ABSTRACT
The previous chapters were devoted to the analysis of the evolving iconography of Atatürk and forms of ritualism related to his image, of debates on Aya Sofya, and above all of the meaning of a figure such as Hrant Dink. They aimed at showing on an empirical basis how secularism is changing in Turkey. Up to a decade ago, it would have been impossible to question and de-mythologize Atatürk, to suggest a multi-religious re-opening of Aya Sofya, and to suggest that a street be named after an Armenian victim of murder. Something is changing. While I am not sure that the Kemalist conception of secularism can change, can be internally reformable so to speak, I am quite convinced that the assertive Kemalist version of secularism is on the way to being replaced. But the question is: replaced by what? If we witness, as I believe, small but significant steps ahead, what are they steps towards? The mainstream answer seems to indicate a passive form of secularism as the substitute for assertive secularism. In Ahmet T. Kuru’s words, the difference between the two is the following: ‘Assertive secularism requires the State to play an “assertive” role to exclude religion from the public sphere and confine it to the private domain. Passive secularism demands that the State play a “passive” role by allowing the public visibility of religion. Assertive secularism is a ‘comprehensive doctrine’, whereas passive secularism mainly prioritizes state neutrality towards such doctrines’ (Kuru 2009, 11). This distinction parallels, more or less, that between laicism as it evolved in France on the one hand, and secularism as it evolved in the Anglo-American context (see Yavuz 2000, 21–42; Yavuz 2009) on the other. I must confess that I am not fully convinced by this kind of answer. If this is the right answer, Turkey is ‘simply’, so to speak, shifting from a Western-like model of modernity to another one, from France (although the Kemalist model of secularism was not French-like at all, officially France was the model and source of inspiration), to England. Despite my admiration for the latter, I do not think that this is the case. I do not think that current developments in Turkey are going in the direction of a ‘standard’ Anglo-Saxon model. In my view, Turkey is interesting (theoretically, sociologically and from a normative point of view too) precisely because it is experiencing something like a ‘local modernity’ (Göle 2010), an alternative (Gaonkar 2001; Rosati and Stoeckl 2012) way to arrange politics and religion, religion and society, drawing from its own resources, and drawing from its Ottoman past. My thesis is that Turkey, through its political and cultural postKemalist but also post-Islamist elites (see Atasoy 2005), is trying to transform hüzün (the feeling of a ‘deep spiritual loss’, according to Orhan Pamuk Istanbul’s true soul, see Işin 2010) as a positive resource for shaping a new modernity and a new way of dealing with religions (in the plural) in a postsecular age.
