STATE-BUILDING, SECULARISM, AND CONTESTATION: A STUDY OF AFGHANISTAN, IRAN, AND TURKEY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Government By Ahmad Farid Tookhy, M.A. Washington, DC July 10, 2018 Copyright 2018 by Ahmad Farid Tookhy All rights Reserved ii STATE-BUILDING, SECULARISM, AND CONTESTATION: A STUDY OF AFGHANISTAN, IRAN, AND TURKEY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY Ahmad Farid Tookhy, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Charles E. King, D.Phil. ABSTRACT Through a comparative historical analysis of Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan in the early decades of the twentieth century, this study seeks to help us understand how and why the introduction of European models of governance into the Islamic cultural area– through the construction of modern national states– spurred theoretical and physical contestations in the latter over the role of religion in public life. Two central questions guide the study. First, why and how did the rulers of Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan seek to limit the role of religious norms, symbols, authorities, and institutions in their societies in the course of their state-building project? Second, what theoretical and physical contestations did these projects occasion and why? I use primary sources and historical scholarship and a historical-interpretive approach to help find answers to these questions. These theoretical and physical contestations issued from the fact that the project of state-building, on the one hand, amounted to a radical departure from the old social order and, on the other, threatened the material and symbolic interests of the beneficiaries of the old social order. These contestations were conditioned by a number of factors, which were, in turn, products of longue durée macro-historical developments in each country: the character of religious beliefs and customs, the structure and cohesion of the religious body, historical precedents for relations between political and religious power, the general habits and dispositions of the population, and the length and scope of each society’s exposure to the European currents of thought. iii The decisive factor in each setting was the social base and material capabilities of the modernists versus proponents of the old social order. In both Iran and Turkey, the social and conceptual conditions for the transformation of the institutional order had largely been laid down through previous attempts at social change; hence the success of the ruling elites in constructing relatively modern national states. The absence of the requisite social and conceptual conditions for the revolutionary transformation of the old social order led to the failure of the state-building project in the case of Afghanistan. iv The research and writing of this thesis is dedicated to everyone who helped along the way. Many thanks, Ahmad Farid Tookhy v Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Cases and Context ................................................................................................................... 3 The Impact of Europe.............................................................................................................. 9 Revolutionary Transformation of the Social Order ................................................................ 17 Theoretical and Physical Contestation ................................................................................... 20 Chapter One: The Secularization of Politics .............................................................................. 25 Sociological Theories of Secularization ................................................................................. 26 Critiques and Revisions ......................................................................................................... 32 The Drivers of Secularization in Western Europe .................................................................. 36 The Secularization of Politics ................................................................................................ 41 Chapter Two: Afghanistan, 1919-1929 ...................................................................................... 53 The Old Social Order ............................................................................................................ 54 The Afghan Modernists ......................................................................................................... 61 Attempts at Transformation of the Social Order .................................................................... 64 Theoretical and Physical Contestations ................................................................................. 69 Politics and the Persistence of the Old Order ......................................................................... 80 Chapter Three: Iran, 1905-1941 ................................................................................................ 86 Shi’ism and the Persian Symbolic Universe .......................................................................... 87 The Old Order and State-Ulama Relations............................................................................. 92 Persian Intellectuals .............................................................................................................. 97 The Constitutional Revolution ............................................................................................. 101 Theoretical and Physical Contestations ............................................................................... 105 Second Attempt at Transforming the Social Order .............................................................. 115 Theoretical and Physical Contestations ............................................................................... 122 Chapter Four: Turkey, 1908-1938 ........................................................................................... 127 The Transformation of the Ottoman State ............................................................................ 128 Changes in the Ottoman Social World ................................................................................. 137 Theoretical and Physical Contestations ............................................................................... 144 The Kemalist Project of Social Change ............................................................................... 152 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 159 vi Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 168 vii Introduction A large part of the struggles occurring in Western Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, Foucault wrote, “were fundamentally struggles over who would actually have the right to govern men, and to govern them in their daily life and in the details and materiality of their existence; they were struggles over who has this power, from whom it derives, how it is exercised,… the qualifications of those who exercise it, [and] the limits of their jurisdiction.”1 During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, under the direct or indirect influence of European powers, similar struggles began to appear in the Islamic cultural area. This study is an enquiry into the nature, contour, and outcomes of these contestations in three Muslim-majority societies during the early decades of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, as part of their attempts at constructing modern national states, rulers of many Muslim-majority countries tried, coercively often, to limit the influence of religious ideas, authorities and institutions in their societies. In fact, this was not confined to Muslim societies if we look at the broader global trends. Attempts by state rulers or political movements to deprive religion of its privileged position as the ideological basis of public life were common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the nineteenth century, such measures occurred largely in Western Europe and the Americas; in the twentieth century, they spread across the globe. According to one estimate, about half of the world’s population, practicing different religions, were subjected to radical projects of secularization at some point between 1917 and 1967.2 Some notable examples include Russia, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Republic of Turkey, Iran, Tunisia, Algeria, and so on. 1 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 149. 2 Shah and Philpott, “The Fall and Rise of Religion in International Relations: History and Theory,” 44. 1 Thus, in a significant number of countries across the world, the ruling elites or emerging political movements sought to push religious symbols, values, authorities and institutions to the sidelines of public life, occasionally even trying to coercively privatize or altogether eliminate religion. Depending on the context, the justification for such projects was normally furnished by the “ideologies of progress”3- in particular, nationalism, liberalism, and socialism- which were the staple of domestic and global politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beneath such ideological justifications, however, lay a deeper transformation