since the third option is practically impossible due to its power as both a principle

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and a state doctrine, I tend to make a comparison between secularism’s thin and thick descriptions. Gunn (2013, 87) made this type of conceptual attempt in summarizing seven different interpretations of secularism as “hostility toward religion,” “state neutrality and tolerance toward religion,” “indifference toward religion,” “anticlericalism,” “a decline in religious explanations for the origin of the world,” “the liberation of individuals from the dogmatism of religion,” and “the privatization of religion and the removal of religion from the public sphere.” Following this, they classified four types of states, namely “secular and neutral,” “secular and interventionist,” “theocratic,” and “hybrid.” Let me first reflect on the seven-item classification of secularism and then the four-item classification of state secularism. Although the first four items of the sevenfold classification might resemble secularism, the final three seem to be more affiliated with secularization than secularism. After this initial conceptualization, I question whether hostility toward religion and anticlericalism can be still understood using the same concept today. In today’s multilayered world of identities, the questions of whether individuals are religious or not and whether they are secular or not are irrelevant. Here, I would like to propose some statements that might help further think about the concepts of religion and secularism. • Every individual is homo religiosus; that is, they connect and reconnect with reality through specific beliefs, knowledges, and principles. • Therefore, the terms non-religious or irreligious become void from the perspective of the concept of homo religiosus. • Following this, an individual, who is religious within today’s social relations, might be secular or non-secular. • Also, the religious individual mentioned above does not necessarily have to be pious. • This same individual might have some of their own beliefs, and they might also have hostile attitudes toward other beliefs or religions. These attitudes make them non-secular. The list mentioned above might include other statements as well, but the main concern here is not compartmentalization. Instead, I would like to show how such a list creates a challenge for Gunn’s classification of the state. If the individual positions with respect to religiosity and secularity vary, then a state cannot be considered as “secular interventionist.” In other words, if a state is secular, it should not be interventionist. Interventionism is a relevant concept to neither secularism nor religion. With similar concerns, one cannot assume a hybrid option regarding secularism. Since there is a correlation between the various vague understandings of religion and secularism, I prefer to reinterpret the latter independently from the former. Secularism appeared as the ideology of the dominant church’s counterparts in the Middle Age. However, today, it should be thinly defined with respect to belief, not religion. Following this, I propose that secularism is the fundamental principle that every individual has a right to live within the limits of their beliefs based on their own (spatiotemporal) perceptions. The state is the regulatory instrument or actor (depends

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on the researcher’s methodology and conceptualization) that is also responsible for the maintenance of this principle. Contrary to the mainstream ideological position with regard to religion and its counter-ideological position toward secularism, the main issue has always been how representative the system is of all individuals. Moreover, today, from a post-human perspective, the question should be reformulated as how representative the system is for all living beings, a position of which is ontologically much more inclusive as well as more coherent with scientific facts. This position further allows me to ask what religion and secularism mean in a post-human political milieu. In this sense, I define religion as the web of connections based on the human perception of reality with respect to belief, which leads to specific attitudes and actions toward human and non-human others. Moreover, secularism corresponds to the regulative principle of protecting any human belief and perception of reality. This principle is not necessarily defined as a state principle. Then, I prefer to call this version green secularism, enabling this world to be equally habitable for all species, which is not possible without balancing all normative beliefs in society. Creating the conditions for such a balancing is a question of law and therefore of politics. In this matrix, green secularism can play a part among other principles in the development of post-human democratic society. So, what are the preconditions for green secularism? This question must be investigated in a separate work, but synthesizing the ideas of Asad’s myth, Bruce’s cult and Taylor’s immanent frame might be a good start to talk about these conditions. In this view, everyone creates their life force attaching to their myths appearing in different forms; some of these myths make way for cults, and the immanent frame provides a basis for such cult formation. However, the ‘modern’ immanent frame, manipulated by the Western historicity of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, is not a secular frame of mind. The long history of human domination over other humans and non-humans has been reflected as different projects but always sought to interfere what is different and to redesign it. In such a passionate attempt, human and non-human others have not been allowed to live their ‘century’ as they want, keeping Taylor’s interpretation of secular in mind. Today, there is a struggle between different cults, and this leads to contesting ideas of religion and secularism. This struggle mainly stems from the same non-secular immanent frame. Such a framing causes the marginalization of others, which is a prominent reflection of modern ‘friend–enemy’ politics. In this political equilibrium, both traditional cults, i.e., world religions, and modern cults, i.e., the modern liberal nation-state, have their own self-proclaiming legitimacies. These legitimacies become meaningful only if people attach meaning to them. So, new identities threaten both world religions and the modern liberal nation-state more than these two threaten each other. Belongingness to both world religions and the nation-state diminishes or takes new forms among people these days. Therefore, they prefer to call themselves “unaffiliated” (PEW Research Center 2017) or to change their nationalities. However, this does not mean that they are outside religion. They might have different religious identities than the hegemonic ones. They might be members of a cult with huge future potential. Using Asad’s genealogy of myth, one can investigate how a

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cult of the past can transform into a religious tradition. For instance, when Methodism was launched by Wesley and their colleagues two centuries ago, it was just a cultic interpretation. Later, it became a prominent denomination. This example led me to think that re-enchantment is an unremitting experience for individuals. While some halos disappear from the immanent frame, others appear and become part of reality. Disenchantment and re-enchantment are integral aspects of being homo religiosus. Therefore, disenchantment or re-enchantment alone cannot be the solution. They must have a unique character, i.e., allowing harmony with(in) nature and among human and non-human individuals. Now, it is time to reformulate Jonathan Swift’s statement given at the very beginning of this chapter. Maybe, we have just enough secularism to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. For sure, this is an ethical question, bringing many questions with it. Can secularism gain a green character? What should be the role of equality in this investigation? Is a non-hierarchical value system possible? Can we accept the proposition that any religious value, e.g., belief in God or gods, is not superior to any other value, e.g., to care for animals? If states guarantee the equality of all human values, then there may be a chance for equality among humans as well as between humans and non-humans. Otherwise, every individual, from their perspective, will continue to conserve ‘some’ values but not care about others. To conclude, I agree with British sociologists that there have been apparent macrolevel historical trends supporting the secularization paradigm. However, looking at micro-level trends, I conclude modern societies have become secularized, but not secular. In other words, although scores are high (or low, according to the question) when we consider some dimensions of secularization, people and state systems are not becoming more secular. Still, I agree with Asad—albeit interpreting their argument in a different way: This is a prominent characteristic of the modern liberal state, a modern structure governed by mostly non-secular individuals. In this interpenetrating structure, the concepts remain equally vague. The obstacle to understanding modern societies stems initially from the assumption that they are secular. However, the main problem is modern identities’ relationships with others and otherness. Therefore, the secularism debate stands on the one hand between the nature of reasoning and the philosophy of religion and, on the other hand, between the nature of politics itself, including education policies, and knowledge production systems.

References Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Berger, P. L. (1967). The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion. Garden City: Doubleday. Berger, P. L. (Ed.). (1999). The desecularization of the world: Resurgent religion and world politics. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Braidotti, R. (2008). In spite of the times: The postsecular turn in feminism. Theory, Culture and Society, 25(6), 1–24. Bruce, S. (1992). Introduction. In S. Bruce (Ed.), Religion and modernization: Sociologists and historians debate the secularization thesis (pp. 1–7). New York: Oxford University Press. Bruce, S. (2002). God is dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell. Bruce, S. (2006). Secularization and the impotence of individualized religion. The Hedgehog Review, 06(Spring/Summer), 35–45. Bruce, S. (2011). Secularization: In defence of an unfashionable theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bruce, S. (2016). Introduction to new edition. In S. Bruce & B. R. Wilson (Eds.), Religion in secular society: Fifty years on (pp. vii–xix). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, J. (2008). Sexual politics, torture and secular time. The British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 1–23. Casanova, J. (1994). Public religions in the modern world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Casanova, J. (2006). Secularization revisited: A reply to Talal Asad. In D. Scott & C. Hirschkind (Eds.), Powers of the secular modern: Talal Asad and his interlocutors (pp. 12–30). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Casanova, J. (2009). The secular and secularisms. Social Research, 76(4), 1049–1066. Gunn, T. J. (2013). Secularism, the secular, and secularization. In J. Contreras & R. M. M. de Codes (Eds.), Trends of secularism in a pluralistic world (pp. 59–106). Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana and Vervuert. Lechner, F. J. (n.d.). Secularization. http://sociology.emory.edu/home/documents/profilesdocuments/lechner-secularization.pdf. Accessed June 20, 2018. Mahmood, S. (2006). Secularism, hermeneutics, and empire: The politics of Islamic Reformation. Public Culture, 18(2), 323–347. Martin, D. (1978). A general theory of secularization. Oxford: Blackwell. PEW Research Center. (2017). The changing global religious landscape. http://www.pewforum. org/2017/04/05/the-changing-global-religious-landscape/. Accessed November 5, 2018. Schultz, K. M. (2006). Secularization: A bibliographic essay. The Hedgehog Review, 06(Spring/Summer), 170–177. Scott, D. (2006). Appendix: The trouble of thinking: An interview with Talal Asad. In D. Scott & C. Hirschkind (Eds.), Powers of the secular modern: Talal Asad and his interlocutors (pp. 243–304). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Scott, D., & Hirschkind, C. (2006). Introduction: The anthropological skepticism of Talal Asad. In D. Scott & C. Hirschkind (Eds.), Powers of the secular modern: Talal Asad and his interlocutors (pp. 1–11). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Shiner, L. (1967). The concept of secularization in empirical research. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 6(1967), 207–220. Stark, R. (1999). Secularization, R.I.P. Sociology of Religion, 60(3), 249–273. Stark, R., & Iannaccone, L. R. (1994). A supply-side reinterpretation of the “secularization” of Europe. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 33(3), 230–252. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Taylor, C. (2008). Charles Taylor interviewed. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/ charles-taylor-philosopher-interview. Accessed August 12, 2018. Taylor, C. (2009). Interview: Charles Taylor. https://philosophynow.org/issues/74/Charles_Taylor. Accessed August 12, 2018. Taylor, C. (2016). Afterword. In F. Zemmin, C. Jager, & G. Vanheeswijck (Eds.), Working with A Secular Age: Interdisciplinary perspectives on Charles Taylor’s master narrative (pp. 369–384). Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.

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Wallis, R., & Bruce, S. (1992). Secularization: The orthodox model. In S. Bruce (Ed.), Religion and modernization: Sociologists and historians debate the secularization thesis (pp. 8–30). New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, B. R. (1982). Religion in sociological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ça˘gda¸s Dedeo˘glu is Research Associate at The Center for Critical Research on Religion. Previously, Dedeo˘glu worked as Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at Istanbul Arel University and as Research Scholar at the University of Florida’s Department of Religion. Dedeo˘glu’s research interests include political ecology of religion and science, secularism, and critical ontologies. These interests animate Dedeo˘glu’s involvement with other research organizations, including the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture and the Political Ecology Network.

The Sociology and Anthropology of Secularism: From Genealogy/Power to the Multiple Manifestations of the Secular Fabio Vicini

Introduction: Between Modernization and Secularization Secularization has been a topic of sociological and anthropological discussion since founding fathers of the discipline such as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx reflected on the processes of modernization and industrialization that had been transforming Europe since the nineteenth century. It was especially Weber who associated the process of capitalist transformation and modernization with that of “disenchantment” and hence secularization of the world (Weber 2004). However, the secularization thesis was explicitly formulated for the first time only in the 1950s by the advocates of modernization theory. These scholars defended the idea that in order to become modernized, non-Western societies had to switch from their “traditional” economies, technologies, and cultures, to European-like ones in which religiously informed worldviews would be no longer prevalent (e.g., Lerner 1958; Eisenstadt 1966; Huntington 1968; see Tipps 1973). New accounts of modernization emerged in response to this scholarship in the following years which called for a higher level of analytical complexity and suggested the existence of a multiplicity of different patterns to modernity beyond the one derived from Europe (e.g., Eisenstadt 2000). In parallel, attempts were made to reformulate the theory of secularization in a more rigorous fashion (Casanova 1994; Taylor 2007) and to explain the reemergence of the religious phenomenon in the last quarter of the twentieth century both within and without the West (Casanova 1994; Stark 1999; Stark and Finke 2000). In the meantime, since the end of the eighteenth century, anthropology had been developing as a separate branch of the social sciences mostly dedicated to the mission of exploring and understanding exactly what the early theorists of secularization had aprioristically excluded from their inquiry: religion and the central role it still played in non-Western societies. It follows that anthropologists have long excluded the F. Vicini (B) ˙Istanbul 29 Mayis University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Ünsar and Ö. Ünal Eri¸s (eds.), Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_6

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secular from their analysis much like sociological explorations have tended to neglect the resilience of religion in Europe. Yet it soon became clear that this disciplinary separation was largely artificial. On the one hand, new works on modernization acknowledged that the theoretical constructs of their predecessors did not allow to account for the revitalization of religion in the post-Cold War era. In parallel, anthropologists exploring the impact of the colonial legacy on the legal, educative, and administrative systems of non-Western societies begun to point to how these societies were not as unchanging as their predecessors had initially thought. The anthropological interest in the study of secularism emerged indeed from a reflection on the extent to which European-inspired “secular” institutional frameworks had been enforced on the colonies by bringing about a set of radical changes in the institutional settings and lives of the colonized. A pioneer in drawing attention to the complicity between anthropology and colonialism (see Asad 1973), Asad (2003) was also the first to spark a debate on secularization in anthropology. As he has insightfully remarked in the first pages of his highly influential Formations of the Secular, while the study of the religious phenomenon has been a core concern of anthropological inquiry since its inception in the nineteenth century, the “secular” has remained largely understudied (Asad 2003: 21). Asad dedicates the first part of the book to explore the emergence of such a concept and the kind of sensibilities it enabled in Europe beginning in the sixteenth century. Animated by a distinctive “skeptical attitude,” he critically explores how secular power is invisibly enacted through language (Scott and Hirschkind 2006). He is not simply content with defining the secular factually for what it is or it is supposed to be. He also aims to unsettle the ideological association of the secular with dominant views of the subject, individual freedom, and self-realization that are commonly upheld by modern liberal discourse. Indeed, Asad put great effort into illustrating how, for example, the common view that sees pain and suffering as something that human beings do naturally reject is not a universal trait shared by all cultures, but the reflex of specific modern “secular” views of the subject. This new modern view differs largely from pre-modern accounts in which pain and suffering were central in the path that the religious virtuoso had to go through to achieve ethical maturity (Asad 1993, 2003: 67–99). Accordingly, Asad is persuasive in showing how the secular logic is not as neutral and universal as it is often thought to be. On the contrary, even secular humanitarian discourses that claim to export welfare and human rights worldwide often end up exerting a form of violence upon populations with values and sociopolitical views that are different from those of Western political modernity. When, later in Formations of the Secular, Asad moves from exploring the concept of the secular to researching the implications of secularization processes, he cogently demonstrates that the diffusion of a secular logic outside Europe had severe implications for the way “religion” was lived in those places. Contrary to what the proponents of the modernization thesis implied, religion has never really disappeared either from Europe or from the rest of the world. Rather, it has been significantly reconfigured by the transformations that were brought about by modernization. The domain of “religion” itself, namely what should be understood as “religious” (as

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distinct from “secular”), has been determined by historically specific dynamics of secularization. For instance, in his account of the transformations that took place in the legal domain in Egypt following the modernizing reforms of the late nineteenth century, Asad illustrates how so-called Islamic law (sharia) was transmuted into a subsidiary field of state’s legislation dealing only with a few specific matters such as personal disputes and family law (Asad 2003: 227–235). Not only the religious domain was drastically shrunk in the process, but “religion” was confined to the private sphere of the family and the individual inner forum. In this regard, secularization has affected world societies much more subtly and pervasively than assumed by those accounts that understand secularism simply as functional differentiation. As remarked in one of the opening sentences of the book, it is easy to think of secularism “simply as requiring the separation of religious from secular institutions in government, but that is not all it is” (Asad 2003: 1). The affirmation of the political doctrine of secularism brought with it the diffusion of a secular logic geared to the regulation (rather than elimination) of the religious sphere. This and other statements were a tacit response to other, more sociological, works proposing a “neutral” account of secularism as a process immune from power dynamics. Casanova (1994) has notoriously claimed that of the three major propositions that underlie the secularization thesis, the differentiation between the secular and the religious spheres is the only tenable one.1 In this regard, Casanova has defined modernization-cumsecularization as “a process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres—primarily the modern state, the capitalist market economy, and modern science—from the religious sphere, and the concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere” (Casanova 2006: 12, 13).2 On the contrary, for Asad the political doctrine of secularism is entirely pervaded by power. It follows that secularization cannot be merely understood as the functional division of society into separate spheres of action and influence. Rather, secularism is the emblem of the European modern political project whose exportation abroad has impacted on non-Western sensibilities, attitudes, and assumptions through a redefinition of what is admissible and what is not in these societies. It is for this reason that Asad is interested in exploring “the doctrine and practice of secularism regardless of where they have originated” (Asad 2003: 17). Rather than with origins, Asad and the scholars who have been inspired by his work are foremost interested in understanding how the political project of secular modernity has impacted on the lives of people outside the West.

1 The

other two propositions were the decline of religious practice (a view that had been defended by the advocates of the modernization thesis) and the shrinking of religion to the private dimension. According to Casanova (1994), both have been disproven by the current religious revival. 2 In this updated version of his theory, Casanova (2006) agrees with Asad’s critique of his original position but maintains that the search for a theory of secularism resting on a more traditional comparative historical and sociological perspective should still be pursued because dropping it entirely would leave us without adequate analytical tools to understand the phenomenon.

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Ethnographic Explorations of Secularism Following Asad’s pioneering work, a series of studies have explored the issue of secularism from an ethnographically grounded perspective by looking at the processes of articulation of the secular/religious binary in specific historical and cultural settings with particular attention to the legal dimension (e.g., Agrama 2010, 2012; Bowen 2008, 2010; Mahmood 2012, 2015; Starrett 2010; Scheer et al. 2019). One of the most important works of this anthropological trend is Agrama’s (2010, 2012) ethnographic account of how the secular and the religious intertwine in legal practice in contemporary Egypt. Agrama provocatively suggests that the question of whether Egypt is a secular or religious state is crucial not so much for the answer it might possibly receive but, rather, because it points to the core of his main argument: “that secularism itself incessantly blurs together religion and politics in Egypt, and that it is a form of power that works through and relies upon the precariousness of the categories it establishes” (Agrama 2012: 71). Agrama recounts the exemplary case of the apostasy verdict of 1996 that was passed on Abu Zayd, a Cairo University Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, for his proposal to approach the Quran hermeneutically. Although the concept that was used by his accusers—the principle of hisba that asks Muslims to command the good and prohibit evil—did not appear in any legal code at the time, the High Court of Cassation used it as legal ground to process Zayd and nullify his marriage. What is significant about this story, according to Agrama, is not the fact that an allegedly secular court introduced a “religious” concept into its regulation, but that secularism—intended as the dominant system of modern ruling—conferred the judiciary such faculty, namely the power to decide whether an allegedly religious principle can or cannot be absorbed within secular law. It is in this sense that Agrama (2012: 24) argues that “secularism involves less a separation of religion and politics than the fashioning of religion as an object of continual management and intervention.” Rather than a neutral principle of government, secularism is the expression of the state’s sovereign power in a liberal modern era in which indeterminacy rather than normativity is the rule. Such power lies in the faculty that secular institutions retain of deciding whether a behavior should be considered legally acceptable or not, and eventually, of applying exceptions to the law. Following the philosopher Agamben (1998)—and Schmitt’s (2005) work on political theology before him— Agrama highlights how the sovereign is best conceived “as the one who can make the exception to the law” (Agrama 2012: 142, 143). In the case of Abu Zayd, the exception is called upon through the vaguely defined idea of “public order.” It is indeed in the name of the principle of collective security and solidarity that the exception to the rule is invoked and a “religious” principle is applied to the case. It is because “the public order exhibits an irresolvable tension between formal legal equality and majority sensibility” (Ibid. 2012: 223) that space is left open for the arbitrary intervention of the secular sovereign (read secularism). It follows that, rather than being made of some essential principles, secularism is better understood as the expression of a

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pure form of power which continuously redefines, at will, the line separating what is permissible and what is not. In her poignant critique of the right to religious freedom in the Middle East—a right that is so often flaunted in the international arena either as embodied in the legislation of the nation-states or as enshrined in international law—the prematurely departed anthropologist Saba Mahmood too approached secularism as the globally dominant liberal model of sovereignty. Despite its self-proclaimed neutrality, according to Mahmood (2012, 2015), the principle of religious freedom is a prime example of how liberal secular logic regulates (rather than just leaves space for the expression of) religious affairs—by so allowing Western powers to perpetuate their hegemony over non-Western societies. In her words, although secularism has promised “to demolish religious hierarchies in order to create a body politic in which all its members are equal before the law,” it has generated two paradoxical outcomes. First, it has transformed minority–majority relations by making identity difference “involved in the regulation and management of religious life to an unprecedented degree,” and second, it has intensified “preexisting interfaith inequalities, allowing them to flourish in society” (Mahmood 2015: 2). In this regard, the principle of religious freedom has made religious difference more relevant than it ever was before, by so contributing to the escalation in religious violence between Christians, Muslims, and other minorities in Egypt and the broader Middle East beginning in the twentieth century. Rather than the expression of atavic inter-religious conflicts, sectarianism is the direct consequence of the affirmation of the right to religious freedom under the shield of secular law. Initially implemented in the region during colonial occupation, this principle is now imposed on a global scale outside the West through the rhetoric of human rights. Contrary to claims that would see religious freedom as the solution to interfaith conflicts, Mahmood argues that the notion has fostered religious divisions in the negative, by making them more marked and relevant than ever. The debt of both Agrama and Mahmood to the work of Talal Asad is boundless. This can also be inferred from Mahmood’s definition of secularism—which could not be straighter in rejecting Casanova’s theory of functional differentiation. In her words, secularism “is not simply the organizing structure for what are regularly taken to be a priori elements of social organization—public, private, political, religious— but a discursive operation of power that generates these very spheres, establishes their boundaries, and suffuses them with content, such that they come to acquire a natural quality for those living within its terms” (Mahmood 2015: 3). This definition contains both the two main lines of inquiry opened by Asad. On the one hand, it points to secularism’s prerogative when it comes to defining the border between the religious and the secular domains (Agrama 2010, 2012). On the other, it highlights how secularism has infused societies with a new “configuration of the human sensorium,” by generating new and distinct secular sensibilities, affects, and embodied dispositions which undergird modern liberal forms of governance (Hirschkind 2011: 633). Far from marking the simple absence of religion, in this configuration secularism is seen as a creative form of power that affects the human perception and experience of the world (Scheer et al. 2019).

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A common indissoluble trait of this scholarship is the view that secularism represents the political project of our times and that, as such, it has profoundly affected the way the boundaries between public and private, secular and religious, legitimate and illegitimate, wished and undesired behaviors have been, and continue to be, drawn both in the West and in the rest of the world. Indeed, it persuasively illustrates how secular principles of governance that were introduced in sixteenth-century Europe still dominate our post-national world in the guise of global discourses on human rights, religious freedom, and the like. In this sense, these studies have been very effective in revealing how the Western political project has shaped our world even more deeply than a structural analysis of the legal, educational, and political transformations of the last century and a half would suggest. However, this perspective is limiting when it comes to its analytical capacity for explaining how the relationship between the secular and the religious is articulated and negotiated in specific historical and social settings beyond Europe—and, at least in part, also within it (see Bangstad 2009). As it has been argued, the very definition of what is “secular” is contested and can be understood only contextually, in relation to how it is distinguished from its “religious opposite” (Starrett 2010), whereas the works inspired by Asad tend to reproduce a predetermined understanding of secularism which hinders the exploration of the processes of subtle articulation and re-articulation of the relationship between the secular and the religious in different places and epochs. When Asad (2003: 1) asserts that “abstractly stated, examples of this separation can be found in medieval Christendom and in the Islamic empires— and no doubt elsewhere too,” he seems to be well aware that the opposition of secular versus religious is not an entirely European novelty. However, the scholarship he has inaugurated has tended to overlook the dynamics by which a secular sphere might have emerged somewhere else too in order to provide a solution to similar or different problems and according to specific sociocultural dynamics.

The Multiplicity of Secular Experiences New approaches in the study of secularism have highlighted that no matter how important the trend led by Asad and his students is, it has generally understood the secular/religious distinction as the exclusive outcome of Western (and particularly colonial) history thus precluding the exploration of how the distinction has been historically articulated in non-European contexts (Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2016; Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2017). In this regard, they suggest exploring how the boundaries of religion have been drawn in history within a multiplicity of institutional and regional settings by means of differentiation and distinction from its conceptual and institutional opposite: secularity. The “multiple secularities” framework has been inspired by the “multiple modernities” approach, a previous trend in sociohistorical and civilization studies emerging in the early 2000s that criticized proponents of the modernization thesis of the 1950s and 1960s for conceiving modernity as the outcome of a single and linear path stemming from a unique Western experience. Adopting

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a comparative perspective, this trend argued that multiple and diverse pathways to modernity have emerged from Axial Age civilizations (from about the eighth to the third century BCE), which have only successively interacted, in historically specific and complex ways, with European modernity (Eisenstadt 2000; Arnason et al. 2005). The multiple secularities paradigm arises from a similarly felt need to historicize the debate in order to look for the multiple and variegated ways in which the relationship between the secular and the religious has been articulated in different places and epochs both in the West and in the non-Western world.3 The scholarship on secularism has often limited the analysis to transformations within Christendom and Western societies (e.g., Casanova 1994; Taylor 2007), sometimes even suggesting that secularism would be an exceptional development of European history (e.g., Berger et al. 2008). Studies comparing the way secularism has been distinctively institutionalized in different countries have importantly suggested that there is not one form of secularism only, but many, and that within each of them, the religious/secular distinction is articulated in specific ways (Cady and Hurd 2010). For instance, secularism can be implemented either in a stricter and more “assertive” way (as in France and Turkey until the 2000s) or in a more pluralist and “passive” one (as in the USA) (Kuru 2009). Similarly, it can take either a “moderate,” pluralist, and inclusive form, or a more “radical” one (Modood 2010). Although these studies certainly enrich the perspective on secularism, according to the proponents of the multiple secularities paradigm, they continue to see secularism as a Western import and fall short when it comes to exploring the complex dynamics through which the secular/religious divide has been articulated across time and space. Further, they are unable to illustrate how cultures of secularity operate beyond state policy by shaping everyday life. In the most up-to-date account of the paradigm, Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt (2017: 10) point to how one of the main problems with the trend of studies inspired by Asad is that it conflates the analysis of secularism with its critique, so that “secularism is often viewed primarily from the perspective of the critique of ideology.” While Asad has insightfully illustrated the complex genealogy of the secular/religious divide and suggested that such distinction is part of a long history that predates nineteenth-century Europe, those who followed his line of research have tended to emphasize the European origins of the distinction. This attitude was rooted in their critique of Western colonization and its aftermath. No matter how groundbreaking this scholarship has been, it has ended up replacing the normativism of classic theories of secularization with a new one in which secularism is seen in the negative as the ensemble of discourses and practices that have historically constrained the natural development of local forms of social, cultural, and political organization. Secularism can only be portrayed in the guise of the modern state and its sovereign power, an 3 However, the multiple secularities project differs from the multiple modernities paradigm on at least

two points. First, it aims to be more empirical and less abstract by focusing on “cultures of secularity” rather than on grand civilizational pathways. Second, in addition to investigating the appearance of the secular/religious divide within ancient pre-modern civilizations, it is also interested in recent (including contemporary) articulations of secularity in every region of the world (see Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2017: 17–19).

