The Making of a Postsecular Society Classical and Contemporary Social Theory
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Massimo Rosati University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Italy
Edited and with a foreword by Alessandro Ferrara © Massimo Rosati 2015
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Rosati, Massimo, 1969- The making of a postsecular society : a Durkheimian approach to memory, pluralism and religion in Turkey / by Massimo Rosati. pages cm. -- (Classical and contemporary social theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-2312-2 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-2313-9 (ebook) -- ISBN 978- 1-4724-2314-6 (epub) 1. Postsecularism--Turkey. 2. Secularism--Turkey. 3. Religion and sociology--Turkey. 4. Cultural pluralism--Turkey. 5. Durkheim, Émile, 1858-1917. 6. Turkey--Religion. I. Title. BL2320.R67 2015 306.609561--dc23 2014030040
ISBN 978-1-4724-2312-2 (hbk) ISBN 978-1-4724-2313-9 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 978-1-4724-2314-6 (ebk – ePUB) II
Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited, at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD Contents
List of Figures vii Foreword by Alessandro Ferrara ix Preface xi Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction: New Centres, New Stories 1
Part I: A Sociological Theory of Postsecular Society
1 Centre and Periphery: Social Symbolic Morphology 15
2 Clarifying the Postsecular: A Sociological Reading 33
3 Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre: The Sacredness of Sacred Places 47
4 Memory, Trauma and the Work of Rituals: The Dynamics of Symbols 69
Part II: The Turkish Laboratory
5 Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey: A Symbolic Analysis 83
6 From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? The Neo-Ottoman (Democratic) Narrative and the Reconstruction of the Turkish Central Value System 119
7 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: An Old Symbol in Transformation 175
8 Turning Religious Differences into a Museum: Aya Sofya 201
9 When the Water Finds its Crack: Hrant Dink at the Crossroads of Contemporary Turkey 213 vi The Making of a Postsecular Society
10 Modernities and Religions: The Four Quadrant Model 247
Conclusion: Habap and the Water that Came from Heaven 259
Appendix: Durkheim in Turkey 265
References 275 Index 297 List of Figures
1.1 The formal structure of the centre-periphery model 21 1.2 Cybernetics of the holy 22 1.3 Centre-periphery general model 25
3.1 Social integration/social regulation 61 3.2 Different ways of structuring social space 62 3.3 Categories of social space 63
5.1 Centre-periphery model in Turkey, 1923–1950 95
6.1a Centre-periphery model: Turkey, 1950–2011: Antagonistic centres 169 6.1b Centre-periphery model: Turkey, 1950–2011: New hybrid centres 170
9.1 Window of book and music shop beside the entrance to Sebat Palace 216 9.2 Poster above the entrance to Sebat Palace 217 9.3 Heart-shaped wreath, a centre of focus at the commemoration 218 9.4 The intersection of Halaskargazi caddesi, the street where Dink was killed, and Ergenekon caddesi 223 9.5 The dove as a symbol connected with Hrant Dink 227 9.6 Placards carried at the commemoration: ‘We are all Armenians’, ‘We are all Dink’ 228 9.7 The human circle outside the premises of Agos 233 9.8 Reverence in front of the wreath, the centre of the temporary shrine 234
10.1 Relationships between modernities and religions: The four quadrant model 250 To the memory of Hrant Dink, to Anna, Giovanni, Valentina, Flavio, Marco, Maddalena, Alì and Agop: may they live together differently, as in Hrant’s dream. Foreword
My friend Massimo Rosati was just going over the manuscript of this book one more time before sending it to the publisher when, on the morning of 30 January, 2014, a sudden respiratory crisis took him away in less than an hour, aged 44. He had no premonition of what would happen and, like all of us, made plans for the day, the week, the months and the years ahead. The next day he and I were to attend the inaugural session of a Master’s programme and in the afternoon he expected guest speakers for a colloquium that never took place. Contingency could not have sent a stronger reminder of the fragility of all that is human. Not everything human, however, is ephemeral. As imponderable contingency strikes, the impulse is called forth to repair the fabric of meanings left behind by those we love. Massimo and I had been engaged in a continuous dialogue, as colleagues and friends, for over two decades and thus it was not difficult to pick up where he had left his work unfinished. The first part of this book reflects the urgency he felt to complete Habermas’ seminal idea of the postsecular society with a sociological reflection on the diversity of ways in which the ideals of accepting diversity – ‘living together, differently’ as he put it, borrowing from his hero Hrant Dink – and of mutual learning across the religious-secular divide could become a reality. He chose to cross-fertilize the notion of the postsecular with Shils’ theory of society as always comprising a centre and a periphery, no matter how varied and conflict-ridden they might be. As all great sociologists, however, he felt the need to keep his feet solidly on the ground, and his elective ground was Turkey, the focus of the second part of the book. Fascinated by the slow and contested transformation of the secularist imaginary and symbolism of Kemalist Turkey into a more nuanced neo-Ottoman narrative of coexistence and reconciliation with those religious roots that after 1989 had reemerged as a major source of identification, Massimo Rosati dedicated five years of solid research work and countless visits to all parts of Turkey to the writing of this book. He used to read Today’s Zaman every day, made himself familiar with the polemics around the memory of Hrant Dink, the journalist of Armenian origins assassinated in 2007, attended the memorial ceremonies at every anniversary, noting the growth of a germinal new postsecular spirit, and conducted many interviews with protagonists of Turkish intellectual life, all of which he thoroughly and painstakingly documented himself before venturing out any hypothesis. My part in the making of this book has only been that of a compiler who went one more time over the materials, checked the alignment of announced and actual contents, completed references and footnotes, and tried to homogenize x The Making of a Postsecular Society terminology – a technical and editorial role often infused with enthusiasm at rediscovering the theoretical brilliance of my friend, one of the best social theorists of his generation on the European scene. I was not always able to accomplish even these simple functions as completely as I would have wished. The reader will sometimes encounter the phrase ‘note of the ed.’ or ‘(sic)’ when the source of a quote remained unavailable or I was uncertain about its wording. Similarly, a certain oscillation will be noticed between the uses of the often recurring lexemes ‘reflective, reflectivity’ and ‘reflexive, reflexivity’. After consultation with Neil Jordan, ‘our’ editor without whose invaluable help Rosati’s manuscript would not have materialized into a book, the decision has been made not to impose more uniformity on the author’s thinking than we would be confident would not at some point alter his thought. The same reasoning has applied to the sometime intricate relation between the association named ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’ and ‘The International Hrant Dink Foundation’, both of which are referred to in the text but not always consistently or clearly. An effort has been made to make references to the two consistent in the text, but no final certainty exists as to whether the right group is referred to in each case. I trust readers will accept and forgive these possible inaccuracies as the result of the peculiar circumstances under which this book has come into being. Finally, thanks are due to Alessandra Vitullo for her generous and valuable help in compiling the index.
Alessandro Ferrara Rome, July 2014 Preface
This work is based upon three main sources. The first is the international socio- anthropological and political-philosophical literature on Turkey, mainly in English. I am aware that my ignorance of the Turkish language may in principle represent a major limitation, but given the general aims of the present work (a study of Turkey within the framework of issues in social theory), and the centrality of English as a vehicular language in the scientific community, I am confident that my contribution does not ignore key issues in the debate. Nonetheless, I cannot deny that valuable contributions in other languages could have been considered. My secondary sources are Turkish newspapers in English, mostly Today’s Zaman and Hürriyet Daily News. In my opinion they are quite representative of two different but not extreme views on Turkish politics, culture and history. Their columnists, in spite of their writing from different political perspectives, offer specific representations of the Turkish panorama to the international community. As a sociologist, I am interested in precisely such representations, and the fact that they speak intentionally to an international audience has made these two newspapers even more precious for my work. My third source is observation and interviews: ethnographic observation of some events and places, and interviews with ‘qualified witnesses’. When appropriate, their names will be mentioned. Writing this book was a challenge from many points of view, not least because of the delicate balance between theory and the everyday changing events of current politics and life. I hope that my reading of the Turkish situation is capable not only of encompassing the most relevant events and their meaning, but above all of placing them within meaningful categories of analysis. Above all, the facts of June 2013, the so-called Gezi Park resistance, seem to force one to look at the ‘Turkish model’ from a new perspective. At the time of that event, this book had already been started in terms of structure and main line of development, and despite the challenge that Gezi Park represented for the analyst, I remain confident that my main points and thesis have not been subverted by that event. Needless to say, I attempted to include Gezi Park in the picture, though I could not find a separate space for it, as I most certainly would have done if at the time the book had not been in its final phases. This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgements
This book is the outcome of work lasting over five years, during which time I have contracted many debts. At the beginning of the story there are the Istanbul seminars organized by ‘Reset Dialogues on Civilizations’. Although my own research took a different route from the Reset Dialogues on Civilizations’ style, I wish to thank warmly Giancarlo Bosetti and Nina zu Fürstenberg, Seyla Benhabib, Alessandro Ferrara and all the participants of the 2008 and 2009 conferences for the stimuli offered by that environment. Nilüfer Göle, whom I first met on the occasion of the Istanbul seminars, has been of precious inspiration to me. Among the initial materials on which this book is based, is also a paper that I gave in Jerusalem, at the invitation of Anat Lapidot Firilla and Yochi Fisher at the Van Leer Institute: many thanks for your insights both on Turkey and postsecularism, and for making me feel at home in Jerusalem. After several years, I owe a special thanks to Maureen Galvin, who revised the manuscript struggling hard with my English. Years ago, I thanked her for her generosity; five years later I have no words to reiterate my debt towards her. As I said, this book is the outcome of years of study and research, but also of travelling through Turkey, spatially and emotionally. I shared this adventure with my family, including my extended family, namely friends with whom I travelled during summers and with whom I shared unforgettable moments: Gerardina, Angelo and Giovanni, not to mention Barbara and Anna. Sorry for involving you in my stuff and thanks for your patience. A special thanks to Gera(rdina), because in thousands of ways she helped me in writing this book: her curiosity and passion for Turkey nurtured my work, and her help in everyday life has been essential in accomplishing the goal of finishing the book and not disappearing from the world: it may be a truism but whoever finds a friend finds a treasure. Falling in love with Turkey and its contradictions and trying to understand and possibly explain them meant also learning a lot from the people I met and who had a part in the picture. People at Agos: Zeynep Taskin, Fethiye Çetin, Rober Koptas, Ozlem Dalkiman, Patrak Estukyan, Rakel Dink; in different ways all of them gave me a lot both intellectually and personally. Handan and Hasan Tekin at Detay Müzik shop, thanks for the hot teas and CDs. Thanks also to Professor M. Akif Aydin, Erkam Tufan Aytav, İshan Daği and Mustafa Akyol for their time and points of view, to Orhan Kemal Cengiz for his time, outlook and example. Among my Turkish colleagues and friends I especially want to thank Uğur Komeçoğlu and his students and colleagues, above all for discussions on the occasion of a workshop on Contested Social Spaces in Turkey and Italy held in Rome in 2012. xiv The Making of a Postsecular Society
Parts of this book have been discussed in a series of seminars at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, and I feel indebted towards many colleagues with whom I shared discussions as well as the ordinary joys and ‘sorrows’ of academic life: Valeria Fabretti, Alessandro Ferrara, Tonino Griffero, Claudia G. Hassan, Kristina Stoeckl, Piero Vereni, friends, colleagues, and co-members of the CSPS, the Centre for Studies on Religions and Political Institutions in Postsecular Society that we run together at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. I also wish to thank people in the Durkheimian circle, in the UK as well as elsewhere: Mike Hawkins, with whom at the very beginning of this project I discussed some aspects of Durkheim’s political thought, Bill Pickering and Nick Allen, for their interest in my project and their more than 10 year friendship and Durkheimian co-fellowship, and Raquel Weiss, who gave me the opportunity of discussing the general outline of this book at the conference entitled Alternativas religiosas da America Latina, organized by the Associação de Cientistas Sociais da Religião do Mercosul in November 2013, and who is infusing new life into Durkheimian studies. Important steps along the way towards finalizing this project have also been two international workshops: one on A Post-Kemalist Turkey?, organized by the Van Leer Institute of Jerusalem in 2011, and the one organized by CSPS at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ the same year on Multiple Modernities and Postsecular Societies; many thanks to all the participants in them, as well as to participants at the conference on Multiple Secularities and Global Interconnectedness in Lipsia in 2011, organized by Marian Burchardt: with reference to these occasions I especially want to thank Anat Lapidot Firilla, Yochi Fischer, Medi Nahmiyaz, Kristina Stoeckl. Brigitte Jelen has been of precious help, above all during the dramatic days of the Gezi protest; through frequent discussion, she helped me a good deal to keep in mind that coins always have two sides. Thanks are also due to the Fondazione Roma III Settore, for providing funds to carry on this research, and to Nuffield College, Oxford, which through a Carlo Jemolo Fellowship in 2009 gave me the chance to get the project under way. Finally, in spite of the un-ritualistic character of my intention, I wish to thank this book itself, because it has given me so much: ideas, tastes, colours, sounds and memories; I just have to apologize to it for not being able to write it as it would have deserved.
Introduction: New Centres, New Stories
Take a walk in Istanbul. It is not only a pleasure for your eyes and ears, with the call to prayer five times per day; it is not only an explosion of colours, flavours, tastes, emotions. It is also food for thought; it is a thought-provoking experience. Do not think of hordes of tourists, as probably you are; do not think of stereotyped images of Constantinople, the capital city of the Ottoman Empire. Simply walk, watch and see. Perhaps, before arriving at Istanbul, you read a lot about the city, for example, books written by famous writers in the past, who tried to describe the beauty and eccentricity of the city. Considering my nationality, among the many possibilities I want to take as my personal guide is a famous Italian writer, Edmondo De Amicis, who – in Orhan Pamuk’s judgment – wrote (one of) the best book(s) on Istanbul, in 1878. This is what De Amicis wrote about the human comedy he witnessed on the Galata Bridge:
From the nakedness of Adam to the latest Parisian boots: the Turk’s yellow slippers, the Armenian’s red ones, the Greek’s blues ones, the black slippers of the Israelite; sandals, boots from Turkestan, Albanian gaiters, low-cut shoes, the piebald gambas of the horsemen of Asia Minor, slippers embroidered with gold, Spanish alpagatas, footwear of satin, of rope, of rags, of wood, all crowded together so closely that while you focus on one pair, hundreds of others escape your attention.1
To be sure, in the meantime the social and urban landscape has dramatically changed. Turkey, as commentators and reporters of every kind usually note (Morris 2005), is a country in a state of change. However, something of De Amicis’ description (and surprise) still appears convincing (and astonishing) for us. In a word, it is plurality, the great and sometimes confusing mixture of different people, cultures, identities, religions, histories, memories, that walk side by side on that bridge, and more generally in that enchanting city. What you see if you look at the Turkish laboratory with disenchanted eyes is not only the explosion of an irenic and peaceful plurality, but also deep divides, cultural no less than economic: between rich and poor sectors of the population, between ethnicities, religious groups and civilizations.
1 This passage is quoted also by Geert Mak (2009, 9–10), whose book is an update and sounding narration of the Galata Bridge’s life today. 2 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Try now to have a look at the daily national news. Every single day you can find news about conflicts between secularists and religious parties on the headscarf issue, usually at the beginning of a new academic year; conflicts about the way to accommodate minority groups’ rights: Kurds, Armenians, Orthodox Christianity, Jews, Alevis and so on; conflicts about the alleged Islamization of lifestyles on the part of the ruling AK Party; in other words, conflicts on how to address the problem of Turkish identity – an ongoing debate that dates from the time of the late Ottoman era; conflicts in military-civilian relations. At first glance, at least over the last decades, Turkey appears as a deeply polarized society. As we shall see, this is also the opinion of most scholars, while others suggest that beneath the surface of noisy polarizations lies a political culture and a value system shared by actors apparently at odds. Subsequently, in the following pages, I shall maintain that it is the polarization, conflict,and unusual merging and mixing of traditionally polarized actors (secular and religious) that makes Turkey a particularly interesting laboratory. Now leave Istanbul, indeed a hard task to accomplish. Drive to central Anatolia, on your way to Ankara, and then Cappadocia, and then the East and South-East side of the country, and the Aegean coast, and then again in the South East, in Diyarbakir, Mardin, Şanliurfa, to take some examples. Diversity and plurality will shock you again and again. Driving through Anatolia, passing through small and poor villages in the middle of nowhere before reaching towns or cities – apparently dropped in the middle of the Anatolian steppe – like Ankara, the political heart of the country, or the ‘conservative’ Konya, and before turning towards the sea, the Mediterranean, with Antalya’s big hotels for affluent families, and then the Aegean, with the secular and Kemalist Izmir, on your way to Mesopotamia, you might legitimately wonder what the old man who offers you some water-melon in central Anatolia shares with inhabitants of Beyoglu, in Istanbul. However, despite such huge differences (only cats and minarets seem a common denominator), Turkey is a country where differences and divides are as strong and evident as self-consciousness and self-esteem. Usually, Turks are proud of being part of a shared – sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic – history. There are potent symbols, intrusive in everyday life, in public as well as in private spaces, that at every single moment remind the Turkish people who they are, what their past is, and the kind of challenges that confront them ahead. These are not uncontested symbols; on the contrary they are frequently almost battle-fields, but certainly they are clearly recognizable. Symbols are potent and shared not when they are uncontested; symbols are always poly-semic. Symbols are potent and shared when they are immediately recognizable. These symbols form, in contested ways, a shared frame for the Turkish people, an emotionally charged short-hand reminder of their identity. In fact, being poly-semic, symbols are also open to reinterpretation. Quite frequently, they appear to be as if frozen, but actually deeply change their meaning. Shifts in meanings are not so infrequent. Obviously, it can also happen that some symbols lose their force, or that their meanings take such a negative flavour that Introduction 3 they are first devalued, and then abandoned. It is a normal social and cultural process and Turkey, a very dynamic society, constitutes no exception. Some sacred symbols are changing their meaning, some are losing their sacred character, some are undergoing a process of transformation in consumer goods – i.e., they are close to becoming profane – others are gaining momentum. This symbolic dynamic is not a superficial process that leaves society untouched; on the contrary, it is both an expression and a cause of a deep social change. In fact, Turkey’s identity is experiencing a deep process of change. During the last few decades and years, a series of far-reaching political and economic reforms has upset much of the order that ruled Turkey for so long. Although Turkey’s modernization began in the late Ottoman era, the establishment of the secular nation-state by Kemal Atatürk in 1923 marked the crystallization of an aggressive, elite-driven ‘project of modernity’ that took its inspiration from the West. However, Turkey’s ‘second revolution’, as some people called the recent process of reform towards a post-Kemalist country, is not uncontroversial. Resistance to reforms remains strong. So, Turkey is at the same time secular and Muslim, Western and Eastern, democratic and authoritarian, traditional, modern and postmodern. Like Istanbul, divided between Europe and Asia, Turkey seems to be on the edge of geo-political and cultural cleavages. This is what makes Turkey’s case a particularly stimulating case study. Turkey’s open-ended task of reshaping a new identity beyond the authoritarianism of the military and the iron cage of opposite fundamentalisms – secular and religious – makes it a possible exemplary case not only (from the point of view of political science) for Middle- Eastern countries, as it is happening in the context of the so-called Arab Springs, and in my view for Europe, but also (from a sociological point of view) as a laboratory where active symbolic dynamics can be observed. In the context of this study, particularly relevant are those symbols and symbolic dynamics that involve the relationship between secular and religious spheres, the relationship between the secular and the religious identities of Turkey. Turkey is a superb case study for analysing the making of a postsecular and multicultural society, albeit in the midst of ambiguous and contradictory pushes, a case study particularly relevant for Europe too. Turkey offers an unparalleled case given its long cultural Westernism and the ongoing process of Turkey’s admission to the EU. In fact, the symbolic dynamic that characterizes Turkey affects and concerns Europe too. This is not simply the patently banal consideration that Europe is key for Turkey, and that the fulfilment of the Copenhagen criteria is a condition for Turkey’s admission to the EU, and consequently a strong external constraint for the democratization process (Grigoriadis 2009). My view is rather the other way around: namely that Turkey is crucial for Europe. In my opinion, Turkey and Europe could share, in principle, the same project, a future-oriented utopia: Europe, and Turkey within Europe, as the ‘special area for human hope’, the space where plurality can flourish (Ferrara 2008). This is why today the Turkish ‘democratic opening’, a process of democratization of the Kemalist top- down modernity without democracy, launched by the AK Party in 2007 and still 4 The Making of a Postsecular Society underway, albeit with intermittent progress, is relevant for Europe, itself more and more plural and in a state of change; Turkey, a Muslim-majority country with culturally significant other religious and ethnic traditions, is crucial for the self-definition of Europe as the ‘special area for human hope’. They share the same effort, obvious contextual differences notwithstanding, and they will share the same destiny. Both Turkey and Europe have to reinvent their identities, and have to be capable of changing and reinventing their sacred symbols, in a way consistent with the profile of multicultural and postsecular societies. Now come back, just for a moment, to Istanbul, before taking your return flight from Atatürk Airport. You cannot miss the last look at Aya Sofya. It is not just by coincidence that it is considered a paradigmatic place. Half Byzantine and half Muslim, it is the expression of two divides: within Christianity on the one hand and between Islam and Christianity on the other. But it is also paradigmatic of the way the Kemalist ideology wanted to overcome differences: by turning such a wonderful place of cult into a museum. Religious differences are rationalized, vaporized in the vacuum of a neutral space, good for tourists and for art-lovers, but dead and dried for pious people of every religious persuasion. In the following pages, I will discuss at length the limits of the homogenizing Kemalist ideology, but it must be clear from the beginning that the sociological and political arrangements that I shall consider and in a sense advocate as the best option for Turkey and Europe understood as the ‘special area for human hope’, namely a postsecular society and legal pluralism, require some enlargement both of the Kemalist understanding of social space and of the European secularist self-understanding. Furthermore, as a matter of fact, the Kemalist ideology did not produce a united society, but a climate of mutual distrust where non-Muslims believe they are oppressed and misunderstood by the Muslim majority, Alevis believe that they are oppressed by Sunni Islam, the Kurdish are deprived of a national life and wish to have their own state, Muslims feel they are forbidden to express themselves freely, and non- religious people believe that Islamists have a secret agenda to restore Sharia in the country. One could add other entries to the list (see Ergil in Today’s Zaman, 3/09/2009). In the same way, the European secularist self-perception is not proving to be capable of dealing with increasing religious differences within its enlarging boundaries (see Byrnes and Katzenstein 2006; Motzkin and Fischer 2008). Actually, Aya Sofia is not the only paradigmatic case. It is paradigmatic of a highly controversial symbolic space, that some would like to keep open only as a museum, others would like to reopen as a place of worship for Muslims, others for Orthodox Christians, and others, unfortunately a minority, both for Christians and Muslims. There are many other symbols, sanctuaries and places that in today’s Turkey are contested and at the centre of symbolic struggles. In this book, I shall take into consideration three of them: namely, Aya Sofia, symbols related to the father of the modern republic, Kemal Atatürk, and a new emergent symbol, Hrant Dink. All of them are expressions of deep divides and, at the same, are recognizable symbols of a Turkey in search of bridges for closing those divides, overcoming fractures, and recomposing a new, hopefully multicultural and Introduction 5 postsecular, memory. While most of the scholarly literature approaches Turkey in political-philosophical terms, I chose for myself a different route, focusing on a cultural and symbolic analysis, without giving up a critical stance. Turkey, in fact, looks like a variegated social space, where religious and ethnic identities, against the Kemalist dream of assimilating every difference to the sole Turkish identity, refuse today to be simply privatized, and make claims for public recognition. Turkey is a puzzle of religious civilizations (different versions of Islam, but also for centuries Judaism and Christianity), and ethnic civilizations (think of the thorny cases of Kurds and of Armenians).2 At the same time, secularism is no longer just an imposed conception, but a practised vision of life and politics for Turkish elites and a part of the middle class, so that sociologists and anthropologists try to think of the Turkish case outside the dichotomies of sacred and secular, stressing the postsecular character of Turkish society and the middle ground growing between different visions of life. In order to overcome simplistic dichotomies, it is particularly relevant to look at the presence of Islam in Turkish politics, an extensively investigated phenomenon by social scientists, in terms of liberalization of a previously undemocratic political system. As on a comparative basis it has been argued for the case of Indonesia, so it has been argued for the Turkish case that Islamic social movements can be important for promoting a democratic and pluralistic society, and that the Turkish example holds long term promise for the rest of the Muslim world. Here a civil-society- centred, deliberative-democratic understanding of politics (the one developed in the Habermasian tradition but also the one developed within the framework of a dramaturgical view of politics and public space) is key to overcoming simplistic and mistaken theocratic readings of the Islamic presence in the social and political Turkish panorama. All these issues, here simply sketched out, make of Turkey a precious laboratory for the development of a critical and pluralistic republicanism. Turkey’s decision to apply for admission to the EU, and the subsequent strong resistance on the part of, for example, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and also Italian political parties such as the Lega Nord, opened up a very instructive discussion on the idea of European identity too. So, once again, it is not implausible to believe that if Europe is key to the future of Turkey, Turkey’s admission to or rejection by the EU will be key for the future of Europe too. A considerable part of this broad range of issues will be kept as the backdrop of this study. Others, more skilled in political philosophy and political science, may deal properly with them. My effort will be rather directed at finding a genuine cultural sociological path to the ways in which a postsecular society comes about, if any such process is (hopefully) underway. As a social theorist with a Durkheimian background, I am particularly sensitive to the ways in which social bonds are nurtured, shaped, and also re-shaped. This is why I shall concentrate my attention on those ritualistic practices that generate new symbolic constellations,
2 In the following pages the focus will be on the religious side of Turkish pluralism, and I will mostly leave aside ethnic divides. 6 The Making of a Postsecular Society new symbolic central systems, new institutional central systems, and new relationships between centre(s) and periphery(ies). Moreover, my Durkheimian background leads me to focus on those ritualistic practices that take place in special places, called by today’s sociological literature, with a very felicitous expression, ‘postsecular sanctuaries’ – places that are crucial even in contemporary societies and urban landscapes to shaping the quality of the social air we breathe. I suspect that the expert reader has already recognized some key words in this study. It is divided into two parts. The first sets the scene and builds the frame for the second one, where the Turkish case is called on to give life and add movement to abstract concepts. Dry and boring though they may appear, abstract concepts are nonetheless necessary, not only to make communication possible, but also to lend some shape and order to social complexity. This, in brief, is the way I reconstruct the portion of social complexity under my scrutiny. Chapter 1 gives a marked Durkheimian imprint to this study. Following Edward Shils’ elaboration of the centre-periphery model, albeit with some revisions, the chapter maintains that every society, in order to be an integrated community, needs to recognize itself in a symbolic central value system that shares in the nature of the sacred. This is true even in highly complex societies, even in contexts in which a plurality of competing centres are on the stage, and in which plural and not homogenous peripheries enter into conflicting relationships with the central symbolic system. The centre-periphery model, strongly resonant of Durkheimian insights, has been elaborated originally in functionalist tones, but even in Shils’ version it was flexible and complex enough to allow for a more general model of society, which includes society’s genetic code or deep grammar and makes room not only for that social transcendental constituted by solidarity, but also for conflict, contestation and power. Chapter 1 tries to articulate a wide range of possible relationships between centre and periphery, as well as an inner differentiation of the idea of the sacred core of collective identity, capable of hosting symbolic expressions of transgression, deviance and so on. In other words, Chapter 1 maintains that no society is possible without a symbolic gravitational system, but the centre-periphery model does not imply necessarily either the idea of a single homogenous and uncontested centre, or that of pacified and assimilated peripheries. The choice of the centre-periphery model can appear outmoded. Our societies are frequently depicted through other metaphors, such as that of the network-society. However, the chapter stresses that we should overcome such a postmodernist hangover. Important though such metaphors as the network-society might appear, it is time to recognize that under the surface some elemental building blocks of social life are still functioning (Rosati 2009), and that no society works and persists over time without reproducing some kind of logic best grasped in terms of the centre-periphery model. Chapter 2 adds a new keyword: postsecular society. It fits into my argument because it indicates ongoing processes of transformation of the central symbolic system of Western societies. If a secularized self-understanding has until recently been an important ingredient of the value system of Western modernity, above all Introduction 7 in Europe, currently Western modernity is taking a more reflective attitude towards religions, and religions in turn are developing a more reflective attitude towards modernity. The expression ‘more reflective’ means that both secular forms of life and religious traditions are becoming aware that they have to co-exist in the same space and time, that dreams of de-sacralization and re-sacralization of societies can no longer be upheld and may also turn into nightmares. This increase in reflectivity and awareness, both on the part of Western modernity and of religious traditions, is what is meant by the still vague term ‘postsecular society’. Chapter 2 attempts to render the term more useful from a sociological point of view, by clarifying its dimensions. In Chapter 10 the notion of the postsecular is revisited and a four cell (or four quadrant) model, derived from the Turkish case but which in principle can be generalizable, is suggested – a model that shows how postsecular society is just one among several diverse possibilities of understanding the relationship between modernity and religions, within a non-evolutionary frame. The shift from a secularized to a postsecular symbolic central system is a relevant phenomenon that bears consequences at the level of social practices. The postsecular is not only a new academic invention, or the symptom of less dogmatic attitudes of educated Western scholars towards religions. It is also an appropriate label for indicating new forms of life that take shape as a consequence of interpenetrations (Göle 2005) between secular and religious world-views and related practices. A postsecular society is one in which both religious people and non-believers engage in a process of complementary learning in Habermas’ terms. Not simply a cognitive process involving academics in roundtables and congresses, the postsecular is relevant for young generations in the streets, veiled and unveiled women on university campuses, men and women who negotiate their roles in private and public spaces. Chapter 3 elucidates the importance of a specific kind of place and practice that plays a transformative role in the transition from a secularized to a postsecular central value system. These places have been called ‘postsecular sanctuaries’, and important research that has been conducted or is underway shows how places like these are key to the quality of urban and collective life (see Greve 2011). If everyday postsecular social practices work on the molecular and micro-sociological level, rituals that take place in postsecular sanctuaries work on the macro-sociological level, contributing in a significant manner to changing the symbolic value system of a society, giving shape to a postsecular collective macro-imaginary. The last chapter of Part I deals with the working of rituals that take place in postsecular sanctuaries, more than with the idea and features of postsecular sanctuaries in and of themselves. If Chapter 3 addresses questions such as ‘What is a postsecular sanctuary? What makes a place a postsecular sanctuary?’, Chapter 4 offers a closer look at the practices that are performed there. For the sake of my general argument, this book focuses on the practices and rituals that trigger the dynamics of symbols and changes in the central value system of a given society. The Making of a Postsecular Society deals with the transformation of previously sacralised symbols, their shift in meaning, and with the creation of 8 The Making of a Postsecular Society new recognized symbols, capable of collocating themselves in the central value system of a collective identity. Quite frequently, societies need to imprint mana (in Maussian parlance), or charisma (to be Weberian) upon chosen individuals, and to sacralise heroes and/or victims through ritualized practices in order to concretize the societal central values. Heroes and victims give life to a gallery of figures that resembles the totems of a society. The ‘force of the example’ (Ferrara 2008) of figures such as these works as a principle of order for organizing the past and the present of a collective identity, and for selecting the means and purposes for future collective challenges. The practices that take place in postsecular sanctuaries are, in other words, forms of performative memory, ways of shaping and reshaping the collective memory of a community, and in so doing, once again, ways of constantly redrawing the borders and engraving the content of a central value system. The chapters of Part II bring us into the Turkish context. None of them is meant to be a close inquiry into complexities of the political landscape, and even less into the economic one, for example. Of course political facts and events will fill my analyses, but if one dimension is predominant over others, I would say that this is the cultural one. As I said before, there are many reasons why Turkey is at the centre of scholarly interest, and it certainly deserves specific analysis ‘as Turkey’. However, this is not the case of this book. My interest in Turkey ‘as Turkey’ notwithstanding, my way of looking at modern and contemporary Turkey aims at showing the sociological usefulness of the concepts introduced in Part I. Obviously, the opposite is also true: if they are useful, it is because they are capable of telling us something interesting about specific contexts and are capable of organizing a complex reality in a way that throws some light on it. It is a matter of what we see when we look at the world we live in, and what we see depends obviously on the way we look at it. Looking at Istanbul from the top of Büyük Çamlıca, on the East side of the city, one’s gaze embraces the whole city, its spatial dimensions and astonishing differences. From there, as from other places, one legitimately wonders what the inhabitants of the shantytowns of certain areas have in common with those of residential and historical neighbourhoods. Chapter 5 shows that throughout its modern history, Turkey has always had a strong central value system capable of keeping together a society highly differentiated in terms of culture, religion, ethnicity and material conditions. At the same time, it shows how this central value system has, since the very beginning of the history of the republic (and actually even at the time of the late Ottoman Empire), been in a conflicting relationship with significant sectors of Turkish society. What political scientists frequently read in terms of a lack of democratic participation can be translated into the sociological vocabulary in terms of a sometimes stunning lack of communication between the centre and the peripheries of the system. Durkheim, in his Sociological Lectures, developed an ante-litteram dialogical conception of democracy, highlighting communication between the state and the body of society as the key feature of democratic systems. As will be evident, it is this kind of communication that has been practically suspended in the history of modern times in Turkey. Furthermore, Introduction 9 the relationships between the centre and peripheries are extremely dynamic, and Chapter 5 offers a brief periodization that frames macroscopic changes within such dynamics. Chapter 6 highlights ongoing processes of change in the Turkish central symbolic value system. Following decades of Kemalism, that, in truth, modernized the country but was at odds with peripheries, today’s Turkey is trying to find a new balance between centre and periphery. It is an ongoing, open-ended and frequently incoherent process. One of the most relevant areas is that of the relationships between secularism and religious traditions, Muslims and non-Muslims. As is well known, this is one of the most sensitive issues in Turkey, if not the most sensitive. In Chapter 6 different visions of secularism in Turkey are discussed, and above all it is maintained that under the surface of daily conflicts on religious schools, the headscarf and so on, civil society is developing – sometimes against a still reluctant centre – social practices that give rise to areas of interpenetration between secular and religious world-views, and that are molecularly and gradually transforming Turkey into a laboratory for a postsecular society. However, as I mentioned before, micro-sociological postsecular practices deeply affect society within a bottom-up process, but are slow in producing change at the macro-sociological level of the symbolic value systems. Such change is, in my view, the outcome of more visible and mediatised postsecular practices that take place in postsecular sanctuaries. The last three chapters of Part II address three relevant cases of contested symbols in present day Turkey, cases in which under dispute are the loci where the transition to a postsecular identity is beginning to take shape. Different in nature, history and in virtue of their relationship with the history of modern Turkey, these cases are supposed to be exemplary of different gaps and divided memories in search of reconciliation. Chapter 7 discusses the cultural meaning of the figure of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Actually, Atatürk’s smiling, expressive, inspired face, is virtually everywhere: on the back of private cars, in retail shops, in private houses alongside family photos, restaurants, barber shops, and of course in public places; statues of the father of the republic command the streets and squares of every city and village. The pervasiveness of Atatürk’s image and memory is so astonishing that it has been frequently studied by anthropologists and social scientists. It is surely at the core of the centre of the Turkish symbolic value system. ‘Super’ Atatürk, the citizens say when foreign tourists enquire after the reason for the posters in newspapers and drinks shops, is the most powerful symbol that has kept Turkey together. Being the most powerful, strong, evident, pervasive, commodity symbol in vogue still today, it is not surprising at all that it is also one of the most contended – not contested: no one can seriously and openly simply contest or reject Atatürk’s legacy; it would be like giving up one’s own right of citizenship. But it is reinterpreted, sometimes drastically. To the extent that the central symbolic value system is changing, as it is, and as long as Atatürk retains his presence therein, the symbolic meaning of his image and legacy will continue to be reinterpreted. Chapter 7 focuses on this 10 The Making of a Postsecular Society process of reinterpretation of Atatürk’s symbols, the final mark of the changing value system of Turkish society, and, ironically, of its shift towards a postsecular dimension. In Chapter 8 the symbolic meaning is discussed of that unique place that is Aya Sofya (Saint Sofia). The Kemalist view of the national social space resembled, roughly speaking, an empty space. Above all religious differences were feared as threats to the national unity and integrity. Aya Sofya is a paradigmatic instance of the way Kemalism dealt symbolically with such spaces: turning them into museums run by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Today, churches – above all Armenian churches – closed for ages are reopening for historical liturgies, still not regularly for normal services, but just for an annual service of worship, and then turned back again into museums. These symbolic acts are highly indicative of a sort of schizophrenic attitude on the part of the current ruling party: on the one hand, through symbolic acts, it is trying to open new spaces for religious minorities, transforming the Kemalist view of secularism, but on the other hand it still shows ‘nationalistic reflexes’ that seem to slow or even sabotage its own proclaimed programme. Aya Sofya is perhaps the most symbolically powerful case, given its history and the enormous artistic value that makes the site famous worldwide: contended by Orthodox Christians and Muslims, and at the moment closed to all cults, its destiny will impact significantly on the reshaping of the central symbolic system of the country, and also beyond Turkey; in the chapter, in fact, it is claimed that the destiny of Aya Sofya is relevant for Europe too. In Chapter 9 the symbolic meaning of the memory of Hrant Dink is discussed. Hrant Dink was killed in January 2007, beneath the premises of the Armenian Turkish weekly magazine Agos. The Editor of Agos, Dink was the voice of the Armenian community. Not uncontested even within Armenian circles, he was trying to bridge Turkish and Armenian divided memories of the 1915 tragedy. He had been accused of ‘insulting Turkishness’ and was at the centre of a hate- campaign. His funeral was attended by crowds of people of every religion and ethnicity, carrying signs with slogans such as ‘We are all Armenians’. Every year, on 19 January, beneath the premises of Agos, a commemoration of Dink’s murder takes place, organized by civil society, and a sort of illuminated sanctuary enwraps the people gathered there to commemorate him. His figure is becoming a symbol, a ‘guiding light’ for part of the country. At the same time, as a symbol of a different country – a country in search of free speech, religious freedom and so on – the memory of Dink still has to overcome the resistance of a centre chained to its own responsibilities for his death. Over and beyond the annual commemoration of his death and other ritualized circumstances related to his name and life, the trial and consequently the juridical arena are becoming crucial arenas in which a new collective memory is being built and a new symbolic value system organized. The Making of a Postsecular Society considers Hrant Dink as the ultimate case study because he is the very synthesis of what a fully democratic and minority sensitive (religious minorities included) community is supposed to be. The chapter is based on an ethnography of commemorations since 2011. Introduction 11
Chapter 10 returns to broader theoretical issues. The first theoretical chapters had to pave the way for a cultural analysis of the Turkish case, showing that by means of neo-Durkheimian categories, a sound interpretation of a specific context such as Turkey is possible. A cultural understanding of the postsecular and a renovated centre-periphery model show at the symbolic level how the identity profile of the country is changing. At the same time, the empirical analysis of Turkey affects theory retroactively, suggesting a theoretical four quadrant model that illustrates how postsecular society is just one among several possibilities for arranging the relationship between modernity and religions marked by high levels of reflectivity. Such a reflective attitude, shared by both secular forms of life and religious traditions (in some cases and contexts) is what makes the difference compared to past forms of the blurring of borders between religions (religious syncretism) and past forms of hybridization between cultures and religions. In other words, what in principle differentiates contemporary forms of deep rooted, postsecular cosmopolitanism from past ‘Ottoman’ forms of cosmopolitanism is the reflective character of the former. The Conclusion reconstructs the value and meaning that Turkey has today for Europe. If Turkey needs Europe to accomplish a process of democratization begun when it became a candidate for EU membership in 1999, I argue that Europe needs Turkey to free itself from ghosts that have to do with an ancient past, but also with the newly arising phenomena of Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism, anti- Semitism, fear of ‘others’. Living together differently is the challenge that both Turkey and Europe face in similar ways, bound together as they are to the same destiny. The idea of this book rose at the crossroads between two of my main intellectual interests: David Émile Durkheim’s thought and work on the one hand and analyses and interpretations concerning the place and role of religions in contemporary societies on the other. While travelling to Istanbul to give a paper at the first meeting of the Reset Dialogues on Civilizations in May 2008, I was reading the chapter of a book by Ivan Strenski, The New Durkheim, entitled ‘A Durkheimian Text in Turkey: Ziya Gökalp, Hüseyin Nail Kubali, and Muslim Civil Society’ (Strenski 2006). Impressed both by my first visit to Turkey and by the story of Durkheim in Turkey, I devoted a short stay in Oxford, through a Carlo Jemolo Fellowship at the Nuffield College, to deepening my understanding of the appropriation of Durkheim’s sociology – basically through a Turkish edition of Professional Ethics and Civic Morals by Hüseyin Nail Kubali – by Turkish intellectuals, and of the frequently told story of an alleged continuity between Durkheim’s thought, Ziya Gökalp and Kemal Atatürk. According to this narrative, Durkheim’s thought can be considered one of the main sources of a Kemalist and rightist corporatist view of society and social space, if not even of fascism. The Making of a Postsecular Society adopts Durkheimian categories in order to offer a very different reading of present day Turkey, aimed at making the most intellectually of those pluralistic tendencies that in Turkey struggle against Kemalist and post-Kemalist nationalistic and homogenizing powers. In this sense, I hope to show that a contemporary 12 The Making of a Postsecular Society re-appropriation of the classical sociological concepts can move in an entirely opposite direction culturally and politically, and can foster a pluralistic and radical view of democracy and social solidarity. However, in the Appendix, I come back to the story of Durkheim in Turkey, to show briefly how the mainstream narrative of the continuity between Durkheim, Gökalp and Atatürk is a mistake, based on superficial readings of Durkheim’s sociology of religion and political sociology. Part I: A Sociological Theory of Postsecular Society This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 1 Centre and Periphery: Social Symbolic Morphology
‘Society has a centre’. This is the famous incipit of an essay by Edward Shils, published in its original version in 1961. At that time, the idea – relatively uncontroversial – that ‘society has a centre’ already had a long-standing history, dating back to the 1890s. It was a particularly Durkheimian idea. It was Durkheim, in the Division of Labour in Society and also in other writings, who assigned to ‘social morphology’ a prominent role within the broader sociological domain (Durkheim 1984). After Durkheim, other Durkheimians, pre-eminently Maurice Halbwachs and Robert Hertz, showed the importance of social morphology to deciphering spatial and symbolic social configurations (Hertz 1909; Halbwachs 1938). In effect, social morphology has not merely to do with the spatial organization of the population, the latter being ‘simply’ a condition and the ‘physical substratum’ of more complex organizations (Halbwachs 1938, 13); if ‘material support’ is necessary, what really matters in the morphological study of a society is the entire constellation of material and symbolic components of a given social group. As a consequence, in Halbwachs’ account, one can speak, for example, of a ‘religious morphology’, a ‘political morphology’, and of a ‘general morphology’ (ibid.). Obviously, the pioneering morphological studies conducted by Durkheim and his followers did not prove uncontroversial (see, for example, Schnore 1958). However, above all, the social morphology implicit in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life gave a strong impulse to subsequent studies. Furthermore, even if the centre-periphery model has been applied over the decades in many different areas and in many different ways, one can basically distinguish two main macro-areas, and two main macro-approaches. The first is that of urban studies. Here, above all sociologists and anthropologists, not to mention economists, made use of this conceptual pair in order to study the spatial structuring of human activities and social groups within an urban frame. How and why are some core activities for the life of a city concentrated in the centre, and how and why are marginal activities and drop-out individuals and groups clustered at the periphery(ies)? It was notably the Chicago school that turned the centre-periphery model in a spatial direction, as Robert Park’s city-maps clearly show (see Hannerz 1980, chapter 2). The second area was that of international studies, and of the so-called dependency-theories and world-system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, that are basically concerned ‘with the expanding control and exploitation of the material 16 The Making of a Postsecular Society resources of the “periphery” or “satellite” on the part of the “core” or “metropolis”’ (Hannertz 1989). The two approaches are rather the consensual and the conflict-based, that replicate a classical divide in sociology and in the social sciences at large (see Lockwood 1992). The consensual approach stresses the inner need of a society and a group for social solidarity, and the legitimating and hegemonic function of the centre. The conflict-based approach, on the other hand, stresses the power relationships between centre(s) and peripheries. As we shall see, there is no reason to consider solidarity on the one hand and power relationships on the other as opposite or unrelated problems, either in general (Honneth 1996) or with specific reference to the centre-periphery model. On the contrary, this model is complex enough to take both sides of the coin into consideration. No matter how significant the differences that set these approaches apart might be, all of them rely at least contingently upon Durkheimian insights, and then on Shils’ elaboration of them. Even the sophisticated and useful elaborations by Mary Douglas and her followers (Perri 6 and Mars 2008), would be unthinkable without Durkheim and Mauss’ intuition that social life depends on systems of classifications that organize symbolically and spatially natural, social and moral complexity along the lines of the sacred and profane. In precisely the same way, ‘the tension between centre and periphery can well be regarded as one of the main axes for the construction of social reality’ (Giesen 2004, 75). Though not fully recognizing his debt to the Durkheimian legacy, it was Edward Shils who grasped the foundational role of the centre-periphery conceptual pair for the social sciences, and it was perhaps Shmuel Eisenstadt who more than others made it workable for comparative sociological studies (Eisenstadt 1988). At the same time, as we shall see, Shils’ construction of the relationship between centre and periphery is, in an important sense, much more Weberian than Durkheimian. My view is that if we want to make the most of this model, we should combine Durkheimian and Weberian intuitions, provided that they are consistent. At the same time, we shall need to test the capability of this model of explaining spatial and above all social morphology, in the light of challenges brought by new, apparently more updated metaphors, such as ‘network society’ and similar. My conclusion will be that the centre-periphery model, traditionally used in order to explain power and symbolic dynamics in Turkey, retains its explanatory force even in our highly complex societies at large. Dissatisfied with classical ‘explanations’ in terms of ‘shared values’ or ‘aggregation of interests’, from the 1930s Shils ‘was trying to arrive to an intelligible account of what makes a large aggregate of human beings into a society’, and from the 1960s he started to believe that the ‘development of the conceptual scheme of centre and periphery is a step in the right direction’ (Shils 1988, 265). Of course it is just a step, and not the definitive answer, but nonetheless, a step in the right direction. In this sense, the centre-periphery model ‘deals with and attempts to provide an answer to the central question for the discipline, the question of the constitution of society’ (Greenfeld and Martin 1998, 1). Once again, we are back Centre and Periphery 17 to the ‘grammar of society’, to its black box so to speak, to its ‘genetic code’, and once again we shall see that Durkheimian categories will help us to open this box to some extent (Rosati 2003 and 2009). I will reconstruct freely the general model – here and there revising Shils’ account – with special reference to four points: 1) the structure of the centre of society; 2) (a) its relationship with social subsystems; and (b) its relationship with an ‘ontological’ or philosophical-anthropological backdrop; 3) different kinds of relationship of peripheries with the centre of society; 4) historical developments in the relationship between the centre and peripheries. In the second part of this book, we shall see how this model proves to be fruitful for the analysis of (past and) current symbolic developments in the Turkish context.
The General Model: Centre-periphery
The Structure of the Centre of Society
Contrary to current views, according to which contemporary societies are centre-less societies, Shils’ idea was that society indeed has a centre. This centre, according to Shils, ‘has (…) nothing to do with geometry and little with geography’ (Shils 1975, 3), but has to be understood as the repository of the ‘central value system’ of a society, that ‘partakes of the nature of the sacred’, needless to say, here understood in strictly Durkheimian terms. It was Shils’ merit to transform ‘the conception of center and periphery from mainly geographical and demographical concentrations and distributions characteristic of the Chicago school of urban ecology (Park, Burgess, McKenzie, and Wirth) into a conception of the concentration and dispersal of charisma, deference, authority, power, and status in social and cultural systems’ (Singer 1988, 214). This central value system, is composed of primary and secondary values. Primary values are those pursued and affirmed by ruling elites and intellectuals (Eisenstadt 1988), both at the central level and within subsystems hierarchically dependent for their legitimacy on the centre; at an abstract level, primary values constitute the authority of a society, in several respects. They are expected to regulate the economic, political, and moral life of that society. Secondary values are those qualities that people who exercise authority in different subsystems are expected to show and perform, depending on the degree of proximity to the central authority. The central value system of a society legitimates its central institutional system. Crucial, both for its self- understanding and its legitimacy, are the symbolic forms that this central value system takes, and by whom it is constituted. Shils stressed the non-internal unity of the centre, its non-singularity, and above all the idea that there is probably not a single society with a unique centre. In every society, there are always competing centres, and consequently in a sense a plurality both of value systems and of their symbolic expressions: 18 The Making of a Postsecular Society
There are probably very few societies without centres; there is probably no centre without competing centres within the same society. There is probably no society in which the centre is completely and harmoniously cooperative and consensual within itself. There is probably no society where the centres of the various spheres are not in some measures of tension among themselves. There is no society in which a centre, challenged or unchallenged, does not have subsidiary centres through which it acts; there is no society which does not possess a multiplicity of lesser centres, “lesser” meaning a smaller radius of effectiveness than the more central centres. (Shils 1988, 253)
As is clear from this passage (and similar others are easily found in Shils’ works), the centre-periphery model does not entail any idea of a monolithic society, internally undifferentiated or without inner tensions, strains, competition, conflict and contestation. Nor does it imply the idea of a single authority, and of a passive social body that willingly accepts its authority. On the contrary, one can imagine a dynamic society, with more than one centre in competition for the loyalty of a social body: a social body perfectly capable of choosing and critically deciding to which centre to give its loyalty (see Lynch 2012, 31–35). However, there is still a sense in which Shils’ model can be refined. If it is true that he clearly recognized the existence of a plurality of competing centres, and the inner differentiation in principle of each of them, it is also apparent that qua centres they have, in Shils’ view, always a positive meaning. Their ‘radius of effectiveness’ can be greater or lesser, their force of attraction can be stronger or weaker, but as centre the centre always has a force of attraction; it always has a positive polarity. If a plurality of centres means a pluralism of value systems – and Shils seems to imply that some sort of value pluralism is part of any society – it is anyhow a plurality of potentially attractive symbols. This view depends on Shils’ understanding of the sacred. As I reminded the reader at the very beginning of this section, the centre ‘partakes of the nature of the sacred’. However, in Shils’ view the sacred always has a ‘positive’ polarity; it is also an expression of the positive values of a society. Here the sacred is equal to the ‘good’, the ‘right’. From a Durkheimian point of view, this is a reductive image of the sacred. It is important to note that the same sacred nature is proper also to ‘negative’ values, and the latter have not only a ‘profane’ character. Societies need to construct images of the evil, that partake of the nature of the sacred too, in order to be aware of what they consider the good and the right (Alexander 2003). What I am suggesting is a revision of Shils’ idea of the sacred along Durkheimian lines, whose rationale is that of making us sensitive to a wider range of symbols that, while part of the central value symbolic system, have not a ‘positive’ polarity, but are on the contrary symbols of transgression, disorder, pollution. Returning to Durkheim, while praising Robertson Smith for his service rendered to the science of religion, he stresses the dual nature of the sacred and its ambiguity. ‘Religious forces’, he writes, ‘are of two kinds. Some are benevolent, guardians of physical and moral order, as well as dispensers of life, health, and all Centre and Periphery 19 the qualities that man values’. These benevolent religious forces ‘inspire a respect that is full of love and gratitude’ (Durkheim 1995, 412). But ‘on the other hand, there are evil and impure powers, bringers of disorder, causes of death and sickness, instigators of sacrilege. The only feelings man has for them is a fear that usually has a component of horror’ (ibid.). As is well known, relations between these two classes of religious forces are complex. On the one hand they are opposite and as radically antagonistic as the pure and the impure, to the extent that any contact between them is forbidden. On the other hand they are ‘closely akin’: first, they have the same relation with the profane (profane things must abstain from any contact both with the pure and with the impure); secondly, what is impure now can, without changing its nature, transform itself into a benevolent force later, and vice versa, depending on external circumstances:
So the pure and the impure are not two separate genera but two varieties of the same genus that includes all sacred things. There are two sorts of sacred, lucky and unlucky; and not only is there no radical discontinuity between the two opposite forms, but the same object can pass from one to the other without changing its nature. The impure is made from the pure, and vice versa. The possibility of such transformations constitutes the ambiguity of the sacred. (1995, 415)
At the basis of this unity and diversity of sacred beings there is, as Durkheim explains, the unity and the diversity of social life. States of collective effervescence are at the basis of both the lucky and the unlucky sacred. But as social life can cause the experience of states of collective euphoria and of collective dysphoria, so the religious forces that grow out of states of collective effervescence can be benevolent and evil:
(…) the two poles of religious life correspond to two opposite states through which all social life passes. The same contrast exists between the lucky and the unlucky sacred as between the states of collective euphoria and dysphoria. But because both are equally collective, the mythological constructions that symbolize them are in their very essence closely related. While the feelings placed in common vary from extreme dejection to extreme high-spiritedness, from painful anger to ecstatic enthusiasm, the result in all cases is communion among individual consciousness and mutual calming. (1995, 417)
Even if Durkheim himself did not examine this point in depth (that on the contrary became a focal point for other Durkheimians such as Mauss and Hertz, see Riley 2010), here there is room enough to include in the centre of society also the ‘sacred evil’, the left-sacred, the ‘demonic’ (Rosati 2008). If the relationships between the pure and the impure sacred, the lucky and the unlucky sacred, the divine and the demonic, are complex and not always easy to grasp, the relationship between the unlucky sacred and the profane is on the contrary quite uncontroversial. In 20 The Making of a Postsecular Society fact, the former has the same relationship of radical separation from the profane that is characteristic of the lucky sacred too. In my view, this is a relevant point: dynamics of symbols involve both the right-sacred and the left-sacred, symbols that inspire love and gratitude, and symbols that inspire a sense of ‘horror’. Both of them are part of the central value system of a society. In a sense, by contrast, primary and secondary values and the central institutional system are constantly kept separate and distant not only from the profane character of the peripheries, but from the absolutely kin (in the quality) and radically other (in the polarity) character of the left-sacred. It explains why, possible confrontations and conflicts between one another notwithstanding, the right-sacred-centre and peripheries are equally radically separated from the left-sacred centre: the former because of an opposite polarity (common sacredness notwithstanding); the latter because of a totally different nature. What I am trying to suggest is that we look at the centre-periphery model as a symbolic social morphology parallel to the Durkheimian distinction between the sacred and the profane. If societies have a centre that partakes of the nature of the sacred, peripheries have to be seen in a sense as the expression of the profane. At the same time, the sacred – and consequently the centre – has to be divided into pure and impure sacred. We have three terms: pure sacred, impure sacred and peripheries. We know that the kind of relationships that are possible between them are very different: what is impure can be transformed into pure, changing its polarity but keeping its sacred nature; on the contrary, the radical gulf that separates the sacred from the profane cannot be overcome. This point requires further explanation. Stressing the radical opposition between the sacred and the profane – and consequently between the centre and peripheries – does not mean that there are no relationships between them, or that they are to be considered static entities. Their relationship is oppositional, but specific contents can change their nature from profane to sacred. If there is a relationship it is because there is some link between the two, and this link is obviously ritual. Ritual can keep the sacred separate from the profane, but it can also have a transformative effect. There are rituals that, in the Durkheimian sense, and even more so in the accounts of other authors, are responsible for social and cultural change, the main force that permits change (even dramatic change) of moral value systems. Through the middle term of rituals, what was considered profane before can later be considered sacred in a renovated symbolic constellation. Ritual is the middle ground between the sacred and profane. Only rituals can put them in communication while maintaining the radical qualitative opposition between them, but at the same time – eventually – transforming their nature. In other words, we have three terms – impure sacred, pure sacred and profane (left-centre, right-centre, periphery), and the following general relationships between them: Centre and Periphery 21
Figure 1.1 The formal structure of the centre-periphery model
1. radical oppositional polarity between left-sacred and right-sacred (centre), but same (sacred) nature 2. radical oppositional nature between peripheries and both the impure and the pure sacred 3. permutation of the profane into the sacred through rituals (inclusion of the peripheries into the centre).
Centre-subsystems Relationship
The centre of society has a strictly hierarchical relationship with the social subsystems. The central value system of a society, that the anthropologist Roy Rappaport called the locus of the ultimate sacred postulates, is the apex of a sort of cybernetics that hierarchically legitimates (sanctifies) subsystems by means of cosmological axioms, ritual prescriptions, taboos, commandments, performatives, sub-authorities, pledges and testimonies, directives, lower authorities, corollaries and so on (Rappaport 1999). In turn, social subsystems are, strictly speaking, still part of the centre of society. Economy, politics, education, all have their own central authority connected with the central value system and, in principle, consistent with it. As the centre of the centre, social subsystems and the central institutional and cultural system are also realms of action, once again, at least in principle, informed by the personal qualities of those who exercise authority; such personal qualities express secondary values. A closer look at Rappaport’s cybernetics of the Holy, correctly considered the most impressive effort of engaging with the Elementary Forms in the twentieth Figure 1.2 Cybernetics of the holy Source: R. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 431. Centre and Periphery 23 century (see Rosati 2009, chapter 9) is key to understanding two crucial elements: the hierarchical relationship of legitimation of social subsystems on the one hand and on the other the kind of relationships that are in principle possible between peripheries and the centre. What this figure makes clear is that if the sacred (centre) is far from being the only actor involved in this cybernetic, it has a pivotal space in the symbolic social morphology of a society. Moreover, the relationships between this centre and the other actors are quite complex, and we can visualize this within the ‘Durkheimian’ scheme provided by Rappaport. However, before trying to clarify this point, let us consider for a moment another element of the picture.
Central Value System: ‘Ontological’ Background
The idea that society has a centre is not, theoretically speaking, an ‘innocent’ one. As always, it has anthropological presuppositions. In a perfect Durkheimian mood and vocabulary, Shils writes that ‘the existence of a central values system rests, in a fundamental way, on the need which human beings have for incorporation into something which transcends and transfigures their concrete individual experience. They have a need to be in contact with symbols of an order which is larger in its dimensions than their own bodies and more central in the “ultimate” structure of reality than their routine everyday life’ (Shils 1975, 7). Again retrospectively, Shils wrote that, ‘Human beings need, above all, objects which embody transcendental values, values which transcend those pursued in the course of the routine of the ordinary life. The orientation toward a centre helps to satisfy this need – although the centre itself sometimes frustrates, rather than satisfies, the need for a transcendental centre in which an earthly institution or collectivity participates or under which the earthly centre is subsumed’ (Shils 1988, 260). Within a Durkheimian frame, these statements, probably far from being uncontroversial within other theoretical paradigms, can be justified in terms of individual need for self-transcendence, to leave the crude natural dimension and reach that transcendent (social) dimension that only makes of man an individual, a moral being (see Durkheim 1960). So far, one could say that the centre of a society has on the one hand a relationship with human beings’ need for belonging and self-transcendence, and on the other a hierarchical relationship with subsystems in which secondary values – consistent with the central value system – circulate.
Centre-periphery Relationships
Shils’ centre-periphery model has frequently been considered consensual and basically functionalist, too interested in integration, and oblivious of conflict and power. In my opinion, this is an unfair assessment of Shils’ approach. As I stressed above, it is true that he was seriously interested in the grammar of social solidarity, 24 The Making of a Postsecular Society but he understood at least implicitly social solidarity as a sociological transcendental (see Rosati 2003), as a condition of possibility of conflict and change. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that Shils himself was not oblivious at all to conflicts between centres and peripheries, heterogeneous and numerous centres on the one hand and heterogeneous and numerous peripheries on the other (Shils 1988, 226). What has to be noted, in my view, is that if Shils started from integration, it was because he was aware that conflict and power without some form of integration would have to be more appropriately called ‘violence’. In order to analyse different kinds of relationships between centre and periphery, Shils followed a Weberian path. Shifting from a Durkheimian understanding of the centre as partaking of the nature of the sacred, to a Weberian translation of it in terms of concentrated charisma, Shils argued that peripheries’ relationships with the centre depend on higher or lower vicinity/distance from the centre. In other words, it is the distribution of charisma that shapes the social morphology in centres and peripheries. One way of conceptualizing conflict within this framework, has been that of tracing a distinction between Great and Little Traditions. Great Traditions (a concept derived from Robert Redfield) are those that embody the central value system, and ‘may be evident in the ‘external’ artefacts such as great works of architecture, or in the writing and sanctification of scholarly books and codices’ (Eisenstadt 2003, Vol. 1, 205). Great Traditions must be symbolically distinct from the Little Traditions of the periphery. The complex, dynamic and frequently conflicting relationships of Great and Little traditions, are summarized by Eisenstadt as follows:
The relations between the Great and Little Traditions were transformed by processes of ideological differentiation. They gave rise to attempts by the carriers of the Great Traditions to permeate the periphery and to pull the Little Traditions into the orbit of the Great ones; as well as to attempts by the carriers of the Little Traditions to dissociate themselves from the Great Traditions, to profane them, and, paradoxically enough, also to generate a distinct ideology of the Little Traditions and of the periphery. (2003, 205)
Furthermore, there can also be another way to conceptualize different kinds of relationships between centre and peripheries, including oppositional and even confrontational relationships, that can be derived from my Durkheimian- Rappaportian framework. Taking another look at the cybernetics of the Holy, what Rappaport’s analysis makes clear is that formal acceptance of numinous beliefs and ultimate sacred postulates is just one possible outcome of the cybernetics of the sacred. The ritual process can reproduce the symbolic constellation of a given society, but it can also, under other circumstances, give rise to a de-sanctification of the ultimate sacred postulates, or to prophetic movements that complain of a hypocritical and insufficient implementation of them. Above all, ritual withdrawal – as Rappaport calls the crucial decision by members of not entering the ritual process – can lead Figure 1.3 Centre-periphery general model 26 The Making of a Postsecular Society to prophetic movements or a de-sanctification of the ultimate sacred postulates. In the context of Rappaport’s analysis, ritual withdrawal has not to be understood as a complete dismissal of all kinds of ritual practices, but as a withdrawal from established, official, rituals. Counter-rituals, such as those analysed by Victor Turner, for example, are always possible, and they can have a liminal effect capable not only of de-sacralizing the established ultimate sacred postulates, but also of generating new ones. In embryo, these liminal rituals were already contemplated by Durkheim (see Rosati 2009). The crux of the matter, in other words, is that from within a Durkheimian framework, and with Rappaport’s help, we can easily observe how the cybernetics of the sacred is a contingent process and how different actors may develop different attitudes towards the ultimate sacred postulates, namely the centre of society. In an attempt to make the above more analytical – and more useful for a close inquiry of actual contexts – I suggest distinguishing, at the typological level, between individual and systemic attitudes of peripheries toward the central value system of a society. Using this time a vocabulary reminiscent of Max Weber, at the individual level one may distinguish between an attitude of passive acceptance of central authority; an attitude of mystical, apolitical rejection of it; an attitude of extreme, passionate denial (still in a sense expressing a strong even if conflicting relationship with the central value system); and, finally, an ascetical attitude toward the centre (expressing hyper-affirmation of the central value system but dissatisfaction, radical in the case of prophetic movements, with its actual implementation). At the systemic level, the centre-periphery relationship can be understood – still at the typological level – in terms of assimilation, confrontation, or solidarity (that is to say, integration without assimilation).
Historical Developments in the Centre-periphery Relationship
According to Shils’ model, and on the basis of Eisenstadt’s studies on the Western world,
as long as societies were loosely coordinated, as long as authority lacked the means of intensive control and as long as much of the economic life of society was carried on outside any market or almost exclusively in local markets, the central value system invariably became attenuated in the outlying reaches. With the growth of the market, and the administrative and technological strengthening of authority, contact with the central value system increased. When, as in modern society, a more unified economic system, political democracy, urbanization and education have brought the different sections of the population into more frequent contact with each other and created even greater mutual awareness, the central value system has found a wider acceptance than in other periods of the history of society. (Shils 1975, 11) Centre and Periphery 27
In other words, within Western civilization, Western societies reduced the distance between centre and peripheries: ‘The movement toward equality of deference, the reduction of differences in modes of life – and the spread of education and of civil and social rights – are parts of this approximation of centre and periphery’ (Shils 1988, 257). The centre has become more inclusive, and this is, among other things, what we (Westerners) mean by ‘modernity’. In Shils’ and Eisenstadt’s works, the development of Western modernity can be described as a process of institutionalization, democratization and diffusion of the charisma from the centre of society towards the periphery(ies) (Shils 1962). In a sense, modernity’s feature is that of reversing the relationship between centre and periphery: if the centre was embodied in traditional societies by the ruler (the prince), now modernity considers the individual power of leaders as derivative, and always subject to the recognition and legitimation of peripheries. Modernity is characterized by a ‘centripetal movement’, so that the new symbolism ‘turns outsiders into insiders, observers into participants, and yesterday’s peripheries into today’s centres, thus extending the horizon of inclusion’ (Giesen 2004, 79). As Giesen emphasises, it is a process of symbolic expulsion and reconstruction that implies conflicts and struggles between Great and Little Traditions, whose outcome implies that:
The authentic centre of modernity is conceived as devoid of any personal and private elements. In contrast to personal rule of the prince and the arcane origin of politics, here the centre is disembodied and impersonal, public and porous. The modern public sphere is defined by open boundaries, excluding outsiders only on their own contingent decisions or by their incidental absence. Access to this public sphere is granted to everybody who observes certain procedural rules of discourse or appeal to certain moral principles, who refers to a common triumphant or traumatic past or believes in a common utopia. (2004, 78)
The statement quoted above does not mean that modernity can dispense with charisma and even personal charisma. It means, however, that personal charisma is now fragile and volatile, and transformed so to speak into the impersonal rule of law or the volatile and short-lived authority of leaders. In this process, one must consider the role played more and more by mass media, which are responsible for the construction of this ‘volatility of public attention’ in the public sphere, and are the makers of a new kind of consensus that has ‘its particular rituals and risks of communication’ (2004, 102). While this process meant an increase in democratic inclusion, since it brought people into relationship with the centre of society, its parallel consequence was a progressive dissolution of the boundaries within society itself, so that cultural differences within society ended up by vanishing. The vanishing of cultural differences was the price paid for democratic inclusion. The process of inclusion into the centre was a process of assimilation of differences and collective identities (Seligman 1994). 28 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Shils’ outline of the different relationship between centre and periphery in pre- modern and modern societies can be substantially accepted under three conditions: first, that it is meant as a description of the Western experience and the ‘move’ from tradition to modernity; second, that it is meant as a general line of development, not in terms of substitution, passing of tradition and so on, avoiding – in other terms – naïve theories of modernization (it is worth recalling that Shils is also the author of fundamental works on the meaning of the concept of tradition) (Shils 1981); third, and foremost, Shils’ scheme is acceptable on condition of considering the high costs that Western modernity had to pay to include peripheries into the centre of society. There is still one final point, perhaps the most important. It is common sense, within the social sciences, that the centre-periphery model was tailored on nation- states, and that contemporary transformations make it useless. Shils himself perhaps authorized this interpretation. As Greenfeld and Martin maintain, in fact, the reference to nationality was at least implicit in Shils’ formulation:
The complex of values and beliefs which constitutes nationality – a very modern phenomenon – may very well be the paradigmatic example in the sense of a society-generating central-value system, because it is uniquely capable of shaping comprehensive, inclusive identities of individuals, and therefore of delineating the outermost structure of a collectivity to which they belong (or the other way round). In nationality, the boundaries of a collectivity are incorporated into the value system; the two coincide: the values are only applicable to a collectivity bounded, and therefore separated from others, in a most important way. The world outside the group to which the values apply has no relevance, it is meaningless and holds no promise for the individual who shares these values, either because of his subjective aversion to non-believers, those who do not share his values, or because, objectively, there is no place for him there. For the individual member, it is the values that establish the boundaries. (Greenfeld and Martin 1998, 4)
There is no doubt that the centre-periphery model applied originally to the nation- state. However, there are no reasons why it should be logically dependent on that very particular phenomenon. If this were the case, the model would actually be seriously weakened in a time of globalization on the one hand and resurgence of local boundaries on the other. But this is not the case. The centre-periphery model tells something important about the grammar of every kind of social grouping. In a Durkheimian mood, I would say that every time people gather together, and share a common focus of attention (see Collins 2004), they are shaping a central value system, and they draw boundaries, mostly in a ritualistic way, that trace borders of inclusion and exclusion, thereby shaping collective identities. The logic of the centre-periphery model, in other words, can be reiterated on global, transnational levels, as well as on local levels (see Rosati 2009). It is about the Centre and Periphery 29 formal logic of the making of society, not about a contingent social phenomenon such as the nation-state. However, it is worthwhile to confront criticisms of the centre-periphery model more closely. In Chapter 3 the strict relationship between space and the symbolism of the centre will be discussed and we will come back to these issues later on too. However, one cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that it is by geographers themselves, and above all urban geographers and urban sociologists, that the centre-periphery model has been criticized to the point of dismissal. According to Edward W. Soja, for example, the idea of centre-periphery implied a theoretical preference for the search for order and cybernetic equilibrium, and this preference is politically biased (Soja 1999, chapter 4). I have already tried to say why this criticism is not necessarily valid. However, according to Soja the centre-periphery model also does not work anymore because cities’ borders are becoming permeable and do not permit the easy tracing of dividing lines between what is inside and what lies outside the city and the country, urban space and peripheries, and so on (ibid.), such that the entirely different nature of social reality requires a paradigm shift. For sure, other influential analysts of contemporary cities use other metaphors beyond Soja’s post-metropolis, such as global cities (Sassen 2006). The most challenging metaphor, however, the true antagonist of the centre-periphery model, is the idea of the network informational society, and of the city as a network and as a space of fluxes of information, technologies, images, sounds, capitals – much more than a space made of physical places (Castells 1996; 2004). What these images indicate is precisely the idea of a centre-less society, made by networks of economic but above all informational knots and processes. From the point of view of these perspectives, the global post-metropolis has lost every spatial and symbolic similarity with the European model of the city. Webs and knots, fluxes and processes are immaterial dimensions, and contemporary post-metropolises are cities without borders, radically different from the historical cities, understood as ceremonial centres, and spaces for ‘the common’, religious as well as civil (see Gregotti 2011). Despite the apparent appeal of these metaphors, their fashionable character, and their genuine capability of grasping key features of contemporary societies (and urban space), I maintain that the centre-periphery model retains its utility both as a general model ‘to arrive to an intelligible account of what makes a large aggregate of human beings into a society’, as was Shils’ hope in the 1930s, and to explain the specific relationship between space and religions in contemporary cities. The first point calls into question what I call the ‘deep grammar of society’. Here the point seems to be related to the relationship between the spatial and the symbolic dimensions. According to Castells, far from being a simple ‘reflex’ of society, space is a fundamental dimension of society, even society in itself. Consequently, changes in the spatial configuration of society must imply some kind of change in the way society represents itself. This is why, for example, the walled and symmetrical Italian city of the Renaissance, with its civil and spiritual powers that face one another in the central square of the ‘common’, cannot be 30 The Making of a Postsecular Society the proper form of the immaterial informational global city. Though this is right, and the relationship between social space and the identity of a collectivity is very strong, one should not completely conflate social and symbolic morphology. It was actually Shils, and before him Maurice Halbwachs, who stressed that the ‘centre’ ‘has (…) nothing to do with geometry and little with geography’ (Shils 1975, 3), but has to be understood as the repository of the ‘central value system’ of a society. Space can express, in important ways, the central value system of a society, but at the same time it is important to stress that what this chapter discusses is the utility of the image of the centre for expressing symbolic dynamics, the proper morphology of the value system of a society. Space, and urban space first of all, can be taken as an index of symbolic morphology, but urban space, and social- physical space in general, must not be simply taken as the mould of a society’s soul. The non-absolute equivalence and symmetry of spatial and symbolic morphology, very close to one another but not simply a reflex of one another, is the first argument against the obsolescence of the centre-periphery model in the study of symbolic dynamics. The second argument comes from Castells himself. Stressing the importance of architecture in giving a meaning to physical spaces immersed in the space of fluxes in contemporary informational cities, he notices a rebirth of architectural symbolism in recent times. Here the point is that even the network society and the informational city, spatially centre-less immaterial webs of communicative and financial knots, need symbolic expression. That peculiar space of fluxes that, according to Castells, is the contemporary centre-less and boundary-less city, needs new symbols, but symbols nonetheless. So Bofill’s airport in Barcelona, Moneo’s station in Madrid, the Kursaal Congress Centre in San Sebastián, the Lille Grand Palais by Koolhas, are mentioned by Castells (2004) as ‘cathedrals in the information age, places where to look for meaning for their own wandering’ (2004, 75). In other words, what Castells seems to adumbrate, is that the metaphor of a symbolic centre, or of symbolic centres (in the plural, which is perfectly consistent with Shils’ view), is re-emerging from within new, updated and fashionable metaphors such as the network society. Every society, whatever its social morphology, needs a symbolic central value system, and needs also to find the proper spatial manifestation of it. The third argument comes from a classic contribution to the modern literature on the city, Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960). What Lynch showed in this book was the collective representations that specific social groups have of their city, and above all the existence of certain constant needs on the part of people on the street, independent of the specific city in which they live. People have, according to Lynch, a mental image of the social space they inhabit, and this mental image includes key elements such as legibility, clarity, structure and identity, and above all what Lynch calls imageability:
A highly imageable (apparent, legible, and visible) city in this peculiar sense would seem well formed, distinct, remarkable; it would invite the eye and the ear to great attention and participation. The sensuous grasp upon such surroundings Centre and Periphery 31
would not be simply simplified, but also extended and deepened. Such a city would be one that could be apprehended over time as patterns of high continuity with many distinctive parts clearly interconnected. The perceptive and familiar observer could absorb new sensuous impacts without disruption of its basic image, and each new impact would touch upon many previous elements. He would be well oriented, and he could move easily. (1960, 10)
Imageability as synthesis of an apparent, clear, legible and visible urban space, has a fundamental orienting function, and makes possible the absorbing of novelties by organizing them on the backdrop of elements of continuity. A city, according to Lynch, needs a fundamental shape, a general scheme, so that groups can form a mental image of the city and can easily orient and move within it. In other words, the need for a ‘centre’, a legible figure organized around some centre, is a cognitive need of individuals and groups; both need symbolic and spatial ‘hooks’ to orient themselves in the urban space, and cannot avoid shaping representations of their inhabited space organized around centres that make it imageable. The above three arguments – the non-absolute equivalence between spatial and symbolic dynamics, the resurgence of the metaphor of the symbolic centre even within metaphors of centre-less network cities and societies, and the cognitive need for collective groups to find a clear structure and identity in their inhabited space in order to form collective representations of it – run against a naïve dismissal of the centre-periphery model. In the second part of this book, we shall see how these arguments work in the context of a global metropolis such as Istanbul, a city of 15,000,000 inhabitants, that would literally be ‘unimaginable’ without its symbolic centres. Once enriched and made more complex in the ways suggested above (pluralizing the idea of the centre, making room for antagonistic centres and peripheries, opening the centre(s) to the notion of left-centre), the dichotomy of centre and periphery continues to be a basic dimension of the deep grammar of every society and social space. It remains a hidden lens that allows us to scratch under the surface of social space and to dig out those areas of ‘concentration and dispersal of charisma, deference, authority, power, and status in social and cultural systems’ (Shils 1988, 214) that give shape to moral, social and in an important sense also spatial order. However, another argument against a simplistic dismissal of the centre- periphery model comes from the surface of social life and space. If it is sometimes necessary to scratch under the surface, at other times a fresh look at the surface is helpful too. In fact, as commentators have noticed, students of urban space and social geographers are not always, and sometimes not in the least, sensitive to the religious dimensions of the ‘postmetropolis’. Discussing Soja’s work, Baker and Beaumont correctly maintain that the emergence of the postsecular city could be included as a major contour of the postmetropolis (Baker and Beaumont 2011, 257):
If there had been this dimension (the religious one), then Soja would have been far more attuned to the religious dimension of frictioned space in which the lived 32 The Making of a Postsecular Society
urban environment is a battleground for cultural and ideological control. (…) we have seen how religion and religious identity have profoundly affected the way people view and contest urban space in, for example, Jerusalem and in the East End of London (…). But had Soja also been aware of the spiritual and religious reenchantment taking place in the Postmetropolis, then he could have seen how religion is also not only mutating into, but contributing to, frictionless space by astutely mimicking the urban design and flows of product and communication created by neo-liberal global capitalism. So, for example, mega-churches in cities such as Singapore and Sydney effortlessly embed themselves into the leisure event/shopping mall nexus of the postmodern global city. (2011, 258)
Religions are part of the postmetropolitan social space, both as a cause of conflict and contestation in frictioned contexts (as in Jerusalem, for instance, where the sacred is a tangible principle of the organization of entire neighbourhoods, and frequently motivated the cutting and reshaping of parts of the city in contested ways (see Fenster 2011)), and in frictionless spaces, where they have found a way of integrating themselves within the mainstream of the global cities (see also Becci, Burchardt, Casanova 2013). In Chapter 3 I shall return to the new spaces in which religious life can unfold in contemporary landscapes. So far, it has been enough to explain the different reasons why the religious-like logic of the centre- periphery model is far from outmoded – or perhaps it is outmoded, but only as a consequence of a postmodernist and neoliberal hangover. Such a fashionable rhetoric perhaps will share the fate of the neo-economy: once its ephemeral life is realized, social theorists will turn their attention again back to the long-lasting dimensions of social life. Chapter 2 Clarifying the Postsecular: A Sociological Reading
Making the Postsecular Sociologically Useful
‘Postsecular’ society is becoming an increasingly widespread key term in contemporary debates, within the philosophical as well as the sociological domains. Even if it is not so new, the term has acquired a new conceptual relevance and specificity as a consequence of an in depth analysis of classical theories of secularization.1 In this chapter, I take for granted narratives of secularization, and I start from a position sympathetic with those views that stress the need for a change of paradigm (Davie 2007; Bhargava 1998; Calhoun, Juegensmeyer, VanAntwerpen 2011). Furthermore, my main aim is to contribute to a specifically sociological clarification of the still too vague notion of ‘postsecular society’, that I take as the best candidate for the paradigm change. Admittedly, it is a controversial premise.2 From a glance at the existing literature, one might have the feeling that, more than being a useful sociological tool, the notion expresses both a general intuition – the insufficiency of secularization theories, in one version or another, to grasp the present state of the relationship between religions and contemporary societies and/ or political arrangements – and a normative stance: namely, the need for a normative point of view in order to find more just ways of accommodating religious claims in our liberal institutions. From the sociological domain, voices of prominent sociologists, such as James Beckford, sound sceptical about the sociological usefulness of the notion of the postsecular (see Beckford 2010 and 2012); Bryan S. Turner, discussing Habermas’ influential discourses and papers on religion, wrote that though ‘generous’, it happened in the past that they did ‘not provide any new
1 See Beckford 2003, Chapter 2. I agree with Beckford’s nuanced statement, according to which ‘one of sociology’s most important tasks is to investigate the changes in the meaning attributed to “secularization” at different times and places’. However, just as secularization, taken in its contextual meaning, ‘can be good for social theory’, in the same way this chapter’s aim is that of showing that the postsecular can be good for social theory too. The most relevant premise of my reflections is Grace Davie’s position, according to which a ‘step change’ in the debate occurred once we became aware that it is perfectly possible to be ‘fully modern and fully believers’ at the same time (Davie 2007, ix; Davie’s book is the best introduction to the field and to the debate on secularization from a point of view sympathetic with the opportunity of a paradigm shift). As will become clear, awareness is a key term in my own understanding of the postsecular. 2 See McLennan 2007. 34 The Making of a Postsecular Society insights or conclusions that are not already familiar to social scientists’ (Turner 2011, 104–5). However, the biggest problem seems to be the lack of clear defining criteria of the concept, which would be helpful also for empirical research. In fact, the postsecular has frequently been confused with ‘false friends’, such as the idea of the de-secularization of the world, re-enchantment and above all with a condition of overcoming the immanent frame (Taylor 2007) of modernity. My hope, perhaps overly ambitious, in trying to help to clarify the concept, is also that such a clarification may serve to increase the sociological usefulness of the notion of ‘postsecular society’.3 The second part of this book, taking Turkey as a case study, aims at testing empirically the notion of the postsecular, and at the same time, at bringing fresh blood to its further theoretical definition. Consequently, in this chapter, I shall trace my personal route to the postsecular, in the attempt to offer a strictly theoretical analysis of its main constitutive elements; at the end of the second part of this book, after the discussion of the Turkish case study, I shall return to the general topic of modernity, religion and the postsecular, and shall try to suggest a theoretical model – derived from a generalization of the Turkish case – for understanding the possible relationships between religions and modernity (where the postsecular is one among three other possibilities), a model capable, in principle, of being tested in other contexts. In the following pages, I want to distinguish two different, though not unrelated, ways of approaching the postsecular. The first way casts the concept in socio-political terms, the second in socio-anthropological ones. The first considers religion as a first order concept, taking specific meanings on the basis of practices, beliefs and experiences of human actors (Beckford 2003, 21); in this sense, I include conventional religions, implicit religions, folk religion, invented religions, and so on and so forth. However, it is my deep conviction that conventional and institutional religions, once de-privatized, challenge basic assumptions of Western modernity, forcing us to reflect on new categories such as the postsecular much more than individualized and spiritualized religious experiences, constitutively more consonant with Western, modern (religious) individualization (see Rosati 2009). The second approach considers religion in a very Durkheimian sense, as a set of practices and beliefs centred on the notion of the sacred, capable of generating social solidarity on the one hand and of expressing a given collective identity on the other. In this sense, religion can assume ‘religious’ as well as secular, civic or
3 Indirectly, I hope to contribute to persuading James Beckford that ‘postsecularity has sound sociological roots’, against his present skepticism, see James A. Beckford 2010. I also hope to be more persuasive in the eyes of David Martin, who expressed his skepticism towards the notion of postsecular in a review of Rosati and Stoeckl 2012, see Martin 2015. Literature on the postsecular is rapidly growing; the following reference is limited to mainstream exponents of the different perspectives: Habermas 2006a and 2006b, Habermas 2008, Habermas 2007; Calhoun, Juergenmeyer, Van Antwerpen 2011; Philosophy & Social Criticism 2010; Molendijk, Beaumont, Jedan 2010; Beaumont, Baker, 2011; Gorski, Kim, Torpey, VanAntwerpen, 2012; Rosati, Stoeckl 2012; Knauss, Ornella 2007. Clarifying the Postsecular 35 political forms; in other words, we must decouple (see Knott 2013) the notion of religion, to include in it both the secular and the religious sacred. In this chapter, I shall introduce just this second meaning of the postsecular and then discuss it at length theoretically in chapters 3 and 4, and empirically in chapters 8, 9, and 10.
