Following a critical analysis of different theoretical approaches to the question of secularism in current scholarship, and a critique of the underlying concepts of religion and the secular and the way they are interrelated, we argue for what we call a post-religio-secular perspective. This notion aims at an understanding that conceives of the public roles of religion not as explainable, and preliminary, phenomena (as the evolutionist paradigm of modernism would hold) or as regrettable aberrations that ought to be fought (as the liberal bias dictates). Rather, the post-secular-religious turn in the study of religion can be described as a scholarly attitude that not only is critically engaged with the assumptions and politics of the religio-secularist paradigm but seeks to open up new spaces for the study of religion by self-consciously taking into account the historicity and thus perspectivity that such study necessarily entails. The post-secular-religious stance opens perspectives that allow for new epistemologies and methodologies with regard to the religious and the secular—freed from the monofocal, evolutionist, and Eurocentric assumptions of the modernist framework that links religion and politics as a binary pair and to that extent remains attached to organicist perceptions of division (between the religious and the secular/politics) or integrality (as evidenced in the discourse of the theologico-political).

Politics of Religion-Making

The realities of global and local early-twenty-first-century politics put scholars critical of the religio-secular paradigm in a challenging position. While most of us engage in theoretical projects that take for granted the failure of secularism—indeed, many of us would question or reject most if not all of the premises of secularization theory—it has to be acknowledged that on the level of politics the religio-secular discourse has, especially in times of a perceived “return of religion,” not lost its pervasiveness (as, for example, Charles Taylor’s designation for our “secular age” [secularity 3] indicates). To the contrary, this “return” has reinvigorated secularist forces, which often respond with interpretations of the role of religion in political conflicts invoking pictures of a cultural if not civilizational clash. The political reality forces us, paraphrasing Talal Asad, to think about the conditions in which the dichotomies between “the religious” and “the secular” do (still) seem to make sense in so many public discourses. Such inquiry needs to ask questions about political and epistemological hegemony: “How, when, and by whom are the categories of religion and the secular defined? What assumptions are presupposed in the acts that define them?” In different ways, the chapters constituting this volumecontributors to Secularism and Religion-Making tackle these programmatic questions. They analyze cases where religion does seem to make sense and investigate how notions of religion and the secular are reified within specific, local and transnational, competitions for intellectual, material, and political resources.

The key concept or “critical term” that has guided the work of the contributors to the volume is religion-making. Broadly conceived the term religion-making refers to the ways in which religion(s) is conceptualized and institutionalized within the matrix of a globalized world-religions discourse in which ideas, social formations, and social/cultural practices are discursively reified as “religious” ones. Religion-making works, sometimes more and sometimes less explicitly, by means of normalizing and often functionalist discourses centered around certain taken-for-granted notions, such as the religion/secular binary, as well as binaries subordinated to it (such as sacred/profane, this-worldly/otherworldly, etc.). We see the notion of religion-making not as a homogeneous analytical concept, but, rather, we see it as a heuristic device that allows us to bring into conversation a wide range of perspectives on practices and discourses that reify religion (as well as its various subcategories and associated others, such as, most prominently, the secular). Religion-making is thus a heuristic tool for analysis and deconstruction, and does not have any aspirations of reinstating notions of authenticity and essence through the backdoor by comparing different religion-making projects. The critical work done by the term religion-making is not concerned with the evaluation of authorizing and legitimating claims of any particular religion-making politics in a normative or normalizing sense. Far from aiming to endorse any particular religion-making processes, we rather want to foster perspectives through which these processes are contextualized and historicized within the frameworks of particular epistemes of religion and the secular, respectively.

