Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey: Anthropocratic Republic (Contemporary Anthropology of Religion) 3030796566, 9783030796563

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Prologue: ‘Handmaiden to the National Unities’
Chapter 1: Theocracy and Anthropocracy
1.1 Introduction
1.1.1 Representing Theocracy
1.1.2 Practical Theocracy
1.1.3 Anthropocracy
1.2 Conclusion: Foundationally Anthropocratic?
References
Chapter 2: Non-theocratic Politics: Secularism and Anthropocracy
2.1 Introduction
2.1.1 Secularism
2.1.2 Two Theories of Science
2.1.3 Secularism, Post-secularism, and Anthropocracy
2.2 Conclusion: An Anthropocratic Age?
References
Chapter 3: Anthropocratic Republic?
3.1 Introduction
3.1.1 Anthropocracy Alaturca
3.1.2 The AKP and Anthropocracy
3.2 Conclusion: A Global Political Mode?
References
Epilogue
References
Index

Citation preview

CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION

Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey Anthropocratic Republic Christopher Houston

Contemporary Anthropology of Religion

Series Editors Don Seeman Department of Religion Emory University Atlanta, GA, USA Hillary Kaell Department of Anthropology, School of Religious Studies McGill University Montreal, QC, Canada

Contemporary Anthropology of Religion is the official book series of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Books in the series explore a variety of issues relating to current theoretical or comparative issues in the study of religion. These include the relation between religion and the body, social memory, gender, ethnoreligious violence, globalization, modernity, and multiculturalism, among others. Recent historical events have suggested that religion plays a central role in the contemporary world, and Contemporary Anthropology of Religion provides a crucial forum for the expansion of our understanding of religion globally. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14916

Christopher Houston

Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey Anthropocratic Republic

Christopher Houston Macquarie University Sydney, NSW, Australia

Contemporary Anthropology of Religion ISBN 978-3-030-79656-3    ISBN 978-3-030-79657-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79657-0 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Artokoloro / Alamy Stock Photo ‘God is Sovereign’ This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to my sons; to my parents, brothers, and sister; and to my partner.

Contents

1 Theocracy and Anthropocracy  1 1.1 Introduction  2 1.2 Conclusion: Foundationally Anthropocratic? 26 References 27 2 Non-theocratic Politics: Secularism and Anthropocracy 31 2.1 Introduction 32 2.2 Conclusion: An Anthropocratic Age? 54 References 58 3 Anthropocratic Republic? 61 3.1 Introduction 61 3.2 Conclusion: A Global Political Mode? 83 References 87 Epilogue91 References93 Index103

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2

Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680), Moses Descends from Mount Sinai with the Tablets of the Law, 1662, Oil on canvas, 423 × 284 cm, Royal Palace, Amsterdam, Google Art Project Zeki Faik İzer (1905–1988), Inkılap Yolunda/On the Way of Revolution, 1933, oil on canvas, 176.5 × 237 cm, Istanbul Resim ve Heykel Muzesi (Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture Collection)

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Prologue: ‘Handmaiden to the National Unities’

In 1904 the writer and journalist Yusuf Akçura wrote a long article titled Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset (Three Styles/Types of Politics) and published it in the TÜRK newspaper, based in Cairo.1 Oriented to the political crisis besetting the Ottoman Empire, in it Akçura identified and defined three different ‘ideas’, ‘policy packets,’ or ‘programmes’ as potential political options for the Ottoman state to ensure its social efficacy and independence. According to Akçura, one option sought to create a composite Ottoman nation, “moulding the subjects of the state who were of different ethnicities and faiths into a united nation, by means of freedom, equality, security and fraternity” (1904: 2). The second by contrast advocated for a Muslim nation or an ‘Islamic Commonwealth,’ “without regard to differences of ethnicity, but taking advantage of their common faith” (ibid: 4). And the third project wished to organize the Ottoman state on a radical new policy of Turkish Nationalism based on descent and ethnicity/race. Following general trends, Akçura named the three styles of politics Ottomanism, [Pan]-Islamism, and Turkism. Against both Islamism and Ottomanism, and despite the habitation in 1904 of millions of Christians, Jews, and non-Turkish Muslims (e.g. Kurds) in the Ottoman domains including in Istanbul, Akçura plumped for Turkish nationalism, proffering as cure to 1  Akçura wrote the book in Ottoman Turkish and in Arabic-Ottoman script, and republished it as a political pamphlet in 1912  in Istanbul. It was later translated into ‘Ankara’ Turkish and into the Latin script in 1927. Akçura himself (1876–1935) became a prominent Kemalist, entering Parliament in 1923 and becoming President of the Turkish History Society in 1932.

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the ills afflicting the Empire a new political compact based on the unification of the Turks. In doing so he claimed, too, that the rival paradigms of both Ottomanism and Islamism were un-timely, illusory, and, given imperialist realities, geopolitically unlikely. Nevertheless, the fact that the vast majority of Turks were also Muslim caused him pause. He proposed that Islam itself, despite its heterogeneity, must become an important factor in the realization of Turkish unity. For that to happen, however, Islam would have to change, denying its cosmopolitan cross-ethnic communalism by admitting “the existence of the nationalities within itself” (ibid: 9). Insisting that nationalism was the dominant current in contemporary society, for Akçura alteration in Islam was inevitable. Indeed, perceiving that like all religions it had lost its political importance and force, his proposal for how it might regain its former influence is telling. Islam could only do so “by becoming a helper and even a hand-maiden to the national unities” (ibid: 10). Here, then, in a pamphlet written in 1904 is a lucid recommendation concerning how any emergent Turkish nation-state in Anatolia should politicize and shape religion for its own ends. For Akçura, it should establish what in this small book I call anthropocracy.

CHAPTER 1

Theocracy and Anthropocracy

Abstract  This chapter begins its identification of anthropocracy by presenting a working model of theocracy and its particular articulation of political power and religion. This is because anthropocracy can be analysed as structurally identical to theocracy, but as a political order that reverses its organizing values. The second section shows that like nearly all modernist political programmes, anthropocracies assert that political rule, law, or legitimacy is derived not from the divine, the transcendental, or the ‘supernatural’ but from the people, or from the anthropos. However, in doing so, they re-position existing religions, cosmologies, religious institutions, and/or deities to become chief supporters of the new arrangements. Thirdly and equally importantly, the chapter shows how anthropocracy deliberately downplays the political and structural dimensions of those religious institutions in facilitating the rule of [particular] humans. Keywords  Religion • Anthropocracy • Theocracy • Autonomy • Sovereignty • Divine kingship • Divine law • Natural law • Abraham • Moses • Sharia law

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Houston, Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey, Contemporary Anthropology of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79657-0_1

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1.1   Introduction What is anthropocracy?1 Literally speaking anthropocracy translates simply as the ‘rule of humans’ or perhaps as ‘human reign,’ from the words anthropos (humankind) and -cracy (rule). Likewise literally, it may also be translated as the rule of male humans, if we follow the grammatical gender of the Greek word anthropos. In classical and biblical Greek the word has a masculine form and is often—but not exclusively—used to denote a male person.2 This masculine connotation becomes significant later in this study when we consider the gender of anthropocratic rule. Thirdly, and literally speaking again, the immediate definitional opposite of anthropocracy as a political idea and project is theocracy, translated as the ‘rule of God/Deity.’ Theocracy is important for our argument below. At their heart, anthropocracy and theocracy are historical and contemporary modes of governance, characterized by their welding together religion and politics in a particular way. This short book defines anthropocracy in a less literal and in a more processual fashion. Summarily, anthropocratic political projects encompass three core features. First, like nearly all modernist political programmes, they assert that political sovereignty, law, or legitimacy is derived from the people or from the anthropos rather than from the divine, the transcendental or (as Akçura termed it), the ‘supernatural.’ However, secondly, while doing so, they re-position and re-interpret existing religions, cosmologies, religious institutions, religious practices, and/or deities to become chief supporters of the new arrangements, mediators between the people and their rule, law, or sovereignty. Thirdly and equally importantly, they either deliberately downplay or better, elide the political and structural dimensions of those religious institutions in facilitating human rule in the abstract, and the rule of particular humans in practice. In brief, in 1  This book extensively revises and extends an article published in Critique of Anthropology (Houston 2019). 2  There is ongoing debate in New Testament studies, Christian theology, and Ecclesiology over the significance of the male grammatical gender of the Greek word anthropos, especially over the inclusivity or exclusivity of the word regarding gender, as well as over its translation from the Greek New Testament into other languages (i.e. Carson 1998). For example, internal debates within Christian denominations over male and female leadership in the Church emerge in exegesis of Ephesians 4: 8, where Paul describes how Christ gives gifts to anthropos—to males or all to brethren?—to use in service to the Body of Christ (the Church). In the discipline of anthropology, anthropos is now translated as referencing human beings in general, thus giving it its definition as the study of humankind.

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the name of popular sovereignty anthropocracies de-legitimize the rule of God(s) even as they re-deploy it to stabilize the rule [of the representatives] of the people, all the while obfuscating their political conscription of the divine. Anthropocracy as a political concept has been written about briefly in other places. For example, in his book The New Global Law Rafael Domingo calls for a Global Parliament and for the transformation of the United Nations into a new institution named United Humanity. In describing this new desired system Domingo considers naming it anthropocracy but prefers the term anthroparchy because “we are dealing with a system of Government based more on legitimacy (-archy) than on mere legality (-cracy)” (2010: 118). For Domingo, the founding of anthroparchy is a future-oriented project, requiring the creation of new global institutions in a utopian form of government that concerns itself with issues (such as climate change) that legitimately affect humanity as a whole (2010: 119). By contrast in this short volume I suggest that the term anthropocracy better describes already existing political orders, not future utopian institutional arrangements. Further, as a specifically modern project of political order, anthropocracy is formally distinguishable from other political arrangements to which it may be thought to be similar, such as secularism, modern constitutionalism, or even, as in Bolshevism, the political application of atheism. The argument here is explorative and provisional rather than definitive in making claims about political typologies or ideological subspecies. To make it I divide the book into three sections. This chapter begins its identification and exploration of anthropocracy somewhat indirectly by first presenting a working model of theocracy and its particular articulation of political power and religion. Here I argue that theocracies, too, possess a tripartite order: gods, delegates, and followers. Even literal theocracies ruled by a ‘god-thing’ (De Heusch 2005: 25) must appoint ministers to assure His reign, helpmeets of glory or truth who manage His people. More clearly, in societies instituted through divine law the interpreters, judges, innovators, or priests of that law position themselves in a mediating position between the deity and ordinary believers and, sometimes riskily, between the deity and the temporal power. I then show how anthropocracy can be analysed as structurally similar to theocracy, but whose organizing values informing its identical tripartite

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political order are reversed. If in theocracies gods rule men, in anthropocracies men rule gods. Chapter 2 seeks to widen this discussion of anthropocracy by proposing that it usefully be understood as constituting, as Parla and Davison (2004) put it, one ‘non-theocratizing’ possibility in modern politics and ideological discourse. Clearly secularism and laicism are others. To clarify distinctions between them I examine elements of the voluminous debates that have explored, over the past three decades, varieties of religious-political entanglements most generally grouped under the rubric of secularity. In this re-assessment many once taken for granted assumptions about the historical genealogy and the political arrangements of secularism have been questioned and revised. Indeed, there have been a number of different responses to Cannell’s call for a “genuine comparative anthropology of secularisms based on particular historical and local studies” (2010: 86). Given acknowledgement, then, of both this wide variety of ‘secular’ political systems across societies and of significant differences in  local subjects’ experiences of secularism within them—of their institutions, affects, practices, discriminations, and so on—one vital question becomes whether we should grant the same word, secularism, to each of them. In agreement with a number of other writers (i.e. Davison 2003; Parla and Davison 2004; Stepan 2011) I presume that we should not. In Chap. 2 I seek to clarify certain distinguishing differences between two contrasting non-theocratic political doctrines and practices: secularism and anthropocracy. Alongside both theocracy and secularism, anthropocracy can be described as a ‘third way’ of structuring political relationships between states and religions, a system of governance that weaves religion and politics—or gods and states—together in a particular way. To ground this argument about anthropocracy, in Chap. 3 of the book I present an analysis of what I interpret, perhaps perversely, to be an exemplary anthropocratic political system, that of the Turkish Republic. Perverse because for many this will appear a surprising claim, given that post-1923 modern Turkey has often been held up for emulation as a model secular order for the modernizing third world. Indeed, a number of ̇ scholars of Islam (e.g. Inalcık 1996; Sayyid 1997; Lewis 1998) have claimed that in the Muslim world and for Islamic societies either Kemalism (shorthand for secularism) or Khomeinism (shorthand for theocracy) is their diametrically opposed sole choice.

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By contrast, more recent literature on the Turkish state notes that as a political practice Kemalism in Turkey is not secularist in any normative senses of the term (nor is the Turkish state ‘democratic’ despite this term, too, being stated in the Constitution). Chapter 3, then, offers an original solution to a historical [Turkish] puzzle, the dilemma over how best to describe and analyse state-religion and state-society relations in the Turkish Republic. It also argues that certain advantages accrue to our understanding of contemporary politics in Turkey by reconceptualising as anthropocratic the style whereby both the Kemalist and the present ruling AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) regimes have nationalized the divine to expedite the rule of particular humans. Much of the political science literature on Islamism takes for granted that one core aim of Muslim activism is the abolition of secularism and the establishment of theocracy—say a sharia-based Islamic State—amidst fears that Turkey under the current AKP government is engaged in the Islamization of society and the theocratization of the state (see Waldman and Çalışkan 2017; Bose 2018). However, rather than arguing that the AKP has generated ‘regime change’ (Polat 2016) by overturning Kemalist ‘secularism’ in Turkey, Chap. 3 explores its extension of the ‘anthropocratic Republic.’ The study concludes by briefly  hypothesizing whether and how the concept of anthropocracy or of anthropocratic politics in Turkey aids us in understanding features of state-religion relations and power dynamics in other modern times and places as well. 1.1.1  Representing Theocracy Anthropocratic political projects encompass three core features. They affirm that the political order and the law is humanly made, and preferentially an outcome of popular sovereignty. They enrol or insert religion, God, or the gods as supporter[s] of the people’s order or law. They downplay or even deny this mediating divinity, given that it potentially contravenes or undermines their first contention. To clarify how these anthropocratic operations work let me start in an apparently roundabout way, first with the political category of theocracy (Sect. 1.1.1) and then with its political practice (Sect. 1.1.2). On both the definitional and practical grounds that I sketch out below theocracy may be presumed to be anthropocracy’s most illuminating counter-case. Although other political formations/formulations such as secularism, autonomous society, and democracy similarly cast particular light upon its

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structure, anthropocracy turns the core power relations of theocracy upside down. Put slightly differently, in theocracies gods activate men, whereas in anthropocracies men activate gods. Taking the meaning of the term theocracy literally—the rule of God— we note of course that in societies informed by monotheistic religions there has never [yet] been actual theocratic rule or politics. Presumably both the absence of, and the eschatological hope for, authentic theocracy will continue until the vision of the biblical book of Revelation of the end of times is fulfilled—when the “new Jerusalem comes down from heaven, and the dwelling place of God is with humanity and we will be His/Her people” (Rev 21:3). This hope is a Judeo-Christian one, which does not apply to other religious traditions. Perhaps this long history of the absence in person of the coming God is one reason why, in many modern polities, the term theocracy is now used much more as a discrediting accusation than it is as an analytic diagnosis. The pronunciation—more frequently the denunciation—of political movements or regimes as theocratic leads onto one, first, aspect of its explication: investigation of the application of the term theocracy, and of the implications of its use, in current political discourse. Here the study of theocracy as accusation involves apprehending the intentions of intellectuals, political movements, governments, or states that describe certain systems or regimes—less commonly themselves—as theocratic, or diagnose certain movements to be purveyors of theocratic rule. Further, because in the present political moment it is more usually Muslim regimes or Islamist political movements that are thus labelled theocratic, a related task would be to identify just what such discursive representations do for the collective self-understanding and agency of those who make them.3 Forty years ago, in his book Orientalism Edward Said asserted that far from realistically portraying the Arab-Islamic world, the West’s imagined Orient acts to constitute the Western self as its opposite in character and style. As Said puts it, “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (1978: 1–2). Nevertheless, here I do not wish to catalogue charges of theocracy made by [western] state representatives, politicians, journalists, or 3  See for example Clive Kessler’s (2014) argument in Quadrant magazine that Islam seeks to impose its own “sacred, since divinely ordained, sociopolitical template” upon others. See also Joel Kahn’s (2015) refutation of his claims.

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academics against their enemies and disseminated in the media.4 But I do want to briefly consider a philosophically distinct yet typically Eurocentric theory of cultural difference and cultural specificity that projects a model of theocracy as the plumbline to distinguish between Western and non-­ Western societies. The social theory is that of political thinker Cornelius Castoriadis, described by David Curtis in his Foreword to The Castoriadis Reader as constructing a political ‘project of autonomy.’ In privileging issues of heteronomy in his thinking about non-‘Greco-Western’ societies, Castoriadis also strongly demarcates the cultural specificity of the West, with which his work, directly or indirectly, is more empirically concerned. Castoriadis contends that only in ancient Greece—and then again in Western Europe—has there been a rupture in what he calls the ‘heteronomous’ institution of society, a challenge to the “self-occultation of society and to the misrecognition by society of its own being as creation and creativity” (1997a: 327). In both of those cases he sees the unique emergence of autonomous society, societies that explicitly recognize themselves as origin of their own imaginary significations, and thus that institute themselves by lucidly positing the law for themselves. Autonomous societies also generate autonomous individuals, subjects capable of acting “deliberately and explicitly in order to modify [their] law” (Castoriadis 1997b: 340). Only autonomous individuals are capable of saying, against the tenants of divine law, that ‘the law is unjust.’ By contrast, for Castoriadis heteronomous societies are simultaneously intrinsically theocratic, not because God rules in them but because they posit for their members religious or extra-social sources for society’s own existence and form, so as “to exclude the idea that it might be self-­ institution” (Castoriadis 1997c: 213). In particular, he asserts that Islamic societies fabricate individuals that are incapable of critique, either legal or textual.5 Indeed, for Castoriadis an Islamic religious perspective deems the text inviolable, “since it is of divine origin” (1997d: 87). Is any of this true? Castoriadis makes these claims despite decades of research on Islamic jurisprudence that traces out how, similarly to legal systems everywhere, Muslim judges negotiate an “inherent tension 4  Liberal secularists may also accuse ‘Christianist’ political movements of seeking to found a theocracy, as imagined in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale and in the television series based upon it. Frank Herbet’s novel Dune combines elements of both Islamic and Christian theocratic histories. 5  For an opposed argument see Houston (2004) and Ahmad (2011).

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between following the dictates of the law (where they are phrased as rules) and following the impulsion to justice that those rules are intended to secure” (Clarke 2012: 116). More obviously, the same tension may be seen in exegesis of Islamic scripture. To give just one example, Jeenah (2001) argues for the validity of exegesis that chooses to minimize the interpretive weight given to a particular hadith or that disputes certain Quranic interpretations and orthodox jurisprudence dictates, on the grounds of their contravening the core Quranic value of justice. Most significantly, Castoriadis’ pronouncements ignore the thousand-year history of the pluralization of schools of Islamic law, which testifies to the legitimacy of divergences of opinion in processes of law-making, legal reasoning, and judging. Castoriadis secures the exceptionality of the ‘Greco-­ Western’ institution of autonomous society and the uniqueness of its ‘law-challenging’ citizens through downplaying these exegetic practices and by disregarding this rich history of pluralism of religious interpretations, misrepresenting how ‘theocracy’ actually works in the process (see below). 1.1.2  Practical Theocracy But can something more substantive be said about theocracy and its actual political arrangements and operations, other than underlining the literal non-appearance of God in monotheistic societies or by analysing how social theory has mobilized the term to make civilizational distinctions? Let me develop three main points in the following text. Firstly, in societies actuated by different, non-monotheistic, religious imaginaries and practices, clearly literal theocracies have been more widespread. One religio-political institution well known in the anthropological and historical literature is that of divine kingship. Morrison notes the repeated recurrence of the rule of gods in many times and places, as well as the variety of their sovereignty and governing processes, including “instances in which attempts to delineate a divine kingship never got fully established (China), kings marked as divine were relatively uncommon (Mesopotamia), kings are always divine but not powerful (contemporary Akwapim), divine and powerful (Egypt, Maya), semi-divine (Rome), and so on” (2008: 267). When gods rule, differences between their theocracies depend upon their degree of divinity as well as upon its qualities. In somewhat similar vein, Feeley-Harnick’s (1985) review of the anthropological literature shows that there is little agreement amongst

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ethnographers about a host of issues pertaining to the divinity of kings. Areas of controversy include connections between power, legitimacy, and social prosperity/fertility; relations between kingship, sacrificial regicide, and scapegoating; functions and meanings of installation rites and deification rituals; debates around effective exercise of ‘real’ power versus ownership of sacred/mystical/magical power; and disputes over models that posit an evolutionary transition over time from divine kingship to secular rule, or from theocracy to secularism.6 Interestingly, in making use of the categories deification and self-­ deification (e.g. Bernbeck 2008), scholars of divine kingship simultaneously appear to cast doubt upon the authentic divinity of such rulers. For example, Brisch treats both as a “strategy of pre-modern rulers to bolster their power and to create new ideological foundations to support growing political expansionistic tendencies.”7 Likewise, in his discussion of divine kingship in Mesopotamia, Cooper asks “what impelled Naramsin and Shulgi to break with the traditional model of kingship and become gods” (2008: 261) (my emphasis). The implication, of course, is that they were once all too human. In a similar fashion, description of the installation rites that sacralize the ruler and effect their apotheosis (i.e. Gilbert 2008) shows how thereafter the divine-king shares the substance and authority of the existing deity, becoming an embodied container and agent of a power bestowed upon them by authentic divinity.8 In the main, in its discussing of deification, installation, consecration, and sacred inauguration a ‘secular’ cynicism hangs over the literature in its insinuation that god-kings are actually human, and do not in reality possess transcendental powers. The doubts arise, perhaps, as much from the scant ethnographic resources historians of the ancient world possess to sympathetically apprehend the

6  Webster argues that in Mesoamerica ‘theocratic organization’ was necessary for the emergence of state-type institutions. Nevertheless, he also notes that in much writing this distinction between a ‘theocratic’ stage of organization with a later, secular stage is problematic because “the connotations of the ‘theocratic’ stage have often been so strikingly at variance with those of the ‘secular’ stage that it is difficult to envision what sorts of evolutionary continuities are found between them” (1976: 813). 7  See [https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/symposia/religion-and-power-divine-kingshipancient-world-and-beyond-0]. 8  A variation upon this theme may be the Shinto idea that the Emperor is the direct descendant of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. There is debate, however, over whether the Emperor is divine in the same manner as Amaterasu. Thanks to Jean-Paul Baldacchino for this point.

