From Religious Empires to Secular States: State Secularization in Turkey, Iran and Russia [1 ed.] 1138696390, 9781138696396

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Series Editors’ Foreword
1 Introduction: The Secular State and Its Three Types
2 Mobilizing Sheikhs and Ulama: Religion and the Ottoman Empire
3 Accommodationist State Secularization in Republican Turkey
4 Appeasing the Ulama: Religion and the Imperial State in Iran
5 Separationist State Secularization in Pahlavi Iran
6 Taming the Church: Religion and the Russian Empire
7 Eradicationist State Secularization in the Soviet Union
8 Conclusion: The Fates of Three Models of Secular States
Appendix
References
Index

Citation preview

“Birol Bas¸kan makes a major and innovative contribution to the study of secularization. His comparison of one Christian (the USSR) and two Muslim (Turkey and Iran) countries is buttressed by deep and insightful historical research to provide empirical and analytic leverage for his penetrating insights on the paths to, and ultimate limitations of, state-directed secularization. This book will become essential reading for scholars of the three countries and for sociologists who study politics and religion.” —Richard W. Lachmann, University at Albany “Theoretically refined and empirically rich, this book examines the intersection of religion, politics, Islam, and secularism from an innovative standpoint. The author separates the concepts of state, liberalism, and secularism and then creatively re-assembles them. For secularism, the key in this reassemble is the state-building process: secularism is not so much driven by ideological commitment but material needs for survival in an uncertain domestic and international environment. Offering empirically rich histories, the author builds a clear typology of paths for state secularization— accommodationist (Turkey), separationist (Iran), and eradicationist (Russia) to explain differences in the state secularization. This book will be an essential reading for political scientists, historians, areas studies specialists, and comparative sociologists who are interested in religion and politics.” —Turan Kayaog˘ lu, University of Washington, Tacoma

From Religious Empires to Secular States

In the 1920s and the 1930s, Turkey, Iran, and Russia vehemently pursued state-secularizing reforms but adopted different strategies in doing so. But why do states follow different secularizing strategies? The literature has already shattered the illusion that secularization of the state has been a unilinear, homogeneous, and universal process and has convincingly shown that secularization of the state has unfolded along different paths. Much, however, remains to be uncovered. This book provides an in-depth comparative historical analysis of state secularization in three major Eurasian countries: Turkey, Iran, and Russia. To capture the aforementioned variation in state secularization across three countries that have been hitherto analyzed as separate studies, Birol Bas¸kan adopts three modes of state secularization: accommodationism, separationism, and eradicationism. Focusing thematically on the changing relations between the state and religious institutions, Bas¸kan brings together a host of factors, historical, strategic, and structural, to account for why Turkey adopted accommodationism, Iran separationism, and Russia eradicationism. In doing so, he expertly demonstrates that each secularization strategy was a rational response to the strategic context in which the reformers found themselves. Birol Bas¸kan is an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. He holds a PhD in political science from Northwestern University. His research looks at state-regime-religion relations in the Middle East.

Conceptualising Comparative Politics: Polities, Peoples, and Markets

Edited by Anthony Spanakos (Montclair State University) and Francisco Panizza (London School of Economics) Conceptualising Comparative Politics seeks to bring a distinctive approach to comparative politics by rediscovering the discipline’s rich conceptual tradition and inter-disciplinary foundations. It aims to fill out the conceptual framework on which the rest of the subfield draws but to which books only sporadically contribute, and to complement theoretical and conceptual analysis by applying it to deeply explored case studies. The series publishes books that make serious inquiry into fundamental concepts in comparative politics (crisis, legitimacy, credibility, representation, institutions, civil society, reconciliation) through theoretically engaging and empirical deep analysis. 1 Moments of Truth The Politics of Financial Crises in Comparative Perspective Edited by Francisco Panizza and George Philip 2 From Religious Empires to Secular States State Secularization in Turkey, Iran, and Russia Birol Başkan

From Religious Empires to Secular States State Secularization in Turkey, Iran, and Russia Birol Başkan

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of Birol Başkan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baskan, Birol, author. From religious empires to secular states : state secularization in Turkey, Iran, and Russia / by Birol Baskan. pages cm. — (Conceptualising comparative politics: polities, peoples, and markets ; 2) 1. Secularism—Turkey—History. 2. Secularism—Iran—History. 3. Secularism—Russia—History. 4. Religion and state—Turkey— History. 5. Religion and state—Iran—History. 6. Religion and state— Russia—History. I. Title. II. Series: Conceptualising comparative politics; 2. BL2747.8.B325 2014 322'.10904—dc23 2013040882 ISBN: 978-0-415-74351-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-81360-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To my grandfather, Arif ‘Çavuş’ Başkan.

Contents

Acknowledgments Series Editors’ Foreword

xi xiii

1

Introduction: The Secular State and Its Three Types

2

Mobilizing Sheikhs and Ulama: Religion and the Ottoman Empire

24

3

Accommodationist State Secularization in Republican Turkey

51

4

Appeasing the Ulama: Religion and the Imperial State in Iran

73

5

Separationist State Secularization in Pahlavi Iran

95

6

Taming the Church: Religion and the Russian Empire

109

7

Eradicationist State Secularization in the Soviet Union

132

8

Conclusion: The Fates of Three Models of Secular States

146

Appendix References Index

163 183 199

1

Acknowledgments

This book has grown out of a dissertation submitted to the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. I owe great intellectual debt to the committee members, Will Reno (the chair), Edward Gibson, and Georgi Derluguian. During my five years of graduate life at Northwestern, I also incurred great debt to several fellow graduate students: just to name a few, I must count Ato Kwamena Onoma, Jae Jeok Park, Jean-François Godbout, Jiangnan Zhu, Lee Seymour, Sarah Stucky, and Tao Xie. Several others have made critical contributions to this book. I want to name specifically Ahmet T. Kuru, who also suggested the book’s title, Amira Sonbol, Anthony P. Spanakos, Ekrem Karakoç, Francisco Panizza, Mark Farha, Mazhar al Zo’by, Richard Lachmann, Sultan Tepe, Turan Kayaog˘ lu, and three anonymous reviwers of Routledge. I wholeheartedly thank them all. I also want to extend my gratitude to the staff of libraries at Northwestern University, State University of New York at Fredonia, Qatar University, and Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar for their valuable help in the process of writing this book. At Routledge, I am grateful to Anthony P. Spanakos, Francisco Panizza, Natalja Mortensen, and Darcy Bullock for their precious help through the whole process. I thank Routledge Taylor and Francis Group for allowing me to reprint certain parts of my “What Made Ataturk Reforms?” in chapter 3 and Cambridge University Press for allowing me to reprint certain parts of my “State Secularization and Religious Resurgence: Diverging Fates of Secularism in Turkey and Iran” in chapter 8. The former appeared in Islam and Christian Muslim Relations in 2011 and the latter in Politics and Religion in 2013. My wife, Feyza, has brought color and joy to my life, which would have otherwise been quite dull. I am and will always be grateful for this. I also want to express my gratitude to my broader family—my maternal aunt, Yas¸ar; my brother, S¸enol; my paternal aunts, Gülhan and Nurhan in particular; my uncles; my cousins; my nephew and niece; and all my in-laws. I am blessed to have you all in my life.

xii

Acknowledgments

I owe the greatest debt, of course, to my mother and father, Nezaket and S¸efik Bas¸kan. I hope I have made you truly happy and genuinely proud of me. May Allah give you both a long and blessed life. I would like to dedicate this book, however, to my grandfather, Arif Bas¸kan, whom we lost just recently.

Series Editors’ Foreword

Both liberalism and Marxism thought that religion had no place in modern public life: liberalism cordoning it off to the private realm, Marxism condemning it to the dustbin of history. And yet, as any cursory look at international affairs would confirm, religion has an obstinate presence in modern politics.1 Of course, there are significant variations in the role played by religion in public life. As a spin doctor of former British prime minister Tony Blair famously said, politicians “don’t do God” in Britain. In contrast, in the United States, politicians cannot afford “not to do God.” In other areas, particularly in the Muslim world, religion and politics remain firmly joined together. The temptation is to see this part of the world as exceptional to the distinction between “church and state” that is seen in the modern West. Given that even within the West, there exist plural relations between religious organizations, ideas, and movements and the state, among other agents of governance, it should not be surprising that concepts of secularism based on “separationism” would be misleading in the Middle East.2 But then, it is not only so in the Middle East. It is equally inadequate in examining countries where Orthodox Christianity is the historic religion of the majority.3 The conceptual challenge of understanding secularism in different contexts means precisely doing that—understanding secularity as taking different forms depending on context rather than assuming that monolithic modernization theory will be sufficient for all times and places. Offering a more precise lens on the process of constructing a secular state in Iran, Turkey, and the Soviet Union, Birol Bas¸kan makes three important contributions to our understanding of secularism and secularization. The first one is conceptual: What does it mean that a state is secular? Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) defined a secular state as a state that: is not officially and substantively linked to a religion; acknowledges and guarantees full religious liberty; and grants full equality between people of different faiths and full political participation to people of all faiths. With some variations, this definition has been adopted by most scholars working on the field of secularization. Bas¸kan challenges this consensus, arguing that Taylor’s definition fits the characterization of the modern liberal democratic state but not of the much broader category of

xiv

Series Editors’ Foreword

the secular state. The challenge is more subtle than Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed (2004), which offers “reflections on popular politics in most of the world,” but it is no less bold. Liberal democracy occupies so narrow a range of countries that, if it is not considered a universal telos, there is little reason to consider it “typical” enough to derive a notion of secularism from its experience. For Bas¸kan, state secularity refers to a particular relationship the state has with religion through its leaders—namely, a relation by which the state claims absolute sovereignty and as a consequence brings to an end the autonomous existence of religious communities within the territory. As such secularity is a necessary condition of the modern state that is compatible with a range of possible relations between religious authorities and the state on the condition that it is the latter that determines the role of religion within its territory. In other words, it is not the separation but subordination of religious authorities to the state that defines a secular state. Subordination leads to policies, to notions of tolerance and coexistence, and also to forms of discrimination that are distinct from those associated with separation. The book’s second contribution is the study of secularization as a process. Bas¸kan argues that secularization is linked to the process of building the modern sovereign state. This is, of course, not a particularly new insight. What Bas¸kan adds to the argument is that secularization was not dependent, as claimed by scholars such as Jose Casanova, on the capture of state power by militant secularizing movements (1994). Rather, he argues, the secularization of the modern state stems from its very nature as a sovereign state, not from the ideology of groups who build it. If secularization is an integral part of state building, the same factors that have contributed to the birth of the modern state, such as the existence of a hostile international environment and the requirements of a nascent capitalist economy, also contributed to the process of secularization. Yet Bas¸kan’s analysis of secularization does not fall into some kind of abstract structural determinism. Rather, he brings politics back to the study of secularization: The secularization of the state was about weakening or, if necessary, destroying the existence of autonomous religious organizations. As he puts it, state secularization was not an impersonal historically determined process, but rather a deeply political one of redistribution of power. Bas¸kan’s analysis of the particular strategies pursued by state rulers to subordinate religious organizations to the sovereign state and of the strategic context in which reformers found themselves explains what is, perhaps, the most important contribution of the book to the study of the modern secular state: the existence of different paths to secularization and of different models of secularism. Based on a richly textured empirical study of processes of secularization in Republican Turkey (1923–present), Pahlavi Iran (1925–1979), and Soviet Russia (1922–1991), Bas¸kan shows that while all modern secular states are characterized by common features

Series Editors’ Foreword

xv

such as the monopoly of legislative power and the elimination of the religious communities’ veto power over its sovereign decisions, they differ in some critical ways. He argues that the differences stem from the fact that the secularizers pursued radically different strategies in dealing with religion, religious communities, and religious institutions. If, as in Turkey, the reformers came to power through an intense intraelite competition and faced an acquiescent religious community, “secular accommodationism” was the outcome. In Turkey, the Kemalist rulers closed religious courts and schools and strongly asserted the secular nature of the state, but they did incorporate certain religious institutions into the state, put Islamic scholars on the state payroll, and propagated a particular understanding of Islam through the religious institutions under its control. This was not a simple example of religious repression or separationism. If, as in Iran, the reformers came to power through a palace coup and faced a disengaged religious community, “secular separationism” was the outcome. Religious institutions continued to operate but were deprived of their privileges and depended on their own organizational and financial resources. In contrast with Turkey, the Iranian state did not seek to control religious bodies or impose a particular interpretation of Islam. Ironically, this opened a space for many of the forces behind the 1979 revolution and the regime that followed. If, as in Soviet Russia, the reformers came to power through a civil war and faced a confrontational religious community, “eradicationism” was the outcome. The Soviet state waged war against religion, officially adopting atheism as an integral part of the state ideology, closing down religious institutions, expropriating church assets, and prosecuting priests. While the book is about recent rather than contemporary history, it is almost unavoidable to try to draw some lessons for the present, particularly in light of developments such as the Arab Spring, the electoral triumph of Hassan Rouhani in the 2013 presidential election in Iran, and the revival of authoritarian religious nationalism in Russia. While Bas¸kan is careful not to chose among the different models of secularism, he notes that Turkey’s accommodationism is the only one that has survived today and that, while not by any means a fl awless democracy, Turkey is certainly much more democratic than either Iran or Russia. Whether this means that accommodationist secularism is the best path to democracy for other Muslim countries remains an open question that is left as such by this engrossing book. From Religious Empires to Secular States is the second publication in Routledge’s series on Conceptualising Comparative Politics. Bas¸kan’s book beautifully captures the spirit of the series: to bring a distinctive approach to the study of comparative politics by placing a particular analytical emphasis on the conceptual issues underlying empirical studies and showing how these can be related to some classical questions in politics, history, and sociology through the use of the comparative method. By exploring

xvi

Series Editors’ Foreword

the meaning of secularism in different contexts, Bas¸kan shows how an historical study of the contextual differences in which the concept has been used allows for a deeper understanding of its meanings and enhances it analytical power. Francisco Panizza and Anthony Peter Spanakos Coeditors, Conceptualising Comparative Politics NOTES 1. Berger (1999). 2. Neusner (2003). 3. Papanikololaou (2003).

REFERENCES Berger, Peter L., “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in Peter L. Berger (ed.), The Secularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999. Casanova, Jose, Public Religions in the Modern World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Chatterjee, Partha, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Neusner, Jacob, ed., God’s Rules: The Politics of World Religions, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003. Papanikolaou, Aristotle, “Byzantium, Orthodoxy, and Democracy.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, v. 71, no. 1 (March 2003), pp. 75–98. Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

1

Introduction The Secular State and Its Three Types

Sometime in the early 14th century . . . somewhere in northwest Anatolia . . . Osman Bey, the tribal leader of a relatively weak Anatolian emirate known as the Ottomans, visits Sheikh Edebali, a local Sufi sheikh, and stays the night in his convent. In his room, Osman sees a copy of the Qur’an hanging on the wall. Out of his great respect for the Holy Book, he does not lie down on his bed; rather, he falls asleep while sitting up. In his dream, Osman sees a moon rising from the breast of Edebali and sinking into his own. Then a tree sprouts from Osman’s navel, and its shade encompasses the whole world. Osman Bey wakes up and asks Edebali for his interpretation. “Osman, my son,” says Sheikh Edebali, “congratulations, for God has given the imperial office to you and your descendants, and my daughter Malhun shall be your wife.”1 With that, Osman’s dream became the most famous and resilient founding myth of the Ottoman Empire.2 Some 600 years later in 1925 . . . in Kastamonu, a town in North Anatolia . . . the president of the newly founded Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, delivers a speech. In his speech Kemal states in no unequivocal terms his stance on Sufi convents and sheikhs: “Gentlemen and the nation, know well that the Republic of Turkey cannot be a nation of sheikhs, dervishes, disciples [müritler] and devotees [mensuplar].” Using a polysemous word “tarikat,” a word that literally means “path” but also means “Sufi order,” Kemal continues: “The truest and the most authentic path [tarikat] is that of civilization. It is enough to do what the civilization orders and demands in order to be a human. The sheikhs of Sufi Orders will understand this truth with all clarity and immediately close down their convents on their own initiatives.”3 What is the critical difference between Osman Bey and Mustafa Kemal? The obvious answer is Osman Bey was a founder of an Islamic empire while Mustafa Kemal was the founder of a modern secular state. But what does this difference really amount to? To paraphrase Charles Taylor’s opening sentence of his Secular Age, what does it mean to say that a state is secular, not religious?4 And to add another layer to Taylor’s question, what might be the possible paths out of religious states into secular ones? These are the two questions I aim to address in this book. To this end, I compare the historical experiences of Republican Turkey (1923–present), Pahlavi Iran

2

From Religious Empires to Secular States

(1925–1979), and Soviet Russia (1922–1991). It was in these respective periods that my three cases made their transitions from a religious imperial past to a secular modern present, each adopting a distinct model of state secularization in that transition.5 If “state secularity” is to be understood as a modern condition, a model derived from the experience of a single country or a single civilization or a single religion is not going to capture that condition in its entirety.6 A comparative study, therefore, is indispensable to understand and grasp the true nature of state secularity. The three cases selected in this book are ideal in the sense that they clearly exhibit a critical variation in their paths from the religious past to the secular present. Despite this variation, however, they also share a certain common feature that constitutes, in my view, the defining characteristic of state secularity. I hope to persuade the reader that this book goes beyond such specificities and arrives at a religion- and/or civilization-free conceptualization of state secularity. I also hope to persuade the reader that the book provides a persuasive account of the variation observed across the three cases and, in doing so, avoids any essentialist claims about the cases. There are five main sections in this chapter. In the next section I discuss what constitutes, in my view, the defining characteristic of state secularity. In the second section I discuss the alternative paths, represented by the experiences of Republican Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, and Soviet Russia, in state secularization. In the third section I discuss the methodology employed in this book, and in the fourth I explain my reasons for choosing Republican Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, and Soviet Russia as my cases. The final section provides a summary of the remaining chapters.

CONCEPTUALIZING STATE SECULARIZATION

The Problem By comparing the “state secularization” processes in three major Eurasian countries, Republican Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, and Soviet Russia, this book seeks to make a conceptual contribution to social sciences in general and the field of comparative politics in particular. There is a great deal of conceptual confusion around the term “secularization,” a confusion observable even among scholarly circles. The conceptual confusion is in part due to conceptual stretching of these terms and their indiscriminate application to different kinds of spheres and/or agents. As for the former, Oliver Tschannen, for example, found out that scholars attach to the term “secularization” several different meanings such as differentiation, rationalization, worldliness, autonomization, privatization, generalization, pluralization, decline in religious practice, collapse of worldviews, unbelief, scientization, and sociologization.7 Regarding the

Introduction

3

application of the term to different kinds of spheres and/or agents, one can speak of, for example, individual secularization or societal secularization or organizational secularization,8 or of public secularization9 or political secularization10 or polity secularization,11 or of international politics12 or of the state. State secularization has obvious affinities with several of these different kinds of secularization, especially public, polity, and political secularization. Interested readers may find it enlightening to further investigate how different scholars define these related terms.13 I am not going to delve into this discussion. Fortunately there are more direct definitions of the term “secular state,” and scholars seem to agree on its basic features as Donald E. Smith explicitly stated them fifty years ago. According to Smith, the secular state is a state that guarantees individual and corporate religious freedom, that does not discriminate individuals or groups on the basis of their religion, and that neither promotes nor intervenes with religion.14 Four decades later, Silvio Ferrari, Charles Taylor, and Ahmet Kuru defined the secular state in more or less similar ways. Ferrari, for example, defines the secular state as a state that grants all political and civil rights to individuals irrespective of their religion, that does not intervene in religious organizations’ internal organization and doctrines, and that does not legitimate its power on the basis of religion.15 Charles Taylor’s definition is not much different. For him the secular state is a state that is not officially and substantively linked to a religion, that acknowledges and guarantees full religious liberty, that grants full equality between people of different faiths, and that allows for full political participation of people of all faiths.16 Ahmet Kuru’s definition is more restrictive. For him the secular state is a state whose legislative and judicial processes are not under any institutional religious control and that declares constitutional neutrality toward religions, which means it does not establish either official religion or atheism.17 These definitions have serious limitations of employment in other contexts. This can be readily seen in that, according to these definitions, none of my cases in fact should be considered genuinely “secular.” This is because neither Republican Turkey nor Soviet Russia nor Pahlavi Iran developed the kind of neutrality toward any religion that these authors speak of. Soviet Russia was suppressive of all religions. Republican Turkey was not neutral, as it has not only supported Sunni Islam but also denied that support to the Alawites and severely restricted the religious freedoms of many Sunnis and Alawites alike. Among the three, Pahlavi Iran was probably the most neutral, even though that neutrality was introduced and implemented by force. The definitions proposed by various scholars are limited because they rather conceive a “liberal democratic secular state,” not simply a “secular state.” In fact, Smith explicitly acknowledges that his definition is derived from the liberal democratic tradition of the West.18 In order to overcome this limitation, one might simply suggest dropping the liberal component in the aforementioned definitions. If we follow this

4

From Religious Empires to Secular States

suggestion, we in fact end up with the most basic definition of the secular state. That is, the secular state is a state that is disconnected or separated from religion. This definition has certain appeal, but it also has a major problem. Namely, the difficulty of determining what constitutes “disconnection” or “separation” between the two.19 If we follow this definition, we should first specify those spaces that belong to the state only and those spaces that belong to religion. Then, we must check whether the state and religion are properly separated and in their proper places. But how are we going to specify a priori such spaces? What are, for example, those spaces that belong to the state? Any such specification is going to be necessarily ideological. The same is also true for religion. Any specification of spaces for religion is going to be inescapably ideological and theological. Defining “the secular state” based on empirical data has its own problem. Let us consider a hypothetical country that is undergoing state secularization. The process is supposed to separate respective spaces for the state and religion. What factors are going to determine the institutional outcome of state secularization? Certain ideologies and many other factors might indeed play a role. However, the process is also going to be a highly a contested one. In other words, the respective spaces of the state and religion are going to be determined politically. This makes the process, to a large extent, unpredictable. The process is, therefore, most likely to produce quite diverse institutional relations between the state and religion.20 This basically means that any definition of the term “secular state” based on empirical data will suffer from institution bias. Conceptualizing state secularization as separation between the state and religion is a case in point. The challenge is then to conceptualize state secularization in such way that, as much as possible, the term will be free from these constraints. In other words, the term should not be defined according to a particular idealized institutional relationship and should not refl ect the particular dictates of any civilization/religion/ideology. By and large scholars avoided this challenge. Therefore, scholars have generally ended up with using the old definition as we have already seen. Another option is not to stick to any definition of the secular state. For example, Alfred Stepan follows this option. “Despite my general reservation about the term ‘secularism,’ in my current research, I use the concept of ‘multiple secularisms’ to get around some of the difficulties of a single meaning of ‘secular’ and to help me identify and analyze the great variations in state-religion relations that can and do exist in modern democracies.”21 In the face of extremely diverse institutional relations between the state and religion, this latter option is, in this author’s view, better than sticking to the old definition, which assumes one particular institutional relationship. However, I also believe that we should take up the challenge of reconceptualizing the secular state, not escape from it. To do this I propose to approach “state secularity” from an alternative angle.

Introduction

5

An Alternative Perspective: State Secularization as a By-Product Secularization, however defined, is obviously about religion. As such it is also about religious community and religious institutions. Let me first simply define “religion.” A religion is a set of beliefs and practices believed to have descended from a transcendental being, God. Religious community is the community of individuals who perform, by virtue of formal or informal education or some other spiritual qualities, certain tasks, deemed religious, for adherents of that religion. Religious institutions are such buildings and places where religious community reproduces its ranks and undertakes its religious tasks.22 For the convenience of simplicity, my discussion will refer to religion only but, unless otherwise stated, will apply to religious community and institutions as well. Religion might exist in a variety of relations with a given domain of human life. When we talk about secularity of that domain, we are really referring to a particular type of relationship that domain has with religion. “Secularization” refers to the actual historical process that brings about that relationship. State secularity and state secularization are just extensions of this idea. To be more specific, “state secularity” refers to a particular relationship the state has with religion, and “state secularization” refers to the historical process that brings about that relationship. Two questions are critical. What is that particular relationship? And what historical process helps bring it to life? Let me first start with the second. The historical process that brings state secularization is, in this author’s view, the process of building a modern sovereign state. In other words, state secularization is intimately linked to the evolution of the modern sovereign state. This needs further clarification. I must first set the record straight. I am not the first person who links secularism and the modern state. Charles Taylor, for example, explicitly did so.23 “The inescapability of secularism,” Taylor notes, “fl ows from the nature of the modern state.”24 Taylor reasons that the modern nation state had to be secular in order to find a common denominator for individuals with different religious backgrounds and to define a political ethic independent of different religious teachings.25 Let us remember that Taylor understands secularism as a condition for the liberal democratic state. By connecting secularism and the modern state, Taylor does not necessarily contradict himself. He simply suggests that the secular character predated the liberal democratic character of the modern state by some hundreds of years. Jose Casanova also connects secularism to the modern state. In his Public Religions in the Modern World, Casanova sees the rise of the modern state as one of the four developments that has driven secularization. Along with three other developments—the Protestant Reformation, the rise of modern capitalism, and the rise of modern science—the rise of the modern state undermined the medieval system and became one of the carriers of a critical feature of secularization, differentiation. In the hands of various “militant

6

From Religious Empires to Secular States

secularist movements,” the modern state also became the vehicle of war against religion elsewhere, from Latin America to the Soviet Union.26 In connecting secularism to the modern state, I differ from both Charles Taylor and Jose Casanova. Charles Taylor traces the origin of liberal democracy in the secularity of the modern state. Sometime in the future, secularity of the modern state in Turkey, Iran, and Russia can be the seeds of liberal democracy in these countries, but not for now. As these cases illustrate, secularism can be as authoritarian as religion. Jose Casanova better captures the latter possibility. But his account also suggests that if militant secularist movements did not capture state power elsewhere, we would not see secularization in those places. Hence, for Casanova, secularity of the modern state was a choice made by secularist movements driven by an ideology. I suggest, however, that the modern state has to be secular whether built by religious fundamentalists or militant secularists. The secularity of the modern state stems from its nature, not from the ideology of groups who build it. In making this bold assertion, I get inspiration from Talal Asad. In his Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad well captures the nature of the modern state and its implications for religion. The modern state, Asad says, “clearly demarcated spaces that it can classify and regulate: religion, education, health, leisure, work, income, justice and war.”27 This is not novel. But, Asad also states, “the space that religion may properly occupy in society has to be continually redefined by the law.”28 Unfortunately, Asad does not elaborate on the implications of this statement. However, its implication is quite clear: whatever role religion plays, be it in the society or the state, it is going to be determined by the lawmaker or the sovereign. True to this implication, Asad claims that reforming the Islamic law is also “both the precondition and the consequence of secular processes of power.”29 In its idealized form, building a modern sovereign state is, in the words of Stephen Krasner, building a “political authority based on territory, mutual recognition, autonomy and control.”30 That political authority is to be exercised over a clearly defined geographical space, is to be recognized by other political authorities as their equals, is not to be shared by any external actor, and is not just a de jure authority, but also a de facto one, able to implement its own logic effectively.31 Building a modern sovereign state within a given territory is a major undertaking; this is why many attempts have, in fact, ended in failure. We can distinguish two major components in modern state building. The first component is institution building. That is, building a modern sovereign state requires building armed forces to defend and expand the territory under control, eliminating or pacifying internal rivals, and improving state capacity to extract resources, both financial and human, from the populations living in the territories over which is claimed sovereignty. The latter also involves investment in infrastructure, economy, and public health.32 Building a modern sovereign state is not just about institution building, though. It is also, as Michel Foucault states, an ambitious project of reshaping

Introduction

7

and disciplining the populations over which is claimed sovereignty.33 Seeking to create a more disciplined, loyal, homogenous, and patriotic body of citizens, this second component requires massive investment in public education.34 Especially in undertaking this second component of modern state building, state rulers cannot simply leave religion, religious community, and religious community/institutions untouched. There are several reasons for this. First, there is an ideological issue. The modern state claimed “absolute” sovereignty over a given territory, an idea that was at odds with the concept of “God” held by most religions. Second, the modern state claimed the right to legislate on its own, by virtue of its absolute “sovereignty”; this is of course at great odds with religions’ own claims to provide their own laws for the management of at least some worldly affairs and religious communities’ own claims to have exclusive authority over the interpretation and application of those laws. Third, the modern state strove to provide some critical public functions through its own institutions and claimed, at a minimum, the right to regulate some public spheres not under its control. This expansion of state power inescapably expanded the regulatory role of the state into such public functions as education, judiciary, and provision of welfare services—services that religious community had long undertaken. Fourth, religion was part of the cultural space that the state desired to give a shape and tailor in order to control and discipline the populations. As Taylor notes on this point, “attempts to discipline a population, and reduce it to order, almost always had a religious component, requiring people to hear sermons, or learn catechism.”35 Last, but not least, with their extensive network of religious institutions and wealthy endowments, religious community could raise to any state a stubborn challenge, which in fact, as chapter 7 illustrates, is what happened in Russia. Hence, the elimination of the power base of religious community naturally entered the agenda of state builders. Wherever it has been undertaken, the building of a modern sovereign state inescapably brought an end to the autonomous existence, both in institutional and ideological terms, of religious community within the territory over which that modern state claimed absolute sovereignty. This is, in my view, what constitutes “state secularization” at the most basic level—that is, unqualified declaration and unhindered application of sovereignty over all matters, public and private. Such a view of state secularization as a by-product of modern sovereign state building does not prescribe any particular, be it ideological or institutional, relationship between the state and religion. Rather, it is compatible with a range of possible relations between the two. For example, the state can still be secular even if it owns thousands of religious institutions, employs religious figures, and even intervenes in the interpretation of religion, as has been the case in Republican Turkey. The state can still be secular no matter whether it adopts a relatively neutral stance toward religion, as was the case in Pahlavi Iran, or mobilizes all its resources to eradicate religion, as was

8

From Religious Empires to Secular States

the case in Soviet Union. The perspective defended in this study rather looks at whether the state is the supreme partner in its relations with religion and religious institutions. This in practical terms suggests, for example, that members of religious community do not enjoy any legal privilege other than those given by the state or that religious community is subject to the laws issued by the state. A state does not cease to be secular even if it employs religious symbols, as the state in Turkey has done, or even justifies its policies by a religious argument or legislates according to a religious law. The critical condition that makes a state secular in all these scenarios is that they are not imposed upon, but are rather the choices made by, the state. It is difficult to determine when the state rulers in the three cases under consideration in this book first developed the ambition to build a modern sovereign state. This is a task difficult to undertake even regarding Western Europe, where the modern sovereign state originated. International Relations theorists take the Treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648, as the beginning of the modern international state system, the constitutive institution of which is the modern sovereign state. However, the evolution of that system was long in the making well before that date.36 By the last quarter of the 16th century, for example, the notion of state sovereignty as we understand it today had been developed by the French philosopher Jean Bodin. Compared to Western Europe, the three cases under consideration in this book are latecomers. This is not to deny that the premodern states in these cases did not have certain features that presaged the modern sovereign state. For example, the Ottoman Empire had long had a standing army and an elaborate legal system. However, the Ottoman state was not a sovereign state for it had developed a limited ambition to regulate human life in its entirety, leaving, for example, religious communities quite autonomous in their internal affairs. We can single out Peter the Great in Russia in the early 18th century, and Mahmut II in the Ottoman Empire and Abbas Mirza in Iran, both in the early 19th century, as the origins of this idea in their respective countries. To what extent do these figures share the ambitions of the modern sovereign state? An answer to this question requires further historical research and is beyond the scope of this work. We can safely assume, however, that by the early 20th century, the state rulers in these three cases seemed to have shared that ambition.37 There is an additional related issue that requires some attention. Building a modern sovereign state is not just a matter of imagination, but also a matter of capability and technology. Therefore, it is plausible that some other historical figures, be it in Turkey, Iran, or Russia, might have imagined the modern sovereign state well before the 20th century. The question is whether that imagination could be implemented at that time. We should remember that in Western Europe the full realization of that imagination has taken several centuries. Linking “state secularization” to modern sovereign state building prioritizes the factors that have transformed “the state” as the drivers of state

Introduction

9

secularization. The literature38 on the topic points to two such facts: the existence of a hostile international environment, and hence the continuous need for state rulers to update their states to survive in that environment,39 and the development of a capitalist economy.40 As the cases in this book illustrate, these two factors were also at work in transforming three land-based empires in Turkey, Iran, and Russia into modern sovereign states and can therefore be singled out as the prime movers of state secularization.41 Similar factors had driven state secularization in different countries, yet along different paths. This is what I now turn to.

PATHS OF STATE SECULARIZATION

Alternatives: Accommodationism, Separationism, and Eradicationism To reiterate, once state secularity is linked to absoluteness of state sovereignty, “state secularity” becomes compatible with many different ideological and institutional arrangements between the modern sovereign state and religion. This is in fact the case in real life, with secular states, even in Europe, exhibiting striking differences in their relationships with religion, religious community, and religious institutions.42 The question is, then, how do state secularities vary across my three cases? And, can the existing literature help in capturing that variation? First, let me describe the variations I observe across the state secularization experiences of Turkey, Iran, and Russia in the 1920s and the 1930s. As the succeeding chapters illustrate, all three cases of state secularization achieved certain common goals as a result of state secularization. In the end, the state came to ground its legitimacy in nonreligious claims, denied religious community any veto power or even feedback on its policies, monopolized legislative power, extended its activities into religious community’s traditional strongholds—education, justice, and social welfare services—and propagated a culture that was either against or at odds with their dominant religions. More importantly, however, all three cases differ in certain critical ways. The differences stem from the fact that the secularizers pursued radically different strategies in dealing with religion, religious community, and religious institutions. To use a metaphor, in the two decades following the First World War, the Turkish, Iranian, and Russian states reevaluated their centuries-old marriage with religion. In Turkey, the couples renegotiated the terms of their marriage. In Iran, they divorced, but in a rather friendly manner. In Russia, they also divorced, but through a painful and adversarial process. More specifically, it is possible to speak of three idealized strategies of state secularization: accommodationism as experienced in Turkey, separationism

10

From Religious Empires to Secular States

as experienced in Iran, and eradicationism as experienced in Russia. Chapters 3, 5, and 7 illustrate these models in detail. To describe them briefl y here: State rulers in Turkey adopted accommodationism. They closed down some religious institutions but incorporated some others into the state body. To run those kept within the state, state rulers employed the members of religious community. The state continued to pay the retirement stipends of former members of the Ottoman religious community that had been employed in those closed religious institutions such as religious courts and schools. However, the Turkish state went beyond imposing mere control over religious institutions. Acting more like a religious reformist, the Turkish state adopted a particular understanding of Islam and has since then propagated that particular understanding of Islam through its religious institutions.43 While state rulers in Turkey adopted accommodationism, those in Iran adopted separationism. Even though religious community/institutions lost many of their previous privileges as a result of state secularization in Iran, they continued to operate in Iran but had to depend on their own organizational and financial resources. They continued to administer their own mosques and seminaries and kept their monopoly over interpreting religion and other religious services, and the Iranian state did not venture into any of these purely religious activities. State rulers in Russia, on the other hand, adopted eradicationism. They not only secularized the state, but also waged a brutal and hostile campaign against religion and religious community, closing down religious institutions, plundering their wealth, and propagating atheism to eradicate religion in their population’s hearts and minds.