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all-encompassing form of power that regulates all the spheres of society. It is this monolithic representation of the secular project as one of exclusive domination over the religious field that the advocates of the multiple secularities perspective contest because, in their view, it precludes a more detached investigation of how the secular/religious relationship has been articulated in multiple and different—and, why not, more balanced—ways both inside and outside Europe. In order to arrive at a more neutral concept for the exploration of the secular/religious divide, the advocates of this paradigm have preferred to use the notion of “secularity” as distinct from both secularization and secularism (Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine 2016; Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012, 2017). Secularization has been generally used in sociological and anthropological literature to mean the process of differentiation of society into separated spheres and the following resignification that each sphere underwent as a result of this process, whereas, as illustrated above, secularism has been usually employed to define the institutional arrangement and separation of secular power from religion, and the domination of the former over the latter. Although different, these terms are related and can both be associated with the way the secular/religious couple has been articulated in Europe since around the sixteenth century. In contrast, secularity is a more open and malleable notion, which is more consonant with the goal of exploring processes of cultural and symbolic differentiation between the secular and religious spheres in different social and historical settings. In this regard, it is used by the advocates of the multiple secularities project to investigate the emergence of the distinction within different social domains largely before the advent of the Western project of political modernity. Following a longstanding tradition in German sociology that goes back to the work of Weber (1949), they suggest to consider the secular and the religious as “ideal types” possessing a heuristic value and allowing for cross-cultural and historical comparison. Although they are aware of the risks of excessive theorization that their proposal may entail, they maintain that secularity and secularism are useful heuristic concepts to develop a comparative framework that aims to be as comprehensive as possible (Casanova 2006: 35, see also note 1). In sum, the “multiple secularities” paradigm offers new insight for the analytical investigation of secularism beyond conventional timelines and conceptual limits by calling for the programmatic exploration of “differentiations between the religious and other social domains (which are thereby marked as non-religious)” in response to “specific societal problems” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2017: 20). By not subordinating the analysis to the critique of ideology, this approach argues for a more detached exploration of the secular/religious dichotomy in different periods and places, in all domains including everyday life and culture, and economic, social, and political institutions. While the programmatic nature of this trend is an advantage, it can also be a constraint, however. The “in the making” nature of the project leaves some questions open, such as whether the idea of secularity can be so easily translated into other epochs and places in which the religious and secular spheres might have not been as clearly separated as it happened in Europe. One is indeed left to wonder about the

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nature of secularity itself and what it stands for beyond defining a “non-religious” space. One related question is where the line separating this space from its “religious other” lies given the contested nature of the notion of religion when applied outside Christendom (Asad 1993). It may indeed simply be that the “secular” itself is not a good analytical category, not only inasmuch as it is always constructed in relation to its opposite, but also because what constitutes the secular and the religious at the emic level is always contested (Starrett 2010). Finally, it is possible to perceive a veneer of secular bias in the critique moved by the advocates of the multiple secularities paradigm against the Asadian school when they criticize it for excessively highlighting religion as a space of freedom at the expenses of “the role of the autonomy associated with modernity and secularity.”4 Regarding this last point, I would suggest that neither secular nor religious discourses are liberating or oppressive per se and that their effects on people’s lives have to be scrutinized singularly and contextually for each case. In part, this is what the multiple secularities paradigm invites us to do when it calls for exploring secularity beyond the contours of Western political experience, without conflating notions of state, secularity, and secularism. The emphasis placed by this paradigm on the multilayered nature of secular experience paves the way for an inquiry into how the secular/religious distinction is articulated in multiple ways in different places and epochs. Below I rely on some studies in historical sociology to sketch the possibility of such an exploration with regard to bureaucratic culture in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the sixteenth century.

The Disentanglement of State and Islam in the Ottoman Empire While the multiple secularities project “expressly do not confine analysis to the relationship between the state and religion” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2017: 13), the following overview focuses on the emergence and evolution of secularity in the Ottoman state. This choice may seem to be dictated by the need of finding a “safe 4 The

full passage is as follows: “While the secularisation paradigm is often considered to be Eurocentric and antireligious, recent research generally fashions itself as sympathetic toward religion. At times, the studies evoke the impression of a ‘natural’ religiosity among the population and of an ideological secularism founded on an alliance between political and academic elites. Compared to the older debate, recent contributions often engender an inversion of the subject and object of the critique: Whereas secularism used to be regarded as a means of liberation from the constraints of traditional and religious authority, religion now appears as a space of freedom, and secularism as an instrument of regimentation and of exclusion. The heightened awareness of secularism’s articulation of power relationships and knowledge regimes, and its selective authorisation of forms of religious subjectivity and expression that are compatible with liberal modernity, is significant. However, such an awareness becomes flawed when it downplays the role of the autonomy associated with modernity and secularity, compared to that of moments of domination, as well as when it defines modernity in a manner that excludes religious freedom” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2017: 10, 11).

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haven,” since, after all, the state is generally accepted as being the secular space par excellence. Such a view, however, would mean to reiterate the point that the modern state is the quintessence of secularism, and therefore, that its precursors in the ancient and medieval worlds must share at least some of its traits. However, neither the Ottoman nor the Turkish state should be imagined as essentially “secular”—and the same applies to some of the most important ideologues of the early Turkish Republican era (Dressler 2013). As I have argued elsewhere, state and religion have always been intertwined during both the Ottoman and the Republican periods (Vicini 2016). Therefore, also the differentiation between the secular and the religious spheres has never been clear-cut, and this should be kept in mind when exploring secularity in the Ottoman-Turkish case.5 This does not mean agreeing with those classical studies in sociology and anthropology defending the idea that, since Islam encompasses all domains of life including the law and the state, Muslim societies have traditionally lacked a differentiation between the secular and the religious spheres (Gellner 1983; Lewis 1994). This argument has been opposed for two main contrasting reasons. On the one hand, recent works on secularism have shown that European societies are much less secular than generally assumed (e.g., Bowen 2008, 2010). On the other, the anthropological literature has abundantly demonstrated that a complex intermingling of secular and religious dimensions also characterizes Muslim-majority societies (Asad 2003; Agrama 2012). As remarked above, however, these latter studies have usually focused on the post-colonial era, often ending up reproducing the idea that the secularization of these societies was the byproduct of Western domination. Historians have generally paid greater attention to the existence of a secular/religious distinction in ancient societies, in particular with regard to the two domains of state administration and the law (Crone 1980; Lapidus 1996). According to Lapidus (1996), a first degree of differentiation between the two spheres had already emerged in Mesopotamian societies between the fourth and the late third millenniums BCE when sacred and royal authority were split as the priests took over the religious field and the kings became political specialists. This separation of labor was linked with the emergence of new imperial states which had to rule over an increasing number of cities and a multiplicity of religious communities. For analogous reasons, the distinction was maintained within the Roman and Sassanid Empires.6 In turn, when between the seventh and the eighth centuries Arab Muslims expanded northward and conquered large parts of the lands that belonged to these two empires, they integrated large part of their legal and administrative practices, including the distinction between the secular and the religious spheres, into their system. As the Umayyad 5 Actually,

the separation has never been absolute anytime or anywhere, although it has certainly reached a higher degree of separation in European history, beginning with the Peace of Westphalia (see Asad 2003; Salvatore 2007). 6 Although the emergence of a first separation of religious and political functions can be traced back to the third and fourth millenniums BCE, Lapidus (1996) clarifies that it became more discernible only later in the Roman Empire, where Christianity had established its autonomous legal institutions already before becoming the official religion.

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and the Abbasid dynasties centralized their political power by concentrating the military and the bureaucratic bodies in their hands, the Caliphate progressively evolved into something resembling more a monarchical entity than reflecting the communitarian ethos of the first Muslim community. Although formally the Caliph remained the leader of the community, he was deprived of his original spiritual role. As he became progressively more concerned with strictly political issues, the source of religious authority passed from him to the class of the Muslim virtuosos. These were scholars who embodied the original message of the Prophet Muhammad and implemented Islamic law both in society and for the administration of the state (Lapidus 1996: 10, 11; Cf. Hodgson 1974, I: 221 ff.). The split between Islamicate states bearing the banner of Islam but identifying themselves as cosmopolitan empires on the one hand, and locally organized organic communities on the other, was fully institutionalized under the Turkic empires, the Seljuk’s (1037–1194) first and the Ottomans later (1299–1922). The Ottoman state tradition has been largely shaped by Roman and especially Sassanid traditions, as well as by a Turkic/Mongol ideal of quasi-divine monarchy which had roots in the pre-Islamic past. Therefore, the principle of sovereignty undergirding the idea of the Sultanate was substantially at odds with the Islamic ideal according to which the Caliph held both political and religious authority over his subjects (Findley 1980: 8). Indeed, the imperial fiat of the Sultanate, at least in some respects, exceeded what was allowed by Islamic laws (Mardin 1991: 115). Relatedly, some scholars have even claimed that, in these times, the Caliph title became someway auxiliary and the Ottomans took it over from the late Egyptian-based Abbasid dynasty mainly to increase their legitimacy in the eyes of the Arabs whose lands they were conquering (see Karateke 2005). Others have additionally noted that because the Ottomans initially ruled over a predominantly Christian populated area, they could not rely on Islam as the only source of political legitimacy and had to opt for a political system that subordinated religion to the state’s needs (Barkey 2014: 472). This does not mean to claim for a total detachment of the Sultan, state elites, and the common people, or to suggest that after all the Ottomans had an instrumental view of Islam. As remarked by Mardin (1991, 2005), offering a two-tiered representation of Ottoman society as divided between the elites and the common people is misleading and would undermine our capacity to appreciate the way the Ottoman rulers resorted to ideals of an Islamically organized society that were shared by both the classes. As clarified below, Ottoman state bureaucrats possessed a different status and identity from the rest of the population. However, they needed a political theory that could at least formally safeguard the principle of the supremacy of Islamic law over secular law and the legitimacy of the Sultan as its upholder (Mardin 1991: 117). This was found in the application of the Platonic ideal of the philosopher-king to the Sultan administering the sharia under the guidance of “divine wisdom” (Gibb 1982: 144, 145; Mardin 1991: 118). The theory served the needs of the Ottoman rulers, which is why it regularly appeared in major collections and works dealing with the administration of the state. Far from being just a gimmick, it reflected a set of “operational rules” that were already shared by Ottomans of both low and high status (Mardin 1991). The idea of “divine wisdom” allowed indeed for the integration of

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a social order mainly regulated through the sharia, which was interpreted locally by the Islamic scholars (ulema), with the level of state administration governed by what might be called “secular” codes (kanun) and imperial decrees (e.g., Findley 1980: 8, 9; Barkey 2014: 473, 474).7 A similar mechanism that allowed for connecting the elites with at least some segments of wider Ottoman society operated at the level of personal codes of conduct and behavior. The set of codified behaviors known in Arabic as adab included a distinct and composite literary culture as well as corresponding modes and etiquettes of proper public demeanor. While its origins date back to pre-Islamic “secular” Persian court culture, adab was integrated into the Islamic tradition, within which it soon began to overlap with the set of ethical rules and moral behaviors exemplified by the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds (hadith).8 Since this code was shared among courtiers, literati, and state bureaucrats both within and without the Ottoman Empire, it served the goal of building good relations with foreign administrators and literati abroad, as well as with religious scholars and traders at home (Salvatore 2016: 123–125, 2018). For this reason, adab culture was part of the education that civil and military servants too received at the Palace school, and as a consequence, it acquired a more marked “state-oriented” (and in this sense “secular”) character over time (Findley 1980: 10, 11). As remarked by Salvatore (2018), however, ambivalence has prevailed for a long time and only a “soft distinction” could be traced between adab culture and the hadith tradition until the colonial epoch. Indeed, in the Ottoman context, the distinction between secular and religious spheres was never as clearly marked as one might think. This is especially true for the two domains of sharia and adab inasmuch as they both provided the elites and the rest of society with shared codes that allowed for the construction of interclass relations of mutuality and solidarity. Only if one moves from the level of laws and norms to that of the lifestyles of the bureaucrats, the distinction becomes more evident. Since the very beginning, Ottoman state employees had indeed cultivated a quite separate and distinctively “secular” identity, which they have progressively reinforced in the successive centuries through their special relation with European chancelleries. In one of his seminal articles, Mardin illustrates the cleavage between state bureaucratic elites and the class of religious scholars (ulema) in the Empire by reporting the words that Sehzade ¸ Korkut, a sixteenth-century Ottoman prince sent on administrative duty to a provincial town, wrote to his father. In his account of the situation on the ground, Sehzade ¸ noted the existence of a clear distinction between what he labeled as the “team of the just” and the “team of the unjust.” The former was composed of 7 One of the most basic and common examples of how the Sultan used the kanun to legislate beyond

the sharia is the charge of interests. This was permitted by Ottoman law, although within certain limits. For instance, under Suleiman I, the kanun approved a charge of interests only within the limit of 10% (Gerber 1994: 73–75, quoted in Barkey 2014: 474). 8 Particularly relevant here according to Salvatore (2016: 124, 2018: 10, 11) was the role of the Sufi networks in trickling down elite etiquette taken from the adab tradition to groups of more ordinary people—especially merchants belonging to the higher middle strata of society—between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries.

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Islamic scholars who had been educated in Islamic educational institutions (medrese) and those who, like them, followed Islamic ideals of justice in the administration of current affairs. On the contrary, the “team of the unjust” were the “servants” (kul) of the Sultan and totally depended on him. They did not even possess rights, including the right to inherit. For this reason, they recklessly enforced the Sultan’s fiat on the population with no regard for social justice (Mardin 1991: 116–117). Educated at the Palace school into the arts of war and government, they had only very limited knowledge of religious matters. While until the fifteenth century no sharp distinction between them and those educated in the medrese existed, the gap widened over time. By the end of the eighteenth century, as the volume of chancery arose, the state servants grew into a distinct bureaucratic elite that administered the Empire under the orders of the Grand Vizier. As such, these bureaucrats controlled state records and were responsible for bookkeeping, as well as for financial and other important matters. Because they had much more occasions than the ulemas to interact with foreign functionaries and representatives, they were also highly exposed to political principles and new ideas coming from Europe, including enlightened despotism (Mardin 1991: 117). It is not by chance if these were the same functionaries who one or two generations later initiated the movement of reform and modernization of the Empire known as Tanzimat. In a later article, Mardin (2005) goes a step forward and refers to the work of the doyen of Ottoman history, Inalcık (1973), to illustrate the evolution of these two opposite worldviews and administrative cultures during modern times. He takes the “organicistic theory of the state” elaborated by the seventeenth-century eclectic Ottoman scholar Katip Çelebi (1609–1657) as an example of pre-modern secularity. Largely indebted to Ibn Khaldun’s sociologically informed analysis of the rise and demise of states, Katip Çelebi’s proposition advocated the autonomy of the state from religious authority in defiance of classical Islamic theories of the state elaborated by sixteenth-century jurists such as Kınalızade Ali Çelebi (1510 c.ca–1572). According to Mardin, Katip Çelebi’s critical account of religious-based theories of administration anticipated later shifts in Ottoman bureaucratic culture such as the custom, that has become common since the 1730s, of sending Ottoman statesmen to European capitals to observe Western “ways.” Personnel were usually selected from the Amedi Odası, a new bureau responsible for the communication with Western states which was also established during the eighteenth century. Even more significantly, the bureaucrats’ reports focused on material elements of life such as the military, financial, and economic organization, and contained no, or only very little, mention of religious issues. Mardin concludes by emphasizing how it is from the “positivistic” flavor emanating from these reports that future Ottoman bureaucrats cultivated a fascination with positivist scientific views coming from Europe which will largely influence the reform movement of the Tanzimat in the nineteenth century. Although Mardin maintains an ambivalent position with regard to the origins of such “secular” logic, he seems to suggest that it originated from inner Ottoman trajectories which only later intertwined with externally imposed European ones. In sum, it can be said

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that although a tacit aura of secularity has surrounded Ottoman bureaucrats’ discourses and practices since the sixteenth century, this consolidated into a separated worldview only later, when it innervated European-esque ideas. While initially this bureaucratic culture was imbued with religious principles, it gradually gained sharper “secular” contours between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries and reached its full-fledged status with the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923.

Conclusion This chapter has contrasted anthropological explorations of secularism and the secular with a new emerging sociological trend investigating the secular/religious distinction in different places and epochs. Informed by Foucauldian views of modern state power and governmentality, anthropological works have generally tended to depict secularism as an eminently European phenomenon that has later spread across the world through Western colonization and domination. Although the majority of scholars who have worked in this direction, both within and outside anthropology, have acknowledged that secularism can manifest itself differently in different cultural and historical contexts, they have remained confined to models coming from the Western experience. As a consequence, they have explored the secular/religious distinction only in light of the impact that the imposition of modern secular forms of governance has had on the emergence of such separation in non-Western countries. Instead, the second trend suggests to approach the study of secularism and the secular from a more detached perspective and in relation to wider cultural, social, and economic processes. Putting aside issues of genealogy and power, this line of research has opted for taking a more analytical stance and pointed to the need of exploring secularity beyond the contours of European experience. The critical insight of the first approach should never be dismissed, in particular when secularism is considered from the perspective of how Western domination has shaped the life of people in the MENA region and the rest of the colonized world. However, this chapter has pointed to the advantages of the second trend of studies. Above all, it has valued the way the multiple secularities paradigm helps questioning the common view that sees secularization as being mainly a Western import. It is with this new paradigm in mind that in the concluding part of this chapter, I have explored the emergence of a distinct form of secularity from within Ottoman bureaucratic culture. As a general conclusion, it is possible to argue that putting in the foreground the European experience with secularism and the secular involves the risk of dismissing non-Western societies’ history, thus preventing the analysis from detecting alternative patterns that may have emerged in those contexts. In other words, while the critique of modern liberal secularism is certainly important and to the point, it may conceal more than it reveals about endogenous social and cultural dynamics. The exploration of endogenous ways of articulating the secular/religious distinction is especially useful insofar as it presents us with new alternative models for

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thinking secularism outside of Western paradigms. This endeavor acquires particular significance not only academically, but also for the same societies under study, which are today struggling to achieve social reform and change within a global world in which unilateral models are no longer able to offer universal solutions. In such a context, the need to look for alternative social and political models is as urgent as that for better analysis. Despite the limitations that any attempt at coming up with a comparative framework for studying secularity may suffer, the multiple secularities paradigm provides a definition of secularity that is as loose as needed to serve the purpose of such a conceptual enterprise.

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Starrett, G. (2010). The varieties of secular experience. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(3), 626–651. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417510000332. Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Tipps, D. C. (1973). Modernization theory and the comparative study of societies: A critical perspective. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 15(2), 199–226. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0010417500007039. Vicini, F. (2016). Post-Islamism or veering toward political modernity?: State, ideology and Islam in Turkey. Sociology of Islam, 4(3), 261–279. https://doi.org/10.1163/22131418-00403003. Weber, M. (1949). The methodology of the social sciences. In E. A. Shus & H. A. Finch (Eds.). Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Weber, M. (2004). Science as a vocation. In D. Owen & T. B. Strong (Eds.), The vocation lectures. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Wohlrab-Sahr, M., & Burchardt, M. (2012). Multiple secularities: Toward a cultural sociology of secular modernities. Comparative Sociology, 11(6), 875–909. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569133012341249. Wohlrab-Sahr, M., & Burchardt, M. (2017). Revisiting the secular: Multiple secularities and pathways to modernity (Working Paper No. 2). Leipzig: The Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities—Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities,” Universität Leipzig. http://ul. qucosa.de/api/qucosa%3A16726/attachment/ATT-0/. Accessed February 20, 2019. Wohlrab-Sahr, M., & Kleine, C. (2016). Research programme of the HCAS “Multiple secularities— Beyond the West, beyond modernities” (Working Paper No. 1). Leipzig: The Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities—Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities,” Universität Leipzig. http://ul.qucosa.de/api/qucosa%3A16727/attachment/ATT-0/. Accessed February 20, 2019.

Fabio Vicini is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Istanbul 29 Mayis University. After being a Ph.D. fellow at Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies and Zentrum Moderner Orient (2011), he has received his Ph.D. in Anthropology and History in 2013 from the Institute of Human and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore. The same year, he was awarded the Middle East Studies Association’s (MESA) Malcolm H. Kerr Award in the Social Sciences. His work has appeared in journals such as the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Culture and Religion, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, La Ricerca Folklorica, and Sociology of Islam. His last book is titled Reading Islam: Life and Politics of Brotherhood in Modern Turkey (Brill, 2020).

Understanding Turkish Modernization in the Midst of Conjectural Changes in Ethics and Politics A. Murat Sener ¸

Introduction The rise of modern Turkey as a secular state has long been an intellectual and scholarly interest of cross-disciplinary studies where due assessments have always remained subject to constant re-evaluation and re-interpretation. Policy decisions to address newly emerging threats occurring at the domestic and the global realms paved the way for the indoctrination of Islamism in politics and social structure by giving rise to a wide-ranging discourse of secularism in Turkey. In retrospect, following the introduction of multi-party system in 1946, the instrumentalist use of religion in vote hunting to attract conservative–rural electorates was the first major initiative. Later, the turmoil of 1968, the idea of Turkish-Islamic synthesis by the early 1970s against the leftist movements, and its adoption as the state’s official cultural policy in the 1982 Constitution were important milestones in pertain to the Cold War climate with strong bearings on how scholars and policy-makers came to view secularism. Essentially, a continuous reliance on the political exploitation of religion opened the door for various discourses of secularization and a critique of modernization in Turkey. At the global realm as well, modernity, once regarded as an incarnation of Enlightenment principles, came under increasing pressure in ethics and public policy. By the 1970s, it took much of the heat in the wake of the Islamic resurgence and ethnic tensions. The Islamic revolution of Iran in 1979 casted further doubt upon the accuracy of the concept and sparked off a new philosophical debate. Consequently, new readings advanced in light of mounting skepticism over the ideas of progress and a reasoned debate. The growing unease continued to heighten in the 1990s when the idea of religious revival shaped the conventional view and came to be seen by the dissidents of modernity as a question of modern secular state. It prompted scholars A. M. Sener ¸ (B) Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Ünsar and Ö. Ünal Eri¸s (eds.), Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_7

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to concentrate on issues surrounding cultural authenticity and question the prospects for its genuine implementation outside the cultural framework of the Western political thought. Along this line, the Islamist Welfare Party’s rise to power in Turkey was quickly depicted as a cultural dilemma where the “indigenous faithful” was rising against the “Westernized tyrant.” In the eyes of the scholars of the Middle East, this dichotomous picture highlighted a dominant representation of political Islam. The secularization thesis yet received its greatest blow in 2001 from the 9/11 terror attacks with their ideological links in political Islam. Events described above are noteworthy because they put numerous pressures on how we today come to perceive modernity and what we should understand from it. The contemporary criticism is due to the conditions of ongoing conflict that do not fit the idealistic picture envisioned by Enlightenment thought that speaks of liberation and human emancipation. The standard (instrumentalist) approach which dominates the present discourse in the fields of ethics and politics locates this disappointment in the religio-political spectrum and directs its main criticism at the secularization narrative. It is important to note that, however, this evaluative stance has never been immune from the effects of emerging political trends and policy-makings. So, it exhibits the marks of conjectural changes and emerging concerns; thus, the criticism is largely politically driven. For instance, with the end of the Cold War, the replacement of the green crescent with the moderate Islam constituted a notable illustration with US public diplomacy geared to influence foreign audiences in support of building “moderate Muslim networks” as a new bulwark against the threat of radical Islam. In result, alongside this political drift which remains hostile to secularization and modernity, today there is also a growing neglect about the vital aspects of modernization process such as the development of a modern psyche and a sovereign individual that alone form a very relevant and critical discourse. With their political assertations, scholars of ethics and the Middle East prove also politically effective given that they serve as a powerful means to legitimize certain policy decisions and agendas. More specifically, this politically driven trend which advances on a criticism of modernity and the secularization thesis bears a decisive mark in the way people are now taught to think about Turkish modernization. Scholarly writings which dominate the literature argue that Turkey as a secular republic is a false state where the “real people” are cut off from their cultural roots through an artificial modernization project, and thus, they are rising against the “secular tyrant.” Since the mid-1990s, this discourse has been used particularly to legitimize political Islam and Islamic elements in society. In the same vein, the perpetuated “absence of popular demand from below” and “attack on the traditional society” rhetoric add to the banality and shallowness of this discourse which provides a very distorted picture of the secular development of polity and society in modern Turkey. Critical of these well-rehearsed assessments, this article traces the growing unease with modernity in the realms of ethics and politics. It delineates how they have contributed to the prevalent antagonism in the contemporary reading of Turkish modernization.