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fusion of deities with human flesh and blood9 as from any over-­commitment to rationalism or materialism. Nevertheless, in suggesting that it is mere mortals who turn themselves into gods to strategically stabilize their rule, does the literature on theocracy take on an anthropocratic ‘flavour’? In some ways it does, because the agnostic hesitations of scholars concerning the divinity of the king arouse suspicions in readers that in reality theocracies, too, are [cynically] ruled by men. On the other hand, scholars’ study of the ritual practices, courtly etiquette, sexual interdictions, mystical force, purification ceremonies, spatial privileges, and radical distancing that surround a deified king explicate how the established social order is explicitly legitimized as divinely ordained. However, theocracies resemble anthropocracies in different fashion, and that is in the way they must of necessity institute a mediating governmental ‘structure’ between the deity and the ruled. Even a god requires courtiers, retainers, officials, laws, judges, rituals, priests, treasurers, and treasuries, and so on. Contrary to any simple fantasy of the divine ruler’s efficacious absolute power the deity-king, too, as in other kingdoms or empires, has to innovate political institutions to govern. Although Morrison concludes that theocracies ruled by god-kings comprise “a rarely achieved, often unstable form” (2008: 270), they do as a matter of course establish practices and protocols of government that aid the god in his rule while regulating interaction between his sacred self and subordinates. Even in a theocracy, then, alongside the rule of god, commoners also experience the rule of men. This is a good example of how certain concrete, practical features of theocracy may resemble those of anthropocracy, even as their core political imaginaries are opposed. Although in both systems humans govern humans, in theocracies humans do so under the aegis of god, whereas in anthropocracies they govern in the name of the people. Secondly, readers will have noticed that many historical reconstructions of theocratic polities presume some sort of state structure. But does theocratic ideology and its accompanying embodied socio-religious practices occur in less state-centric societies as well? Marshall Sahlins’ recent suggestive essay on the original ‘political state’ provides us with a more expansive definition of theocracy, bringing to our attention broader aspects of its 9  One thinks by contrast of Paul Stoller’s (1989) empirical apprenticeship in shamanism, and of his intimate familiarity with the Songhay possessing spirits.

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existence as the constitutive other of anthropocracy. In an interesting analogy that extends the appearance and practice of theocracy—not that he uses the term—to stateless, apparently egalitarian societies, Sahlins argues that they, too, are “engaged in cosmic systems of governmentality,” ruled by “divinities, the dead, species-masters and other meta-persons [spirits] endowed with life and death powers over the human population” (2017: 92), so that “they [humans] are systematically ordered as the dependent subjects of a cosmic system of social domination” (2017: 99). For Sahlins, living under the hegemony of the gods, spirits, ancestors, or meta-persons is not easy: disobeying their regulations or transgressing their taboos may result in the visitation of ill-fate, sickness, or even death upon those afflicted by their power. Yet despite the apparently massive unequal distribution of fateful efficacy between cosmic powers and human actors that characterize stateless theocracies, Sahlins also notes the constant social intercourse and efforts of mere mortals to directly negotiate with, channel, or propitiate those forces, to steal their power, or to devise systems to blunt or manipulate them. Taking Sahlins at his word, we might imagine an anthropological research project on ‘comparative theocracies’—with their variously coercive, malevolent, capricious, beneficial, or just gods, spirits, meta- or non-­ humans—in myriad places around the world that simultaneously explores how human beings ‘manage,’ broker, or reckon with the cosmic forces that surround them. How do spirits or the divine communicate through the mediums, saints, or oracles they choose to inhabit? What “occult knowledge or ritual skills” (Sahlins 2017: 115) procure fruitful intercourse with the goddess? How do religious experts or institutions attend to and manage the sometimes unexpected, sometimes gnomic revelations of spirits? Which regimes of truth or procedures of falsifiability seek to discern authentic utterances of supernatural beings or gods from inauthentic pronouncements or advice? What of contemporary prophets, warning or informing their societies about the plans and actions of the deity, and organizing believers to get in line with the ways of the Lord? Who is permitted to interpret sacred script? In what ways do religions educate the future doctors of divinity or the apprentices of divine intervention in the history of previous acts of sacred power or revelation? How do religious mediums sense the good (or the bad) that the deities want? Here the research project involves study of individuals’ and lineages’ knowledge of the divinities and of the manipulation of their nature/character from below.

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Thirdly, any comparative analysis of theocracy will of course also examine those societies that institute divine law, positing what Castoriadis calls ‘extra-social’ sources for their legal arrangements. As we have seen, although Islamic societies and Islamic sharia law have been the prime target of much modern-orientalist assertions about theocracy, in her book What’s Divine about Divine Law? Hayes notes that the ancient Greeks too, as well as Jews and Christians all developed their own concepts of the divine origin of law. Indeed, comparing the Greek and the biblical models of divine law, Hayes notes both their profound differences, as well as the long-conflicted history of their revisions in the light of each other.10 Unlike biblical conceptions, Hayes argues that for the Greek sources divine law is not divine because it refers to the law of God. On the contrary, divine law is so because of its qualities, which may indeed bring it into conflict with the written (or positive) laws of the sovereign, including of the arbitrary and coercive law of a ‘local’ sovereign God. Divine law is natural law, a “rational order that is unwritten, universal, eternal and unchanging” (Hayes 2015: 59). For the Greeks/Romans, one should ideally live a life according to natural law governed by universal reason, if necessary over and above one’s deference to the conventions of written, changeable, and parochial [divine] legislation or constitution. The incompatibility between Greek and Jewish conceptions of divine law—one existent timeless in the cosmos and identifiable by reason; the other revealed in history by God and accessible in faith by the community it institutes—is replicated and exacerbated by Pauline Christianity’s critical alternative to both. As Paul writes in his First Letter to the Corinthians: 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

Hayes argues that Paul’s strategic particularization of Mosaic law serves to make it non-binding to Gentiles, answering in the negative the 10  Hayes give us the example of Maimonides, the greatest Jewish jurist of the Middle Ages, whose writings more closely resembles the classical Greek conception of divine law as natural order or eternal truth, rather than the biblical view that testifies to its origins in an act of [arbitrary] divine will.

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enduring question of whether Gentiles may access Israelite identity, even as they are included within Israel’s redemption narrative (ibid: pp. 140–164). But she also claims far less convincingly that Paul’s parochializing of Israel’s law would pave the way much later for Christianity’s “full embrace of natural law as an ontologically primary mode for God’s communication of the norms that obligate universal humankind” (ibid: 5–6). One should not hold Paul even part-responsible for that. Indeed, by contrast surely the divine law revealed in time to Paul by the crucified God is equally ‘parochial,’ as well as irrational, unreasonable, and non-natural. As Paul proclaims, for the wise it is foolish and for the classical philosophers a scandal. As an aside, Hayes’ discussion of the nature of divine law for the Greeks qualifies Castoriadis’ radical antithesis between the theocratic institution of society, and the Greek breakthrough in philosophy that supposedly opens up ‘unlimited interrogation’ of society’s own norms and forms. She shows that despite the classical tradition’s critique of arbitrary and cultish divine law, partly on the basis of its revocability or alterability according to a later revelation from God[s], Greek sources in fact accepted the existence of a divine law whose truth was naturalized, and thus closed to ‘unlimited interrogation.’ Classical conceptions of eternal unchanging natural law made Greece more heteronomous that Castoriadis appears to acknowledge. What about Islamic divine law? As we have already seen, the historical practices of legal reasoning in Muslim societies makes Islamic theocracies more lucidly self-instituting than Castoriadis concedes. In his book The Impossible State: Islam, Politics and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (2013), Hallaq sketches out what he calls the ‘paradigmatic Islamic governance’ that lasted for nearly 1200 years until its collapse in the nineteenth century under the pressure of Western colonialism. In it the idea of divine sovereignty predominates, as it is from God alone that the moral law originates. Because God is sovereign He should also be the sole legislator. His “law and will” is revealed in the sharia (2013: 51). Although the sharia is also the “earthly, sociologically contextualized representation of His moral will,” for Hallaq it “precedes any and all such rule both logically and in time” (2014: 3). In short, the prime source of the Islamic system of rule of law is Quranic teachings, from which the ‘paradigmatic’ or foundational concepts of its constitutional law (sharia) derives. Certain legal and political consequences follow from these axioms. One is that the Sultan, Caliph, or ruler—that is, the military-political

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executive—cannot legislate or make law. He may implement or enforce it but God is its author, the source of all knowledge, and it is only the legal class of jurists whose reasoning arises from engagement with the scriptures that are able to discover God’s intentions. Theirs is authority “by virtue of the divine act of delegation” (2014: 26). The ruler does not make sharia law but is subject to it. Nor, then, does he possess sovereignty. For Hallaq this leads to the phenomenon of jurists’ law, and then in turn to a robust system of separation of powers in Islamic society and in its constitutional organization. “The law of the Sharı ̄ʿa court is not dependent on the legal will of the ruler but the contrary: the ruler – what we have called the sultanic executive – stood under the Sharı ̄ʿa law” (2013: 49). Further, as the product of pious subjectivity and knowledge, there is a legitimate personal and spiritual dimension to legal reasoning, so that an ulema intellectual is entitled to issue his own sharia opinion (fatwa). This intellectual individualism gives on to the famed feature of legal pluralism in Islamic law, “where every mujtahid [jurist consult] has an equally legitimate right to reach “legal” opinions on what he thinks to be God’s hukm in any particular instance” (Hallaq 2012: 32). Hallaq’s identification of a historic form of Islamic governance is made by setting up a conceptual contrast between it and what he calls the ‘paradigmatic modern state,’ a state whose constituting qualities have spread as much to today’s Iran and Saudi Arabia as to any other part of the world, despite its origin in enlightenment Europe. His reconstruction leads to at least two surprising conclusions. One is that in classical Islamic governance theocracy does not entail either jurist rule or a fusing of religion and temporal power but their separation. Paradigmatic Islamic governance produced theocracy without a state. The other concerns the core claim of the book. For Hallaq there never was, nor can there ever be an Islamic State, given that the essential ‘form-properties’ of the modern state—sovereignty, law/violence, rational bureaucracy, and cultural hegemony—are intrinsically contrary to the moral, political, epistemic, and psychosocial practices of classical (pre-colonial) Islamic governance. Following Hallaq’s argument, we might say that in seeking to establish a new regime, the eponymous Islamic State in the Levant ironically managed only to institute a passé modern one. In sum, posited as anthropocracy’s constitutive other, above we have sketched out at least two forms of theocratic organization: rule by the gods themselves, or rule by their divulged divine law. For Greeks divine law is immanent in nature; for monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity,

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Islam) it comprises a new moral law revealed in the very moment God reveals Himself as He is. We noted, too, that theocracies exist in both state and non-state contexts, and that in [many] tribal theocracies mobilizing or pacifying the ruling spirits becomes an everyday specialist task. For Hallaq, Islamic theocracy institutes in the first instance a community (ummah) rather than a state or a ruler-executive. These summarizing conclusions show that, contrary to dominant evolutionary assumptions in archaeology, theocracies are better approached as vibrant social possibilities, orders, or ‘types’ of politics in the present, and not as an early phase in the socio-­ political evolution of ‘complex societies,’ or as a precondition for later, secular, states (i.e. as in Webster 1976).11 Further, our discussion of theocracy thus far makes us pay attention to the sex of the gods, as well as to the ‘gender’ of the law. Sacred rulers are nearly always kings (although historical evidence shows the divine queenship of women too (Nelson 2003), and in Catholicism the undead Mary is venerated as the Queen of Heaven). Similarly, in monotheistic theocracies the interpreters of divine law and the judges of human disputes are predominantly men, suggesting that as in anthropocracy, theocracy must be understood not only as the rule of male gods and of their male proxies, but as their production of a male-inflected sacred law. Finally, can we posit a simplifying heuristic model to define theocracy, despite the varied degrees of divinity of ruling gods, spirits, meta-persons, or ancestors, as well as of multiple conceptions of the divinity and content of divine law? A plausible approach to the study of theocratic polities is one that posits their possession of three core features. First is their triumphant or fearful assertion or testimony that political sovereignty, order, law, legitimacy, authority, or fateful power is possessed by God(s). Second is their creation of politico-religious practices, institutions, offices, persons, or classes of person as proxies through which God’s rule, law, lore, will, or guidance is discerned, legislated, negotiated with, or devolved to. And third is their obfuscating—or at least their deliberate downplaying—of the activist or autonomous power of the human agents that discern, execute, regulate, enliven, or innovate God’s rule or divine law and its 11  An interesting example is the emergence of contemporary Christian theocratic politics in the Pacific. See the work of Timmer (2015) for an excellent discussion of a political movement seeking to institute theocracy ‘from below’ in the Solomon Islands. See also the analysis  of Eves, Haley, May, Cox, Gibbs, Merlan, and Rumsey (2014) on ‘Christian politics’ in PNG.

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politico-religious institutions, to which everyday management of this divinely powered politico-legal system is devolved. In short, theocracy should be apprehended procedurally, a dynamic system of governance based on proclamation of a revelation/manifestation of God’s—or of god’s or spirits’—acts, order, law, sovereignty, or power; the management (re-distributing or de-fanging) of those acts by politico-­ religious institutions and their human representatives (lawyers, judges, prophets, shamans, priests, oracles, etc.); and the simultaneous downplaying or even concealing of the relative autonomy of such humans and of such mediating human operated institutions or systems.12 Hayes gives us the example of the ‘embarrassing’ revision of divine law in the Torah itself, when the Deuteronomic authors updated or even annulled earlier versions of the law found in Exodus. Citing Levenston (2002), she describes how they did so through a ‘rhetoric of concealment,’ which “camouflages a variety of interpretive and rhetorical strategies designed to hide its revisionist activities” (2015: 20). Concealment protects theocracy’s first assertion. How might theocracy itself be visually constituted, including its act of self-camouflage? (Fig. 1.1) Each of the three features of theocracy are evident in the painting above, Ferdinand Bol’s famous composition of Moses descending from the mountain with the divine law carved on a stone tablet. In venerating the law, the people and angelic babes alike testify that it is given by God (and not Moses). There are no dissenters; no vanquished opponents. And yet missing in the painting itself is any human institution that must of necessity mediate between the inscribed divine law and the people it addresses and re-constitutes. Here the founding moment is eternal; its future routinization unknown. Conspicuous by its absence, there is no portrayal of the process whereby the divine law inscribed on stone is to be transposed into the human words of the judge. Commissioned in 1662 for the new Amsterdam Town Hall, and in particular for its Magistrates’ Court, this concealed element is only revealed by the site of its hanging, in the courtroom. There the political authorities proclaim that the divine law is grounded in the pronouncements and authority of the human judge, disguising and domesticating it within a human social institution. 12  Ironically, on this more procedural definition the future-eschatological and direct rule of God may not be considered theocratic.

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Fig. 1.1  Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680), Moses Descends from Mount Sinai with the Tablets of the Law, 1662, Oil on canvas, 423 × 284 cm, Royal Palace, Amsterdam, Google Art Project

1.1.3  Anthropocracy In contrast to theocracy, let me now identify another style or type of politics, one that similarly articulates God and humans in a cosmic polity, but whose defining political rationality and emotional affect is very different in intent to theocracy. Anthropocracy issues not in the rule of God but in its apparent opposite, the rule of human beings (and sometimes, as we will see in Parts Two and Three, of male human beings). More empirically,

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anthropocracy like theocracy involves particular humans’ rule over other humans, and perhaps by extension over other non-human living beings as well. Yet just as we distinguished between theocracy as literally defined and the actual organization of really existing theocratic polities, anthropocracy, too, has a more complex operational reality. As with theocracy, in anthropocratic arrangements—as well as in anthropocratic political episodes—we also find a tripartite structure. Rejecting, like many modern ideologies, divine sovereignty and the divine origin of law, their first affirmation is that political authority, common law, and social legitimacy derive from the people. Anthropocracies proclaim their own human constitution. However, their second feature, and this distinguishes anthropocratic arrangements from more ‘classical’ secular or republican ones, is their establishing of religio-political apparatuses, most often in the form of religious institutions, whereby God and/or revealed law is co-opted and mobilized to facilitate and legitimize human rule [over others]. Most typically this involves the establishment of a state-religion and not, as in more secular contexts, religion’s formal separation from the political system, or even its disestablishment. Third, in this enrolling of the divine as religious live aid to human rule we find another element, similar to theocratic systems: an obfuscating of how these religious institutions have been re-functionalized to reinforce the people’s sovereign reign. Anthropocracies may do so through annual celebration of the Republic, through anti-religious public performance, or by asserting an ideal spiritual and private role for (national) religion, thereby seeking to desensitize citizens’ perceptions of its political aspects. In short, if the study of theocratic regimes involves examination of God’s rule as mediated by humans, the study of anthropocratic regimes involves examination of human rule as mediated by God. How might anthropocracy and its act of obscuration be represented ̇ visually? Zeki Faik Izer’s work ‘On the Way of Revolution’ (1933), celebrating the Turkish Republic’s cultural revolution, highlights two of its three features (Fig. 1.2). Depicting the Republicans emerging from Ankara (see its famous castle in background), led by a modestly dressed woman holding the national flag aloft and standing on the pedestal of a statue inscribed with 1923, she looks back to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who points the way forward. The founding anthropocratic claim is revealed in the book carried by the young girl: not the Quran but Turkish Language and History, official text of the new nationalist Republic. She tramples underfoot a scroll written in Arabic

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̇ Fig. 1.2  Zeki Faik Izer (1905–1988), Inkılap Yolunda/On the Way of Revolution, 1933, oil on canvas, 176.5  ×  237  cm, Istanbul Resim ve Heykel Muzesi (Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture Collection)

script. Cowering before the triumphant procession are the white-bearded religious ‘remnants’ of the Ottoman Empire, as well as a vanquished Greek soldier. Youth supplants the aged; modern men and women the traditional; the sacred nationalist city the countryside; Turkish nationalists the Greek. In the background a woman takes off her head scarf in an anthropocratic gesture, while next to Atatürk a man holds his fedora, following the sartorial style of the exemplary leader. And yet, as with the Bol painting above (but in reverse), this confounding of religion in the name of the nation conceals the operating of a core religio-political institution—the Ministry of Piety, or the Diyanet (see Chap. 3), already established a decade before in 1924 by the Kemalist regime. Anthropocracies are not irreligious. Bol’s Moses painting foregrounds the revealing of the divine law and masks the moment of its ̇ human management. Izer’s work foregrounds the revelation of the

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Turkish essence of the sovereign people and disguises the moment of its divine support.13 Moses and Atatürk, servants each but of opposed powers. ̇ Taking the image of Faik Izer’s painting as inspiration then, we might imagine a research project on ‘comparative anthropocracies’ that explores how in myriad places around the world regimes marked by their proclamation of human sovereignty direct the cosmic forces that they quietly resurrect. How is divine law regulated or altered to reinforce the ordering of human-appointed polities? Through which methods do states or governments govern and mobilize religion? For what reasons, historical and/or political, do states decide to fund or to even incorporate particular religious traditions and their theologies within institutional structures, while neglecting or suppressing others? Which religious institutions and rituals affirm the will of the people (as expressed by the human sovereign)? In what circumstances—say in times of legitimation crisis, imperial expansion, historical threat, or declining popularity—do [secular] regimes or governments turn anthropocratic, moved to subtly call upon the guidance or blessing of the divine to baptize their acts?14 How efficacious are one-­ off or periodic rituals and symbolic events that invoke God to justify the decisions and actions of the humanly instituted regime or its policies? How are they opposed?15 Further, and just as in theocratic situations, how might we study the messy real practices of anthropocracy from below? For example, what of the attempted manipulation of human rulers in the name of religion by those very religious forces authorized by them to speak; or the unsympathetic censuring of the programmes or formats of official religious institutions by other more irreligious state organs; or opposition to the religious initiatives of state-approved bodies by rival religious factions, or by more 13 ̇  For two different analyses of Izer’s painting, including of comparisons with the Delacroix work ‘Liberty Leading the People’ from which his painting works off, see Somay (2014) and Doğanay (2017) [https://www.gazeteduvar.com.tr/yazarlar/2017/07/17/devrim-imgelerive-15-temmuz-destani]. 14  Witness USA President Donald Trump, at the height of the mass protests against the killing of black Americans by police, visiting St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, holding up a bible in his hand. 15  Witness, too, the outrage of the Episcopalian Bishop of Washington at President Trump’s impromptu, unapproved visit, who stated that she supported ‘those seeking justice for the death of George Floyd and countless others.’ See: https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2020/jun/02/outrageous-christian-leaders-reject-trump-use-of-churchas-prop-during-george-floyd-protests

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pious, more liberal, or more heterodox religious believers and denominations? In the ceaseless performance of symbolic politics by modern states, governments, and civil society groups, sometimes it is hard to discern where human elaboration of religion to support human sovereignty ends and human elaboration of religion to support divine sovereignty begins. In addition, alongside cross-cultural exploration of the varieties of ways anthropocracies depose God to enthrone humanity, this research project must also say something more substantive about their actual political logic. When humans rule, differences between anthropocracies depend keenly upon their definition and construction of the people, as well as upon other values and qualities (i.e. reason, science, or progress) that they use to justify human sovereignty. With this in mind, below let me revisit briefly in turn each one of anthropocracy’s tripartite elements. First, who are the sovereign people? Only atheism, which has rarely been a political programme all in itself, could claim sovereignty against all Gods on behalf of the whole of humanity.16 Otherwise, in nearly all modern political projects, the people are particular and discrete.  Often they are the dominant ethnicity in the chauvinist ethnic nation-states that dominate the global political order. Sometimes they are the proletarian class in a revolutionary communist ‘dictatorship.’ At other times they are Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or  Christians as powerful  religio-political majorities. Too often they are those who are authentically native and morally superior in populist political programmes; or  the economically and racially rich in gerrymandered political systems that legislate some votes to count more than others; or  an educated elite. Last, they may be  some combination of these particularities, for example Confucius Han peasants as the people in communist China (and not Muslim Uyghur land owners). Further, in anthropocracies the ‘people’ in whose name the government rules and whose consent—genuine or fake—legitimizes the sovereignty of their representatives are simultaneously select and abstract. They are select, as Yusuf Akçura’s argument reveals, because they are just one fortunate ethnic, class, or religious identity in the midst of others they live amongst. And they are abstract because they are simplified, addressed, and mobilized as members of an imagined and united group and not as individuals with dynamic intersubjective identities and multiple interests. Moreover, in anthropocracies the sovereignty of the chosen people is invariably co-distributed, jointly exercised by other powerful modern forces and ideas such as progress, reason, or science. These sovereign  Cf. ‘God is humanity’s stolen essence’ (Fredrick Feuerbach).

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powers are simultaneously  forms of knowledge, myths, and social practices, buttressing anthropocratic rejection of the enchanted, primitive, false rule of the  gods. Each of them  supplement, and sometimes  even undermine, the authority of the people, co-ruling on their behalf. Each also enables anthropocratic regimes to legitimize their laws by claiming either their progressiveness or their [r]evolutionary necessity, obscuring the ‘arbitrary’ choosing of those laws by the nominal people as self-­binding norms. Music revolution (say against sacred music) is proclaimed to be a rational enterprise and not a preferential one, when in fact it is a plumping for one aesthetic and sonic style/mood over another. Similarly, the equality of citizens (for example) is presented as scientific ethos, rather than as a principle, a value, or a chosen practice. In Castoriadis’ terms, anthropocracies (like theocracies) too often become  heteronomous because in appealing to the abstract people or to science as an extra-social source for law, their reformist elites refuse to confront the very essence of self-­ instituting laws: their non-necessity; their elected character; and their need for self-given limits. Secondly, above we noted that in theocracies political subjects or religious followers also experience human authority, through God’s delegation to deputies of knowledge and governance of the divine law. In both theocracies and anthropocracies, then, men govern men—in the first in the name of God, and in the name of the people in the second. Indeed, if in an anthropocracy the sovereignty of the people is also appropriated in practice by single-party rule or by a dictator at the very moment it is proclaimed, then citizens’ political experiences of each will be similar. In theocracies human mediators must be careful in contradicting the divine powers, especially if the divine law is well known. In anthropocracies, likewise, the gods and their officially appointed handmaidens must be careful never to contradict the human powers, at least if they wish to retain their positions. In brief, in both theocracies and anthropocracies the mediators and representatives of gods and humans are in a structurally analogous position, one translating God’s words to the people in the vernacular, the other communicating the human sovereign’s word to them in god-speak. Thirdly, what [else] do anthropocracies conceal? We have noted already that there is obfuscation concerning how the deity and related religious institutions have been re-tooled to support the sovereign reign of the people, diluting the boldness of anthropocracy’s first atheistic declaration. New religious institutions, new religious practices, and new religious understandings and concepts are created to coalesce in a programme that announces human sovereignty while eliciting supportive divine intentions.