Accounting for the Variation Why, then, do state secularizers adopt different strategies? This question has long been neglected by scholars. There was an early attempt in 1970 by Donald E. Smith to capture the multiple modes of secularization and theorize about it. Unfortunately, Smith’s work did not generate an interest in the topic as social sciences in general and political sciences in particular were to make a paradigmatic transition and leave behind grand theories of modernization and political development.44 As a part of this shift from grand theories to more midlevel theories, starting in the mid-1970s, political scientists and sociologists narrowed the scope of political development to institutional state building.45 A related and rather auspicious development was that political scientists and sociologists also developed an interest in uncovering and explaining the variations. This growing interest in variations also affected the study of secularization.46 The first contribution came from a rather unexpected source. Adopting the rational choice approach in their study of secularization, a group of scholars began to question whether secularization had actually occurred and generated a lively debate among sociologists.47 However, this internal debate does

Introduction

11

not concern this study, for the debate really turned around individual and societal secularization.48 Yet this group of scholars made a critical contribution to the study of state secularization. They gathered an extensive array of data on institutional state-religion relations, clearly illustrating that state-religion relations are extremely diverse even in Western Europe, the home of secularization. This enormous data collection effort was later extended to non-European countries, illustrating an even wilder diversity of institutional state-religion relations across the world.49 This scholarly effort to map state-religion relations across the globe left no doubt that the secular state has historically taken different institutional shapes. More qualitative studies also give the same message. For example, Ira Katznelson and Gareth S. Jones’s edited volume, Religion and the Political Imagination, portrays secularization as “not one grand historical sweep, but a diversity of paths; not one narrative, but many.”50 Even though both quantitative and qualitative studies opened our eyes to the diversity of experiences in state secularization, this gigantic scholarly effort unfortunately did not generate similar conceptual and theoretical efforts treating institutional state-religion relations as an object of analysis. For example, even though the individual chapters are insightful, Katznelson and Jones’s edited volume does not provide a coherent narrative of state secularization. Therefore, the chapters point to potential factors that affected secularization such as “the qualities of religion, the degree of confessional pluralism and institutional rules governing transactions between religion and the state within specific types of political regime.”51 But the volume does not provide a clear picture of how these factors interacted with one another or with some other macro-historical developments in producing a particular secularization type.52 Robert Barro and Rachel M. McCleary’s study, which utilizes a large sample size, fares better in this regard. The authors ask why some states adopt an official religion while others do not. The authors claim that states adopt an official religion out of benevolence to appease the faithful. But such a policy is costly. Hence, Barro and McCleary show that as the religious homogeneity of a society increases, the results of which decrease the cost of adopting an official religion, the likelihood of a state adopting an official religion increases. The authors also find that historical legacy plays a critical role in the adoption of official religion. Crediting institutional inertia, the authors note, “The probability of state religion in 1970 and 2000 depends substantially on the status in 1900.”53 However, we are left wondering why states adopt an official religion in the first place. Historical legacy also figures into Ahmet Kuru’s Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion. Through an in-depth analysis of three cases, the United States, France, and Turkey, Kuru shows that the nature of cooperation between an ancient regime and the dominant religion significantly affect the type of state secularity developed. By focusing on the transitional period

12

From Religious Empires to Secular States

of regime change, Kuru substantiates Barro and McCleary’s finding that regime change significantly decreases the likelihood of state religion as both France and Turkey disestablished the dominant religion in the aftermath of a regime change. Whether a secular state has an official religion is certainly an interesting feature and one in which secular states might differ from one another. First, as Charles Taylor rightly claims, this difference is in many cases symbolic or vestigial.54 More importantly, Kuru showed that this feature does not capture the full variation across the United States, France, and Turkey. Indeed, in Barro and McCleary’s data these three countries do not exhibit any variation. However, through his analysis of actual state policies toward religion, Kuru shows that these countries can still have different types of state secularities. Even though it is an improvement, Kuru’s typology also has limited applicability for many other cases. For example, if we apply the definition of “assertive secular state,” all three countries considered in this book are then classified as “assertive secular states.”55 In other words, Kuru’s typology does not capture the critical variations this book observes across the three cases. Mark Farha’s attempt to capture alternative paths in state secularization is more nuanced.56 Farha speaks of three variants of state secularism: coercive, communal, and consociational. Each of these variants, Farha claims, is the direct outcome of the ways the states dealt with societal heterogeneity in their countries. If a state accommodates societal heterogeneity, as it did in Lebanon, the outcome is consociational secularism. If a state cannot cope with heterogeneity and instead is partitioned along communal lines, as it did in British India, the outcome is communal secularism. Finally, if a state eradicates societal heterogeneity and imposes cultural homogeneity, as it did in China, the outcome is coercive secularism. Farha furthermore suggests that three factors account for this variation in classification: the strength of state institutions, the hold of communal ideologies, and the degree of economic inequality.57 Even though Farha’s typology is richer, it is unfortunate that he does not fully elaborate his causal mechanism.58 Most notably, religious community and institutions—the target of state secularization—are completely missing in Farha’s account. This is because Farha views secularism as almost nothing more than a state strategy to cope with societal heterogeneity. However, as understood here, secularism is more about changing the relationship between the state and religion. On this Farha’s typology is not of great help. This book makes at least two direct theoretical contributions to this newly developing literature. First, this book further refines Kuru’s too general and vague category of assertive secular state. It also complements Farha’s typology. Farha’s coercive secularism is simply what I call in this book “eradicationist” secularism.59 In this book, however, I introduce two additional typologies: separationist and accommodative secularisms. This threefold typology (eradicationist, separationist, and accommodative secularisms) better captures the variations across Turkey, Iran, and Russia.

Introduction

13

Second, and more importantly, this book brings “politics” into the study of state secularization. From the very beginning, state secularization has been viewed as a mechanical outcome of impersonal historical processes.60 The modernization/political development school fits perfectly into this characterization. It is possible to observe a similar approach even in, for example, work by Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary.61 The authors assume a benevolent government in their model. In order to appease the faithful, this government seeks to invest in religion. However, there is a cost associated with this investment. The authors then argue that as the cost of this investment increases, the likelihood of state religion decreases. In this book, on the other hand, I pay close attention to the “politics” of state secularization. As claimed earlier, state secularization is the indispensable part of the modern sovereign state. However, the particular institutional shape it takes depends on regime building. More specifically, I argue that the variations across Turkey, Iran, and Russia owe a great deal to the nature of regime transition, or to the strategic context in which the reformers found themselves. Two features of the strategic context are critical: the first is the nature of regime transition, and the other is the attitude of the religious community toward the new regime and the nature of their participation in the transition. If the reformers came to power through an intense intra-elite competition and faced an acquiescent religious community, accommodationism was the outcome. If the reformers came to power through a palace coup and faced a disengaged religious community, separationism was the outcome. If the reformers came to power through a civil war and faced a confrontational religious community, eradicationism was the outcome. From a longer historical perspective, this regime transition simply required the reconfiguration of state power over the society, during the course of which the state attempted to destroy or weaken autonomous societal organizations. As a result, the whole reconfiguration of state power changed the ruling elites’ relationships with the rest of society. To be more precise, secularization of the state was about weakening, or, if necessary, destructing, the autonomous existence of religious organizations. However, the particular strategies state rulers pursued depended on the strategic and structural conditions in which they found themselves. Thus, state secularization was not an impersonal historically determined process, but rather a deeply political one that redistributed power.

Islam and State Secularization There is one final critical issue to be tackled. To introduce it, I want to quote from a prominent scholar of Islamic Studies. In his Islam and Politics, John Esposito, regarding Mustafa Kemal’s objective with his reforms, says the following: “Once the heart of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey provides the sole example of an attempt to establish a totally secular state in the Muslim world. . . . Although Kemal initially appealed to Islam, his goal was to

14

From Religious Empires to Secular States

counter Western imperialism and to establish a modern secular state, not to restore an Islamic empire.”62 Esposito’s juxtaposition of a modern secular state and an Islamic empire as two choices Mustafa Kemal faced in the beginning of his career refl ects a deeper assumption many academics have held about Islam. To be more specific, they treat “the Islamic” and “the secular” as two distinct, dichotomous, and mutually exclusive categories. This is not a healthy way. The following quote from Mustafa Kemal might be illustrative: “Our Republican government has an office of the Directorate of Religious Affairs. Under this office work many state employees such as many religious counsels, preachers and prayer leaders. These individuals’ level of knowledge and wisdom is known.”63 Yet Kemal complained that he came across many ignorant, even illiterate people who were not employed, but still undertook religious duties. Kemal had a problem with these nonstate religious figures: “These ignorants act as if they represent the people. As if they like to put a barrier between the state and the people so both were not in direct touch. I want to ask people like these: From whom did they take this right and responsibility?”64 Mustafa Kemal did not make this statement at a time he had to appeal to Islam, which, as Esposito hints, is viewed as the pragmatism of Mustafa Kemal. Rather, he made this statement in the very speech he delivered in Kastamonu in 1925 where he said: “Republic of Turkey cannot be a nation of sheikhs, dervishes, disciples [müritler] and devotees [mensuplar].” In fact, when we look at the whole speech, Kemal does not really look like a reformer who wants to separate religion and the state. Rather, the standard explanation proposed in the field of Turkish Studies argues that the speech shows Mustafa Kemal’s desire to establish firm control over Islam. The critical question is, however, why did Mustafa Kemal want to do develop that control? Why did he not simply let religious community and religious institutions go their own way?65 As long as academic accounts continue to treat “the secular” and “the Islamic” as dichotomous, mutually exclusive categories, this question cannot be satisfactorily addressed. There is, however, a fundamental problem with this treatment. The problem is that it is perfectly in line with a particular ideological disposition toward Islam. That perspective views Islam as a rigid, unchanging, and unreformable entity.66 This view feeds on two critical assumptions about Islam: Islam has not gone through a reformation similar to Christianity, and the gates of rational interpretation (ijtihad) of Islamic sources were closed a long time ago. For such a state like the Ottoman Empire, which was extensively linked to Islam, secularization of the state, a critical defining feature of modernization/Westernization, could not proceed without getting rid of Islam from the state. This was not enough, however, as the same disposition also views Islam as not simply a religion, but also a state. The author of the most authoritative

Introduction

15

text on secularization in Turkey, Niyazi Berkes, puts it in the following way: “One of the distinguishing marks of this tradition was the relation of religion and state. In Islam there were no concepts of church and state as specifically religious and political institutions. Religion and state were believed to be fused together; the state was conceived as the embodiment of religion, and religion as the essence of the state.”67 Because Islam by its nature cannot renounce its claim on politics and the state, by implication, state secularization cannot proceed if Islam is left alone. Since Islam will refuse to be restricted to private lives only and will look for ways to come back, by implication, then, the “secular” state must firmly control it. Hence, the very desirable condition of institutional separation between religion and the state is compromised in the case of Turkey. There is also a more subtle issue involved here. The compromise implicitly acknowledges that Turkey has become “Westernized” not an alla franca model, but an alla Turca one. Mustafa Kemal’s “Turkish” model definitely had an element of control, with the Directorate of Religious Affairs serving that function. This was inescapable as Kemal sought to establish a one-party system, which either absorbed into its structure some civil organizations or shut down many others. The model was, however, more than that. Kemal’s model also had a strong element of religious reformism, which sought to transform “religion.” Recruiting the best minds of the Ottoman religious community for this task, Kemal indeed made a lasting impact on religious thinking in Turkey. This was, I believe, Kemal’s major achievement. However, this achievement is hard to see if the strictly ideological dichotomy between “the secular” and “the religious” is not dropped and alternative conceptualizations are not tried. Once this false dichotomy is dropped, we will see that a broader range of possible arrangements can be made between “the secular” and “the religious” and can be emphasized even in Muslim countries. On a related note, members of the Ottoman religious community were not, as often portrayed by Turkish Islamists, passive victims of state secularization. On this, actually, they seem to be in agreement with the scholarly literature on the topic. However, the reality is more complicated. As both chapters 2 and 3 illustrate, members of the Ottoman religious community actively and positively participated in state-building and regime-building projects in both the Ottoman and republican periods. A comparison among Turkey, Iran, and Russia shows that there is no predetermined pattern of religious figure participation in both state and regime building, be it at the institutional or individual level. Religious community and institutions can be obstructive of state secularization, but they can also, as in the case of Turkey, be constructive.68 How they engage state secularization depends on their connections, not only with the ancient regime,69 but also with the other societal groups that can provide religious community and institutions an alternative source of power.70 Moving forward, I trace how the historical connections between religious community/institutions and the ancient regimes evolved in Turkey, Iran,

16

From Religious Empires to Secular States

and Russia in chapters 2, 4, and 6 respectively. My account looks at the impact of modern state building and integration with the world capitalist economy regarding the relationships that religious community/institutions nurtured with the state and the society.71 My account gives partial credit to the main finding of the field of Turkish Studies on the issue: in other words, that the emergence of a secular elite, in the course of the aforementioned processes, proved to be critical in state secularization.72 It was also critical that this elite had been infl uenced by the spread of modern science and the positivist philosophy accompanying it.73 The same observation holds true in the case of the Soviet Union, where state secularization was implemented by a secular elite. Yet the case of Iran, which did not have such a powerful secular elite at the time of the reforms, sheds serious doubt on whether the emergence of a secular elite is absolutely essential for state secularization. METHODOLOGY In this book I employ comparative historical analysis,74 a mode of analysis that aims to construct “historically grounded explanations of,” or causal linkages among, “large-scale and substantively important outcomes.”75 As employed in this book, this analysis has two components: a cross-country comparison and a longitudinal analysis. In the cross-country comparison, I choose a certain critical juncture—the period during which my cases pursued state secularization policies—and compare it across the three cases. This component of the analysis addresses the questions of how and why Turkey, Russia, and Iran differed in their secularization strategies. The other component of the analysis, the longitudinal analysis, traces how state-religion relations had changed in my cases in the period prior to the said critical juncture. The longitudinal analysis serves two purposes. First, it helps us see how state building and state secularization are intimately linked in each case. Second, it provides vital input for the cross-country comparison. To be more specific, the longitudinal analysis also traces how certain structural factors such as religious community/institutions’ political, economic, and social assets, the institutional capacity of the state, had evolved up to the critical juncture under analysis. To clarify, a typical comparative historical analysis takes a critical juncture and looks at its institutional/historical legacy to analyze a political outcome in the future. My analysis is just the reverse. My question is, rather, why do similar critical junctures produce different institutional/historical legacies? To address this question, I go back far in history and trace the structural factors leading up to that critical juncture. Then I take these structural factors into account in the cross-country comparison. Why is this necessary? The outcome of any critical juncture depends on two sets of factors: strategic choices of individuals and/or organized groups and structural factors. The challenge in analyzing such periods is then to combine these two sets of

Introduction

17

factors into a narrative. I believe that a particular outcome of a given critical juncture refl ects the strategic choices made by individuals and/or organized groups. Hence Karl Marx’s dictum: “Men make their own history.” But the context within which individuals and/or organized groups make their strategic choices is determined by structural factors. Hence the rest of Karl Marx’s dictum: “But, they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”76 I therefore do two different analyses in this book. First, I analyze the strategic interaction between state rulers and religious community in the course of state secularization. Second, I analyze how certain structural factors that shaped the strategic context evolved over time. For the analysis of strategic interaction, I favor a thin description of human/group preferences in this study. More specifically, I assume that individuals and groups, such as state rulers and religious figures, simply pursue their materialistic self-interests or, to be even more specific, seek more political and economic power. In contrast to this thinner description of individual and group preferences, I adopt a thicker description of “structure” in this study: among others, the institutional capacity of the state, the ability of religious figures and communities to mobilize human and economic resources for their cause, the socioeconomic structure of the country, and the geopolitical environment are some critical structural factors I pay attention to in this study. Paying attention to the strategic context, I believe, is a useful corrective for the analysis of state secularization. In the literature, various actors, be it secularized elites or religious community/institutions, play fairly predictable roles, and the variation is explained in terms of the strength or weakness of particular coalitions. The literature does not generally explore why rulers adopt entirely different strategies to carry out the tasks of state secularization. By taking strategic context seriously, this study does not prescribe any particular strategy to any political actor. CASE SELECTION For this book I chose Turkey, Iran, and Russia as my cases. My choice was based on a number of good reasons. First, all three cases adopted their secularization strategies around the same time—specifically, in the 1920s and the 1930s. In other words the respective secularizers of Turkey, Iran, and Russia adopted their secular models in the same international milieu, right after they came to power and in a top-down fashion. Yet still they adopted different strategies. Second, prior to state secularization, all three cases were multiethnic and multi-faith empires born in the same milieu. They brought political unity back to those geopolitical spaces left politically fragmented by the disintegrating successor states of the Mongol Empire: the Il-Khanid Empire and

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From Religious Empires to Secular States

the Golden Horde. As these two states fully disintegrated by the mid-14th and mid-15th centuries respectively, the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Muscovite Russians moved in to fill their places. Third, in their empire-building journeys, these three states had engaged religion and religious community/institutions; the nature of their engagement displayed great similarities. Broadly speaking, all three imperial projects claimed to have defended and/or expanded the domains of their respective religions: the Ottomans defended and promoted Sunni Muslim; the Safavids, Shi’a Islam; and the Muscovite Russians, Orthodox Christianity. In line with this, the ruling classes extensively used religious symbols and titles to legitimize their rule and their course of action. The Ottoman state builders were “ghazis” (the defenders of faith) or caliphs (the successors of the Prophet); the Safavid state builders were “the deputies of the Imam,” the messianic figure in Shi’a Islam; and the Russian state builders were “tsars.”77 In all three cases, the ruling classes endowed religious institutions with huge tracts of lands; built monumental mosques, seminaries, churches, and monasteries; and delegated the provision of critical public goods, such as justice, education, and social welfare services, to religious community/institutions. In all three cases, religious teachings served not only as the basis of individual and social morality, but also as an important source of state law. Yet there were critical differences among the three cases too, and as this book seeks to illustrate, these differences contributed to the variation in state secularization strategies. To avoid making any essentialist claim, one topic needs to be addressed here: that is, whether the particular religion an empire had supported predetermined the outcome. As mentioned earlier, the obvious difference among the three relates to religion: Turkey has been Sunni Muslim, Russia Orthodox Christian, and Iran Shi’a Muslim. In order to show that it is not religion per se that predetermined the outcome, this study adopts a longer historical perspective to control for this factor. The accounts presented in this book show that state-religion relations have always been in constant fl ux in each country such that the particular form of state-religion relations in a particular country was dependent on many factors other than the particular religion in question. That is to say, religious teachings do not necessarily impose upon state builders a particular option. However, as I claim in this book, the way religious community/institutions are organized, whether hierarchically or not, might affect, but does not predetermine, the outcome. THE MAIN ARGUMENT IN BRIEF This book is divided into three parts. The first part covers the case of Turkey, the second part that of Iran, and the third part that of Russia. Each part is further divided into two chapters. The first chapters in each part, chapters 2, 4, and 6, discuss how religious community had developed its political, social,

Introduction

19

and economic assets up to the time of state secularization. The second chapters, chapters 3, 5, and 7, discuss how and why the reformers adopted different secularizing strategies. In brief, the following narrative will be proposed. The Ottoman, Russian, and Safavid rulers found themselves in different circumstances: while the Ottoman Empire first expanded into territories populated mostly by non-Muslims, the Safavid Empire had to manage populations of a different sect, and the Russian Empire had to manage populations of the same religion. Facing different circumstances, three imperial projects pursued different policies toward religious community. While the Ottoman Empire promoted plurality of religious community in its territories, the Russian and Safavid empires hindered such a development by helping, and using force if necessary, one group within religious community keep full control over all religious institutions and activities. Turkey, Russia, and Iran thus entered the 18th century under different institutional arrangements. Developments in the 18th and 19th centuries further separated their historical evolutions. The 18th century was critical. While the central authority weakened in the Ottoman Empire, it strengthened in Russia and collapsed in Iran. Under a weakening central authority, religious community continued to fragment in the Ottoman Empire, some becoming even more entrenched with the imperial state and others becoming more independent. The situation began to change in the 19th century as the central authority recovered its strength, during the course of which the state increased its control over religious community and religious institutions, especially over their finances, and more importantly managed to secure the cooperation of a group of the religious community—religious scholars. In Iran, without a secular power support, Shi’a religious scholars instead strengthened their ties with Iranian society, moving toward even more autonomy from the state. Even the coming of the Qajars into power in Iran made no change in religious scholars’ ties with the society. The Qajars’ repeated failures to rebuild the central state institutions simply strengthened these ties. In Russia, starting in the early 18th century, the central authority strengthened, and the religious leaders (e.g., the church) became even more entrenched with the imperial state—a situation that continued well into the early 20th century. The new rulers in Turkey, Russia, and Iran faced different conditions at home when they began to undertake their secularization campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, their secularization campaigns differed greatly from each other. It is possible to observe the differences across two dimensions. The first dimension is the level of state hostility toward religion and religious community/institutions. The second dimension is the level of state incorporation of religious community and hence of religious institutions. In Turkey, the new rulers had to confront religious community/institutions that were quite fragmented and excessively dependent on the state for financial resources. Hence, the Turkish state managed to take over almost all public functions from the religious community/institutions without any serious

20

From Religious Empires to Secular States

opposition. In addition, it incorporated religious community/institutions into its apparatus—the state now providing religious services. There was basically no need for the Turkish state to fight religion for it found a very cooperative body of religious community. In contrast, in Russia, the new rulers had to confront an extremely wealthy and hierarchically united body of religious community that was extremely dependent on state protection. Nevertheless, the church managed to pose the most stubborn opposition to the new rulers in Russia. As a result, the Russian state not only imposed strict control over the church by incorporating it into the state apparatus, but also became very hostile to religion in an effort to undermine the appeal of the church. In Iran, the state neither incorporated wealthy and united religious community/institutions nor adopted a policy hostile to religion, for religious community/institutions had strong ties to the society. In many aspects, therefore, the secularization campaign in Iran remained far less ambitious than those pursued in Turkey and Russia, leaving considerable space for religious leaders to continue their activities. The concluding chapter, chapter 8, discusses how the models of state secularity have met their fates in Turkey, Russia, and Iran. As the chapter shows, accommodationism has survived in Turkey while separationism and eradicationism were dropped in Iran and Russia in 1979 and 1991 respectively. This chapter narrates the journey of each model in its respective country in the rest of the century so as to arrive at some broad lessons on why accommodationism in Turkey has proved to be the most resilient among the three cases analyzed in this book. It is critical to keep in mind that my objective is not a through scholarly analysis of the reasons Turkey has kept its model and Iran and Russia had to drop their models. This is itself another major undertaking. I still believe, though, that even a rather descriptive narrative helps us derive broad lessons on how state secularization should be undertaken. To be more specific, the concluding chapter argues that, among the three models, accommodationism is the most conducive to political order.

NOTES 1. Finkel (2005:2). 2. The authenticity of Osman’s dream is debatable. But there is historical evidence that Sheikh Edebali, a contemporary of Osman Bey, married one of his daughters. See Finkel (2005:12). 3. Atatürk (2006). Translation is mine. 4. Taylor (2007:1). 5. A lengthier discussion of my reasons for choosing Turkey, Iran, and Russia has to wait for the moment. 6. Davison (2010)’s call for “decentering” Europe in the study of secularization carries the same message. See also Cady and Hurd (2010). 7. For the discussion of these meanings see Tschannen (1991). 8. Dobbelaera (1981).

Introduction 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

21

Casanova (1994), Taylor (2007). Creppel (2010). Smith (1974). Hurd (2007). Please see the aforementioned relevant footnotes. Smith (1963:3–4). Ferrari (2005:11–12). Taylor (2010). Kuru (2009:7). Kuru’s definition seems to be derived from the American model of secularism. Bhargava’s work (2011:97) points out that the secular state in the American model is a state that is disconnected from religion at three distinct levels: first, the state and religion do not share any common end, an end defined by religion; second, they are institutionally differentiated; and third, public policies and laws are not religiously justified. Hence, the secular state is a state that is neither theocratic nor has an established religion. Smith (1963). Cady and Hurd’s (2010) call for paying attention to how the two constitute each other is noteworthy. The empirical data on state-religion relations give precisely this picture. See, for example, Chaves and Cann (1992), Gill (1999), Grim and Finke (2006), and Fox (2008). See also Cady and Hurd (2010), Katznelson and Jones (2010), and Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and Vanantwerpen (2011). Stepan (2011:115). The emphasis is mine. For example, Islam and Christianity are religions in this sense. Sheikh al Islam, qadis (religious judges), muftis (religious counsels), imams (religious leaders), Sufi sheikhs, and dervishes in Islam, and patriarchs, bishops, priests, monks, and nuns in Christianity, are some members of respective religious communities. Madrasahs, mosques, and convents in Islam, and seminaries, churches, and monasteries in Christianity, are some respective religious institutions. Political development school had portrayed state secularization as a critical part of political development. See Almond (1956), Almond and Powell (1978), and Smith (1970). Spruyt (1994) also links secularism and modern state building. Spruyt argues that the expansion of trade in Europe created a moneyed class whose interests clashed with the beliefs, norms, and organizational logic of the Roman Catholic Church. These new classes preferred and supported alternative state organizations, the sovereign territorial state, city-states, and cityleagues, depending on the profit margin of their trade. The church lost its bid for political supremacy in Europe, and hence a major block was lifted from in front of state secularization in Europe. Spruyt’s (1994) account stops far back in history and therefore does not elaborate the full link between modern state building and state secularization. Taylor (1998:38). Taylor (1998). Casanova (1994:24). Asad (2003:201). Asad (2003:201). Asad (2003:256). Krasner (2001:18). Also see Spruyt (1994:3), Pierson (1996). Anderson (1974), Tilly (1975, 1985, 1990). Foucault (1995). Anderson (1974), Tilly (1975, 1985, 1990), Weber (1976), Gorski (2003). Taylor (2007:3). This point strongly echoes in the state-building experiences of the Dutch Republic and Brandenburg-Prussia. See Gorski (2003).

22

From Religious Empires to Secular States

36. Phillips (2011). For a critical account, see Kayao˘glu (2010b). 37. Scott (1999) might be useful to understand this. 38. For a review of the literature, see Spruyt (2002). The literature on the origin and development of the modern international state system is also relevant to the discussion. For a good review and the critique of the literature see Phillips (2011). 39. Tilly (1975, 1990). 40. Anderson (1974). 41. This perspective is in contrast to the dominant view on state secularization, which emphasizes “ideology” as the prime mover. See the previous discussion. 42. Fox (2008), Kuru (2009). 43. The Turkish state’s active role in how Islam should be understood and practiced is not emphasized even in Turkish Studies. There are notable exceptions, however, such as Sakallio˘glu (1996), Aktay (2000), and Kara (2008, 2009). Among these, only Sakallı o˘glu (1996) is in English, but unfortunately she does not elaborate on this quite insightful observation. Aktay (2000) and Kara (2008, 2009) infl uenced my thinking on the topic, but unfortunately they do not extend their thinking to the broader question of how we should be thinking of secularization. Another notable study in English is Ardı ç (2012). Independently, both Ardı ç (2012) and I called state secularization in Turkey “accommodationist.” Ardı ç’s (2012) analysis unfortunately ends in 1924. 44. Smith (1970). 45. Tilly (1975) represents the first break in that transition. 46. See, for example, Lyon (1985) and Martin (1991). 47. For a review of this approach to the study of secularization, see Iannacconne (1995). 48. Stark (1999:251–252) says, if all that secularization means is “a decline in the social power of once-dominant religious institutions whereby other social institutions, especially political and educational institutions, have escaped from prior religious domination . . . there would be nothing to argue about . . . At issue is not a narrow prediction concerning a growing separation of church and state.” Casanova (1994) also holds that the modernization/political development school’s prophecy of religion’s decline was false. However, he argues that the differentiation of secular spheres, the state from religion, is defensible. 49. See Grim and Finke (2006). Fox (2008) represents an even more ambitious attempt in the same vein. See the combined effort in the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) available at www.thearda.com. 50. Katznelson and Jones (2010:5). It should be noted that this volume is not interested in state secularization per se, but rather addresses a broader issue, political secularization. See Ingrid Creppel’s chapter in the volume. 51. Katznelson and Jones (2010:22). 52. Cady and Hurd (2010) and Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and Vanantwerpen (2011) also suffer from the same problem. 53. Barro and McCleary (2005:1368). In their other works, the authors treat the variable of state religion as an independent variable. See Barro and McCleary (2003, 2006). 54. Taylor (2007). 55. According to Kuru, Communist Russia cannot be a secular state, for it is hostile to religion. Kuru (2009). 56. Farha (2012). 57. Farha (2012). 58. It would be difficult to do so in an article of less than thirty pages.

Introduction

23

59. Farha (2012) also counts Russia as an example of coercive secularism. He also counts Turkey as an example of coercive secularism. Obviously, I disagree with him on this latter characterization. 60. Katznelson and Jones’s volume also calls for paying more attention to “politics” as a factor in explaining the diversity of secularization experiences. See Katznelson and Jones (2010:11–12). 61. Barro and McCleary (2005). 62. Esposito (1998:100). 63. Atatürk (2006). 64. Atatürk (2006). 65. Davison (1998) is a commendable attempt to make sense of this and similar anomalies. However, Davison (1998) is not a good source to visit to seek an answer to this question. This is because his is not a positivist attempt, but a hermeneutical one, and any hermeneutical study of that sort is going to be tautological. At the end his argument amounts to saying that the founders of the republic implemented reforms in that way because it was what they understood from “secularism.” 66. I should note that John Esposito does not hold such a view. 67. Berkes (1999:7). 68. A recent study by Bein (2011) also makes a similar observation. Also see Ardı ç (2012). 69. Kuru (2009). 70. The relevant societal group might change from country to country. In Iran, for example, religious community were able to ally with the merchants as a societal group. But religious community in Turkey and Russia did not have such an option. Hence, whether such a societal group to ally with exists in a country affects the model of state secularization state rulers adopt. 71. Lachmann (2000) beautifully illustrates the critical importance of taking into account religious community/institutions’ relationships with the state elites as a factor in accounting for state-religion relations. Lachmann shows that the church’s relative autonomy from the nobles explains why the English monarchs could confiscate the church’s properties, while the French monarchs could not. 72. This was the standard account of secularization in Lewis (1961) and Berkes (1999). 73. This is also the standard view in Turkish Studies. See Mardin (1962, 2006), Yavuz and Esposito (2003), Kuru (2009), Hanio˘glu (2010). 74. I benefitted from Mahoney and Rueschemeyer (2003), Collier and Collier (1991), and Thelen (1999, 2004). 75. Mahoney and Rueschemeyer (2003:6). 76. Marx (1852). 77. As Bogatyrev (2006:244) puts it, “Church texts described Old Testament kings as ‘tsars’ and Christ as the Heavenly tsar. Muscovite political vocabulary reserved the title of tsar for the rulers of superior status, the Byzantine emperor and Tatar khan. In the Muscovite view, the moral authority of the Orthodox emperor and the political might of the Muslim khan derived from the will of God.”