Narratives of (Western) Modernity
In order to try to clarify the socio-political meaning of the postsecular, and to try to make it more useful sociologically, I shall compare briefly two very different narratives that end with the need to include the notion of the postsecular society in our vocabulary. The reason is that they imply different genealogies and assessments of Western modernity and I hope to draw from them two crucial dimensions of the concept of postsecular society. In the second part, we shall see that by contrasting these two dimensions, four different ways emerge in which modernities (in the plural) have dealt with religions. For the time being, however, I shall attempt to detect the essential features of any kind of postsecular society or postsecular modernity. In order to do so, I want briefly to reconstruct the narratives of modernity proposed over the years by two very different, but in my view complementary, authors: Jürgen Habermas on the one hand, and Adam B. Seligman on the other. Through their work, we can detect the two main dimensions of any postsecular society. It is well known that Habermas defined modernity as an ‘unfinished project’, whose philosophical basis lies in the unfolding of a communicative rationality capable of balancing, sociologically speaking, the instrumentality of political and economic subsystems (Habermas 1984; 1987). It is also well known how Habermas’ trust in the full implementation of the project of the Enlightenment is contingent upon a discursive interpretation of democracy and the law. Modernity, democracy and the law are characterized, according to Habermas, by a common cognitive feature that marks a sort of evolutionary development from traditional to modern societies, namely reflectivity and self-reflectivity. Modernity’s wager (Seligman 2000), from Habermas’ point of view, has to do first of all with an increased reflectivity, a dialogical capability of discussing validity-claims conceived as the only source of legitimation of the speech acts exchanged in the public sphere, and of institutions operating in the public and political domain. Democracy and the law, discursively understood, are the political and juridical positivization of such a self-reflective discursive rationality (Habermas 1996). Habermas’ way of approaching religions in the contemporary landscape, marked by a deep discontinuity between The Theory of Communicative Action and his subsequent works, is characterized by the same trust in the cognitive development of contemporary forms of life, secular as well as religious. This is not the right context in which to analyse Habermas’ growing interest in religions as central social and political phenomena, or his own changes of attitude and theoretical perspective over the years (Rosati 2003). In the context of these pages, 36 The Making of a Postsecular Society
I am interested simply in showing how, from a Habermasian perspective, we have to detect reflectivity as a cognitive evolutionary element of modernity ‘at its best’ and, as far as it accomplishes such a requirement, characteristic of a postsecular modernity. Fascinated by Eisenstadt’s, Bellah’s and other authors’ work on the Axial Age and modernity as a form of civilization (Arnason, Eisenstadt, Wittrock 2005), Habermas still defends the potentially universalistic character of modernity, whose Western roots and cultural particularism do not invalidate its cognitive universalism. Understood as a civilization, modernity is, in Habermas’ view, the cognitive milieu common to every culture, society and form of life. That means that there is no form of life that nowadays can easily avoid dealing with modernity and its cognitive structures or that, in other words, can make itself immune from entering a dialogical process that results in a progressive, even if partial, linguistification of authority claims. In this sense, living within modern civilization means, both as secular or as religious persons, being almost forced to engage with one another in a self-reflective scrutiny of one’s form of life and in a complementary process of learning from other viewpoints. Consequently, the first meaning of the idea of a postsecular society is the following:
This term “postsecular society” refers not only to the fact that religion continues to assert itself in an increasingly secular environment and that society, for the time being, reckons with the continued existence of religious communities. The expression postsecular does not merely acknowledge publicly the functional contribution that the religious communities make to the reproduction of desired motives and attitudes. Rather, the public consciousness of postsecular society reflects a normative insight that has consequences for how believing and unbelieving citizens interact with one another politically. In postsecular society, the realization that “the modernization of public consciousness” takes hold and reflexively alters religious as well as secular mentalities in staggered phases is gaining acceptance. If together they understand the secularization of society to be a complementary learning process, both sides can, for cognitive reasons, then take seriously each other’s contributions to controversial themes in the public sphere. (Habermas 2006a, 258)
The ‘normal’ expectation, for both the Enlightenment’s secular tradition and the religious doctrines, is that they are capable of reflecting upon their respective limits: this is what self-reflectivity is all about. The normal expectation is also that they are available to engage in a process of complementary learning from other traditions and viewpoints. Once again, what has to be stressed is that Habermas is not pointing out some altruistic or benevolent attitude of civilized people, but to the structural presuppositions of every social interaction within the context of that peculiar yet universalistic civilization which nowadays modernity is. Of course, one might suspect that ‘functional’ and sociological factors – such as the de-privatization of traditional religions and the insufficiency, if not failure, Clarifying the Postsecular 37 of ‘orthodox’ theories of secularization – play a role in fostering and/or making a process of complementary learning more urgent, but my opinion is that, from Habermas’ point of view, this understanding of the postsecular society ‘simply’ brings to fruition modernity’s inner cognitive structures. There are several other points in Habermas’ position that deserve discussion, and that are actually constantly under discussion and scrutiny above all from a political-philosophical point of view: his idea of the self-sufficiency of the liberal state’s ‘political’ (in the Rawlsian sense) presupposition with regard to its need for legitimation (2006a, 253); his warning against a ‘widespread misunderstanding’ of the idea of constitutional patriotism as a simply abstract notion, independent, for example, from a ‘politics of memory’ capable of inculcating it in the hearts and habits of citizens; his idea of a sort of ‘asymmetry in epistemic claims’ between religious and secular citizens, that should be compensated for for the sake of the modern ideal of equality (2006a, 254–5).4 Fortunately, Habermas’ interpreters are always in large numbers and skilled in philosophical argumentation, so that we can exploit their work and limit ourselves to stressing once again a single point. Postsecular society, if we follow Habermas’ narrative of modernity, means that while ‘religious consciousness has been forced to engage in processes of adaptation’, so that it is more and more forced to fluidify itself (2006a, 257), in a parallel fashion, ‘secular citizens, insofar as they act in their role as citizens of a state, may neither deny out of hand the potential for truth in religious conceptions of the world nor dispute the right of believing fellow citizens to make contributions to public discussions that are phrased in religious language’
4 Habermas’ idea of postsecularism has been criticized from ‘outside’ the Habermasian camp, so to speak, above all for its ethnocentric character (see Leezenberg 2010), and for its rationalistic bias (see Martin 2010). McLennan finds misleading Habermas’ presuppositions that: ‘a) the majority of citizens in liberal states are secularists, b) that they are consciously secularists, c) that secularism simply means “non-believing”’ (p. 42). Bernice Martin points out how Habermas’ communicative game must be played according to Enlightenment rules (self-criticism), and that for the same reason ‘Habermas’s criterion of reflexive detachment looks politically and sociologically naïve because it requires religious citizens, many of whom have not exactly been formed by the European Enlightenment, to behave as if they had’ (p. 73). Leezenberg deconstructs Habermas’ idea of postsecularism, stressing its ethnocentric overtones, its underlying linear view of progress, and in the end concluding that the postsecular, at least in its Habermasian version, turns out to be an ‘ideological representation’. In my opinion, these judgements are partly convincing. It is true that sometimes, Habermas’ considerable open-mindedness and goodwill notwithstanding, secularist and rationalistic biases emerge strongly from his pages. However, I think that they are not logically connected to Habermas’ idea of the postsecular. They are Habermas’ biases, not limits of the notion in itself. Further, my hope is that Seligman’s position helps to correct and balance Habermas’ biased idea of religions, precisely because it does not ask religions to give up their vocabularies and particularities, but to articulate reflectivity from within. 38 The Making of a Postsecular Society
(2006a, 257). Reflectivity and the consequent process of complementary learning are a mature fruit of the project of modernity as a civilization. In my view, however, Habermas’ approach to the postsecular is biased by two elements. First of all, sociologically speaking, quite untenable is his idea that religious viewpoints, when expressed in the political sphere, must be translated into public reason, that is, must give up a religious vocabulary. This is a sort of step back to the hermeneutic model of the Enlightenment. Craig Calhoun has provided an excellent criticism of Habermas’ idea of translation. Translation, as Calhoun reminds us, implies a ‘highly cognitive model of understanding’ (2011, 85). However, ‘the idea of translating religious arguments into terms accessible to secular fellow citizens is more complicated. To be sure, restricting attention to argumentative speech reduces the extent of problems, because arguments are already understood to be a restricted set of speech acts and are more likely to be more commensurable than others. But the meaning of arguments can be more or less embedded in broader cultural understandings, personal experiences, and practices of argumentation rather than themselves having somewhat different standing in different domains (…) We are, indeed, more able to understand the arguments of others when we understand more of their intellectual and personal commitments and cultural frames (“where they are coming from”, in popular parlance)’ (2011, 85). The second, related point, is that Habermas’ idea of the postsecular portrays religions basically in terms of beliefs and it is biased by a cognitive dimension. This is a Western and Christian-like bias of which religious scholars are increasingly aware (see, for example, Strenski 2010). These two biases are overturned by Adam B. Seligman’s view of religions, and by his strategy for accommodating religions within modern civilization. As we shall see, reflectivity is a key word in Seligman’s view too, but his strategy for handling the relation between modernity and religions does not require anything like the translation of religious particularities into an allegedly neutral public reason. Seligman too considers modernity as a civilization, but in a quite different way from Habermas. If in Habermas’ view modernity is first of all a common environment that embraces virtually all forms of life in virtue of its cognitive evolution, Seligman understands modernity as a specific constellation and set of social forces, institutional arrangements and cultural values, that are the outcome of a very particularistic story. In the vein of Eisenstadt’s comparative sociology, Seligman shows, in a number of extremely important works, how Western modernity cannot be understood independently from its Christian sources, and how it is epistemologically as well as axiologically a post-Protestant constellation (Seligman 2000 and 1994). Controversial as this might seem, it is not in itself an unusual viewpoint.5 Trying to summarize his argument, one could say that, according to Seligman, Western modernity is the outcome of a process of spiritualization, de-ritualization and individualization of pre-Axial religions and of Judaism, ending with the shaping of a secular public and political space, and
5 See my sympathetic discussion of Seligman’s view in Rosati 2009. Clarifying the Postsecular 39 with a liberal idea of the self. It is not per se the expulsion of the sacred from the modern horizon, but its radical immanentization, so that authority, far from being a heteronomous force, now becomes ‘simply’ a transcendental one.
Modern culture and politics (…) staked its all on the ability to construct an authoritative locus of sacrality on a foundation of transcendental rather than transcendent dictates. We have eschewed any idea of the revealed truth of a transcendent Being in favour of ‘self-evident’ truths, thought to be as amenable to reason as the principles of Euclidian geometry (…) We have wagered our idea of the sacred on beliefs in individual rights, rooted in reason and serving as the “touchstone of our morality”, partaking in “transcendental morality”. This appeal to reason as the sacred remains at the base of contemporary democratic and liberal ideas of citizenship, political order, and individual identities. (Seligman 2000, 12–13)
Such a process implies a deep transformation of the ways in which borders of collective identities are drawn and shaped. Instead of ritual being the main symbolic compass, individual beliefs – supposedly rationalized and consistent with a universalistic transcendental moral law – are now called to design the borders of an inclusive moral community, actually without borders and empty of differences. The consequences of these processes – processes triggered by a transformation of world-views (more or less the Weberian disenchantment and rationalization process) and intertwined with materialistic elements (the Weberian interplay of interests and ideas) – are manifold. From a sociological point of view, the main consequence is the vanishing of collective (mainly religious) identities and/or their trivialization in terms of their becoming objects of consumption. From the socio- political point of view, the consequence seems to be a reactive and unreflective new ‘primordialization’ of those identities that do not share a post-Protestant profile.
The problem, then, is apparent on the empirical level. If the only source of tolerance is a secular liberal political and social order, we may all be in for some difficult times, for secularism seems to be in retreat, and liberal assumptions of the self and society are under attack in many places. (Seligman 2000, 130)
Finally, taking for granted – from a very unreflective stance – the modern post- Protestant understanding of religions (unfortunately, a still widespread and naïve attitude among educated and liberal-minded scholars) implies a reductive view of religions as sets of beliefs or doctrines rather than organized practices referring to the sacred (basically, the opposite of the Durkheimian definition of religion), with the consequent devaluation of the centrality of rituals in religious 40 The Making of a Postsecular Society and, at large, in social life (Seligman et al. 2008) – a mistake until recently also committed by Habermas.6 This, however, is where Seligman’s narrative departs from other similar stories critical of modernity, and where it meets – at least potentially – more anthropologically sensitive approaches to religions. This is also where Seligman’s work takes a perhaps unexpected twist. Fully aware that ‘if the only source of tolerance is a secular liberal political and social order, we may all be in for some difficult times’, Seligman does not work primarily on the reflectivity of Western modernity, but on the contrary on the reflectivity of religious traditions. Ironically, while he seems to accept liberalism as the best that modernity may offer, he asks religious traditions to take seriously their inner vocabularies, their being part of a pluralistic cultural, social and political environment, and to articulate from within their own ways of learning to live together. Instead of trying to make liberal tolerance appealing to religious traditions, his project aims (first) at recognizing religious differences as visible and deeply practised by individuals and groups, and (second) at developing a ‘principled tolerance’ capable of recognizing the internal and the external ‘other’ on the basis not of liberal but of religiously coloured sources:
Existing liberal accommodations of the privatization of difference are overthrown. What all too often takes their place is a trivialization of difference, or, alternatively, its rearticulation as political “pork”; so instrumentalized, it is again reduced to the shared common denominator of interest. And again elided. An alternative solution, I am suggesting, is one that involves precisely its recognition. For that recognition to take place, difference must itself be established and accepted. He or she, bearers of recognition, must do so from their own particularity and not from an assumed or latent or carefully disguised universalized position. One of the only ways to make such a move is from a position of humility and modesty – not weakness, not passivity (from which one could not be tolerant). This approach is very much part of the Islamic idea of hilm, as it is the Jewish concept of anva and injunction against the use of force in arriving at the truth. (Seligman 2004, 172)
While Seligman’s project and work – aimed at articulating such a ‘phenomenology of religious tolerance’ and at fostering practices of tolerance consistent with this approach7 – is not the only alternative path to the liberal way to follow (see Rosati 2009, 131–4), it is certainly of the utmost interest and importance. However, for present purposes I shall limit myself to taking from it the second dimension, which defines, in my view, the idea of the postsecular society. If,
6 Relevant considerations on the importance of rituals are found in A postsecular world society?: An interview with Jürgen Habermas, by Eduardo Mendieta, http://blogs. ssrc.org/tif/2010/02/03/a-postsecular-world-society/. 7 See http://www.bu.edu/cura/henry-luce-foundation-funding/issrpl-2/. Clarifying the Postsecular 41 following Habermas, the reflective level of modernity as a shared environment and cognitive structure has to be considered the first dimension of the postsecular society, actually common to every Axial civilization, then following Seligman we can maintain that the level of religious reflectivity – namely the capability of articulating inner sources of a principled tolerance – has to be considered the second dimension of the postsecular society. From these narratives we detect reflectivity – both of modernity (in Eisenstadt’s terms originally a Western project, whose original programme was shaped by the Enlightenment and was later shared in selective ways by other civilizations, so that nowadays it is a common environment with peculiar declinations, see Eisenstadt 2006) and religions – as the key dimension of a postsecular society.8 At the same time, we must consider that the postsecular society is neither an ontological condition, nor an already given social and political reality. It is something in the making. However, working on specific contexts (such as Turkey in the second part of this book), one can detect common features that shape an ideal-type (in the strictly Weberian sense) of the postsecular. Reflectivity, both of modernities (whatever their specific declination) and religions, is the first key element of this ideal-type, enhanced in turn by other macro-sociological changes.
Dimensions and Ideal-Type of the Postsecular Society
Reflectivity is crucial to understanding that the postsecular is a sort ofthird position that results from a dialectical relationship between the secular and the religious. If early (Western) modernity conceived of religions as being on an opposite plane to reason and the Enlightenment, an increased awareness made contemporary modernities conscious of ‘the relationship between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ as a dialectic and not merely oppositional’ one (Knott 2005a, 125). In other words, the idea of the postsecular does not mean that we are living in a non-secular environment and with non-secular institutions, but it ‘refers to the limits of the secularization thesis’ and it emphasizes the interrelation between the two camps (Molendijk, Beaumont and Jedan 2010, x). As Kim Knott (2005a) makes clear, the secular and the religious are two sides of the same coin. The postsecular is characterized by a condition of co-presence of religious and secular viewpoints and practices, and accordingly it is not to be confused with a condition of de-secularization. What is characteristic of the postsecular is that the ‘dividing
8 Of course reflectivity is widely recognized by social theorists as a key feature of modern societies. Antony Giddens and Ulrich Beck are probably the most well-known sociologists to analyse the increase of reflectivity in different spheres of modern and contemporary societies. However, the work of both Habermas and Seligman fits particularly well into my picture because no one has been more capable than Habermas of offering a general account of the development of modernity from a socio-philosophical point of view, and no one has been more specifically focused than Seligman on religions. 42 The Making of a Postsecular Society lines (and hence roles) of religions and science, faith and reason, tradition and innovation are no longer rigidly enforced (or indeed enforceable), and new relations of possibility are emerging’ (Beaumont and Baker 2011, 2). Interpenetration – to use Nilüfer Göle’s expression (Göle 2005) – between once rigidly separated borders is essential to the making (and understanding) of a postsecular society. Accordingly, another key feature of a postsecular society is the co-presence in the same field of secular and religious beliefs and practices, that interact dialectically in a way that can sometimes move and reshape the dividing lines between them, raising also the possibility of new configurations both of secular and religious viewpoints and practices (see Day, Vincett, Cotter 2013). The above mentioned questioning of the old dividing lines between the secular and the religious has been made possible by that line of development of the relationship between various forms of modernity and religion that Casanova called the de-privatization of religions (Casanova 1994). Against the true but partial thesis of the privatization of religion in modernity, recent decades show, according to Casanova and many others (see, for example, Ward and Hoelzl 2008), a new capability of being the centre of attention for traditional religions, and not only for new religious movements. What makes this new phase of modernity interesting is precisely the renovated centrality of those religions that Jakelić called ‘collectivistic religions’ (2010), which run against Western modernity’s dogmas such as choice and individual autonomy, and clamour for a public voice. This renovated centrality of traditional and de-privatized religions is the third feature of a postsecular society. Accordingly, a postsecular society has to be understood as a society in which a plurality of individual and collective religious beliefs and practices enrich and strengthen pluralism in general. A postsecular society is a society full of religious differences and particularities. It is a cosmopolitan society, but one in which cosmopolitanism has to be conceived of as full and not empty, not bypassing and neutralizing differences and particularities, but crossing them. Religious pluralism – a religious pluralism that is fostered by globalization and immigration and challenges the root conditions of religious monopoly – and full cosmopolitanism are the fourth feature of an ideal-type of the postsecular society. Only in the presence of these four elements does the idea of a complementary learning between secular and religious beliefs and practices make sense. Co-presence of the secular and the religious in the same field, de-privatization of religions and religious pluralism are sociological factors that increase the reflexivity of religious and secular forms of life, and all together they are conditions of the possibility of a complementary learning process, the fifth characteristic of a postsecular society. Finally, the sixth feature of postsecularism is a genuinely Axial idea of the sacred. In fact, in this context such a feature challenges the mainstream thesis of secularization and the transformation of the sacred in individualistic terms: the sacred that inhabits our time is not only an immanent one, but keeps its transcendent and heteronomous force (Seligman 2000). Traditional religions, which demand Clarifying the Postsecular 43 a public voice in the social and political sphere, and whose presence must be recognized as a fact if not as a shared value, do not look at this world as the final and only reality, but keep the capacity for ‘beyonding’, transcending the given reality in the name of a more perfect and heteronomous reality (Bellah 2011, 9). To sum up, the main features of postsecular societies are, in my view, the following:
a. the co-presence of secular and religious world-views; b. de-privatized religious movements claiming public recognition qua communities of faith who share particularistic sets of beliefs and practices; c. a condition of vibrant religious pluralism (including traditional religions, and not only the so-called new religious movements), that forces religious movements to increase their reflectivity and impedes the consolidation of strong positions of monopoly; d. reflexivity, historicity and agentiality, namely the three features characteristic of each Axial civilization (Wittrock 2005), increased by the conditions a–c above; e. secular citizens and groups that, to quote again Habermas, ‘neither deny out of hand the potential for truth in religious conceptions of the world nor dispute the right of believing fellow citizens to make contributions to public discussions that are phrased in religious language’ (Habermas 2006a, 260); f. the presence of genuinely Axial visions as expressions of the sacred. The sacred cannot be expressed only by civic symbols (the flag, the constitution, political religions and so on), and it cannot take only immanent forms.
If these conditions are sufficiently present, then in principle new postsecular transformative social practices could generate hybrid forms of life, both on the social and on the political level. On the sociological level, postsecular transformative practices can negotiate new relationships between genders and roles, new understandings of public and private, codes of decency and so on; on the political and constitutional levels, they can generate new institutional arrangements, more or less different from the liberal ones. By definition, this is an open process, highly context-dependent, so that it is impossible to describe or anticipate it in detail. What is certain is that when at work it is a potent multiplier of the forms that modernities can assume. The outcome of postsecular social practices is not only multiple modernities, but alternative forms of modernity, or, in Nilüfer Göle’s vocabulary, ‘local modernities’ (Göle 2010; Eisenstadt 2003; Taylor 2001). In mentioning transformative postsecular social practices, I have in mind two different kinds of social practices, both of which are already in place in some contexts: on the one hand, widespread everyday encounters between bearers of secular world-views and bearers of religious world-views (encounters frequently loosely ritualized: coffee houses, public parks, media products and so 44 The Making of a Postsecular Society on);9 on the other, more strongly ritualized events, such as ceremonies, liturgies, civil society assemblies, that take place in set urban spaces – which have been called postsecular sanctuaries.10 My hypothesis is that if everyday postsecular social practices work at the molecular and micro-sociological level, rituals that take place in postsecular sanctuaries work at the macro-sociological level, contributing in significant ways to changing the symbolic value system of a society and giving shape to a postsecular collective macro-imaginary. This is where our reflection on the postsecular meets the above discussion of the centre-periphery. The postsecular is a new and particular content of the collective consciousness of modernities that comprehend themselves as plural.11 In this sense, transformative social practices characteristic of a postsecular society, which are possible if the above conditions are satisfied, change the content of the central value system of a society from a secular self-understanding in which the secular and the religious are conceived of as two antagonistic camps, to a postsecular one in which they are part of the same field. This is what the second part of this book will illustrate in empirical terms, discussing Turkey as a case study. However, as our case study will show, this is not an irenic process. In fact, reflectivity (and consequently a process of complementary learning) is frequently triggered, from a sociological perspective, by conflict and disruptiveness. This is another major lack in Habermas’ account of the reflectivity of modernity. Since the publication of A Theory of Communicative Action (1984), critiques – even from within the same intellectual milieu (Honneth 1993) – underline how in Habermas’ view conflict is frequently reduced to a form of misunderstanding or otherwise to an effect of strategic rationality. However, conflict is frequently much more than that. Both in cases of recognition and in cases of redistribution (Fraser, Honneth 2003), conflict implies the disturbing and disruptive presence of the ‘Other’ (Göle 2011). It is the disturbing and disruptive presence of the ‘Other’ – such as the visibility of Islam in the European public space, according to Göle’s analysis (see also Norton 2013) – that could trigger what Habermas calls a process of ‘self- clarification’, critical self-reflectivity (Habermas 1996), and thus one that opens the way, in principle and depending on specific circumstances, to a process of complementary learning. Conflict and disruptiveness must be thematized, ina sociological approach to the postsecular, as the middle term between fixed and
9 Concrete examples of practices of this kind will be discussed in the second part of the volume. 10 Again, examples of practices of this kind will be offered in the second part of the volume. 11 The volume Rethinking Secularism (Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, Van Antwerpen 2011) provides a number of theoretical examples of conceptions of ‘reflective secularism’. Rajeev Bhargava’s ‘principle distance’, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s idea of a ‘suspension of (dis) belief’, and Alfred Stepan’s notion of ‘twin toleration’, are all forms of reflective, context- dependent secularism – different configurations that secularism can assume in a postsecular society. Clarifying the Postsecular 45 ossified dividing lines between the secular and the religious on the one hand, and a process of complementary learning on the other. Once again, in the second part of this book, we shall see how this middle term is crucial specifically in the Turkish transition towards a postsecular society.
The Socio-anthropological Dimension of the Postsecular
In the previous section I tried to detail as far as possible the relevant sociological dimensions (modernities’ and religions’ reflectivity) and features (co-presence of secular and religious beliefs and practices in the same field, de-privatized traditional religions, religious pluralism, Axial views of the sacred together with immanentized ones) that make possible, even in the presence of conflict and disruptiveness, that peculiar form of self-reflectivity and self-clarification that enables a process of complementary learning between secular and religious perspectives to take place. However, I do not think that this is the only way to conceptualize the postsecular. In a sense, the idea described above of the postsecular remains focused on the surface of social and political life. It pays attention to the phenomenology of social and political life, to what happens in terms of changes, much more than to what characterizes social life in terms of continuities within discontinuities. In order not to lose sight of this last, crucial aspect of society, we must introduce a socio- anthropological perspective, that implies a stronger awareness of the role of ritual and the sacred as the building blocks of social life at large, as the deep grammar of society (Rosati 2009). In this very Durkheimian sense, the idea of the postsecular rectifies a paradoxical misunderstanding caused partly by sociology itself. While the Durkheimian tradition, as well as the socio-anthropological perspectives underpinning Durkheimian premises, emphasized the constitutive character of ritual and the sacred for every society, including modern Western societies, in secular as well as in religious domains, independently of transformations of specific religious traditions occurring in Western modernity, sociologists, social scientists and political philosophers were shaping a self-understanding of Western modernity that left no room for ritual and the sacred, except in terms of the backwardness of residual enclaves. The idea of the postsecular implies a return to Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, becoming aware, once and for all, that every society needs specific practices and places – postsecular sanctuaries is the felicitous expression that recent literature has begun to use (Greve 2011) – where the central value system of a society (which according to Shils partakes of the nature of the sacred) is produced. It implies, in other words, a sort of culturalist social morphology, a grammar of sacred places, and an inquiry into those social processes that construct collective memory and shared symbols. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted precisely to conceptualizing the postsecular from this socio-anthropological perspective, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between space and the sacred on the one hand, and ritual and memory on the other. Obviously, we must always keep 46 The Making of a Postsecular Society in mind that, if this analysis at this point remains articulated at an abstract level, this is only because such concepts pave the way to the second part of the volume, where they are re-examined within the context provided by the Turkish case. Chapter 3 Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre: The Sacredness of Sacred Places
Sacred Places and Religion as the Deep Grammar of Society
One of the most radical and fruitful ways of considering religion is that of conceiving of it as the deep grammar of society (Rosati 2003, 2009). In Durkheimian terms, it means taking religion as the matrix of other social institutions on the one hand, and the orienting principle of the human faculty of ordering time, space, and cognitive and moral classification on the other. This is a twofold argument: genealogical in the first case, symbolical-morphological the second. The former is subject, in principle, to critical rejection on the basis of the progressive secularization of law, art, politics, economy and so on; the latter is more resilient, and shows how secularization is only a superficial phenomenon. In this chapter, I want to consider the relationship between religion – understood as a principle of order, as the deep grammar of society – and space, particularly urban space. As is well known, Durkheim himself, in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, offered key contributions to the analysis of the category of time, and subsequently, in Durkheim’s wake, similar contributions have shown the relevance of religious life in the organization of social rhythms.1 The notion of space, however, received perhaps even more attention. It was Durkheim himself, even before publishing the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, who demonstrated the place of social morphology within the field of sociology. Subsequent to the so- called ‘revelation’, namely the discovery of the importance of religion in social life, he drew a precise link between morphology and religious life. Theorists who were part of the Année Sociologique – Marcel Mauss, Robert Hertz, Maurice Halbwachs – found this link fundamental, as later did scholars of Durkheimian inspiration – for instance Roger Caillois – as well as contemporary theorists such as Bernard Giesen and others. The core issue of this tradition maintains that space has been shaped since the onset by religious categories. Our systems of classification, for instance our systems of cognitive differentiation between high and low, left and right – in other words, elementary spatial categories that are fundamental for organizing our empirical experience – are represented as deriving from the distinction between sacred and profane (see
1 Remarkable is the contribution given to this field by Italian anthropologists, see, for example, Lanternari 1959, Brelich 2011. 48 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Hertz 1909), in line with the classic essay of Durkheim and Mauss on the primitive forms of classification (Durkheim, Mauss 1974). At the beginning of this tradition, the most vivid and clear cut testimony of the awareness of the core role of religious life in shaping space, urban in the case in point, is perhaps La cité antique by Fustel de Coulanges. Reading this masterpiece, one has the impression of seeing the ancient city flourish thanks to the various social groups and their public cults. According to the French historian, ‘social ties’ themselves depend on religious cults: ‘ce qui est certain, c’est que le lien de la nouvelle association fut encore un culte. Les tribus qui se groupèrent pour former une cité ne manquèrent jamais d’allumer un feu sacré et de se donner une religion commune’ (Fustel de Coulanges 2009, 9). As is well known, Fustel de Coulanges, one of the theorists who most influenced Durkheim as a youth, pinpointed the link between city and religious life with reference to Græco-Roman cities. Subsequently, religious historians, archaelogists and anthropologists have shown how cities were, in effect, ‘God’s cities’ (or of the gods), even with reference to other civilizations (the most suggestive examples are perhaps the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and of Mesoamerica). Fustel de Coulanges argues that in ancient cities the organization of space and social relations (authorities, subjects and sovereignty) first in the family and then in public life generally, derives from the duties imposed by the cult. In this sense, he inspired Durkheim to elaborate the concept – revolutionary in the context of the social sciences, secular and modern (see Stroumsa 2010) – according to which religion could be conceived as a social event capable of explaining other social events. Fustel de Coulanges’ thesis, however, pivoted on the assumption that the strong link between religion and urban life could only be circumscribed to the ancient city. He expressed in a certain sense, a ‘classic’ secularist concept according to which modern forms of life (organization of space and systems of governance included) evolve and emancipate from religion:
La comparaison des croyances et des lois montre qu’une religion primitive a constitué la famille grecque et romaine, a établi le mariage et l’autorité paternelle, a fixé les rangs de la parenté, a consacré le droit de propriété et le droit d’héritage. Cette même religion, après avoir élargi et étendu la famille, a formé une association plus grande, la cité, et a régné en elle comme dans la famille. D’elle sont venues toutes les institutions comme tout le droit privé des anciens. C’est d’elle que la cité a tenu ses principes, ses règles, ses usages, ses magistratures. Mais avec le temps ces vieilles croyances se sont modifiées ou effacées; le droit privé et les institutions politiques se sont modifiées avec elles. Alors s’est déroulée la série des révolutions, et les transformations sociales ont suivi régulièrement les transformations de l’intelligence. (Fustel de Coulanges 2009, 3)
However, here the great historian seems to be confusing genealogical theory with a structural-morphological construct. If it is true that, in the West, modernity Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre 49 implies a process of functional differentiation of social spheres (one of the aspects of secularization, see Casanova 2000), it is questionable that religious symbolism has ceased to influence meaningfully the morphological organization of the social.2 Considering urban space, Roger Caillois, for instance, in his by now classic Man and the Sacred, has highlighted how:
The configuration of modern cities renders even more the perception to a certain extent, of the value, partly mythical and partly objective, of their layout: in the centre the Church or the cathedral (seat of the Divine), the municipality, institutional buildings, the courts of justice (symbols and temples of power and authority), theatres, museums, monuments to the deceased, statues of great men (various features of the sacred patrimony of the city) benefit from enormous squares, huge road networks, flowering gardens; at night bright lighting confers on these privileged areas splendor and security. On the outskirts of this reassuring, warm, official nucleus, the great agglomerates of urban life develop into a shadowy belt of poverty and misery where badly lit, narrow streets offer little security and refuge to inns and hotels of ill repute and other clandestine buildings (…). Consequently, the contrast between the pure and the impure, in the shift from a religious to a secular environment is reflected in the opposition between law and order and crime and between a respectable life and an abject existence, conserving the ancient topography of mystical principles: good in the centre, evil in the periphery. (Caillois 2001, 46–7, Italian edition; transl. by the author)
In other words, it is not only the morphology of Stonehenge or Teotihuacán, that is nourished by religious symbolism. Even the most complex relation between centre and periphery in modern cities preserves traces of such lexicon and semantics (see Greve 2011). As will become evident, in our postsecular cities (Beaumont and Baker 2011) religions ‘appear’ in places previously not envisaged and sacred places take on, at times, new and unusual forms albeit maintaining the same elementary grammar.
The Sacredness of Sacred Places: Two Contrasting Views
Space and the sacred are closely linked but, as Durkheim maintains, it is a truism that not everything that is social is sacred and not every space can be considered sacred. What then is a sacred place? What is the difference between a place having the characteristics of a sacred place and other forms of social spaces? What makes the centre of a social space and within such a centre, specific spaces
2 ‘Invisible religion, civil religion and the hidden religious core of modern politics converge in the claim that religion persists in modern society – although changing its dress’, Giesen and Šuber 2005, 5. 50 The Making of a Postsecular Society more sacred than others? In this study, the literature on anthropology and that on religious studies (see Lawrence, Low 1990), above all after the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in social sciences (see Lefebvre 1991), the output of which on the issue has been remarkable, enables us, starting from the classics, to distinguish between ‘essentialist’ concepts of the sacred and sacred places on the one hand and locative or relational concepts on the other.3 In the light of essentialist perspectives, a specific place is sacred by virtue of exceptional hierophantic manifestations or epiphanies on the part of divine powers, or from the presence of divinities or mysterious and numinous sacred forces. Rudolph Otto, Gerard Van der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade are classic examples of theorists who considered sacredness a substantial characteristic of particular places. In general, above all in ancient times, sacred places were not artificially constructed premises but natural elements ‘that had acquired a religious significance, stone or tree, grotto, wood or hill, where Man had had a peculiar perception of divine presence’ (Turner 1979,15; on Eliade and sacred space, see Smith 1993, 91). A classic paradigmatic instance, from Eliade’s perspective, is the account of the episode of Jacob’s dream to Bethel. In the words pronounced after the dream of the steps, substantially, two characterizing features emerge relative to the sacred, their divine origin and their function as a meeting point between Man and the Divine: ‘certainly HASHEM is present in this place and I did know’. And, struck with fear, he added ‘this is none other than the abode of God and this is the gate of the heavens’ (Genesis 28, 16).4 In this perspective, the gods themselves decree the sacredness of the places in which we pray and the consecration of a place is a divine act. On the contrary, as concerns the relational perspective, the consecration of a particular place is essentially a human act. If, according to Eliade, the sacred erupts, manifesting itself almost as an ‘empowering force’ transforming specific places into potent centres impregnated with a meaningful presence, from the perspective of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, places become sacred as a consequence of human praxis of consecration, such as the output of ritual and its work in specific historical circumstances. In this vision, nothing intrinsically sacred exists; places are rendered sacred by human acts of sanctification or, more accurately, by ritual acts of consecration. In this case, it is the act of ritual that generates the sacred rather than ritual being the most consonant way of approaching a place which is sacred by virtue of a ‘divine presence’. The contrast between these two points of view has been expressed in terms of opposing the poetics to the politics of sacred places (Chidester and Linenthal 1995) where the one does not necessarily exclude the other. While the essentialist approach has been adopted by scholars of religious studies in line with the phenomenological tradition, the relational perspective proves extremely useful from a sociological and anthropological viewpoint, as
3 The distinction has been drawn from Chidester and Linenthal 1995. 4 ArtscrollSeries. Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre 51 shown by Jonathan Z. Smith in a series of fundamental works (Smith 1987; Smith 1993; Knott 2005a and 2005b). Despite the difference of these two approaches, ‘the politics of its construction and contestation has always been a subtext, even in attempts to work out a substantial, essentialist definition of the sacred’ (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 6). Chidester and Linenthal show how even in the analysis of Van der Leeuw – a phenomenologically oriented author according to whom ‘the mysterious situation of a locality, its awe-inspiring character, suffice’ and man ‘adds nothing at all to Nature’ (Van der Leeuw 1956, 394) – the sacred place, the poetics of the sacred place, cannot ignore ‘political’ acts of selection, limitation, exclusion and so on and so forth. Van der Leeuw’s poetics of the sacred is based on the formulation of metaphorical equivalence and synecdoche. Metaphorical equivalence is that of the home, the temple, the settlement, the destination of pilgrimage and the human self. ‘House and temple’, according to Van der Leeuw, ‘(…) are essentially one: both can stand firm only in virtue of the power residing within them. The house is an organic unity, whose essence is some definite power, just as much as the temple or church’ (1956, 395–6). Reference is not to a power given tout court, but to the fact that the effects of such power are repeated over and over again independently. The sacredness of a place depends on the fact that the place has become a ‘position’, having been selected from among others by virtue of its intrinsic power. At the same time, however, a sacred place is also one in which timeless cyclic practices of specific human activity are repeated. If we moderns do not feel the ‘unified’ and organic power of houses, temples and so on, this is because according to Van der Leeuw, we are ‘semi-Americanized’ people, satisfied with living in apartments that are no longer like the houses of the past, ‘worlds unto themselves’ that were obliged to produce their own means of survival (fire, handmade objects and furniture). The house is a metaphor that can be transferred to other kinds of places where the unitary power of a portion of selected space can be lived in or experienced. As concerns the second item of the vocabulary of the poetics of sacred places dear to Van der Leeuw, namely synecdoche, it has to be said that the latter is linked to the previous equivalence, and unites sacred places by means of a nucleus central to each (such as the hearth to the house, the altar to the temple, the sanctuary to a specific site, the chapel to a shrine of pilgrimage – the heart to the human body). The previous metaphorical equivalences, together with this kind of synecdoche, constitute Van der Leeuw’s vocabulary of the poetics of sacred places. However, as Chidester and Linenthal point out, ‘even if unintended, Van der Leeuw laced his analysis with hints of a politics of sacred space’ (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 7). In effect, even if the sacred seems to be characteristic of certain places, the consequence of a divine presence, Van der Leeuw has shown his awareness of the fact that sacred places are ‘positioned as such’ and that ‘the positioning of a sacred place is a political act, whether that positioning involves, in his own terms, selection, orientation, limitation, or conquest. Ultimately, Van der Leeuw recognized that every establishment of a sacred place was a conquest of space’ (1995, 7–8). 52 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Even if at times weighed down by essentialist prejudice, more appropriate in the case of apologists of faith rather than in that of social scientists, Van der Leeuw’s analysis of sacred places appears extremely penetrating from a phenomenological point of view. His analysis is investigated further by Harold W. Turner who, in line with the phenomenological tradition, illustrates in great detail the characteristics of sacred places, distinguishing them in two categories: the temple and the meeting- house, in other words, the domus dei and the domus ecclesiae. The difference between the two is a relevant one, in that the meeting-house would appear to be a meeting place for the faithful rather than the house of God. Clearly, in the meeting-house (church, synagogue and mosque for instance) ‘a slightly different conception is held of the immanent presence of transcendent divinity’ (Turner 1979, 15). The differences are significant and even from an intuitive perspective, a natural temple such as a grotto or a mountain, a mosque or an altar in the home, does not function on totally identical logics. My thesis, however, is that at least some of the characteristics are the same, given that in any case an elementary grammar is at work relative to each sacred place, and the characteristics of the sacred place make it different from any other. It is my intention to examine Turner’s phenomenological analysis briefly in order to extract an elementary grammar of sacred places from it.
An Elementary Grammar of Sacred Places
Turner premises that ‘all space is organized and oriented by sacred space, itself regarded as the centre of man’s life (…)’ (Turner 1979, 9). This is only another way of highlighting the orienting function of the sacred, on a cognitive level as well as from the social point of view. Here we are discussing a construct already sustained by Durkheimian theorists: categories of classification – left and right, above and below and so on – are nourished by the vocabulary and the semantics of the sacred. Starting from Roger Caillois up to recent studies on hyper modern cities such as Tokyo, many analysts show that the orienting function of sacred places remains valid even in our contemporary daily lives, it is part of the ‘rumour of angels’ that can be heard in the middle of traffic in urban streets. The capacity to function as an ultimate gravitational centre for human vicissitudes, according to Turner, derives ‘from a second characteristic structure found in the sacred place, its capacity to mirror or to represent on earth a more perfect and ultimate realm conceived as lying beyond the terrestrial domain’ (Turner 1979, 10). This is another extremely important element. Yet again the difference between grotto, mountain, church or domestic altar has to be taken into account in their function of reflecting the ‘ultimate realms’. On the basis of the religious tradition and of the sacred place in question, the ultimate realm can take on many diverse forms, such as, for instance, a spiritualized natural order, the idea of a transcendent Realm of God, or a chain of familiar memories (see Giesen 2005). Once again, I do not intend to assert that these are insignificant differences; quite the contrary. However, what makes this a Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre 53 second fundamental characteristic of any sacred place is the fact that every sacred place is a testimony of the conviction that the actual worldly order is neither the best nor the only one. A sacred place can reflect or evoke a natural divinity, immanent or transcendent, in the same way that an idealized real society or a single individual can, but is – by virtue of its own logic – in each case a symbolic reference to something desirable, normatively speaking. In other words, a ritual representation belongs in the realm of the subjunctive, in the subjunctive mood of what if (cf. Seligman et al. 2008, 19; Rosati 2009). Given this correspondence or reference of sacred places to a superior order, the third characteristic of any sacred place is that of being a point of encounter between two orders, and/or (according to the form considered, temple or meeting-house) the ‘house where the gods dwell when they deal with men’ (Turner 1979, 10). In any event, whether we are talking about the house of God or a meeting-house, and whatever shape or form the sacred takes, a sacred place is a point of encounter between man and the transcendent sphere. This connecting function explains the symbolism of the links to the many reference points, parts and objects that can be found in sacred places. Thresholds, gates and doors as well as columns and pillars are key examples of symbolic links. For instance, the dividing line between sacred and profane at the entrance to a mosque, where the rite of removing one’s shoes symbolizes the safeguarding of the sanctity of the space beyond the threshold or, for instance, the mezuzoth on the doorposts of Jewish houses, which protects the entrance to the rooms beyond. The fourth characterizing element of a sacred place is the ‘cult object, image or idol, that symbolizes and embodies the divine presence at the sacred place’ (Turner 1979, 10). Here once again, Durkheim’s precious lesson from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life comes into play. In fact, Durkheim has underlined how the image or symbolic representation of the ‘divinity’ is considered much more sacred than the object of cult in itself. This is because even if in a certain sense the object of cult embodies the presence of the divine in a sacred place, transcending the boundaries and material limits of the former is a natural element of divine power: ‘(…) while the gods are really to be met at this place they cannot be contained in it (…) while they are truly immanent in this the sacred object they are just as truly transcendent and beyond it in their own proper realms. Indeed, this may be regarded as the basic endeavor of all sacred places, to guarantee the immanent presence of divine beings who by their very nature transcend all such places’ (Turner 1979, 10). The four characteristics of sacred places delineated above, based on a free interpretation of Turner’s works – their orienting function, their capacity to reflect a perfect transcendent order, their being a point of encounter between man and the sacred, and finally their containing and representing, albeit only in part and to a limited extent, the sacred – render sacred places different from any other place. From the phenomenological perspective, this difference is part of the experience of feeling the sacred. A sacred place has its own characteristic ‘atmosphere’, 54 The Making of a Postsecular Society perceived on crossing the threshold. Tonino Griffero highlights how the concept of atmosphere – so penetrating in our social life, way beyond the climatic dimension – refers to emotional spaces that have a transcending power, that are not merely external subjective projections of inner sentiments, but rather, semi-things having, in Durkheimian terms, a sui generis nature (Griffero 2014). If it is true that these four characterizing elements imbue sacred places with an atmosphere that is different from any other space, then we have to distinguish, in line with Jonathan Z. Smith, between two different categories: locative sacred places and utopian sacred places. Jonathan Z. Smith’s basic intuitions are quite in line with Durkheim’s thesis. He frequently makes reference to Durkheim himself, to Mauss, Hertz and other Durkheimian theorists, showing appreciation for their capacity to comprehend and highlight how religion is a peculiarity of human creativity, its main function being ‘a variety of attempts to map, construct and inhabit (…) positions of power through the use of myth, rituals and experiences of transformation’ (Smith 1993, 291). As is evident, from this perspective follows consequently a politics of sacred places. Having critiqued the paradigmatic poetics of Eliade’s sacred with reference to the notion of space – by virtue of its mystical character, its emphasis on the concept of centre and its excessive marginalizing of the concept of periphery – Smith distinguishes two fundamental conceptions of space, two authentically different visions of the world which he calls (a) locative and (b) utopian space:
The difference between these two standpoints – horror in the face of the vast, and enthusiasm for expanse and openness – is not merely a matter of aesthetic sensibility. A total worldview is implied and involved in assuming these postures, one that has to do with a culture’s or an individual’s symbolization of the cosmos and their place within it. There have been many ways of naming these two basic structures of human symbolization and experience. One might speak of a centripetal and a centrifugal viewpoint. One might adopt the language of Bergson and speak of the closed/static society and the open/dynamic one. Or one might follow the fruitful lead of Eric Voegelin and point to the contrast between a “compact” and a “differentiated” experience of the cosmos. (Smith 1993, 131–2)
Needless to say, another way could be that of associating the locative vision of space with the primitive and the archaic, and the utopian vision with modern society. However, Smith warns the reader against resorting to implicit evolutionary patterns given that ‘both have been and remain existentialist possibilities which may be appropriated whenever and wherever they correspond to one’s experience’ (Smith 1993, 132). As we shall see, even if it is possible to observe in some religious traditions a shift from a locative conception of space to that of a utopian one, it should be considered: a) that locative experiences of space are possible within conceptions of the utopian world (just as from a mature Durkheimian Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre 55 perspective, forms of mechanical solidarity become necessary even in societies of organic solidarity); b) that some elementary mechanisms of sanctification of space, the basic grammar of ‘gestures of approach’ to sacred places, are the same in both models (as will soon be evident); c) that each culture has its own way(s) of expressing the dialectics between locative and utopian visions of space, such as, for instance, the narratives describing creation as an imposing of limits to a chaotic Cosmos on the one hand, and the narratives relative to the transgressing of such limits on the other. But continuing to dig deep into the differences between the locative and the utopian point of view we see that in the locative vision, the world is perceived as delimited. Order, in Smith’s description, is established by erecting walls, channelling and confining (the waters for instance, in the cosmological narration). What is open and boundary-less is considered chaotic, demonic and threatening. Spaces such as the desert and the sea are paradigmatic expressions of threatening openness (Smith 1993, 134). The utopian vision, on the contrary, reverses in ideal-typical terms the meaning of limit and opening. If social change is in this perspective basically a question of symbolic changes (Smith 1993, 143), it is clear that the shift from a locative to a utopian conception implies a diverse understanding of the relations between limits and boundaries on the one hand, and the open and infinite on the other:
Rather than the positive limits they were meant to be, they have become oppressive. Man is no longer defined by the degree to which he harmonizes himself and his society to the cosmic pattern of order; but rather by the degree to which he can escape the patterns. Rather than the hero-that-failed of the locative world-view, the paradigm here is the hero-that-succeeded, succeeded in escaping the tyrannical order. Every man is called upon to be such a hero. (1993, 139)
This symbolic inversion also implies a different understanding of the concept of centre. In the framework of the locative conception of sacred space, the centre obviously has a fundamental relevance. Perhaps no one more than Eliade has highlighted its symbolic function (Eliade 1980). The centre is the place in which there is an ‘over-abundance of reality’, in which the force of sanctity is more tangible. Studying above all the Jewish tradition, Smith cites a Rabbinic text which clarifies how the Jewish tradition of the Holy Land that espouses the situational point of view, rotates entirely around the symbolic power of the concept of centre:
Just as the navel is found at the center of a human being, so the land of Israel is found at the center of the world (…) and it is the foundation of the world. Jerusalem is at the center of the land of Israel, the Temple is at the center of Jerusalem, the Holy of the Holies is at the center of the Temple, the Ark is at the center of the Holy of the Holies and the Foundation Stone is in front of the Ark, which spot is the foundation of the world. (Smith 1993, 112) 56 The Making of a Postsecular Society
The crucial function of the symbolism ‘Israel-Jerusalem-Temple’ as the centre of space, a function also extended to time, has, however, to be seen in the Rabbinic key after the exile. Smith shows how, in this case, there has been in the Jewish tradition a shift from a locative to a utopian conception. Being exiled means in fact being cut off from the land and from its symbolic function. In any event, the guiding function has now to be carried out by other elements. There is wide consensus in believing that in the context of Judaism, this new guiding function is carried out – as much in the Rabbinic tradition as among the Jews of the Lurianic Community and later for the Hassidim – by the potent symbolism of the Sabbath. Even if the Sabbath is ‘a cathedral in the temple’ (Heschel 2003), the space dimension is in any event called to account in its symbolism.
On Friday afternoon the faithful, dressed in white, would go out into an open field which would be transformed through ritual into the “holy apple orchard”. There they would solemnly await and escort into town the exiled and the weeping Bride of God. Chanting the Song of Songs, the wedding liturgy of the broken “Old One” on high and the Bride trapped below, they would bring the Bride into their house to celebrate the nuptial feast. (Smith 1993, 124)
The wedding reception takes place in the house, in the dining room.
Each dining room would be transformed through this ritual activity into, at one and the same time, the Lost Temple of Jerusalem and the Celestial Tabernacle. (ibid.)
The room is decorated with myrtle; the table, lit by the Sabbath candles and laid with special food, awaits the angels who will come to pray with the family. Thus, each Sabbath, each dining room everywhere in the world is transformed into a new centre, the symbolic utopian expression of the ancient centre situated in a physical sense.
(…) now this Centre, this new creation, which for a brief moment is like the old, is explicitly related to both the old Temple and the Heavenly shrine. The living room, the hic et nunc, is abolished, and once more the participants in the ritual “go up” to Jerusalem as in the days before the exile (…) through ritual the dining room table becomes homologized to the Tabernacle and, further still, with the celestial shrine. (Smith 1993, 125)
It is evident that the sacredness of the Sabbath dining room is intrinsically the product of ritual and that the sacred place represented by the Sabbath dining room is the outcome of activities of human sanctification. Even if de-localized and multiplied by the number of Sabbath dining rooms in the world, the centre never loses its guiding function. The centre has now become transferred to the Sabbath dining room, sanctified by ritual and seen symbolically as the Temple of Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre 57
Jerusalem. Here the sacred does not ‘burst out’, it does not erupt into space, but is produced by means of ritual. Its poetics is no less powerful just because Eliade’s mystique is no longer valid.5 The shift from a conception of locative sacred space to one of utopian space implies a significant reviewing of ways of producing and approaching the sacred. Despite these differences, the elementary grammar of sacred places is still, once again, significantly the same. To examine this element in depth, we need to continue our research in the field of Jewish Studies, a source, incidentally, exceedingly useful from a Durkheimian point of view (Rosati 2009 and Rosati 2012a). To observe how such a grammar still works in the utopian model, an extremely interesting study by M. Baruch Bokser, dedicated to the ‘gestures of approach to the sacred’ (Eliade) in Rabbinic literature, is enlightening. The issue, maintains Bokser, is simple: ‘if the people believe that the Divine can manifest itself in the world without being restricted to a single area, how should they treat this extended zone of the sacred? Since sacred places are marked off from the world at large – where the divine may also be found – by the preparations that must be undertaken before entering it, what Mircea Eliade calls “gestures of approach”, and by the behavior that must be followed in it, must people then follow this protocol for the large domain?’ (Bokser 1985, 279). It is important to consider that not only are we still working with categories that are clearly Durkheimian, but also that our research is still parallel to the distinctions between house of God and meeting- house on the one hand and locative and utopian sacred space on the other. Post-Biblical literature based above all on the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran provides the response we are seeking. The Scrolls, in fact, extend the notion of sacred place – God does not dwell only in the Temple of Jerusalem but among all the Jewish people and consequently, in all the cities of Israel – and in a parallel sense they even extend the rules of behaviour to inside such expanded sacred places. Even Bokser highlights how the de-localization of sacred places and the parallel extension of ritualistic behaviour protocols inside the new sacred places is linked, among the Essenes, to the conception of the Sabbath as a Temple. By venerating the Sabbath, a cathedral in time, God’s sanctuary, the Rabbis have attempted to give form to a new experience of the sacred dimension.
Early Rabbinic authorities, following a changed perspective on holiness, in effect redefined the sacred, asserting that one could worship God in one’s everyday life without the Temple and could experience the Lord in prayer and study in any place.
It follows therefore, that:
5 I am aware that Eliade’s thought on this point is more complex than usually conceived of. I myself (Rosati 2013) have argued in another context that Eliade’s position is not so unequivocal in terms of an ‘ontology of the sacred’. For a convincing reflection on this point, see Rennie (2006) and Paden (2006). 58 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Special procedures apply in the world at large only when an individual acts so as to elicit the sacred. (1985, 287)
This means that the difference between sacred and profane is preserved and that the loss of centre represented by the Temple does not imply the loss of the symbolism of the centre or its guiding function.
(…) Rabbinic culture sought to preserve, and in principle not to reject, the cosmological sacred center. Indeed precisely because rabbis shared in and envisioned a society venerating a locative special manifestation of the sacred, they had to find new meaning for the concept of the sacred so that it could persist in the face of reality. (1985, 288)
Here the grammar of the sacred place and its symbolism still work: regardless of where they live, all Jewish people have to have a means of entering the sacred centre, and this means is now the act of prayer, and the Sabbath in particular. Such redefinition of the sacred centre does not involve, however, only that cathedral in time which is the Sabbath, but also a physical space such as the Synagogue, ‘a situated’ place of cult, in which the gestures of approach, inclusion and exclusion, have to be respectful of the sacred ‘presence’ and in which behaviour protocols are far stricter compared to other meeting-houses such as for instance, the mosques.6 In short, what we are witnessing in the shift from a locative to a utopian model of sacred place in this particular tradition is that the symbolism and logics of the centre remain operative, while their forms and related procedures change as a consequence of the extension of the concept of sacred place and of the re- conceptualizing of the very idea of sacred. The response to our initial question is, consequently, the following:
The Rabbinic assertion that God may be experienced everywhere and not just in a central cult did not pose a problem. While the Bible may assume that holiness inherently exists, or the divine Potent Presence dwells, in such fixed places as a tabernacle or Temple, the early Rabbinic system, recognizing the potential for sacredness in the whole world, taught that extra Temple sacredness needs to be activated. Accordingly, it is when people take steps to initiate the sacred that they must follow the proper gestures of approach. The Rabbis, like other ancients, therefore preserved the idea of the sacred space in a manner that enabled the group to function without a single center. They both insisted that the sacred requires a special protocol and also limited these requirements and
6 See Bokser 1985, 292: ‘In the Synagogues superficial behavior is not acceptable. One should not enter the Synagogue on a hot day because of the heat or because of the cold on a cold day, or further, because of the rain on a rainy day. One should not eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor take a Sacred Scroll, one should not comb one’s hair or put on make-up in a Synagogue’; for a vademecum on decorum in the Synagogue, see Levy 1963, Chapter VI. Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre 59
in effect made them part of the Rabbinic system centering on the importance of human action. (1985, 299)
As is quite evident, we find ourselves in the midst of a relational concept of sacred places, sensitive to their historic dimension, but at the same time aware both of the persisting over time of the orienting function of the sacred (places) and of the persisting of fundamental elements of the grammar that distinguishes them – as well as aware of both the key role of the symbol of centre (albeit revisited) and that of adequate gestures of approach (albeit revisited). From the argument outlined above, it should be clear that a relational perspective becomes a more favourable point of view for comprehending both the grammar of sacred places and the modality of their production. As concerns the grammar of sacred places, I have highlighted the role of centre (locative or utopian), the role of gestures of approach, the orienting function of sacred places, their being a point of encounter between diverse orders of reality, their reflecting a perfect realm and their paradoxical function as containers of a sacred power that always transcends its own boundaries. As concerns the production of a sacred place, I have already emphasized the role played by ritual, which is obviously an integral part of the gestures of approach. In this respect, let me add one more consideration. It has already been mentioned that a sacred place is a site that can take on the form of a natural site, of a house of a Divinity or a meeting-house, separated from the space which is ordinary or profane. A sacred place is also a ritual place in which behavioural patterns of ‘controlled’ actions are set, that often respond to canonical orders of meaning (see Rosati 2009). Ritual sites are places of cult, of prayer, meditation, pilgrimage, sacrifice, commemoration, bereavement, thanksgiving and expiation. They are also places in which social and symbolic boundaries are erected or built by means of distinguishing grids. The most important is the distinction between sacred and profane, the pure and the impure, which often implies strict corporal practices (Chidester and Linenthal 1985, 11). If the production of a sacred place is linked above all to the functioning of rites, then two elements should be emphasized. In the first place, as stated, sacred places have an orienting function: they clarify the distinction between centre and periphery, internal and external, high and low. They ‘provide a structure for experience and through them we learn who and what we are in society’, just as the geographer David Harvey illustrates (Chidester and Linenthal 1985, 12). In the second place, this function of society-building should not be envisaged as an ever consensual activity. Sacred places are also contested spaces, sites of negotiation for the rightful or legitimate ownership of sacred symbols, for the ‘correct’ meaning of a sacred symbol, for the creation of a new symbol and the relation between the latter and collectivity. Sacred places are places in which centre(s) and periphery fight for control over the symbolic resources of a society, in which the periphery attempts to impose new symbols or new meanings onto ancient ones, in order to reach the centre of society, while the old centres try to maintain their stronghold. Protest is a normal way of participating in the symbolic production of sacred places. 60 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Chidester and Linenthal distinguish between four strategies of production in sacred places, ‘appropriation’, ‘exclusion’, ‘inversion’ and ‘hybridization’. According to the authors, ‘appropriation and exclusion are the two strategies most often employed in attempts to dominate sacred space by advancing special interests of power or purity’, while ‘inversion and hybridization are particularly suited for resistance to domination’ (Chidester and Linenthal 1985, 19). These are extremely useful distinctions, which, susceptible to empirical testing, permit the balancing of the Durkheimian analysis of the construction of sacred space and of the construction of social ties against that of dominion and power.
Not Only ‘Sacred’: A Douglasian Interpretation of Social Space
The modalities of meaning of sacred places that we are reconstructing are, in a certain sense, characteristic of social spaces generally speaking. Social spaces are constructed when social and symbolic boundaries are delineated by means of distinguishing grids. Any social space takes on a specific form according to its symbolic boundaries, that is to say, its general symbols and rituals. Or in other words, overturning the argument, symbolic boundaries, general symbols and rites are characterized by spatial effects. In order to show that what renders any social space different from a sacred place is the functioning of its grammar as described above – the existence of a symbolic centre, gestures of approach, rituals of various kinds – Mary Douglas’ grid/group model proves useful (see Mars 2008). Mary Douglas’ institutional theory, recently denominated by her advocates ‘Cultural Theory’, considered as a general frame for a wide range of social phenomena, has decidedly deep Durkheimian roots, insofar as it considers society as a ‘field of strengths’ organized along a two-dimensional latitude, regulation and integration (based on Durkheim’s terminology), and grid/group (using Douglas’ terminology) (see Perri 6 and Mars 2008). Social regulation or discipline can be defined as ‘the degree to which social relations are conceived as if they were normally, naturally, properly, desirable or unavoidably, principally involuntary (Perri 6 2008, 124). Echoes of Durkheimian intuitions can be heard here, according to which systems of classification organize the lives of individuals and present themselves as forms of imposition upon them. Social integration, on the contrary, can be considered as ‘the degree to which social relations are conceived as if the norm, the normal situation, the desirable condition, or else the unavoidable situation is where individual autonomy would always be held accountable to a larger and bounded group’ (Perri 6 2008, 124) or, in other words, it emphasizes the collective dimension and the capacity of groups to include individuals within a bounded unit (Mars 2008, 186). Social regulation and social integration can take on both weak and strong forms. The combination of these two variables generates four potential social orders and forms of solidarity (Thompson 2008, 160–61): ‘strong regulation, strong integration is the world of hierarchy; weak forms of Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre 61
Figure 3.1 Social integration/social regulation both clearly lead to individualism. Neither dimension can be derived from the other, for there is no logical incoherence in the idea of the accountability to a voluntary chosen order (weak regulation, strong integration: the enclave which is internally egalitarian but has sharp boundaries between insiders and outsiders) or, for that matter, in the idea of life ruled by prevailing institutions over which one exercises little choice or control but weakly tied to others (isolated). In fact, these two positions turn out to be very important’ (Perri 6 2008, 125). Gerald Mars applies a grid/group matrix to the concept of social space and shows that based on the way persons interact and on the basis of a combination of strong/ weak integration and social regulations, we are able to distinguish four different categories of culture that he calls ‘piazzas’, ‘modules’, ‘pyramids’ and ‘keeps’. The four formal categories of culture are coherent groups ‘of values and attitudes’, four forms of different life, so to speak, four organizational cultures. ‘Piazzas’ is the term used by Mars to indicate those cultures characterized by individualism, competition, autonomy, opportunism, risk taking; ‘modules’ indicates ‘the cultures whose members tend to be isolated and controlled by rules and classifications decided from outside their ranks’ (Mars 2008, 191) (project teams are a paradigmatic example); ‘pyramids’ indicate hierarchical cultures, bureaucratic systems, well organized groups; ‘keeps’, finally, are the egalitarian cultures, groups, sects that sharply demarcate differences with the outside. Each of these cultures provokes different spatial effects and produces a different way of moulding and organizing social space. The analysis of Mars is summed up in Figure 3.3. 62 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Figure 3.2 Different ways of structuring social space Source: G. Mars, ‘Corporate cultures and the use of space: an approach from Cultural Theory’, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, Vol. 21, n. 3, 2008, p. 89.
These categories of social space – identified by means of Mary Douglas’ grid/ group matrix and applied by Gerald Mars to his study of corporate space – show how the form of social space is clearly dependent on symbols and rituals and on the level of social integration and regulation. Social spaces can be either more or less structured on the basis of these variables. However, on the basis of the above, we could argue that a social space can become a sacred place only in the event of a hierarchical model being present. A sacred place necessarily has a pyramidal form being the point of encounter between the two, being the image of a world which is considered better and containing, albeit in a partial form, the presence of the sacred. In other words, if the Durkheimian categories with which we are working take into account the structuring of social spaces as such, only their specific combination (strict regulation and strong integration; the centrality of ceremonial and symbolic forms) can delineate and explain the distinctive characteristics of a particular social space which is a sacred place. Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre 63
Figure 3.3 Categories of social space
Contemporary Postsecular Sanctuaries: The Multiple Places of Religion
Recounting the history of the city, John Rennie Short summed up the familiar narrative of secularization: in the beginning cities were built environments of a religious type, while nowadays most of the city is ‘outside the Temple’ (Short 2006). According to this narrative, only the post-colonial cities are becoming ever more religious, while in the Western cities signs of a deep religious crisis are becoming evident. Short’s reconstruction is still mainstream today in the social sciences and in a general sense. In ancient times cities reflected cosmologies, they were ceremonial sites. The city was the Cosmos, in a profound sense, as in the cases of Pericles’ 64 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Athens, Ancient Chinese cities such as Changan and Beijing, and the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. Yet in the West, the mercantile cities, humanistic cities and capitalist cities ‘have weakened the city as a place of cosmic narration. The long history of urbanization reveals a constant secularization of the city, a growing disenchantment (…) the city itself has lost its religious meaning. The city has become undecipherable as a religious document; it is no longer a mere religious element, a text from which to understand the world, and still less a place in which to participate in rituals of cosmic significance that create links between the people and the place, between the sacred and the profane’ (Short 2006, 11). Contemporary anthropology, even in works of authors inspired by Durkheim, seems to evaluate religion as a non-relevant element for contemporary metropolitan life (Hannertz 1980). According to most narratives, a historical split occurred in the nineteenth century, when the architecture of the sacred lost its creative force and the sacred in the city remained merely a memory of the past, transformed into museums. The loss of religious meaning as enmeshed in the structure of the city was a consequence of the end of the guiding function of the centre, beginning with the polycentric American cities, proceeding with the European cities and, nowadays, post-metropolis cities (Augé 2009; Soja 1999). Modern and contemporary cities are cities with no centre or where the centre can only be a repository of the memory of the past, perhaps with a symbolic value but no longer with a sense of belonging for the man in the street. But is this really how postsecular cities are from Latin America to the United States, Europe and Asia? Is it really true that religion is outside the boundaries of contemporary cities? Does a place, a sanctuary, exist for religions in postsecular cities? We could try to draw up a provisional chart. In contemporary cities, traditional sacred places do exist, naturally: as we have said before, cathedrals, churches, synagogues and mosques, which according to context can be more or less crowded or empty, vibrant or depressed; civil mausoleums, monuments to leaders of the nation, memorials to the victims of wars or for commemorating fundamental moments of the life of a community. It is well known that the places of the memory, to quote an expression of Pierre Nora, are expressions of civil and political religions (Nora 1989). In an important sense, they function as sacred places and often satisfy nearly all the criteria that make a space a sacred place, the only exception consisting of their reflecting a transcendent dimension in a different mode. All these sanctuaries, be they religious-traditional or civic-political, are part of the modern landscape as they were in nineteenth century society. The novelty in all probability lies in the other forms of postsecular sanctuaries, in which it is possible to experience a ‘presence’ – the experience of intensifying, profound power that transcends the self, an experience that places the individual in relation to the ultimate aims – in a not strictly traditional way:
How should we consider, in this respect, the many places of traditional cult that have been transformed for practical reasons or on principle, into multi-religious Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre 65
places of cult, prayer or meditation? And how should we consider places that have been transformed or planned intentionally as “places of silence” open to everyone? Is there now a real blurring of the boundaries between the sacred and the profane? Or, further, what should we think of “multifunctional” places utilized for specific religious activity on Fridays or Sundays and for many other activities during the rest of the week? (de Haardt 2010, 178)
Maike de Haardt highlights how these are significant developments of the concept of sacred place, offering new possibilities for experiencing a ‘presence’ in postsecular cities, possibilities that have to be taken into account before evincing that a large part of the city is lived ‘outside the Temple’. In other words, the point seems to be that the temples themselves are changing and that now they can take, for instance, the form of places of multi-religious cult, or multi-functional places for sacred or profane activities at different times. Studying their functioning both in theory and in practice is extremely interesting for grasping whether or not they are to be found inside the grammar of sacred places described above (Della Dora 2011; Kong 2010). De Haardt, for instance, cites the potential blurring of the boundaries of the sacred-profane: if this is the case, are we still in the presence of ‘religious’ places and phenomena? Do such places represent a fatal challenge to the Durkheimian conception of religion, or rather, can they be classified as religious even from this theoretical stance? Some examples might help: an integral part of ‘traditional’ sacred places, as we know them to date, has been the presence of a surrounding perimeter that creates a sharp distinction between the sacred and the profane, not to mention a physical pathway symbolizing a journey of initiation towards communion with the sacred. Can traces be found of enclosures and pathways in ‘temporary’ sacred places, ‘part-time’ sanctuaries – that have been built up or erected on the occasion of specific celebrations and ‘taken down’ or ‘demolished’ after their last ‘liturgical’ occurrence – or even multi-religious places of cult? And even if the traces have been preserved, do they still hold the same significance? This is just one example and much literature already exists on such new places, not to mention imposing projects of research that benefit from generous funding (for example, http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/architecture/ research/mfs/). To the extent that there are no clear-cut answers to the research questions posed, and ours can only remain open ended, it should be taken into account that we are not in the presence of residual phenomena: on the contrary, in some cases they are emerging phenomena, in other cases they are scenarios already relevant and consolidated (above all in post-colonial cities, but also in Europe) in those cities where religious communities are active that are remodelling social spaces (see Beaumont and Parker 2011; Becci, Burchardt, Casanova 2013). On the whole, the places in which religions can start in postsecular cities are quite numerous. Daily religious practice in postsecular cities can ‘take place in quite unexpected’ places, and the task of research is to investigate the logics of these new places and their related practices: domestic altars and televised liturgies, faith-based organizations 66 The Making of a Postsecular Society and chat rooms on the Internet, ‘invented religions’ (see Ammerman 2007, Cusack 2010, Deacy and Arweck 2009), on-line religions (Karaflogka 2006) multi-faith and meditation halls (see Gilliat-Ray 2005a and 2005b). Are all these phenomena changing the grammar of sacred places? Can a sacred place exist in cyber space? (O’Leary 2004). How does a domestic altar work? Does a canonical liturgy exist or are there only forms of individualized religion characterized by moral expressivism? (MacIntyre 2007). To conclude this brief inventory of sanctuaries (both new and traditional) that characterize social space in postsecular cities, let us consider, for instance, the proliferating of new commemorative places, such as the Gardens of the Just, or the so-called ‘self-made Gardens’7 in the framework of Prayer Group initiatives where public spaces are utilized to create small sacred places in public squares and parks. Here the people worship beloved popular- religious figures such as Padre Pio. One might well ask what significance these new sacred places have in the context of our reflections? And, what meaning does this inventory, partial and open ended, have for us? Gilliat-Ray, a scholar who has dedicated much research to new, non‑ conventional sacred places, notes the differences between the sanctifying ritual of conventional religious spaces, in which symbols and architecture constitute essential ingredients of a sacred place and non- conventional spaces in which such ingredients are lacking. In Gilliat-Ray’s view, the growing importance of non-conventional spaces could be an (additional) indicator of the evolution of religion in contemporary societies, one that points in the direction of forms of individualized religion: ‘sites of spiritual activity that are in some sense generic or universal and marked by an absence of explicit religious symbols or architecture associated with the one single faith community allow space for people to explore their own sometimes muddled beliefs (or lack of them). (…) People can undertake their own interpretative work (…) Such spaces are thus perfectly suited to the needs of an increasing number of people who have forgotten (or who may have never known) the protocols of visiting religious buildings’ (Gilliat-Ray 2005b, 364–5). In my view, Gilliat-Ray’s perspective is of extreme interest, but should be completed: the transformation of places of cult in postsecular societies seems to indicate a dual trend, to date frequently observed by sociologists of religion, in the direction on the one hand of individualizing and spiritualizing not only beliefs but also the praxis, and on the other in the direction of a relevant religious punctuating of social spaces on the part of sacred places of a non-conventional type, which can be added to or at times replace traditional ones. However, it is not possible to answer these questions in the abstract. Theory, reflecting on a changing social reality, has to set meaningful questions. Empirical research is to try to offer answers. In the second part of this work, I shall consider different kinds of postsecular sanctuaries in the Turkish context: a part-time street sanctuary, related to the commemoration of Hrant Dink; a traditional sanctuary, Aya Sofya, turned into a museum and, in the minds of only some people of good
7 I have borrowed the term from Pezzini, Russo 2008. Postsecular Sanctuaries and the Centre 67 will, to be turned into a multi-religious place of worship; sanctuaries – a civic mausoleum and also home altars – dedicated to the father of the modern republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. My research hypothesis is that the basic grammar of the sacred space outlined above is still relevant to understanding the functioning not only of traditional but also new forms of postsecular sanctuaries, and that a Durkheimian conception of religion as based on the distinction between the sacred and the profane is still a precious lens through which to read our postsecular social landscape. Furthermore, I will try to show how it is in these kinds of postsecular sanctuaries that old symbols are reinterpreted in new ways, new symbols produced, new constellations of centres and peripheries shaped, and new central value systems crystallized, all through ritualistic actions – more frequently than not, in contested ways. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 4 Memory, Trauma and the Work of Rituals: The Dynamics of Symbols
Memory and the Central Value System
Society has a centre, a central value system. Ever since the eighteenth century, one of the building blocks of Western modern societies, above all in Europe, has been the idea of secularization. Secularization is part of the self-representation of Western modern societies. However, it seems that a new scenario is slowly taking the place of the old and a new postsecular consciousness is growing. The co-presence of religious and secular world-views in contemporary societies is not a self-evident datum, but a process that implies a change in consciousness, a reshaping of the central value system of many Western societies. What I am interested in, is precisely the making of a postsecular society, the study of such practices and rituals (see Rosati 2009 for the difference between practices and rituals) that trigger the dynamics of symbols and changes in the central value system of a given society. I am interested in the transformation of previously sacralised symbols, in their shift of meaning, and in the creation of new recognized symbols, capable of taking their place in the central value system of a collective reality. In other words, I am interested in the process of social construction of a new postsecular central value system. In my view, key to this process is the kind of liturgies that take place within postsecular sanctuaries, where new values are created and/or old symbols are reinterpreted, frequently through contested rituals. Drawing on the cultural sociology of Jeffrey Alexander and Bernard Giesen, I will attempt to illustrate how the process of social construction of victims on the one hand, and the transformation of the image and meaning of heroes on the other, play the role of essential ingredients in the redefinition of any collective identity. New victims, victims turned into new heroes, and/or past heroes reinterpreted in new ways, are the effect of a community’s work on its own memory, and in turn memory is an absolutely key factor in the shaping of a community’s identity. Quite frequently, societies need to imprint mana (in Maussian terms), or charisma (in Weberian terms) in chosen individuals, and to sacralize heroes and or victims through ritualized practices, in order to bestow as much concreteness as possible onto their central values. Heroes and victims give life to a gallery of figures that are like the totems of a society. The force of the example (Ferrara 2008) of figures like these works as a principle of order to organize the past and the present of a collective structure, and to select the means and purposes for future collective challenges. Practices that take place in postsecular sanctuaries are, in 70 The Making of a Postsecular Society other words, forms of performative memory, ways of shaping and reshaping the collective memory of a community and, once again, ways of constantly drawing and re‑drawing borders and of carving out the content of a central value system. In order to understand the way in which a central value system changes, we need to ponder over the role and functioning of collective memory, that far from having only a conservative function, plays a key role in cultural change. Entirely within a Durkheimian frame, I shall recall first of all the notion of collective memory, and Maurice Halbwachs’ analysis of its main features.1 Secondly, following Alexander’s culturalist approach, I will summarize the main steps in the process of the social construction of traumatic events that, in a given society, may incarnate the idea of evil, and in so doing contribute to reshaping its central value system. Finally, the analysis of processes of construction of victims and heroes will provide us with the kind of social symbols that most thoroughly incarnate the central value system of a society. Such a process of reshaping the collective memory and the central value system of a community through liturgies is typical not only of postsecular societies. Once again, the processes described are part of the making of every society. Peculiar to a postsecular society is a different content of values and symbols that fill the central value system on the one hand and a stronger emphasis on victims as sacralized figures, more than on triumphant heroes on the other.
Collective Memory
The identity of societies, no less than that of individuals, needs a sense of continuity. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim mentioned memory as the faculty called upon to guarantee such continuity from the collective point of view. In the section devoted to commemorative rites, Durkheim stressed that a collectively imagined past is crucial for the unity of a society, and accordingly for its solidarity. However, he did not realize how memory is key to bridging periodic moments of collective effervescence, and consequently to guaranteeing over time a feeling of the continuity of collective consciousness that would otherwise remain dependent on sporadic moments of effervescence (Mistzal 2003a and 2003b). Furthermore, Durkheim did not make the most of its pluralistic view of society (Rosati 2009) and addressed memory as a collective function of society as a whole. Finally, more frequently he considered memory as a faculty called upon to preserve the shared idea of an imagined past, rather than as a resource for integrating present needs, interests and local, sometimes conflicting, values, of different groups (Durkheim 2005, 374–91). All these weaknesses were redressed by Maurice Halbwachs, who,
1 On memory from different perspectives, see Assmann 2011, Zerubavel 2003; key reflections on memory and memory and modernity, sensitive to a Durkheimian approach, are in Connerton 1989 and Connerton 2009. Memory, Trauma and the Work of Rituals 71 still within a Durkheimian frame, provided the most imaginative and rich picture of the features of collective memory in a pluralistic, modern society.2 Halbwachs’ view can be summarised in four main steps. First, against individualistic and psychological theories of the time (above all those of Bergson and lately Blondel), Halbwachs maintained that individual memory separated from collective memory is ‘provisional and without meaning’ (Mistzal 2003b, 53). Our memory, as individuals, is not independent from social influences and constraints. We are not free to remember whatever we want, and above all, we lack the ability or even the possibility of remembering whatever we want, independently of the nurturing presence of collective frames. Halbwachs showed the frame-like nature of individual memory, establishing a connection between a social group and a collective memory, that forms the necessary frame of individual memory. As Halbwachs wrote in one of his most famous works on the topic, ‘the individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the framework of social memory’ (Halbwachs 1992, 182):
If we examine a little more closely how we recollect things, we will surely realize that the greatest number of memories come back to us when our parents, our friends, or other persons recall them to us. One is rather astonished when reading psychological treatises that deal with memory to find that people are considered there as isolated beings (…) Yet it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories. (1992, 38)
A crucial corollary of this socially framed understanding of memory, is that memory ‘by definition’, as Barbara Misztal emphasises, is multiple, ‘because there are as many memories as groups’ (Mistzal 2003b, 51). Not coincidentally, Halbwachs devoted most of his work on collective memory to the detailed study of specific memories, such as the memory of the family, the memory of social classes, religious groups, musicians. This is an important point and advancement with reference to Durkheim’s early intuitions on the sociological meaning of memory, because Halbwachs from the very beginning shows how social memory is intrinsically differentiated, and even individual memory is always pluralistic, given that each of us has as many memories as the many groups to which we belong. The second step has to do with the opposite of memory, that is, forgetfulness and oblivion. If the possibility of remembering has to do with our belonging to social groups (families, social classes, associations, corporations, armies, trade unions, political movements, and so forth), it is logical that forgetfulness depends on our losing contact, empirically or mentally, with those social groups. If I stop
2 On Halbwachs’ life and work, see Becker 2003; on a certain revival of interest for Halbwachs’s thought, see Baudelot 2007 and Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 1999. 72 The Making of a Postsecular Society interacting with the rest of my family, I cannot recollect images or memories of my young mother, who died when I was a child; memory, in Halbwachs’ view, is something that people take part in collectively; it has a performative nature, but above all it is something shared with others in common (frequently ritualistic) practices. Notwithstanding my efforts, solipsistically I can just be forgetful of my mother’s face and voice. The third step helps us to understand the dynamic character of memory. In contrast to Durkheim, Halbwachs does not stress only the conservative nature of memory. Of course, memory has to preserve the continuity and the very existence of social groups, and above all some kinds of social groups will tend to try to present themselves as almost always the same over time. However, he stressed also the presentist character of memory, namely its being shaped by beliefs, interests, and aspirations of the present. Memory does not preserve the past untouched, but it is always a reconstruction of the past oriented by the present. It is a reconstruction of the past aimed at meeting present needs. In this sense, and also because of its emotionally intense tone, memory is different from historical knowledge (Halbwachs 1992, Chapter 3). Let us consider again family memories:
A given scene which took place in our home, in which our parents were the principal actors, and which has been fixed in our memory therefore does not reappear as the depiction of a day such as we experienced in the past. We compose it anew and introduce elements borrowed from several periods which preceded or followed the scene in question. The notion we have at this moment of recreation of the moral nature of our parents and of the event itself – now judged from a distance – imposes itself on our mind with so much power that we cannot escape being inspired by it (…). So it is that within the framework of family memory many figures and facts do indeed serve as landmarks. (1992, 61)
So far, we have said that individual memory is framed by collective, plural, memories, and it is always at least tacitly shaped by needs and warrants of the present. Far from being an act of purely individual introspection, and immediate apprehension of past realities, memory is a complex social fabric. Individuals never remember being alone, nor can they remember really solitary experiences: they remember always through collective frames and collective fragments of life. Individuals are in a sense meeting points crossed by streams of collective memories. Consequently, their inner consistency, the coherence of their identity, is the outcome of the union of the many and diverse social memories of each individual. If we think of a collective identity, we have exactly the same kind of logic: the identity of a nation, for example, is the outcome of the combination of the multiple memories of the social groups that animate national life, and so its consistency and unity depends on the relation between different, local memories. This is where Halbwachs’ fourth step becomes relevant. As a process of reconstruction shaped by presentist needs, values and interests, memory can be a contested phenomenon; local memories can be contradictory to one other, and Memory, Trauma and the Work of Rituals 73 also processes of reconstruction of single memory groups are frequently a field of contestation. Furthermore, some collective memories, of specific social groups, may work as counter-memories against a reified ‘subject-less social memory’, the memory of society as a whole.3 Reconstruction in the light of the present, contestation and pluralism are constitutive features of collective memory, of that same collective memory whose function is to guarantee the continuity of social groups. The four characteristics mentioned above are the basic building blocks of Halbwachs’ notion of social and collective memory. His analysis, however, is much richer and more detailed than this. Interpreters, for example, point out the differences that separate Le cadres sociaux de la mémoire (On Collective Memory) from La mémoire collective (Collective Memory). In the latter, a difference between social and collective memory is introduced by Halbwachs, and the notion of current of collective thought is introduced and discussed in relation to collective memory (Namer 2000). However, in the context of the present reflection, I consider it more important to stress two other points, related to Halbwachs’ sensitivity for social morphology and for the relation between memory and space on the one hand, and to his elaborated consideration of the memory of religious groups on the other. Taken together, these two additional elements show how the work of this brilliant, original follower of Durkheim’s thought can contribute to enriching our comprehension of the functioning of postsecular sanctuaries, and the way liturgical performances shape and reshape collective memory and societies’ central value systems. Let me discuss these aspects of Halbwachs’ work on collective memory by starting from his keen awareness of the relationship between space and memory. Space is considered by Halbwachs as one of the most important ‘landmarks’ of a society.4 That ‘a society first of all needs landmarks’ (Halbwachs 1992, 122) is a very Durkheimian statement. Society needs borders, margins, landmarks, to establish differences, relationships of similarities, solidarity and difference. Space is one of these landmarks, and it is a record and a store of collective memory. Chapter Five of Collective Memory, devoted to ‘collective memory and space’, emphasizes the role of the objects that are around us, pictured as a ‘mute and still society’, an echo of a past form of life. Space and the objects that fill it are like the marks of a group, materialized and lasting watermarks of the spiritual and empirical life of a community. Space is an essential part of collective life: this is true for cities, houses, nations, for every group that thinks of itself as a collective identity. Given the frequently lasting nature of social spaces, it is quite evident that
3 On Halbwachs’ distinction between social memory as memory of subject-less society and collective memory as memory shared by specific social groups that works as a critical tool, see Namer 2000 and Jaisson 2008. 4 Halbwachs’ interest in space and social morphology was a lifelong intellectual interest, see Halbwachs 1938 and 2008. See also Jaisson 1999. 74 The Making of a Postsecular Society they are doomed to have a prominent role in the effort of safeguarding over time that collective life. Halbwachs devoted a special attention to religious space. In fact, the very distinction between the sacred and the profane needs to be embedded in space. That explains why the memories of religious groups are stored, frequently and above all, in specific places, cities as well as sites, as is well known and rarely contested. This is true, according to Halbwachs, above all in traditional societies, where religion was, so to speak, ‘over-abundant’, and almost every place had a religious character and meaning. However, if secularization has eroded the extension of sacred places, even today believers need common places in which to perform common rituals and in which to recall and reactivate the bonds that link them together in the same society (1992, chapter 5). Anticipating contemporary, albeit not naïve, theories of secularization, Halbwachs emphasized how religious groups, more than other kinds of groups, need to fix their memories within space. In fact, religious groups are in a sense intrinsically conservative, they cannot admit of being different than in the past, and in order to show that, they must be capable of finding themselves and their memories in familiar places. However, above all in the Legendary Topography of the Holy Land, Halbwachs stressed how the memory of religious groups, as that of any other social group, is basically re-constructive, and aimed at serving needs and interests of the present, rather than being merely aimed at historical accuracy (Halbwachs 2008, 96).