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Antagonism Toward Modernity in Ethics and Its Critique An unexpected turn of events forced upon all serious theorists a reconsideration of modernity the 1970s onwards. Criticism originally stemmed from a strong disappointment with the conditions of economic stagnations, poverty, and religiously inspired conflict and terror. It also put the idea of universal human emancipation under increasing pressure by questioning the viability of this narrative. Thus, many contemporary writings now invoke two important arguments that reflect on this growing dissatisfaction. The first, the ideas of progress and continual betterment, which underline a moral claim and associate secularism with modernization, are not sound. The second, the rising trend of Islamism and the prevailing democratic deficiency outside the cultural context of Judeo-Christianity render secularization thesis obsolete. So, a presumption of a failure on the part of the secular modern state and a conjecture of religious revival lie at the core of this criticism that ultimately comes to denounce modernization as a myth. In her remarks, Hurd (2008) notes that: If Westphalia signaled both a dramatic break from the past and a consolidation and “a codification of a new conception of political authority” that was secular and also deeply Christian, then perhaps contemporary international relations is witnessing the gradual emergence of a series of post-Westphalian, post-secular conceptions of religiopolitical authority. … In some ways, we are back to Europe in 1517. In other ways, we never left. (p. 3)

Reconsidering the relation between religion, modernity, and secularisms, scholars of ethics direct their criticism mainly at the conjecture that treats secularism as a decisive component in modernization. Their evaluations concur with the general assumption that stresses a religious revival and the pivotal role it plays in international conflict and policy-makings. A crucial point of objection draws upon the ideas of change for the better and progress over the past which the dissidents argue underscore secularization as a process with moral claims based on rationality and knowledge. Adherents of this view such as Jakobsen and Pellegrini (2008) state that secularization rests on a set of theoretical opposites along the lines of modernization versus continuation, progress versus regression, and freedom versus repression which ultimately define religion as an outdated notion in conflict with modernity (p. 6). Calling attention to the eighteenth-century colonial context, it is also emphasized that there is a strong cultural bond between secularism and Christianity which brings its contemporary use as a world discourse into question. Drawing from David Hume’s The Natural History of Religion, Jakobsen and Pellegrini (2008) noted that the origin of secularism was in part due to the early attempts to conceptualize an allencompassing category of religion with universal implications to assimilate people of different culture and belief systems into a single practice on the basis of Protestant Christianity. According to this line of thought, cultivating on Protestant faith as “the generic model of religion,” secularism was in fact born out of a necessity as part of a larger political project to justify colonial policies and cultural assimilation to achieve modernity (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008, p. 8). Concisely, the promise of universalism despite belonging to a distinct cultural heritage and claim to a moral

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progress despite subjugation and slavery set the basic weaknesses of secularism in the eyes of its critics in the field of ethics. Reinforcing the points delineated above, another view underlines the JudeoChristian outlook as the central ingredient and the seedbed of moral consensus that blend contemporary Western secularism with Christian cultural heritage. Reflecting on Charles Taylor and Samuel Huntington’s discussions, Hurd (2008) suggests that this particular tradition has been especially vital for liberal democracy to take shape and endure in Western civilization where religion and state can coexist peacefully. According to Hurd, it forms a fertile ground from which the idea of separation between church and state flourishes as a truly unique Western experience, defining Euro-American secular public life with its origin in a larger Latin Christendom context. In this respect, Former US President George Bush is argued to set an illustrative figure and exhibit a Judeo-Christian outlook given his strong references to God and heavens (Hurd 2008, pp. 38–43). This line of thinking which confines the formation and consolidation of liberal democracy to a Christian moral basis raises serious questions about the prospects for secular development in different settings outside the cultural framework of Christian context. Shifting attention to the Turkish context, Hurd (2008) points out “the rise of Islamic political identification” as a result of a long struggle against the secular state establishments, founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (p. 71). According to Hurd, a renegotiation of the “secular” which began in the 1950s reached its apogee during the AKP rule when, in Jenny White’s terms, a “Muslimhood” began to shape the public domain as a reflection of rising religious morality (Hurd 2008, pp. 67–69; White 2003, pp. 6–9). Notably, this viewpoint which underpins the standard scholarly reading of the past decade of Turkish politics legitimizes Islamism and praises Islamic political parties and Islamic tarikat formations as a means of “moral interpretations” against the very secular principles based on which modern Turkey was founded in 1923. Challenging the basic premises of such conventional readings, an actual critical stance must have questioned whether it is really Islam as a faith-driven notion that has been in rise and whether modernization has ever truly prevailed in this context at the first place. These are the kinds of questions worth asking that demand a very close reading of the actual historical context and require a developmental perspective that scholarly analyses have largely overlooked. Therefore, a common flaw in the conventional ways of telling the story in both ethical and political studies is that their discourse focuses almost exclusively on a religio-political outlook which obscures the psychosocial and intellectual impoverishment in those settings where modernity is argued to fail. In other words, it can be argued that what they call an “Islamic revival” is in reality an unintended outcome of policy choices and decision-makings in which exploitation of religion results in the persistence of the traditional as opposed to the modern. Moreover, the alleged failure of modernity may not be the case after all as it was never genuinely intended or fully accomplished in those territories where an “Islamic awakening” is argued to occur as a recent development. Any serious attempt to study Turkey’s secular development must first acknowledge the central theme of modernity based on which the process actually cultivates. Hence, what it is to be modern, and the rational that one needs to derive from it, is of

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the utmost importance to our ability to make accurate assessments. It needs to be emphasized that secular evolution of polity and society in Turkey highlighted a distinct phenomenon outside the context of religio-politics. Looking at the drive and philosophy underneath, Turkish modernization did not form and advance in relation to religion as some would like to believe. Therefore, efforts to view it exclusively through the prism of religiosity are reductionist, and they constitute a misconstrue of facts. At this point, suffice to say that the core objective of Turkish modernization was to make people aware of their own potential to reason and question and endow them with the capacity to make rational decisions. As simple as this may sound, it was in fact a very ambitious agenda that determined the course of Turkish modernization and ultimately necessitated what Lerner (1964) called the “production of new Turks” (p. 112). While the disappointment in the realization of Enlightenment goals is well emphasized, one must also take note of the human factor, arguably the most overlooked aspect in the processes of modernization. It is vital to stress that a truly modern state can only be possible first by achieving a modern self. Therefore, engaging with modernity first at the individual level is essential based on which a modern state can possibly be constructed. As Smith (2016) articulates, Westphalia marked not only the onset of the sovereign state but also the “sovereign individual” that came out as a new idea of the self (p. 9). During the zenith of scientific innovations of the eighteenth century, a new philosophical and intellectual outlook accompanied with a growing awareness of the ability of human beings to take personal initiatives, hence, to be the masters of their own destiny. Associating it with the “bourgeois” as a distinct category of human being, Smith (2016) notes the crucial attributes of “modernity” as: The desire for autonomy and self-direction, the aspiration to live independently of the dictates of habits, custom, and tradition, to accept moral institutions and practices only if they pass the bar of one’s critical intellect, and to accept ultimate responsibility for one’s life and actions. (p. 9)

In the same vein, Smith (1957) suggested that one’s determination and ability to reconstruct and recreate her environment constituted a decisive experience, shared in common both by modern Western civilization and the founding generation of the Turkish elite (p. 180). Putting it into historical perspective, the wars of religion which marked the end of biblical politics also highlighted a major turning point for the mankind as human life was no longer dedicated to a divine purpose or confined to traditional deeds which priestly politics dictated. The transition from the traditional to the modern reflected on a critical shift in human psyche as individuals now began to rediscover their purpose in life outside their customary routines according to conscious choice and free will. In sum, individuals’ self-awareness about their own capacity to make meaningful change and to be creative underline the essence of modernity that alone constitutes a defining moment in history. Beyond this central message, with a utopian optimism and profound excitement early enlightenment thinkers’ correlation of modernity with human emancipation and liberty opened the

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door for the contemporary criticism of secularization and modernization thesis in ethics which Hurd, and Jakobsen and Pellegrini delineated in their work.

A Question of Cultural Dilemma or US Public Diplomacy? Reinforcing the criticism raised above, views propounded by scholars of the Middle East showed noteworthy parallels in their claim of Islamic revival which they argued rendered secularism obsolete. In his article “Islam and Secularization in the Twenty-First Century,” Esposito (2000) claimed the “defeat of secularism” in Turkey in the aftermath of the Islamist Welfare Party’s electoral results in the 1995 general elections (p. 4). According to Esposito, an indigenous revival alongside an “Islamic reawakening” served as a catalyst to achieve a democracy that in the process political Islamists were acting as the chief agents of liberty and pluralism against the secular regimes that already crumbled in authoritarianism. He concluded that Muslims all around the world chose to live in a sociopolitical setting that was not secular but Islamic (Esposito 2000, p. 4). In the same vein, Hurd (2008) noted a rising trend of “Islamic political identification” in Turkey as a mass movement against “authoritative Kemalist designations of the secular” (p. 71). It is noteworthy that conventional critique of Turkish modernization situates Kemalism as the founding ideology exclusively in a religio-political framework. Furthermore, it depicts a cultural dilemma where the “indigenous faithful” clashes with the “secular tyrant.” Taking this line of thinking too far, in his assessment Kevin Robins evoked the preRepublican period as “the real Turkey” and “the real people” as opposed to modern Turkey, founded in 1923 as a secular republic. Robins (1996) stated that: For the Kemalist elite, it seemed as if the principles of modernity could be accommodated only on the basis of the massive prohibition and interdiction of the historical and traditional culture. … What this resulted in was not only disavowal and suppression of historical memory in the collectivity, but also, and even more problematically, denial and repression of the actuality of Turkish culture and society (p. 68). … The real Turkey was the ‘other’ against which this official nation was constituting its identity. … Of course, the real people could never be banished. (p. 71)

According to Robins (1996), “Kemalist ideology,” once considered as a secular alternative to the spirituality in the Muslim culture, did not find much ground; thus, it was an “empty substitution” (p. 69). Along the same lines, Yavuz (2003) suggested that a rising trend of Islamism as a popular movement stemmed from an ideological quarrel between “Muslim Anatolian civil society” and “Kemalist state establishment” (p. 46). He described secular reforms and policy initiatives of the early decades as a vicious assault on local culture that Islam historically shaped and characterized. In the writings of Robins and Yavuz, secularism has come to be associated with the alienation of the Turkish state from its very own people against whom it is purported to be in a constant conflict due to its alleged hostility to religion. This widely held discourse also found a political echo on October 29, 2016. During the opening ceremony of the new railway station in Ankara, President Erdo˘gan stated

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that “they detached this nation from its (cultural) roots…; they tried to imprison us within an artificial modernization project” (Cumhuriyet 2016). In this statement, a profound animosity was particularly noteworthy given that the same day was also the 93rd anniversary of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. As illustrated above, the conventional view today supports a politically inspired picture that is highly circumscribed and distorted. And, the banality of this reading must be understood in light of the conjectural change that occurred following the end of the Cold War in 1991. In this respect, the growing emphasis on Islamism in scholarly writings since the mid-1990s reflects on a new juncture where moderate Islam replaces Brzezinski’s doctrine of the green crescent as a new idea to prevent Muslim states from leaning toward socialism or falling into Islamic extremism. The instrumental use of Islam as an ideology during the Cold War is well known. Islamism, which has been promoted and used as a bulwark against communism, once again endorsed as an antidote but this time against the very threat of radical Islam represented by the Salafist and Wahhabi movements. In this regard, the RAND Corporation (2007) suggested important parallels in terms of the challenges that the Cold War climate and radical Islamism created for the USA. Moreover, it recommended making “the building of moderate Muslim networks” a clear objective for the US governmental programs in addition to other US assistance plans to counter radical Islamism. Essentially, in the eyes of policy-makers, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, numerous attacks on various American installations in Saudi Arabia and East Africa, and finally the attacks on September 11, 2001, justified this policy shift. Thus, in the “Global War on Terrorism,” the new conjecture focused on the radical tide as the consequences of internal dynamics in those states where “moderate elements” must be engaged and empowered against the intimidation and violence of radical Islamists. In his book The Battle of Ideas in the War on Terror, Satloff (2004) pointed out the strategy that the USA should adopt with a wide range of societal, financial, and educational applications for “moderate Muslims” to counter Islamist ideas (pp. 60–69). In the same vein, in his article “Our Enemy’s Face,” Holbrook (2005) would note that “the long-term battle is against the underlying ideas,” highlighting the role of the new rhetorical terrain in shaping public opinion and getting international support. In this rhetorical framework, moderate Islam would serve to provide an ideological conformity and a new theoretical ground to ensure the allegiance of Muslim states to Washington’s unilateral policies. Furthermore, in 2007, Holbrook would point out creating “moderate Islamic democracies” around the world as the main objective of the USA since the September 11 attacks. He would further suggest Turkey under the rule of pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party and Malaysia as two examples of moderate Islamic democracies that he argued should serve as models for the rest of the Muslim world (Cumhuriyet 2013). It is important to note that the criticism directed at Turkish modernization, and secularism at its core, must be viewed in light of this newly emerged conjecture which saw promoting moderate Islam as its main objective. Thus, the false criticism of “suppression of Islam by the secular Turkish state” is deeply indebted to the fact that with its strict separation of religion and state Turkey did not fit the proposed model that could serve as a viable trajectory for other states. In its categorization

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of “potential partners,” the RAND Corporation (2007) would define Turkey as “aggressively secular” along the same lines with the French tradition of laiceté (p. 71). Thus, in the eyes of policy-makers, Turkey was far from an ideal ally where a clash occurred between the état laique and “assertive manifestations of religiosity.” As the RAND pointed out, one also should not overlook the US officials’ reluctance to view secular elements as actual allies given their affiliation with the political left (p. 125). Hence, “liberal Muslims” and “moderate traditionalists” which involved the Sufi tarikat networks constituted ideal partners instead to reach out. In this scheme, the RAND (2007) portrayed Fethullah Gülen as an ideal ally and a promoter of modern Sufi Islam who endorsed the Islam’s compatibility with democracy and republicanism based on the Islamic notions of shura (p. 74). This report also warned about a probable weakness in this projection by stating that: … Practical difficulty in that in many cases moderate Islam is rooted in local culture, which is very difficult from the deracinated and globalized Islam of the Salafis. For instance, the Turkish mass-based Gülen movement advocates a Sufi-influenced “Turkish Islam” that may be difficult to propagate outside of the Turkish cultural zone. (The RAND 2007, p. 89)

Particularly, this statement was noteworthy as it reflected on the US government officials’ insistence on viewing and forcing “moderate Islam” as a true attribute of the Turkish cultural heritage from where they thought they could disseminate the so-called moderate ideas. By doing so, this new conjecture, which sought to foster “moderate Muslim networks,” in fact paved the way for the Islamization of Turkish polity. Scholars and administrative officials went on to play a crucial role in both lunching the concept and influencing the way in which people were now taught to think about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Turkish modernization. In his visit to Turkey on April 1, 2004, the US Foreign Minister Colin Powel stated that “why not an Islamic Republic and democracy like Turkey” (Cumhuriyet 2004a, b). Powel’s description of Turkey as an “Islamic Republic” resulted in a shock and public outrage. Turkish President Necdet Sezer on April 14 responded by defining moderate Islam as “a major step backward from Turley’s perspective, in more lucid terms, a model of (Islamic) reaction” (Cumhuriyet 2004a, b). Reflecting on US policy toward Turkey on the other hand, Fuller (2008), Former Vice Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA stated that: If “Turkish Islam” has regional credibility, it can affect regional discussion and alter debate about the role of Islam in public life. The model would not be the old, secularist Kemalist one in which the state suppresses Islam. Rather, it would be of a vital, proud, and moderate Turkish Islam that is capable of comfortable coexistence with non-Muslim states. (p. 177)

On April 19–20, 2004, co-hosted in Washington D.C. by Johns Hopkins University and the Foundation for the Journalists and Authors (Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakfı) of whom Fethullah Gülen was Honorary Chairman, “Islam, Democracy, Secularism: The Turkish Experiment” was a very significant meeting in the series of annual roundtables known as the Abant Forum. It provided a vivid illustration of such efforts on the part of academics and state officials to instigate a perception of a “new Turkey” in line with the model of moderate Islam. Among the participants, scholars such as

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John Esposito, Hakan Yavuz, John Voll, Jenny White, Dale Eickelmen, Elizabeth Hurd, and Elisabeth Özdalga were notable figures. In this period, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan’s definition of secularism in Ankara solely as “the state’s equal distance to different faith and values” would raise criticism among bureaucratic cadres. Vice Chairman of the Republic Populist Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi), Onur Öymen, would react by noting that: Secularism refers to a form of governance not on the basis of religion but according to the rule of positive law. Their (advocates of moderate Islam) aim is to confine the use of secularism solely to the guarantee of religious practice. (Cumhuriyet 2004a, b)

Along with the dual progress of the Justice and Development Party and the Gülen movement, Fuller suggested the rise of an Islamic community in Turkey as a dynamic force to accomplish a much-desired political evolution. Revealing the role casted for Turkey, Fuller (2008) described the aim of the Abant meetings as: Performing a signal service in setting forth a basic set of principles capable of directing Turkey through the shoals of internal change, religious and secular debate, and reform and democratization. These principles are of direct relevance to debates in other Muslim countries. (p. 65)

The Context of the “Indigenous” and the Turkish Reformation As discussed above, a disappointment among the scholars of ethics since the 1970s which has brought the notion of secularization into question, and a conjectural change since the 1990s which has endorsed “moderate Islam” led to a criticism of Turkish modernization by the turn of the decade. In a close association with instrumentalist policy-inspired assessments, new interpretation has presented a plot that revolves around an “artificial Westernization” and a “suppression of the indigenous culture.” This assumption which has been perpetuated in scholarly writings emphasizes that modern Turkey was an outcome of a forced modernization that occurred at the expense of the local (Muslim) culture. Delineated in the accounts of Robins, Yavuz, and Hurd, this narrative questions the compatibility of the secular reforms with the social and cultural tendencies of the mass Anatolian population. Thus, it argues that Atatürk had no regard for the cultural fabric of the masses based upon which he intended to create a modern secular state. Summarizing this criticism, Macfie (1994) states that: His elitist attitudes, it has been suggested, led him to adopt a superficial approach to reform, concerned not with the underlying economic forces which ultimately determine the social order, but with the surface aspects, as expressed in systems of government, structure of law and modes of dress; while his apparent contempt for religion, and the moral code which religion supports, led him to underestimate their significance as bonding agent of the social fabric, particularly in the rural areas. (p. 188)

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Criticism directed at Atatürk’s motives is fallacious and lacks grave accuracy from a historical standpoint. The most critically, it turns a blind eye to the actual developmental context which must serve as the focal point for any serious attempt to review the secularization in Turkey. Essentially, critics miss the gist of the founding reforms as they ignore the human condition inherited from the Ottoman centuries. By 1924, it had long been crumbled under deep psychological despair and physical impoverishment. As a consequence, ameliorating the human condition was the main premise and central focus of this endeavor. As Andrew Mango noted, the envisioned state was to be built on a very poor, illiterate, and rural society that suggested a very ambitious agenda beyond nation-building (2010, p. 4). And, it was exactly the central point of Atatürk’s secular reforms that indigenous customs and practices were not something to be preserved but to fight against. In this scheme, a crucial aspect of Turkish modernization that the contemporary readings persistently overlooked was that it obligated first a rejuvenation and liberation at the individual level. In Lerner’s (1964) terms, it was “the production of New Turks” which necessitated “the integral transformation of personality” (p. 128). As Lerner (1964) noted: Atatürk aimed at nothing less than reshaping a traditionalized society by transforming the daily deeds and desires of the people - first the new elite, then the ancient mass… In a society whose illiterates exceed 90% of the population, the job had to be done for the long run and from the very bottom. (p. 112)

In 1924 at the anniversary of the War of Independence Atatürk stated that: Surviving in the world of modern civilization depends upon changing ourselves. This is the sole law of any progress in the social, economic and scientific spheres of life. Changing the rules of life in accordance with the times is an absolute necessity. In an age when inventions and the wonders of science are bringing change after change in the conditions of life, nations cannot maintain their existence by age-old rotten mentalities and by tradition-worshipping…. Superstition and nonsense have to be thrown out of our heads. (Berkes quotes Türk Yurdu 1998, p. 464)

This strong call for urgent action and change in Atatürk’s speech was in reference to devastated psychic and physical conditions of the mass population. Findings of various ethnographic and socio-psychological studies of Anatolian villagers in the early decades concurred the bleak picture that Atatürk reflected on in his speeches. These studies provide important insights into the setting which contemporary critics invoke as “the real people” and “Muslim Anatolian civil society.” Driven by the twin engines of superstition and stability, Lerner noted that a prevailing dysphoric mood was the norm that set the approved forms of behavior and belief systems in the setting of the traditional. Moreover, the Anatolian folklore passed it on from one generation to the next with no change. With a very limited perception of the world which orbits around the themes of God, death, and the jinns, in the eyes of the traditional, change was correlated with evil, disgrace, and infidelity. This changeless trait of the Anatolian peasant explained inertia and obedience underneath the prevalent passivity and nonparticipant ways of life. In Lerner’s (1964) terms, “in obeisance to the fatalistic rule of Kısmet [fate], the Traditional lives under the narcosis of resignation” (p. 146). Lerner’s in-depth analysis of Turkey’s traditional context in the early 1950s showed that with their lives confined to a strict family–mosque–village routine, a

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lack of curiosity, and unresponsiveness formed the psychic trait of Turkish villagers whose lives were detached from any tangible concern and aspiration. In this scheme, an inability to self-project into an unfamiliar role, place, or time renders faculties of ambition, desire, and participation obsolete as they are not part of the cultural make-up of the traditional. Lerner traces the roots of this passivity back to the Ottoman context where public opinion and participation did not exist because oral communication as the only method of interaction served an administrative purpose for social control. It was aimed at not public enlightenment or shaping opinion but ordering behavior. This structure has reinforced, in Lerner’s (1964) terms, a “courage culture” based on a perception of bravery and heroism as opposed to “ingenuity culture” where intelligence, ambition, and creativity underpin a rational and participant behavior (pp. 113, 114, 151, 152). In his depiction of the traditional Anatolian culture, Lerner (1964) noted that: The whole complex forms a “courage culture,” in which absence of curiosity is a primary component (“theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die”). The absence of curiosity goes together with the absence of knowledge in a reciprocal equation; ignorance and immobility are twin growths. (p. 133)

J. A. Morrison’s study of Central Anatolia in 1932 revealed significant parallels with Lerner’s findings, bringing attention to the extent of psychic and physical deprivation. In his description of Ali¸sar village, he noted that the living conditions of the occupants exhibited strong resembles with that of Çatal Höyük, an early Neolithic town in Anatolia. Still, what he found the most striking was the villagers’ acceptance of their situation as normal. Villagers’ indifference to it was a particular interest of Morrison who stated that: The Anatolian peasant is singularly incurious about almost everything that does not directly concern his daily life. To the average peasant, anything that happened more than fifty or sixty years ago is çok eski (very old), regardless of whether the event took place one hundred or one thousand years earlier. Asked how old his village is, he will answer with exasperating vagueness not unmixed with satisfaction çok eski (Lerner quotes J. A. Morrison 1964, p. 131).

Along the same lines with Morrison’s assessments, Muzafer Sherif’s study of five Turkish villages in 1944 showed that the traditional had no actual conception of time, space, and distance. Hours as units of time, the names of the days of the week and the calendar months were unknown to the villagers. Also, standardized units of distance such as kilometers did not exist in this context where it was the physical effort made to reach a destination determined villagers’ sense of distance. And, it remained subject to change given individual’s sex and age. Study of the village of Karlık, a mountainous region in east of the Aegean coast, provided notable clues in that respect. For instance, Galicia, a province in Poland, occurred closer in distance in the minds of the villagers than Van Province of Turkey. This rather distorted picture was due to oldsters who served during WWI reached Galicia by train in a shorter period of time than Van where they had to travel by walk as a means of commute. Expressions such as “first rooster” and “leaving of oxen” were used to describe time while the days of the week were named after the names of market days in town and other villages in the area. In the village of Be¸sikdüzü, the least isolated village on the

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coast of the Black Sea, of the 842 villagers only 80 owned a calendar or a timepiece (Sherif 1948, pp. 377–385). Against the backdrop of the extreme psychic and social deprivation, the 1920s onwards Turkish modernization eventually evolved into a cultural revolution, aimed at stimulating a transition from the courage culture to the ingenuity culture, and from passivity to a new participant way of life. In other words, the ultimate goal was to generate a dramatic change in people’s thought ways. It was the suppression of ignorance that set the cornerstone of this cultural project. Thus, the “New Turks” was meant to be sovereign individuals who developed a self-awareness of their own potential to take affairs into their own hands, and who understood that it was not a divine purpose or kısmet that dictated life but free will and choice. It is important to acknowledge that in contrast with the conventional assumption, the founding generation of the 1920s was well-aware of the cultural attributes and conditions of its mass population. They also recognized the enormous task that they faced with upon embarking on such an ambitious agenda. This comprehension of obstacles was evident in Atatürk’s speech where he emphasized the path for progress and liberation. In his address to a commission of teachers in 1922, Atatürk asserted that: Ideas full of irrational superstition are morbid. Social life dominated by irrational, useless, and harmful beliefs is doomed to paralysis. We must begin by purging minds and society of their very spring. Our pride in political, social, and educational life will be science. Progress is too difficult or even impossible for nations that insist on preserving their traditions and beliefs lacking rational bases. (Berkes quotes Atatürk’ün Maarife ait Direktifleri 1998, pp. 465, 466)

Contrasting the traditional psyche, which superstition and absence of change defined, this strong stress in Atatürk’s speech on rational thinking required a profound shift in mentality and a transformation of personality. In many ways, it brought to mind the struggle against what Thomas Hobbes described in Leviathan as “the kingdom of darkness.” Three centuries later, this time in the Turkish context, it echoed as Atatürk defined “the black clouds of ignorance” the main adversary in his endeavor to grant people the liberty to determine their own destiny. This struggle constituted a critical aspect of Kemalizm that was first born out of a political necessity and then advanced as a very pragmatic ideology based on proven results. Atatürk’s pragmatism proposed that in order to avoid being exploited by advanced nations, an underdeveloped nation must achieve an equal level of civility with the former. In the eyes of Atatürk, the struggle for independence in the post-WWI context revealed a clear distinction between advanced nations and those nations that truly stuck in time and had themselves exposed due to their ignorance. In 1924, at the anniversary of the War of Independence, Atatürk noted that “in an age when inventions and the wonders of science are bringing change after change in the conditions of life, nations cannot maintain existence by age-old-rotten mentalities and by tradition-worshipping” (Berkes quotes Türk Yurdu 1998, p. 464). Here, the most fundamental challenge which the founding fathers faced was how to relate and adapt their inherited religion to the modern way of life and thinking. Wilfred Cantwell Smith argued that the founding Turkish elites were the first Muslims who met this particular problem. And, their solution was similar to those of their Christian

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counterparts who had already encountered and had to deal with the same question. Alike the Protestant reformers, the Turks sought novelty, not restoration. According to Smith (1957), what both the Protestant reformers and the Turks shared in common was “the experience of remaking one’s environment,” a crucial element of modern Western civilization (p. 180). They both exhibited as Smith (2016) puts it, the quality to “take affairs into their own hands” in order to achieve what in the past had been left to kısmet (p. 7). And, the Turks looked at the West for methods and techniques in this field since the Western world had already gone through a comparable experience (Smith 1957, p. 204). Essentially, the question was not about religion, but being modern or staying medieval. A self-critical attitude and a sincere acknowledgement of the actual conditions set founding Turkish elites apart as true reformers in their endeavor to create a new state that would to stand on its own feet. A very notable feature of this founding generation was that rather than blaming the West for their hardship and appealing to God for solution, they looked in the mirror and questioned their very own methods and way of life only to discover superstition, ignorance, and dogmatic practices as the actual source of their vanity. Another remarkable aspect of Turkish modernization which deserved attention was that it was neither an outcome of hatred nor was it born out of a reaction to the West. The founding cadres were able to draw a clear line between the civility of the West and its imperialist tendencies. In this scheme, as Mango (2010) pointed out, civilization corresponded to a phenomenon that could not be reduced to simple explanations of modernization. Atatürk viewed civilization as a universal virtue; thus, he turned to the most developed part of the world and took it as a model for his new state. Mango (2010) suggested that while many of his colleagues would be satisfied simply by mimicking Western institutions alone, Atatürk believed in modernization as a total process that is indistinguishable from its philosophical basis (p. 3). Elaborating on the underlying strength of Kemalizm, Sina Ak¸sin emphasizes internal development over materialistic. Ak¸sin (2007) states that: Technological, scientific, philosophical, cultural and artistic development are inseparably connected and individuals and institutions should not be restrained by social, political or religious dogma, because for them to be productive, freedom of thought, together with respect for science, culture and art as well as for those who expend effort in these areas is essential. (p. 229)

With regard to religion, what Atatürk did was to challenge its traditional power structure in the political domain and striped it off its administrative discourse by making it strictly a private matter. Reason as opposed to superstition now would determine the way people approach their religion. Early signs of this religion by reason attitude were evident in Atatürk’s intend to establish a board of Islamic studies with the objective “to study Islamic philosophy in relation to Western philosophy, to study the ritual, rational, economic, and demographic conditions of the Muslim peoples” (Berkes 1998, p. 484). Along this course, after the abolition of the Caliphate, in 1924 a Department of the Affairs and Piety (Diyanet), the Department of Evkaf, and a Faculty of Divinity were founded in the University of Istanbul. Within the new

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secular state apparatus, the Diyanet did not aim a mystical purpose but served as a public agency. This rational approach led to the translation of the Quran into Turkish language to enable people to actually understand their religion by reading it for the first time in their native tongue. Starting from September 26, 1932, the call to prayer was no longer conducted in Arabic but Turkish. Smith (1957) defined the efforts by the founding elites as a potential “Turkish Reformation” which he argued generated a “real moment” in Islamic history (pp. 161–163).