2

Mobilizing Sheikhs and Ulama Religion and the Ottoman Empire

Republican Turkey adopted a model of state secularity in the 1920s that sought to accommodate religion. The next chapter argues that this choice was the natural outcome in the particular strategic context in which the state secularizers found themselves. One feature of that strategic context was that the state secularizers faced an acquiescent religious community, some members of which even took active part in the formation of the new regime. In order to understand this attitude of the religious community, we have to look at the resources at their disposal at the time of state secularization. As we will see, the religious community in Turkey was extremely fragmented and had weakened societal networks. This condition of the religious community was the historical legacy of the Ottoman Empire for the new Republic. This chapter narrates the evolution of this historical legacy. The narrative will also show how the Ottoman state was non-secular. This was because in the Ottoman territories religious community/institutions had come to assume certain critical state functions such as education, judiciary, welfare services, and religious services and, more importantly, performed them virtually autonomously. The Ottoman state did not share the ambition of the modern sovereign state in providing these services or intensively regulating them. The state’s primary interest was just to expand and/or protect its territories against enemies and maintain internal order. Given the available technology of state building that made only a limited state possible, the Ottomans could not erect a secular state. This changed, however, in the early 19th century as the Ottoman rulers began to initiate their own project of building a modern sovereign state. As a result, the Ottoman state had become proto-secular in many ways before the 20th century. This chapter first discusses the post-Mongol politico-religious context in Anatolia and then illustrates how the Ottomans intensively mobilized members of religious community for their imperial state-building project. The chapter then looks at the changing role of a critical group of religious community, the ulama, in the imperial structure as the central authority weakened in the 17th and the 18th centuries. The chapter then discusses how modern state-building reforms of the 19th century and other developments

Mobilizing Sheikhs and Ulama

25

brought about the condition in which the religious community found itself in the 1920s. THE ORIGIN The Ottomans—unlike, as we will see later in the book, the Safavids and the Russians—expanded into territories inhabited largely by people of a different religion. To conquer in the first place and then colonize and Islamicize, the Ottomans enthusiastically encouraged and generously supported all sorts of Muslim religious figures and groups to settle in their newly conquered territories. This policy unintentionally created a highly pluralistic and fragmented body of Muslim religious institutions, which also led to a tacit division of labor among them. The Ottomans especially sought the participation of militant Sufi orders, which had historical connections with the nomadic Turks since their migration from Central Asia to Anatolia, in their military incursions into first Byzantine territories and then the Balkans. Sheikhs of these militant Sufi orders had long been serious powers to reckon with in Anatolia for they could mobilize armed forces, especially nomadic Turks, and pose a serious threat for any ruler.1 In the most famous instance, for example, one such sheikh, Baba I˙ shak, incited a massive rebellion in Anatolia against the Seljuqs. The rebellion lasted for two years and was crushed in 1241 only after the Seljuqs suffered some humiliating defeats.2 Sufi sheikhs and dervishes facilitated for the Ottomans the recruitment of nomadic Turks and often themselves fought on their side.3 A famous example is a Sufi sheikh known as Geyikli Baba who fought with the Ottomans against the Byzantine Empire. Geyikli Baba was granted a piece of land near Bursa and established his convent there.4 It is interesting to note that Geyikli Baba introduced himself to Orhan Ghazi as a disciple of Baba I˙ lyas, who was known for his participation in Baba I˙ shak’s massive rebellion against the Anatolian Seljuqs in 1241.5 There were other militaristic Sufis with names such as Abdal Kumral, Abdal Musa, and Abdal Murad, who joined the armies of the early Ottoman rulers Osman and Orhan. In return, these Ottoman rulers bestowed favors and built zawiyahs and tombs for them.6 Two Sufi sheikhs, Seyyit Ali Sultan and Seyyit Rüstem, joined the conquest of Dimetoka, in present-day Greece. In return, both were granted land, the former in Dimetoka and the other in Gallipoli, to establish their convents.7 Horos Dede, another Sufi sheikh, joined the conquest of Constantinople, today’s I˙ stanbul, and later established a convent in the capital city.8 Cafer Gülbaba fought in several wars in Europe and died in the siege of Budin in 1541.9 These individual examples, however scattered, clearly show a pattern of Ottoman policy with regard to militaristic Sufis. “First a sheikh and his

26

From Religious Empires to Secular States

disciples perform a certain service to the beg or sultan, which often took the form of fighting in his army against ‘infidels.’ Then the ruler gives the sheikh the right of ownership of a certain land, on which the sheikh founds his hospice as pious endowment or vakf.”10 The confl uence of Sufi orders and Ottoman military forces was not confined to individualistic contributions though. It also took place at an institutional form, best manifested in the Janissary corps’ relationships to a Sufi order, Bektas¸ism. The Janissary corps was the standing army of the Ottoman Empire. It was first formed from prisoners of war and was under the direct command of the Ottoman sultan. Later, Christian children, who were taken from their families at an early age and raised among Turkish families, became the backbone of this standing army. The Janissaries had been the stronghold of a Sufi order, Bektas¸ism. In the words of a prominent Ottoman historian, Halil I˙ nalcı k, “By the end of the sixteenth century Hacı Bektas¸ was officially recognized as the patron saint of the Janissaries, and a Bektas¸i father permanently resided with the corps. The Bektas¸i order and the Janissary corps became so inseparable that when a new dede was chosen as the head of the order he came to the Janissary barracks in I˙ stanbul to be crowned by the aga of the Janissaries.”11 It is no wonder that the abolition of the Janissaries in 1826 came along with the suppression of the Bektas¸i order. The Ottomans also sought to attract nonmilitarist Sufi orders to their territories.12 The Ottomans gave them tax exemptions and built convents and endowed land for them.13 And it seems this was the most usual policy for favoring the Sufis in the Ottoman Empire.14 A prominent Ottoman economic historian, Ömer Lütfi Barkan, wrote a now classic article published in 1942 in which he gives numerous examples of land and villages granted by the early Ottoman sultans to Sufi orders.15 Barkan observes that the Sufis practically colonized the newly conquered territories. Based on his analysis of the documents of a Sufi convent endowed by Selim I in Dayr al-Asad in Israel, Aharon Layish arrives at a similar conclusion. “The document before us sheds light on an impressive instrument of the policy of colonization and Islamization of conquered areas in the Ottoman Empire. That policy seems to have been applied not only in Anatolia and Rumelia but also in the Arab provinces, at least in Palestine.”16 In pursuing this policy, the Ottomans encouraged convents to be built in mostly depopulated areas in the Balkans.17 The convents brought Sufi disciples to mostly deserted and depopulated areas, in which either villages formed for the first time or village life fully began again in old villages. Over time, the convents became centers of economic activity in their environments, and in particular they revitalized agriculture and husbandry in the countryside. The Ottomans also made sure that some convents were established along main trade routes to guard the caravans and serve the travelers passing by. In fact, the grant of land to the zawiyahs was conditional: “The state gave the right to administer the vakf to a certain sheikh and his descendants

Mobilizing Sheikhs and Ulama

27

provided that they should serve the needs of travelers passing through. . . . In the case of not fulfilling their duties, the sultan had the right to take the vakf back to give it to another sheikh.”18 The convents were also instrumental in the spread of Islam among Christian populations. The Sufis’ fl exibility in the formal requirements of Islam and their easy adoption of local practices facilitated the conversion process.19 Thus, the Ottomans governed a much less hostile population than would otherwise have been the case. They could also boast throughout the Islamic world that they were promoting Islam in non-Muslim lands. It should be emphasized that the Ottoman state was non-secular not because it extended a generous hand to Sufi orders of all kinds. Even today’s secular states might prefer to do that too. Rather, the Ottoman state was non-secular because it left the Sufi orders completely autonomous in their religious activities and public services. BUILDING IMPERIAL INSTITUTIONS While expanding their empires, the Ottomans also engaged non-Sufi members of religious community and, more importantly, Muslim religious scholars, or the ulama. This engagement was similar to the way the Ottomans engaged the Sufi orders. The Ottoman state also extended its patronage to the ulama and encouraged their activities. The sultans and other high-level state officials built monumental mosques and religious schools, madrasahs, and endowed them generously. However, this engagement was also different. The Ottomans incorporated the ulama into the imperial ruling elite as the former filled important bureaucratic and judicial posts in the Ottoman imperial administration. This was to a certain extent unavoidable. The Ottoman dynasty had a tribal origin. The founder of the empire, Osman, was himself a tribal leader. The ulama class helped the Ottoman dynasty build imperial institutions. In terms of the availability of the ulama, the Ottomans were rather in an unfortunate position. Their predecessors, the Seljuqs, the Timurids, the Ak-Koyunlus, and the Kara-Koyunlus, had to work with already existing ulama families in the regions they ruled. The Ottomans had to create an ulama class. Hence, in many cities the Ottomans conquered, such as Bursa, I˙ znik, Edirne, and I˙ stanbul, they were the first Muslim rulers who built large mosques and madrasahs. The Ottoman rulers invited religious scholars from other parts of the Islamic world as administrators and teachers in these madrasahs. Because a long-established madrasah tradition was nonexistent, Ottoman religious scholars and madrasah students went to older religious learning centers in Egypt, Iran, and Central Asia to study under prominent scholars of their time.20 As the empire fully institutionalized, it was the madrasahs in these cities who formed the highest-ranking madrasahs throughout the Ottoman

28

From Religious Empires to Secular States

territories. Hence, the Ottoman central administration could depend on these madrasahs to staff its imperial institutions. The Ottoman ulama thus acquired political and economic status by being deeply incorporated into the Ottoman imperial state as one of its main pillars. Unlike the Sufis, who remained outside the formal state institutions, the ulama class became part of the imperial state, filling important bureaucratic and judicial posts in the Ottoman imperial administration. In its fully developed structure, the empire was not only a military-administrative complex, but also a religious complex, hierarchically organized under the sheikh al Islam. The sheikh al Islam not only managed the administration of the religious institutions,21 but also ensured that the laws issued by the sultan were in conformity with Islam. The sheikh al Islam was the only person in the whole imperial structure who could authorize the deposition of the sultan, and in the Imperial Divan he held a position on par with that of the grand vizier, the head of the ruling institution. The ulama provided mainly educational and legal services in the empire. Not only in I˙ stanbul, but also in many small localities in Anatolia and the Balkans, the ulama supervised education in the seminaries.22 They provided legal services as judges in the cities and smaller localities throughout the empire. The Ottoman judges in the courts tried the cases of “transgressors against the holy law or the secular, whether murderers, thieves, miscreants, adulterers, drunkards or shirkers of whatever sort.” Furthermore, the Ottoman ulama certified, registered, and advised and adjudicated on “marriage, divorce, desertion, death, and the transfers of property associated with each such passage, and all manner of vexing human problems.”23 It should be emphasized that the Ottoman state was non-secular not because the ulama class was part of the imperial bureaucracy. Rather, it was non-secular because the ulama undertook such public functions as education and judiciary autonomously. This autonomy got a further boost by the financial autonomy the ulama class enjoyed. This autonomy came from two sources. First, the ulama had administered the religious endowments—waqfs— that had financed all religious institutions under their control. Second, the ulama, unlike the bureaucrats and the Janissaries, had never held the status of slaves of the sultan. Therefore, their personal wealth could not be confiscated by the state upon their death, but could be transferred to their heirs.24 As we will see shortly, these two sources turned the ulama into critical players in the imperial state. The ulama’s positioning within the imperial institutions came with a cost. They were separated from the Muslim urban and rural masses. This separation also found a formal expression. The Ottoman society was visualized to comprise two separate sections: the state and its officials (including the ulama) and the masses, the reaya, consisting of all Muslims and non-Muslims. The reaya, in turn, was compartmentalized into different groups according to their taxation status: townspeople, peasants and nomads, which were

Mobilizing Sheikhs and Ulama

29

further divided according to their religions and sects.25 The separation of the ulama from the masses, in turn, left the fl oor completely open to the Sufi orders as the organizers of the religious lives of the masses. The relative autonomy of the Sufi orders enabled their religious institutions to exercise a high degree of day-to-day social control over the common subjects, who looked to them for spiritual services. It is worth quoting Ernest Gellner on this: Such large segments of Muslim populations look not only, and not so much, toward the ulama for spiritual guidance, as they do toward other types of religiously significant groups, whom there is a tendency to lump together under the heading of Sufism . . . Roughly speaking: urban Sufi mysticism is an alternative to the legalistic, restrained, arid (as it seems to its critics) Islam of the Ulama. Rural and tribal “Sufism” is a substitute for it.26 In regulating the religious lives of the masses, the Sufis were not alone. It is necessary to mention another group to have a complete picture of the religious community in the Ottoman Empire. Using a contemporary term, we can call this group, who staffed local mosques as prayer leaders and preachers, the hocas. Extremely disunited and fragmented, this group has rarely played a critical political role, but rather acted more as a barrier in front of full Sufi monopolization of religious services among the masses. The history of the Ottoman Empire records a confrontation between the hocas and the Sufis to this effect. Known as the Kadılızadeler, and resurfacing at least three times in the 17th century, a group of mosque hocas initiated a movement against the Sufi orders that went as far as attacking the individual members of the Sufi orders and their convents.27 Among the three groups, the hocas had always been closer to both urban and rural masses. Like other members of the religious community, the hocas also lived off the income generated by religious endowments and enjoyed certain rights—for example, they were exempted from certain taxes. However, the masses had more say in the recruitment of hocas. The Ottoman Empire attempted to control the hocas through inspections by the religious judges. The hocas were expected to help the state sustain order and security, serve as moral police and notaries in their local settings, and organize the masses to undertake certain municipal services.28 In short, the Ottoman policy toward the Sufis, the ulama, and the hocas created, intentionally or not, a highly pluralistic and fragmented body of religious community. This pluralism also accompanied a tacit division of labor among them. While the Sufis and the hocas had been among the masses, the ulama had been among the ruling elite. It is important to note, however, that even the ulama had enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy in their activities, an autonomy they would begin to lose as the Ottomans built a modern sovereign state in the 19th century.

30

From Religious Empires to Secular States

THE DECLINE AND THE ULAMA By the late 17th century, Ottoman military expansion stopped.29 The next 200 years witnessed the rise of provincial notable families, called the ayan, and the weakening of central authority. By the late 18th century, “nearly everywhere the central state became visibly less important and local notable families more so in the everyday lives of most persons. Whole sections of the empire fell under the political domination of provincial notable families.”30 To begin with, the weakening of central authority benefitted the Ottoman ulama. By the late 16th century, it was not the provincial families but the provincial governors who represented the main centrifugal force. As they had their own troops, they began to ignore and resist orders from the capital. To balance the growing powers of the governors, the central administration increased the power of the religious judges in the provincial administration at the expense of the governors.31 First, the judges were to supervise the administrative officials in their localities. Second, the judges, as part of their role in marriage contracts and deathbed testaments, made tax assessments and collected taxes or participated in these activities. Third, they intervened in the affairs of litigants. All these duties brought lucrative gains for the religious judges.32 In such a context, strong local families—future ayan candidates—found potential allies in the religious judges against the provincial governors. Thus there developed a rapprochement between the ulama class and the local families. In fact, some ayan families had their origins in the ulama.33 A similar development occurred in the capital of the empire. High-ranking bureaucrats and military personnel avoided the confiscation of their wealth through allying with the ulama. First, some civilian and military bureaucrats began to enroll their sons into religious institutions and passed their wealth to them in their lifetimes. Thus we observe, in the 17th and 18th centuries, a rapprochement between “the men of the sword” and “the men of the pen.” Second and more importantly, civilian and military bureaucrats began to establish “shady” religious foundations, which were “jealously guarded by the religious scholars.” According to this new arrangement, “the revenues nominally set aside for the pious purpose but in reality continued to go to the donors and their heirs under various and dubiously legal pretexts.”34 Hence, both in the provinces and in the center of the empire, the ulama gained an unprecedented importance, while in both areas they entrenched themselves even more into the ruling elite and added to the layers separating them from the masses. Furthermore, both the ulama in the capital and the ulama families in the provinces benefited from the spread of tax farming due to their critical roles in the bureaucracy.35 However, this prominence came at a cost: the ulama lost its unity in two ways. The first divide occurred between the local ulama families who entrenched themselves within the rising ayan families and the body of ulama that was affiliated with the central administration. The second divide occurred in the latter group between the

Mobilizing Sheikhs and Ulama

31

high-ranking and the low-ranking ulama. The highest offices in the religious institutions of the Ottoman Empire became the footholds of a relatively small group of ulama families, who closed the gates of upward mobility in the institution. The sons of the ulama in high offices got preferential treatment in appointments and in getting diplomas from theology schools.36 The practice was also extended to those who could make the necessary payments to benefit their siblings. In this state, the Ottoman ulama entered the long 19th century. BUILDING A MODERN SOVEREIGN STATE—THE 19TH-CENTURY REFORMS Ottoman historians single out 1689, the defeat at Vienna, as the start of the Ottoman decline. Yet the Ottomans could not perceive the extent of the decline until the second half of the 18th century. The victories against the Russian and Habsburg empires in the first half of the century must have blinded them. Yet the Ottomans could not escape the conclusion after the crushing defeats they tasted in the Russian-Ottoman wars of 1768–1774 and 1787–1792.37 The early 19th century also witnessed massive rebellions in the Balkans, first of the Serbs and then of the Greeks. It became painfully clear to the Ottomans that their military forces, the Janissaries, had become utterly useless in the battlefield. Not only ineffective in the field, the Janissaries also became a nightmare in the capital for the sultan, as they often rose in rebellion against him. It was Selim III who initiated the first serious military reforms in the Ottoman Empire.38 He established a new military unit in 1793 and named it Nizam-ı Cedid. The provincial families immediately reacted to this new military unit, which started a period of provincial unrest and rebellion. Even though Selim III abandoned the project, the Janissaries rebelled and dethroned him. A new sultan, Mustafa IV, rose to the throne, and concessions were granted to the Janissaries. Unhappy with this arrangement in the capital, the provincial families of the European part of the empire moved to the capital with their militias, suppressed the Janissary leaders, and demanded the return of the sultan to the throne. It was too late for Selim III, who had already been killed by the Janissaries. The leader of the provincial families, Alemdar Mustafa Pas¸a, dethroned Mustafa IV and replaced him with Mahmud II (1808–1839). In return, Mahmud II chose Alemdar Mustafa Pas¸a as the grand vizier.39 The sultan and the provincial families signed the famous Sened-i I˙ ttifak, which specified the rights and obligations of both sides. The reign of Mahmud II marks the true beginning of transforming the Ottoman state into a modern sovereign state. In a matter of eighteen years after his inauguration, Mahmud II ruthlessly suppressed local notable families, confiscated their wealth, either killed or dispersed their members, and

32

From Religious Empires to Secular States

finally destroyed his own central army, the Janissaries, in 1826. Thus two important obstacles to state building disappeared from the scene. The imperial decree that dissolved the Janissaries also established a new army.40 The first regiment of the army was established in I˙ stanbul. Then the provincial governors were ordered to raise provincial regiments. The officer corps would be sent from I˙ stanbul and would be directly responsible to the head of the army in I˙ stanbul. The salaries, armaments, and other supplies would come from I˙ stanbul. The Ottoman government invited Prussian instructors to modernize the army along European lines. Mahmud II introduced additional changes to the old army. Some corps were disbanded and some were reorganized, and new corps were established. The Ottoman bureaucracy, which had mostly been staffed by a closed circle from vizier and higher bureaucrat households in the capital and provinces, also became the target of reforms. First, Mahmud II increased the job security of the bureaucrats by abolishing the custom of confiscating the bureaucrats’ wealth upon their death. The bureaucrats were to receive regular salaries, a system of hierarchy was introduced, and new schools were opened to educate them; in this way Mahmud II attempted to break the monopoly of vizier and pasha families over bureaucratic appointments. Mahmud II also introduced reforms in the tax system. The tax collectors would be directly appointed from I˙ stanbul. The first Ottoman census was undertaken to determine the tax base of the population. In order to extend the state presence into Ottoman society, a postal service was established and new roads were built. Although the lack of necessary financial resources crippled these reforms, Mahmud II initiated a period of extensive state building that would continue incessantly and stubbornly well until the 1920s. More importantly, Mahmud II’s initial reforms of the military, education, administration, tax collection, and legal services laid the general framework upon which later Ottoman statesmen would carry on further reforms. For the rest of the century, the Ottoman statesmen expanded the size of the army. In order to update the military technology of the army, the Ottomans imported arms supplies from Germany and Britain and, to some extent, from France. At the beginning of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was transformed into “one of the most important markets for armaments in the world.”41 The Ottoman Empire sought foreign loans from Europe to finance its military expenditure and became indebted to European financiers to such an extent that the Ottoman state faced bankruptcy in 1878. To avoid fiscal collapse, the Ottoman state established the Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881, which would collect its own taxes within the empire. For the rest of the century, German assistance continued in the form of technical education and personnel. In 1841, provincial armies were established with their own command centers. All provincial armies were subordinated to the head of the army in I˙ stanbul. In 1845, the Ottoman state officially introduced conscription. Christian subjects also served in the army but were given the option of paying a tax instead. Later, the conscription

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system was further expanded to include more Muslim populations. In 1891, Hamidiye cavalries were established from the Turcoman and Kurdish tribes. Tribal leaders would command their own men in these cavalries, while the Ottoman state would send regular officers to train and supervise their operations. Old military engineering schools were modernized; new military training schools were established to train the officer corps. The Ottoman statesmen expanded the size of the bureaucracy, increasing it from 2,000 or so people at the end of the 18th century to 35,000 or so in 1908. This came with a continued effort to rationalize the bureaucracy.42 Specialization increased, leading to better differentiation among the different units of the bureaucracy and the creation of different ministries. Consultative assemblies were established to prepare new reforms in their respective domains. Provincial administration was reorganized hierarchically. Despite the efforts to monopolize taxation under the control of the central authority, the 19th-century statesmen were not very effective in implementing direct taxation. Tax farmers played the dominant role in the collection of taxes even at the end of the 19th century. THE ULAMA IN THE PROCESS As mentioned, Mahmud II initiated a process of modern sovereign state building, primarily in military affairs. Reforms in finance, administration, education, and the legal system soon followed.43 As suggested in the introduction chapter, building a modern sovereign state ultimately affects religion and religious community/institutions. Even Mahmud II’s initial reforms began to affect the ulama. Until that time, the ulama had undertaken educational and legal services autonomously, performed various administrative functions in the provinces, kept their institutional autonomy so that the sheikh al Islam independently appointed judges and teachers in theology schools, and secured their financial autonomy through their roles in the administration of religious endowments. Immediately after the destruction of the Janissaries, Mahmud II took over the control of all religious endowments, except for those foundations supporting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and put them under the newly created Ministry of Religious Endowments. This new system transferred the control of the revenues from the ulama to the state. During the reign of Mahmud II, the Ottoman state also began to open new professional schools to train military-civilian bureaucrats for the ever-growing state apparatus: a military medical school (1827), a school of military sciences (1834), a school of learning (1839), and a school of literary studies (1839).44 The Ottoman state also opened secondary schools (rüs¸diye) starting in the 1840s and high schools (idadi) starting in the 1870s. The state also invested in more specialized professional schools. A School of Teachers (for secondary schools) was founded in 1848 in I˙ stanbul,

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a School of Administration (Mekteb-i Mülkiye) in 1859, and a School of Law (Mekteb-i Hukuk) in 1874.45 Until the end of its collapse, the empire expanded its educational system across its territories, with not only primary, secondary, and high schools, but also professional schools, increasing in number. For example, by 1905–1906, except for Basra, Hijaz, and Ishkodra, every province had a school of teachers in its capital city.46 By 1909, in addition to I˙ stanbul, three more Schools of Law were also founded in Selanik, Konya, and Beirut.47 Finally, after two failures, the Ottoman state founded a university, Darülfünun-u S¸ahane, in 1900, with three faculties, theology, literature, and mathematical and natural sciences.48 In 1909, the Schools of Law were added to the university. In the field of legal reform, too, the Ottoman state introduced measures that undermined the monopoly and autonomy of the ulama in the field. First, the Ottoman state introduced a series of legal codes: among others, the Penal Code in 1840 (which was revised in 1851 and 1858), the Commercial Code in 1849, the Land Code in 1858, the Maritime Trade Code in 1863, the Ottoman Code of Public Laws in 1865, and the Ottoman Civil Code between 1866 and 1888.49 Second, the Ottoman state established new courts: commercial courts, mixed trade courts, administrative courts for state officials, and Nizamiye courts.50 Especially, the establishment of Nizamiye courts was critical as they significantly narrowed down the jurisdiction of religious courts. Nizamiye courts were to handle criminal and civil cases for Ottoman subjects, while religious courts were to deal with cases dealing with marriage, death, and inheritance. Both courts remained under different ministries: while the Nizamiye courts were under the Ministry of Justice, the religious courts had remained under the office of the sheikh al Islam, except for three years between 1916 and 1919 when religious courts operated under the Ministry of Justice.51 INVOLVING THE ULAMA Even though the process of building a modern sovereign state undermined the monopoly of the ulama over education and legal services, it did not pose an existential threat to them. In tandem with the process, Ottoman sultans continued to repair and restore mosques, tombs, Sufi convents, and theology schools. They continued to grant financial aid to the ulama, to Sufi sheikhs, and to seminary students.52 Furthermore, as mentioned before, the office of the sheikh al Islam continued to justify major state policies on religious grounds.53 The Ottoman statesmen, however, went beyond simple paying lip service, but rather intensely involved the ulama in their modern sovereign state-building project. In parallel with the expansion and transformation of the Ottoman state, the religious community also expanded and transformed, fully reorganized under the office of the sheikh al Islam. The reform of the

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religious community started with a simple act, in fact, settling the office of sheikh al Islam in a permanent building.54 Three days after the Janissaries were destroyed, Mahmud II gave their head office to the sheikh al Islam. In that building the office expanded and assumed the administration of all state functions deemed religious. In addition to continuing its traditional function, issuing religious edicts, the office of the sheikh al Islam was also to administer and inspect religious judges and courts, religious teachers, and schools. The office also assumed the administration of properties belonging to the orphans and the inspection of religious endowments.55 By the end of the empire, the office of the sheikh al Islam had become a full-fl edged state bureaucracy.56 In an effort to accommodate existing religious institutions within the newly evolving modern state institutions, the office of the sheikh al Islam set out to reform religious schools so as to better cater to the needs of the expanding state. Among its most successful initiatives, the office founded new religious schools. For example, in 1854, the office founded a school to train religious judges, Muallimhane-i Nüvvab (later Medresetül Kuzat). In 1914, the office founded two new religious schools in I˙ stanbul, Darü’lHilafeti’l Aliyye and Medresetül Mütehassisin. These new schools employed religious scholars as teachers to run their programs and opened new venues for aspiring religious students to rise in the religious hierarchy. But, more importantly perhaps, these schools aimed to endow their graduates with more modern skills and train them in new sciences. For example, Medresetül Kuzat’s program included not only certain religious topics, but also more modern legal topics, such as land code, penal code, international law, administrative law, and economics.57 Transforming the empire into a modern sovereign state, therefore, involved reforming religious institutions. The same process involved the ulama in other ways. For example, the ulama took active part in both central and provincial administration. The sheikh al Islam became a member of the council of the ministers. Religious scholars often served as ministers, especially of justice, education, and endowments. Religious scholars also served in critical state councils such as the Council of Education and the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances. The later separated in 1868 into the Council of Judicial Ordinances, which became the Ministry of Justice, and the Council of State. Before they became sheikh al Islam, for example, Ahmet Arif Hikmet, Mehmet Arif Efendi, and Mehmet Sa’addin Efendi served in the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances; Ömer Hüsameddin Efendi and Haydarizade I˙ brahim Efendi in the Council of Education; El Hac Refik Efendi and El Hac Ahmed Muhtar Efendi in the Council of Judicial Ordinances; and Mehmet Sahib Efendi and Mustafa Hayri Efendi in the Council of State.58 Religious scholars also served in another critical council, the Temporary Council of Education (Meclis-i Muvakkat-i Maarif), formed in 1845 to reform the Ottoman education system. Of the eight members of the council, four were religious scholars, one of whom, Abdülkadir Efendi,

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chaired the council.59 A religious scholar, Sayyafl ar S¸eyhizade Esad Efendi, also served in and later chaired the permanent Council of Education, Meclis-i Maarif. As members of various councils, the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances in particular, religious scholars took part in the preparation of legal codes. I am not in a position to judge whether these codes were compatible with the Islamic law. Leaving that debate to legal historians,60 this book points to the fact that religious scholars were involved even in the preparations of those heavily borrowed from Europe. For example, a religious scholar, Ahmet Cevdet,61 chaired the commission that revised the penal code in 1858. A group of religious scholars also was involved in the preparation of the original code of 1840.62 Ahmet Cevdet also was involved in the preparation of the land code and, more importantly, chaired the commission that drafted the Ottoman Civil Code, known as Majalla. The commission was formed mainly by religious scholars and in fact codified the Hanafi School of Jurisprudence.63 If we look at the careers of rank-and-file religious scholars in the 19th century, we also see a similar picture. Examples are available in the appendix. Religious scholars, for example, served in local educational and administrative councils. Religious scholars also served as prayer leaders and religious counsels in military units of the new Ottoman Armed Forces and prayer leaders in the embassies. Even opening new state schools and establishing a secular legal system did not go against the interests of the religious scholars.64 First, religious courts continued to work alongside the state courts, although they were increasingly restricted to personal and family law cases.65 Likewise, religious schools continued to work alongside state schools. A Turkish historian, Murat Akgündüz, gives tens of examples of financial contributions by the state to the seminaries and their students in the 19th century66 and of the distribution of their shares from religious endowments.67 In fact, an important prerogative of seminary students continued, though with some restrictions: exemption from military service if the student passed an exam set by the office of the sheikh al Islam.68 It is true that the opening of state schools and secular courts ended the monopoly of the ulama in the education and legal systems. But, at the same time, this expansion created new job opportunities for religious scholars and graduates of religious schools. In the first place, the ulama continued to serve in religious courts and schools. But, as examples in the appendix show, they also worked frequently in state courts and schools. This was to a large extent inescapable. Even though the Ottoman legal reforms started in the first half of the 19th century, the first School of Law was established in 1878. In fact, the office of the sheikh al Islam opened a new professional school, Muallimhane-i Nüvvab, to train religious judges who could serve in both courts. Because the sheikh al Islam appointed and supervised the religious judges, the new courts practically remained under the jurisdiction of

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the sheikh al Islam.69 In 1879 the Ministry of Justice, established in 1868, began to appoint and supervise all judges serving in the Nizamiye courts. The appointment of judges from among the ulama to these courts also became the prerogative of the Ministry of Justice. Religious scholars served in the new state courts at all administrative levels: in the lower administrative units (kaza and sancak), religious judges were also the head of Nizamiye courts. Religious judges were also members of the provincial courts70 and served as the head of the judicial office of the provincial appeal court.71 Many ulama biographies point to the same pattern: the Ottoman ulama moved back and forth between the religious and the secular courts in their careers.72 We observe a similar pattern in the field of education. The educational reforms, although undermining the monopoly of the ulama in this field, still helped them by expanding the job market. Examples are available in the appendix. The ulama not only served as teachers in the seminary schools, but also began to staff the new state schools from primary to secondary schools, from vocational schools to universities. Religious scholars taught particular classes in the state schools: in general, they taught religious and language courses (Arabic and Persian) in primary, secondary, and high schools in both civilian and military branches. More importantly, religious scholars also taught classes in such critical state schools as the Boys’ School of Teachers (Darü’l Muallimun), the School of Law (Mekteb-i Hukuk), and the School of Administration (Mülkiye), which were founded to train teachers, judges, and bureaucrats for the expanding Ottoman state. For example, Hüseyin Hüsni Efendi taught in both the School of Law and the School of Administration, Musa Kazı m Efendi taught in the School of Law and the Boys’ School of Teachers, and El Hac Ahmed Muhtar Efendi taught in the School of Administration.73 There are less prominent examples as well. Eg˘ inli Muhammed Hulusi Efendi and I˙ stanbullu Mehmet Esad Efendi taught in the Boys’ School of Teachers; Zafaranbolulu Mehmet Fehmi Efendi, Elmalı lı Hamdi Efendi, Nasuh Efendizade Mustafa Asim Efendi, Turs¸ucuzade Ahmet Muhtar Efendi, and Kuyucakzade Mehmet Atif Efendi in the School of Administration; and Seydis¸ehirli Mahmud Esad Efendi and Manisalı zade Mustafa S¸evket Efendi in both the School of Law and the School of Administration.74 Religious scholars also served as administrators and teachers in Darülfünun, the empire’s only university. A religious scholar, Manastı rlı I˙ smail Hakkı Efendi, delivered the opening lecture, and the topic was the first chapter of the Qur’an, “Fatiha.” The commission formed to recruit teachers also included religious scholars.75 Not surprisingly, the teachers in the Faculty of Theology were all religious scholars.76 But among the teachers of the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Literature were also religious scholars. For example, Ali Fehmi Efendi, I˙ smail Saib Efendi, and I˙ zmirli I˙ smail Hakkı Efendi taught in the Faculty of Literature,77 and Musa Kazim Efendi, Mustafa Hayri Efendi, and Mehmet Fehmi Efendi in the Faculty of

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Law.78 It should be noted that a prominent sheikh, Veled Celebi, also taught in the Faculty of Literature. The intensive participation of religious scholars in the new state school system was to a certain extent unavoidable. If we take a look at the curricula of the state schools, we see some classes religious scholars could teach with great ease. Considering the pool of teachers available at that time, the state had to employ religious scholars to teach those classes. To give an example, the curricula of state primary schools in 1904 included a class titled The Qur’an in the second and third year six hours and five hours a week respectively. The program also had a class titled Catechism in all three levels and a class titled Proper Recitation of the Qur’an in the third year. In secondary state schools, in 1904, the program included a class on proper recitation of the Qur’an in all three levels (six hours a week in the first year, one hour a week in the second and third years), catechism in all three levels (two hours a week), morality in the third year, morphology of Arabic in the second year (two hours a week) and morphology and syntax of Arabic in the second year (four hours a week), and syntax of Arabic in the third year (three hours a week). State high schools also had classes that could be taught by religious scholars: in 1899, the program had Proper Recitation of the Qur’an and Religious Studies and Arabic in all seven years.79 Two university faculties, the School of Law and the School of Philosophy and Literary Studies, also included classes such as theology, logic, Arabic, Persian, jurisprudence, and principles of jurisprudence. All professional schools, including military schools, also had classes on religion and Arabic in their curricula.80 The most remarkable benefit that the state reforms brought to the ulama in the field of education was in primary education. In 1824–1825, the Ottoman sultan, Mahmud II, issued an edict that made primary education practically mandatory for all Ottomans. Having no primary school of its own at that time, the Ottoman state de facto delegated primary education to religious scholars, who had been running local religious schools (mektep). As Selçuk Aks¸in Somel notes with great insight, the Ottoman statesmen really saw primary education as a natural part of religious affairs.81 This can be seen readily in a memorandum presented to and approved by Mahmud II in 1839. According to this, primary education would start in available local religious schools, where students would study the alphabet only. Then, those students who successfully read the whole Qur’an from the beginning to the end would move to higher primary schools attached to bigger mosques, known as Salatin mosques. In these schools, the students would study composition, lexicology, morality, writing, and calligraphy. Graduates of these schools would then move to professional schools, established to train civilian and military bureaucrats. Both levels of primary schools were under the control of religious scholars. As mentioned before, the lower-level religious schools were attached to mosques, which were financed by religious endowments. Therefore, these schools were technically under the jurisdiction of the ulama-dominated Ministry of Religious Endowments (Evkaf Nezareti).

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As for the Salatin primary schools, the office of the sheikh al Islam assumed the responsibility of appointing teachers to and inspecting schools.82 The Ottoman state did not open state primary schools (ibtidai mekteb), an alternative to religious primary schools, until 1870s. The first one was opened in 1872 in I˙ stanbul. The pace of opening new state primary schools was considerably slow. By the last decade of the 19th century, the number of state primary schools was not even 20 percent of the number of primary schools controlled and staffed by the ulama: there were 28,596 primary schools controlled by the ulama and 4,194 primary state schools.83 As discussed earlier, in these new state primary schools as well, religious scholars served as teachers and administrators. Despite having intensively involved the ulama, modern sovereign state building in the Ottoman Empire was still a secular process for it considerably decreased the administrative and financial autonomy of the ulama. AHMET CEVDET PAS¸ A: PERSONIFICATION OF OTTOMAN ENGAGEMENT WITH RELIGION No figure better exemplifies the nature of Ottoman state building as it pertains to religious community/institutions than Ahmet Cevdet Pas¸a. A brief look at his life will add to the prior discussion.84 Ahmet Cevdet was born in Lofça, a town in the north of Bulgaristan, in 1822. He did not come from a scholarly family. But upon the insistence of his grandfather, Hacı Ali Efendi, Ahmet Cevdet began to study under the religious counsel (müftü) of Lofça, Hafı z Ömer Efendi. In 1839, he went to I˙ stanbul to advance his education in Islamic sciences. He studied under several prominent religious scholars and finally received his diploma in 1844. In addition to standard religious sciences, Ahmet Cevdet also studied a range of topics from mathematics to geography, from logic to literature. Soon after his graduation, Ahmet Cevdet was given a religious rank and began to receive a monthly stipend. A year later, Ahmet Cevdet was appointed as a religious teacher (dersiam), which gave him the right to teach in I˙ stanbul mosques. Around the same time, the great Ottoman reformer, Mustafa Res¸it Pas¸a, requested from the office of the sheikh al Islam a young religious scholar who would inform Mustafa Res¸it about the Islamic principles and law. Upon the recommendation of the office of the sheikh al Islam, Ahmet Cevdet began to work for Mustafa Res¸it. Ahmet Cevdet soon distinguished himself and even became the teachers of Mustafa Res¸it’s children. Ahmet Cevdet had served as Mustafa Res¸it’s legal consultant until the latter’s death in 1858. After this fortunate start, Ahmet Cevdet’s career took new turns. In 1850, Ahmet Cevdet became a member of the Council of Public Education (Meclis-i Maarif-i Umumiye) and director of the School of Teachers. During his tenure as a member of the Consultative Council (Encümen-i Danis),85

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he penned the first three volumes of what would become his twelve-volume history book, Tarih-i Cevdet. In 1855 Ahmet Cevdet was appointed as the palace official chronicler and served in that position until 1865. In 1856 he joined the High Council of Tanzimat and in that position participated in the revision of the Penal Code and in the preparation of the Land and Registration Codes. Ahmet Cevdet also became a member of the Council of Judicial Ordinances (Meclis-i Ahkam-i Adliye), established in 1861 to prepare laws and serve as an administrative court for high bureaucrats. In the meantime, Ahmet Cevdet’s rank in the religious hierarchy had speedily improved, and he finally reached the rank of military religious judge in 1863, a position just below that of sheikh al Islam. As the prospect of sheikh al Islam became a reality, Ahmet Cevdet was transferred from religious class to bureaucracy in 1866. From that time on, Ahmet Cevdet assumed the title pas¸a instead of efendi. Ahmet Cevdet’s brilliant career continued in the bureaucracy as well. First he served as the governor of Halep in 1866–1868 and then became the head of the Tribunal of Judicial Ordinances (Divan-ı Ahkam-ı Adliye), established in 1868 to serve as the court of appeals. In the same year the council was transformed into a ministry, and Ahmet Cevdet became its minister. This ministry would be renamed the Ministry of Justice in 1876, and a separate Court of Appeals was to be established under it in 1879. It was in this period the Nizamiye courts were founded, and it fell on Ahmet Cevdet to legitimize them as compatible with Islam. In 1869, Ahmet Cevdet became the chair of newly founded the Society of Majalla, a group of religious scholars authorized to compile the Ottoman Civil Code. The society had produced a total of sixteen books of law and dissolved in 1888. Among the contributions the society made was to draft the code of Trial Procedures, which introduced public prosecution into the Ottoman legal system. While serving in the society, Ahmet Cevdet also assumed even more critical positions. He served as minister of justice (five times), minister of education (three times), minister of religious endowments (two times), minister of interior (one time), and minister of commerce and agriculture (one time). Ahmet Cevdet was also a prolific writer. Among his books was a twelvevolume history book covering Ottoman history from 1774 to 1826 (Tarih-i Cevdet), a history book on prophets (Kısas-ı Enbiya), a history book on Crimea and the Caucasus (Kırım ve Kafkas Tarihçesi), an Ottoman grammar book (Kavaid-i Osmaniyye), a book of logic (Mi’yar-ı Sedad), a book on the Qur’an (Hülasatü’l Beyan fi Te’lifi’l Kuran), a book of catechism (Asar-ı Ahd-ı Hamidi), and a book on the high character and virtues of the Prophet (Hilye-ı Saadet). Ahmet Cevdet’s biography perfectly illustrates the opportunities modern state building opened for young religious scholars. Many others followed his lead in bringing religious background and education to the service of the Ottoman state. In order to better understand the ulama’s involvement in the Ottoman project of building a modern sovereign state, we must look

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at the broader context. Two features of that context deserves emphasis: an apocalyptic aura and a weakening society.