Trauma and Evil, Heroes and Victims
Thus far I have attempted to recall the main features of collective memory. Above all, following Halbwachs, I have tried to stress how memory is crucial in the shaping and reshaping of a collective identity’s central value system, in the light of its present needs. After the end of the Second World War, a particular class of events acquired a central place in collective memory, namely events categorised as ‘traumatic’ (Bell 2006). This represents a significant change in the working and in the content of collective memory, which nowadays is more focused on the remembrance of collective suffering than in the past. If societies want to keep alive, fractured and divided memories connected with traumatic events need to be bridged and recomposed through narratives capable of reshaping coherent central value systems. Suffering and evil have to be recounted within shared stories. As we shall see in the second part of this book, bridging divided memories of traumatic events plays a major part in the ongoing process of reshaping the central value system of Turkish society and also in the making of a postsecular society. In order to deal with the Turkish context and its exemplary value we now need to Memory, Trauma and the Work of Rituals 75 dwell on the process of the social construction of narratives of traumatic events. Once again, a Durkheimian approach is particularly fruitful.5 We owe to Jeffrey Alexander the most effective and detailed explanation of the social construction of narratives of traumatic events. Within the frame of a culturalist and neo-Durkheimian perspective, Alexander shows how an event is coded as evil when it is represented as such. As Alexander wrote, ‘the gap between event and representation can be conceived as the “trauma process”’ (Alexander 2004, 11), a process that has its speakers (the so-called ‘carrier groups’), its audience (the public, putatively homogenous but sociologically fragmented), and which occurs in a specific situation (the historical, cultural, and institutional environment within which the speech act occurs). The cultural construction of trauma, and so the first step of the coding of an event as evil, depends on a ‘claim to some fundamental injury, an exclamation of the terrifying profanation of some sacred value, a narrative about a horribly destructive social process, and a demand for emotional, institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution’(Alexander 2004, 11). The carrier group will have to prove capable of ‘telling a new story’, often highly contested and polarizing. If the process succeeds, then a new master narrative will be established. The process, which occurs in specific institutional arenas (religious, aesthetic, legal, mass media, sometimes state bureaucracies), has to offer compelling answers to a set of crucial questions in order to succeed. According to Alexander, the main issues at stake are:
1. The nature of the pain – What actually happened? 2. The nature of the victims – What group of people was affected by this traumatizing pain? 3. Relation of the trauma victims to a wider audience – Do victims and the wider audience feel part of the same collective reality? 4. Attribution of Responsibility – Who caused the trauma? Who actually injured the victims?
As already stated, if the process succeeds, the outcome is not only a new master narrative, but also ‘a demand for emotional, institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution’. Evil, or what now has been coded as evil as the outcome of the trauma process, has to be overcome, the identities affected by the trauma must be purified, the dividing line between good and evil must be re-established. Victims need to commemorate their pains, perpetrators must expiate their sins, and the whole community has to try to overcome divided memories and attempt to reach reconciliation, in order to find reasons for living together in the future. It is at this juncture that rituals become necessary, in order to shape a post-traumatic social and moral order: public rituals of commemoration, expiation and reconciliation. Such rituals have to be performed in proper spaces, temples and sanctuaries. This
5 On suffering and evil from a Durkheimian point of view, see Pickering and Rosati 2008. 76 The Making of a Postsecular Society is where present reflections on collective memory meet what has been discussed in the previous chapter about space, sacred places and postsecular sanctuaries. Postsecular sanctuaries are places where the central value system of a society is reaffirmed, revitalized or even, depending on the situation, changed and re-shaped. They emerge at the end of the social construction of a new master narrative, when a phase of ritualization is entered, but sometimes (as we shall see in a specific case in Turkey) they occur at the beginning of the process, as the triggering element (space and time) of a new re-configuration of a system of symbols. Frequently, they are in the midst of the social – for example, urban – space, in order to mark its symbolic centre. However, postsecular sanctuaries are not all of the same nature, and they are changing their characteristics in an essential and very interesting way. In a way, they are shifting from being an expression of triumphant narratives and collective identities, to being the symbolic representation of a ‘negative transcendence’ and of a more universalistic form of social solidarity (Giesen 2005). Postsecular sanctuaries could be diverse: they could be churches, mosques and synagogues as well as civic monuments and private home-altars, as well as part-time street altars. But they are also not all the same because they can celebrate heroes or victims, can be part (the end or the beginning) of a process of the social construction of heroes, or vice versa of victimization. Even if both heroes and victims are present in contemporary social landscapes, it is possible to maintain that nowadays a sort of shifting process is taking place towards monuments and postsecular sanctuaries dedicated to the celebration and commemoration of victims, rather than heroes. The main implications and the most relevant meanings of this process are evident. We know that sacred places are meeting points between two orders (Chapter 3), places where one can experience some form of encounter with the sacred; we know also that they have to ‘contain’, as far as it is possible, the sacred, through images or symbols of the sacred itself. Consequently, it is easily understood why monuments quite often represent the face of the hero, assumed as the expression of the sacred. ‘The representation of a hero’s face is’, as Giesen writes, ‘at the core of the monument’ (Giesen 2004, 32). This is true above all for early-modernity’s monuments, those, for example, aimed at celebrating heroes of nation-building processes, and accordingly at expressing narratives of triumph. However, insofar as the nature of the sacred changes, the features of its representation also have to change as a result. As we have seen in the context of our analysis of the symbolic morphology of centre-periphery (Chapter 1), typical of modernity is a process of transformation of the sacred centre that from being personal becomes impersonal: from the king to the public sphere, so to speak. The process implies, among other things, a ‘crisis of representation’ of modernity: whereas the face of the hero in traditional or early modern societies represented a mediator between the god(s) and humans, contemporary modernity seems to want to erase the vividness and concreteness of the face of heroes and mediators. How can an anonymous sacred centre be represented? How can ‘a face’ be given to an impersonal sacred? How can ‘we the people’ be represented? How can something like constitutional values Memory, Trauma and the Work of Rituals 77 be represented symbolically or architectonically? The shift from monuments to heroes and triumphant aspects of collective narratives towards monuments to victims is not unrelated to this ‘crisis of representation’:
(…) in this transformation of the sacred that once had a face, a voice and a place into an anonymous and impersonal, invisible and omnipresent principle, the order of modernity also engenders a hidden elective affinity to the symbolic opposite of the hero: the anonymous victim who has no face, no voice, no place anymore. (Giesen 2004, 42)
Once again, this shift does not mean that heroes are no longer being represented. The cult of personality is an evergreen social process, and we shall see that it is not at all unknown to our specific case study. However, impersonal forms of representation are gaining momentum, and we have to consider the implications of this transformation. One might well ask who the victims are. As in the case of evil and trauma, victims are not only ‘produced by human actions’, they are the outcome of a process of victimhood: they are socially constructed, and the process is quite similar to the process recalled above of social construction of traumatic events. In fact, it follows more or less the same steps. In the second part of the volume where Turkey is the subject of study, a concrete example of a process of victimhood is illustrated and we shall see how it is triggered by specific carrier groups, how it ‘happens’ within specific arenas (law courts, religious ceremonies, literary discourses, parliamentary debates, news-media), how it needs to write a narrative that not only remembers victims and tries to establish a sort of anamnestic memory that redeems (at least partially) past sufferings, but also has to attribute responsibilities, and finally to find some performative and shared way (usually rituals) to expiate responsibilities and bridge divided memories (Giesen 2004, 47). Another aspect is particularly relevant in the process of the social construction of victims, and that will prove to be crucial with reference to Turkey. In fact, these kinds of processes deeply alter the borders between centre and periphery, the relationship between them, and the balance between social actors that expresses old and new primary and secondary values (Chapter 1). Social boundaries are fragile, mobile, always changing, and they are constructed ritualistically, drawing symbolic lines that separate the sacred and profane, insiders and outsiders. Victims, before being recognized as such, before the process of victimhood, are at the margins of social boundaries. They are not categorised as ‘us’, as part of the same collective identity to which we belong. They are not part of our group, of the national community, of the human consortium. They are ‘otherized’:
Victims take a special position in a community. If they are still alive, their subjectivity is damaged; they have been, temporarily at least, excluded from the usual rights attributed to every member of the community. They are displaced and uprooted persons, assembled in camps, submitted to violence, 78 The Making of a Postsecular Society
torture, rape. Similar to heroes, but at the opposite end of the social order, they have been put into a state of exception in a space beyond laws, rules and rights. (Giesen 2004, 48)
As individuals or members of misrecognized communities, victims threaten the established border between us and them, as soon as they step over the threshold of the subhuman. Before that threshold they are invisible; one step beyond and they start to re-shape borders. As Giesen explains:
Victims are impersonal subjects, they have no face, no voice and no place. Even if they are still alive, they are numbed and muted, displaced and uprooted. They embody the dark fringe of human societies, where doubts about the seemingly clear boundaries arise, where subjects are suddenly turned into objects and objects are endowed with a voice – a realm of haunting ghosts, monsters and nightmares in between common subjectivity and plain objectivity, a realm ruled by demons and deprived of humanity. In the construction of victimhood, a culture encapsulates the latent suspicion that boundaries between inside and outside could also be constructed otherwise, that the exclusion of an outside can never be perfectly justified, that there is a latent subjectivity even in the excluded outside of objects, that the recognition of subjects as alike and the definition of objects as different rests on fragile foundations, that culture is based on the latency and even on the repression of claims of subjectivity. (Giesen 2004, 53)
The reversal, or at the least the reshaping, of the actual boundaries between insiders and outsiders, and, consequently, the reshaping of the central value system of a community, takes place exactly when the ‘latent suspicion’ triggers, by the hand of carrier groups, a process of social construction of victimhood. Here rituals show their transformative dimension, their anomic function, their liminal nature. Usually, a ‘time of latency’ occurs in between the occurrence of evil and its recognition as a cultural trauma, and ‘only later on, after the time of latency, can the culture of a community perceive the victimization in the past, talk it out and work it through’ (Giesen 2004, 55). When the culture ‘talks it out’ and ‘works it through’, the seeds of the ritualised process of victimisation are potentially ready to bring to fruition the transformation of a central value system. A number of other variables can, of course, determine the course of the success of the new master narrative, but in principle the soil is ready. If the larger audience identifies with the former margins of the collective identity, then centre and periphery are redesigned. At this stage, the new collective identity feels closer to its right-sacred (Chapter 1), to its idealized profile, and needs ‘special institutions for remembering the victims, rituals to mourn their suffering and to represent the forgotten subjectivity of the dead’ (Giesen 2004, 55). Once again, the new sacred needs material supports, needs to be embedded in non-volatile spaces, to be remembered. However, here monuments and sites do not celebrate triumphant narratives, but the faceless victims of past atrocities and wrong-doings. This is how sacred spaces dedicated Memory, Trauma and the Work of Rituals 79 to suffering memories come into being. They, just as the category of victims as such, are the outcome of a social process of construction of meanings, and in turn they are agents of construction of new meanings. Victims and spaces to remember them are not ‘natural results’ of individual actions, but, on the contrary, presuppose the centrality of a strong anonymous public sphere, capable of giving voice within specific arenas to voiceless fringes of society, capable of turning peripheries into the centre. This is a powerful dynamic of symbols, proper mostly to modern societies, and to their new imaginary and way of representing the sacred:
The social construction of victims has, indeed, a core function for the distinction between centre and periphery, between inside and outside, between subjects and objects. Victims – whether dead or surviving – demarcate the fringe of human societies, the frontier where the neat cultural classification gets stuck into semantic swamps and moral twilight, where the fragility and imperfection of social order becomes obvious. This perspective on fringe presupposes a strong public sphere as the center of society and institutional arenas where the outlands of damaged subjectivity can be ritually embraced and coped with. (Giesen 2004, 71)
It is a reversal of the meaning of victims, once at the periphery of society as strangers, vagabonds, handicapped or insane people.6 It is a reversal that manifests all its solemnity in architectural forms:
War memorials that in the nineteenth century focused on the heroism of generals and soldiers today imagine the soldiers killed in actions as victims. Holocaust museums spread rapidly in Western societies and the new nations in Africa consider the colonial yoke to be at the core of their national identity. (Giesen 2005, 127)
It is indeed a significant change. The sacred must be concrete, must have solid representations, must be symbolically expressed, even once it no longer has the face of the king. However, the new sacred centre of contemporary societies, ‘hints at a new mode of transcendence’ extended beyond the borders of kin, friends, neighbours, co-believers, fellow-citizens, to embrace, in principle, anonymous victims (though the effort is frequently that of giving a name to each of them). It becomes a form of ‘negative transcendence’ (2005, 130), simultaneously agent and outcome of memories ritualistically in search of composition. Contemporary emphasis on victims as the new sacred centre of contemporary societies is not, however, without its critics. Frequently it is criticized for leading to a politics of anger and resentment, a politics of ‘competitive victimhood’:
6 See I. Wilkinson (2005). 80 The Making of a Postsecular Society
This gives rise to an endless proliferating list of the aggrieved. Each of their claims is surely true, but you cannot build a free society on the basis of these truths, just as you cannot heal trauma by endlessly attempting to heal your wounds. A culture of victimhood sets group against group, each claiming that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation, is greater than that of others. We have suffered; we are victims; therefore you must put it right. (Sacks 2007, 61)
This is, according to critics, multiculturalism at its worst. I have already stressed in this chapter how, in my view, the social emerging of the figures of victims indicates a new sensitivity on the part of contemporary societies, a sensitivity directed at the precariousness of our lives (see Butler 2004) and to the capability (and the experience) of suffering understood as the central core of a moral minimalism and negative universalism (see Walzer 1994), as a key feature of our common humanity. This is not the appropriate context in which to analyse in depth such a delicate issue. What is relevant here is noticing a certain shift from ‘triumph to trauma’ (Giesen 2004) that will be relevant in the analysis of the Turkish case. However, one could also reply that in order to avoid the negative consequences of ‘politics of victimhood’, what is really important is a pedagogic principle according to which no cultural, religious, ethnic group that has suffered discrimination, violence, oppression, marginalization, and is being propelled towards the centre of society by the generalized recognition of its suffering, can claim a ‘monopoly of suffering’. Contrary to Margalit’s opinion (2002), a universalistic ethic of memory is not impossible if centred on experiences of suffering, provided that no one claims a monopoly of suffering. Part II: The Turkish Laboratory This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 5 Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey: A Symbolic Analysis
Not Only in the Abstract: The Centre-periphery Model and the Turkish Case Study
In the first part of the volume, an effort was made at theory building. Most of the building blocks underpinning my theoretical approach derive from categories with a Durkheimian inspiration. Both the centre-periphery model, despite its Weberian overtones, and the notions of sacred places, memory and trauma – in their strict relationship with ritual – can be considered part of a Durkheimian conceptual constellation. As regards the postsecular, this key concept in the light of Durkheimian theory is examined from a contemporary perspective. The centre- periphery model offers a general and comprehensive, as far as possible, symbolic morphological approach to any society, including contemporary Western societies, their complexity notwithstanding. Such a demanding claim can be maintained only insofar as both centre(s) and periphery(ies) are considered in symbolic (as opposed to geographical) and pluralistic terms, open to contestation. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 focused on particular dimensions of the relationship between religions and contemporary modernity, especially those related to space and memory. Needless to say, the relationship between religions and modernity is much more complex and involves much more than space and memory. However, I want to show that from a sociological point of view, space and memory are interesting and fruitful litmus tests for analysing shifting understandings of secularization, namely the most general category elaborated by social theory in order to comprehend the complexity of the relation between religions and various forms of modernity. The postsecular is a new category, according to which religious and secular world-views and practices co-exist in the same field, in more or less reflective ways depending on the contexts. Such change in the identity of modern societies, used to thinking of themselves as fully secularized until recent times, has to be reflected in their central value systems. The central value system of societies that display – concerning religions – high reflectivity, has to mirror such a move from a secularized to a postsecular self-understanding. Space and memory are maps on which these changes leave their traces. More so, space and memory are also maps on which struggles for symbolic changes are fought. That is why in space and memory I am interested in finding traces and struggles for changes in the symbolic value system of a society, with reference to the shifting from a secular to a postsecular self-understanding of a collective identity. 84 The Making of a Postsecular Society
In Part I, I attempted to introduce the conceptual building blocks of a sociological theory of postsecular society. It is crucial, however, that the making of a postsecular society not be analysed just in the abstract. There are two reasons for this caveat. First, by definition, the postsecular is a context-dependent concept. One cannot have a general theory of the postsecular, as sociologists in the past envisaged general theories of secularization. It was a misguided attempt, then, to devise a general theory of secularization, and it would equally be a mistake now to envisage a general theory of the postsecular. What I tried to do in Part I was to define just some of the conceptual building blocks of a sociological theory of postsecular society, but these notions require testing in specific contexts. Second, working on empirical case studies may help not only to test and refine theory, but can also contribute to the progressive development of broader conceptual schemes. In other words, a sociological theory of postsecular society has to be a middle-range theory (Merton 1949), the outcome of specific empirical case studies in a circular relationship with more general theories such as the centre-periphery model. That is why the second part of this book is dedicated to the analysis of a specific case study, namely contemporary Turkey (see also Rosati, Stoeckl 2012 for other ‘laboratories’). In the Introduction, I briefly mentioned some the reasons why Turkey can be considered, at least in my view, an appropriate case study for highlighting the transition to a postsecular society. The following chapters dig deeper into symbolic maps of the Turkish central value system, in order to study the making of a postsecular society above all on the material and immaterial grounds of space and memory.
1923–1950: Mutual Non-recognition
It has been suggested that the centre-periphery model, developed by Edward Shils originally in the 1960s, is a key paradigm for understanding the history of modern Turkey. Though not uncontested, the centre-periphery theory – applied to Turkey first by Sherif Mardin (2006) – has proved capable of critically reading the history of modern Turkey, the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic, and to show how some key continuities between them lie under the surface of dramatic breaks. Above all, in the context of the present study, the centre-periphery model proves useful not only from the political-sociological point of view, in order to throw light on the history of modern Turkey, but also to facilitate a symbolic analysis of the changes in Turkey’s contemporary value system. Mardin’s basic idea is that the Republic of Turkey inherited a tradition from the Ottoman Empire – that of creating a political, economic and equally strong symbolic divide between commercial classes and civil and military bureaucracies that formed the centre of state power on the one hand and peripheral groups in society on the other. The process of modernization that had been taking place along Western lines, since at least the Tanzimat period, widened the gap further between the centre and alienated peripheries, not least because it failed ‘to win the hearts Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 85 of Muslims because of state repression and the abuse of power by westernizing bureaucrats’ (Atasoy 2005, 9). Mardin explains how the modern republic emerged from the Ottoman Empire without closing the gap between centre and periphery, but rather widening it. Other major scholars of Turkey, such as Heper, also agree on the usefulness of the centre-periphery paradigm:
The state-civil society confrontation persisted during the republican period too. The state elites’ perception of civil society remained Hegelian: civil society was for the most part conceived of as a “sphere of universal egoism”. The reaction to this attitude by those who claimed to represent civil society was no less radical. While one group consistently accused the other of “divisiveness”, the counter tendency included the perception of power as absolute (…), and as uncompromising defiance. The Turkish Republic seems to have inherited from the Ottoman Empire a strong state and a weak civil society. As in the Ottoman period, the bureaucratic elite continued to perceive the state as vital for holding together the community. (Heper 1985, 16; see also Heper 1980)
The new republican Kemalist centre encouraged and actually forced people to replace traditional habits and social arrangements, but rather than being a hegemonic force, it enforced a top-down process, that alienated the masses and polarized society. Differences and contrasts between centre and periphery are of a social, cultural, economic, political, religious and symbolic nature. The centre of Turkey, more recently called ‘White Turkey’ (Yavuz 2009, 309 n. 31; Bora 2013), represents the urban, secular, nationalist, Westernized part of the country; its central institutional system is occupied mainly by the military, the judiciary and bureaucrats. The periphery (the so-called ‘Black Turkey’) on the contrary, is made up of religious groups, agricultural and traditional, far removed from the modern Western way of life. As will be shown, this model (admittedly, not the only theoretical paradigm for interpreting Turkey, see Atasoy 2005, Chapter 1) has to be articulated and specified in many senses: as demonstrated in general terms in Chapter 1, centres and peripheries are frequently mobile, multiple and internally differentiated, maintaining complex relationships between one another nonetheless. It is the simplicity of the model that helps us to grasp some order underneath the complexity of Turkish reality, and to make visible both decades- long continuities and discontinuities. For my purposes, the centre-periphery model is useful above all because it draws attention to the cultural-ideological dimension of state dominion, and to the cultural-ideological dimensions of the peripheries’ counter-cultures. My aim, in fact, is not to provide a political history of modern Turkey, but to suggest a symbolic analysis of changes within its central value system, changes that reflect a different understanding of modernity and secularism over the years, and that perhaps in the last decade or so, may foreshadow – in the midst of dramatic contradictions and serious comedowns – the making of a postsecular (and post-Kemalist) society. In order to appreciate these differences we need to look at the evolution of the Turkish central value system from the 86 The Making of a Postsecular Society beginning of the republic onwards. Consequently, I shall start with a brief analysis of Kemalism’s central value system. A convenient way to begin is perhaps by mentioning a book published in 1928 by a Jewish businessman, Moiz Kohen, who, accepting diligently the Republican Peoples’ Party regulations, invited his Jewish countrymen and all the other minorities to ‘Turkify’ themselves in order to attain the status of citizenship granted by the 1924 Constitution (see Bali 2006). Echoing the Ten Commandments, Kohen proposed his Decalogue to accomplish Atatürk’s idea of nation and citizenship:
• Turkify your names • Speak Turkish • In the synagogue read part of the prayers in Turkish • Turkify your schools • Send your children to state schools • Interest yourself in Turkey’s affairs • Socialize with Turks • Eliminate the (Jewish) community spirit • Do your particular duty in the area of the national economy • Know your constitutional rights. (2006, 44)
In other words, besides urging his fellows to share feelings in common with non- Jewish communities, Kohen was inviting religious minorities in the country to commit suicide as recognizable, particularistic groups and identities in order to become fully integrated within a homogenous entity (the national body) devoid of differences. He was accepting the process of nation-building along assimilationist and anti-pluralistic lines. The Kemalist programme of modernization, interpreted by critics at the time (as well as nowadays by Islamists, post-moderns and pluralist democrats) as a process of ‘Westoxification’, was irreconcilable with ethnic, religious and gender differences (Göle 1997; Arat 1997). The emphasis on differences and particularities was labelled as backward, traditional, anti-modern, Ottoman in other words, and equated with conflict, divisiveness, inequality. Differences, above all religious differences, practices and beliefs, including those within Islam, had to be privatized. The so-called ‘spirit of the millet system’ had to be cancelled from the minds of Turks. Religion, above all Islam, was not declared irrelevant within its frame of reference, but the Kemalist reforms carried out between 1924 and 1937 (the abolition of the caliphate; the closure of religious schools, lodges, foundations, tarikats; the abolition of religious law and the adoption of a new civil code; the elimination of the claim of Islam as the state religion; the declaration of secularism as one of the main pillars of Kemalism; the ban of Arabic as the language for the call for prayer by muezzins, the declaration of the state as secular, see Tepe 2008; Zürcher 1993) aimed at turning religion into a private matter. As Elizabeth Özdalga writes, ‘official secularism (…) was not based on atheism. Rather, it represented a Western ideal of modern religious piety which was individualistic Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 87 and intellectualistic. According to a common Christian understanding, piety mainly concerns a person’s inner life. Apart from showing special consideration to one’s fellow-beings as an integrated part of daily life, there are no external signs of religious piety other than church attendance and the sacraments received within the frame of the church’s ceremonies’ (1998, 20). Özdalga grasps a crucial point, stressing that such a set of reforms was tailored on a Western and basically Christian (Protestant-like) understanding of religion, secular space and of the self (Rosati 2009, Chapter 2), not easily recognizable from within the Islamic culture and other non-Christian religious traditions. It is not just by coincidence that this in-depth process of Turkification was elite- driven, and had to break the most interiorized habits of Turkish daily life. The shift from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet and the language reform policies on the one hand, and the ban of the traditional dress code in favour of a modern and Western one on the other, aimed at transforming people’s self-perception and gender relations. If it is true that language is Allah-language, because ordinary speech in Turkish is infused with religious expressions,1 it follows that the language reform policies wanted to uproot the sacred from daily life. The liberal mindset of a Western visitor to the Anitkabir, the Atatürk Memorial Tomb, is of course surprised (and disturbed) by the patent cult of personality. However, what one can see behind the commemorative corridors of the Anitkabir is also the artificiality of the change imposed by Atatürk’s reforms on the Turkish society, such as, for example, pictures of children at school desks, from one year to another dressed differently, and obliged to use an alphabetic system quite alien to them. In Turkey, Kemalism has been the hegemonic ideology ever since Atatürk’s times up to the present, and it has preserved its power ‘in a variety of legal, constitutional, practical-political, and sociocultural ways, covering nearly the entire gamut of social and political life. Among the most notable cultural forms are the ways in which the personality of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk occupies a prominent presence in all sites of human social relations in Turkey’ (Parla and Davison 2004, 37). We shall see how even Atatürk’s image has been changing in the Turkish social imaginary, while keeping its core role in the Turkish central value system. Over the years, Kemalism, that cannot be taken as an undifferentiated ideology (see Koçak 2013; Haniouğlu 2012), but that can nonetheless be grasped ideal- typically, has been a true political religion, whose appeal perhaps is declining only nowadays under the pressure of current transformations:
1 For interesting examples of aestheticising religious expression to its corresponding secular, see Özdemir and Frank 2000, 49; on language reform, see also Lewis 1999; according to Martitn Heper, Atatürk’s reforms aimed at institutionalizing ‘a technique of how to think, not a prescription of what to think’; Kemalism, in his view, was a cognitive and not a cultural revolution, aimed at teaching Turks to ‘use their learning faculties’ (Heper 2012, 80, 84). The positive effects of this cognitive revolution are still lasting, and explain why secularism is not under threat today; see also note 3 below. 88 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Courses on Atatürk’s teachings and the history of his reforms are compulsory at every level of the education system. The cult has its equivalent of religious feast days in public holidays, on which Atatürk is ceremonially remembered, and its place of pilgrimage in his mausoleum complex (…). Kemalism has a canon of sacred texts, most prominently the Nuturk, Atatürk’s six-day speech of October 1927 in which he detailed his role in the Turkish War of Independence. While, in a manner reminiscent of the hadith, his deeds and comments on a vast range of subjects are cited for validation and inspiration. Saying or writing anything derogatory about Atatürk is regarded by Kemalists as tantamount to blasphemy and the perpetrator is liable to prosecution under laws criminalizing insulting Atatürk’s memory. His cult even has the equivalent of the Prophet Muhammad’s Hijra in Atatürk’s landing at the Black Sea port of Samsun prior to withdrawing into the Anatolia heartland to launch the War of Liberation. (Jenkins 2008, 58–60; see also Karaveli 2010, 94: While Atatürk has secularized Turkey, the Kemalists have, paradoxically, sanctified Atatürk)
Taha Parla and Andrew Davison have offered a quite sophisticated and convincing interpretation of Kemalism, as a ‘specific variant of rightist, corporatist ideology committed to a view of society, reason, and action that bears only a slight resemblance to its rationalist and pragmatic reputation’ (Parla and Davison 2004, 9). On this basis, Parla and Davison reject not only the so-called ‘tutelary democratic thesis’ (according to which the authoritarian character of Atatürk’s reforms was not intrinsic to Kemalism, but necessary to bring Turkey out of the traditional Ottoman heritage and to transform it into a modern, democratic, secular and egalitarian society), but also interpretations of Kemalism in terms of the six arrows2 (nationalism, populism, republicanism, transformism, laicism, statism) as oversimplifying the Kemalist ideology: ‘Accounts of Kemalism that rely on the six arrows or on the oversimplified modern, secular, positivist, and pragmatic self-representation of Kemalism fail to capture adequately the explicit and implicit non-secular and antidemocratic aims, interests, and presuppositions of the Kemalist corporatist ideological frame and of the politics constituted by it’ (2004, 9). Kemalism is better understood as a form of rightist corporatism, the difference between solidaristic corporatism and rightist being that ‘solidaristic corporatism (…) conceives of corporations as buffers between the individual and the state, whereas fascist corporatism assimilates all within the metaphysical corporatist state, denying all distinctions between state and society’.3
2 Stressing the centrality of the six arrows is the usual way to reassume the principles of Kemalism, see Karal 1981, 11–35; see also Dumont 1984, 25–44; for an official account and reassessment of the six arrows, see Atatürk Research Center 2001. 3 Parla and Davison 2004, 9. Here I am referring to Kemalism as an ideology, not necessarily to Atatürk’s thought and convictions. Martin Heper, for example, in his seminal work on the etatist tradition in Turkey, stresses the difference between Atatürk’s Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 89
The best way, perhaps the most impressive, to see the Kemalist ideological understanding of social space is by visiting the Atatürk Memorial Tomb and the Kocatepe Mosque in the capital city of Ankara (incidentally, a city created almost ex nihil or at least completely reshaped by Atatürk’s decision to move the capital from Istanbul, to highlight discontinuity with the Ottoman heritage). They are the two most important republican monuments; they stand facing one other, the Atatürk Memorial Tomb from a hill overlooking Ankara, the Kocatepe Mosque from the new city centre, as if they were ‘in a relationship of challenge and response’ (Meeker 1997, 157). Even if they are respectively a shrine of Kemalism and a shrine of Islam, there is a common ground that both monuments address, as Meeker stresses in a fascinating essay: both of them have to express the contemporary nationalist imaginary, and have to educate people to a precise idea of the relationship between the individual and the state. The architecture of the Anitkabir, for instance, is inspired by principles of symmetry, linearity and proportion, in order to construct a ‘unitary space of geometric structure’ (1997, 174). Its geometric rationality reflects perfectly the Kemalist idea of the public space: ‘in the Turkish Republic, the combined projects of modernity and nationhood involved the planning and construction of a public space and time for a mass society of anonymous others. The principles of reason and science set the new modernist and nationalist regime apart from the old personal and imperialist regime’ (1997, 174; see also Özbudun 2012a and more recently Wilson 2013). It reflects the idea of the modern-nationalist public space and time full of anonymous masses and empty of particularistic individuals and groups. Differences notwithstanding, this is also the spirit of the architecture of the Kocatepe Mosque. Completed in 1987, it is shaped in neo-Ottoman style, but the Ottoman soft curves and lines are now rationalized and, so to speak, stylized; intended as a ‘great place of worship’, it is officially a ‘national place of worship’, just as the Anitkabir, Kocatepe Mosque ‘symbolizes the public sphere of the nation, understanding of the six arrows and subsequent interpretations by the bureaucratic elite. While for Atatürk they were ‘techniques that were going to be used to generate those goals’, they were a dynamic Weltanschaung, but in the hands of the bureaucratic elite they were transformed and distorted (1985, 68) – transformed into an ideology (1985, 71) of unquestionable dogmas: ‘The Atatürkist state was (…) exposed rather than that which he necessarily succeeded in developing. This does not mean that Atatürk’s ideas did not have any impact at all. What is being suggested is that some of his basic ideas were distorted by the civil bureaucratic elite in particular, and by the intelligentsia, in general. The fact is often overlooked, and the bureaucratic version of Atatürkist thought is presented as “Atatürkism”. Frequently no distinction is made between the state tradition which may be traced back to Atatürk and that which can be attributed to the bureaucratic intelligentsia’ (1985, 68). Parla’s and Davison’s view is more critical. For a review of the liberals’ recent criticism of Atatürk’s thought and/or Atatürkism as it has been developed by Kemalists, see Karaveli 2010; however, it is beyond the scope of my work to engage in a discussion on Atatürk and Atatürk’s thought per se. 90 The Making of a Postsecular Society but in a peculiar way. As one might have guessed, the use of advanced construction techniques is supposed to symbolize the modernity of Islam during the republican period (…). The architects mention various features of the mosque building which demonstrated that Islam during the republican period was modernist’ (Meeker 1997, 178). In this sense there is an affinity with Anitkabir: Kocatepe Mosque expresses national Islam, offering to the secular state an alliance based on modernist and nationalistic premises: ‘the logic of the Kocatepe Mosque, which differentiates it from the Sultanahmet Mosque, has to do with its referencing of the nationalist imagination, the experience of a mass society of anonymous others (…). The Kocatepe Mosque projects an image of a vast throng of believers coming from all over the nation and assembling as a great indivisible unity’ (1997, 197). It reflects the image of an undivided society, with no intermediate groups between individuals and the state, and where the state has an almost mystical flavour; in other words, both these national monuments are the perfect expression of the Kemalist rightist corporatist ideology. Corporatism is perhaps an infelicitous political ‘label’. Even if it has a long history, the roots of which go back to the Middle Ages, theoretical reflection on the issue started in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, under the influence of the Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. However, old and Catholic roots notwithstanding, corporatism suffered at least from two main problems: contamination with radical right and fascist regimes on the one hand and theoretical vagueness on the other. Until the 1980s, in fact, ‘corporatism was a term largely restricted to the study of the history of ideologies and/or fascist regimes’ (Panitch 1980, 159). Being a search for a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism, and given its emphasis of solidaristic relationships between different sectors of society, and, above all, given its aversion for class conflicts, corporatism’s ‘incorporation into fascist ideology and practice tended to indicate that the social harmony promulgated in corporatist theory could only be crudely approximated in practice by the use of state repression and force, primarily against the indigenous organizations of the working class’ (1980, 160). However, since the end of the 1970s corporatism has referred also to liberal Western democracies, such as, for example, England, a country with an unquestionable liberal pedigree. A brief definition, emerging from a comprehensive survey of the literature of the 1970s, considers corporatism as a ‘political structure within advanced capitalism which integrates organized socioeconomic producer groups through a system of representation and cooperative mutual interaction at the leadership level and mobilization and social control at the mass level’ (1980, 173). For my purposes, the above definition has the advantage of broadening its application to non-rightist or fascist regimes, but also of showing how most frequently its perimeter is designed around socioeconomic issues. In other words, it is understood in the specialist literature ‘as an actual political structure, not an ideology’ (ibid.). From our point of view, this is a serious limitation, given that corporatism implies a more general understanding of politics, society, the state, relationships between the state and different kinds of actors within the social Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 91 sphere. From a broader sociological point of view, it cannot be considered only as a branch of political-economic issues. Such a broad perspective on corporatism is offered by Taha Parla and Andrew Davison, who discuss Kemalism in the context of corporatist theories. In their definition,
corporatism’s distinction lies in its rejection of the categories of individual, class, and tradition as the core analytical categories of its political vision, though each may play some role within different corporatist articulations. Corporatist formulations derive models of society and forms of political and economic organization from occupational groups, professional organizations, or corporations. These groupings compose the fundamental building blocks of its political vision. (Parla and Davison 2004, 12)
The authors distinguish between two different variants: solidarity corporatism (the roots of which are found in Durkheim’s thought) and rightist corporatism. However, both of them share anti-individualistic premises, and are critical both of liberalism and Marxism. The distinction between the two variants is of the utmost importance. The following quotation clarifies the concept:
What distinguishes the solidaristic and fascist variants of corporatism is essentially the different ways in which they postulate the interrelationship between the individual, society, and the State. The fascist variant assimilates society and therefore the individual, at least in theory, with a metaphysical corporative State. Its motto is “everything within the State, nothing outside the State”. It sees the occupational groups and the corporations as the public organs of the State, to be used to control and dominate society, transmitting to the latter orders of the State concerning the duties and the obligations of individuals who have no prior rights vis-à-vis the State. By contrast, solidaristic corporatism views the occupational groups as a buffer between the individual and the State. While imbuing otherwise egoistic individuals with public-spiritedness, corporations check and restrain the State from encroaching upon individual members’ autonomous domain, thereby protecting them. In solidaristic political theory and jurisprudence, individuals still possess rights, although these rights are limited in comparison to those of the liberal model. But they also have duties or obligations to society – not to the State – in the interest of unity and solidarity. In the solidaristic variant, the State is but a regulatory and coordinating institution, with jurisdiction primarily in the inter-corporation domain. (2004, 29)
In other words, the main difference between the two variants is that solidaristic corporatism is conceived of as a solution against both egoistic individualism and étatism, whereas rightist corporatism is clearly a form of étatism. In both variants, groups or corporations are the main political bodies, and corporative councils organized in pyramidal forms support or even replace the institution of parliament 92 The Making of a Postsecular Society as the main mechanism of central political decision making. With reference to Turkey, the authors argue that corporatism came in Turkey via appropriation by Gökalp of the solidaristic variant of corporatism found in Durkheim’s thought.4 However, along the way Kemalism – while maintaining elements of this variant of corporatism – has operated significant transformations, consciously introducing elements of fascist corporatism (2004, 34). Parla’s and Davison’s work is based on a close reading of Atatürk’s discourses and official documents. On this basis, they firmly reject apologetic interpretations of Kemalism as ‘the birth of humanism’ and ‘enlightenment’ in Turkey, bringing to Turkey the belief in and hope for ‘rational democracy’ (2004, 3). On the same basis, they reject the so-called ‘tutelary thesis’, according to which absolutists and authoritarian tendencies within Kemalism ‘have been necessary to the tutelary requirements of the democratic vision’ (2004, 4): something necessary, in other words, to transform a backward society into a modern democracy.5 In the same way, they reject also the current picture of Atatürk as a ‘reluctant leader’, that is the correlative viewpoint of the ‘tutelary thesis’: ‘insofar as the dominant theme is that Kemalism was a tutelary democratic ideology – meaning that Kemal’s intention was to create the conditions for democracy through necessary authoritarian measures – Mustafa Kemal is portrayed as a “reluctant” charismatic leader, if one at all’ (2004, 147). However, the picture that emerges from Atatürk’s discourses is very different, and the kind of leadership there established has ‘reinforced the highly antidemocratic tendencies of the ideology that bears his name’ (2004, 145). Political discussion was neutralized in a form of anti-politics ‘of tranquil obedience to the great leader’ or ‘great father’, so that the line between ‘criticizing’ and ‘defamatory’ activities became very slippery and determined by ideologically imbued state courts. Political institutions had to make room for a single truth (2004, 50), the nation had not to speak in many discordant voices, and ‘Kemalists sought to annihilate obliviously visible disagreements about the nature of the people’s (and the nation’s) interests’ (2004, 86). As the architecture of the Anitkabir expresses clearly, Kemalism had a unified vision of society, with no divisions in terms of interests and values. This was also the meaning attached
4 On Gökalp, Durkheim and Kemalism, see the Appendix. 5 For example, ‘The institutional machinery set up by the Ankara government transformed Turkey into a true democracy in principle. In practice, however, the Kemalist regime fell short of its model. Practical necessity forced Mustafa Kemal to establish a mixed governmental system tinged with ad-hoc absolutism and futurist democratism that were more liberal in some aspects than many western democracies. Did Mustafa Kemal consider this unusual paternalist dictatorship merely a transitory phase of the road to total democracy? The two attempts at a multi-party system, in 1924 and 1930, are generally viewed as indications of the democratic tendencies of the new regime. However, the failure of both experiments tends to prove that the leaders of the young Turkish republic were ready to tolerate the formation of a pluralist democracy only in the absence of opposition forces’ (Dumont 1984, 28). For the tutelary approach see also Lewis 1961. Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 93 to the word ‘republicanism’ (2004, 86). As is apparent, even if fascist tendencies did not dominate Kemalism, they were in any case far from absent (2004, 247). The multifaceted profile of Kemalism is apparent also when considering the idea of nation propagated by Atatürk’s claims. According to Parla and Davison, in analysing them one can find two sides of Kemalist nationalism: on the one hand the civic-national definition, according to which the Turkish identity is not restrictive in ethical terms, and that accords equal citizenship to people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, as stated in Article 88 of the 1924 Constitution.6 However, Atatürk’s claims leave room also for a very different idea of citizenship, one in which the criteria for national membership were less inclusive. A racist idea of ‘Turkishness’, ‘Turkdom’ or ‘Türklük’ is, above all, to be found in Atatürk’s later discourses, the basis of a non-inclusive idea of belonging, that excluded the recognition of minorities’ cultural and political autonomy: ‘How happy is one who says, “I am a Turk”’ became a sinister saying for minorities.7 Particular attention has to be paid to the Kemalist consideration of religion, given the Kemalist legacy for contemporary Turkey from this point of view also, and its meaning in terms of ideas of social space. Despite the official self- representation and image of Kemalism as a fully secularist ideology, as Parla, Davison (1998, Chapter 4) and others show, things are much more complex. Laicism was certainly part and parcel – a major part actually – of Kemalist early reforms, and it stood for the expulsion of religion from sensitive spheres of legal, social and political life (Eisenstadt 1981 and 1984); it stood also for the secularization of education in conformity with modern and positivistic lines. Not particularly worried about the Christian genesis either of positivism or of Western conceptions of the privatization of religion, apparently Kemalism borrowed above all from French culture the rhetoric of laicité, allocating religion to a matter of conscience. In this sense, Kemalists were neither atheists nor anti-religious: they had no interest in uprooting religion from private morality or individual conscience (Parla and Davison 2004, 100–125; more recently, see Gürbey 2012), but from the public sphere they certainly did. However, it is not entirely accurate to say that Kemalism’s purpose was that of uprooting religion from the public sphere. The official rhetoric was frequently almost anti-religious, confining religious practices and beliefs to a backward society, but as a matter of fact, Kemalism aimed at controlling Islam, subordinating it to national institutions. Instead of the total and tidy separation of state and religion(s), Kemalism wanted to control the majority religion of the country by delving into the life of every single mosque. The instrument was the Directorate of Religious Affairs, which made of Islam in Turkey a sort of ‘Turkish State Islam’.
6 ‘The name Turk, as a political term, shall be understood to include all citizens of the Turkish Republic, without distinction of, or reference to, race or religion’, Art. 88 of the 1924 Turkish Constitution. 7 On the racist elements of Atatürk’s thought in relation to the Thesis of Turkish History and the sun language theory, see Haniouğlu 2011, chapter 7. 94 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Nowadays, the Department of Religious Affairs, a large umbrella-like bureaucratic structure, ‘supports, sponsors, and controls Islam and directs its public expressions. It recruits, appoints, supervises, and pays all religious functionaries and provides their training. It plans, administers, and governs all formal religious instruction in the nation’ (Özdemir and Frank 200, 233). In other words, the Turkish idea of lailik is not fully explained either by separation or by control. As Andrew Davison shows, ‘the conceptual tension between separation and control has provided the dynamic focal point for the debate over lailik since 1923’ (Davison 1998, 56; Gürbey 2012). Though there is no clear and full separation between religion and the state – so that Turkish secularism is certainly a quite particular kind of secularism if compared with the ‘official’ French twin-model8 – differentiation is for sure much greater than it was in the Ottoman empire, and in any case it marks the clear superiority of national political institutions over religious ones (see also Dole 2012, 11). All these elements draw the image of a two-sided Kemalism: on the one hand the apologetic image of a solidaristic kind of corporatism, on the other the more frequent actuality of a rightist version of it, tinted with fascist traits, inhospitable to differences and aiming at shaping a public sphere and national society devoid of a plurality of voices and lifestyles. Even if the reality of the contemporary social and political panorama in Turkey is far from being a uniform and tranquil undivided whole, even if differences and tensions are part and parcel of its daily life, and, above all, even if today Turkey is perhaps evolving in a different direction, as will be shown in the following chapters, Kemalist ideology has not lost its grip on official self-representations and political party policies. As Parla and Davison again argue,
Since the middle-1990s, it has been common, for example, to see various forms of the tutelary thesis represented in public life in Turkey. One form, witnessed in the mid-1990s when the Kemalist establishment confronted challenges to its authority from Turkish-Islamist and Kurdish nationalist movements, was the proliferation of signs and symbols stressing the link between Mustafa Kemal, the republic, and democracy (…). Knowingly or not, they reproduced the core of the tutelary democratic thesis proffered by Kemalism and most of its interpreters throughout the history of the republic. The basic idea contained therein is that Atatürk originated, supported, and encouraged the development of democratic life in Turkey. This is the trust of the tutelary democratic thesis. (Parla and Davison 2004, 268–9)
As we shall see, the hegemony of the Kemalist ideology is so strong and unquestionable that today even deep and crucial processes of transformation – at
8 See Dumont 1984, 38: ‘In theory the Turkish Republic opted for unflinching secularism. In practice, however, the principle was seriously compromised’. Figure 5.1 Centre-periphery model in Turkey, 1923–1950 96 The Making of a Postsecular Society the social, political and constitutional level – have to be framed within its basic assumptions in order to maintain their legitimacy and credibility. A close look at this representation of the central value system of Kemalist Turkey indicates that the central value system of Kemalist Turkey, that in neo- Durkheimian terms expresses its ultimate sacred postulates, namely values and beliefs, is officially shaped by the six arrows. Nationalism, populism, republicanism, transformism, laicism and étatism constitute the primary values and beliefs of Kemalism understood as a political religion and, at the same time, a complex view of society and of the relationship between individuals and society. However, as I have attempted to point out, the central value system of Kemalist Turkey is much more complex and articulated. As a form of rightist corporatism, the Kemalist central value system is characterized mainly by other primary values, such as an understanding of national identity and integrity as an undivided and homogenous social space, where no cultural, religious and ethnic differences are allowed. Kemalist Turkey is a mass society of anonymous others, where specific and particularistic others (with their stories, memories, languages and so on) cannot exist. Further, the central value system of Kemalist Turkey is characterized by a strong cult of the Great Father of the Republic, and may have racist overtones as in the ‘Turkish History thesis’ (see below p. 114). Finally, one of its main features, generally speaking and above all in relation to the present study, is an assertive form of secularism. According to Ahmet T. Kuru, ‘Assertive secularism requires the State to play an “assertive” role to exclude religion from the public sphere and confine it to the private domain’. It is contrasted withpassive secularism, which ‘demands that the State play a “passive” role by allowing the public visibility of religion. Assertive secularism is a “comprehensive doctrine”, whereas passive secularism mainly prioritizes state neutrality towards such doctrines’ (Kuru 2009, 11). As has emerged clearly before, assertive secularism in the Turkish case implies both separation and control. The central institutional system was constituted at this time (and partly today, but the balance seems gradually changing as we shall see) by specificsub-systems , that play the role of the ‘guardian of the Kemalist order’. They are the bureaucracy (Atasoy 2005, 54–9), a ‘statist liberal economy’ (Atasoy 2005, 50–54), a political single-party system (Zürcher 1993, chapter xiii), a secular and nationalist education system (see Bayar 2012, White 2013, 71–7), and above all the military and the judiciary (Cizre 2012; Özbudun 2012b), the strongest among the guardians of the Kemalist order. The working of these sub-systems requires proper roles, personal qualities and secondary values. Key roles in the establishment and preservation of the Kemalist central value system were (are) those of functionaries (Heper 1993), school teachers and educators in the public education system (Özyürek 2006), and big-business men (Yavuz 2012). Personal qualities are (were) an enthusiastic adhesion to Kemalist nationalism, positivism as a mentality, attitude and almost faith, and, if any, a form of religious individual piety. Taken together, the central value system and the central institutional and cultural system form the centre of society. As I suggested before (Chapter 1), Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 97
Shils’ morphology of the centre can conveniently be enriched with Durkheimian categories, partly differentiating the centre right and centre left, partly looking at the reproduction of the centre through Rappaport’s cybernetics of the Holy. As we know, the centre of society holds the sacred values of a society, the ultimate sacred postulates. The Kemalist six arrows and the other primary values mentioned above are a quite appropriate exemplification of what a modern, secular society such as Republican Turkey may sacralise and consider (in principle) ultimate postulate, unquestionable and definitive. Rappaport’s cybernetics of the Holy makes clear the hierarchical relationship of the legitimation of social subsystems. They are legitimized by cosmological axioms, ritual prescriptions, taboos, commandments and directives, which in turn derive from the ultimate sacred postulates. From the primary values of Kemalism derived quite an impressive series of axioms, ritual prescriptions, taboos, commandments and directives during the years 1924–1937. Bans, such as the ban on the fez, the ban on Arabic language for the azan, the ban on Arabic from schools, but also the abolition of the Caliphate, the closure of religious schools, lodges and foundations, the abolition of religious laws, all fixed new taboos, and delineated in a symbolically powerful way the perimeter of a demonized form of life, now considered backward. Reforms such as the adoption of the new civil code, and secularism first as a pillar of Kemalism and later as a constitutional principle, were commandments and performatives that shaped the new positivistic, Western and modern form of life. Through these performatives and taboos, the primary Kemalist values transmitted the proper secondary values to the subsystems and to their inherent roles. Rappaport’s cybernetics of the Holy is extremely useful also in understanding the kind of potential individual and systemic attitudes towards the ultimate sacred postulates and the related process of transmission of authority/charisma from the centre to the social body. According to Rappaport, the outcomes of the cybernetics of the Holy are determined by an attitude of ritual acceptance or, vice versa, of ritual withdrawal. Ritual acceptance determines formal acceptance of the ultimate sacred postulates, whereas ritual withdrawal determines prophetic movements of opposition and in principle de-sanctification of elements of the regulatory hierarchy, if not of the whole central value system. On the basis of Rappaport’s indication, and echoing Weber’s classification of types of attitudes towards the world in religious traditions, I have suggested (Chapter 1) distinguishing four kinds of possible individual attitudes toward the centre: passive acceptance, mystical and apolitical refusal, passionate denial, and ascetical hyper-affirmation of the primary values of the centre; and three possible systemic relationships between centre and periphery: assimilation, confrontation and solidarity. The period 1923– 1950 in Turkey was a period of strongly conflicting relationships between centre and periphery. The Kemalist project of modernization of the country did not leave room for modernity à la turca, did not distinguish, as had other modernizers before during the Tanzimat period or as Gökalp had (Gökalp 1968 and 1959; Göle 1996, chapter 2), between culture and civilization. Both the material aspects of the West (such as technology) and the cultural aspects of the Western form of life had to 98 The Making of a Postsecular Society be assimilated within a nationalistic blueprint. Consequently, assimilation within a homogenous social space was the only form of integration contemplated and permitted. That means that in the period under consideration, there were basically only two types of systemic attitudes of peripheries towards the centre: assimilation and confrontation. Urban elites, bureaucracy and the Alevis chose assimilation. Urban elites, bureaucracy and the military, as we have already mentioned, were the expression of the Kemalist social bloc (Gramsci) that was struggling for hegemony. At the individual level, they expressed a form of enthusiastic affirmation of the primary values of the centre and were passive in the sense of being uncritical. The case of the Alevis is much more complex. The condition and recognition of the Alevis’ minority and above all of their places of worship are today one of the litmus tests of the ongoing process of democratization in Turkey. I shall clarify this point later. In the beginning they were a predominantly rural community of the central east and (partly) south east of the country, but nowadays, as a consequence of migration, they are mainly settled on the outskirts of big cities such as Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. If today the Alevis are in search of their own space of recognition qua religious minority, at the onset of the republic, for specific reasons (related above all to the need for protection from the Sunni majority) they joined the secular project of Atatürk: ‘the loyalty Alevis feel towards Atatürk can hardly be exaggerated. They regard him as a number of things: the founder of the nation and the protector from religious persecution, the man who rescued them from foreign rule, who revealed scientific enlightenment and modernity to a sometimes reluctant population, and enabled Anatolian, Turkish civilization to emerge once more after centuries of Arab and Koranic-dominated interpretation of history’ (Shankland 2003, 21; Clarke 1999; Shakland 1999, chapter 6; Massicard 2006). The love still felt today for the Great Father is the emblem of their adhesion to the Kemalist project, taken in its leftist version (see Koçak 2013, 66–7). The groups and people that rejected full assimilation into the Kemalist idea of the nation were left with just two options: an apolitical (mystical) rejection and withdrawal, that by definition does not give life to organized forms of collective action, or a passionate denial of the primary values of the centre and a form of confrontational social and political action. This was the alternative left open for a large part of the Sunni majority, for the Kurds and other minorities. They became alienated from the Kemalist Republic, confrontational peripheries, ‘Black Turkey’ cleaned from the public space (see Yavuz 2000). However, contrary to ‘the commonly held view’, and contrary to Kemalist efforts, ‘the Kemalist reforms (…) did not unify society but rather helped to politicize nascent identities such as the Kurdish ethnicity and Sunni/Alevi Islam. As a result of nation-building and militant secularization, society came to be divided along the now familiar cleavages of Turkish versus Kurdish and state versus society’. (Yavuz 2003, 53; On the Kurdish issue, see Heper 2007, Yildiz and Muller 2008; Somer 2008). The Kemalist fear of the articulation of different identities and lifestyles in the public domain – a consequence among other things of the so-called ‘syndrome of Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 99
Sevres’ – actually polarized society and politics, so that relationships between the Kemalist centre and various peripheries have always been highly confrontational. What was completely missing in the period under consideration was a genuine idea of solidarity among strangers (Candas and Bugra 2010), a notion of living together differently. Far from considering the ‘others’ an opportunity, they (Greeks, Jews, religious Muslims, Armenians, Kurds, Syriacs, Roma, Alevis and so on) were ‘pushed out by the system’. The making of the republic was for several reasons a dramatic process, but it destroyed that cosmopolitan world that Anatolia was. ‘Other’ communities were left with the simple choice: ‘like it or leave it’, of being assimilated or leaving: ‘if you don’t want to leave or if you cannot leave, what you will have to do is to become isolated, to hide, to change your name and to be silent about your ‘other’ identity. You never say you are Alevi, Armenian or Kurd or that you belong to a sect’.9 As we have seen in Chapter 1, the centre can be articulated from an inner perspective in right and left centre. If the Kemalist six arrows and the social block that accepted them constituted the right centre (in turn not homogenous, but divided into a nationalist not infrequently racist Kemalism and a more social democrat Kemalism), the left centre was made up of those ‘Little Traditions’ (Eisenstadt 2006), namely cultural and religious minorities and from the Sunni majority, which chose a confrontational approach and refused to be assimilated within the homogenous nationalistic project and identity. They were ‘otherized’, labelled as ‘backward’, and started to symbolize Turkey ‘at its worst’, the inner enemies, always potentially threatening the national integrity, the evil to be eradicated. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt considered the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 part of the wave of the great revolutions that shaped modern civilization (Eisenstadt 2006). It shared with them many of the elements of the original Enlightenment project, save for the universalistic dimension. At the same time, the outcome of the Kemalist revolution differed greatly from those of the other modern revolutions. In fact, the shift in the basis of political legitimation and the symbols of political community (that is characteristic of any modern revolution),
took place in a unique way: the society withdrew from the Islamic framework into that of the newly-defined Turkish nation. While this process appears similar to the path followed by European nation-states, it in fact involved the negation of a universal framework: Islam (…). Thus the Turkish revolution rejected completely the religious basis of legitimation and attempted instead to develop a secular national one, as the major ideological parameter of the new collectivity (…). (Eisenstadt 1981, 135)
Consequently, even if the official ideology was Western-like, and many of the premises of the Turkish revolution were consistent with those of other great
9 See E. T. Aytav, http://www.todayszaman.com/news-243278-writer-aytav-says-ali- should-throw-the-ball-to-hagop-before-its-too-late.html. 100 The Making of a Postsecular Society modern revolutions (it took place within the frame of an imperial and semi-feudal society), the consequences of the Kemalist revolution were very different from those of the other European revolutions. The Kemalist revolution’s rejection of the religious basis of legitimation implied an almost complete displacement of the former ruling classes (political as well as religious) ‘by the members of the secondary (bureaucratic and intellectual) élites’ (Eisenstadt 1981, 135), and the formation of a capitalist system ‘imbued with a strong étatist orientation’. In Eisenstadt’s words,
The displacement of the ruling groups was not connected with that of the stronger elements of the traditional social and economic spheres. In urban and rural settings displacements occurred in two seemingly contradictory directions. First, the élitist establishment and bureaucracy became stronger, formulating étatist policies and orientations. Secondly, there was a movement towards a somewhat more autonomous class formation based partly on the links between the bureaucratic elements and the stronger socio-economic ones. These shifts in the principles of legitimation, the symbols and the boundaries of community, together with the change in the ruling class, were connected with the ideological restructuring of centre-periphery relations toward modernity. Concomitantly, political participation was in principle extended to broader strata, although in the early years of the revolutionary regimes it was entirely controlled by the ruling group. (1981, 135–6)
In other words, the kind of reconstructing of the centre-periphery relations operated by the Kemalist revolution was a top-down process, which tried to implant a Western kind of modern society without democracy, without a universalistic dimension, without a real interpenetration of peripheries towards the centre, without the inclusion of symbols of protest as legitimate (a central feature of modern revolutions, Eisenstadt 2006) within the symbolic central value system. It was an authoritarian project that implied total misrecognition of the previous (Sunni) religious basis of legitimation, misrecognition of minorities’ cultural and religious rights, and a strong étatist control (instead of a clear and neat separation) over religion(s). If we consider the relationship between Turkish modernity and religions in the period 1923–1950 in broad terms, we might conclude it was a form of mutual non-recognition between modernity and religions. Mutual non- recognition here does not mean that religious world-views were simply pre- modern and against modernity tout court, but that a confrontational approach on both sides prevailed, and that both sides were characterized by very low levels of reflectivity. Mutual non-recognition thus means neither complete separation nor absence of instrumental relationships, the latter on the contrary being rightly emphasized by scholars again and again until recently (see Turam 2012); rather, it means a condition where reflectivity was low on both sides. This condition of mutual non-recognition can be taken, as we shall see in greater detail later on, as the very opposite of a postsecular condition. Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 101
Old theories of modernization in the social sciences, the so-called theories of convergence, did not fail (not always or not completely) to notice this authoritarian profile of the Kemalist revolution. However, they considered it a temporary feature of the Kemalist revolution, necessary because of a backward society recalcitrant to modernization. Above all, they predicted that once brought to fruition, the process of modernization in Turkey would have followed Western paths (see Lerner 1958; Lewis 1961). However, we are witnessing a different story, and nowadays we need different theoretical lenses through which to interpret the Turkish context. We need to interpret it from within the theoretical frame of multiple modernities, multiple secularisms, and the postsecular. The reconstructing of the centre-periphery relationships after 1950, and after the failed experiment of a multi-party system during the Atatürk’s time (Zürcher 1993), followed a different path, anything but linear, which I shall now attempt to delineate briefly before discussing the last decade.
1950–1980: Democratizing an Authoritarian Modernity
At the theoretical level, my main thesis is that the postsecular implies in a sense going beyond sacred and secular, it implies a continuous redefinition of the borders between secular and religious world-views, a mutual adaptive transformation, in Sultan Tepe’s words, a ‘mutually transformative interaction’ (Tepe 2008, 22). Turkey is an excellent case in point because Kemalist rhetoric notwithstanding, ‘The Kemalist nation could justify itself only through religion, while the Islamic opposition could maintain its popular appeal only by accepting the boundaries and terms of the modern nation-state while simultaneously appropriating novel means of discovering scientific Islamic insights, relying on print capitalism (i.e., production and consumptions of pamphlets), or increasing engagements in public discussions and private household meetings’ (2008, 97). This process of mutual adaptation was (and still is), in the Turkish case, anything but consensual. It implied a very confrontational redefinition of the borders between centre and periphery. In order to describe briefly this process, I suggest distinguishing three phases at the end of the single party system: 1950–1980, 1980–2002 and 2003 to date. Needless to say, this is a disputable distinction, but it helps to focus on the major reconfigurations of the borders between centre and periphery. In this chapter I shall consider the phases 1950–1980, and 1980–2002. In the following chapter I shall examine the most recent and still ongoing phase. During the period 1950–1980 participatory politics and a limited democratization entered the socio-political Turkish landscape. This opening up of new spaces of opportunity ‘enabled some social groups to express their pent-up discontent in Islamic idioms’ (Yavuz 2003, 59). Yavuz’s observation is important because it indicates that Islam, in this phase as later on too, became a vector of inclusion of peripheries marginalized by Kemalist politics, a liberating force that triggered a process of democratization in the beginning just for the sake of Islam, 102 The Making of a Postsecular Society and later on (in the phase that started in 2002) for other peripheries too. Such a reconstruction of the balance between centre and periphery was carried on through religious symbolic and cultural paraphernalia, which in turn caused a secularist reaction:
This symbolic and cultural paraphernalia – the conspicuous patronizing of mosques and religious rituals by members of the Democratic Party and the reluctant follow-up by the Republican People’s Party – laced with protests that secularism was being lost, identified the Democratic Party with the culture of the periphery. (Mardin 2006, 313)
However, the main leaders of the Democratic Party (DP), Celal Bayar and Adnan Menderes, were ‘just as much part of the bureaucratic “class” as other Republican People’s Party members’ (ibid.) and ‘on the whole, remained pro-secular and fully supported the Kemalist programs’ (Yavuz 2003, 61; see also Atasoy 2005, Azak 2012). In order to understand DP’s position on secularism, one example is quite apt, given the highly symbolical meaning of the issue at stake, the ban on the Arabic ezan (the call to prayer recited by muezzin five times a day). As is known, the ban on the Arabic ezan was established in 1932 even before the reform imposing Turkish as the national language. It was Atatürk himself who wanted the ban, influenced by Ziya Gökalp’s view of ‘nationalism in religion’, namely by the idea that a ‘pure’, nationalized Islam had to be established against ‘impure Islam’. Pure Islam was that directly controlled by the state on the one hand, and privatized on the other. As already maintained, not separation of state and religion, but control of religion by the state and privatization of religion (Islam) were the two pillars of the Kemalist view of (assertive) secularism. The removal of the ban was, in 1950, a cornerstone of the DP campaign for a revision of the Kemalist understanding of secularism (see Azak 2012). In fact, it was defended on the basis of an alternative view of secularism, more respectful of freedom of conscience and worship; on the basis, in other words, of what has been later called a ‘passive’, as opposed to assertive, secularism. At the same time, the DP was far from contesting the secular frame in itself, and above all two key points of the Kemalist understanding: control of religion by the state through the Dyianet, and emphasis on freedom of conscience and religion but referring to the Sunni majority, and not, for example, to the Alevis or non-Muslim minorities. In other words, the DP was an agent of partial democratization, including Sunni peripheries marginalized by the Kemalist view of the republic, but at the same time sharing relevant elements with Kemalism. In this phase important structural transformations – already started in the 1920s (urbanization, political participation and education) – were brought to fruition too, and empowered marginalized sectors of Turkish society (Yavuz 2003, 61). The DP was the political tool to give representation to those rural peripheries and traditional sectors considered backward by Kemalism, and to new economic élites that were becoming aware of their power as a consequence of economic Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 103 liberalization. Periphery became the ‘party of movement’, while the Kemalist urban and bureaucratic centre became the statist order. According to Mardin, this polarization became even more pronounced after the coup of May 27, 1960, against the DP government, a coup staged because the republican and the Kemalist order was perceived to be in danger (Zücher 1993, 293): ‘the old polarization of the centre against the periphery acquired a new form: the preservers of the Procrustean early Republican order against those citizens who wanted change’ (Mardin 2006, 314). After a decade of political and social chaos, political violence and conflicts between leftist and rightist groups, a new coup in 1971 tried once again to re-establish the ‘rigidity of the older order’ (2006, 315), making of the centre-periphery opposition a permanent feature of Turkish political and social life. Over the decades, the picture became more complex, and other dimensions added to the original cleavage between centre and periphery, yet the centre-periphery opposition did not lose its explanatory validity:
Organized labour is not completely a part of the periphery. The crosscutting cleavages of owners against non-owners of the means of production are an aspect of Turkish politics that could change the picture. A party representing the Shi’ite minority has emerged, and rumblings concerning Kurds’ attempts at separate organization have been heard for some time. Certain members of the bureaucracy are now quite aware of the demands of a differentiated and integrated modern system, and some of them are defecting to parties representing the periphery. But these considerations are future aspects of Turkish politics, and centre-periphery is still one of its extremely important structural components. (2006, 315)
The decades between the 1950s and 1970s were years of deep contradictions. The DP started as a vector of democratization and ended as an authoritarian force; political violence was at its zenith, and, above all, ‘the elitist pretensions of the bureaucratic intelligentsia did not disappear’ in the 1950s (Heper 1985, 75–7). However, the multi-party system started to flow towards both centre and periphery, and beyond parties’ struggles and political turmoil, deep transformations were taking place under the surface. The periphery was not only trying to enter the centre via political representation, but was also increasing its reflectivity and self- reflectivity. Part of the Islamic world started to develop an attitude of rejection of the Kemalist assimilationist project, while at the same time was engaging with science, modernity and rationality. Given that religions’ (in particular Islam’s) reflectivity is crucial to understanding the contemporary making of a postsecular society in Turkey, we have to examine the figure of Said Nursi, whose role was essential in making Islam a democratizing force of the Kemalist anti-pluralistic view of modernity and social space (see Markham and Pirim 2011). In fact, Said Nursi’s Nurcu groups played a key role in the development of Turkish civil society. Said Nursi (1878–1960) was for a long time considered one of the major threats to the new Kemalist order. Having taken the side of the 104 The Making of a Postsecular Society war of Independence, Nursi started to criticize members of the Grand National Assembly because of the risk of establishing a positivist version of secularism that would have denied religion and Turkish Muslim identity. Accused of having links with the Kurdish-Islamic revolt of Sayh Said in the east in 1925, he had always denied that whatever he did or wrote in his life was against the secular order and new secular laws. Actually, my interest in the figure of Nursi lies in the fact that his suspicious attitude toward politics – despite the fact that at the beginning of the 1950s he invited his followers to support the DP – and political Islam, brought him to stress Muslim consciousness, the importance of education, and the centrality of Islam practices in everyday life, in order to shape gradually a bottom-up vernacular form of modernity. He tried to revitalize Islam within the context of the new secular republic, urging Islam to find its compatibility with modernity and, at the same time, struggling against a positivist view of modernity that ‘sought to uproot human beings from their sacred origins’ (Yavuz 2003, 154). In this way, he contributed in the long run to the reflectivity of both sides. Against the positivist, top-down modernization characteristic of Kemalism, Nursi developed over the decades (see Mardin 1989; Atasoy 2005, 74–81), in different ways and in different phases, a programme articulated in three steps, ‘beginning with the process of 1) raising individual Muslim consciousness, continuing 2) the implementation of faith in everyday life, and then 3) the restoration of the sharia’.10 It was the blueprint of a process of gradual transformation, which had to start with work on the inner self of Muslims, and with the construction of an inner community. On the other hand, sharia meant, in Nursi’s view, a law-governed, just society. That is why he devolved his energies to society and education, more than to the establishment of a political Islam:
In addition to his stress on the concepts of justice, identity, community, and the connection between science and religion, Nursi’s extremely cautious attitude toward politics and the ideological state helped the movement to become more active in social and cultural spheres. Nursi’s understanding of the state differed from that of the Young Turks and the later Kemalists, for he treated the state as the “servant” of the people and argued for a neutral state without any ideology. (Yavuz 2003, 161)11
10 Yavuz 2003, 161; Mardin offers a slightly different reconstruction of the three stages, or three duties of Muslims: 1) strengthening faith, 2) applying the sharia integrally, 3) unifying the Islamic world. However, Mardin agrees on the gradual nature of this process, so that, for example, the second duty could not be implemented until the first was mature enough. In other words, ‘he consigned steps two and three to an indefinite future’, Mardin (1989, 100). 11 On Nursi and accusations of supporting rebellions in the eastern provinces, see Markham and Pirim (2011, 14). Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 105
Nursi’s aim was that of reconciling faith and science, modernity and tradition, of protecting modernity and science from unbelievers and positivists, and religion from fanaticism and fundamentalism. Crucial, from our perspective, is Nursi’s view of religion. He was deeply committed to ‘reintroducing the traditional Muslim idiom of conduct and of personal relations into an emerging society of industry and mass communication’ (Mardin 1989, 13) because of his awareness that religion is not only beliefs, but that ‘it structures the social life of Islamic societies, … it provides the foundations for political obligation and, in short, it penetrates the smallest interstices of daily life and of social and political organization’ (1989, 3). Conceiving of Islam as a matter of idiom, customs and behaviours in everyday life, and Islam being at the time considered ‘backward’ and at the periphery of the Kemalist symbolic value system, the sociological importance of Nursi lies in the fact that ‘what Nursi was doing was promoting key concepts in the language which expressed the special character of peripheral status’ (Mardin 1989, 7; Markham and Pirim 2011, 10–13). He contributed in a decisive way to raising Muslims’ consciousness but at the same time to increasing reflectivity (opening up Islam to modernity and science), to vernacularizing a positivist understanding of modernity (increasing in the long run modernity’s reflectivity and self-reflectivity), and to sowing the seeds of a postsecular civil society. One of the major insights of Nursi, as we have seen, was the keen awareness of the importance of education and modern tools such as printed materials and other media, for spreading Islam within the new mass society. Such awareness was shared by his followers too, who, after Nursi’s death in 1960, transformed his inner circle into ‘textual communities’ that spread across Turkey (Yavuz 2003, 162; Markham and Pirim 2011, 17–19). The way in which these textual communities started to work was through the dershanes, groups of people who gathered together in ‘a special apartment or one-floor building where a congregation of people meets to read aloud and discuss Nursi’s writings’ (ibid.; see also Yavuz 2006, 129–61). Print-based Islamic discourse, as Yavuz calls it, became in this way the nucleus of large-scale communities of practices. In a way perfectly consistent with a Durkheimian understanding of religion, Yavuz writes that ‘reading creates a community, and a collective reading becomes a ritual activity to affirm this communal gathering’ (Yavuz 2003, 163). In turn, these textual communities or dershanes became counter-publics, public spheres where the peripheral language of Islam started to question the Kemalist symbolic value system, started to articulate, with the language of the periphery, a vernacularized notion of modernity, within a secular frame but negotiating borders both of Islamic identity and of the positivist Kemalist view of modernity:
Institutionalized as dershanes, the reading of the RNK (Risale-i Nur Külliyati, The Epistles of Light of Said Nursi) has been transformed from a silent, inward process to an ultimately communal and interactive experience. (2003, 164) 106 The Making of a Postsecular Society
They were ‘stepping stones in the construction of new counterpublics’ through ‘new mechanisms of sociability (dershanes, foundations, magazines, philanthropic associations)’ (2003, 168) that raised Muslim consciousness, opening at the same time ‘new spaces of opportunity’ and democratic social life. Essential to comprehending Nursi’s contribution to awareness-raising of Islam in Turkey, is his understanding of pluralism and disagreement. Perfectly aware of pluralism as a constituent element of the human consortium, recognized and grounded in the Qur’an, Nursi developed a position that has been called ‘grounded pluralism’ ‘which affirms diversity yet also remains committed to the public nature of religious traditions’ (Markham and Parkim 2011, 51), and that today could be taken as a template against both aggressive secularism and religious theocracy. Starting from a ‘tradition-constituted’ point of view (MacIntyre), and consequently from a deep commitment to the particularities of each tradition, he believed in persuasion and non-violence as tools to reach agreement, but also in the inevitability of disagreement. According to Markham and Parkim, Nursi’s view of grounded pluralism can be summarized in four points:
1. Said Nursi is committed to the truth of Islam and the importance of persuading others to that truth 2. Nursi finds in his tradition several reasons why it is important to commit to constructive co-existence with other traditions 3. Nursi believes that the resort to violence by Muslims against non-Muslims demonstrates a lack of self-confidence in Islam. Self-confident Muslims who are strong in their faith do not need to resort to violence 4. Nursi believes that the state needs good citizens and pious believers make good citizens (2011, 55).
All things considered, the figure of Said Nursi has to be taken as a central juncture in the narrative of the history of modern Turkey for the following reasons: a) through his life and writings he increased both consciousness, self- awareness and reflectivity and the self-reflectivity of Muslim people. Through Nursi’s life and writings Islam became both more conscious of itself in the republican period, and at the same time more conscious of the secular and modern environment in which it was called to live; b) Nursi insisted on keeping Islam distinct from politics (2011, 3), did not envisage any Islamic state, but at the same time did not imagine Islam to be a private affair. Instead of a state-centred perspective, he had a faith-centred perspective, which means that Islam was a matter of education, of a faithful attitude spread into society; c) such a society and faith-centred perspective were to have important consequences in further developments of contemporary Turkey. In fact, in the subsequent fragmentation of Said Nursi’s legacy, his teachings were embraced by other movements, such as the Fetüllah Gülen, which I shall consider in the following chapter, making a Sufi-inspired Islam a hegemonic social actor within Turkish civil society. A society-oriented Islam, capable of reaching consensus and shaping a form of life Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 107 through education, more than a state-oriented one, represented the proper tone of the Turkish model.