The chapters of this volume incorporate and combine theoretical (philosophical/theologico-political) with descriptive-analytical (historical/sociological/anthropological) modes of critique. In this way the volume seeks to avoid the impasse between theory and empiricism that continues to be a hallmark of many books with a focus on the politics of religion and secularism. Without losing sight of the theoretical issues that are constitutive of this volume, in regard to the politics that we put under the critical lens, it is useful to distinguish the ideal-typically among three different levels and discourses of religion-making, as well as the linkages between them: (1) religion-making from above, that is, as a strategy from a position of power, where religion becomes an instrument of governmentality, a means to legitimize certain politics and positions of power; (2) religion-making from below, that is, as a politics where particular social groups in a subordinate position draw on a religionist discourse to reestablish their identities as legitimate social formations distinguishable from other social formations through tropes of religious difference and/or claims for certain rights; and (3) religion-making from (a pretended) outside, that is, scholarly discourses on religion that provide legitimacy to the first two processes of religion-making by systematizing and thus normalizing the religious/secular binary and its derivates.

What we term religion-making from above refers to authoritative discourses and practices that define and confine things (symbols, languages, practices) as “religious” and “secular” through the disciplining means of the modern state and its institutions (such as lawmaking, the judiciary, state bureaucracies, state media, and the public education system). While state institutions represent dominant positions of power within public discourse, other non-state actors in the public sphere might also sometimes assume positions of normative efficacy, be it certain media (mainly print and television, possibly also the Internet), influential public personalities (opposition politicians, public intellectuals, showbiz and media stars), or corporate enterprises. The example of neoliberal U.S. pundits arguing for a remaking of Islam may serve as an example to illustrate the often unabashedly political nature of such religion-making, revealing itself in very Foucauldian ways as an act of governmentality aimed at creating liberal-secular subjects. In a 2003 report published by the RAND Corporation, a conservative U.S. think tank, the “Islamic world” is depicted as in a severe crisis of identity posing a major threat to the “rest of the World.” Islam needed to be brought in line with Western/American interests. It is a difficult operation, as is frankly admitted: “It is no easy matter to transform a major world religion. If ‘nation-building’ is a daunting task, ‘religion-building’ is immeasurably more perilous and complex.” One of the heralds of neocon U.S. American dreams of civilizing Islam, Daniel Pipes, drove this language one step further. In 2004 he remarked that the “ultimate goal” of the “war on terrorism” was “religion-building” in the sense of a modernization of Islam. In his view, “only when Muslims turn to secularism will this terrible era of their history come to an end.” The imperialist tone of such statements is part of the rhetoric of the “new world order” and the “Middle East Project” envisioned by the conservative U.S. political circles that had been related closely to the Bush administration. To sum up the hardly concealed concern behind the arguments of the cited U.S. neocon pundits, the West/United States has to engage in a remaking of Islam, analogous to nation-building referred to as religion-building, with the goal to create a modern, that is, secular, Islam in line with American interests and a neoliberal, modernist frame for religion as secured by the doctrine of secularism (see Saba Mahmood’s sharp criticism of the liberal biases underlying secularist rhetoric and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s critique of the recent Chicago Council report on religious freedom). The examples point not only to imperialist ambitions within U.S. politics, but more broadly exemplify drastically how political religion-making discourses can be. In line with the U.S. American tradition of liberal secularism, U.S. religion-builders are less concerned with keeping religion out of politics than with regulating its political manifestations (such reformist politics directed toward Islam are also present in Europe).

While scholars of postcolonial studies have discussed the role of religious and secular discourses in the legitimation and administration of the nation-state, less attention has been directed to cases in which marginalized sociocultural communities have adopted the language of religion as a means of empowerment vis-à-vis assimilationist politics directed against them. Such religion-making from below forms a dialectical relationship with religion-making from above, implicitly accepting the latter’s hegemony, to the language and semantics of which it responds. Whether perceived as acts of emancipation, appropriation, or subversion against hegemonic religious and secular knowledge regimes, religion-making from below has played important roles in local discourses of religion and secularism.