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We have seen, too, that there is obscuration concerning the language of the people as sovereign. Anthropocratic political discourse claims to represent all while fudging on both the rule of particular persons and the sovereignty of a particular communal group. But too often they camouflage something much more important and fundamental: the fact that although replacing the divine sovereign, anthropocracies also retain something of his characteristic power. Which particular quality of the divine do anthropocracies covet? In 1686, in one of the “linchpin trials of English constitutional history” (Sherwood 2008: 108) concerning the power of the (Catholic) King to abrogate the law, the presiding judge made his affirmative decision by drawing upon the most terrible story in the book of Genesis, God’s directive to Abraham to sacrifice his beloved only son. Meditating on the exceptional command rather than on the sorry figure of Abraham, the judge concluded that just as “the laws of God may be dispensed with by God himself” (ibid: 109), “he who makes the law can break the law (within the law)” (ibid: 110.) In other words, in the very same way that God is not bound by His own law (in this instance by the command that one shall not kill), neither, in this ruling, is the King. Sherwood notes that in the normal run of political affairs today, few democratically elected governments would use such stark analogies as the ‘hyper-sovereign’ God of Abraham to justify any suspension of their own laws. Nevertheless, as the work of Agamben, Schmitt, and others have shown, echoes of this divine right of kings to disregard legal codes is heard in justifications for anthropocracies’ (and secular states’) all too common dispensing with the law. During its ‘war on terror’ Sherwood gives the prime case of the US Government’s argument for a “necessary exception to the principle that ‘No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war, or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture’, as set down by the International Torture Convention in 1984” (ibid: 110) (italics in original). Indeed, in multiple instances contemporary governments legitimized by the grand narrative of their emancipation from coercive divine law simultaneously free themselves from the binding law of the people by declaring a state of emergency. To mention just one more example, since the beginning of multiparty democracy in Turkey in 1950, the military have intervened four times to suspend the constitution (in 1960, 1971, 1980, 1997), and in the case of the 1980 coup d’état, to extensively and unapologetically break the law against mass detention, torture, and murder.

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In sum, in their unspoken readiness to dispense with the very [people’s] law used to legitimize their own [secondary] sovereignty, anthropocratic regimes conceal their adherence to a particular religious conviction that defines the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception” (Schmitt 1985: 21). More clearly than for theocrats, for whom the law is divine and thus impossible to suspend, the evidence suggests many anthropocratic regimes believe in [their own] sovereignty without bounds. For example, not only can the sovereign abrogate the law, but just as with the God of Abraham and Isaac, anthropocratic sovereignty too often claims or possesses the most fundamental power of all, the right to kill. Indeed, in declaring opposition movements terrorist, sovereign states or regimes are enabled to enact extraordinarily illegal measures against their members with impunity. More literally, anthropocracy, as the sovereign rule of humans, may also be argued by humans to bestow on them the right to annihilate non-­human beings and animals, as seen in God’s providential provision to Abraham of the sacrificial ram. In the same way, Carol Delaney draws our attention to the gendered nature of the chilling Abraham-Isaac story. As the 1686 court ruling shows, sovereignty to make the law also ensures the power to break it. Delaney notes another analogy, this time between the creating of law and the generating of life, whereby Abraham as the procreator of his son “is the one who ‘begets’ and by means of his ‘seed’ imparts the life-giving essence that defines a child” (1998: 18). Here men bestow life, and “thus were also given control over it” (ibid: 18), while also possessing a concomitant power to destroy it. Anthropocracy’s replacing of God’s limitless sovereignty with that of its own conceals that its sovereignty is also a patriarchal one, masculine rule on behalf of the ‘ideal’ people (see Chap. 2). Finally, above I mentioned how difficult it is to discern differences on the ground between religious institutions and activism that primarily service human (state) sovereignty, and religious activism and institutions that primarily serve divine sovereignty. Representatives of religion may see little contradiction in seeking to honour both. Ordinary citizens may give their own meanings to both theocratic and anthropocratic rites and rituals. Something of the same ambiguity pertains to the perception of a different biblical figure, pivotal to debates over politics, government, and the state in both the early-modern period (roughly 1550–1700) and even today. As we have already seen in the Ferdinand Bol painting, Moses was also of central significance in protestant Holland in the seventeenth century. But this intense interest in both Moses and the Mosaic Constitution was global. Shalev explains how ‘political Hebraism’ was also influential in

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America, where for anti-British and anti-monarchical revolutionaries the Mosaic constitution “presented a historic archetype of a federal republic sanctioned by God” (2009: 240). According to Hammill, thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli, Locke, Milton, Spinoza, and Hobbes all reflected upon the Mosaic narrative and the political history of the ancient Israelites to draw radically different conclusions about the origins of government and of sovereignty; about the generating of a people unified by assent to the law; about religion, revelation, divine authority, and statecraft; and most importantly here, about “the problem of constituting power” (2012: 3). In The Prince, for example, Machiavelli recommends to any new ruler that they should follow the exemplary ‘armed prophet’ Moses, founder of both a new religion and of a new constitution and state. Yet Machiavelli speaks about Moses and religion with a forked tongue: on the one hand Moses is a “mere executor of things that had been ordered for him by God” (1961: 50) and thus the founder of a theocracy. On the other, Machiavelli reminds the prince that Moses killed thousands of doubters in enforcing his rule, and suggests that the Mosaic constitution was not necessarily divinely authored. Accordingly, Machiavelli advises the wise ruler that in itself the revelation of religion is unimportant. It is the political utility of religion as a useful fiction that needs calculating, its instrumental capacity to inspire obedience and virtue in people, each of which ensures the human sovereign’s reign. As Tarcov puts it, “[Machiavelli] insisted on the subordination of religion to politics as the only alternative to the subordination of politics to religion, rather than their uneasy separation we incline to favor” (2014: 213). In short, the political aim of Machiavelli’s Moses is anthropocracy. And yet, as we have seen earlier, I read the painting as revealing the instauration of theocracy. Unsurprisingly then, Bol’s painting of Moses with the Tablets of Law has been interpreted in radically different ways. Hammill by contrast argues that Bol’s painting puts the Mosaic constitution to different political use. Although he agrees that Bol’s Moses “mystifies state power” (2012: 13), Hammill views the painting through a Machiavellian lens, claiming that Bol portrays the Mosaic constitution via “a Republican understanding of obedience, representing the constitution of the Hebrew state through the people’s desire to submit to the law” (ibid 2012: 11) (my italics).

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1.2   Conclusion: Foundationally Anthropocratic? Let us conclude by taking stock. Theocracies proclaim the rule of God (over humans) yet mediate this rule through human actors. By contrast, anthropocracies proclaim the rule of humanity (over gods, other humans, and non-humans) yet mediate this rule through divine actors. Theocracies seek to religionize politics. Anthropocracies wish to politicize religion. Or to put it less monotheistically, theocracies (from below) foster and train human specialists caught up in ‘cosmic systems of governmentality’ to pacify and manipulate the actions of divine powers, spirits, or meta--humans. Anthropocracies authorize divine powers that are instrumentalized to facilitate (particular) humans’ rule. There is a third feature of both theocracy and anthropocracy identified by the two paintings above. Each camouflages their institutional arrangements, backgrounding in the case of theocracy the possibility of independence of the human helpers nominated to execute God’s rule; and in the case of anthropocracy, downplaying the political role of the divinities conscripted to carry out the rule of men. In brief, the ideological and cosmological declarations of theocracy and anthropocracy concerning the legitimacy of political rule or the basis of political sovereignty are radically opposed. Yet despite such polemics, we have also noticed that in their common intertwining of politics and religion and of God and humans, often there is difficulty in discerning differences between them as modes of political practice. Davison says the same pertains for secularity, where “the dominant habit is to see ‘secular’ outcomes whenever there is no ‘theocracy’” (2003: 347), rather than attend to the specifics of their varied empirical and conceptual relations. Declaring (pace Bol) that the law comes from God does not mean that the people cannot use it to govern themselves, nor that theocracy (as Hallaq and Shalev show) may not be anti-monarchical, against both sacred kingship and the divine right of kings. Similarly, as Hammill’s interpretation of Bol’s painting of Moses indicates, perhaps there is little difference in people’s phenomenological experience of obedience, to either Republican or theocratic regimes? All this leads us to hypothesize (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that contrary to the contentions of Yusuf Akçura, rather than three perhaps there are only two ideal-type political orders in the modern world: theocracy and anthropocracy? Or to put it another way, perhaps all modern states— barring theocracies both from above and from below—are foundationally

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anthropocratic as a matter of course, even as they may also be something else as well, that is, oligarchic, secular, socialist, authoritarian, social democratic, corporatist, and so forth. In other words, although there are multiple modern political styles articulating religions, states, and societies, in practice do not all of them, including secular orders, affirm in some way or other anthropocratic principles and demonstrate, irregularly or routinely, anthropocratic acts?

References Ahmad, I (2011) Immanent Critique and Islam: Anthropological Reflections. Anthropological Theory 11 (1): 107–132. Bernbeck, R (2008) Royal Deification: An Ambiguation Mechanism for the Creation of Courtier Subjectivities, in N.  Brisch (ed.) Religion and Power. Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond. (pp.  157–170). Illinois: University of Chicago Press. Bose, S (2018) Secular States, Religious Politics. India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cannell, F (2010) The Anthropology of Secularism. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 85–100. Carson, D (1998) The Inclusive Language Debate: A Pleas for Realism. Grand Rapids: Baker. Castoriadis, C (1997a) ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Pyschoanalysis, and the Imagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, C (1997b) “Phusis’ and Autonomy’, in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Pyschoanalysis, and the Imagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, C (1997c) ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Pyschoanalysis, and the Imagination (pp.3–18). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, C (1997d) The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Clarke, M (2012) The Judge as Tragic Hero: Judicial Ethics in Lebanon’s Shari’a Courts. American Ethnologist 39(1): 106–121. Cooper, J (2008) Divine Kingship in Mesopotamia, A Fleeting Phenomenon, in N. Brisch (ed.) Religion and Power. Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond. (pp. 261–266). Illinois: University of Chicago Press. Davison A (2003) Turkey, A ‘Secular’ State? The Challenge of Description. The South Atlantic Quarterly 102(2): 333–350.

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De Heusch, L (2005) Forms of Sacralized Power in Africa. In D. Quigley (ed.), The Character of Kingship (pp.25–38) Oxford: Berg. Delaney, C (1998) Abraham on Trial: The Social legacy of Biblical Myth. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Doğanay, Ü. (2017) Devrim Imgeleri ve ‘15 Temmuz Destanı’ [https://www. gazeteduvar.com.tr/yazarlar/2017/07/17/devrim-imgeleri-ve-15-temmuzdestanı] Accessed 05/06/2020. Domingo, R (2010) The New Global Law. New York: Cambridge University Press. Eves, R., Haley, N., May, R., Cox, J., Gibbs, P., Merlan, F., and Rumsey, A (2014) Purging Parliament: A New Christian Politics in Papua New Guinea? SSGM Discussion Paper 1: 1–21. Australian National University. Feeley-Harnick, G (1985) Issues in Divine Kingship. Annual Review of Anthropology 14: 273–313. Gilbert, M (2008) The Sacralized Body of the Akwapim King, in N. Brisch (ed.) Religion and Power. Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond. (pp. 171–190). Illinois: University of Chicago Press. Hallaq, W (2012) Qur’ānic Constitutionalism and Moral Governmentality: Further Notes on the Founding Principles of Islamic Society and Polity. Comparative Islamic Studies 8 (1–2): 1–51. Hallaq, W (2013) The Impossible State: Islam, Politics and Modernity’s Moral Predicament New York: Columbia University Press. Hallaq, W (2014) Ouranic Magna Carta. https://www.academia.edu/11170218/ The_Quran_and_the_Rule_of_Law_in_Islam Hammill, G (2012) The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayes, C (2015) What’s Divine About Divine Law? Early Perspectives. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Houston, C (2004) Islamism, Castoriadis and Autonomy. Thesis Eleven 76: 49–69. Houston, C (2019) Anthropocratic Republic? Kemalism, Theocracy and Secularism in Turkey. Critique of Anthropology 39 (3): 329–349). Inalcık H (1996) The Meaning of Legacy: The Ottoman Case, in Brown (ed.). Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East. New York: Colombia University Press. Jeenah, N (2001) Towards an Islamic Feminist Hermeneutic. Journal for Islamic Studies 21: 36–70 Kahn J (2015) Foundational Islams: Implications for Dialogue. Arena 134: 22–26. Kessler C (2014) The Islamic State and “Religion of Peace”. Quadrant Online, https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/09/islamic-­s tate-­r eligion-­ peace/ Accessed 01/10/2018. Lewis B (1998) Multiple Identities of the Middle East. New York: Schocken. Machiavelli, N 1961 (1983) The Prince. Middlesex: Penguin.

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Morrrison, K (2008) When Gods Ruled: Comments on Divine Kingship, in N. Brisch (ed.) Religion and Power. Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond. (pp. 267–271). Illinois: University of Chicago Press. Nelson, S (ed.) (2003) Ancient Queens: Archaeological Explorations. California: AltaMira Press. Parla T and Davison A (2004) Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Polat, N (2016) Regime Change in Turkey: Politics, Rights, Mimesis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sahlins M (2017) The Original Political Society. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(2): 91–128. Said, E (1978) Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin Books. Sayyid, B (1997) A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. London: Zed Books. Schmitt, C (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press. Shalev, E (2009) ‘A Perfect Republic: The Mosaic Constitution in Revolutionary New England, 1775–1788. The New England Quarterly Vol 28 (2): 235–263. Sherwood, Y (2008) Abraham in London, Marburg-Istanbul and Israel: Between Theocracy and Democracy, Ancient Text and Modern State. Biblical Interpretation 16: 105–153. Somay, B (2014) The Psychopolitics of the Oriental Father: Between Omnipotence and Emasculation. Springer. Stepan, A (2011) The Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democratic and Non-­ Democratic Regimes, in C. Calhoun, M. Juergensmeyer, & J. VanAntwerpen (eds.) Rethinking Secularism (pp.114–140). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stoller, P (1989) Fusion of the Worlds: Ethnography of Possession Among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tarcov, N (2014) Machiavelli’s Critique of Religion. Social Research: An International Quarterly 81 (1): 193–216. Timmer, J (2015). Building Jerusalem in North Malaita, Solomon Islands. Oceania 85(3): 299–314. Waldman S & Calışkan E (2017) The ‘New Turkey’ and Its Discontents. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Webster, D (1976) On Theocracies. American Anthropologist 78 (4): 812–828.

CHAPTER 2

Non-theocratic Politics: Secularism and Anthropocracy

Abstract  This chapter widens the discussion of anthropocracy by proposing that it be understood as one ‘non-theocratizing’ possibility in modern politics and ideological discourse. Clearly secularism and laicism are others. To clarify distinctions between them the chapter explores central concerns of the burgeoning literature on secularity, including deconstruction of its standard philosophical and historical lineages. The chapter considers the claim that in many contexts the export of ‘secularism’ to the ‘non-­ European world’ occurred as an aspect of Western colonial governance. It makes a counter-argument to suggest that concentration on the implementation of the West’s doctrine of liberal secularism in the modernizing world simplifies the experiential dimensions of secularity there. These discussions in Part Two pave the way for the project’s empirical case-study in Chap. 3, the diagnosis and the application of anthropocracy as an alternative term to explain Turkish laicism. Keywords  Religion • Anthropocracy • Secularism • Secularization • Laicism • Islam • Ottoman Empire • Secular modernity • Science • Rationality • Reason • Democracy • Phenomenology • Post-secularism • Colonialism • Sociocracy • Androcentrism

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Houston, Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey, Contemporary Anthropology of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79657-0_2

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2.1   Introduction As we have seen in Chap. 1, it is easy enough to distinguish between the contrasting core ideological or conceptual affirmations of theocracy and anthropocracy. It is much harder to trace out differences between their applied political and religious practices. In them we see the same acts performed for different reasons. This difficulty comes about for another reason too—in every society the boundaries between religion and non-religion, or religion and politics are porous and hard to draw. Religions are always political, if by this we mean minimally that religions are always concerned with human ethics and intersubjective relations. Politics are always religious, if by this we mean minimally that politics are always conducted through symbolic/ritual practices while also being underpinned by ‘cosmological’ contentions. Anthropocracies and theocracies then are overlapping ventures, the first politicizing religion, the second divinizing politics, each downplaying the political opportunity structures created for subjects or groups that occupy their mediating institutions. A similar dilemma appears to be the case for another pairing, the nontheocratic political systems of anthropocracy and secularism. Clarifying distinctions between certain of their historically generated principles or ideas—that is anthropocratic state authorization and control over religion compared to secularist separation of religion and state—appears more straightforward than identifying differences (and similarities) in their socially embedded enactments. Thus, in secular Australia there is universal state funding of private ‘religious’ schools (Jewish, Christian (Protestant/ Catholic/Orthodox) and Islamic (Sunni/Alevi), Buddhist, Bahai, etc.), schools that are required to teach both the state-authored ‘secular’ curriculum and a state-approved denominational religious theology and ethics. Government schools on the other hand no longer teach ‘scripture’ (although there are some differences in curricula between states). At the same time imagine the growing cult of ANZAC Day, now a state-celebrated public holiday in whose sacred rituals and affective charges school children from both public secular and private religious schools are forced  to participate. Are these non-theocratic arrangements secular or anthropocratic? In short, political ideologies analytically described are tidier than the empirical acts from which they draw their name. This attests to the limitations of ideal type concepts. To give just one example, a recent article noted the difficulty in labelling the AKP’s political regime in Turkey,

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where more or less free elections take place amidst severe media censorship, repressive policing, constitutional limitations on protests and industrial action, and constant performative mobilization of the urban assemblage in support of the government. The author lists as possibilities the following terms: tutelary democracy; semi-democracy; illiberal democracy; soft authoritarianism; pseudo-democracy; and competitive authoritarianism (Çalıșkan 2018). The same issue pertains to description and analysis of secularism and anthropocracy as modes of political action. One reason they are hard to disentangle is that secularism and anthropocracy share certain elements ̇ painting, in triumphalizwith each other. As we have seen in the Faik Izer ing the human wresting of sovereignty from God(s), anthropocracy possesses its own peculiar political mood and affect. Alongside its recourse to the disenchanting power of science or reason as it pragmatically de-sacralizes then re-sacralizes religion, anthropocracy presents itself not only as a political order that happens along with enlightenment developments but as something created: a bold, new, human-­centred order. Many defenders of the secular feel the same about secularism: that it, too, is a never-ending project, one that requires advocacy and demands courage in opposing divine oppression and combatting religious illusion.1 Bruce Kapferer discerns something similar in the orientation of most contemporary thought in the social sciences and philosophy—he claims that their “secularism manifests the potency of human thought finally liberated and liberating, a demythologizing force that replaces God with Man, that sees human beings as the architects of their own destiny” (2001: 341). A second reason for why secularism and anthropocracy overlap as political practices is because Governments everywhere each describe as secular their own very different collocation of political sovereignty, religion, state, and distributed social functions (i.e. India, France, Turkey). That is, secularisms as real political orders manifest themselves in manifold ways globally, each with their own specific histories. Some arrangements, as this book argues for Turkey, might be better classified as something else. Of course, the diversity of secular systems around the world has been widely discussed over the last few decades. For example, in the aptly named volume Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (2010), a follow-up work that responds to Charles Taylor’s magnum opus A Secular Age (2007), 1  Witness Lord Asriel in Philip Pullman’s novel The Subtle Knife, who has embarked upon the greatest mission of all: “to make war on the Authority” (1997: 313).

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Nilüfer Göle notes how Taylor’s tracing of secularism to internal reforms in Latin Christendom makes it logically impossible to compare French and Turkish secularisms. And indeed, early in his book Taylor rules out extending his purview to “Islamic countries, India and Africa” (2007: 1), asserting that unlike everywhere else, the secularity of the ‘North Atlantic world’ means that only ‘we’ are aware that “there are a number of different construals” (ibid: 11), standpoints, and theories of reality and of moral/spiritual life. Despite Taylor’s presumptive claim, in her successful juxtaposing of the different meanings of the secularist headscarf ban in each country, Göle shows how comparisons might be made. “By coupling the incomparable,” she writes, “one is invited to engage in an interdependent mirror reading of the two instead of measuring the gap between them” (2010: 247). Here rather than normalizing one secularism—usually the French model— and then describing the Turkish situation as piggy-backing upon it, comparison begins with the historical experience and contingent developmental events of each (as Taylor does for the West more generally). Göle describes the Turkish case as ‘authoritarian secularism,’ testament to the Kemalist’s state’s forced, top-­down introduction of new practices of selfhood, ethics, aesthetics, spatiality, spirituality, and gender, and thus to its production of a central and antagonistic cultural fault line between secularist and nonsecularist Muslims in Turkey, one that is simply not replicated in France. Still, given Göle’s anxiety about the ‘incomparability’ of subjects’ phenomenological experiences of these two contrasting political situations (France and Turkey), one question becomes whether we should grant the same word—secularism—to describe their governing orders. The same issue arises when we consider the very different political arrangements of other famous secularisms. For example, putting aside for now the contemporary re-structuring of religio-political relations pursued by the Hindu-­ supremacist BJP government, historical ‘secular pluralism’ in India sought to guarantee the flourishing of the subcontinent’s major religious traditions. Indian secularism has normally been seen as a policy of state neutrality in order to protect a multi-faith society, while not removing religion from the public sphere.2 Even then, an alternative origin story is heard in claims that it is the Hindu religion itself that best guarantees religious 2  Ram (2013) shows nonetheless how a different perspective was applied to the religious art practices of the ‘lower castes,’ demeaned as ‘folk’ religion and subjected to rationalist critiques of superstition.

