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  • Flawed Secularism

    FLAWED SECULARISM
    Alfred Stepan

    Times of India
    April 2 2008
    India

    NEW YORK: The chief prosecutor of Turkey's high court of appeals
    recently recommended to the country's constitutional court that the
    ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) be permanently banned. Now
    the supreme court has decided to hear the case. Only last July, the
    AKP was overwhelmingly re-elected in free and fair elections to lead
    the government. The chief prose-cutor also formally recommended that
    Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, President Abdullah Gul, and 69 other
    leading politicians be banned from politics for five years.

    Clearly, banning the AKP would trigger a political crisis that would
    end Turkey's efforts to join the European Union in the foreseeable
    future and threaten its recent strong economic growth. So the chief
    prosecutor's call should not be taken lightly - all the more so
    given that the constitutional court has banned 18 political parties
    (including the AKP's predecessor party) since the current constitution
    was introduced in 1982. Indeed, the recent call to ban the AKP is
    directly related to its efforts to change Turkey's constitution.

    The underlying charge in the chief prosecutor's indictment is that
    the AKP has been eroding secularism. But the origins of the current
    constitution, and its definition of secularism, are highly suspect.

    Turkey's existing constitution was adopted in 1982 as a direct product
    of the Turkish military coup in 1980. The five senior generals who
    led the coup appointed, directly or indirectly, all 160 members of
    the consultative assembly that drafted the new constitution, and they
    retained a veto over the final document. In the national ratification
    referendum that followed, citizens were allowed to vote against the
    military-sponsored draft, but not to argue against it publicly.

    As a result, the 1982 Turkish constitution has weaker democratic
    origins than any in the EU. Its democratic content was also much
    weaker, assigning, for example, enormous power - and a military
    majority - to the National Security Council. While the AKP has
    moderated this authoritarian feature, it is difficult to democratise
    such a constitution fully, and official EU reports on Turkey's
    prospects for accession repeatedly call for a new constitution,
    not merely an amended one.

    With public opinion polls indicating that the AKP's draft constitution,
    prepared by an academic committee, would be accepted through normal
    democratic procedures, the chief prosecutor acted to uphold the type of
    secularism enshrined in the 1982 constitution, which many commentators
    liken to French secularism. Yet the comparison with what the French
    call laicite is misleading.

    Certainly, both French laicite and Turkish secularism - established
    by modern Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk - began with a similar
    hostility towards religion. But now they are quite different. In
    Turkey, the only religious education that is tolerated is under the
    strict control of the state, whereas in France a wide variety of
    privately supported religious education is allowed, and since 1959
    the state has paid for much of the Catholic Church's primary school
    costs. In Turkey, Friday prayers are written by civil servants in
    the 70,000-member State Directorate of Religious Affairs, and all
    Turkish imams also must be civil servants. No similar controls exist
    in France. Similarly, until the AKP came to power and began to loosen
    restrictions, it was virtually impossible in Turkey to create a new
    church or synagogue, or to create a Jewish or Christian foundation.

    This may be why the Armenian patriarch urged ethnic Armenians in
    Turkey to vote for the AKP in last July's elections. Here, too,
    no such restrictions exist in France.

    The differences between French and Turkish secularism can be put in
    even sharper compa-rative perspective. In the widely cited "Fox"
    index measuring state control of majority and minority religions,
    in which zero represents the least state control, and figures in the
    30s represent the greatest degree of control, all but two current EU
    member states get scores that are in the zero to six range. France is
    at the high end of the EU norm, with a score of six. Turkey, however,
    scores 24, worse even than Tunisia's authoritarian secular regime.

    Is this the type of secularism that needs to be perpetuated by the
    chief prosecutor's not-so-soft constitutional coup? What really worries
    some democratic secularists in Turkey and elsewhere is that the AKP's
    efforts at constitutional reform might be simply a first step towards
    introducing sharia law. If the constitutional court will not stop a
    potential AKP-led imposition of sharia, who will?

    There are two responses to this question. First, the AKP insists that
    it opposes creating a sharia state, and experts say that there is no
    "smoking gun" in the chief prosecutor's indictment showing that the
    AKP has moved towards such a goal. Second, support for sharia, never
    high in Turkey, has actually declined since the AKP came to power,
    from 19 per cent in 1996 to 8 per cent in 2007.

    Given that the AKP's true power base is the support it got in
    democratic elections, any attempt to impose sharia would involve
    the risk of alienating many of its voters. Given this constraint,
    there is no reason for anyone, except for "secular fundamentalists",
    to support banning the AKP, Erdogan, or Gul, and every reason for
    Turkey to continue on its democratic path. Only that course will
    enable Turkey to give itself a better constitution than it has now.

    The writer is director of the Centre for Democracy, Toleration and
    Religion at Columbia University.
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