THE CONTEXT

Apocalyptic Aura Some groups among the ulama might have indeed opposed the process of modern sovereign state building in the Ottoman Empire. But that opposition never materialized into a massive reactionary movement. The international context of the building of the modern Ottoman state might have contributed to this. As noted before, by the early 19th century the Ottomans had realized that reform was critical in order to ward off the increasingly aggressive Western powers. The 19th century brought no respite to the empire. The century started with the Serbian revolt of 1804. The Russians intervened on behalf of the Serbians and forced the sultan to grant them limited autonomy. A war broke out with Russia in 1806. Only deteriorating relations with France, and Napoleon’s invasion, forced the Russians to bring a quick end to the war in 1811. The Ottomans reoccupied Serbia in 1813, leading to the second Serbian revolt in 1815. In 1821, Iran attacked the Ottoman Empire and scored military successes. In the same year, the Greeks rebelled, which eventually brought Russia, France, Great Britain, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire into confl ict. The sultan recognized the independence of Greece in 1832 with the Treaty of Constantinople. Russia attacked the Ottoman Empire in 1828. The gains Russia made in the field were enormous; fortunately, however, their territorial gains were greatly curtailed in the Treaty of Edirne in 1829 thanks to the intervention of the European powers on behalf of the Ottoman Empire. The 1830s saw humiliating defeats of Ottoman forces at the hands of an Ottoman governor, Mehmed Ali Pas¸a of Egypt. The intervention of Russia, Britain, Austria, and Prussia saved the Ottoman dynasty from its own governor. The Crimean War broke out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1853. With the British and French entering on the side of the Ottomans, the Ottomans avoided another humiliating defeat. Another war broke out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1877, after the Ottomans suppressed rebellions in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. This war ended quickly after the Ottoman forces were crushed at the hands of the Russians. But European intervention again curtailed many of the territorial gains of the Russians: Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Romania became independent states; Bosnia and Herzegovina remained under nominal Ottoman rule; and some pieces of land in eastern Anatolia went to Russia, Cyprus to Britain, and Tunis to France. The Ottomans also tasted defeat in the Tripolitanian War of 1911–1912 against Italy and in the Balkan Wars against the joint forces of Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria.

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By the beginning of the First World War, the only European land held by the Ottomans was the area between Edirne and I˙ stanbul. Protracted wars with Russia, and internal rebellions, especially in the Balkans, simply increased the pressure on the Ottoman rulers to speed up their reforms. More importantly, I believe, they contributed to the sense of extraordinary urgency and an apocalyptic feeling among the ulama, drastically reducing their incentives to object to the state-building reforms. In fact it was quite the reverse: they enthusiastically rushed to make their own contributions.

Weakening Ottoman Society Modern state building in the Ottoman Empire either destroyed or seriously weakened some intermediary bodies, especially the artisan and merchant guilds. The watershed event for the guilds was the destruction of the Janissaries, the central army of the Ottoman Empire. The Janissaries had long engaged in local trade and artisanship, and therefore they, too, were organized into guilds. In other words, the guilds had a strong arm, embodied in the Janissaries, that could protect their legally recognized monopolies. The destruction of the Janissaries in 1826 left the guilds weak against governmental measures aimed at promoting free trade in line with pressures from the European powers. For example, the 1838 treaty with Britain abolished all legal monopolies provided to Ottoman merchants and artisans and decreased custom duties in favor of British subjects. Every loss in the battlefield forced the Ottomans to provide similar favorable conditions to foreign merchants. The guilds could not raise any effective challenge to the ongoing liberalization of the economy as the state became stronger. In time, they lost their monopolies and privileges and, as a result, were weakened. In the early 20th century, the guilds were no more than registers of artisans and merchants. Local notable families also lost their power in Anatolia as the Ottoman state strengthened its grip over the provincial administration. The most important consequence of the suppression and elimination of local notable families was that no class of big landlords emerged in the subsequent history of Anatolia. Not only in the Ottoman Empire, but also in Safavid and, then, in Qajar Iran, most land legally belonged to the state. Two other categories were waqf lands managed by religious groups through pious foundations and private land. The last category really constituted a marginal part, mainly found around people’s houses in the form of private gardens. State lands constituted by far the largest category and were granted to military men in return for their military or administrative services in the provinces. If state building had failed in the Ottoman Empire, local notable families could have challenged the state’s monopoly over the land and appropriated land as their own private property. This is what happened in places where the Ottomans could not extend their central rule, like Syria, Lebanon, and

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Iraq. Local notable families became absentee landowners and, thus, important political players in the subsequent histories of those countries.86 But in Anatolia especially, where the Ottomans extended their central authority, state-building reforms eliminated the most likely candidates for future landlords, local notable families, and there was little private ownership of land when private property became legal in the mid-19th century. Thus successful state building eliminated that option for Anatolia. From that time on, the state remained by far the largest landowner in Turkey, and peasants could have their own small pieces of land, which were much more appropriate for subsistence agriculture.87 The pattern of Ottoman integration with the capitalist world economy also took its toll on the Ottoman societal forces. First, let me give a general description of the economic structure in Anatolia prior to the 19th century, which to a large extent holds true for Iran as well. Self-sufficient peasants constituted the largest unit in society, producing for their own consumption and required to supply some surplus to the government. The areas immediately surrounding the towns also produced some surplus to sell to the city dwellers with whom the rural peasants became increasingly connected through commerce. In return, the city provided basic handmade products. The pastoral nomads constituted the second largest unit in society and mainly engaged in animal husbandry—producing milk, meat, and wool— and transportation, with the peasants and the nomads exchanging products. The towns were the administrative and military centers and, thus, became important markets for their surplus produce. Artisans and merchants were important elements of the town economy. Both groups were organized into guilds, setting their own standards and prices, restricting entry into the market, and controlling the quality of the produce. The artisans mainly produced for the administrative and military personnel of the state. Prior to the 19th century, international trade was also a part of this economic structure. The merchants imported luxury goods mainly for government officials and exported a whole variety of goods, including agricultural goods and textiles. The government, in return, assured the regular supply of meat and farm produce to the town dwellers. Foreign trade with Europe increased enormously in the 19th century, in parallel with the overall growth of international trade.88 As a result the basket of export and import goods changed. Both the Ottoman and the Iranian economies began to import finished manufactured products from Europe, most notably textiles. In return, they exported cash crops to Europe, most notably cotton, tobacco, and opium. Malcolm Yapp summarizes the changing patterns of foreign trade with Europe very nicely: “In 1800 the Near East conducted mixed trade with Europe exporting raw materials, foodstuffs, and manufactured goods and importing a similar mix. By the end of the century, the Near East exported almost only food and raw materials and imported manufactured goods together with some food, notably grain, sugar, coffee and tea.”89

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From Religious Empires to Secular States

The unit in society that was most hard hit by the increasing trade with Europe was the artisan class, as the domestic handicraft industry could not compete in the market with cheap European goods, except for a few items such as carpets and silks. The pastoral nomads continued to play important roles in transportation in the difficult terrains of Anatolia and Iran. Inner Anatolia and Iran were mostly inaccessible to European firms and merchants. Therefore, unlike in other Middle East countries, European firms and merchants had to strike deals with local merchants to penetrate deep into the market. Therefore, the merchants were the main beneficiaries of Anatolia’s increasing trade with Europe. In the Ottoman case, in contrast to the Iranian case, which will be discussed later in the book, it was the non-Muslim populations, especially the Greeks and the Armenians, who were the main beneficiaries and principal carriers of economic integration. The Muslim manufacturers and merchants lost their privileged status as their monopolies were abolished, and they could not compete with the non-Muslims in the market. Çag˘ lar Keyder puts it nicely: “With the expansion of trade, it was the Levantine population which formed the principal link between European markets and local producers. Representative agencies of merchant houses were established in port cities which in turn engaged non-Moslem Ottomans . . . to serve as intermediaries. This pattern quickly drove Moslem merchants out of the field.”90 Muslim merchants survived in the economy, probably not decreasing in number, but in much more subordinate and local positions. Although we do not have detailed statistics, the following serves to illustrate this point. According to a census conducted in 1915, there were 214 private industrial establishments in Turkey. An estimate based upon the names of the owners of these establishments finds that 172 of them, or 80.4 percent, belonged to non-Muslims.91 The underrepresentation of Muslims in business life became a real concern for Turkish rulers only after 1908, and to address this, in 1913 and again in 1927, the state passed laws to encourage industry, and the creation of a national bourgeoisie became an economic state policy. As a result, the Turkish state created a dependent bourgeois class in Turkey; Ays¸e Bug˘ ra’s study on Turkish businessmen clearly shows that “success in business seems to be related, first and foremost, to the nature of one’s relationship with the state.”92 Çag˘ lar Keyder emphasizes two factors in explaining the dominance of nonMuslims in Ottoman commercial life. First, non-Muslims could get foreign passports, which put them under the administrative and legal control of foreign ambassadors. It was then legally easier for European traders to deal with them since, in the event of a dispute, they could bring them in front of the consular courts. Second, non-Muslims had some cultural advantages over Muslims because they shared the religion of the Europeans in their partnerships.93 We can also note that the Greeks and Armenians had extensive familial networks stretching over vast areas, including Europe. These networks put them at a more advantageous position vis-à-vis the Muslim

Mobilizing Sheikhs and Ulama

45

merchants. State building is also partly responsible for the overwhelming dominance of non-Muslims in Ottoman commercial life. An ever-expanding bureaucracy and army provided attractive job opportunities to young and talented Turkish Muslims. As we know, it was mostly the Turkish Muslims who could have good careers in the bureaucracy and in the army. Available statistics support this fact. For example, according to an official census of I˙ stanbul conducted in 1886, out of the 24,112 people in government services, 22,984 were Muslims.94 The same was true for the army. The officer corps was mostly Turkish in origin. In terms of societal structure, then, the political and economic developments of the 19th century brought a clearer stratification of social classes: the Turks were either state officials or peasants; the Greeks and Armenians were merchants, bankers, and businessmen. We can also speak of the urban Turks, who were either small-scale artisans or merchants; the former were hardly affected by the European economic hegemony, and the latter could survive but were financially weak in the market. Ironically, the relative strength of the non-Muslim commercial class served the interests of the state builders in some respects, at least at the core of the Ottoman state. As subjects from the periphery of the Ottoman state, these merchants came from communities that could neither assert themselves politically in state politics, nor threaten the stability of the existing elite coalition in the capital. This was different from what would have happened if a Muslim business elite had taken their place. In that case, there would have been moneyed local notables who might have been able to use their wealth more easily to mobilize supporters to challenge the state. Of course this dynamic was different in the homelands of these commercial minorities. In those places they did have extensive social connections with surrounding communities and could mobilize them against the state. Hence, the Ottoman ulama did not have a merchant class with whom to ally themselves. It should be added here that the extent of economic integration with Europe should not be exaggerated in either the Ottoman or the Iranian case. Unlike Egypt, neither Anatolia nor Iran was fully integrated into the world economy. Per annum increases in foreign trade were below the world average for Anatolia and Iran: there was a 2.5 percent increase in both as compared to a 3.5 percent increase in world trade throughout the 19th century.95 Subsistence farming continued to dominate the agricultural sector of the economy. No cash crop item dominated the agriculture of either region. For example, the share of the leading commodity in total export revenues was 88.9 percent for Egypt, while it was 11 percent and 17.4 percent for the Ottoman Empire and Iran respectively in 1910–1912.96 As the societies remained predominantly rural in both cases, they could not offer much aid to the ulama class, which was rather urban in nature. Ironically, perhaps, other developments led to even more ruralization of Ottoman society. Throughout the 19th century, the Ottomans, like the Qajars in Iran, faced quite a hostile international environment. Unlike the Qajars, however, the Ottomans had to deal with secessionist ethnic groups, such as

46

From Religious Empires to Secular States

Serbians, Montenegrins, Albanians, Bulgarians, Arabs, Armenians, and Greeks. The superior Ottoman forces suppressed almost all uprisings successfully, but the intervention of the great powers, especially Russia, on behalf of the secessionists tore away the Ottoman territories one by one. Added to these territorial losses, the Ottomans lost territories to Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire throughout the century. By the beginning of the First World War, the Ottomans had lost almost all of their territories in the Balkans, except the coastal plain between Edirne and I˙ stanbul. In the Caucasus, the Russians advanced deep into East Anatolia. Moreover, the Ottomans lost all of their territories in North Africa to France, Italy, and Britain. What remained in the hands of the Ottomans were Anatolia and the Arabic provinces of Iraq, Greater Syria, and Hijaz on the Arabian Peninsula. Although conscription was extended to non-Muslims in the mid-19th century, most Christians preferred to pay exemption taxes. Thus the Turkish peasantry of Anatolia had to bear the human cost of the expanding army and protracted warfare of the 19th century.97 Apart from the human costs of all these wars, protracted warfare had another important consequence for Anatolian society. As the Ottomans seceded from their former territories, especially from the Balkans and the Caucasus, massive migrations of Muslims fl ocked into the contracting Ottoman territories. The exact number of migrants is not really known. The fact that even in contemporary Turkey there are a considerable number of people who still define themselves as Georgian, Abhaz, Cherkez, or Bosnian shows how significant it is. The migrations had significant impacts on the societal structure of Anatolia. The most important impact was that the migrating Muslims were largely peasants; thus, apart from providing more human resources for the Ottoman army, the migrations added more rural character to the Turkish Muslim population. In short, throughout the 19th century, the Ottoman society seriously weakened as a result of these developments. This means that those ulama who wanted to oppose the Ottoman project of modern sovereign state building did not have the option of approaching the masses and creating a social base upon which they could survive independently from the state. This option would not have worked for several reasons. The first reason was the dual structure of Ottoman religious life. As described before, the Sufi orders were very strong in the Ottoman Empire and had already, together with another group, the hocas, taken into their own hands the control of the religious lives of the masses. More importantly, perhaps, the Sunni ulama did not have the option that was open to their Iranian colleagues. Comparatively successful state building in the Ottoman Empire, and the way the Ottoman economy integrated with the capitalist world economy, simply wiped out the possible societal forces the ulama could have used as allies against the Ottoman state. As we will see in the next chapter, the First World War also took its toll on not only the ulama, but also the Sufi sheikhs.

Mobilizing Sheikhs and Ulama

47

NOTES 1. For a description of the religious life in Anatolia at the time of the rise of the Ottomans, see Köprülü (1993) and Kafadar (1995). It must be noted that sheikhs and ulama (religious scholars) have historically represented two alternative, but not necessarily competing, approaches to Islam. Sunni Islam to a large extent embraced Sufism while Shi’a Islam did not. It is beyond the scope of this study to elaborate on this difference between Sunni Islam and Shi’a Islam. For the sake of this study, it must be noted that Sunni Islam has kept its institutional pluralism while Shi’a Islam could not. Whether this difference between Sunni and Shi’a Islam affected the Ottomans and the Safavids in devising their policies toward religion needs further scholarly inquiry. 2. See Ocak (1996). One should bear Paul Wittek’s “Ghazi State” thesis under this light. See Wittek (1938). Like many other rulers of the period, the early Ottoman rulers proudly used the religious epithet “ghazi” to attract the Sufi sheikhs and dervishes to their sides. 3. See Köprülü (1993). 4. Ocak (1992:90–91). Geyikli Baba’s tomb in Bursa is still open to visitors. See www.bursadakultur.com. 5. Geyikli Baba has a tomb in Bursa still open to visits. See www.bursadakultur. com. 6. Köprülü (1992:107) and Öngören (2000:24). For more information on Abdal Musa, see Yı ldı rı m (2001). 7. For more examples, see Yı ldı rı m (2001). 8. Özköse (2003:257). 9. The Ottoman governor of Budin built a tomb for him in 1543. The tomb was destroyed during the Second World War. It was restored by the Turkish Ministry of Culture in 1997. Two presidents, those of Turkey and Hungary, attended the opening ceremony. Akyol (1999:14–15). 10. Yı ldı rı m (2001:104). 11. I˙ nalcı k (1973:194). 12. The following discussion is from Öngören (2000). 13. As an illustration see Faroqhi’s (1976) discussion of the zawiyah of Hajji Bektash. Faroqhi shows that successive sultans endowed the tax revenues of certain villages to that zawiyah. 14. Öngören (2000:266–267) gives various examples of tombs, mosques, and zawiyahs in different parts of the empire, from Baghdad to I˙ stanbul, built by Suleyman I. 15. Barkan (1942). 16. Layish (1987:78). 17. For how this policy was pursued in the Balkans, see Antov (2006). 18. Yı ldı rı m (2001:126). 19. Zhelyazkova (no date). 20. I˙ nalcı k (1973:166–167). 21. Repp (1972) discusses the hierarchical system of the Ottoman religious institutions in rather more detail. See also Zilfi (1988). 22. Alkan (2000). 23. Zilfi (1988:26). 24. Chambers (1972). 25. I˙ nalcı k (1978:44). 26. Gellner (1972:308–309). 27. See Zilfi (1986, 1988).

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28. Beydilli (2001). 29. On the decline of the Ottoman Empire, see I˙ nalcı k (1977, 1978, 1980) and Quataert (2000). 30. Quataert (2000:46). The Karaosmanog˘ lu family ruled in the west of Anatolia, the Çapanog˘ lu in central Anatolia, the Canikli Ali Pas¸aog˘ lu in northeast Anatolia, Ali Pas¸a in Epirus, the Osman Pasvanog˘ lu family in the region from the lower Danube to Belgrade, the Süleyman Pas¸a family in Baghdad, the Jalili family in Mosul, and Ali Bey in Egypt. 31. I˙ nalcı k (1977). 32. Zilfi (1988:28). 33. I˙ nalcı k (1977) points out that some of the ayan families had names such as Kadizade or Muallimzade, which imply that the family’s origin lay among the ulama. 34. Quataert (2000:34). 35. In the words of S¸ahin (2003:20), “There is a consensus among the Ottoman historians that the chief beneficiaries of the life-term tax farming system were military and bureaucratic officials, high-level ulema and provincial military officials such as beylerbeyis . . . The participants of the provincial auctions were socially heterogeneous. The majority of new malikâne holders were Janissaries, former sancakbeyis, and other members of the military orders having the titles vizier, Pas¸a, and ag˘ a as well as local notables who bore the title -zâde, the members of local ulema recognized by the title seyyid, s¸ eyh, müderris, and lastly, the members of civil bureaucracy or kalemiye.” 36. Repp (1972:31). 37. During this second Russian war, the Ottomans had to fight against the Austria-Habsburg Empire as well. 38. Before Selim III (1789–1807), Mahmud I (1730–1754), Mustafa III (1757– 1774), and Abdülhamit I (1774–1789) also introduced military reforms, but in very limited areas of the military. Selim III’s military reforms encompassed the whole Ottoman army. 39. An account of this period can be found in any history book on the late Ottoman Empire. I benefited from I˙ nalcı k (1978:49–51), Ortaylı (2003), and Özdeg˘ er (no date). For a very detailed account, see Shaw (1977). 40. For more detail on the construction of the new army and the problems encountered, see Levy (1971). 41. Grant (2002:9). Grant (2002) historically traces the transformation of the Ottoman Empire from a self-sufficient producer to a dependent consumer of military armaments. 42. The most detailed account of Ottoman reforms in bureaucracy is Findley (1980). See also Weiker (1968). 43. See Shaw (1977) on military reforms, Shaw (1975) on state finance, Findley (1980) on administration, and Berkes (1999) on education and the legal system. 44. The previous sultans had opened a very limited number of military engineering schools. For Ottoman reforms in education, see Somel (2010). 45. See Somel (2010). 46. Somel (2010:173). 47. I˙ hsanog˘ lu (2010:647–709). 48. For a detailed account of how Darülfünun came into being, see I˙ hsanog˘ lu. I˙ hsanog˘ lu (2010) gives many examples of how religious scholars served as administrators and teachers in the university. 49. Shaw (1977:118–119). 50. My discussion ignores minority courts, administered by religious minorities, and consular courts. For consular courts, see Kayaog˘ lu (2010a). 51. See the discussion in Otacı (2004:229–249).

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52. Even Mustafa Res¸it Pas¸a, one of the most prominent Ottoman statesmen in the continuing building of the legal system, is said to have taken Ahmet Cevdet, a brilliant young religious scholar, as his protégé so that he could learn about Islamic law in order not to enter into confl icts with the ulama. This anecdote is from Shaw (1977:64). 53. See the discussion in Yurdakul (2008:270–291). 54. Until that time, the sheikh al Islam had undertaken his duties at home. 55. The office of the sheikh al Islam had the directorate of Inspection of Religious Endowments (Evkaf-ı Hümayun Müfettis¸lig˘ i Dairesi), the Administrative Council of Properties of the Orphans (Meclis-i I˙ dare-i Emval i Eytam), and the Administration of Funds of the Orphans (Eytam Sandı kları S¸ubesi). See the first volume of Albayrak (1996:41–46). 56. On the transformation of the office of the sheikh al Islam, see Cihan (2004), Özkul (2005), Yakut (2005), and Yurdakul (2008). 57. See Kahraman, Galitekin, and Dadas¸ (1998:575). 58. For the biographies of sheikh al Islams, see Kahraman, Galitekin, and Dadas¸ (1998). 59. Somel (2010:61). 60. Among legal historians there is debate about the extent to which these codes were compatible with the Islamic law. For a review of this debate on different codes, see Otacı (2004). 61. On the life and achievements of Ahmet Cevdet, see Mardin (2009). 62. Otacı (2004:213). 63. Mardin (2009:160–167) discusses fourteen religious scholars involved in the preparation of the Majalla. 64. Both Berkes (1999) and Ortaylı (2003) note this dualistic structure that emerged after the Tanzimat reforms. It continued to survive until the end of the empire in 1918 and was abolished by the more radical reforms undertaken by Atatürk. Berkes (1999) also provides a good discussion of the reforms in the context of the secularization of education and the legal system in Turkey. 65. Anderson (1959:22). 66. Akgündüz (2004:23–28, 44–49). 67. As I noted, religious foundations financed the theology schools and their students. The Ministry of Religious Endowments did not confiscate the foundations, but instead took control of them. Thus, the surplus revenues went to the state, not to the ulama. 68. Akgündüz (2004:32–33). The exam, known as Kurra imtihani, began in the 1850s, almost seventy years before Reza Khan introduced the same system for theology students in Iran. 69. See Davison (1963) and Shaw (1977:119). 70. Otacı (2004:238). 71. Cihan (2004: 194–195). 72. See Table A-1 in the appendix. See also Feyziog˘ lu (2010). 73. All three names served as sheikh al Islam. See their biographies in Kahraman, Galitekin, and Dadas¸ (1998). 74. The biographical information about these names can be found in the second and third volumes of Mardin (1966). 75. See the first volume of I˙ hsanog˘ lu (2010:357). 76. See I˙ hsanog˘ lu (2010). 77. See the second volume of I˙ hsanog˘ lu (2010: 547–555). 78. For the biographies see Mardin (1966). 79. See Somel (2010:357:361). 80. Akgündüz (2004:156–159) provides the curricula of the seminary schools and the state schools of all levels.

50 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

From Religious Empires to Secular States See Somel (2010:54). This discussion relies on Somel (2010:51–54). See Cihan (2004:243–251). The following account can be found in greater detail in Mardin (2009). Modeled after the French Academy of Sciences, the Consultative Council operated between 1851 and 1862. The council was established to translate and produce scientific works and write textbooks for the future Ottoman university. Albert Hourani uses the term “notable politics” to refer to politics in postOttoman Middle East states. See Hourani (1993). This description is true even today. See Keddie (1980:122), Foran (1991:799), and Quataert (2000:127). Yapp (1987:30). Keyder (1987:22). Cited in Bug˘ ra (1994:39). Bug˘ ra (1994:5). Keyder (1987). Shaw (1977). In contrast, Egypt’s foreign trade increased by 4 percent per annum above the world average. See Yapp (1987:2). Pamuk (1987:146). It should not be surprising that the most heartbreaking Turkish folk songs are stories of soldiers who went away to war but never returned. “Yemen Türküsü” and “Çanakkale I˙ çinde” are famous songs in this category.

3

Accommodationist State Secularization in Republican Turkey

The previous chapter showed that secularization of the state, defined in the introduction chapter as establishing absolute state sovereignty, began in Turkey in the early 19th century. This chapter describes how state secularity was fully established in the early 20th century and explains why it accommodated religion. The chapter argues that two factors are critical to the latter outcome: first, the reformers were consolidating their powers in the midst of ongoing intra-elite competition, and, second, religious community was acquiescent toward the new regime. The chapter first provides an account of how the state secularizers came to power in Turkey. This account will show that the new regime was formed in the midst of an ongoing elite competition. The chapter then discusses how state secularization was accommodative, which also illustrates how religious community was by and large acquiescent to the new regime. The chapter finally discusses why the state adopted an accommodationist model of state secularity in Turkey. STRATEGIC CONTEXT: THE COMING TO POWER OF MUSTAFA KEMAL ATATÜRK In Turkey, state secularization took place in the midst of a stiff intra-elite competition for political power. Even though this competition was fully unleashed in the aftermath of the independence war, 1919–1922, it originated in the late 1900s. If a date is to be specified, it started on July 3, 1908.1 On this particular date, Ahmet Niyazi, an officer in the Ottoman army, mutinied with his four hundred soldiers in Resne, a Macedonian town, in protest against the reigning sultan, Abdülhamit II. Other officers such as Enver in Tikves¸ and Eyüp Sabri in Ohri followed Ahmet Niyazi’s lead. The officers, soon to be joined by the masses in several critical towns, demanded that Abdülhamit II should reinstate the constitution of 1876, which he had suspended thirty years prior. Unable to suppress the mutinies and stop the protests, Abdülhamit II conceded on July 23, 1908.

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A clandestine organization, the Committee of Union and Progress, or the CUP, was behind the constitutional revolution against the sultan. The committee immediately established a political party in October 1908 and participated in the parliamentary elections held in December 1908. Even though the committee failed to win a majority of seats in parliament, it soon became the most infl uential political organization in the empire thanks to its members’ positions in the military and civilian bureaucracy. It would take some time for the committee to consolidate its power, however. The first real challenge was a rebellion instigated by military officers, who had recently been purged by the committee, and religious students. The rebellion started on April 12, 1909, when the soldiers of the Fourth Military Hunter division in I˙ stanbul jailed their superiors and surrounded parliament. Clerics, religious students, and other discontented groups soon joined the rebellion. The rebels demanded from parliament and the sultan that the religious law be implemented, that the prime minister and the minister of war should resign, and that the military officials purged from the army should be reinstated. The rebels soon went on a rampage, killing several high-level officials, including one minister, and attacking the office of the CUP in I˙ stanbul and the journals affiliated with the committee. In I˙ stanbul, the rebels started a vicious hunt for the committee members. The leaders of the committee had to fl ee I˙ stanbul to save their lives. It took a military unit from Selanik, a stronghold of the committee, to put down the rebellion on April 19, 1909. By declaring martial law in I˙ stanbul and establishing military courts to try the rebels, the military in fact put the committee back in power. Paving the way for the committee’s monopolization of power, parliament deposed Abdülhamit II on April 27 and enthroned Mehmet V with much reduced power. Even though the opposition regrouped and united under a political party in October 1911, the committee scored an overwhelming victory in the 1912 elections.2 It had to face another challenge, however, this time from the ranks of the army, the most secure power base of the committee. A junta, formed in June 1912,3 forced the CUP-controlled government to resign and dissolved parliament in July 1912. Conveniently for the committee, in October 1912, the Balkan States united and attacked the Ottoman Empire. The short war ended in disaster for the latter. Nearly all of its European lands were lost, and the Balkan armies reached the outskirts of the capital. This uncertain political environment gave a priceless opportunity to the committee to take political power once again through staging a counter-coup in January 1913. A new cabinet was formed that was fully under the control of the committee. The military successes in the Second Balkan War simply boosted the committee’s power and popularity both in the capital and in the provinces. From the very beginning, the committee also had to solve serious internal problems. Because of its secret central decision-making body, the committee

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did not have strong internal cohesion. Even the military members of the committee were divided into different cliques.4 In 1913, the committee finally settled its internal disputes through a coalition of three strong men representing the most important cliques: Talat, Cemal, and Enver. The beginning of this triumvirate’s rule truly marked the beginning of the CUP’s rule in the Ottoman Empire. Neither the sultan nor any other group would be able to challenge its rule in the next five years. The First World War broke out in July 1914, which helped the CUP extend its power further throughout the empire. They purged suspect military officials from the army and appointed their loyalists to important offices. The war effort brought further rapprochement between the masses and the CUP, the latter forming numerous national and local nonstate organizations, clubs, and charities to encourage the masses to contribute to the Ottoman war effort.5 The Ottoman Empire joined the Axis powers in November 1914 and was defeated after an exhausting war. The armistice signed on October 30, 1918, also ended the rule of the CUP. The leaders of the CUP left the country on November 1, 1918, and four days later the CUP dissolved itself. It was a formal, not an informal, end. In the meantime, British and French forces began to occupy key Turkish cities in Anatolia and East Thrace to implement the terms of the armistice. The immediate local resistance to these occupations highlights the importance of the already existing grassroots organizations of the dissolved CUP. Among the activities undertaken by the unionists, the opening of Müdafaa-i Hukuk (the Defense of the Rights) organizations in many parts of Turkey became foundations for local militia forces, famously called Kuvayi Milliye, to resist occupation. The military officials of the regions also helped organize them and distributed ammunitions from their stocks. 6 A clandestine organization, Karakol Cemiyeti, operated in I˙ stanbul to help military and civilian officials escape from I˙ stanbul, which was occupied by the Allied forces, and join in the liberation movement. Karakol Cemiyeti also raided the foreign military supplies and sent them to the army. More important, military forces from the Ottoman army continued to operate, despite the Armistice agreement’s mandate that they be demobilized. These scattered forces numbered 110,000–130,000 even after demobilizations during November 1918.7 Many military officials with unionist backgrounds refused or delayed the demobilization of their troops, again showing the apparent depth and autonomy of the social roots of this state-building movement. Even though the unionists provided the leadership cadre in the resistance movement, they also worked tirelessly to get the support of Sufi orders and religious scholars. Recognizing this, Binnaz Toprak says, “The War of National Independence was fought with the aid of local clerics in Anatolian towns and villages, as well as through heavy use of Islamic themes in the nationalists’ publicly declared aims—much more so, in fact, than official historiography would later admit.”8 Many other studies—for example, Dankwart Rustow9—provide interesting examples of how various religious

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figures participated in the War of Independence. There were considerable numbers of religious clerics, according to a calculation around 11 percent,10 in the first parliament, which led the war. In order to counter the sheikh al Islam’s fatwa against the independence war led from Ankara, 147 members of the clergy issued a religious fatwa in favor of the war of liberation. Religious intellectuals, like Mehmet Akif and Es¸ref Edip, preached in the mosques to mobilize the people.11 It soon became evident that local militias could not liberate the country unless united. Mustafa Kemal played a critical role in this process of unification. Mustafa Kemal was born into an insignificant family in 1881 in the city of Selanik in today’s Greece. His father, Ali Rı za, was a low-ranking clerk and lumber trader, and his mother, Zübeyde, was a housewife. He started his education in a local school tied to a mosque but soon transferred to a private school, S¸emsi Efendi Mektebi. At age of twelve, he entered the military school, studying at Secondary School of Military in Selanik (1893–1896), High School of Military in Manastı r (1896–1899), Military College in I˙ stanbul (1899–1902) and finally Military Academy in I˙ stanbul (1902–1905). Mustafa Kemal thus grew up in the same milieu that nurtured many of his generation into arch-opponents of the reigning sultan, Abdülhamit II. Both during his student years in I˙ stanbul and after his graduation in Damascus, he was involved in anti-regime clandestine groups. However, when he was on duty in Damascus (1905–1907), he was far away from the real centers of anti-Abdülhamit activities in the Balkan territories of the empire. He returned to one such center, Manastı r, and was stationed there from 1907 to 1909. But it was too late. The Union and Progress Party was already well established there. Therefore, Mustafa Kemal could not place himself in the leadership cadre. Mustafa Kemal first fought in the Trablusgarp War and then in the Balkan Wars. But he truly distinguished himself in the First World War. He was the commander of a military unit that halted the advance of the British land forces in the Dardanelles. His heroic and successful management even earned him a promotion to the rank of colonel. After the Dardanelles, Mustafa Kemal was first sent to the Eastern Front and then to the Southern Front. By the time the Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mondros in October 1918, he was the commander of the 7th Army in Halep, Syria. On November 13, 1918, he returned to I˙ stanbul and began to work in the Ministry of War. He stayed in I˙ stanbul for six months. By the time he landed in Samsun on May 19, 1919, as the 9th Army inspector, local resistance organizations and militias had long been formed and fighting for independence. More importantly, several Ottoman commanders, such as Ali Fuat and Kazı m Karabekir, were already in Anatolia, planning to initiate a national struggle. Mustafa Kemal set to work by issuing a historic document, known as Amasya Tamimi, in June 1919. Joined by four other Ottoman generals, Rauf Orbay, Refet Bele, Ali Fuat, and Kazı m Karabekir,

