Ahmet T. Kuru, Yoshie quoted: > the JDP [the Justice and Development Party, the AKP] is > not anti-secular; rather, it defends a distinct > interpretation of secularism that differs from that of the > Kemalist establishment. The debate between the > establishment and the JDP is not simply a conflict between > secularism and Islamism, but rather a discussion about > the true meaning and practice of secularism itself.
This is important. Let me put it this way: If secularism is about the separation of the religion and state, then the Republic of Turkey has never been a secular state. As was also mentioned in an article by the Iranian-born neo-conservative Amir Tahiri, posted to the A-List, unlike in Iran where the religion controls the state, in Turkey the state controls the religion, as I will describe later. Consequently, neither Iran nor Turkey are secular states because in both of these countries the state and religion are not separated but intertwined. In a sense, Iran is the mirror image of Turkey and vice versa since the role played by the religion in one is replaced with the role played by the state in the other. As I mentioned before here and elsewhere many times, the Kemalist project was about establishing a capitalist nation state and a western nation for that state out of the remaining muslim subjects of the Ottoman empire. When the Kemalist project started, the Kemalists had no intention to replace the Ottoman Empire with a republic along the above lines. Their intention was to save the empire and modernize it but overtime they ended up doing the above. Their greatest mistake in my view was that they confused modernization with westernization. But they were not the only ones: Russians did the same, Greeks did the same, what have you and for understandable reasons. The unique difficulty the Kemalists encountered, which their other westernizing contemporaries did not, was the religion: the religion of the West was Christianity, not Islam. Yet the Kemalists had to create their western nation, that is, the Turkish nation as we know it now, out of a muslim population for reasons I will talk about later. To be continued. Sabri ____________________________________________________________________________________ The fish are biting. Get more visitors on your site using Yahoo! Search Marketing. http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/sponsoredsearch_v2.php