1980–2000: Paternalistic Domestication of Islam
The period of the predominance of the DP started to change the balance between centre and periphery, mostly including the peasants and non-urban sectors of society within the centre. However, Kemalism had also ‘otherized’ other peripheries, such as pious conservative people (Sunni Muslims), Alevis, Kurds, and other non-Muslim religious and cultural minorities. If the 1960s and 1970s were characterized by other cleavages too, mostly the political divide between left and right, the 1980s and the 1990s are important because they started a process of inclusion at least of the Sunni majority within the centre. However, they are characterized also by the third reaction of the Kemalist centre to such an effort of reshaping the balance between centre and periphery, through the 1981 military coup. To attempt to bring some order in this complex panorama, I want to distinguish between three main narratives that compete for primacy in the Turkish central value system of the time. The first narrative is in my view the most complex. It has to do with the key figure of Turgut Özal, considered – from the point of view of this narrative – the ‘architect of the democratization process’. From such a point of view, it was Turgut Özal’s reform policy that initiated Turkey’s economic, social and political liberalization. If already in the 1960s a newly emerging bourgeoisie was starting to challenge the civilian-military bureaucracy over the definition of the process of modernization, it was during Özal’s years that the power of the cast iron Kemalist cage started to wane, and ‘the new Anatolian business class, along with Istanbul-based industrialists, increased its power’ (Yavuz 2009, 16; Yavuz 2003; ESI 2005). This process opened – according to Mardin – new spaces of opportunity, obviously in the economic sector but also in social and political spheres. Relying upon the network shaped by Nursi’s movement, Özal’s reforms gave a fundamental contribution to the beginning of the formation of a post-Kemalist public sphere, to the vernacularizing of modernity and, in principle, to the transition to a post-Kemalist political order:
With the socio-economic transformation of society, however, new political, economic, and cultural opportunity spaces emerged. These new spaces for political parties, action groups, associations, reading circles, newspapers, and market and fashion shows became sites of contestation and negotiations between Islam and modern lifeworlds. Because Islam is regarded as the major source of the constitution of the Self, religion increasingly became more important in these new urban spaces. As a result of the Turkish experiment with modernity, a number of religious, ethnic, and ideological movements have punctuated the state’s political history. Next to Kurdish ethnonationalism, the Islamic movement has been the most powerful claim-making movement. In short, 108 The Making of a Postsecular Society
the structural transformation (urbanization, industrialization, and education) actually empowered the marginalized sectors of Turkish society and facilitated its return to politics, economy, and education. The return of religious activism and religiously framed movements is not a fearsome “return of the oppressed”, but rather an attempt to vernacularize modernity. (Yavuz and Esposito 2003, xxiii)
Contrary to early-modern theories of modernization, here the process of modernization (liberalization, for example, in the economic sphere) did not imply either a secularist trend, or a reactive revolt against modernity, but the creation of hybrid forms of life, practices and beliefs. Filling the gap opened by these new opportunity spaces, conscious Muslims (Yavuz 2009) started to negotiate new understandings of justice and modernity within the public sphere (Çinar 2005). There is a substantial continuity between Özal’s moral conservatism and economic liberalism on the one hand and the political culture of the presently ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), at least during its first seven years of government on the other. Even if the AK Party comes from the history of the Islamic political parties led by Necmettin Erbakan, important sectors of the intelligentsia close to the AK Party linked the action of the ruling party (before it started to reverse its own reforms) to Özal’s reforms, and give shape to a neo- Ottoman democratic narrative. Even if this narrative plays a key role in the decade subsequent to the 2003 elections, which I shall consider in the next chapter, given that Özal’s figure is considered a turning point in Turkish contemporary history among the intellectuals who underpin the main chapters of this narrative, I prefer to mention its main features here (see Heper and Evin 1994). The reason I call it the neo-Ottoman democratic narrative is because it implies a significant re-definition of the Turkish identity, memory of the past, and prospects for the future (see Barkey 2012).12 Its main features are the idea of continuity with the Ottoman past, instead of the dramatic break stressed by the Kemalist narrative, not without nostalgic and traditionalistic overtones, but also functional – depending on the versions of such a narrative – to a democratization of the national identity in post-Kemalist terms.13 The shaping of this narrative is brought
12 Neo-Ottomanism is a label usually used in the public discourse and scholarly literature above all with reference to the new attention of the AK Party’s foreign policy towards the Middle East and, in general, to a pivotal role played by Turkey in the areas once ruled by the Ottoman Empire. However, it denotes also a broader sensibility in politics, art and culture at large, for the heritage of the Ottoman times. On the (new) Turkish foreign policy, see Robins 1991 and 2007; Schonmann 2008; Jung and Piccoli 2001; Kardas 2006; Yavuz 2009; Sözen 2010; Sahin 2011. 13 It is important to keep in mind that in the Turkish context this Ottoman nostalgia is in a sense shared by liberals too, allied for years with pro-religious conservatives; H.M. Karaveli includes the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk among them: ‘liberal intellectuals tend to embellish the Ottoman, Islamic past. They deplore the “unjust and needless” secularist reforms that “ravaged” the pluralistic, civil society that the Republic had inherited from Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 109 to fruition in the years 2003–2011, but Özal’s years are central to its formation. Consequently, we have to consider Özal’s years as a transitional period, the seeds of which bloom later. The period 1980–2000, in fact, is distinguished by two other narratives, with a lesser degree of reflectivity and self-reflectivity. One is the narrative of political Islam, linked to the figure of Necmettin Erbakan, the other is the Kemalist reaction to it, the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, that in my view leaves its authoritarian and paternalistic mark on this period. Islamic political parties are, in principle, simply not possible in the Turkish legal system, given that, according to the Constitution, religion cannot be used for political purposes. However, Erbakan’s political movements (the National Order Party, 1970–1971; the National Salvation Party, 1972–1980; the Welfare Party, 1983–1998; the Virtue Party, 1998–2001), were among the first overtly Islamic in Turkish republican history. The National View14 (Milli Görüs) parties represented an effort to re-establish Islam and Islamic values at the centre of national life, overcoming the Kemalist project of a Western-like modernity, but combining a religiously inspired communitarian life with science, progress and economic welfare. The National View vision, which politically reached its peak years after the 1980 military coup (Erbakan became the first Islamist prime minister in July 1996), was articulated by Erbakan in his Adil Düzen (Just Order). Summing up its main points, one could say that the general concern of the National View was a criticism of the Kemalist import of a Western – and consequently inauthentic – model for the Turkish context. The National View tried to offer a complete alternative to the Kemalist top-down form of modernization, in economic, political, cultural and social spheres. In economics, for example, the National View sponsored and supported good tradesmen, morally responsible agents, considered part and parcel of the Muslim tradition, and consistent with the Qur’anic model for a balanced political and economic development, in contrast to the Kemalist centralized policies.15 Science (Erbakan himself was an engineer) the Ottoman era. Ottoman nostalgia and the belief that the Republic’s break with a more authentic culture has left an existential void in republican Turkey is, typically, a theme that runs through much of the work of Pamuk. The longing for “authentic” is arguably a distinctly conservative undercurrent in the liberal judgement of Kemalism’ (2010, 96); while I have some reservations on the judgement on Pamuk’s work, the emphasis on the alliance between liberals and religious conservatives is crucial to understanding the democratic nature of this neo-Ottoman narrative. 14 National View is the expression used to indicate Erbakan’s parties and the network of groups and foundations associated with them. 15 According to Haldun Gulalp, the National View position can be considered exemplary of a shift from developmentalist to ‘post-developmentalist’ concerns in Turkey. In the 1970s, ‘Erbakan’s party championed ‘heavy industry’ as the surest route to Turkey’s independence from the West. Twenty years later, in its present reincarnation as Refah Partisi (Welfare Party), the Islamist party no longer emphasizes the need for industrialization but rather focuses on such “post-industrial” themes as protecting the environment, building civil society, and withdrawing the state from all economic activities’ (1997, 59). 110 The Making of a Postsecular Society was not considered antithetical to Islam, but instead of Western positivism, the National View exalted Islamic contributions to the global culture. Kemalist secularism was criticized as being inconsistent and at the same time inauthentic and oppressive; the Kemalist view of the nation was considered Leviathan, a continuation of Western colonization on Muslim land. Finally, Western culture was criticized because of its materialism and denial of religious values. However, the most interesting and characteristic element of the National View was its recovery of an alternative model of social contract, elaborated by Islamic intellectuals, notably Ali Bulaç, that proposed relying upon the heritage of the Muslim experience above all as codified in the so-called ‘Medina contract’, in order to deal with contemporary pluralism. It was a reflection on a different understanding of citizenship, overtly critical of the Kemalist model. State-controlled secularism, in fact, proved to be not hospitable to diversity and ‘has usually adopted the position that diversity is detrimental to national unity and social cohesion’ (Baban 2004, 1). Not coincidentally, it was the Medina document and not the millet system that was recovered. In fact, according to Islamic intellectuals a fundamental difference distinguished them. Whereas ‘in the Ottoman Millet system a hierarchy existed between religious communities (…), the Muslim community was the ‘sovereign nation’ (millet-I hakime) and non-Muslim communities were ‘subject nations’ (millet-I mahkume) (…) in the Medina document no such hierarchical division existed, with each community awarded equal status’ (2004, 12). In Ali Bulaç’s words, the Medina document was a multi-religious pluralistic project within the framework of a common political body (the umma). One of the most well-known Islamic scholars in the 1990s (see Toprak 1993; Meeker 1991; Karasipahi 2009), Ali Bulaç presented the Medina document in 1998 as a project of living together ‘alternative to a modern state that is becoming more totalitarian, overtly and covertly, through raw or sophisticated means’ (Bulaç 1998, 178). According to Bulaç, this project – aimed at ending a situation of conflict between religious communities after the Prophet Muhammad’s hijra in 622 – rested on two basic principles: first, the principle ‘to you your religion, to me my religion’ (Sura 109, Verse 6), or in other words, ‘you are what you are’, which invited everyone to exist on legal foundations, and secondly on a principle of participation instead of domination. In more detail, the implicit constitutive principles in the Medina document were:
a. the idea that a righteous and law-respecting project of living together ‘cannot but be based on a contract among different groups’ (1998, 174); on the basis of this contract, where groups were named and cited one by one, commonalities belong to the sphere of the covenant, differences to the autonomous sphere; b. participation rather than domination, namely an inclusive and equalitarian principle, has to be the starting point, because by definition a totalitarian or unitarian political arrangement cannot allow for diversity. This is a first, important, provisional conclusion: Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 111
each religious and ethnic group enjoys complete cultural and legal autonomy. In other words, in such areas as religion, law-making, judiciary, education, trade, culture, art, and the organization of daily life, each group will remain as it is and will express itself through the cultural and legal criteria it defines. (1998, 175)
c. the implicit principle is that a righteous project of living together has to rest on the idea of ‘multiple judicial systems’ (see Turner and Arslan 2011):
in a pluralist society, several legal systems, not necessarily one single system, may coexist. Of course if conflicts arise between laws – which are expected to arise – in these cases either a Court of Mazalim [Injustice] extends its authority to decide the case, as was the case historically; or higher courts formed by the legal representatives of all legal communities may be established. (Bulaç 1998, 175)
Bulaç’s preference at the time was for leaving ‘the injured party free to choose among legal systems’, a possibility inscribed within the Islamic law.
d. a fourth implicit principle was that the umma was not stripped of every function. On the contrary, certain issues remained subject to its legislation:
While the Document transfers power to central authority (the state?) in judiciary, defence, and the proclamation of war – legislation, culture, science, arts, economy, education, health and other services are left to civil society. (1998, 178)
Despite its recognition of the prerogative of a central authority, it is clear that the Medina document, and Bulaç’s interpretation and advocacy of it, ‘gives priority to civil society over the state because the communities themselves decide what is good and bad for the community’ (Baban 2004, 13). After all, according to Bulaç,
Experience shows that unless the realms of economy, culture, science, education, art, health, communication and so on are taken away from the control of the centralized state and transferred to groups with different religions and identities, real pluralism cannot be envisioned. The precondition for such a revolutionary design is to bring the singular quality of law to an end and to leave this realm, among others, to the discretion of legal groups. (Bulaç 1998, 178)
A bottom-up model of participation replaces a model centred on a singular sovereignty. Such a pluralistic legal system (see Rosati 2010) is the expression of a view of the nation understood as a ‘union of communities’, where the state has the 112 The Making of a Postsecular Society role of moderator (see Tepe 2008, 196). However, the defence of this ‘multi-legal community’ (Yavuz 2003, 227) by the National View, raised much controversy. Ironically, it has been criticized because of its limited pluralism:
… the NV’s inclusive ideology is challenged by ummah’s unity and its reduction of Islam to mostly hegemonic orthodox Islamic practices. The limitations of such reductionism manifest themselves best in the conditional acceptance of heterodox communities. The public practice of Islam becomes decisive in defining Muslim identity, notwithstanding the promise of inclusive membership in a Just Order and its national and transnational community (…). As a result, the party’s silence on how to deal with differences that result from divergent interpretations and historical constructions of Islam poses significant questions regarding the boundaries of its inclusive rhetoric. (Tepe 2008, 199)
In fact, significant questions also concern other aspects of Erbakan andthe National View’s outlook. Erbakan’s rhetoric and speeches were strongly marked by anti-Zionist tones, and his view of international politics and relations (Erbakan was against Europe, NATO and other international organizations) was biased by the usual repertoire of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic convictions: ‘he explicitly accused a particular group, the ‘Zionists’ of controlling the whole world. He accused every other political party in Turkey of blatant, co-ordinated corruption. He stated quite openly that Europe and America, having being bought out by the “Zionists”, have enslaved Turkey’ (Shankland 1999, 117). In other words, though the National View played a role in bringing the Sunni majority closer to the centre of the Turkish national value system, it chose a confrontational approach that was poor in terms of reflectivity and self-reflectivity, and very limited in terms of openness to other minorities and peripheries. Such a confrontational and ultimately anti-pluralistic approach on the part of the National View – which I must say is shared by post-Islamist intellectuals such as Bulaç too, despite his own defence of the pluralistic attitude within Islam16 – can be observed also at the symbolic level. A few examples (among many) that could be taken into account of conflict over symbols involving the National View parties over the years, above all in the 1990s, when the Welfare Party had significant experience of government in big cities such as Istanbul and Ankara, as well as at the national level. Let us start with the controversies surrounding the ‘provocation’ of building a big mosque in Taksim Square, Istanbul. It followed the Refah Party’s victory in the election in 1994, which caused a great shock to the secularists. The idea of building a huge mosque in Taksim Square was symbolically provocative, because Taksim Square is not just any place. Many new mosques have been built since the 1980s, but Taksim Square is the symbol of the secular republic, the symbolic home of secular Turkey (see also Chapter 7). It is where the Republic Monument
16 Quite evident in his weekly columns in the newspaper Today’s Zaman, above all when he writes about Israel, Europe and the USA. Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 113 is, where the Atatürk Cultural Center hosts concerts, exhibitions and theatrical performances, and where workers and political groups gather for protests and marches. Furthermore, Taksim Square is at the beginning of Istiklal Çaddesi, the heart of Beyoglu, by definition the most ‘European’ area of Istanbul. In other words, almost nothing there says that you are in the city that was the former capital of the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, both sides – Islamists and secularists – recognized that Taksim Square is a symbol of the nation, and this is why it was relevant for secularists to defend the secular profile of the square, and for the Islamists to make Islam visible right there. As Alev Çinar wrote, ‘Islamists chose to compete for the same space with secularists, to frame and reshape the centre of the city in accordance with their nationalist project’ (2005, 116). Contested memories (the Ottoman and Muslim past of Turkey) and identities (secularists or otherwise) were contrasted through and in space:
the controversy over the Taksim Mosque project was over Turkey’s national identity. What was at stake in this dispute between secularists and Islamists was whether or not Turkish national identity would incorporate and use Islam as a self-defining mark. The adamant secularist reaction against the project reflected the obstinacy of secularists against granting Islam a visible presence in the Turkish national identity. On the other hand, the aggressive promotion of the project by Islamist circles reflected a desire to insert Islam into national space – both the nationalized space in Taksim Square and the conceptual space of the nation wherein the national identity was formulated. Therefore, the Taksim Mosque became an attempt to inscribe Islam upon secular-national space, and emerged as the articulation of the Islamist version of nationhood as part of an alternative nationalist ideology that designated the national space of Taksim Square as the appropriate place to establish itself as a contending nationalist project. (2005, 117)
Compared to other cases and examples taken into consideration, the Taksim Square controversy is also instructive because here space is the battlefield of opposite factions unable to find a common definition of their national identity. If they had common ground in the nationalist horizon, they deeply disagreed over the definition of such a nationalist project, and no common symbol emerged. It was in a sense a struggle for the symbolic appropriation of the space, where no co-existence between religious and secularist profiles could easily be conceived of. The project was abandoned after 1997, following the National Security Council decree in February, and the shutdown of the Refah Party and the removal from office of the then Mayor Erdoğan. However, it is interesting that a decade later, controversies started over the appropriate use of the Atatürk Cultural Center, in Taksim Square, a temple of the secularist bourgeoisie, which some circles consider under-exploited, and would like to see opened to activities with religious leanings. Similar dynamics were present in other cities too. Ankara is another interesting case, because Ankara is not just any city. Chosen by Atatürk himself to be the 114 The Making of a Postsecular Society capital city of the new, Republican and secular nation, Ankara was built on a rationalist design, to express the essence of the positivist and modern view of Kemalism, to be the ‘anti’-Istanbul: ‘in urbanist terms, the planning of the capital city of Ankara is an unsurpassed example of the monumental narrative of modern Turkey’ (Nalbantoglu 1997, 193). As such, the city was ruled for many years by Kemalist parties, and it was the model of the ‘secular city’. However, starting from 1994, pro-Islamist parties won local elections three times, and the ‘secularist dream’ started to ‘vanish’: in 1994, the new mayor had a statue that he judged obscene removed, following which other statues were removed from public spaces for the same reason; but in 1995 a still more potent symbolic ‘attack’ on the secular city was launched,
this time on the Ankara emblem. In 1997 the City Council had selected the “Hitit Sun” which represents the ancient roots of Ankara, to be the city’s emblem or badge. After another City Council in 1995 the “Hitit Sun” was replaced by a new emblem, a composition of a mosque and stars. This started a long debate over what image should represent the capital. Only recently, in July 2008, did a court decision put an end to this dispute and stipulate that the City Council’s decision of 1995 to replace the “Hitit Sun” was unlawful. However, so far the Metropolitan Municipality of Ankara has not acted on this decision. (Sönmez 2010, 260; see also Hanioğlu 2011, 196–7)17
Once again, one has to consider the symbolic relevance of such controversy. The ‘Hitit Sun’ emblem establishes a clear and direct link between the city and its Kemalist identity, being the Turkish History thesis – according to which the Turks and the Ottomans were descendants of migrants from Central Asia – an Atatürkist invention.18 And once again, one has to remember that an emblem is not just an emblem or a mere artifice; an emblem, or a symbol, ‘by expressing the social unity tangibly, it makes the unity itself more tangible to all (…) the emblem is not only a convenient method of clarifying the awareness the society has of itself: it serves to create – and is a constitutive element of – that awareness’ (Durkheim 1995, 231). Moreover, after shaping the group’s identity and self-awareness, the emblem makes this awareness stable over time, preventing it from fading out when the group is not gathered together: ‘without symbols, social feelings could have only an unstable existence. Those feelings are very strong so long as men are assembled, mutually influencing one another, but when the gathering is over,
17 In September 2011 the Turkish Council of State also cancelled a further design, known as the ‘Smiling Cat of Ankara’, a Turkish Angora, that the City Council chose as the new logo after being forced to replace the previous one that featured the Kocatepe Mosque. The Turkish Council of State established that the Hitit Sun had to be considered the only legitimate logo. 18 The Anadolu Medeniyetler Muzesi, The Anatolian Civilizations Museum, being a wonderful expression of national pedagogy, see Gür 2007. Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 115 they survive only in terms of memories that gradually dim and fade away if left to themselves’ (Durkheim 1995, 232). As in the case of Taksim Square, here too we have a ‘struggle between two projects not yet overt’ (Sönmez 2010, 264), where it seems that no common ground is possible, and even a peaceful co-existence between different narratives is under pressure. Other examples are possible, and some of them will be considered later: national commemorations of the Republic Day or Independence War, reinterpreted by Islamists along lines that include Islam in the national epic (Özyürek 2006), or counter-celebrations (such as May 29 in Istanbul, an unofficial celebration that Islamic circles are used to commemorating to remember the conquest of Constantinople in 1453) (Çinar 2005). However, what is common to them all is a confrontational, reactive, defensive character that does not trigger any complementary learning process. The fourth narrative, the one that characterizes this phase most, is the Turkish- Islamic synthesis. From the political point of view, the Turkish-Islamic synthesis has been expressed in its purest form by the Nationalist Action Party (NAP), from 1973 to date. Ideologically, its clearest statements are formulated in Alparslan Türkes’ works, such as Nine Lights. The political history of this formation is controversial and stormy: despite a perceived affinity with Kemalism, the organization was closed down and the party banned in 1980, and the NAP ‘from its inception both challenged and was challenged by the Kemalist State’ (Tepe 2008, 164) – and yet the NAP was meant to be a Kemalist, nationalist party, but also Islamist. Having a grey wolf as its symbol, the NAP maintained that Islamic values are inherent in the Turkish tradition, and that there is a strict and constitutive nexus between Turkish ethnicity and Islamic customs. This compatibility and synthesis between ethno-nationalism (grounded on the idea of Turkishness) and Islam, is made possible through two different theses. The first is that pre-Islamic Turkish traditions have the same Islamic attributes. Even kut, a divinity of pre- Islamic Turks, shares many of the attributes of Allah: ‘the traditional religions of the Turkish people, in essence, were always monotheistic and maintained moral standards comparable to those of Islam. Therefore, when the Turks adopted Islam, they merely completed their ethical and spiritual growth’ (Tepe 2008, 166). The second thesis is that nationalism and Islam’s universalism are not at odds at all. In fact, the Qur’an recognizes, according to Türkes, that national loyalties do not bring fragmentations, but facilitate progress toward a global Islamic community of ummah. Besides that, the NAP enlarged ideally Turkish borders that naturally and culturally do not coincide with the present ones, but have roots in Central Asia. Emphasizing the harmony between Turkish culture and Islamic civilization, the NAP gave even more than ‘standard’ Kemalism a transcendent value to the state, bringing to fruition the Turkish State Tradition. In fact, in the NAP’s view, the state has to protect the national religious community. Not surprisingly, this view was very influential in different sectors of Turkish polity and the state, Turgut Özal included, but above all among the military, and 116 The Making of a Postsecular Society mainly over the General-President Kenan Evren, the key figure of the 1980 coup. Its appeal derives from the promise of keeping together two dimensions traditionally in tension in Turkish cultural and political life, namely nationalism and religion. However, independently from the factual difficulties of the NAP in keeping them together without hypocritical or disqualifying compromises (Tepe 2008, 169), the main problem arises still at the conceptual level. Looking for national unity within a religious-ethnic community, the Turkish-Islamist synthesis implies an exclusive and not inclusive view of the national identity, incapable of making room for non- Sunni believers and non-Turkish ethnicities. The story of the NAP is also a story of violence, against leftists, Kurds, and whoever is not ‘naturally’ incorporated into the Turkish-Sunni identity: ‘although its Turkish-Islamic ideal allows the NAP to reach out to all cultural, religious, and ethnic groups with success, some distinctive groups, for instance the Alevi and Kurds, are incorporated into this unity only to the extent that they accept the deeply rooted organic unity. Their identities, therefore, become a contingent, yet integral, part of the Turkish identity’ (Tepe 2008, 175). In other words, the NAP expresses the rightist side and core of the Kemalist centre, today represented by the MHP, which in the 2011 National election had 13 percent of the vote. Here religion is instrumental for political purposes, becoming nothing more than a dimension of a non-inclusive ethnic, cultural and nationalistic view; it is openly recognized, but in an authoritarian and paternalistic way. The NAP is just one of the movements that compose the plethora of conservative camps, and other versions of the Islamic-Turkish synthesis have characterized Turkey over the past decades as well as nowadays. At least two other versions have to be mentioned. One is the movement of the Grey Wolves, known above all in the 1970s for assassinating members of the left, Alevis and Kurds, as well as for the attack on Pope John Paul II in 1981, when Ali Agca, a member of the Grey Wolves, shot at and critically wounded the Pope. The other is the movement of the ‘Green Wolves’, so-called by Mustafa Akyol to indicate religious ultra-nationalists whose voice became stronger in the 1990s as a reaction ‘against the more moderate and Western-friendly Islamic circles that were represented by the AKP’ (White 2013, 67). Fringes of these movements, such as the Alperen Ocaklari, the juvenile organization of the Büyük Birlik Partisi, Great Unity Party, were active also in demonstrating against the Pope’s visit to Ayasofia, as we shall see in Chapter 8. As Jenny White writes, ‘some of the suspects involved in the murder of Hrant Dink [see Chapter 9] and other political assassinations are reportedly members of the Grand Unity Party (…)’ (ibid.). Common to all these variants of the Turkish Islamic synthesis is the fear of plurality and diversity, the uneasiness towards Sufi religious orders, Alevis, Kurds, Turkish Christians and Christian missionaries, of whom they fear ‘divisive’ activities (Özyürek 2012). The Turkish-Islamist synthesis is the third form that the relationship between religion and modernity took in Turkey: neither mutual non-recognition, nor democratization of an authoritarian modernity by a more reflective religious tradition, but a recognition by state and politics of a specific religious tradition Centre and Periphery in the History of Republican Turkey 117 instrumental to identity projects, and a willingness by a specific (majoritarian) religious tradition to be exploited politically (and implicitly non-recognized qua religion) in order to keep its condition of monopoly. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 6 From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? The Neo-Ottoman (Democratic) Narrative and the Reconstruction of the Turkish Central Value System
The Struggle for Hegemony in Contemporary Turkey
A central issue considered in this book is the ongoing process of transition from a Kemalist understanding of secularism and national identity, to a post-Kemalist view of the place of religions and cultural differences at large in social and political life in contemporary Turkey. What is happening in Turkey today is not without deep contradictions and false moves, as is the effort of writing a new narrative, the making of a new post-Kemalist and postsecular national identity. Such efforts imply the reshaping of the collective consciousness, making hegemonic a new story of the Turkish past, present and future. I maintain that such efforts are self- projected, that is, that specific social actors behave instrumentally at different levels to the writing of this new narrative. At the same time, social and cultural change happens also in less conscious and instrumental ways, in everyday practices. In this chapter, I consider three different levels at which social actors, some deliberately, some less consciously, are contributing in different ways to writing a new hegemonic narrative, which I call the neo-Ottoman (democratic) narrative.1 First, I start with everyday practices, ‘fragments of cultures’ and new forms of sociality; secondly, I shift to consider a different social arena where a relevant self-aware redefinition of the Turkish identity profile is suggested and shaped, so to speak, that is to say the journalistic arena. Finally, I take briefly into account the political arena. Everyday social practices in public spaces, journalistic
1 As will become clear from the following pages, there are different versions of the neo-Ottoman narrative. Some of them are more liberal-minded, others more radically democratic, others less pluralistic. I enclose ‘democratic’ in brackets just to signal that a neo-Ottoman narrative cannot be judged in itself either necessarily un-democratic or democratic; rather it depends on the balance between the different elements it is made up of. I shall highlight such elements during the chapter. 120 The Making of a Postsecular Society narratives and political action are three examples of the several ways in which a new narrative strives to become hegemonic. But what exactly do we mean by saying that a new narrative, a new collective consciousness, a new central value system and its symbols, strive to become hegemonic? Here it would be worthwhile recalling briefly Antonio Gramsci’s view of state and society. Gramsci’s key role in Marxist intellectual history2 has to do with his recognition of the relative autonomy of ideas and culture in the class struggle against the dogmatic Marxist views of the dependence of the supra-structure on the economic structure. Far from being a mere reflection of economic relationships, ideas and values play a significant part in the shaping of a collectivity and its identity. The collective consciousness of a society is a field of antagonistic forces that tries to pervade the social body to shape it accordingly to specific world-views. Operating through constraint and consent, such forces are successful in making the social order stable and solidaristic only if they prove to be organic within a specific social context, history and life-world. They must, in other words, be in tune with a given society, even when they try to change it. Architects of such a building of collective consciousness are ‘organic intellectuals’, articulating needs, aspirations, values and interests of progressive social forces and classes. They operate in different realms, in civil society as well as in the political and economic domains. If they operate only by force, they establish a dictatorship, and a social order like this is doomed to fall apart very soon; ‘a stable ruling class, on the other hand, is able to exercise what Gramsci called “hegemony” over the other classes of society through the ideological institutions of civil society: the family, the school, the church, the media, political parties, legislatures, etc. Civil and political society together make up the state’ (Mansueto 1988, 272; Özkirimli 2013, 74). The shaping of a new collective consciousness, a new narrative, is a ‘war of position’ to gain control of civil and political society. There must be a ‘historical bloc’ made of organic intellectuals, political actors and social economic classes, who consciously try to play a progressive part in modelling a new narrative in tune with the cultural traits of a given society (Thomas 2009). In my view, this is what is happening in Turkey today.3 The Kemalist narrative is perceived as non-organic to Turkish history and
2 Of course, Gramsci was also a leading figure in Italian political life during the fascist regime; on Gramsci’s life and work, in English, see http://www.internationalgramscisociety. org/. 3 My use of the Gramscian concept differs from Tuğal’s (2009), who links Gramsci’s notion of hegemony – to analyse contemporary Turkey – to that of passive revolution. According to Tuğal, ‘passive revolution is indeed a viable, even if unstable, route to a market economy’ and ‘moderate Islam is the culmination of a long process of passive revolution as a result of which erstwhile radicals and their followers are brought into the fold of neoliberalism, secularism, and Western domination’ (p. 4). Though in the following pages I try to stress ambiguities of the ongoing process and to keep a critical distance from non-reformist and increasingly authoritarian traits of the AK Party’s political and economic action, I am afraid that Tuğal’s perspective undermines the genuine potential of democratization of Turkish contemporary Islam; furthermore, from a theoretical point of From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 121 culture, and that explains why, according to the new narrative, it did not become hegemonic in the Gramscian sense, in addition to why force and the role of the military were key elements in enforcing the Kemalist social order. Nowadays, a new neo-Ottoman (democratic) narrative is struggling to replace the Kemalist one to gain such a hegemonic position. It is trying to do so by consent, by means of the daily ‘war of position’ in the cultural domain, in civil as well as in political society, and of course, by means of economic policies that are market-oriented. Well- known debates and conflicts on the headscarf issue, but also on the imam-hatip religious schools (and recently on the so-called new 4+4+4 school system; on the imam-hatip schools, see Ozgur 2012), as well as debates on music and novels à la franca or à la turca, controversies over architectural styles of public buildings and mosques, all (and many others) are bases for conflicts for the establishment of hegemonic views of social order (Çayir 2006; Kandiyoti 1997; Bozdogan 1997; Meeker 1997; Özbek 1997; Özdemir and Frank 2000; Göle 1996; Çinar 2005; Agai 2006; Tapper 1994; Kandiyoti and Saktanber 2002; Navaro-Yashin 2002). What is at stake in these conflicts is the hegemony of a Kemalist narrative of social order and secularism, or instead, its replacement with a (democratic) Neo-Ottoman narrative. Conflict and the experience of disruptiveness are part and parcel of the shaping of a new collective consciousness (Göle 2011).
Neo-Ottoman Social Practices
The study of everyday social practices in public spaces is a particularly relevant sociological way of focusing on changing balances between ‘modern’, Kemalist understandings of social roles and world-views on the one hand, and allegedly ‘traditionalist’, religiously inspired (mostly Muslim) outlooks on the other. What is evident from studies over the headscarf and similar issues (see note 4) is precisely the redefinition of the very idea of modernity, not at all rejected by the alleged conservatives, but on the contrary endorsed and re-read in a way that transforms both religious and secular world-views. As I have tried to show in the chapter on the idea of the postsecular (Chapter 2), the postsecular has nothing to do either with Peter Berger’s idea of de-secularization of the contemporary world, or with a view, understanding current developments in Turkey as only a form of passive revolution means reducing once again the notion of hegemony to the structural dimension of the market economy, losing the theoretical novelty of Gramsci’s categories. In other words, my effort is that of focusing on the cultural dimension, finding traces of dominion within cultural narratives, although I am aware of the strict relationship between the cultural and the economic dimensions of social life. Furthermore, Tuğal seems to me to have a reductive view of the notion of hegemony, understood as ‘the organization of consent for domination and inequality’ (p. 24), excluding in this way any positive relationship between hegemony and subaltern groups. For a recent use of the Gramscian notion of hegemony to interpret the Middle-East situation, see Journal of Levantine Studies, Vol. 2, n. 2, 2012. 122 The Making of a Postsecular Society sort of de-differentiation of state and church; on the contrary, postsecular states and societies are rather those wherein secular and religious world-views are part of the same field. The postsecular condition is that in which ‘the dividing lines and roles of religion and science, faith and reason, tradition and innovation are no longer rigidly enforced (…) and new relations of possibility are emerging’ (Beaumont and Baker 2011, 2). To borrow Nilüfer Göle’s effective term, the postsecular condition is that in which new zones of ‘interpenetration’ between the religious and the secular are possible, albeit through antagonistic and disruptive processes (Göle 2005). Everyday social practices are precisely the ground on which these areas of interpenetration, sometimes in confrontational ways, take shape, and the dividing lines between tradition and innovation are drawn. Among the many kinds of social practices that may produce similar effects, I want to reflect upon the new forms of sociality studied by Uğur Kömeçoglu and related to Islamic cafes in Istanbul – a less known but equally relevant example compared to the debates over the headscarf. As Kömeçoglu writes, Islamic cafes are now regaining a public visibility and importance after decades of sluggishness and decay. Supplanted by modern, Western-style cafes, traditional Islamic cafes became in the past decades places ‘where unemployed, uneducated, and especially, retired males played cards or backgammon to kill time’ (Kömeçoglu 2006, 164; Kömeçoglu 2005). Nowadays, however, the old kahvehanes – under the new label of ‘café’ – are gaining a new relevance as places of a hybrid publicness, both traditional and modern.4 Considering two empirical examples, the Kaknüs Cafe in the Kiz Kulesi Cultural Center in Üsküdar, Istanbul, and the Medrese Cafe in the Istanbul Cultural Center in Cagaloglu, Kömeçoglu points out that:
these places are an outcome of the Islamic cultural revitalization gaining momentum since the nineteen nineties, and with the establishment of such places as Kaknüs Cafe and Medrese Cafe, one senses the attempt, albeit unconscious, to recreate in modern times, even if in altered form, the old Ottoman coffeehouse, in which cultural and literary activities took place. It is an attempt to resuscitate the cultural memory by reconstructing spaces for public involvement, making use of classical ideas of space. At the time when European-type cafes have become so widespread, the Islamic actor who has established a coffeehouse, prefers not to call the place kahvehane, but uses the Western term café, in order to avoid the negative connotations associated with kahvehane. (Kömeçoglu 2006, 169)
In places like these modernity and tradition are mixed and hybridized with each other not only linguistically; gender relations are transformed too. In fact, while
4 Kömeçoglu, as well as Nilüfer Göle and others, such as Weintraub and Richard Sennett, conceptualize public space more as a space of symbolic display, ‘of complex blending of practical motives with interaction rituals and personal ties, of physical proximity coexisting with social distance’, rather than as places for rational and communicative action as in Habermas. See Weintraub 1997; Göle, 2011. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 123 traditional kahvehane were spaces segregated on the basis of sex (they were places only for men), in the new Islamic cafes, on the contrary, males and females are free to mix in the same social space, even if the owner of one of these cafes tries to restrict some kinds of behaviour, ‘such as flirtatious gender relations’ (2006, 170).
Thus, the strongest element of an Islamic public realm, namely gender politics, is increasingly being questioned when it comes to the traditional form of women’s visibility in closed public spaces. Women’s bodies, sensations, and sexuality are still controlled, but interestingly, not by traditional Islamic spatial arrangements, but within a modern discourse centered on the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and body, on controlling senses and emotional drives between the sexes by inner persuasion. However, inner persuasions are not adequate to preserve Islamic morality for the actor; there is an inherent tension between individuation strategies, definitions of the self and Islamic morality. (2006, 173)
The crucial point here is the mutual transformation of both religious and secular notions.5 Young male and female Muslims become conscious Muslims, namely they willingly recover, restore and preserve their traditional faith, adjusting it to modern times (changing the traditional view of Islamic social space), through the logic of a Western social space; in this way, both Western-modernity and traditional faith are challenged, changed and made hybrid in a very tense and creative relationship. Combining Islamic tradition with modern practices, places like these are the social frame, stage and theatre, where a postsecular society is shaped. Conscious Muslims in social stages like these cafes contest the Kemalist and secular view of the public sphere, assert their particularistic identity, while at the same time refusing to keep it within closed enclaves:
By presenting themselves in a way that announces their group identity, they culturally and ideologically contest the modernist/secularist public sphere. The Islamic public that emerges in cafes like Medrese and Kaknüs is a sphere in opposition to both liberal and extreme communitarian visions, occupied neither by atomistic individuals nor solid communities. (2006, 184)
As is evident from this interesting and little known example, compared to the debate on the headscarf, here the Ottoman imaginary is not recovered for nostalgic purposes, but on the contrary within a neo-Ottoman horizon that aims at shaping a local form of modernity (Göle 2010).
5 C. Houston’s research provides other examples of encounters ‘transgressive of the strict codes of conduct constituting the utopian orders of both secular modernist and Islamist worlds’, 2001, 86. 124 The Making of a Postsecular Society
The Making of a Neo-Ottoman Narrative in the Journalistic Arena: The Today’s Zaman Newspaper
Social theory is well aware of the relevance of media and newspapers in the making of the public sphere. Though nowadays newspapers are far from being the most important media (Habermas 1991; Thompson 1995; Habermas 2007), given the strategic importance of new media such as the internet and social networks, e-newspapers keep a relevant role in expressing and shaping opinions. Since 2007, Today’s Zaman has been the most widespread English-language newspaper in Turkey. In fact, it is important to know and to keep in mind that Today’s Zaman is part of a big media network related to the Gülen movement, arguably one of the most important social actors in contemporary Turkish civil society (Yavuz and Esposito 2003; Yavuz 2003; Lorasdagi 2007). Even until the end of the 1980s, Gülen was essentially a Turko-Ottoman nationalist. He was interested in redefining the Turkish national identity as Ottoman and Islamic, firmly within a state-centred frame. However, stressing the Ottoman (and Sufi) legacy and favour of Turkish Islam, during the last two decades he (and his media and educational network) has been changing his language, vocabulary and message significantly.6 According to Hakan Yavuz, an important scholar of contemporary Turkey, sympathetic with the Gülen movement’s views, ‘Gülen is attempting to construct a new social contract in which the multiculturalist Turko- Ottoman tradition plays a formative role’ (Yavuz 2003, 197). The key point is that the Gülen movement, Today’s Zaman included, fosters the idea of a new social contract (perhaps it would be preferable to call it a covenant), in which key words and concepts, but also emotional feelings, are: a) the Ottoman heritage interpreted as a guarantee of tolerance and respect for differences; b) multiculturalism as the natural contemporary form that that legacy takes; c) the language of human rights as the best way to defend differences and the rights of Black Turkey ‘otherized’ by Kemalism; d) an uncontested secular frame, parallel to; e) an open criticism of the Kemalist understanding of secularism. I shall now identify these features of the neo-Ottoman democratic narrative sponsored by the Gülen movement, in the writing of three well-known and authoritative columnists of Today’s Zaman, and in that of a columnist of the Hürriyet Daily News, who shares many ideas with them.7 Among the columnists I consider, there are some who cannot be defined as neo-Ottomans; however, they are paradigmatic expressions of those liberal and democratic thinkers and public intellectuals who – at least until 2011 – were
6 For the educational network of the Gülen movement, and particularly religious education, Agai (2006); for a comprehensive story of the movement in its different phases and for criticisms, Yavuz 2013; for the movement and ‘the politics of engagement’, see Turam 2007; for the movement’s market-oriented mind-set, Keskin 2012. 7 In the following section I use as sources articles and columns by the personalities under consideration, and personal interviews with three of them: Orhan K. Cengiz, Ishan Daği, and Mustafa Akyol. I was unable to interview Ibrahim Kalin. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 125 sympathetic to the AK Party’s democratic policies, and in this sense were part of a liberal-democratic-conservative alliance that shaped a neo-Ottoman democratic narrative. The neo-Ottoman (democratic) narrative is the outcome of a cultural and political alliance between Muslim conservatives, Muslim liberals, liberals and leftist democrats. Two of the columnists I consider in the following pages are on the Muslim conservative side of the alliance, one is a leftist democrat, and the other is a liberal. However, as I attempt to show, they share some key elements of the same neo-Ottoman democratic narrative, either out of sincere adherence or for instrumental reasons. The first personality I consider isIbrahim Kalin. Chief Foreign Policy Advisor to the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Kalin received his PhD from the George Washington University in Washington, DC. Widely trained in Islamic studies, his research is in Ottoman intellectual history, and interfaith relations. These interests brought him to be among the signatories of the Common Word, a major initiative to improve Muslim-Christian relations. As a columnist of Today’s Zaman, Kalin writes mostly on perceptions of Islam in Europe, religion(s) in Turkey, and the AK Party foreign policy. Naming, according to Kalin, is important, because naming says something crucial about identity. However, the problem with Turkey has always been that ‘Turkey has been called many things’ (Terrible Turk, the Sick Man of Europe at the time of the late Ottoman Empire and so on), and in this way it has been in a sense subject to Orientalism (Said 1979). However, what is new, according to Kalin, is that today Turkey is ‘reinventing itself as a young, dynamic and self-confident country’, and it is doing so ‘according to its own references’.8 This search for a new voice may appear at times a rather confused debate, but despite confusion, ‘through its democracy and pluralism, growing economy and dynamic bold foreign policy, Turkey is building not just a new image but a new identity’.9 Democracy and pluralism are the cultural and political traits of a young and internationally more and more relevant country. What must be noted is that new collective energy stems from a recovered capacity of the country for being in touch with itself, expressing itself through ‘its own references’. This is where religion comes into the picture, and Kalin addresses critically the Kemalist project of modernization. The Kemalist project of modernization was Jacobin, in the sense of being elite-driven, top-down, and religion was ostracized, so that today ‘religion is probably the single most difficult issue to discuss in Turkey’10 and is a source of tension: ‘there is always high tension, anger, emotion, passion when religion comes up. The religious conservatives display anger towards those who do not practice religion. The secularists fear a religious comeback and resort to all kinds of authoritarian measures to suppress religiosity’.11 However, the real point
8 I. Kalin, ‘Turkey finds a new voice to express itself’, Today’s Zaman, 14/7/2011. 9 Ibid. 10 I. Kalin, ‘Talking about religion in Turkey’, Today’s Zaman, 28/2/2008. 11 Ibid. 126 The Making of a Postsecular Society is not, in Kalin’s narrative, the struggle between secularists and ‘the so-called Islamists’, but ‘between reformists and the establishment’.12 This is a crucial point of the neo-Ottoman narrative: the real struggle in Turkey is against the establishment, the deep state, the Kemalist centre, the historical bloc made by the military and the judiciary. Ergenekon13 is the material and symbolic expression of power that resists the democratization of the country. Between reformists and secularists, Kalin maintains, there is democracy, ‘the middle ground embraced by all Turks’. But, and again it is a key point, ‘it is a democracy that is also at peace with the history and culture of Turkey’,14 which means that it is from the Jacobean, Western-like, positivistic project of Kemalism. The real struggle is not between Islam and democracy, but between centre and periphery, in Turkey as elsewhere in the Muslim world, between ‘powerful centralized states and the disempowered peripheries’.15 The AK Party’s years are, according to Kalin, a time of democratization. Central to the democratizing project, it is a reconsideration of the Kemalist understanding of secularism. Those who fear that their life and country are threatened by a hidden project of re-Islamization (the famous allegedly ‘hidden agenda’ of the AK Party) and re-introduction of the Sharia in the country, think of secularism as ‘more than simply the separation of religion and state’.16 They have an assertive view of secularism; for them, ‘it is a way of life. It is the foundation of the Turkish Republic. It is the essence of Atatürk’s legacy. It is the only way to move Turkey forward against the threat of an outdated tradition and religious dogmatism’.17 However, in this way secularism is transformed into just a specific and particular world-view, instead of being a common ground on which to confront different world-views. The problem ‘with the defenders of secularism in Turkey’, Kalin maintains, ‘is that they see their way of life as the only one worth protecting. What is more troubling is that they see their lifestyle as identical to the fundamental principles of the republic’,18 though they are a ‘militantly secularist minority’. The underlying argument is that secularism à la turca, so to speak, is a force against pluralism. Identifying secularism with a single lifestyle and with the basic principle of the Turkish Republic, ideology and collective life, impedes the flourishing and even the very existence of other lifestyles; but ‘democracy is not a regime where everyone thinks the same way and lives the same way. On the contrary, democracy is a regime of reconciling differences by accepting different views and lifestyles as being of equal value’.19 In other words, in Kalin’s narrative,
12 I. Kalin, ‘Islam, democracy and Turkey’, Today’s Zaman, 18/3/2010. 13 On Ergenekon see Chapter 9. 14 I. Kalin, ‘Islam, democracy and Turkey’, Today’s Zaman, 18/3/2010. 15 I. Kalin, ‘Democracy and the Muslim word’, Today’s Zaman, 1/3/2007. 16 I. Kalin, ‘Democracy and Secularism, Turkish style’, Today’s Zaman, 24/5/2007. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 127 recovering the capacity of naming itself by drawing on its own resources, is for Turkey nothing less than a matter of freedom. Freedom of civil society is what has been repressed by a nationalistic Jacobin project. Freedom of civil society is what now has to be restored, and it has to be restored drawing on ‘organic’ cultural and historical references.
One of the grave consequences of top-down modernization in the Muslim world has been the loss of tradition and with it the confusion of identity. In the name of modernizing themselves and catching up with the brave new world, pre-modern societies have turned against their tradition and in some cases destroyed some of the world’s greatest treasures. Today, this is painfully visible in Turkey’s modern cities. Tradition is not about repetition but about continuity. It is about maintaining roots so that one can have fruits.20
The highly debated issue of the headscarf is considered by Kalin in the same light. He, as many others within the neo-Ottoman democratic narrative, frames this issue within a larger debate on freedom in Turkey. ‘The debate over the headscarf is as divisive as it is because it is not seen as part of the larger problems of liberties in Turkey’, and the problem is also that the ‘laicist camp is hopelessly immersed in a dogmatic battle over this’.21 In fact, the problem is twofold. On the one hand single groups consider freedom from the perspective of single areas – liberties for Kurds, Alevis, other minorities – while on the other, the laicist camp considers every single area of liberty as a threat to the integrity of the state and to their lifestyle, the latter identified with the ideology of the entire collectivity.
Yet, luckily, there is a core group of intellectuals and political actors who see freedom as a whole and insist that unless the sphere of civil liberties in Turkey is seriously expanded, individual cases will continue to cause pain and division. This is exactly what the AK Party government has tried to do over the last five years, for which it should be given credit. Instead of addressing their “own” issue, i.e., the headscarf and imam-hatip schools, the middle and high schools that provide religious education, AK Party officials sought to open up some breathing space for such critical and sensitive issues as the Kurdish problem, the Alevis, Article 301 and the law on foundations for non-Turkish foundations in Turkey.22
This is the neo-Ottoman narrative that strives to become hegemonic. The relevant move is that the religious and conservative camp presents itself as highly self- reflective, and adjusted to a postsecular condition precisely because it uses ‘the universal language of basic rights and liberties, (while) laicists use a heavily
20 I. Kalin, ‘Tradition and Identity’, Today’s Zaman, 9/11/2011. 21 I. Kalin, ‘A hierarchy of freedoms’, Today’s Zaman, 21/2/2008. 22 Ibid. 128 The Making of a Postsecular Society religious language to prove that the headscarf is not a religious obligation’.23 The conservative and religious camp ‘oppose the ban by using primarily the language of basic human rights’.24 More broadly, ‘Turkish religious conservatism is adapting the universal language of human rights to deal with the most critical issues of the country, including religious freedom and the Kurdish problem’.25 Such a move is not inauthentic but a genuine combination of religious traditional conservatism with basic human rights. The neo-Ottoman democratic narrative runs like this: ‘The fact that Turkish religious conservatism has internalized the universal language of human rights and liberties is in tandem with the universal language of the Islamic tradition’.26 On the contrary, according to Kalin, in the laic camp the debate is not over human rights and liberties, but ‘about maintaining a narrow and oppressive model of Turkish laicism. The Turkish secularists have very little to say or contribute to liberties’.27 To sum up, the headscarf debate is a ‘litmus test for democracy in Turkey’,28 a litmus test for the struggle against the ‘logic of fear’, according to which, ‘if you allow non-Muslim minorities certain rights, they will take over the country’.29 Taking up the flag of freedom and liberties, the religious conservative camp tries also to revise the Kemalist idea of modernity. In fact, according to Kalin, the ‘modernist secularists’, namely the Kemalists, defining modernity as free from traditions and religions, from every difference and particularities, excludes the idea of ‘individual choice’ from the notion of modernity. Here Kalin is obviously ironical: though he says that he has his own ‘reservations about choice-based definitions of modernity’,30 he stresses the contradiction of an allegedly Western idea of modernity that does not include individual choice. Such a criticism, the springboard from which to maintain the revision of an undemocratic view of modernity in Turkey, means changing the balance between centre and periphery, including in the centre the ‘otherized’ peripheries, and reshaping the central value system of the country.31 In other words, the struggle for liberties in Turkey has, following Kalin’s narrative, the counter-intuitive (to the Western mind) consequence of vernacularizing the notion of modernity, making it ‘local’, colouring it with the thousands of tints of religious and cultural minorities. This would appear to be the blueprint of a multicultural Turkey. But perhaps multiculturalism is not the most appropriate label here. In fact, Kalin is
23 I. Kalin, ‘Roles shifting in the headscarf debate’, Today’s Zaman, 7/2/2008. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 I. Kalin, ‘The headscarf and secular democracy’, Today’s Zaman, 2/12/2007. 29 I. Kalin, ‘Is freedom a threat to Turkey?’, Today’s Zaman, 24/1/2008. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 129 critical of the ‘misdeeds’ of multiculturalism.32 While multiculturalism embraces diversities, it ends up by closing them within ‘voluntary ghettos’, and narrowing spaces for social and cultural communication between them. If the debate over multiculturalism is revealing of Europe’s self-understanding, as Charles Taylor has emphasized several times,33 multiculturalism does not seem to be the appropriate recipe for Turkey. Here is Kalin’s narrative touch with almost explicitly neo- Ottoman overtones:
If multiculturalism has failed us, where do we turn? One clue is to be found in the experiences of classical cosmopolitanism where social order was closely knit together with the notion of a ‘good life’ based on virtue and the common good. The cosmopolitan Islam of Baghdad, Alexandria, Istanbul, Andalusia and others allowed freedom and morality to complement each other. An ethical cosmopolitanism can teach us again how to be free and diverse without giving up on a spiritual center.34
The classical Islamic tradition developed a notion of what we might call “Mediaeval cosmopolitanism” whereby different religious, ethnic and cultural traditions have merged in big cities such as Baghdad, Damascus, Alexandria, Cordoba, Sarajevo and Istanbul. In Andalusia, the experience of “convivencia” (living together) among Jews, Christians and Muslims was a result of the Islamic notion of cultural inclusivism (…).35
These are genuine pieces of a neo-Ottoman narrative. Here the golden past of the Empire is fleetingly echoed to suggest a model of living together differently that is ‘organic’ to the Turkish past, that is a ‘reference of its own’ tradition. Here liberties are supposed to be compatible with cultural and religious differences. Here modernity is vernacularized and made ‘local’, against the Kemalist failed blueprint of detaching Turkey from its past, through the revitalizing of an (allegedly) authentic cosmopolitan past and tradition (see Meijer 1999). The second case of the new narrative emerging from the columns of Today’s Zaman is that of Orhan Kemal Cengiz. Orhan Kemal Cengiz is a lawyer, a human rights defender, and columnist (above all for Radikal and Today’s Zaman). He experienced personally the ‘attentions’ of the deep state, being threatened and intimidated because of his legal work on behalf of one of three men killed in an attack at a Christian publishing house in April 2007. His columns are characterized by a particularly sensitive tone and touch and the pronounced ability for empathising with minorities and suffering groups. Recurrent subjects
32 I. Kalin, ‘Multiculturalism and its misdeeds’, Today’s Zaman, 13/5/2010. 33 See I. Kalin, ‘Muslim identities and Europe’, Today’s Zaman, 6/5/2010. 34 I. Kalin, ‘Multiculturalism and its misdeeds’, Today’s Zaman, 13/5/2010. 35 I. Kalin, ‘Islam and pluralism’, Today’s Zaman, 18/6/2012. 130 The Making of a Postsecular Society of his columns are memories, memories of suffering of Armenians, Kurds and Christians, or the denied rights of minorities, above all religious ones. Naming is important. Cengiz would certainly agree with Kalin on this. In a column in Today’s Zaman, Cengiz ponders over the cruel custom of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of erasing ‘people’s memories before carefully planting their ‘big narratives’ in the minds of the people they directed and manipulated’.36 That is why, as Kundera wrote, ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. In Turkey, names of places started to change in 1916, under the effect of Enver Pasa’s decree,37 and during the twentieth century more than 15,000 names of places changed. It is an open debate in Turkey today as to whether those places should take back their old names, above all in the east and south-east, where Armenian and Kurdish villages were forced to change their names or erase them altogether. And this is the point: changing toponyms was an attempt to cancel and to make people forget the rich multicultural environment characteristic of the Ottoman society. Armenians, Greeks, Bulgarians and other non-Muslim memories were deleted by decree. And, in Cengiz’s view, with that decree Enver ‘laid the foundations of a long tradition that stands today’.38 In another column, discussing (not by coincidence) the headscarf issue, Cengiz links contemporary and current fears of religious veiled women, but also of minorities’ rights, with the ‘original sin’ of the destruction of that cosmopolitan world that was Anatolia before 1915: ‘if we had the same population structure today as we had before 1915, there would have been 17 million non-Muslims living in this country’.39 But ‘tragic things happened’ and Turkey ‘lost all these people’. Turkey, Cengiz maintains, today fears heterogeneity because heterogeneity was destroyed at that time:
The key to understanding Turkey is this. The masterminds of these massacres, pogroms and lynching campaigns against non-Muslims and the people who engage in fear mongering concerning “Sharia” or an “Islamic state” and so on come from the same political tradition. One is the other’s predecessor. They once decided to homogenize Turkey by scaring away non-Muslims, and today they are fighting against devout Muslims in Turkey.40
36 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Erasing the names of places and Enver Pasa’s decree’, Today’s Zaman, 12/7/2011; see also O.K. Cengiz, ‘Uludere massacre and government’, Today’s Zaman, 17/1/2012. 37 Enver Pasa was one of the three men at the head of the Committee of Union and Progress, responsible for massacres of non-Muslims in Turkey. 38 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Erasing the names of places and Enver Pasa’s decree’, Today’s Zaman, 12/7/2011. 39 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Non-Muslims, the headscarf and the Gordian knot’, Today’s Zaman, 22/10/2010. 40 Ibid. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 131
Cengiz’s narrative is democratic because he advocates liberties, as Kalin does, in a non-selective way. Pushing the government to reject hypocrisy, Cengiz writes that
Erdogan wants to solve the headscarf problem immediately, but he has shown no intention of solving the problems of Alevis and non-Muslims. He wants Turks to have language rights in Germany but denies the same rights to Kurds in Turkey. What Erdogan and the AK Party do not understand is that the problem that they want to solve and all other “identity” problems were created by the same mentality in this country. And to solve any one of these problems in an effective and sustainable manner, you should try to solve all these problems in one go.41
Not at all uncritical of the government and of Erdoğan,42 Cengiz shares with neo- Ottoman democratic narratives – from an independent, left-liberal or democratic standpoint43 – a strong denunciation of the Kemalist policies of the homogeneization of social space. In fact, the present of Turkey is strictly connected, in Cengiz’s analysis, to past sufferings. Without understanding the suffering that minorities and ‘otherized’ people had to undergo in the history of modern Turkey at the hands of nationalists, the country cannot offer the prospect of a different future and a new social covenant to its people.
It seems to me that we need to understand the great suffering of victims; we need to feel that all that suffering happened in our country. We should try to understand the connections between what happened in the past and what is going on now – in political life, in daily life – and try to cleanse all this from today.44
41 Ibid. 42 O.K. Cengiz, ‘An open letter to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’, Today’s Zaman, 7/2/2012; Cengiz’s position became more and more critical of the government after the Uludere massacre, Erdoğan’s growing authoritarianism and, obviously, after the Gezi Park protest and repression; see, for example, ‘How the Uludere massacre alienated Kurds from Turkey’, Today’s Zaman, 20/12/2012; ‘Uludere massacre one year later’, Today’s Zaman, 27/12/2012; ‘The price of no criticism for the government’, Today’s Zaman, 30/10/2012; ‘Gezi and freedom of press’, Today’s Zaman, 25/6/2013; he, as well as Dagi and Akyol, who I shall consider in the following pages, became more and more critical of the AK Party and Erdoğan after the Gezi Park protest, see, for example, ‘Fascism or democracy: which direction?’, Today’s Zaman, 17/9/2013; ‘Why are they trying to change the structure of the judiciary?’, Today’s Zaman, 16/1/2014. 43 This is his self-representation and definition, given during a personal interview. At the interview, Cengiz emphasized that in his view Turkey does not need to come back to its Ottoman past, but needs a strong culture of human rights. With the neo-Ottoman narrative, however, he shares criticism of the anti-pluralistic Kemalist views. 44 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Should we identify ourselves with Oskar Shindler or Hitler?’, Today’s Zaman, 9/2/2011. 132 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Cengiz’s argument is on memory, and particularly on memory of victims and their heirs. Cengiz is suggesting, almost supplicating in prophetic tones his fellow citizens, to make a radical change in the symbolic central value system of Turkey: from glorious memories of nationalistic triumphs, to the memory of the suffering of victims, as we have seen in the first part of this book (Chapter 4). At the same time, he is well aware of the risks of a process of victimization of collective memory. In fact, as he writes in another column,
Victims of mass human rights violations have a tendency to become kind of egocentric. This is an inevitable process. After so much suffering and struggle, their pain and grief becomes the centre of the world for them. If they cannot divest themselves of this egocentrism, victims have a great potential to become perpetrators themselves.45
This kind of sensitivity explains why Cengiz’s favourite and most recurrent subjects are, as a columnist for Today’s Zaman, the rights of religious minorities,46 the legal personality of non-Muslim foundations,47 the debate on the Armenian ‘genocide’48 (which he calls genocide, and considers the true block of the Turkish
45 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Kurdish insights into Armenian tragedy’, Today’s Zaman, 18/10/211. 46 See, for example, O.K. Cengiz, ‘Will minority newspapers survive?’, Today’s Zaman, 23/8/2011; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Non-Muslims praise law to return properties, await its implementation’, Today’s Zaman, 4/9/2011; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Their properties have been given back, what about seized foundations?’, Today’s Zaman, 1/9/2011; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Non-Muslim and old paradigms’, Today’s Zaman, 21/2/2012; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Greek radio, Greek properties’, Today’s Zaman, 17/5/2012; O.K. Cengiz, ‘A common past and destiny marks the good people of Anatolia’, Today’s Zaman, 8/3/2012; O.K. Cengiz, Today’s Zaman, 20/3/2012; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Attack on Protestant pastor on eve of Easter draws condemnation’, Today’s Zaman, 10/4/2012; O.K. Cengiz, ‘The new constitution and the Protestants’, Today’s Zaman, 2/5/2012; O.K. Cengiz, ‘The problems faced by minority schools’, Today’s Zaman, 5/5/2012; ‘Is there any ‘legal’ place of worship for Alevis in Turkey?’, Today’s Zaman, 9/8/2012; ‘Why can we not make fundamental improvements for non-Muslims?’, Today’s Zaman, 3/4/2013. 47 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Non-Muslims and Muslims need to unite for a freedom of religion act’, Today’s Zaman, 18/12/2009, 21/12/2009, 23/12/2009; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Is there such a thing as a Church in Turkey?’, Today’s Zaman, 10/10/2010; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Erdoğan vows equality for all non-Muslims in Turkish law’, Today’s Zaman, 29/8/2011; ‘Religious freedom problems in Turkey in 2012 and forever’, Today’s Zaman, 21/5/2013; ‘Who are the owners of places of worship in Turkey?’, Today’s Zaman, 16/5/2013. 48 See, for example, O.K. Cengiz, ‘When forefathers become murderers’, Today’s Zaman, 29/11/2011; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Are you helping Turkey confront 1915?’, Today’s Zaman, 23/12/2011; O.K. Cengiz, ‘French bill again’, Today’s Zaman, 24/1/2012; ‘I wish I wasn’t an Armenian’, Today’s Zaman, 28/1/2013; ‘1915: heroes and murderers’, Today’s Zaman, 1/11/2012; ‘The price of denial of the events of 1915’, Today’s Zaman, 4/10/2012; ‘When will official reaction to 1915 change?’,Today’s Zaman, 7/5/2013. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 133 memory and process of coping with the past,49 though he keeps a critical attitude towards ‘genocide bills’ by foreign parliaments, which do not help Turkey in confronting the events of 1915),50 debates on the status of the Orthodox Christians in Turkey,51 and the like. Common to Cenzig’s approach to each of the above mentioned ‘thorny’ issues, is the suggested recipe to make possible a change of step in the Turkish symbolic value system: empathy. Empathy is what is most lacking in Turkey and what is key to overcoming barriers and bridging divided, suffering memories:
I am always struck by this enormous lack of empathy in Turkey. People cannot go out of their own identities: they do not try to feel what other people may be feeling under certain circumstances (…) The lack of empathy, which is partly caused by our cultural codes and partly because of the injection of nationalist sentiment into religious identities, is at the same time the biggest obstacle to understanding how the political system functions in Turkey.52
As we saw in Chapter 4, empathy is a key element in the process of social construction of social trauma, in the recognition of people, individual and groups, as victims. Orhan Kemal Cengiz is part of a ‘carrier group’ that triggers a process of reshaping of collective memory aimed at including within the national symbolic system groups previously at the fringes of society. He is clearly a radical-democrat, who shares with neo-Ottomans a democratizing effort, and who has become more and more critical of the latter as the government’s reformism waned. The third figure I shall consider for his role in the shaping of a new narrative in the journalistic arena is Ihsan D. Daği. Professor at the Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University of Ankara, Ihsan Daği is also a regular columnist for Today’s Zaman. His columns, collected in 2008 in a book,53 cover a wide range of issues, brought together by the leitmotif of the need for a post-Kemalist Republic. Daği encompasses discussions of secularism within the broader frame of the struggle against Kemalism as the ‘political culture and the
49 Communication to myself during a personal interview, Ankara 19/2/2012. 50 O.K. Cengiz, ‘How Armenians see Justice and Development Party?’, Today’s Zaman, 25/8/2011; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Are you helping Turkey confront 1915’, in Today’s Zaman, 23/12/2011; ‘French Bill again’, in Today’s Zaman, 24/1/2012. 51 See, for example, O.K. Cengiz, ‘What is Bartholomew grateful for?’, Today’s Zaman, 16/8/2011; O.K. Cengiz, ‘The meaning of Davutoğlu’s visit with Patriarchs’, Today’s Zaman, 6/3/2012; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Will the Halki Theological School be opened?’, Today’s Zaman, 27/3/2012; O.K. Cengiz, ‘Now it is Halki Seminary’s turn’, Today’s Zaman, 2/4/2012. 52 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Christians, Muslims, Empathy’, Today’s Zaman, 26/3/2010; this ‘lack of empathy’ was stressed also by Mustafa Akyol, below discussed during a personal interview with me in Istanbul, 18/2/2012. 53 I.D. Daği, Between Democracy and Militarism: Post Kemalist Perspectives, Orion Publications, Ankara, 2008. 134 The Making of a Postsecular Society national psyche’ of Turkey.54 In his columns, he frequently reconstructs the ‘old narrative’ of Kemalism:
In its essence, Kemalism envisages a homogenized nation and a disciplined society. Since the nation was not homogeneous but diverse ethnically and religiously, the state apparatus was used to eliminate sources of difference, or at least to silence claims of difference. This resulted in assimilation efforts aimed at Kurds and the exclusion of many non-Muslims during the republican period. This positioned the state elite as a hegemonic authority vis-à-vis society that was subjected to the interference of the state.55
Daği uses the centre-periphery paradigm to describe the Kemalist/authoritarian elite as the centre of Turkish politics at least until the 1950s, and the periphery as the democratic force that has been entering into a ‘grand struggle’ with the centre over the decades of republican history. Beyond the nationalist political elite, embodied above all by the CHP56 and the MHP,57 and the judiciary, the main protagonist of the old Turkey’s narrative was the military, whose alleged ‘tutelage’ function over Turkish democracy is perhaps Daği’s preferred critical target.58
Since the 1960 military coup the military established itself as autonomous from the political sphere. With the 1961 constitution it created tutelage over politics. While it was autonomous from politics, the latter was subordinated to the priorities and preferences of the military. This was done by claiming that the military was the vanguard of the Kemalist republic. Such a self-appointed role after the 1960 military coup constituted the grounds for the constant interference of the military in political affairs.59
No one played a greater role than the military in ‘ruling by fear’, fixing external and above all ‘internal enemies’, such as identities, ethnicities, religions and ideologies, accused of threatening the national identity and being disloyal to Atatürk’s legacy. No one more than the military, in Daği’s view, shaped and still holds the state-ideology that characterized the ‘old Turkey’:
54 I.D. Daği, ‘Why do we need a post-Kemalist republic?’, Today’s Zaman, 21/2/2011. 55 Ibid. 56 The Republican People’s Party 57 The Nationalist Action Party 58 See, for example, I.D. Daği, ‘Is democracy possible with Kemalism and the military?’, Today’s Zaman, 5/7/2010; ‘Will the military come to rescue the secularists?’, Today’s Zaman, 1/7/2011; ‘Towards normalization of Turkish politics?’, Today’s Zaman, 1/7/2011. 59 I.D. Daği, ‘Why do we need a Post-Kemalist republic?’, Today’s Zaman, 21/2/2011. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 135
The old Turkey was a country where people were supposed to serve and remain loyal to the state and satisfy the demands of the state elite. It was a country that existed for the state and its owners, i.e., the state elite. Citizens were commanded to be stripped of their ethnic, religious and even ideological identities. In the old Turkey, the nation was imagined to be homogeneous despite diversities on the ground. The old Turkey was based on a notion of the superiority of the state over society – an understanding that gave a privileged status and power to the bureaucracy over the citizens, which is an anomaly by any democratic standard. It was a republic in which the civilian and the military bureaucracy imagined for itself a “right to rule”.60
The old Turkey was a country where the economy was run by the state, and where internal enemies were created in a preposterous fashion. A clear example of such a process, in Daği’s view, is the Kurdish issue:
The Kurdish question has always been used as a pretext for authoritarian political formations in Turkey. This was first carried out over the Kurdish rebellion in 1925 by Sheikh Said. To suppress the rebellion, the regime in Ankara did not limit its measures to the Kurdish areas and people. But the occasion was used to suppress all opposition in Ankara and Istanbul (…). Since then the pattern has not changed: ‘Kurdish demands’ have been used by the authoritarian elements in the state to postpone full democracy, suppress human rights, ignore the rule of law and spread a militarist political culture provoked using the threat the Kurdish demands were supposed to pose to the integrity of Turkey.61
Needless to say, in Daği’s opinion, the Kurdish question, as with other problems and issues of contemporary Turkey, cannot be resolved either in terms of security and with a military answer, or within the Kemalist frame of a homogenous society. Rather, it has to be solved by addressing the Kurdish demands, and ‘depriving the state of an excuse to postpone meeting the requirements of full democracy’.62 Well aware of the perceptions of the Turkish reality that people and governments have in the West – Kemalists have always been sympathetic to the
60 I.D. Daği, ‘Emergence of a “new Turkey”’, Today’s Zaman, 6/12/2010. 61 I.D. Daği, ‘Why do we need a post-Kemalist republic?’, Today’s Zaman, 21/2/2011; on the Kurdish issue, see also I.D. Daği, ‘What is the PKK trying to do?’, Today’s Zaman, 26/8/2012; ‘The new ‘other’: the Kurdish political opposition’, Today’s Zaman, 16/9/2012; ‘Is a Kurdish solution in sight?’, Today’s Zaman, 6/1/2013; ‘Turkey’s Kurdish conflict: pathways to progress’, Today’s Zaman, 4/11/2012; ‘Competing strategies in the Kurdish question’, Today’s Zaman, 13/1/2013; ‘Are Turkish people ready for Kurdish peace?’, Today’s Zaman, 1/4/2013; ‘Pax-Ottomana for Kurds’, Today’s Zaman, 24/3/2013; ‘The PKK’s gain’, Today’s Zaman, 28/4/2013; ‘Is the PKK resisting Öcalan’s directives?’, Today’s Zaman, 14/4/2013. 62 Ibid. 136 The Making of a Postsecular Society
West and Europe – Daği deconstructs such a case of ‘wishful thinking’. Since the very beginning of the republic, ‘the Kemalists’ understanding of the West has been limited to the Western lifestyle, listening to Western music and dressing like Westerners. But when it comes to Western political values like democracy, human rights and the rule of law, they immediately shy away from the West’.63 And they do that, according to Daği, with good reason, because embracing Western political values would imply losing their hegemonic position. In fact, this has started to happen, gradually, ever since the 1950s. Here Daği tells a familiar story, already briefly mentioned, according to which the first elections after the end of the single party system, in May 1950, meant the beginning of a gradual and highly contrasted effort of changing the balance between the Kemalist elite and the peripheries. Despite military coups and strong defensive reactions by the military and civilian bureaucracy, democracy started to erode the privileges of the Kemalist vanguard. Key milestones in this process of overcoming the Kemalist republic were the EU integration process, which since 1999 has represented a powerful external constraint in favour of democratization,64 the 2003 and 2007 elections, which gave a political majority to the AK Party, the Constitutional Referendum in 2010, and the 2011 general elections, which established a third term for the AK Party. This chain of events clearly says, according to Daği, that when Turkish people have a chance to choose, they choose democracy. The last stage of this struggle is to be a new Constitution, to be written after the 2011 election, and the emergence of a new Turkey. What about the new Turkey? What does it look like? With a certain amount of optimism, Daği describes the emergence of a ‘new Turkey’ in the following terms:
The ideas and ideals of democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights and minorities and a market economy have gained currency in this old country. As a result, for the last 10 years or so Turkey has being going through a tremendous process of change. Change is everywhere: in politics, business, civil society and foreign affairs. We should try to understand the dynamics and actors of this new Turkey. And we should not make a mistake in identifying the driving forces behind the efforts to build a new Turkey. I think it is not the political leadership but social and economical forces that we need to look at to understand the dynamics pushing for a new Turkey. We make a fatal mistake if we think that the new Turkey is the Justice and Development Party. (AK Party)65
It would be a mistake, in Daği’s view, because the new Turkey stems from society and a new business elite, it is a cultural-intellectual phenomenon as well as a
63 I.D. Daği, ‘Is democracy possible with Kemalism and the military?’, Today’s Zaman, 5/7/2010. 64 See I.D. Daği, ‘Emergence of a new Turkey’, Today’s Zaman, 6/12/2010; for the EU integration process as an external constraint, Gregoriadis 2009. 65 I.D. Daği, ‘Emergence of a “new Turkey”’, Today’s Zaman, 6/12/2010. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 137 political one. Contrary to the Kemalist project, it is not a top-down project. The proper name for this new Turkey is ‘post-Kemalist Republic’. In this post-Kemalist republic, the military are not a separate sphere out of civilian democratic control and secularism cannot be used as a tool manipulated by the authoritarian military and civilian bureaucracy to maintain the status quo; in this sense, a postsecular Turkey goes hand in hand with a post-Kemalist republic. A new Constitution, after the 2011 general elections, represents for Daği the necessary condition, and at the same time the seal of a new, post-Kemalist Turkey: a Constitution ‘without an official ideology’.66 In fact, the Constitution will need to guarantee a free competition of ideas and ideologies, instead of protecting and enforcing just one. ‘There can be no ideology of state, and people may have more than one’.67 A new Constitution, which overcomes the post-coup Constitution of 1981, seems to be the common claim of many voices within (and also outside) the democratic neo-Ottoman narrative. A Constitution for a multicultural or perhaps cosmopolitan Turkey, mindful of its past tradition of tolerance and diversity, and at last aware of the violence suffered by minorities under the Kemalist republic. In the case of Kalin and Cengiz it seems quite clear that a new Constitution will have to be closer to the West (because it will embrace political values such as human rights and equal citizenship, de facto denied by the Kemalist illiberal version of Westernism), but at the same time, it will have to be written with ‘its own references’. A new Constitution will reflect a vernacularized modernity, a local modernity. In the case of Daği it is less evidently a local, Turkish hint of liberal- democratic values. Daği is quite clear in maintaining that a new Turkey, predicated against the old Kemalist narrative, is a common aim of the liberal-conservative- leftist alliance. In other words, this is the historical bloc that tries to make hegemonic a new narrative. Daği expresses the liberal component of this alliance, without glorifying the Ottoman past, but instrumentally, to bring conservatives towards his own liberal position. In fact, he is convinced that conservatives ‘learn’ and change, and are becoming in Turkey more and more liberal, while Kemalists neither learn nor change.68 However, Daği – as well as the other columnists under consideration, except for Ibrahim Kalin – is more and more sceptical and even severe towards the AK Party, charged with losing its reformist stance after the third electoral mandate, of becoming the new owner of the state, and of succumbing to the same nationalistic poison characteristic of the Turkish state tradition. As we shall see, signs of cracks in the liberal-conservative-leftist coalition have become more and more evident since 2011, turning into an open split after the Gezi Park protest.69
66 I.D. Daği, ‘A constitution without an official ideology’,Today’s Zaman, 1/5/2011. 67 Ibid. 68 Personal communication to me during an interview in Ankara, 19/2/2012. 69 See, for example, I.D. Daği, ‘A difficult period for the Ak Party’, Today’s Zaman, 1/1/2012; I.D. Daği, ‘Changing positions in Turkish politics’, Today’s Zaman, 20/5/2012; ‘Re-securitizaion of Turkish politics’, Today’s Zaman, 14/8/2012; ‘The state and society 138 The Making of a Postsecular Society
The fourth figure I consider is Mustafa Akyol. He is a columnist forthe Hürriyet Daily News and Star. Although he does not write for Today’s Zaman, he shares with the other columnists considered above relevant ideas, expressed from a particularly significant angle – that of a faithful Muslim and committed liberal. In this sense, I take his position as exemplary of a sociologically and politically significant galaxy of Muslim liberals, very active in the journalistic arena as well as in civil society, such as, among others, Hilal Kaplan (see White 2001). Author of Islam without Extremes: A Muslim case for Liberty (2011), Akyol is interested in searching for a Muslim tradition of pluralism and secularity, a school of thought well equipped theologically to adapt creatively to modernity. In the seventh century, the school at stake was that of the so-called ‘Postponers’ (the Murjiites), according to which ‘to be a Muslim (…) was to internalize “the knowledge of, submission to, and love of God”’ (Akyol 2011, 84). As far as one can see, it was a sort of turn towards interiority and spirituality, such as that occurring in Christianity with the Protestant Reformation. Postponers opened the way, according to Akyol, to religious pluralism and tolerance. Though their view did not find fertile ground at the time, their influence was strong on themost tolerant of the four Sunni schools, the one founded by Abu Hanafi, and more than this, its teachings are alive in the Mutazilites’ thought, and today in the Ankara theological school (2011, 233–7). From this tradition, one can surmise that freedom ‘in the theological, political and economic sense – was not unknown in classical Islamdom’ (2011, 95), above all those critical freedoms that Akyol develops and defends in his own volume and names ‘freedom from the state’, ‘freedom to sin’, and ‘freedom from Islam’. In the light of this theological horizon, here simply sketched out and roughly summarized, he interprets – both in his book and in his columns – worldly affairs and, with particular attention, Turkish life and politics. This is the part of his thought that interests me most. In fact, here one may see that he shares with the neo-Ottoman democratic tradition a few, key elements. Firstly, a general narrative of Turkish modern history; secondly, a strong case for liberty and pluralism, with special concern for religious pluralism; thirdly, a sympathetic view towards the AK Party government, albeit more and more critical after the first months of the third electoral mandate. As far as the first point is concerned, Akyol shares the neo-Ottoman narrative of centre-periphery and the idea that the turning point in modern Turkish history is represented by the years of Turgut Özal (2011, Chapter 8). Trying to restore respect for the Ottomans, Özal – so the narrative runs – ‘based his policies on the notion of the three freedoms – ideas, religion and enterprise’ in post-Kemalist Turkey’, Today’s Zaman, 21/4/2013; ‘Imprisoned by the State’, Today’s Zaman, 5/6/2013; ‘Re-securitizaion of Turkish politics’, Today’s Zaman, 14/8/2012; ‘Is the AK Party still a democratizing force?’, Today’s Zaman, 6/10/2013; ‘Post-modern authoritarianism in action’, Today’s Zaman, 10/11/2013; ‘Post-Kemalist but still illiberal Turkey’, Today’s Zaman, 15/12/2013; ‘Turkish new path: de-democratization’, Today’s Zaman, 12/1/2014. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 139
(2011, 218). On the basis of these three freedoms, Özal was able to cement a broad coalition. Among Özal’s supporters,
It was the small group of liberal intellectuals – most of them secular but not secularist – who had been sidelined for decades in a political sphere dominated by the Kemalist state, the Marxist Left, and the Nationalist Right. Also in favour of Özal were the country’s millions of Kurds, whose identity had been systematically suppressed since the early years of the Republican era. The third and the largest group of Özal’s supporters was the Islamic camp. To them, he was not only a saviour who erased the burdens of the ultrasecularist regime but also, as the first Turkish Prime Minister to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, he was the man who returned religion to public respectability. (2011, 219)
Consequently, when the AK Party came to power and ‘embraced democratic conservatism’, this conservative but liberal orientation was not completely new to the country, but had a long history behind it:
It had its roots (…) among the Islamic liberals of the Ottoman Empire as well as in the center-right tradition of Turkish politics represented by the Progressive Republican Party in 1924, by Adnan Menderes between 1950 and 1960, and by Turgut Özal between 1983 and 1993. (2011, 224)
Recapitulating the neo-Ottoman democratic narrative, from the perspective of a liberal Muslim, on the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Akyol writes that:
The original sin was committed in the first five years of the Republic, when Mustafa Kemal got rid of all his opponents either by assassination (e.g. Ali Şükü Bey), or execution by show trials (e.g. Cavit Bey), or party closures and house arrests (e.g. Kazim Karabekir). Instead of continuing the democratic process which began in the late Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal and his followers (the Kemalists) silenced all dissenting views and established a republic without democracy (…) transition from dictatorship to democracy began as early as 1950 (…) Since then, free and fair elections have been regularly held in Turkey, and they were almost always won by the Democratic Party or its successors – the Justice Party of Süleyman Demirel, the Motherland Party of Turgut Özal, and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This line represents the centre-right tradition in Turkey, which has always been friendlier to religion and the free economy than the ultra-secularist and “statist” Kemalist. Therefore, it is no accident that all four of the military coups that have taken place since 1950 overthrew center-right governments and claimed to restore true Kemalist principles. It is also quite telling that the only Turkish Prime Minister 140 The Making of a Postsecular Society
executed by a military junta is Adnan Menderes, the leader of the Democrat Party and an icon of the whole center-right.70
Such a narrative works, from Akyol’s perspective, as a legitimation of liberal and pluralistic policies, within the Islamic camp (that, according to Akyol, has to be open to freedom from the state, freedom to sin and freedom from Islam) and against the Kemalist narrative. To give a few examples, Akyol welcomes steps made by Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (see next section) to solve the problem of misogyny within the Islamic tradition.71 He takes the part of those who advocate a reconsideration of divided and suffering memories – first with regard to the Armenian issue;72 he is ferociously critical of restrictions of freedom of speech, at home as well as abroad;73 and he supports the Muslim liberal components of the Arab Spring.74 Furthermore, such a narrative works also as an orienting principle to assess, so to speak, the quality of life within the public space, and finally to judge public policies. As concerns the quality of life within the public space, particularly relevant, from my perspective, is Akyol’s view of secularism and of religions within the public space. Like many others, he distinguishes between a secular state and a secularist one:
70 M. Akyol, ‘The Turkish Spring (since 1950)’, Hürriyet Daily News, 1/11/2011. 71 M. Akyol, ‘Islam and Women: A Small Step Forward’, Hürriyet Daily News, 7/12/2011; ‘Islam, Judaism and women’, Hürriyet Daily News, 20/4/2013. 72 M. Akyol, ‘Why Erdoğan is ‘Armenian-minded’’, Hürriyet Daily News, 29/11/2011; M. Akyol, ‘Kemalist Turkey: Good for the Jews?’, Hürriyet Daily News, 2/9/2011; M. Akyol, ‘Kurdish as official language for Turkey’, Hürriyet Daily News, 26/5/2012; M. Akyol, ‘At last: Kurdish classes in Turkish schools’, Hürriyet Daily News, 13/6/2012; ‘Turks, Armenians and Ottomans’, Hürriyet Daily News, 3/11/2012; ‘Wise man versus unwise nationalism’, Hürriyet Daily News, 13/4/2013; ‘An Islamic apology to Armenians’, Hürriyet Daily News, 27/4/2013. 73 M. Akyol, ‘Defying Turkey’s blasphemy law’, Hürriyet Daily News, 8/11/2011; M. Akyol, ‘Why France is so illiberal’, Hürriyet Daily News, 24/12/2011; M. Akyol, ‘Let’s get some freedom fries’, Hürriyet Daily News, 25/1/2012; M. Akyol, ‘Why dozens of Turkish journalists are in jail’, Hürriyet Daily News, 2/12/2011; M. Akyol, ‘Why Turkey’s best pianist is on trial?’, Hürriyet Daily News, 6/6/2012; ‘From European Union to club of dictators’, Hürriyet Daily News, 02/02/2013; ‘Religious freedom in ‘Islamist’ Turkey’, Hürriyet Daily News, 4/5/2013; ‘Media freedom in Turkey’, Hürriyet Daily News, 18/5/2013. 74 M. Akyol, ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to Allah’, Hürriyet Daily News, 30/9/2011; M. Akyol, ‘The Islamists are coming’, Hürriyet Daily News, 10/12/2011; M. Akyol, ‘Muslims need liberalism, not just democracy’, Hürriyet Daily News, 17/12/2011; M. Akyol, ‘Sharia was made for man’, Hürriyet Daily News, 28/12/2011; M. Akyol, ‘It is indeed the Islamic Spring’, Hürriyet Daily News, 21/12/2011; M. Akyol, ‘Where have all the Islamists gone?’, Hürriyet Daily News, 25/2/2012; ‘Muslim politics without an ‘Islamic state’’, Hürriyet Daily News, 27/2/2013; ‘From Egypt to Turkey: Is the problem Islam’, Hürriyet Daily News, 3/1/2013; ‘How Tahrir Square betrayed itself’, Hürriyet Daily News, 6/6/2013. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 141
The former is a state that is neutral to religion and respects the right of its citizens to live by their faith. A secularist state, on the other hand, is hostile to religion and wants to curb its influence in public life, and even in the lives of individual citizens. It is hard to reconcile Islam – or any other religion, for that matter – with secularist states. But why should Muslims not to be content with secular ones that respect religious freedom? (2011, 256)
Drawing from the work of Abdullah Ahmed An-Na’im (2008), Akyol maintains that there are no reasons to separate Islam from politics, while at the same time there are no reasons for not separating Islam from the state. Islamic political parties, liberal as well as socialist, can be legitimately part of the political game, without wishing to impose an Islamic state. What is more, according to Akyol:
The Sharia, too, can be separated from the state and exist in the civil sphere as a guide for conservative Muslims who wish to organize their lives according to it – just as has been done by the Orthodox Jews who have long been living according to the Halakha, their religious code, in Western countries. (2011, 257)
As an example, he mentions the UK as an interesting case study:
which is practically, if not technically, a secular state, and also a very liberal one. In late 2008, the government officially allowed the establishment of Sharia courts to deal with matters of family law and make legally binding decisions if parties agreed. In just a year, more than eighty Sharia courts were opened through the country, and thousands of British Muslims, mostly immigrants, appealed to them on matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. (2011, 259)
Granting the voluntary nature of the appeal to Sharia courts, the UK example is, in Akyol’s view, the best way to solve the problem of the public relevance of religions within a secular frame. It is clear from his perspective, as from Daği’s, that overcoming the Kemalist view of a secularist state implies nothing more than embracing an Anglo-Saxon model of secularism; Turkey has to shift from France’s model to the UK’s, so to speak. The French model of secularism, shared by the Kemalists (but as we have seen in the previous chapter, only apparently so), would not allow, for example, the punctuating of social space with sacred places, such as prayer rooms (mescids). Opposing Ahmet Altan, the well-known Editor in Chief and columnist of the radical liberal newspaper Taraf, Akyol defended, for example, a ‘new law by the Turkish government [that] requires spaces for prayer in all shopping malls, movie theaters, and other public spaces such as theaters and operas’.75 In fact, against Altan’s opinion, that opening prayer rooms in public spaces is not a national priority and is just the government’s way to ‘hide the real issues from the public
75 M. Akyol, ‘Prayer rooms in Turkish opera houses?’, Hürriyet Daily News, 9/6/2012. 142 The Making of a Postsecular Society agenda’ (Altan), Akyol takes seriously the religious needs of practising Muslims, and, in principle, of every believer:
Turkey’s fully practicing Muslims, which make up at least 30 per cent of society, need spaces for prayer five times a day, and it is only a public service to give them this option. (Let me also point out that the laws not only decree prayer rooms, but also nurseries for babies, and various health and security standards. If Turkey’s Christians and other minorities have similar demands, I am certainly with them.)