Religion-making from below operates via processes of cultural translation. Translation here needs to be understood as a two-way relationship. Translation of the language of the religio-secular construct into new territories can be forceful and violent, as evidenced amply in postcolonial studies. But one should not understand the appropriation of religio-secularist discourses as necessarily resulting from coercion. Credit needs to be given to the more complex dynamics of agency in the adaptation of these discourses in non-Western vernacular languages. Charles Hallisey has discussed this dynamic as “intercultural mimesis—a phrase denoting the cultural interchange that occurs between the native and the Orientalist in the construction of Western knowledge about ‘the Orient.’” In other words, while it is indisputable that the politics of translation of the concept of religion beyond the Christian West were molded by the power imbalance that is characteristic of Orientalist scholarship and its objects of study, analysis of this translation process has to provide sufficient space for the agency of local appropriations of elements of this discourse. We need to think the appropriation of the Western discourses of religion and the secular in a manner that does not reduce local actors to the role of passive objects but instead focuses on “local productions of meaning,” that is, the agency of locals in the encounter with Orientalist knowledge.

Triggered by the emerging field of postcolonial studies following Edward Said’s Orientalism, awareness of academia’s complicity in the essentialization of particular others has increased considerably. The work of Said and those who followed in his footsteps has forced self-proclaimed or thusly institutionalized “Orientalists” to reflect on the history of Orientalist disciplines and their role within imperialist projects. The multifold implications of scholars in imperialist projects unmasks pretensions of objectivity and reveals that religion-making from the pretended outside is often closely linked with more politically motivated religion-making from above. The academic study of religion in particular has been implicated in imperialist projects and Eurocentric discourses more generally, and it still plays, especially in the United States, where its institutional position is much stronger than in Western Europe and despite an admitted increase in self-critical reflection to this extent, an important role in the objectification of religion(s). Unraveling such entanglements, as an inquiry into the politics of religion-making brings along, is therefore a challenging project particularly for the discipline of religious studies, since it entails the theoretical and methodological deconstruction of the very concept (“religion”) through which this discipline is legitimated. World-religion courses are flourishing, and classes of this or similar kind belong to the bread-and-butter courses of many religious studies departments. It will be interesting to see in which ways the academic discipline of religious studies can respond to the challenges that it will have to face once it recognizes and positions itself more deliberately toward the historical biases that contributed to its creation, as well as the religion politics in which it is still involved. The problem of course is not new, and many readers will be familiar with J. Z. Smith’s controversial dictum “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study.” Tomoko Masuzawa’s recent work on the Invention of World Religions has further increased awareness of the urgency to raise critical self-reflection on the involvement of the academic study of religion in the making and re-making of the concept of religion. Beyond the very existential problem that this constitutes for institutions organized around religious studies as an academic discipline, the relationship between this discipline and the genealogy of the religion and world-religion concepts is itself an interesting and most important field of inquiry. In this context Peterson and Walhof have rightly asked about “what is the proper agenda for religious studies in a context in which the object of study, religion, has been invented or worked over by powerful economic, social, and political forces.”  Such questions need to be addressed in order to understand better the role of both academic and political elites and institutions in the making and remaking of “religion” and the “secular”.

The soon to follow written explanation can be expected to be in line with the two perceptions that dominate the general view of current political developments in Turkey: first, that Turkish society is split between secularists/Kemalists on the one side, and Islamists/traditionalist Muslims on the other; secondly, that it was the AKP’s anti-laicist politics—most emblematically its take on the headscarf—that constituted the major reason for its political predicament. I believe that these two perceptions hide the much more complex economic and political transformations and realities of Turkish society, and would like to challenge the first and complicate the second.

Focusing on the religious/secularist divide—and thus assuming ideology is the major problem—serves to cover up material conflicts of interest. These conflicts result partially from structural changes in Turkish society (as a consequence of immense demographic transformations); partially from the emergence of a new Islamic middle class; and partially (as a consequence of the earlier two developments) from the increased self-confidence of more traditionalist parts of Turkish society, who wish to claim their share of political power. In light of these material and political conflicts, the question of Turkish laicism should be recast: who has an interest in securing the prominence of religious/laicist contestation in Turkish politics, despite the fact that one could very easily claim that other issues ought to be much more pressing? Why would observers elevate this ideological divide above, for example, the widely felt economic instability of the country, huge geographic imbalances of development, and the socio-political fault lines that have emerged as a result of the rapid social changes of the last decades?

