Murat Akan

"Murat Akan bizlere, laiklikle ilgili fikirlerin Fransa ve Türkiye arasında nasıl gidip geldiğinin ve bu fikirleri din ile toplum arasındaki ilişkiye dair daha geniş anlayışlarla nasıl ilişkilendirileceğinin fevkalade kapsamlı bir anlatısını sunuyor. Çok yönlü, ince düşünülmüş derin teorik yaklaşımı, ampirik araştırmasından besleniyor. Bu kitap, karşılaştırmalı laiklik ve çoklu modernlikler çalışmalarındaki pek çok yanlış anlamayı açıklığa kavuşturacak. Sosyal bilimler alanından pek çok bilim insanının yanı sıra entelektüel merakı olan herkes tarafından mutlaka okunması gereken bir kitap."  –Peter van der Veer, The Value of Comparison kitabının yazarı
"Fransa ve Türkiye üzerine yapılan karşılaştırmalı çalışmalar genelde katı antiklerik laiklik ile ılımlı liberal laiklik arasındaki karşıtlığı vurgular. Murat Akan’ın bu parlak ve isabetli çalışması, iki uçlu bir yaklaşımın laikliğin siyasi inşasının temel sorununu göz ardı ettiğini gösteriyor: Devlet sivil dini. Bir tarihçinin titiz bilgisi ile bir sosyoloğun teorik ustalığını bir araya getiren Akan, Üçüncü Fransa Cumhuriyeti’nde liberal laikliğin nasıl kazandığını ve Türkiye’de Kemalizm’in AKP’nin egemenliğinin yolunu nasıl açtığını gösteriyor. Akan’ın kitabı, bu konuya dair okuduğum en iyi kitap ve küresel laiklik kavrayışlarını önemli ölçüde canlandıracak." – Jean Baubérot, École pratique des hautes études (Sorbonne)
"Akan, özellikle (bununla sınırlı kalmamakla beraber) Fransa ve Türkiye’deki din ve laiklik çalışmalarına dikkate değer katkılarda bulunuyor. Kitap derin bir arşiv çalışması sunuyor; hem Türkçe hem de Fransızca kaynaklara hâkimiyetiyle, Akan Türkiye-Fransa karşılaştırmalarına özgün bir katkıda bulunuyor. Laiklik Siyaseti bir karşılaştırmalı tarih çalışmasının en iyi örneği." – Cihan Tuğal, University of California, Berkeley
"Laiklik üzerine tarihsel, antropolojik, siyasi ve hukuki akademik çalışmalara önemli bir katkı." -Journal of Church and State Dergisi
"Akan, Fransa ve Türkiye’deki laiklik araştırmalarına önemli bir katkı sunuyor. Hem genel olarak laiklik siyasetiyle hem de özel olarak Fransa’daki ve Türkiye’deki deneyimlerle ilgilenen bilim insanları bu kitabı yararlı bulacak." – Politics and Religion Dergisi
“Kritik dönemlerdeki geniş çaplı tartışmaların titiz analiziyle Laiklik Siyaseti Fransız ve Türk laikliği üstüne çalışan öğrenciler için temel başvuru kitabı haline gelecek.” – New Perspectives on Turkey Dergisi

Discussions of modernity—or alternative and multiple modernities—often hinge on the question of secularism, especially how it travels outside its original European context. Too often, attempts to answer this question either imagine a universal model derived from the history of Western Europe, which neglects the experience of much of the world, or emphasize a local, non-European context that limits the potential for comparison. In The Politics of Secularism, Murat Akan reframes the question of secularism, exploring its presence both outside and inside Europe and offering a rich empirical account of how it moves across borders and through time.

Akan uses France and Turkey to analyze political actors' comparative discussions of secularism, struggles for power, and historical contextual constraints at potential moments of institutional change. France and Turkey are critical sites of secularism: France exemplifies European political modernity, and Turkey has long been the model of secularism in a Muslim-majority country. Akan analyzes prominent debates in both countries on topics such as the visibility of the headscarf and other religious symbols, religion courses in the public school curriculum, and state salaries for clerics and imams. Akan lays out the institutional struggles between three distinct political currents—anti-clericalism, liberalism, and what he terms state-civil religionism—detailing the nuances of how political movements articulate the boundary between the secular and the religious. Disputing the prevalent idea that diversity is a new challenge to secularism and focusing on comparison itself as part of the politics of secularism, this book makes a major contribution to understanding secular politics and its limits.

Charles Taylor's “radical redefinition of secularism” has a significant place in the post-9/11 research on secularism. He replaces secularism's “old” paradigm, separation between state and religious institutions, with a “new” one, responding to diversity. Taylor appeals to French laïcité in-itself as the old paradigm. With an analysis of the parliamentary debates at the institutional origins of the old paradigm in the Third French Republic, this article questions whether Taylor's redefinition of secularism is truly radical. This historical intervention in Taylor's “radical redefinition” reformulates his novelty as the reconfiguration of the relation between generality of laws and meaning worlds in the institutional response to diversity. The Third Republic pushed generality in laws against diverse meaning worlds. Taylor (with Jocelyn Maclure) demands that general laws reasonably accommodate “meaning-giving convictions.” I explore this reversal and argue that it's questionable Taylor offers a radical redefinition of secularism—or even that we need one.

One mark of the rising research field of secularism and religion is that the field itself moved from area studies towards mainstream social science. This move can be traced through the increasing significance of Turkey. Turkey’s AKP was presented as a liberal and moderate challenge to radical Kemalist secularism in Turkish Studies, then analytical pillars of research in comparative politics and political theory relied on this presentation. After AKP’s authoritarian turn, how can we reflect on its past narration as liberal and moderate? As opposed to the thesis of rupture between the early and the late AKP, this article develops the thesis of confiscation. First, I resituate Kemalist secularism vis-à-vis French secularism with comparative history. I argue that institutionally it’s a limited, not a radical, secularism. Then, I examine gradual institutional changes during the AKP with statistics, court decisions, legislation and parliamentary discussions, and demonstrate that limited Kemalist secular institutions ease the way for AKP’s will to religionize society and the state. My analysis tackles a central thesis in the literature: secular institutions can make reasonable accommodations of religion without losing their own core. I show that in Turkey, accommodations of religion turn into confiscation of secular institutions.

The 2020 ‘mosque-ing’ of Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia) shook a cornerstone of the Turkish Republican tradition. I lay out the immediate political context, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the content of five court decisions that built up to the mosque-ing, and what these show about the current state of secularism, democracy and institutions in Turkey. I argue that the Ayasofya episode is a case of polarization to the point of abeyance and waqf-izing the Turkish state. Evaluating the episode in light of the past decade of Turkish politics, I propose that it is the present stage of a trajectory from the politics of modernity to the anti-politics of abeyance, and that the midpoint of this trajectory is the politics of ‘multiple modernities’. It is time to lay to rest the wave of conservative epistemologies emerging from Shmuel Eisenstadt’s ‘multiple modernities’.

Laiklik has been a major theme of the literature on Turkey and has turned Turkey into a critical case in world politics, area studies, and the comparative politics literatures on secularism, democracy, and modernity. A binary distinction setting Kemalism against Islam has been the problematization dominating the study of laiklik. The re-describing of the original formulation of Kemalist laiklik or uncovering of ever new meanings of laiklik emerging under changing conditions or articulated by rising political actors have shaped the direction of scholarship. This chapter highlights an argument from research on Turkey and France for the ease of capturing laiklik with comparison and pulling it out of the whirlpool of new meanings schools. French institutions of laïcité established during the Third French Republic parted with the premise of a Catholic majority country and were built on the premise of diversity. In contrast, the premise of a Muslim majority country undergirds institutions of laiklik since the founding of the Turkish republic. Ironically, Kemalist institutions eased the way for the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi’s (AKP) politics of religion because these institutions were built on the premise of a Muslim Turkey. The post 9/11 secularism literature has had difficulty in situating Kemalist laicism and the AKP’s politics of religion in relation to each other and in a comparative-historical framework, because it confines itself to an analytical framework of secularism built on the premise of a majority religion.

The debates on laïcité in France have been capped by a claim that French cultural imaginary laïcité has reasserted itself against the ‘new challenge of diversity’, this new challenge explicitly being contrasted to the old challenge of the Catholic Church. There have been plenty of references to the French Third Republic during these debates, yet these references fail to recognise that in fact the concept of diversité was part of the discussions on laïcité during the Third Republic. This is a historical fact that questions the distinction between old and new challenges. This article locates the concept of diversité in the parliamentary deliberations during the making of the ‘Loi du 28 Mars 1882 sur l’enseignement primaire obligatoire’ and the ‘Loi du 9 Décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des églises et de l’État’ and then compares the relations of diversité and laïcité at that time with their relations in contemporary France. The article lays out the move of diversité from a constitutive premise of laïc institutions in the Third Republic to challenging laïcité, and it explores the politics behind this move. I argue that laïcité has not been reasserted but rather has regressed in France.

Multiple modernities has emerged as the post-Huntingtonian paradigm in the study of secularism and religion, and the concepts 'imaginary' or 'verstehen' are the most common candidates guiding research aiming to articulate this multiplicity. This article revisits Shmuel Eisenstadt's original 'Multiple Modernities' thesis, Charles Taylor's concept 'imaginary' and Max Weber's 'verstehen', and offers concise examples on how they are put into practice in the current literature on secularism and religion. I argue that the original Eisenstadt thesis is built upon interactions of modernities, and the 'imaginary' and 'verstehen' analytics eliminate from sight non-isomorphic relations between ideas and actions, despite the ample presence of both interactions and non-isomorphic relations in the politics of secularism and modernity. Turning multiple modernities into an exercise in typologies of non-interacting modernities articulated in isomorphic relations between ideas and actions produces new kinds of post-Huntingtonian culturalism. I finally sketch a comparative politics of new meanings as the counter-hypothesis to which 'imaginary', 'verstehen' and non-interacting typology analytics of modernities have to respond.

French republican universalism – expressed most strongly in the principle and practice of laïcité – and multiculturalism have constituted opposite poles on questions of citizenship and integration. The report of the Stasi Commission on laïcité on 11 December 2003 and the following legislation on the donning of religious symbols in French public schools have once again, spurred debates over the meanings and practices of laïcité.The report and the law have been interpreted in different ways. Some have presented them as a reaffirmation of a historically constituted laïcité under new circumstances, others as a divergence from the real problems of racism, unemployment and gender inequality. In this article, I offer an alternative reading by supplementing a critical reading of the report with an analysis of its historical and immediate institutional context. I evaluate the Stasi
Report in its immediate context of institutional change, and in the historical context of selected developments concerning laïcité since the 1905 law separating churches and State. I argue that the Stasi Report marks a fundamental break with French republican universalism, and I show that this break occurred contemporaneously with key gestures of multiculturalism: the establishment of the French Muslim Council and the creation of Muslim high schools under contract with the French state. This double movement to narrow the boundaries of laïcité, and for the state to expand the boundaries of identity-specific, Muslim public institutions and private schooling constitutes a reorganization of the public sphere in France which qualifies as a move towards multiculturalism.