ABSTRACT
No idea better epitomizes the ethos of modern Turkey than the doctrine of secularism. None of the principles set out to define Kemalism in 1931—republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism, statism, and revolutionism (Zürcher, 1993: 189)—has been more persistently and stubbornly referred to in defense of the Republican regime than secularism. As the authoritarianism of the one-party period was superseded by more liberal and democratic ideas after the end of World War II, secularism continued to serve as the hub around which the Kemalist state elite (the military, the judiciary, and the higher echelons of the civil bureaucracy) guarded its hegemony.