What is interesting in Akyol’s position is not only his reflective way of looking at relationships between religions and politics, and his pluralistic stance, but also his attention to the transformative potentialities of the mutual interaction between the secular and the religious within social space. As we have seen in a previous chapter (Chapter 2), this is a point strictly connected with the idea of the postsecular, such that Akyol’s satisfaction – from the institutional point of view – with the Anglo- Saxon idea of secularism does not mean that, from the sociological point view, new and unexpected social practices and forms of life cannot be imagined as the outcome of the blurring of inherited borders between the secular and the religious:
I more than welcome the image of a pious Muslim who goes to the opera on a Saturday night, but also sneaks to the prayer room in the intervals to perform his evening services. For sure, two mutually-hating groups in Turkey will find that image scandalous. The first are the secularists, who would despise seeing anything religious in a setting as modern as the opera. The second group is the Islamists, who would despise the idea of a fellow Muslim enjoying such Western and profane forms of art. However, that very synthesis of modern and traditional, and Islamic and Western, is what Turkey is, and what it needs more of. This was already apparent in the nascent Muslim middle class, which enjoys shopping malls, movie theaters, and restaurants with foreign cuisine. If they begin to frequent the opera as well, I will only be happier. For, as Ahmet Altan rightly noted, there has never been any discussion in the history of Islam on whether there should be prayer rooms in operas. But now there is, and that is why we live in interesting times.76
Such an opening of public space to religious, as well as to cultural, linguistic and ethnic differences at large, is considered by Akyol as proof of a democratizing process, in the Turkish public and political sphere over the last 10 years. For this democratizing process the AK Party has to be praised, according to Akyol. However, as with the other columnists we are considering who joined the conservative- leftist-liberal alliance from different perspectives, he is becoming more and more critical of the AK Party. In fact, ‘as time went by, the AKP’s reformism began to
76 Ibid. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 143 wane. Their initial enthusiasm for progress was gradually replaced by an emphasis on “stability”. And their rhetoric of humility became increasingly overshadowed by bursts of arrogance’.77 So, Akyol agrees with other liberal critics (among whom one has to mention Daği and Cengiz),78 that the AK Party’s third term in power has so far actually been its worst. The charge, roughly speaking, is that of being too nationalistic, too ‘Turkish’,79 sharing with the ‘state tradition’ the attitude to protect state establishments even to the detriment of truth. This is exactly what happened on the occasion of the tragic episode at Uludere (on 28 December 2011), when 34 villagers, smugglers, were killed by Turkish jets that took them for a group of guerillas from the PKK (the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party):
Since the first day following the attack, various conspiracy theories began emerging, as is always the case in Turkey, to explain what really happened. The PKK and its supporters said that the fascist Turkish state slaughtered the Kurdish villagers intentionally, just for the fun of it. Some liberals or conservatives argued that “the deep state” must have been involved, with the intention of fuelling the fire in the east. I, however, have seen no reason to look for any explanation other than that this was a tragic mistake. The way the government has dealt with the matter was perhaps a bigger mistake, though. Five months have passed, but those who were responsible for the decision to bomb the group have not been yet disclosed. There have been official expressions of “regret” or “sorrow”, but no “apology”.
What this tragic but unfortunately not unique episode shows, is that the AK Party, which was used at first to presenting itself as the defender of all those sectors of the country victimized by Kemalism, is becoming the new centre, inheriting from the Kemalist centre the same pro-state culture and attitudes, and losing credit among democratic liberals, conservatives and leftists. As we shall see in another section, the brutal repression of the protest against the reconstruction of Taksim Square and transformation of Gezi Park in Istanbul into a huge mall is another patent manifestation of the authoritarian degeneration of the AK Party, which is alienating the loyalty of liberal Muslims, and liberal democrats and leftists.
77 M. Akyol, ‘The AKP’s biggest blunder’, Hürriyet Daily News, 2/6/2012; ‘Are liberals the AKP’s ‘useful idiots’’, Hürriyet Daily News, 6/4/2013; ‘Quo vadis AKP?’, Hürriyet Daily News, 26/6/2013. 78 See I.D. Daği, ‘What is wrong with the AK Party?’, Today’s Zaman, 3/6/2012; O.K. Cengiz, ‘A complete submissive media is desired’, Today’s Zaman, 4/6/2013; I.D. Daği, ‘Turkey between democratic and authoritarian axes’, Today’s Zaman, 30/6/2013. 79 M. Akyol, ‘AKP is too Turkish – not too Islamic’, Hürriyet Daily News, 1/2/2012; see also M. Akyol, ‘Turkish government should have apologized’, Hürriyet Daily News, 4/1/2012; more recently, see ‘Erdoğan’s illiberal democracy’, Hürriyet Daily News, 9/11/2013; ‘How Turkey’s conservatives failed’, Hürriyet Daily News, 11/1/2014. 144 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Institutional and Political Actors: The Diyanet and the AK Party
Having considered social practices and the journalistic arena, I want to take into consideration the political arena, as the third space in which the new neo-Ottoman narrative establishes its hegemony. The Presidency of Religious Affairs (the Diyanet) is one of the political actors that must at least briefly be considered. Mustafa Akyol, whose opinion on the current state of the Diyanet we shall have to take into account later, considers Ali Bardakoğlu, former President of Religious Affairs since May 2003, the best president of this key institution since its foundation.80 His voice is of paramount importance because the Diyanet, an official institution established in 1924 after the abolition of the Caliphate, represents the highest Islamic religious authority in the country. At the same time, being established by the Grand National Assembly, it was given a structure that complied with the secular structure of the (Kemalist) state. In other words, it has been over the decades the expression of national Islam, used by the state to control Islam, to nationalize it, and as such it was unsympathetic (so to speak) to religious minorities, both within Islam (the Alevis) and to non-Muslims. In this light, Bardakoğlu’s presidency was particularly relevant, because he tried to draw a new and different path, balancing continuity and discontinuity: continuity with the proper mission and aims of the Presidency of Religious Affairs as an institution of a secular state on the one hand, and discontinuity with its previous lack of sensitivity for differences and diversities on the other. The solution was found by Bardakoğlu in a neo-Ottoman narrative and in a version of local modernity. Let us start with the latter point. Bardakoğlu’s aim was that of making Islam flourish within the framework of a secular state. At the same time, he was open to the other religious traditions which the country embraced, and recognized religious freedom for all (and so, for example, the right to a house of worship – a highly debated issue with reference above all to Armenians and Alevis). In order to join together all these apparently irreconcilable aims, he framed the search for the basis of living together (differently) in terms of the idea of ‘multiple modernities’:
Being modern does not mean undergoing the same process of enlightenment that the West did, or admitting the values that have been imposed by this process at the expense of one’s religious and cultural merits. Today a new concept emerges from the sociology of religion under the name of “multiple modernity”. This new concept argues that modernity is not the privilege of only one culture or geography, that it is to say cultures outside the West can and will develop their own modernity. (Bardakoğlu 2006, 67)
The West is not the only model for a modern society. On the contrary, each society has to rely upon its own references, traditions and features.
80 M. Akyol, ‘A farewell to a great cleric’, Hürriyet Daily News, 11/12/2010. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 145
In the Turkish case, an essential ingredient in combining modernity, Islam and religious freedom for everyone, is, in Bardakoğlu’s view, the proper ‘nature’ of the Turkish Islamic tradition. In fact, the Islam that grew in Anatolia was led by ‘spiritual guides in the area of religious freedom and tolerance, such as Rumi, Yunus Emre and Haci Bektas Veli’ (2006, 48). The Turkish Sufi tradition, in other words, is the first block of a peculiar way to build modernity and to arrange together secularism, freedom with religion and pluralism. The second building block of this peculiar Turkish combination of secularism, freedom with religion and pluralism is the Ottoman legacy, and particularly the spirit of tolerance of the millet system (see Rodrigue 2013). The Ottoman Empire ruled between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries from the Balkans to Caucasus, from North Africa to the Middle East, and over the centuries religious communities – above all Jews and Christians – have had administrative and legal autonomy for everything concerning civil law, law of inheritance and commerce. On the bases of Bardakoğlu’s assessment, which in turn relies upon scholarly meditations (see İhsanoğlu 2004), the millet system sanctioned non-discrimination between religions, languages, races and colours. It was a truly successful experience. Of course, Bardakoğlu is aware that from the point of view of the contemporary expansion of democratic rights, Ottoman egalitarian politics may appear far from ideal, yet ‘when we look at the problem from a historical perspective, we can see that non-Muslims were recognized and given liberties centuries ago in the Ottoman Empire. Different faith groups under the sovereignty of the Empire were not forced to change their religion and convert to Islam’ (2006, 78). But still more important, for the Turkish experience and in order to grasp the meaning of Bardakoğlu’s narrative, is that from this specific point of view there is a relevant continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish secular republic: against the Kemalist emphasis on break and discontinuity, and against sociological interpretations (Mardin) that emphasize the continuity of the cleavage between centre and periphery, Bardakoğlu emphasized a continuous experience of tolerance and pluralism:
The Ottoman Empire was gradually transformed from the millet system into the constitutional state, and certain legal developments took place in the field of freedom of religion (…) With the establishment of the Turkish Republic, certain changes, such as the abolition of the Caliphate and the unification of education further cleared the way for the project of secularization. The Constitution of 1924 characterized freedom of conscience (religion) as a natural right for every citizen. With the constitutional amendments of 1937, it was stated that secularism was one of the basic principles of the Republic. The Constitution of 1961 reaffirmed the freedom of conscience, religious belief and conviction including the right for free worship and religious rituals. The Constitution of 1982 preserved the contents of this Constitution. In addition to these constitutional developments that protected the freedom of religion, Turkey also ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1954 and adopted the articles pertaining to the freedom of religion mentioned in the declaration. (2006, 50) 146 The Making of a Postsecular Society
The constitutional history of Turkey, pre and post republic, is told as an undivided and coherent development of guarantees of freedom of religion for everybody. In this way, Turkey can be considered fully secular – even more secular than some Christian states which mention religion in their constitutions – and fully respectful of freedom of religion for every tradition. What is significant in Bardakoğlu’s version of this persuasive narrative, in itself similar to other uncritical perspectives, is the strict link between past and present, between the Ottoman Empire and contemporary Turkey.81 This is the essence of the neo-Ottoman narrative told from an institutional actor such as the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the clue to the redefinition of the Turkish identity. It is the effort to soften the troubled relationship between (Kemalist) republican secularism and religious freedom on the one hand, and stress the continuity between the Ottoman past and the contemporary re-evaluation of freedom with religion(s) on the other. This is the picture of the past:
When judged according to the standards of liberty and freedom of the period concerned, we can easily argue that non-Muslims enjoyed a remarkable amount of freedom; so much that it would have been unthinkable for many states in the same period. Non-Muslims enjoyed several important freedoms which were later to become fundamental rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed the freedom to select their religious leaders, build their temples, practice their religious rituals, ceremonies and festivals, open their religious schools and provide a religious education in these establishments in their own language (…) In this period, authority in matters of internal legal matters and educational issues within the community was granted to religious leaders who were freely elected by the community concerned. Moreover, minority communities enjoyed certain financial privileges. For example, lands belonging to churches and synagogues were exempt from taxes. The millet system provided freedom, not only in the areas of religion and worship, but also in areas of civil law and politics. (2006, 81)
While almost none of the above mentioned liberties are recognized in the modern republic, even after a decade of AK Party rule, in consequence of a Kemalist understanding of secularism, this is the picture of the present:
The dominant and widespread perception of religion in Turkey provides room for the existence of liberty and freedom for non-Muslims minorities. Based on its
81 An uncritical, persuasive representation of the Ottoman past is, according to H.M. Karaveli, often presented by liberal intellectuals too: ‘Liberal intellectuals tend to embellish reforms that “ravaged” the pluralistic, civil society that the Republic had inherited from the Ottoman era’, Karaveli 2010, 96. ‘Ottoman nostalgia’ characterizes, according to Karaveli, prominent figures such as Orhan Pamuk and Etyen Mahçupyan. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 147
long historical experience, one can freely argue that the culture of co-existence and the moderate perception of religion in Turkey are able to contribute to the establishment of a foundation for sustainable peace by saving religion from being a source of violence, tension and conflicts between societies. (2006, 82)
Once again, it is important to keep firmly in mind the institutional nature of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, entrenched within a secular state, and for decades one of the most effective and controversial tools for controlling religion. But, in the light of this function, Bardakoğlu’s narrative aimed at keeping together secularism, Islam and religious pluralism, is striking. This is the neo-Ottoman narrative’s effort at becoming hegemonic at its best:
Both in the past and in the present, Turkey has embraced religious and cultural differences as an asset. It has not viewed diversity as a threat and thus has not attempted to suppress diversity to mould it into a monolithic culture. If we look at historical experiences and current practices we will see that there has been a process of preserving differences and diversity. From a thriving Jewish community to various Christians communities, from Sunni Islam to other Islamic denominations, their religious traditions have shaped contemporary Turkish society. In this sense, Turkey has developed a system in which Islam, democracy and the secular state system go hand in hand (…). We should take lessons from Turkey’s experience with Islam, democracy and the secular state system. Turkey provides historically successful references and experiences that are marked by a tolerant and moderate cultural legacy, as well as a social practice that is open to free participation (…) Turkey is a secular state with a dominantly Muslim population. However, it is also home to diverse cultural and religious communities, all of which go towards strengthening democracy. (2006, 89–90)
In Bardakoğlu’s account there is no trace of the disruptive character of conflicts and negotiations over public space between secular and religious views; there is no trace of struggles for recognition of religious minorities’ rights, which are still denied or restricted today; finally, there is no trace of criticism – stemming from post-Kemalist perspectives – of the Kemalist view of secularism as an ideology that misrecognizes diversity. However, in this account there is a palpable effort to push Turkey, its culture and institutions, every sector of society, towards a state of co-existence between religious and secular forms of life, and a condition of religious pluralism stronger than in the past, beyond a state of religious monopoly. What is palpable, in other words, is the performative effort of the Diyanet, under Bardakoğlu’s presidency, to bring Turkey towards a postsecular condition. He started a process of reform of Sunni Islam in Turkey, even a mosque reform,82 that
82 M. Akyol, ‘A mosque reform on the way?’, Hürriyet Daily News, 27/9/2008; in 2012, under the new Presidency, an important programme was launched to train religious officials to fight against domestic violence in Turkey. 148 The Making of a Postsecular Society promised to democratize the Diyanet itself. From this perspective, democratizing the Diyanet, making it representative of Alevis and other non-Muslim religions too, would be the right step to take, the way to shape a Turkish model of secularism.83 Returning for a moment to Ibrahim Kalin’s words, he recounts once again, in one of his columns, the story of the legacy of Ottoman society, in a bid to make it the firm ground on which to build the future of a Turkish post-Kemalist Republic:
The Ottoman society was a ‘frontier society’ in the sense that it always bordered different territories, cultures, languages, ethnicities and religions. Almost by necessity, the Ottomans, because they were an empire, had to embrace diversity as a founding principle of their socio-political order (…). Islam’s metaphysics of unity and diversity helped Muslim societies as well as the Ottomans deal with the reality of religious differences. Muslim scholars and intellectuals took note of the difference between an absolutely one God and the apparent multiplicity of the world of creation but did not understand this in terms of a dichotomy or dualism. Instead, they saw a unitary and integral reality designed according to the principle of unity in diversity.84
The guiding principle of unity in diversity comes both from Islam’s metaphysics and from historical experiences. Consequently, according to this narrative, a local, vernacularized version of modernity is the only way, on Turkish soil, to hold together secularism, Islam, and religious and cultural diversity. Readers will certainly remember that Ibrahim Kalin is currently Chief Foreign Policy Advisor to the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In fact, despite their differences, everyday social actors as considered by Uğur Kömeçoglu, columnists of the Today’s Zaman newspaper, and institutional actors such as the Presidency of Religious Affairs under the Presidency of Ali Bardakoğlu, are part of the same historical and cultural bloc that advances a democratic neo- Ottoman narrative, hegemonic in contemporary Turkey – a bloc which, however, is beginning to crack (if not crumbling once and for all as I write). The AK Party is the political obstacle to this process. Although ‘we make a fatal mistake if we think that the new Turkey is the Justice and Development Party (AK Party)’,85 the importance of the AK Party cannot be underestimated, but neither can current criticisms against it, even on the part of liberals, conservatives and leftists who sympathized with its policies.
83 This point was suggested, for example, by M. Akyol as the answer to my specific question on what could be a model of secularism proper to Turkey, rather than simply shifting from a French to a UK model (Interview in Istanbul, 12/1/2012). Although from a political-philosophical point of view this is a key point that would merit discussion in greater detail, it goes beyond the purposes of the present section. 84 I. Kalin, ‘Pluralism and Turkish culture’, Today’s Zaman, 1/7/2011. 85 I.D. Daği, ‘Emergence of a ‘new Turkey’, Today’s Zaman, 6/12/2010. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 149
The AK Party is an extremely interesting topic of study per se, and a fascinating case study for political sociologists and political scientists (Tepe 2008; Yavuz 2003 and 2008; Cizre 2008; Hale, Ezbudun 2009; Tibi 2008; Casanova 2006; Gülalp 2013; Insel 2013; Kalyvas 2012). For almost a decade the AK Party seemed to be committed to bridging the divide not only between Turkey and Europe (Grogoriadis 2009; Yildiz-Muller 2008), but also between different sectors of Turkish society: Kemalists and Islamists, Kurds and Turks, Turks and Armenians, Sunnis and Alevis, Muslims and other religious minorities. For almost a decade, under strategic pressure to rebalance relationships with the military, the AK Party has been a reformist agent, committed to broadening spaces of democracy not only for the Sunni conservative majority it represents apparently, in order to include it in the centre of national political and economic life, but also for groups ‘otherized’ by Kemalism. Over the years, it has launched at different times and in waves ‘democratic initiatives’ and openings (concerning the solution of the Kurdish question and the accommodation of other minorities, and cultural and religious differences) that seemed to be the political counterpart of the cultural neo-Ottoman (democratic) narrative, which found support amongst democrats and liberals. Although such a process was far from being completely clear, without shadows or dark sides from the beginning, it was also quite evident that the AK Party – although perhaps motivated by strategic reasons connected with costs and rewards – ‘has shifted toward a more pronounced emphasis of themes such as democracy, human rights, and the rule of law’ (Kalyvas 2012, 191), following a trajectory similar to that of conservative Catholic parties in Europe (Kalyvas 2012). After 2012, its reformist stance started to wane, and an authoritarian tone, above all by its leader Tayyip Erdoğan, gained momentum. Considering the specific approach adopted in this book, I am interested mainly in those symbolic acts undertaken by the AK Party to change the Turkish central symbolic system towards a post-Kemalist identity and consistent with a neo-Ottoman (democratic) narrative, as well as of course in those symbolic acts that nowadays make such a shift weaker. I focus on four topics: secularism, the AK Party’s policies towards ethnic minorities, towards religious minorities, and towards memory. Other issues, such as symbolic changes in the relationship, for example, towards the military (certainly another key issue) will be considered in a subsequent chapter. Finally, I mention some critical situations that render the entire process ambivalent or in trouble. In the official programme of the party, secularism is discussed under the section dedicated to fundamental rights and freedoms. There, one can read that ‘Our party considers religion as one of the most important institutions of humanity, and secularism as a pre-requisite of democracy, and an assurance of the freedom of religion and conscience. It also rejects the interpretation and distortion of secularism as enmity against religion. Basically, secularism is a principle which allows people of all religions and beliefs, to comfortably practice their religions, to be able to express their religious convictions and live accordingly, but which also allows people without beliefs to organize their lives along these lines. From 150 The Making of a Postsecular Society this point of view, secularism is a principle of freedom and social peace. Our Party refuses to take advantage of sacred religious values and ethnicity and to use them for political purposes. It considers the attitudes and practices which disturb pious people, and which discriminate them due to their religious lives and preferences, as anti-democratic and in contradiction to human rights and freedoms. On the other hand, it is also unacceptable to make use of religion for political, economic and other interests, or to put pressure on people who think and live differently by using religion’ (http://www.akparti.org.tr/english/akparti/parti-programme#bolum_). As is clear, secularism is defined very much in line with the idea of passive secularism discussed earlier. Against the backdrop of this idea of secularism, the AK Party promised – from the very beginning of its political activity – to lift the ban on the headscarf, interpreting women’s desire to wear veils as a matter of religious freedom.86 Although the point is highly controversial, my view is that the AK Party’s positions on issues concerning religion(s) are consistent with the post- Islamist identity of the party and the vocabulary of human rights embraced by the intelligentsia close to it (Bilgili 2011). In this light, particularly relevant from a symbolic point of view was the Prime Minister’s statements during a high-profile Egyptian television interview which he gave during his first visit to Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. On that occasion, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan emphasized that Egyptians should not be ‘afraid of secularism’, and that he hoped that the new Egypt ‘will be secular’ (http://www.worldcrunch.com/don-t-be-afraid- secularism-how-erdogan-s-egypt-tour-looks-turkey/3757). Despite not being very clear in theoretical terms, he said that Turkey prefers a model of secularism that is not identical to the ‘Anglo-Saxon or Western model (…) Individuals cannot be secular, states are. A devout Muslim can successfully govern a secular state’ (http://www.todayszaman.com/news-257047-erdogan-tell-arabs-his-secularism- remarks-mistranslated.html). To stress the compatibility of personal religious values and a secular state, he said that he himself, a devout Muslim, was the Prime Minister of a secular country, and then continued, maintaining that ‘in a secular regime people have the freedom to be religious or not’ (http://www.worldcrunch. com/don-t-be-afraid-secularism-how-erdogan-s-egypt-tour-looks-turkey/3757). Leaving aside the (critical) reactions that this interview provoked in Egypt, in Turkey many observers interpreted it as a smart move in domestic policy. Presenting Turkey as a model in a country where he was recognized as a very authoritative and esteemed political leader, very influential in the Middle East,
86 The headscarf issue had an important evolution from the symbolic point of view too, when in October 2013 for the first time four headscarved deputies walked into the parliament and faced no words of protest from the opposition. Days before, the MHP and CHP opposition voiced objections to the announcement of the women. In the end, however, nothing happened and they changed their mind, choosing instead to keep a low profile. After Merve Kavacçi’s preclusion from taking her oath in the parliament in 1999 due to her veil, and her expulsion from it in 2001, what happened in 2013 marked a deep change and maybe the normalization of the headscarf issue. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 151 and consequently proposing Turkey as a regional leader, he was in fact doing many things at the same time: he was sending a message to Islamists in Arab societies, urging them to follow the Turkish path in order to combine Islam and democracy; he was inviting Western societies to be reflective about the role of Islamists in the Arab Spring, instead of being unreflectively afraid about Islamist ‘drifts’; and he was speaking to secularists in his own country, showing everybody that he was a guarantor of secular institutions. With such an unexpected move he turned into a defender of secularism right in front of the Muslim world. Apart from those ever-concerned secularists who have always felt under threat from a conservative party, according to polls, most of the country felt that there was no interference in personal lifestyles up to 2013. However, in 2013 a series of government acts and Erdoğan’s speeches significantly raised secularist concerns of a growing interference in their lifestyles. In May 2013, parliament adopted a law limiting advertisements and promotion of alcoholic beverages, apparently from health considerations; before, Erdoğan had expressed on several occasions his personal view against abortion, suggesting the necessity of changing the law, as well as his personal approval in some cases of the death penalty; again in May, the municipality of Ankara posted a public announcement in a subway station, calling on passengers to ‘behave in accordance with moral codes’, targeting young people who were ‘acting inappropriately’ kissing each other in the subway. These, and other episodes, made secularists concerned about a growing pressure to Islamize the country, despite professed loyalty to secularism.87 Another central value of Turkish political culture, and central ‘arrow’ of Kemalism, which the AK Party tries to reinterpret, is nationalism. We have seen in Chapter 5 how important nationalism is in the Kemalist view, and how illiberal and undemocratic is the Kemalist understanding of national space. We have also seen how the neo-Ottoman democratic narrative tries to take as a paradigm a multicultural and pluralistic model of national identity. The AK Party has been supported for a long time, almost a decade, by those who joined the conservative, liberal and leftist alliance, precisely because of its democratizing and reformist force vis-à-vis the rights of minorities, groups marginalized and ‘otherized’ by Kemalist ideology and power. In my view, this is not wishful thinking, because for years the AK Party nurtured not only hope, but actually improved conditions for minorities and marginalized groups. However, at times it did seem to be the politics of ‘a step forward and two backwards’, or a politics of democratization only in some areas and not others – a ‘selective’ approach to different groups (Gülalp 2013, 131).
87 While I am reviewing my text, other major crises are erupting: a corruption investigation that implicated both the AK Party and Erdoğan’s inner circle – a deep crisis with the former allied Gülen movement, which means an intra-Islamic divide, and a contested reform of the judiciary that would put it under closer control by the government. These are just more elements that testify to a clear authoritarian turn on the part of Erdoğan’s AK Party, and open opposition from former liberal and democratic allies. 152 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Among the most ‘otherized’ groups misrecognized by the Kemalist view of national identity, there are ethnic minorities such as Kurds and Armenians. Speaking of Kurds, one has to remember that in 2009, at the beginning of the so-called democratic initiative, or democratic opening (Ulusoy 2011), there were calls for a solution in principle first to the Kurdish issue and then broader issues concerning minorities. On the symbolic level, the one that interests me most, was the very important speech that Prime Minister Erdoğan gave to parliament on 11 August 2009. On that occasion he made an emotional appeal for unity in order to solve the Kurdish issue (Today’s Zaman, 12/8/2009). Employing a common religious basis as leverage, for example, Erdoğan rhetorically asked ‘What mother would be able to stand that pain?’ (more than 40,000 people had been killed since the 1980s due to the conflict between government forces and the PKK), and then stated with conviction that ‘Motherhood does not have an ideology or politics. A mother in Yozgat and a mother in Hakkari read the same prayer, and the masses turn to the same direction during their prayers. There is something seriously wrong here. Turkey loses, and mothers and fathers lose’ (Today’s Zaman, 12/8/2009). Erdoğan’s emotional speech dominated the agenda for weeks and months. It created schisms among Kurds as well as among political parties in the parliament, but also raised hopes among civil society and business groups. However, the government failed to finalize a Kurdish initiative or package by that year, as it had promised, and after years it seemed that nothing was left of the hopes raised by that emotional call. The Uludere massacre is perhaps the lowest point in the whole affair. At the same time, another step forward was made in June 2012, when Erdoğan promised that Kurdish would be offered as an elective language course in Turkish schools (something unthinkable before), and above all with a new settlement process launched at the end of 2012. What is relevant in the context of my analysis, which aims neither to reconstruct every single moment of the Kurdish issue in Turkey nor cover its full complexity, is that Erdoğan’s approach seems oriented, at its best, to consider expanding democracy and (cultural and social) rights as the proper way to solve the Kurdish issue, drawing on two basic elements: a strong feeling of oneness, national unity and common sense of belonging on one hand, and a common religious (Muslim) background on the other.88 Needless to say, the last point in particular makes things even more difficult, in a sense, when the ethnic
88 This sense of common belonging as a way to approach minorities’ demands by Erdoğan was also evident in his words about problems faced by the Roma people. Addressing thousands of Roma in Istanbul in March 2010, he said: ‘(…) we are aware of the bitter smile on your face. We are aware of your problems’, and mentioning a Roma saying ‘the road toward the destination is part of the destination’, he added: ‘today we are heading towards the destination. We call this road the project of national unity and brotherhood. We are taking up the issues one by one. The Kurds, the Laz, the Roma, the Circassians, all Turkish citizens, whoever comes to your mind, are our brothers. Their problems are our problems (…)’, Today’s Zaman, 15/3/2010. On the Kurdish question from a social-theoretical point of view, Kömeçoglu 2012. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 153 minorities at stake are non-Muslim, and divided memories cannot rely upon a common Islamic background. This is the case in the Armenian issue. Once again, to consider just symbolic acts, here the ‘incident’ of the ‘Statue of Humanity’ occurring in 2011 is noteworthy. The statue was made by the Turkish artist Mehemet Aksoy, and commissioned by Naif Alibeyoğlu, the former mayor of Kars. It stood 30 metres high on a hill outside the city and represented two human figures with hands reaching out to each other. It was meant to symbolize a gesture of reconciliation in relations between Armenia and Turkey, after an agreement in 2009 established formal diplomatic recognition between the two countries. During a visit to Kars in January 2011, Erdoğan referred to the statue as a ‘freak’, and after that the statue was removed and demolished. Although Erdoğan said that he meant just to express an aesthetic judgment, one cannot avoid thinking that on that occasion, on that specific thorny issue and suffering memory, nationalistic drives and instrumental needs (gaining votes from nationalists in the 2011 elections) prevailed on a coherent democratic opening. The episode of the Statue of Humanity was particularly disappointing for those who, after another key episode (one related to Dersim – which I shall consider shortly), hoped that memories of 1915 would soon be faced by the AK Party government.89 However, where the AK Party government seems to me closest to the main trait of a neo-Ottoman narrative, and where virtues and limits of its approach are better reflected, is in what I call the AK Party’s ‘politics of religion’ (Riesebrodt 2010, chapter 2). Politics of religion is the expression that Martin Riesebrodt uses in order to analyse the kind of strategies that large empires have historically used to deal with the religious heterogeneity that usually characterizes them, and to control religious institutions. As he writes, ‘in a situation of religious plurality and competition, two solutions are conceivable. Either one religion is given precedence and the others are marginalized or even persecuted, or the ruler tries to integrate a plurality of religions into the political system. The grounds for this kind of integration may be multiple, but two of them seem of particular importance. First, legitimation by several religions may be deemed necessary, especially in large empires. Second, it may be in a ruler’s interest to create a balance of power that he or she can manipulate, one in which the various religious groups compete for the ruler’s favour’ (2010, 38). Such a definition of politics of religion may appear inappropriate with reference to Turkey, where there is no ruler but
89 I shall consider the Armenian issue again in Chapter 9, analysing the meaning of the figure of Hrant Dink in contemporary Turkey. However, it is worthwhile to mention that, on the basis of periodic reports released by the Hrant Dink Foundation, Armenians (and Jews) are still the main targets of hate speech in the country in editorial opinion columns and news articles, more than other ethnic or religious minorities and more than lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender communities. The above mentioned ‘incident’ of the ‘Statue of Humanity’ has to be seen in this frame too. For the Hrant Dink Foundation reports, see http://www.hrantdink.org/?Detail=9&Activities=4&Lang=en. 154 The Making of a Postsecular Society the law, and a politics of religion would have to mean ‘simply’ democracy and rights. However, Turkey was born on the ashes of a great empire, and we know that throughout the republican decades religious minorities have been among the most ‘otherized’, marginalized and even persecuted groups in the country. The AK Party government is carrying on a genuine symbolic politics of religion, the purpose of which seems to be that of enlarging the social basis of legitimation of republican institutions (and of course of the AK Party itself).90 Interestingly enough, such a politics of religion has a ‘spatial’ dimension, being mostly focused on space, above all places of worship, the true repositories of living and contested memories (see Chapter 3). According to the 2012 report by the Hrant Dink Foundation, hate speech is, unfortunately, increasing in Turkey, at least considering the number of headlines and news stories that have vilified specific groups on the basis of ethnicity, religion or other characteristics. In a situation like this, even mild gestures of openness may have a great symbolic importance. Let us consider a few cases, which refer to the politics of religion of the AK Party towards religious minorities: first, for instance, relationships with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate (The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople). One of the most delicate issues at stake in the relationship between the Patriarchate and the Turkish government has to do with the Halki Seminary, closed by Turkey in 1971 as a consequence of the crisis with Greece over Cyprus, and which worked as a Theological School educating Orthodox clergymen, above all future Patriarchates. Its closure, aimed at putting religion under the control of the military, is still today a threat to the survival of the Orthodox Patriarchate, and its reopening represents a litmus test for the democratic opening of the AK Party government. Soon after launching the democratic opening towards Kurds, Erdoğan broadened in August 2009, as I have mentioned, his democratic offensive with regard to religious minorities. In a (rare at the time) meeting with Turkey’s religious minorities’ leaders, he pledged to address their problems, stressing that the AK Party government kept equal distance from every ethnic and religious group, and was against both ethnic and religious nationalism. On that occasion, the Patriarch Bartholomew raised the question of the Halki Seminary, but Erdoğan made no statement on the issue. The atmosphere became much more tense at the end of that year, when the Patriarchate, interviewed by CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ said that the Greek Orthodox community did not feel that they enjoyed complete and equal freedom compared to other Turkish citizens, and that they felt like ‘second-class citizens’. The Patriarchate emphasized that 100 years before, 2 million Orthodox Christians were living in Turkey, and now only about 4,000 are left, mostly in Istanbul, as a consequence of population exchanges and of the difficult situation in which Orthodox Christians live there. Finally, he remembered the case of the Halki Seminary, which the government
90 The enlargement of the basis of legitimation of the AK Party but also of the republican institutions became evident on the occasion of the referendum on 12 September, 2010, when non-Muslim minorities voted to a greater extent ‘yes’. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 155 promised to re-open but which remained closed. When asked, ‘Do you sometimes feel crucified in Turkey?’, he responded, ‘Yes, I do’. As is imaginable, the crude expression ‘crucified’ caused strong reactions in the press and at the political level too. The Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davatoğlu, and the President, Abdullah Gül, who is well known for being a moderate, reflective and democratic politician, considered the crucifixion metaphor ‘extremely unfortunate’ (Today’s Zaman 22/12/2009). Only a few tried to understand the reasons behind the Patriarchate’s harsh words, among them, Orhan Kemal Cengiz, who wrote: ‘Why then, I thought, was Bartholomew also angry with this government? This government has made many reforms, but the Halki Theological School is still closed. The Patriarchate still suffers from non-recognition. The constraints surrounding the election of a patriarch are still valid and in effect. Here we come to an understanding of his frustration. He may be the last patriarch of this historic institution. This is why he talks about crucifixion, dying and resurrection. The Patriarchate is indeed on a cross and on its deathbed. And ironically this government is the last chance for the Patriarchate. If this government is replaced with a nationalist one (and it is the only alternative we have) or with an authoritarian regime as a result of the return of military guardianship, then quite difficult days for the patriarchate and all minorities will start again. So from the perspective of the patriarchate, we have in power the only government that can do something for religious minorities, but they are not doing anything significant’.91 The pendulum of the relationship between the Patriarchate and the Government shifted again a few months later, when Erdoğan offered citizenship to Orthodox foreign archbishops, as a way of overcoming a possible crisis of survival of the Patriarchate. In fact, according to Turkish law, in order to be a Patriarchate one has to be a Turkish citizen. In view of the next elections of the new Patriarchate, the Orthodox Christians were facing a shortage of candidates, and consequently Erdoğan’s gesture was interpreted as a real opening. However, in this politics of ‘stop and go’, the Halki Seminary is still closed, a failed test (at the moment) by the AK Party government. Just to give an idea of the kind of attitude adopted towards the issue by the government: in July 2012, following the visit of the new Religious Affairs Directorate President Mehemet Görmez to the Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, new hopes that the seminary would be opened soon were raised. At that time, it was the AK Party spokesperson and Deputy Chairman Huseyin Çelik who voiced his support for the reopening of the seminary. In January 2013, it was Erdoğan himself who said that it might be reopened, and in March it was Deputy Prime Minister Arinç’s turn to voice his support. In July 2013, voices about the opening of a new democratization package, including the reopening of the seminary, were still circulating in the press. However, each time no bold steps were taken, and the Patriarchate, in Bartholomew’s words, ‘had been given false hopes many times’ (Today’s Zaman, 17/2/2013). In October 2013, the government passed a new
91 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Bartholomew crucified, Erdoğan suffers from Hellish torture! (2)’, Today’s Zaman, 30/12/2009. 156 The Making of a Postsecular Society democratization package, which included above all some reforms aimed at the Kurds, but once again failed to solve the issue of the Halki Seminary. Phases of stop and go are also manifest if we consider another aspect of the politics of religion, namely the symbolic liturgies in restored Armenian or Orthodox churches. I want to mention a few cases that had great public visibility. On 15 August 2009, a historic service was conducted by Patriarch Bartholomew at the Sümela Monastery. Thousands of Orthodox pilgrims attended it. It was a historical event, because it was the first in Turkish republican history, given that the Monastery functions basically as a tourist attraction, and also because the Trabzon area is of particular importance for ultranationalist groups (in Trabzon Father Andrea Santoro was killed in 2006, and from Trabzon came Ogün Samast, the killer of Hrant Dink, see Chapter 5 below and White 2013, Chapter 4). The liturgy was allowed on only one day in the year, but was presented by the government as part of a broader effort to solve problems related to places of worship for all religious minorities. A one-day liturgy also took place on Akmadar Island on Sunday, September 19th, 2010, in the Armenian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Cross, 95 years after the last liturgy. Open to worship on that occasion, the Cathedral – restored in 2007 by the Turkish authorities – was soon returned to its status of museum. For just one day hymns and prayers resonated in that church on Lake Van. For the people who attended the event, it was a bitter or at least mixed happiness. In fact, the government decided to erect the Holy Cross on the top of the church only after the ceremony, some say as a sign of the ambiguous intentions of Ankara. Others wrote that ‘thousands attended the moving ceremony, under unusually blue and beautiful skies, full of promises of a future of peace and reconciliation, and they did not seem to mind that not everything was in place. It was the notion of moving ahead, albeit with small steps, that mattered to them’ (Yavuz Baydar, Today’s Zaman, 20/9/2010). Small steps ahead: small, or small but ahead – that is the problem. A couple of meditated reflections by observers help to explain what occurred, and the nature and limits of such a politics of religion. Bülent Kaneş, for example, in the columns of Today’s Zaman, understood the two above mentioned events as a sign of the increased awareness on the part of the Muslim majority in Turkey ‘that without advocating rights and freedoms for everyone, they cannot attain their own. This is because those who create obstacles before the religious freedoms of non-Muslim minorities are the same as those who restrict or block all sorts of human rights in this country’ (Bülent Keneş, Today’s Zaman, 22/9/2010). In this sense, the AK Party’s politics of religion expresses the awareness by the Muslim majority that religious freedoms for non-Muslim minorities is a guarantee for Muslim rights too, and that to curb rights for the former was (is) the same poison that curbs rights for the latter too. As is crystal clear, ‘we will see not only that the non-sense of allowing an annual worship service at Sümela Monastery or the Akmadar church is abandoned, but also that these religious places will be open to use by the faithful for rituals or ceremonies at any time. Furthermore, we will discard the meaningless debates revolving around the Halki Seminary on the Island of Heybeliada near From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 157
Istanbul in the dustbin of history and we will be proud of the fact that the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate is on our soil and acknowledge its natural right to open up a monastery to train clerics for its religious community’ (ibid.). For the time being, however, one witnesses a further new reopening for worship (such as Surp Girogas Armenian Church in Diyarbakir in 2012, the Greek school on the island of Gökçeada, where the Patriarch celebrated Easter on May 2013) and year after year the annual one-day celebrations in places such as Akdamar and Sümela on the one hand, but also new, contradictory facts such as those concerning the Gabriel Monastery on the other.92 The ideal is a country where the sounds of the call for prayer and church bells mix seamlessly. That is what Turkey stands for. What is the poison that prevents this, and what is the poison that prevents the AK Party’s politics of religion making stronger steps in this direction? In Orhan K. Cengiz’s view, which I fully endorse, it is nationalist reflexes. Mentioning also the point of view of Rober Koptaş, editor in chief of Agos, the Armenian weekly once directed by Hrant Dink (see Chapter 5), Cengiz writes that people in the AK Party government ‘are better than all the others because they do not come from a nationalist background, but they have not done enough because they are infected with the nationalist virus just like everyone else in this country’.93
We all are very pleased to see the progress made. But this government has also self-sabotaged what it has done: this renovated church [Akmadan Church in Van] reopened as a museum, not as a church. It was not given to the Armenian Patriarchate, to which it historically and traditionally belongs, but is instead run by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Instead of holding a service every Sunday, it will open one day a year. Its cross was not erected before the service. OK, I accept some of these issues may be attributed to realpolitik, but not all. The government may have refrained from erecting the cross just before the referendum because of the fear of a nationalist reaction, but opening it as a museum and not giving it to the Armenian community cannot be explained by fear. These are just nationalist reflexes.94
92 Mor Gabriel is a 1,700-year-old historic monastery, in the southern province of Mardin’s Midyat district. In 2008, the Forestry Ministry, the Land Registry Cadastre Office, and the villages of Yayvantepe, Çanderali and Eğlence sued the monastery for allegedly occupying their fields. After the legal process, the monastery was judged as an ‘occupier’. The case brought strong reactions, at home and abroad (see O.K. Cengiz, ‘How was a monastery robbed in Turkey?’, Today’s Zaman, 12/6/2012; İ. Yilmaz, ‘Mor Gabriel and the new AKP’, Today’s Zaman, 25/6/2012; R. Frifrini, ‘An inseparable pair: Mor Gabriel and Aramean rights’, Today’s Zaman, 15/1/2013) and the case was brought to the European Court of Human Rights. 93 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Fear of the Cross: the nationalist within’, Today’s Zaman, 22/10/2010. 94 Ibid. 158 The Making of a Postsecular Society
In other words, the consistency of the democratic opening of the AK Party’s politics of religion depends on how the nationalistic wing of the AK Party slows and restricts the AK Party’s democratic approach to non-Muslims. Another key issue concerning the politics of religion has to do with the rights of the Muslim Alevi minority. Once again, space, in the form of sacred places, is involved. Between June 2009 and January 2010, a series of workshops organized by the government were organized to try to solve the Alevi question, involving representatives of the Alevi community, theologians, politicians, journalists and civil society organizations. One of the most important issues at stake was the recognition of cemevis, Alevi places of worship. At the end of this series of workshops which, according to the then State Minister Faruk Çelik, the government approached in a sincere spirit, unafraid of paying whatever the cost might be (Today’s Zaman, 12/11/2009), doubts remained. Speaking of cemevis, for example, most of the participants agreed on according them legal status, but not on legally recognizing them as ‘places of worship’ (also on the basis that Islam would recognize only one legitimate place of worship, namely the mosque); furthermore, many other problems remained unsolved: the fate of the Madimak Hotel in Sivas, where, in 1993, 34 people were burned to death by a religious fundamentalist mob; chapters in textbooks on religion about the Alevi faith, biased with Sunni prejudices; and above all the fate of the Diyanet, which, according to the Alevis, runs contrary to the impartial nature of the state, and should accordingly be abolished (and not merely enlarged to include Alevi representatives). Presenting a report drafted by the ‘Association for Confronting the Past and Researching Social Events’, entitled ‘What happened to the Alevi initiative?’, the association’s president, Cafer Solgun, said that the workshops were undoubtedly significant, and that ‘The Turkish State has finally felt the need to listen to the demands of Alevis for the first time ever, which carries a historic meaning in Turkey. However, there are still contentious matters related to the Alevi community’ (in Today’s Zaman, 18/6/2012). So, once again, small steps ahead. Consequently, it is not surprising that the Alevi community is nowadays doubtful about the new government ‘Alevi initiative’.95 The politics of religion does not imply only symbolic aspects, so crucial when they relate to rights to worship or places of worship. It involves also key economic
95 In the last months of 2013 relationships between Alevis and the Sunni majority, and above all between Alevis and the state, seemed to get even worse. The Gezi Park protest and the Syrian crisis exasperated tensions, so that I. Daği, among others, noticed that Alevis became more and more alienated from the state, see ‘Is Turkey losing its Alevis?’, Today’s Zaman, 22/9/2013; important also were discussions around the project of building a cami (mosque)-cemevi, a shared place of worship for Alevis and Sunni Muslims. Some interpreted the project as a constructive way to overcome prejudices, some as an assimilationist project on the part of the Sunnis against Alevis. As a matter of fact, the democratization package presented by the government in September 2013 left unanswered the demands of the Alevis. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 159 factors. It will be recalled that in Turkey religious minorities are recognized only with the legal status of foundations. However, though this improper form of recognition was not enough, what happened was that ‘In 1936, non-Muslim foundations in Turkey were requested to declare their property to the government. In 1974, when the Cyprus crisis occurred and the situation escalated, the Supreme Court of Appeal made a decision regarding the non-Muslim foundations’ declarations and said that the declarations of 1936 would be considered under their regulation and if there was no explicit clause saying that these foundations may acquire new property, then all acquisitions of new properties after 1936 should be deemed invalid. As a result of this horrific, law-massacring decision of the high court, non-Muslim foundations lost thousands and thousands of properties. Their properties were taken from them one by one with court orders and through administrative decisions’.96 The problem was apparently solved by the AK Party with a revolutionary step, namely through a decree that declared that all properties that were taken from non-Muslim foundations after 1936, would be given back. After this decree, a number of non-Muslim foundations (Greek Orthodox, Jewish, Catholic), as well as Alevi associations, applied to the Directorate General of Foundations (VGM) to ask for the return of their properties. However, there are not only problems in carrying out this important decree, but also a more general problem, stressed by Orhan Cengiz: ‘in the last four decades Turkey has not only seized the property of these foundations but also foundations themselves. There have been so many non-Muslim foundations that were taken over by the Directorate General for Foundations on the grounds that they were not capable of forming necessary legal bodies’.97 Greek Orthodox, Jewish and other foundations were included in these ‘seized foundations’, and that means that not only properties, but the management itself of these ‘seized foundations’ was taken over by the Directorate General for Foundations. This part of the problem has still to be faced by the government: small, though significant, steps ahead. A final element related to the AK Party’s important role in the redefinition of the Turkish identity, in tune with some traits of the neo-Ottoman democratic narrative, has to do with memory. There are many suffering and divided memories in Turkey, the memory of 1915 being the first and most problematic of them (Tuğal 2007). Memory, as illustrated in Chapter 4, has to do with present and future, even more than with the past. This is true for the memory of 1915 too.98 But the memory of 1915 is still a big block in Turkey, something on which the process of ethical self-clarification by the country is still far from being advanced. Other parts of the past have reached a more mature reflection. One interesting and recent case has to do with the massacre that took place in 1937 in Dersim, during the single party period. The facts are notorious: at the time, Dersim was a semi-autonomous
96 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Their properties have been given back, what about seized foundations?’ Today’s Zaman, 1/11/2011. 97 Ibid. 98 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Why is April 24 so important for Turkey?’, Today’s Zaman, 24/4/2012. 160 The Making of a Postsecular Society region and an alleged revolt erupted as a consequence of the Resettlement law, led by the chief of a Zaza tribe, Seyyd Riza. The government reacted with air strikes and other brutalities, causing 70,000 victims, mostly Kurdish Alevis. The head of the CHP government at the time was İsmet İnönü, President of the Republic after Atatürk’s death. For decades, the official version was that Atatürk himself was not aware of the involvement of the state and CHP in the planning of a real genocide. The nature of the event, its meaning and codification (see Chapter 4), is exactly what is at stake. For years, a controversy over the definition, genocide or ‘simply’ suppression of a revolt, has divided scholars, politicians and society at large. What happened recently is that a CHP deputy, Hüseyin Aygün, said that the massacre took place with the knowledge of the state, the ruling CHP, and also that it was simply a ‘myth’ that Atatürk himself was not aware of it. A war of words erupted after this declaration, and the twist came when Erdoğan took the decision of doing what had never happened before, namely apologizing for the Dersim massacre on behalf of the state. At the same time, he stressed that he was doing this in spite of the heirs of the CHP, in spite of Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu, presently leader of the CHP and himself from Dersim: ‘Is it me who should apologize or you? If there is an apology on behalf of the state and if there is such an opportunity, I can do it and I am apologizing. But if there is someone who should apologize on behalf of the CHP, it is you, as you are from Dersim. You were saying you felt honoured to be from Dersim. Now, save your honour’. Furthermore, Erdoğan defined Dersim as being ‘one of the most tragic events of our recent history. It is a disaster waiting to be enlightened (sic.) and boldly questioned’. Attempts were made to legitimize the strikes targeting Dersim as ‘quelling an uprising’, Erdoğan maintained, but it ‘was an operation which was planned step by step’. (The Telegraph, 23/12/2011). Here the politics of religion become the politics of memory and apology, and many observers hoped that it was the beginning of a new critical reconsideration of the past, and that 1915 would be the next wound to be addressed.99 Small, but significant, steps ahead. The above examples of the AK Party politics of religion and memory effectively tell a story of small but significant steps ahead. At the same time, the AK Party self-sabotages its credibility as a reformist party and government, restricting the freedom of press, restricting students’ freedom of speech, turning articles of the Penal Code on ‘helping a terrorist organization’ into the criminalization of ideology,
99 In fact, Turkish politics and recent history offer many examples of divided memories and politics of memory. To mention a few, beside the most central of the frequently debated issues (the 1915 genocide of Armenians) are the already mentioned killing of 35 people (in 1993) at the Medimak Hotel in Sivas, so important on the divide with the Alevis; the execution of the Prime Minister Adnan Menderes after the 1960 coup d’état, on the island of Yassiada, which some would like to see transformed into a ‘democracy museum’, apparently government included. And of course, Dersim and, more recently, Uludere. About all of these issues there are confrontations on the redefinition of the national memory and identity. See Maessen 2012. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 161 giving signs of wanting to bring religion back onto the political agenda (as in the case of the so-called religion controversy in the educational system, the case of restrictions on the advertising and sale of alcohol, the case of Erdoğan’s speeches on abortion, and so on and so forth), and above all increasing authoritarianism as on the occasion of the Gezi Park protest (see Chapter 7). In recent years, ‘Turkey’s arresting machine (has) gone mad’,100 and criticism of the AK Party on the part of liberals, democrats and even conservatives has been increasing because of this authoritarian shift.101
The Democratic Neo-Ottoman Narrative in Action: Memory, Minorities and the Holocaust
The next three chapters will be dedicated to the analysis of three empirical case studies, considered particularly relevant in the changing of the Turkish central symbolic value system. They have, in a sense that I will clarify, the structure characteristic of liturgical rituals (Rosati 2009), and it is precisely because of that structure that they may have an impact on the central symbolic value system. Everyday social practices, as well as ideological discourses in newspapers,102 have an impact at a molecular level, and performative effects in the everyday, whereas liturgical rituals have a stronger impact at the symbolic level. However, before entering into the bubbling world of empirical analysis, I want to consider a middle- ground case: the way newspapers in Turkey are contributing to the shaping of a new memory of the Holocaust. There are reasons to take this case into consideration here. Let me clarify such reasons, before beginning to analyse the case. First: as is obvious, the memory of the Holocaust has to do with the remembrance of victims, it is a ‘negative memory’ in the sense analysed in a previous chapter (see Chapter 4). From a theoretical point of view, I note how memory of contemporary societies is becoming more and more memory of victims and suffering, instead of
100 M. Akyol, ‘Turkey’s arresting machine gone mad’, Hürriyet Daily News, 7/1/2012. 101 To take just a few examples of criticisms from within the liberal-democratic- conservative camp: İ. Yilmaz, ‘Latent negative nationalism in Turkey’, Today’s Zaman, 29/2/2012; İ. Yilmaz, ‘AKP: reverting back to Islamism?’, Today’s Zaman, 1/7/2012; İ. Yilmaz, ‘Revisiting the AKP’, Today’s Zaman, 30/5/2012; E. Uslu, ‘The crisis in conservative archipelagos’, Today’s Zaman, 8/6/2012; E. Uslu, ‘The new AKP’, Today’s Zaman, 1/8/2012; E. Uslu, ‘The AKP has become a conservative party’, Today’s Zaman, 30/5/2012; L. Kemal, ‘I liked the AKP because it was reformist’, Today’s Zaman, 30/5/2012; S. Kiniklioğlu, ‘Are liberal politics possible?’, Today’s Zaman, 30/5/2012; L. Kemal, ‘One religion controversy’, Today’s Zaman, 9/5/2012; M. Esayan, ‘The long march of the AK Party’, Today’s Zaman, 28/3/2012; Y. Baydar, ‘Liberals parting ways with AKP?’, Today’s Zaman, 31/1/2012. 102 I am using the concept of ideology in the Gramscian sense of vision of society and politics, which implies in principle a progressive ideology too, not (only) in the Marxian sense (if that was Marx’s only meaning of ideology) of false conscience. 162 The Making of a Postsecular Society heroes and triumph. We notice these important elements in the following chapters too, but the memory of the Holocaust considered here is important because it shows how remembering the Holocaust permits the neo-Ottoman democratic narrative to make room for previously marginalized sectors of society (minorities – in this case Jews) – making an important ideological function – without getting on the slippery slope of other more divisive memories such as the Armenian issue. The memory of the Holocaust is a less controversial issue, and here it is less difficult to establish a consensual narrative. At the same time, and this is the second reason why I take it into consideration, the memory of the Holocaust is a delicate issue in Turkey, so that it can be considered a litmus test of the capability of the country to struggle against negative sentiments such as anti-Semitism, beyond the already stressed diffidence towards minorities. Let me start with some brief historical notes on the Jewish presence in Turkey. To date, the community numbers from about 18,000 to 25,000 individuals (Brink- Danan 2012). It is therefore a very small community, mostly concentrated in Istanbul, around 1,500 people in Izmir, and small groups in other medium-small cities. Around 95–96 per cent is composed of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, and the rest consists of around 100 Karaites. Despite the numbers, a lively community life and cultural heritage exists: just in Istanbul there are some 40 active synagogues (20 of which have practising members), some of which are very old like Ahrida in the Balat district; in Istanbul the community has two hospitals, a publishing house and private schools which follow the national curriculum but that teach Hebrew. However, although the Jewish community is in a slightly better state than other religious minorities in Turkey, the real problem is their legal status. Like other minorities recognized by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), such as Greeks, Jews and Armenians (other minorities being officially non-existent), the Jewish community is ‘classified’ as ‘Vakif’; a religious foundation and administrator, but non-owner, of its properties. As stated, religious freedom is one of the great chapters opened in the process of democratization in the country. The non-Muslim minorities, as well as some intra-Muslim minorities such as the Alevis, have no substantially legal personality. According to Turkish law, the only legally recognized entities are companies, associations and foundations. Religious communities are ‘recognized’ within the latter category, as it is evidently only slightly less implausible than calling a religious community a ‘company’ or ‘association’. The absence of legal recognition, together with a certain widespread intolerance (as polls point out periodically) for religious diversity, have meant that by the end of the Ottoman Empire religious minorities in Turkey have had a history of fears: of being massacred, marginalized, expelled or excluded – as long as they have been unwilling to give up their cultural, religious and linguistic identity. In this context, the Jewish minority had a better destiny than others. Traces of Jewish presence date from the fourth century bc, on the Aegean Coast (the site of Ephesus) in Anatolia, a Biblical land par excellence. But it is clear that the most impressive development of the Jewish communities dates from the Ottoman era, when the Ottomans conquered Bursa (1324) and moved their capital. In the From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 163
Byzantine era, the Jewish communities were harassed, to say the least, and they welcomed the Ottomans as saviours. From the end of 1300, Jews fleeing from Sicily, from the France of Charles VI (1394), and Hungary (1376) found shelter in the Ottoman Empire. After 1453 (when Mehmet II conquered Constantinople), the community of Constantinople experienced the more liberal rule of the Ottomans. The historical reconstructions of the life of Jewish communities in the centuries of Ottoman rule are part of the public use of history that I am concerned with; they are part of the neo-Ottoman narrative I am analysing, which is shaped in this case largely in the historical-scientific arena and in the press. The memory that opinion makers and post-Islamic intellectuals are building, often leads to an emphasis on the discontinuity between a supposedly multicultural Ottoman Empire on the one hand, and republican ideology allergic to any difference on the other. So, one frequently reads pages in newspapers in which life in Jewish communities in the centuries of the Ottoman millet system is depicted as guaranteed within a multicultural and cosmopolitan environment. The 300 years of Ottoman power are compared to the golden age of Andalusian princes, poets and viziers as an example of peaceful co-existence between Muslims, Jews and Christians (Menocal 2002). After 1492 and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the Ottoman Empire, according to these reconstructions, became a paradise for Sephardic Jews, and in the liberal atmosphere that Jews breathed in at that time, Jewish literature and Jewish thought could flourish (think of the compilation of the Shulhan Aruch by Joseph Caro, or the lehà dodi by Shlomo Halevi Alkabes, or the experience of the ‘Lost Messiah’ Sabbatai Sevi). After 1923, however, the Jewish people, as mentioned, were granted minority status, and in 1926 with the adoption of the Swiss Civil Code in respect of individual rights, they were denied recognition and considered purely religious communities. The years of Nazi terror are those on which we need to focus more closely. For now, suffice it to say that the memory in the press and historiography is that of a Turkey (neutral in World War II) which opened its doors to Jews fleeing from Germany and Vichy, especially careful to welcome the intellectual workforce that could add to the ranks of senior executives and academics in Turkey. We shall see that some figures, mainly those of (Kemalist) diplomats, are offered nowadays as examples of the positive role played by Turkey in the rescue of Jews during the Nazi era. After the war, against the backdrop of an insidious anti-Semitism linked to anti-Zionism mainly due to the Middle East issue (Ali Bulaç’s position on these issues is very instructive), the perception of the Jewish community (on its part always ready to emphasize loyalty to the Kemalist Republic) has been linked to the strategic position of Turkey in the Western bloc. In other words, good relations with Israel until recently have played their part in ensuring a fair climate of co-existence. In recent years, two events must be mentioned: the 2003 attack on the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul, parallel to the attack on the British consulate and the HSBC Bank, which killed a total of 58 people and injured hundreds; and the new growing diplomatic tension between the government of Erdoğan and Israel. These variables, both internal, related to the process of transformation underway in Turkey, and international, 164 The Making of a Postsecular Society play a central role (which I can only exhort the reader to keep in mind) in the construction of the memory of the Holocaust in that country. Take the case of relations with Israel. In recent years, these have become more tense, finding symbolic expression in the controversy surrounding the issue of Gaza and the Marmara ship episode (Kusher 2010). The process of the social construction of a memory of the Holocaust, aimed at emphasizing not only the neutrality of Turkey in World War II (and therefore its lack of responsibility in the crimes of Nazism), but also the role that Turkey had, especially at the diplomatic level, in the work of saving many Jews. The perlocutionary intent seems to be to produce a profile of Turkey as a country devoted to defending human rights, whether in defence of Nazi horror yesterday, or in support of Palestinian rights today. The central point, in my view, is that the harsh and sometimes explicit criticism of Israeli government action is not advanced in the name of Muslim brotherhood, in the name of an umma in which the electoral base of the AK Party would partake, but by way of articulating a vocabulary of human rights. Thus, the memory of the Holocaust becomes a piece of a larger mosaic, in which the overall profile of Turkey is at stake, headed towards a post-Kemalist identity, able to recover a positive relationship with its religious identity and its past Ottoman Empire, but well aware of the internal pluralism within its borders. Let us consider the narrative told mainly by Today’s Zaman. My first example concerns the public use of history, the visibility given to a historical work of reconstruction of the role of Turkish diplomacy in the rescue of Jews during World War II; the second case has to do with the representation of the commemorations of the 2003 terroristic attack against Istanbul’s largest synagogue. At the end of August 2010, two articles were published which relate to Turkey’s role in World War II, and in particular the attitude towards the Jews.103 They move from the works of American historians, the thesis of which I shall refer to shortly. The issue seems to be Turkey’s neutrality during the Second World War. However, the memory of the Holocaust which is shaped from the articles, relying on the use of public history, emphasizes the role of some key figures of Turkish diplomacy, including İsmail Necdet Kent, Behic Erkin, and Selahattin Ülkümen. The first, who died in 2002 with honours and recognition from the Turkish government, served as consul in Vichy, France, where a large community of French Jews of Turkish origin was first threatened with regard to their goods and then their physical survival. Kent did his best to have Turkish Jews destined for Auschwitz released, creating a diplomatic incident that eventually forced the Vichy authorities to free 80 Turkish French Jews destined for certain death; he did his best so that the Jews had French recognition (providing passports and documents) as Turkish citizens, under the protection of a Constitution that does not distinguish between Turkish and Turkish for reasons of religion or race (Article 88 of the Constitution of 1923). Kent, like other diplomats whose names
103 See M. Lieberman, ‘Turkey was neutral – they weren’t: diplomat Heroes of the Holocaust’, Today’s Zaman, 24/8/2010. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 165 are perhaps less well-known, was in the service of Ambassador Erkin Behic, a man from the long course of Turkish political life. Already a personal friend of Atatürk during the war of independence, and commander of important battles during the campaign in the Dardanelles, Erkin Behic was appointed Ambassador to France by İsmet İnönü, the second President of the Republic, who defended the country’s neutrality during the Second World War. Erkin Behic was the director of the strategy to save the Jewish-Turkish Vichy French at the time. According to documents, he managed to save about 3,000. Finally, the third figure considered is that of Selahattin Ülkümen, recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, at the time 30 years old and Turkish consul on the island of Rhodes; he saved the lives of dozens of Turkish Jews on the island facing the German authorities, making no distinction, among citizens of the Turkish Constitution, between Jews, Christians and Muslims. He risked his life and put at risk that of his then pregnant young wife (who in fact died from injuries as a result of the bombing of the house where they lived, but not before giving birth to their son), to remain faithful to the principle that whoever saves one life saves the whole world. These and other facts mentioned in the articles are based on documents, found in the work of two historians in particular: Arnold Reisman and S.J. Shaw. The former, already the author of Turkey’s Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Atatürk’s Vision, is considered the author of a book that marked a turning point in the historiography of the role of Turkey in the Holocaust: Holocaust: Turkey, the US and the UK; the latter is the author of Turkey and the Holocaust. In general, these historians emphasize certain aspects of Turkey’s role: a) the Turkish government officially adopted a policy of neutrality, but in the 1930s, in welcoming academics, scientists and scholars with different skills within its educational system, in the process of rapid modernization, the government actively and directly contributed to saving hundreds of Jews; b) in practice, as some key figures testify, Turkish diplomacy did much more than remain neutral, because the official neutrality turned in different circumstances into an active contrast to the tragic fate of the Jews, providing diplomatic protection to its citizens in the Jewish Diaspora; c) the Turkish government actually helped the Jews of the Diaspora, Turkish or non-Turkish, turning a blind eye to the passage of ships within its territorial waters destined for Palestine. The episode of the Struma, a symbol in the past of indifference to the fate of Turkish Jews, becomes now on the contrary the symbol of the Turkish effort to save Jewish lives. Now, let us consider the way in which social memory is constructed as I analysed in Chapter 4; in other words, Alexander’s sociological explanation of the social construction of collective trauma. These are the components of the narrative of the Holocaust and of the part that Turkey played in defence of the Jews which is told in the articles under consideration. The above mentioned facts, and the biographies of the Turkish diplomats, are loaded with a meaning that goes beyond the role played by Turkey during the years of persecution and extermination. In fact, they are placed in a narrative that includes the history of Jews during the Ottoman Empire, painted in broad but 166 The Making of a Postsecular Society uniform brushstrokes: after 1454, from the mouth of the Chief Rabbi of Edirne, it was better for Jews to live ‘under the Muslims than under the Christians’, and at the end of the sixteenth century there were perhaps 30,000 Jews in Istanbul and 44 synagogues. In other words, the history of the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey from Atatürk to the post-World War II period, shows clearly that, unlike what often happened in the Christian world, Jews and Muslims co-existed peacefully. It is not just a chapter in a recent and very tragic story, but the attitude of an entire civilization towards a culture and a religion: the Jewish one. And, of course, this narrative is inserted in the frame represented by the climate of recent years, with a souring of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Israel as a result of well-known political events (Gaza and the question of the Freedom Flotilla in particular). Thus, a Turkish-Jew living in Israel, a noted biochemist, was quoted as saying that ‘the close ties of friendship and tolerance that characterized relations between Turks and Jews over the centuries are proof of the fact that Muslims and Jews can live together in mutual respect, and should be an example for our neighbouring Arab countries … in no generation of Jewish life in Turkey have we seen a single Muslim try to kill a Jew in the name of Allah’.104 That the claim of the Ottoman past of tolerance, or its representation as such, is presented so frequently against the idea of public space – homogenous and allergic to pluralism – Kemalist Turkey, as against the political projects of Islamic fundamentalism, is also evident from the way in which space was found for the commemoration of the attack in 2003 on Istanbul’s largest synagogue, Neve Shalom. On the morning of 15 November 2003, a bomb exploded in front of the synagogue, while another exploded in front of a local HSBC Bank, and in front of the British Consulate, causing more than 700 victims, with 58 injured. The Jews killed numbered 8, the rest were bystanders: Muslims. The attack was claimed by groups close to Al-Qaeda. The synagogue itself was the subject of a previous attack in 1986, and on that occasion 22 Jews were killed, gathered in the synagogue during Shabbat services. The victims of the two attacks are buried in the cemetery of Ulus Istanbul, where a memorial was erected in memory of the two attacks. The memory of the victims of 2003 is collectively celebrated annually in front of the synagogue itself. In 2010, commemoration on the morning of 15 November was attended by city officials and religious figures, for a moment of joint prayer.Today’s Zaman emphasized how the prayers were Jewish and Muslim, in memory of the victims of both religions, and, as in subsequent speeches, it has been stressed that in Beyoğlu, the neighbourhood traditionally considered the heart of the secular, commercial and bohemian European city, Jews and Christians have always co-existed peacefully. ‘Here there is no place for terror’ was the message delivered on the occasion of the commemoration. Again, the emphasis on the commemoration of the attack of 2003, the participation of Islamic authorities in memory of Jewish victims, in a context of almost daily tensions between Ankara and Jerusalem, is part of a ‘strategy’ of conscious emphasis on the centrality of
104 Ibid. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 167 the game being played today in Turkey around the rights of minorities, who have a stake in the redefinition of the post-Kemalist secular republic, and a strong and self-conscious Islamic Lebenswelt. The spiral of signification intended to re-describe the image of Turkey’s role in saving Jews during the Holocaust today is triggered by certain entrepreneurs of memory who, in my specific example, revolve around the religious movement Fethullah Gülen, and act mainly in the intellectual and journalistic spheres. The nature of the trauma is redefined by a shift in emphasis away from the neutrality of Turkey, or even indifference to the fate of Jewish historiography, as emphasized in the previous building upon the drama of the ship Struma, in order to underscore Turkey’s active role in the rescue of Turkish Jews and other Jews of the Diaspora, whether by conscious government policy, or through the role of many Turkish diplomats. To the question ‘who were the victims?’ an answer is offered today that is at least implicitly more complex than it was long ago. Certainly the victims were Jews, but Jewish-Turkish or ‘Turkish-’. This is a shift of the utmost importance, since it goes to the heart of the idea of Turkish national identity, making room for plural, composite identities. In order to make a shift to step three, there now has to be greater identification between victim and audience than ever before; in other words, a greater recognition of belonging to the same collective identity of groups that previously, for long periods, were conceived of as second-class citizens. This is a laborious, time-consuming, controversial working through feelings of guilt, responsibility, victimization and so on. Paradoxically, and perhaps not quite so reassuringly with regard to the outcome of the process, such a re-description of the nature of trauma is possible not through a critical review of Turkish responsibilities (as required in the case of any revision of the trauma and the tendency to consider the Armenians and Kurds responsible for it), but rather through an emphasizing of positive actions which before were hidden or not duly emphasized. Far from having an attitude of indifference towards the plight of the Jews, the re-description of the memory of the Holocaust now passes through an emphasis on the positive role towards the Jews that republican Turkey adopted from the 1930s to the end of the war, and before that by the Ottoman Empire. In this sense, as Marcy Brink- Danan wrote, analysing mainly the Quincentennial Foundation’s public relations campaign (Brink-Danan 2012), the ‘Jews, in the role of ‘good minority’, serve as a powerful foil to the Armenian genocide discourse (…) in particular, enabling Turkey to display a history of cosmopolitanism and refute the bad press it so often garners over the genocide question but also with regards to Kurdish and Islamist critiques’ (2012, 56). Finally, the most important point is that when asked about the relevance of the trauma in question for the future of national identity, one might now say that the new re-description of the memory of the Holocaust, as shaped by the entrepreneurs of memory, starts precisely from an ‘ideal interest’ in re-describing the collective identity of the Turkish nation, balancing differently from in the past the checks and balances among the elite of ‘White Turkey’ with the various suburbs of ‘Black Turkey’, which also include the different religious and cultural minorities. 168 The Making of a Postsecular Society
The reality is of course more complex than that suggested by the new Holocaust memory. The narrative constructed around the tolerance of the Ottoman Empire, or perhaps rather more about the tolerance of the Kemalist Republic, is not devoid of gaps and omissions. During the war the Jews were harassed with the odious asset tax (Varlik), like the Armenians and the Greeks, and they were considered for 40 years as second-class citizens. This evidence is most often remembered only when it comes to criticizing Kemalism; as it is not frequently remembered that though anti-Semitism was forbidden by law, there was an almost openly anti- Semitic press in the 1950s and 1960s. It is not frequently noted even today, that the more tense relations with Israel become, the thinner becomes the line between criticism of the government of Israel and anti-Semitism, both in public opinion and among the post-Islamist intelligentsia.105 The narrative about the history of Jews in Turkey, single chapters of it as well as its whole design, uses not only the ‘trope of tolerance’, but also the technique of ‘erasure of the improper element’ which could depict Turkey as intolerant (2012, 46). However, with regard to the narrative about the memory of the Holocaust as well as the broader neo-Ottoman narrative, I fully agree with Brink-Danan’s point: ‘I do not see the mythologization of the Ottoman past or of the Turkish tolerance as a question of false or true representation; instead, I see it as a strategy for the management of diversity’ (2012, 35). The following chapters will delve deeper into these issues, through analyses of empirical case studies.
Competing Centres and Ambivalent Common Ground
What have we learnt, in conclusion, from this long chapter? The message we can grasp is threefold. First, we can observe – since the 1980s but above all during the last (AK Party) decade, after the turmoil of the 1990s – the constant growing and shaping of an alternative centre competing with the Kemalist one. Opposed to the Kemalist centre which dominated Turkish life up to the beginning of the AK Party era – in different forms and with different intensity – there is now a reformist centre, whose central value system is made up of cultural and political values such as a passive conception of secularism, moral conservatism and economic liberalism, but also of a stronger emphasis on human rights, minority rights and pluralism. Key performatives and commandments that serve to legitimize this new reformist central value system are a series of democratic packages aimed at meeting the Copenhagen criteria for entry to the European Union, the so-called
105 Again, in 2013, after the eruption of the Gezi Park protest, the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Beşir Ataly said that the protest was triggered by external powers and by the ‘Jewish Diaspora’, though after the worried reactions of the Jewish community he denied the media reports. See http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-deputy-prime-minister- denies-remarks-on-jewish-diaspora-.aspx?PageID=238&NID=49858&NewsCatID=338; Doğu Ergil, ‘Turkey’s Jewish problem’, Today’s Zaman, 31/8/2013. Figure 6.1a Centre-periphery model: Turkey, 1950–2011: Antagonistic centres Figure 6.1b Centre-periphery model: Turkey, 1950–2011: New hybrid centres From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 171
‘democratic initiative’ or opening to minorities, the lift of the ban on the headscarf, and a new foreign policy. At the institutional level, instead of bureaucracy and the military, key institutions are now the Anatolian Tigers and the Müsiad, media networks, and the Imam Hatyp schools. Figure 6.1a summarizes the antagonistic centres. However, the story I have told in this chapter is much more complex and nuanced. In fact, what we have also observed is not only the existence of two competing and alternative centres, but also the mixing of values and practices common to them and their mutual hybridization. In a sense, what makes the Turkish case particularly complex (and interesting) is precisely this intermingling of forms of life and central value systems, above all (given the main focus of this book) between secular and religious forms of life. Saying this is still not yet enough. In fact, terms such as ‘intermingling’ and ‘hybridization’ are still too vague, and in this specific situation they hide two very different processes that the transformation of the old Turkish central value system is undergoing, and two very different forms that could result from this process of transformation. The new ‘common ground’ that could result from the meeting (more or less confrontational, more or less reflective, more or less consensual) between the old and the new central value systems, could consist in the crystallizing of two completely different value constellations: a new form of nationalism or a new form of rooted cosmopolitanism. I shall come to this opposition in the Conclusion, but let me stress at this point that the postsecular has to be seen as part and parcel of a rooted cosmopolitanism, as one of the central cultural values of such a new value system. In this chapter, we have seen traces of both of these new configurations. At the level of everyday social and cultural practices, we have seen – through Uğur Kömeçoglu’s fascinating analysis of the Islamic cafes – how recovering authentic cultural heritages of the Ottoman tradition may result in more than nostalgic refusals of modernity, in a vernacularization of modernity itself. Such a process of vernacularization implies the mutual transformation of both traditional and modern forms of life, at a middle level – so to speak – of reflectivity, a blurring of modernist divides and borders between tradition and modernity, the secular and religious. Practices of socialization in environments like these Islamic cafes pave the way to the making of a postsecular society; they are in themselves traces of the postsecular. At another level, traces of a vernacularized modernity and of a postsecular society are quite evident in the journalistic arena, through the effort made by some media networks of making a persuasive new narrative that balances and combines neo-Ottoman overtones and democratic claims, in different manners depending on the specific voice (the columnists considered earlier). Also at the political level, we have seen how – despite contradictions and ambiguities – key actors such as the Diyanet and the AK Party are carriers of a new narrative that strives to become hegemonic, and that tries to make both sides of the old confrontational world-view more reflective: 172 The Making of a Postsecular Society compared to Erbakan’s National Outlook Movement, the AK Party has shown a higher level of reflectivity in dealing with secularism and criticism of its Kemalist outlook. At the same time, what one can observe more and more frequently since 2012 is precisely the opposite process: a form of return on the part of the AK Party to its ‘Erbakan matrix’. According to many analysts, in fact, the AK Party is no longer acting as a centre-right party, but as an ideological party. The ‘emergence of a new AK Party’106 has been emphasized since the first months following the victory in the national elections of 2011. After defeating the ‘others’ against which the AK Party defined its own identity, mainly the military and the judiciary, Erdoğan’s party occupied all social and political spaces, becoming the new owner of the state, and ‘the undemocratic elements in the identity of the ruling party emerged’.107 Daği calls it ‘postmodern authoritarianism’, that is not specifically characteristic of Islamic parties but has to do with the temptation on the part of the majority to enforce by legislation ‘a particular way of life (using) the state apparatus to impose its choice of morality, lifestyle and value system’.108 In this sense, İsan Daği and other authoritative analysts and scholars of Turkish contemporary life agree in considering the tendency towards socially engineering the best citizen – a feature that the AK Party actually ironically shares with Kemalists. İshan Yilmaz considers the democratizing drive of the AK Party as almost completely vanished109 and the AK Party a ‘religious Kemalist party’. On the basis of this felicitous expression, the AK Party converges with Kemalists on a state-centric ideology, on a charismatic and personal view of politics, on a pro-Western rhetoric devoid of any actual appreciation of values such as pluralism and trust in civil society, and on a de-facto anti-Muslim propensity.110 Furthermore, they share a strong antipathy with regard to freedom of the press, for international criticism, and despite liberalization (strong under the AK Party ruling) do not accept the state losing control of the economy.111 Despite almost a decade of harsh confrontation with the guardians of the Kemalist state, today the AK Party shows that it shares with them the authoritarian tendency to engineer the ‘best’ citizen, who, with a still more felicitous expression, Yilmaz calls the Homo LASTus: namely Laïcist, Atatürkist, Sunni Muslim, and Turk.112 Other analysts seem to blame Erdoğan himself and his authoritarian personality, more than its political culture, for the
106 İ. D. Daği, ‘The emergence of a new AK Party’, Today’s Zaman, 22/7/2012. 107 İ. D. Daği, ‘The changing identity of the Ak Party’, Today’s Zaman, 9/9/2012. 108 İ. D. Daği, ‘Imagining an AK Party society’, Today’s Zaman, 23/12/2012. 109 İ. Yilmaz, ‘AKP: no longer a democratizing force’, Today’s Zaman, 13/7/2012. 110 İ. Yilmaz, ‘AKP: a religious Kemalist party? (1)’, Today’s Zaman, 18/7/2012. 111 İ. Yilmaz, ‘AKP: a religious Kemalist party? (2)’, Today’s Zaman, 20/7/2012. 112 İ. Yilmaz, ‘The new constitution and social-engineering the ‘best’ citizen’, Today’s Zaman, 20/2/2013. From a Secular to a Postsecular and Post-Kemalist Turkey? 173 waning of the reformist stance of the AK Party.113 Such an authoritarian turn by Erdoğan became still more evident in the light of the Gezi Park protest in May 2013, which I shall deal with in the next chapter. The next three chapters will be devoted to the analysis of three case studies, particularly relevant, in my view, to the study and exemplification of current trends in contemporary Turkey. Through all of them, we shall see how the process of changing the old Kemalist central value system has fluctuated between different poles: the consolidation of a reformist centre, totally antagonistic to Kemalist elites as well as to Kemalist sectors of society, and the taking shape of two mixed and hybrid forms of life between religious and secular individuals and groups, which in turn can be very different from each other. In fact, they can give rise either to a new modus vivendi on neo-nationalistic bases, or to the genuine, reflective making of a pluralistic and reflective postsecular society, characterized by a rooted cosmopolitanism.
113 E. Uslu, ‘Erdoğanism’, Today’s Zaman, 28/6/2013, and E. Uslu, ‘Erdoğanism II’, Today’s Zaman, 30/6/2013. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 7 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: An Old Symbol in Transformation
Welcome to Atatürk’s Land
The last three chapters of this book are devoted to detecting changes in the Turkish symbolic system. In contrast to the last chapters, I have chosen empirical case studies at the macro-sociological level, for at this level liturgical rituals (Rosati 2009) make more evident and at the same time effective ongoing changes. I shall focus on contested symbols, contested social spaces and contested memories. Conflict and contestation, in fact, are part and parcel of the struggle for hegemony that marks the shift from a Kemalist to a post-Kemalist Turkey, and the making of a postsecular society. The first symbol I want to take into consideration is Kemal Atatürk himself. No other symbol is more central to the Turkish central value system than the image of the founder of the modern republic. As Esra Özyürek notes (Özyürek 2006), visitors and newcomers are immediately greeted in Turkey with images of Atatürk, as much in Istanbul as elsewhere in the country, from airports to streets, in public buildings as well as in private shops, on coins1 and banknotes. Images of Atatürk, above all statues (whose construction must follow codified and detailed rules), are an integral part of Kemalism as a state doctrine that has a canon of sacred texts, rituals and pilgrimages, sanctuaries and feasts (Jenkins 2008, 81; Meeker 1997). What matters, however, in the present context, is the progressive transformation of the iconography relative to Atatürk, and of the meaning of this powerful, shared, virtually incontestable symbol, protected by law as well as by the morally coercive force of public opinion. In this chapter I want to focus on transformations related to the image of Atatürk, and their meanings in relation to the transformation of the notion of secularism and the formation of a post-Kemalist and postsecular country. I will consider several classes of things related to Atatürk: first, symbols such as images, statues, and different kinds of representation of his body, but also representations of his life through different languages such as biographies; second, public rituals related in one way or another to Atatürk’s
1 In June 2012 commemorative coins were put into circulation to mark the 10th anniversary of the Turkish Olympics. These coins stirred a public debate, given that, for the first time in the history of the republic, they did not represent Atatürk’s image on either side. Some observers, commentators and citizens, disliked them and said that they were part of a plan aimed at discrediting the republic’s founder (see Hürriyet Daily News, 15/6/2012). 176 The Making of a Postsecular Society figure; third, the heritage of Atatürk, his ‘presence’ in the context of discussions on the new Constitution that Parliament had to write after the elections of June 2011; finally, the ways in which symbols related to Atatürk have been made publicly visible again in the context of the Gezi Park protest, and the manner in which they were embraced, not always and necessarily in an antagonistic fashion in relation to religious people and groups.