Conclusion: Facts to Bear in Mind The actual course of Turkey’s secular development and its engagement with modernity cannot be comprehended without recognizing the human condition inherited after long Ottoman centuries. The contemporary writings by the adherents of “Islamic awakening” hypothesis and the dissidents of modernization and secularization thesis view it as a cultural dilemma where the “indigenous faithful” clashes with the “secular tyrant.” This widely held view advances on the “absence of popular demand from below” and the “attack on traditional society” rhetoric and suggests that modern Turkey is a false state where “the real people,” cut off from their cultural roots, are rising against their “Westernized oppressors.” Mainly, the growing antagonism toward modernization and secularization narratives since the 1970s and the US government’s public diplomacy to build “moderate Muslim networks” within the initiatives for the “Global War on Terrorism” in the post-9/11 period put their stamp upon this vastly banal and fallacious interpretation of Turkish modernization. A significant weakness of this criticism is that it situates the processes of modernization within a religio-political framework by turning a blind eye to the psychosociological and the physical context of the rural masses in the 1920s. Thus, efforts to view it exclusively through the prism of religiosity prove misleading as they miss the gist of secular reforms. Crumbled under deep psychological despair and physical impoverishment, ameliorating the human condition was the main premise and the central focus of the founding fathers who designed and carried out Turkish modernization. Therefore, moving away from the usual and politically inspired assessments, the actual developmental context must serve as the focal point of any serious attempt to review secularization in the Turkish context. It is imperative to recognize that the secular evolution of polity and society in Turkey was a distinct phenomenon that did not occur and advance in relation to religion. Maybe the most vital aspect of Turkish modernization which the critics have persistently overlooked is that it focused on first a rejuvenation and liberation of the traditional whose opinion range for centuries was curbed by superstition and “absence of change” which defined the rural context. Against the backdrop of extreme psychic and physical desolation, Turkish modernization would ultimately evolve into a cultural revolution. And, stimulating a change in people’s thought ways by endorsing a culture of ingenuity and promoting a transition from passivity to new participant ways of life would set the core objective of this venture. Essentially,

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the envisioned new Turkish state could only be possible by accomplishing first the modern self who acknowledged that it was not a divine purpose or kısmet that dictated human lives, but free will and choice. It obligated to achieve sovereign individuals who were self-aware of their own potential to take affairs into their hands. This transition from the traditional to the modern constituted a major shift in mentality as individuals were now expected to acquire an actual opinion range beyond their customary routines by conscious choice and personal will.

References Ak¸sin, S. (2007). Turkey from empire to revolutionary republic: The emergence of the Turkish nation from 1789 to the present. New York: New York University Press. Berkes, N. (1998). The development of secularism in Turkey. New York: Routledge. Cumhuriyet. (2004a, April 21). ABD’nin ‘Ilımlı ˙Islam modeli’ Büyük Ortado˘gu Projesi’nin parçası [‘The model of Moderate Islam’ by U.S. is a part of the Greater Middle East Project]. Cumhuriyet. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from https://www.cumhuriyetarsivi.com/oku/?newsId=3203651& pageNo=8&home=%2Fmonitor%2Findex.xhtml. Cumhuriyet. (2004b, April 21). Washington’da yapılan Abant toplantıları ve Erdo˘gan’ın laiklik tanımına tepki: ‘Seriatın ¸ önünü açmak istiyorlar’ [Reaction to the Abant gatherings in Washington and Erdo˘gan’s definition of secularism: ‘(They) aim to pave the way for Sharia’]. Cumhuriyet. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from https://www.cumhuriyetarsivi.com/oku/?newsId=3203651& pageNo=8&home=%2Fmonitor%2Findex.xhtml. Cumhuriyet. (2013, October 12). Kerry’nin model ülkesi Malezya [Kerry’s model country, Malaysia]. Cumhuriyet. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from https://www.cumhuriyetarsivi.com/ oku/?clipId=20619874&home=%2Fmonitor%2Findex.xhtml. Cumhuriyet. (2016, October 29). Erdo˘gan Cumhuriyet Bayramında Cumhuriyet Kazanımlarını Hedef Aldı [Erdo˘gan targeted the achievements of the Republic in the Republican Day]. Cumhuriyet. Retrieved February 14, 2019, from www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/video/video_haber/ 623408/Erdogan__Cumhuriyet_Bayrami_nda_Cumhuriyet_kazanimlarini_hedef_aldi.html. Esposito, J. (2000). Islam and secularism in the twenty-first century. In J. Esposito & A. Tamimi (Eds.), Islam and secularism in the Middle East (pp. 1–13). New York: New York University Press. Fuller, G. (2008). The new Turkish Republic: Turkey as a pivotal state in the Muslim world. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, Washington, DC. Holbrook, R. (2005). Our enemy’s face. Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR2005090801857.html. Hurd, E. S. (2008). The politics of secularism in international relations. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Jakobsen, J., & Pellegrini, A. (2008). Times like these. In J. Jakobsen & A. Pellegrini (Eds.), Secularisms (pp. 1–35). Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lerner, D. (1964). The passing of traditional society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: The Free Press. Macfie, A. L. (1994). Profiles in power: Atatürk. New York: Longman. Mango, A. (2010). Introduction: Atatürk and Kemalism throughout the twentieth century. In C. Kerslake, K. Öktem, & P. Robins (Eds.), Turkey’s engagement with modernity: Conflict and change in the twentieth century (pp. 1–9). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Robins, K. (1996). Interrupting identities: Turkey/Europe. In S. Hall & G. du Paul (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity. London: Sage.

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Satloff, R. (2004). The battle of ideas in the war on terror. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Sherif, M. (1948). An outline of social psychology. New York: Harper & Brothers. Smith, W. C. (1957). Islam in modern history. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Smith, S. B. (2016). Modernity and its discontents: Making and unmaking the bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. The RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy. (2007). Building moderate Muslim networks. Retrieved January 19, 2019, from www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/ 2007/RAND_MG574.pdf. White, J. (2003). Turkey’s new ‘Muslimhood’: The end of ‘Islamism’? Congress Monthly, 70(6), 6–9. Yavuz, H. M. (2003). Islamic political identity in Turkey. New York: Oxford University Press.

A. Murat Sener ¸ holds a bachelor of arts in Political Science (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) and a master of arts in International Relations (University of Wyoming). In 2007, in his master’s thesis Prospects for Democracy in the Arab World: A Study of Egyptian and Algerian Politics, he examined the interplay of conflicting political doctrines, represented by Arab nationalists and Islamists. He commenced and pursued his Ph.D. from September 2008 to December 2014 at the University of St. Andrews. In 2015, he took his studies to Yeditepe University where he is currently in the process of submitting his Ph.D. dissertation. His research, the Myth of Political Islam in Turkey, challenges dominant representations of political Islam in the literature. His study proposes an account of the social and economical context and socio-demographic factors underpinning the actual processes beneath the formation and evolution of the so-called political Islam in Turkey. His research interests also include the government-imposed social conservatism in pertain to the rise of authoritarian political regimes; populism as a political style; otherization as a means of political mobilization; the processes of democratization; and modernity.

The Political Economy of Secularism in Turkey: Beyond Culturalist and Ideational Explanations Cemil Boyraz

Introduction The literature on secularism in Turkey explains the overall institutionalization of the secular norms and principles with reference to the modernization theory and mainly reduces it to the doctrine of the state-building elites as a result of their educational background or positivist worldviews. A similar approach is also observable in historical analyses on the formation of the Turkish modernization, particularly in the prominent works of scholars such as Bernard Lewis (1961), Niyazi Berkes (1964) and Feroz Ahmad (1993). In these works, the political history of Turkey is narrated in terms of a conflict between “reactionary forces” and “modernist elites,” in mere cultural terms predominantly. Even in the analyses of Mardin (1973) who argued that the role of the religious groups does not necessarily conflict with the political and economic modernization process, this dichotomy is regenerated with reference to the “center and periphery paradigm,” and the center is the core modernizing elite and the periphery as the religiously motivated reactionary groups.1 Evidently, the reactions to the secularist policies had a cultural character and the formation of the cultural hegemony has always been complimentary to the formation of the politicaleconomic hegemony. However, this would not mean that there was no class content or political-economic considerations of the social classes appeared in the reactions to the secularist program in the early Republican period of Turkey. Moreover, in the literature on the Turkish political history, state containment of religious affairs, called laicism as an authoritarian form of secularism in Turkey, 1 As

will be discussed in the following sections, current analyses on the rise of Anatolia-based capitalist fractions propose a similar dichotomy between “Islamic capital”—“Secularist capital” and assume a conflict between them, with an underestimation of merged interests and considerations in the political-economic reproduction of power. C. Boyraz (B) Istanbul Bilgi University, Santralistanbul Campus, E5-204 Eyup, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Ünsar and Ö. Ünal Eri¸s (eds.), Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_8

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is considered as unavoidable to create a new modern society. For the development of political and economic structures in Turkey and its integration with the modern world, although such role of secularism is irresistible to create a modern society and reproduce the state power, political-economic motivations to build such modern society and struggles among the social classes during this process are generally underestimated. A similar problem is also detectable in the recognized analyses of the Turkish political history, such as the works of Metin Heper (1985) in which an over-arching capacity is dedicated to the state elites in the designation of social structure independent of political-economic considerations of the reproduction2 of the social classes. These analyses, mainly derived from the perspectives presented by Mardin and Heper, underrate the role of the social classes and their politicaleconomic strategies of the reproduction and narrate the sources of the sociopolitical change in Turkey with a more culturalist–institutionalist perspective.3 Another problem identified within the historiography of Turkey had been that the introduction of secularist policies from the early nineteenth-century Ottoman modernization process is comprehended as an imposition of Western colonialism or imperialism, and Ottoman Empire is generally narrated as the “sick man of Europe.”4 While it is safe to argue that international power competition had an impact on the political and economic formulations and respective changes in the structure of social classes of the Ottoman Empire, it would be totally reductionism to neglect considerations of reproduction of power among the social classes within the society. In this perspective, not to consider the internal actors as passive subjects of the imperialist geopolitical competition, the analysis of internal processes should also be comprehended with reference to both essential role of the state policies on the containment of the religion to create a modern society, and the role of the politicization of religion to contain social reactions to the political-economic changes in the following decades. Within these considerations, this chapter aims to provide a critical politicaleconomy analysis of the sources and development of secularism in Turkey, beyond the mainstream paradigms narrating the Turkish political history through Eurocentric lenses and modernization approach as criticized above. Apparent in many nationstate formation processes, the two main pillars of the formation of national identity in Turkey have been the ideas of nationalism and secularism, and that both could be analyzed through the political-economic rationality of the associated policies. It is suggested in this chapter that the processes of economic transformation and liberalization, changing social structure towards urbanization and industrialization, and socio-economic power struggle at varying degrees played a constitutive role 2 The use of the term “reproduction” here is derived from the ideas of Marx (1977, p. 711), in Volume

I of Capital, in Chap. 23, where he argues that “every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction.” 3 For a more comprehensive critic of these culturalist and institutionalist approaches, see Kaliber (2004), Güngen and Erten (2005), and Dinler (2003). 4 For a critic of such reductionism problem of explaining the change in the nineteenth-century Ottoman state and society with the impact of the international actors and factors, as well as underlining the importance of the internal factors, see El-haj (1991).

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in the formulation of secularist policies and reforms in Turkey. Therefore, it will be argued that the co-development of international economic integration and the rise of secularist forces were not simply a coincidental phenomenon. In this framework, the disciplinary content of the secularist policies in Turkey in order to increase state power and capacity, which was actually shaped by the considerations of the reproduction of power among social classes, will be investigated. Moreover, to go beyond the notion of the state capacity and not to fall into elitist trap which analyzes the source of the change with reference to the motivations and aspirations of the political elites, the processes of economic integration into the capitalist world and respective positioning of the state, and the reactions of the social classes to such integration process will be discussed in a relational perspective. To this end, it will be argued that an analysis based on the dynamic deliberation of the political elites, bureaucratic cadres, and Islamist groups over the meaning of secularism, modernity, and westernization should be sought in the context of the manifestations of the political-economic or class interests of the aforementioned groups. Recent scholarly debates on the future of secularism and Islamic revivalism in Turkey, and their dialogue with the debates introduced by Bayat (2005) as “postIslamism” or by Habermas (2010) as “post-secularism,” would not be comprehended without an analysis counting such role of political and economic processes in the secularism project. To provide a political-economic analysis of the historical formation and evolution of the secularism in Turkey, following this introduction, this chapter is composed of eight parts. Firstly, a brief theoretical debate will be presented about the prospects for such a political-economic analysis of the secularism. Secondly, a political-economic analysis of the development and reconfiguration of secularism in Turkey will be discussed with reference to the legacy of the nineteenth-century Westernization attempts in the Ottoman Empire, which would also serve to the facilitation of the integration into the capitalist world economy via the reconfiguration of the state power. In this framework, the reforming process in the military, economy, education, legal structures, and other fields to reproduce political power will be presented in the context of the development of socio-economic forces. Thirdly, as another way of supporting the continuation thesis which formulates similarities between nineteenth-century reforming projects and the early Republican practices,5 assertive secularism policies of the early Republican period will be listed, which aimed an intensive containment of the state on the role and meaning of the religion in the sociopolitical formation. The emergence of the Turkish form of secularism, or laicite, or the creation of the “folk religion” will be narrated as a process shaped by the socio-economic power struggles during the early Republican Era. In the fourth part, starting by the relaxation in the assertive secularist policies by the electoral victory of the Democrat Party ending the Single-Party Era (1923–1946) in Turkey by 1950, the processes of the instrumentalization and politicization of the religion in the multi-party years will be analyzed in the context of shifting concerns of the political and economic elites and search for new alliances among the social classes after the post-war Turkey. The discourse of 5 For

a study based on an analysis of such continuity thesis, see Zürcher (1992).

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the Democrat Party promising a rapprochement between the capitalist liberalization, economic development and socio-religious values, and re-definition of the national identity covering religious and traditional values will be also investigated in such context of reproduction of power considerations of ruling and economic elites in the midst of the legitimacy crisis emerged after the Second World War. The importance of such instrumentalization and politicization of religion in the 1960s and 1970s to challenge the rise of the socialist-left and political mobilization in Turkey will also be contextualized in such perspective. In the fifth part, the patterns of the shift in the traditional discourse of the state elites on secularism will be discussed. In this context, the rise of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis introduced by the military regime (1980–1983) after the 1980 coup and promoted by the ruling era of Turgut Özal during the 1980s will be comprehended in a political-economic perspective which aimed to instrumentalize the social role of the religion to contain political mobilization and build a hegemonic bloc overriding class conflict in the society. Then, in the sixth part, as a result of the state policies during the 1980s championing the role of the religion in the society as a “unifying ideology,” the rise of the political Islam in Turkey and resulting Kemalist intervention by 1997 known as “28 February Process” will be analyzed. In this part, the rise of the political Islam in Turkey and military reaction to such resurgence in the 1990s will be first evaluated within the context of rising social-economic and political instability which brought a serious legitimacy crisis in the post-Cold War Turkey on the one hand. And then respective analysis of the intensified economic competition among the capitalist fractions in Turkey, namely between the traditionally state-supported Istanbul-based bourgeoisie and the Anatolian capital mostly conducting as small-scale and mid-scale economic enterprises in search for a political representative assisting to their internationalization demands to take place in such economic competition, will be covered in such analysis of the 1990s of Turkey. In the seventh part, the condition of secularism in the era of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) will be analyzed in the shifting political-economic interests following the drastic 2001 financial crisis in Turkey, as seen in the rising legitimacy crisis in the society and difficulties emerged in the management of the contradictions among different fractions of the capitalist classes. In the concluding remarks, it will be suggested that the past, present, and the future of Turkish secularism cannot be merely analyzed as a cultural and elite-led process, but needs to be investigated in the reconfiguration of the political-economic interests of social actors in Turkey, shaped by the changing international and national political-economic conditions.

Political-Economic Analysis of the Secularism: Beyond Culturalist and Ideational Explanations In this study on the political economy of secularism, the term secularism is not merely formulated as an indispensable product of a conscious effort or doctrine

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of the state elites. With a different perspective, the issue of the secularism, as the increasingly declining role of the religion as the main organizing principle of the socio-political world or its influence in law, politics, education and public life (Ferrara 2009), is mainly analyzed with reference to its material sources, namely the conflict between the social groups on the role of the religion. As Gorski (2003) underlined, it is inevitable to comprehend state-society relations as a dimension of social struggles. In that struggle, the importance of the political and social control on religion in general; containment of the religious institutions and spheres, in particular, needs to be addressed in the context of manifestations of political-economic interests. During the formation of the political and legal construction of a viable regime of capitalist property relations and the development and increasing of state capacity (Mann 1984; Tilly 1985), control over previously privileged religious groups and their social sources of power gain significant importance in order to challenge their status quo ruling over legal and interpretative processes. In other terms, the process of secularism is ridden with the conflict between tradition and change based on class interests, between the ones building national capitalist state and the secularized bourgeoisie, and the ones concerned with protecting the social status quo ante. Such an approach to the role of religion and secularization does not mean that religion necessarily obstructs capitalist development and is not compatible with modernity. There is vested literature building an antagonism and duality between Islam and capitalism (Huntington 1996; Lerner 1964; Weber 1993 [1922]; Turner 1974). Similar to the nineteenth-century Orientalists, early Islamist activists and intellectuals had similar views on the incompatibility of Islam and capitalism: Jamal ad-Din alAfghani (1838–1897), Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), and Ali Shariati (1933–1977). On the other hand, in this article, it is argued that the role of religion in general or Islam, in particular, cannot be conceptualized independently of the sociopolitical processes and material conditions of societies, unlike the views of the Orientalists and Fundamentalists. Thus, the dynamics of the struggle between social classes competing on the role of religion within society to pursue material interests are very informative for the analysis of the socialization of secularist values and institutions. Within this framework, during this struggle among social classes, attempts to control the social role of the religion may also be crucial for the reproduction of economic inequalities and the hegemony of the political-economic ruling classes. On the contrary, religious values may also constitute a motive for the political mobilization of the oppressed classes. As Billings (1990) reminds us, for Gramsci, religion may play a role as a tool for oppression and control, but also as a motive for political mobilization for the oppressed against oppression. In our case of Turkey, as seen in many cases of the rise of the political Islamic movements particularly in the Middle East region, urban poor and workers in informal sectors who have been negatively affected by the neoliberal transition will be the subjects of mobilization for political Islamic parties and leaders since the 1970s onwards.6 Here, the religion is politicized for both purposes of internationalization desires of the capital fractions with religious motives, to represent these interests at the political level and to contain 6 For

some studies on this issue, see Tu˘gal (2009) and Gürel (2015).

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mass reactions against the outcomes of neoliberal policies with religious rhetoric. In such a result, obviously, the crisis of the secularism and left in general in the Turkish context also paved the way for the rise of the Islamic parties.7 In such framework of a materialist understanding of the notion of secularism, this study approaches secularism, not as an ideational issue but focuses on the material vested interests in the uses and abuses of the religion or the politicization of religion in general, as well as the execution of secularist policies. Obviously, for the organizational capacity and power of the dominant classes, such use and abuse of religion may shift in time, which means that there is need for a dynamic analysis in terms of the shifting discourses and policies in time, to understand the political-economic motivations behind the secularization discourse and reactions against the secularization process, rather than merely reducing it to the culturalist explanations or ideas of the ruling secularist elites.8 Within this context, one might argue that in the Turkish case, execution of the secularist policies reflects such political-economic interests rather than the positivist, Westernist, and secular educational background of the state-building elites and social support given to them. Additionally, reactions to those secularization processes should be understood in terms of the degrading status of traditional groups. Transmission of religious legitimacy and power to the institutions of the modern capitalist state which will contain the social influence of religion had been the main source of contention during the nineteenth-century Ottoman modernization (Weiker 1968; Keyder 1987; Mardin 2006). At this point, the uses of religious discourses in positive or negative connotations were totally shaped by concerns related to the needs of the struggle over religion. While it was essential to mobilize masses around religious values to expand the political coalitions during the War of Independence of Turkey between 1918 and 1922, after the transition to the Republic, there would be comprehensive political control on religious groups and practices in order to contain reactions of the degraded religious groups and to form capitalist form of social relations and state, since religion had a mobilizing capacity in many reactions. Then, with the multi-party period and particularly after the 1980s, policies promoting the role of religion in society targeted demobilization of the masses in the face of increasingly worsening social conditions, or to find a solution to the question of recapturing political hegemony. On the other hand, state control over religion has never disappeared.

7 During the 1990s, large sections of the secularists and leftists in Turkey reacted to the globalization

in a defensive (or reactive) nationalist way (e.g., in their reactions to the internationalization of capital) and underestimated both the sociological and political-economic role of the religion within the society. 8 For such an example to analyze Turkish secularism in a political-economic context, see Koçal (2012). For another article on the history of the secularization from the 1920s in Turkey, see Do˘gan (2016).

