AN ISLAM COMPATIBLE WITH THE REPUBLIC
Jean-Francois Bayart

Liberation
Nov 13 2009
France

When Nicolas Sarkozy rejects accession for Turkey on the grounds
of Europe’s "natural borders," everybody know that he is speaking
of "cultural borders." And Turkey’s culture is Islam: It would be
incompatible with Europe, and even with the Republic [France].

Yet Turkey has been a republic since 1924. Islam has democratized
in Turkey. It has appropriated the idea of the nation, republican
institutions, the civil code (introduced in 1926 and modelled on
Swiss legislation), the market economy, education, the mass media and
scientific knowledge. It has adopted the political party as method
of political participation and, because it is as theologically and
ideologically varied as in the rest of the Muslim world, it has given
rise to a pluralist education, the one rivaling the other to a greater
or lesser degree. The believers have also themselves divided up their
votes across the political checkerboard, while non-believers have
voted for Muslim parties.

More than that, Islam has made a decisive contribution to the
democratization of the Kemalist republic. By virtue of the
parliamentary system, successive Muslim parties or conservative
parties with a religious sensibility, close to brotherhoods, have
incorporated within the republican institutions the religious masses
that do not identify with the aggressive secularism of Kemalism and
filled the space that could have fallen to the jidahist groups. They
supported the move of the peasant farmers to the cities during the
rural exodus. They lent a voice to those of the Kurds who sought to
express their defiance of a centralizing state but without joining
the armed struggle of the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party]. They
also permitted the rise of the Anatolian elites that the Kemalist
establishment was confining to the periphery.

On the other hand, Kemalist nationalism is less secular than it
claims. It is ethno-confessional, like its counterparts in the Balkans
and Caucasus. In the Kemalist republic nationals of Turkish origin
or Sunnis of the Hanefite rite are implicitly more citizens than the
Kurdish, Alevi, and Christian and Jewish inhabitants. But the origin
of this implicit discrimination does not have much to do with Islam
as a religion. It is political and is part of the unleashing of a
cultural nationalism from the latter half of the 19th century as
well as of the crossed operations of ethnic cleansing that followed,
the genocide of the Armenians being its culmination. The same logic
is found at work for the benefit of Orthodox, Catholics or Jews, or
Shi’is or even Sunnis, depending on the Balkan, Caucasian, or Middle
Eastern country in question. After all, an Arab Israeli is a little
less Israeli than a Jewish Israeli and it is not so long ago that that
religion ceased to be indicated on the identity cards of the Greeks.

The paradox of Turkey is due to the fact that the secular nationalists
are the ones that hold this ethno-confessional conception of
citizenship and the ruling Islamic party, the AKP [Justice and
Development Party], with the support of the conservatives, is
questioning it. Closing the door to Europe on Turkey by claiming it is
a Muslim country is clearly to play the game of this conception. There
is, moreover, a certain coherence in hearing Nicolas Sarkozy, a man
so concerned about "national identity," inadvertently assume the
slogan of the Turkish far right: "France, you must like it or leave
it!" On the other hand, many Turks who are not necessarily believers
but who vote for the AKP to oppose nationalist authoritarianism,
say to Europe, along with the left-wing intellectual Murat Belge:
"Do not allow us to become fascist!"

The Europeans have two reasons to be concerned about the future
of Turkish democracy. It is not in their interest to see the
development of an ultranationalist Moscow-Ankara axis. And they
bear a direct historical responsibility for the development of these
ethno-confessional nationalisms in the Eastern Mediterranean, which
they fuelled ideologically and supported politically, even militarily,
under cover of "protection" – a self-interested one – of Christian
minorities. We are still paying the price in Lebanon, in Palestine,
in Iraq, in the Balkans, of the disastrous way the "Orient question"
was handled.

The failure of negotiations between Turkey and the European Union
would be a continuation of this disaster.
From: Baghdasarian