Representing Atatürk
There are basically three different types of representation of Atatürk’s body: as a soldier, as a statesman and as a man of the people (Özyürek 2006, 96). However, if the first and the second are part of the traditional iconography of the republic, and symbolize the ideal of the independent nation, unified under the banner of the six arrows (nationalism, republicanism, populism, laicism, transformationism, statism – the nucleus of the rightist corporatist view of society shared by the charismatic leader, see Parla and Davison 2004 and Chapter 5), the third is the outcome of a process of transformation that began in the 1990s. Beyond representing Atatürk as a triumphant hero (Giesen 2004), now the new commercialized Atatürk paraphernalia (stickers, pictures, t-shirts, ashtrays, lighters and hundreds of other commodities), miniaturize the image of Atatürk, and frequently depict him as an ordinary human being ‘with a social life and desires’ (Özyürek 2006, 105), representing the same Western style and tastes (his hats, clothes) but this time penetrating a different space. In fact, if the monumental images of the soldier and the statesman basically occupy the public space of streets, squares and public buildings,2 now the new miniaturized and ‘humanized’ images of Atatürk, ‘are
2 Though I am interested more in the transformations of the ways the founding father is represented than in classical representations of the triumphant hero, it does not mean that the latter have no currency today in Turkey. On the contrary, for example, in Artvin’s Adatepe area the construction has been started of the biggest sculpture dedicated to Atatürk, which should have an expected height of 22 metres and weight of 60 tons, based on a famous photograph of Atatürk in Kocatepe. The sculptor Aylin Tekiner dedicated a study to Atatürk monuments, showing how above all statues disseminated in the country have a political value much more than an aesthetic one, having turned Atatürk into a cult object. Tekiner shows how the rate of Atatürk monuments being erected increased significantly after the 1980 military coup, but also how even before, in the 1950s, when the DP was ruling, monuments were used as a form of legitimation of political actors: ‘In 1950, although Atatürk’s CHP (Republican People’s Party) lost the elections, the ruling Democrat Party, or DP, kept adding monuments. They also wanted to own the cultural heritage of Atatürk’, see interview in the Hürriyet Daily News, 9/1/2011; on representing Atatürk in images and aftermaths, K. Hart 1999; even today, new museums dedicated to Atatürk are opened (such as in Gaziantep), new encyclopaedias on him are published, new photographic exhibitions are organized, above all on the occasion of official commemorations. Statues continue to be a symbolic battlefield of particular relevance. In March 2013 in Batman, a predominantly Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 177 displayed in private businesses, homes, and, more important, on the bodies of private citizens, all outside the direct authority of the state. In such miniature forms, Atatürk’s representations, although still icons of the state, become a part of the bourgeois subject’s domestic sphere’ (Özyürek 2006, 105). Atatürk’s image is added to those of family weddings within the domestic space and is displayed in small barbershops or drugstores. It is a process of miniaturization and in a sense of privatization of the leader’s image that is not only part of a broader commodification of lifestyles and identity symbols (Navaro-Yashin 2002), but expresses, according to some interpreters, a privatization of secularism, the retreat of secularism into the private space, under the blows of an Islam which, conversely, is increasingly present in the public sphere. ‘My Atatürk’ is displayed at home, as at work, on one’s car, or on one’s own body, as a symbol of the nostalgia for the modern, against ‘your veils’ (Özyürek 2006, 99). What this new way of representing Atatürk seems to indicate is both a persistent symbolic polarization between secular and religious people, and a transformation of the image of Atatürk in a less triumphal form. As we shall see, these are not the only directions of the ongoing transformations related to his image, and the process is very complex. Some elements seem to confirm a certain tendency towards a sort of demythologization of the figure of the founding father, but others seem to say that Turkey is far from de-sacralizing it. Others still, rather than emphasizing polarization between secular and religious people, underline the existence of a ‘politics of engagement’ and overlapping between the two, such as, for example, the existence of ‘Atatürk corners’ in the Gülen movement’s schools (see Turam 2007, 145). In recent years, historical movies and documentaries have tried to approach Atatürk’s figure in a different way from the past. Can Dündar, for example, a renowned documentary director, in his movie ‘Mustafà’, tried to offer an intimate account of Atatürk’s life, and to present the man beyond the myth.3 However, the movie caused fervent debate that divided the nation, and caused reactions from Kemalists. Dündar was accused of sacrilege, and risked being incriminated. Demythologization is the expression used several times with reference to an important book, recently published but already widely discussed, which I now want to examine in more depth. Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography by M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, aims at ‘demythologizing’ Atatürk, namely at considering his life, thought and political action in the context of his time, instead of as an object of veneration (Hanioğlu
Kurdish city in the southeast, the authorities replaced the famous Atatürk slogan, ‘How happy is the one who says I am a Turk’ written on the statue of the great leader in the city centre, with another of his famous adages, ‘Peace at home, peace in the world’. The fact provoked controversies, but of course was read also as an effort at including non-Turkish groups in a pluralistic fashion, see M. Akyol, ‘Toward a less dictating Atatürk?’, Hürriyet Daily News, 30/3/2013. 3 Discussions were provoked also around a book by Fatih Bayan, which dramatized Atatürk’s love for Latife, focusing consequently on Atatürk’s love life. 178 The Making of a Postsecular Society
2011, 4; see also Hanioğlu 2012). According to the author, ‘for many years, the scholar who aspired to portray Atatürk as he really was resembled the pre-modern historian rash enough to attempt a depiction of the historical figure of Jesus. Not surprisingly, the more scholarly and authoritative biographies of Atatürk have been authored by non-Turkish scholars, and even these long after his death. Today the subject can be dealt with more openly in Turkey, but demythologizing Atatürk is still difficult’ (Hanioğlu 2011, 2). The common attitude is that of considering him as ‘a solitary genius impervious to his upbringing, early socialization, social milieu, and intellectual environment’ (Hanioğlu 2011, 6). On the contrary, Hanioğlu’s effort is that of showing that in some respects, ‘the ideas he espoused had been widely discussed in detail long before the republican reforms, and were not novelties originated by the founder of the republic’ (Hanioğlu 2011, 227). Historians should start to consider Atatürk as a ‘normal’ topic of historic and context sensitive research, as a man of his time, instead of as a personality out of his time, and as an object of sacred respect. In the context of examples, with reference to crucial aspects of his ideas and political reforms, as is well known, Atatürk was an admirer of science and Western positivism. He thought that ‘science promoted progress while religion retarded it’ (Hanioğlu 2011, 53). At the time, opinions like this were quite common among young Turks, and ‘although he skimmed the major works of popular materialism and was profoundly influenced by them, Mustafa Kemal never became an original scientist thinker in his own right’ (Hanioğlu 2011, 53). The crude opposition between faith and reason was also connected to his strong battle in favour of secularism and to his attitude towards Islam. In Hanioğlu’s words, the popular philosophy of scientism served as a ‘deus ex machine’ to justify such an attitude. Although he never had towards religion and Islam the kind of approach that was characteristic of his contemporaries in the Soviet Union, he thought that a ‘reconfigured version of Islam could be co-opted to serve as a vehicle for progress and enlightenment’ (Hanioğlu 2011, 56). He wished to ‘tame the power’ of religion, ‘to exploit it to raise the moral standard of the masses’ (Hanioğlu 2011, 153). But once again, these were not ideas original to Atatürk: the idea of a Turkification of Islam, for example, was taken from the work of Ziya Gökalp, and had a large circulation among his contemporaries. Hanioğlu shows how the same kind of influence of the most important current of thought of his time is apparent when considering other aspects of Atatürk’s thought and political action: the idea of nationalism and the effort of creating a sort of ‘Turkish cult of reason’ was reminiscent of the French and American revolutions, and the racial foundation that he tried to give to a pre- Islamic identity of the country was reminiscent of the popular Darwinian theories of evolution of the time (Hanioğlu 2011, 161). In this respect, I am not interested in discussing the historical merits of Hanioğlu’s book. My point is considering it as part of a broader reconsideration of the figure of Atatürk, that while continuing to be a central symbol, perhaps the central symbol, of the Turkish value system, is about to enter a process of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 179 demythologization.4 Hanioğlu wants to show that ‘Atatürk was a product of the social realities of his time’ (Hanioğlu 2011, 229). This can appear a common, even banal, observation; however, once referred to a man that is usually considered a lonely hero and giant, a solitary genius that saved the nation by himself, a common and almost banal judgment can be part of a significant process. But what is more interesting is the way in which Hanioğlu’s book has been received in those circles of media and opinion makers who, as we have seen before, are actively trying to write a new narrative. Stressing the ‘meticulous research of primary sources’ and the ‘prominent’ position among historians of its author, these ‘carrier groups’ (see Chapter 4) welcome the effort of demythologizing Atatürk as a major step in the consolidation of freedom of expression and liberal and pluralist democracy in Turkey.5 Emphasizing the realistic picture that the author offered of Atatürk, usually considered ‘uncreated’, or a ‘giver of wisdom’,6 reviewers generally notice that demythologizing Atatürk implies historicizing and contextualizing his thought and life, and also becoming aware that his effort at eradicating religion from the public sphere had the negative consequence of being forced to ‘fill the vacuum’ with much worse forms of cult: a Turkish cult of reason, an institutional cult of the republic, a cult of the CHP, and above all a personality cult surrounding Atatürk himself, not so different from those that flourished in Europe in totalitarian regimes.7 Demythologizing Atatürk, through historical revisionist accounts of his life and political action can be considered a major shift in the Turkish symbolic system towards a post-Kemalist central value system. However, this is not a unidirectional trend. The ‘cult of the personality’ is so rooted that not only do Kemalists react to such a demythologizing work, but sometimes the very social and political actors expected to have a cultural and political interest in challenging the Kemalist symbolic system also fall victim to the same mindset. For example, in June 2010 Klause Jurgens, a columnist of Today’s Zaman, drew his readers’ attention to an occurrence of a few days before, when Prime Minister Erdoğan cancelled an official visit to Argentina because of a ‘change in protocol’. The
4 However, on 6 November, 2011, newspapers reported the news of a journalist accused of violating Turkey’s Law on the Protection of Atatürk, having said in a programme on CNN Turkey that he was a dictator. On this episode, see M. Akyol, ‘Defying Turkey’s blasphemy Law’, Hürriyet Daily News, 8/11/2011, S. Kiniklioğlu, ‘The Republic’, Today’s Zaman, 11/11/2011, İ.D. Daği, ‘Was Atatürk a Dictator? Ask him’, Today’s Zaman, 13/11/2011; all of them expressing critical remarks about the persistent difficulty of talking freely about the founder of the republic; see also M. Akyol, ‘Was Atatürk not a Dictator?’, Hürriyet Daily News, 21/4/2012; in February 2012, even the opposition leader Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu voiced his opinion in favour of the removal of the Law on Protection. 5 See, for example, Ş. Alpay, ‘Demythologizing Atatürk’,Today’s Zaman, 10/7/2011. 6 See M. Akyol, ‘A Quest for the Historical Atatürk’, Hürriyet Daily News, 6/8/2011. 7 See H. Millas, ‘Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography’, Turkish Review, July– September 2011, 122–7; H. Millas, ‘Atatürk’, Today’s Zaman, 19/7/2011, J. Lagedijk, Today’s Zaman, 28/8/2011. 180 The Making of a Postsecular Society fact was that ‘permission granted earlier by the Environment Ministry of the autonomous Buenos Aires federal district to unveil a bust of the founder of the current Turkish Republic had been cancelled after efforts by the Armenians who are hostile to Turkey’.8 However, the point is that ‘a reaction like the one attributed to the Turkish Prime Minister is something I would have expected from members of other political parties, but not from the ruling AK Party. Is the unveiling of a statue perhaps more important than trade, civil society contacts, tourism and in general terms global networking? Is the Armenian diaspora (…) still able to force a Turkish prime minister to reschedule his official agenda? How come?’9 According to the columnist, this is a ‘CHP-esque’ (grotesque) attitude, which reveals the AK Party’s incapacity to follow coherently a new AK Party-ish (stylish) conduct. As the title of the column synthesizes, symbolism in present-day Turkish politics is ‘between CHP-esque and AK Party-ish’, and Atatürk’s image is at the centre of this uncertain symbolic turn.
Post-Kemalist Rituals?
Atatürk is an ‘old symbol’ in ‘transformation’. The outcome of this process of transformation is still not entirely clear, but despite these contradictory directions, signs are relevant and significant. Social anthropologists have shown, for example, how there is still another transformation of this powerful symbol, besides those considered in the previous section. It does not express only the triumphant Kemalist ideology, secularism included, or in its miniaturized and privatized form, the present, alleged weakness of secular, ‘White’ Turkey in comparison with Muslim and ‘Black’ Turkey; Atatürk’s image is a symbol so sacred, intangible and shared that in the past decades even Islamic movements have tried to re-interpret it and to appropriate it. So, for example, during the celebrations for the 75th anniversary of the republic, in 1998, the then ruling Islamist Welfare Party, showed pictures of Atatürk in public prayer, praying with chest-level palms turned upward, or with his then wife Latife Hanim veiled. As is the case with symbols, Atatürk can be considered a polysemous symbol, capable of taking different meanings for different people and groups. In an interview, a member of the Saadet Partisi (The Felicity Party, the heir of the Islamist Movement of Nemcmettin Erbakan) told me that if Atatürk were alive today, he would be a member of the Saadet Partisi! As I was told by Erkam Tufan Aytan during another interview, ‘everyone in Turkey has his/her own Atatürk!’ It is an important statement, because it signifies that while under changing circumstances Atatürk’s image can be stretched in different, even apparently contradictory or historically inconsistent directions, it cannot be simply
8 K. Jurgens, ‘Symbolism in present-day Turkish politics: Between CHP-esque and AK Party-ish’, Today’s Zaman, 27/6/2010. 9 Ibid. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 181 abandoned or rejected; on the contrary, it continues to be, though in contested ways, a major source of collective self-recognition.10 More recently, other relevant things have happened in the Turkish symbolic system with reference to Atatürk and/or Kemalist symbols. I want to mention four of them, namely debates and controversies on the occasion of important official celebrations: the anniversary of Atatürk’s death, Victory Day on 30 August, Youth Day on 19 May, and Republic Day. The death of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is usually commemorated in different ways. Official commemorations take place at the Anitkabir in Ankara, usually attended by political authorities at the highest level and by the military, but also by civil society associations. Cultural and artistic initiatives take place all over the country and traffic stops and sirens blare for two minutes at 9:05 am, the time at which he died at the Dolmabahçe Palace in 1938. The latter is a form of remembering that affects ordinary people at the beginning of a working day and for foreigners it is not easy to understand how it is possible that so many people feel obliged at such a hectic time in the morning to stop their cars in the traffic to stand for two minutes to remember the founding father of the republic. But people do it, although it is not easy to say exactly how many of them, and it is a relevant fact. However, in recent years the anniversary of Atatürk’s death has been characterized by different kinds of reflection too. In the journalistic arena, the one that I am considering in more depth, columnists have started to question the mythological nature that Kemalists attributed to Atatürk, and above all have started to try to dissociate the memory of
10 On the occasion of the 73rd anniversary of Atatürk passing away, this phenomenon of ‘partisan appropriation’ was once again quite apparent. Just a few examples: both Gül and Erdoğan, in the context of official commemoration at the Anitkabir, mentioned parts of the Nutuk to stress different points: Gül to emphasize the necessity of a new Constitution, more liberal and democratic, to make a stronger Turkey, and Erdoğan to stress more ‘Kemalist’ overtones, such as the integrity and indivisibility of the country against the daily deadly actions on the part of the PKK. Yusuf Kanli, a columnist for the Hürriyet Daily News, points out how ‘there are many perceptions of Atatürk in this country. To what extent do these perceptions correspond to the real Atatürk? Who cares, everyone at every period develops his/her own perception of Atatürk and this tradition is continuing on’. Certainly, Kanli is aware that here it is not historical accuracy that is at stake, but symbolic appropriation. This is why his conclusion – ‘Perhaps it is high time to remove Atatürk as a political fault line of the country’ – though arguably polemical and provocative, does not sound convincing. The fact that ‘everyone has his/her own Atatürk’ independent of historical accuracy means that at stake is the effort by many sectors of civic and political society to make his image more consistent with a certain identity profile of the country, not that of drawing an identity profile with no space for a reference to the founding father. Furthermore, this phenomenon of ‘partisan appropriation’ is a reaction to the ‘arrogance of the property owner’, to use Markar Esayan’s appropriate expression, namely to the Kemalist attitude of using the symbol of Atatürk to draw the borders of an exclusive identity that ostracizes ‘others’, that fosters a homogenous nation and uses the memory of Atatürk as a de facto means of division and exclusion. 182 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Atatürk, his historical and political achievements, from the cult and political usage that Kemalists made of it over decades. In other words, the interesting point is the effort at separating Atatürk from Kemalism, of ‘saving Atatürk from pro-tutelage groups’,11 in order to save his memory from Kemalist appropriation and to make it shareable with the whole nation. In order to have it as a genuinely shared symbol, for White and Black Turkey, it must be saved from its Kemalist interpretation. In 2010, the 72nd anniversary of Atatürk’s death took place after the politically crucial referendum of 12 September, in which the Kemalists were severely defeated. Consequently, according to some columnists, the 72nd anniversary turned into an occasion to express their rancour in society, their paranoia and fears, above all the fear of Islamization and the alleged will on the part of those who wear and defend the headscarf to bring in Sharia law. Tattooing Atatürk’s signature or face on their body, placing Atatürk’s signature on the bumpers of their cars, is a ‘typical chauvinist Kemalist response to the transformation of society and new public demands, and questioning the repercussions of Kemalism in Turkey’.12 A chauvinist use of Atatürk’s image is an apparent sign of the growing separation of Kemalist groups from society:
Although they are the most educated segment of society, they are ignorant. They fail to understand the changing nature of society and the international scene and they fail to connect themselves to the rest of society. Therefore, they fail to understand what the public demands. Perhaps because they read Kemalist newspapers, watch Kemalist debates on TV and ignore what the other sides say, or at best fail to refute the ideas that are coming from the other side without checking whether they can be true or not, the Kemalists live in an “intellectual ghetto” that makes them ignorant in understanding the real debate among the people.13
If by portraying Atatürk as an icon they ‘have created an ideology known as Kemalism’,14 the new neo-Ottoman narrative does not seem to aim at ‘cleansing’ public space of symbols of Atatürk, but rather to separate them from Kemalism. However, to do so the government introduced a ban on institutions other than those representing the state from laying wreaths on monuments to Atatürk on national days. Needless to say, the ban was highly controversial, preventing civil society organizations and political parties from honouring the memory of the founder of the republic in the proper way. November 9, 2012, turned into a controversial date precisely because of this ban, until a memo issued by the Interior Ministry promised that the ban would be withdrawn. In 2013, 9 November provided an opportunity for hardline Kemalists to express their discontent towards the
11 See H. Gülerce, ‘Saving Atatürk from pro-tutelage groups’, Today’s Zaman, 11/11/2010. 12 E. Uslu, ‘Kemalist rancor’, Today’s Zaman, 11/11/2010. 13 Ibid. 14 F. Sişli Zibak, ‘Iconizing Atatürk’, Today’s Zaman, 11/10/2010. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 183 government after the Gezi Park protests and more recent harsh debates following Erdoğan’s attacks on freedom of lifestyles. The number of people (one million) who visited the Anitkabir on the occasion of the 2013 commemoration triggered a debate on a possible rediscovering of Atatürk and his legacy, more in a climate of polarization than one of conciliation.15 The second celebration I want to consider is Victory Day, the celebration commemorating the end of the War of Independence. In 2010, no different from previous years, celebrations were dominated by the military, which, through parades, wanted to demonstrate that the Turkish people and their army, if united, can face the hardest challenges to the nation’s independence and integrity. There is no need to say that in celebrating the 1922 victory, the military meant to stress their central role in facing present challenges to national unity and integrity, or what they understand as such. However, in this case too, the Kemalist ritualization of Victory Day did not pass either unnoticed or uncriticized. The tanks rolling into stadiums in big cities and parades of soldiers in the major cities raised the question of whether ‘it is healthy for a nation carrying out ambitious efforts to democratize to allow celebrations imbued with military overtones (…) for many active in the human rights field, the military parades are only a demonstration of the military’s power’.16 A prominent journalist, Mehemet Altan, said that Turkey’s regime was following the ‘Prussian model’ of ‘a soldier nation’, according to which ‘every Turk is born a soldier’. In his opinion, the celebrations had not changed from the 1930s: ‘Even the parade formation has remained the same. The military cannot change it even if it wants to. Politics, as an institution, does not want a change in the military. Political parties are not making an effort to change this regime. All parties are serving militarism. The regime is not democratic, but there are no efforts to transform it into a democracy, because the military-politics relationship has turned into a field for profit. The General Staff cannot be brought under supervision of the National Defence Ministry’.17 In fact, the military-politics relationship has changed a great deal in recent years and it is still changing, as part (a relevant part) of the democratization process. If one compares the celebrations of Victory Day in 2010 and 2011, these changes are evident at the symbolic level too. In 2011, for the first time, it was the country’s civilian president, Abdullah Gül, who received greetings from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and not the Chief of General Staff. It was a change in the Victory Day celebration protocol that came from the Chief of Staff, General Ozël, who was appointed after the last major crisis between military and civilian powers in the country. This symbolic change was considered by the non-Kemalist press as a sign of the normalization of the relationship between the two powers. Another symbolic sign of this normalizing
15 See S. Kiniklioğlu, ‘Rediscovering Kemail?’, Today’s Zaman, 13/11/2013; M. Türköne, ‘After Atatürk’, Today’s Zaman, 11/11/2013. 16 B. Altintaş, E. Yavuz, ‘Military parades on national holidays indicate weak democracy’, Today’s Zaman, 31/8/2010. 17 M. Altan, in ibid. 184 The Making of a Postsecular Society phase, pointing out the military’s fading influence over Turkish politics, was that during a Supreme Military Council meeting, Prime Minister Erdoğan sat alone at the head of the table, ‘contrary to earlier seating arrangements in which the prime minister sat beside the armed forces chief’.18 The 2011 Victory Day celebrations, in other words, showed signs of an incipient post-Kemalist ritualization. This new protocol, implying relevant symbolic changes, was adopted in 2012 too. Despite this, controversies over the ban on laying wreaths at Atatürk’s monuments marked Victory Day in 2012 and 2013. The third ritualistic occasion I want to consider is ‘Youth and Sport Day’. On 19 May, Turkey marks the beginning of the War of Independence, remembering the day Atatürk landed in Samsun. Traditionally, officials and political leaders visit the Anitkabir in Ankara, and participate in gatherings of students in stadiums, above all in the Atatürk Stadium in Ankara. In fact, remembering Atatürk’s famous speech ‘Nutuk’, 19 May celebrates youth as the ‘follower and keeper’ of the nation’s independence. However, once again in 2011, the post-Kemalist press did not hesitate to denounce ‘fascist overtones’ that characterise the official celebrations. Slogans such as ‘one language, one flag, one motherland’, formed by choreographed formations of military cadets in stadiums, were (rightly) compared to those performed in fascist and communist countries. Post-Kemalist opinion makers, as well as civil society associations, stressed that Turkey should start to celebrate 19 May in a more civilian manner, in a de-militarized way, through forms of post-Kemalist ritual. Mustafa Akyol wrote incisive words of criticism against the Kemalist ritualization of Youth Day. After noticing how in Turkey almost every official day is about the ‘commemoration of Atatürk’, he stresses how the meaning of these official days is that of ‘portraying Atatürk as an all- knowing, and all-righteous leader, who can be only venerated and obeyed, but never questioned’. At the same time, this cult of the great leader has performative effects in the present (as always, memory has a presentist nature, see Chapter 8); in fact, ‘keeping Turkey as ‘The Atatürk Republic’ has a very pragmatic benefit for those who define themselves as ‘Atatürkist’. It implies a political system which they have an exclusive right to own and utilize, whereas the non- Atatürkists can only be second-class citizens, and even deserve to be labelled as ‘enemies within’.19 In a quite direct manner, Akyol shows how the memory of Atatürk, once shaped and practised, so to speak, by Kemalist groups, instead of being a uniting symbol, divides the country along cultural, religious and ethnic lines, being ‘discriminatory against a very large part of society – which includes conservative Muslims, ethnically conscious Kurds or liberals’.20 But this is not the only problem with such a Kemalist memory of Atatürk. The main problem with rituals like Youth Day is their very illiberal nature. First of all, they are ‘a roadblock to meritocracy’: ‘in a political system defined mainly by the charisma
18 Ibid. 19 M. Akyol, ‘Why do we really have a ‘Youth Day’?’, Hürriyet Daily News, 20/5/2011. 20 Ibid. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 185 of a person, your allegiance to that person becomes much more important than your merits. What matters is not your skills and your hard work, but your loyalty to the leader and his “path”’.21 A second problem with the ‘Atatürk Republic’ is its ‘intense collectivism’: ‘According to its official ideology, the individual is really not a big value in itself. Thus he or she can be easily sacrificed for a collective body called “the nation”’.22 The Youth Day celebrations are an archaic ritual that should be abandoned in a democratized country, precisely because they express a collectivistic ideology:
The festival is supposed to promote “sport”, but this never includes competitive ones such as football or tennis. The common activity of the day is rather choreographed dances on stadium grounds, or team gymnastics in which male athletes use their well-built bodies to form human-towers – a relic from the age of “racial fitness”. Another usual “Youth Day” scene is the thousands of youngsters in stadium tribunes (sic), who hold placards that collectively form huge images such as the national flag, portraits of Atatürk, or slogans referring to Atatürk, such as “we are on your path”.23
Akyol’s lunge against such a Kemalist ritualization of Atatürk does not stop here. In his opinion, in fact, the very ‘Address to the Youth’, the part of the Nutuk dedicated to youth that is at the core of the Youth Day, should be abandoned. The reason is that ‘there is simply no mention of democratic values in Atatürk’s address’.24 The beginning of the address (‘Oh Turkish Youth! Your first duty is to preserve Turkish independence and the Turkish Republic forever. This is the only basis of your future and your existence’) expresses an ‘authoritarian mentality that defines the ‘first duty’ of every Turkish citizen’.25 In other parts of the address, Atatürk warned the youth against ‘enemies from within and without’, and this, in Akyol’s view, is the ‘root of the mentality that defines certain social segments in Turkey as internal enemies (…) and gives a blank cheque to those Kemalists who want to topple elected governments via military coups’.26 Finally, at the end of his address, Atatürk told the new generations of Turkey that ‘the power you need is in the noble blood in your veins’. This reference to the ‘noble blood’ is, as Akyol notices, a reflection of the biological racism of the 1930s, that ‘does not fit into the democratic definition of the citizenship we need’.27 To sum up, what Akyol shows in a cogent way, is the undemocratic and illiberal features of these Kemalist-type forms of celebration of Atatürk’s Republic and Atatürkism.
21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 M. Akyol, ‘Atatürk youth at work’, Hürriyet Daily News, 29/4/2011. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 186 The Making of a Postsecular Society
May 19, 2012 marked a new era, as a consequence of a new regulation introduced by the government. A memo issued by the Ministry of Education, in fact, cancelled traditional celebrations, claiming that students were being negatively affected by parades and by their militaristic overtones. The new celebrations, organized by the Ministry of Youth and Sports, took the form of a ‘Youth Week’: concerts, stage plays, seminars and sporting competitions in the universities and streets replaced military parades in the stadiums. The idea was that of having a nationwide, civic festival, which would last for a week. However, as is imaginable, such a shift and change did not occur without sparking controversies. After an initial negative reaction on the part of the Council of State, which annulled a government decree that limited the scope of the 19 May festivities, Prime Minister Erdoğan said that ‘Turkey no longer belongs to a group of elitists or certain groups’ (the military and Kemalist elites), and that ‘no one should dare to discipline or brandish us like a tutor over 19 May celebrations anymore’ (Hürriyet Daily News, 30/4/2012). If previous celebrations aimed at raising Kemalist generations, he voiced his wish for a ‘religious generation’, causing harsh reactions and strengthening the charge of a ‘hidden Islamic agenda’. Most of the post-Kemalist commentators, in the columns of the Today’s Zaman above all, welcomed the new regulation introduced by the government, not as a way of raising a religious generation, but of making a step ahead towards a de-militarization and democratization of the country,28 despite criticizing some ‘tragicomic’ forms that the new celebrations sometimes took (such as cutting a birthday cake for Atatürk).29 However, 19 May 2012 was also marked by tensions. In fact, as the press relates, ‘some participants (…) reacted negatively to the style of celebrations in Taksim, showing their displeasure that a moment’s silence had not been observed in memory of Atatürk. Furthermore, a crowd, mostly supporters of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), marched in Istanbul to protest the government’s decision not to hold large-scale official ceremonies in stadiums’ (Today’s Zaman, 20/5/2012). As is evident, softening the militaristic and Kemalist tones of 19 May celebrations remains a controversial issue. Even in 2013, CHP representatives criticized the ceremonies for being ‘too short’. The last celebration I want to consider is Republic Day, which is celebrated on 29 October. After Gül’s election as President of the Republic, 29 October became a reason for tension. In fact, the official reception is usually held at the Dolmabahçe, the presidential residence where Atatürk died. Since 2002, the Dolmabahçe has been included in the list of ‘public spaces’, where, in accordance with the will of the at the time ultra-secularist President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, wearing headscarves
28 See, for example, K. Jurgens, ‘May 19, 2012 – Milestones in the Making’, Today’s Zaman, 13/2/2012, and ‘May 19, 2012, rings in a new era, almost’, Today’s Zaman, 18/5/2012; M. Esayan, ‘May 19 and the characteristics of reforms’, Today’s Zaman, 20/5/2012; M. Türköne, ‘May 19 celebrations’, Today’s Zaman, 16/1/2012 and ‘A new May 19’, Today’s Zaman, 14/5/2012; B. Dedeoğlu, ‘May 19’, Today’s Zaman, 18/5/2012. 29 M. Esayan, ‘May 19 and the characteristics of reforms’, Today’s Zaman, 20/5/2012. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 187 is banned. As is known, Gül’s wife wears a headscarf, and for this reason Kemalist groups did not want her to attend the official celebration at the Dolmabahçe Palace on that day. In order to avoid adding further tensions to his contested candidature since his election in 2007, on 29 October Gül held two separate receptions: one for the military and senior government officials, and another in the evening for the media, NGOs, artists and others. The latter hosted the spouses of the invitees, their heads covered or otherwise. However, in October 2010, after months of controversy, President Gül decided to commemorate the establishment of the Republic of Turkey by merging the receptions that in previous years had been kept separate. Furthermore, a few days later, his wife officially welcomed Germany’s representatives, walking down the red carpet and greeting the Turkish soldiers. By introducing the headscarf in public spaces, Gül was trying to make places related to the memory of Atatürk (such as the Dolmabahçe palace) open to religious markers; he was trying to separate the memory of Atatürk from Kemalism and from a Kemalist understanding of secularism. However, his decision to host a single reception was not welcomed by the military and by the leader of the CHP, the main opposition party and heir to Atatürk’s Republican Party. Both the military and the CHP representatives decided to boycott the reception, and the military held its own reception. The decision was taken by the post-Kemalist press as a proof of the military’s unwillingness to normalize relationships with the civil power. Reactions, both on the part of the AK Party and on the part of the non-Kemalist press, were severe. The Prime Minister said that ‘Tonight’s reception is right here. I do not find any other reception right. The reception of the head of the public is here, and the public is here too’ (reference unknown – ed.). What is symbolically at stake is precisely the idea of the public, and the two receptions symbolize two very different notions of the public; according to President Gül, who did not mention in his comments the military’s decision, ‘Turkey is here. All of Turkey’s truths are here – all of its differences and colours. Turkey’s reality is here’, at the reception at the Dolmabahçe Palace, where a pluralistic and ‘colourful’ public space would be displayed as opposed to the empty and monochrome public space of the military reception.30 Change appears to be on the horizon if we compare 2010 with 2011. As in 2010, President Gül announced that on 29 October, a single reception would be held. However, he added also that the General Staff would not organize a separate reception. Opinion makers and the non-Kemalist press interpreted this new attitude on the part of the military and their new head as a sign of normalization,
30 See ‘Commanders, Kiliçdaroğlu hold own celebrations on Republic Day’, Today’s Zaman, 31/10/2010; ‘Dispensing with the Republic and Queen Atatürk II’, Today’s Zaman, 31/10/2010; ‘Reception boycott shows CHP, military distant to normalization’, Today’s Zaman, 1/11/2010; V. Baydar, ‘Divided we stand’, Today’s Zaman (date unknown – ed.); S. Alpay, ‘Two Faces of the Republic of Turkey’, Today’s Zaman, 01/11/2010; A. Kanbolat, ‘Republic Day poisoned between tension and holiday’, Today’s Zaman, 2/11/2010. 188 The Making of a Postsecular Society a new step toward democratization.31 If things took an unexpected course it was because of a dramatic earthquake in the area of Van, which killed more than 600 people and caused enormous damage. To express solidarity with the victims of the earthquake, President Gül cancelled parades and receptions all over the country. Gül’s decision was for a cause of more controversy, because it was interpreted by the leader of the opposition CHP, Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu, as proof of the lack of attention on the part of the ruling AK Party to the symbols of national unity and pride. In his opinion, celebrating Republic Day was the right and best way to show national unity both over the devastating earthquake and the continuing recent deadly attack by the outlawed Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). Kiliçdaroğlu was not the only one to criticize Gül’s decision, given that thousands of people joined him and other opposition leaders in unofficial marches in Istanbul, Izmir and other cities.32 So, once again, Republic Day ended by representing a moment of division. Controversies and ‘first times’ also marked Republic Day celebrations in 2012. As a consequence of the ban by the Ankara Governor and government’s officials on a rally of the opposition and leftist civil society associations, for the first time Republic Day was celebrated at two separate events in Ankara: an official celebration at the Anitkabir and an unofficial celebration in front of the first parliament building. The alternative festivities had as their slogan ‘to claim ownership of the Republic’, coined by the CHP and leftists and Kemalist civil society organizations. For the first time, Kemalists felt oppressed and lost, and reacted by claiming once again the ‘ownership’ of the republic. If such a claim is an evident show of a persistent lack of pluralistic culture,33 it is also true that the ban on celebrations organized by the opposition is anti-democratic and quite dangerous, as Orhan Kemal Cengiz noted, having the effect of polarizing society: ‘the last thing we need in Turkey for democratization’, he writes, ‘is to give the old elites the impression that they cannot express themselves freely. Let them complete their mourning process in a healthy way and return to democratic competition’.34 The 2013 celebrations were marked once again by contradictory signals: on the one hand Emine Erdoğan, the Prime Minister’s wife, attended the official ceremony for the first time (in previous years she was absent to avoid a possible political crisis due to her headscarf), but on the other hand, old slogans, such as ‘How happy is the one who says “I am a Turk”’ marked the protests of tens
31 See A. Albaykar, ‘A single reception to be held on October 29’, Today’s Zaman, 21/10/2011; a similar process of normalization occurred in 2012, on the occasion of the National Sovereignty and Children’s Day, hosted by the Parliament Speaker Cemil Çiçek and attended for the first time by headscarved wives of politicians. 32 Popular rallies by ‘secularists’ and Kemalist against the AK Party or ‘Islamist’ symbolic distortion of national days are not new; for rallies in 2007, see Navaro-Yashin 2002, Özyürek 2006, and Tambar 2009. 33 M. Akyol, ‘When Kemalists feel oppressed’, Hürriyet Daily News, 31/10/2012. 34 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Do not interfere with Kemalists’ mourning’, Today’s Zaman, 23/10/2012. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 189 of thousands gathered in an alternative rally in Ankara, together with new ones, such as ‘Everywhere is Taksim, everywhere is resistance’.
‘Atatürkism’ and the Constitution Wave
After the referendum in September 2010, and even more so after the national election of June 2011, a new Constitution, capable of democratizing the one written by the military in 1981, became the top issue on the political agenda. Despite resistance in Kemalist circles, post-Kemalist circles started to become outspoken in their proclamation of the necessary post-Kemalist profile of the new Constitution: ‘The referendum result has proven people are capable of making their own constitution and that the CHP and its Kemalist allies are not in a position to stop it. The liberal/ democrat/conservative alliance for democratic reform has won over the nationalist pro-status quo front (…) This is a step to a post-Kemalist republic. A republic that is not ruled by the state elite but by the people like in all democratic regimes; a republic in which power is not monopolized by a few high bureaucrats and judges but shared by the people. This is a move from a republic under the tutelage of a civilian-military bureaucracy to a fully functioning liberal democracy’.35 The next step was the Constitution of the so-called Reconciliation Commission, formed in the new parliament, which had been assigned the task of drafting the text of a new Constitution for Turkey.36 The Reconciliation Commission, whose very name expresses the ambition of writing a shared text capable of bridging divided memories, aims not only at involving all the parliamentary parties, but also at involving civil society groups and professional associations. In principle, this commission would have to trigger a ‘snowballing’ process, a ‘cybernetics of the sacred’, the outcome of which would have to be new ‘ultimate sacred postulates’ (see Chapter 5): ‘The whole of society is excited about the process. Everywhere across the country, civil society organizations are participating in debates about what the new Constitution should be. They are creating their own agendas and submitting them to Parliament, which will eventually write the Constitution. A strong wave is rising in support of the new Constitution. The Constitution drafting process has permeated all social groups. Participation is high and we are making progress via constructive and healthy discussions’.37 A deliberative process
35 İ. Daği, ‘Towards a Post-Kemalist republic’, Today’s Zaman, 13/9/2010. 36 The Commission dissolved in November 2013, and hopes for a new charter fade consequently. 37 M. Türköne, ‘The Constitution Wave’, Today’s Zaman, 24/10/2011; it is worth noting that from the political point of view the process stopped several times, and in July 2013 is still far from reaching its outcome. While I am writing, the latest hypothesis seems to be that to unlock the process the government will present a two-stage offer to the opposition parties, approving in Parliament the articles agreed on as a charter package, and submitting controversial articles to a ‘multiple-choice’ referendum to the people. 190 The Making of a Postsecular Society like this (see Habermas 1998), lending itself to interpretation along the lines of Rappaport’s cybernetics of the Holy (see Rosati 2009), cannot but incur some highly thorny symbolic issues. The most sensitive of them have to do with the elements of Atatürkism still contained in the 1981 Constitution and disseminated not only in the current Constitution, above all in the first four articles, but in other strategic oaths of loyalty, such as those required of students at school and members of parliament. On the occasion of the first meeting of the new Parliament after the elections of June 2011, precisely this oath was among the reasons that kept some of the newly elected members of parliament out of the main political space of the country. The oath, imposed by the 1981 Constitution, reads as follows:
I swear upon my honour and integrity, before the great Turkish Nation, to safeguard the existence and independence of the state, the indivisible integrity of the Country and the Nation, and the absolute sovereignty of the Nation. To remain loyal to the supremacy of law, to the democratic and secular Republic, and to Atatürk’s principles and reforms; not to deviate from the ideal according to which everyone is entitled to enjoy human rights and fundamental freedoms under peace and prosperity in society, national solidarity and justice, and loyalty to the Constitution.
Once again, it was Mustafa Akyol, among others, who stressed in a column in the Hürriyet Daily News the authoritarianism (and even the absurdity) of a similar oath. The first problematic term is in the first sentence, which mentions ‘the great Turkish Nation’. Here the problem is that ‘a considerable part of Turkey’s Kurds have long objected to that term, and argued that they can be a part of the ‘nation of Turkey’, but not of ‘the Turkish Nation’. In their view, the latter is like making Iraq’s parliamentarians swear ‘before the great Arab Nation’, whereas, of course, not all Iraqis are Arabs’.38 Indeed, such a promise of loyalty to an ethically and culturally homogenous nation, which is a legacy of Kemalism, is obnoxious not only to Kurds, but to many other minorities.39 What is at stake here, symbolically, is the recognition of minorities and their loyalty to a constitutional contract which in turn recognizes their difference from a homogenous social and political space. The second controversial sentence is that referring to the ‘indivisible integrity of the Country and the Nation’. As Akyol observes, the fact is that ‘there are people who believe that a Turkey divided into two, or more parts, as a “federation” will be much nicer. There are even some “separatists”, both on the Turkish and Kurdish sides, who believe that Turks and Kurds must get divorced and have their own countries. I think these are very bad ideas, but unless promoted violently, they
38 M. Akyol, ‘The absurdity of Turkey’s oath’, Hürriyet Daily News, 29/6/2011. 39 In July 2013, Alevis still voice their concern over the new Constitution that would – on the basis of the work already done by the Constitution Conciliation Commission – fail to improve their rights. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 191 should have their place under the sun’.40 Though particularly controversial, perhaps courageous, but certainly sensitive, this is not Akyol’s opinion alone. Another of the columnists considered in this book, Orhan Kemal Cengiz, who expresses a post-Kemalist view said, in a provocative manner, that a separatist party would be healthy. Sharing Ahmet Altan’s view (another radical opinion maker), Cengiz wrote that ‘having a separatist party would be a huge step forward for democracy in Turkey. Allowing such a political party to operate freely and being ready to bear the consequences would be the most powerful antidote for paranoia, fear and nationalism, all of which have always dominated the political sphere in Turkey’.41 Needless to say, these are sacrilegious opinions from a Kemalist point of view, and the sacralization of Atatürk’s principles works exactly like a fence against their legitimacy, such that repeating ‘Atatürkist’ oaths works like a ritualistic protection of the national indivisibility, integrity and homogenous nature against profane opinions. It is precisely Atatürk’s principles that constitute the last component of the oath criticized by Akyol. They are, he maintains, the ‘worst imposition of the oath’:
That every member of the parliament should “remain loyal to Atatürk’s principles and reforms”. Well, if that is a must, why then do we have various political parties? We would all gather at “Atatürk’s party”, the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP. Personally speaking, I clearly object to some of the “principles and reforms” of Atatürk, such as the bloody “Hat Revolution”, by which the trimmed hat was made compulsory, or the “Language Revolution”, by which the rich Ottoman language was “purified” and much impoverished. If I happened to join the Parliament one day, I would probably get inspired by the ‘principles’ of other figures, such as John Locke, Edmund Burke or Ibn Khaldun, which all proposed limited governments, not tyrannical ones.42
Leaving aside Akyol’s gallery of intellectual heroes, which one can accept or otherwise, the conclusion is quite clear (and shareable):
The obvious truth is that we have an authoritarian constitution that imposes the ideology of its makers (the 1980 junta) on the elected members of the parliament. In fact, such oaths are everywhere in Turkey, even in primary schools, where little kids are made to recite every morning that “they will relentlessly walk on Atatürk’s path, I believe that such old ceremonies reflect not just the authoritarianism, but also the absurdity of our establishment”.43
40 Ibid. 41 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Why we need a separatist party’, Today’s Zaman, 20/10/2011. 42 M. Akyol, ‘The absurdity of Turkey’s oath’, Daily Hürriet News, 29/6/2011. 43 Ibid. 192 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Scholars, and hopefully readers with less specialized skills, sensitive to the power of rituals, may easily understand the importance of such rituals – daily rituals, such as the oath at primary school, or liturgical political rituals such as those considered in this chapter. Unless one maintains that their symbolic and causal force is nil, it is clear that the shaping of a democratized, post-Kemalist and postsecular Turkey depends also on the shaping of post-Kemalist forms of ritualization of the Turkish collective memory. I have tried to show in this chapter that with specific reference to the powerful symbol that Atatürk still represents nowadays in Turkey, the process is open: non-linear, contradictory and ambiguous, but surely open.
Atatürk’s Symbolic Legacy: Immortality and Unfulfilled Promises
Considered from the perspective of the changes in the symbolic sphere, and above all from the perspective of changes concerning the symbols related to the figure of the founding father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the shift from a Kemalist to a post- Kemalist Turkey, and from a hardcore, assertive secular republic to a postsecular country, appears to be an incomplete transition. If in the 1920s and 1930s of the past century Atatürk secularized Turkey, since the 40s onwards, ‘Kemalists have, paradoxically, sanctified Atatürk’ (Karaveli 2010, 94). Historians, intellectuals in general, politicians, opinion makers and so on, are divided in their judgments on Atatürk, his political life and values. According to some of them (those who sanctified his cult, frequently for their own benefit) he was the source of every wisdom and truth. Then there are those according to whom Atatürk’s thought expressed an ‘unfulfilled promise of enlightenment’ (Karaveli 2010), while Kemalism went further and further astray after Atatürk’s death. There are those for whom Atatürk’s thought was inevitably burdened by the historical condition of the country at the time, by the limits of the historical international context, but it was – compared with the time – a great lesson of civility, love for institutions, popular sovereignty and independence, so that today he would have no difficulty in rethinking, for example, secularism, institutional arrangements that preserve unity and integrity of the country, and political participation, in a way different from that which he fostered during his lifetime (Mango 2000). Finally, there are those according to whom, as recent debates show, he was simply a dictator. From my sociological perspective, matters are less ‘black and white’. It would be naïve to discuss whether Turkey should abandon any symbolic reference to its founding father. Political struggles on values and ideologies are not only legitimate, but necessary. Whether for the purpose of writing a Constitution with Atatürkist echoes or not, this is something that Turkish citizens and engaged intellectuals must discuss. As a non-Turkish sociologist interested in Turkey, I can simply observe that Atatürk is there, in the squares and streets of every Turkish city; his image is tattooed on the body of the people, his signature is stamped on cars and elsewhere as a sign of belonging. No matter that sometimes he is a symbol Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 193 that unites and sometimes divides: it is there, powerful, apparently immortal – immortal, but not unchanging. An Italian anthropologist, Claudia Mattalucci-Yilmaz, showed in a brilliant article how Atatürk’s immortality is a condition that is neither stable nor definitive (Mattalucci-Yilmaz 2006, 203). Following the Durkheimian tradition, and above all making explicit reference to Robert Hertz and his work on the social representations of death, she stresses how immortality and the transformation of a dead person into an ancestor – Ata – is the outcome of ritual activities (Mattalucci-Yilmaz 2006, 200). In more detail, she emphasizes how, as in other cases in the past century (Mussolini in Italy, for example), the body of the founder of the republic started to represent and incarnate the republic itself while Atatürk was still alive. Atatürk himself was the best model for the political aesthetics of the new country. At the same time, it was precisely that body which expressed the new values of the republic, the right-sacred (see Chapter 1), and was also the incarnation of a dissipated life and habits: it is well known that he drank too much raki, suffered from cirrhosis of the liver, had no natural children, divorced his first wife and did not marry a second time. As Mattalucci-Yilmaz maintains, the body of the leader was sacred and execrable at the same time, both exemplar and transgressor: it incarnated reforms on the one hand and violated the new republican order on the other (Mattalucci-Yilmaz 2006, 192). In other words, Atatürk’s body expressed both the right and the left sacred of the new republican order. The definitive transformation of this body into a positive symbol is a consequence of the ritual practices enacted after his death. The symbolic efficacy of the body of the leader was amplified by a two stage funeral rite. Soon after Atatürk’s death, on 10 November 1938 at 9:05 am there began a magnificent and deeply mournful collective rite. The body was embalmed and for seven days it was left in the Dolmabhaçe ceremonial room for the people’s last homage. Around the coffin, six torches commemorated the six arrows and the founding principles of the republic. After the funeral ceremony in Istanbul, a completely secular ceremony followed, the coffin was brought to Ankara on a special train and every town on its passage rendered homage to the leader. The first funeral rites took place in Ankara on 21 November, but in every city, at 2:00 pm, people gathered in squares, under Atatürk’s statues, and observed three minutes of silence. On the whole, these rituals had to transmit the feeling of a united country – its political leaders, the military and people – even after the great leader’s death (Mattalucci-Yilmaz 2006, 196–7). However, the crucial moment for the transformation of Atatürk’s body into an immortal symbol was the second burial. During the Inönü Presidency, the decision to build a mausoleum for the leader was taken. The chosen place, destined to become a sacred space, was the hill of Rasattepe, Ankara. The reason was that ‘According to the general overview of today’s and tomorrow’s Ankara, Rasattepe is like a star in the middle of a crescent that extends between Dikmen and Etlik, the two final points of Ankara. Ankara is the body of the crescent. If building Anıtkabir here is accepted, the following situation will occur. Turkey’s capital city Ankara, 194 The Making of a Postsecular Society with its arms wide open, will embrace Atatürk. Thus, we will lay Atatürk in the middle of the ‘star and crescent’ of our flag. Atatürk will symbolically unite with our flag’ (http://www.tsk.tr/eng/Anitkabir/dusunce/yersecim5.htm). As is clear, it was a highly symbolic choice. After the building of the Anitkabir (see Meeker 1997), Atatürk’s body was definitively buried in the Anitkabir on 8 November 1953. Now the body could be returned to the earth and left to its natural destiny. But the symbol was now independent of the materiality of the body. The remains of the body and the Anitkabir became a single thing, a single object of cult and memory. The Anitkabir became the sacred centre of a secular cult, and a part of its charisma radiated in statues and squares over the country dedicated to the image of the leader (Mattalucci-Yilmaz 2006; see also Ökten 2007, Dole 2011) It became a sacred place, presenting all the features common to sacred places as analysed in Chapter 3: it has an orienting function in the moral order of the republic, it mirrors a perfect republican order (at least consistent with the Kemalist view of republicanism), it is a meeting point between citizens and the sacred figure of the leader, and finally it contains the sacralised body of the leader himself. The Anitkabir became, in other words, the perfect example of a civic sacred place. Immortality is no small thing. It is achieved through highly ritualistic practices, highly liturgical and canonical. Since 1960, when the Mausoleum and the Museum of the Anitkabir was opened, it has become the centre of liturgical ceremonies to commemorate Atatürk. In very recent years, as I have tried to show in this chapter, the liturgy has been slowly changing. Maybe not yet in the official liturgies at the Anitkabir, but the ways of representing Atatürk are changing in several other contexts. These changes are of no small momentum either. In the long run, consistent with the long breadth of rituals, they will produce changes in the symbol. As I have tried to show, the most significant change regards the effort, consciously made by a post-Kemalist elite, to make the symbol of Atatürk consistent with the neo-Ottoman democratic narrative, to separate it from a Kemalist interpretation, and to make it representative of a post-Kemalist and postsecular national profile.
After Gezi Park: A New Meaning for Taksim Square?
It began as an environmental protest against the ‘cementization’ of one of the last urban green areas in the centre of Istanbul, Gezi Park, next to Taksim Square. The government’s project was that of rebuilding Ottoman barracks previously totally demolished, allegedly out of respect for history (Topçu barracks were a symbolic building under Allied occupation of Istanbul). However, protesters criticized the hidden intentions of the government, namely the plan of building within the barracks a shopping centre and luxury residential flats. In fact, the protest was from the very beginning something more than a simple environmental issue. Leaving aside other dimensions (which I shall touch upon later), the target was also the government’s policy of a symbolic ‘re-conquering’ of social space through giant buildings: a mosque in Taksim Square, one at the top of Çamlica Hill, a third Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 195 bridge over the Bosphorus to be named after Yavuz Sultan Selim, a third airport in the city. From the very beginning, in other words, it was quite clear that it was impossible to detach the environmental protest from the anti-capitalist criticism of the economic ultra-liberalism of the AK Party and the muscular politics of social space pursued by it. However, quite soon after the occupation of Taksim Square on 28 May 2013 by environmentalists, the protest turned into a still more complex and pluralistic social movement which, according to several commentators, marked a new turning point in contemporary Turkey. The ruling party’s reaction to it was another turning point: tear gas, police force and violence, media silence and Erdoğan’s continuous insults of the protesters – called looters (çapulcu) and drunkards (ayyaş) – turned the protest into a struggle for liberties against the authoritarian policies and attitudes of the AK Party and Erdoğan, which soon became widespread all over the country. For one month the world had to witness an arm-wrestling match between mostly peaceful people and police ready to attack on a daily basis with no mercy. Seven people lost their lives and the country had to face a new shock. Although many cities and neighbourhoods in Istanbul and elsewhere were involved and although there was almost everywhere some creative and meaningful collective expression of civic protest and participation, Taksim Square was without doubt the central stage of the whole civic dramaturgy, that I now want to consider in order to point out interesting transformations which occurred relating to its symbolic meaning. Many actors took part in the representation; however, the national and above all the international audience were struck by a series of deep divides that crossed Turkish society and politics. The Gezi movement brought to light the leftist opposition to the ultra-liberal economic policies of the government, the environmentalist and leftist opposition to consumer society, commercial capitalism and global exploitation of labour symbolized by AVM (Alişveriş Merkezi, the malls); but it showed also other divides: the alienation of the Alevis from the Sunni majority (the Alevis had a big part in the protest, frustrated in those days also by the naming of the third bridge on the Bosphorus after Yavuz Sultan Selim, considered by the Alevis as being responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Alevis in the early part of the sixteenth century); the alleged (and initially over- represented by the Western media) divide between secularists (worried above all by the government’s interference in lifestyles: see the alcohol issue already mentioned) and religious sectors of society; the growing divide between the AK Party and democrats and former liberal allies (above all intellectuals) as a consequence of the authoritarian stance of the government toward the protest; the growing divide between the AK Party and European and Western governments and political parties (who criticized the disproportionate use of force by the police); but also very significant divides within the AK Party, between Erdoğan and President Gül, between the AK Party and the Gülen movement, and more broadly within the Islamist camp itself. As real as all these divides are, from my perspective they were in a sense less significant than their opposite. In fact, during those days Taksim Square was also the stage of some extremely interesting and significant encounters 196 The Making of a Postsecular Society between sectors of society traditionally polarized. Sociologically speaking, it was clear that conflict also fostered solidarity, and it was precisely Taksim Square – traditionally the symbol of the Kemalist Republic – that became the creative and festive centre of postsecular practices, despite tensions and institutional violence. The Gezi movement has been interpreted in many different ways by commentators in the press (more meditative and scholarly reflections have not yet appeared at the time of writing). At the very beginning, it was compared to the Arab Spring, and Taksim Square read as the Turkish equivalent of Tahrir Square for Egypt; it was interpreted as a protest very close to the ‘Occupy’ movements, for its emphasis on justice and equality, for the role of social networks and young people; it was read as a youth movement close to the 1968 youth revolt, for its anti- authoritarian stance; but it was also conceived of as a social eruption consequent to the deep malaises of modern culture and civilization. As Nilüfer Göle maintained,44 the Gezi movement ‘is all and none of them; it has borrowed elements from each of them. Like all of them, it is a movement where citizens occupy a square and stand guard there. But it has an originality that sets it apart from others’.45 In full agreement with Göle, my own position is that Gezi’s originality comes from its pluralistic character, from unexpected encounters between sectors of society allegedly polarized, and – with reference to the religious dimension – from its postsecular tone. Taksim Square, traditionally a symbol of the Kemalist Republic, has become a stage for this original representation. In line with our symbolic analysis, it should be noted how it was the government (and mostly Erdoğan himself) that seemed most prone to polarizing society. I have already mentioned controversial laws such as that the regulation of alcohol, or the warning against kissing in the underground in Ankara, which gave rise to concern for the freedom of lifestyles above all among secularists. Together with the issue of the third bridge on the Bosphorus, the policy of sacred spaces discussed earlier, and with nonsensical statements according to which the Gezi movement was the outcome of an international conspiracy, led by the West and by Israel, against a democratically elected government, all the government’s and Erdoğan’s acts seemed aimed at declaring and fighting a Kulturkampf.46 What the AK Party and above all Erdoğan’s way of dealing with the protest made evident was a very dangerous evolution of the AK Party after 10 years in power, already apparent from other ambiguities (see Chapter 6). The real problem is not the Islamization of society, Sharia law or even freedom of lifestyles under attack, but a Kemalo- Islamist synthesis,47 the main ingredients of which are a form of postmodern authoritarianism – that implies a strongly majoritarian view of democracy and
44 N. Göle, ‘Gezi: authonomy of public square movement’, Today’s Zaman, 7/6/2013. 45 Ibid. 46 See M. Akyol, ‘A park, a bridge, and our kulturkampf’, Hürriyet Daily News, 1/7/2013; M. Akyol, ‘AKP, alcohol and freedom to sin’, Hürriyet Daily News, 29/5/2013. 47 See İ. Yilmaz, ‘Gezi and Kemalo-Islamist attacks on sociologist Göle’, Today’s Zaman, 10/7/2013(1), 12/7/2013(2). Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 197 does not refrain from enacting the majority’s values in the form of laws that bind all of society48 – as well as a strong anti-pluralism. What the Gezi Park protest made apparent was the shaping of a new Kemalo-Islamist authoritarian centre, in opposition to a pluralist periphery. If we examine the main symbols and practices shared by the people gathered at Taksim Square during those days, we see a pluralistic periphery that includes a postsecular attitude among its main features.49 At the beginning of the protest, Western media, above all, overemphasized a strict secularist identity of the movement. Pictures showed flags with Atatürk depicted on them to convey the understanding that Taksim Square was once again the stage of a harsh polarization between Muslim and secular Turkey. However, with the passing of days even Western media had to adjust their account and recognize that the secular/religious divide was an oversimplified picture. One of the most interesting elements in the protest was in fact the presence of a significant Muslim component among the people in the square. Particularly relevant – though not in quantitative terms – was the activism of a group called ‘anti-capitalist Muslims’, a left leaning Islamic group whose most representative figure is İhsan Eliaçik. He is in favour of an anti-capitalist and revolutionary understanding of Islam, based on freedom and pluralism.50 Strongly critical of the AK Party and of Erdoğan, he maintains that the AK Party simply used religion to legitimize capitalism. Characterized by the same conservative reflexes shared by its old statist enemies, the AK Party did not change several laws established during the period of the 1980 coup, but focused on false issues such as alcohol and abortion instead of poverty and inequality. According to the anti-capitalist Muslims and their leader, the Turkish (Kemalist) model of secularism is oppressive and in need of criticism, but Turkey is and must remain secular; clerics must not have the authority to rule ‘just because they are clerics’, and lifestyle issues – less important than justice and the struggle against poverty – should be matters of dialogue and not imposition. The role of a group like this – actually not the only one, the ‘Labour and Justice Platform’ being, for example, another example (http://www.emekveadalet.org/) – was important in a twofold sense: on the one hand it made visible and audible ‘an Islamic voice against Erdoğan’51 and showed other articulations internal to the Muslim camp, changing the secularist perception of the role of Muslims in the Gezi Park movement; on the other hand, it showed also that ‘a new type of religious understanding is going to
48 See İ. Daği, ‘Not Islamism but postmodern authoritarianism’, Today’s Zaman, 26/5/2013. 49 Of course, violent sectors of society were very active during the protest too, but the will of the main part of the movement to isolate them was clear, to draw a sharp distinction between the movement and them, and to affirm the non-violent character of the protest itself, as opposed to police violence. 50 See interview with İ. Eliaçik, ‘Anti-Capitalist Muslim leader says Gezi youth want new approach to Islam’, Hürriyet Daily News, 22/6/2013. 51 M. Akyol, ‘An Islamic voice against Erdoğan’, Hürriyet Daily News, 22/6/2013. 198 The Making of a Postsecular Society be born from the Gezi spirit; (it will be) more libertarian, giving more importance to moral social values, with a spirit of revolution’.52 In other words, both sides and their mutual perceptions of the ‘others’ started to change in Taksim Square. As an activist in the Labour and Justice Platform told me, one of the most important aims of such a group (close to the anti-capitalist Muslims but also with its own autonomy and specificity) is that of trying to ‘break the othering that exists between Islamists and socialists who work towards social justice. We believe that the possibility of a common language between religious and secular aims for social justice is significant, not only for our country and the area but for all the oppressed in the world’.53 This is a genuine, leftist postsecular vocabulary. What matters is also that an effort like this to ‘break the othering’ between Islamists and socialists, and more broadly secularists, was made during the protest through a practice like prayer. Friday prayers were organized in Taksim Square, and also the Muslim holy night of kandil was also celebrated in the square, a symbol of the Kemalist Republic. According to İshan Eliaçik, they were requested to organize it by the youth in Gezi Park, and were supported not only by other Muslim groups such as the Labour and Justice Platform, but also by leftist and secular groups that ‘protected’ people during prayer in order to avoid possible provocations. Moreover, social media called upon people to avoid consuming alcohol in the square that night and volunteers distributed kandil simidi, a kind of simit baked for that specific religious day.54 According to Eliaçik, ‘prior to Gezi, the understanding of secularists was “we don’t approve of it but we respect it”. Now it is one step further, there is also interest. They are interested in our understanding of religion’. Remembering that Taksim Square is ‘a site of struggle for ideological predominance’ and a genuine ‘centre’ of the city’s (and the nation’s) identity (see Chapter 5), these are not irrelevant encounters.55 Gezi Park has been a social movement rich in fantasy and symbolic imagination. Thinking of the ‘standing man’ as a symbol of a peaceful civil disobedience as opposed to police violence is enough to recall the flux of creativity that was given off from the square, the outcome of collective effervescence at the level of symbolic production. However, although in this context it is not possible to deepen our reading of the symbolic value of the Gezi Park movement at large,56 it is important to stress that symbols produced by collective effervescence during the protest were uniting symbols as opposed to polarizing policies by the government.
52 Interview with İ. Eliaçik, ‘Anti-Capitalist Muslim leader says Gezi youth want a new approach to Islam’, Hürriyet Daily News, 22/6/2013. 53 Email interview. 54 See, for example, ‘A typical day of protest at Gezi Park with religious ceremony, Quran reading in Turkey’, Hürriyet Daily News, 5/6/2013. 55 See M. Esayan, ‘Encounter’, Today’s Zaman, 21/6/2013. 56 It is not my aim in this section to offer a complete sociological or political reading of the Gezi Park movement; my only purpose in this context is pointing out possible symbolic transformations of the meaning of Taksim Square as a consequence of the movement. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 199
The Gezi Park movement ‘has brought together people, ideas, lifestyles and clubs that are hard to get to come together, including young and old, students and bureaucrats, feminists and housewives, Muslims and leftists, Kurds and Alevis, Kemalists and communists, Fenerbahçe and Beşiktaş supporters’.57 Although not exclusively Istanbul-centred, the Gezi Park movement can be understood as a ‘creative minority’, whose importance in democracies is well known. Ironically, it can also be understood as the most mature fruit of the AK Party’s 10-year struggle against Kemalism for rights and liberties; one thing is for sure, it marks ‘a new watershed’ for democracy in Turkey.58
57 N. Göle, ‘Gezi: autonomy of public square movement’, Today’s Zaman, 7/6/2013. 58 Ibid. This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 8 Turning Religious Differences into a Museum: Aya Sofya
Space, Religions and Religious Memory
Recently, since the so-called spatial turn, the elaboration of a methodology for studying the relevance of sacred spaces for the development of virtues of appreciation of religious pluralism has been underway (see Greve 2011; Molendijk, Beaumont, Jedan 2010; Knott 2005a). Postsecular sanctuaries are set urban spaces where religious rituals foster social solidarity in cosmopolitan socioscapes. In Chapter 4, I tried to link the reflection on space and the sacred, elaborated in Chapter 3, with that on memory – particularly with the way in which collective memory is constructed – and finally on the way in which social memory is in turn linked to space. Through the thought of Maurice Halbwachs first, and Jeffrey C. Alexander later, I emphasized some key features of collective memory. To recapitulate, they are: reconstruction in the light of the present, contestation and pluralism. Collective memory is the outcome of a reconstruction by specific social groups of a controversial past, aimed at writing and sharing a specific narrative. As highlighted in Chapter 4, Halbwachs devoted special attention to religious space – an emphasis rooted in the very distinction between the sacred and the profane, in the allegedly universal nature of religion and in its consequent need to be embedded in space. Describing the memory of religious groups, Halbwachs showed how their memories are stored, frequently and above all, in certain specific places, cities as well as sites. According to Halbwachs, despite the fact that this is most true in traditional societies, where religion was so to speak ‘over-abundant’, and almost every place had a religious character and meaning, even ‘today’ (at Halbwachs’ time, but I would add, nowadays) believers need common places in which to perform common rituals and to recall and remember bonds that link them together in the same society (1992, chapter 5). Anticipating contemporary rather than naïve theories of secularization, Halbwachs emphasized how religious groups, more than other groups, need to fix their memories within space. In fact, religious groups are in a sense intrinsically conservative: they cannot admit of being different from how they were in the past, and in order to show this, they must be capable of finding themselves and their memories in familiar places.1 Such stimulating observations led me to look at those sites which, in Turkey, have a deep religious meaning but are contested sites, representing – at least for
1 On religion and memory, see Hervieu-Léger 2000. 202 The Making of a Postsecular Society some groups – wounds that express a divided memory and are objects of the effort to shape new and different narratives. In the Turkish case, this is not, in fact, an impossible exercise. Turkey is full of sanctuaries, of different kinds and belonging to different traditions, not infrequently at the centre of contestations, conflicts and ideological or harsh religious debates. Let me start from some notes on ongoing controversies, related to what one could call a ‘politics of religious space’, before addressing one specific dispute.
The AK Party and the Politics of Sacred Space
I have already touched upon space, religious spaces particularly, in previous chapters. I have already mentioned debates, for example, over the cemevi, namely the Alevis’ places of worship, still not officially recognized as such, as well as the harsh contestations over Erbakan’s project of building a mosque in Taksim Square in the 1990s. (I mentioned the issue again in the last section of the previous chapter.) I would like to start from this last case, to point out an interesting feature of the AK Party’s politics of sacred spaces. In the 1990s, Erbakan’s project to build a mosque in Taksim Square (see Chapter 5) was meant to be a provocation. It was part of a clear polarization between secularists and Islamists. Given the symbolic meaning of Taksim Square, the heart of republican and secularist Istanbul, building a mosque there was a relevant expression of renewed power on the part of political Islam, which was judged to be an inadmissible sign of arrogance by secularists, the very Islamization of social space. As is well known, Erbakan’s project fell with the 1997 coup. However, it has been, in a different way, recovered by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, within the frame of a broader political use of sacred spaces. Building new mosques, renovating ancient ones, making them more comfortable for women, even environmentally friendly, all over the country, is part of a coherent political use of sacred space; it is part of a coherent neo-Ottoman narrative, which implies a mixture of safeguarding traditional cultural and spiritual capital, opening to the needs of less considered social categories (such as women), and conservative hegemonic ambitions. Among the many potential examples of such a political use of sacred space, two projects deserve particular mention. The first regards a new version of the project of a mosque in Taksim Square. It was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself who announced, in May 2012, the intention of constructing a new mosque in Taksim Square, near the French Consulate General. Actually, the project was not only that of constructing a mosque, but of a broader cultural centre, including above all, a museum documenting the history of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. What is interesting is that from the very beginning, the planned mosque was called Taksim Cumhuriyet Camisi, namely Taksim Republic Mosque, and the architect was supposed to be Ahmet Vefik Alp, a former politician from the MH Party (the nationalist party). Its name is a clear mark of the new policy of the AK Party, which differs from Erbakan’s. Instead of using sacred Turning Religious Differences into a Museum 203 spaces to polarize and deepen the confrontation between Islamists and secularists, Erdoğan has tried to use them to reaffirm the reliability of his party, and more than this, the role that it has as the guarantor of republican values. Instead of igniting conflict between religious and secularist values, the project of a mosque in Taksim Square pursues a new synthesis of national and religious values. The price that Erdoğan seems inclined to pay is that of strumming nationalistic chords. The second project that it is worthwhile to mention is that of a new mosque, again in Istanbul, on Üsküdar’s highest hill, Çamlica, on the Asian side of the city. Once again it was Erdoğan who announced the intention of building the mosque, emphasizing the grandiose character of the project. In fact, the idea was that of having a giant mosque, visible from every corner of Istanbul, together with a tourist area, cafes, restaurants, a recreational space, a children’s park, and within the mosque a space with facilities for courses on Ottoman calligraphy, gilding and ebru (the technique of paper marbling). To strengthen this show of neo-Ottoman cultural and spiritual hegemony, the project envisages at least six minarets. In the words of Haci Mehemet Güner, the head architect of the project, ‘the project is very demanding in terms of its size. The mosque will have the highest minarets in the world. The height of the minarets will even surpass the [105 meter tall minarets of] Medine-I Münevvere mosque [in Medina]’ (Hürriyet Daily News, 5/6/2012). The symbolic meaning of a project like this is apparent considering that there are no people living in the area and that it is also a protected natural area. Needless to say, this project (still waiting for approval by the Local Authorities) is highly controversial, but it is clear proof of Erdoğan’s policy of sacred spaces.
Aya Sofya: Glimpses of a Postsecular Sanctuary
If the above mentioned cases are examples of the hegemonic strategy of the AK Party and its leader, in talking about symbols that express the shifts in the central value system of contemporary Turkey, one cannot avoid pondering over the meaning of that very particular space that is Aya Sofya, or Hagia Sophia, or St. Sophia, in Istanbul. In a sense, in Turkey there is no better candidate for the role of postsecular sanctuary. In fact, its history is not unique in Turkey; other sanctuaries share the same story,2 but no other has the same artistic and symbolic magnitude. Built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, between the years 532 and 537 ad, the church was dedicated to St Sophia, referring to Christ as the Word or as the Wisdom made flesh. Having served as the Cathedral of Constantinople for 1,123 years, it was to become the Mosque of Aya Sofya for another 481 years, and has been a museum since 1934. It was turned into a museum by Atatürk himself.3 Aya Sofya is not only an astonishing architectural heritage of humanity, but also a multi-layered religious symbol, the frozen memory of religious groups.
2 Another example is St Savior in Chora (Kariye Camii or Kariye Kilisesi) in Istanbul. 3 For a short history of Aya Sofya, see Freely 1998, 330–33. 204 The Making of a Postsecular Society
As already mentioned, one of Maurice Halbwachs’ lessons is that memories are always particularistic, given that memory is always the memory of a group, and groups are plural in modern societies (Halbwachs 1950 and 1992). Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine cathedral, is a sacred place at the centre of the memory of Orthodox Christians; Aya Sofya, the mosque, is a sacred place at the centre of the memory of Muslims. Nowadays, it is the perfect spatial manifestation of the Kemalist understanding of secularism: by turning it into a museum, religious differences and conflicts were neutralized, banning them from public space and turning them into aesthetic differences good for tourists and art lovers. At the same time, Aya Sofya is still a contested symbol today. While Kemalists want to keep it as a national museum, Orthodox Christians want it reopened to religious worship for Christians, whereas Muslims want the same but for Muslims. However, there is also a fourth group, not large in number (but one that included Hrant Dink in its ranks, see Chapter 9), made up of people who would like to see it transformed into a multi-faith sanctuary, the symbol of a multi-religious country. Solutions proposed by columnists, scholars and individual political personalities suggest that the building be open to Christian worship on Sunday, Muslim worship on Friday, and the rest of the week to visitors. Leaving technicalities aside, what matters is the different understandings of secularism that these positions reflect. The present state of the museum of Aya Sofya reflects a secularism understood both as the privatization of religion and the control of the state over religious symbols, which is the form of secularism characteristic of the Turkish state tradition. Those among Orthodox Christians and Muslims who lobby in favour of the reopening for single- faith worship dream of the prevailing of a single memory, while those – among them Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and secularists – who think of a multi-faith and multipurpose sanctuary see it as the symbol of a different understanding of secularism. As will be seen, the state and future of Aya Sofya has a particularly relevant symbolic meaning, for Turkey of course, but also for a multicultural and multi-religious Europe. In the following pages, I would like to summarize debates on the status of this astonishing site, above all distinguishing the diverse actors and their different positions in what I consider a genuine example of struggle over memory, functional to different identity profiles of the country. Debates on Aya Sofya are not constantly on the agenda. However, from time to time the issue comes out, as a secret and repressed subject.4 After all, it is clear that to many people it is an unresolved issue, a wound that sooner or later should be healed, and that in the meantime cannot avoid producing pain and suffering from time to time. This was the case with a group of Greek Americans, gathered in the ‘Free Agia Sophia Council of America’, a US-based international
4 For example, in February 2013, 401 people appealed to a parliamentary commission with a request to change the present status of Aya Sofya in Istanbul, to reopen it as a Mosque. As far as I know, the commission is still considering the application. In November 2013 Turkish Deputy Prime Minister, Bülent Arinç, a prominent personality in Erdoğan’s government, expressed his hope to see Aya Sofya Museum used as a mosque. Turning Religious Differences into a Museum 205 congregation, who in September 2010 planned to hold a Divine Liturgy at Aya Sofya. Immediately, Turkish authorities reminded them that worshipping at Aya Sofya is not permitted under Turkish law, and warned the group to avoid tensions and provocations. The Istanbul-based Greek Orthodox Patriarchate made its opposition to the proposed Divine Liturgy known too, and a few days later, Chris Spirou, the leader of the Free Agia Sophia Council of America, said that the trip to Istanbul was cancelled, and that they were not looking for a war. The government’s reaction on this occasion were strong and unequivocal; the then Culture Minister Ertuğrul Günay made clear that ‘the state will take measures against such efforts’, and that ‘the iconic Istanbul site would never host any kind of religious service and would maintain its status as a museum’ (Hürriyet Daily News, 16/9/2010). But what exactly is the Free Agia Sophia Council of America? According to their website, the mission of the organization is to ‘restore the great Church of Agia Sophia located in Istanbul (Constantinople), Turkey, as a functioning Church of the Orthodox Christian faith, and to re-establish Agia Sophia as the Holy House of Prayer for all Christians of the world and the Basilica (Seat) of Orthodoxy that it was before the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 ad’. The association’s criticisms seem to be directed against two main targets:5 Muslim occupation as well as the present status of Aya Sofya as a museum: ‘in 1453 the Turks not only occupied the holiest site in all of Orthodox Christendom – the Holy Agia Sophia Church, which is to Orthodox Christians what St. Peter’s and the Vatican are to Roman Catholics – but also continue to this day to desecrate the site, which Turkey retains as a museum, and refuse to allow the restoration of Aya Sofya to the Orthodox Church’. According to this group of Orthodox Christians, Aya Sofya has been desecrated twice, violently in 1453 and nowadays by its conversion to ‘an international bazaar’ (see the founder’s message on the website). Through political, diplomatic and legal means, the Free Agia Sophia Council of America is committed to pursuing Aya Sofya’s restoration as a functioning Church for Orthodox Christians. On the Council’s website, one can read the letters that Chris Spirou wrote to Tayyip Erdoğan in 2008, 2009 and 2010, as well as to Nicolas Sarkozy, in order to advocate the cause of Aya Sofya being a Christian site, in which, as far as one can see, there would be no room for Muslims. If we turn to the other side of the barricade, and take a look at radical Muslim nationalist groups, we see that the situation is not very different. From the quantitative point of view, they are almost irrelevant. However, their position must be taken into account, because they are, nevertheless, the expression of a specific mood within Turkish society. On the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit in May 2006, a few thousand people, above all young militants of the Felicity Party, protested against the Pope’s visit (the visit took place after the famous and
5 It is necessary to say that it was impossible for me to have contact with Chris Spirou or other members of the associations. They did not reply to any communication, so it was impossible to have interviews or even a few words on the matter with them. 206 The Making of a Postsecular Society controversial address in Regensburg), and took advantage of the situation to claim the reopening of Aya Sofya for Muslims. It was Erbakan himself, who, on that occasion, asked for the reopening of Aya Sofya as a religious site for Muslims. Questioned on this issue, a member of the Felicity Party told me in 2012 that ‘Aya Sofya is the legacy of Fatih Sultan Mehmet who is conqueror of Istanbul. So it should be designated according to his will. We have documents in Turkish institutional Archives. He began to use this building as a mosque. We should use it how he wants’. Asked whether Christians are entitled to ask on their part for the reopening of the building as a church, he replied: ‘this cannot be acceptable. Orthodox Christians are part of our society. We have been living with them for hundreds of years. We are neighbours with them. I think this claim is being used by diaspora for political perspectives, not religious. Historians accept that Fatih Sultan Mehmet changed the age from middle to new with the conquest of İstanbul. So Aya Sofya belongs to Turkish history because of this reality’. In his opinion, this is a shared conviction in Turkey, such that ‘if you go to referendum now and ask the citizens if Aya Sofya should be reopened or not you will see that at least 90% of the voters will say yes, it should be. So not only Saadet Party members, but Turkish people also have the agenda to use Aya Sofya according to Fatih’s legacy’. But there is something more in the hypothetical agenda of those who desire Aya Sofya to be a symbol of a pluralistic and multi-religious country. As we shall see, they are not organized into any movement, they do not constitute a ‘carrier group’ (see Chapter 4) able to trigger the process of writing a new narrative and are capable neither of challenging the current narrative that sees Aya Sofya as a museum symbol of a Kemalist view of secularization, nor the main counter- narratives, according to which it is a symbol (only) of Christianity or a symbol (only) of Islam. As we shall see, they have no practices capable of challenging the present status of Aya Sofya, and no symbolic means of triggering a ‘prophetic movement’ in Rappaport’s sense (see Chapter 1). In October 2010, during an interview for Today’s Zaman on Ottoman laws and religious minorities, Professor M. Akif Aydin, the head of the Centre for Islamic Studies in Istanbul, said that as a Muslim he feels disturbed to see Aya Sofya as a museum, but at the same he added that ‘I believe the continuation of the culture of coexistence at Aya Sofya, which I hope will improve in Turkey, is more important and acceptable than its remaining as a museum. I’d like it, as a Muslim, to become a mosque. But if Aya Sofya is supposed to be opened to Muslim worshippers on weekdays, then it should be opened to Christians on Sunday. Aya Sofya was built as a place of worship. It served people in this way for more than a thousand years, both as a church and a mosque. It is neither a church nor a mosque now. It disturbs me to see that Aya Sofya has become a museum and a tourist destination’ (Today’s Zaman, 5/10/2010). The first element emphasized by Professor Aydin was the status of the space: a space that served for such a long time as a sacred place cannot be turned into a profane space without inflicting damage on the deep memories that it holds. Aya Sofya belongs first of all to worshippers rather than to the state. The second element that he emphasized was the plurality of religious Turning Religious Differences into a Museum 207 groups to which it belonged and he consequently suggested a sort of multi- religious roster system that would foster the culture of co-existence: ‘I think it would be better for Aya Sofya to be a place of worship for the two religions rather than remaining a secular museum’ (ibid.). Mentioning the government’s opening toward religious minorities (see Chapter 6), he concluded, maintaining ‘if we can reopen a church in Van why not open Aya Sofya to worship? This would contribute to the willingness of Muslims and Christians to coexist’ (ibid.). During an interview he gave me months later, he said that neither Muslims nor Christians are happy with the current status of Aya Sofya as a museum, but that the issue of its transformation is not on the agenda for political reasons. If the issue is not on the agenda after nine years of AK Party rule (at the time of the interview), it is because it is not convenient. After all, after nine years the AK Party had still not resolved the headscarf issue, so why start a new controversy just for a symbol? In other words, it would not be politically convenient. On the AK Party’s attitude towards the issue it was not possible to find out more. No members of the AK Party wanted to answer questions on the issue. However, we may speculate on it in different ways. We have already seen that Erdoğan himself is far from insensitive to a politics of space and to the symbolic relevance of sacred places, both to show the renewed hegemony of an Ottoman heritage and a Muslim identity of the country (see previous section), and the AK Party’s opening towards religious minorities (see Chapter 6). At the same time, he constantly sends contradictory messages. In 2011 the old church of Aya Sofya at Izmit (Nicaea), which is significant to Christianity because of the Second Council held there in 787 A.D. and was turned into a mosque in 1331 and into a museum in 1920, was reopened as a mosque. Aya Sofya at Izmit had a story quite similar to the more well-known Aya Sofya in Istanbul: it had an important symbolic meaning, but the government’s decision was not that of using it as a symbol of multi- religiosity and pluralism. The press in the West speculated that the reopening of Aya Sofya in Izmit as a mosque was a prelude to the reopening as a mosque of Aya Sofya in Istanbul too. The same destiny seems to be shared by another Aya Sofya: that in Trabzon, which in February 2013, the Foundations Directorate announced, was soon to be reopened for Muslims, despite the protests and criticisms from the Greek-Orthodox Patriarchate (see Hürriyet Daily News, 7/2/2013). Professor Aydin was not the only one to foster the idea of making Aya Sofya a symbol of religious pluralism. Mustafa Akyol, whose relevant opinion we have already considered (see Chapter 6), pushed the argument still further, maintaining (during an interview with me) that it should be opened to worshippers as well as to art lovers and tourists, making it a space shared by religious people as well as non-religious (which is to say, in my own view, a postsecular space). Following an important speech by the then President of Religious Affairs Dr Ali Bardakoğlu, against the politics of ‘museumization’ of places of worship and in favour of the reopening of old Christian churches, such as the Sümela Monastery, Mustafa Akyol commented on Bardakoğlu’s mentioning of the opportunity of reopening Aya Sofya in Istanbul too. However, as Akyol noticed too, from Bardakoğlu’s 208 The Making of a Postsecular Society words, it was not clear for what form of worship he meant. On the contrary, Akyol’s words are unequivocal. Whatever one’s opinion might be, one ‘has to see that the building has a story with both religions. It is also true that both Christians and Muslims would love to have it back. So, one is inevitably forced to ask, which religion should have it?’ (Hürriyet Daily News, 27/8/2010). Akyol’s answer is that ‘both should have it. The magnificent temple, in other words, should be shared by Christians and Muslims, both with regard to space and time. For Islam, this is not something unheard of. The Grand Umayyad Mosque of Damascus was shared by Muslims and Christians for a period in the early seventh century. If we do that again in Turkey in the twenty-first century, we will be accomplishing something great, not just for both faiths, but also for the fate of the world’ (ibid.). Here Akyol points out a crucial dimension of the possible reopening of Aya Sofya as a postsecular sacred space: the message sent by its reopening would not only be relevant for Turkey, but for the world at large. As I have maintained several times in this book, Turkey’s efforts to find a new balance between the religious and the secular in a pluralistic and multi-religious time, speaks to the world; it is an exemplary effort, and from my perspective particularly relevant for Europe, in the dark times of Islamophobia, resurgent anti-Semitism, xenophobia and fear of the ‘other’. During my interviews, I found enthusiastic adherence to Aydin and Akyol’s position by Orhan Kemal Cengiz, and in principle, a favourable view from İshan Daği, in spite of his scepticism about its implementation. After the indication of Bülent Arinç (the government spokesperson) indication of the possibility of reopening Aya Sofya as a mosque, Cengiz wrote that ‘it appears to me that Hagia Sophia Mosque will be a present to attract nationalist and conservative votes as the elections approach. Converting the other Hagia Sophias in Iznik and Trabzon into mosques were grave mistakes and disrespectful to Turkey’s Orthodox Christians. I believe converting Hagia Sophia in Istanbul into a mosque would be a terrible mistake that disrespects Turkey’s history and heritage’ (Today’s Zaman, 10/12/2013). However, no matter how influential such figures may be in terms of shaping public opinion, they are not strong and organized enough to constitute a genuine carrier group. Making of Aya Sofya a symbol of a postsecular Turkey, in the sense here understood – namely a pluralistic, multi-religious country in which secular and religious people live together differently – faces strong resistance. The strongest resistance comes from secular and religious nationalists, who together form a new centre compared to which secular and religious pluralists are still a periphery. In order to trigger a ‘spiral of signification’ that tells a new story and to bridge divided memories (Alexander 2004, 12; see Chapter 4), they have to activate institutional arenas (in this case above all religious, aesthetic, legal, state bureaucracy and mass media) where a new story can take shape. Once again, Akyol had a sense of the importance of such a spiral, as reflected in his maintaining that ‘if Dr Bardakoğlu promotes such an ecumenical re-opening of the great shrine, it might become a bit more plausible’ (Hürriyet Daily News, 27/8/2010). However, asked by journalists, Bardakoğlu said that the issue is not on the Directorate’s Turning Religious Differences into a Museum 209 agenda yet, and that ‘this is not a decision we can make. The Religious Affairs Directorate expresses its opinion when it is asked’ (Today’s Zaman, 26/8/2010). Everything suggests that much depends on the AK Party’s policy of sacred spaces.