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The Legacy of the Nineteenth-Century Modernization As a result of the dissolution of the Ottoman agricultural system, system of taxation and justice, and crisis of the Sultanate to reproduce its political-economic power at the local level, one could observe that secularization in different aspects of social and economic life, and the introduction of modern techniques of state power was thus based on the legal and economic restructuring processes. Nineteenth-century Ottoman reform movement aimed to reproduce the political power of the Sultanate in four major areas: reforms in the military, education, fiscal and transportationcommunication infrastructure.9 This had obviously required a secular modernization approach for the transformation of the legal, fiscal, educational and communicativetransportation structure, as well as the abolition of the traditional structures for the integration to the world capitalist economy. However, projections aiming to increase state capacity led to the external sovereignty problem and dependency to the imperialist powers, which would later bring more problems in the management of social tensions during the process of the modern restructuring of the state-society relations.10 On the other hand, as discussed above, a general mistake in the literature analyzing the Ottoman nineteenth century had been the reduction of the desire for change to external pressure. These reforms, seen in the centralization of the army and economy, and in the developing capacity of the educational and communicative infrastructure, were both unavoidable to balance the decline of the despotic power within the borders of the Empire (or to satisfy local demands) and to cope with the global political-economic competition. Therefore, reform movement starting with the Tanzimat (Regulation 1839) era and then Islahat (Reform 1856), and the introduction of Anayasal Monar¸si (Constitutional Monarchy 1876) were all means to increase state capacity to regulate domestic problems and to cope with local demands, as well as to balance external pressures.11 In this process of integration with the world economy and to manage the dynamics of global economic and geopolitical competition (Pamuk 2005), reactions rose from the former traditional groups, particularly from the Muslim artisans and tradesmen losing their status vis-a-vis non-Muslims (Keyder 1987). This was particularly visible in the abolition of the traditional boundaries of the commercial law based on Sunni belief, via the execution of the 1838 Baltalimanı Treaty, which introduced the right for trading in the Empire for non-Muslims and international companies as well as property rights (Silier 1981). A similar contention could be observed in the struggle between military-bureaucratic elites and religious classes. This was the era of the declining status of the religious ulema (religious classes)12 due to the fact that centralization of the economy and increasing fiscal control of the political authority 9 See

Quataert (1994) and Akyıldız (2004). Wallerstein et al. (1979). 11 See Turan (2008). 12 Eisenstadt (2006) notes that Ottoman ulema enjoyed a much higher degree of autonomy when compared to the ulema in other Muslim societies. Partial state control on the ulema will be increased throughout the process of political centralization in Turkey. 10 See

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over ulema-controlled vaqfs, which would bring a serious tension. As Ergil argued briefly, “Turkish secularism was not the product of the “free” evolution of two independent institutions, the State and the Church, but rather a constant struggle between the traditional and modern branches of the ruling elite on the one hand, and the ruling and “transitional” capitalist and pre-capitalist classes on the other.” (1975, p. 72). Therefore, struggle over the role of the religion and its different uses in political projections or mobilizations during the early Republican era manifests the reproduction concerns of the traditional groups and the secularist–Westernist elites who aimed to transform social and political structure to a modern capitalist one. In this context, the political reaction of the traditional groups (such as large landowners, traders, and Sunni ulema) does not merely and necessarily display a culturalist character but their concerns based on the erosion of the former status due to the capitalist–secularist transformation (Emrence 2000). This was one of the most important reasons for the ˙ emergence of the Committee of Union and Progress (the CUP, Ittihat ve Terakki), which started to consolidate its power particularly after 1908 in the evolution of national capitalism within the remaining territories. Hatred toward the Abdülhamid regime among the leaders of the CUP was about his attempt to restore the traditional power of the ulema for political concerns. Positivism and secularism of the CUP leaders were not merely about their secular–Westernist educational background, but also about their aims to eliminate the uses and the abuses of religious values for the reproduction of the religion-based status of the traditional classes. At this point, it should be noted that for the political mobilization of the masses, religion was also very instrumental for the leaders of the CUP. This is one of the most important reasons behind the execution of the anti-non-Muslim policies of the early twentieth century.13 Therefore, even the CUP leaders did not attempt to erode the traditional power of religion in a radical manner, but they promoted the discourse of “real Islam” as open to progress and science (Hanio˘glu 1995; Zürcher 2010). 31 Mart incidents demonstrating the power of religion and the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 reflecting the power of non-Muslim separatism were considered by the CUP leaders that religion was both a threat for the secular–capitalist transformation and essential to mobilize masses to organize a national independence struggle around the notion of Islamic solidarity (Ahmad 1991). During the 1908–1918 reign of the CUP, firstly the legislative power of the caliphate was terminated, its budget was cut drastically, S¸ eyhülislam (the highest religious authority during the Ottoman times) stood out of the cabinet, modern ministries were built, and new limitations were set to the role of the religious courts. And then new rights for the establishment of the private property regime were introduced and other secularizing attempts such as the introduction of the 1917 Civil Law and early attempts for modern clock-agenda-alphabet were recorded (Peker 2016b).14 These were very important to limit the social role of the religion and to erode the power of the traditional actors. On the other hand, in line with the Islamic nationalization process, collective violence was organized against the non-Muslims and 13 See 14 For

Dündar (2006) and Aktar (2010). a brilliant and comparative analysis on secularism, see also Peker (2016a).

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nationalist economic policies targeted the existence of them in economic life, which was particularly important for the detachment of the non-Muslim bourgeoisie15 and primitive accumulation via the appropriation of the non-Muslim wealth for the development of a national economy. In other words, both violence generated against the non-Muslims and policies limiting their economic activities were all tactical and strategic moves of the CUP to create its social legitimacy basis.16 This systemic anti-non-Muslim policy would continue in the following decades through diverse strategies and tactics of the state to realize similar objectives.

The Legacy of the Early Republican Years: Functional Role of the Assertive Secularism Reformation process would continue in the early Republican years with the overall transformation of political, economic, and social spheres. The early 1920s would be the era of reforming zeal. Following the abolition of the Sultanate in 1922 and the declaration of the Republic in 1923, caliphate was abolished in 1924, a giant structure to control the religious field; namely, Directorate of the Religious Affairs (the DRA) was built in 1924 and religious courts were eliminated in the same year; curricula of public schools were unified (Tevhid-i Tedrisat) in 1924, a new civil law was introduced in 1926; religious orders and tekkes were prohibited in 1925 and 1926; national calendar was adopted in 1925; Western-style Debts and Commerce Laws were enacted in 1926. Moreover, to cease the role of the religion in different aspects of social and cultural life, a new alphabet was introduced in 1928 and the statement of the “religion of the state is Islam” was omitted from the 1924 Constitution in 1928, with additional regulations for the secular lifestyle (such as the modern hat in 1925 targeting the symbolic power of religious groups) and cultural sphere were enforced. In the 1930s, the principle of secularism would be inserted into the constitution (in 1937) and Ezan (religious call for praying) would be Turkified (in 1932), as well as the introduction of the modern measures in 1931 rather than old-fashioned and non-standard values (ar¸sın, endaze, okka, çeki), official holiday for the workers would be Sunday rather than traditional Friday (in 1935). When the speeches of early Republican period leaders, such as Mahmud Esad Bozkurt and Recep Peker, are analyzed, it is observed that they underline the importance of the necessity to adapt themselves to the zeitgeist. In other words, legal reforms are considered as an important element to integrate the existing socio-economic structure to the world economy, as well as to facilitate trade relations and for the socialization and internalization of the bourgeoisie economic relations.17 15 As a result of these processes, rate of the non-Muslim population in the first quarter of the twentieth

century would fall from 19% in 1914 to 2.5% in 1927, which is less than two per thousand by 2008. See ˙Içduygu et al. (2008). See also Keyder (1987) and Barkey (2018). 16 See Gingeras (2009). See also Kieser (2014). 17 For a detailed analysis, see Peker (2016b).

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All these reforms were not made simply to eliminate the legacy of traditional values of the past era, but also for the secularization of social life in accordance with the will to build a capitalist and modern nation-state, which would be interpreted in the context of the considerations among the ruling elites to reproduce their political and economic power. Similar to the ones given against the reformation process in the long nineteenth century of the Ottoman state, reactions to early Republican reforms were widespread among the social groups and the common ideology of them has been the religion itself (Karpat 1959), which had a huge mobilizing capacity. Thus, religion was a dynamic and radical ideology for the organized resistance of the traditional groups (Toprak 1981; Ergil 1975). To contain reactions particularly in the rural areas and accelerate rapid transformation of social-economic and cultural structures, constitutional and legal framework were formulated in an authoritarian spirit, as seen in the structure of 1924 Constitution, articles of the 1925 Law of Establishment of Silence (Takrir-i Sükun) and the existence of the Courts of Independence until 1927. As a matter of fact, consideration for the reproduction of the political and economic power was not limited within the ruling elites. Seemingly having a reactionary character to the changes in traditional values and hierarchies, it should be noted that various revolts in Anatolia were supported by rural petty bourgeoisie and peasants, who suffered from heavy economic pressures caused by falling prices with the great depression in 1929 (Emrence 2000). It should be also stated that in many cases rebels were mobilized by the feudal landlords who also had serious concerns about their degrading status, as well as erosion of their organic relation with religious actors. Shaikh Said rebellion in 1925 and revolts in Rize and Erzurum in the same year of 1925, Menemen in 1930 and Bursa in 1933 were also about the degradation of the status of traditional groups (particularly ulema as alim, imam, s¸eyh, kadı) and their concerns for the reproduction of the social power, including cultural and political-economic features.18 As Toprak (1981) reminds, the failure of the Kemalist reforms to reach to the countryside was about the fact that the threatened value system of Islamic society was not totally replaced with a new ideological framework, although there had been significant attempts to achieve such goal during the 1930s. Moreover, the similar result had been observed in that there did not emerge a program of serious commitment to the structural economic change in the countryside, mainly due to the imperial legacy and the drastic effects of 1929 Depression. Opening of the People’s Houses in city centers by 1932 to expand Kemalist ideals of the Six Arrows and Village Institutes in rural areas by 194019 would hardly change the capacity to deliver the messages of the center to the large periphery, and internalization of the values of the system integration. Thus, although there emerged a certain form of Kemalist Islam via the strict control over the social meaning of the religion and various secularizing reforms, because of 18 On

the cultural character of these revolts, see Brockett (2012). a matter of fact, the practice of the opening of the Village Institutes to change the economic and social-cultural structure of the countryside was contradicting with the failure of the singleparty regime to initiate a Land Reform, namely the redistribution of the lands enjoyed by the large landlords, which could bring concrete results for such purposes. For a detailed debate, see Karaömerlio˘glu (1998). 19 As

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such problems of internalization and socialization of the secularist values, one could argue that no aspect of the social, economic, and political life was secularized in the true sense of the word. The strict control of daily religion has always been a problem in the internalization of the regime principles among the people (Brockett 2012), and Turkish secularism and nationalism have not fully achieved a significant degree of social integration, namely the realm of intersubjectivity based on communicative action, in Habermasian context (1970).20 Weaknesses in the economic infrastructure and developmental problems accentuated by the Great Depression in 1929 also enhanced social discontent out of the policies of the regime. Obviously, the absence of a peasant revolution, due to the dependent character of the peasantry, the existence of a semi-colonial regime inhibiting the development of the commercial bourgeoisie accelerated social unrest during the 1930s (Ergil 1974), as well as the failure of the radical reformism based on secular capitalist lines. Therefore, control of the religious field and assertive execution of secularism have been one of the major components of the techniques of the domination for the early Republican regime. Moreover, different social classes instrumentally resorted to religious values in order to mobilize people to protect their degraded status. In other words, secularism has set itself in the midst of class struggle during this period. At this point, as Peker (2016b) notes, the year 1928 when the article of 1924 Constitution noting that “the religion of the state is Islam” was removed, marks a new phase in the elimination of social legitimacy and power of religion and its impact on social relations. Afterward, Imam Hatip schools (schools of the religious preachers) were closed in 1929–1930, religious courses were excluded from primary school curriculums, and the DRA aimed to contain religious reactions via its intensified effort to initiate facilities and programs based on secular values.21 Even the moderate attempts to modernize religion disappeared by the mid-1930s (Mardin 1977),22 as observed in the eroding power of the DRA and waqfs. During this process, the ratio of deputies having a religious background fell to 1% in the parliament until the mid-1940s, while it was 20 in 1920 and 4 in 1925.23 During the Second World War years, due to the worsening economic conditions, the reproduction strategies of the ruling elites would fail and a huge social discontent emerged questioning the legitimacy of the single-party regime. Radical economic measures initiated by the regime during the wartime, such as the introduction of National Protection Law of 1940 giving a giant authority to the state in the economic transactions (the monopoly to determine prices and what to produce) and the Tax on Agricultural Products (1943), would intensify tension among various social classes ranging from commercial bourgeoisie, landlord, and peasantry. Although 20 For

a study analyzing Kurdish challenge to Republicanism, based on an analysis in the context of social integration versus system integration, see Boyraz and Turan (2016). 21 For the religious sermons read in the mosques in the early Republican years, which are prepared by Mustafa Kemal himself, see Usta (2005). 22 On the other hand, the process of the secularization of the curriculums in education and literature continued, for example, a secularist reorientation of the popular chapbooks, see Boratav (1946). 23 Peker (2016a, p. 249).

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the practice of Wealth Tax (1942)24 which provided an opportunity for the nascent bourgeoisie to expropriate properties and wealth owned by the non-Muslims was welcome in the context of considerations for reproducing economic power, same bourgeoisie fractions would later feel insecure if same authoritarian practice will be executed against their interests in the future (Zürcher 2004, p. 207). Similarly, considerations among the large landowners increased again with the revitalization of the debate on a possible Land Reform (1945) 25 which aimed the redistribution of the large lands enjoyed by the landlords to the small peasantry suffering during the war times. Uncertainties in the state policies in economic life shifting from liberal to etatist versions would bring a significant source of discontent against the regime and appeared in the 1948 Congress of Economy, in which open market economy for rapid economic development was demanded by different economic actors.26 When the desires to take place in the new world order after the war within the context of geopolitical and economic concerns are added, the transition to multi-party rule in 1946 was an inevitable result. In its opposition years of 1946–1950, such erosion of the social support of the single-party regime during the war times would be an advantage of the Democrat Party to mobilize large sections of the society. Moreover, promises of the DP for the relaxation of the assertive secularist policies and particularly for reading of Ezan in Arabic again from the mosques would sound in the large Anatolia as an important cultural factor in the support given to the DP. In order to counter the rise of the Democrat Party’s populist discourse, which is based on the promotion of the religious values via the relaxation of the assertive secularism policies of the single-party era, the RPP initiated a reform in its 1947 Congress, bringing elective religion courses in the curriculums of primary schools, establishment of the Faculty of Theology in Ankara, opening Imam Hatip courses, reopening of some religious centers and the selection of Semsettin ¸ Günaltay as the Prime Minister (1949–50), who was a wellknown member of the conservative wing within the CUP.27 While some scholars interpret these developments as the acceptance of failure by the single-party elites of radical modernization paradigm to create social legitimacy,28 they could be also considered as the concerns of the ruling elites for the reproduction of the power via a vis the DP threat which represents a combination of newly emerging class interests and political-economic considerations of reproducing the power. For the context of this study, such shift in the political authority in 1950 elections was important in the motion of secularism in Turkey since the DP was considered as the proper candidate

24 See

Aktar (2012) and Guttstadt (2013). Karaömerlio˘glu (2000, 2006) and Keyder (1987). 26 See Türkay (2002) and Keyder (1979). On the bourgeoisie demands in the Congress, represented by Istanbul Traders’ Association, the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Istanbul Regional Industrial Association, the Turkish Association of Economists and the Turkish Economy Organization, see also Akgül (2008). 27 See Bilgiç and Bilgiç (2017). See also Uzun (2012). 28 For example, see Bora (1996). 25 See

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to politicize the religion, contain the rural reactions, and direct it to rapid capitalist development.

Democratic Transition and the New Features of Secularism: 1950–1980 Coming to power in 1950 elections, the DP mobilized large sections of the rural society, around traditional conservative values, adding to its discourse a promise of economic development after tragic experiences of the Second World War period. For liberalization and capitalist development, the instrumentalization of the traditional values had significant value for the bourgeoisie and landed oligarchy. Social mobilization capacity of religion was important, and it could play a role in the solution of the political legitimacy problem of the regime and enhance a sound capitalist economic development. On the other hand, the DP was also against religious fanaticism and state control over religious affairs did not end, but a much more active state-controlled liberalization was pursued in the DP era. Call for prayer, ezan, was Arabic again in 1950, which was one of the most important elements of the political propaganda of the DP during the 1946–1950 period.29 Moreover, Imam Hatip schools were reopened and religious courses were added to curriculums. Religious networks (orders and communities) were actively used to extend patronage relations and electoral success as well. Moreover, the economic program of the DP bringing a relaxation also in the tight control of the state bureaucracy in the economic sphere brought the political support of the developing bourgeoisie. The new era would signify the desires to give an end to the supremacy of the bureaucracy over the landed and mercantile bourgeoisie. For the large rural masses, liberalization discourse of the Democrat Party had two meanings: liberalization of the assertive secularist policies (Kuru 2011) and economic development through the free market economy. In these respects, the electoral victory of the Democrat Party in 1950 and its hegemony during the 1950s was largely due to these shifting class interests and economic expectations. As Ergil argued, there appeared two distinct manifestations of Islamic conservatism in Turkey, “firstly, religion serves as a dynamic and radical ideology of reaction for organized traditional groups and classes in transition against the forces of capitalism in economically and socially more developed areas of the country, and secondly religion, as one of the most important cultural institutions that influence social relations and attitudes, is often used as an instrument of social control by the bourgeoisie to preserve the status quo” (1975, p. 74). This use of the religion by the landed oligarchy through the mobilization of the local religious actors particularly in the rural areas of the country had a particular role for the continuation of their political-economic interests. Within these considerations, Democrat Party, in coalition with the landed oligarchy particularly, mobilized largely rural masses (constituting 3 of 4 of the total 29 For

an analysis, see Azak (2008).

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population) through the discourses of economic development and religious freedoms. A more liberal and populist order in state–religion affairs was very important for the DP leaders in order to mobilize masses around the political-economic values of the New World Order built after the 2nd World War. However, economic decline see in the mid-1950s as a result of debt-driven agricultural growth policies, the rise of the etatist discourse in the DP economic policies as seen in 1956 National Protection Law, populist redistribution of the state resources to agricultural areas rather than the initiatives for further industrialization and eroding status of the Kemalist establishment (army, bureaucracy and intellectuals) vis-a-vis the authoritarian policies of the Democrat Party would result in the first military intervention in Turkey in May 27, 1960. Although May 27, 1960, coup gave an end to the Democrat Party era and restored the former status of the Young Turk coalition (Zürcher 2004) based on the supremacy of the Kemalist bureaucracy and military in the political-economic rule, in the following years, the Justice Party (JP) as the successor of the Democrat Party would hold the power and between 1965 and 1969, and a significant industrial development and growth in the GDP would be achieved. Secularist policy of the Justice Party aimed to underline the importance of the religious values for the society on the one hand, and those values should not have been exploited by “traders” of the religion on the other. Therefore, for Demirel, economic development with the protection of the conservative values is complementary to each other.30 On the other side, partly inspired from the emergence of different politicaleconomic alternatives in the Third World and Western experience of 1968, and with the positive contribution of the relatively democratic feature of the 1961 Constitution recognizing basic political rights, accelerated processes of urbanization and industrialization; workers and youth generation started to raise their critics for a fair distribution of the national income and equal provision of the public services after the mid-1960s. The RPP softened its hardcore secularist stance and issued a much more social democratic discourse known as the “Center of the Left” (Ortanın Solu) under the leadership of Bülent Ecevit in the early 1970s. That is one of the reasons for the emergence of the Nationalist Front of the 1970s, based on center-right, extreme nationalist and Islamist parties (Justice Party + National Salvation Party + Nationalist Action Party, JP-NSP-NAP), against the collective mobilization of the working classes starting by the late 1960s. The coalition also represented a class coalition of the different fractions of the bourgeoisie in Turkey: namely, big bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and landed oligarchy supporting the JP, and declining local commodity producers and merchants of Anatolia supporting the NSP (formulating its economic motto as Islamic puritanism and national capitalism). This was particularly important to understand the intra-class conflict among the two fractions of the capitalist class shaped through a “cultural war” between “secularism” and “Islam.” Since Istanbulbased big bourgeoisie historically had privileged access to the state sources, by the 1970s, Anatolia-based small- and mid-scale capitalist enterprises having a conservative orientation raised their voices under the leadership of Necmettin Erbakan and 30 On

the discourse and approach to the secularism of the Justice Party, see Demirel (2004).

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supported the rise of the political Islam vis-a-vis center-right Justice Party to take part in the economic competition.31 Instrumentalization and politicization of the religion would also play a role in this era, and struggle against socialism in Turkey was represented as “preserving the religion from the communist threat.” Conservative nationalist sections of the society were mobilized via religious values in order to eliminate rising class demands of the workers in big cities. In the tragic massacres of the Alevis in the 1970s and attacks against leftist organizations and their members in Anatolia were thus justified by this discourse. As a matter of fact, behind the violent attacks against the Anatolian Alevis in the 1970s, a different religious sect than the Sunni Islam practicing religion in a different way with a much more focus on secular and humanist values, increasing visibility of the Alevis in the economic and public spheres and rise of their organizational capacity with their support to the leftist circles would also play a decisive role. As seen in many cases throughout the political life in Turkey in the twentieth century (such as the Extermination of the Armenians in 1915, Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, Anti-Jewish Events in the Thracian region in 1934, Wealth Tax in 1942, ˙Istanbul Pogrom against the non-Muslims in the 6th and 7th of September 1955, Deportation of Greeks in 1964, Anti-Alevite Mara¸s and Çorum Massacres in the 1970s and so on), economic interests or motivations in state policies or cases of social mobilization against the non-Muslims and Alevis should not be underestimated in the analysis of the historical evolution of the state–religion relation, as well as social meaning of the religion. To sum up, controlling the religious field through assertive secularist policies as seen in the single-party era and championing the role of religion to contain popular unrest as seen after the 1950s have always been a key factor for the ruling classes in Turkey. As Ergil briefly argued, “religion ceased to be merely an ideological tool in the hands of the ruling classes with which they manipulated the less prosperous classes and blocked the emergence of new forms of political expression based on objective class interests” (1975, p. 75). Therefore, one might easily argue that there is an organic relation between the dynamics of capitalist development and the changing role of the religion as well as the struggle over its meaning among different social classes. Such relation would represent a much more complicated feature after the 1980 military coup which brought a new architecture in the state–society relations, particularly on the new social role and meaning of the religion in the socio-economic life.

31 For

a discussion, see Karaveli (2016). In this context, as will be discussed later, one of the most important sources for the hegemony of the current governing party may be considered its capacity to manage such inner contradictions of capitalist accumulation and competition among different fractions of the bourgeoisie in Turkey.

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Post-1980 Transition: Marriage of Conservatism with Neoliberalism September 12, 1980, coup would restore the order of the bourgeoisie (Yalman 2015) not only through the suppression of working-class politics and organizations, and systematic torture of the politically mobilized actors of the left and the right, but also through the promotion of the well-known Turkish-Islamic synthesis to contain popular unrest and extend social control for a smoother transition to the neoliberal order after the 1980s. In this new era, it was openly declared by the bourgeoisie-supported military elites that religion would play a unifying role to override class interests and conflicts and provide social cohesion, just like the secularist–populist–nationalist discourse of the Republican elites in early years. Thus, not only the authoritarian practices of the 1980–83 military rule but also the promotion of religious values had been a key factor to get popular support and eliminate the question of legitimacy. This would also mean the strengthening of the DRA (Gözaydın 2015)32 and the promotion of religious education and religious orders accordingly. Moreover, the increase in the number of Imam Hatip schools was remarkable, compulsory religious courses were added to the curriculums, and the right for university education for Imam Hatip school students was then recognized. Such execution of the conservative policies by the so-called most prominent vanguard of the secularism in Turkey, namely the Turkish army, could be seen as a contradiction for many students of Turkish politics. However, when the class character of the army to restore viable conditions for the sustainable capital accumulation meeting the political-economic considerations of the bourgeoisie in Turkey via the execution of such conservative policies are taken into consideration, this would not be a surprising result. Moreover, to speak in terms of geopolitical analysis, for the realization and preservation of the Western interests in the Middle East (being a region of turbulence and instability due to the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Russia, Iran–Iraq war and Islamic Revolution in Iran); the political and economic stability in Turkey by 1980 and promotion of such TurkishIslamic synthesis by the soldiers as part of the project of US-supported Green Belt to balance the Soviet threat was considered as highly important in the Western camp. The electoral victory of Özal’s Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi) in 1983 and its supremacy during the 1980s would not be surprising as well, due to his capacity to represent economic desires of the bourgeoisie shifted in the post-1980 process, his conservative background, and his discourse displaying a synthesis of the conservative and neoliberal values. Özal underlined the importance of family, tradition, and moral values in the social formation of Turkey. Moreover, like Demirel in the mid1960s (Bora and Erdo˘gan 2003), he argued that economic development and faster integration with the world did not necessarily conflict with the ideals of protecting these values in society. Promotion of religious conservatism in the Özal era33 was 32 For

a historical analysis on the role of the DRA in general and its hegemonic instrumentality in the post-1980 conjuncture in particular, see also Lord (2018). 33 As Atasoy argued “Under Özal’s leadership the MP, although not an Islamist party, managed to establish a broad-based coalition and promote the view that Turkey’s economic development

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very important to override the legitimacy crisis within society and to build a hegemonic bloc for faster capitalist articulation via the socially costly neoliberal agenda. Therefore, patronage networks with religious orders and communities, dating from Justice Party governments in the pre-1980 period, proliferated after the mid-1980s, particularly during the Özal Era, who was also a well-known member of a politically influential religious order in Turkey.34

The Rise of Islamist Politics and the Kemalist Challenge By the 1980s, as a result of the state policies promoting the role of the religion to contain social discontent and create social cohesion which collapsed during the 1960– 1980 period of the political mobilization, it was sociologically and economically observed that Islamist groups had started to be more visible in the public sphere and extended their economic activities in order to accelerate their integration with the world capitalist economy.35 Islamist cadres benefited from this global conjuncture change with the end of the Cold War, adding the motives of the identity politics based on universal human rights and respect to the difference to their program and discourse. The oppression of the Left in Turkey throughout the 1980s would also provide a fertile environment for the rise of the Islamist parties, as a hope to the losers of the neoliberalization, particularly in the big cities. As seen in many geographies of the underdeveloped world, the 1990s signified the dominance of the financial crisis in Turkey, which would lead to the deterioration of macroeconomic indicators in all aspects, such as the huge problems of the balance of payments, hyperinflation,36 unfair distribution of the national income and structural unemployment. The Welfare Party, as the new presentative of the political Islam in the 1990s, mobilized the urban poor and Anatolian bourgeoisie (small- and mid-scale enterprises in Turkish economy) via the Just Order (Adil Düzen) and National Outlook (Milli Görü¸s) discourses. With the former one, it promised to eliminate income differences that emerged after the financial crisis in the mid-1990s and negative social costs of the 5th of April 1994 Economic Measures Package prepared under the monitoring of the IMF (Gülalp 1999). The latter one, namely the National Outlook, expressed the synthesis of national and conservative values against the supremacy of Westernist and secularist values in domestic policy and foreign policy. However, crisis-ridden policies of the Welfare Party threatened the status of the veto powers in the system, as well as the sound progress of the capital accumulation and integration into the world economy. This process resulted in the memorandum given to projects should rest on the moral/cultural strength and legitimacy of Islam … The presence of a strong pro-Islamic faction within the party was crucial in establishing a link between Muslim cultural values and a neo-liberal economic development project.” (2009, p. 105). 34 For an analysis, see Yalman (2009) and Onis et al. (1992). 35 See Ayata (1996) and Çakır (1994). 36 See Celasun (1999).