It is undeniable that there is a close connection between the AKP’s affirmative position on the headscarf—emblematic of the question of laicism—and the current political crisis. But mainstream public debates on this crisis, as launched both by Kemalist and secular-right Turkish media outlets and echoed by the international media, often reduce the conflict to one between Islamists and secularists, a conflict over cultural heritages and civilizational missions as old as the Turkish Republic. True, in the fashioning of the republican public the female body became the surface on which this conflict was inscribed by a male public gaze. And opposing sides have continued to argue about where and how this body should be (un-)dressed. Yet the battlefield should not be mistaken for the source of the conflict. I would argue that too much focus on the headscarf, and by implication too much focus on laicism, does more to obscure the current political situation than to explain it.

I do not claim that the current crisis in Turkish politics has nothing to do with different conceptions of secularism. Certainly, what is at stake in the public debates about the Islamic headscarf is the power to define the language and the rules of conduct in the Turkish public sphere, particularly when it comes to the legitimate place of religion. To use a term coined by José Casanova, the conflict is about the “knowledge regime of secularism.” The current debates reflect the trembling of this knowledge regime, and in this sense the anti-Islamist rhetoric that is found not only among staunch laicist Kemalists, but also among many traditionalist—and laicist—Muslims, is proof of the success of this regime, as it has, for roughly 80 years now, been propagated by the institutions of the state, and dominated public discourse. More recently, with the opening of the public sphere to previously marginalized segments of society, the knowledge regime of Turkish laicism has come under question, and the meanings of laicism are now debated as openly and controversially as never before: should Turkey stick to its top-down, state-centered definition and organization of religion, or might it be beneficial for the public good if the state were to soften its grip on religion? How should the realms of the private and public be defined, and how much room should there be for religious symbols and speech in the latter? Finally, what are legitimate communal and individual religious rights, and how should one weigh them if they appear to be in conflict? The origins of this debate can be traced back to the beginnings of the Republic, when discussions about the headscarf, the female body and laicism operated as a proxy for the larger debate on the modes and direction of Turkish modernization, and its civilizational commitment.

A critical analysis of the history and politics of Turkish secularism certainly has to be part of any attempt to grasp the current crisis, and the semantics of Turkish politics more generally. The analysis should not end here, however, but should also consider broader political and material interests, beyond the realm of ideological contestation. In other words, one should not forget to ask who benefits from the maintenance of the current knowledge regime of Turkish laicism. What are the stakes for those who seem never to tire of casting the debate in religionist-laicist terms? As a matter of fact, one could easily argue that for many major recent developments, the laicism/religion focus bears very little explanatory potential. It is, for example, not for religious reasons that the Turkish economy (and not only those parts of it with roots in traditional Islamic culture) has been supportive of the AKP, and neither is it for religious reasons that the AKP has proved to be the political party invested the most strongly in advancing Turkish prospects to enter the EU. It is also hardly for religious reasons that there occurred in the Kurdish dominated southeastern provinces of the country in the last elections a remarkable transfer of votes from Kurdish nationalist candidates and parties to the AKP. These developments—and more examples could be given—have more to do with economic interests and political reasoning than with civilizational or religious commitments.

The simplistic perception of Turkish society as divided into two camps, one laicist and the other Islamist, is but a caricature; the large majority of the population does not easily fit into this scheme. A Turkish citizen who is undecided about whether to cast her vote for the AKP or for the Kemalist CHP is therefore not schizophrenic. The considerations that influence her decision are not ideological, but rather pragmatic and everyday: economic concerns, both personal and general; concerns over affordable housing and retirement; and concerns about public services such as health care and education (to name the most pressing issues in the minds of many). One can hardly deny the existence of identifiable groups of Kemalist hardliners—as well as staunch Islamists—whose respective lifestyles and worldviews can be fitted in the dichotomist laicist/religionist perception. And it is also true that people can get temporarily polarized around extremely controversial issues. But the political, ethnic, cultural, religious, and class divisions of Turkey are multiple, and to divide Turkish society categorically along laicist/Islamist lines is not more meaningful than dividing it according to ethnic (Turkish/Kurdish), religious (Sunni/Alevi), cultural (Istanbulites/Anatolians), class specific (bourgeois/proletarian) or other binary categories.