Cordoba Calls Istanbul and Vice Versa: Europe and Turkey
In an article in the Armenian-Turkish weekly magazine that he directed, Hrant Dink (who will be at the centre of the next chapter and my final ‘case study’) wrote about the meaning and destiny of Aya Sofya:
As the right time has come, I will add my own point of view to the never ending debate on the dilemma of “whether it is preferable to consider Santa Sofia exclusively as a museum or as place of worship”. The first factor to take into account is the emotional need people feel when visiting this majestic building. If a Muslim considers it a sacred place to pray in or if a Christian feels the need to pray there, then why not? I am not able to provide a technical solution to the problem but let’s imagine a Turkey in which both Christians and Muslims can worship in Santa Sofia, and reflect for a moment on the positive repercussions this would provoke in the world. What you call multiculturalism would certainly welcome such a solution. After all, multiculturalism does not mean transforming a place of worship into a museum in the name of laicism; on the contrary, it means respecting a person’s religious feelings and keeping places of worship open for them, provided that in the process, no one is discriminated against. (Dink 2008; translation from the Italian edition by the author)
Dink’s words express in a very clear way two outlooks that I fully share and defend throughout this book, one general and one specifically referred to Aya Sofya: the general point is about multiculturalism, which consists not in transforming places of worship into museums on behalf of secularism or laicism, but in opening them to worshippers on the basis of a principle of equality; the second point has to do with the impact on the world of a hypothetical reopening of Aya Sofya as a multi- religious place. It could be a message of pluralism of the utmost importance to Europe too, in times of resurgent intolerance and fear of the ‘other’. Unfortunately, there is a long list of episodes that recall the risk of returning to the dark Europe of the past century, particularly when faced with the most severe economic crisis for decades. From a symbolic point of view, it is the second point that interests me in this context. Recall the Swiss referendum on minarets that refused to authorise the construction of mosques with visible minarets, which in the posters of rightist movements were represented as rifles; or debates on the construction of new mosques, and episodes such as that occurring in Lodi, North Italy, on 15 October 2000, when the local Catholic voters of the racist political party Lega Nord desecrated a site upon which a mosque was to be built by pouring pigs’ urine over the ground; or the sentence of the Regional Court of Cologne against 210 The Making of a Postsecular Society circumcision, which started a debate over this two thousand year old ritual key to Jews and Muslims. In a continent affected by sentiments and events such as these, in 2006 the Islamic Council of the Spanish city of Cordoba, a council that represents the 300,000 Spanish converts from the growing Spanish Muslim community of over two million, asked the Vatican to permit Friday prayers in the magnificent cathedral of the city. The petition was rejected, as we shall see (The Independent 16/10/2010). But why was such an apparently strange request made? As is perhaps well known, Cordoba Cathedral is another example of a sacred place with a story of conversions. At the very beginning, it was a church dedicated to the martyr St Vincenzo; after 750 ad it was taken by the new governor Yusuf ibn’Abd al-Rahman, and under caliph Al-Hakam (796–822 ad) was transformed into the Great Mosque. It was the beginning of the golden age of Al-Andalus, and the Great Mosque of Cordoba was the emblem of that golden age of the city – the biggest and wealthiest city in Europe at the time, with a population of about half a million Jews, Christians and Muslims living in relative harmony – and of Al-Andalus at large, still today hailed as ‘the ornament of the world’ (Menocal 2002). After 1236, when Christian forces conquered Cordoba, the Great Mosque was converted again into a cathedral. It did not undergo significant architectural alterations up until the sixteenth century. In fact, in 1523 (under Charles V) the building of a large Gothic chancel and choir in the very middle of the Mosque was begun. It was a radical alteration; in fact, the capilla mayor is ‘everything the Mosque is not’, and ‘stepping directly from the mosque into the capilla mayor is a cultural shock. It’s difficult to imagine another building where you can stand with one foot in an Islamic house of worship and the other in a church’ (www. spainthenandnow.com/spanish-architecture/cordoba-s-cathedral-is-a-mosque/de afult_44-aspx). Here, architecture seems the very spatial embodiment of a story of co-existence between Islam and Christianity, confrontational as well as reciprocally rich. ‘Together the two temples (the mosque and the church) are an ideal architectural metaphor for the shared history of Christianity and Islam. Both offspring of Judaism, sharing in Abraham (Ibrahim) a common father, Christianity and Islam are like two conjoined and competing siblings struggling for supremacy’ (ibid.). The alterations of the original space continued over the years, and ‘the space within the capilla mayor and the choir was filled with images and figures which are forbidden in Islam’ (ibid.), that had a pedagogical value and function in an age when the masses were largely illiterate. Despite this, even today the population still calls the big building La Mezquita, showing traces of this past in the collective memory.6
6 ‘Islam is written into the stones of Granada, Cordoba, and Seville. That writing might inscribe it in the past, but it is also present on the street. Tourists from all over the Muslim world come to Cordoba. They file with Spanish school children into the Tower of la Calahorra to hear animated figures of Maimonides, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Arabi, and Alonso X address the audience. Each speaks of acceptance, of his affection and regard for aspects of Turning Religious Differences into a Museum 211
Perhaps now the Islamic Council’s request to pray on Friday in Cordoba Cathedral is more understandable. The petition, supported by the socialist local government, was refused by Catholic authorities. In truth, they deny that any official petition has ever been presented to them, but acknowledge that there is some debate on the issue and over the years there has been a request by the Islamic Council and Izquierda Unita. Questioned on the matter, Archbishop Michael L. Fitzgerald, then head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, said interestingly that everyone should ‘accept history and go ahead’, instead of trying to ‘take revenge’ (interview available at www.internetica.it/islam-cordoba-htm). He fully recognized the right to and the need for places of worship for Muslims in many social spaces such as airports or prisons, where interreligious spaces are possible. But in cases like Cordoba, and where a Catholic chapel already exists, where the Holy Sacrament is kept, it would not be appropriate to share space with other confessions. Authorities of the local church of Cordoba said that they ‘wish to live in peace with believers in other religions’, but also that they ‘do not want to be subjugated to pressures that do not help harmony’ (www.internetica.it/ Samir-Cordoba.htm), and that sharing the cathedral with Muslims would ‘generate confusion among the believers’. Finally, in Catholic environments the risk is also adumbrated that accepting the Islamic Council’s request would represent a precedent for similar cases, which could be risky for Muslims too: Christians, for example, could ask for the reopening of Aya Sofya in Istanbul! However, the petition could also be easily read in another way. Instead of being a way of trying to take revenge over history, a hidden step in the war to Islamize Europe, it could be read as a symbolic step in opposition to Islamophobia, which has been on the rise in Spain since the attacks of 11 September in New York and the rail bombing in Madrid of March 2004. In the land of Moriscos, converted Catholics of Muslim origin, fear of Islam is not unknown, and sharing a place like the Cathedral-Mosque of Cordoba, whose story speaks of conflicts and troubled co-existence, could be a powerful way to talk about peaceful co-existence. It is symptomatic that Aya Sofya is mentioned as a sort of second step in a spiral of revenge, instead of being mentioned as a potentially equivalent symbol of pluralism in Turkey. Turkey and Europe could speak a common language of pluralism and multi-religiosity; they could show that they are ready to look at religious minorities not as the ‘other’, the inner enemy, but as their inner most precious asset, and they could elevate Aya Sofya and Cordoba’s Cathedral-Mosque to magnificent symbols of a past and a present of co-existence – symbols against violence and intolerance.
the others’ faith. The exhibit is a little preachy and the text may be a little too sophisticated for the smaller children, but it testifies to the pride of Spain in its Andalusian past, the pride of Cordoba in its miscegenate culture’ (Norton 2013, 156). This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 9 When the Water Finds its Crack: Hrant Dink at the Crossroads of Contemporary Turkey
He made a new beginning today in Turkey. You, too, have become his seal. The headlines, the speeches, the taboos changed with him. For him there were no immunities and taboos. As it says in scriptures, his heart overflowed.
Rakel Dink, Letter to my beloved
The struggle of men against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan Kundera, quoted by Orhan Kemal Cengiz
Hrant Dink
Hrant Dink was an Armenian-Turkish journalist, the founder and director of Agos, a weekly Turkish-Armenian magazine committed to bridging Turkish divided memories on the Armenian uprooting.1 He was shot on 19 January 2007, in Istanbul, in broad daylight, beneath Agos’ premises. The killer was a young Turkish nationalist, soon arrested. However, after four years, Dink’s family, friends and public opinion are still waiting for justice: in fact, nobody yet knows who armed the young Turkish nationalist, although it has emerged that the Turkish police and other sectors of state institutions bear some responsibility, for, although informed of the plans to kill Dink, they failed at least to protect him. The murder of Dink is part of a more complex picture of a hidden state power aimed at destabilizing the country and fostering a new military intervention to restore the principles of Kemalism, held by a secret organization called Ergenekon. Dink’s funeral turned into a huge demonstration on the part of anti-Kemalist Turkey in favour of freedom, justice and equality. Every year, on 19 January, thousands of people gather together beneath Agos’ premises to commemorate his memory and sacrifice, and to ask for justice. Around the figure of Dink is now developing a set of symbols (the white dove above all, which has now, for example, been reproduced in a public park dedicated to the memory of Dink in Mersin) and a
1 For a short biography, see http://www.hrantdink.org/?HrantDink=10. 214 The Making of a Postsecular Society ritual that binds together broad sectors of civil society: ethnic, cultural and religious minorities (Armenians and Kurds in the first place); sectors of the mainstream Sunni Islam that share a common anti-Kemalist feeling; leftist political parties and movements, trade unions and civil rights activists. Dink is becoming the symbol of a pluralistic, democratic Turkey, strongly centred on human rights and cosmopolitan values, but also concerned with the value of cultural and religious differences and particularities. Dink’s friends are quite frequently secular leftists; however, though not particularly ‘musical to’ religious rituals, Dink himself was well aware of the meaning of religions for individual and collective life, and he considered them part of a pluralist public space. Dink’s figure is becoming the symbol of a Turkey in search of democratization, where secularism is interpreted not as an assertive and aggressive form of repression, control and privatization of religions, but as a condition of equal access for every culture and faith to public space. With reference to religion, the memory of Hrant Dink challenges above all secular (but also religious) nationalism. Sociologically, Dink represents not a triumphant hero, such as Atatürk, but an example of a process of the social construction of victimhood, that deeply alters the relationship between centre and periphery, brings categories in the past relegated to the margins of society towards the centre, altering and changing the sacred centre itself. From a sociological point of view, it is extremely interesting that the memory of Dink is taking shape in a highly ritualistic way: the annual commemoration outside Agos’ premises reproduces the spatial form of the temporary, ‘unofficial sanctuary’ (see Kong 2010; Della Dora 2011) that was spontaneously shaped soon after he was killed; his friends at Agos told me during interviews how, through the ritualistic event of the commemorations, the space in front of Agos’ premises – and now also the premises of the International Hrant Dink Foundation – is itself becoming a sacred space. As we saw in a previous chapter, sacred places (unofficial postsecular sanctuaries included) have four features: an orienting function, the capacity of mirroring a transcendent and more perfect order, being a meeting point between men and the sacred, and finally containing and representing (always in a partial and limited way) the sacred. The analysis that follows will show how the temporary sanctuary built on the occasion of the commemoration of Dink precisely meets the properties of this grammar, and that through ritualistic actions a new sacred symbol, related to the memory of Dink, is taking shape. Finally, my analysis will show how the new, ritualistic memory of Dink’s sacrifice aims at bridging divided memories in Turkey, being a growing shared symbol of a new post-Kemalist collective memory.
The Commemoration
Osmanbey, in the Şişli district, is an elegant neighbourhood in Istanbul. Halaskargazi caddesi, where Hrant Dink worked and where he was killed, is an elegant, broad, and busy street. Atatürk’s house in Istanbul is in the same street. As we shall see, When the Water Finds its Crack 215 there are other, astonishing, coincidences that make this street a genuine turning point in Turkey’s future. It is 15 minutes from Taksim Square, the symbolic core of secular, pro-Western, Kemalist Turkey. One of the first times that I took a walk from Taksim Square to Halaskargazi caddesi, it was the day before the fourth commemoration of Hrant Dink’s murder, on 18 January 2011. It was a normal working day in the afternoon: cars running on the street, and people walking in haste. Apparently, there were no signs, on the way to arrive at number 74, of what was to happen there the day after; were Turkish people working and walking there aware at that moment of the meaning of that street? Walking towards Sebat Palace, the nice, elegant palace that hosts Agos’ premises (and now the International Hrant Dink Foundation), I was trying to figure out people’s reactions to the event of the day after: perhaps the majority of the Turkish people and even of the inhabitants of Istanbul were unaware of Dink’s life and death, or about the commemoration; certainly some of them, nationalists, would have been deeply disturbed by it; but perhaps, I was chewing over this hope, a certain number of them would have been there, under Agos’ premises, at 3.00 pm, when he was shot in 2007, to ask for justice, and to renovate their daily struggle for freedom and equality in Turkey, whatever the meaning they attach to these words. Once arrived under Agos’ premises, my mind was filled with images that I saw on the web of Dink’s body lying on the ground, in front of a jewellery shop on the left of the entrance of Sebat Palace. On the right I recognized the book and music shop, and there I saw signs of what would happen the day after: on the window there was a poster, announcing the following day and rallying for the commemoration, prepared by the association ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’, and inside the window a few books, in Turkish, on Hrant, including a recently published biography of 700 pages, then undergoing translation into English (Çandar 2010). The poster read ‘On January 19th, at 3:00 pm, at the same spot he was shot, we will be there, in front of Agos’. I was to be there too, before 3:00 pm, to start my ethnography. On 19 January 2011, I left my hotel at about 10:00 am Newspapers announced events on that day not only in Istanbul but in other cities too, to remember Dink. Today’s Zaman and Hürriyet Daily News, available in English, mentioned Fethiye Çetin’s Fourth Report on Hrant Dink’s Murder,2 and set the tone of the 2011 commemoration: a woeful but firm denunciation of the responsibilities of the judiciary, of the government, of the parliament, for the way the investigations were conducted. After four years, Dink’s family, friends and public opinion have no justice. These were also the main slogans during the commemoration – the writings on placards and banners: ‘no justice, no parliaments, no government for 4 years’. At about 10:30 am I reached Sebat Palace. It was early, but the first television channels were already there, on the other side of the street: Turkish television, Turkish CNN, but also foreign television stations. From the book and music shop, on the right of the entrance to Sebat Palace, Armenian and Turkish-Armenian
2 http://www.hranticinadaleticin.com/en/documents.php. 216 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Figure 9.1 Window of book and music shop beside the entrance to Sebat Palace music came; I talked a bit with the owners of the shop, and they explained to me that they were ethnic and political songs. In front of the window of the music and book shop, they built a small shrine: books on Hrant, the same that I noticed the day before in the window, surmounted by a poster, with Dink’s face and below the writing ‘my dear friend’, and carnations on the right and the left-hand side. Shopkeepers and other people that began to rally under Agos’ windows had stickers on their jacket, showing Dink’s face. At 11.30 am the media were growing in number and lots of cameramen and journalists started to prepare their instruments. But now, a crucially important component of the scene was beginning slowly to take shape. In fact, two people began hanging a giant poster of Dink’s face in the middle of the two windows on the first floor of Sebat Palace, just above the gate of the big entrance. The image showed a worried man, with his hands closing his mouth. On the left and the right, two equally giant posters reminded us that four years have passed without justice (4 years, no faces, no hearts). People walking in the street paused a little, their noses upwards, towards the giant posters. In the meantime, while the numbers of people began to grow, in front of the jewellery shop’s window display where Dink was shot, the centre of the scene started to take shape. A big, red, heart- shaped wreath, made of carnations, was placed under the window of the jewellery When the Water Finds its Crack 217
Figure 9.2 Poster above the entrance to Sebat Palace shop. It was to be the centre of the temporary shrine, the focus for most of the time of the attention of the people gathered together. Flowers and placards were lying more and more numerous around the big heart-shaped wreath and the space on the sidewalk in front of the window and in front of the heart-shaped wreath itself was slowly filling: flowers, wreaths from shopkeepers in the neighbourhood, dozens of white candles, then hundreds of placards. Later, copies of Agos were put at the centre of the heart-shaped wreath, as well as a stuffed dove, a particularly significant symbol, as we shall see. It was the making of the sanctuary. For sure, this was an ‘unofficial’ sanctuary (Kong 2010), a temporary sanctuary, in a city where there are hundreds of official sanctuaries, but a sanctuary nonetheless. This phase of the making of the sanctuary follows invisible rules: the people who build it, members of civil society associations, mostly of the association ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’, and people from Agos, reproduce exactly the shape of the first shrine, the one that was built soon after Dink’s murder: the same heart-shaped wreath, the same symbols, the same objects, the same position, from the tragic days soon after the killing, to the fourth commemoration, year after year. As we shall see, it is not the only recurrent element in the set, in the organizing of the space, and in the people’s conduct. This phase, the sanctuary-building, was quite long. Hundreds of placards were brought from volunteers. While the music filled the air, the crowd, ever more 218 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Figure 9.3 Heart-shaped wreath, a centre of focus at the commemoration numerous, focused around the sanctuary under construction. Passers-by would lay flowers, stop, light a candle, leave or remain in prayer in front of the heart- shaped wreath. At 12:00 pm, Fethiye Çetin arrived, and went upstairs, to join the Agos group. Towards 1:00 pm the crowd ceased to be a crowd, and began to take a shape, to act as a community, following a pattern. I asked a member of the association ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’ what was going on, and she told me that Dink’s family was arriving. Now there was a main common focus (the sanctuary), a secondary common focus (Agos’ windows and the giant posters hanging there) and a common pattern. In fact, as soon as the news that the family was coming circulated, the crowd made a circle in front of Agos’ entrance. Once again, its shape was not coincidental. It was the same circle and shape that was drawn the day of Dink’s funeral (see the photographic book Hepimiz Hrant Dink’iz by the Uluslararası Hrant Dink Vakfı, 2007). The first line was made by people of the association ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’. Behind them, women and men formed a chain hugging one another, closing the space around Sebat Palace. It was as if the group ritualistically drew a border: there were people inside, taking part in the commemoration – namely that part of the country that wants to remember, and to fight for justice – and beyond that circle there were people that neither partake of the same sacred time nor share the same sacred space. Reporters were When the Water Finds its Crack 219 interviewing Fethiye Çetin, a lawyer of Dink’s family and author of a well-known book (Çetin 2008), and Rober Koptaş, the present editor-in-chief of Agos. It was palpable that if the temporary sanctuary, the big heart-shaped wreath, was the common symbolic focus, the Agos group, the space on the first floor of Sebat Palace, and above all Dink’s family who in a while were to join the rest of the group inside, was what the people gathered together wanted to protect. In fact, protection was what the circle around Agos’ entrance aimed at symbolizing – the same circle that was drawn in the dramatic moments of the funeral. After four years, while the state still does not do what is necessary to render justice, Dink’s friends – the social centre of post-Kemalist Turkey, as opposed to the Kemalist and nationalistic centre – were still there. Who were the people gathered under Agos’ premises? As we shall see better later, when trying to interpret the commemoration, they were the so-called ‘social centre’, namely the conservative, liberal and democratic coalition joined (at least up to 2011, see Chapter 6) to urge a profound democratization of Turkey, so that it might be a democratic country in which identities are respected and recognized. The central core of the ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’ association, the front line of the circle around the entrance of Agos, was made obviously by Armenians, but also by human rights activists of other communities: Kurds, Jews, Muslims; there were conservatives and progressive Muslims,3 women with headscarves and non- believers, young and old political activists. The group ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’ are mostly secular and leftist activists, but as we shall see, their relationship with religion is a complex one and can be considered an example of ‘complementary learning’, namely of a postsecular cognitive attitude. Though the crowd had a strong political connotation, against nationalism and fascism, frequently pointed out by the people’s slogans as the absolute evil, the protagonist of the commemoration was civil society. There were members and representatives of political parties, Kurds and people from the CHP, but no party symbols, flags or anything else of the kind. Apparently, no representative of the ruling AK Party was there. At 3:00 pm, the time when Dink was shot in the back, the crowd was called to silence. Dink’s voice filled the air, a recording of a known and moving discourse. The words of ‘When the water finds its crack’ marked the official beginning of the commemoration. ‘When the water finds its crack’ is a discourse that reveals a great deal about Dink’s way of approaching the Armenian-Turkish relationship, a lot of his communicative ‘strategy’ and style, and also a lot of his deep love for the territories once inhabited by Armenians. It is known that Dink considered unproductive the discussion over the linguistic labelling of the facts of 1915. To understand what happened, rather than using the word genocide (which does not help the discussion, causing as it does defensive reactions on the Turkish side) he
3 In 2012 a group of Muslim intellectuals, journalists and writers gave birth to the ‘We Demand Justice Initiative’, aimed at sensitizing public opinion and above all Islamists to the reopening of the case, after the sentence at the end of 2011 apparently closed it. This group put pressure on President Gül in particular and met with him in August 2012. 220 The Making of a Postsecular Society used to say that Armenians were ‘cut off from their roots’. Telling the story of an Armenian woman living in France who happened to die in a village of Sivas, Dink reported the words of an old man, according to whom that woman did like the water that finally ‘had found its crack’. The big trauma that Armenians suffered was being cut off from their roots, and like the water that searches for its crack, they look for their roots. It is a known story, and ‘When the water finds its crack’ is a well-known discourse; despite this fact, when the recording filled the air, many people in the crowd were moved to tears once again, as if it was the first time they had heard the story. After this emotional beginning, the ritual continued with a central part. From the balcony of Agos, now the centre of the attention of the people, the real core of the drama, Bülent Aydın, a journalist of the Sabah newspaper and a friend of Dink’s, on this occasion the master of the ceremony, read the names of victims of political violence in Turkey, journalists killed like Dink. The group included Sebahattin Ali, Dogan Öz, Cevat Yurdakul, Cavit Orhan Tütengil, Ümit Kaftacioglu, Ugur Mumcu, Çetin Eemeç, and many others. The daughter of the journalist Abdi Ipekçi, assassinated in 1979, talked to the crowd, saying that all the people gathered there were ‘relatives in suffering’. That was the meaning of the reading of the list of assassinated people, the performative effect that the ritual aimed at reaching: shaping a community of ‘relatives in suffering’, a community of memory of victims of political violence. Reading lists of victims’ names is a frequent technique in remembering victims and making their commemoration ritualistic. It is a linguistic practice capable of raising strong emotions. Beyond that, the master of the ceremony reminded the people of all the reasons to complain to the government, parliament and judiciary for the state of the trial and of the investigation. The crowd was called to make its demand for justice strongly, to voice its determination not to surrender to nationalism, fascism and illegality. For an hour or so, the master of the ceremony conducted the ceremony from the balcony. Dink’s wife, Rakel, said nothing, but greeted the crowd from behind the glass window on the first floor, the same white scarf around her neck as she wore on the day of the funeral (see again the photographic book Hepimiz Hrant Dink’iz by the Uluslararası Hrant Dink Vakfı,4 2007). During this phase it was palpable that the sacred that must be protected were the people within Agos, the family, Dink’s colleagues and friends. It was the balcony at the first floor of Sebat Palace that was the centre of attention. After an hour, the set changed again. The master of the ceremony retired, and the big heart-shaped wreath came again to be the symbolic centre of common attention; again music, again candles, again flowers. Rakel Dink went down to lay a flower at the shrine on the street, and a mob of reporters immediately formed. For another hour, the crowd continued to assemble, though less and less numerous, beneath Agos’ premises. Reporters continued to conduct interviews and the sanctuary continued to collect flowers, messages, candles, placards and
4 International Hrant Dink Foundation. When the Water Finds its Crack 221 prayers. At about 5:30 pm, while the sanctuary was still there, people gradually began leaving the area. There was to be another rally, again to remember Dink, a little later, at 7:00 pm, at Taksim Square: the same slogans, the same groups. It was a second rally mostly for people who could not go to Agos at 3:00 pm, but the huge difference was that the second one was a march, from Taksim Square to Tunel, through Istiklal caddesi. Despite the meaning of that area, a traditional setting for pro-democracy parades, the absence of an established sanctuary made the crowd less integrated, less coordinated, more a set of individuals than a group. There was no master of the ceremony, nor common practices, except marching together.
Anatomy of a Ritual
To analyse the fourth commemoration of Dink’s death, we may focus our attention on a few dimensions and elements, considering the elemental grammar of a ritual (Rosati 2009, chapter 3). First of all, we have to consider the sociological composition of the crowd gathered at Sebat Palace. Newspapers the day after wrote that there were ‘thousands’ of people, more than the year before (but 19 January 2010 was a snowy day in Istanbul). The people I interviewed told me that they were surprised because the interest and knowledge of Dink’s case, as well as the memory of his life and work, were growing year after year. Another element that everybody stressed during interviews was the pluralism of the crowd that took part first in the funeral and then every year in the commemorations. Dink is becoming a symbol that unifies generations: from older generations, of Armenians in particular, who still may have living memories of ‘what happened’, to younger generations of activists for human rights (see also testimonies in Balankar 2012). Furthermore, and perhaps above all, Dink is becoming a symbol capable of bridging many divides: between pious conservatives and leftist secularists, between Kurds and Armenians, Armenians and Turks. Religious and ethnic minorities were largely represented at the commemoration because Dink had made his life’s work the visibility of problems of minorities as a whole, and not only in relation to the Armenian community. He was capable of feeling and showing empathy with other minorities,5 and other minorities understood that his struggle for freedom of expression was a struggle for everybody. As I was told during interviews, in particular by Fatiye Çetin on this specific point, before Dink raised the problem, the view was diffused that minorities had no problems in Turkey, but minorities themselves did not have confidence enough to say that this was not at all the case. It was Dink that had started to make their problems visible, and other minorities recognized in his work a common interest. This was true not only with reference to ethnic minorities, but also along the religious-secular divide. If young veiled women take part every year in the commemoration, it is because Dink’s struggle for freedom of expression is their own struggle, for example, against the ban on
5 See the article on the Kurdish issue, Agos, 16/5/2006. 222 The Making of a Postsecular Society the headscarf in public places. Patrak Estukyan, the editor of the Armenian pages of Agos, a leftist, secular man, told me that Dink’s work pushed both secularists and religious people to a ‘mutual revision’ (this being the exact expression he used during an interview) of their point of view: he himself, Patrak Estukyan, was becoming more sensitive to religious issues and to the rights of religious people in Turkey as a consequence of the dialogue started by Dink with devout Muslims. It is an important point, because it shows that while Dink was trying to give the Armenian community a civil leadership, independently of the Armenian Patriarchate6 (as in the case of the Jewish community, which has both civil and religious representatives), and independently of his personal attitude towards religion7 he considered religious freedom and the freedom of religious groups as part and parcel of his idea of a just society. He was, for example, in favour of the re- opening of Aya Sofya for worship, both for Orthodox Christians and for Muslims. He was in favour of a multicultural Turkey, and understood multiculturalism not as turning a church or a mosque into a museum, but as leaving religious people free to pray in places that are for them particularly meaningful.8 He had a transformative idea of multiculturalism: living together differently means also a mutual ‘appropriation’ of the other’s point of view, lifestyle, culture. In the old multiculturalism, he used to say, everyone sung her song; in the new multicultural society that has to be built in Turkey and elsewhere, everyone sings her song and that of her neighbour.9 Turkey has many divided memories, but minorities see in Dink the symbol of an empathetic way of approaching the sufferings of everybody, even in the case of contrasting memories and sufferings, as in the case of Armenian-Turkish relationships, or Armenian-Kurdish ones. His ideas, his personal qualities and his example explain why so many and such different people attended his funeral and, every year, attend his commemoration. The second element of the ritual that we have to consider is space. Here, space has a crucial relevance, in more than one sense. To have a ritual there must be a group assembly, the bodily co-presence of people. I noted that on the occasion of the fourth commemoration there were many people physically gathered under Agos’ premises – many and different people. They were physically and symbolically separated from outsiders. As I stressed describing the commemoration, before 3:00 pm the crowd took the shape of a circle in front of the entrance of Agos. It was a symbolic way of expressing the idea of protection, but that circle made a visible barrier to outsiders. In 2011, for the first time, people gathered in a different point of the city: one group at Taksim Square, and another at Sisli, and then both marched to Osmanbey. As people at Agos told me, this spatial dissemination in different parts of the city means perhaps that Agos is ‘losing control’ over the
6 For the sometimes tense relationships between Dink/Agos and the Armenian Patriarchate, see ‘Interview with Rober Koptas’, Today’s Zaman, 13/9/2010. 7 See interview in Agos, 16/9/2005. 8 On Dink’s position with regard to Aya Sofya, see article in Agos, 7/7/2006. 9 See article in Agos, 21/7/2006. When the Water Finds its Crack 223
Figure 9.4 The intersection of Halaskargazi caddesi, the street where Dink was killed, and Ergenekon caddesi commemoration, but at the same time, that the commemoration is becoming ‘of the city’ and not only of Agos. Space reflects both the centrality ofAgos , its being the symbolic core, the sacred space that the assembly physically protects, and the appropriation by the city as a whole of Dink’s memory. The type of social space that one may observe beneath Agos’ premises on the occasion of the commemorations resembles Gerald Mars’ ‘keeps’ culture (see Chapter 7), where there are strong boundaries against the outside and space is free inside. It is the space proper to egalitarian collectivities, where the space is clearly demarcated from the outside, but open on the inside, where boundaries are minimized. In this culture and form of space, ceremony and symbolism are not particularly important inside, but are crucial to drawing boundaries with the outside. The space around Agos is the space of the egalitarian collectivity of those who are against nationalism and fascism, as the slogans remind passers-by every minute. It is a closed space, in a sense, closed to and against those who do not want to take part in Dink’s commemoration, closed to Kemalist and nationalistic Turkey – but it is open and egalitarian inside, open to diversity, inclusive. Space around Agos is important symbolically also for another reason. As I said, Agos is in Halaskargazi caddesi. Five hundred metres before arriving at Agos, coming from Taksim Square, Halaskargazi caddesi – namely the street where Dink 224 The Making of a Postsecular Society was killed, where Agos is, the symbol of a struggle for freedom for recognition of minorities in Turkey – crosses a street with a particularly meaningful name, namely Ergenekon caddesi. Ergenekon is the name of a mythical place in the Altay Mountains, particularly dear to Turkish nationalists, because it is related to national myth and poems. However, Ergenekon is also the name of a clandestine, Kemalist ultra-nationalist organization, with ties with the ‘deep state’. As we shall see when focusing on the main narrative that constructs meanings about the figure of Dink, the narrative that constructs the social process of trauma in the sociological sense (see Chapter 8), Ergenekon is the organization accused of being responsible for Dink’s murder. In other words, the intersection of Halaskargazi caddesi and Ergenekon caddesi symbolizes, in a tragically ironic way, a country at a crossroads between democracy, freedom and pluralism on the one hand, or violence and the authoritarian denial of rights on the other. There is still an important story related to this physical and symbolic crossroads. In January 2011, members of the Istanbul Municipal Assembly, from the ranks of the CH Party, the main opposition party, proposed changing the name of Ergenekon caddesi to Hrant Dink caddesi. The proposal was supported by other members of the CH Party, but it was finally rejected because the majority of the members of the Municipal Assembly voted ‘no’. The majority was from the AK Party. Considering that the CH Party is often represented as the main supporter of the status quo, and the AK Party as the most reformist government in recent last decades, the story might appear quite ironic. Furthermore, considering that the AK Party was among the subjects threatened by Ergenekon, as along with Armenians, Kurds, pious Muslims, Alevis and leftists, and that ‘all connections in the trial of Hrant Dink murder (sic) have pointed to this shadowy deep state structure, Ergenekon’,10 the story might appear quite nonsensical. However, unfortunately it makes perfect sense, if we consider – as I was told during interviews – that the AK Party must sometimes play nationalist tunes too, and above all that Ergenekon is of course not only a secret organization, but also a ‘mindset’,11 a mindset that was characteristic of the Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (the Committee of Union and Progress), responsible for ‘the atrocities against the Armenians’ and which ‘continued its bloody activities for the entire modern history of this country’,12 penetrating into the Turkish deep state. As the AK Party gets close to the centre, it risks (as we have already seen in Chapter 7) being compromised by this mindset; nationalism is a risk for the AK Party too. As İshan Daği writes, ‘The party leadership is capable of taming nationalism, but instead, if it falls victim to radical nationalism, it will lose its reformist stance. Once this happens, the AK Party will
10 O.K. Cengiz, ‘‘Hrant Dink Street’. Shame on the Justice and Development Party Members’, Today’s Zaman, 12/2/2010. 11 This is the expression frequently used by Erkam Tufan Aytav, my interview. 12 O.K. Cengiz, ‘‘Hrant Dink Street’. Shame in the Justice and Development Party Members’, Today’s Zaman, 12/2/2010. When the Water Finds its Crack 225 dissolve into the state and status quo just like its opponents. This would be the end of a reformist party and the end of the liberal/democrat/conservative coalition’ (Daği 2008, 125). The crossroads between Ergenekon caddesi and Halaskargazi caddesi is also the crossroads between democracy and militarism, to recall the title of Daği’s book. As I was told during an interview with Erkam Tufan Aytav, Ergenekon’s mindset is the symbol of what Turkey has to overcome; Dink and Ergenekon stand as opposites. Re-naming that street Hrant Dink caddesi would be a tremendous symbolic change. The third element we have to consider is the focus of attention. In a ritual, the group assembly must have a common focus of attention. As Durkheim wrote in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, people’s eyes and gazes must converge on a shared point. In the commemoration of Dink, we have two different common focuses of attention depending on the phase of the ritual. The first one is the red heart-shaped wreath. It catalyses people’s attention and emotions from the very beginning of the commemoration to its end. It is a reminder of the deep sorrow felt soon after Dink’s murder and funeral. The space around the red heart-shaped wreath is a true sanctuary. It is built with care, and ritual gestures of approach by the people who leave flowers, light candles, and place placards over itare deeply religious. These gestures of approach, which need the physical support of a sanctuary, a place where they can converge, sanctify the symbols that are over it. As we saw in a previous chapter (Chapter 3), the space becomes sacred through ritual actions and gestures. The area close to Agos is made sacred; it is sanctified during the commemoration through those ritualistic gestures that converge over the sanctuary. I would even say that the sanctuary, the red heart-shaped wreath, is the commemoration. The red heart-shaped wreath is a temporary sanctuary, an ‘unofficial sanctuary’ (Knott 2005; Kong 2010). ‘Unofficial sanctuaries’ are sites of religious practice different from the ‘official sacred’ sanctuaries. They can be schools, communal halls or domestic shrines, but also temporary street shrines such as our red heart-shaped wreath. Istanbul is a city with thousands of official sanctuaries, Muslim and non-Muslim, but I am contending that in a particular time, through ritual action, the area of Halaskargazi caddesi around Agos is also made sacred, and the red heart-shaped wreath is the sanctuary that catalyses common attention. The second common focus of attention during the commemoration is Agos’ balcony. During the central part of the commemoration, it is from there that the master of the ceremony guides the crowd, from there that Dink’s friends and the family greet the assembled people; there, behind that balcony, inside the flat at the first floor of Sebat Palace, are Agos’ offices, where Hrant used to work, where his work is now carried on, every day, by his friends. Behind that balcony there is the forge of empathetic memories. Then, there is time. Time, in a ritual, is another important element. Time here is relevant in a twofold sense. First, the commemoration is an annual ritual; memory is re-enacted every year, on the same day, at the same hour. Of course, in Dink’s name, the Hrant Dink Foundation organizes several events and activities every year, but the commemoration is the only one in which large masses of people can 226 The Making of a Postsecular Society participate. The annual re-enactment makes it a scheduled event, a spike in time. Secondly, time is important also within the ritualistic space. Within the ritualistic space, we have a two-track timing. On the edge of the ritualistic space, at the beginning and at the end of the commemoration, we have a loosely organized time. There is the shaping of the sanctuary, the organizing of the set, but still not comprehensive common action. It is only at 3:00 pm, when the recording of ‘When the water finds its crack’ starts, that time begins to be fully organized.Now the master of the ceremony takes in his hands a common time. Now, there is only a common, joint experience. For an hour or so there is a keen separation from before and later, and the recording is the temporal threshold. Before and later, beyond the temporal edge of the ritual space, there is profane time, the everyday; in the middle there is a different time, the time to shape together a community of memory, the time to recall ancestors (the list of names), the time to remember the ‘totem’ (Dink himself). This is the time of a shared mood. A shared mood is another, necessary and key dimension of rituals, of a common focus of attention and common action. The ritualistic intensification of common action is due to the necessity of intensifying a shared mood. Music, rhetorical questions by the master of the ceremony, slogans, all of this must produce a shared mood. However, I would say that the commemoration is an emotionally intense but ‘modest’ common practice. As I said before, as is characteristic of an egalitarian space, common gestures, even body-chains, are necessary to draw boundaries that separate the sanctuary from the outsiders, but within the egalitarian, ritualistic space, people are free to approach the sanctuary in their own way. Gestures of approach to the sanctuary are drawn from official religious acts (lighting candles, praying), and the shared mood is mostly of quiet contemplation. Collective effervescence is produced only by repeated, rhetorical confrontations with the big enemies: nationalism and fascism. Otherwise, the prevailing feeling is that of modest contemplation, as well as modest gestures by the people. Bodily gestures and linguistic parts of the ritual are well balanced, and so it is rational and spontaneous. As with every ritual, the commemoration is supposed to have a performative dimension. It produces outcomes. Rituals are causal mechanisms (see Rosati 2009). Against prevailing opinions, rituals do not simply express previous feelings, morals or beliefs. They create feelings, morals, beliefs, opinions. The performative dimension of the commemoration is the working on, and the shaping of, the category of victim, a community of memory of victims. I shall elaborate more on this point later. For the time being, suffice it to say that the commemoration draws an identity profile of the Turkey that will be centred on the memory of a man (and others like him, whose names are remembered by the master of the ceremony) who is the symbol of a victimized minority. It is a radical inversion of the Kemalist centre-periphery configuration; it is a radical rewriting of the nation-building project of the Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress) first, of the Kemalist centre after, and of the state (and deep state) tradition still nowadays. In order to make this inversion real, to give dignity When the Water Finds its Crack 227
Figure 9.5 The dove as a symbol connected with Hrant Dink to the former margins of society, past victims must symbolically be brought into the centre. They must be in the symbolic and physical space of Turkish citizens. People must see their presence through street names, statues in public parks and so on. If the republican nationalistic project was realized through the homogenizing of public space (which included ethnic cleansing, see Akçam 2004), that had its symbolic expression and pedagogy in the representation of Atatürk as a triumphant hero (see Chapter 7), the new, republican, post-Kemalist project will have its margins, peripheries and victims of the past as its new respected totems. At least for a while, a period of mourning will be necessary. Symbols are strictly related to this performative outcome of the commemoration. Dink was fighting for freedom of speech. Under the charge of insulting Turkishness, as a consequence of the application of the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code (reformed in 2008), he was sentenced to six months.13 After the sentence, he started to confess, with his usual sincerity, that he felt frightened. In his final article for Agos, he wrote that he felt ‘just like a dove’: ‘like a dove I
13 Other known people, writers and journalists were accused on the basis of Article 301, such as Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak, Perihan Magden, Murat Belge, Hasan Cemal, Ismet Berkan, Haluc Sahin and Erol Katiricoglu, but only Dink was convicted for violating that article. 228 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Figure 9.6 Placards carried at the commemoration: ‘We are all Armenians’, ‘We are all Dink’ have my eyes everywhere, in front of me, at the back, on the left, on the right’. He felt scared and frightened as a dove, but at the same time he was still so candid as to believe that ‘in this country people do not touch and disturb the doves’. He believed that ‘doves continue their lives in the middle of the cities. A bit frightened but at the same time free’.14 He felt uneasiness like a dove, but he felt also a dove’s freedom; he felt like a person and like a member of a collectivity that has the right to live free in its cities. The dove symbolises both this uneasiness and this freedom. Doves were released on the day of the funeral; a stuffed dove was in the red heart-shaped wreath sanctuary, and doves are now, for example, in a public park dedicated to Dink’s memory in Marsin. The dove is an interesting symbol and image. Dink did not use the dove to indicate what one could expect soon, namely peace and reconciliation. He mentioned first the dove’s uneasiness, a mood resulting from fear and injustice suffered.15
14 H. Dink, Agos, 19/1/2007. 15 The dove is perhaps the symbol most associated with Hrant Dink. However, other symbols played a relevant part in the recent past, or could do so in the future. In the text above I discussed the relevance of the crossroads between Ergenekon caddesi and Halaskargazi caddesi, and the tremendous symbolic value that changing Ergenekon caddesi’s name to Hrant Dink caddesi could have. Orhan Kemal Cengiz (interview with the author) told me that something more effective would be important, such as, for example, re-naming the Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen airport and dedicating it to Dink (for the meaning When the Water Finds its Crack 229
Despite the mantra repeated by thousands and thousands of placards during the funeral, during every commemoration, during every event organized to remember Dink: ‘We are all Armenians’, ‘We are all Dink’, despite articles in which he thanked known and unknown friends, Armenian as well as Turkish, Christian as well as Muslim, for their solidarity and support,16 and despite of course the love of his family and closest friends, perhaps he felt the burden of solitude. At the end of the story, as Khatching Mouradian, the editor of the Armenian Weekly, wrote, no one was Hrant Dink:
I only saw one man – lying bullet-ridden, face down, on the side-walk. He was alone. Where were all the other Hrant Dinks then? After that fateful day – out of guilt, anger, or resignation, I do not know – many in Turkey who knew Hrant became more vocal. And many who hadn’t known him now did, and their lives were affected profoundly. Yet, despite the outpouring of emotion and ink, despite the outrage in Turkey and beyond, and despite – or should I say because of – the incessant repetition of “We are all Hrant Dink, We are all Armenian”, Hrant is no less lonely today than he was four years ago on that sidewalk.17
So the symbol of the dove is a twofold symbol. On the one hand, it expresses fear and uneasiness, on the other, freedom and hope. It expresses the fear of the victim; it makes resonate a past and present of violence and misrecognition of minorities, differences, and human rights, but it expresses also freedom and hope for a future when violence will be overcome, when no one will touch doves. Like Dink himself, it bridges divides: between ethnic gaps, cultural differences, religious suspicions, but also between the past and, hopefully, the future of the country.18 The memory of Dink, and the dove that now stands for Dink’s memory, cannot express just the right-sacred, the ‘positive’ centre of the national value system, because its memory is too strictly related to suffering and mourning. It echoes also, paradoxically, the left-sacred (see Chapter 1), not Turkey ‘at its best’, but on the contrary Turkey ‘at its worst’: those people who in Turkey kill doves. Perhaps it could prove, in the near future, to be a powerful symbol precisely because of its ambiguity and polysemy. Perhaps this is part of the reason why Dink’s memory seems to be growing and strengthening year after year, instead of vanishing after the outpouring of emotion. of Sabiha Gocken in the Dink affair, see below page 244). İshan Yilmaz – another relevant columnist for the Today’s Zaman – suggested that the most important way to show respect to the figure of Dink would be ‘to give his name to a university in Turkey’ (‘The University of Hrant Dink’, Today’s Zaman, 20/1/2012). 16 See, for example, the article in Agos, 4/8/2006. 17 K. Mouradian, ‘No One is Hrant Dink’, Armenian Weekly, http://www.armenian weekly.com/2011/01/14/mouradian-no-one-is-hrant-dink/. 18 This twofold meaning of the symbol of the dove was stressed in interviews, particularly by Ozlem Dalkiman, a member of the association ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’. 230 The Making of a Postsecular Society
As I said before, rituals do not only reflect and give external expression to inner feelings, but they also ‘establish conventional understandings, rules and norms in accordance with which everyday behaviour is supposed to proceed’ (Rappaport 1999, 123). In other words, they establish standards of morality, and in principle the feeling of ‘righteous anger for violation’ of them (Collins 2004, 48). If the memory of Dink is beginning to stand for those sectors of Turkish society victimized in the past by nationalistic violence, then the annual commemoration is called to establish a morality centred on the notion of non-violence. Once again, the symbolism of the dove as well as the white doves released during the funeral seems to allude to an utter rejection of violence as a means in the social and political struggle and confrontation, and to a self-conscious choice of unambiguous coherence between the purpose of a peaceful society, and the legitimate means of reaching that purpose. Continuing our anatomy of the commemoration, I would like to stress another significant element, one which is almost decisive in the formation of a memory related to Dink, and in making Dink a symbol of a post-Kemalist Turkey. I am thinking of the liturgical character of the commemoration. In Ritual and the Sacred I distinguished between two different forms of performances, liturgical rituals and mystical or post-modern like practices. As I wrote there,
if the distinction is useful from an analytical point of view, it has to be considered as a continuum ranging from a maximum of formal, stylized (usually religious) liturgical rituals, to a minimum, proper to mystical postmodern social practices. Secondly, however, ritual form “adds something to the substance of ritual, something that the symbolically encoded substance by itself cannot express” … Ritual (performativity) form (invariance, formality and “decorum”, encoding by other than the performers) is an integral part of the communicative virtues of rituals … Above all, without formality, liturgical orders (namely, orders not encoded by the performers) would be unconceivable. Spontaneous practices can communicate basically self-referential messages … but canonical messages need punctilious invariant behaviour. Formality means that not always in rituals is everything available to the performers; something is often heteronomous, out of our hands. It is formality that introduces a tension between us, our hic et nunc, and tradition. (Rosati 2009, 49–50)
As the quotation from Kundera that opens this chapter suggests, the struggle against arbitrary power must rely on the power of memory, and the making of a tradition, the shaping of a chain of memory, in turn depends on the slow crystallizing of meanings, ritual after ritual. A chain of memory depends on the existence of canonical meanings and messages communicated by the ritual, but in turn the existence of canonical meanings depends on some properties of rituals, namely formality, invariance, and decorum, not encoded by the performers themselves, or not self-consciously at least. In order to shape a chain of memory, a ritual must have an invariant structure and an even punctilious design, which always When the Water Finds its Crack 231 occurs in the same way year after year. It is this liturgical dimension that permits the crystallization of a chain of memory, and the shaping of a tradition. At the same time, every ritual communicates not only canonical meanings, but also self- referential ones, namely meanings related to the hic et nunc of the involved group. If this is not the case, if it fails to communicate self-referential meanings, a ritual risks being perceived as dry and non-authentic. If we look at the commemoration, we see that there are both canonical and self-referential meanings. As mentioned before, behind the commemoration there is a fixed script: it happens every year on 19 January, the rally is always at 3:00 pm, the set is always the same (centred on the sanctuary of flowers), and the organization of the space (the circle in front of the entrance to Sebat Palace) is the same year after year. More than this, these very elements are nothing other than a reproduction of what happened the first time on the occasion of the funeral. In other words, it seems that the funeral is, under many aspects, the original matrix of the annual commemorations. In this sense, it seems that there is a deliberate intention to shape a sort of canon, a recurrent liturgical structure. If the core-group of Hrant’s friends and members of Agos are obviously the masterminds of the whole dramatic representation, the crowd and single participants may well be unaware of the origins and meanings of some symbols and invariant forms. In any case, what is quite evident is that there is a pre-ordered script that orients the whole ceremony, and people are simply not free to change such a script or to invent it on the spur of the moment. At the same time, although the script comes from the funeral, in every commemoration there are also self-referential meanings. In the 2011 commemoration, they were apparent in messages on placards in slogans, and on banners, all denouncing the ‘4 years’ of lies, silence, and responsibilities of the institutions for the disappointing and frustrating outcomes of the investigation. In this way, a fixed structure and an invariant form are adjusted on the specific urgency of the present moment and condition. This is the way to communicate and renovate the original sorrow and emotion, reconnecting people to that extraordinary moment of collective solidarity and uproar that Dink’s funeral represented in 2007, but at the same time stressing the present state of the battle for justice. Hrant Dink is a symbol of post-Kemalist Turkey. After the astonishing participation in his funeral, the relative success (in terms of the number of people in attendance) of annual commemorations and the progressive dissemination of symbols related to his memory (such as public parks dedicated to Dink), indicate that that there is a civil society capable of self-organization, capable of nurturing a civic ritualism that fosters and even establishes new and different standards of morality. This rainbow movement, composed of such different components, is a sort of ‘prophetic’ movement, in the sense of being critical towards official values and symbols. If we think of Roy Rappaport’s cybernetics of the sacred (see Chapter 1), it is quite clear that a movement like this one, the forge of a new, post-Kemalist symbol, represents a withdrawal from Kemalist ritualism and ritualistic legitimation of the Kemalist central value system. As a form of ritual withdrawal, it generates a ‘prophetic movement’ that ‘de-sanctifies’ the elements 232 The Making of a Postsecular Society of the Kemalist regulatory hierarchy, but at the same time gives birth to a new cybernetics of the sacred, the outcome of which are new standards of morality, new ultimate sacred postulates and a new regulatory hierarchy. In this way the old central value system is de-legitimized and a new one is under-construction. These are the symbolic dynamics of the new Turkey.
A Postsecular Sanctuary: The Grammar of the Sacred Space at the Commemoration of Dink
I am considering the ritual of the commemoration of Hrant Dink, and more generally the place that his figure is taking in the contemporary Turkish symbolic system, as an example of a ‘liturgic performance’ whose nature is typically postsecular. My main thesis is that Turkey is a particularly favourable laboratory for studying the making of a postsecular society, its features and dynamics. The ritualistic performances related to Dink’s memory are, in my view, a profitable example of this making of a postsecular society. In order to make my thesis clearer and hopefully more convincing, I want to pause again on some characteristics and functions of the commemoration, and above all of the social space that embraces the commemoration. In a previous chapter, I tried to detect an elemental grammar of sacred social places, and I now wish to show how the social space around Agos, and particularly the red heart-shaped wreath that constitutes the sanctuary during the commemoration, share with sacred places the basic features of this elemental grammar. Let me start with the sanctuary itself and the space around it, the sidewalk in front of Sebat Palace, and Halaskargazi caddesi in the environs of Sebat Palace. The first element to show is the postsecular nature of this social space. As already said, in a city full of official sanctuaries, from so many religious traditions, I am considering a street, unofficial and temporary sanctuary. It is neither surprising nor unusual to notice the presence of sanctuaries and ‘religion’ in unofficial places. In Chapter 3, relying upon specialized literature, I have already noted that today religions ‘happen’ in streets as well as at private home altars and in buildings, concert halls and multi-functional places and so on, beyond churches, mosques and synagogues (or other traditions’ official temples). But more than this, we can qualify our sanctuary and the whole social space in front of Agos’ premises, during the commemoration, as a postsecular sanctuary and sacred social space. I shall discuss shortly the reasons why we can qualify this social space, during the commemoration, a sacred one; now, however, a few words on its alleged postsecular character. What makes it a postsecular social space, is mainly the co-presence of religious and non-religious people, gathered together there for the same reason, well aware of being in a pluralistic space, and already in the midst of a process of complementary learning. As pictures show, veiled women formed the human When the Water Finds its Crack 233
Figure 9.7 The human circle outside the premises of Agos circle in front of Agos’ premises together with apparently non-religious men (see for example the photograph below). It is a distinguishing feature of the postsecular (see Chapter 2) that the religious and the secular are part of the same field (Knott 2005a, 76–7). Rather than considering the secular and the religious as opposite poles, mutually exclusive, as an aut-aut, as one against the other, they should both be considered as part of the same field, of the same modern society. This is precisely what happens on the occasion of the commemoration of Dink. Differences are not erased, but as interviews make clear, both sides enter a relationship of alliance against an authoritative and/or a paternalistic modernity that misrecognizes religious and cultural differences as human rights, or that manipulates some traditions against others. While such an alliance can be initially a simple modus vivendi or a matter of mutual interest, there are clear signs that a process of complementary learning has now been triggered. If we consider the conditions that we listed as the basic criteria that define a society as a postsecular one (see Chapter 2), we may observe how they are all met by the social space characteristic of the commemoration under consideration. In Chapter 3, I recalled Smith’s distinction between locative and utopian sacred spaces. Although Smith warns against imposing implicit evolutionary schemes, he also maintains that there is a certain shift over history from locative to utopian 234 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Figure 9.8 Reverence in front of the wreath, the centre of the temporary shrine sacred spaces. However, I noted also that despite significant differences between locative and utopian sacred spaces, some crucial elements remain in both cases, for example, the crucial meaning of the centre of the sacred space, the meaning of the threshold that separates a sacred space (locative or utopian) from the outside, profane environment, and gestures of approach to a sacred space (locative or utopian). In the case of the commemoration of Dink, we may notice how all these elements are present and relevant. If we consider the whole area around Agos’ premises as the space under consideration, and if we consider it as a space sanctified through the ritual of the commemoration during the commemoration itself, then we can easily conclude that the red heart-shaped wreath, our postsecular sanctuary, is the centre of the sacred space: the point at which common attention is focalized before and after the central part of the commemoration. Its sacred meaning and central symbolic role are shown not only by the whole mass of objects that surrounds it, but above all by the gestures of approach to it and to these objects. People stop in meditation before it, their hands light candles and protect the light with the same care and solemnity that is usually used in official sacred spaces. It is palpable that reverence, respect and solemnity are the only appropriate behaviour and gestures once in front of the red heart-shaped wreath. When the Water Finds its Crack 235
The same sense of solemnity marks the other focus of common attention, namely Sebat Palace. During the central part of the commemoration, the balcony of the apartment at the first floor, and Agos’ base in general, are clearly perceived as spaces to be protected, as spaces set apart (the essential feature of the sacred) and protected from inappropriate behaviour. Not coincidentally, members of the association ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’ are on the threshold of the entrance to Sebat Palace. It is, of course, a matter of security, but it is also a symbolic defence of a sacred space from inappropriate invasions. The red heart-shaped wreath, the sanctuary of the commemoration of Dink, has another function common to sacred spaces. As I wrote in Chapter 3, they have an important orienting function. The phrase ‘orienting function’ must be understood in a broad sense: sacred places have an orienting cosmological function (ancient sites, temples and sanctuaries had a symbolic relation with mountains or with the sun or the moon; churches, mosques and synagogues look East, towards Jerusalem or Mecca), but they have an orienting function also because they differentiate the sacred from the profane, the good and the right from evil, they set the basic coordinates for cognitive and moral judgements. Recent studies, above all in the field of urban sociology, show that even in contemporary societies and cities, even in global cities (and Istanbul is an example of a global city, see Göktürk, Soysal and Türeli 2010), sacred spaces (official as well as unofficial) continue to orient and ‘organize’ the daily life of people: for many groups, of immigrants, for example, but not only for them, daily activities, weekly life-patterns revolve around religious life in sacred spaces in so-called ‘infra-spaces’ (see essays in Molendijk, Beaumont, Jedan 2020; Baker, Beaumont 2011). During the commemoration, it is clear that the temporary sanctuary fulfils exactly this orienting function: it is the point at which common attention is catalysed. The sanctuary physically and literally orients people’s gazes and bodies. People move towards, stand in front of, respectfully approach, the sanctuary. The sanctuary is a gravitational point, like the balcony of Agos. Furthermore, it is clear that its orienting function has to be understood symbolically and morally too. The sanctuary is above all a symbol: it is something that stands for something else, and consequently its orienting function has to be understood in broader terms. The sanctuary orients towards specific standards of morality, towards a community of memory of victims of violence, towards the ideal of a society in which living together differently is the common good. In this sense, the social space around Agos’ premises shows, during the commemoration, another feature of sacred spaces. It is a meeting point between two orders; it is the meeting house for people celebrating the sacred. More than a domus dei, the temporary sanctuary built on the occasion of the commemorations, is a domus ecclesiae, in the sense that it is a space more for people who together celebrate and remember their sacred totem and values, than a house for the god. Despite this, despite the fact that the power of the sacred is muted in street sanctuaries such as this one, set in the middle of an urban space, in a secular environment, and for just a short period of time, it is palpable during the commemoration that people gathered there share the common aspiration to, and 236 The Making of a Postsecular Society anticipation of, a different social and moral order. As a religious ritual is always a glimpse of eternity, a commemoration is a glimpse of a different society and social order, experienced together by people gathered around the sanctuary. Finally, on the basis of the analysis of the commemoration and of the space around Agos during the commemoration, we can also observe two other features of sacred places discussed in Chapter 3. First, it is absolutely apparent that the sacredness of that sacred place depends on ritual practices. The space around Agos’ premises is not sacred in itself, in virtue of ontological features of the place, or in virtue of exceptional manifestations, epiphanies or hierophanies of divine powers, as according to substantial conceptions of the sacred space. That space becomes sacred, at a particular time, under specific circumstances, as a consequence of a collective practice called commemoration. It is a ritual that makes sacred that space, consistent with relational views of the sacredness of sacred places, as that embraced and developed by Z. Smith on Durkheimian premises. Secondly, the commemoration of Dink’s murderer shows also that sacred places may be places both for contesting power relations, and contested places. In fact, the commemoration is openly confrontational towards nationalism and the whole Kemalist power and value system, but at the same time – while a unifying moment for the social centre and the liberal-democratic-religious coalition – it is also contested from nationalist viewpoints. At the moment, the memory of Dink still cannot be considered a shared symbol for the whole country. This symbol, like others, is the ground on which is played the game for a new balance between the old Kemalist, and the new religious nationalist centre and new pluralistic (secular and religious) peripheries in Turkey. In addition, from the theoretical point of view, the case study shows that sacred places can at the same time be sites of contestation and of making community, and that rituals can be at once a form of integration and conflict (see Bell 1997).
Making Sense of an Emergent Symbol: The Social Construction of a Post-Kemalist Memory
In Chapter 4, drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ work, I showed how collective memory is always the memory of specific social groups that reconstruct the past in the light of their present needs. Linking collective memory with the social groups’ present life, Halbwachs was able to show the pluralistic and frequently confrontational character of social memory. Memory is frequently a contested ground, a matter of struggle between groups. In the same chapter, drawing from culturalist premises, I maintained also that specific events, in order to be remembered as traumatic and perceived as social traumas, must be categorized in that manner: in other words, there are no ‘naturally’ traumatic social events, or memories of traumatic events, but only events that are socially constructed and codified as traumatic. Thanks to Alexander’s brilliant work on this, we have a sort of sociological analytic of the way in which a narrative of a traumatic event takes When the Water Finds its Crack 237 shape. Now, after the description of the fourth commemoration of Dink’s murder and the analysis of some key elements in that commemoration, above all space, I turn to the construction of the memory of Dink’s figure and symbol, in the light of the categories outlined in Chapter 3. Following Alexander’s theoretical framework, the first element to consider in the trauma process, the process that fills the gap between event and representation of the event as evil or traumatic, is the carrier group. There must be one or more groups of people that voice some ‘fundamental injury, an exclamation of the terrifying profanation of some sacred value, a narrative about a horrible destructive social process, and a demand for emotional, institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution’ (Alexander 2004, 11). The carrier groups have to propose and make convincing, and ultimately shared, a narrative about the event that they want to see codified as traumatic. In the case of Dink’s murderer, the carrier groups that triggered the trauma process are internal to Turkish civil society. As is obvious, we are not talking about an institutional memory, built by way of a top-down process, but on the contrary about a counter-institutional memory. In Halbwachs’ terms, it is a collective memory (the memory of one carrier group at the beginning, later the memory of a variety of groups) that contests the social memory (the diffused, mainstream and institutional memory) (Halbwachs 1950, chapter 1; Jaisson 2008). In the case of the memory of Dink, the first carrier group is the association ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’. As I said before, they were the first to shoulder the heavy work of organizing the funeral, and they are the most active in the organization of annual commemorations, preparing press statements and honouring Hrant’s legacy in many ways.19 The carrier groups have a fundamental task to accomplish, that of telling a new narrative and making it convincing and, in the end, shared. In order to do so, they have to answer some fundamental questions and to define some fundamental dimensions of the event. The first question, related to the nature of the pain, and consequently of the event, is: what happened? What happened on 19 January 2007, at 3:00 pm? A man was killed, but unfortunately many people are slaughtered every day. What is the difference between Dink’s death and the death of others? Here the definition of the nature of the event is inevitably related to the more general narrative that the carrier groups want to shape. Dink’s death can be related to the struggle over the definition of the events of 1915; it can be read as a tragic chapter of the unresolved Turkish conflict between memories in relation to the Armenian issue. This is an almost natural and perfectly plausible reading. What happened was the silencing of the effort of giving voice to the rights of the Armenians in Turkey. However, as we shall see, the effort is that of enlarging the definition of the nature of the event, and defining it as the outcome of the deep state’s wish to silence a man who was pointing the finger at the centre of the symbolic universe of the Kemalist Republic. Given that we shall ponder more over this point in a
19 I want to thank Ozlem Dalkiman for the precious information that she gave me on the association ‘Friends of Hrant Dink’. 238 The Making of a Postsecular Society while, for the time being it suffices to say that the nature of the pain is defined in such a way as to make it more universalistic than it would have been if referred only to the Armenian issue. What happened was not only the killing of an activist for Armenian rights, but the killing of a man who – while struggling for the rights of Armenians – was struggling also for the redefinition of Turkish national identity and, ultimately, for human rights as such. It is a universalistic definition of the pain that, without disconnecting it from the suffering of specific communities (the family, Dink’s friends, the Armenian community), avoids a particularistic interpretation of the event. This is also clear if we pay attention to the second question that the carrier groups have to answer: who was the victim? Here, what is at stake is the definition of the victim himself, and not of the event as a whole. Needless to say, these are two related problems. Once again, the nature of the answer cannot be taken for granted. Depending on the perspective, from the point of view of Kemalists and nationalists, even before he was slaughtered, Dink had been labelled, ‘the son of a missionary’ (alluding to the historical fear of Christians’ work of disintegrating the integrity of Turkey, the never overcome ‘Syndrome of Sèvres’, see Özyürek 2012), as a traitor or a person who ‘betrayed the bread he ate’, as an ‘Armenian’ (that in Turkish can be used to mean ‘bastard’); on the other hand, even part of the Armenian community was suspicious of his reluctance to use the very word ‘genocide’, and above all about his scepticism with regard to the strategy of the Diaspora, of lobbying for resolutions of recognition by foreign parliaments of the ‘Armenian genocide’. These resolutions had, in Dink’s opinion, the counterproductive effect of making Turks more defensive and prone to feeling themselves under siege, and consequently less open to discussion. In other words, during his life Dink was a controversial figure in many circles. In light of the above, it is clear that the definition of the victim given by the carrier groups cannot be taken, once and for all, as a ‘natural’ fact. Consistent with the definition of the pain and of the event in itself, the carrier groups de-particularized the definition of the victim. Of course, on the sidewalk in front of Agos there was the body of that man, with his story, loves and unique life. At the same time, the carrier groups did not define the victim only as the leader of the Armenian community, but both as the leader of the Armenian community more engaged in the effort of bridging the Turkish and the Armenian memory, and as a man committed to the full recognition of human rights for all. As in the case of the definition of the event and of the pain, defining the victim in universalistic terms, without erasing his specific identity, was essential in order to trigger a mechanism of broader identification by the larger audience. The man killed that day was of course the leader of the Armenian community, but also a journalist struggling for freedom of expression: a man committed to one of the most essential human rights. The relation of the victim to a wider audience is, in fact, one of the most delicate steps in the trauma process. If there is no identification on the part of a wider audience with the victim, the trauma process cannot be successful and is doomed to fail. If the carrier groups want to be successful in making that When the Water Finds its Crack 239 event a central element in the collective identity and to transform the victim into a recognized symbol, the way in which the event and the victim are defined must sound inclusive of society at large. Given that, obviously, there can be no identification of the nationalist and Kemalist part of the country with the figure of Dink, then for the narrative to be successful, his death must be felt as a tragic loss by the widest possible sectors of non-Kemalist and non-nationalist Turkey. As I stressed before, and as my interviewees regularly emphasized, it was really impressive to see the huge crowd that participated in the funeral, and it is meaningful that year after year there are more people present on the occasion of the commemoration. Furthermore, it is not only the number of people present that is relevant, but also their variety: leftists and unionists as well as conservatives, secularists as well as religious people, Armenians as well as Kurds and Turks, and so on. The identification of such different sectors of Turkish society with the figure of Dink depends on many things: certainly Dink’s own personality, his sincerity and capability of talking to people’s minds and hearts; however, it depends also on the fact that he was soon perceived to be a man who was fighting a battle common to many other marginalized people and groups. As I said before, it is because he is perceived as a fellow by the very different people who compose(d) the liberal- democratic-religious-conservative coalition, that he can become a symbol of post- Kemalist Turkey. Without this broad identification, the memory of Dink could not be imagined as a bridge between Turkish divided memories, as it is in fact becoming – and increasingly so. Another piece of the new narrative that carrier groups have to add is related to the definition of responsibilities: who was responsible for what happened? Who is responsible for Dink’s death? Once again, in answering this question we are very close to the centre of the narrative. This is a partial list of what newspapers wrote in the days after his murderer:
A teenager, according to full forensic reports; the same teenager, according to his own testimony; the “murderer state” according to left-wing fanatics; Mr Dink himself who betrayed the lands where “he was fed”, according to right-wing fanatics. “The secularist state establishment”, according to the Islamists. The Islamist government, according to the secularists. The “deep-state” according to deep-state connoisseurs. Foreign secret services, according to conspiracy- connoisseurs. “The bloody-thirsty Turks – the descendants of genocide- makers”, according to the Turk-hating Armenians. The Armenians, according to Armenian-hating Turks. Xenophobic Turks, according to the separatist Kurds. Separatist Kurds, according to xenophobic Turks. Article 301 and the jurists who convicted Mr Dink of insulting Turkishness, according to the liberals.20
Needless to say, the whole narrative has completely different meanings on the basis of who is indicated as responsible for Dink’s death. I am not interested in
20 B. Bekdil, ‘A Reprint – In honor of Hrant’, Today’s Zaman, 20/1/2011. 240 The Making of a Postsecular Society comparing these different versions of the responsibilities of Dink’s death. Rather, I want to take a closer look at the one position most consistent with a universalistic definition of the nature of the pain and of the nature of the victim. In fact, this is the carrier groups’ effort, that of making Dink a symbol of a post-Kemalist memory, universalistic and capable of bridging divides. Ogün Samast, the young nationalist who shot and killed Dink, was convicted. He was sentenced to 22 years and 10 months in prison. For some, this is the end of the story. There was a killer, who was soon arrested, who has now been sentenced: end of story. However, the story is more complex, and it is the story told by the carrier groups (by Dink’s lawyers, by the family, by civil society associations, by columnists in the press, and so on). Annual reports on the case21 denounce a long list of irregularities in the whole story, before and after Dink’s murder. Soon after Dink’s assassination, the family filed a case at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) against Turkey, because despite the gendarmerie and the police having been informed about threats and plans to kill Dink, they did not act to protect him and prevent those plans.22 Beyond that, reports denounce deleted records and hidden files, which indicate how police tried to cover up the truth. In other words, according to the counter-memory of the carrier groups, Samast shot Dink, but the masterminds are still unknown:
Although police arrested the gunman, Ogün Samast, and an associate, Yasin Hayal, a few days after Dink’s murder, the higher-ups who may have planned the murder are still a matter of concern for many. An investigation in the wake of the Dink assassination revealed that a group of ultra-nationalists was behind the murder. Strong evidence suggested that some members of the group had ties with the police department in Northern Trabzon, the home-town of the plotters. Some gendarmes later confirmed that they had been tipped off about the plot to kill Dink before the murder was committed.23
But responsibilities, according to this counter-memory, are broader still than this. Dink was assassinated by the ‘smoke’ that encompassed Turkey since the events of 1915. According to Orhan Kemal Cengiz, the ‘smoke’ started to target Dink after he said that Sabiha Gökçen, the adopted child of Atatürk, the first ever female fighter pilot, was an Armenian orphan who survived the events of 1915. This was a full deconstruction of the symbolic universe of the Kemalist Republic. The ‘smoke’ reacted to this deconstruction. According to Cengiz, the ‘smoke’ is made up of different elements: gangs within the state, the media that cover up the sins of the gang, the judiciary that refuses to see the crimes of the state and the culture of
21 See http://www.hranticinadaleticin.com/en/documents.php. 22 Dink himself had already filed a case at ECtHR against the sentence for insulting Turkishness under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. In September 2007 the ECtHR ruled that Turkey had failed in its duty to protect the life of Dink. 23 Today’s Zaman, 30/8/2010. When the Water Finds its Crack 241 denial: ‘This smoke is the dark side of this country. Dink knew this darkness very well; he knew the “smoke” was following him. He could see it (…) This revelation by Dink about the history of Turkey irritated the “smoke”, which then decided to push the button for his annihilation’.24 That means that before and after Dink’s assassination, responsibilities lie with individuals, certainly, but are also ascribable to a mindset: a mindset deeply connected to the Turkish state-tradition, a mindset that permeates the state, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, large parts of the media, the military, and so on. This mindset would be a pattern that links other recent crimes in Turkey, closely related to one another according to some (as suggested by Adem Yavuz Arslan’s book entitled Bi Ermeni Var: Dink Operasyonunun Sifreleri, – There’s this Armenian: The Codes of the Dink Operation), such as the harassment of priests in Adana, Izmir and Mersin, murders in Trabzon (Father Andrea Santoro), and the murder of three missionaries in Malatya. The name of this mindset, pattern and finally organization, is Ergenekon. Ergenekon killed Dink: ‘Ergenekon committed the Dink murder. The goals of the Ergenekon gang were to destroy the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) rule and the Gülen movement. Dink’s murder may be the peak in a planned process (…). The Dink murder is an Ergenekon operation’.25 According to this narrative, Ergenekon is ultimately responsible for Dink’s assassination, and Dink’s assassination was part of the same plan aimed at destroying the AK Party and the Gülen movement. This is why a neo-Ottoman narrative can include Dink’s figure in its gallery and story: they are equally victimized sectors of Turkish society, in the past as well as today. Liberal Muslims and democrats of different ethnicities, Kurds and Armenians first of all, are on the same side against the Kemalist-nationalist Republic. Solving Dink’s case in its entirety would mean that Turkey has passed through the crossroads of Ergenekon caddesi and Halaskargazi caddesi, renaming Ergenekon caddesi, ‘Hrant Dink caddesi’. Although Ergenekon’s major aim was to destroy the AK Party, and apparently the AK Party and the groups that stand behind the counter-memory of Dink are part of the same periphery excluded for decades from the central value system of the Kemalist Republic, the position of the AK Party in this narrative is much more complex, even ambivalent. This ambivalence, stressed frequently by interviewees, explains why there were no representatives of the party at the commemoration. I have already mentioned the cry ‘shame on the Justice and Development Party’ launched from the columns of the Today’s Zaman when AK Party members at the Istanbul Municipal Assembly voted against the plan to rename Ergenekon caddesi ‘Hrant Dink caddesi’. There, I noted that from the liberal and democratic side of the liberal-democratic-religious coalition that usually supports the AK Party there are warnings (increasing since the repression of the Gezi Park revolt) against the current risk that the AK Party may compromise itself with the state mentality, with nationalism and, ironically, with the same Ergenekon mindset that
24 Today’s Zaman, 19/1/2011. 25 M. Esayan, ‘Ergenekon Killed Dink’, Today’s Zaman, 11/9/2011. 242 The Making of a Postsecular Society seriously threatened it. As already stated, the AK Party has been accused of not doing that which would be within its power to make investigations on the case more effective. But for the sake of accuracy, another episode may be mentioned. In a defence submitted to the ECtHR, Dink was compared by a state lawyer (whose office is under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) to a neo-Nazi leader, likening Dink’s trial to that of the neo-Nazi leader Michael Kühnen by the German Government. The state lawyer’s thesis was that restrictions on Dink’s writings were not a violation of freedom of speech, since they contain ‘hate speech’ (the alleged insult to Turkishness established as a crime by Article 301). That shameful comparison implied, among other things, ‘that it was Dink who was to blame for his own murder because he was found guilty of insulting Turkishness by the Turkish judiciary’.26 On that occasion, the Minister for Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davatoğlu, the Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin and the President of the Republic Abdullah Gül were apologetic and expressed shame ‘that a victim, whose assassination can never be explained without the context of his exercise of free speech, is compared by the state’s lawyer to a person tried for hate speech’.27 What this episode shows, in another columnist’s words, is that ‘transformation under Turkey’s circumstances means a tough struggle for control and coordination of the bureaucracy and changing the pro-state mentality. After eight years in power, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is still unsuccessful in implementing both’.28 That is the charge against the government: Erdoğan said, soon after Dink’s assassination, that the same hidden powers that killed Dink threatened him too, alluding to the long ban against his party. However, as Sanem Altan wrote, ‘We are now in 2011. The government has had some confrontations with the powers it claimed were threatening it. It now feels strong enough to not fear them. The government was able to make unprecedented decisions, but it failed to cast light on the Dink murder. Can the Prime Minister still say “those powers are threatening me?”’29 Orhan Cengiz shares the same point of view. The AK Party ‘has always complained about being a victim of the status quo in Turkey’, and consequently it would not have to defend ‘the very same status quo before the ECtHR’.30 After years of ruling, the AK Party should be able to reorganize the state ranks and, for example, get rid of those lawyers who are not sensitive to human rights. However, the problem is deeper than this. It is not only that the AK Party failed to purge the state from sectors not sensitive to human rights; not only that the AK Party is itself not completely alien to nationalistic traits; the real problem, which brings us to the core of this narrative, is Turkey’s incapacity to confront its
26 İ. Daği, ‘The Shame’, Today’s Zaman, 23/8/2010. 27 Y. Baydar, ‘Shameful Ignorance about “hate speech”’, Today’s Zaman, 23/8/2010. 28 Ibid. 29 Sanem Altan, quoted in F. Zibak, ‘Government’s responsibility’, Today’s Zaman, 20/1/2011. 30 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Hrant Dink, the Nazis and a state that never apologizes’, Today’s Zaman, 18/8/2010. When the Water Finds its Crack 243 past. Dink was murdered because he was a ‘constant irritation in the eyes of the Turkish deep state’.31 What prevents Turkey from confronting its past, and why was Dink a constant irritation? Orhan Kemal Cengiz offers the clearest answer to these questions, and summarizes at the same time the most important elements of the new narrative that the carrier groups are shaping. Let us read what he writes:
Starting with 1915, we created a dual identity for Turkish society. The real “self” was buried with all other memories in the collective subconscious, and an “ideal image” was created and put in place. According to this “ideal image”, we were supposedly a brand new nation that had created itself from the ravages of the Ottoman Empire. However, nothing was new about this “new nation”. Murderers, assassinations and massacres simply continued. For this alienated self, the numbers of ‘others’ have increased with every passing day. Non-Muslims, Kurds, leftists, devout Muslims and Alevi were all turned into “others”, while this alienation from the self has ever deepened. Who were the citizens of this country, who were the enemies? Why did we have so many enemies?32
This is a fragment of an already familiar narrative: Turkish memories are divided, and part of them, those of the non-Kemalist peripheries, were buried. The Kemalist Republic was built on the repression of the real country, a top-down process of modernization that tried to shape a non-authentic identity, against the pressure of peripheries:
To maintain this identity, we continued to scare away non-Muslims; Alevi were massacred to prepare the ground for military interventions; thousands and thousands of Kurdish villages were set on fire; devout Muslims were oppressed; intellectuals were killed one by one. None of the perpetrators of these crimes have ever been held accountable for what they did.33
The conceptual misrecognition and violent repression of differences and pluralism is the original sin that the Kemalist Republic inherited from the CUP and that continued over the decades.34 Here is where Dink intervened, and where he deconstructed the ‘ideal image’ of the new nation:
If we understand all these things, we can also understand why Hrant Dink was killed and why, in spite of all the evidence, the trial of his murderers has not gone anywhere. Dink, as an outspoken Armenian, had always been a target for
31 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Is it money that keeps Turkey denying what happened to Armenians?’, Today’s Zaman, 11/8/2010. 32 O.K. Cengiz, ‘1915 and the unsolved Hrant Dink’, Today’s Zaman, 19/11/2011. 33 Ibid. 34 O.K. Cengiz, ‘Our sophisticated fascists’, Today’s Zaman, 11/9/2011. 244 The Making of a Postsecular Society
the murder machine of the deep state. However, in my opinion, there was one particular statement that made him an immediate target. He said that Sabiha Gökçen, the adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was actually an Armenian orphan. This statement was a real threat to our “dual” world. Dink’s statement was a devastating attack on the heart of the taboo; he was forcing us to confront our past on an emotional level, which is the only way you can start to come to terms with the content of your subconscious. With a single statement he reminded us of our artificial identity and of the real self lurking beneath it.35
That single statement penetrated to the heart of the lie on which the republic was built, and detonated from within the Kemalist symbolic universe. Dink emotionally forced Turkey to go through its memories, and to go to the heart of those memories, to face the fact that the ‘other’ was within the very cradle of the republic. Dink deconstructed the Kemalist symbolic system from within; he unearthed buried memories, and openly, frankly and empathetically tried to bridge divides. Having deconstructed the Kemalist symbolic system, and paid with his life for this, he can become the symbol of a Turkey ready to confront its past and come to terms with it. Mourning victims, marginalized over the decades, pushed to the margins of the Kemalist ‘ideal image’, provide the best emotional way to reshape the balance of centre and peripheries. This is the counter-memory, so to speak, that the new narrative related to the figure of Hrant Dink tries to reshape. The shaping of this narrative happens in specific arenas. I took into consideration the journalistic arena and the writings of some columnists that we have already met in a previous chapter (see Chapter 6). But of course this narrative takes shape in other arenas too. I mentioned some important books on Dink, as well as events and initiatives promoted by the International Hrant Dink Foundation (awards, workshops, films and documentaries, and so on). The legal arena is crucial too, given the importance of the trial, the participation of carrier groups, peoples and intellectuals to the court hearings; the ECtHR is of course part of the legal arena. Then, as should be clear enough, there is the ritualistic arena. In Alexander’s view of the social trauma process, rituals come at the end of the process, as a form of memory transmission. In my view, rituals are part and parcel of the production of a new narrative, memory and symbol, and I hope that the analysis of the commemoration of Hrant Dink has cast some light on this point. The above analysis is based on direct observation of the 2011 commemoration. However, I also attended the 2012 and 2013 commemorations. The 2012 commemoration was marked by the sentence that just a few days beforehand was released by the courts, according to which relevant figures such as Erhan Tuncel (the main suspect and defendant) were acquitted in the case. The sentence failed to find a ‘terrorist organization’ behind the plot, to reveal any intricate illegal connections and responsibilities. Ironically, it was not only the family, lawyers, public opinion and President Gül who expressed disappointment and regret for
35 O.K. Cengiz, ‘1915 and the unsolved Hrant Dink’, Today’s Zaman, 19/11/2011. When the Water Finds its Crack 245 such a sentence, but even judge Rüstem Eryilmaz, the president of the court, who said ‘I am not satisfied with the verdict either’. After this shocking sentence, President Gül stated that Dink’s case is a major test for Turkish democracy and called for a more transparent final verdict from the Supreme Court of Appeal. In other words, five, six years later, justice has still not been done.36 Above all, year after year scepticism and criticism with regard to the AK Party, considered more and more part and parcel of the self-protecting state apparatus that fails to investigate the illegal connections and responsibilities in the Dink affair, are growing.37 What is not changing, however, is the meaning of the memory of Hrant Dink as a symbol of social trauma, of Turkey’s still troubled confrontation with its own past. Thousands of people, some 10,000 every year in Istanbul alone, gather on 19 January to commemorate Dink. From the sociological point of view, there are major differences from the commemoration previously described. Crowds that gather in Istanbul and other cities are from different backgrounds, ethnic origins, faiths and political groups, because ‘Dink is not a symbol of Armenians, human rights defenders or liberals. He is a phenomenon of the entire society’.38 While such a judgment is perhaps too optimistic,39 there is no doubt that Hrant’s memory continues to grow as a symbol of a more democratic and pluralistic country.