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freedoms for all, because “Hinduism acknowledges that aspects of the universal divinity are discernible in all forms of worship” (Cannell 2010: 93). Here the assertion is that India could become secular because it was religious in a certain way. Description becomes even more interesting in the case of Naser Ghobadzadeh’s book Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamist State (2015), in which he identifies a reformist discourse in Iran that envisages the “emancipation of religion from the state” (2015: 2). He names the case for the institutional separation of religion and state for the sake of religion, ‘religious secularity.’ And what is the relationship between secularism and civil religion, which according to Kim and Ivanhoe “can be promoted but never officially founded, sanctioned or supported; it can and must draw upon particular historical religious traditions but never speak from or represent any such tradition or school”? (2016: 6). Authoritarian secularism. French laicite. Secular pluralism. Hindu secularism. Religious secularity. Civil religion. The qualifying of the terms ‘secular’ or ‘religion’ in all of them show political analysis requires other concepts. Cannell notes that the “meanings of ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’ are constantly changing in the literature, depending on whether a given author believes that they are real” (2010: 86). But that is an unfortunate way of putting it. ‘Secularism’ in India, France, Turkey, and so on is real as a political order. But perhaps what Cannell means is that if secularization is not conceived as a unitary, inevitable, or inescapable global process connected to (western) modernity, as once orthodoxly maintained in the social sciences, then this variety of self-­described secularisms becomes one key theme that the growing field of studies of secularism seeks to illuminate. Anthropocracy may then emerge, alongside secularism, as a recognizable political type on the spectrum of non-theocratic politics. To identify anthropocracy’s style and import, this chapter begins by analysing Niyazi Berkes’ exemplary portrayal of secularization, drawing attention to its typical mis-description of modern social and political life (Sect. 2.1.1). Taking the work of Ernst Gellner as an example, I then investigate a discourse on science that posits its culture-transcending nature to be central in ‘secular modernity’s’ marginalization of religion. At the same time, Edmund Husserl’s  phenomenology presents us with an alternative theory of science, and I show how it undermines the naturalism of Gellner’s (and others’) scientific-secular thinking (Sect. 2.1.2). Last, I assess certain so-called post-secular perspectives, including the work of Charles Taylor and Talal Asad, which re-consider or deconstruct the

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discourse of secularism, including its claims to reason and rationality over against religion (Sect. 2.1.3). This chapter concludes by arguing that in many instances both androcentrism and anthropocentrism also emerge as defining features of post-theocratic politics, redefining what it means to live in a secular or anthropocratic age. 2.1.1  Secularism Secularism as a political project and secularization perceived as a long-term historical process are enduring topics of debate in comparative religious and political analysis. However, as noted above, contemporary re-assessment of the global plurality of legal-political institutions and social-historical contexts of secularism[s], as well as greater recognition of individuals’ radically different regional experiences of them, has sparked a burgeoning new literature. Nevertheless, if in recent decades components of the classical secularization thesis have been criticized on various grounds, defence of secular rationality is still widespread in contemporary social theory (i.e. Gellner 1992; McLennan 2010; Hagglund 2019). Indeed, Cannell contends that secularization convictions continue to be the default position at the borders of the academic, the journalistic, and the political (2010: 87). That is, over and beyond debate concerning the empirical decline or resurgence of religion in different countries, a much more public and polemical dispute involves claims over the necessary link between secularism and critique, over the epistemological presumptions of cognitive relativism, and about the religion-destroying truth of the analytical scientific method.3 What was/is the classical secularization thesis whose standard historical and philosophical presumptions have been debated and dismantled over the last few decades? (e.g. by Kahn 2001, 2016; Asad 2003; Masuzawa 2005; Taylor 2007; Eagleton 2009; Bowen 2010; Cannell 2010; Scott 2018). The question is best answered through an example. In his far-reaching study The Development of Secularism in Turkey (1964), Niyazi Berkes traces out the emergence there of what he calls ‘modern civilization.’ Berkes’ work is still one of the definitive discussions in English of the history of laicism in Turkey, but for our purposes it also reveals certain central assumptions about the nature of secularization processes.  It is no surprise that a resurgence of possessive secularism has often targeted Islamic politics, in particular, as a threat to Western history and particularity. See for example Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Asad et al. 2013). 3

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Dating its origins back to developments in the early eighteenth century, Berkes concludes that secularism in Turkey was constitutionally formalized by 1928 with the disassociation of the fundamental institutions of the State from religious principles. For Berkes there are two types of secularism. In Muslim societies secularization takes a particular form, involving struggle against the domination of religious rules over all areas of the lifeworld. In other words, modern civilization frees various ‘sectors of social life’ from the domination of religion. Unlike in Christian societies where secularization ensues a struggle between the dual authorities of church and state that culminates in varieties of their uneasy separation, in Ottoman history the basic conflict is between the forces of tradition (that promote the domination of sacred law) and the forces of change goaded by the breakdown of medieval society, caused partly by exposure to developments in the Western economy. Here secularization translates as the replacement of religious institutions and sentiments. For Berkes, secularity as the demise of the traditional system in the birth of the new comes about through a dual procedure. Given its contested history, he distinguishes between secularism as an idea and secularization as a process. Secularism is programmatic—a doctrine implemented as political, constitutional, and educational policy. Secularization is more social-structural, beyond the control of individuals or political groups. An analogy might be made between class conflict as a social process, and socialism as its clarifying and mobilizing ideology. Which principles of secularism can we identify and extract from Berkes’ history? They include (1) his distinguishing between two contrasting systems of governance, the traditional (Islamic medieval) and the modern; (2) the presumption that traditional order equates with stability or social stasis and modern society with change, and further that for traditional society any alteration over time is an evil deviation from an established religious order rather than ‘legitimate’ change; (3) the generation of binary oppositions between each system, made by downplaying similarities in the socio-political function or practice of their institutions and by exaggerating contrasts between their social imaginaries or cultural concepts. For example, Berkes writes that in contradistinction to modern political systems, in Muslim states “the ruler was limited in the exercise of his authority only by the Şeriat” (1964: 14). But does not the law curtail the actions of any ‘modern’ Prime Minister or President in exactly the same way? They also include (4) the conflation of ‘rational’ behaviour with secularism and (5) the conviction that the primary driver of the

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concatenation of changes defining the emergent non-traditional social order is the ‘modern’ (or perhaps in the nineteenth century the ‘industrial’) rather than capitalism.4 Where do we identify the expression of these tenets of secularism in Berkes’ account of the development of secularization in Turkey? Berkes claims that on principle in ‘Ottoman-Turkish’ society “each individual and category [i.e. peasants, artisans, Jews, etc.] should remain where and as it traditionally was” (1964: 12). Indeed, the medieval Muslim political view “was permeated by belief in a social structure based on distinct orders and estates” (ibid: 10). Further, “the privileges granted to the ruling estates were not available to the lower orders” (ibid: 12) (is not this the case in secular societies all over the world?). Important in this view was emphasis “on the need for a power with which to oversee and hold the separate units together” (ibid: 10). At the same time, the principles of the tradition were not subject to fundamental modification: they could “only be interpreted by definite groups of men in accordance with definite rules” (ibid: 7). And yet, contradictorily, Berkes also writes that “the will of the ruler was free from the limitations of the Şeriat,” so that there was “no conception of legislation as distinct from the administrative and judicial branches of government” (ibid: 14). By contrast, Berkes presents modern society as radically contrastive with this traditional system, with its “concept of natural rights and equality of citizenship” (ibid: 13.) Similarly, in it value was vested in the individual and not in their position, designated according to ‘rational norms.’ A secular society is one that maintains a degree of differentiation in its value system (ibid: 6). Freedom from the domination of sacred rules “emerges in all major social institutions; it is particularly manifest in economic and scientific-technological behaviour. Rational behaviour, as the epitome of secularism, seems to appear in these areas first” (ibid: 7). Perhaps most significantly, the secularization of the state meant the “evolution of science, morals, and laws autonomously from religious dogma” (ibid: 497). “Philosophy deposed kalâm (theology) just as the modern civil codes had superseded the Şeriat” (ibid: 496). This [logically] leads to guaranteed freedom of conscience, thought, and expression, because the state abstains from “siding with any creed, from imposing any new or old 4  Centring capitalism in the story that explains the spread of global secularism—say by examining relations between scientific progress and the profit motive—would produce different features of secularism.

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dogmas, doctrine, or philosophy having relevance for matters of faith” (ibid: 497–498).5 In brief, for Berkes secularism entails not the separation of religion and state, but the shrinkage and replacement of religion by new institutions animated by ‘neutral’ reason and knowledge. And yet did any of these features constitute the condition of actual secular modernity in republican Turkey? When we look at Kemalism in its foundational years (1923–1950), we see that its defining ‘six arrows’ included none of democracy, socialism, liberalism, or citizenship, the political expression of the principle of natural rights. In their place the Atatürk Republic proclaimed populism (halkçılık), a programme that sought to uplift and educate the Turkish people even as it explicitly maintained that they were composed of functional, occupational groupings (i.e. merchants, farmers, workers, state officials, free professionals, industrialists, etc.), amongst whom antagonistic class relations did not exist. As Mustafa Kemal affirmed in 1923, “it is not possible to separate into classes practitioners of various occupations because their interests are compatible with one another, and all of them compromise the people … It is thus I see our nation” (Parla and Davison 2004: 83). That of course sounds like the functional estates of ‘traditional’ Ottoman society. Indeed, as a way of ensuring that this classification became true, in 1935 the Government felt the need to replicate Mussolini’s Italian Labour Law that banned all ‘class-based’ activities, including the forming of trade unions and the holding of strikes. Given this profession of unity amidst a functional division of labour, in the single-party period in which opposition parties were prohibited, Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) claimed both to protect the interests of the Turkish nation, and to be its sole legitimate representative. Other presumptions of Berkes concerning secularization also appear problematic. The idea that it is (only) secular society that provides a ‘degree of differentiation in value systems’ is surely misplaced, given the great multiplicity of religions, sects, professions, and social classes in the 5  There is something both ironic and tragic about Berkes’ strongly felt conviction of religion as partisan, dogmatic, and enslaving. Like everyone writing in the field of religion and politics, Niyazi Berkes was not a dispassionate scholar, un-invested in the field that he was researching. Indeed, critical of politics in Turkey, Berkes’ work clashed with the really existing secular norms of the state. He was charged by the government in 1946 with making communist propaganda, dismissed from his position at Ankara University, and forced to flee the country, to take up a (temporary) position at McGill University in Canada. He was never permitted to work in Turkey again.

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Ottoman polity, not to mention its systematic legal pluralism that allowed rights of jurisdiction to Christian and Jewish religious authorities, whilst enabling their adherents to use the Islamic şeriat (sharia) courts if they so preferred. There is a peculiar historicism at work here, in which the [Islamic] medieval period, rather than something complex and diverse in itself, is reconstructed as the other to secular modernity, the workshop within which secularism develops and which it explodes. The same reductive procedure applies in reverse to the modern, whose denizens’ lives are said to be necessarily heterogeneous compared to the homogenous lifeworlds and shared worldviews of the traditional subjects of pre-modernia. In fact, it is much more likely that the opposite is true: attempts by nationstates to make ethnic and religious identities uniform and thus mobilizable gain traction only after the collapse of empires (Scott 1999). Further, and as we have seen in Chap. 1, paradigmatic Islamic governance separates executive and legislative power, unlike in the Kemalist single-party period when in 1936 the CHP announced “full congruency” between state administration and party organization. As in Italian fascism, “with this declaration all state officials in the administrative field became local party officials” (Keyder 1987: 100). The authoritarian incorporation of Turkish civil society into the ‘party-government’ assemblage was achieved most fully in these years, with the closing down or forced incorporation of all quasi-independent civil society groups into the ruling CHP. Lastly, Berkes’ assertion that secularization enables the evolution of morals, laws, and economic behaviour away from religious conceptions, and that this development manifests as more ‘rational behaviour’ in those fields is equally hard to sustain. Certainly, the claim that in post-Ottoman Turkey, Christians, Jews, and Muslims no longer addressed each other “primarily as religious communities” (Berkes 1964: 9) but as Turks, Greeks, Kurds, Armenians, and so on testifies to the power of nationalism. But it is not clear on what grounds, moral or otherwise, anyone would think that this ethnic perception is more ‘rational.’ The same hesitations apply to changes in economic behaviour. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on how new capitalist economic arrangements (in Algeria under French colonialism) demanded the exercise of new economic dispositions for Algerian selves compelled to operate within their domain attests to a clash of economic habitus. But he does not claim that the acquisition of the capitalistic “spirit of calculation” (Bourdieu 2000: 17) or the adoption of a strategy of rational maximization equates to more substantively rational, or less ‘cosmological,’ economic behaviour.

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It appears we have a puzzle. I have presented Berkes’ work as a paradigmatic example of classical secularization theory applied to explain alteration in a particular historical social formation. And yet in this application there appears to be a profound gap between the qualitative oppositions posited to characterize traditional and modern society or religion and secularity, and the actual realities of cultural-political modernity in ‘secular’ Turkey. Several complementary conclusions might be drawn in response. The first is that the secularization thesis, perhaps sound for some societies, only very partially accounts for historical and contemporary developments in Republican Turkey. Something else is needed there, say an ‘anthropocratization’ thesis. Chapter 3 will pursue this possibility. A second conclusion is that the theory of secularism itself is only very partially true. Here another issue comes into play, and this is whether the inadequacies in Berkes’ account make us rethink both secular representations of religious and secular societies, as well as polemical pro-secular arguments that contend secular modernity is characterized by the co-emergence of realityrevealing and religion-eliminating science, which in turn leads to more ‘rational’ behaviour. 2.1.2  Two Theories of Science Does any more central contention bedevil the field of comparative research in history, religion, and politics? Resounds of this debate on science and religion, to take just one example, can be heard in a century of interpretation of Max Weber’s influential work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (i.e. Turner 1974; Tenbruch 1980; Schluchter 1996). One, more dominant in political science, reads it as an affirmative account of modernism that sees the West as giving birth to a definitive breakthrough of rationality, in the process casting the Rest into the pit of tradition, reenchantment, or eternal catch-up—no matter what indigenous sources of rationalism, pragmatic environmental knowledge, or disenchantment there may have been. The other, more germane to anthropology, intuits that social-imaginary significations such as rational mastery or democracy, said to characterize the particular culture of the West, are values as arbitrary and peculiar as the ends animating any other social-historical society. Here secular modernity, as Charles Taylor (1995) argues, is best interpreted not as the discovery of a culture-neutral reason that dissipates the myths and errors of

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earlier social beliefs (of its own and of others), but as both an internal reform of Christendom and as the creation of a new socio-historical constellation. Kemalist modernity might be interpreted in exactly the same way, both as an alteration within Islam and as the making of a new society through innovative transformation of existing social-imaginary significations. These disputed interpretations of science and secularity give onto a number of other issues vital to the study of secularism and anthropocracy, including reconstruction of colonialism’s role in the emergence of European secularism, and interest in the indigenous origins of non-theocratic politics (Sect. 2.1.3). But first we must deal carefully with a more foundational issue, with secular accounts of antagonism and competition for truth between science and religion. Amongst the humanities, anthropology has been the discipline most interested in detailing the rich diversity of ways human beings across the globe organize their most fundamental intersubjective relationships. These involve, to name some central concerns, their regionally particular relations with god(s) and with fate-controlling powers; their relations with other living beings [nature], and with objects/things; and their relations with the state, with family, with friends and foes, and with their own selves. This interest in the cultural multiplicity of human practices and communities coincides with characteristic theoretical concerns, conflicts, and faultlines within the discipline. What constitutes, for example, rationality and reason amidst the variety of ways of being human and diverse dimensions of human experience?6 Other clusters of problems include renewed interest in comparative cosmologies (e.g. de Castro 2004), as well as in counter-arguments that connect the ontological turn in anthropology to expressivist currents in modernity itself (see, for example, Kahn 2016). There are disagreements, too, over relations between the self and the collective; and controversy over the political and ethical purpose of the anthropological enterprise itself. Is anthropology primarily social science, constructing objective knowledge about human beings and their worlds that transcends the self-understanding of the inhabitants of those worlds? Or is anthropology more solidarist social activism, seeking to intellectually  In The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis claims that society’s creation of its own existence is not a functional response to any universal needs: society “makes use in each case of the rational lines of what is given, but arranges them according to and subordinates them to significations which themselves do not belong to the rational order … but to the imaginary” (1987: 149). “What we call ‘reality’ and ‘rationality’ are its works” (ibid: 3). 6

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help defend those inhabitants from applications of the most destructive practices and imaginaries of modernity and capitalism? All of these issues congregate in the study of religion, science, politics, secularism, and anthropocracy. For some writers, the rise of science has been central to the evolution of secular societies. For them, secular modernity provides a quantum leap forward in humans’ objective understanding of the world, resulting in the debunking of religion. Others have been more critical of the understanding of science such claims entail. I sketch out the alternatives below. One advocate of the position that a crucial discontinuity happened in human history with the development of science in western Europe in the seventeenth century and after is the anthropologist Ernst Gellner. Although the genealogy and social context of the emergence of modernity is complex (Gellner is more interested in its implications than in tracing out its precedents), once the shift occurs there is no going back to the other side of what he calls the ‘Big Ditch.’ Thereafter a “new form of knowledge exists which surpasses all others, both in its cognitive power and in its social iciness” (Gellner 1992: 50). The “existence of trans-cultural and amoral knowledge is the fact of our lives” (ibid: 54). Despite its religious roots, this cognitive style or style of knowledge is now intrinsically secular and non-religious. Its dominance means we live in a world defined by the “existence of a unique, unstable and powerful system of knowledge of nature, and its corrosive, unharmonious relationship to other clusters of ideas (‘cultures’) in terms of which men live” (ibid: 60). In short, because ‘enlightenment rationalist fundamentalism’ eviscerates the claim that all cultures are cognitively equal, for Gellner the anthropological issue is to comprehend the global disruption caused by the dominance of this real and unbelievably powerful ‘culture-transcending’ cognitive and technological knowledge, which all societies must adapt to or adopt in some measure. What do these principles of knowledge or cognitive procedures mean for religion? Enlightenment secular fundamentalism (Gellner’s term): desacralizes, disestablishes, disenchants everything substantive: no privileged facts, occasions, individuals, institutions or associations. In other words, no miracles, no divine interventions and conjuring performances and press conferences, no saviours, no sacred churches or sacramental communities. All hypotheses are subject to scrutiny, all facts open to novel interpretations, and all facts subject to symmetrical laws which preclude the miraculous, the sacred occasion, the intrusion of the Other into the Mundane. (ibid: 81)

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In short, science reveals religions’ ignorance of the genuine functioning forces of the world. Gellner notes the multiple emotional qualities and efficacy of religion, but “places these within the logic of a real historical world impossible to grasp, cognitively, in religious terms” (McLennan 2015: 127). According to McLennan, Gellner’s ‘methodological atheism’ exemplifies the project of critical social science. Political secularism is an integral aspect of this religion-shattering knowledge, with its emphasis on minimizing and privatizing the errors of religion by withdrawing God(s) from society (its legal systems, public sphere, education, etc). Following Chap. 1, we might differentiate this particular secular understanding of religion from an anthropocratic one. While assertive secularism takes for granted the falsity of religion’s own ‘meta-physical’ claims and language, anthropocracy is interested in a controlled re-sacralizing of them for purposes of governance. How should we understand Gellner’s (and many others’) declarations concerning the relevance and efficacy of  this secularizing history and science? First, science may be amoral and culture-transcending, but it is doubtful that scientists are or can be. As Edmund Husserl said a hundred years ago, “When it is actually natural science that speaks, we listen gladly and as disciples. But it is not always natural science that speaks when natural scientists [or anthropologists] are talking” (1982: 39). More significantly, there is not just  one history or narrative of the emergence of science, and competing accounts are not so simplistic. Husserl’s phenomenology can be understood as an attempt to improve science by exposing the fallacy of its dominant naturalistic philosophy. For Husserl, science is naïve in assuming that the world exists independently of the subject’s—in this case the scientist’s— apprehension and objectification  of it, and of their intentions towards it. He calls this presumption the ‘natural attitude,’ characterized by the “naïveté with which one presupposes that the world is self-evidently in being – given to us by experience as self-evidently already out there” (1931: 5). For Husserl, the natural attitude in science or theoretical naturalism assumes that “every phenomenon is encompassed within and explained by the laws of nature” (Moran 2000: 142). For example, for many varieties of cognitive science ‘consciousness,’ like any other psychical or physical object in the world, is posited to be a natural phenomenon. Yet as Husserl points out, description and analysis of consciousness as a neurophysiological property of the brain or of the psyche disregard the fact that experiential knowledge of its nature relies on the scientist’s consciousness to disclose it. Dan Zahavi puts it this way: “Every positive science rests upon

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a field of givenness or evidence that is presupposed but not investigated by the sciences themselves” (2004: 337). By contrast, phenomenology criticizes forms of objectivism that attend “only to what appears and not to the relation of the appearing to the subject” (Moran 2002: 2). Thus, one central insight of Husserl’s work includes its identification of consciousness’ positive constitution of the meaning of the ‘world’—its entities, situations, events, living beings, people, places, ideas, and so on. Here ‘objectivity’—the act of positing the sense, value, and significance of those things for one’s self—is constituted out of subjectivity. Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty gives the example of an unclimbable rock face: a “large or small, vertical or slanting rock, are things which have no meaning for anyone who is not intending to surmount them, [that is] for a subject whose projects do not carve out such determinate forms from the uniform mass of the in itself and cause an oriented world to arise – a significance in things” (1962: 436). In short, perceiving the world simultaneously involves the constitution of its sense. Naturalistic science is one way of constituting the significance of things. In the light of Husserl’s work, Gellner’s description of scientificsecular rationality as ‘culture-­transcending’ reveals a commitment to a particular model of knowledge, informed by naturalistic assumptions that presume the existence of a subject-independent world. It fosters a collective naturalism, in which ‘nature,’ simply out there, is taken for granted, waiting for its operations to be objectively discovered. However, far from culture-transcending, naturalism can be described in Debaise’s words as the very “cosmology of the moderns” (2017).7 Indeed, that much scientific-secular thinking fails to consider the basis of its knowledge of ‘nature’ (in terms of its intelligibility and givenness for consciousness) means that many proponents of secular scientific rationality appear  Debaise bases his criticism of the ‘modern conception of science’ on the work of Alfred Whitehead, who protested against what he perceived as science’s ‘bifurcation’ of nature. There is a strong resemblance between Husserl’s critique of naturalism and Whitehead’s attack on ‘scientific materialism.’ Whitehead writes: 7

there persists … the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also, it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived. (cited in Debaise 2017: 8)

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unaware, or perhaps less than honest, of the structures, interests, and intentions that orient so much of the  production  of contemporary science. For example, why does Gellner not talk about the “capitalist structuration of science and technology” (McLennan 2015: 134), including their hardwiring by a regime of intellectual property rights?8 Given its funding by states and private corporations, how convincing is his claim that science, unlike religion, “fails to legitimate social arrangements”? (1992: 60). Why does he not mention military science—about how preparing for war undermines science’s ‘amoral’ impartiality, as seen in the present arms race in autonomous weapons systems (for example,  killer robots)?9 What of science and its use in political projects, as applied  in DNA testing to rewrite India’s history,10 or the political forbidding of research into certain topics (say into firearm deaths in the USA)?11 Why no analyses of science communities and disciplines and the gendered dynamics of their research practices,12 nor of internal science versus science debates that detract from grandiose claims for the consensual truths unveiled by rational modernity?13 Where is the recognition of the 8  The economist Jonathan Aldred answers the simple question as to why more money is spent on research for anti-wrinkle cream than for malaria treatments: “Because a vaccination programme only works if the poor get vaccinated too, which limits the price manufacturers can charge.” In https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/05/pandemic-orthodoxeconomics-covid-19 9  According to a 2020 report prepared for Congress by the Congressional Research Service, in 2017 43.5% of all US government expenditure on research and development was devoted to defence. See https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45441.pdf 10  The aim of the research is to prove through DNA testing that Hindus are related to the first inhabitants of India. See https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ india-modi-culture/ 11  Paul Krugman claims that “from 1996 to 2017 the Centers for Disease Control in the US were literally forbidden to fund research into firearm injuries and deaths.” See https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/arguing-with-zombies-reviewpaul-krugman-trump-republicans?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR3wZz HCC9i72BEo86NumK6XWEHcRryoT4zDw7E9aVwAWfpP1ruNMYMTvBoastronomy 12  Chanda Prescod-Weinstein discusses ‘toxic masculinity’ in the field of physics and astronomy, and particularly in the area of early universe cosmology. See https://www.publicbooks.org/toxic-masculine-cosmology/#fnref-20759-3 13  There is probably no more significant area of controversy than so-called ‘race science’ and its defence of ‘race realism’ that not so long ago “represented the common sense of the US scientific establishment [while] its tenets offered justification for racial discrimination in American law” (https://www.publicbooks.org/what-the-nazis-learned-from-america/) In his small book Is Science Racist? (1917) Jonathan Marks analyses how contemporary toleration for racism in science means that racist science can still get published in leading science journals.

