OP-ED: Secular tension in Turkey

In the last couple of weeks, Turkey’s agenda has shifted from Cyprus to domestic politics. And to its dismay, the controversy over ‘secularism’ has come to the fore yet again.

It did not have to be like this. Everything was going so well for the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi — Justice and Development Party) government. On the foreign policy front, Turkish Cypriots had overwhelmingly voted in favour of a United Nations re-unification plan. This enhanced Ankara’s image in the European Union. With the Greek Cypriots’ resounding ‘no’, the Cyprus referendum showed to the international community that Turks are willing to compromise.

Things were also going well at home for the AKP. The economy was doing well and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party easily won the local elections. These elections made perfectly clear that the AKP faced no serious political competition. The party won almost 45 percent of the votes while the main opposition failed to gather half as many and stayed at 18 percent.

Under these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that success seems to have gone to the AKP’s head. Today, the media and mainstream political analysts are lambasting the government for what they see as the implementation of a hidden Islamic agenda. At the heart of the problem lies the Higher Education Board (YOK) reform bill. Ironically, the bill does little to reform higher education. Instead, the controversy revolves around the question of whether students graduating from religious high schools (Imam-Hatip schools, as they are known in Turkish) will have the right to continue their higher education in secular university programmes.

This may appear to the West as a mere technicality, but in Turkey it goes to the heart of power politics and the secular future of the country. The polarisation over the matter has been so remarkable that the stock exchange has plunged, interest rates are up, and people have started buying foreign currencies in anticipation of more trouble.

So what is the big deal about this bill? Why religious education, and whether graduates of Imam-Hatip schools can go to a university, is such a thorny issue? The long answer has to do with Turkey’s peculiar and problematic understanding of secularism. But the short answer is about the political mood and intentions of the AKP.

Let’s stick with the short answer. Since the AKP came to power as a very moderate pro-Islamic party in November 2002, it has always avoided getting embroiled in religious issues. Learning from the mistakes of its banned predecessors, the AKP decided to focus its political energy on foreign policy and economic recovery. Democratisation, in order to join the European Union, became top priority.

Many observers within Turkey’s secular establishment, especially the military and civil bureaucracy, remained sceptical of AKP’s true intentions. The staffing of bureaucratic positions by AKP supporters and reforms curbing the role of the military within the National Security Council raised eyebrows. But since the AKP appeared sincere in its pro-European Union vocation and since Westernisation is a civilisational goal for Turkey’s secular-Kemalist elite there was no serious objection to the AKP’s reformist drive.

This has changed with the religious-education issue. Indeed, the AKP is having a hard time justifying the Higher Education Reform Bill with its pro-European Union reform agenda. The Imam-Hatip controversy is a purely domestic issue but it has symbolic value, together with the headscarf ban in Turkish universities, for the conservative lower-middle classes of Turkey, the main constituency of the AKP. In that sense, the AKP is finally catering to its base. This shows that the party is feeling confident and successful enough to take such risks.

This is a risky strategy because by catering to its base the AKP may end up alienating its liberal middle-class supporters. But more importantly, the AKP may also rock the boat with the military. So far Prime Minister Erdogan and Chief of General Staff General Hilmi Ozkok have managed to tame their own hard-liners to avoid unnecessary friction. The European Union is the glue that holds this uneasy alliance. Any departure from the EU goal is bound to cause trouble.

Beyond this immediate political controversy, the problem of Imam-Hatip schools is related to Turkey’s peculiar understanding of secularism. There will simply be no satisfactory solution to religious education and the headscarf problem as long as Turkey’s interpretation of secularism is based on the control of religion by the state. Perhaps there is need for Turkey to understand that secularism is about separation between state and religion and not domination of the religion by the state.

Omer Taspinar is Co-Director of the US-Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. and Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies