Abstract
In two interviews conducted in May 2007, prominent Turkish social scientist şerif Mardin suggested that if the conditions one day become conducive for it, the bigots in his country may exert an effective communal pressure on the secularly oriented to adopt certain Islamic life styles and the secularly oriented may find it difficult not to act in conformity with the set of norms imposed on them.1
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Notes
See, e.g., Metin Heper, “The Conservative-Democratic Government by Pious People: The Justice and Development Party in Turkey,” in Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought, Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi, ed. (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 2006), 345–61; Berna Turam, Between Islam and State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Hakan Yavuz, ed., The Emergence of a New Turkey: Democracy and the AK Party (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006).
On these reforms, see Metin Heper, “Islam, Polity and Society in Turkey: A Middle Eastern Perspective,” Middle East Journale (1981): 345–63.
See Metin Heper, The State Tradition in Turkey (Beverley, North Humberside, U.K.: The Eothen Press, 1985), chap. 3.
Metin Heper, “Islam and Democracy in Turkey: Toward Reconciliation?” Middle East Journal 51 (1997): 34–35.
Gareth Jenkins, Political Islam in Turkey: Running West, Heading East? (Houndsmills, Basinstokes, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 138.
In the process, members of the founding generation of the republic began to feel deep nostalgia for the “good old days.” See, Esra Özyürek, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006).
Ali Çarkoğlu and Binnaz Toprak, Türkiye’ de din, toplum ve siyaset (Religion, Society and Politics) (Istanbul: TESEV Publications, 2006), 92.
For a discussion of the Ottoman heritage of the present day Turks, see Metin Heper, The State and Kurds in Turkey: The Question of Assimilation (Houndsmills, Basingstokes, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), chap. 2.
Ali Çarkoğlu and Ersin Kalaycioğlu, Turkish Democracy Today: Elections, Protest and Stability in an Islamic Society (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 152.
According to one definition, which is adequate for the purpose of this article, the Sharia is a body of rules that regulates the conduct of the Muslim; it covers not only belief and ritual but also matters of custom and law. Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University, 1964), 9, cited in Çarkoğlu and Kalaycioğlu, Turkish Democracy Today, 124. This definition of the Sharia draws on Berkes’s but is somewhat different from of Çarkoğlu and Kalaycioğlu’s.
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (1993): 42.
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© 2012 Berna Turam
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Heper, M. (2012). Does Secularism Face a Serious Threat in Turkey?. In: Turam, B. (eds) Secular State and Religious Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010643_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010643_5
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