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contradictory outcomes of new technologies, and of the social relations in which they are embedded, that  produce their effects upon the world? (Kierans and Bell 2017). We must consider several final things in assessing Gellner’s exemplary championing of secularism in the name of science and his accompanying demythologizing of religion. First, when Gellner’s work in the areas of life that anthropology is traditionally most interested in is examined for fruits of the cognitive breakthrough he sketches out, how shrivelled and dry its sustaining insights appear! In a recent paper on Gellner’s work, Chris Hann politely comments that Gellner’s model of Islamic society “is no longer seriously debated by the specialists” (2015: 45). Zubaida (1995) makes a frontal attack on it, and in Turkish, Persian, or Mughal studies few scholars would apply his core theory of ‘cyclical reformation’ in Islam to ‘Perso-Turkic’ or Ottoman history. Gellner’s sanguine view of enlightenment secular rationalism and its scientific breakthrough in cognition appears in keeping with his equally benign description of the nation-state, said to sustain industrial modernity through a universal education system while facilitating social mobility, homogenizing class-cultural differences, and providing wide dispersal of wealth (see Hann 2015). For Gellner there is only one type of industrial society, and even fundamentalist regimes have to conform to it. And there’s the rub. Many claims about disenchanting science reach a point where ‘epochal’ statements end and the difficult task of interpreting political realities and ethics in the real world begins. Too often, tendentious opinions, partisan politics, ethical presuppositions, and inevitable discriminations come majorly into play. Even as capital ‘S’  science is defended, the positions of its advocates on particular matters of social significance for our lives together are too often just that: partial and controversial  arguments, informed by unproveable first assumptions, and connected to political positions and policies that conceal the interests and faith on which they rest. Secular science presented as a superior cognitive procedure may produce efficacious (if reductive) knowledge of nature, but its usefulness as guide to conduct on matters to do with our political, ethical, and social existence is limited. Significantly, sometimes Gellner is more circumspect than his always flamboyant [s]wordsmanship exhibits. Thus, although he mocks cognitive

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relativism as a romantic affectation of postmodern ‘re-endorsers,’14 he does not extend his scorn to the possibility of moral relativism. Even Gellner is not sure whether secular knowledge can answer the question about what values we should live by. When judged by the pragmatic criterion of technological efficacy, science trumps all other knowledge and cognitive styles. On the other hand, “looking at the diversity of human ­activities, this great power only really seems to work in certain fields  – natural sciences, technology. In other spheres, the understanding of society and of culture for instance, … one is hardly tempted to speak of a breath-taking revolution” (1992: 62). Nevertheless, for Gellner what is important in the end is a world marked by asymmetry: asymmetry between powerful naturalistic sciences and fields of social practice such as morality, politics, and culture upon which they encroach; and pervasive asymmetry between those countries who develop and control such knowledge and others who don’t and can’t. For Gellner, it is the dominance of one cognitive and technological style that causes the harsh realities of global inequality and disruption. Forget the mechanisms of colonialism, world systems, or planetary capitalism. Rather it is as if what that style could do, it is fated to do. 2.1.3   Secularism, Post-secularism, and Anthropocracy Over the last two decades or more, many of the binary conceptions that characterize the discourse of secularism—that is science versus religion, or the secular versus the sacred/religious—have been reconsidered, criticized as distinctions that constitute an affirmative and Eurocentric theory of modernity. Indeed, Gellner’s concluding positions in 1992 can be thought of as a provisional finishing line from which new ‘post-secular’ re-assessments of secularism have taken off. Post-secular perspectives accuse the secularization thesis of west-centrism in its models of religion’s privatization, compartmentalization, and decline in modernity (e.g. see, Casanova 2011). They identify, too, a problematic duality in the explanation for secularism’s spread that vacillates between insisting on its cause in the truth of the cognitive style and knowledge of secular science, or 14  According to Gellner, cognitive relativism proclaims that “the old simplicities and the new luxuries are much of a muchness, and in any case that one must not value one above the other, that each is to be judged by its own standards, and that no one standard can stand beyond culture, and all cultures contain their own justifications” (ibid: 79).

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pragmatically attributing it to its modernizing technical and economic prowess. Each implies (ala Gellner) that its spread is only incidentally linked to Western imperialism and colonialism. Equally significantly, postsecularism steps back from triumphalist versions of secular modernity that assert it inaugurates the liberation of human life from error as untenable religious practices, ideas, and identifications/selves are progressively replaced by true(r) understandings of the world. Famously, Taylor names these accounts of secularism ‘subtraction stories,’ because they understand the “history of religion as the career of a mistake that can now be corrected” (Warner et al. 2010: 24). If not by an advance in rationality or by a sloughing off of illusions, then how? Taylor (2007) encourages his readers to perceive of secularism in the West not as negation of religion but as an outcome of diffuse changes in Latin Christianity itself that over time constructed new values, new understandings of the self, new sensibilities, and new experiences of spirituality and nature. The West could become secular only because it became religious in a certain way. Castoriadis would call secularity a new institution of society, in which reformed religious imaginaries “enter the new with the signification given them by the new and could not enter it otherwise” (1997: 14). The cumulative result of centuries of these developments makes the Western present a ‘secular age,’ marked today by an ambiguous emptying of religion from public space, and in many places by decline of religious belief.15 Most fundamentally, a secular age is characterized by a transformation in the conditions of belief. Secular societies are not post-religious: [many] people still practise. Rather, they are secular because of the shift in the “whole background framework in which one believes or refuses to believe in God” (Taylor 2007: 13). In secular societies believers and unbelievers alike live in what Taylor calls an ‘immanent frame,’ predicated on a stark distinction between the natural and the supernatural that developed in Latin Christianity. Dwelling in the immanent frame gives us the sense of “living in impersonal orders – cosmic, social, and ethical orders which can be fully explained in their own terms and don’t need to be conceived as dependent on anything outside, on the ‘supernatural’ or the ‘transcendent’” (Taylor 2010: 307). One central component of this immanent 15  This privatization is ambiguous because contrary to ideal models, in many secular societies there is no neat institutional separation of religion from supposedly autonomous spheres of public activity—that is, educational, economic, political, and so on.

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frame is a shift of self-­perception from a porous to a buffered self, a subject that is not open to possession, affliction, or affection from any supernatural or meta-human other but that is sealed off and operating on its own sources of energy. To be personally religious or irreligious in a secular age involves grappling with these conditions, and it is in his description of this experiential grappling that Taylor’s work is phenomenological. It is also clearly Eurocentric. In one way, Eurocentrism in Taylor’s genealogical account is inevitable, given the incredible detail of his investigation into the elements (regions, times, people, ideas, collective understandings) that have contributed over centuries to the emergence of secularity as both a sensibility and as a social-political condition in the West. Nevertheless, in its introspective focus and method there is a profoundly significant missing dimension to the project, and that is the ‘role’ of the non-West in the making of European secularity. This is a widespread criticism. Wendy Brown notes that Taylor’s focus on secularism in Europe alone makes it ‘more provincially European, monolithic, colonial, than it needs to be’ (2007: 1), while Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun assert that “the colonial governance of non-Christian peoples was one of the central contexts in which Europeans developed their understandings of religion, the state, and themselves” (2010: 26–27). Another interlocutor germane to the development of Western selfcomprehension and similarly absent in Taylor’s discussion is Orthodox Christianity, and through it the “Islamochristian synthesis”16 (Lowry 2003: 137) of the Ottoman empire, which as a Mediterranean power was a fundamental player in the early modern system of European states. Although Taylor (2010: 301) acknowledges in response that his work fails to consider the ways that Latin Christendom’s understandings of religion were developed through encounters with other parts of the globe,17 he is unrepentant in maintaining that his main target is the self-regarding selfperception of ‘the West,’ which presumes its inventive and contingent conceptions about the economy, social being, religion, rationality, nature, and so on are objective truths of the world. 16  Perhaps the closest equivalence to Taylor’s project in Islamic studies is the work of Wael Hallaq (2013, 2019). His focus on the classical Islamic system similarly sketches out an internally consistent paradigmatic model of Muslim thought, state, and subject formation that minimizes the influence of other religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism— upon it. 17  He also comments wryly that the book would have to be longer than its 900 pages were it to do so.

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If for Taylor secularism in the West developed regardless of the West’s colonial projects around the world, and if therefore A Secular Age is not able nor concerned to extend its discussion of ‘deep secularity’ to the nonWestern world, how else can we explain the global spread and variety of modes of secularism? In Formations of the Secular Talal Asad proposes one particular account. Like Taylor he contends that the practice of ‘secularism’ is best identified by tracing the shifting meanings of certain key Christian-European words/ concepts/practices over time—for example as identified in new discourses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the significance of pain, on suffering, on inspiration, on myth, and on human agency. One facilitator of the complex theorizations that coalesced together to form the concept of the ‘secular’ was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ wars of religion, partly resolved by the principle ‘whose realm, her/his religion’ (see also, Calhoun et al. 2011: 14–16). More significant than religious toleration, for Asad these new secular arrangements initiated the “sovereign power of the modern nation-state” (Bangstad 2009: 191). Another core contributing factor to the constitution of the secular was “European encounters with the non-European world, in the enlightened space and time that witnessed the construction of ‘religion’ and ‘nature’ as universal categories” (Asad 2003: 35). For Asad, these encounters occur on a two-way street. Via European colonialism and then American imperialism, “West European history … has had profound consequences for the ways that the doctrine of secularism has been conceived and implemented in the rest of the modernizing world” (2003: 25). The spread of the concept of the secular has happened because of the West’s domination, making secularism an import and an imposition in non-­ Western contexts. Even so, Asad gives a complex account of how the secularization of law happened in the case of colonial Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes not only its circumscription and reform of the sharia, but also how the importation of European legal codes and procedures advanced centralization and state building even as the reforms were also means by which a partially independent Muslim government sought to limit and resist more direct British intervention (2003: 214; 218). But these are not Asad’s prime interests. His concern is not merely with who authored secularism or even in its virtues or vices, but in identifying how in Egypt “new institutional and discursive spaces … make different kinds of knowledge, action, and desire possible” (ibid: 217). In the light

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of such investigation, a secular state is revealed as a “complex arrangement of legal reasoning [punishment and violence], moral practice [ethics], and political authority” rather than distinguished, as normative secular theory asserts, by “religious indifference, or rational ethics, or political toleration” (ibid: 255). In some ways, in critically de-constructing the orthodox definition of secularism, Asad re-describes (as secular) what we have called anthropocracy in Chap. 1. Let us take stock. How do Asad’s and Taylor’s insights apply to the issue of the existence of multiple alternative modes of secularity or anthropocracy? One problem in particular stands out. As we have seen, for both Taylor and Asad key terms such as ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ are historically emergent concepts, mutually defining and linked both to western-Christian history and to the modern colonial- or nation-­state’s political project to reorganize certain domains of cultural practice. Each presumes either that there are no non-Western indigenous secularisms (Taylor) or that if there is, there is a definitive break and fundamental difference between the practices, sensibilities, and traditions of secularity in the West and the secularity of other societies that it replaces (Asad).18 Let me argue that both of these presumptions are false. For one, neither the Ottoman state nor the Persian Qajar regime ever lost their governing sovereignty. Indeed, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman government was able to strengthen its control over many once autonomous Kurdish and Arab authorities on its eastern periphery (Deringil 2003; Houston 2008). In that case, secularism and anthropocracy in the Ottoman Empire are not well understood to be mere repercussions of colonialism, or the result of mimicry of European political secularism, or consequences of the passive ‘spread’ or ‘diffusion’ of Western social imaginaries there. Rather, we should interpret Ottoman-­Turkish anthropocracy in a different way—as a consequence of a long-term project of political self-alteration. In its consummate phase, from 1900 to 1950, the ̇ Committee of Union and Progress [Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti], a late-­ Ottoman military and bureaucratic social-political movement, established the Turkish Republic and instituted a new society through a voluntary, historically messy, and utilitarian transformation of selected aspects of both Islam and dimensions of the immanent frame. As we have seen with 18  Bangstad argues that for Asad, secularism “seems to form part of an historical script pertaining to the West, and to the extent that it is appropriated by the ‘non-West’ it is seen as forming part of ‘Western’ dominance through ‘Westernized’ elites and as constituting a script written by ‘Westerners’” (2009: 194).

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Yusuf Akçura, in an alliance with Turkism, the ‘Young Turk’ anthropocrats rejected a rival nineteenth-century Ottoman secularism and established in its place a reformed and re-embedded Sunni Islam and a Turkish ethnicstate as twin planks in its new regime, an alternative Muslim institution of society. Clearly then, both secularism and anthropocracy, as varieties of nontheocratic governance, have a complex genealogy in Turkey. In the first instance their origins can be traced back to the intellectual foment and political-legal transformations of the Ottoman nineteenth century. But equally importantly, their underpinnings can be identified in more diffuse developments—to centuries of aesthetic, philosophical, and religious innovations, as well as to socio-political modifications, in Ottoman social imaginaries and institutions. Shahab Ahmed’s wonderous book What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic shows us a way forward in studying Islam as a human and historical phenomenon in what he calls the ‘Balkans-to-Bengal complex’ in Islam’s ‘post-formative’ period 1350–1850. In it he argues that prevailing essentialist conceptualizations of Islam fail to do justice to the “capaciousness, complexity, and, often, outright contradiction that obtains within the historical phenomenon that has proceeded from the human engagement with the idea and reality of Divine Communication to Muhammad, the messenger of God” (2016: 7). To establish his point, he presents six integral historical phenomena or manifestations of Islam in that period that have in some way or other been marginalized in prevalent conceptualizations of the term ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic,’ asking about the significance of each for normative claims made by Muslims about the religion. We can also name these to be backgrounded elements to Muslim secularism and anthropocracy. These include Qurantranscending Islamic philosophy; shariah-minimalizing Sufism; panentheism in the philosophy of ‘unity of existence’; beloved poets (e.g. Hafız and Celaleddin Rumi); visual Islamic art; and wine drinking. When the most “widely-copied, widely-read, widely-memorized, widely-recited … book of poetry in Islamic history … takes as its definitive themes the ambiguous exploration of wine-drinking and (often homo-) erotic love, as well as a disparaging attitude to observant ritual piety, is that canonical work and the ethos it epitomizes Islamic?” (ibid: 32), he asks. These contradictory claims about Islam attest to ongoing debates and disagreements amongst Muslims about their religion as well as to the emergence of new socio-religious syntheses and trajectories in the Balkansto-Bengal complex. All are ignored in Berkes’ reductive Ottoman history. Most importantly for our argument here, we can add to Ahmed’s list

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a seventh historical phenomena enacted by Muslims in that period and similarly typically doubted to be Islamic according to dominant and prescriptive orthodox claims about essential Islam. That is the cacophonous realm of political thought, state power, religion, and governance. Constitutionalism, consultation, autocracy, separation of powers, shared sovereignty, citizenship, Ottomanism, Turkism, Islamism, democracy, secularism, anthropocracy, and so on can all be seen as new constructions of Islam, indigenous products created by Muslims in their taking-up, developing, debating, and contradicting of existing institutional and discursive Islamic elements. Against Taylor’s Eurocentrism and Asad’s genealogy of colonial contamination, Muslim societies became secular/anthropocratic in the twentieth century only because in the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries they became Islamically religious in certain ways.

2.2   Conclusion: An Anthropocratic Age? In his book Positive Theory of Social Existence, published 1851–1854, Auguste Comte sketches out the history of [the only] two types of society. The first he calls primitive theocracy, characterized by the rule of priests oriented to the deity. The second he names sociocracy, whose development passes through three transitional phases, the Greek, the Roman, and the Mediaeval eras. He thus manages in one schema to make western history the universal history of the world, and contemporary theocratic government an evolutionary throwback. Based on the scientific principles of his new sociology, Comte proclaims the arrival of the positivistic state and of the ultimate sociocracy: We see now, in the vanguard of humanity the beginning of the end of this long education of Man; for we can clearly trace its general features, now that we have founded the new Science of Sociology, and as a deduction from Sociology, the Universal Religion. Five centuries of anarchy have passed even in the West, since the last phase of the preparatory eras closed with the Middle Age. We must see in this how urgent is the need of a new reorganisation: a new spiritual life first, and then a new material life. (Comte 1875: 344)

Is sociocracy another word for anthropocracy? Clearly, they share common elements. Each political theory considers the formalization by religion of the deity’s self-revelation an impediment to hard-won human sovereignty. And yet despite that conviction, neither proposes as a consequence religion-free society or a privatized civil spirituality. Rather, as also recommended by Yusuf Akçura, each prefers and recommends a

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public-political religion that functionally contributes to, not obstructs, the revolutionary projects of the new social movement—state assemblages that have dominated politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, certain core differences emerge between them. Comte devises a scientifically underwritten new religion, providing an atheistic substitute for the Catholicism of his day, one in which humanity publicly venerates itself, with him as its high priest. Worship involves a liturgical calendar that dedicates holy days to great men in history. By contrast, even while disposing with the sovereignty of the deity, anthropocracy more quietly goes about the partial rehabilitation of its Lord. Comte’s sociocracy requires scientifically informed new religion. Anthropocracy knows better, seeking to instrumentalize existing religious conceptions and practices. Clearly, secularity is less regulated than both, in leaving the organization and propagation of religious activities and beliefs to the discretion of individuals and autonomous religious authorities— even if, as Asad diagnoses, there are coercive limits to the independence of religious denominations in a secular political system. In brief, according to Comte, sociocracy is the master appellation for every non-theocratic political arrangement. Logically, anthropocracy and secularism are its subspecies. If we must have a catch-all concept for non-theocratic rule, let me conclude Part 2 by mounting a brief argument for why the term anthropocracy, and not sociocracy or secularism, is the more suitable candidate. The reason is that certain normative political arrangements taken for granted as characterizing ideal secularism obscure two significant political features of secular orders. The first has been their historical politics of male domination; the second is their anthropocentrism. By contrast, in the expression anthropocracy—literally, the rule of men—each of these elements are identified and acknowledged. The androcentric gendering of secularism is a slippery subject to grasp. One reason is that as we have seen, mainstream accounts of secularism present it as involving legal reforms, political parties, ideologies, state policies, and public institutions. Alternatively, the discourse of secular modernity foregrounds relations between state and religion as central to its enterprise, variously advocating human liberation from superstition; knowledge and science; the virtue of an irreligious public sphere; and the necessity of state guardianship over flawed religious creeds. In both cases the topic of secularism’s gendered prejudices and practices is downplayed. And yet, when the first secular parliaments of every country in the world opened their doors to the representatives of the people, was it merely

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incidental to their secular political arrangements that the vast majority of those representatives were men? Although it may be objected that this masculine domination references existing social relations and not secularity per se, the empirical fact of such gender imbalance—say in the first Turkish laic-national assembly in 1924 and thereafter—suggests a more immanent connection (see Chap. 3). A second reason for the de-emphasizing of male privilege in discussions of historical secular systems is somewhat at cross purposes with the first. Today secularism is now felt by many people to be a political style that retards gender inequality, in comparison to the patriarchy and sexism of organized religions, particularly of Islam. In the widespread and often deeply Islamophobic discourse of secularism as female emancipation, its dramatic struggle to free [Muslim] women from oppressive private religious practices remains a powerful narrative. And yet, in her recent book Sex and Secularism, the historian Joan Scott argues that contrary to contemporary equations between secularism and gender equality, “gender inequality was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity,” and that “Euro-Atlantic modernity entailed a new order of women’s subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics” (2018: 3). If Scott’s contentions have any validity, the term anthropocracy literally draws our attention to gender discrimination that has been one key dimension of historical non-theocratic political orders. Science-centric accounts of secularism that attribute its emergence to the growth of reason and rationality reveal another of its central political features. As we have already seen earlier, certain versions of secular science reductively constitute—unacknowledged—living beings as things objectively knowable in themselves rather than as things meaningful or known only in relation to the purposes and perspectives of the perceiver. Indeed, what Zahavi (2010) calls naturalized science posits that even when encountered in study or in the laboratory the world exists independent of human intentions towards it or of human constitution of its significance. For naturalism, nature is taken to be an object of cognition even as the event of its cognizing is taken for granted.19 19  This is not an argument to claim that religious cosmologies, similarly understood as meaning-constituting ideologies, do not also cause suffering to animals, as the rite of animal sacrifice in expiation for human sin or as gifts to the ancestors, shows. However, it is an argument to say that without some sort of phenomenological reduction or epoche, both scientists and priests may take for granted the intentions orienting their pragmatic practices towards non-human living beings.

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The same naivety applies in the triumphant attributing of secularism to science, whereby religion, God, religious beliefs, spiritual practices, and so on are claimed to dissipate as external entities in the light of truer scientific knowledge. In the process the act of giving them meaning is denied. The resulting sovereignty of humans over against God overlaps with a theoretical attitude that also facilitates the merciless rule of human beings over non-humans. Bilgrami presents a version of the first scientific naturalism, the deism of the late seventeenth century that in the image of God as clock-winder saw Him set the universe in motion and then withdraw. But the victory of providential deism against, say, the pantheism advocated by Spinoza, was not won by any scientific superiority, but because “the ideologues of the Royal Society, around the Boyle lectures started by Samuel Clarke, forged an alliance with commercial and mercantile interests that were keen to view nature in predatory terms for profit and gain … Nature, being brute, could not make demands or put constraints on us” (2010: 149). Similarly, Asad (2003: 47–49) describes how pain inflicted upon animals in systematic experimentation in the eighteenth century became central to new secular understandings of suffering and agency. What are the social and political consequences of this objectification of nature, including in some disciplines of human nature itself? Although phenomenological anthropology recommends concrete investigative description of scientists’ perceptions of and interactions with ‘nature’ (see for example Lyons (2013) careful work on the science of animal experimentation), here let me pre-emptively propose that a strong correlation exists between naturalized philosophy and the instrumental destruction of our environment, which today has reached ruinous proportions. One result is that animals in their hundreds of millions are addressed and treated as objects. The outcome is their exposure to factory farming and slaughter, to experimentation and to murder in laboratories, to the appropriation of their habitats, and to the destruction of their homes. In short, some advocates of secularism and anthropocracy, enchanted by natural science, accept as inevitable the ‘rule’ of humans over animals. But only anthropocracy literally declares it, for those with ears to hear, in its name. Precisely because it does, we should acknowledge that we dwell, not only in the anthropocene, but in an anthropocratic age as well.