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Mustafa Kemal unequivocally declared that the country was in grave danger (Article 1) and that the I˙ stanbul government could not undertake its responsibilities (Article 2). The document also stated that the nation needed a national council, and it called for a national congress to be held in Sivas. First, several regional congresses, such as I˙ zmir, Nazilli, Trabzon, Erzurum, and Redd-i Ilhak, and then a national congress in Sivas, united all local resistance organizations. This unity found its institutional manifestation in the opening of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) in Ankara on April 23, 1920. The sultan’s government in I˙ stanbul, fully controlled by anti-unionists, would not relinquish power without a struggle. It managed to instigate more than twenty local rebellions throughout Anatolia against the Mustafa Kemal– led Ankara government. With no standing army of its own, the Ankara government relied on militia commanders, the most notable being Çerkez Ethem, to suppress these rebellions.12 The first military victory came in the Eastern Front against the Armenians. Kazı m Karabekir, appointed by the TGNA as the commander of the Eastern Front, led the Turkish forces and scored several victories, imposing upon the Armenians the Treaty of Gumru in December 1920. On the Western Front, Mustafa Kemal led the Turkish forces and scored two decisive victories against the Greeks. An armistice signed on October 11, 1922, thus ended the Turkish War of Independence. In addition to military victories against the Greeks and Armenians, local resistance and diplomacy also contributed to clearing the country of foreign forces. The French forces left cities such as Urfa, Antep, and Maras¸, for they were unable to crush local resistance in these cities. Through diplomacy, the French and Italian forces also left Anatolia without any engagement with the regular Turkish army. Finally, it was through diplomacy that the foreign forces, including the British, left I˙ stanbul. The Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate on November 1 of the same year and participated as the sole representative of Turkey in Lausanne Congress, which met to negotiate the peace agreement. The elimination of this external threat completed one struggle, but it started a new internal struggle, particularly among the ex-CUP military and civilian officials. Even during the War of Independence, Mustafa Kemal faced challenges to his leadership.13 Able to instigate successive rebellions, the sultan still posed a formidable challenge. Unlike his brother, Mehmet Res¸at, Vahdettin was determined to take back the political power the unionists had jealously guarded since 1913. The sultan must have been quite popular as Mustafa Kemal put his mission in the beginning as saving the sultan-caliph. Enver Pas¸a could also pose a challenge. In fact several former unionists planned to bring Enver Pas¸a back to Turkey to replace Mustafa Kemal Pas¸a as the leader of the liberation. This plan failed, however, because of a very timely Turkish victory over the Greek forces. The victory boosted the popularity

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and consolidated the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pas¸a. More importantly, a good number of the deputies, including some former CUP members, formed an opposition group against the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pas¸a in the first parliament. Mustafa Kemal successfully eliminated this group in the first post–War of Independence elections held in early 1923.14 The popularity of Mustafa Kemal Pas¸a as the leader of the war of liberation helped his group, reorganized as the Republican People’s Party (RPP), win the elections in 1923 very easily. Only three of Mustafa Kemal’s opponents in the first parliament were reelected. The new Turkish parliament declared Turkey a republic on October 23, 1923. On the same day, Mustafa Kemal Pas¸a was elected as the president of the republic.15 The opposition to Mustafa Kemal continued even in the second parliament, but now he faced even more formidable enemies. In the summer of 1924, Rauf Orbay and Refet Pele took the lead in organizing an opposition party. Kazı m Karabekir and Ali Fuat Cebesoy joined the opposition. All these individuals were the first leaders of the war of liberation and commanded great reputation and respect in the army. The increasing power of Mustafa Kemal and their feeling of alienation in the new state must have pushed them to the opposition. I˙ stanbul bureaucracy and media, which were losing their privileged position with the shift of power to Ankara, stood behind the new opposition.16 The party, named the Progressivist Republican Party (PRP), was founded on November 17, 1924, and further strengthened by the resignations from parliament of RPP members. Alarmingly, perhaps, military officials constituted a larger percentage in PRP than in RPP.17 Yet Mustafa Kemal and his clique already held the key positions in the state. Two events gave them the necessary condition to eliminate this new opposition. First, a Kurdish rebellion, led by Sheikh Said, broke out in February 1925. As the rebellion became more serious, the government was granted extraordinary powers. The PRP and the newspapers supporting the party were closed down in June 1925. One year later, in July 1926, an assassination attempt on Mustafa Kemal by former CUP members was foiled in I˙ zmir. The act was interpreted as an attack on the new republic.18 The government, led by I˙ smet Pas¸a, ordered the formation of an extraordinary court to punish the aggressors. PRP deputies, among them Ali Fuat Cebesoy, Kazı m Karabekir, Refet Bele, Cafer Tayyar Eg˘ ilmez, and many former CUP members, were jailed. Nineteen of them were hanged. Some, such as Rauf Orbay, were jailed. Others, most notably the first leaders of the war of liberation, such as Cebesoy and Karabekir, were released but marginalized thereafter. The outcome of the trial was the exile of all these military leaders and ex-CUP members from politics during the lifetime of Mustafa Kemal. It is illustrative to look at the brilliant career of Kazı m Karabekir, the most formidable of Mustafa Kemal’s challengers. Karabekir was born into a noble family, Karamanlis, the most formidable opponents of the Ottomans in Anatolia. He was the son of an Ottoman general: following his father’s footsteps, Karabekir went to the military schools. He was the top student

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in his class, one of his classmates was Mustafa Kemal. Karabekir was one of the founders of the Union and Progress Party. He took part in successful military operations. Finally, he joined the First World War. His military missions were in Iran, the Dardanelles, Iraq, and the Caucasus. Following the Armistice of Mondros, he was offered the highest position in the armed forces, the chief of staff of armed forces. He refused the offer and asked for a position in Anatolia. He eventually went to Erzurum, where he could mobilize his troops. He joined the four other military officers in signing the Amasya declaration, which officially started the War of Independence. Karabekir also pioneered to unite local resistance organizations in the East under the Erzurum congress. He also secured the membership of Mustafa Kemal in this congress. During the War of Independence, Karabekir served as the commander of armed forces in the east. He fought against the Armenians, defeated them, and secured the eastern border by signing a treaty with Armenia. Then he forwarded troops and military equipment to the Western Front, where Mustafa Kemal was in command. In the first election after the War of Independence, he traveled with Mustafa Kemal to promote his Republican People’s Party. According to his diaries, he felt increasingly marginalized by Mustafa Kemal and people surrounding him.19 He joined the opposition that materialized in parliament, which came to an end when the party was closed down. Karabekir was brought to the court for being involved in the assassination attempt against Mustafa Kemal. He was acquitted, however, and he withdrew from public and political life and lived a life under police surveillance. Only after Mustafa Kemal died in 1938 did Karabekir turn back to political life and become a deputy. He was the chair of parliament when he died in 1946. Thus by 1927 the political future seemed secure for Mustafa Kemal and his clique. That is also the year he delivered his famous speech, Nutuk, in the party congress. Any reading of this long speech delivered on October 15–20, 1927, will show that Mustafa Kemal’s authority was not well established until 1927.20 Later becoming the official Turkish historiography, the speech discredited not only the sultan in I˙ stanbul, but also his former colleagues, who actually fought in the War of Independence, and emphasized “his own role and the novelty and originality of the national movement he had led.”21 Seemingly secure in power, Mustafa Kemal and his regime faced yet another opposition in 1930. The emergence of such an opposition once again showed the fragility of the political coalition around Mustafa Kemal.22 Ironically, though, Mustafa Kemal personally encouraged the formation of an opposition party, Free Republican Party, to be led by his close associate. The new party attracted more support from the public than it was supposed to attract, and it was subsequently closed down. After this attempt the political regime in Turkey started another round of purges and closures: one of the few remaining independent organizations, Türk Ocakları (Turkish Houses), was also incorporated into the party as Halk Evleri (Public Houses) in 1931.

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In 1933, I˙ stanbul University, one of the few places not subordinated to the regime, was closed down and reopened in the name of university reform, with faculty unsupportive of Atatürk reforms being purged. Even an apparently harmless yet independent women’s organization was not left alone. Nezihe Muhittin’s Turkish Women’s Federation was closed down by the new regime in 1935. Nezihe Muhittin originally imagined the federation as a women’s party. She made an application in 1923 even before Mustafa Kemal’s own party. However, Nezihe Muhittin was refused on the grounds that women were not granted political rights in Turkey. Instead she established the Turkish Women’s Federation with female enfranchisement as an objective. The federation reached 1,000 members and four branches by 1935. One major success of the federation was to host the 12th International Women’s Congress in I˙ stanbul in 1935, in which she complained about the regime in Turkey to the participants. Refusing to be part of the political regime and acting independently, the federation was closed down in 1935 by the state.23 Thus ended the intense intra-elite competition in Turkey. It is worth emphasizing once more that no opponent of Mustafa Kemal enjoyed a societal power base, as their infl uence was rooted in their positions in the state apparatus. Therefore, the elimination of potential rivals did not lead to massive social protests. Unlike Russia, the struggle did not turn into a brutal civil war, but rather remained by and large an intra-elite business. In the midst of it, state secularization took place. As I will discuss, this nature of regime building in Turkey affected state secularization. Before that discussion, however, let me first elaborate how state secularization was accommodationist in Turkey. ACCOMMODATIVE STATE SECULARIZATION IN TURKEY In Turkey, state secularization accommodated religion. The state took over critical public functions from religious community, abolished the religious law, denounced it as a source of legislation, and characterized itself as a secular state. Thus the state firmly established its absolute sovereignty. Secularizing reforms also incorporated religious institutions into the state. The incorporation found a distinct institutional dimension: the directorate of religious affairs under the office of the prime minister. The administration of all religious places such as mosques and the appointment of personnel for these religious places were put under the jurisdiction of the directorate. The offices of religious counsels and their personnel in every town were linked to the directorate. It is essential to note that the jurisdiction of the directorate of religious affairs included not only the administration of religious places, but also the enlightenment of the masses regarding Islam. In this vein, some research groups previously under the office of the sheikh al Islam, such as Heyet-i I˙ tfaiyye, Tedkikat and Te’lifat-i I˙ slamiyye, Heyet-i Müs¸avere, and Tedkik-i

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Mesahif, were tied to the Directorate of Religious Affairs.24 As regards activities in this genre, the directorate financed some religious scholarly projects: for example, Muhammed Hamdi Yazı r wrote nine volumes of Qur’an interpretation that were published between 1935 and 1939; Mehmet Akif Ersoy was contracted to write a translation of the Qur’an but did not complete it—instead, Muhammed Hamdi Yazı r translated the Qur’an into Turkish; Babanzade Ahmed Naim translated a collection of the hadiths into Turkish in twelve volumes with commentary, known in Turkish as Sahih-i Buhari Muhtasarı Tecrid-i Sarih Tercümesi ve S¸ erhi. Ömer Nasuhi Bilmen, another famous religious scholar, wrote a practical religious guide, Büyük I˙slam I˙lmihali, and an important work of jurisprudence in six volumes, Hukuk-u I˙slamiyye ve I˙stihalat-i Fıkhıyye Kamusu, for the directorate. The state also took control of the education of religious officials who were to become its employees. The Ministry of Education opened a theology faculty at I˙ stanbul University, as well as thirty I˙ mam-Hatip schools to educate prayer leaders and preachers for the mosques. By incorporating religious institutions into its body, the Turkish state in fact assumed the provision of religious services in its territories. To undertake this task, the state embraced the religious community and offered its members positions in its institutions. Biographical information about late Ottoman religious scholars’ careers in Republican Turkey testifies to this.25 Sadı k Albayrak, in his five-volume Son Dönem Osmanlı Uleması (The Last Ottoman Ulema), documents approximately 2,840 short biographies of late Ottoman religious scholars.26 Among these biographies, only 161 of them give specific information about the career of the subject after the closure of the religious schools and courts. From these biographies, we can infer the general state policy with regard to the individual members of religious communities in Turkey. The state either employed and dispersed them throughout the state apparatus or accepted them as retired officials and paid their pensions.27 Of these 161 religious scholars, 21 were employed in the Ministry of Justice, 12 in the Ministry of Education, 52 in the Directorate of Religious Affairs, 7 in the university, 8 in the other state offices, and 51 were retired on a pension; 3 of the religious scholars left the country, 4 faced trial, and 3 received no job or regular payment. Furthermore, the law that closed the madrasahs also stipulated that the students of the seminaries were to be transferred to state schools under the control of the Ministry of Education.28 If we look at tens of biographies, available from other general sources such as Türkiye I˙slam Ansiklopedisi (Turkish Encyclopedia of Islam), we see the same picture. It is illustrative to visit some of these biographies here. A prominent example is Arapkirli Hüseyin Avni, who was born in 1864. He started his madrasah education in Arapkir, Malatya, and pursued his studies in I˙ stanbul. In 1887 he passed the prestigious exam of the office of the sheikh al Islam and became a general instructor (dersiam) in mosques. In the next fifteen years he offered public religious classes in Beyazı d Mosque

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in I˙ stanbul. In 1902 he was promoted to the professorship of theology at Darülfünun in I˙ stanbul and thereafter assumed various important positions. When the madrasahs were closed down in 1924, he was the head of a prestigious research institute, Darü’l Hikmetü’l I˙ slamiye. During the republican period, Hüseyin Avni was appointed to the Faculty of Theology in Darülfünun as a professor of hadith, history of hadith, and theology.29 Another example is Bekir Hakkı Yener, who was born in 1882. He graduated from Medresetül Kudat, which was established by the office of the sheikh al Islam to train religious judges. He also passed the general instructorship (dersiam) exam and became a general religious instructor in 1914. When the madrasahs were closed down, he was entitled to a retirement pension. During the republican period, he served as a lawyer in I˙ stanbul for three years and worked in the office of I˙ stanbul’s religious consulate and in the Directorate of Religious Affairs.30 Ali Himmet Berki’s career shows even more clearly that the Turkish state welcomed the graduates of madrasahs into the state service. He was born in 1882 into an ulama family and graduated from Medresetül Kudat. He worked in the office of the sheikh al Islam and served as a religious judge in Tokat, Amasya, and Ankara. During the republican period, he moved to the judiciary, having served in various courts in I˙ stanbul and Eskis¸ehir. In 1933 he became the head of the second division of the Court of Cessation and served there until his retirement in 1950. During his tenure, he published several books: one, Hatemül Enbiya, Hz. Muhammed ve Hayatı, was about the life of the Prophet of Islam, and the other, I˙slam Hukukunda Feraiz ve I˙ntikal, was on Islamic jurisprudence. Two of his sons, Osman Fazil Berki and Mehmet S¸akir Berki, became professors of law, and the third, Sadettin Berki, became a judge.31 Hasan Hüsnü Erdem’s career paints a similar picture. He was born in 1889 and graduated from Darül Hilafe Madrasah, which was later converted to an I˙ mam-Hatip school during the republican period. He also passed the dersiam exam and became I˙ stanbul’s general religious instructor. After the madrasahs were closed down in 1924, Hasan Hüsnü became a teacher in the Ministry of Education, teaching various classes ranging from Turkish to sociology in secondary, high, and I˙ mam-Hatip schools in Antalya. His teaching in state schools continued until 1944. Between 1944 and 1961, he was at the Directorate of Religious Affairs and joined the consultation committee. During his tenure, from 1952 to 1959 he taught at the Faculty of Theology at Ankara University, which opened in 1949. He became the director of religious affairs in 1961 and served until 1964.32 Mustafa Fehmi Gerçeker’s biography shows that a political career was also open to the late Ottoman religious scholars. Born in 1868, he received his madrasah education in I˙ stanbul and went back to Bursa. He taught at a madrasah and became a religious counsel in Karacabey, Bursa. He supported the Ankara government during the independence war and served as the

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minister of Sharia and Awqaf. Even though his ministry was closed down in 1924, his membership in parliament continued until the end of his life. He served as a Bursa representative for thirty years.33 Examples are plentiful of the successful careers carved out by madrasah graduates. During the republican period, Hüseyin Sadeddin Arel34 became a lawyer and a composer, Ebu’l Ula Mardin35 a professor of law, Mehmet Tevfik Gerçeker36 a member of the Council of State and the Constitutional Court, Abdurrahman S¸eref Güzelyazı cı 37 a librarian and a teacher, I˙ smail Saib Sencer38 a librarian, Ömer Ferit Kam39 a professor of literature, and Naim Hazı m Onat,40 who suggested the surname Atatürk to Mustafa Kemal, a parliamentarian and a professor of linguistics. The biographies of many other late Ottoman religious scholars illustrate the same point.41 The Turkish state successfully incorporated religious scholars into the new bureaucracy, the Directorate of Religious Affairs employing some 5,000 of them,42 and benefitted from their expertise even in fields such as education and law, which were secularized. It is illustrative to look at the career of two members of the commission that translated and adopted the Swiss Civil Code. Such a look also illustrates that the Ottoman state-building process also produced hybrid figures who pursued both secular and religious educations. One of them was Sabri S¸akir (Ansay),43 who was born in 1888 in I˙ stanbul. His father, S¸akir Efendi, was a religious teacher. Sabri S¸akir first studied in state schools. After he graduated from high school, he studied in Mekteb-i Kuzat, the school founded by the office of the sheikh al Islam to train religious judges. Sabri S¸akir served as the religious judge of Boyabat and then became the head of the Court of First Instance in Iznik. Sabri S¸akir was sent to Germany by the Ministry of Justice to study law, and he stayed for one year. On his return, he worked as a judge in courts in I˙ stanbul. Sabri S¸akir worked in the commission that translated the Swiss code into Turkish and then was appointed as professor in the School of Law in Ankara, a school established in 1925 to train judges for the secular courts of the new republic. Sabri S¸akir taught at the Ankara School of Law until his retirement in 1958 and served as its dean from 1944 to 1946. Sabri also taught Islamic law in the Ankara Faculty of Theology, founded in Ankara in 1949, and served as its dean from 1955 to 1957.44 The other was Ebul’ula Mardin, who was born in 1881 in a Balkan town, Is¸kodra. He came from a scholarly family, a family that had produced religious scholars for centuries. His grandfather, Ömer s¸evki Efendi, was the religious counsel (müftü) of Mardin, and his father, Yusuf Sı tkı Efendi, even rose to the top of religious hierarchy. Ebul’ula studied both under prominent religious scholars of the time and at the School of Law in I˙ stanbul. After he worked in secular state courts, he became a professor of law at the I˙ stanbul School of Law in 1910 and also taught classes at the I˙ stanbul School of Administration. In addition to serving as a deputy in the Ottoman

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parliament from 1914 to 1920, Ebul’ula also worked in the office of the sheikh al Islam, first as a secretary and then as a counsel. During the republican period, Ebul’ula Mardin continued to teach in the Faculty of Law and retired from the university in 1951. As this process unfolded, seemingly hostile reforms enacted in Turkey (from the perspective of religious traditionalists), such as the bans on the wearing of the fez and religious dress, and on the use of various religious suffixes before names, effectively eliminated outward differences among what was now a diverse mix of nonreligious state officials and their new colleagues from the religious institutions. In another act the Turkish state likewise sought to consolidate its monopoly over religious services. By 1925, there were many Sufi orders in Turkey; they had their own mosques, special houses for praying, and their own understanding of Islam. Thus, the establishment of the Directorate was simply the first step in incorporating religious institutions into the state. Parliament passed a law in November 1925 that banned all Sufi orders. Thus, the state eliminated its only competitor and became the sole provider of religious services in Turkey. Like the religious scholars who had worked in the religious schools and in the Sharia courts, the leaders of the Sufi orders, the sheikhs, were incorporated into the state apparatus.45 The majority of Sufi sheikhs did not oppose the state, and some even supported the reforms and accepted official positions. For example, Abdülbaki Baykara,46 a Mevlevi sheikh, worked as a teacher; Abdülaziz Bekkine,47 a Naks¸i sheikh, as a prayer leader; Veled Çelebi I˙ zbudak,48 a Mevlevi sheikh, as a parliamentarian from 1923 to 1943; Kenan Rifai,49 a Rifai sheikh, as a teacher; Hüseyin Nazmi,50 a Naks¸i sheikh, as a clerk; Said Özok,51 a S¸abani sheikh, as a clerk in the Ministry of Defense; and Mahmud Sami Ramazanog˘ lu,52 a Naks¸i sheikh, as a prayer leader and preacher. However they have been portrayed, the secularization reforms in Turkey were not hostile to the main religion, Islam. There was no reason to be so. In contrast to the case in Russia, neither the ulama nor the Sufi sheikhs posed a direct threat to the new regime. Most, if not all, actively supported the Ankara government during the independence war. Mustafa Kemal himself took the lead in securing the support of religious community. As the chair of the first parliament, for example, Mustafa Kemal picked two sheikhs as his deputies: one, Abdülhalim Efendi, was a Mevlevi sheikh, and the other, Cemaleddin Efendi, was a Bektas¸i. To secure their support for the War of Independence, Mustafa Kemal also sent personal letters to numerous Sufi sheikhs.53 Religious community in Turkey did not figure in any opposition to Mustafa Kemal. For example, according to a calculation, out of 355 deputies in the parliament that led the War of Independence, 41 were religious figures. While only 2 religious figures sided with Mustafa Kemal’s opponents, 20 religious figures were among his supporters. The remaining 19 religious figures remained independent in this struggle.54

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Some former Islamists, religious scholars, and Sufis were among the reformers. S¸erafettin Yaltkaya, who also served as prime minister during one-party rule, was an Islamist. As mentioned, Naim Hazı m Onat, the person who suggested the name Atatürk to Mustafa Kemal, was a former madrasah graduate. Fevzi Çakmak, the chief-of-staff of the Turkish Armed Forces under both Mustafa Kemal and his successor, I˙ smet I˙ nönü, was known to be a member of a Sufi order, and so was the minister of education under I˙ smet I˙ nönü, Hasan Ali Yücel.55 Even in implementing a reform as controversial as the Turkification of the language of basic Islamic rituals, Mustafa Kemal found supporters among the members of the religious community. In the month of Ramadan in 1932, Mustafa Kemal visited I˙ stanbul to promote the recitation of the Qur’an in Turkish. He personally participated in the gatherings held in 1932 in Yerebatan Mosque on January 22, the Sultanahmet Mosque on January 29, and the most impressive in Ayasofya Mosque on February 3, when not only the Qur’an, but also the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, were recited in Turkish, with whole event broadcast on the radio. The final novelty was introduced on February 5, when Mustafa Kemal personally asked Sadettin Kaynak, who later became a famous composer, to deliver the Friday sermon in Turkish, and while wearing Western clothes rather than traditional religious garb.56 This does not suggest that the reformers were all practicing Muslims. They were, however, all comfortable with socializing and befriending those who were. This neutral, if not friendly, attitude partly explains why the Turkish state continued to employ religious school graduates and Sufis (for example, the graduates of the School for Religious Judges [Medresetül Kudat] could serve as judges in the secular courts in Turkey),57 provided retirement pensions, and in general turned a blind eye to those religious scholars and sheikhs who continued their religious activities, provided that those activities took place within state-owned mosques or private houses. Many biographies confirm these facts.58 What is particularly striking about the secularizing reforms in Turkey was that the reformers justified their policies by resorting not to some secular philosophy or worldview, but to religion itself. The speech delivered by Seyyid Bey in parliament, for example, provided a very strong religious justification for the abolition of the caliphate.59 In a sense the Turkish reformers were employing “ijtihad” to shape the dominant religion to their own understanding of what it should be. As should be clear by now, the Turkish state in fact monopolized religious services, incorporating most members of the religious community into its body and going against independent religious figures, by force if necessary, as the life of Said Nursi particularly testifies. Through an existing network of mosques and offices of religious councils, the Turkish state since then has promoted a particular understanding of Islam.

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The new state-sponsored understanding was quite simple, in fact. It makes at least three assertions about Islam. First, it asserts, politics is a dirty business, a view that has since affected the way in which Turkish state officials view politics. In their view, religion is something higher. Combining these two ideas, the reformers came up with a powerful third one. Religion should not have anything to do with such a dirty business as politics. A natural conclusion was that no one should utilize religion for the sake of politics and that anyone attempting to do so should be stopped, by force if necessary. Second, the new state-sponsored understanding of Islam argues, no person or group of people represents Islam, a view refl ected in the often-quoted assertion that Islam does not recognize any special person or group as acting as a conduit between God and individuals as Christianity does. Hence, any group of people pretending to act so should be discredited or destroyed. Third, the new state-sponsored understanding of Islam claims that there is a pure Islam as set forth in the Qur’an and practiced by the Prophet. Over time, however, that purity was corrupted as un-Islamic ideas and practices entered in the body of Islam. The state assumes the task of cleaning Islam from such ideas and practices.60 It will be useful to quote from the person after whom the reforms were named: Mustafa Kemal. In a speech delivered in the city of Kastamonu on August 30, 1925, Atatürk says, Our republican government has an office of Directorate of Religious Affairs. There are a lot of officials, like mufti [religious counsel], hatip [preacher], imam [prayer leader], employed in this directorate. The level of knowledge and wisdom these individuals have is known. I see a lot of individuals, however, who do not have responsibilities in this area, but still continue to wear the same garb. I came across many among these who are ignorant, even illiterate . . . it is never permissible to permit this carelessness.61 Propagating this highly depoliticized understanding of Islam through a network of mosques and offices of religious counsels, the Turkish state also skillfully used religious symbols and terminology to give meaning to such state-sponsored, seemingly secular concepts as the nation, the state, national anthems, and fl ags. For example, commonly people refer to the Turkish Armed Forces, often viewed as the bastion of secularism in Turkey, as “The House of the Prophet”; both ordinary people and the state call the soldiers of that army Mehmetçik, Mehmet being a Turkish rendering of Muhammad; the state calls soldiers and officials killed on active duty “martyrs”; clerics pray for the founding fathers of the political regime, Mustafa Kemal and his friends, during important religious rituals. The term “anarchy” denotes extremely antireligious sentiments in Turkey, almost being equated with godlessness. The term “nation” is translated as millet in Turkish, a term used during the Ottoman period to denote groups sharing the same religion.

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Therefore, in the Ottoman system, Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Bosnians, Circassians, and so forth were in fact just one millet. The Turkish national anthem employs religious terminology quite often: Oh glorious God, the sole wish of my pain-stricken heart is that No infidel’s hand should ever touch the bosom of thy sacred temples. These adhans [Islamic call to prayer] and these shadahs [witnessing] that my hearing is accustomed to are the foundations of my religion, And may their noble sound last loud and wide over my eternal homeland. The Turkish state emerged as a major proselytizer, funding a ten-volume commentary in Turkish, the first Qur’an commentary in Turkey, and translations of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sayings into Turkish. Thousands of copies of the Qur’an commentary, translations of the Qur’an, and the hadiths were printed and distributed throughout the country. The reforms proved to be quite effective and were in large part responsible for the fact that during the republican period no major religious revolt took place against the new regime.62 WHY DID TURKEY ADOPT ACCOMMODATIONIST STATE SECULARIZATION? Why was state secularization accommodative of religion? First, as discussed earlier in this chapter, the reformers in Turkey found themselves amidst an ongoing political competition. This competition was an intra-elite competition, which, unlike the one in Russia, did not involve the masses. All the aspirants to political power, including the new state rulers, had their power bases within the bureaucracy. Therefore, they could hardly mobilize the masses for a mass-based political movement. The religious community, staffing the mosques scattered all over the country, occupied a pivotal position in such a situation. The effectiveness of the mosques in mobilizing the masses had already been seen during the war of liberation, when the eloquent preachers, including Mustafa Kemal Pas¸a, used the mosques to address the people.63 The existence of such a competitive political environment, which shook the new rulers’ hold on political power, drove the Turkish state rulers to merge the religious institutions with the state apparatus. The merger served two purposes in the struggle to survive. First, the new state rulers decimated all powers of the Ottoman family, including the position of caliphate, which was religious in nature. The same act also included closing down the religious theological schools and abolishing the Sharia courts. If these three acts had occurred at the same time as the total exclusion of the religious institutions from the state apparatus, the new state rulers would have given a very provocative signal to the masses, who would have interpreted these acts,

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with the help of the religious community, as acts of aggression against Islam. Therefore, merging religious institutions with the state apparatus prevented such a provocative signal being sent to the masses about the intentions of the new state rulers with regard to Islam.64 Second, merging religious institutions with the state apparatus stopped other aspirants to political power from using their organizational resources to reach out to the masses. Hence, a merger between religious institutions and the state would undermine the emergence of a wide opposition movement, which would have mass support. In such a strategic context, the exclusion of religious institutions would probably create a discontented segment in society, the religious community, which could give the other aspirants to political power a very strong and legitimate excuse for rebellion against the new rulers and, more importantly, a channel for mass mobilization. Hence, the state rulers in Turkey opted for merging the religious institutions with the state apparatus. Second, chapter two detailed how the Ottoman state policy toward religion, ambitious state-building measures, and integration with the world capitalist economy left religious community fragmented, financially state dependent, and without any wealthy societal ally. On top of these came the upheavals of the late Ottoman period. The late Ottoman period was quite destructive of Turkish society, which had to bear the costs and consequences of five different inter-state wars, the Trablusgarp War with Italy, two Balkan Wars, the First World War, and the War of Independence. The First World War was the most costly in both economic and human terms for Turkish society. Ottoman armies fought from the beginning to the end of the war over a vast area covering the Balkans, the Caucasus, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. The human costs of waging a war on such a great scale put great strain on the population. The empire mobilized more than two million men during four years of war. When the armistice was signed, only 600,000 troops remained to be demobilized.65 We can assess the human costs of the period. The empire’s population in areas now within contemporary Turkey was estimated to be approximately 15.3 million in 1913. An official census conducted in 1927 calculated the population of Turkey as 13.6 million. The population loss was probably higher than this rough measure shows because two major developments in this period might have partially compensated for the wartime loss. First, the Muslims migrated from the areas previously controlled by the Ottoman Empire to the areas of contemporary Turkey. Second, the population should have increased owing to the peaceful period between 1922 and 1927. Kemal Karpat, an Ottoman historian, estimates that in the period between 1914 and 1922, 18 percent of the Muslim population in Anatolia was lost because of wars.66 It appears that the majority of these losses were males of working age and thus decreased the labor power of Turkish society, especially in agriculture. The gender distribution of the Turkish population over 30 in 1935 is more telling: the ratio of men to women decreases as the age interval increases. While the ratio of men to women in age group 30–39

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is 0.93, it decreases to 0.71 for age group 40–49, to 0.67 for age group 50–59, and to 0.58 for age group 60–64.67 The wartime losses, the population exchanges between Turkey and Greece, and the population upheavals of the period owing to population migrations68 completely changed the religious composition of Turkish society. Before the First World War, non-Muslims constituted 18 percent of the overall Anatolian population, but the population census of 1927 estimated that non-Muslims constituted only 2.6 percent of the overall population.69 Although these population changes increased the religious homogeneity of Turkish society, the ethnic heterogeneity continued, especially owing to the migrations of Ajar Georgian, Circassian, and Abkhaz Muslims. Yet the most striking contrast between emigrants and newcomers was neither ethnicity nor religion, but occupation.70 The outgoing Greeks and Armenians had dominated commercial life and had ties with the foreign markets and engaged in trade. On the other hand, the incoming groups were largely peasants and settled in rural areas of Turkey. This not only increased the rural nature of Turkish society, but also weakened the societal structure. Up to this time, many Turks had worked either for the state or in agriculture as small property owners, who produced for the market as well as for their own consumption. These small owners lived in small villages and were not unified by any encompassing social organization. Caucasian and Balkan Muslim newcomers were simply inserted into this already disunited body of peasantry. Religious homogenization in Turkey also brought a change in the occupational composition of Turkish society.71 In the process of Ottoman integration into the capitalist economy, it was the Christians, the Greeks, and the Armenians who were the main beneficiaries as they were linked to international commercial networks.72 This, coupled with the fact that the incoming Muslims were mostly peasants, led to the disappearance of the moneyed classes in Turkey during this period. It now fell to the Turkish state to create a new Muslim bourgeoisie,73 and this was openly declared at the I˙ zmir Economic Congress in 1923. Ays¸e Bug˘ ra’s State and Business in Turkey clearly shows that contemporary giant Turkish companies owed a great deal to the support of the state throughout every stage of their developments.74 Thus, being allied with the state would pay handsomely at that time if you were enterprising businessmen. And the opposite might also be true. If you were a dissident, the Turkish state was capable of undermining your wealth. The war thus severely weakened the societal base upon which religious community could thrive in Turkey. More importantly, it severely damaged the societal ties of religious community. Chapter two showed that ambitious Ottoman state building largely diffused religious scholars throughout the expanding state institutions. The war and the general weakening of Turkish society negatively affected the Sufi orders the most, as during the war not only the regular visitors of the orders but also their permanent members were conscripted.75 Many of the societal supporters of the Sufi

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orders probably died in the war.76 From biographies of prominent religious scholars, we learn that many of them, as well as Sufi sheikhs, actually fought in the wars, mobilizing their students as military units. Seminary students and young members of Sufi orders were also recruited into the army by the state, putting a stop to religious education in this period. Inevitably these developments disrupted the religious networks across the country. Furthermore, the army used the facilities of the Sufi houses during the war for a variety of reasons. Religious students, possibly the ulama’s only link to society, were also conscripted into the army. Many religious schools and Sufi houses, especially those in Anatolia, were also ruined during the war. The war of liberation (1919–1922) further weakened the religious community as foreign armies occupied not only I˙ stanbul but also other urban centers. The religious community’s societal resources and networks were essentially destroyed in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire. Having no wealthy societal ally, financially state dependent, and extremely fragmented, the religious community had to acquiesce to a secularizing state. There is another dimension to state secularization in Turkey that made the religious community more acquiescent to the reforms. That is, the secularizing reforms were in many ways necessary in that environment where the reformers were under close international scrutiny to prove that the new Turkey was truly a secular state.77 This proof was essential to establish full political independence. A secular image abroad would simply close down a window of opportunity and could be used by the great powers to intervene in Turkish domestic politics as they had done so often before. Introduced on March 3, 1924, three reforms—the abolition of the caliphate and of the Ministry of Sharia and Awqaf and the closure of the madrasahs— greatly contributed to that image. The abolition of the caliphate served another interest. The caliphate might have created undesirable confl icts for the young republic. Millions of Muslims were living under the rule of Britain and France, and the young republic was wary of wars and international confl icts. The abolition of the caliphate simply eliminated one possible source of frictions with great powers of the period. Furthermore, the futility of the caliphate as a strategic political tool had long become painfully clear to many who fought in the First World War. Despite the caliphate’s declaration of religious war, jihad, against Britain, France, and Russia, many Muslims sided with them and fought against the Ottoman Empire. The closure of madrasahs was not that controversial either. It should be remembered that new schools of religion were opened in their stead, although they were later closed down. But it should be kept in mind that there had long been an ongoing debate in Turkey that blamed the madrasahs for not producing qualified graduates. I am not in a position to judge authoritatively on the quality of education in the madrasahs, but even quite famous Islamists were critical of the madrasah system at that time. In one of his fiery poems, Mehmet Akif, for example, a famous Islamist of the time, argued that the current madrasah system was not up to the challenges of the ages.78

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Even the archenemy of Mustafa Kemal, the former sheikh al Islam, Mustafa Sabri, was highly critical of the madrasah system. In one of his articles, he addressed the issue.79 Said Nursi, the future dissident of the new regime in Turkey, also aimed to reform the madrasah education. For example, he proposed to build a madrasah that he would name “Medresetül Zehra.” Abdülhamid II, the pan-Islamist Ottoman sultan who emphasized the title of caliphate more than any other Ottoman sultan, shared the same idea, giving more priority to developing a secular school system, not the madrasah system. Hence, the reforms closed down a religious institution that had been subject to criticism even from its own children. The adoption of the Swiss code is more telling. As Dora G. Nadolski persuasively claims, Turkey desired to establish full control over its own legal system. A European code would simply destroy the last vestiges of the capitulatory system. It should be remembered that under this system, as G. L. Lewis puts it, “foreigners were not subject to Turkish laws; they paid no taxes, their houses and business premises were inviolable, and they could be arrested or deported only by order of their own Ambassadors.”80 This system not only allowed foreign powers to intervene in Turkish internal affairs, thus challenging her sovereignty, but also privileged foreigners and non-Muslim Ottoman citizens, who took foreign passports, in the commercial life of Turkey. The capitulations were first abrogated in 1914 unilaterally but were reimposed after the First World War to be re-abrogated in the Treaty of Lausanne.81 The abrogation was still not complete because Turkey did not have a complete civil code, for the existing Mecelle code “did not contain that portion of the Shari’a which treats procedures of family, marriage and inheritance.”82 As a result, secular court systems would not be able to deal with cases related to these issues, which would remain as a possible window for the intervention of foreign powers in lawsuits involving non-Muslim foreigners in Turkey. In any case, under the Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey was obliged to adopt a Western law system for its minorities. Rather than keep a dual system, the new regime preferred a unitary legal system within its territories. In short, the adoption of the Swiss Civil Code “meant the abandonment of the dual court system, religious and secular, final abrogation of the remaining vestiges of the capitulatory system, and the abolition of the Mecelle.”83 It is interesting to note that the Swiss Civil Code had been half-heartedly applied for a long time. This was the finding of the International Association of Legal Sciences meeting held in 1955. Hilmi Ziya Ülken summarizes the finding: “Of the 937 articles of the Swiss Civil Code, only 335 have been used effectively so far, in that in the case of two-thirds of the articles no circumstances to which they are applicable have emerged.”84 The meeting also found that the Swiss Civil Code had been barely implemented in two areas: family law and land law, the former being the area where the Islamic law matters the most. This finding might indicate the practical mentality, not the idealism, of the reformers in adopting the Swiss code. It might also

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be telling to take a look at some minor introductions into the Swiss code. As noted by Gotthand Jaschke, for example, the new code banned marriages between two individuals breast-fed by the same woman. This was clearly taken from Islamic law.85 In short, Turkey adopted an accommodationist model of state secularity under unusual circumstances that made it the natural outcome. This model has survived in Turkey to this day. In the concluding chapter, I discuss the factors that made this model so resilient. NOTES 1. The following historical account can be found in any work on the period. I particularly benefitted from Tuncay (2005), Zürcher (1991), and Ahmad (2010). 2. The opposition claimed that the elections were fraudulent and that voters were beaten and harassed. This ignores the fact the Committee of Union and Progress had the most extensive grassroots organization in the empire. The committee showed its strength in mobilizing the masses in several incidents. See Ahmad (1988). 3. The junta members called themselves “Halaskaran Zabitan,” or “the savior military officials.” 4. See Zürcher (1987). 5. Ahmad (1988) discusses the activities of the CUP during the First World War in more detail. 6. Zürcher (1987) provides a very detailed discussion of how the unionists contributed to the postwar political developments; see especially chapter 3. 7. Zürcher (1987:141). 8. Toprak (1993:629). 9. Rustow (1957:72). 10. Demirel (2009:148). 11. See sections in Aktay (2004) on Mehmet Akif Ersoy and Es¸ref Edip. 12. For more on these rebellions, see Çelik (2007). 13. I owe a lot to Zürcher (1987) for the following discussion. 14. For more on the second group, see Demirel (2009). 15. See a very detailed account of the declaration of the republic in Alpkaya (1998). 16. For detailed discussion of Rauf Orbay’s opposition in the party, see Alpkaya (1998). 17. Frey (1965). 18. A classical rhetoric of Mustafa Kemal was that he always associated and identified himself with the people, and he represented his opponents as those who did not understand what the people wanted. 19. Karabekir (2008). 20. See Adak (2003). 21. Zürcher (1991:239). 22. See Weiker (1973). I did not discuss this opposition because it appeared much later. The reforms regarding religious organizations had already been undertaken by that time. 23. Arat (2005:17). 24. For a thorough analysis of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, see Kara (2009). 25. The names of the religious community about whom I could find information can be found in the appendix.