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the Welfare Party-led coalition government37 by the National Security Board in its monthly meeting held on February 28, 1997. The political aim of the decisions held in the meeting was to contain and limit the rise of the political Islamic networks and activities, particularly in educational and economic life, creeping their influence in the state institutions to frame the political Islam friendly with the political-economic limits of the system. This process could also be comprehended as the reaction of the highly internationalized capital fractions based in big cities of Turkey such as ˙Istanbul and ˙Izmir, supporting the military tutelage to control the rise of the Anatolian capital mostly composed of small- and mid-scale companies having sub-contracting relations with the international capital (Bu˘gra and Sava¸skan 2014). For example, as seen in the well-known political crisis observed in the privatization tender of the Petlas (a state economic enterprise in the production of aircraft tires), won by one of the most prominent representatives of the Anatolian capital, namely the Kombassan Holding, such considerations among the big bourgeoisie located in Istanbul would intensify (Özel 2009). Throughout the 28th February Process, generally known as “postmodern coup,” crisis-ridden policies of the Welfare Party and its clash with the veto powers would also bring serious restrictions in the economic activities of many Islamic-oriented business groups which aimed to deepen its internationalization during the 1990s (Tanyılmaz 2015). Thus, secularist intervention of the army to politics cannot be understood without such economic competition among different capital fractions within the Turkish economy. A new political alternative would be available in 2002, with the division in Islamist politics and the foundation of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in 2002. The rule of the JDP would signify a coalition to build another hegemonic bloc after the terrific 2000–2001 crisis in the Turkish economy, which came out of “rampant unemployment, poverty and crime, high rates of inflation, large-scale bankruptcies, irrational use of resources, inefficient services, contraction of the productive sector, bad administration of the State Economic Enterprises (SEEs), inflated public employment and a public tendering system conducive to a rent-seeking mentality” (Aydin 2005, p. 57). The rule of the JDP would successfully incorporate Islamic values to the neoliberal values, which is discussed by Atasoy (2009) as “Islam’s marriage with neoliberalism.” As Karaveli (2016) argued, However, once again, the dynamics of capitalist development played out and—again— shifted the scales in favor of Islamization: The small businessmen of Anatolia had joined the global economy, and as a consequence, the earlier, structural differences between big business and small business had started to disappear. “Islamic” business no longer clamored for a sheltered “national” economy but craved access to global markets and finance. This was the “material” background to the split of the Islamist movement: the “reformers” who founded AKP spoke for a business class that remained religiously conservative, but for which supporting an ideological and religious hostility to the United States and Europe no longer made any sense.38

37 For 38 See

a political-economic analysis on the rise of the Welfare Party in Turkey, see Onis (1997). also Yankaya (2009).

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Reconfiguration of Secularism Under the JDP Rule The JDP came to power with the promises of sustainable economic development, further integration with the world economy and withdrawing the traditional political Islamic legacy (National Outlook) known with its anti-Westernist, anti-EU and antiIsrael character, which would mean a new form of marriage between neoliberalism and Islam. When the program and by-laws of the party are analyzed during the foundation process, unlike the Welfare Party, the JDP was underlining the importance of secularism which should not necessarily conflict with the conservative and traditional values within the society. When compared to other political Islamist parties in the Middle East aiming to marry Islamist values with the realities of the global political economy, it could be safely argued that the political-economic and ideological discourse of the JDP39 may be considered as a stronger articulation of market and religious values (Tu˘gal 2009). In this context, promotion of the religious identity is a complementary element of its neoliberal populism (Weyland 2003), 40 which could be defined as the forging of non-class forms of identity and representation. After executing a strategic and pragmatic democratization program (David 2016) in line with the EU Accession Process in its first years to consolidate its power and reproduce itself vis-a-vis the veto powers in the system (transformation of the higher judiciary, namely Constitutional Court and Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors, and National Security Council),41 the conservative populist and authoritarian discourse of the JDP has become more visible in political life of Turkey. Although the party declared the shift from National Outlook vision, stress on the importance of the religious symbols and values has never been disappeared in the party discourse and policies in the educational system, family life, gender relations, and labor system as well as the promotion of the faith-based organizations (FBOs). While some scholars argue that the ruling party projects to transform the national identity with a more conservative and religious package,42 political-economic concerns to mobilize masses through religious values should never be underestimated. It is widely acknowledged that inflation control and high growth rates in GDP were 39 For

an analysis, see Onis (2012). populism is instrumental and vital to demobilize mass reactions against the economic discontents of neoliberalism and associated political crisis of the democracies. In such context, neoliberal populism vital for the political organization of the subjection aims to create new non-class forms of identity and representation that attempt to disarticulate social conflict from material relations of power and re-embed social relations within increasingly moralized notions of community. See Jayasuriya and Hewison (2004). 41 Within the framework of the EU harmonization process, a reform package was introduced that includes reducing the influence of the military in politics, eradicating death penalty, abolishing the State Security Courts, strengthening gender equality, broadening freedom of press, restructuring the judiciary in European standards, and establishing the supremacy of international agreements over internal legislation. These practices both increased the party’s legitimacy in the eyes of the political and economic actors at the international level, as well as it provided a certain degree of increase of the party autonomy vis-a-vis the veto powers in the system. See Kumbaracibasi (2009). 42 For an example, see Ate¸s (2017). 40 Neoliberal

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achieved at the expense of drastic increases in debt, structural unemployment, and the increasing gap between rich and poor sections of society which led to the party’s failure to deliver the growth rates to the social justice program it promised. At this point, Atasoy asks the crucial question, “What are we to make of the Islamic commitment to social cohesion in the context of a neoliberal economic orientation which continues to generate massive inequalities?”. The AKP government has allocated funds for employment creation and job training programs, offered credits to small entrepreneurs, and supported micro-credit, but this barely touches the real problem. More significant is the fact that the AKP government bases its social welfare policies largely on family and social solidarity networks. Its family-centered social policy focuses on motivating and mobilizing civil society initiatives that can provide social assistance… Municipal governments have also become key players in providing social assistance, with budgets heavily reliant on donations from private individuals, thus acting as mediators between the local poor and Muslim charitable donors.43

In this context, while there is traditional continuity for the rightist parties of Turkish political life in the use of themes of conservative populism (from Menderes to Demirel, Özal, and Erbakan),44 the distinguishing feature of the strategy of the JDP was the extension of social help–charity mechanisms as a religious duty, communitybased solidarity networks and patronage-clientelist relations in the midst of deepening inequalities stemming from the macroeconomic restructuring process. As a matter of fact, such vision had also been suggested by the institutions of Washington Consensus, World Bank, and IMF in its global research project on poverty as a case. This is a particular feature of the neoliberal populist governments, as Weyland (2003) argues, neo-populist leaders appeal for support especially to the largely unorganized informal sector and the rural poor, and neoliberal reformers and the international financial institutions benefit these sectors with targeted social emergency and anti-poverty programs. Islamic values of harmony and brotherhood were also instrumental for the oppressive labor regime of the governing party. As Yılmaz (2012, p. 114) argued, “MUSIAD (pro-Islamic business association, author’s note) affiliated employers characteristically emphasize the Islamic values of harmony and brotherhood in industrial relations to paper over real and potential conflicts.”45 The Islamic perspective on labor relations depicts the model Muslim entrepreneur as one who manages to reconcile his profit-maximization drive with the Islamic principles of fairness and social responsibility.”46 In addition to such shift from an Islamist critique of the capitalism and neoliberalism to the internalization of the market values and execution of an oppressive labor regime, another important point of debate to comprehend the condition of the secularism in the governing party era is on its policy on the gender question. Co¸sar 43 Atasoy

(2009, p. 133). such an analysis underlining the continuity, see Türk (2014). 45 See also Bu˘ gra (1998, 2002). 46 For an impressive study and counterargument on such promises of fairness and responsibility, underlining the use of Islamic values to neutralize inequalities in the working relations, see Durak (2011). 44 For

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and Ye˘geno˘glu (2012) argue that JDP’s gender vision as a version of patriarchy fed religious and nationalist conservatism. This is particularly visible in the shift of official policy from emphasizing the women’s right to protecting the family as a social security institution. In the context of the development of the informal employment conditions, authors state that “the official policy of ‘protecting the integrity of the family’ put forward by the AKP encourages women for ‘flexible,’ ‘part-time,’ and ‘home-based’ work” (Ibid, pp. 179–212). Authors also evaluate the Law on Social Security and General Health Insurance of 2008, which “leaves women with options of either conceding to work under insecure conditions or staying at home as wives.”47 Not only in terms of normalization of the gender inequalities in the working life via Islamic references, pronatalist48 discourses such as “women in his country to have at least three children, if one without any children ‘incomplete’ and ‘deficient’,” comparison of abortion to “murder” and “it is against nature to treat men and women equally” all serve to reproduce its political power via the normalization of gender inequalities and promotion of the patriarchy. Similarly, the main reason of the everunresolved problem of the unemployment is explained by the prominent members of the ruling party claiming that the increasing number of women employees in the labor market causes such unemployment problems in Turkey. As a matter of fact, such claims do not represent reality due to the fact that unemployment among women is higher when compared to male workers. Other examples in this context may be listed as such: the criticisms of birth control techniques by the ruling party elites as considering such defense of the controls as being in “high treason,” control of pregnant women under the program called GEBL˙IZ since 2008; debates on the prohibition of the C-sections, change in the name of the Ministry of Women and Family as Family and Social Policies, the introduction of the law allowing muftis to perform civil marriages in 2017 October, ongoing problems in the working life based on the discrimination of the women and unsolved problem of maternal leave.49 All these prove that there is a significant shift in the ruling party’s approach to the gender question when compared to the framework introduced between 2003 and 2004 as a part of the EU Accession process and the content of the reform packages on the issue. These uses and abuses of Islamic references to normalize inequalities in socioeconomic life are not limited by gender-blind discourses but also seen in the ruling party’s discourse on the youth policies and educational system, in which a similar form of the instrumentalization of religious values serves for the logic of governmentality. Then Prime Ministers’ speech declaring “we want to raise a religious youth” in 2012,50 increasing number of the Imam Hatip schools and religious courses in the curriculums, introduction of the 4 + 4+4 year compulsory education to reopen

47 See

also Co¸sar and Ye˘geno˘glu (2011). a debate, see Frank and Çelik (2017). 49 For a comprehensive study on different implications of the gender policies of the ruling party, see Dedeo˘glu and Elveren (2012). 50 For the video record of the speech, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLzqB876I7M. 48 For

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secondary classes of the Imam Hatip schools, ongoing activities of religious communities to provide scholarships and educational services for the poor segments of the society, increasing number of Islamist-leaning private schools may all be considered as attempts to extend popular support via religious values, as well as the desire to cover up structural problems in the right for education in Turkey.51 The critical political-economy approach in the analysis of the ruling party’s foreign policy discourse is also important to understand the party’s aims to reproduce its power via Islamic references. In this context, although recent shift of the party’s foreign policy discourse with a more focus on the Islamic geography was considered as a break from the traditional foreign policy of Turkey and discussed as the reemergence of the neo-Ottomanist ideals,52 this point should also be understood within the framework of the needs of small- and mid-scale enterprises and big industrialist’s search for new markets and economic relations based on trade and infrastructural projects.53 A similar strategy could be easily observed during the 1980s of Özal governments in Turkey, when foreign trade with the Middle Eastern countries (such as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Saudi Arabia) developed significantly and particular privileges or incentives were provided for the economic activities of the Islamic financial institutions in Turkey (Hosgör, 2011). Active diplomacy for the reconstruction of the politicalbusiness alliances via Islamic references built through MUSIAD, TUSKON, and ˙IG˙IAD (associations of Islamist businessmen and entrepreneurs) shows that the ruling party aims to extend its popular support responding to the internal contradictions of capital fractions in Turkey and their desire for international integration. During this process, it should be noted that the success of the ruling party had been the effective management of the contradictions within the Turkish bourgeoisie whether in Islamist or secularist orientation for a long period. It should be also noted that, although it governs for more than 17 years and mostly completed the process of the state-party fusion, the ruling party in Turkey still and successfully refers to the assertive secularism policies of the Single-party Era (1923-1946) and the tutelage of the army on the Islamic activities after the 28 February Coup of 1997, as cases of victimhood. This may be explained by what Açıkel (1996) referred as the “holy victimhood of Turkish Islamism”, as well as a discursive strategy seeming counter but hegemonic. Moreover, in the sacralization of the ruling party’s economic program, not only social assistance and help programs, which reach more than 10 million people and partly organized by the local municipalities of the party (particularly on religious days), but also the role of the religious civil society composed of Islamist newspapers, communities, orders, and associations has significantly increased. Religious community affiliation and loyalty still plays an important role in the extensive use of the patronage and clientelism of the party (Gürakar and 51 See Bayhan and Gök (2017). For a particular case study issuing the extension of religious education

in early childhood, see Aksoy and Eren Deniz (2018). a critique of such approaches based on the “axis of shift” in Turkish foreign policy, see Onis (2011). For the author, such kind of foreign policy activism based on solid political economy fundamentals may be considered as a shift for the party’s foreign policy to reproduce its power; however, it is rather a “crude characterization.” 53 See Hoffmann and Cemgil (2016). 52 For

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Bircan 2018). In the economic sectors offering high levels of profits such as construction, infrastructural development projects, energy and mining, the ruling party provides significant benefits to the supporters, as particularly seen in the changes of the procurement law more than 180 times in last seventeen years of the government. Additionally, these would prove a shift from a critique of the Islamist capital on traditional support of the state to the Istanbul-based big bourgeoisie to the development of extensive patronage relation built with the state. Lastly, the use of religious–spiritual connotations by the ruling party after the failed coup attempt in July 2016 with the words of “survival,” “resurrection,” and “salvation” proves that religious discourse will be increasingly influential in the following decades to demobilize masses and contain social discontent stemming from neoliberal economic policies. Therefore, the political-economic character of the ruling party’s neoliberal populist discourse with conservative tones as a technique of domination and logic of governmentality should never be underestimated in the analyses on the future secularism in Turkey.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter, differently than the mainstream approaches analyzing the execution of the secularism with the impact of the Western imperialism and secular-Westernist background of the state-building elites, secularist projections during the long twentieth century of Turkey are contextualized within the framework of political-economic processes, namely struggle over religion based on the shifting material interests due to the great socio-economic transformation. It was argued that for the political and legal construction of a viable regime of capitalist property relations and the economic development, control over previously privileged religious groups and their social sources of power had been essential in the early Republican practices. In such terms, one might observe continuity in the state policies of secularism before and after the Republic in order to use the disciplinary capacity of the secularist policies with the aim of further integration with the world economy and fulfill rising local demands. Obviously, this process would bring tension with the traditional classes reproducing its power vis-a-vis the legal and interpretive authority on the religious affairs regulating social and economic life. This struggle over the social meaning of religion would also be instrumental in the multi-party years, as a component of the crystallization of different class interests or shifting political-economic consideration of the reproducing the power. Therefore, the success and failure of secularism in Turkey should be necessarily related to the reproduction strategies of the state elites and social classes. That would mean, in the analysis of the historical formation and evolution of the Turkish type of secularism, the character of Turkish nationalism and conservatism, processes of ethnic homogenization and populist use of the religious values should be considered in this framework, namely tactics and strategies of the social classes to reproduce their power due to the changing political and economic conjunctures. Recent debates on the future of secularist regimes and the role of the religion in political systems in

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the world in general and the Middle East in particular need to be addressed within this framework.

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Cemil Boyraz is an Associate Professor of the Department of International Relations at ˙Istanbul Bilgi University. He held his PhD in political science with a dissertation about the political economy of nationalism, analyzing the case of the post-1980 privatization process in Turkey. He also went to Josef Korbel School of International Studies in Denver, USA in 2010 as a visiting scholar. His research interests concern Turkish politics and foreign policy, theories of nationalism, secularism and populism studies, international political economy and global labor movement. He has articles and book chapters on the Kurdish question, Political Islam, Neo-Kemalism and Alevi Question in Turkey, global political economy, and an edited book on the political participation of the youth in Turkey published in 2010. He is currently teaching on the Turkish political history and world economic history; writing a co-authored book about the political-economic history of Turkey, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in late 2020, and working on the new articles on the neoliberal authoritarianism and populism in a comparative perspective, and on the question of ethnic and religious pluralism in divided societies.

Does Religion Matter? In Search of a Secular Rationale of the EU Neighbourhood Policy: Cases of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan Hikmet Kirik and Pelin Sönmez

Introduction The last decade of twentieth century witnessed the Cold War ending brought confidence that the European conviction of a happy and successful liberal society based on the ideals of the enlightenment is universally plausible. Nevertheless, 9/11 terrorist attacks showed how fragile such hope was and yet the convictions largely an illusion. The vacuum created by the demise of the erstwhile “Second World”, let the tension between the West and a large part of the former “Third World” return to boiling point. Ideological divergences were replaced by social and cultural differences. Arab groups expressed their anti-Western anti-American feelings through the language of religion. In his address to American nation, the then-president Bush declared war on the evil act of global terrorism “targeting western cause of human dignity and freedom guided by conscience and guarded by peace”. Shortly after presidential statement, invasion of Afghanistan by NATO troops followed by military intervention in Iraq by the USA and its allies. In 2001, Jude oven published his book titled Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism: The Foundational Crisis of the Separation of Church and State. Considering changing sentiments over the role of religion in public sphere in contemporary liberal states, Oven focuses on almost universal degradation of enlightenment rationalism by virtue of anti-foundationalist critic. He warns against the consequences of the demise of liberal rationalism for the separation of church and state. He forcefully questions whether liberal regimes can successfully defend their commitment H. Kirik Department of Public Relations and Political Science, Faculty of Political Sciences, Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] P. Sönmez (B) Department of International Relations, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Kocaeli University, Kocaeli, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Ünsar and Ö. Ünal Eri¸s (eds.), Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_9

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to modern separation of church and state as Enlightenment’s political philosophy as well as its political project. The answer is a conditional “yes they can” but only if they repair damages caused by anti-foundationalist approach, which denies, “any claim to knowledge is founded in the one truth” expressed by contemporary liberals like Rawls who defends the idea throughout his books Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism (Oven 2001). Regardless of anti-foundationalist critic, modern separation of church and state in Western Hemisphere differs both philosophically and as a political project. A recent book titled Religious America, Secular Europe embarks upon comparison of the American and European experiences. Policies such as concerning religious diversity, pluralism and tolerance are one aspect among others, which the study undertakes persuasively. They highlight the question: Is religion part of the problem or part of the solution? They conclude that “Europeans are inclined towards the former possibility, Americans towards the latter … Europe is secular because ‘it is European’ and not because it is modern” (Berger et al. 2008). Does it make Europe an exceptional case in terms of its patterns of religious life? Grace Davie provides an elaborative answer to this question by examining a number of factors which she believes have played a part in the formation of the role of religion in Europe today and most likely tomorrow. One of these factors according to her is the legacies of the past: initially, a special part in which historic churches played in shaping European culture; secondly, in today’s Europe, lesser people attending to church ceremonies. Further elaborating on these points, Davie further argues that tradition is one of the three crucial elements—others are Greek rationalism and Roman organisation, and has had an “irreversible effect on the shaping of time and space” in European continent (Davie 2006). Today, Christian tradition still communicates the everyday life of European people through what she terms “vicarious religion”. By vicarious, she meant: [T]he notion of religion performed by an active minority but on behalf of a much larger number, who (implicitly at least) not only understands, but, quite clearly, approve of what the minority is doing (Davie 2006).

Vicarious religion in its simple terms stands for institutional relevance of religion vis a vis society indicating less personal participation by the believers but a degree of approval on both procedural level and content. It can be more visible particularly during some of the most symbolic moments of individual life such as, birth, marriage and most of all, a death. Therefore, the religious practice among large part of Christian constituencies in Europe today turns out to be a matter of choice rather than an obligation or of a duty. Whether it is a further secularisation of belief as it changes the nature of a relationship between the faith and the faithful by situating the individual at its centre, Davie drew number of rather tentative conclusions. Having realised that several factors are at work, two religious economies in Europe run alongside each other. What she calls “voluntary membership” is increasingly becoming at least de facto norm among the churchgoing minorities. Whereas the majority of citizens perceive religious services as “public utility” understood as

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religious, affiliation is a matter of a given social reality. Elsewhere, she defined this attitude as “believing without belonging”. It refers that Christian cultural identity has become rather implicit, diffused and submerged among majority Europeans (Davie 1994; Davie2000). Different interpretation of this social fact is offered by Danièle Hervieu-Léger as “belonging without believing”. In “Religion und sozialer Zusammenhalt”, its attributes to “secular” and “Christian” cultural identities are intertwined in complex and rarely verbalised modes among most Europeans (Casanova 2004). Regardless of proper terminology and despite huge differences existing at national level, the public roles of religion in Western European societies decline rapidly and drastically. The emergence of so-called post-Christian Europe owes great deal to post-war political conditions, which gave way to the European Union (Casanova 2006). Nevertheless, developments such as the eastward expansion together with the process of further integration via European Constitution and controversial issue of the role of Christianity in the formation of European identity have made an important comeback to European public agenda. It is reported that seven states, led by Italy, urged the union to recognise a “historical truth” and refer explicitly to the “Christian roots of Europe” in its new constitution. The European Parliament rejected a proposal from Christian Democrat MEPs to mention the continent’s Judaeo-Christian roots. Secular France and Protestant Nordic countries of Sweden and Denmark stand firm to protect liberal political values by arguing that the constitution should refrain from mentioning any religion whatsoever (Black 2004). Without any explicit mentioning of God, the draft constitution attempted to compromise by referring in the preamble to “Europe’s religious, cultural and humanist heritage” (EC Preamble 2005). The Lisbon Treaty, on the other hand, reached a different type of compromise. Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU) provides, for the first time, legal bases for an “open, transparent and regular dialogue” between the EU institutions and “churches, religious associations and philosophical and nonconfessional organisations”. In return, European citizens will retain their support for the Union and hence begun to feel that the EU is far more than just an economic organisation. It is argued that such compromise “provided better opportunities for the churches to exercise their influence on the supra-national European level and confirmed the strong presence of the religious component in European identity” (Mudrow 2016). In his article examining recourse to religion as a source of law in the legal and political order of the European Union, McCrea demonstrates that “the legitimacy of religious input into law is recognised institutionally, symbolically and substantively”. According to McCrea, constitutional values of the Union which driven from a balance of religious, humanist and cultural influences work in a strange way since the power of “reinforcing” or “restricting” each other’s influence at the same time. He then concludes that: The notion of pluralism, balance and inheritance are key features of the recognition of religion as a basis of law in the EU constitutional order. The legitimacy of religious input into law is recognised at a symbolic level through the recognition of religion as an element of the Union’s constitutional values, at an institutional level in the recognition of religious bodies in the lawmaking process and in substantive law through the recognition of religion

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as part of a public morality which the Union and Member States may legislate to protect. (McCrea 2009)

Here, two concepts are crucially important to understand the overall approach. One is the notion of “balance” and the other is “inherited”. In the whole formation, both notions work individually and reinforcing manner. At an individual level, the term balance reflects that religion is not the sole source of public morality but must share this function equally and side by side with cultural and humanist influences. The critical point here is that these three sources of public morality can reinforce as well as be in conflict with each other. The term inherited on the other hand refers to specific religions, namely those who have significant cultural roots in Europe. Implicitly assumed that these religions are also “capable of reconciling themselves to humanist influences”, therefore “exercise greater influence over EU law” than those faiths which lack such characteristics (McCrea 2009). Finally, seemingly inclusive formulation of “religious associations” mentioned in the Article 17 of Lisbon Treaty may be relevant in social sphere promoting religious freedom. The universal character of freedom of religion as outlined by the EU guidelines includes the right to establish and maintain freely accessible places of worship, train clergy, establish religious schools and build places of worship or assembly, the freedom to select and train leaders or the right to carry out social, cultural educational and charitable activities (CoE 2013). However, as far as the realm of law is concerned, it could well be interpreted as exclusive; since taken together, these two notions leave not much room for religions other than Christianity. The case of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) shows that the framing of religion as a “freedom” issue is not neutral, in particular when rekindled through the persecution of (Christian) religious minorities in the Southern Mediterranean region. Discourse of religious freedom in the EU is a “socially constructed and quite contested concept” under the influence of European domestic politics (Richardson 2015). Thus, instead of being guided by a universal meaning, it is driven by a “Euro-Atlantic” understanding of religion that “is very likely to divide rather than to unite” (Zucca 2013) The question remains to what extent the third notion of “plurality” could be maintained. Possible implications may be of concern at three levels. The first is how to embrace those European citizens who belong to a faith other than inherited? Secondly, the possibility of negotiations between the EU and Turkey about the eventual membership leaves religion on Europe’s diplomatic agenda and with it the issue of the compatibility between political Islam and European notions of balance and inheritance. Finally, to what extent, if any, this formulation reflected upon European Neighbourhood Policy in reference to MENA region? Despite equal importance of all three issues, this article will focus only the last point.

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Wider Europe and Neighbourhood Policy In 2003, the European Commission adopted a scheme of “Wider Europe” to set out a new framework for relations over the coming decade with countries who do not currently have a perspective of membership but who will soon find themselves sharing a border with the Union at the eve of a historic expansion in 2004 “marking the reunification of Europe after decades of division” (from 6 to 28 members EC). At the following year, European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) launched and further developed throughout 2004 to help the EU support and foster stability, security and prosperity in its closest neighbourhood. Acknowledging the new dynamics brought about by globalisation, the enlargement and the limits of the promise of EU membership as a foreign policy tool, both schemes were an attempt to find the new ways of maintaining the EU as a global “normative power” (Manners 2002; Larsen 2014). Complementary to Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) thorough ENP policy approach shifts from the principles of multilateralism and regionalism to differentiated bilateralism in which, as Schneider rightly points out, “multispeed Europeanization” process was enhanced which takes into account the different aims and political and economic conditions of each partner (Schneider 2010). The initial aim was to form a ring of well-governed states around the EU that would provide a buffer against rising international terrorism, organised crime, illegal flows of migrants or military pressure (ENP overview EC web document). At the core of the scheme lied the promotion of European values in nearby countries that could not join the EU either because they were ineligible geographically, being located in North Africa or West Asia, or because they fell far short of the EU’s political standards (Kavalski and Cho 2018). Acknowledging the emerging new dividing lines between the enlarged EU and its neighbours, the objective was to strengthen the prosperity, stability and security of all based on democracy, rule of law and individual rights and freedoms. The European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI) was created as a successor to the cooperation programmes TACIS (for the Eastern European countries) and MEDA (for the Mediterranean countries), with enlarged objectives and an increased budget. It went operational in January 2007, and its programming phase ended in January 2014. In terms of budget, the overall allocation for the ENPI instrument initially amounted to about EUR 12 billion for the seven-year period 2007–2013, which represented an increase of 32%, in real terms, compared with the amount available over the period 2000–2006 for the MEDA and TACIS programmes combined (ENPI—Overview of activities and results, 2014). The European Neighbourhood Instrument (ENI) replaced ENPI providing support to the implementation of the political initiatives shaping the ENP including the Eastern Partnership and the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM). The European Union Special Representative (EUSR) and the Task Forces for key countries including Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan are two institutions created after ENI. Together these institutions aimed to enhance the effectiveness and visibility of the EU. It has a budget of e15.433 billion and

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will provide the bulk of funding to the European Neighbourhood countries through a number of programmes until 2020. The whole procedure starts with signing an Association Agreement between the neighbouring country and the EU, followed by a country report prepared by the Commission to address the general situation of a neighbouring country. ENP implementation formally begins with an Action Plan setting out the priorities and guiding the work between parties. The first part of an Action Plan consists of Copenhagen Criteria, such as democracy, rule of law, human rights, free movement of goods, services and labour, acceptance of legal norms for single market and specific regulations for sectors. Progress report is the next step for the functioning of the ENP, which is prepared by the Commission for the monitoring of the reforms and cooperation on a yearly basis. Those reports generally covered the period of 2006–2014. After the revised ENP in 2015, functioning of the ENP may go hand in hand with partnership priority papers. The EU was offering those countries to adopt their political system in line with Europe, particularly in respect of human rights and democracy, in exchange of certain economic and financial incentives. From one perspective, since the citizens in those neighbouring countries wish to have both material well-being and the rights and freedoms enjoyed in Europe anyway, these are reasonably sufficient offers. From another perspective, however, what the EU offers was asking more in return for much less considering complexity of democratic transitions which involves the implementation of reforms based on “universal”, European values.

