The re-election of Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, yesterday was a defeat for freedom in general and raises ongoing questions about religious freedom in particular in Turkey.
The Republic of Turkey’s unfreedom dates back to its founding in 1923 under Kemal Atatürk, whose authoritarian rule was designed to eliminate Islam’s influence on society and to replace it with a secularism of “laïcité” modeled on the French Revolution. He succeeded only in part. Turkey’s heartland remains religious to this day. The country’s subsequent history has oscillated between democratic openings that have returned Islam-friendly governments to power followed by coups and crackdowns led by the country’s Kemalist military and judiciary.
When Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (whose Turkish initials are AKP) was elected in 2002, many saw in it a hope for an Islamic version of a European Christian Democratic Party that would advance liberal democracy, allow increased religious freedom for Muslims, and maybe, just maybe, allow Turkey to gain entry into the European Union.
This dream is dead. For awhile it looked hopeful – and many in the AKP’s rank and file remain committed to a religion-friendly democracy – but since 2011, Erdoğan has turned into an authoritarian thug. He has cracked down on popular protests, curtailed judicial independence, restricted the press and social media, committed electoral fraud, overseen a rise in corruption, and accrued the power to oust and even imprison legislators. In suppressing a coup attempt in July 2016, Erdoğan arrested one-third of his generals and admirals, detained some 10,000 officers and soldiers, imprisoned about 50,000 people affiliated with the movement of Gülen, his chief rival, and had some 70,000 professionals – professors, journalists, businesspeople – and 150,000 public employees fired or suspended from their jobs. Erdoğan has not resisted the trappings of a sultan, building himself a presidential palace of 1,150 rooms, costing $615 million and built with stone pillars and sheet glass. A referendum last year fortified presidential power, and allowed him a second, and possibly third, term as president, creating the possibility that he will be in power until 2032.
Erdoğan is authoritarian, but is he an Islamist authoritarian? Is he rolling back Kemalist secularism for the first time, turning Turkey into a repressive Islamist state? It is not clear. Some observers believe that he intends a traditional sharia state, others that he is more a thug than a puritan. Since 2011, he has issued calls for Turkish children to become a “pious generation,” vastly increased funding for “Imam Hatip” reliigous schools, introduced Islamist textbooks in these schools, made religious education compulsory in all primary schools (with exceptions only for Christians and Jews), required new schools to include prayer rooms, successively lifted rules banning women from wearing headscarves in state institutions (including schools, universities, the police and the military), sponsored the building of mosques, and cracked down on Alevis.
To be sure, these policies move Turkey in a religious direction but they do not make it Islamist. Funding religious schools is little different from what many western democracies do, and Imam Hatip schools contain only 10% of Turkish students. The lifting of restrictions on headscarves is in fact a liberalizing move. Religious freedom means that women can don a headscarf in Turkey or France and doff one in Iran. Still other measures – like the issuance of religious textbooks – admittedly look more Islamist. All in all, though, Erdoğan is not creating another Iran or Saudi Arabia.
More troubling is the Turkish government’s treatment of religious minorities (meaning both non-Muslims as well as groups like Alevis, which Sunni Muslims consider heretical). These policies have been around since Atatürk and are unlikely to change under Erdoğan. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty defined citizenship according to Islam and gave official recognition to some minorities will denying it to others. In the case of recognized minorities – which today include Armenian Orthodox Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Jews – the state, acting in the spirit of Kemalist religious management, created a General Directorate for Foundations that governs their charitable foundations; regulates their religious practice; has at times expropriated their property and grossly overtaxed them; and has kept the seminary of the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul closed for over four decades now, thus preventing the training of clergy and contributing to the decimation of this community in Turkey. Alevis, a syncretic offshoot of Islam who amount to about 15% of the total population, have suffered sharp restrictions, including obligatory education into Sunni Islam, curtailments on the construction of meeting places, and lack of representation at the state level. Discrimination against them dates back at least to the 16th century Ottoman Empire. Sufis, practitioners of an Islamic mysticism, saw their orders dissolved and their practices banned in 1925 and continue to exist underground. Christians experienced repressive violence continually during the first twelve years of the republic, pograms directed against the Greek Orthodox Church in 1955, incidents of violence in 1963 and 1974, and several assassinations in the past decade-and-a-half. American Protestant pastor Andrew Brunson was imprisoned in the aftermath of Erdoğan’s 2016 coup, is still imprisoned, and faces up to 35 years in prison for the “crime” of being a member of the Gülen opposition “terrorist” movement, charges that outside humanitarian groups widely regard as bogus.
Erdoğan is likely to remain in power for quite some time. May religious freedom and democracy advocates make loud and clear the repression that takes place under his regime for an equally long period of time.
These reflections are drawn from the manuscript of my forthcoming book, Religious Freedom in Islam: The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World Today, due to be published by Oxford University Press this coming February.