Secularism Gone Crazy

In Turkey, the battle continues between secularists and Islamists. This week, the country’s highest court agreed to consider banning the Islamist-leaning “Justice and Development Party” (AKP) and bar 71 of its leading members – including the current prime minister and president – from participation in political life. This wouldn’t be the first time that the avowedly secular court (8 of its 11 judges are secularists) has weighed in on such controversial political matters. Under stipulations in the 1982 Turkish constitution, the high court is granted broad discretion to ban political parties – a privilege that the court has exercised several dozen times. Under this latest court case, brought by the state prosecutor, the AKP is being tried for its “anti-secular” outlook and its alleged efforts to force Islamic law down the throat of the Turkish state.

But, contrary to popular perception, it is not the secularists who are in the right. Backed by an interventionist military, the secular establishment is profoundly anti-democratic. Under the banner of the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, they have repeatedly intervened in the country’s political process to suppress dissent, ban legitimate political parties, and stifle religious freedoms for Turkish citizens. In contrast, the mainstream and popular Islamists actually represent a more forward-looking path for Turkey. Although religiously-tinged, the AKP has advocated for closer ties to the EU, pursued a mainstream domestic agenda (focusing primarily on economic growth and social reform), and largely stayed away from divisive religious issues. They are moderate enough, in fact, that their most divisive “religious” reform – falsely labeled, however, given that it has everything to do with social freedom and little to do with religion – has been an effort to overturn a ban on the wearing of headscarves in public institutions.

Not Exactly the Taliban
Since first coming to power in 2002, the AKP has pursued a broad platform of liberal reform. Their efforts include an ongoing attempt to overturn the freedom-gutting censorship law enshrined in the constitution’s Article 301, passing the greatest expansion of women’s rights since Ataturk, reaching out to the nation’s oppressed Kurdish minority, abolishing capital punishment, cracking down on torture, and allowing greater freedom to criticize the military. Interestingly, it’s the Islamist AKP government that has consistently pushed for liberal reform and democratic consolidation; the secularist CHP party, for its part, has often opposed these changes.

Turkish secularists do have their supporters, however. Michael Van Der Galien, a blogging colleague at Poligazette, is quick to defend the latest efforts to dethrone the AKP. He writes that there is certainly ground for trying to ban the party, given that the AKP has “tried to destroy secularism from within for months and even years now.” It is not clear what evidence there is to back up such an assertion, and none is provided. Indeed, contrary to the fears of many secularists, there is virtually no popular support for undercutting secularism and instituting Islamic law in Turkey, a goal that critics like Van Der Galien would attribute to the AKP. Between 1996 and 2007, the Turkish public’s desire for shari’a went from 19% to a pitiful 8%. Given that the Islamist government was elected by a democratic plurality, it would be nearly impossible for them to institute shari’a reforms.

In fact, the AKP appears to be working towards a very tolerable middle ground between liberal democracy and secularism. While continuing to respect the country’s historical division between mosque and state, the Islamist party is also committed to undercutting the state’s antipathy towards organized religion and broadening social and religious freedoms. (Under the legacy of secular rule, for example, private religious schools are illegal, women are highly restricted in their ability to wear the hijab, Turkish imams must also be civil servants, and getting authorization to build a new church or synagogue, or establish a religiously-affiliated foundation is almost impossible.) Efforts by the AKP to reduce these restrictions are not attempts to install shari’a law or establish an Islamic state. Nor could they be read as a stepping stone towards undercutting the country’s secular foundation. Instead, with a few exceptions, they appear to largely be an attempt to expand the scope of religious freedoms to the level that we see in most European and Western countries. None of this is to say that the AKP hasn’t supported its share of questionable policies. But, by and large, they are quite moderate and actually represent the type of mainstream, constitutionalist Islamist party that could serve as a model for the region at-large.