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.