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References Ahmed, S (2016) What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Asad, T (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, T, Brown, W, Butler, J Mahmood, S (2013) Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press. Bangstad, S (2009) Contesting Secularism/s: Secularism and Islam in the work of Talal Asad. Anthropological Theory 9: 188–208. Berkes, N (1964) The Development of Secularism in Turkey. Montreal: McGill University Press. Bourdieu, P (2000) Making the Economic Habitus: Algerian Workers Revisited. Ethnography 1(1): 17–45. Bowen J (2010) Secularism: Conceptual Genealogy or Political Dilemma? Comparative Study of History and Society 52(3): 680–694. Brown, W (2007) [https://tif.ssrc.org/2007/10/22/idealism-­materialism-­ secularism/] Accessed 27/05/2009. Calhoun, C, Juergensmeyer, M, & VanAntwerpen, J (2011) Introduction. In C.  Calhoun, M.  Juergensmeyer, & J.  VanAntwerpen (eds.) Rethinking Secularism (pp.3–30). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cannell, F (2010) The Anthropology of Secularism. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 85–100. Casanova, J (2011) The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms. In C.  Calhoun, M.  Juergensmeyer, & J.  VanAntwerpen (eds.) Rethinking Secularism (pp. 54–74). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, C (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society. London: Polity Press. Castoriadis, C (1997) ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’, in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Pyschoanalysis, and the Imagination (pp.3–18). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Comte, A (1875) (1851–54) System of Positive Polity, Vol. 2. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Caliskan, K (2018) Towards a New Political Regime in Turkey: From Competitive toward Full Authoritarianism. New Perspectives on Turkey May 58: 5–33. Debaise, D (2017) Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press. Deringil, S (2003) ‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45(2): 311–342. Eagleton, T (2009) Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gellner, E (1992) Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London: Routledge.

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Ghobadzadeh, N (2015) Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gőle, N (2010) The Civilizational, Spatial and Sexual Powers of the Secular. In M. Warner, J. VanAntwerpen, & C. Calhoun (eds.), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (pp. 243–64). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hagglund, M (2019) This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. New York: Pantheon Books. Hallaq, W (2013) The Impossible State: Islam, Politics and Modernity’s Moral Predicament New York: Columbia University Press. Hallaq, W (2019) Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha. New York: Columbia University Press. Hann, C (2015) After Ideocracy and Civil Society: Gellner, Polanyi and the New Peripheralization of Central Europe. Thesis Eleven 128: pp. 41–55. Houston, C (2008) Kurdistan: Crafting of National Selves. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (Oxford: Berg). Husserl, E (1913) (1982) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. General introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (trans: Kersten F). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E (1931) (1989). Phenomenology and Anthropology. In Nenon T and Sepp HP (eds) Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937), Gesammelte Werke, XXVII. pp. 164–181. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kahn J (2001) Modernity and Exclusion. London: Sage Publications. Kahn J (2016) Asia, Modernity and the Pursuit of the Sacred. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kapferer, B (2001) Anthropology. The Paradox of the Secular. Social Anthropology 9 (3): 341–344. Keyder, Ç (1987) State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development. London: Verso. Kierans, C & Bell, K (2017) Cultivating Ambivalence. Some Methodological Considerations for Anthropology. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(2): 23–44. Kim, S & Ivanhoe, P (2016) Introduction, in Ivanhoe, P & Kim, S (eds.) Confucianism, A Habit of the Heart: Bellah, Civil Religion, and East Asia. Albany: SUNY Press. Lowry, H. (2003) The Nature of the Early Ottoman State. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lyons, D. (2013). The Politics of Animal Experimentation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Marks, J (1917) Is Science Racist? Cambridge: Polity Press. Masuzawa, T (2005) The Invention of World Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McLennan, G (2010) The Postsecular Turn. Theory, Culture & Society 27(4): 3–20.

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McLennan, G (2015) Is Secularism History? Thesis Eleven 128: 126–140. Merleau-Ponty, M (1962) (1989) Phenomenology of Perception. London, UK: Routledge. Moran, D (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology. London, UK: Routledge. Moran, D (2002) Editor’s Introduction, in D. Moran and T. Mooney (eds.) The Phenomenology Reader (pp. 1–26). London, UK: Routledge. Parla T and Davison A (2004) Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Pullman, P (1997) The Subtle Knife. London: Scholastic. Ram, K (2013) Fertile Disorder. Spirit Possession and Its Provocation of the Modern. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Schluchter, W (1996) Paradoxes of Modernity, Culture and Conduct in the Theory of Max Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Scott, James (1999) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, Joan (2018) Sex and Secularism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, C (1995) Two Theories of Modernity. The Hastings Centre Report 25 (2): 24–33. Taylor C (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, C (2010) Afterword: Apologia pro Libro suo, in M.  Warner, J. VanAntwerpen, & C. Calhoun (eds.), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (300–321). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tenbruch, F (1980) The Problem of Thematic Unity in the works of Max Weber, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 31 (3): 316–351. Turner, B (1974) Weber and Islam. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Viveiros de Castro, E (2004) Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation. Tipiti, Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, Vol. 2 (1): 3–22. Warner M, Van Antwerpen J, & Calhoun C (2010) Editors’ Introduction, in M. Warner, J. Van Antwerpen & C. Calhoun (eds.) Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (1–31). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Zahavi, D (2004) Phenomenology and the Project of Naturalization, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3: 331–347. Zahavi, D (2010) Naturalized Phenomenology, in S. Gallagher & D. Schmicking (eds.) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (3–19). New York: Springer. Zubaida, S (1995) Is There a Muslim Society? Ernest Gellner’s Sociology of Islam. Economy and Society 24 (2): 151–188.

CHAPTER 3

Anthropocratic Republic?

Abstract  To ground these arguments about secularity, theocracy, and anthropocracy, this chapter presents an analysis of what it contends is  an exemplary anthropocracy, the politics of the Turkish Republic. Of course, this is not an orthodox description of modern Turkey. Indeed, much of the political science literature on Islamism takes for granted that one core aim of Muslim activism there is the destruction of secularism and the establishment of theocracy amidst fears that Turkey under the current AKP (Justice and Development Party) government is engaged in the Islamization of society and the theocratization of the state. By contrast, rather than arguing that the AKP has generated ‘regime change’ by overturning Kemalist ‘secularism’ in Turkey, this chapter explores its extension of the ‘anthropocratic Republic.’ Keywords  Religion • Anthropocracy • Turkey • Turkish Republic • Laiklik • Diyanet • Kemalism • AKP • Islamism • Nationalism • Atheism • Kurdish question

3.1   Introduction In Chap. 2 I argued that the hugely varied relations between religions, states, and societies in the contemporary world have required an expansion of the analytical categories used to describe and compare their © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Houston, Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey, Contemporary Anthropology of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79657-0_3

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politics. Acknowledgement of ‘multiple secularisms’ is one response (e.g. Stepan 2011), and the study of ‘project theocracies’ (Timmer 2015) another. A third schematic option is recognition of an anthropocratic style of politics, drawing attention not only to its subordination of the divine to the state, but to its retooling and pressing into service of religious practices, institutions, and languages—and thus of the God activated in them—for the explicit rule of (particular) men. Anthropocracy can be defined more literally as well, describing male dominated and anthropocentric political orders. In this chapter let me put some flesh on these dry theoretical bones, by applying the concept of anthropocracy to a historical society—to the past and present of the Republic of Turkey. For some, this may appear a quixotic enterprise, given the analytic orthodoxy that claims the Turkish Republic instituted itself in 1923 through establishing a secular political system.1 For others, the enterprise might appear unrealistic on different grounds—many people accuse the current AKP government of threatening that very secularism, with the long-term goal of re-Islamising or even theocratizing the Turkish political system. In this chapter, then, I intend to dispute both the dominant representation of the political arrangements of Turkey as secular (Sect. 3.1.1) and the claim that the AKP is pursuing an anti-secular political programme. On the contrary, in it I argue that the AKP, too, is instituting an anthropocratic Republic (Sect. 3.1.2). Of course, this first contention is not mine alone. Andrew Davison reminds readers that given their different etymologies, histories, and normative presuppositions, ‘secularism’ is not a synonym for the word ‘laicism.’ Equally significantly, he adds that even when politico-religious institutional arrangements in Turkey are properly re-labelled as laicism, those arrangements must be understood as a “limited, inconsistent, and ambivalent form of laicism” (2003: 333). In similar vein, and as we have seen (in Chap. 2), Göle argues that French and Turkish laicity are not the same beast and thus that using that word to analyse the Turkish political system is misleading, especially if explication begins with French laicite. 1  Even over the past few years literally hundreds of media articles make varieties of this claim. For example, on the very day that I revised the introduction (29/04/2020), The Guardian published an article on young people and religion in Turkey which asserts, almost in passing, that: “Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, banished religion from public life, creating a secular, pro-western republic that broke with the Ottoman past.” See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/29/turkish-students-increasingly-resisting-religion-study-suggests

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More recently, in their book Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey, Parla and Davison criticize the “tendency to mis-conceptualize Kemalism in the limited vocabulary of the great ‘isms’” (2004: 13). Indeed, for them describing Kemalism as secular suggests an “absence of rigorous attention to various analytical possibilities within the range of non-theocratic options” (2004: 14). In Turkish itself the words used to describe the Republic’s religio-political arrangements are laik and laiklik. Although often translated as secular and secularism in English, their meanings are plainly not the same. As Parla and Davison more bluntly explain: We do not equate laicism with secularism, although there are some areas of shared meaning and practice. Kemalist laicism is most often described throughout the literature as ‘secularism’, leaving the impressions that Kemalist laicism achieves everything from a radical separation between State and tradition to the privatization or elimination of religion in the conscience. As we argue, Kemalist laicism is at odds with these ideas in both concept and practice. [It] is a partly anticlerical and even limited form of laicism that posits neither a thorough separation between religious institutions and the state nor the privatization of religion characteristic of liberalism. (2004: 14)

If the normative languages of secularism and laicism, then, do not accurately elucidate institutional political practices2 in Turkey nor truthfully portray people’s religious or irreligious lives, for Parla and Davison the ideology of corporatism provides a firmer foundation for descriptive analysis of Kemalist politics. Corporatism is one possibility used to describe the Turkish system within the spectrum of non-theocratic politics (although one could also imagine a theocracy that has corporatist features). As I have asserted above, anthropocracy can be conceived of as another. What I propose to re-name as Turkish anthropocracy emerged in its recognizable contemporary form with the institution of the Republic in 1923,3 which polemically benchmarked its political and cultural revolution against selected features and institutions of its predecessor, the 2  In an earlier work Davison diagnoses how Anglophone accounts of the institutional politics of the Republic “express a shared commitment to unduly narrow secular modern prejudices” (1998: 9). 3  In Chap. 2 I have argued that this broad anthropocratic political project was initiated by the Ottomans, remodelled by the Young Turks, and ‘perfected’ by the Turkish Republicans. In similar fashion, in Ottoman Ulema, Turkish Republic (2011), Bein traces back many of the early Republican reforms in the administration of religion to ideas and practices arising in the late-Ottoman period.

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cosmopolitan and Islamic Ottoman Empire. Indeed, in its early decades the Republic accentuated its ‘total’ modernity vis-à-vis claims that it had abolished the theocracy of the Ottoman Empire (Herzog 2009). Joel Kahn’s work on modernity (2001) illustrates certain defining features of the early Turkish Republic. Critiquing the dominant Anglophone account of modernization, Kahn rejects the idea of a pure modernity with its origins in the West for an intercultural modernity that is formed as much as by what took place in its Asian [or Middle-Eastern] spaces as in its western ones. Yet ironically, Turkish Kemalists themselves have been partisan towards the first account, presenting laiklik to be a consequence of the inexorable rise of reason and science, against the irrationality of the Ottoman-Islamic organization of society. Historiographical claims always facilitate an expansion of personal and corporate agency for those who advocate them, as we will see for Republican elites who distinguished and felt themselves to be the vanguard on the universal path to modernity. Debate and controversy over state-religion-society relations in the Turkish Republic, both historically and in the present, are ongoing. When historical Kemalism is re-examined, a complex picture emerges. In a review of some of the more recent literature Murat Somer shows how it is polarized between conflicting interpretations. On the one hand there is the maximal claim that the Atatürk Republic was hostile to Islam and to religion. Its abolition of the Caliphate, dismantling of shariah law courts, takeover of pious foundations (vakıf ), and closure of Islamic medreses and the lodges of Sufi/dervish orders are all presented as evidence of the animus of Kemalist elites towards Islam. There is a related more minimal charge that it was simply indifferent to them. For example, the historian Mete Tuncay characterizes the relationship between the Republic and ‘Islam’ in its first decades not as one of enmity (as in the Soviet case) but more of disregard (umursamazlık)—that is, as depreciation of the “traditional” content of Islam (2001: 95). As an example of this high neglect, he notes a serious discussion in 1926 at a council meeting of the State Commission of Fine Arts about whether to turn Sultan Ahmet Camii (Istanbul’s celebrated Blue Mosque) into an art gallery. Both hostility and indifference are seen as connected to the endeavour to remove religion from the public sphere. This is the basis for Ahmet Kuru’s (2007) description of Kemalism as ‘assertive secularism.’ On the other hand, there is the contention that the Republic endorsed, enabled, and reformed Sunni Islam, creating a ‘symbiotic relationship’ between state and religion “where the state is the controlling and

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dominant party” (Somer 2013: 588). Somer himself prefers what he calls a more ‘integrationist’ model of state-religion relations in Turkey that acknowledges state promotion of religion. In some analyses these two positions are woven together, for example in Soğuk’s unintentionally anthropocratic admission that Kemalism “limited religion’s role in politics while at the same time it fostered specific religious sensibilities in everyday life in order to support the state” (2011: 4). I presume both interpretations can be true—that the early Republic simultaneously censured Islam as a potential threat that might mobilize resistance against its civilizing project, and fostered it as a potential ally that might win the consent of the Muslim population to its Turkifying one. Combined, both projects constitute anthropocracy in a nutshell. Otherwise, the relationship between the Islamic religious institutions established by the Turkish Republic itself and its other, more ‘progressive’ Republican forces, has been perplexing for many. For example, two decades ago Günter Seufert wrote of the ‘bizarre situation’ that occurs in periods of political polarization when “the competences and the influence of the institutions [of the state religious bureaucracy] are both limited and extended at the same time” (1999: 353). More generally, the state’s own organizations of religious learning, for example its Faculties of Divinity ̇ (I lahiyat Fakülteleri), are often perceived by the laicizing establishment both as “means of secularization and as an integral part of the Islamic threat to the political order” (1999: 353) (emphasis in original). We might also return briefly to Niyazi Berkes here who incisively examined what he called the dual facets of Turkish secularism, but did not have an apposite word to name what he described. Acknowledging the peculiarity of a Kemalist secularism that did not separate religion and state, Berkes identified how in the name of the sovereignty of the people it forcibly secularized all aspects of worldly affairs (education, family life, law, economy, etc.) with the intent of producing a “non-political religion” (1964: 480). He went on to explain that “religion was guaranteed freedom and protection so long as and insofar as it was not utilized to promote any social or political ideology having institutional implications” (ibid: 499). Yet despite these claims, Berkes also admitted the political intent of Kemalism’s newly created “non-political religion” and “non-separationist secularism,” when he concluded that “under the regime of popular sovereignty the religious question becomes one of religious enlightenment on the one hand, and, in terms of a national existence, one of moral re-­ integration on the other” (ibid: 482–483). In other words, Kemalist

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anthropocracy both enlightens believers by purifying Islam (presumably according to scientific reason), while functionalizing religion for moral ethnic solidarity. De-politicizing certain aspects of Ottoman Islam, the Kemalists re-politicized it for the Republic, seeking to embed a public religion in the private conscience of citizens.4 Somer concludes by criticizing the edited collection by Berna Turam (2012) titled Secular State and Religious Society: Two Forces at Play in Turkish Politics. Its scholarly contribution, he says, consists merely in challenging journalistic clichés about Turkey’s secularism by stating that state-­ society relations in Turkey are ‘constantly shifting’ and ‘more complex.’ Unfortunately, he notes, “the book does not try to tell us how we should conceptualize the Turkish state–society relationship as an alternative to simplistic accounts” (Somer 2013: 592) (my italics). Below I take up Somer’s, and Davison and Parla’s, summons to provide a conceptualization of that relationship that side-steps naïve formulations of a secular state—religious society. Far from suppressing religion, we will see that through its anthropocratic policies the Republic re-makes it. 3.1.1  Anthropocracy Alaturca In keeping with the first principle of anthropocratic rule, the Turkish Republic emphasizes the political sovereignty of the people as well as the human origins of its law—what Castoriadis would call its political self-­ institution and autonomy. Thus, we see the famous phrase inscribed on the wall behind the speaker in the Turkish National Assembly: ‘Egemenlik Kayıtsız Şartsız Milletindir’ (Sovereignty Unconditionally Belongs to the People). This anthropocratic feature is reaffirmed in the preamble to the military junta’s 1982 constitution, Turkey’s fundamental law, which recognizes the absolute supremacy of the will of the nation, and … the fact that sovereignty is vested fully and unconditionally in the Turkish Nation and that no individual or body empowered to exercise it on behalf of the nation shall deviate from democracy based on freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and the rule of law instituted according to its requirements. 4  Jeremy Walton puts it somewhat similarly. The “political history of Islam and secularism in Republican Turkey can be understood as the interplay between these two divergent imperatives: privatization and minimization, on the one hand, and monopolization and homogenization, on the other” (2013: 185).

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The same sentences are repeated in the preamble to the revised constitution, proposed by the AKP and passed by referendum in 2017. Similarly, Article 6 of the present constitution states: Sovereignty belongs to the Nation without any restriction or condition. The Turkish Nation shall exercise its sovereignty through the authorized organs, as prescribed by the principles set forth in the Constitution. The exercise of sovereignty shall not be delegated by any means to any individual, group or class. No person or organ shall exercise any state authority that does not emanate from the Constitution.

Recognition of anthropocracy as a specific mode of political order might help us ‘solve’ a constitutional puzzle. As we have established, anthropocracy affirms that in the name of the sovereign people, humans make the constitution. Yet ironically, Yaniv Roznai also shows how in many such [anthropocratic] constitutions, statements of the unamendability of certain constitutional principles are also enshrined. Known as ‘Eternity Clauses’, Roznai draws attention to what he terms the paradoxical nature of the constitutional entrenchment of secularism, given that it “abandons the idea of a secular law – changeable by nature – shifting [it] to the realm of the transcendent” (2017: 257). From the perspective of an anthropocratic politics, however, the irrevocability of laicism declared in Article 4 of Turkey’s 1982 constitution (and reproduced in the 2017 constitutional amendment package produced by the AKP) is no “self-contradiction” (Roznai 2017: 257). The language and the idea of constitutional eternity is best understood as connected to anthropocracy’s recruitment of the divine to serve the rule of men. In other words, for modern constitutionalism, wedded to people’s rational ability to decide their own laws, the constitutional ‘eternalization’ of secularism is contradictory and unnecessary. By contrast, for anthropocratic analysis its very immutability confirms the employment of religious categories to support human rule. Sociologically, it is true that a cluster of factors in Turkey have made proclamation of the people’s full right and power to govern itself more a constituting ideal than a political fact. The lack of multi-party elections until 1950 is one. A history of military interventions or coup d’états (in 1960, 1971, 1980, 1997, as well as the failed insurrection in 2016) is another, each causing severe democratic ‘shrinkage’ in instituting regular periods of legal exception or states of martial law. Parslow (2016) notes

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that since 1923 Turkey’s state leaders have declared a ‘state of siege’ (sıkıyönetim) eleven times, covering forty years of the Republic’s seventy-­ eight years before the AKP came to power in 2002. Equally significant, Turkish nationalism has made a state of emergency the political norm in the country’s Kurdish regions. A third compromising element is the fact that the 1982 and 2017 constitutional amendment packages were voted upon by the people in conditions of emergency rule. Together these all mean that in reality the sovereignty of the people has been a flawed political practice. Nevertheless, the constitutional clauses express an anthropocratic intention and commitment. Just as importantly, but in a more literal sense, so too did the Republic of Turkey’s first constitution (1924). In not permitting women to vote or to stand for the national assembly, it also established the sovereign rule of men. At the same time, and in conformity with the second core feature of anthropocracy, this non-theocratic national sovereignty did not involve either the separation of religion and state or a pact of mutual non-­ interference between religious organizations and the government, each of which a more normative language describes as germane to secularity. And despite the accusations of some Muslims in Turkey it was not an atheistic project either, as was unfolding ‘next door’ in the Soviet Union at the very same time. Rather, and as we will see below, Kemalism encouraged the participation of the divine in certain spheres of social practice and governance,5 even as it sought the exclusion of religion from others. To manage this, in 1924 the Republic established and financed the General Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), its essential, anti-­ secular, anthropocratic institution, bringing both religious institutions and the training and appointment of religious personnel under the aegis of 5  For Parla and Davison (2004: 107–108), one of the regime’s intentions was to secure religion and the deity in the domain of ‘private conscience.’ The domain of conscience should not be thought to be of minor importance compared to public politics. Anxiety over the force and role of conscience in political life has been a prime concern of political theorists and commentators from the seventeenth century onwards (but has a much longer genealogy). Thomas Hobbes’ views on conscience are revealing: according to Hanin (2012: 56), Hobbes thought conscience “akin to a disease …; it invites suspicions of antinomianism and rampant moral subjectivism; it is a destabilizing force responsible for the mayhem of the state of war that requires quick suppression in society.” Conscience is a political ‘problem’ for anthropocratic regimes because it may lead individuals or groups to make moral decisions that contradict the laws or edicts of the state.

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the state. The first article of the law constituting it stated that, “the administration of all matters concerning the beliefs and rituals of Islam will belong to the Department of the Affairs of Piety” (Berkes 1964: 485). It went on to clarify that the Directorate’s duties included “the administration of all mosques … as well as the appointment and dismissal of all imams [preachers], hatips [orators], vaizs [preachers], seyhs [leaders of dervish houses], müezzins [callers to prayer], kayyims [sextons], and all other employees of the state” (Davison 2003: 337). Governmentally, all religious functionaries in Turkey became salaried state bureaucrats of the Diyanet, appointable after completion of their state-approved qualifications. Specialists in Islamic şeriat law, too, were employed by the Diyanet, and non-authorized ulema suppressed. Supplementing the rule of the people, and in keeping with anthropocracy’s second characteristic, the Kemalists incorporated religion into its governing machinery, officially defining what Islam should be about, how it should be taught, and enlightening its citizens as to how they should practise it.6 Early clues revealing the concerns of this redeployed, regime-­supporting Islam can be seen in two projects it initiated in 1925, the publication Askere Din Dersleri (Religious Lessons for the Soldier), prepared for conscripts by the Diyanet on the request of the General Staff; and the handbook Yeni Hutbelerim (My New Sermons), written for mosque imams. In Askere Din Dersleri soldiers were instructed on how to practise Sunni Islam, advised about its core principles, and encouraged to feel that religion encompasses specific affects and duties towards the State and the ethnic Turkish nation. Lessons 46–57 include topics such as ‘Defending the Fatherland Is a Command of Allah,’ ‘Soldiering Is a Holy Duty,’ ‘Obedience in Military Service,’ ‘Duties Towards the State,’ ‘Every Person Is a Soldier in Islam.’ Its first chapter includes a section titled ‘Love of Fatherland Comes from Belief.’ In it its author claimed that “Islam also has a sixth pillar, which is cihad, military service … This duty is different from prayer, fasting, hajj, and zakat. Unless this duty is fulfilled, the others cannot be properly performed” (Gürpınar and Kenar 2016: 66–67). Here one hears the new state’s attempt to sacralize nation-making practices 6  In 1994, in my first period of fieldwork in Istanbul, Diyanet jurisconsults ruled in response to a question from a citizen that the eating of prawns was not haram. Similarly, I remember the advice of a mosque imam employed by the Diyanet, who while we were chatting told a parishioner that should he be interrupted by the ringing of his doorbell while doing his prayers, he would need to start the cycle from the beginning, and not from where he had left off to answer the door.