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26. Albayrak (1996). 27. In general, the state offered jobs to the members of the clergy. If the job offer was rejected, then a regular payment was provided. 28. Alpkaya (1998:241). 29. Yurdagür (1991). For more detail, see S¸engezer (2008). 30. Kaya (1992). 31. Berki (1992). 32. Ertan (1995). 33. Ertan (1996a). 34. Sanal (1991). 35. Yavuz (1994). 36. Ertan (1996b). 37. Bayı ndı r (1996). 38. Bilgin (2001). 39. Bolay (2001). 40. Tüccar (2007). 41. The list of biographies on which my claim is made can be found in the appendix. 42. Kara (2009:110). 43. Sabri S¸akir Efendi’s father-in-law, Mustafa S¸evket Efendi (Yunt), was also a member of the commission. Mustafa S¸evket was also another hybrid figure the Ottoman state building produced. Mustafa S¸evket’s father, Muhammed Emin Efendi, was a religious scholar. He studied at Darülfünun Faculty of Theology and participated in “Huzur Dersleri,” religious classes held in the month of Ramadan with the presence of the sultan. See Mardin (1966:317–320). 44. On Sabri S¸akir Ansay, I relied on Gürsoy (1962). 45. In addition to examples given here, see also Küçük (2007). 46. Özcan (1992). 47. Azamat (1992). 48. Kara (2001). 49. Tahralı (2002). 50. Azamat (2006). 51. Özcan (2007). 52. Tosun (2007). 53. Kara (2002:83–95) published three letters of Mustafa Kemal. 54. Demirel (2009:149–150). 55. I thank I˙ smail Kara for pointing this out in a personal communication via email, August 5, 2010. See Sayar (2002). 56. Atatürk himself chose the verses from the Qur’an to be read in the sermon. The chosen verses are quite interesting: “When it is said to them: ‘Make not mischief on the earth,’ they say: ‘Why, we only want to make peace!’ Of a surety, they are the ones who make mischief, but they realise (it) not. When it is said to them: ‘Believe as the others believe.’ They say: ‘Shall we believe as the fools believe?’ Nay, of a surety they are the fools, but they do not know” (The Qur’an, 2:11–13). 57. See Kara (2004). 58. See, for example, Kara (2000). 59. Seyyid Bey’s speech can be found in Kara (1986). On the abolition of the caliphate, see Ardı ç (2012). 60. See Kara (2009:77). 61. Translation is mine. For the full text of the speech, see Atatürk (2006). 62. The Sheikh Said Rebellion has always been portrayed as such. However, this portrayal largely depends on a problematic assumption that there were no Kurds in Turkey. This goes back to the new regime’s understanding of the nature of a nation.

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63. On the participation of religious figures in the War of Independence, see Sarı koyuncu (1995) and Çelik (1999). For Mustafa Kemal’s relations with religious figures, see Sarı koyuncu (1999). 64. This is still a matter of dispute in Turkey. The new state rulers were very cautious not to take a position directly against Islam in the eyes of the people. They explicitly claimed that they were not against Islam, which was in their view the true and last religion. But rather, the new rulers argued that they were against people and organizations who claim to represent Islam. 65. For a detailed account of the Ottoman Empire’s participation in the First World War, see Erickson (2000). 66. Cited in Keyder (1989:112). 67. These statistics are calculated by the author according to Mitchell (2003:27). 68. The CUP passed a law of military conscription for Christians; this led to massive migrations from Turkey to, especially, the United States. Quataert (2000:173) argues that Christian migrants numbered more than 800,000. 69. These numbers are from Keyder (1989:112). 70. I depend on Keyder (1989) for this discussion. I discuss the pattern of Ottoman integration into the world economy in the following. 71. Keyder (1989). 72. Quataert (2000, 194) also points this out, adducing a list of 1,000 merchants living in I˙ stanbul as evidence. Only 3 percent of the merchants on this list were foreigners: the vast majority of the rest were non-Muslim Ottomans. 73. This process in fact started in the late Ottoman period under the unionists. See Ahmad (1980). 74. Bug˘ ra (1994). 75. This information is based on a survey of Sufi sheikhs in I˙ stanbul conducted by the Ottoman state in 1918. The fifth volume of Albayrak (1996) records the answers given to the surveys. 76. A sheikh of a house, Ahmet Münip Efendi, answered that there were approximately 400 participants in the houses. But he could determine only 130 who were alive after the war. Interestingly, most of these names were either retired people or state officials. 77. I˙ smail Kara also does not believe that the reformers really intended to take such strong measures as closing down the madrasahs. He argues that this was what Turkey promised in the Treaty of Lausanne. 78. In the poem, Mehmet Akif complains that the madrasahs cannot produce qualified religious scholars who can produce original works. The poem can be found in Kara (2008:142). 79. The passages from Mustafa Sabri’s article can be found in Kara (2008:147–148). 80. Cited in Nadolski (1977:541). 81. For more on Ottoman/Turkish legal centralization, see Kayaog˘ lu (2010a) especially Chapter 4. 82. Nadolski (1977:524). 83. Nadolski (1977:528). 84. Cited in Nadolski (1977:529). 85. Cited in Aktas¸ (2005:12). I thank Amira Sonbol for this point.

4

Appeasing the Ulama Religion and the Imperial State in Iran

Pahlavi Iran adopted a model of state secularity in the 1920s and 1930s that separated the state and religious institutions. The chapter argues that this choice was the natural outcome in the particular strategic context in which the state secularizers found themselves. One feature of that strategic context was that the state secularizers faced a disengaged religious community, which was able to keep its neutrality toward the newly forming regime. In order to understand this attitude of the religious community, we have to look at the resources at their disposal at the time of state secularization. As we will see, the religious community in Iran was fairly united under a semi-hierarchical organization and had extensive societal networks. This condition of the religious community was the historical legacy of the Safavid and Qajar periods. This chapter narrates the evolution of this historical legacy. The narrative will also show how the Safavid State was non-secular. This was because in both the Safavid and Qajar periods, religious community/ institutions had come to assume such critical state functions as education, judiciary, welfare services, and religious services and performed these functions virtually autonomously. Like the Ottoman state, the Safavid state did not share the ambition of the modern sovereign state; therefore, it left religious community/institutions autonomous in their both public and religious activities. Given the available technology of state building that made only a limited state possible, this was natural. It should be noted, however, that unlike the Ottoman state, the Safavid state had proved to be more ambitious in giving an order to and shaping religion and religious community/institutions. In this regard the Safavid state prefigured even the Russian imperial state under Peter the Great. If it had not collapsed in the early 18th century, the Safavid state could have assumed certain features of a modern “secular” state well before the 20th century. Since the Qajar state, which reunited Iran in the late 18th century, also proved to be not ambitious in its claim to sovereignty, Iran’s realization of state secularity had to wait the 1920 and 1930s. This chapter first discusses the politico-religious context within which the Safavids rose to imperial power and then illustrates how Safavid policies sought to shape religion and religious community/institutions in Iran.

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The chapter then looks at how the collapse of the Safavid Empire, Qajar rule in the 19th century, and other developments brought about the condition in which the religious community found itself in the 1920s. THE CONTEXT Pre-Safavid Iran had passed through a historical experience similar to that of Anatolia in the pre-Ottoman period. Both Iran and Anatolia were part of the Great Seljuq Empire (1037–1194) and fell victim to the Mongolian armies. Both regions also fell under the control of the same post-Mongolian state, the Ilkhanids. Once the Ilkhanids weakened and collapsed, many petty states appeared not only in Anatolia, but also in Iran, and vied for power—these states included the Jalayirids (1339–1432), the Muzaffarids (1314–1393), the Chobanids (1337–1357), and the Sarbadars (1337–1381). Iran, like Anatolia, became subject to Timur’s invasion. Following the dissolution of Timur’s empire, Iran fell into political chaos again. Western Anatolia was fortunate to have the Ottomans, who even though suffering at the hands of Timur, managed to recover soon. But Iran had to wait for its unification until the early 16th century. Anatolia and Iran also experienced the same wave of Sufi revivalism. Some Sufi orders, such as Kubrawiyya, Sa’diyya, Suhrawardiyya, and Mawlawiyya, which had widespread followers among the Turks, belonged to the Iranian Sufi tradition, and the infl uence of Persian-Sufism continued to dominate Sufi circles in Anatolia. For example, Jalal al-din Rumi, the spiritual founder of Mawlawism, wrote his famous Mesnevi in Persian. And Persian continued to dominate Ottoman classical poetry and music up until the end. Persian Sufism also infl uenced other Sufi orders that do not belong to the Iranian tradition. For example, the most famous Turkish Sufi, Ahmed Yasawi, trained under a Persian Sufi, Yusuf al-Hamadani, and became one of his four successors.1 He later formed a distinctive Turkish Sufi tradition.2 The Sufi sheikhs and dervishes in Iran also enjoyed greater prestige—as much as their colleagues in Anatolia. The successive rulers, including Timur, built for them zawiyahs and tombs and sought their alliance. In some cases, Sufi sheikhs even became important political players on their own. For example, Shaikh Hasan Juri and his disciples fought for the Sarbadarids, and the sheikh died in a battle. In another incident, Muhammad bin Falah—reminiscent of, but much more successful than, Shaikh Badr-al Din or Baba Ilyas—achieved to unite discontented Arabian tribes behind himself, which became known as the Musha’sha’ movement, and established a petty state in southwestern Iran. In 1514, the region under the control of this movement was reincorporated into the Safavid Empire as an autonomous region of Arabistan. The movement’s emirs continued to serve as governors in this region up until the 1925. Yet no Sufi sheikh in Anatolia could ever have imagined what their colleagues achieved in Iran. In the beginning of the 16th century, by the time

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the Ottomans had already turned into a world power, a Sufi order, Safawiyya, established a long-lasting empire in Iran: the Safavid Empire. THE RISE TO IMPERIAL POWER The rise of the Safawiyya order as an empire builder became possible due to two developments in the region.3 The first, and possibly most important, development was that neither Timur and his successors nor such strong statesmen of the 14th century as Gahan Shah of the Kara-Koyunlu dynasty and Uzun Hasan of the Ak-Koyunlu dynasty were able to establish a stable, long-lasting administration to Eastern Anatolia and Iran. The second development, as an enabling condition, was the ever-increasing centralization of the Ottoman Empire in the West. This resulted in marginalization within the overall Ottoman political system of the Turkish tribes, which had formed the armed forces of the expanding Ottoman Empire up until that time. During the reign of Beyazid I (1389–1401), the Ottoman Empire already showed strong signs of centralization, which increased the discontent of the Turkish tribes. The defeat of the Ottomans in the war of Ankara against Timur came mostly because an important tribal force moved to the other side. Yet the real blow to tribal power came during the reign of Mehmet II (1451–1481). Until Mehmet II, the Ottoman sultans saw themselves as “the first among the equals.” With and after Mehmet II, who gained enormous prestige with the conquest of Istanbul in 1453, the Ottoman sultans became emperors. The top positions in the empire began to be filled by the devshirmes, who were legally the slaves of the sultan. As they got more and more marginalized in the Ottoman system, the Turkish tribes turned to the east and became potential military forces to be recruited at ease. At the intersection of these two historical developments, the Safawiyya order underwent a radical transformation in the second half of the 15th century. The order was founded by Sheikh Safi ad-Din (d.1336) in the city of Ardabil, Azerbaijan. Safi ad-Din and three leaders after him—all of them his descendants, his son, his grandson, and his great-grandson—were all known as “pious men of exemplary conduct and character, loved by their followers and respected by the temporal powers in Tabriz or Sultaniya, in Bagdad or Mawara’annahr, by Mongols, Ilhanids, Galayirs, Jubanids, Timur, and the Timurids.”4 More importantly, in the second quarter of the 15th century, the order showed no sign of inclination toward Shi’ism or the extremist doctrines especially prevalent among the nomadic Turks. The centralization of the Ottoman Empire and the continuing political fragmentation left in Eastern Anatolia a large, discontented nomadic Turkic population among whom Bektashism was particularly widespread. This was the Safawiyya order, which incorporated into its body most of the former heretical movements appeared among the nomadic Turks. Bektashism, therefore, contained strong Shi’ite tendencies, to the extent that Rudolf Tschumi

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claims, “in their secret doctrines, (the Bektashis) are Shi’is, acknowledging the Twelve Imams and, in particular, holding Dja’far al-Sadik in high esteem.”5 Having no Shi’ite inclination of any sort up to that date, the Safawiyya order met with this body of potential military force and, as a result, underwent a radical transformation with the succession of Sheikh Junayd. Two aspects of this change are noteworthy. First, the order began to adopt a strongly Shi’ite fl avor and incorporate extremist views. More importantly, however, the order transformed from contemplative Sufism to a militant version. “When the boon of succession reached Junayd, he altered the way of life of his ancestors: the bird of anxiety laid an egg of longing for power in the nest of his imagination. Every moment he strove to conquer a land or a region.”6 Sheikh Junayd assumed the leadership of the Safawiyya order in 1447 and journeyed throughout Anatolia and Syria for seven years. These trips likely introduced him to his followers and probably helped him realize the military potential in the order. In any event, we see him in 1456 organizing a large-scale military attack against the Empire of Trabzon situated in northeastern Anatolia on the coast of Black Sea. He later directed his attention even more to the Caucasus. Junayd’s fame likely impressed many of his contemporaries. One of them was Uzun Hasan of the Aq-Qoyunlu dynasty, who hosted him for three years in his court and gave his sister to Junayd. Junayd finally lost his life in a battle in 1460 against the Sirvan-shah Khalil-Allah. The next sheikh of the order, Haidar, was born a few weeks after Junayd died and came to Ardabil, the center of the order, at the age of ten in 1470. He assumed the leadership of the order and began to recruit soldiers into his order to continue his father’s policy. Not surprisingly, the Turkish tribes responded to his call. The order’s network throughout Anatolia must have played an important role in this revival. Sheikh Haidar introduced a uniform for the members of his order. The red turban with twelve gores (possibly symbolizing the twelve imams) determined the name of the order’s soldiers— “the Redheads,” or more famously, Qizilbashlar. The Qizilbash forces were divided into military units according to the tribal affiliations of the troops. The order then appointed a representative, a khalifa, usually picked from tribal leaders, to each unit. Khalifat al-khulafa then served as the supreme leader of all khalifas, linking the sheikh and the order’s forces. Khalifas’ responsibilities included not only controlling and securing the Qizilbashes’ loyalty to the sheikh, but also recruiting Turkish nomads into the Safavid military forces. In 1483 and 1487, we see Sheikh Haidar on raid against the Circassians. In 1488, he was killed in a battle with another Sirvan-shah, Farrukh-Yasar. The order thus faced another crisis: the adherents withdrew into obscurity as they did after Sheikh Haidar’s death. Ali succeeded his father, but he was killed in fighting with the forces of a contender for the Aq-Qoyunlu throne. Ismail succeeded his brother as the leader of the order. He spent his early years in Lahijan under the protection of his men. As soon as the Aq-Qoyunlu state fell into civil strife and chaos, Ismail decided to move. He sent out

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emissaries in Anatolia and Syria to join him in Erzincan in Eastern Anatolia. Some 7,000 followers from various Turkish tribes met with him in Erzincan in 1500. With that force, he first turned to the Sirvans, who had killed his father and grandfather. He defeated Sirvan-shah Farrukh-Yasar and moved against the remnant of Aq-Qoyunlu in Tabriz, capturing the city in 1501. Shah Ismail thus founded the Safavid state in Iran and proclaimed “twelver Shi’ism” as the state religion. Then he set out to expand his territories. He first annexed Eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia and then turned to the east. By 1514, his empire stretched from Afghanistan to Eastern Anatolia. In tandem with this territorial expansion, Shah Ismail pursued a brutal religious policy forcing the Sunnis to convert to Shi’ism. Those who refused to convert were ruthlessly executed by Shah Ismail. As military successes followed one another, the Turkish tribes in Anatolia fl ocked to his standard.7 This massive infl ux of manpower—men capable of serving as soldiers—caused suspicion and anger among the Ottoman statesmen. As early as 1502, the Ottomans began to persecute the Qizilbash sympathizers. A massive rebellion in 1507 led by a Qizilbash, Shah Quli, severely damaged the Ottomans even though Shah Quli was eventually captured and killed. The increasing Safavid threat in the east eventually led to the replacement of Beyazid II, who was too soft on the Qizilbash, with his son, Selim I, whose title was “the grim,” in 1512. Selim I then set out an extensive campaign against the Qizilbash in Anatolia and organized a campaign against the Safavid Empire in 1514. In the Battle of Chaldiran, Shah Ismail experienced his first defeat. He never recovered from the psychological trauma of this loss. He never set out again for a military expedition and spent the remaining ten years of his life hunting, drinking, and playing competitive games. As a result of this war, the Ottomans annexed Eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia. But the Safavid Empire survived8 and continued to trouble the Ottoman Empire for at least another century. The Ottomans and the Safavids fought in 1534–1555, 1578–1590, 1603–1611, 1617–1618, and 1622–1639. In these wars, the Ottomans advanced further in the east, capturing Azerbaijan and Armenia, but for a short period. The Safavids regained them back, and the Treaty of Qasr e Shirin finalized the Ottoman eastern border with the Safavids in 1639. The Safavid Empire continued to rule over Iran until its collapse in 1722 in the hands of the Afghans. THE SAFAVID SUPPRESSION OF THE SUFI ORDERS In more than 200 years of their rule over Iran, the Safavids pursued a policy completely opposite the Ottoman policy toward Sufi orders. Even though they were themselves Sufis, the Safavids suppressed other Sufi orders. Even their own adherents, the Qizilbashes, could not escape this fate. As described in the previous section, the Safawiyya Sufi order united otherwise disunited Turkish tribes under a religious banner, organized and

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turned them into a formidable military power, and, upon that military power, founded the Safavid state in Iran in 1501. In return for their services, the Qizilbash leaders were appointed as provincial governors and also occupied the highest military posts in the empire. The Qizilbash leaders kept their own military forces in the provinces, collected taxes, and remitted to the center only a small share of the province’s total tax revenue. After the death of Ismail I—who was venerated as a semi-god by his followers—in 1524, the Qizilbash leaders asserted their control over the state while the new shah, Tahmasp I (1524–1576), was too young to take action against them. The Qizilbash leaders were, however, too disunited to exert a unified attempt to control the new empire. Quite the reverse, they fell into a bitter struggle among each other. For ten years an interregnum lasted. As a result, the most powerful tribal Qizilbash forces—the Rumlu, the Ustajlu, the Takkalu, and the Shamlu—simply weakened each other’s power. At the end of the interregnum, Tahmasp I established his authority over the Qizilbash leaders and sought opportunities throughout the rest of his reign to undermine Qizilbash power. Following the death of Tahmasp I, the Qizilbash leaders fell into another cycle of internal fighting, exhausting each other’s power once again and paving the way for their own end. It was Abbas I (1587–1629) who finally completely subordinated the Qizilbash forces. His solution was to establish an alternative military force composed of slave soldiers. This system was already in place in the Ottoman Empire, where it was known as the devshirme system, and seemed to be working quite well. The regional source of slave soldiers was the Caucasus. Georgians and Circassians, captured as slaves during raids in the Caucasus, were brought to Persia as royal bodyguards. As they were replaced by the slave army, the Qizilbash forces never regained their previous prestigious position in the empire even after Abbas I’s death in 1629. Other Sufi orders, which were generally nonmilitaristic, met the same fate under the Safavid rule in Iran. The suppression of Sunni Sufi orders started as early as Ismail I’s reign. For example, the Naqshibandi order entered Iran in the second half of the 15th century and spread as far as Isfahan and Tabriz in western Iran. The order’s life was, however, short lived in Iran. The Safavids extirpated the order in western and central Iran to establish Shi’ite supremacy in the country. Only in the 19th century did the Naqshibandis gain some presence in western Iran, under Kurdish auspices; in fact, they led a rebellion among Kurds under Sheikh Ubaydullah in the late 19th century.9 Another Sunni order, which faced the same fate, was the Khalwetiyye order. In fact, after Shah Ismail I entered Tabriz in 1501, the leader of the order, Ibrahim Gulseni, found it expedient to leave Iran. He settled in Egypt and died there in 1533. For a short period, he also travelled to Istanbul to clear charges against him and established three zawiyahs in Anatolia.10 The Safavids initially tolerated Shi’a Sufi orders such as the Nurbakhshiyya and Dhahabiyye. But, especially during the 17th century, both lost their

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infl uence in Iran as a result of persecution at the hands of Shi’ite religious scholars. The Nurbakhshiyya never recovered in Iran, while the Dhahabiyye began to revive only in the second half of the 18th century, through the struggle of Qutb al-Din Nayrizi (d.1759). Nayrizi’s books provide detailed account of how the Shi’ite ulama persecuted the Sufis and destructed the zawiyahs. By 1998, the order’s official convents numbered just seven.11 Another Shi’a Sufi order, which revived in the 19th century, was the Ni’matullahi order, which rushed to ally itself with the Safavid state. In fact, Shah Ismail appointed a Ni’matullahi sheikh, Mir Nizam al-Din Abd al-Baqi, to what was then the highest religious post—the office of sadr—in Iran.12 The order kept its infl uence through zawiyahs throughout the 16th century. The relative security of the Ni’matullahi order is perhaps one reason why the Ismailis developed ties with it in the early Safavid period.13 But during the reign of Abbas I, the Safavid state attacked the order, forcing its dervishes to migrate to India.14 The order was reintroduced in Iran only in the 19th century. The revival of the Ni’matullahiyya was far more impressive than that of the Dhahabiyye. The order now seems to be the largest in Iran, with some sixty convents throughout the country in 1998.15 Especially after the reign of Abbas II (1642–1666), the Shi’a religious scholars undertook the prime responsibility in the persecution of the Sufi orders. Even after the fall of the Safavids, they continued to suppress the Sufis. A famous Shi’a scholar, Aqa Muhammad Bihbahani, earned the nickname Sufi-kush (Sufi-killer).16 In the words of Juan Cole, “The campaign against the Sufis created an atmosphere of witch-hunting . . . A man could be publicly disgraced and cursed on mere suspicion of Sufi tendencies. While these practices benefited the ulama in helping to cut off patronage to their Sufi competitors, they made life unpleasant for respectable persons of slightly unorthodox views.”17 In one such incident, Mushtaq Ali Shah—one of the devotees of Ma’sum Ali Shah, who reintroduced Ni’matullahiyya to Iran—was recognized in the mosque by its mullah, who issued a fatwa of death on Mushtaq on the spot. Mushtaq could not escape and was stoned and beaten to death by the mullah’s followers in the mosque.18 The late 17th-century Shi’a scholars also targeted their criticisms against former Shi’a religious scholars of such caliber as Sheikh Baha’ al-Din Amili, Mir Muhammad Baqir Damad Husaini, and Sadr al-Din Shirazi,19 who produced scholarly works on Sufism. For example, a prominent (and possibly the most powerful) Shi’ite scholar, Muhammad Baqir Majlisi (d.1699), called them “followers of an infidel Greek.”20 Under the assault of Majlisi and his like-minded colleagues, “Sufism was divorced from Shi’ism and ceased to infl uence the mainstream of Shi’i development.”21 The title of a recently published book summarizes the outcome: The Rise of Religious Externalism in Safavid Iran.22 The hold of anti-Sufism continued from then on so strong among the Shi’a ulama that even such an infl uential scholar as Ruhollah Khomeini complained about it in the 1980s. The following excerpt is from a letter

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written by Khomeini long after the revolution. The letter was addressed to some members of the Iranian clergy, who criticized Khomeini of advising Michael Gorbachev to read such mystical philosophers as Ibn Arabi, Avicenna, and Sohraverdi. This old father of yours has suffered more from stupid reactionary mullahs than anyone else. When theology meant no interference in politics, stupidity became a virtue. If a clergyman was able, and aware of what was going on [in the world around him], they searched for a plot behind it. They were considered more pious if you walked in a clumsy way. Learning foreign languages was blasphemy; philosophy and mysticism were considered to be sin and infidelity. In the Feiziyeh my young son Mostafa drank water from a jar. Since I was teaching philosophy, my son was considered to be religiously impure, so they washed the jar to purify it afterwards. Had this trend continued, I have no doubt the clergy and seminaries would have trodden the same path as the Christian Church did in the middle Ages.23 As a result of suppressive Safavid policies, all sorts of Sufi orders lost their networks among the Iranian populace as their convent networks were extirpated throughout the Safavid domains. In the early 1840s, Zayn al-’Abidin Shirvani, a famous Ni’matullahi sheikh, complained that “in the whole land of Iran there is neither abode nor site where a dervish can lay his head. . . . In the rest of the inhabited quarter of the world, among all its different races and peoples, hospitals for the sick and khanaqahs for the dervishes are built—except in Iran, where there is neither khanaqah nor hospital!” In contrast, at the beginning of the 20th century, there were more than 200 ˙ zawiyahs in Turkey’s capital city, Istanbul, alone.24 THE ULAMA: INSTITUTIONALIZING THE IMPERIAL RULE In contrast to their differences in policy toward Sufi orders, the Ottomans and the Safavids pursued strikingly similar policies toward the ulama class. Like the Ottomans and other predecessor states, the Safavids also extended state patronage to the ulama class, building monumental mosques and madrasahs and endowing them dearly. Not dissimilar from the Ottoman ulama, the Safavid ulama played important strategic, bureaucratic, and judicial roles.25 The ulama class contributed critically to the institutionalization of the imperial rule in Iran, during the course of which tribal forces lost their importance and were replaced by slave-origin soldiers and statesmen. As in the Ottoman case, the ulama class also became highly dependent on the state in the Safavid Empire; however, the Safavids achieved this in a remarkably different way. Unlike the Ottomans, the Safavids ruled over populations in which the majority were Muslim. Long before the Safavids,

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Iran had been Muslim. Therefore, by the time the Safavids came to power, there were many madrasahs. In fact, one objective of the Safavid architectural activity in religious buildings was “to repair and extend earlier monuments.”26 Only in Isfahan did the Safavids, under Abbas I (1587–1629), engage in major construction of madrasahs and mosques. More importantly, these madrasahs and mosques had been run and administered by strong native ulama families who also occupied bureaucratic posts and controlled waqfs. The rising and falling dynasties, whether the Seljuqs, the Timurids, the Aq-Qoyunlus, or the Qara-Qoyunlus, simply recognized the status of already strong ulama families in the regions they ruled and sought their cooperation. The Safavids attempted to break their dominance by introducing twelver Shi’ism as the state religion in Iran.27 Some regions of the country, such as Khurasan, and cities, such as Qum, were inhabited by Shi’a Muslims; but Iranian society was, by a large ratio, mainly Sunni. Hence, the Safavids had to import Shi’a ulama from elsewhere because there was basically no Shi’a ulama in Iran to teach Shi’a Islam. It has even been suggested that when Shah Ismail declared Shi’ism as the state religion of Iran in Tabriz, no Shi’a text could be found in Iran except one, in a private library. To solve this problem, Shah Ismail invited Arab Shi’a theologians from Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain to Iran to spread their creed among the Iranian masses. This was truly a revolutionary break with the past for Shi’a ulama because it was the first time they had been able to ally with a political power since the Buyid state, which was established around Baghdad after the fall of the Abbasid Empire. Moreover, this set the stage for a much stronger Iranian state, compared to the situation in Ottoman lands. It looked as though the Safavid rulers would do what Henry VIII did in England later in the same century, establishing his own official state church and turning the religious organizations into adjuncts of the state. Shi’a ulama thus came to completely alien territories. Shi’a ulama faced formidable competitors in this alien territory: not only Sunni and Shi’a Sufi orders, which gained unprecedented strength during the Mongol invasion,28 but also, as noted previously, strong local notable ulama families, who controlled important religious and state offices. The Safavids, as long as these families confessed Shi’ism—and many did—appointed them to the same offices. The local notable ulama families were so powerful that no Shi’a religious scholar had been appointed to the highest religious office in Iran, the office of sadr, in the 150 years since the Shi’a ulama’s entry into Iran, except for a student of Al-Karaki (d.1534) who held the office for a short time.29 Another group that challenged Shi’a ulama was the sayyids, the descendants of Islam’s Prophet, who refrained from taking administrative functions in the state but collected religious taxes (alms and one-fifth taxes) and received regular stipends from the office of sadr. Without the active and persistent support of the Safavids, which the Shi’a ulama in Iran held dearly, Shi’a ulama would not have gained even a small foothold in Iran. The resulting nature of the relationship is easy to guess: as Algar says,

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“they [Shi’a ulama] were initially obedient and loyal servants of the State,”30 dependent on royal patronage. Shi’a ulama worked as juridical consults and judges in the cities, prayer leaders in the leading mosques, professors in theology schools, and judges in the army.31 Thus, the nature of the relationship between Shi’a ulama and the Safavid state resembled the one between Sunni ulama and the Ottoman state, in the sense that both ulama were dependent upon the revenues coming from state appointments. In the words of Arjomand: “In the sixteenth and the most part of the seventeenth century, the structural relationship between the religious and political institutions in Shi’ite Iran did not differ appreciably from the ‘caesaropapist’ pattern to be found in the Sunni Ottoman Empire.”32 The differences are in degree rather than in nature. The dependence of Shi’a ulama was probably much more severe than that of Sunni ulama because they were imported into an alien environment and faced competitive groups in Iran in the provision of religious services both to the state and to the masses. This does not mean, however, that the Shi’a ulama had no autonomy in performing their duties. The Safavid state did not regulate their activities in the way a modern sovereign state would do. The combination of policies the Safavid Empire pursued toward religious community/institutions led to a very different religious environment that was much more homogenous than that in the Ottoman Empire. As discussed, the Safavids eradicated all Sunni and Shi’a Sufi orders in Iran. Thus, the most important rivals of Shi’a ulama were in fact eliminated in Iran. This enabled the Shi’a ulama to manipulate their rivals in Iran through undertaking the organization of the masses’ religious lives. Some orders had their own pious foundations that provided a host of welfare-improving activities. This extensive network among the masses gave the sheiks of Sufi orders opportunities to play infl uential roles. But, by eradicating both Sunni and Shi’a Sufi orders, the door was opened for Shi’a ulama to take the organization of the masses’ religious lives into their hands. In this way, Shi’a ulama had access not only to state resources, but also to the masses. It took quite some time for Shi’a ulama to realize the potential of the masses as an alternative power base. Although the Safavids fully supported the Shi’a ulama, their support did not go so far as eliminating the local ulama families. Understandably, the latter strongly resisted the incorporation of Shi’a ulama into the state bureaucracy. They were quite successful, in fact, keeping their power over the state for such a period that only one Shi’a scholar, Mir Ni’metullah Hilli (d.1534), had been appointed to the highest religious office in Iran, the office of sadr, in the 150 years following their entry into Iran. The office of sadr can be understood by looking at its functions: “(1) the supervision and administration of the religious endowments and distribution of their revenue to the students and clerics and to charitable undertakings; and (2) the supervision of the administration of the sacred law as the chief judiciary authority of the State.”33

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The most prominent figure in shifting the Shi’a ulama’s power base toward the masses was Muhammed Baqir Majlisi (d.1699). Up to his time, “it would be true to say that Shi’ism had sat lightly on the population of Iran, consisting mostly of mere expressions of love for Ali and hatred of the first three caliphs.”34 Majlisi sought ways to bring Shi’ism to the level of the ordinary people and tried to make it encompassing in the lives of the people. This move, in a sense, meant shifting the power base of Shi’a ulama from the state to, especially, the urban masses. It was a tactical move on the side of Shi’a ulama, who had not competed effectively with the local ulama families at the state level until the time of Majlisi, which changed the battle ground. His major contributions in this vein were as follows: (1) Shi’ifying popular rituals in Iran and encouraging visitations of the tombs of the imams and their descendants as parts of Shi’ism; (2) stressing the roles of the imams as mediators between the masses and God; (3) writing many books on theology, history, manuals of rituals, and the lives of the imams in Persian, thus making Shi’ism accessible to the masses; (4) putting the fundamentals of Shi’ism in dogmatic terms understandable to the masses, and so on.35 His achievement was great indeed: in the words of Arjomand, “Majlisi’s massive output of religious writings reached down to the masses and succeeded in capturing their imagination and enlisting their loyalty.”36 As the masses converted to Shi’a Islam, in part due to persecution, the Shi’a ulama began to fill the religious market in Iran left by the Sufi orders. Even though the details are not clear, in this process, Shi’a ulama began to send their students to the local mosques as prayer leaders and preachers. Thus, gradually, Shi’a ulama and their students monopolized the religious services in Iran. The relationship between the ulama and mosque staff would not remain as student-teacher relations but would develop further, refl ecting a specialty of Shi’a Islam in contrast to Sunni Islam. THE COLLAPSE AND THE SHI’A ULAMA The Safavid state weakened in the second half of the 17th century and eventually collapsed in 1722 when the Afghans attacked and overthrew Safavid rule. Iran plunged into political turmoil and chaos. Internecine tribal warfare paralyzed the country for the rest of the century. Bakhtiyaris, Qashqayis, Afshars, and Zands in central Iran, Kurdish and Arab tribes in western Iran, the Turkoman and Shahsaven tribes in northeastern Iran, and different clans from the Qajar tribe on the south coast of the Caspian Sea asserted their control over their regions and started to fight each other for political supremacy. In the interregnum, two dynasties—the Afsharids and the Zands—came very close to uniting Iran, but failed. This period devastated the economic and human resources of Iran. Major cities were repeatedly sacked and plundered by wandering tribal forces. One estimate claims that two-thirds of the urban population was lost due to tribal anarchy in this period of chaos. The tribal

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warlords imposed heavy tax burdens upon the peasants in order to finance their armies, forcing many to leave for safer places.37 This period was also detrimental to both Shi’a ulama and local ulama families in Iran. The Afsharid ruler, Nader Shah (d.1747), dealt serious blows to both groups. He systematically confiscated all religious endowments, discouraged Muharrem ceremonies, forbade the cursing of the first three caliphs, restricted all jurisdictions to state courts, and so on. Likewise, Karim Khan of Zand was not sympathetic to Shi’a ulama, regarding them as parasites.38 The collapse of the state in this period and the unfavorable policies followed by the tribal warlords forced many Shi’a ulama to emigrate to the learning centers in Iraq, which was then under Ottoman rule.39 The existence of a strong Shi’a community and the learning centers in Iraq facilitated the survival of Shi’a ulama during this time.40 The losses that Shi’a ulama had to bear in this period turned out to be short-term. In the long run, the overthrow of the Safavid rule, resulting in a period of interregnum, would prove helpful to Shi’a ulama. This critical period left three legacies for Shi’a ulama. First, Shi’a ulama had to develop their own financial resources accruing not from state services, but from their ties with the masses. Thanks to the efforts of Majlisi to bring Shi’ism to the levels of the masses, Shi’a ulama could become the organizers of the masses’ religious lives. As Said Arjomand puts it: “The Shi’ite Ulama, for their part, incorporated many of the features and practices of popular Sufism into the official belief system during the seventeenth century. These developments eliminated the rivalry of the Sufi shaykhs as popular religious leaders and enabled the emergent Shi’ite hierocracy in Iran to control the daily religious life of the masses to an extent unknown in other Islamic lands.”41 Second—a legacy that interacts with the first—Shi’a ulama could get out of the boundaries of state bureaucracy; they approached the masses even more closely, which eventually put them in a coalition with the urban groups against the state. Finally, the clerical notables, who were dependent only on state services, were liquidated, leaving Shi’a ulama the only religious authority in Iran. THE 19TH CENTURY AND THE FAILURE TO BUILD A MODERN SOVEREIGN STATE In the last decade of the 18th century, a Turkish tribe, the Qajars, defeated all their tribal rivals and united Iran once again.42 The Qajar conquests stopped once they reached the boundaries of the British colonies in the east, those of the Russians in the north, and those of the Ottomans in the west. The Qajars faced a no less hostile international environment in the 19th century. The first formidable challenge appeared in the north from Russia, which began to penetrate deep into the Caucasus and threaten the newly conquered territories of Iran. The war started in 1804 and ended with Russian victory

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in 1813. Under the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Gulistan, signed in 1813, Iran lost all of its territories north of the Aras River and recognized the authority of Russia over these lands. Another war with Russia erupted in 1826 and ended with a crushing defeat at the hands of the Russians. The Treaty of Turkmenchay, signed in 1827, brought further territorial losses to Iran. As a result of two wars against Russia, Iran lost Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Severely damaged by the losses in the Caucasus, Iran turned to the east and laid siege to Herat in western Afghanistan in 1838. But intense pressure from the British forced Iran to abandon the project in 1839. Iran laid another siege to Herat in 1856, which led to the Anglo-Persian War of 1856–1857. The war ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1857, by which Iran gave up all her claims over eastern Afghanistan to Britain. Especially after the defeat it tasted in the Crimean War in 1853–1856, Russia turned its attention to Central Asia, over which Iran had claimed authority. By 1885, the Russians advanced their frontiers to include such cities as Marv, Sarakhs, and Ashkhabad up until Elburz Mountain range in northeast Iran. Only British intervention halted further Russian advance beyond the Elburz Mountain range. Like the Ottomans, the Qajars also initiated state-building reforms in the early 19th century; however, as they simply could not overcome internal opposition, all their attempts failed. In fact, Iran entered the 19th century in a more advantageous position than that of the Ottomans. Almost all societal forces that could act as barriers to state building or bases upon which to launch new state-building projects were drastically weakened in the 18th century as central rule collapsed in Iran after the Afghan invasion, which started in 1719. In addition, the Qajars were able to find some foreign financial and military support early in the 19th century that could serve as a stepping stone for further military reforms. First the French, then the British, offered help to the Qajars in the form of financial aid and military personnel at the beginning of the 19th century.43 The pioneer of state building in Iran was Crown Prince Abbas Mirza, the governor of Azerbaijan, who observed the advance and the military superiority of the Russians. He established a new army of 6,000 troops “equipped with mobile artillery and fairly up-to-date weapons, paid regularly by the state, dressed in uniforms, housed and drilled in barracks, and trained by European officers.”44 He sent students to Europe to study sciences necessary for the military. However, Abbas Mirza could not continue on his path—he was prevented from doing so by an array of groups, including his own brothers. Another attempt to build the state came in 1848 when the new shah, Naser al-Din, appointed Amir Kabir as his prime minister. Amir Kabir also introduced state-building measures such as strengthening the army and establishing factories to satisfy the needs of the army, introducing austere financial measures to pay for these. This second attempt also failed, for the same reason: an array of groups, most notably the courtiers, reacted against Amir Kabir’s

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measures of financial austerity. Finally, the queen mother persuaded her son to dismiss Amir Kabir from office in 1851. Mirza Husayn, another minister of Naser al-Din Shah, faced the same failure in state building in the period between 1871 and 1873. The formation of the Persian Cossack Brigade in 1879 is the only successful case of Qajar state building.45 A total of 400 of the shah’s own men and another 200 army volunteers formed the first regiment. In 1880, another regiment of the same strength was formed. These two regiments thus constituted the only regular force in Iran and were designated as the Cossack Brigade. A Russian lieutenant-colonel became the first head of the brigade. In 1914, the total strength of the brigade was 2,754 men, under a Russian commander. From its establishment, however, the brigade was seen as a Russian arm of Iranian politics. “Neither the shah nor the government had any control over the appointment of Russian officers to the brigade. . . . They were assigned to the brigade without reference to the Iranian government, which had no knowledge as to when they were to come or when and why they left.”46 In response, the Iranian government had little incentive to provide payments to the brigade. By 1907, for example, the Iranian government had stopped making payments. Eventually, the brigade’s payment fell upon customs administration, which reserved the revenue of northern customs to the brigade. It seems that the Russian government then assumed the cost of the brigade. After the revolution in Russia, which cut the brigade’s ties with Russia, the British came in. By 1921, the brigade possessed 300 Iranian officers and 7,000 men. The brigade’s involvement in the constitutional struggle in favor of the shah forced the constitutionalist Iranian government to establish an alternative military force—the government Gendarmerie—in 1911, under the supervision of Swedish officers.47 At the end of 1913, the Gendarmerie possessed 36 Swedes and nearly 6,000 Iranian officers and men. Payments to the Gendarmerie also became financially troublesome to the Iranian government, consuming approximately half of the Iranian budget. The British offered financial help for the force, which was declined. Instead, German money was sought. German sympathy with the Iranian nationalists in the Gendarmerie eventually pushed the force into a series of confrontations with the British during the war, which cost the Gendarmerie dearly. Except for a few Swedish officers and a few hundred men who preferred neutrality between the Germans and the British, the Gendarmerie lost all of its men. The post-war Iranian governments rebuilt the Gendarmerie upon that core Gendarmerie force. Due to the high prestige that it gained during the war, the Gendarmerie regained its manpower in a short time. By 1921, it possessed 360 Iranian officers, 358 cadets, and 9,270 men. Thus throughout the 19th century, state power in military, finance, and administration gradually deteriorated in Iran. Agha Muhammed Khan, the first Qajar monarch, was truly a tribal leader, charismatic enough to establish an alliance among the disunited clans of the Qajar tribe. He lived a very

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simple life, eschewing the palace in favor of a tent. His bureaucracy was minimal, consisting of only three officers other than him: a revenue officer for the army, an accountant, and a vizier. He carried out all other government functions.48 Following his death in 1797, however, Iran faced another civil disorder. Yet the weakening of the tribal coalition did not result in a tribal nightmare such as the one that had paralyzed 18th-century Iran.49 The Qajars, in fact, did well in managing the tribal danger—not through establishing military superiority, but through strategic tactics such as divide and rule, promoting one tribal group over another, and creating rivalries among different segments of the society.50 The tribal leaders were also appointed as governors of provinces, thus securing their loyalty to the center. The members of the royal family, however, constituted the main pool of candidates for governorships. Governors, whether tribal leaders or royal family members, were not paid from the central treasury of fixed monthly salaries, but were granted the right to collect the taxes in their administrative units. In return, the governors had to provide troops upon the request of the shah. The provincial armies under the command of the Qajar princes, and tribal cavalry forces under their tribal leaders, thus formed the backbone of the Iranian army in the 19th century. The shah had only the palace guard under his direct command; this numbered only 2,000 horsemen in 1890.51 The triple structure of the army continued without much change until the end of the century. The second half of the 19th century witnessed the increasing sale of governmental offices of every rank, including governorships, ambassadorships, and ministries, through annual auction in the capital. In general, the positions went to the highest bidder.52 The shah also approached the Europeans in the second half of the 19th century. The deal was simple: the shah would grant concessions to an entrepreneur in return for an initial payment and future share of the profits. In the first grand-scale concession, a Briton—Baron Julius de Reuter—obtained, in 1872, “the exclusive right to finance a state bank, farm out the entire customs, exploit all minerals (with the exception of gold, silver and precious stones), build railways and tramways for seventy years, and establish all future canals, irrigation works, roads, telegraph lines, and industrial factories.”53 However, both pressure from Russia and domestic protests forced the shah to cancel the concession in 1873. Despite the cancellation, smaller-scale concessions were granted.54 Another big concession was granted in 1890, when the shah, Naser al-Din, granted the right to produce, sell, and export Iran’s entire tobacco crop to a British company. This led to a series of huge protests, mainly organized by the religious scholars of Iran, that forced the shah to cancel the concession once again in 1892.55 Hence, in the second half of the 19th century, the Qajar state sold whatever they could: “titles, patents, privileges, concessions, monopolies, lands, tuyuls (right to collect taxes on crown lands), and most detrimental of all, high offices—judgeships, ambassadorships, governorships, and even ministries.”56 The monarch remained desperate to generate new revenues at the close of the 19th century. The process culminated in

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the constitutional revolution, when a coalition of bazaar merchants, religious scholars, and a tiny group of intellectuals rebelled against the shah in December 1905. Unable to move against the protests, the shah granted a constitution to the country in December 1906, just before his death. This was, however, just the beginning. Iran once again plunged into a civil war. THE FAILURE AND THE ULAMA The Qajars brought peace and order to Iran. In this century, the Shi’a ulama managed to acquire what the Sunni ulama in the Ottoman lands lacked— financial independence from the state, organizational capacity within an informal hierarchical structure, and monopoly over religious services. Financial independence was made possible by the elimination of the sayyids, the descendants of the Prophet of Islam, as rivals in religious services, who had collected religious taxes up to then. They faced the same fate as the local ulama families of Iran, losing the prestige and status they had enjoyed during Safavid rule. During the Qajar period, many of the sayyids entered into the patronage networks of either Qajar rulers or the ulama. Hence, Shi’a ulama became the only religious authorities in Iran. Then religious taxes began to accrue into their hands. This set in motion a process of selection. Some individuals among the ulama distinguished themselves as the most learned, increasing their reputations over time. As their reputations increased, more religious taxes accrued to them, which made it possible to finance more students in their madrasahs. This, in turn, brought more followers. This process culminated in the emergence of an institution called marja-i taqlid (the source of imitation) in the 19th century.57 It also found a place in the doctrine, which stated that the ulama as a whole were to imitate the most learned among them. As stated, this took some time. It evolved over time through the choices of the masses, as they chose some members of the ulama over others, and in part through the choices of the ulama themselves. The emergence of marja-i taqlid considerably increased the organizational capacity of Shi’a ulama within an informal hierarchical structure. It is important to note that the resurfacing of rival religious movements in Iran in the meantime gave further impetus to the organization of Shi’a ulama under this informal hierarchical structure. For example, the Sufis challenged Shi’a ulama in the Iranian religious market and appealed to some groups. One of them, Hajji Mirza Aqasi, was even able to gain the loyalty of the third Qajar shah, Muhammad Shah, and became his highest official in Iran. The Sufis found patronage during his rule: lands were granted, new Sufi buildings erected, posts at court and government missions given to the Sufis, and so forth.58 In addition to the Sufi threat, heterodox religious movements such as Shaykism, Babism, and Baha’ism emerged and seriously challenged the authority of Shi’a ulama. Babism, whose originator, Sayyid Ali

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Muhammed, claimed that he was the gateway (Bab) to the hidden Imam,59 probably presented the biggest threat to the authority and monopoly of the ulama, some of whom even faced physical violence from the Babis. Not only some laymen, but also the lower ranks of Shi’a ulama and theology students, joined this heterodox religious movement.60 Only with the support of the Qajar state were the ulama able to remove the threat of the Babi movement and its leader, who was killed by the state. While Sufism and other heterodox movements presented varying degrees of challenge to Shi’a ulama, they could not undermine its monopoly of religious services in Iran. Instead, these movements forced Shi’a to develop the institution of marja-i taqlid, thus, as an unintentional consequence, strengthening their hand in the provision of religious services and, by extension, in local social control at the expense of the state. This institution solved some additional problems faced by Shi’a ulama. It was very likely that the religious taxes produced both competition among the ulama to attract them and practical problems for the masses, such as to which particular individual scholar it was better to pay the taxes. These practical problems, if not resolved, could jeopardize the position of Shi’a ulama in the society and undermine their respectability. A competition for the religious taxes could be seen by the masses as being at odds with piety, abstention, and the honor of being a scholar. The spread of such views could invite alternative religious groups to gain ground among the masses. Therefore, the introduction of the institution of marja-i taqlid proved a very important step for Shi’a ulama for keeping their positions in Iranian society.61 The Qajar state, if we exclude the reign of Muhammad Shah, either helped or allowed Shi’a ulama to suppress the ability of rival religious groups to get a foothold in the Iranian religious market. In addition to this general policy with regard to Shi’a ulama, the Qajar dynasty helped Shi’a ulama in some other ways. The Qajars were among the Turkish-speaking tribes of Iran. During the interregnum following the collapse of Safavid rule, they also fought for political supremacy in Iran, achieving success under the leadership of Agha Muhammed Khan in 1779. Following in the footprints of previous rulers,62 the Qajars distributed the lands as pastures among the tribal leaders who joined their coalition. In return, the tribal leaders were expected to administer their own tribes, supply men during war, and collect taxes from their tribes for the Qajar shah. The Qajar family also apportioned some land for themselves, which would grow in size in the following century. Family members and people personally attached to the family also staffed the provincial governments. The governor of a province had to pay tributes to the shah from taxes collected in the province but remained relatively autonomous in local affairs. This system continued without any drastic changes throughout the 19th century, refl ecting the lack of interest on the side of the Qajars in initiating state building through these means of domination, except for some sporadic and unsuccessful attempts. Seen from a different angle,

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the Iranian case is an example of “patrimonial” state building. This strategy did not require any challenge of groups close to the rulers, who probably could have frustrated state builders’ aims and possibly even threatened the dynasty’s control. What changed was the size of the court and its beneficiaries. It has been said that Agha Muhammed Khan, the first Qajar ruler, administered state affairs with just two ministers and himself. The size of the court increased considerably during the reign of the second Qajar ruler, Fath Ali Shah. The rest of the century saw continued growth in the size of the court and its beneficiaries. To finance the court and its beneficiaries both in the capital and in the provinces, “taxes were farmed, governorships put up to auction, and royal or state domains sold.”63 In the second half of the century, the Qajars also began to look for foreign loans and sold a variety of privileges to the Europeans in return for more money to finance the court’s beneficiaries and the shah’s expensive trips to Europe. With the rise of the Qajars, Shi’a ulama returned to Iran at an official level. During the early years of the 19th century, the Qajars extensively supported the ulama both politically and economically for reasons on which we can only speculate. The most probable seems that the Qajars were nomadic and alien to the native Iranians. Thus, they probably saw the ulama as a good urban ally, helping their rule to be easily accepted, especially, by urban groups. The ulama, in turn, needed the Qajars in order to be reincorporated into Iranian urban society. Hence, from the reign of Fath Ali Shah onward, the Qajars included the ulama and their religious organizations, theology schools, and shrines among the main beneficiaries of court disbursements. Throughout their rule, shrines had been embellished and repaired, mosques constructed, the ulama paid, theology schools erected and endowed, gifts given to the ulama and the shrines, interventions of the ulama for extending pardons to rebels and criminals accepted, the advice of the ulama sought, waqf lands confiscated by Nadir Shah restored, and tax exemptions granted to the ulama.64 The Qajar dynasty’s support of Shi’a ulama went to the extent of suppressing the Babi movement, which challenged the religious authority of Shi’a ulama in Iran. This implicit cooperation between the state and the ulama even found its place in Shi’a doctrine: Qashfi (d.1850–1851) claimed that in the period of occultation,65 the religious and political jurisdiction of the imam was to be appropriated by the political rulers and the ulama. He further claimed that the ulama willingly left the political jurisdiction of the imam to the political power of the time; in return, the political power left the religious sphere to the ulama.66 The failure of state building during the Qajar period consolidated the position of the ulama among the urban groups even further. The Qajars left the ulama almost autonomous in the administration of religious foundations and educational and legal services. Theology schools provided manpower that the ulama could muster in case of necessity. Religious foundations enabled them to provide public services to the people, acting as the guardians of orphans and widows.

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INTEGRATION WITH THE WORLD CAPITALIST ECONOMY AND THE ULAMA Failed state-building attempts in Qajar Iran not only left intermediary bodies intact, but also strengthened them in the course of the 19th century. For example, the guilds could organize their members in mass protests against the shah, who wanted to raise financial resources through concessions to foreign firms toward the end of the 19th century. In one such protest, as mentioned before, the shah cancelled a tobacco concession granted to a British firm after mass protests organized by the guilds and Shi’a scholars. The most effective weapon the guilds could use was forcing their members to close their shops and paralyze the local economies. At the same time, the provincial administrators and tribal chiefs appropriated state land as their personal property. The merchants also bought estates as Qajar rulers began to sell state land in order to raise money to cover their expenditure. High-ranking religious scholars who administered religious endowments also acquired huge estates in this time period. Thus, toward the end of the 19th century, a class of major landowners emerged in Iran. Ann Lambton marks the Qajar period as “the final break-up of the old system of land-holding”67 due to the conversion of state land into private property. As an example, she points to Isfahan, where all state land but for some ruined villages was sold in the latter half of the 19th century. M. Ali Kazimbeyki provides more detailed information from the Mazandaran region. By 1848, most of the 1,000 villages in Mazandaran were state land, and a considerable proportion was granted in return for military service. In 1888, the government owned only 50 villages in the province. The rest of the lands became hereditary assignments to certain individuals. In 1899, that number decreased to 4 unsold villages. In the early 20th century, it was not the shah but local powers who were the largest landowners in the province. The state’s land in Mazandaran also fell into the possession of either the courtiers or a few wealthy merchants from Tehran.68 The landowners in Iran did not constitute a distinctively new class. Instead, it is better to consider them a hybrid class of former high-ranking state officials, merchants, and high-ranking religious scholars who also invested in land. The Qatar state engaged in neither road nor railroad building.69 As a result, transportation within Iran was extremely difficult due to rough terrain. The state did not introduce the necessary legal regulations for market-friendly institutions such as property rights. Neither a system of courts nor any other mechanism existed in order to enforce contracts. Arbitrary confiscation was widespread. The legal system was extremely slow. Ann Lambton, for example, recounts lively examples of two Iranian merchants who could not solve their business problems in more than two decades through the formal legal system, although both the shah and British envoys intervened on their behalf.70 In a well-written biography, Shireen Mahdavi depicts the fascinating life story of a 19th-century Iranian merchant, Hajj Mohammad Hasan Amin al-Zarb. He made his enormous wealth despite a variety of problems,

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including confiscation, even though he had strong ties with the court in Tehran and even served as a minister of mint.71 Ironically, the same barriers that an Iranian merchant had to face in his business life made the Iranian market inaccessible to foreigners. The extremely low number of foreigners in Iran at the beginning of the 20th century adduces to this fact. In other words, the Iranian market remained in the hands of Iranian merchants. In due course, the high-ranking ulama became extremely rich, to the extent that they could establish business deals with rich merchants and lend money at high interest rates, all of which helped solidify ties between the ulama and the merchant class. This linkage was further strengthened through marriage alliances between the ulama and the merchants.72 The merchants, apart from finding business partners, also found support in the ulama’s power to reverse policies that were detrimental to their interests.73 The tobacco concession of 1891 represents a classic example of ulamamerchant alliance against the Qajar rule. This concession granted the right of sale and distribution of tobacco in Iran, and the monopoly over exporting all tobacco produced in Iran, to a British company, the Imperial Tobacco Cooperation. The company, in return, would pay fifteen million pounds a year to the shah. The Shi’a ulama and merchants’ opposition to the concession began immediately after the concession was granted. The merchants closed down their shops, paralyzing the market in towns. The ulama stopped teaching in the theology schools and mobilized the masses against the shah. The ulama went as far as issuing a religious order “declaring the use of tobacco in any form to be tantamount to war against the Hidden Imam.”74 Eventually, the shah had to cancel the concession. Thus, the last decades of the Qajar rule feature an ever-weakening state in the face of an urban alliance led by Shi’a ulama. The weakening state left a “power vacuum,” as Keddie (1972) calls it, inviting the ulama to fill it: “In Iran, however, there is rise in ulama power, which is directly related to a governmental ‘power vacuum.’ ”75 NOTES 1. Trimingham (1998:54). 2. See the discussion on the difference between Turkish and Iranian Sufisms in Ülken (2004). 3. See a detailed discussion in Mazzaoui (1972). 4. Mazzaoui (1972:53). 5. Quoted in Mazzaoui (1972:62). 6. As such, a Sunni writer, Fadl Allah ibn Ruzbihan Hungi, describes the transformation the Safawiyya order underwent. Quoted in Mazzaoui (1972:72–73). 7. See Sümer (1992) on the role of Anatolian Turks in the establishment of the Safavid Empire. 8. This discussion of the Safawiyya order’s rise to power in Iran depends partly on Mazzaoui (1972), but mostly on Roemer (1986). 9. Algar (1976:139). Algar (1976) recounts very nicely the history of the Naqshibandi order and its political significance.

Appeasing the Ulama 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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On the Khalweti order, see Martin (1972). For more on the revival of Dhahabi order, see Lewisohn (1999). Uyar (2000–2001). “Ismailism is a branch of Shi’ite Islam which differs from Ithna ‘Ashari Shi’ism in viewing Isma’il ibn Ja’far rather than Musa ibn Ja’far as the seventh imam.” See Pourjavady and Wilson (1975:113). For the connections between Ismailis and Ni’matullahis, see Pourjavady and Wilson (1975). Arjomand (1984:116–118). For more on the revival of Ni’matullahi order, see Lewisohn (1998). Lewisohn (1998:441). Quoted in Lewisohn (1998:440). Recounted in Pourjavady and Wilson (1975:120–121). For these and other Shi’ite scholars who contributed to high Sufism, see Nasr (1986). Cited in Momen (1985:115). Momen (1985:116). Turner (2000). See a very sound critique of the book in Rizvi (2003). Quoted in Moin (1999:276). The Feiziyeh is a madrasah in Qum, Iran. These zawiyahs belonged to twelve different Sufi orders. See Albayrak (1996). See Akyol (1999) for a persuasive case for this assertion. Hillenbrand (1986:759). The forthcoming discussion owes to Arjomand (1984, 1988) and Algar (1983). As I described here, this was not unique to Iran. In the Ottoman Empire as well, Sufi orders were among the masses as their spiritual leaders. Arjomand (1984:125). Algar (1983:15) continues, “One finds one of the earliest among them, for example, a certain Shaykh Ahmad Karaki, even writing a treatise defending the practice which was to be found, not only in Iran, but in neighboring Sunni countries, of prostration before the monarch.” Uyar (2004:111). Arjomand (1983:138). Arjomand (1984:123). Momen (1985:116). See more details on this point in chapter 9 of Momen (1985) and Arjomand (1984:155–159). Arjomand (1984:156). Cited in Arjomand (1988:21). Arjomand (1984:215–217). Litvak (1990:33). Keddie (1972:226). Arjomand (1988:12). This period is vividly depicted by Avery (1991), Perry (1991), and Hambly (1991), all in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7. See Martin (1996) for further discussion of British help. Abrahamian (1982:52). The following discussion is based upon chapter 2 in Cronin (1997). Cronin (1997:55). The following discussion is based upon chapter 1 in Cronin (1997). For the development of Qajar administration in their early years, see Meredith (1971). See Lambton (1977) for the details of the tribal resurgence in 18th-century Iran. See Abrahamian (1982:41–49) for more detailed discussion of these strategies of survival.

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51. Arjomand (1988:24). 52. See Sheikholeslami (1971) on the sale of offices in the second half of the 19th century. 53. Abrahamian (1982:55). 54. See Abrahamian (1982:55–56) for examples. 55. For the details of the tobacco grant and its cancellation, see Keddie (1966) and Algar (1969). 56. Abrahamian (1982:56). 57. See Moussavi (1985, 1994). 58. Algar (1969) discusses the reign of Muhammad Shah in detail in chapter 6. 59. It will be clear why this was against Shi’a ulama when I discuss Shi’a doctrine in the next chapter. Simply, Shi’a ulama claimed that they were the representatives of the imams. Therefore, the Bab clashed with the ulama. 60. One estimates that 400 ulama accepted Babism. Cited in Algar (1969:148). 61. Sometimes a single individual, sometimes a few individuals, occupied the office of marja-i taqlid. The first marja-i taqlid was Muhammad Hasan Najafi (d.1850), who was followed by Morteda al-Ansari (d.1869) and Mirda Shirazi (d.1895). After Shirazi, a period of multiple marja-i taqlid followed, such as Shirazi Khurusani (d.1911), Tabataba’I Yazdi (d.1918), Taqi Shirazi (d.1920), Isfahani (d.1920), Naini (d.1936), Hairi (d.1936), and Hasan Isfahani (d.1946). Between 1946 and 1961, Burujirdi appeared as the single marja. After his death, the office was held by eight mujtahids, including Khomeini. See Moussavi (1994:292). 62. Lambton (1991:459) says, “The Qajar land system was inherited from the Safavids and goes through the Ilkhans and Saljuqs to the early centuries of Islam.” 63. Keddie (1972:213). Classical references are Sheikholeslami (1971, 1977). 64. Algar (1969) details all these activities for each Qajar ruler until 1905. 65. Shi’a Islam believes that only the descendants of the Islam Prophet have legitimacy to rule. They count twelve of them, where the last one went into occultation. I will discuss the doctrinal aspects in the next chapter. 66. Uyar (2004). 67. Lambton (1969:151). Ann Lambton’s study is a classic in the study of land holding in Iran. 68. Kazimbeyki (2003:100–102). 69. In contrast to the absence of railroads, by 1913, Egypt had 4,500 kilometers, and the Ottoman Empire had 3,500 kilometers of railroads. See Issawi (1993). 70. See Lambton (1987). 71. See Mahdavi (1999). 72. Lambton (1993:166). 73. Algar (1969) gives us a historically detailed account of how the urban alliance under the leadership of the ulama grew against the Qajar dynasty. This process would culminate into the constitutional revolution of 1905. 74. Algar (1969:211). See chapter 12 in Algar (1969) for more detail. Keddie (1966) is a more detailed historical source on the tobacco concession. 75. Keddie (1972:213–214).

5

Separationist State Secularization in Pahlavi Iran

This chapter explains why state secularization was separationist in Iran. The chapter argues that two factors were critical to the outcome. First, the reformers introduced secularizing reforms after they had already consolidated their powers. Hence, there was no strategic urgency to take on the cost of incorporating religion into the state. Second, religious community had an alternative source of power in society and so could more peacefully part from the state and the regime. The chapter starts with an account of how the reformers in Iran came to power; the discussion is needed to get a sense of the strategic context of state secularization. Prior to the reform period, Iran did not experience an exhausting international war, but rather had its own tragedy—civil war. The chapter goes on to describe the impact of the civil war on the religious community/institutions. Finally it discusses how and why the state and the religious community/institutions separated in Iran. STRATEGIC CONTEXT: THE COMING TO POWER OF REZA SHAH On July 19, 1906, fifty clerics and merchants opposing the Iranian government took sanctuary in the garden of the British legation in Gulahek, a town close to Tehran, having obtained an informal promise by the head of the legation, Grant Duff, not to use military force to expel them. Religious leaders and their students, numbering 1,000, took sanctuary and joined in demonstrations against the government in the city of Qum to show their support. The number of people claiming sanctuary gradually increased to 14,000 and included merchants, traders and clerics, intellectuals, and students.1 A committee formed by the protesters to negotiate their demands with the government demanded a written constitution and the opening of a parliament. On August 5, 1906, the shah of Iran, Muzaffar al-Din, capitulated to the demands of the protesters. The electorate was divided into six groups: the princes and the shah’s tribe, the aristocracy and the nobles, the clerics (the ulama) and their theology students, the landowners and the farmers, the

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merchants, and the guilds. Elections were held, and parliament was convened in October 1906. The shah also ratified the constitution proposed by parliament, in December 1906, just before his death. In the beginning of 1907, the new shah, Muhammad Ali, and his court seemed alone against the whole country. However, the revolutionaries could not keep up their unity for long and began to fragment in mid-1907: “A new phenomenon made its appearance in the streets: the conservative crowd demonstrating for the court and against the constitution. . . . They [the constitutionalists] had lost the monopoly of the streets.”2 The same conservative societal elements swelled the ranks of the royalists, merchants, craftsmen, clerics, and theology students, supported by aristocrats. The ensuing two years witnessed street battles between the supporters of the shah and the constitutionalists. Although disunity among the crowd boosted the shah’s efforts to bring the old regime back, the constitutionalists forced the new shah to sign the supplementary constitution, which took place in October 1907. A failed assassination attempt on the shah in mid-1908 was a turning point. He staged a coup against the government: he first ordered the Russian-led Cossack Brigade3 to bomb parliament, and then he dissolved parliament. The military balance between the constitutionalists and the royalists tilted in favor of the constitutionalists in 1909 when the Bahktiyari tribal and Caucasian fighters joined in the struggle on their side. The entry of these new constitutionalist forces into Tehran in 1909 concluded the civil war. The shah of Iran, Muhammad Ali, took refuge in the Russian embassy and abdicated in favor of his twelve-year-old son, Ahmad Shah. New elections were held, and parliament met again in November 1909. The main outcome of the constitutional revolution was twofold: the elimination of the shah’s court as an executive power and the installation of a powerful legislative body in its place. Without a strong executive, parliament would not achieve much, mainly due to the opposition to the proposed reforms from entrenched groups, such as the aristocracy and the ulama, in parliament. The parliamentary “proceedings increasingly looked like endless pointless squabbles, a waste of time that got the country nowhere. While the country was burning, it seemed that the Majlis [parliament] was playing second fiddle to the parliaments of Europe.”4 The only notable achievement in the meantime was the creation of an internal security force, called the Gendarmerie, with Swedish help. To reform the finances of the country, an American economist, William Morgan Shuster, was employed as the treasurer-general, to protests from Britain and Russia. The end came when Shuster’s measures confl icted with Russian interests. An ultimatum to dismiss Shuster was defied by parliament as Russian troops marched toward Tehran. Parliament was dissolved in 1911, and Shuster was dismissed. The decade following 1911 brought further decentralization of power due to the failure of successive cabinets to implement ameliorating reforms.

