Secularism and State Religion in Modern Turkey: Law, Policy-Making and the Diyanet by Emir Kaya (review)

With Secularism and State Religion in Modern Turkey, Kaya makes an important contribution to a growing literature in Turkish studies that questions the usefulness of standard tropes characterizing Turkish politics and society along a secular vs. religious divide. Deploying “descriptive methods of legal pluralist theory,” the book seeks to avoid “the vicious circles of ‘secularism talk’” that have convoluted the study of the relationship between state, religion, and society in Turkey for decades. Kaya deems the theoretical tool of secularism as “too scattered and speculative to be useful” and instead offers a book that he calls “a treatise on secularism—a treatise that treats a particular type and implementation of secularism, though often tacitly, not head-on” (pp. 6–7). The focus for Kaya is on how the coexistence of Islam and Turkey’s particular variety of secularism is actually manifest in the field of law, as well as the institutions and individuals tasked with maintaining a balanced coexistence. As such, the study is rightly structured around an exhaustive examination of Turkey’s Presidency of Religion Affairs (the Diyanet), and how this official body relates to both state and societal elements. Kaya asks: What is it exactly that the Diyanet is doing as an institution and, concomitantly, what is done by means of it?

The book’s central hypothesis about the Diyanet is structured around relative appearances. According to Kaya, the Diyanet appears “deficient” from some vantage points and “fair and fitting” from others, thus eluding decisive answers to the often-asked question “is it any good?” Rather, the institution as depicted through Kaya’s research comes across as a “flawed and indispensable body at the same time” (pp. 3–4), both a product of historical legacies and a pragmatic necessity. My hunch is that future scholarship is likely to debate the book’s self-proclaimed “relativism” with vigor because, at various points in the text, relativism seems to slip towards contradiction. For example, Kaya states that the Diyanet “claims to represent a multitude of voices and perspectives” (p. 75), but a thorough explanation of how exactly the Diyanet supports this claim is lacking. Furthermore, in the conclusion Kaya describes Turkey’s approach to religion as “an open-minded pluralist solution” (p. 182). Such lines of argumentation seem like a bridge too far, especially when one considers that the Diyanet is a tax funded, state institution that does not offer representation or services to Turkey’s non-Muslim and Alevi communities.

To its credit, the book addresses the Diyanet’s relationship with Turkey’s multitude of religious minority groups and other detractors—both pious and non-pious alike—at some length (see below). Thus, I believe that what Kaya may be attempting to argue is that the Diyanet has tried to embrace certain norms that are traditionally associated with secularism and others that are indisputably religious, which is a type of pluralism unto itself. Either that, or that the Diyanet is pluralist in the sense that it strives to maintain an equilibrium between the various sources of law that emanate from the state, from religion, and from society, respectively. Yet even still, legal pluralist theory as a research methodology and pluralism as a description of the religion-state-society arrangement that Turkey has institutionalized do occasionally appear to be conflated in ways that will unnerve critical readers of the book.

Still, Secularism and State Religion in Modern Turkey is a very useful scholarly exercise for three reasons. First, through a multifaceted examination of the legal underpinnings of the Diyanet the book opens a number of new portals for analysis that go beyond the tired and polarizing discussions—the headscarf issue being just one such example—that typically structure academic work religion-state-society relations in Turkey. Indeed, several chapters of the book, especially chapters two and three, are a valuable reference for those seeking to identify the actual nuances...