36 For documents relative to the trial, see http://www.hrantdink.org/index.php?Hrant Dink=16&Lang=en. 37 Most columns on the occasion of the fifth commemoration in January 2012 emphasize responsibilities and ambiguities with regard to the AK Party’s part in relation to the trial. See, for example, Daği, ‘Murder as a collective crime’, Today’s Zaman, 22/1/2012. Among the columnists whose narratives I am focusing on, Orhan Cengiz is the one who wrote more on Dink after my observation in 2011 too. See, for example, ‘Truth is persistent: Hrant Dink’s Case’, Today’s Zaman, 10/1/2012; ‘Dink murder and 100-year-old gang’, Today’s Zaman, 20/1/2012; ‘Will the Malatya massacre also be covered up after Dink?’, Today’s Zaman, 26/1/2012; in these articles there are no significant differences from what has already been said in Chapter 7 about his position, or what has been said about the narrative surrounding Dink. 38 M. Türköne, ‘Hrant Dink 5 years later’, Today’s Zaman, 22/1/2012. 39 It is, for example, İshan Daği’s view, much more pessimistic, that thinking of Dink’s memory as a unifying symbol is a case of wishful thinking (interview with the author). This page has been left blank intentionally Chapter 10 Modernities and Religions: The Four Quadrant Model
Assertive Secularism, Passive Secularism and the Postsecular
The previous chapters were devoted to the analysis of the evolving iconography of Atatürk and forms of ritualism related to his image, of debates on Aya Sofya, and above all of the meaning of a figure such as Hrant Dink. They aimed at showing on an empirical basis how secularism is changing in Turkey. Up to a decade ago, it would have been impossible to question and de-mythologize Atatürk, to suggest a multi-religious re-opening of Aya Sofya, and to suggest that a street be named after an Armenian victim of murder. Something is changing. While I am not sure that the Kemalist conception of secularism can change, can be internally reformable so to speak, I am quite convinced that the assertive Kemalist version of secularism is on the way to being replaced. But the question is: replaced by what? If we witness, as I believe, small but significant steps ahead, what are they steps towards? The mainstream answer seems to indicate a passive form of secularism as the substitute for assertive secularism. In Ahmet T. Kuru’s words, the difference between the two is the following: ‘Assertive secularism requires the State to play an “assertive” role to exclude religion from the public sphere and confine it to the private domain. Passive secularism demands that the State play a “passive” role by allowing the public visibility of religion. Assertive secularism is a ‘comprehensive doctrine’, whereas passive secularism mainly prioritizes state neutrality towards such doctrines’ (Kuru 2009, 11). This distinction parallels, more or less, that between laicism as it evolved in France on the one hand, and secularism as it evolved in the Anglo-American context (see Yavuz 2000, 21–42; Yavuz 2009) on the other. I must confess that I am not fully convinced by this kind of answer. If this is the right answer, Turkey is ‘simply’, so to speak, shifting from a Western-like model of modernity to another one, from France (although the Kemalist model of secularism was not French-like at all, officially France was the model and source of inspiration), to England. Despite my admiration for the latter, I do not think that this is the case. I do not think that current developments in Turkey are going in the direction of a ‘standard’ Anglo-Saxon model. In my view, Turkey is interesting (theoretically, sociologically and from a normative point of view too) precisely because it is experiencing something like a ‘local modernity’ (Göle 2010), an alternative (Gaonkar 2001; Rosati and Stoeckl 2012) way to arrange politics and religion, religion and society, drawing from its own resources, and drawing from its Ottoman past. My thesis is that Turkey, through its political and cultural post- 248 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Kemalist but also post-Islamist elites (see Atasoy 2005), is trying to transform hüzün (the feeling of a ‘deep spiritual loss’, according to Orhan Pamuk Istanbul’s true soul, see Işin 2010) as a positive resource for shaping a new modernity and a new way of dealing with religions (in the plural) in a postsecular age. What this new form of arranging borders between the secular and the religious will be – in the political realm, in the realm of aesthetics, in the religious itself – is not easy to foresee. However, we can be quite sure that if the shift from a Kemalist, assertive view of secularism will take place towards something like a local form of modernity and postsecularism, the main features of a postsecular society as analysed in abstract terms in the second chapter of this book, will be concretely implemented. It is opportune to remind ourselves of the main features of a postsecular society:
a. the co-presence of secular and religious world-views; b. de-privatized religious movements claiming public recognition qua communities of faith that share particularistic sets of beliefs and practices; c. a condition of vibrant religious pluralism (including traditional religions, and not only the so-called new religious movements), that forces (sometimes in disruptive and confrontational ways) religious and secular movements to increase their reflectivity and impedes strong positions of monopoly; d. reflexivity, historicity and agentiality, namely the three features common to each Axial civilization (Wittrock 2005); e. secular citizens and groups who, to quote Habermas, ‘neither deny out of hand the potential for truth in religious conceptions of the world nor dispute the right of believing fellow citizens to make contributions to public discussions that are phrased in religious language’ (Habermas 2006, 260); f. the presence of genuine Axial visions as expressions of the sacred. The sacred cannot be expressed only by civic symbols (the flag, the constitution, political religions and so on), and it cannot take only immanent forms.
In other words, Turkey will implement in concrete ways a social and political environment in which co-existing secular and religious forms of life, framed by secular institutions, will trigger a process of complementary learning capable of reshaping, redefining and mutually transforming both the idea of the secular and that of the religious that Turkey had over the republican decades. Previous empirical case studies and historical reconstructions should be thick enough to show that if the outcome is not easy to foresee and contemporary Turkey is a very contradictory and ambivalent context, the seeds are yet real and the postsecular in the Turkish context is far from being just a case of wishful thinking. Furthermore, it is good to remember that the postsecular society is neither an ontological condition, nor an already given social and political reality. It is something in the making, a new way of accommodating religions in a secular space, whose concrete forms are context-dependent. A postsecular society is something new, evolving, unprecedented. Modernities and Religions 249
From Turkey to a General ‘Four Quadrant Model’
Remaining a while yet with Turkey, as we have seen, relationships between modernity and religion(s) have in the past been of very different kinds. I have distinguished three forms that the relationship between modernity and religions took in Turkey over past decades: mutual misrecognition, authoritarian modernity in search of democratization, paternalistic domestication and instrumentalization of Islam, to the detriment above all of religious and cultural minorities. Every time, from one stage to another, what changed were levels of reflectivity both of secular actors and religious groups, as well as the central value system of the country. The present stage is characterized by a struggle against old and new nationalistic centres, by the pressure that minorities and pluralistic peripheries (including a pluralistic and liberal Islam) are making to ‘conquer’ the centre and reshape the central value system in accordance with their pluralistic values. In terms of views of relationships between the secular and the religious, it is more a struggle for a postsecular condition than a postsecular condition already realized. As I have maintained throughout this book, Republican Turkey is not just one case among others. It is a an ‘exemplary’ case of sorts, a ‘single well-made experiment’ in Durkheimian terms (see Durkheim 1995, 418). Given its history, its cultural sources, in other terms considering it a relevant example of one of the last Great Modern Revolutions (Eisenstadt 2006), Turkey has more than a little to say to Western modernity too. Of course, the history of Republican Turkey, its past and present, are unique and peculiar, but at the same time modern and contemporary Turkey’s dynamics and tribulations have an exemplary value. Considering above all the ‘solutions’ adopted to deal with religious and cultural differences in the public domain and to ‘construct’ the image of the ‘other’ that were deeply indebted to Western modernity, we may maintain at least that Europe can be seriously affected by ongoing Turkish developments not only in political and economic terms, but also in cultural ones. In other words, the Turkish case may be ‘generalized’ to offer a broader theoretical lens to make sense of historical experiences concerning ways to deal with religious differences in modern societies. Keeping in mind what was said in Chapter 2, we may maintain that modernities’ reflectivity on the one hand, and religions’ reflectivity on the other, are two defining dimensions of the idea of the postsecular society in general, at least from the socio- political point of view. However, this is only part of the story. In fact, they are not only two defining dimensions of the idea of the postsecular society but also two constitutive dimensions and even conditions of postsecular embedded social practices. Roughly speaking, one might assume that high levels of reflectivity on the part of both religions and modernities will trigger a process of complementary learning between secular and religious forms of life that in turn will creatively give life to hybrid social practices, will reshape the borders between the two, will negotiate identities, roles and spaces. Postsecular forms of life are contingent upon postsecular social practices, which in turn depend on the levels of reflectivity of modernity and religions. 250 The Making of a Postsecular Society
The general idea is as follows:
Figure 10.1 Relationships between modernities and religions: The four quadrant model
Let us start from quadrant A. Here modernities’ reflectivity is low with respect to religions. To some extent, reflectivity has always been part of the Enlightenment project, as of every other Axial civilization, and in fact Western modernity understood itself as the highest and best institutionalization of reflectivity; however, Western modernity has frequently displayed dogmatic attitudes too. With respect to religions, quadrant A is reminiscent of the first phase of theories of secularization, when traditional religions were expected to disappear from the modern horizon and science was supposed to replace them as the new faith. Nowadays, the so- called new atheists seem to bring us back to that Comtian time. But this phase is also characterized by a very low level of religious reflectivity, such that religions feel at war with modernity’s main cultural and socio-political features. There is a confrontational approach on both sides, a mutual misrecognition. Although it might appear that this is a condition characteristic only of the early modern world, it is worth stressing that I am not presenting an ‘evolutionary’ model, and that on the contrary, within every quadrant there can be traces of the others. In other words, such a mutual misrecognition (on a large scale, for example, typical of post- revolutionary France), is observable even today in segments of several societies, Modernities and Religions 251 in the West as elsewhere. In Italy, to give an example, discussions on laicism are quite often far from showing a ‘postsecular’ spirit, and their protagonists face one another as ‘laicists’ against unconditionally pro-Pope bigots. In the US, and in different ways in the UK, one might take as an example the confrontations between new atheists and Evangelical neo-fundamentalists. As Michael Ian Borer has shown, what is common to these interpreters of modernity and different kinds of religious literalist or integralist, is a quest for certainty, a ‘Cartesian anxiety’ that makes their epistemology scarcely reflective (see Borer 2010). Here, no complementary learning process can be triggered. Quadrant B presents a different picture. Here we have low levels of reflectivity on the part of modernities, and comparatively higher levels of religious reflectivity. I call a situation like this ‘authoritarian modernity’, because here religious movements tend to have a democratising orientation towards the larger society. Solidarnosc in Poland might be a classic example, but more generally, ‘religion is acknowledged to have contributed to the development of civil society in countries of Central and Eastern Europe, in providing an institutional space, a wealth of symbols, metaphors and stories, an international dimension and an intellectual heritage’ (Ward and Hoelzl 2008, 37). In their demanding religious freedom, social movements may pave the way to larger categories of rights. Frequently, in claiming religious rights they consciously adopt the language of human rights – defending not only the rights of Catholicism, Islam or other specific traditions – against authoritarian but fully modernized regimes. The adoption of the human rights discourse shows that religious movements are capable of entering the public sphere, defending their right to become actors within it, without giving up their symbols and marks on the one hand, or segregating themselves into ‘liberated zones’(see Roy 1994, 80) separated from wider (modern) society on the other hand. In this quadrant religions are peripheries in search of a way to penetrate a hostile centre, while in quadrant A they are not necessarily at the periphery of the social system. Quadrant D is characterized by the opposite situation. Here we have comparatively high reflectivity of modernities, but low levels of religious reflectivity. I would call this a state of paternalistic domestication of religion. This is typical of contexts characterized by a strong religious monopoly that forces secular actors to deal strategically at least with the mainstream religious tradition. In fact, instead of choosing a confrontational approach, here secular forces choose the way of instrumentalizing the religious mainstream tradition, to exploit it for functional reasons. It is neither an aprioristic refusal of religion, nor a sincere recognition of it, but an instrumental exploitation of its resources (functional, identitarian and so on). Religion is not considered qua religion, or not sincerely at least, but as a functional resource. Conversely, religious reflectivity is very low because religious actors move between a radical refusal to have any contact with the secular world on the one hand, and a willingness to be exploited in exchange for public recognition on the other. This is what happened, for example, in Italy at the beginning of the 1990s (and still happens frequently nowadays), where 252 The Making of a Postsecular Society after the collapse of the First Republic, the Catholic Church took the role of main defender of national unity against a ferocious crisis of legitimation of the political system, and against the attack of organized criminal associations at the heart of the state. Here religion is clearly a cultural and political element, but as the example shows, it can be a periphery that comes to help a centre in trouble, as well as a periphery so influential that it is co-opted by the centre in order to keep its control over society. Let us now consider quadrant C, the one that indicates the postsecular condition. It is in a sense the opposite of quadrant A. It has become almost a refrain to say that our societies are becoming increasingly postsecular. However, our four quadrant model indicates how, in order to have a postsecular society, two overarching conditions are required to be met. A society must present highly reflective and modern social, cultural and political subsystems on the one hand, and a highly reflective religious landscape on the other. This affords the only possibility of triggering a fruitful complementary learning process. A society must be, in Davie’s words, ‘fully modern and fully religious’ (Davie 2007, 9). Needless to say, this is a condition that runs against ‘orthodox’ theories of secularization. At the same time, the co-presence of highly reflective and modern structures (in terms of differentiated subsystems and in terms of the taken for granted ‘immanent frame’ [Taylor 2007]), and of highly reflective religious actors within the public sphere, means that the idea of a postsecular society has little to do with the idea of a de-secularized society (Berger 1999). If this were not the case, the notion of a postsecular society would be useless as an analytical tool for societies that have never been fully secularized, or where religions have always been public religions in Casanova’s sense (such as Italy and Spain, for example [see Thiebaut 2010]).
Kinds of Relationship between Religious and Secular Actors
Let us explore further the implications of quadrant C.1 As I pointed out before, a key condition of a postsecular society is a situation of co-presence of religious forms of life (in the plural) on the one hand, and secular forms of life on the other. However, a situation of co-presence can also turn into a sort of static mutual separation. This form can resolve into a self-referential attitude on the part of the players involved. In this case, co-presence is merely a de facto condition, not implying a real impact on either the institution or on the religious organizations. Needless to
1 The following distinction between four forms of relationship between religious and secular actors in conditions of co-existence has been developed through empirical research in different contexts conducted at the CSPS at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. I wish to thank above all Valeria Fabretti whose contribution on this specific point to my view of the postsecular has been crucial. In fact, it is more precise and true to say that this part of this chapter is hers as much as mine. Modernities and Religions 253 say, in such cases, it is not possible either for processes of complementary learning to be triggered, or for a postsecular social praxis to take shape. A second possible form of relation consequent on a condition of co-existence can be labelled adaptation on behalf of religious actors to the prevalent secular rules of social and political institutions. Here adaptation has a passive connotation, standing for a form of assimilation or colonization on the part of secular rules and codes common to modern institutions of religious forms of life. Once again, properly speaking, co-presence here has nothing to do with the postsecular: it neither triggers a complementary learning process nor permits postsecular social praxis to take shape. A third form of relation that we can detect in situations of co-presence is indeed conflict. During the last decade, particularly following the attacks of 11 September, conflict has been the most visible form of relation between secular and religious forms of life. It was the visibility of religions that caused a disruptive effect (see Göle 2011). However, disruptiveness it is not always unproductive. On the contrary, it can also raise reflectivity, as we saw in many cases in our Turkish case study. Unlike self-reference and adaptation, conflict can be a genuine ingredient of a postsecular society, a feature of relationships between religious and secular forms of life that co-exist in the same space. Sociologically speaking, it is well known that conflict is a form of relationship that presupposes the sharing of a common ground on the part of disputing actors (see Simmel 1903), and that it is part and parcel of social change (Coser 1957). This is not the proper context, but it would be easy to show that above all, contributions such as those of Randall Collins, are important in explaining why and how solidarity and conflict are not opposing elements (Lockwood 1992), but part of the same empirical relationships (Collins 2002). Finally, the fourth kind of relationship between secular and religious forms of life is cooperation. At the institutional level, it presupposes institutions open to learning from religious groups, to recognizing them and to finding proper mechanisms of governance together with religious groups to deal with religious pluralism; at the level of religious groups and organizations, it presupposes openness to living within a secular environment and within secular institutions, without merely adapting to secular forms of life and codes. In other words, cooperation fosters mutual transformation and the blurring of consolidated borders. Properly speaking, the postsecular has to do only with the last two forms of relationship, conflict and cooperation, both of which are capable of producing social change in conditions of co-existence between secular and religious forms of life, and both capable of raising levels of reflectivity. Furthermore, it should now be clearer why the postsecular is something different from a passive form of secularism. If the latter implies neutrality and a self-referential attitude on the part of secular and religious actors, then the postsecular implies, as already remarked, mutual transformation, complementary learning, and reflective and conscious forms of hybridization. 254 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Cultural Levantinism, Cosmopolitan Nostalgia and the Postsecular
Reflectivity, as is apparent, is a key ingredient of the postsecular. Tobemore precise, in a sense it is just that ingredient that makes the difference between postsecular forms of shifting the border between the secular and the religious, and past forms of negotiation between them. As we have seen in previous chapters, the neo-Ottoman narrative emphasizes the multicultural character of the Turkish Ottoman past, the mostly peaceful co-existence of religious traditions among each other on the one hand and with non-believers on the other. Modern history is a continuing process of negotiation between politics and religion; however, what is new nowadays is the highly reflective character of such a negotiating process. Reflectivity is surely an outcome of secularization, such that religions are induced to adjust themselves in a reflective way to secular institutions and environments; however, what is new and shows the reflective character of processes of a postsecular society, is the mutual transformation, the mutual adjusting of secular and religious forms of life: a mutuality that results from a modus vivendi, in turn justified by considerations of prudence and instrumentality, as has frequently been the case over the centuries, but also out of a reflective willingness to learn from the other. Recently, the historical and political concept of the Levant, as a ‘category of identity and classification’ (Lapidot-Firilla 2011) has been proposed not only for reading that part of the world, but for reading the rest of the world from that perspective. Levantinism stands for cultural mutation, mixed culture, a troubled sense of belonging and non-belonging, perpetual oscillation, liminality, but also cultural innovation. Nowadays, the Levant can be thought of as a project, with cognitive, political and social dimensions, a project that implies a strong appreciation of complementary learning from the ‘other’, a strong criticism of the homogenizing processes of nation-state building characteristic of the twentieth century, and openness to hybrid forms of life:
the Levant has been a theater for the intermixing patterns, transgressive practices and hybrid imaginings that make the Levantine writers’ work so revealing. A revised conception of the Levant as a space of complementary differences that allows for change and exchange across and, within communal boundaries, opens up a space for a new anthropology of the Levant. (Monterescu 2011, 37, emphasis added)
In the writings of Jaqueline Shohet Kahanoff, for example, ‘the term Levantine describes individuals who embody this mixture: ‘to be a Levantine is to live in two worlds or more at once without belonging to either’. Kahanoff’s Levantinism functions as both history and social theory, oscillating between description and prescription, the past and the future’ (Starr and Somekh 2011, xxii–xxiii). For the author, it was the ‘natural’ and unreflective legacy of her youth in the Egyptian Levantine society; in Turkey, it is the legacy of that ‘Little Tradition’ – in Eisenstadt’s Modernities and Religions 255 terms – that struggled from peripheries against the Kemalist centre, and that still today tries to reshape a new pluralistic centre, a coalition of democratic minorities and pluralistic majoritarian Sunni Islam; but generalized, Levant stands for a ‘utopian cosmopolitan society’ (ibid.), a rooted cosmopolitanism. The meaning of Levantinism can reflectively and consciously shift ‘from a shameful word to a possible description of honor for people who exist in dual culture’ (ivi, xxiv). The postsecular is the equivalent of the Levantine taste for rooted cosmopolitanism with reference to religions: a passion for the dignity of differences and particularities, to be defended against homogenization and empty forms of universalism, and to be embraced as the plural expression of a common human nature. Levantinism and rooted cosmopolitanism are part and parcel of the Turkish landscape. As we have seen, they are also part of the neo-Ottoman narrative. Here, memory, history and myth overlap and intermingle. As a sociologist, I am interested in this overlapping, which, while historically not entirely trustworthy and in need of critical checking, proves to be a narrative that is both authentic and capable of moving to action. Good ethnologies, for example, show how cosmopolitanism is a constitutive part of the urban memory in Istanbul, pondering over different aspects of this memory, but also emphasizing how such a memory ‘was similar to other cities of the Middle East, where Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and other non-Muslim residents had significant roles in the Ottoman administration, urban economy, and the modernization process of the Empire’ (Mills 2010, 7). It is the memory of a ‘mosaic’, destroyed by nationalism, nurtured in the streets of Istanbul as well as of Alexandria and Beirut (see also Meijer 1999). Current ‘nostalgia for cosmopolitanism’ – an interesting flip side of ‘nostalgia for the modern’ already met in a previous chapter (see Özyürek 2006) – can be seen as a response to contemporary international discourse on tolerance, globalization and multiculturalism, but it is ‘produced in a local context where cosmopolitanism is believed to have real meaning as a lived, historical reality that was fundamentally altered by the effects of state-driven nationalism on the urban landscape and daily life’ (Mills 2010, 9). In Istanbul, for example, it is nostalgia for the mahalle life ‘as a space of shared belonging’, as an environment ‘where everyone knew everyone else and religion never separated neighbors’ (2010, 15). I call it memory of a rooted cosmopolitanism because of its spatial dimension, its embedded character both in streets and in some living and particularistic cultural and religious tradition, which differentiates it significantly from a Kantian form of cosmopolitanism. Noteworthy also is the fact that such a cosmopolitan memory is shared by secularists as well as by Islamists. Both of them have their own versions of it, but ‘both broad strains of cultural memory can be seen as challenging the strained secular, ethnically Turkish identity authored by secular, military, ruling elite’ (2010, 220, n. 24). Of course, such a cosmopolitan memory and nostalgia also has a ‘dark side’. In fact, quite frequently its fabric is also made up of silence and denial of the traumatic events connected with the nation-building process that caused real minorities almost to disappear from the mahalle. In Turkey, it implies the cancellation of the 1915 uprooting of the Armenians, and more recently of the 256 The Making of a Postsecular Society riots of September 1955 against Greeks. It is because of the traumatic nature of those events in the light of cosmopolitan memory that silence grew (and silence, as Paul Simon wrote, grows like a cancer). However, although a critical sociology must take into consideration denials and historical fallacies or lies, it also has to detect the grain of authenticity that remains. If the nostalgia for the cosmopolitan memory is a myth, it need not be rejected immediately as such. Nostalgia for cosmopolitan memory, for another world or for Levantinism, can be considered a myth; however, not in the usual ‘enlightened’ sense of ‘false’ (see Segal 2004). It is a myth in the technical sense of a return of a sort of archetypical figure, a ‘nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history’ (Boym quoted in Mills 2010, 107). Evidently, it is a myth in the Eliadian sense of the word (see at least Eliade 1949, 1964, 1969): repetition and replication of a time before history, even before the traumas related to the nation-building process. However, there are at least two good reasons why such a mythical figure must not be rejected but ‘reflectively’ assumed: one has to do with the place of myths in social life, and the other with this specific myth. As far as the first point is concerned, the Durkheimian perspective of this book makes – as already explained – of myth, ritual and the sacred, key elements in social life; this perspective amounts to a culturalist view of sociology as a kind of social psychoanalysis whose ‘goal is to bring the social unconscious up for view. To reveal to men and women the myths that think them so that they can make new myths in turn’ (Alexander 2003, 4). In other words, according to this perspective the critical stance of a reflective sociological exercise is not to free men and women from myths, but to contribute to a public work of self-clarification that brings about new and more progressive myths in lieu of the old and regressive ones. In this sense, although nostalgia for cosmopolitan memory ‘largely functions to obscure history, it is also possible that interest in cosmopolitanism may indicate a shift, an increasing awareness of minority positions and experiences’ (Mills 2010, 216). Amy Mills is absolutely right when she claims that:
Imagining that a multiethnic, multireligious, diverse urban life happened in the past, by looking at the places where it happened, must occur together with a critical look at how and why non-Muslim minorities are now, mostly, gone. The church and the mosque must not merely be taken for granted as “proofs” that the tolerance existed. Similarly, oral histories that recall a shared neighborhood life cannot be seen as simply reproducing a nostalgic discourse. Rather, memories of cosmopolitanism must be examined for how they speak of loss and betrayal, and how they articulate a stake in the future of the city. (2010, 216)
In the previous chapters we have seen how fractured memories are one of the main problems in contemporary Turkey, and how the symbols taken into consideration – Atatürk, Aya Sofya and Hrant Dink – are both fields of struggles for recognition and of tentative solidarity. Despite struggles, ambiguities and steps backwards, Modernities and Religions 257 what previous chapters showed is that such a cosmopolitan memory, both in its secular version and in its religious, Islamic, neo-Ottoman (democratic) variation is the best environment – once reflectively and critically urged to deal with past traumas and sufferings – to nurture a cultural sensitivity towards differences and minorities as well as a postsecular attitude open to a complementary learning process between secular and religious forms of life. This page has been left blank intentionally
Conclusion: Habap and the Water that Came from Heaven
Throughout the pages of this book, I have told the story of competing centres attempting to shape the central value system of modern and contemporary Turkey. During the first decades of the modern republic, it was Kemalism – with its ‘six arrows’ principles, its homogenous view of social space and its assertive view of secularism – that left its strong imprint on the cultural, social and political life in the country. In the 1950s a process of partial and contradictory democratization began, which received strong impetus in the 1980s with Turgut Özal’s reforms and the opening of ‘opportunity spaces’ for social and cultural actors previously outcast. However, it was not until the rise of the post-Islamist political party, the AK Party, that the process could start to become hegemonic. For a decade or so, a new reformist centre seemed to be competing with the Kemalist centre to become hegemonic, profoundly reforming the Kemalist central value system. At the same time, the process did not come to fruition, and the AK Party lost its initial reformist stamina. As I write this conclusion, we are left once again with more competing centres: the old Kemalist centre, weakened but not completely overcome, and a new hybrid centre, the outcome of an overlapping between old and new forms of nationalism, secular and religious, that find in the statist Turkish political culture their authoritarian and anti-pluralistic lowest common denominator. Between the folds of such an incredibly complex process, a further new centre seems, with difficulty, to be emerging. I call it a democratic pluralistic centre, which makes the most of the first reformist years of the AK Party government and is attempting to bring them consistently to fruition. The Making of a Postsecular Society embeds a view of the postsecular as a specific content of the central value system of this new, emerging democratic pluralistic centre – a view focused mainly on the symbolic dimension, on the symbols that express such a panorama perpetually in transformation. To conclude, and prior to a final reflection on the meaning of these processes of transformation for Europe, I want to pause again a while on the symbolic dimension, to highlight briefly how the main competing centres on the ground can be understood, after the weakening of the Kemalist centre in its original form and the weakening of the reformist centre in its initial years. The first flashback brings us to the village of Habap, or Havav, in Armenia. It is a village in Eastern Turkey. For centuries, until 1915, Armenians used to live there, 260 The Making of a Postsecular Society and a monastery and two churches proved the presence of their faith. There were also watermills in Habap, and two fountains, one for each neighbourhood. They were drinking fountains, and the ‘people of Havav believed that the crystal clear, good tasting water streaming forth from these fountains, which ran lukewarm during winter and cool during summer, came down from heaven’ (Çetin 2012). After the 1915 disaster, those who survived had to continue their lives elsewhere, and never returned to the village. Current villagers apparently know little about the Armenians who used to live there, and for decades they allowed the monastery, the churches and the fountains to be ruined and destroyed. But memories of life in Habap before 1915 still survived. Survivors handed them on to their children and grandchildren, and the history of Habap was unveiled. In 2009, two years after Hrant Dink’s assassination, the Hrant Dink Foundation started a project of restoration of the two fountains. Fethiye Çetin, author of a key book of memories (Çetin 2008), lawyer of the Dink family and the main driving force of the whole process, told the story of the restoration and its meaning:
(…) The fountains had to be restored; the clear, good-tasting water had to come streaming out again. They had to be restored so that the souls of all those people brutally murdered, uprooted from their land, or unable to go back to sip the water coming out from the fountains they held so dear, or the souls of the Haranushes, Maryams and Horens, could rest in peace; (…) Yes, we had to do this, but not like a regular restoration project, but rather as a process involving working with the villagers, talking of the village’s past and all the events constituting its history, breaking the silence that dominated a hundred years, and reviving memories that have been repressed and that were on the verge of being erased. We had to restore what we broke and let the water run from dried fountains together. To do this, we had to have the villagers, the young people in the village, young Turks and other young people outside of Turkey work together; Turkish, Kurdish, and Armenian youth had to come and voluntarily work here, touching each other, facing the pain of past. We had to draw close to one another, produce together and as a result, as Hrant Dink put it, heal together. (Çetin 2008, 10)
And they did. Villagers, young people from Turkey and volunteers from many countries around the world, Turkish, Armenians, Kurds; doing it together, according to testimonies, they learned to talk about the history of the fountains and of the village with no fear, to deepen their knowledge of the past trauma, and to heal together suffering and divided memories. Sharing the restoration practice, sharing everyday side-by-side work (Sacks 2007; Sennett 2012), they learned both to nurture a feeling of trust and, for the villagers, a feeling of ownership of their village. In November 2011 the opening ceremony took place. Villagers, volunteers and representatives of the institutions finally drank from the water of the two fountains, and the village headman declared ‘the church is next’, suggesting the restoration of the church as a second step. Could there be a better symbol of a joint practice able to bridge divided memories, to restore a lost – though idealized Conclusion 261
– sense of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ proper to the Levantine spirit, a sense of a genuine pluralism? Could there be a better symbol of a new pluralistic centre, a value system in which cultural and religious differences are not marginalized but ‘restored’ in a pluralistic environment? But now let us take a glimpse at Taksim Square, Istanbul, during the long days of the Gezi park protest, as well as at the other squares and streets all over the country during that time. Water cannon riot vehicles, pepper spray and tear gas, violent repression by the police of the protest – this is what one can see. What one can hear is the voice of a Prime Minister deaf to criticism, who turns people who criticize him into enemies, and who talks about plots against the government by international media, business circles, demonstrators and, of course, the Jewish Diaspora. Is there a ‘better’ image of the dark side of the other version of the overlapping between the state and nationalistic tendencies within the AK Party? The government’s and specifically Erdoğan’s reaction to the Gezi Park movement has been the clearest and most alarming expression of the authoritarian and anti-pluralistic character of the new centre that combines secular and religious nationalism, and that appropriates from within the old state-centred ideology that was characteristic of Kemalism too. In this sense, Berna Turam is right when she writes that ‘similar to other social and political forces, the pious in power often illustrate political continuity with the long-lasting secular tradition, including its weaknesses and failures’ (2012, 4). After the weakening of the Kemalist old central value system, and after the weakening of the reformist centre led by the AK Party’s coalition with liberals and democrats that until 2011 raised high hopes and partially democratized the country, it seems that we are left with a new form of polarization, precisely at a time in which old polarizations become meaningless. The new polarization is that between two competing centres, both of them the outcome of the blurring of borders between religious and secular forms of life and actors. One of them is a statist anti-pluralistic centre, which synthetizes religious and secular nationalism. This is the political centre, whose periphery is a democratic and pluralistic – religious and secular – public sphere; the other is a democratic and pluralistic societal centre, whose periphery is the statist neo-nationalistic centre. Between them there are antagonistic relationships, but even here borders can be fluid, and at the present time no one can easily predict future directions. As I have often maintained in the previous pages, such dynamics are relevant not only for Turkey, but for Europe too. The destinies of Turkey and Europe are strictly related to one another. The history of Turkey’s accession to the EU in the last decade has seen several ups and downs. As Joost Lagendijk summarizes, in the first two years of AK Party government, namely in 2003 and 2004, ‘the party surprised many in Turkey and the EU’ (2012, 185). Several reforms were passed and in 2005 the EU decided to start accession negotiations with Turkey. However, the years 2005 to 2008 were marked by a surprisingly rapid slowdown in the reform process. There are several reasons that could explain the change. Since the start of the negotiations, opponents of Turkey’s accession, 262 The Making of a Postsecular Society both in Turkey and inside the EU, have become more visible and vocal. The EU started looking increasingly inward after the defeat of the Constitutional Treaty in 2005. On top of that came the changing of the guard in the key EU member states Germany and France. The new leaders of both countries broke with the pro-Turkey policy of their predecessors and spoke out clearly against Turkey’s EU membership. Their very vocal opposition played into the hands of those forces in Turkey that were against reforms from the very start (ibid.). Though in 2009 the process seemed to regain energy, to date it has reached a deadlock, and of course events such as the government’s manner of dealing with the Gezi Park protest gave new voice to those in the EU who fiercely contest Turkey’s accession. However, both sides have a lot to lose from a deadlock or from a definitive failure of the process. In the European imaginary, Turkey and Turks have always been ‘the other’. Europe has always been plural: ‘there is a pagan Europe, still alive in North and South. There is a secular Europe, and an atheist Europe. There is a Jewish Europe and a Muslim Europe’ (Norton 2013, 141). On the other hand, making Europe homogenously Christian has always been a matter of conversion, conquest and craft (ibid., 143). Today, faced with immigration processes and growing Islamophobia – not only in the US (Gottschalk and Greenberg 2007) but in Europe too (Esposito and Kalhin 2011) – the image of Europe as a ‘Christian club’ has regained political and cultural currency. However, Islam is written in the stones of several European cities, from Andalusia to Italy and North Europe. As Anne Norton points out,
Islam is already woven into Europe – in every sense. The dome and the minaret are already imprinted on the horizon of Europe. These forms, tiles, and mosaic patterns are woven into the stone fabric of European architecture. The sound of the lute moves from Asia to Europe to the Americas and back again. The oud migrates, circulates, changing shape and sound, played once by a European, then by an Arab, then by an Arab European. The oud evolves, giving birth to the lute and the guitar (…) The languages of Europe bear Arab words within them (…) Arabic numerals mark an intellectual integration so profound it goes unnoticed (…) all the senses testify to the presence of the Arab, the Turks, the Muslim: the sound of the lute, the sight of the arch, the feel of the carpet under one’s feet, the smell of coffee, the taste of olives. (Norton 2013, 163)
Europe and Turkey face the same challenge and their destinies are strictly related to one another because they face the same pluralistic challenge. Over the past centuries they were reciprocally the image of the ‘other’; over the past centuries, they opened terrible wounds still unhealed today. The twentieth century has been the century of genocides, whose roots go deep down into previous centuries (Totten and Parsons 2013), and Europe and Turkey were the main scenarios of those dark pages of world history. Now Europe promises to be ‘the special area for human hope’, and Turkey to recover its Ottoman and Levantine taste for difference and Conclusion 263 pluralism. In the midst of contradictions, two-facedness and hypocrisy, cynicism has not, in my view, a right of citizenship. This is why I turn to look once again at Habap, to figure out the moment in which Fethiye Çetin could hear the sound of the water of the restored Upper Fountain, looking at it as the best viaticum towards a postsecular and pluralistic society:
At that moment, that sound, the sound of the water, finally drowned out all the desperate cries, wailings and sobs that were echoing in the back of my head. I drank the water, hoping that the souls of all those who had died or had been killed rested in peace. Me, Zeynep, Dilek, Anoush and the young people who worked at the construction of the fountain all shared a hug together. They washed the fountain and the platform all clean with the flowing water. I lit a cigarette, first time in five years since I quit, and commemorated all the Sürens, Dikrans, Bogoshes, Maryams and especially Haranush and Hrant. (Çetin 2012, 28) This page has been left blank intentionally
Appendix: Durkheim in Turkey
The Durkheimian Roots of Turkish Sociology
The history of Durkheim’s thought in Turkey is, apparently, a minor topic within the huge sea of Durkheimian studies. As far as I know, beyond Turkish scholars’ works, the issue was raised in the 1990s by a couple of articles published in the journal Durkheimian Studies (Smith 1995; Kahveci 1995). More recently, research and reflection on this point have been started again by Ivan Strenski, in an interesting chapter of his The New Durkheim: a chapter that stands between the history of ideas and social and political theory (Strenski 2006). As we shall see, Durkheim’s thought has been related to that of Ziya Gökalp, in turn considered one of the most important voices of Turkish nationalism and sources of Atatürk’s thought itself. The theoretical consequence seems to be that there must be some proximity between Durkheim’s thought and that of Atatürk, or even with the Kemalist view of society. In this Appendix I want to show that such a theoretical proximity is false and based on a wrong interpretation partly of Gökalp’s thought – as Taha Parla demonstrated – and partly of Durkheim’s. The genesis of sociology in Turkey has to be seen against the backdrop of the ideological polarization between Westernists and Islamists or pan-Islamists, which characterized the Tanzimat period. Even if these two movements agreed on the alarming situation of the late Ottoman Empire, on the decline of the East and on what at the time appeared to be the clear supremacy of the West, they were diametrically opposed when it came to the diagnosis of the reasons behind such a decline and, above all, on its possible remedies. According to Islamists, the political unity of Muslims and the return of the original and pure Islam was the only way to stop exploitation by European imperialism, provided that – as they believed – Islam was capable of adapting itself to modern needs. According to Westernists, on the contrary, the only viable solution was importing the modern Western form of life, that was displaying its patent superiority in every sphere of social and political life (see Berkes 1936, 241). As Berkes states in one of the first investigations into sociology in Turkey, ‘the conflict between the two movements came to an end with the defeat of the first. The revolution of 1908 prepared the way for the realizations of the aspirations of the Westernists’ (1936, 241). At the same time, even the most ardent Westernists had to realize that not every problem was solved, and that ‘there were incompatible elements in European and Ottoman 266 The Making of a Postsecular Society institutions’ (1936, 241). Being the ‘science of crisis’, sociology found in this environment the right soil to start its adventure in Turkey. The beginnings of Turkish sociology were marked by the influence of French authors (Fahri 1936; Çelebi 2002). Even if Herbert Spencer’s thought had some appeal, it was above all Comte’s watchwords ‘order’ and ‘progress’ that resounded familiarly in the Turkish context. As in post-revolutionary France, the feeling was that of facing the necessity of re-building society. Comte’s thought was brought into Turkey by Ahmed Riza, who studied in Paris in the early 1880s, and was then philosophically adopted also by the mathematician Salih Zeki. The influence of French sociology was not limited to Comte, given that, for example, Prince Sabahaddin, ‘the first sociologist of the Westernist Turkish thinkers’ (1936, 241), studied in Paris with the followers of Le Play. Others, such as Dr Abdullah Djevdet, translated Gustave Le Bon’s works. Being numbered among the Westernists, the above mentioned authors – be they followers of Comte or Spencer, Le Bon or Le Play – basically believed that Western institutions and culture had to be imitated and imported. However, Westernists and pan-Islamists were not the only resounding voices. Another current of thought was that of the so-called pan-Turks, who were gradually becoming aware that the multi-national Ottoman Empire was at its end, and who believed that the future could not be in a cosmopolitan political entity, but in a homogenous, ethnic-based nation. Consequently, more than building on the Muslim heritage, the pan-Turkish movement – known as ‘Turanism’ – encouraged studies in Turkish folklore, history, linguistics and ethnology. In his presentation on the origins of Turkish sociology, Berkes mentioned Ziya Gökalp as the ‘leader and most influential exponent’ of Turanism (a very controversial assessment, see Parla 1985 for a different view), and also as the ‘real founder of Turkish sociology’ (1936, 242). As we shall see, Gökalp’s sociology was Durkheimian from several points of view. Drawing on Durkheim’s works, above all The Rules of Sociological Method and The Division of Labour in Society, Gökalp contributed considerably to the diffusion of Durkheim’s sociology. As Durkheim was in France, he was also committed to the institutionalization of sociology in the Turkish educational system, and he was the first to teach at the University of Istanbul, in 1912, as the newly established Chair of Sociology. Again, as Berkes maintains, ‘the subsequent development of sociology as an academic discipline owes much to his personal and professional influence’ (1936, 241–2). A great part of this influence was due to Gökalp’s efforts at synthesizing the opposing ambitions of Westernists and Islamists, by means of the conciliation of the three watchwords ‘Turkify’, ‘Islamize’, and ‘Modernize’, that – with the softening or even suppressing of the second term – became also a slogan in the furthering of reformation and process of nation building under Atatürk. The influence of French sociology, and particularly of Durkheim’s thought, on Turkish sociology, however, lasted well beyond Gökalp. Sociology became more and more important after the establishment of the republic in 1923, and in 1924 it Appendix 267 was introduced into all college and normal-school programmes. The first textbooks were translations of French textbooks or were inspired by the general conception and partition of sociological branches as expressed in L’année sociologique. Durkheim’s thought had been continuing to be a pivotal focus, not only in those first years but up to our time (Kahveci 1995, 55–7). It is well known – and is part of the story told by Strenski – that Durkheim’s Leçons de sociologie were edited for the first time in 1950 by Professor Hüseyin Nail Kubali, the Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Istanbul, who received Durkheim’s lectures through Marcel Mauss. In the early 1930s Kubali was working on his doctorate in law in Paris (see Kubali 1936), and engaged himself in a deep study of the French sociological school. His works are significant, among other reasons, because they make clear what Turkish sociologists and thinkers were mostly looking for in French authors: in the midst of the efforts to shape the new nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the republic, it was the idea of the state developed by French authors that was important in and for Turkey. Given the above, the urgent theoretical question is that perfectly formulated by Ivan Strenski:
is it fair to see Durkheim’s social theory as a kind of scholarly forerunner of Kemalism, and thus of Turkish fascist corporatism? Further, was Durkheimian corporatism practically operationalized as a blueprint for actual fascist or fascist- tending corporatism, such as that which some scholars have identified at periods in the history of Kemalist Turkey’s history? (Strenski 2006, 306)
This is the question I want to discuss briefly in this Appendix. The relationship between Durkheim’s social and political theory and Kemalism – via Gökalp – is not only a chapter in the history of ideas and in Durkheimian studies, but is also above all a juncture of our understanding and interpretation of Turkey’s modern and contemporary history that – as maintained throughout this book – has an exemplary meaning which transcends Turkey and involves Europe too.
The ‘Ranulf Thesis’: Strong and Weak Versions
Reading Durkheim as a conservative thinker is anything but unusual. Perhaps, within the sociological tradition, Robert Nisbet’s account of Durkheim’s alleged conservatism – related to the emphasis on the notions of authority, the sacred, fear of anomie characteristic of modern societies, corporatism, priority of society over the individual and so on – is the most well known (Nisbet 1965). However, at the end of the 1930s, when Nazism was in power and fascist regimes darkened European skies, Svend Ranulf launched the most radical and offensive criticism against Durkheim, judged – together with Tönnies and Comte – as a scholarly forerunner of fascism. After reviewing Durkheim’s main works, and Durkheim’s criticism of liberal and individualistic modern society (without any mention, for 268 The Making of a Postsecular Society example, of Durkheim’s defence of moral individualism, his taking the side of Dreyfus and so on), Ranulf asked the anything but innocent question:
Is not the rise of fascism an event which, in due logic, Durkheim ought to have welcomed as that salvation from individualism for which he had been trying rather gropingly to prepare the way? (Ranulf 1939, 31)
Ranulf conceded that there could be aspects of fascism that Durkheim and his followers (he mentioned extensively Mauss’ disconcert at Nazism) would probably have considered unacceptable and that perhaps would have urged Durkheim to reconsider his opposition to individualism (an opposition, by the way, erroneously attributed by Ranulf to Durkheim). However, this caution notwithstanding, at the end of his article Ranulf stated again and again that the group of sociologists he considered, Durkheim included, ‘have – for the most part unintentionally and unconsciously – served to prepare the soil for fascism by their propagation of the view that the society in which they were living was headed for disaster because of its individualism and liberalism and that a new social solidarity was badly needed’ (1939, 34). Consequently, in the midst of the struggle against fascist regimes, Ranulf concluded that ‘sociologists should realize that indulgence in glorifications of the Gemeinshaft and in the deprecations of the Gesellscahft is equivalent to a piece of fascist propaganda unsupported by genuine science’ (1939, 34). In fact, even before Ranulf’s article, another interpreter had already established a clear connection between Durkheim’s thought and ‘some of the principle doctrines of the militant Action Française, of the Italian Fascists, of the Russian Bolshevists, and of “one-hundred-per-cent” Americans’ (Mitchell 1931, 88). As in Ranulf’s case, and as we shall see in the case of other interpreters, the original sin was, according to Marion Mitchell, ‘Durkheim’s emphasis upon the collective life as a reality distinct from and superior to that of its individual members’ (1931, 89). Mitchell recognized that collective life in Durkheim had to be understood in pluralistic terms, since societies meant ‘the clan, the tribe, the city-state and the nation, religious sects, the school, the literary and the occupation groups’ (1931, 89), and he mentioned the importance Durkheim attached to the individual. However, just as ‘despite his recognition of the individual being, one is inclined to feel that Durkheim has reduced man’s brain to a mere reservoir for group sentiments and ideals’ (1931, 91), in the same way Durkheim’s recognition of the moral value of humanity did not prevent him from exalting the nation as the highest social group and, according to Mitchell, from turning his apparently and in principle ‘pacific and humanitarian rather than military ideal of patriotism’ into an ‘active’ and ‘most aggressive’ kind of patriotism at the time of World War I. Finally, Durkheim’s idea of religion and his emphasis on collective effervescence brought grist to the mill of those who proclaimed a religion of nationalism (1931, 104). Ranulf’s thesis is more radical than Nisbet’s. In fact, neither Mitchell nor Ranulf did maintain that Durkheim was personally and consciously involved, in his time, Appendix 269 in rightist movements, but considered his thought to be consistent in principle with rightist opposition to Western, liberal, individualistic democracies, and to have contributed to paving the way for it. Given the above judgment on Durkheim’s sociology and political sociology in particular as intrinsically conservative or even as a forerunner of rightist and fascist movements, it is not surprising that his thought has been mentioned as a source of Kemalism. Once again, those interpreters who stress the continuity between Durkheim’s thought and Gökalp’s on the one hand and between the Durkheim-Gökalp ticket and Kemalism on the other, are not maintaining that Durkheim (or even Gökalp) would have been ready to accept Atatürk’s ‘benevolent dictatorship’ (Devereux 1968, ix), but that in his (or their) thought, traces of a rightist corporatism coloured with fascist tints can be found. This is what I want to object to in the next two sections.
Interpreting Ziya Gökalp
The first step concerns Ziya Gokalp. I shall briefly discuss two key points of his thought, on the basis of my own reading of his books (those available in English, Gökalp 1959 and 1968) and of the most important interpretations in the secondary literature. The two points at stake are, on the one hand, his view of the role of religion and Islam in the late Ottoman Empire and later in the new republic and on the other, his political ‘theory’ and view of politics and society. For a long time, the most authoritative interpretation of Gökalp’s thought has been Uriel Heyd’s Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp (1950). In that book, Heyd represents Gökalp as an apostle of romantic nationalism, interested in shaping a homogenous Turkish nation through education and socialization. Although his view of the nation was a cultural one – rather than racial or ethnic – he was ready, in Heyd’s view, to subordinate individualism, internationalism, cultural pluralism and minorities’ rights to the supreme value of the nation’s homogeneity. His famous distinction between culture and civilization – the first being national, emotional and unconscious, and the second being international, rational and conscious – undergirded his cultural but homogenous idea of the nation. Even religion has a space in Gökalp’s view only because of its functional value as a means of social integration, while its dogmatic dimension would be doomed to be overcome once and for all. In this picture, Gökalp’s work is framed by the nationalistic moment, and not by issues concerning religion and secularization. More recently, this interpretation has been criticized by Taha Parla (1985) and by Andrew Davison (1998). In contrast with Heyd, Parla’s Gökalp is a democratic, pluralist, tolerant, non-elitist, non-expansionist, rational, egalitarian, feminist, internationalist, anti-racist, humanist thinker. Above all Taha Parla shows how Heyd’s interpretation is biased by his exclusion of Gökalp’s writings on sociology, which provided the genuine foundation for his political thought. Indeed, according to Davison’s expression, ‘Gökalp’s sociology was his political 270 The Making of a Postsecular Society contribution’ (Davison 1998, 98). Overlooking the sociological foundations of his thought, which were clearly Durkheimian, Heyd’s analysis failed to grasp the central meaning of Gökalp’s political thought, namely its solidaristic corporatism. In Parla’s synthesis, Gökalp maintains that:
[it] is pure and simple solidaristic morality which values the individual, without negating its prerogatives, according to his service to social solidarist and public institutions (…) the individual gains meaning only in society without being negated by society let alone by the state (…) and is defended against the incursions of the state precisely by the occupational groups and their corporations, which serve as a buffer between the state and the individual. What facile liberal clichés cannot capture is that, in solidaristic corporatism, even the occupational groups which collectively constitute civil society, exist for the free development of the individual personality, which, however, has to be “social”; but still within a framework of cultural and philosophical liberalism. (Parla 1986, 67–9)
Davison’s own interpretation largely overlaps and agrees with Parla’s (1998). Davison too believes that Heyd’s misreading depends on his overlooking the sociological dimension of Gökalp’s thought, as well as on his sharing the centrality of solidaristic collectivism, as opposed to rightist corporatism (see Parla and Davison 2004, Chapter 5). Davison distances himself from Parla on the stronger consideration of the problem of secularization and religion in modern society as the frame of Gökalp’s thought. The question of religion in modernity is, in Davison’s view, the key point of Gökalp’s intellectual journey, much more so than nationalism and/or solidaristic corporatism per se. According to Davison, Gökalp’s reflection on the role of religion (Islam) in modernity is based on two pillars: the refusal to consider only nas (the Koran and the Sunna) as the proper source of Islamic law to the advantage of örf (mores of different Islamic societies, customs, opinions, traditions) that should be added to divine revelation on the one hand, and a full separation of politics and religion, a complete disestablishment of religion (Davison 1998, 100–101) on the other. Once such a premise is stated, Davison maintains,
Religion remains central to national culture, and thus within the personal, social, and spiritual needs of human beings. Though no longer as significant as it once was at both the international and the national level, within Gökalp’s description of the sociological trends, religion is a key element of national culture. It may even be the basis for common ties of a spiritual kind among coreligionists of different nations. In this way it remains an international ideal, but it is not the most encompassing one for modern Turkey. (1998, 121)
Religion, therefore, must not be confined within the private realm and should not (and need not) be privatized. At the same time, Islam can keep and strengthen Appendix 271 its vitality only if the two above mentioned premises are fulfilled: namely a) that its laws evolve, and b) that it remains independent of political power and state institutions. Religion must occupy its own sphere, which is not to say that it must be privatized, but that its leaders ‘must abandon their claims to politics, just as politicians should ensure the autonomy of religious practice and institutions’ (1998, 124). According to Davison, with regard to religion’s function in modern societies Gökalp followed Durkheim in considering religion a pillar of organic solidarity (see also Strenski 2006): ‘not simply a matter of private conscience, religion occupies a place in the public life of individuals where public means something other than “political” (…) Religion neither disappears nor becomes merely a private matter’ (1998, 129). A close reading of Gökalp’s works (1959; 1968) shows how for him religion plays a key role in the shaping of personality, in regulating instincts, in national life as a part of culture, and in international life as a spiritual component of a shared civilization. Consequently, despite structural differentiation from politics and inner evolutionary trends to religious (Islamic) laws – what we would call secularization – he ‘gave religion a privileged place in the national culture that he sought to preserve as Turkey continued its integration with the West’ (1998, 131). In other words, conceptually religion played a key role in the original synthesis of nationalism, Islam and Westernism that he was looking for as a reaction to the crisis of his own society. Following Davison’s and Parla’s interpretation, what becomes clear are also the differences from Kemalism with regard to both of the two key points under scrutiny: on the one hand, the structural differentiation of politics and religion, and on the other, solidaristic corporatism. Whereas Kemalism did not institutionally and symbolically (Davison 1998) disentangle politics from religion but at the same time still purported to expel religion from social life, Gökalp instead believed that the legitimate personal and social role of religion could be preserved only by separating it from politics. As Davison emphasizes, ‘he demanded the complete autonomy of political and religious spheres for the sake of both’ (1998, 133). Once again, this position does not entail sharing liberal Western naïve representations of religion as a private issue, but looking at religion as a pillar of organic solidarity, namely as an essential ingredient of a vital social sphere, capable of nurturing a non-atomistic individualism. It has to be considered as one of those intermediate bodies that shape a system of solidaristic corporatism, completely different from the state-centred version of rightist corporatism (Parla and Davison 2004) characteristic of Kemalism and other rightist, fascist or fascist- like forms of corporatism, because the former aims to protect individualism from a totalitarian state, but also society from atomized individuals with no collective representations. 272 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Durkheim and Solidaristic Pluralism
As we have seen, according to Parla and Davison, Heyd’s misinterpretation of Gökalp’s thought stems, among other things, from the author’s underestimation of the sociological basis of Gökalp’s thought. At the same time, Durkheim’s thought – which without doubt undergirds Gökalp’s views – has itself been frequently interpreted as conservative. The consequence is that readers may ‘infer a connection’ (Smith 1995, 48, n. 1) between the two of them, relating the alleged ‘integral nationalism’ (Melson 1992, 138) of Gökalp to Durkheim’s sociological view, even ending up relating Gökalp’s alleged position of hostility towards minorities to Durkheim’s idea of society. However, such an inference is wrong because it is based upon a false premise, namely a bad reading of Durkheim’s sociological view and ‘political theory’. Durkheim’s political thought has received wide attention (see, for example, Giddens 1996). Within this sub-field of Durkheimian studies, some have focused on Durkheim’s theorization of occupational groups. Mike Hawkins, for example, has maintained that ‘Durkheim attempted to construct a corporatist theory by wedding the notion of society organized along functional lines to secular and republican values in which individual liberties retained moral paramountcy’ (Hawkins 1994, 481). According to Hawkins’ close reading of Durkheim’s texts this version of corporatist theory would involve an ‘unresolved tension between, on the one hand, the imperatives of social discipline and, on the other, the legitimacy of personal autonomy and freedom’ (ibid.). In a more radical interpretation, Timoty Kaufman- Osborn maintains that ‘the novelty of Durkheim’s project is disclosed not in his deployment of the occupational associations to promote conservative, liberal, or socialist programs but rather in the radical transformation of the relationship between state and society’ (Kaufman-Osborn 1986, 640), which implies in principle a de-territorialization of political obligation. In Ritual and the Sacred: A Neo-Durkheimian Interpretation of Politics, Religion and the Self (2009) I sided with those interpreters who see in Durkheim ‘a precursor of an Anglo-Saxon style of multiculturalism, respectful of all forms of identitarian adherence’ (Birnbaum 2008, 8). If one considers that Durkheim never thought of society in the abstract, but always in terms of social groups, and of the self in terms of its attachment to specific social groups (see Cladis 1992; Watts Miller 1996 and 2012), then Parla’s reading of Durkheim in terms of solidaristic corporatism – as opposed to fascist corporatism – becomes very plausible (Parla 1985). However, from a neo- Durkheimian point of view, there are no reasons to consider only occupational groups as key social units. As Strenski maintains, and believes characteristic of both Durkheim’s and Gökalp’s thought, religious groups too must be considered ‘pillars of organic solidarity’: they ‘should occupy a place in public life, (but) where public means something other than political’ (Strenski 2006, 128). Thus we are back to a form of solidaristic pluralism (which I prefer to solidaristic corporatism) very different from the Kemalist state-centred corporatism. Telling this story, namely the story of Durkheim’s solidaristic pluralism, may throw a Appendix 273 different and new light on Gökalp’s thought too, and may offer a new path of research to historians of ideas. To social and political theorists, this story can offer a new and fascinating perspective on how to conceive of the relationship between politics, religions and society in a postsecular horizon, particularly in relation to the subject of multicultural jurisdictions (see Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2010). Finally, to interpreters of contemporary Turkey and its exemplary meaning, this story can offer theoretical tools for articulating a pluralistic and democratic framework for living together differently – a new life for Durkheim too. This page has been left blank intentionally References
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Adam 1 Augé, Marc 64 Agai, Bekim 121, 124n axial age 36 Agca, Ali 116 Aydin, Akif M. xiii, 206 Akçam, Taner 227 Aydin, Bülent 220 Aksoy, Mehemet 153 Aygün, Hüseyin 160 Akyol, Mustafa 116, 124n, 131n, 133n, Aytan, Erkam T. 99n, 180 138–140n, 141, 141n, 142–143n, Azak, Umut 102 144, 144n, 147, 148n, 161n, 177n, 179n, 184, 184n, 185, 185n, 188n, Baban, Feyzi 110, 111 190, 190n, 191, 191n, 196n, 197n, Baker, Christopher 31, 34n, 42, 49, 122, 207, 208 235 Albayrak, Aydin 188 Balankar, Ferda 221 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 18, 70, 75, 165, 201, Bali, Rifat N. 86 208, 236, 237, 244, 256 Bardakoğlu, Ali 144–148, 207, 208 Ali, Sebahattin 220 Barkey, Karen 108 Alibeyoğlu, Naif 153 Bartholomew 154, 155, 155n, 156 Alkabes, Shlomo H. 163 Baudelot, Christian 71n Allen, Nick xiv Bayan, Fatih 96 Alonso X, 210n Bayar, Celan 1, 102 Alp, Ahmet V. 202 Bayar, Yeşim 96 Alpay, Şahin 179n, 187n Baydar, Yavuz 156, 161n, 187n, 242n Altan, Mehemet 141, 142, 183, 183n, 191 Beaumont, Justin 31, 34n, 41, 42, 49, 65, Altan, Sanem 242, 242n 122, 201, 235 Altintaş, Bariş 183n Becci, Irene 32, 65 Amicis, Edmondo de 1 Beck, Ulrich 41n Ammerman, Nancy T. 66 Beckford, James 33, 33n, 34, 34n An-Na’im, Abdullah A. 141 Behic, Erkin 164, 165 Arabi, Ibn 210 Bekdil, Burak 239n Arat, Yeşim 86 Belge, Murat 227n Arinç, Bülent 155, 204n, 208 Bell, Catherine 236 Arnason, Johann P. 36 Bellah, Robert 36, 43 Arslan, Adem Yavuz 111, 241 Benedict XVI 205 Arweck, Elisabeth 66 Benhabib, Shila xiii Assmann, Aleida 70n Berger, Peter 121, 252 Ataly, Beşir 168n Berkan, Ismet 227n Atasoy, Yildiz 85, 96, 102, 104, 248 Berkes, Niyazi 265, 266 Atatürk, Kemal 3, 4, 9–12, 67, 86–89, 92–94, Bey, Ali S. 139 98, 101, 102, 126, 134, 160, 165, Bey, Cavit 139 166, 175–187, 190–197, 203, 214, Bhargava, Rajeev 33, 44n 227, 240, 244, 247, 256, 265–267 Bilgili, Nazlı Ç. 150 298 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Birnbaum, Pierre 272 Charles VI 163 Bokser Baruch M. 57, 58n Chidester, David 50, 50n, 51, 59, 60 Bon, Gustave Le 266 Çiçek, Cemil 188n Borer, Michael I. 251 Çinar, Alev 108, 115, 121 Boym 256 Cizre, Ümit 96, 149 Bozdogan 121 Cladis, Mark S. 272 Brelich, Angelo 47n Clarke, Gloria L. 98 Brink-Danan, Marcy 162, 167, 168 collective identities 39 Bugra, Alp 99 Collins, Randall 28, 230, 253 Bulaç, Ali 110–112, 163 complementary learning 7, 36–37, 42, 45, Burchardt, Mirian xiv, 32, 65 115, 219, 232–233, 248–254, 257 Burgess, Ernest 17 Comte, Auguste 266, 267 Burke, Edmund 191 Connerton, Paul 70n Butler, Judith 80 constitutional patriotism 37 Byrnes, Timothy A. 4 corporatism 90–94 rightist corporatism 91, 94 Caillois, Roger 47, 49, 52 Coser, Lewis A. 253 Calhoun, Craig 33, 34n, 38, 44n Cotter, Christopher R. 42 Çandar, Tuba 215 Coulanges, Fustel de 48 Candas, Aysen 99 cybernetics of the sacred 21, 24, 26, 232 Caro, Joseph 163 Casanova, Jose 32, 42, 49, 65, 149, 252 Daği, İsan xiii, 124n, 131n, 133, 133n, 134, Castells, Manuel 29, 30 134n, 135, 135n, 136, 136n, 137, Çayir, Kenan 121 141, 143, 143n, 148n, 158n, 172, Çelebi, Nilgun 266 172n, 179n, 189n, 197n, 208, 224, Çelik, Faruk 158 225, 242n, 245n Çelik, Huseyin 155 Dalkiman, Ozlem xiii, 229n, 237n Cemal, Hasan 227n Davatoğlu, Ahmet 155, 242 Cengiz, Orhan K. xiii, 124, 129, 130, 130n, Davie, Grace 33n, 252 131, 131n, 132, 132n, 133, 133n, Davison, Andrew 87, 88, 88n, 89n, 91–94, 137, 143, 155, 155n, 157, 157n, 176, 269, 270–272 159, 159n, 188, 188n, 191, 191n, Day, Abby G. 42 208, 213, 224, 224n, 228n, 240, Deacy, Christopher 66 242, 242n, 243, 243n, 244n, 245n Dedeoğlu, Beril 186 central institutional system 17 deep grammar of society 29–31, 45 central value system 17, 30, 69–70, 78 Demirel, Süleyman 139 centre-periphery model 15, 23–28, 76 democracy 8, 12, 35, 92, 94, 100, 125–126, applied to Ataturk Turkey 103 135–136, 139, 147, 149, 152, 154, combined with sacred/periphery 20–21 160, 179, 183, 189, 191, 196, 224, peripheries’ relations to the central 225, 245 value system 26, 28 dependency theory 15 peripheries’ relations to the central de-secularization 34 value system in Kemalist Turkey Devereux, Robert 269 97–98 Dink, Hrant ix, x, 4, 10, 66, 116, 153n, Shils’ view of the centre 17–18 154, 156, 157, 204, 209, 213–227n, Çetin, Fethiye xiii, 215, 218–221, 260, 263 228, 228n, 229, 229n, 230–240n, charisma 8, 24, 27, 31 241, 242, 242n, 243, 244, 244n, Charles V 210 245, 245n, 247, 256, 260, 276 Index 299
Dink, Rakel xiii, 213, 220 Fraser, Nancy 44 disenchantment 39 Frifrini, Roberto 157n92 Djevdet, Abdullah 266 functional differentiation 49 Dole, Christopher 94, 194 Dora, Veronica Della 65, 214 Gaonkar, Dilip P. 247 Douglas, Mary 16, 60, 62 Giddens, Antony 41, 272 Dreyfus, Alfred 268 Giesen, Bernard 16, 27, 47, 49n, 52, 69, Dumont, Paul 88n, 92n, 94n 76–80, 176 Dündar, Can 177 Gilliat-Ray, Sophie 66 Durkheim, Émile D. 225, 249, 265–269, Gökalp, Ziya 11, 12, 92, 92n, 97, 102, 178, 271–273 265–267, 269–273 Göktürk, Deniz 235 Eemeç, Çetin 220 Göle, Nilüfer xiii, 7, 42–44, 86, 97, 121–123, Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 16, 17, 24, 26, 27, 196, 196n, 199n, 247, 253 36, 38, 41, 43, 93, 99, 100, 249, Görmez, Mehemet 155 254 Gorski, Philip S. 34n Eliaçik, İshan 197, 197n, 198, 198n Gottschalk, Peter 262 Eliade, Mircea 50, 54, 55, 57, 57n, 256 Gramsci, Antonio 98, 120, 120n, 121n Emre,Yunus 145 Greenberg, Gabriel 262 Enver, Pasa 130 Greenfeld, Liah 16, 28 Erbakan, Necmettin 108, 109, 109n, 112, Gregotti, Vittorio 29 172, 180, 202, 206 Greve, Anni 7, 45, 49, 201 Erdoğan, Recep T. 113, 125, 131, 131n, Griffero, Tonino xiv, 54 132n, 139, 140n, 143n, 148–151n, Grigoriadis, Ioannis N. 3, 149 152, 152n, 153–155n, 160, 161, Gül, Abdullah 155, 181, 183, 186–188, 163, 172, 173, 179, 181n, 183, 184, 219, 242, 244, 245 186, 188, 195, 196, 197, 197n, 202, Gülalp, Haldun 109, 149, 151 203, 204n, 205, 207, 242, 261 Gülerce, Hüseyin 182 Ergil, Doğu 4, 168n Günay, Ertuğrul 205 Ergin, Sadullah 242 Güner, Haci M. 203 Erkin, Behic 164, 165 Gür, Asli 114 Eryilmaz, Rüstem 245 Gürbey, Sinem 93, 94 Esayan, Markar 161n, 181n, 186n, 198n, 241n Haardt, Maike de 65 Esposito, John L. 108, 124, 262 Habermas, Jürgen ix, 7, 33, 34n, 35–37n, Estukyan, Patrak xiii, 222 38, 40, 40n, 41, 41n, 43, 44, 122, evil 18 124, 190, 248 sacred evil 19–20 Halbwachs, Maurice 15, 30, 47, 70, 71, 71n–73n, 74, 201, 204, 236, 237 Fabretti, Valeria xiv, 252n Hale, William 149 Fahri, Ziyaeddin 266 Hanafi, Abu 138 Fenster, Tovi 32 Hanim, Latife 180 Ferrara, Alessandro xiii, xiv, 3, 8, 69 Hanioğlu, Şükrü 114, 177–179 Fischer, Yochi xiv, 4 Hannertz, Ulf 15 Fitzgerald, Michael L. 211 Hart, Kimberly 176n force of the example 8, 69 Harvey, David 59 four quadrant model 7, 10, 11, 252 Hawkins, Mike xiv, 272 Frank, Kenneth 87n, 94, 121 hegemony 98, 120–121, 144, 203, 207 300 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Heper, Martin 85, 87n, 88n, 96, 98, 103, Kardas, Saban 108n 108 Katiricoglu, Erol 227n Hertz, Robert 15, 19, 47, 48, 54, 193 Katzenstein, Peter J. 4 Hervieu-Léger, Daniele 201n Kaufman-Osborn, Timoty V. 272 Heschel, Abraham J. 56 Kavacçi, Merve 150 Heyd, Uriel 269, 270, 272 Kemalism 93–94, 95, 102 Hoelzl, Michael 42, 251 Kemalist values 97 Honneth, Axel 16, 44 Kemalist six arrows 96, 99 Houston, Christopher 123n post-Kemalist republic 85, 107–109, Hurd, Elizabeth S. 44 137, 175–179, 189 post-Kemalist rituals 180–189 identity of society 70 Keneş, Bülent 156 of individuals 72 Kent, İsmail N. 164, 186 Turkish identity 93, 125 Keskin, Tugrul 124 İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin 145 Khaldun, Ibn 191 imageability 30–31 Kiliçdaroğlu, Kemal 160, 179n, 187n, 188 immanent frame 34 Kiniklioğlu, Suat 161n, 179n, 183n İnönü, İsmet 160, 165, 193 Knauss, Stefanie 34n Insel, Thomas R. 149 Knott, Kim 35, 41, 51, 201, 225, 233 Ipekçi, Abdi 220 Koçak Cemil 87, 98 Işin, Engin F. 248 Kohen, Moiz 86 Kömeçoglu, Uğur xiii, 122, 122n, 148, Jaisson, Marie 73n, 237 152n, 171 Jakelić, Slavica 42 Kong, Lily 65, 214, 217, 225 Jedan, Christoph 34, 41, 201, 235 Koptaş, Rober xiii, 157, 219, 222n Jenkins, Gareth 175 Kubali, Hüseyin Nail 11, 267 John Paul II 116 Kühnen, Michael 242 Juegensmeyer, Mark 33 Kundera, Milan 130, 213, 230 Jung, Dietrich 108n Kuru, Ahmet T. 96, 247, 285 Jurgens, Klause 179, 180n, 186n Kusher, David 164 Justinian 203 Lagendijk, Joostn 261 Kaftacioglu, Ümit 220 Lapidot-Firilla, Anat 254 Kahanoff, Jaqueline S. 254 Lawrence, Denise 50 Kahveci, Erol 265, 267 Leezenberg, Michiel 37n Kalin, Ibrahim 124n, 125, 125, 126, Lefebvre, Henri 50 126n, 127, 127n, 128, 128n, 129, Leo XIII, 90 129n–131, 137, 148, 148n, 262 Lerner, Daniel 101 Kalyvas, Stathis N. 149 Levy, Isaac 58 Kanbolat, Asan 187n Lewis, Geoffrey L. 87n, 92n, 101 Kandiyoti, Deniz 121 Linenthal, Edward T. 59, 60 Kanli, Yusuf 181n ‘living together differently’ ix, 11, 99, 144, Kaplan, Hilal 138 222, 235, 273 Karabekir, Kazim 139 locative sacred places 54 Karaflogka, Anastasia 66 Locke, John 191 Karal, Enver Z. 88n Lockwood, David 16, 253 Karasipahi, Sena 110 Lorasdagi, Berrin Koyuncu 124 Karaveli, Hali M. 88, 89n, 108n, 146n, 192 Low, Sethna 50 Index 301
Lynch, Gordon 18 modernity 27, 35–38, 40–41, 76, 100 Lynch, Kevin 30, 31 mutual adaptive transformation of modernity and religion 101 MacIntyre, Alasdair 66, 106 vernacularizing modernity 128 Maessen, Enno 160n Molendijk, Arie L. 34n, 41, 201, 235 Magden, Perihan 227 Monterescu, Daniel 254 Mahçupyan, Etyen 146n morphology of society 23, 30, 47 Mak, Geert 1n Morris, Chris 1 mana 8 Motzkin, Gabriel 4 Mango, Andrew 192 Mouradian, Khatching 229, 229n Mansueto, Anthony 120 Muhammad 110 Mardin, Sherif 2, 84, 85, 102–104n, 105, Muller, Mark 98, 149 107, 145, 157n multiculturalism 128–129 Margalit, Avishai 80 multiple modernities 43, 144 Markham, Ian S. 103, 104n, 105, 106 Mumcu, Ugur 220 Mars, Gerald 62 Mussolini, Benito 193 Martin, Bernice 37 Martin, David 34 Nalbantoglu, Gulsum B. 114 Martin, Michel 16, 28, 37 Namer, Gérard 73, 73n Massicard, Elise 98 Navaro-Yashin, Yael 121, 177, 188n Mattalucci-Yilmaz, Claudia 193, 194, 288 negative transcendence 79 Mauss, Marcel 16, 19, 47, 48, 54, 69, 207, neo-Ottoman narrative 125, 127–128, 131, 268 144–145, 148 McKenzie, Roderick D. 17 network society 6, 29–30 McLennan, Gregor 33n, 37n Nisbet, Robert 267, 268 medieval cosmopolitanism 129 Nora, Pierre 64 Meeker, Michael E. 89, 90, 110, 121, 175, Norton, Anne 44, 211n, 262 194 Nursi, Said 103, 104, 104n–107 Mehmet II 163 Meijer, Roel 255 O’Leary, Stephen D. 66 Melson, Robert 272 Ökten, Turkey N. 194 memory 70–71, 73 Ornella, Alexander D. 34 and the individual 72 Otto, Rudolph 50 collective 75 Ottoman coffeehouses 122 social versus collective 73 Ottoman cosmopolitanism 10 Menderes, Andnan 102, 139, 140, 160n Öz, Dogan 220 Mendieta, Eduardo 40n Özal, Turgut 107–109, 115, 138, 139, Menocal, Mario R. 163, 210 259 Merton, Robert K. 84 Özbek, Meral 121 Millas, Herkül 179n Özbudun, Ergun 89, 96 Miller, Willie W. 272 Özdalga, Elisabeth 86, 87 millet system 86, 110, 144–146, 163 Özdemir, Adil 87, 94, 121 Mills, Amy 255, 256 Ozël, Necdet 183 Misztal, Barbara 70, 71 Ozgur, Iren 121 Mitchell, Marion M. 268 Özkirimli, Umut 120 modernities 35, 41, 43–44, 101 Özyürek, Esra 96, 115, 116, 175–177, 188n, 238, 255 302 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Paden, William 57n folk 34 Pamuk, Orhan 1, 108, 109, 146, 227n, 248 invented 34, 66 Panitch, Leo 90 Kemalist consideration of religion 93, Park, Robert 15, 17 101 Parker, Spencer 65 mutual adaptive transformation of Parla Taha 87, 88, 88n, 89n, 91–94, 176, modernity and religion 101 265, 266, 269–272 mutual non-recognition of modernity Parsons, William S. 262 and religion 100 Perri 6 16, 60, 61 politics of religion 157–160 Pezzini, Isabella 66n privatization of 204 Piccoli, Wolfango 108n Protestant understanding of 39 Pickering, William S.F. xiv, 75 relations of modernities to religion Pirim, Suendam B. 103, 104n, 105 249–255 Play, Pierre G.F. Le 266 Rennie, Bryan S. 57n pluralism 18, 42, 73, 106, 111–112, Riesebrodt, Martin 153 125–126, 138, 145, 147, 164, 166, Riley, Alexander T. 19 168, 172, 209, 211, 221, 224, 243, ritual 20–21, 39, 45, 50, 59, 74, 83, 105, 261, 263, 269 214 legal pluralism 4 as the middle ground between the religious pluralism 43, 45, 201, 207, sacred and the profane 20 248, 253 counter-rituals 26 postmetropolis 31–32 ritual of commemorating Hrant Dink postmodern 3, 6, 32, 196, 230 219–232 postsecular cities 31, 49, 64–66, 76 ritual withdrawal 26 postsecular cosmopolitanism 10 Riza, Ahmed 266 postsecular sanctuaries 6–7, 9, 45, 64, 73, Riza, Seyyd 160 76, 201, 203 Robins, Philip 108 postsecular society 3, 4, 6–7, 33–37, Rodrigue, Aron 145 40–43, 100, 105 Rosati, Massimo viii–x, 6, 17, 19, 23, 26, postsecular value system 69 28, 34, 35, 38, 40, 45, 47, 53, 57, postsecular, the 33–34, 37, 45, 83, 101 59, 69, 70, 75, 84, 87, 111, 161, profane 19, 47, 53 175, 190, 221, 226, 230, 247 Roy, Olivier 251 Ranulf, Svend 267, 268 Rūmī, Jalāl al-Dīn 145 Rappaport, Roy 21–24, 26, 97, 190, 206, Rushd, Ibn 210 230, 231 Russo, Maria R. 66n rationalization 39 Redfield, Robert 24 Sabahaddin 266 reflectivity 38, 40 sacred, the 18–19, 47, 49–50, 53 religious reflectivity 41, 43, 45 left sacred 19–20 self-reflectivity 36 negative sacred 18–19 Reisman, Arnold 165 positive sacred 76 religion 34, 109–110, 119, 122, 125, 126, sacred places 52 128, 134, 138, 144–154, 178–179, sacred center becoming impersonal in 197–198, 219, 222, 268–273 contemporary modernity 76 conventional 34 sacred meeting house 52 de-privatization of 42 sacred places having an orienting implicit 34 function 59 Index 303
sacred temple 52 Sönmez, Nihan Ö. 114, 115 Sahin, Haluc 227 Soysal, Levent 235 Sahin, Mustafa G. 108 Sözen, Ahmet 108n Said, Edward 125 Spencer, Herbert 266 Said, Sayh 104, 135 Spirou, Chris 205, 205n Saktanber, Ayse 121 Starr, Deborah A. 254 Samast, Ogün 156, 240 Stepan, Alfred 44n Santoro, Andrea 156, 241 Stoeckl, Kristina xiv, 34n, 84, 247 Sarkozy, Nicolas 5, 205 Strenski, Ivan 11, 38, 265, 267, 271, 272 Sassen, Saskia 29 Stroumsa, Guy G. 48 Schnore, Leo F. 15 Suber, Daniel 49n Schonmann, Noa 108 secondary values 21, 77 Tambar, Kabir 188n secularism 5, 9–10, 37, 86–87, 94, 96, Tapper, Richard 121 101–102, 104, 106, 110, 119–121, Taylor, Charles 34, 43, 129, 252 124, 126, 137, 141–142, 145–151, Tekiner, Aylin 176n 168, 175, 177–178, 180, 187, 192, Tepe, Sultan 86, 101, 112, 114n, 115, 116, 197, 204, 209, 214, 247–248, 253, 149 259 Thiebaut, Carlos 252 AKP Party’s conception of secularism Thomas, Peter D. 120, 124 150 Thompson, John B. 60 Akyol’s view of secularism 140 Tibi, Bassan 149 assertive secularism 96 Tönnies, Ferdinand 267 passive secularism 96 Toprak, Binnaz 110 secularization theory 33 Torpey, John 34n Segal, Robert A. 256 Totten, Samuel 262 Seligman, Adam B. 27, 35, 37, 38, 38n, Tuğal, Cihan Z. 120n, 159 39–41n, 42, 53 Tuncel, Erhan 244 Sennett, Richard 122, 260 Turam, Berna 100, 124n, 177, 261 Sezer, Ahmet N. 186 Türeli, İpek 235 Shafak, Elif 227 Türköne, Mümtazer 183n, 186n, 189n, Shankland, David 98, 112 245n Shaw, Stanford J. 165 Turner, Bryan S. 33, 34, 111 Shils, Edward ix, 6, 15–18, 23, 24, 26–31, Turner, Harold W. 50, 52, 53 45, 84, 97 Turner, Victor 26 Short, John R. 63 Tütengil, Cavit O. 220 Simmel, Georg 253 Simon, Paul 256 Ülkümen, Selahattin 164, 165 Singer, Milton 17 ultimate sacred postulates 21, 24, 26 Smith, David N. 265, 272 in Kemalist Turkey 97 Smith, Jonathan Z. 50, 51, 54–56, 233, 236 in ‘the new Turkey’ 232 Smith, Robertson 18 Ulusoy, Kıvanç 152 social solidarity 23–24, 26, 34, 76, 201, urban sociology 15 268 Uslu, Emre 161n, 173n, 182n Soja, Edward W. 29, 31, 32, 64 utopian sacred places 54 Solgun, Cafer 158 Somekh, Sasson 254 Van der Leeuw, Gerard 50 Somer, Murat 98 VanAntwerpen, Jonathan 33, 34n 304 The Making of a Postsecular Society
Veli, Haci B. 145 Yavuz, Baydar 183n victimhood 76 Yavuz, Devrim 96 Vincett, Giselle 42 Yavuz, Hakan M. 85, 98, 101, 102, 104, 104n, 105, 107, 108, 108n, 112, Wallerstein, Immanuel 15 124, 124n, 149, 156, 247 Walzer, Michael 80 Yildiz, Kerim 98 Ward, Graham 42, 251 Yilmaz, İshan 157n, 161n, 172, 172n, Watts Miller, William 272 196n, 229n Weber, Max 26, 97 Yurdakul, Cevat 220 Weintraub, Jeff 122n White, Jenny B. 96, 116, 138, 156 Zeki, Salih 266 Wilkinson, Ian 79n Zerubavel, Eviatar 70n Wilson, Christopher S. 89 Zibak, Sişli F. 182n, 242n Wirth, Louis 17 Zürcher, Erik J. 86, 96, 101 Wittrock, Björn 36, 43, 248 world-system theory 15