Hermeneutics and the Politics of Secularism

Abstract

An interesting exchange occurred during a recent seminar on modernity in Turkey.¹ During a set of presentations that critically engaged several standard assumptions about the meaning of a “secular” state, one colleague described ways in which state and religion are structurally integrated in matters of governance in the contemporary practices of several secular states in Europe. Her presentation successfully challenged the assumption that “secular” practices in the West conformed to the ideal-typical model of a strict separation between political and religious spheres.² The examples of an intermingling between state and religion in Europe led some of us to think that such practices were not radically different in principle from the highly integrated relationship between state and Islam in Turkey (assuming for the moment that Turkey is not “in” “Europe”). This observation, in turn, sparked many questions. One concerned the possibility of abandoning the Anglo-European ideal type of “the separation of the political and religious spheres” as the starting point for the comparative study of secularist politics in favor of the model of secularism found in Turkey. In Turkey’s laicist politics, the ideal has always been significant integration, not separation. Would it be possible to theorize secularism beginning from Turkey, rather than Europe? The implications of these reflections struck some of us as profound: could the observation of significant intermingling between state and religion in European practices lead us to decenter Europe and center Turkey in the study of secularism and secularity?