Religious Freedom in the Context of European Neighbourhood Policy Religious freedom is among such universal values within the framework of diversity, democracy, rule of law and peace and stability. Violations of this value, on the contrary, may exacerbate intolerance and often constitute early indicators of potential violence and conflicts (CoE 2013). Religious freedom became a separate agenda for the EU, based on the Council of Ministers’ conclusion in 2009. It starts with the strong commitment of the European Union to the promotion and protection of FoRB understood as universal right of every person, hence comprising every religion regardless of being traditionally practised or not, as well as minority religions. It also includes right to adopt, change or abandon one’s religion or belief, of one’s own free will. The Council addresses member state as responsible to provide adequate and effective guarantees in order to protect everyone from discrimination, violence and other violations recognising the existence of a practice of denial, and the act of extreme violence against persons belonging to religious minorities. It warns against the misuse of legislation on religious defamation since it is not recognised as a human rights concept. The way in which the EU understood the FoRB is “intrinsically linked to freedom of opinion and expression”. It is this point which gives characteristic to

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the conceptualisation of religious freedom in the framework of the EU. The Council, therefore, underlines the strategic importance of FoRB and of countering religious intolerance, and reaffirms its intention to continue to give priority to the issues as part of the European Union’s human rights policy. Later in June 2013, the Council adopted detailed guidelines on “the promotion and protection of FoRB” (CoE 2013). The Council’s decision clearly set the bases of its action on FoRB as its role in sustaining social diversity, which in turn directly contributes to democracy, development, and rule of law, peace and stability. On the contrary, the absence of it may exacerbate intolerance and often constitute early indicators of potential violence and conflicts. The EU will encourage partner countries (a) to accede and implement relevant international instruments as well as initiate legislative changes; (b) encourage cooperation and coordination efforts to promote FoRB; (c) use political dialogues to encourage cooperation and coordination and hence support dissemination of best practices. Various levels of political engagement with counterparts and meeting with human right defenders in these countries are recommended. So as using external financial instruments to provide funding for human right defenders and assistance to individuals under immediate threat. Alternative funding instruments shall be mobilised for capacity building and training projects in case of preventing violence and conflict based on religion. These also include supporting civil society projects within a wider perspective FoRB. In addition to these positive attitudes, the EU will also take negative measures including the possible suspension of the cooperation in regard to financial assistance. The way in which the EU promotes and protects FoRB should be conceptualised within the framework of foreign policy tool for Europe: a “global normative power” seeking security by maintaining political stability. Examining why and how the European External Action Service (EEAS) has developed a specific approach towards religion, Foret (2017) identifies three reasons and modalities. The first two are: (a) “security threats” and (b) an opportunity for a statement of “European Unity”. The third reason is the perception of religious freedom as security issue. Policymakers in the EU convinced that by reducing religious freedom into the repertoire of human rights with flexibility to comply with local particularisms, it becomes key to “prevent or solve conflicts”. Particular conceptualisation of FoRB in terms of identity and security, EU religious engagement, Wolf rightly pinpoints, constitutes “physical” and “ontological” security-seeking practices, which “provide a stable regional environment as well as cognitive stability to the EU’s identity as a liberal-secular actor” (Wolff 2018). Compared to relative clarity of physical security threatened by rising global terrorism, illegal immigration because of political instability and civil war, ontological security shows more complexity. It helps the EU to maintain its own identity as a secular power yet emphasising the role of Christianity in domestic politics as well as rising it as a foreign policy issue. György Hyvönen MEP, co-chair of the Working Group, called the EU to strengthen its external action against intolerance in the world particularly concerning with the security of Christians and other minorities since “ancient religious communities live under existential threat in Europe’s very neighbourhood … places a very special responsibility on Europe and our institutions” (Connolly 2017).

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Strengthening FoRB, Hyvönen (2014) further argued that it provides “internal and external legitimacy of the political order it represents”.

The Norms and the Power: ENP Implications in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon Now let us focus on the actual policy implications in terms of FoRB in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, since each of those countries is able to set the Partnership Priorities in 2016 and 2017 an ongoing formal dialogue as well as a relatively sound financial cooperation and assistance. Since 2012, Jordan has co-chaired the UfM, underlining the joint ownership of the forum.1 Hence, Egypt and Jordan managed to form task forces following ENP revision in 2011. Official documents prepared by the European Commission including association agreements, country reports, action plans, progress reports, partnership priorities documents, review reports and new action plans analysed in order to figure out policy priorities. We have also looked at funds allocated in each of those countries generally and programme priorities in specific. As the key geographical instrument of cooperation between the EU and Southern Neighbourhood countries, ENI is composed of bilateral cooperation programme, regional programmes, neighbourhood-wide programme and cross-border cooperation (CBC) programme. Egypt participates in all ENI programmes. In addition, the country benefits from other funding programmes such as the Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP), the EU Emergency Trust Fund concerning with irregular migration and displaced persons in Africa as well as EU Emergency Trust Fund for stability and addressing root causes of irregular migration and displaced persons in Africa (EU Trust Fund web document). Jordan benefits from regional and multi-country cooperation programmes and participates in Development Cooperation Instrument. Lebanon limits its partnership with regional and neighbourhoodwide programmes but also takes part in one of the thematic programmes called civil society and local authorities. Together with Egypt, Lebanon benefits from TWINING programme on a variety of areas, while Lebanon and Jordan get aid from the EU Regional Trust Fund related to the Syrian crisis. Finally, yet importantly, specific thematic programmes such as the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights as well as some EU Community programmes such as Erasmus + Program are also available for Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt (ENP overview EC web document). 1 The

Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) is an intergovernmental institution bringing together the 28 European Union Member States and 15 countries from the Southern and Eastern shores of the Mediterranean to promote dialogue and cooperation. It is chaired by a co-presidency shared between the two shores. Since 2012, UfM is assumed by the European Union on the Northern side, ensuring a close link with the ENP, and by Jordan on the Southern side, allowing its full appropriation by the Southern countries. The co-presidency applies to all levels: summits, ministerial meetings and official-level meetings. More details are available on www.ufmsecretariat.org.

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Through bilateral assistance programmes, the EU allocated 558 million euros to Egypt during the period of 2007–2010 and another 449 million euros for the period of 2011–2013 altogether 1.007 million euros. Jordan gets nearly half of the amount allocated to Egypt making the total amount of 488 million euros: 265 million for the period 2007–2010 and another 223 million during the years between 2011 and 2013. Among three countries we examined, Lebanon gets the least funds from the EU. During the years 2007–2010, Lebanon allocated sum of 187 million euros, while another 150 million added during the period 2011–2013. The EU reduced funds allocated to all three countries approximately ten per cent during 2011–2013 period (ENPI—Overview of activities and results, 2014). Support for Partnership, Reforms and Inclusive Growth (SPRING) programme, which was adopted by the Commission (2011) as an umbrella programme, in response to the events of the “Arab Spring” linked allocations of funds with progress, made in each country. The total amount of SPRING programmes reached sum of 540 million euros out of which 90 million euros for Egypt, 101 million for Jordan and 51 million for Lebanon. The logic of SPRING is said to provide a useful tool in trying to give incentives for reforms in partner countries and showing that the EU has been coherent in rewarding democratisation efforts. However, none of these three countries actually spend these amounts probably because of lack of reforms (ENPI—Overview of activities and results, 2014). Examining all relevant Commission Decisions, action fiches and action documents during the nine-year period 2007–2016, EU allocation regarding ENP funds shows particular areas of concentration in each of these three countries. In Egypt, the EU particularly promotes women and citizen rights, as part of human rights in general. An action fiche on Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Civil Society in Egypt (action fiche for Egypt DAC-code 15162/15150, 2008) with 17 million euro budget and an action document for the “Advancing Women’s Rights in Egypt” (Action document ENI/2016/039 542) that has a total budget of 10.24 million euros are two separate programmes to promote projects on the fight against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and advancing women’s rights in Egypt. Partnership between the EU and Jordan focuses on Jordan’s leading role in reducing fundamentalism. A specific programme called “Support to Justice Reform and Good Governance in Jordan” allocated a total sums of 7 million euros aimed to reduce the level of religious extremism and increase public awareness of the content and values of the Amman Message (action fiche for Jordan DAC-code 15130). As for Lebanon, the EU Commission stressed reinforcing the role of civil society and limiting the political/religious pressures hindering partnerships for the NGOs. For a programme called “Reinforcing Human Rights and Democracy in Lebanon”, a sum of 20 million euros was allocated separately in two terms, one in 2009 (action fiche for Lebanon DAC-code 15162/15150) and the other in 2012 (action fiche for Lebanon ENPI/2009/20489). European discourse on matters related to FoRB demands comprehensive preservation and respect for human rights in four areas in particular. They include (a) constitutional guarantees for religious minorities, (b) freedom in their religious practices and life, (c) women rights and their preservation and (d) a more liberal audiovisual

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policy respecting freedom of the media and freedom of expression. These concerns reflected all relevant ENP documents related to Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. The country report on Egypt initially observes limitations since the Egyptian Constitution associates freedom of belief and practice of religious rites with Sharia. The report also expresses concerns about failing to recognise religious groups such as Coptic and Jewish communities as well as Baha’is religious minority. Taken together constitution is preventing rather than promoting religious rights [EU Commission SEC (2005) 287/3]. In a similar line, 2008 Progress Report [EU Commission SEC (2009) 523/2] mentions two important court decisions considering highly relevant to further limitations to the rights of religious minorities. The first one is a court rule denying Baha’is religious affiliations indicated in their identification documents, while the second one concerns with the issue of religious convert. Here, the particular ruling not to allow mentioning their original religion in their ID documents is seen as a contradiction to religious rights and belief. Furthermore, 2009 Progress Report [EU Commission SEC (2010) 517] criticised a decree recognising the right of adherents of non-recognised religions to obtain identification documents without having to declare themselves as Christian, Jews or Muslims. Other issues like governments failing to provide a proper protection of religious and cultural heritage and places of worship discrimination and even sectarian violence against Copts and other non-Muslims [EU Commission (SEC (2010) 517 and (2011) 647] are mentioned in progress reports. Constitutional limitations that are not acceptable to European norms on FoRB extend to a particular practice with the policy of non-recognition towards religious groups such as the Baha’is and the Shias [European Commission SWD (2013) 89 final]. Overall, the Egyptian Constitution perceived as conservative particularly on FoRB [European Commission SWD (2015) 65 final], and yet, the Egyptian State is rather “slow and ineffective” responding to attacking churches; the other religious and private properties are a major deficiency in regard to FoRB [EU Commission SWD (2014b) 71 final]. Concerning the women rights issue, the country report stresses women’s unequal status by highlighting the sexual discrimination within the limits of Islamic jurisprudence, referring that women are not treated as individuals and their status is not equal to men under Sharia [EU Commission SEC (2005) 287/3]. However, 2008 Progress Report welcomes Egypt to withdrew one of its reservations on Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) regarding the right of women to pass on their nationality to their children [EU Commission SEC (2009) 523/2]. As no considerable improvement is observed on women’s status throughout the years, 2012 report stresses a deep concern about the Islamist political parties and their stance towards women’s rights. Egypt is criticised on failing to form a legal environment to protect girls and women from violence, to encourage them to report attacks and to deter perpetrators from committing abuses against them [EU Commission SWD (2013) 89 final]. Comparing with Egypt, ENP perspective against Jordan seems less problematic on FoRB, since it adopted relatively balanced discourse and limited to freedom of expression. According to the country report, Jordan Constitution seems to have a reasonably liberal stance against the rights of ethnic or religious minorities in both

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political and social spheres [EU Commission SEC (2004) 564]. This is probably why Gutkowski pinpointed “a special relationship between the EU and Jordan” as partnership on counterterrorism (Gutkowski 2016). 2009 Progress Report praises Jordan’s experience in fighting radicalisation as well as its willingness to cooperate with the EU on supporting the integration of Muslims in EU Member States [European Commission SEC (2010) 525]. The reports especially stress Jordan’s efforts on founding networks on subjects such as interfaith, tolerance and respect in line with United Nations affords particularly mentioned a resolution proposed by King Abdullah on an annual “World Interfaith Harmony Week” between all religions, faiths and beliefs was adopted [European Commission SEC (2011) 648]. In 2013 report, Jordan was praised for “taking the lead in promoting peaceful inter-religious coexistence in the region, after the visit of the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief” [European Commission SWD (2014) 74 final]. Therefore, in the Action Plan, the Commission declared its willingness to “continue” (rather than to combat) cooperating with Jordan on human rights and fundamental freedoms for two sub-headings. Those ensure FoRB in compliance with the Jordanian Constitution and international standards and continue promoting the importance of tolerance and respect for all ethnic and religious groups through education (EU-Jordan ENP Action Plan). Freedom of expression is an issue where the ENP became critical when it comes to Jordan. The 2010 law on “Press and Publications” was criticised by jeopardising freedom of political speech as it authorises the imprisonment of journalists if they criticise the King, the Royal Court and religious symbols, thereby encouraging self-censorship [European Commission SEC (2011) 648]. Concerns over the freedom of political speech also reflected by the 2013 report mention arresting five university students and activists accused of desecration to Qur’an and anti-regime propaganda [European Commission SWD (2014) 74 final].2 Generally speaking, the EU considers Lebanon as secular in terms of constitutional guaranties. 2011 Progress Report welcomes Lebanese government’s inclusive reform programme with financial support [EU Commission SWD (2012) 117 final]. It particularly mentions Taif Agreement which provides power sharing between Christians and Muslims and all sub-communities are represented in a “proportional” manner.3 Religious communities and sub-communities are free to have their religious courts which adjudicate matters related to personal status, property, marriage, 2 Jordan

year reports of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International highly critical on Jordanian Press and Publications Law and actions of the Audiovisual Commission in terms of freedom of expression. Details are available on https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/ country-chapters/jordan and https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-north-africa/ jordan/report-jordan/. 3 The last amendment of Lebanon Constitution was made by Charter of Lebanese National Reconciliation in 1989. According to the agreement which brought 15 years of civil war to an end, Muslims and Christians are represented on a 50:50 basis in the Parliament, in the Council of Ministers as well as in all high-ranking civilian and military posts: Alawi, Druze, Shia and Sunni within the Muslim community, and Armenian Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Maronites and Protestants within the Christian community.

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divorce, inheritance and child custody according to religious law [EU Commission SEC (2005) 289/3]. However, religious groups, including Baha’is, Buddhists and Hindus although not officially recognised, they are allowed to practise their religion freely since the state recognition is not a requirement to practise religious rites excluding marriages, divorces and inheritance matters [EU Commission SEC (2005) 289/3]. This is probably why the EU-Lebanon Partnership and Cooperation Document does not refrain from calling the country to create a secular personal status law, granting civil rights and obligations to the Lebanese citizens regardless of their religious affiliation (Action Plan for EU-Lebanon Partnership and Cooperation 2013–2015). Two issues, the freedom of media and the rights of women, are what the EU most concerned. The country’s progress report calls for a more liberal audiovisual policy regarding cooperation in the fight against racism, religious intolerance and xenophobia within the framework of an Action Plan (EU/Lebanon ENP Action Plan). 2011 Progress Report criticises restricted activities of some filmmakers, in line with limitation of the airing of a small number of television programmes, films and other artistic material that touched upon what the National Audio-visual Council called “sensitive” religious and political topics [EU Commission SWD (2012) 117 final]. The consecutive reports highlighted similar concerns referring articles in the penal code that prohibits blasphemy and insults against religion and criticises particular provision calling “General Security” which actually censoring films and literature in this regard [EU Commission SWD (2013) 93 final and (2014a) 92 final]. In regard to rights of women, consecutive reports acknowledge “limited progress” since the draft law on the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence was adopted by the Council of Ministers who failed to implement because of opposition from religious leaders [EU Commission SWD (2012) 117 final and (2014a) 92 final].

Conclusion European Neighbourhood Policy has been the European Union’s bid to find a new way of maintaining the EU as a global normative power. The policy mainly relies on a particular perception regarding with this neighbourhood and the core policy motivation. The EU wished to create a circle of friendly neighbourhood securing a buffer against rising international terrorism, organised crime, illegal flows of migrants or military pressure. The irony with this policy, however, countries that are made up of such wider Europe is actually the part of a problem. Therefore, the core of the scheme is to bring them in line with the EU’s political standards via the promotion of European values and make them as part of a solution. The issue of freedom of religion and belief might be one of the issues in this regard. The activation of religion as a frame by the ENP works in a way which reflects its own perception and priorities reproduces polarised perception of the role of Islam as the dominant religion in those countries. As decisions and action fiches examined in this chapter reveal, the ENP approaches religion based on notions such as, democracy, civil society, plurality, tolerance, minority rights, refugee rights and women

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rights working in the background of balance and inheritance. Given that framing FoRB in this way creates controversy even among the larger European public, it might reproduce polarisation between the elite and the masses in these countries on the one hand and hence feed dichotomies such as us and them: Christianity versus Islam. Examining policy priorities in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon indicates the possibility that the EU’s normative agenda might be perceived as yet another example of Eurocentrism, reproducing state-centred and secular approaches to either governing, or rather containing, religion or moulding official forms of religion and actors with whom it can engage. Examining ENPI and ENI funds as the main denominators of the ENP, we observed that ENI provides a tailor-based approach. ENPI shows a change after the Arab Spring, with the introduction of SPRING instrument. Specifically addressing democratic transformation, sustainable and inclusive growth, with SPRING, the criteria for distribution of funds linked to reform adaptation capacity. This is probably why Jordan and Lebanon received more funds compared to pre-SPRING period, while Egypt gets less. The same is also relevant as far as funding through bilateral cooperation programme within the framework of ENI.

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Hikmet Kirik graduated from Istanbul University Communication Faculty, received his MA from Leicester University/UK and his Ph.D. from Westminster University/UK. He teaches social and political theory, at the graduate as well as postgraduate level in various institutions. His research interests comprise of, political communication, democracy, governance and more recently modern Turkish society and politics. He is currently working on a book project on democratic roots of Turkish political modernization. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Security Strategies. He worked as a journalist and involved in publishing business in Turkey. He is an Associate Professor in Political Science Faculty at Istanbul University and teaches postgraduate courses at National Defense University Pelin Sönmez completed her BA from Ba¸skent University Political Sciences and International Relations Department. She received her MA degree in European Union in the Graduate School of Social Sciences at Dokuz Eylül University. She received her Ph.D. in the same field of her MA in the Graduate School of Social Sciences at Istanbul University. After finishing her PhD she lectured in Ni¸santa¸sı University and she has been working in the International Relations Department of Kocaeli University since 2017. She wrote chapters for books like “Europe Seen Here and Elsewhere: Eurobroadmap Visions of Europe in the World”, “The Expansion of EU in Eastern Europe and Western Balkans: Is EU 36 Possible?”, “European Union and Member States: A Research on EU 15.”, “Revisiting Gender and Migration”, “Profile Scanning Study for the Syrian Women Under Temporary Protection Status”. In addition, her articles and critics were published in different academic journals, such as Ankara European Studies Journal, Social Sciences Journal of Dokuz Eylül University, Journal of the Black Sea Studies, Migration Journal, Journal of Security Strategies and International RelationsJournal. She is currently working on European Union, the relationship between Turkey and EU, political integration, migration policies.

Concluding Remarks Seda Ünsar and Özgür Ünal Eri¸s

The relation between church and state, and between the appropriate boundaries of the religious and the political has posed a challenge for scholars and statesmen alike for centuries. Much of the work done on this issue posits a fundamental opposition of modernity and religion and predicts that the practice of the latter inexorably declines as the former progresses (Wilson 1998: 48–49). Calling this “the secularisation theory”, Berger (1999) argues that “modernisation necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals; as societies modernize, increasing commitments to scientific rationality and individual autonomy lessen the influence of ‘the sacred’ and of religiously oriented institutions, leading to an inevitable process of secularisation” (Berger 1999: 201–202). This theory, finding its roots in the Enlightenment era, enjoyed its heyday during the 1950s and 1960s. However, the end of the cold war and neoliberal globalisation is said to have enabled a new kind of secular liberal global society to emerge and consolidate. The relationship between secularisation and modernity has gradually spread world-wide (Cox and Swyngedouw 2000). Modern secularisation theories do not claim that religion will disappear as such, but merely that it will become solely a feature of an individual’s private conscience, with little influence in the public sphere. Thus, a secular state does not mean that society itself is secular (Krzysztof 2015: 540). Alternatively, we can posit that the definitions of the “secular”, secularism, and secularisation are, themselves, in a transformative process. This book starts with chapters, i.e. by Bedri Gencer, Seda Ünsar, and Ça˘gda¸s Dedeo˘glu that seek to contribute to this transformative phase. While Ça˘gda¸s Dedeo˘glu proposes the idea that “the modern is not secular” and Seda Ünsar contextualizes the transformative phase in the evolution of the world-economy and its superstructure, Bedri Gencer S. Ünsar (B) Do˘gu¸s University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] Ö. Ünal Eri¸s ˙Istanbul 29 Mayıs University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Ünsar and Ö. Ünal Eri¸s (eds.), Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_10

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offers an intense analysis on the rise of civilisation itself, and the transformation of European identities as secularisation. The notion of the secular state is based on the following three elements: (1) Freedom of conscience, thought, and religion, which includes the freedom to have or to not have a religion, the freedom to change religion, and the freedom to practice or not practice the religion of one’s choice (2) Equality of rights and duties of all citizens, regardless of their religious or philosophical identifications (3) The respective autonomy of the state and religions, which means both freedom of the state in relation to religions and freedom of religions in relation to the state (Berger 1966: 3–28) The construction of the secularisation paradigm and its relation to modernity is analysed in this book in the chapter by Dedeo˘glu, in which he argues that “secularization was one of the important components of modernization along with bureaucratization, rationalization, and urbanization” (Schultz 2006: 171). Yet, Dedeo˘glu, going beyond this statement, and focusing on the limits of the relationship between secularisation and secularism, questions at the micro-level to what extent “the modern is secular”. In other words, agreeing with the British sociologists that at the macro-level secularisation has been a success, Dedeo˘glu asks: the modern society is secularized, but is it secular? Comparing Steve Bruce, Charles Taylor and Talal Asad through word clouds generated from their pioneering works, he reveals that the history of human domination has always aimed at interfering and restructuring the Other. His intriguing chapter thus pictures a multifaceted reality of secularism and situates the secularism debate within the intersection amongst the nature of reasoning, the philosophy of religion, and the nature of politics including knowledge production systems. In his chapter, Gencer also focuses on the strong relationship between modernisation and secularism to argue that modernisation may be defined as “the changing way of living and secularisation as the concomitant changing way of believing”. On this definition, secularisation appears to be a consequence of modernisation. He also touches on the influence of Western modernisation on the rest of the world while distinguishing between Catholic and Protestant versions of Christianity. Whereas “Catholic-spirited civilisation is imposed on other cultures through war and assimilation and the East was radically bothered which also formed the understructure of Orientalism, the Protestant West tended to ‘softly’ otherwise other contemporary cultures, and as the ‘benevolent civilizer’ the Protestant intellectual aimed to elevate the ‘backward’ communities to the current level of Western development through cultural change called acculturation” (Gencer 2017: 334–335). Gencer, in his profound analysis on civilisation as secularisation and the transformation of European identities, contributes to not only the issue of the definition of secularisation which, in his words, “has become an almost enigmatic, unfathomable concept”, but also the notions of civilisation and cosmopolitanism as essential aspects of secularisation. Fabio Vicini contributes to the debate by focusing on analysing in detail the practice of secularism in Western countries. He confirms how the secular principles of governance introduced in the sixteenth century in Europe through the European

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experience of modernity still dominate the post-national global world through principles such as human rights and religious freedom. His in-depth chapter is revealing in showing how the Western political project has penetrated the rest of the world largely beyond what a mere structural analysis of the legal, educational, and political transformations of the last century and a half would suggest. Both Dedeo˘glu and Vicini use Talal Asad’s work to explain and compare practices of secularism in Muslim countries. Vicini is especially cautious about theories that continue to see secularism as a Western import, arguing instead that they cannot illustrate how cultures of secularity operate beyond state policy by shaping everyday life. Reference to Asad is also made in Ünsar’s chapter where she mentions Asad’s perception of secularism as an “alienating, colonial imposition of the Western worldview”. Her important contribution to this book rests on the political economic explanation of secularism in Muslim countries where Muslim countries placed within economic perpiheralisation and missing the historical evolution of democracy-capitalism and liberalism connection have hard time incorporating secularist principles. Even more, they end up being criticised as unsuccessful to implement secularism because it is a form of Western culture, and “material things can be taken from the West, but not its culture”. Ünsar treats this argument as Orientalist. Introducing a dyadic category of secularism to question the dominant paradigm that views secularism as a Western cognitive type, she calls for a political economy approach that places secularism in the emergence and expansion of liberal capitalist world-economy, its incorporation of the periphery, and the due institutional, political, and social processes. By tracing the imperial logos critiqued by the Western left and its reflections onto and within the periphery, she further draws attention to the differences shaped by the particular necessities of the terrain on which the intellectuals in the core and periphery have to operate, referring to them as the ‘dead albatrosses’ of each. Francisco Jorge Rodríguez Gonzálvez analyses the eighteenth century processes of economic liberalisation and the continuity of corporate models in Spain and situates secularism not as a consequence of a revolutionary move but of a process of definition of distinctive domains of action. The seminal debate in industrialising Europe revolved around two arguments: the need for the liberalisation of industrial production and trade or the preservation of traditional corporations of artisans that were often linked to religious associations. As Britain was the core of the industrializing West, it provided a model to emulate, love, and resent at the same time. In this setting, argues Rodríguez, Spain following a continuity of the religious and industrial corporations allowed corporations to preserve most of their former characteristics, in return of the adaptation to the market conditions. Surveying the British, French, and Italian paths in comparison to the Spanish one through an analysis of the Enlightenment, reforms and associative expressions, guild monopolies, and changes in the traditional patterns of organising labour and production, Rodríguez demonstrates that the rationalisation of the economy led to the expropriation of religious corporations although the government had no intention to secularize the society. In her dissertation work, Ünsar reaaches a similar conclusion on a different terrain, that of the Ottomans, where she looks at the changes in the land regime and the emergence of a property rights structure, the dissolution of the guilds and the loss of economic and political power of the Ulema, and thus treats secularisation as an unintended consequence of

