Secular but sacred: Turkish people’s experience of secularism along with Islam

Turkey has long been a country which exercises secular state system. Its constitution identifies the country as a secular one, and state institutions are no doubt secular. It has been the state’s policy to exercise laicism on every level from education to legal system since the establishment of the Republic in 1923. Yet, this policy did not end up with Turkish people turning away from religion. A very recent research of 2006 revealed that 46 percent of people regard themselves religious. This finding goes well with the new paradigm which stands against the secularization thesis that individual consciousness still remains religious, and that secular or modern way of life is not to make God dead. The same research also revealed that Turkish people do not want a state regime inspired by religion. An overwhelming majority are against theocracy. What is visible from the experience of Turkish people is that even the most conservative and religious segments of Turkish society feel that they are both modern and religious. This feeling began to emerge in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Since then even the conservative and religious segments came to realize that they could adapt to modern way of life or develop their own way of modernity which is, they felt, reconcilable to religion. The President of Religious Affairs, for example, can now make a statement, with almost no objection from religious circles, that the two, religion and modernity, are reconcilable; the office of Grand Mufti of Istanbul organizes football tournaments among Imams for the festivities to celebrate the birthday of Prophet Muhammad, which is an initiative that no one would dare to imagine two decades ago; and some female students of Imam-Hatip schools (secondary school which has a religious syllabus along with standard syllabus) attend the concerts of Turkish rock music stars. This paper, as it is clear from the above examples, is an attempt to identify the case of Islam in Turkey in terms of religion and secularism by displaying some vivid and recent examples from mainly religious and conservative circles of society whose experience can be called “secular, but sacred”. The paper concludes that the definition of “secular steeples” to identify the interaction between religion and secularity in modern world is the case for contemporary Turkish Muslims. Existing thesis on modernity, secularity, and religion One finds three categories of thesis in western oriented sociology on the interaction of modernity, secularity and religion. The first, being called the secularization thesis, purports that modernity leads to complete secularization and gives way the demise of religion in the end. The second claims that time has come to abrogate the secularization thesis because it is already clear that modernity, which had been said to dissolve religion, did not lead religion to diminish. Some even goes further to say that religion today, at a time when modernity is at its zenith, is as stronger as it has ever been. The third, finds a balanced way between the former thesis contending that modernity or secularity is in interaction with religion. It argues that religion perhaps lost its higher position and larger authority in society but is still functional in culture. Let us have a look at these three thesis in detail.