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through references to Islam, including the extension of the religious term martyr (şehit) to those soldiers who die for the nation.7 As Tanıl Bora (2015) reminds us, the root of the two words martyr (şehit) and witness (şahit) is the same. The second publication was aimed at imams whose duties included the Friday sermon. Yeni Hutbelerim was the first book of recommended sermons, followed by a sermon journal, written by the Diyanet and despatched to mosque preachers all over the country. In her analysis of these first model sermons, Azak argues that they reflected “the Kemalist regime’s use of Islam in the service of the nation-state as they emphasized, for instance, the importance of national service as a holy duty or called for donating alms (zekat) to the [state] Aviation Society (Teyyare Cemiyeti)” (2008: 167). Since 1924 the Diyanet has sent out a recommended weekly address, and indeed made its preaching compulsory in recurrent periods of state suppression (of civil society), including in diasporic mosques controlled by the Diyanet in Europe and Australia (see below). In their study of Diyanet sermons over different decades of the Turkish Republic, Gürpınar and Kenar conclude that they communicate two major messages: “(i) the idea of an organic community and (ii) the idea of an imposing communal morality” (2016: 74). For the Kemalists charged with managing the Diyanet, forging the religious attitudes and intentions of the population meant seeking to inculcate citizens with a Turkish national identity whose morality included obedience to the state. Equally significantly, in the 1920s and 1930s certain groups within the Kemalist regime also sought to develop a new Turko-centric nationalist theology (in Turkish, dini-Türkçülük),8 maintaining the privileged status of a Turkified Sunni Islam in comparison with other religious creeds even as they forced Sunnism’s subservience to the state institution. Azak interprets this Turkifying of Islam as simultaneously embodying a nationalist 7  Sam Kaplan (2002) identifies what he describes as a profoundly ambiguous relationship between the Turkish military and the religious public, as demonstrated in the military junta’s renewal and extension of Kemalism’s dual ‘military secularism’ and ‘religious militarism’ after the 1980 coup d’état. Just as in the old curriculum, the new one emphasizes that “the Turkish soldier is a pious defender of the nation” (2002: 113, author’s emphasis). 8  In the wake of the 12 September 1980 military coup d’état, this chauvinistic ‘Turkocentric’ Islam was redeveloped under the authority of the military, and re-named the ‘TurkIslam synthesis.’ See Sam Kaplan’s The Pedagogical State (2006) and its examining of the military’s changing usage of Islam post-1980 through the study of schooling and curricula to see similarities and differences.

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project of vernacularisation. Many people are aware of its most infamous act, its changing of the call to prayer (ezan) and other prayers from Arabic to Turkish in 1932. In the newly created ezan in Turkish, Allah became Tanrı, a word that for many Sunni Muslim Turkish speakers carried polytheistic and idolatrous meanings. (The call to prayer was changed back into Arabic in 1950.) Turkifying religion involved the state in a number of major translation projects, all of which were met with some anxiety by less nationalist Muslims who worried about the translator as ideological mediator between text and reader. Alongside the rendering of the Quran into Turkish, there was also the sponsoring of a new interpretation (tefsir) of the Quran in Turkish, as well as a translation and critical edition of Bukhari’s authoritative hadith compendium (see Gürpınar 2013a). All three enterprises are gestured to in Ziya Gökalp’s famous poem ‘Vatan’ (Homeland), written in 1918 (Wilson 2009: 421): A country where in Turkish the call to prayer is said, The meaning of his prayer the villager can understand,9 A country in whose schools the Turkish Qur’an is read Everyone, young and old, understands the Guide’s command … Oh Turkish son, there is your homeland!

One can see that this fostering of a new Turkish Islam was accompanied by an ambitious ‘de-Arabization’ programme, as shown succinctly in the 1931 Kemalist ‘Turkish History Thesis’ that posited that Turks “provided great service [hizmet] in the development of both the Muslim religion and Muslim civilization, which is wrongly reputed to be an Arab civilization; they produced the greatest scholars and philosophers of the Muslim world” (cited in Copeaux 1996: 101). Taught as core aspects of the new Kemalist school curriculum, all these initiatives sought to inject a Turkish nationalist core into statist Sunni Islam, utilizing a nationalized ‘God’ in service to the new order. At the very same time for Kurdish and Arab Muslims in Turkey the Republic’s translation projects, alphabet reform, and language purification campaign were experienced as the very opposite of vernacularisation, given they not only forbade them from expressing their religion in their own language but forced them to worship in Turkish. Along with the banning of Kurdish music (sacred and profane), and the prohibiting of commentaries on the Qur’an (tefsir) in Kurdish, the  If you were a Kurdish villager, prayers in Turkish were equally unintelligible.

9

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modified Islam of the Kemalists served their broader project to Turkify the population. For that reason, Azgın (2012) has labelled the central regime principles of the Kemalist one-party dictatorship (1923–1946) ‘laic ethnocracy.’ The anthropocratic co-opting of the divine (through the Diyanet) to facilitate human rule, and the rule of Kemalists in particular, possessed other features too. In it not all Islamic traditions were equal. Even as the State bureaucratized Sunni Hanafi Islam, it cast a suspicious eye over Islam’s internal diversity, marginalizing in the name of Sunni orthodoxy Alevi religious practices adhered to by a substantial proportion of the Turkish and Kurdish population. In refusing to fund the building of Alevi worship spaces [Cem Houses], or to train/support religious experts as facilitators of Alevi religious life through employment in the Diyanet, the Republic showed that it disregarded Alevism as a candidate for religico-­ political institutionalization. Yet despite this, Alevism, too, was ‘nationalized’ at the very same time. Dressler (2010) identifies how early Republican intellectuals such as Fuat Köprülü incorporated it into the imagined Turkish nation by tracing its genealogy back to an indigenous Turkish shamanism, thus representing Alevism as carrier of an original and authentic pre-Islamic (and pre-Arab) Turkish culture. These different modes of anthropocratic ‘election’ brought mixed blessings to Islamic denominations. For Sunni Islam re-inscription at the centre of political power simultaneously exposed it to intense state regulation and (thought) control. For Alevism, the nationalist discourse on its pre-Islamic, indigenous Turkish roots marginalized and ‘othered’ it in the perspective of Sunni orthodoxy, with dire consequences for some Alevi in the late 1970s, who became victims of pogroms conducted by right-wing Muslims. Christianity and Judaism, as officially recognized minority religions, were spared anthropocratic mobilization, but not State suspicion. Indeed, as the compulsory (and irrevocable) population exchange of Christians and Muslims between Turkey and Greece in 1923 showed, the explicit link made by the Republic between Muslimness and Turkishness meant that Christians and Jews were essentially positioned as extraneous elements (or worse) in the new ethnic-religious nation. In sum, the endeavour of the Republic to generate an ethnic Turkish Islam through the activities of the Diyanet reveal that far from constituting an arrangement designed to separate Islam from the fields of political

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order and discourse,10 Kemalism reinstates it at the centre of Republican politics. But it does so in the anthropocratic fashion mooted by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. There he advises the Sovereign power to exercise the right to command the religious institution what doctrine it must preach, as well as to approve or disapprove its interpretation of scripture and even of descriptive religious language. In so doing the Diyanet is the central anthropocratic institution that both contours Sunni Islam for service to the state project and counters more ‘radical’ or ‘backwards’ Islamic projects and practices that contest or contradict its foundational tenets. How successful has the Diyanet been in pursuing these joint aims? Any single answer covering 100 years of the Republic is obviously spurious, but five examples of recent religious events give some indication of the wide diversity of Islamic experiences, practices, and political imaginations in Turkey. First, when I was researching Islamic social movements in Istanbul in the mid-1990s I met Kemal, who together with his friends congregated to study the Quran and to encourage each other in becoming more şuurlu (conscious) Muslims. But their new-found knowledge led them away from the Islam of the state. They boycotted the local mosque and refused to pray with the Diyanet-employed imam, even on ceremonial days when large numbers of men attended morning prayer. They jokingly referred to their homes as ‘liberated zones.’ Second, and as we have already seen, through the Diyanet Turkish nationalism propagated a master ethnic identity in the midst of a once multicultural (Ottoman) population. For the large Kurdish population in Turkey the outcome of Turkist nationalist policies was denial of their self-­ description as non-Turks. One response of Kurdish Muslims over the last few decades has been the self-preserving development of an Islam interpreted as licensing the collective right to linguistic self-expression of every kavim (people/nation), Muslim or otherwise. Allied to that, during protests against Government-approved state violence in Kurdish-majority Diyarbakır in 2011, Kurdish religious experts led ‘civilian Friday prayers’ in the public square. Explaining why, Selahattin Demirtaş, co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, declared that “Diyanet imams are selected by the National Security Council and then sent here. We ask 10  This is the diagnosis made by the scholar Bobby Sayyid, who argues that Kemalism is characterized by “rejection of the use of Islam as the master signifier of political discourse” (1997: 70).

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our people not to pray behind those state imams who come here on a special mission … We know that some of the state imams in the region are working for the Government [AKP]. They are here to impose Turkishness and statism on the people” (cited in Sarıgil 2018: 1). Third, in Christopher Dole’s study Healing Secular Life (2012) he notes the ongoing popularity of healers in Turkish cities, including of so-­ called cinci hoca, religious experts with ritual knowledge and skills who can influence the world of spirits (djinn/cin) in seeking to relieve patients’ suffering. This despite a century of state animosity against ‘quack doctors’ and ‘swindlers’ in the name of biomedicine, as well as their condemnation by the Diyanet for their infringing of religious law. Fourth, during the massive Istanbul protests in 2013 against the Government proposal to redevelop Gezi Park (and then against its extreme violence in dispersing activists), a remarkable iftar meal was celebrated on the first night of Ramazan (9 July). Bringing together thousands of Gezi Park protesters in all their diversity—Muslims, Kemalists, Kurds, socialists, LGBTs, and so on—people sat down cross-legged on the famous paving stones of Istiklal Avenue to break the fast, a long ribbon of sheet laden with shared food stretching for kilometres down the street. Anti-capitalist Muslims sat knee to knee with Kemalists. Five hundred metres away, blockaded by police at the entrance to Taksim Square, the AKP held its own official iftar meal, provisioned by the Greater Istanbul Council. Fifth has been the recent high anxiety amongst Diyanet officials about an apparent crisis of faith amongst pious young people, spurred on by sensational media coverage of the emergence of ‘hijabi atheists’ as well as of the turn to ‘deism’ by religious youth. In response the Diyanet convened a consultative body in 2018 to address the problem, resulting in a decision to “declare war on deism” (Bilici 2018: 44). Although the meaning of deism for pious youth in the Turkish context is not clear—is it a belief in a general monotheism that rejects revelation (i.e. the Quran) as a source of knowledge of God, or a disillusionment with the AKP’s continued use of the Diyanet to politicize and institutionalize religion/Islam?— the Diyanet interpreted this drift away from religion as a threat not just to God but to the Republic. As the head of the Diyanet said in decrying the foreignness of the ideas: “No member of our nation can be interested in such a perverse, false notion” (ibid: 44). In essence, for the Diyanet atheism is also perceived as endangering the state, a fear that drives its constant policing of pacifist or spiritual trends amongst young Muslims.

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What we see in all of these examples of religion-politics is the creation and exercise of local and in some cases private secularisms, antagonistically oriented towards state anthropocracy. In them different segments of civil society interpret and adapt religious practices and beliefs for themselves, to challenge both the settled anthropocracy of the Republic and the oppressive, assimilationist forms of religious-nationalist solidarity authorized by the Diyanet. These political acts of oppositional religion can be called secular because activists seek to de-link or separate their own religious practices from anthropocratic state processes, not conjoin them. In the light of these types of events, how should we “conceptualize the Turkish state–society relationship” (Somer 2013: 592)? One shorthand phrase that better captures two of the long-term historical forces at play in Turkish politics is this: religious (anthropocratic) state; secular society, the exact opposite of many clichés about Turkish politics. 3.1.2  The AKP and Anthropocracy The Turkish Republic has long been portrayed as an exemplary secular polity for the developing Muslim third world. And yet as we have demonstrated above, many of its key innovations do not correspond with any of the standard definitions of secularism employed by such claims. [They do, however, conform in some ways to Talal Asad’s focus on secularism as entailing the transformation of legal reasoning, moral practice, and political authority.] Further, and compounding the original ‘error,’ more recently the (mis-diagnosed) secularism of the Turkish Republic has been analysed as a system in crisis. For some, this foundational secularism is imperilled by rising religious fundamentalism. Indeed, Kemalist Turks today accuse its present ruling government of expressing open hostility towards certain core assumptions of the secular past. In Turkey bitter debates revolve around whether the AKP is pursuing the Islamization of the country (Criss 2010). Are the policies of the AKP government since 2002 really best understood as projects directed towards the institution of theocracy? Rather than arguing that the current AKP regime is intent on reforming or even overthrowing what we have argued is mis-named secularism, in this section I explore how it currently works to extend the ‘anthropocratic Republic.’ Any summarizing survey of the AKP’s politics has to confront the fact that the literature on its municipal policies, cultural practices, gender

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programmes, foreign policy, neo-liberal economy, political ideologies, processes of change, historical significance, and so on is enormous and conflicted (e.g. Yavuz 2009; White 2012; Tuğal 2016; Joppien 2017). Despite different valuations, most would agree that the AKP’s first decade at the centre of Turkish politics was characterized by a self-interested and self-protective democratization project, and its second by much more authoritarian governance. Thus, over its nearly two decades of political struggle the AKP has managed first to neutralize and then to control the key organs of the state, including finally the Turkish Armed Forces after the attempted military coup in 2016. Analysis of the party has to examine the changing context of these two different phases and modes of politics. To comprehend the AKP in its first period I want to consider the document Muhafazakar Demokrasi (Conservative Democracy), commissioned and published by the party soon after it won government in 2004. Written by party advisor Yalçın Akdoğan, in its foreword Recep Tayyip Erdoğan asserts that the work should be seen both as a vital contribution to the political identity of the AKP and as bringing a new perspective to Turkish politics. What is the new standpoint heralded by the document? That perspective is normative secularism. In what ways is this a political programme for reformist secularism? At least three key points are made in the document. First is its appropriation of political conservatism’s critique of the enlightenment project of total revolution and rational (as opposed to reasonable) social transformation. Some of the words used to condemn this form of radical change are buyurgan (despotic); baskıcı (oppressive); dayatmacı (forced); tektipçi (homogenizing); tepeden inmeci (proclaimed from above). Similarly, the document rejects social engineering (toplum muhendisliği) and utopian programmes of change while advocating for evolutionary, gradual, or ordered development of traditions, history, and cultural values. At the same time, however, the document defines the AKP’s politics as ‘New Conservative,’ against neither change in principle nor defenders of the status quo. Thus it is not preservation of culture or tradition as such that is lauded but muhafazakarlık as a form of ‘negative philosophy’ (olumsuzlama felsefesi), directed against both the radicalness (thoroughness) and elitism (despotism) of political projects of social engineering. Limiting the power of the political sphere safeguards against “arbitrary and oppressive regimes” (Akdoğan 2003: 26). Second, the document claims that conservative (muhafazakar) concern to limit state and governmental power is connected to a related

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acknowledgement of naturally occurring social diversity (tomplumsal çeşitlilik), cultural difference, and local values, as well as to its desire to have these reflected in the political sphere. Here “variety is richness” (ibid: 10).11 This rending of conservative multiculturalism is complemented by an insouciant acceptance of the inevitability of political and economic reforms demanded by globalization and informed by new ‘universal dominant values,’ in particular those of democracy, human rights, primacy of law, the internalization of pluralism, protection and representation of minorities, and the free market. Along with a rejuvenated importance given to locality and region, these are all interpreted as manifestations of a reaction to the homogenizing and interventionist politics of authoritarian nation-states (ibid: 73). Accordingly, Muhafazakar Demokrasi calls for a less aggravating mode of politics than one whose ceaseless instituting is produced via an antagonistic representation and negating of ‘social realities’ like religion. These themes are brought together under a single master word, democracy. The AKP conceives politics as an “arena of compromise” (ibid: 113) and democracy as a “system [or procedure] that enables different or even opposed styles of life, as shaped by different goals and values scales, to live in the same place together in peace” (ibid: 76). Third, and most significantly, Muhafazakar Demokrasi redefines secularism (laiklik) to mean state impartiality towards religions and between denominations (mezhep) as well as freedom for individuals to live their lives in accordance with their religious or irreligious beliefs. In the process it seeks to shift the focus from the oft-asserted claim that secularism is a necessary pre-condition for democracy to the question of how laicism should be developed in order for democracy to operate in its broadest freedom. In other words, how might laicism itself be made to conform to forms of democratic practice? (ibid: 94). One strategy would be for the state to cease using laiklik as a tool to wage war against or interfere with religion or believers. Another would be to emancipate religion from state or government control (ibid: 95). By the state and government remaining neutral amidst the different lifestyles of citizens, secularism becomes the guarantor of religious freedom. Here the AKP seeks to use certain 11  In principle, the document is strongly in favour of minority (azinlik) rights. It states, “Democracy’s success can be assessed not by majority rule but according to whether minorities are self-determining or not” (ibid: 77). (Demokrasiler cog ̆unlug ̆un iktidarından çok, azınlığın iradesini gerçekleştirip gerçekleştirememelerine göre başarılı sayılmaktadır). But it is not specifically in favour of the rights of Kurds.

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normative ideals of secularism to critique its ‘peculiar’ implementation in Turkey. In brief, and despite the discourse on the virtues of social continuity, Muhafazakar Demokrasi also maintains that the AKP’s political practices and understandings constitute a new synthesis, a synthesis mediating tradition and modernity; historical values and new values; idealism (utopianism) and realism; the local and the universal; and the individual and society. Once securely in power in its second decade, did the AKP institute secular and democratic changes in the way sketched out by its foundational document? Did the AKP shrink or abolish the Diyanet as recommended, so enabling religious freedom via a neutral state in terms of citizens’ religious or irreligious practices? Has it facilitated minorities’ self-­ determination? Has its democratic critique of monopolistic power (military, economic, civilizational) and advocacy for its dispersal been realized in its political practice? In short, did it reform anthropocratic governance? In a word, no. None of these proposed reforms of anthropocratic Kemalist institutions and political practices have been realized. Indeed, recent research on the AKP’s funding of the Diyanet shows that since 2012 it has continued and has even boosted the budget for its nationalist and sectarian mission (Mutluer 2018). Yusuf Akçura’s definitions in his Three Styles of Politics provide us with a clue as to how we can conceive similarities between the anthropocracies of the classical Kemalist and the ruling AKP regimes. Both reject any pan-Muslim multicultural society or political order that facilitates the equality of different Muslim ethnic groups within the political community of believers (ummah) under shariah law—a politics identified by Akçura as Islamism. In government the AKP has never pursued such a political possibility, and its recent coalition with the ugly ultranationalism of the National Movement Party (MHP) confirms its conversion to Turkism and to Turkish ethnic sovereignty. Indeed, for the broader Islamist social movement in Turkey the ‘Kurdish question’ has been serially debated since at least the 1990s. One result has been a major split between Kurdish and Turkish Muslims on its causes and solution. Recent research suggests that the tension between them will continue as long as Turkish-Islamic discourse, channelling the spirit of a covert pro-Turkish identity, denies Kurdish Muslims in the name of Islam itself the legitimacy and necessity of political mobilization based on a defence of Kurdish ethnicity (see Houston 2001, 2018).

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Political, institutional, and ideological continuity with post-1980s’ Kemalism is heard in another field of political action as well. Today under the AKP the Diyanet extends its mediating role between God and ruling men transnationally, appointing imams to state-controlled Turkish mosques all around the world, including to Australia, an unheard-of arrangement for other Muslim groups there. The same Friday sermon preached in Istanbul has already been proclaimed, nine  hours earlier, in Sydney. Yet this anthropocracy abroad is not new. In both Europe and Australia, certain key institutions of the Turkish State have for decades been producers of ‘trans-Kemalism’—what we can now equally well call long-distance anthropocracy—the propagation outside of Turkey of the core political ideology informing the nation-building project of the Turkish Republic since its institution in 1923. From the late 1970s onwards, when Turkish State authorities realized that most ‘guest-workers’ were now permanent settlers in the destination countries, a shift in policy occurred, encouraging Turkey-born migrants abroad not to return home but to contribute to the political and economic affairs of their country of origin from their new places of residence. Accompanying this strategic change, state efforts to inculcate a nationalist subjectivity in second generation Turkish emigrants, and a political project to anthropocracize Turkish ‘civil society’ abroad became key components of its transnational policy, a task that has been carried out, in the main, by its consular institutions and by the offices of the Diyanet. For example, the Diyanet plays a central role in the Turkish State’s use of Islam to fabricate national unity abroad while continuing its ceaseless assimilation politics directed at Kurds. Şenay (2013) tells of a ceremony she attended in the Diyanet’s mosque in Auburn (Sydney), where the imam placed an empty coffin in the courtyard and led prayers in absentia for Turkish soldiers killed in the military struggle against the PKK. The Diyanet has never prayed for the souls of Kurdish guerilla-citizens killed by the Turkish military. Alongside activities aimed at mobilizing the (Turkish) diaspora, a second important component of the AKP’s trans-­anthropocracy has been non-Turkish diaspora dis-integration, aimed at combatting the perceived anti-Turkish influence of political or cultural ‘lobby-groups’ of non-Muslim or non-Turkish emigrants from Turkey, in particular those testifying to the traumatic experiences of Greek, Kurdish, and Armenian communities there.