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redefinition of property rights structure initiated by incorporation into the capitalist world-economy (Ünsar 2008). Rodríguez’s important contribution appears to be in the connection he makes to the liberalisation processes in regard to secularisation through a rich survey of economic history, which also provides an example of a welldocumented case study for the political economy base of secularism that Ünsar seeks to theoretically build in her chapter. The part “westernisation of a western country” in the very title of Rodríguez’s chapter is itself telling in that there is a scholarly need to look for generalisable patterns in the workings of an expanding world-economy and its impact on the superstructure including politics, culture, etc., to question the uncritiqued perception of the phenomenon of “Westernisation” in the conventional literature on what is dubbed as the non-Western world. This again relates to Ünsar’s call for questioning the dominant paradigm that views secularism as solely a Western cognitive category alien to the so-called non-Western cognition, and for connecting the epistemologies of secularism to the macro-historical and global evolution of the world political economy. The debate in literature regarding the influence of the Western model of modernisation on Muslim countries started in the 1950s and 1960s, when, in the pursuit of economic development, many Muslim-majority countries attempted to establish a Eurocentric secular political culture together with Western models of development. The successful experience of European industrial countries, in which socioeconomic development occurred simultaneously alongside the process of separating church and state, it is argued, encouraged leaders in Islamic countries to use this pattern as a template for Islamic societies. The association between Muslim religious identity and socio-economic backwardness apparently led many members of the elite to think that religion (Islam) itself was a cause of Muslims’ socio-economic underachievement, which motivated the choice of secular nationalism as a panacea for backwardness, as already experienced by the West. The secular leaders of these Muslim countries assumed that only secular nationalism could dramatically improve the socio-economic status of the Muslim communities they were leading (Tamadonfar and Jelen 2014). These secular rulers were not, however, alone in this attitude. Various scholars defending theories of modernisation also stress that the social presence of religion hinders change and that religion should be considered as a private matter. Islam in particular is claimed to be incompatible with capitalist development because of the absence of rationality from its theology (Weber 1963: 265), stark differences in values from those of the free market economy, and the extended role of government in its economic system (Tripp 2006: 32–33; Turner 1978: 375–378; Metwally 1997: 941–943; Voigt 2005: 66 and 79). Turkey is commonly portrayed in the scholarly literature on modernisation as the first modern Muslim country, constituting an allegedly successful model of westernisation for other predominantly Muslim societies to follow (Nasr 2009: 232–237). Lewis (1961), for instance, argues that the most positive character of Turkish modernisation has been the willingness of Turkish policy makers to join western civilisation through social reforms. For these scholars, secularisation is one of the main tenets of modernisation. Ünsar also contributes to this debate in her chapter where she explains how the republic transformed the religious state outlook into a state power which derived its legitimacy from a combination of nationalism and laicism;

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popular legitimacy now meant giving power to secular assembly of citizens rather than a religiously ordered sultanate/caliphate. The decline and eventual destruction of the Ottoman Empire led Kemal Atatürk to conclude that social and economic development in Turkey could not progress under Islamic cultural and religious practices replete with hostility towards rationality and thus out of touch with scientific development and production. He therefore proceeded with a secularist stance that was fundamental for economic, political, and social development. A series of reforms in the initial years after the foundation of the republic made Turkey the most secular state in the Middle East. The Islamic Caliphate was abolished, the Ministry of Sharia (Islamic Law) and Religious Foundations were abolished, and all educational institutions were brought under the control of the Ministry of Education, effectively abolishing Islamic schools. The Swiss civil code and the Italian penal code were adopted in 1926, all religious orders (Naqshbandi, Bektashi, etc.) were banned, Islamic and Ottoman headdress for men (fez, turban, etc.) were banned, the Islamic calendar was replaced with the Western Gregorian calendar, Arabic script was replaced with the Latin alphabet, and the Islamic weekend holiday, Friday, was replaced with the Western weekend holiday, Saturday and Saturday. In 1928, the constitutional article stating that “the religion of the state is Islam” was removed. Thus, with no state religion and no religious law, Turkey became a fully secular state by 1928, only five years after independence. Furthermore, in the 1937 constitution, secularism was emphasised as a principle (Berkes 1998: 482). Through these measures, “Islam was ‘disestablished’ and deprived of a role in public life” (Lapidus 1975: 503). Murat Sener, ¸ who discusses the cultural revolution in his chapter, describes how it necessitated the creation of “New Turks”, who developed a self-awareness of their own potential to take affairs into their own hands, and who understood that it was not divine purpose or kısmet that dictated life but free will, choice, and rationality. What Atatürk did was to challenge religion’s traditional power structure in the political domain, making it strictly a private matter. Reason as opposed to superstition would now determine the way people approached their religion. Taking Turkey out of futile debates on issues such as whether or not it is possible to separate faith from religion, and whether or not secularism or science is compatible with Islam that confined, for centuries, the Islamic world in Braudel’s bell jar; Atatürk experimented with new ways, i.e. philosophical, spiritual, ethnographic, historical, etc., to perceive religion as opposed to the previously only available one, that of tradition. Although this is a subject to be analysed on grounds proper to it, suffice it to say here; the republican revolution aimed foremost at shedding off the yoke of deeply internalised underdevelopment inherited from a dismembered empire which only had superficial modernisation, and for that, creating not only the new rational man equipped with the tools of scientific education as master of himself, but also a new psyche, a new mentality, a new mood that did not yield to fate but took matters in hand. Therefore, the republican revolution was, foremost, an act of creating the socio-cultural milieu and the informal institutional structure for transiting to a productive institutional structure, in the sense that Douglass C. North uses it, from a

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redistributive institutional structure and its due informal institutional structure inherited from the Ottoman Empire (Ünsar 2008; Ünsar 2018). This act also meant to bring the reformation process to its zenith that officially started in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire but indeed had been sporadically going on in macro-structural evolution due to its sixteenth-century incorporation by the capitalist world-economy. Hence, the process of secularisation in the republic was not an ideological choice per se, but an evolutionary institutional reality, albeit replete with complications of semi-peripheral, in Wallerstein’s lexicon, integration into world-economy since the sixteenth century (Ünsar 2008; Ünsar 2018). The argument propounded by Cemil Boyraz that secularism was also meant to exert control over previously privileged religious groups and their social sources of power as part of the ongoing international economic integration should be situated, in macro-historical sense, against this setting. Boyraz also shows, in his chapter, that how the rise of secularism went hand in hand with the development of international economic integration, and that this could be (naturally) seen in all stages of political life, including the early Republican era, the revitalisation of the Turkish-Islamic theses in the 1980s, the rise of political Islam in the 1990s, and during the current Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) era. Atatürk’s secular policies were taken as a model by several rulers in Islamic countries, albeit with their own interpretations of his revolution and the structural realities of their countries, who also saw the connection between socio-economic development and secularism. In Tunisia, for example, Habib Bourguiba, who ruled between 1957 and 1987, endeavoured to westernise the country as he was fascinated by the West, especially Francophile culture, as the exclusive path of progress. He linked Islam with regression, believing strongly that the expansion of secularism was associated with the nature and task of government. After taking power, he therefore set reforms in motion aimed at decreasing the influence of Islam in Tunisia, such as altering the education syllabus in favour of secular contents, combined Islamic courts with a secular judicial system, made the secular Code of Personal Status into law, and declared several Sharia family laws illegal (Esposito and Voll 2001:92; Murphy 1999:51). Ben Ali, who ruled after him between 1987 and 2011, was also dedicated to secularism and excluded the Islamist opposition from political competition, branding them as “reactionary” and “anti-modernisation” groups (Murphy 1999: 6–7). In Iran, the Shahs also emulated Atatürk’s reforms. Reza Shah’s triplex ideology consisted of nationalism (archaism), modernisation (Europeanisation), and secularism (de-Islamisation) (Fazeli 2006a, b:46). Some of his fundamental secular reforms, which at least superficially resembled Atatürk’s secularisation program, included taking the judicial system out of the control of clerics, limiting the clergy’s access to endowments (vaghf) as a financial resource, enacting new secular commercial, criminal, and civil codes based on European patterns and replacing religious codes, and restricting religious materials in primary and secondary schools along with introducing Western-oriented academic disciplines in the educational system. In Egypt, the 1923 constitution, drafted and implemented after independence in 1922, also treasured secularism. The era of Gamal Abdel Nasser between 1956 and 1970 can be characterized as the era of secular Arab nationalism, based on language, history,

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and culture—but not religion. He closed Egypt’s Sharia courts and inserted secular themes of study. The two next presidents, Anwar Sadat (1970–1981) and Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011), continued and advanced Nasser’s secular and pro-Western policies of (Hibbard 2010: 54 and 62). In Morocco, French colonialism between 1912 and 1956 subordinated religious figures and the juridical system to the state, limited the application of Sharia in juridical processes, weakened the power of religious authorities, and expanded European modes of clothing, art, sport, and lifestyle (Lapidus 2002: 607–608). However, the experience of the Arab and the Iranian contexts suggests that various forms of secularism forcibly imposed from above especially linked with colonial rule (as in the Arab context) or hegemonised governance (as in the Iranian context) may be neither desirable nor sustainable in the long term. Despite the rules introduced to expand secularism and suppress the role of religion in Muslim countries, religion has clearly not followed the predicted path. On the contrary, its role has grown in both public and private affairs, providing a striking counter-example to the secularisation thesis (Ben-Porat 2013: 4). Yet, at this juncture, it is important to not isolate local political developments from ongoing cosmopolitan entanglements, and to note the impact of the Cold War Era policies shaped by the US and the Soviet Union rivalry and reach into the Middle East region. Gasiorowski’s 1987 dated article on the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran is a fine example of such analysis amongst many others written by Mahmood Mamdani, Tarıq Ali, and other scholars. Still, it can be argued that the 1979 Iranian revolution had already challenged the thesis that secularism is both a cause and an effect of modernisation while the Arab uprising/awakening has also empowered grassroots social movements across the globe, including Islam-informed ones. This has shaken the foundations of secularism as a political philosophy in sociopolitical discourse throughout the Muslim world (Bokhari and Senzai 2018) although there are newly emerging secular social demands in even war-torn places like Iraq within people’s demonstrations under most strained political conditions that also show that secularism has made some way in these societies. Nevertheless, a growing literature has emerged that seeks to answer the question Why did secularism fail to take root in the Muslim world? The most popular explanation is that collectivity lies at the heart of Islam, such that Muslims generally consider Islam integrally as both a political system and philosophy, as well as a driver of social, cultural, and economic development. Consequently, Islam is assumed to play an integral role in personal, societal, and national affairs. This implies that Islamic civilisation, in its true spirit, is all-encompassing and represents more than a body of religious doctrines and philosophies. The Western idea of national government and national loyalty is thus at odds with Islamic conceptions of religious community and Koranic law (Esposito et al. 2018). Based on developments in the Muslim countries, a new concept has emerged within the literature of post-Islamism, which recasts Islam as an alternative, modernising force, affording it a prominent role in economic, social, and political development, while critiquing the secularisation thesis of Western-oriented modernism. This “project” seeks to reconcile Islamic teachings with modernity in general, and principles such as human rights and democracy in particular (Bayat 2007: 18–19).

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Indeed, this is not a new debate in the Islamic world that has been undergoing, since at least the nineteenth century on if not earlier, the familiar tensions of sometimes denouncement, sometimes reconcialiation with the West, secularism, modernity, and democracy. Hourani’s seminal work on Arab thought between 1789 and 1939 provides an in-depth analysis of these unresolved debates (Hourani 1983). While ignoring secularism, the “project” in question, however, continues to equate capitalism and democracy with modernity, perpetuating the Eurocentric intellectual tradition that conceptualises modernity solely in terms of the features of western socio-economic and political life. In the political arena, just as Christianity did not prevent the spread of democracy in Europe, Islam cannot, and should not, be considered inimical to democratic governance and the establishment of a pluralistic society (Hashemi 2013). Thus, in a practical sense, the emerging political system is argued to incorporate democratic and secularist ideals and principles within Islamic ethical, moral, cultural, and value systems. Yet, in praxis, how do these systems in the twenty-first century operate on such issues as women rights, the right to deism or atheism, minority rights and the like? In his chapter analysing post-Islamist discourse, Sener ¸ criticises the critiques of the secularisation narrative and the modern state, and states that “a presumption of a failure on the part of the secular modern state, and a conjecture of religious revival lie at the core of this criticism that ultimately comes to denounce modernisation as a myth”. Sener ¸ further argues that this conventional view supports a politically inspired picture that is highly circumscribed and distorted. The banality of these arguments, Sener ¸ states, must be recognized in light of the conjectural changes that occurred following the end of the Cold War in 1991. His assessment can also be read in line with the part in Ünsar’s chapter which contextualizes secularism in the parameters of neoliberal capitalist world-economy and its postmodern, neoconservative political hegemony—extending her previous macro-historical analysis of the political economy of secularism to the contemporary phase. Sener’s ¸ account of the Turkish case at the local level converges with Ünsar’s macro-analysis of neoliberal capitalism and its postmodern, neoconservative hegemony. In Sener’s ¸ analysis, when the idea of religious revival, shaping the conventional view, was proposed by the dissidents of modernity as a question of modern secular state, it was also connected to the global intellectual questioning of modernity, once regarded highly as an incarnation of Enlightenment principles, as well as the pressures in ethics and public policy in line with the political dynamics of the Cold War era. Yet, the antinomies of questioning the so-called principles, Ünsar argues, denote radically different territories for the intellectuals of the West and the periphery, with serious implications for the renown debate on the role of the intellectual. As Vicini argues in his chapter on the socio-anthropology of secularism, neither the Ottoman nor the Turkish state should be imagined as completely secular entities since state and religion have always intertwined within the state, both in the Ottoman Empire and later under the Republic. Thus, there is no reason to envisage the state in Turkey, or elsewhere, as a completely secular entity. Only as exchanges with Europe increased over time did Ottoman bureaucratic traditions intersect with European secular discourse and administrative practice more clearly, so that they gradually gained sharper secular contours between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century; a

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process that reached its zenith with the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 (Vicini 2016). This analysis also converges with the earlier mentioned analysis by Ünsar of the republican project of transition to a productive institutional structure from the inherited Ottoman redistributive institutional structure, which previously had not (could not have) radically altered the redistibutive structure but aimed to reform it (Ünsar 2018). Overlooking evolutionary institutional patterns, and taking up a more superficial reading of the actual developmental context, the conventional view on the Turkish case argues that religiosity has not disappeared despite the Kemalists’ social engineering project that aimed to secularise society and that instead, an influential Islamist political movement has gradually emerged amongst Islamist groups that perceive capitalist modernity positively. While Ünsar’s analysis of the Orientalist bias in her chapter is theoretically helpful to evaluate such conventional readings, Sener ¸ develops a strong critique of the said-argument by documenting the link between an intent on legitimizing a particular way of thinking in part of the US efforts to promote a model of “moderate Islam” and the current denouncement of secularism in these readings. He further emphasizes that since the mid-1990s, their evaluations almost exclusively cultivate on a religio-political perspective that obscures the actual developmental context. Quoting Sener, ¸ “challenging the basic premises of such conventional readings, an actual critical stance must have questioned whether it is really Islam as a faith-driven notion that has been in rise, and whether modernization has ever truly prevailed in this context at the first place”, which scholarly analysis largely overlooks along with the actual historical context. According to Sener, ¸ focusing almost exclusively on a religio-political outlook which obscures the psychosocial and intellectual impoverishments in those settings where modernity is argued to fail, this view tells the wrong story: “What they call an “Islamic revival” is in reality an unintended outcome of policy choices and decision-makings in which exploitation of religion results in the persistence of the traditional as opposed to the modern”. The distortion Sener ¸ brings to light also reveals a distortion on cause and consequence, and connects well with Ünsar’s analysis of the epistemology of secularism within the developmental context. Once again, quoting Sener, ¸ “maybe the most vital aspect of Turkish modernization which the critics persistently overlook is that it focused on first a rejuvenation and liberation of the traditional whose opinion range for centuries was curbed by superstition and “absence of change” which defined the rural context. Against the backdrop of extreme psychic and physical desolation, Turkish modernization would ultimately evolve into a cultural revolution. And, stimulating a change in people’s thought ways by endorsing a culture of ingenuity, and promoting a transition from passivity to new participant ways of life set the core objective of this venture. Essentially, the envisioned new Turkish state could only be possible by accomplishing first the modern self who acknowledged that it was not a divine purpose or kısmet that dictated human lives, but free will and choice”. Reading the recent developments in Turkey as the rise of a “mass Islamist movement”, as is popular with the conventional view in question, when the current government came into power a decade ago in part due to the misgivings of an electoral party-system and with an image of a pro-Western, centre-right political formation rather than an Islamic one, is obviously another reductionist flaw to which Boyraz’s

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political economy assessment also attests. The post-1980 economic liberalisation programme of then Prime Minister Turgut Özal specifically eliminated the hegemony of Istanbul-centred conglomerates over the Turkish economy. Small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) seized the opportunities provided by the new economic programme to build partnerships with foreign enterprises and export their products to new markets in the Middle East and Central Asia (Ba¸skan 2011). The rise of the new economic elite impacted Turkish political life as many SMEs preferred to form ties with Milli Görü¸s (National View)-affiliated parties, such as Refah in the 1990s and AKP in the 2000s. Here, several important caveats to be noted are in order. Refah (Welfare) Party was a political formation based on anti-Western Islamism, reluctantly but openly mentioning rule on sacred-law, while AKP (JDP) emerged as a centre-right, (neo)conservative political formation with a pro-Western image. A side caveat stems from the fact that even though the National View in question is Refah’s political formulation, Islamism is based on not the idea of nationalism which is secular, but the idea of Ummah defined by membership in Islamic brotherhood, and thus is at odds with the secular ontology of the republic. Yet, as AKP was well-aligned with neoliberalism, Refah under Erbakan’s leadership, in time, took an even more protectionist stance which aligned it with a form of conservative nationalism, despite still retaining Islamism. It is quite paradoxical and can be attributed as a success of the republican modernisation project that currently Refah launches strong objections to not only economic but also socio-political policies of the government, displaying an open appreciation of the economic, political, and cultural achievements of the republic, and a clear opposition to the non-productive and destructive policies of the government. Situated against this setting, the rise of AKP indicates that political Islam, albeit in a moderate form, rose in parallel to the emergence of a conservative capitalist class in Turkey, a phenomenon that strongly questions whether secularism is an inescapable component of modernism, given that Islamism did not disappear with rapid economic development but transformed itself instead (Göksel 2016: 252–253). The flaw in this questioning, however, is two-layered. The first layer is that secularism, as a vehicle of modernism, is not only epistemologically but also ontologically the basis on which the world-economy and therefore its socio-political and socio-cultural structure rest as Ünsar in her chapter analyses at length. Indeed, quoting Rodriguez, “the économistes politiques created a theoretical system where the free play of market forces would result in a stronger economic structure, within a framework of modernisation, development and growth” which, in world history, have occurred ontologically based on the processes of secularisation. Secondly, under the dynamics of superficial multi-party politics from the 1940s onwards, the dissolution of cornerstone projects of the republican revolution such as the Village Institutes that aimed to initiate a productive political, social, and cultural structure or the disruption in land reform that aimed to transform the socio-economic substructure inevitably led to major distortions in modernism, secularism as its vehicle, and democratic consolidation. The transformation in ideologies including Islamism cannot be treated as a phenomenon independent from these developments in the socio-economic substructure and socio-political, socio-cultural superstructure.

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In his chapter, Boyraz analyses the instrumentalisation of traditional values in Turkey’s liberalisation and capitalist development. For example, for the large rural masses, the liberalisation discourse of the Democrat Party had two meanings: liberalisation of assertive secularist policies and economic development through a free market economy. Throughout the well-known Turkish-Islamic synthesis after the 1980s, Özal also underlined the importance of family, tradition, and moral values in the social formation of Turkey. Apparently, conservative political policies and liberal economic policies in Turkey went hand in hand during the heyday of Thatcherism and Reaganism. Like Demirel in the mid-1960s, he argued that economic development and faster integration with the world do not necessarily conflict with the ideals of protecting these values in society. For Boyraz, the political, economic, and ideological discourse of AKP can be considered the strongest articulation of market and religious values yet, in which promotion of religious identity complements its neoliberalism. This analysis is again in line with Ünsar’s macro-analysis of neoliberalism and neoconservatism at the global conjuncture. In this sense, Boyraz contributes to the political economy analysis of development of secularism in Turkey rather than the Eurocentric modernisation approach. In Tunisia and Egypt, secularism was imposed by authoritarian regimes. However, recent political developments in Egypt and Tunisia have also brought post-Islamism into the political debate. Post-Islamists in these countries moved away from a theocratic interpretation of Islam towards an emphasis on its contributions to culture and civilisation (Hashemi 2013). Indeed, this development alone indicates the penetration of secularism, however limited it may be, into these societies. Post-Islamists, in doing so, focus on the compatibility of Islam with democratic politics, plurality, and diversity, economic growth and freedom (Esposito and Voll 1998; Kamali 2001). In Morocco, on the other hand, the secularist policies that came with French colonisation lost influence after independence since the imposition of secular politics as colonial import were not supported by most Moroccan people, who allegedly prefer an integrated religious polity. Accordingly, the Moroccan state in the postcolonial era is established as an Islamic state, with the King acting as the commander of the faithful within its borders. As a traditional Islamic state, it vests sovereignty in God. Morocco defines its official form of Islam in a very clear, specific form: the Maliki school of Sunni jurisprudence, the doctrine of Imam Ash’ari, and the Sufi Sanad or support base. Throughout the history of modernisation, European countries have remained, strictly speaking, secular despite the difficulties of relegating Christianity to the private domain of the individual citizen. In his chapter, Rodriguez concentrates on Spain as example of modernisation, especially through the development of liberal economic state-planned methods. However, he also points out that although Spain’s enlightened elite censured certain religious orders, the influence of the Church on the education system has continued along with religious and industrial corporations, as have common religious expressions that ordinary people participate in, traditional rites and public celebrations related to the need for moral support at crucial moments in their lives.

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Pelin Sönmez and Hikmet Kırık also analyse this issue in their chapter concerning the major texts of the European Union: the draft constitution and the Lisbon Treaty, which both involved discussions about an increasing preference for references to Christianity. From their analysis of the EU’s European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), they conclude that “despite the rising role of Christianity in domestic and foreign policy, due to insecurity brought by global terrorism, illegal immigration and political instability, the EU in fact maintains its own identity as a secular power”. This can be seen specifically in all relevant ENP documents, where the EU clearly demands preservation of and respect for human rights, particularly constitutional guarantees for religious minorities and freedom in their religious practices and life. The conclusion reached by Kırık and Sönmez also converges with Ünsar’s claim that “the epistemic category of the ‘secular’, which, having originated from the Enlightenment for the European, still holds its castle in the European conception of democracy”. As one final concluding remark, secularism appears to be under spotlights for a foreseeable future along with a global Kulturkampf, search for alternative cosmopolitanisms, and transformation of identities. All of these developments are shaped by the intrinsic changes within the global economic structures and their increasingly sophisticated integration processes. Yet, at this point, we would like to go back to Eliz Sanasarian’s reminder, quoting the timeless Mevlana Jelaleddin Rumi, for debates on religion in the introduction of this book; that of essence. Secularism also has an essence. Quoting the late Halliday, “Secularist rigor, in particular the need to recuperate, defend and develop elements in the broader field of radical social and political theory, certainly needs to be applied to the question of religion and to the authority of supposedly sacred texts, invisible deities and bearded, self-appointed, representatives of such ideas and deities in the contemporary world”. “The objection here”, says he, “is not to belief as such, which may well meet the moral and psychological needs of much of mankind, and in a way that rational ideas palpably cannot, but to the intrusion into—when not an imposition on—modern society of forms of authority justified in sacred terms. The difficulty is with the respect—not to say groveling—to which superstition, irrationality and what is now mawkishly termed ‘faith’ have come to receive in our society, and even more so in the USA” (Halliday 2010: 23; italic added).

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Seda Ünsar completed her BA degree in International Relations at Koç University, Istanbul, where she entered with a national ranking of 49th. She received MA degree from Claremont Graduate University and University of Southern California. She completed her Ph.D. with Distinction at the University of Southern California in 2008. She taught at the London School of Economics as a visiting fellow (2008–2009) and was a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute (2009–2010). She taught at Bogaziçi University, and the University of Southern California; worked at Arel University and Yeditepe University, and is currently at Do˘gu¸s University. Her research interests include institutional theory, the political economy of Ottoman institutional modernization and secularism, the political economy of neoliberalism, Western political thought, Islamic political thought, and the Middle East. Özgür Ünal Eri¸s received her BA from Bo˘gaziçi University in Istanbul, her MA from the Department of European Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK, and her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at the University of Essex in the UK. During her studies, she also worked as a visiting researcher in Charles University in Prague, Free University, and Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin. Her MA dissertation thesis was specifically looking at the influence of Luxemburg Summit on Turkey-EU relations, while her Ph.D. thesis focused on German Foreign Policy’s influence on Turkey’s EU membership. Since then, her research interests mainly focus on new security threats, Turkey-EU relations, energy security, and the importance of illegal migration in Turkey-EU relations, and she has published extensively in international books and peerreviewed journals about these issues. She recently co-authored a book on the Political Economy of Muslim Countries published in July 2018 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing Company. Currently, she works as an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations in ˙Istanbul 29 Mayıs University and lectures part-time in some other universities.