All of this said, the questions that remain to be answered are: why has the secularist/Islamist binary acquired as much political leverage as it has, and why does this divide appear to so many observers as such an obvious starting point for an analysis of the current political crisis? Beyond the obvious success of the knowledge regime of Kemalist laicism, and the pressures resulting from this laicism’s institutionalization in state institutions and civil minds, let me suggest some aspects that should additionally be considered in attempts to develop an answer.

(1) The fast speed of the urbanization of Turkish society since the 1950s, and the cultural and economic changes that the subsequent migration into the urban centers have meant for huge parts of the population are important factors that have to be considered. The headscarf student and the Islamist party are urban phenomena that reflect the search for new models of development/modernization in line with traditional values. They demand a voice in the public sphere and proportional access to political institutions and state services. This emergence of new types of actors in the public sphere naturally means shifts in the distribution of access to political and cultural resources, and is bound to provoke resistance by those who resent such redistribution.

(2) A new Islamic bourgeoisie with roots in Anatolian culture (the “Anatolian Tigers”) has become economically very influential, and claims its share in the distribution of social and political capital. It has found a political ally in the AKP and it is clear that this symbiosis is seen by the Kemalist establishment as threatening its privileged position. The “Kemalist establishment” in this case includes those segments of society that hold positions of power in the state institutions (such as the educational system, the judiciary, and the army) as well as those who have, due to their economic position, been able to lead comfortable secular lives and see their secular lifestyles under threat by growing conservative segments of society.

(3) Since the 1980s, Turkey has rapidly transformed into a society strongly influenced by consumer capitalism. Those who benefitted from the economic liberalization and have material stakes in the well-being of corporate capitalism will naturally not like language which frames societal conflicts in terms of class and access to particular consumerist lifestyles. It can be assumed that debates on laicism/religion are much less upsetting to the capitalist sector than debates that focus on the material fault lines that divide Turkish society and problematize the increasing cleavages between socio-economic classes. Attempts to seriously question the neo-liberal politics that took hold of Turkish society after the coup of 1980 have been launched both by the Kemalist left and other leftist critics, but they never were able to set the tone of public debate, and were—especially within the Kemalist camps—sidelined by ideological debates like those on laicism. In this context, it is important to know that the mainstream Turkish media is to an enormous extent monopolized in the hand of a small number of media holdings.

(4) The Turkish military justifies its place above politics with its role as guardian of national unity and the laicist order. If Turkish laicism were to be redefined in a more liberal direction, then the military would be deprived of a major argument to legitimate its supra-democratic status. Therefore, one should assume that the military has an existential interest in safeguarding the current knowledge regime of Turkish laicism. And in fact, the military plays a leading role in public campaigns against enemies of laicism, namely political Islam as the recent political crisis has drastically shown.

The concept of religion dominant in the Turkish public sphere is utterly modernist. It is based on mono-linear readings of history dominated by the Kemalist master narrative, and conceives of the religious and the secular as opposite poles in a two-dimensional plane. This dichotomist view renders the articulation of alternative perspectives on modernity, history, religion, and politics, as well as alternative visions concerning the rules of the public sphere, extremely difficult. This is particularly true since emerging alternative readings of these concepts are not only perceived as an ideological challenge, but also impact the distribution of socio-political power and material privileges. From this perspective, I would argue that the investigation of the knowledge regime of Turkish laicism, which cultivates a perception of the world in line with the religionist/secularist binary, has to be supplemented with a close look into demographic transformations, political privileges, and economic interests. It appears to me that those who feel politically and economically threatened by a new class of political actors, the emergence of a new religiously conservative middle class, as well as the capitalist sector in general, have very manifest interests in the maintenance of the current knowledge regime of Turkish laicism. Any comprehensive analysis of Turkish laicism will have to take these factors into account if it does not want to limit itself to mono-causal models of explanation, which are themselves stuck within the mono-dimensional semantics of the secular-religionist paradigm.

