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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2021
1 For further discussion of Taylor's Secularity III framework, and how it is engaged in this book, see Laliberté, André, “How Do We Measure Secularity?,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021)Google Scholar (this issue), and Six, Clemens, “Transnational Perspectives on a Global Secular Age,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021)Google Scholar (this issue).
2 Tekin, Serdar, Founding Acts: Constitutional Origins in a Democratic Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1–16.Google Scholar In this introductory discussion, Tekin addresses how, historically, the hegemonic vision of a unified people has been frequently imposed on diverse populations by elites and argues that the foundational principle of popular sovereignty must be performatively present with people participating in the founding act of creating the constitution. He goes on to discuss Rousseau's lawgiver as architect, who Rousseau sees as inevitably necessary at the moment of the founding act after a revolution to provide the legal frame to a people not yet living under conditions of a democratic order. Rousseau's expectations of the elite role in the founding of constitutions have been criticized as democratically deficient and even an authoritarian strain in his thought that ignored the agency of the people. Tekin partially rescues Rousseau's lawgiver by recasting it as an interpreter who produces legislation that reflects the moeurs of the people. Even accepting that it is possible, following Tekin, to recast the lawgiver as more democratically informed, Turkey's republican revolution, with its Kemalist vision of staunch secularism and westernism, was in line with the lawgiver as architect ignoring the agency of the people for the sake of their sovereignty. Although there is not enough space here to pursue this engaging analogy, it is worth noting that the governing party's recent populist critiques of republicanism and dismantling of republican institutions and ideals probably reflects the deeply felt resentment among people over the lack of popular participation in the making of the republican moment. This angry reaction was well illustrated by the sudden reversion of St. Sophia into a mosque in 2020 after sixty-five years as a museum that represented the Byzantine and Ottoman legacy, as well as the new republic's discreet message to the Western world in 1934 about the end of religious conflict between Islam and Christianity.
3 For further studies of secularism in Turkey, see the following: Berkes, Niyazi, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964)Google Scholar (the seminal work on the subject to date and based on the presumption of secularism as progressive modernity and an analysis of Turkey's historical challenge); Kuru, Ahmet T., Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Akan, Murat, The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (relatively recent comparative studies); Zafer Toprak, Atatürk: Kurucu Felsefenin Evrimi [Atatürk: The evolution of the founding philosophy] (Istanbul: İş Bankasi Kültür Yayınları, 2020) (the best intellectual history of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's foundational philosophy, which was strongly influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau and other thinkers of the French Enlightenment).
4 Tekin, Founding Acts, 147, quoting Avishai Margalit, Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), ix.
5 Mehmet Acet, “Bizim Hikaye Mi, Başkalarının Hikayesi Mi?” [Is this our story? Or the story of others?], YeniŞafak, August 15, 2020, https://www.yenisafak.com/yazarlar/mehmetacet/bizim-hikaye-mi-baskalarinin-hikayesi-mi-2055949. Acet's column supports the recent statement of Dr. Ibrahim Kalin, the leading advisor to President Erdogan, that we have been living under the fairy tales of others’ modernity for the last 150 years, and it is time that we create our own fairy tales. The statement provoked wide criticism for its rejection of the centuries-long history of Westernization in the Ottoman period and the Republic.
6 For a factual account by a journalist, see Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
7 The Gülenists are somewhat similar to new religious movements elsewhere, such as the Soka Gakkai of Japan or the followers of Dr. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, which was at one point quite popular in East Asia and in the United States. For a recent critique in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt, listen to a recording of a roundtable discussion with academics David Tittensor and Tezcan Gümüş: Ali Moore, “The Rise, Fall and Future of Turkey's Gülen Movement” (podcast) Jakarta Post, October 31, 2019, https://www.thejakartapost.com/multimedia/2019/10/14/the-rise-fall-and-future-of-turkey-s-gulen-movement.html. For a relatively positive view that was quite prevalent earlier, see Yavuz, M. Hakan, Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: The Gülen Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seagar, Richard, Encountering the Dharma: Daisaku Ikeda, the Soka Gakkai, and the Globalization of Buddhist Humanism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
8 Amnesty International reported the following in relation to the events of July 15, 2016:
More than 115,000 of the 129,411 public sector workers—including academics, soldiers, police officers, teachers, and doctors—arbitrarily dismissed by emergency decree following the 2016 coup attempt remained barred from working in the public sector and were denied passports. Many workers and their families have experienced destitution as well as tremendous social stigma, having been listed in the executive decrees as having links to “terrorist orgarizations”. A commission of inquiry set up to review their appeals before they could seek judicial review, assessed 98,300 of the 126,300 applications it received and rejected 88,700 of them.
A law adopted in 2018 (Law No. 7145) that allows dismissal from public service to be extended for a further three years on the same vague grounds of alleged links to “terrorist organizations” was used by the Council of Judges and Prosecutors to dismiss at least 16 judges and 7 prosecutors during the year, further undermining the independence and integrity of the judicial system.
Amnesty International, Human Rights in Europe—Review of 2019—Turkey [EUR 01/2098/2020] (2020), reprinted at, https://www.ecoi.net/en/document/2028219.html (original source no longer available).