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Even more recently, on the day that Turkish armed forces began Operation ‘Olive Branch,’ its military intervention into the Kurdish Afrin canton in Syria (January 20, 2018), the President of the Diyanet announced that every mosque in Turkey would recite the Fetih (Conquest) chapter from the Quran. A friend reported that prayers for the victory of Turkish soldiers in Afrin were made even in the Diyanet mosque in Tokyo. Explaining, the President said: Before or after dawn and evening prayers this evening, in every one of our mosques, the Fetih Suresi will be recited, against the terror activities that threaten our motherland and our peace. Prayers will be made for our army and people, and that the movement begun by our heroic security forces across the border into Afrin will conclude with victory.12

In short, militarism is a central shared value of Turkish republican and AKP anthropocracy, inculcated in Turkish citizens through the state education and religion systems.13 The lifetime of prosecution and punishment dealt out to conscientious objectors, as well as to the groups or individuals who support them, makes Turkey the only country in the Council of Europe that denies the right to conscientious objection against mandatory male military service (Çınar 2014). But alongside similarities, are there not significant differences in classical Kemalist and AKP anthropocracies as well, so that we might also speak about varieties of anthropocracy? There are. Indeed, as Muhafazakar Demokrasi underscores, with the rise of the AKP as the dominant electoral force in Turkey in 2002, a bitter political rivalry between its supporters and their Kemalist opponents has revolved around ‘style of life,’ as well as over the value, weight, and importance given to Islam in the Turkish national character. Although Kemalism, too, articulated Turkish identity with Islam, the rhetoric of the AKP concerning the authentic Islamic self of the Turkish people works differently. Take the AKP’s recent conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque in July 2020. The imperial Byzantine Basilica was transferred from Ottoman mosque to museum—not back into a church—by the Kemalists in 1934,  See

12

https://ahvalnews.com/tr/afrin-operasyonu/diyanet-de-afrine-fetih-suresiyle-el-

atti 13  In the 1982 military Constitution, article 136, the junta also clarified the mission of the Diyanet, explicitly stating that its task is to maintain national unity and solidarity (Ulutaş 2010).

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in the midst of their targeting of the Greek Ottoman population living in Istanbul for forced migration (see Alexandris 1983). Upping the ante, for ultra-nationalists and some Islamists ever since, the constant call to turn Hagia Sophia back  into a mosque has expressed resentment over Istanbul’s ‘incomplete conquest’ and the Republicans’ downplaying of the victorious Turkish-Ottoman legacy. In choosing to celebrate the first prayers in the ‘new’ mosque on July 24, anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne that established Turkey’s borders, vindication of Islam’s superiority in the clash of civilizations merges with AKP supporters’ perception of the Republican elite’s disdain for and mockery of selected Muslim mores and norms. ‘Muslim Pride’ becomes their rancorous intersubjective mood in the present, politically manufactured yet explicable in terms of the efficacy of specific (and rival) horizons of the past. ‘We did it.’ In that case, and just as important as ideology, it is the politics of affect—fear, mockery, victimhood, vengefulness, paranoia, memories, narratives, and symbols—that drives different varieties and visions of anthropocracy in Turkey. Affective life, including social groups’ satirical humour about each other (see Houston and Şenay 2017), cathects with different core operations of the anthropocratic Republic. Public political discourse sometimes ‘pretends’ to address a single, neutral citizenry that might be convinced by its arguments and references. Yet more typical is its aggressive, suspicious, and contemptuous language and mood that presupposes the existence of separate constituencies each characterized by its own shared orientations, including fear and hatred of other imagined rival publics. Here, pace Charles Taylor, we need to consider the phenomenological experience of living in an anthropocratic age, including the affective states, conflicted intersubjective interactions, and embodied perceptions of anthropocratic subjects. As we have seen in Parts One and Two, unlike ideal-type secularism in which religion is claimed to have migrated to the private sphere, anthropocracy simultaneously de-centres revealed religion by proclaiming human sovereignty and re-centres it by incorporating a selective version of it into the new institutions of the people’s order (the Republic). The result is an intense ambiguity in state patronage of religion itself, which is both present and absent in public life and institutions, and concomitantly protected and undermined by the state. As Kaplan notes above, military secularism and religious militarism uneasily coexist side by side. Analogously, anthropocracy generates an intense ambiguity, too, in citizens’ lived experience of religion in Turkey. In anthropocracy’s hybrid

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structuring of both belief and unbelief, religious and irreligious subjects become objects of state suspicion and beneficiaries of state care at the very same time. This plays out in political conflict and in intellectual antagonisms within civil society. Rather than the existence of a central fault line between secularists and anti-secularists in Turkey caused by the authoritarian secularism of the Republic as suggested by Göle and many others, we can rephrase the divide as being internal to anthropocracy itself: the expression of a bitter argument between anthropocrats more committed to human sovereignty and anthropocrats more committed to Islam’s rehabilitation as national religion. This being the case, sometimes that divide may resonate in the unhappy consciousness of a single person. In a brilliant discussion of literary milieus in Turkey, Barış Büyükokutan notes that over the long durée of the Republic many pious Muslim poets, in their close relationships with more irreligious masters of the genre, “split their selves in two, allowing their commitment to total religion to stand side by side with a mechanistic and relativistic worldview” (2017: 4). Büyükokutan finds that the same amiable connections did not pertain between pious and non-pious novelists, and thus hypothesizes that the split-self of poets may not be generalized to the broader population. However, in his study of Islamist literature in Turkey, Kenan Çayır (2007) traces out the transformation in Islamic fiction from its earliest writing of what he calls ‘salvation novels’ in the 1980s to more self-reflexive narratives of Muslim actors in the 1990s that also revealed aspects of conflicted or split inner selves. For Çayır, ‘fragmentation’ of the self in Muslim novels reflected a widespread social phenomenon. Rather than these divided selves being an expression of ‘deep secularity’ (as diagnosed by Charles Taylor), they index the tripartite framework of anthropocracy. The split-self described by Büyükokutan plays out in tense divisions within the broader society as well. In many Turkish cities an agonistic politics prevails in the public, intersubjective aspects of relationships between people of different religious sensibility. Liberal, Kurdish, and heterodox Muslims may pursue secular separation of religion and state. ‘Kemalists’ may obstruct it (see Özyürek 2006; Gürpınar 2013b). Amongst pious Muslims themselves emerging ethnic, denominational, class, and gender divisions reveal a clash of anthropocracies and of Islams. In social life buttressed by anthropocratic political practices and institutions, religious belief and unbelief alike become modes of everyday distinction and reflexive performance. The visibility of ‘Muslim’ particularity in public, say in

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women’s selective wearing of the headscarf, reveals in turn that the embodied life-worlds—corporeal styles, comportment, manners, clothing, consumption, and so on—of ‘non-Muslim’ actors are similarly conscious self-creation. Precisely because the dual project of anthropocracy—de-­ sacralize and re-sacralize—is identified with in different ways by different groups or classes of people, it is also intimately connected with the power, privilege, and embodied distinctions of those classes, as well as with the associational practices and political knowledge they generate (see Navaro-­ Yashin 2002).

3.2   Conclusion: A Global Political Mode? For the anthropocratic Turkish Republic, and perhaps for anthropocratic regimes and political episodes elsewhere, there is no such thing as politically neutral religion. Or ironically, given Castoriadis’ claims, is it rather that for anthropocracy there should be no such thing as an autonomous religion? Thus, Sunni Islam is controlled by the state in the form of the Diyanet, both to ensure its contribution to Turkish ethnic superiority, and to regulate any potentially oppositional or subversive religious practices within it. Its publishing houses and television channels reproduce the state’s political views and thinking. Further, both Kemalist and AKP anthropocracy have officially incorporated Islam into the curriculum of schools and universities, even as they simultaneously reprove any nonauthorized pretensions alternative Islams might have to truth.14 State Islam proffers a legalistic and positivistic theology to Turkish society with no safeguards against its own hubris; it has no use for any negative theology that modestly acknowledges its own ignorance of the divine being. In short, the anthropocratic Republic offers civil society neither freedom of religion nor freedom from it. Accordingly, because unauthorized varieties of Islam may be potentially fractious of the desired corporatist and nationalist society, at times anthropocratic Kemalism and the AKP censures them to prevent their threatening of unity. Yet because religion is also potentially constitutive of a unified public, at other times anthropocratic Kemalism and the AKP mobilizes 14  Joel Kahn’s last work (2016) opens up the question and possibility of an internal, religious ‘contemplative critique’ of the legalism and sharia-oriented politics of Islamist activists in Indonesia. We might make a plea for the contemporary urgency of a similar ‘contemplative critique’ of nationalistic anthropocratic Islam in Turkey.

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Sunni Islam in public space and in modern institutions in order to generate unity. TV funerals of slain soldiers feature victorious generals and majors alongside the imams, together  marching next to the coffin. The fact that the so-called ‘Islamist’ AKP Government does all of these things too adds weight to the argument that ‘secularism’ is a thoroughly misleading description for the political order of the Turkish Republic. Yet why has this anti-secular coupling of religion and politics been so difficult to discern? As we have seen in the work of Niyazi Berkes, one reason is Kemalism’s own investment in the ensemble of practices and ideas named modernizat ion/secularization. In Turkey bureaucratic, professional, and military elites have long legitimized their authority to control and restructure society by asserting that their reforms are consonant with universal and rational historical progress. But equally significant has been the powerful drama of the narrative of radical religious reform. The constant retelling—admiring or appalled—of the early Republic’s hostility to specific Ottoman religious institutions, for example in the story of its rescinding of sharia law, its banning of the fez, its dismantling of the tarikats (Islamic Sufi organizations), or its abolition of the Caliphate, has captured the nation’s political imagination. Here we see the third key feature of anthropocracy in action, the obfuscating or camouflaging of the Republic’s simultaneous re-sponsoring of the divine to aid the rule of the [representatives of the] people. Ironically, in their narrating of the history of modernization in Turkey, both Kemalist and AKP anthropocrats have vested interests in downplaying the religious relations of the Republic as well as the significance of the Diyanet. In doing so the former seek to enhance their reputation as modernizing universalists, and the latter to amplify their status as religious victims of an atheistic and elitist state. Yet as Davison puts it, the “constitutive discourse of this conflict does not bear a ‘secularist’ or ‘atheist’ versus ‘Muslim’ exchange; rather, it is a heated contest between different accounts of politicized Islam” (2003: 341). How might we answer the challenge Davison makes to description? As we have seen in this chapter, authors have used a number of phrases to evoke the situation: laic ethnocracy, religious militarism, ambivalent laicism, non-separationist secularism, constitutional eternalization, religious state/secular society. This internally contradictory and socially explosive repurposing of religion is better named anthropocracy.

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Briefly, what other advantages accrue for our understanding of contemporary politics in Turkey (and perhaps elsewhere) by diagnosing the governing policies of the Republic as ceaselessly anthropocratic? First, it casts a different light on the antagonism between Kemalist and Islamist Muslims there. Rather than interpreting the decades long political and intersubjective fault line amongst Muslims in Turkey as a civilizational dispute, we can re-signify the argument as one concerning the scope of anthropocratic governance and disagreement over its extension to different fields of social practice. On some core political strategies everyone agrees. Thus, as we have seen, the governing AKP has neither rejected the sovereign rule of the people—as seen in their essentially identical Preamble to the amended constitution in 2017—nor abolished or revised the duties of the Diyanet. Further, they are not in favour of Islam carte blanche: on the contrary, and here again in harmony with Kemalist anthropocrats, they are simultaneously solicitous towards selected interpretations of Islam and indifferent or even hostile to others. Yet there are disagreements between Kemalists and the AKP over anthropocratic policy too. For example, even as the AKP’s dini-Türkçülük (Turk-Islam synthesis) denies Kurdish Muslims the legitimacy of political mobilization based on a defence of Kurdish identity, its stated reasons for doing so are different to the Kemalists. For foundational Kemalism, mere recognition of those who ‘think themselves Kurdish’ threatens the existence of a Republic for Turks. For Islamists in the AKP, recognition of the justice of Muslim Kurdish resistance to Turkish chauvinism threatens the desired unity and thus the political efficacy of the Muslim ummah (Islamic community). Although both the AKP and the Kemalists attribute the existence of the Kurdish rebellion to malignant Western action, the AKP Islamizes this discourse by claiming that the West is enacting a modern crusader war against Muslims in Turkey, rather than ‘merely’ seeking the nation’s fragmentation by sponsoring Kurdish separatism. Behind these variations in emphasis we find a more radical disagreement over the centrality or otherwise of Islam in the national culture. Second, and more generally, recognition of anthropocracy as a potentially cross-cultural or even global political mode distributing power between humans (or the state) and the divine (or religion) in the contemporary world can also lessen distinctions between Muslim polities and the political order of many other so-called secular states or governments around the world. We have already seen in Chap. 1 how the presumption that Muslims are especially predisposed to interpret religion as ‘divine law’

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distracts analysts from identifying theocratic practices not only in Greco-­ Roman but also in Jewish, Christian, and non-state contexts. Shahab Ahmed calls this a “legal-supremacist” conceptualisation of Islam in which subjects are imagined as “defined and constituted by and in a cult of regulation, restriction and control” (2016: 120). Orthodox Muslims are some of its main defenders. The category of anthropocracy ensures that in comparative research into the politics of secularity, the same bias is not enacted. For example, how should we describe the Modi Government’s newly appointed commission to re-write India’s history so as to establish a ‘Hindu First’ version, even as it still asserts that the Indian constitution is established by the people? Or what might we make of the fact that all Australian federal and state parliaments and legislative assemblies open with a reading of the Lord’s Prayer, and that the Australian constitution ends its preamble with the Lord’s blessing? What is the significance of the ‘Church’ or ‘Worship’ Tax in Germany (and other European countries), where the state collects a fee from declared members of denominations on their behalf and redistributes it to church authorities, while making tax-­ free such money flows? Why are Orthodox priests in Greece civil servants paid by the state? How about the President of the United States, invoking God and praying for His protection of American soldiers in the context of military intervention in the Muslim world? And in the name of countering violent extremism (CVE), why do we call ‘secular’ the decision of western Governments to sponsor the teaching of particular approved varieties of Islamic theology while suppressing others? Preference for one type of Islam and censure of another is basic anthropocratic intervention into religious education, with its presumption of the legitimacy of the government’s right to select a state-friendly religion that serves current political projects. All these various acts, which reveal political rule justified by the sovereignty of the people alongside (more or less) concealed co-option of the divine to aid in that rule of men, show that anthropocracy may be as much a global norm as an exception. In its enterprise, it exhibits a defining feature of theocracy—at least, according to Potz (2019: 63)—and that is its religious legitimation of state power. Equally importantly, and as we have seen in Chap. 1, anthropocratic regimes, despite constituting a version of non-theocratic politics, often appropriate another controversial element of theocratic order. This is their willingness, as demonstrated in the case of the Turkish Republic, to suspend or abrogate laws that in the name of its

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people the regime itself had instituted, asserting in the process a ‘God-­ like’ sovereignty to make and break the law. In sum, neither theocratic nor secular, or perhaps both at the same time, anthropocracy constitutes its own, distinct mode of political practice. Even as it separates religion and state, it also conjoins them. The examples above suggest that some minimal anthropocracy is the default arrangement of many political power relations across the globe, even in systems that in other ways may also be secular. In that case, it is not just the citizens of Turkey who live in an anthropocratic age.

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Epilogue

Plumping for what we now know is Turkish nationalism, in Three Styles of Politics Yusuf Akçura opted for a political policy that required religion to become a ‘handmaiden’ for ‘national unities.’ In recommending so he passed over two other contenders for reform of Ottoman political life, each of which he problematized for the same reason. Pan-Islamism sought the unity of Muslim peoples in a Muslim nation, while an Ottoman Commonwealth would unite both Muslims and non-­ Muslims in an Ottoman one. Both depended upon a composite, blended nationalism rather than on what Akçura believed was a more contemporary (German) model, nationalism based on ethnicity and descent. Even so, in 1904 Akçura was still uncertain as to which of these three policies would be the most beneficial and practicable for the Ottoman state. For Turkism to prevail, Islam would first have to be transformed, renouncing its claim to being sole director of social life, becoming nothing more than a moral bond between the Creator and the created, and thereby a useful helper in realizing Turkish unity. Sixty years later, Niyazi Berkes described Kemalist secularism as achieving exactly that—the alteration of Islam into a non-political, political religion. This small book calls that achievement anthropocracy.

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Index1

A Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP), 5, 32, 62, 67, 68, 74–85 Ahmed, Shahab, 53, 86 Akçura, Yusuf, xi, xin1, xii, 2, 21, 26, 53, 54, 78, 91 Alevi/Alevism, 32, 72 Anatolia, xii Ankara, xin1, 18, 39n5 Anthroparchy, 3 Anthropocracy anthropocratic Republic, 5, 61–87 anthropocratic rule, 2, 66 Armenians, 40, 79 Asad, Talal, 35, 36, 36n3, 51, 52, 52n18, 54, 55, 57, 75 Askere Din Dersleri, 69 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 18–20, 62n1 Atheism, 3, 21, 44, 74 Australia, 32, 70, 79 Authoritarianism, 33

Authoritarian secularism, 34, 35, 82 Autonomy, 7, 16, 66 B Bahai, 32 Berkes, Niyazi, 35–41, 39n5, 65, 69, 84, 91 BJP government Modi Government, 34, 86 Bol, Ferdinand, 16, 17, 19, 24–26 Bourdieu, Pierre, 40 Buddhist, 21, 32 Büyükokutan, Barış, 82 C Capitalism, 38, 38n4, 43, 48 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 7, 8, 12, 13, 22, 42n6, 49, 66, 83 Çayır, Kenan, 82

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Houston, Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey, Contemporary Anthropology of Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79657-0

103

104 

INDEX

Christian, xi, 2n2, 7n4, 12, 15n11, 21, 32, 37, 40, 52, 72, 86 Christianity, 13, 14, 50n16, 72 Colonialism, 13, 40, 42, 48, 49, 51, 52 Committee of Union and Progress, 52 Comte, Auguste, 54, 55 Constitution, 5, 12, 18, 23, 25, 45, 51, 56, 66–68, 80n13, 85, 86 Corporatism, 63 Coup d’états, 67 1980 coup d’état, 67 Cultural revolution, 18, 63 D Davison, Andrew, 4, 26, 39, 62, 63, 63n2, 66, 68n5, 69, 84 Deification, 9 Demirtaş, Selahattin, 73 Democracy, 5, 23, 33, 39, 41, 54, 66, 77, 77n11 Divine law, 3, 7, 12–16, 12n10, 19, 20, 22, 23, 85 Diyanet/Directorate of Religious Affairs, 68 Domingo, Rafael, 3 E Egypt, 8, 51 Enlightenment, 14, 33, 43, 47, 65, 76 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 76 European secularism, 42 F Faculties of Divinity, 65 First Letter to the Corinthians, 12 France, 33–35 French secularism, 34

G Gellner, Ernst, 35, 36, 43–49, 48n14 Gezi Park, 74 God(s), 2–18, 16n12, 20–26, 33, 42, 44, 49, 53, 57, 62, 71, 74, 79, 86, 87 Gökalp, Ziya, 71 Göle, Nilüfer, 34, 62, 82 Greek, 2, 2n2, 12–14, 12n10, 19, 40, 54, 79 H Hadith, 8, 71 Hagia Sophia, 80, 81 Hallaq, W., 13–15, 26, 50n16 Hayes, C., 12, 12n10, 13, 16 Headscarf ban, 34 Hindu, 34, 35 Hobbes, Thomas, 25, 68n5, 73 Husserl, Edmund, 44, 45, 45n7 I Imperialism, 51 Indian secularism, 34 Islam, xii, 4, 6n3, 15, 42, 47, 52–54, 56, 64–66, 66n4, 69, 70, 70n8, 72–74, 73n10, 78–80, 82–86, 83n14, 91 Islamic jurisprudence, 7 Islamic law, 8, 14 Islamic scripture, 8 Islamic sharia/Şeriat, 12, 40, 69 Islamic society, 4, 7, 12, 14, 47 Islamism, xi, xii, 5, 54, 78 Pan-Islamism, xi, 91 Islamist political movements, 6 Islamization, 5, 75 Istanbul, xi, xin1, 64, 69n6, 73, 74, 79, 81 Izer, Zeki Faik, 18–20, 20n13, 33

 INDEX 

J Jews, xi, 12, 21, 38, 40, 72 Judaism, 14, 50n16, 72 K Kahn, Joel, 6n3, 36, 42, 64, 83n14 Kemalist, xin1, 5, 19, 34, 40, 42, 63–66, 69–72, 74, 75, 78, 80, 82–85, 91 Kemalism, 4, 5, 39, 63–65, 68, 70n7, 73, 73n10, 79, 80, 83–85 Khomeinism, 4 Kings divine kingship, 8, 9 god-kings, 9, 10 Kurds/Kurdish, xi, 40, 52, 68, 71–74, 71n9, 77n11, 78–80, 82, 85 Kuru, Ahmet, 64 L Laicism, 4, 36, 62, 63, 67, 77, 84 Laicite, 35, 62 Leviathan, 73 M Machiavelli, N., 25 Martial law, 67 Martyr, 70 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 45 Mesopotamia, 8, 9 Militarism, 70n7, 80, 81, 84 Military, 13, 23, 46, 52, 66, 67, 69, 70n7, 70n8, 76, 78–81, 80n13, 84, 86 Mosaic law, 12 Mosaic Constitution, 24, 25 Moses, 16, 19, 20, 24–26

105

Moses Descends from Mount Sinai with the Tablets of the Law, 17 Muhafazakar Demokrasi (Conservative Democracy), 76–78, 80 Music revolution, 22 N National Movement Party (MHP), 78 National Security Council, 73 Nature, 11, 13, 14, 24, 35, 36, 42–45, 45n7, 47, 49–51, 56, 57, 67 O 1982 constitution, 66, 67 On the Way of Revolution, 18, 19 Orientalism, 6 Ottoman Empire Ottoman history/society, 37, 47 Ottoman nation, xi Ottoman Islam, 66 Ottomanism, xi, xii, 54 P Parla, Taha, 4, 39, 63, 66, 68n5 Peace and Democracy Party, 73 Phenomenology, 35, 44, 45 Populism, 39 Post-secular, 35, 48 Q Quran, 18, 53, 71, 73, 74, 80 R Rationality, 17, 36, 41, 42, 42n6, 45, 49, 50, 56 Religious school, 32

106 

INDEX

Republican People’s Party (CHP), 39, 40 Romans, 12, 54 Rome, 8 S Sahlins, Marshall, 10, 11 Said, Edward, 6 Saint Paul, 2n2, 12, 13 Science, 5, 21, 22, 33, 35, 38, 41–48, 55–57, 64 A Secular Age, 33, 51 Secularization, 35–41, 51, 84 Secularization thesis, 36, 41, 48 Secular modernity, 35, 39–41, 43, 49, 55 Secular/secularism/ secularity, 3–5, 9, 9n6, 15, 18, 20, 23, 26, 27, 32–57, 62–68, 62n1, 63n2, 66n4, 70n7, 75–78, 81, 82, 84–87, 91 Seufert, Günter, 65 Shamanism, 10n9, 72 Shinto, 9n8 Single-party period, 39, 40 Six arrows, 39 Sociocracy, 54, 55 Somer, Murat, 64–66, 75 Soviet Union, 68 State-religion relations, 5, 65 Sufism, 53

T Taylor, Charles, 33–36, 41, 49–52, 50n16, 54, 81, 82 Theocracy, 2–27, 32, 54, 63, 64, 75, 86 Tuncay, Mete, 64 Turkish armed forces, 76, 80 Turkish History Society, xin1 Turkish History Thesis, 71 Turkish nationalism, xi, 68, 73, 91 Turkish Republic, 4, 5, 18, 52, 62, 64–66, 70, 75, 79, 83, 84, 86 Turkish state, 5, 66, 75, 79 Turkism, xi, 53, 54, 78, 91 Turko-centric’ Islam (dini-Türkçülük), 70, 70n8, 85 U Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset (Three Styles of Politics), xi, 78, 91 W Weber, Max, 41 Y Yeni Hutbelerim, 70 Young Turks, 53, 63n3 Z Zahavi, Dan, 44, 56