Closing political parties that are accused of threatening the laicist order and/or the national unity of the country is a pretty common occurrence in Turkey, and has been a popular political practice ever since the earliest years of the Republic. What is different this time around is that the AKP has an impressive political mandate, having secured a record high 47% of the vote at the last elections in the fall of 2007. When it took over government following a surprise victory in 2002 as reincarnation of the moderate wing of the just banned Virtue Party, it certainly benefited from the electorate’s dissatisfaction with the previous political establishment, which had been widely entrapped in corruption affairs. In its first five years in government, the AKP focused less on Islamic identity politics, and more on a pragmatic politics of services and economic stability, and in this way was successful in earning the trust of people far beyond its traditional electorate. This enabled it to broaden its electorate beyond religious and cultural lines and even increase its vote in 2007. And it should have increased its political leverage, enabling it to move ahead on the path of economic and political reforms in line with the recommendations made by the EU, with which the party had itself closely aligned, hoping to further advance the EU-membership negotiations it had been able to secure in what was its most outstanding political achievement. At first, it indeed looked as if the AKP government was determined and capable to continue its reform politics. However, the party became entrapped in a series of highly sensitive political debates that basically bound all its political energies. Gradually, the government lost political momentum, and found itself in an ever more defensive position.

The current political crisis, and in a sense the fall of the AKP—never mind the outcome of the closure case—started with the struggle over the Turkish presidency in early 2007. Despite its historical position of strength within the Parliament, it proved very difficult for the AKP to move its own candidate into this highest political office. And the political costs of this victory were enormous. The contestation over the presidency mobilized Kemalist Turkey and united it to an extent that the headscarf debate would never have been able to on its own. Laicists perceived an Islamist president as just the next step in the gradual Islamization of the state. In the spring of 2007, encouraged by belligerent political statements from the military, and supported by most of the mainstream media, Kemalists organized mass demonstrations in the name of laicism. Already ruled by a supposedly Islamist government, the fear of a president with roots in the Islamist movement motivated hundreds of thousands of people with apparently very diverse political motives to participate in huge rallies—a truly remarkable event since the Republic had never before seen people from all walks of life taking to the streets in defense of laicism. This successful mass mobilization certainly encouraged anti-AKP forces to continue their attacks. From this point on—only briefly interrupted by the impressive (and for the Kemalist elite, increasingly alarming) electoral victory of the AKP in the fall of 2007—the guardians of Kemalism (i.e., the military, and more recently also the judiciary) increased their pressure on the government.

The final showdown began in February of 2008, when President Gül approved an amendment to the constitution that was meant to allow female students to enter universities with the headscarf. It did not take long for the Republican People’s Party—founded by Kemal Atatürk and convinced that it represents his single legitimate political heir; also currently the AKP’s main opposition in Parliament—to bring the amendment in front of the Constitutional Court. On June 5, the court declared the amendment void and its application illegal.

It was no accident that on the same day, the chief of the Turkish military staff, General Yaşar Büyükanıt, delivered a public speech in which he made clear that neither the Turkish judicial system nor the army would allow modifications of the laicist system. Indeed, when it comes to the protection of laicism, the judiciary and the military tend to walk closely together, and this cooperation appears to be rather concrete, as a scandalous document written from within circles of the General Staff and published by the newspaper Taraf on June 20 revealed. This document, crafted prior to the election of 2007, detailed an action plan—according to official statements, never signed and enacted—for creating a public climate hostile towards the government. The same newspaper has made public secret meetings between high-ranking generals and members of the Constitutional Court in the course of the last year.

Similar procession in tandem can be expected in the last act of the current crisis. The constitutional court commenced its negotiation on the AKP closure yesterday, and can be expected to receive the backing of the army, the highest generals of which will convene for the Military High Council on August 1. Ironically, this council is headed by the Prime Minister, who by the time of its meeting might already have received his (second) five-year ban from politics.