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A report to the British Foreign Office dated 1914 claimed that the central government had lost control outside the capital.5 The First World War made the situation even worse for the Iranians, despite the fact that the Iranian government claimed neutrality in the war. British, Russian, and Turkish armies conducted military operations on Iranian territory and occupied various parts of the country. The government of Iran could do nothing to prevent this occupation. In the meantime, tribalism became rampant. “Brigandage and tribal lawlessness were alarming. Highway robbery was universal; in fact, highway men often raided towns and, in the absence of any authority, sometimes remained, wrecking all economic activity.”6 In the face of these challenges, the central government came to the brink of total collapse. The extent of the political crisis can be assessed by looking at the change in intellectual opinion regarding the appropriate political solution for the problems of the country. For Iranian intellectuals the model to be emulated became not the constitutional monarchies of Europe, but rather fascist Italy. “While the early generation of reformers saw progress as possible only through a constitutional regime, the reformers of the 1920s began to see democracy as an impediment to progress.”7 In the meantime, the clerics became disillusioned with the constitutional revolution as the costs of participating in the revolution began to accumulate. First, they lost their unity as a social stratum. Some, like Sayyid Muhammad Tabatabai, Sayyid Abd-Allah Bihbahani, and Shaikh Abd-Allah Mazandarani, sided with the constitutionalists, while others, like Shaikh Fazl-Allah Nuri and Sayyid Muhammad Kazim Yazdi, sided with the royalists. Yet the dividing line was one of theological disagreement, which would lose its importance when the ulama united against the Russian invasion of Iran in 1911 and issued their religious authorization for the defense of the country. Second, and more importantly, two clerics were executed, Shaikh Fazl-Allah Nuri in 1909 by the revolutionary forces and Sayyid Abd-Allah Bihbahani in 1910 by the radical constitutionalists. The disillusionment caused by their most sustained involvement in politics brought about a partial withdrawal from politics.8 The strong man desperately looked for by Iranian intellectuals would appear on February 21, 1921. The commander of the Cossack Brigade, Reza Khan, marched toward Tehran with 3,000 men and overthrew the existing government in the capital without any resistance from the Gendarmerie or the Central Brigade in Tehran. Reza Khan was not, however, the sole mastermind of this coup. Two Gendarme officers, Major Mas’ud Khan Kayhan and Captain Kazim Khan Sayyah, acted in cooperation with him. Sayyid Ziya Tabatabai, a civilian journalist in Tehran, became the prime minister of a new government, Major Kayhan the minister of war in the cabinet, Captain Sayyah the military governor of Tehran, and Reza Khan the de facto commander of the army. The unity among the instigators of the coup was soon to dissolve. Reza Khan’s Cossack Brigade engaged in a bitter struggle with Sayyid Ziya and the Gendarmerie. The power of the Gendarmerie peaked in the immediate

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post-coup period: it was bigger than the brigade in size; Gendarmerie officers held the military governorships of Tehran and of several provincial capitals and the Ministry of War; and it had prestige that the brigade had never enjoyed. Yet Reza Khan proved to be a most intriguing and skillful politician. First, he succeeded in removing Major Kayhan, his Gendarmerie collaborator, from the post of minister of war. Reza Khan himself became the minister of war, while keeping his post as commander-in-chief of the army. In the next step, he succeeded in removing his other collaborator, Kazim Khan Sayyah, from the post of military governor of Tehran. In Sayyah’s place, a friend from the brigade was appointed. Reza Khan soon succeeded in putting the Gendarmerie under the authority of the Ministry of War, which he headed at that time. Reza Khan also played the nationalist card. His last collaborator, Sayyid Ziya, was trying to secure more executive authority for British officers. Reza Khan initiated a campaign to expel all foreign officers from the army. His success came at the expense of Sayyid Ziya, who was asked to resign by the shah. All these achievements became possible because Reza Khan could secure the support of the Qajar shah, who had the authority to approve official appointments, through his frequent expressions of loyalty to the shah. In early July 1921, after less than five months, Reza Khan had thus cleared the field of all his collaborators in the coup. As minister of war, he also increased the size of the brigade from 7,000 to 17,000 by August 1921.9 Meanwhile, as a protest against the ousting of Sayyid Ziya as prime minister, Gendarmerie officer Muhammad Taqi Khan Pasyan rebelled against Tehran in Mashad, where his troops were stationed. Yet the tribal rebellions in the eastern provinces overwhelmed his forces. In an engagement with the Kurdish tribes, Colonel Pasyan was killed in October 1921. The most dangerous obstacle for Reza Khan thus luckily disappeared. In December 1921, Reza Khan announced the unification of the brigade and the Gendarmerie and the removal of all Swedish officers from their posts. In January 1922, another Gendarmerie officer, Major Abu’l Qasim Khan Lahuti, incited a rebellion in Azerbaijan. The Gendarmes could effectively force the retreat of the military forces sent from Tehran to put down the rebellion, and they set up a revolutionary committee in Tabriz. But another force sent from Tehran crushed the rebellion and established central control over Tabriz. Reza Khan also sought popular support. He immediately took a more aggressive stance in solving the most urgent need of the country, the restoration of internal order and security, by suppressing tribal rebellions. As discussed previously, because of the civil war that had erupted in Iran in the constitutional period, highway robbery and brigandage had been menacing the countryside, and the looting of towns had been rampant. By 1921, large-scale political and tribal rebellions began in provinces such as Gilan, Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Luristan, Khuzistan, Fars, and Mokran. After merging the two military units, the Cossack Brigade and the Gendarmerie, Reza Khan began to conduct a series of campaigns against the tribes and local

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rulers. These were not always successful, but he eventually put down tribal revolts in Azerbaijan, Luristan, Kurdistan, Fars, and Khorasan. His determination to establish internal security and order won him much popularity among urban Iranians.10 Reza Khan also sought the support of the Shi’a ulama in his struggle.11 An opportunity arose when the British, by then the colonial rulers of neighboring Iraq, expelled two prominent Shi’a ulama, Sayyid Abol Hassan Isfahani and Shaikh Muhammad Hussein Naini, from Najaf in Iraq. Reza Khan allowed them to come to Iran and settle in Qum. In April 1924, after visiting them in Qum, Reza Khan made a public statement: “My only personal aim and method from the beginning has been, and is, to preserve and guard the majesty of Islam and the independence of Iran.”12 In return, Isfahani and Naini issued a religious order, or fatwa, saying that obedience to Reza Shah was a religious duty. After Isfahani and Naini returned to Iraq, Reza Shah visited them in Najaf during a pilgrimage he performed to the holy shrines of Najaf and Karbala.13 All these (and other) exchanges between Reza Shah and the two prominent Shi’a ulama, and Reza Shah’s public shows of piety, also won him approval among the Shi’a ulama. His rising popularity among the urban groups, the support of the Shi’a ulama, his skills in political intrigue, and the strong loyalty of his comrades in the former Cossack Brigade enabled him to overcome all attempts to oust him from power. He also succeeded, between 1921 and 1926, in eliminating, one by one, his potential rivals, especially among the ex-Gendarmerie officers.14 Eventually, in October 1925, the fifth parliament deposed the last Qajar shah, Ahmed Shah, from the throne, by eighty-five to five votes with thirty abstentions, and appointed Reza Shah as the regent. Reza Shah in return banned gambling and the sale of alcohol and promised to enforce the laws of Islam. The sixth parliament, which was convened in December 1925, after the deposition of Ahmed Shah, unanimously (with only three abstentions) declared Reza Shah the monarch of Iran. In the sixth parliament, 40 percent of the deputies were ulama. Reza Shah did not forget to express his gratitude to them in the speech he delivered at his coronation: “My special attention has been and will continue to be given to the preservation of the principles of religion and the strengthening of its foundations because I consider the complete reinforcing of religion one of the most effective means of achieving national unity and strengthening the spirit of Iranian society.”15 SEPARATIONIST STATE SECULARIZATION IN IRAN An incorporation of secularization reforms into this story reveals that the political and socioeconomic contexts of the reforms were different in Iran compared to Turkey. Unlike the latter, secularization reforms were undertaken in Iran after the new regime consolidated its hold onto power in Iran.

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State-building reforms affecting the religious community/institutions fall into three broad categories: educational reforms, legal reforms, and other reforms that undermine the financial resources of the religious community/ institutions. Legal reforms in Iran started in 1927 with the reorganization of the Ministry of Justice, which began to be staffed with new personnel who had obtained their legal education in Europe. The new staff replaced the clerics in the ministry. The ministry introduced new regulations on legal procedures and thus constrained the independent actions of what had been, up to that time, religious judges in state offices. A new civil code was introduced in 1926 and was ratified by parliament in 1928. Yet this was not a radical change, since the code combined existing religious law and the French civil code:16 “In the parts dealing with general subjects . . . it was a verbatim translation of the civil code of France. But in matters of personal status it was a codification, simplification, and unification of the shari’ah.”17 The parliament passed a law in 1931 defining the religious courts as special courts. The law limited the jurisdiction of religious courts to marriage, divorce, and the appointment of guardians and trustees. The religious courts could only decide whether an accused was guilty or not. Only state attorneys could pass sentences on those who were found guilty. The law also stipulated that the state courts were superior to the religious courts and that only the former could refer cases to the latter, and not the reverse. Finally, a law concerning the reorganization of the judiciary and the employment of the judges was passed in 1936 and made it almost impossible for clerics to serve as judges in the courts. The law specified that only the holder of a degree from the Tehran Faculty of Law or from a foreign university could sit as a judge in the courts. It further required that the judges in the ministry “who do not possess such a degree must pass special examinations in Iranian and foreign law in order to remain in the employ of the Ministry, and, at any rate, may not rise above the rank of six on an eleven point promotion scale.”18 This law prevented clerics from serving in the ministry.19 The educational reforms in Iran began with the improvement and expansion of elementary and secondary schools. The expansion of the public school system reduced the number of students and teachers in religious schools. First, the graduates of public schools had better job opportunities, especially in state employment. For example, the law mentioned earlier made a degree from the University of Tehran mandatory for judges. Second, several laws provided opportunities for state officials to harass religious students.20 An example of these laws, the Uniformity of Dress Law, passed in 1928, required all males to wear European dress and hat. Although clerics were exempted from this law, another law passed in 1929 tightened the conditions for exemptions for students and teachers, with their status having to be approved by the Ministry of Education. Another track in educational reforms was taken by increasing the control of the state over religious schools. A government decree was issued in 1929 and specified that the Ministry of Education would establish boards to examine religious students

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in Persian and Arabic language and literature, jurisprudence, and logic. In addition to this, a person had to pass examinations to get a certificate to be a teacher in a religious school. A law of 1930 specified the examination schedule for religious schools. In 1934, the Ministry of Education took over the responsibility for providing a curriculum to be followed in the theological colleges. In Iran, the state began to increase its control over the pious foundations, the waqfs, with the ratification of the civil code in 1928. Yet the most extensive regulation came with the ratification of the Endowments Law in 1934 and the passing of an administrative statute in 1935. These steps broadened the jurisdiction of the department of endowments over the waqfs. After these changes, the department was authorized to take over the administration of all waqfs lacking a known administrator. More importantly, the department would oversee “revenues, expenditures; registration of property, contesting claims, initiating legal proceedings; approving or rejecting applications for long-term leases; and ‘comprehensive supervision over all matters related to the interests of the endowment.’ ”21 The department was also authorized to approve or reject budgets submitted to it. These measures allowed the state to take over many religious schools. Another measure taken by the state in this area was the passing of the Law Concerning the Registration of Documents and Property in 1932. Previously, the religious courts had monopolized the registration of legal documents related to property, marriage, and divorce. As Banani notes, such notarial work had constituted the largest source of revenue for religious organizations. The law required that all documentation be registered only in the state courts.22 As this discussion illustrates, the consolidation of the new regime and secularization reforms happened successively, not simultaneously, a fact that had an impact on the type of secular state that emerged in Iran. The new state rulers in Iran came to political power through a coup d’état amidst the civil disorder that gripped Iran. The coup was most welcomed by the urban groups who had been under constant tribal threat. Through successive military campaigns under the direction of Reza Khan, the state could pacify the tribal elements and bring internal order and peace to the country. “Reza Khan’s military leadership, and later government, attracted a good deal of support from an even larger public because of the peace and stability which it bought.”23 This achievement of the state rulers against the tribes further helped the new rulers consolidate their hold on power and increased their prestige, especially among the urban groups.24 The support of the religious community added further speed to the consolidation of their power, whose support in the parliament enabled the new rulers to depose the Qajar dynasty and replace it with the Pahlavi dynasty. These two acts marked the consolidation of the power of the new state rulers in late 1925. Hence, when the new state rulers introduced these reforms affecting religious community/institutions, it must be remembered that they had already consolidated their power and hence created a relatively

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safe political environment. Once the reforms started in Iran, there was no serious possibility of a nationwide rebellion against the new state rulers. As for protests led by the ulama against the state-building measures, the show of even a small-scale military reaction would prove to be a highly persuasive device to stop their evolution.25 The distinguishing feature of the reforms in Iran, as emphasized so far, was the lack of political competition among the state rulers in the same degree as we observed in Turkey. Thus, there was no strategic incentive for the state rulers to merge religious institutions with the state apparatus in an attempt to undermine the possibility of a coalition forming against them. Ironically, the state was weaker overall than the state in Turkey. When the new rulers came to power in Iran, they inherited a failed state from the previous period, as evidenced by the extreme fragmentation of power in that society. As the discussion in the previous section showed, the central authority in Iran had no central army to enforce peace and order beyond the boundaries of the capital, Tehran. Creating internal order and security was at the top of the agenda of every government established during the period, but success was spectacularly lacking in this area.26 The only effective military force in the country was the Cossack Brigade, which numbered just 4,000. Moreover, this force had served as a Russian tool during the period up to 1917 and had been staffed by Russian officers. Reza Khan could rise to the top of this military force only after the Russian revolution, which allowed purges in the army as the Cossack militia lost its primary foreign backing. At this point, the force of foreign fighters became more politically dependent upon their Iranian patron. When Reza Khan marched toward Tehran to take over the government, the incumbent government could do nothing but accept the takeover. This centralized power of the newcomers, however, did not extend beyond the capital. When the country faced the danger of invasion by the Russians and the British, it was not the state officials who organized local militias to defend Iran, but the clerics. Thus, in administration, the army, education, and the legal system, the new rulers of Iran and Turkey inherited opposite legacies from their predecessors. Refl ecting this, in a book comparing the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Pasha and Reza Khan, Eric Jan Zürcher, says, “When looked at from an Ottoman perspective, therefore, the task that faced Reza Khan, and his accomplishments, resemble those of the reforming Sultan Mahmud II (1808–39) as much as they do Atatürk’s.”27 While Reza Khan had first to build the very basics of modern state, Mustafa Kemal Pasha was at a much more advantageous position: he could build on the Ottoman Empire’s former investments on a European-style army and state bureaucracy. The new state rulers in Iran needed financial resources for more immediate needs than incorporating religious institutions. First and foremost, they had to build an army almost from scratch and demilitarize the tribes to provide internal security.28 Between 1921 and 1941, an average of 33.5 percent of the total state revenue was spent on the army. Oil revenues, which were not

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included in the budget, were largely allocated to military purchases of ships, planes, and tanks.29 On the other hand, the state allocated only 4 percent of its total expenditure to education.30 Although the state revenues went to the army, the state could not even pay the army field officers well or feed the soldiers.31 Moreover, it took time for the state to recover from its financial weakness. It was not until 1932 that oil revenues increased, after an agreement between Iran and the British Petroleum Company. Oil revenues still accounted for a small share of government revenue and even in 1937/1938 were just 13 percent of the total.32 In addition to the weakness of the state in Iran, the high organizational capacity of the religious community would also have made a “merger” a very costly choice for the state rulers. A high organizational capacity of the religious community increases the cost of merger for three reasons. First, it allows them to bargain with state rulers collectively. This implies higher wages for the members of the religious community. Second, incorporating such a religious community into the state creates a state within a state and thus poses a more direct challenge for state rulers. Third, less bureaucratic states incur more costs in creating new posts within the state apparatus.33 Religious institutions in Iran presented a different picture, in terms of internal organization, from the picture in Turkey. They were administered and staffed by the same hierarchically structured group of religious scholars, the ulama, who were tightly connected with each other through the networks of religious schools (medrese), mosques, and shrines. At the top of the ulama hierarchy stood the religious scholar called the marja-i taqlid, or the source of emulation. “Superiority in learning is generally held to be the primary prerequisite for the selection of marja’, though no clear cut set of criteria governs the choice. Ultimately, the followers (those who are muqallid to the marja’) decide which marja’ to follow. Ideally, one mujtahid is so renowned and revered for his knowledge and piety that he is recognized as the object of emulation for all Shi’a in matters of religious law.”34 The superiority in knowledge and the sheer number of followers and students determine the scholar who will occupy this top position. Yet there were times when several members of the ulama occupied this position.35 Below the position of marja-i taqlid stood the body of religious scholars, the mujtahids, who had permission to issue authoritative opinions on Islamic law. This second tier of religious scholars was also divided into two groups. The religious class, called the mulla, occupied the lowest ranks among the ulama. They served different functions such as leaders of daily prayers, preachers, instructors, and reciters of religious tragedies.36 The lowest ranks of the ulama, while performing these functions, also represented the marja they followed in their localities and collected religious taxes in the name of the marja from his followers. In return, the mulla were paid almost half of the religious taxes they collected, giving these groups far more autonomy than their counterparts in Turkey enjoyed. Therefore, religious institutions of all sorts, such as religious schools, courts, endowments, shrines, and all other rituals,

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were administered and staffed by this hierarchically structured group of religious scholars. The ulama of Iran were also divided; the top echelon of the ulama, especially, frequently disagreed with each other. Yet these matters were mostly ideological issues, such as the extent of involvement in political events and so forth.37 In emergencies the ulama could easily suppress ideological disagreements and act in unison. Even if the Iranian state rulers had wanted to incorporate the religious institutions for some other reason, such as to staff the growing bureaucracy, the opportunity cost of incorporation for the religious community was still very high. There are several reasons for this. First, Iranian society had gone through a different experience from Turkish society in the period prior to the rise of Reza Shah. It did not experience any interstate war, but rather underwent civil disorder. As it had the Ottoman economy, the First World War also paralyzed the Iranian economy. But the broader society did not have to provide significant economic or human resources for a war effort. This is evident from the population statistics. Iran’s population was 10.5 million in 1910. It became 11.3 million in 1920, a 7 percent increase.38 Also, the population did not suffer from large-scale dislocations or migrations. Even the invasion of Iran in this period by Russia and Britain did not lead to any society-wide mobilization of human and economic resources. In fact, there was no central authority that could have organized that. With no central authority to mobilize them, the urban dwellers, such as the merchants, craftsmen, money lenders, religious organizations, and absentee landowners, simply had to take care of themselves against the independent tribal forces. This common enemy strengthened the interrelationships among these groups, which had already formed a common alliance (further strengthened by intergroup marriages)39 against the Iranian shah in the 19th century. As discussed earlier, it was the power of this alliance that forced the shah to grant a constitution and to open the parliament. The economic institution called the bazaar served as a center around which this alliance materialized. It was the bazaar where “landowners sold their crops, craftsmen manufactured their goods, tradesmen marketed their wares, borrowers raised loans, and philanthropic businessmen endowed mosques and maktabs (traditional schools). The bazaar was, in fact, the granary, the workshop, the marketplace, the bank, the religious nucleus, and the educational center of the whole society . . . each craft, trade and occupation was tightly structured into asnaf (guilds), with their own separate organization, hierarchy, traditions, ceremonies, and sometimes even their own dialects.”40 This institution served not only an economic purpose but also a political purpose in helping these groups to organize and act collectively. As the previous chapter discussed, the ulama in Iran had been a part of this grand urban coalition, mostly serving as their leaders, especially in political events leading to the constitutional revolution. The leadership of the ulama was evident in the disproportionate ratio of ulama deputies in

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parliament, partly because most of the guilds chose members of the ulama as their representatives.41 The leadership of the ulama and their strong ties with the societal forces made them a formidable group in the politics of Iran. Nonreligious intellectuals had to appeal to the ulama to arouse nationalistic feelings to oppose the dynasty and to make political reforms;42 Article 2 of the constitution created a board of five top clerics to review parliamentary legislation. As we have seen, Reza Khan also needed the support of the ulama in his rise to power. Even his brutal policies could not eradicate the power of the ulama among the masses: when he abdicated from power, his son, Muhammad Reza Khan, had to appeal to the ulama to consolidate his position.43 Second, the religious institutions themselves were a source of opportunity and upward mobility for local people, through the availability of jobs for graduates of the religious schools. Since the Iranian state lacked the capacity or political program to increase the opportunities available to local businesses, and could not provide much in the way of state-sector employment, it presented a poor image compared with that of the Turkish state. It is likely that some of the ulama took jobs for the Iranian state, but we can legitimately conclude that the constitutional revolution initiated a period that saw the increasing autonomy of the ulama from the state in financial and employment matters. More importantly, perhaps, the financial resources of the ulama in Iran were much more autonomous from the state and depended instead on the ulama’s strong ties with the masses. The religious community had various sources of income, such as land income and religious taxes. Without any effective redistribution of land, which was not implemented until the 1960s, the income from land would help the religious community/institutions survive financially. In addition, the organizational capacity of the religious community allowed them to collect religious taxes and gifts from the masses more effectively, without engendering competition among different segments of the religious community. Their already existing ties, especially with the urban groups, facilitated the infl ow of religious taxes and gifts into the hands of the ulama. One estimate is that in about 1860 the religious community could spend 2 million tomans per year, which was half of the state budget of 4 million tomans; 75 percent of this amount came from the lands belonging to the religious institutions. If we include payments from the government and gifts from the masses, the amount increased to 2.4 million tomans.44 As we discussed before, the constitutional revolution of 1905 led to the collapse of the state in Iran, which further cut whatever economic ties had existed between the state and the religious community/institutions. Hence, the opportunity cost of incorporation was very high in Iran, which meant that the state rulers would have had to offer much higher wages to the religious community in order to merge the religious institutions with the state apparatus. Therefore the state rulers did not choose a merger. Instead, they took measures that gradually excluded the religious community from

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the political system. The religious community, in their turn, mostly remained aloof and in due course developed their own internal organization and school system. A few attempts at protests remained local and were easily ended with a show of military force, despite the lack of close coordination within this state agency.

AFTER SEPARATION In the face of an ever-encroaching state apparatus, the religious community kept its loosely structured internal hierarchy and its close ties to the merchant class in Iran.45 Dismantled from the state, the religious community began to invest in strengthening their financial base, developing their religious school system and engaging in an even greater variety of welfare activities. The seminaries formed its backbone. The graduate seminarians staffed the mosques all around the country, forming a strong link between the masses and the higher-ranking scholars. Religious taxes and gifts fl owed from the followers into the hands of a few high-ranking religious scholars. The Iranian religious community remained very politically inactive during most of the Pahlavi period. There emerged a few individual religious scholars who were actively involved in politics: for example, Hassan Modarres and Abol Ghassem Kashani46 served in parliament. Yet these individuals did so at the expense of losing their infl uence in religious institutions. A telling anecdote comes from Ruhollah Khomeini, who had a deep respect for both Hassan Modarres47 and Abol Ghassem Kashani. According to Khomeini’s account, Kashani enters a full room where religious students and scholars are meeting. No one, not even religious students who are far below Kashani in religious learning, leaves their seat for Kashani. Only Khomeini leaves his seat so Kashani can sit.48 Both Haeri-Yazdi and Borujerdi, the administrators of the Qum seminaries and the marjas of their times, refrained from active political participation. Except for a few protesting declarations, neither was involved in any political activity. Borujerdi’s antipathy toward politics went as far as prohibiting the members of the religious community from becoming involved in politics. In this vein, he convened a meeting in Qum in 1949 and invited more than 2,000 members of the religious community. The meeting adopted a strong resolution against involvement in politics. The resolution further mandated that “opposition to this resolution by clergymen would result in a withdrawal of recognition of the offender’s status as a professional in the religious institution.”49 The separationist model of state secularity survived in Iran until the Iranian revolution of 1979. In the concluding chapter, I will discuss the fate of this model and refl ect on what made it succumb to the turmoil of the 1970s.

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NOTES 1. Cited in Abrahamian (1969:294). 2. Abrahamian (1969:296). 3. The Cossack Brigade was created during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah in 1879 and was organized by Russian officers. The unit was the most effective military force in Iran. See Banani (1961:53). 4. Najmabadi (1993:667). 5. Najmabadi (1993:667). 6. Banani (1961:35). 7. Cited in Najmabadi (1993:667). 8. Hiro (1985:22). 9. Cronin (1997:95). 10. Reza Khan’s tribal policy continued until the end of his rule. Not only did he put down tribal revolts through a series of military campaigns against the tribes, which continued until the 1930s, but he also tried to destroy their social and economic foundations by forced settlement of the tribes after the 1930s. 11. The following is based on Arjomand (1988), Avery, Hambly and Melville (1991), Faghfoory (1987), and Hiro (1985). 12. Cited in Hiro (1985:23). 13. Hiro (1985:24). 14. See chapter 5 in Cronin (1997) for a more detailed account of Reza Khan’s struggle with the ex-Gendarmerie officers. 15. Cited in Arjomand (1988:81). 16. Even the revolutionaries of 1979 left the civil code almost intact. See Gill and Keshavarzian (1999). 17. Banani (1961:71). 18. Akhavi (1980:39). 19. Arjomand (1988:66). 20. Harassment of religious students by officials led to protests even by some clerics, such as Ha’iri, who were aloof from politics during this period. Ha’iri sent a telegram to Reza Shah, saying, “Although I have up to now not interfered in any [political] matter, I hear that steps are being taken that are openly contradictory to the Ja’fari path and the law of Islam, [in the face of which] it is difficult for me any longer to restrain myself and remain tolerant.” Quoted in Akhavi (1980:44). 21. Akhavi (1980:57). 22. Banani (1961:73). 23. Katouzian (2006:19). 24. On social support helping the rise of Reza Khan, see Katouzian (2003). 25. Algar (1991) provides a few examples of protests easily terminated by a small show of military force. The protests remained very ineffective and local. 26. Banani (1961:32–36). 27. Zürcher (2004:98–99). 28. Cronin (1997). 29. Banani (1961:59). 30. Banani (1961:108). 31. Cronin (1997). 32. Issawi (1971:374). 33. It is highly probable that after a threshold in the strength of the state, the costs of creating new posts within the state apparatus increase if inefficiencies arising from over-employment are taken into account. Thus, the functional form

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34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

From Religious Empires to Secular States of the relationship between the strength of the state and the cost of incorporation is probably U-shaped. Walbridge (2001:4). For example, both Naini and Isfahani, who played supporting roles in Reza Khan’s rise to power, occupied the position of marja-i taqlid. During the same time, Ha’iri, who revived and developed the religious institutions in Qum, was also marja-i taqlid. After these marjas, Burujirdi became the sole marja. Burujirdi was followed by eight marjas, one of whom was Khomeini. See Moussavi (1994). Moussavi (1994:297). Ideological disagreements still continue among the ulama in contemporary Iran, especially about the appropriate level of political involvement of the ulama. Mitchell (2003). Lambton (1993). Abrahamian (1969:290). The guilds were an important aspect of Ottoman economic life too. In particular, Muslim merchants, craftsmen, and tradesmen were organized into guilds. But during the 19th century, the importance of these organizations declined; at the end of the century, they were no more than registers of the members of the groups. Hiro (1985:19). See Keddie (1962). More than a century later, Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian female Nobel laureate, still says that democracy could not come to Iran if its coming opposed religion. This is from a talk she delivered at Northwestern University. Hiro (1985:30). Taken from Floor (2001:68). An interesting statistic is provided by Fischer (1980:94). Fischer looks at the genealogies of four prominent scholars—Kazem Shariatmadari, Sehab ed-din Marashi, Hadi Milani, and Reza Golpayegani—and finds out that out of 275 people in the genealogies of these religious scholars, 88 were either merchants or shopkeepers and 105 religious scholars. For more on Kashani, see Faghfoory (1978). A picture of Modarres appears on the Iranian 100 rial banknote. This anecdote is cited in Moin (1999). Akhavi (1980:62:63).

6

Taming the Church Religion and the Russian Empire

Soviet Russia adopted a model of state secularity in the 1920s that sought to eradicate religion and religious institutions. The next chapter argues that this choice was the natural outcome in the particular strategic context the state secularizers found themselves in. One feature of that strategic context was that the state secularizers faced a confrontational religious community that actively sought to undermine and resist the new regime. In order to understand this attitude of the religious community, we have to look at the resources at their disposal in the time of state secularization. As we will see, the religious community in Russia was hierarchically organized, but also deeply divided, and enjoyed no extensive links with a broad spectrum of societal groups. Still, the religious community put up a quite stubborn opposition against the new regime. This condition of the religious community was the historical legacy of the Russian Empire for Soviet Russia. This chapter narrates the evolution of this historical legacy. The narrative shows that like the Ottoman and Safavid states, the Russian state was not ambitious in claiming and establishing absolute sovereignty within its territories and delegated critical public functions to religious community/institutions. This began to change in the early 18th century as the Russian rulers began to claim absolute sovereignty and implemented reforms to that effect. In other words, the Russian state had been secular in many ways well before the early 20th century. This chapter first discusses the post-Mongol politico-religious context in Russia and then illustrates how intensely the religious community, unified under a hierarchical structure, the Russian Orthodox Church, had taken active part in the Russian imperial state-building project from the early 14th century to the late 17th century. The chapter then looks at how the Russian imperial state had become proto-secular starting with the early 18th century and how the successive developments had brought about the condition in which the religious community found itself in the 1920s.

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THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH: GROOMING AN IMPERIAL STATE1 Orthodox Christianity entered Russia in the 9th century. Unlike the spread of Islam among the nomadic Turks, which was led by disorganized Sufi orders, it was spread by the organized and systematic campaigns of the patriarchate of Constantinople. In this missionary campaign the church found a secular ally, the Kievan state. In the two and a half centuries after the introduction of Christianity, Russia underwent tumultuous historical developments—from the fragmentation of the Kievan state to the ensuing internecine warfare among the Kievan princes. In each of these developments, however brutal on the Russian people, the church found a way to survive and even became politically indispensable and economically wealthier. The church attained autonomy from the Russian state; increased its landholdings; protected its judicial privileges, given and acknowledged by successive Russian princes; and penetrated deeper into the society through churches and monasteries. Even the reign of the Mongols would prove to be beneficial to the church.2 For example, both the grand prince and the metropolitan were directly put under the Mongol khan, thus completing the process by which the church emerged as an agent on its own. The Mongols also granted special privileges to the church, such as exempting its personnel and lands from tax and other duties. In return the church recognized the Mongols as legitimate rulers, conferring upon them a religious title, “tsar,” symbolizing the divine sanction behind the Mongol rule. Like the Safavids in Iran and the Ottomans in Anatolia, the Muscovites in Russia rose to power in the post-Mongol period. The Muscovites shared the same religion with the people, and a powerful religious community, hierarchically organized under the church, had enjoyed great prestige and had at its disposal both material and human resources. Not surprisingly, the Muscovites sought the support of the church and received that support generously. What symbolized the church’s support behind the Muscovite state most clearly was that Alexis, the metropolitan who served from 1353 to 1390, transferred the metropolitanate from Kiev to Moscow. The church provided a critical help to the ruling dynasty, the Daniilovichis, to solve their legitimacy crisis. The church “leaders developed concepts and mythologies that served their ecclesiastical interests, but also imparted legitimacy to the Daniilovich princes and elevated their status above the other members of the dynasty.”3 In one crucial attempt, the church presented the Daniilovichis as the defenders of Orthodox Christianity. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 before the Turks added a considerable weight to this assertion. In one further step, Filofei, the elder of the Yelizarov Monastery in Pskov, argued in an epistle addressed to Vasili III (1505–1503), the grand duke of Moscow, that Moscow became the third Rome, which should not fall: “Instead of Rome

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and Constantinople, there now shines throughout the universe, like the sun in the heavens, a third new Rome in your sovereign empire, the Holy Synodal Apostolic Church . . . for two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourth there will not.”4 Once the Mongol yoke was thrown off in the middle of the 15th century, the Muscovites swiftly expanded their territories, eventually covering much of the former Kievan Rus territories by the second decade of the 16th century.5 Under Ivan IV (1533–1584) they further expanded toward the east, opening the gates of Siberia. This territorial expansion came in tandem with subordinating the noble families to the central authority. Refl ecting the increasing power of the grand prince of Moscow vis-à-vis the noble families, in 1547, a powerful metropolitan, Makarii, bestowed upon Ivan IV a religious title, “tsar,” whom he instructed his folk to obey: “If the tsar’s heart is in the hand of God, then all subjects should obey and fear, according to God’s will, the tsar’s commands.”6 Ivan IV also pursued military reforms that consolidated his status within the Muscovite political system. Between 1545 and 1550, he established the first semi-standing army of the Muscovite state, musketeer regiments, which were paid and trained regularly. The number of musketeers increased steadily throughout the rest of the century. A sign of the growing power of the tsar, Ivan IV also introduced regular service rules for the landholding families, applicable to all sorts of lands: even the hereditary landowners owed service to the tsar to keep their privileges intact, to enjoy extra benefits, and to avoid punishment.7 Fifty years later, the church’s status was further raised to match the Russian tsar. The church had already achieved an autocephalous status by the middle of the 15th century. In 1589, it became a patriarchate. This was in fact an act carried out on the initiative of the tsar in order to match the status of the head of the church with that of the head of the state: only a patriarch could crown a tsar. In the early 17th century, the Russian state collapsed as Russia plunged into a period called the “Time of Troubles.” First, the wars against Poland and Sweden exhausted the resources of the Muscovite state. Then, Ivan IV’s domestic terror, known as oprichnina, took its toll on Russia. The rest came rather swiftly. A succession crisis, then a terrible famine, and finally a disastrous rebellion began the “Time of Troubles” in 1603. Poland and Sweden invaded parts of Russia, including the capital city, Moscow. The period only ended in 1613 with the election of Michael Romanov as the tsar.8 Once the Romanovs, the new ruling dynasty, consolidated their power, they restarted the subordination of the nobility to the central authority. The declining power of the nobility was refl ected in the military power balance. For example, in the Smolensk War of 1632–1634 against the commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, the Russian army could muster around 100,000 men, out of which only around 27,000 were cavalrymen provided by the Russian hereditary landowning elite.9

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Not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively, the Russian landowning military elite could not catch up with the recent developments in military techniques. In contrast, starting in the 1630s, the successive tsars began to devote their attention and resources to the newly formed regiments, which had both infantry and cavalry sections. Trained and officered by foreigners, new formation regiments gradually increased in size and eventually outnumbered all the hitherto existing military categories of the Russian army.10 The old cavalry forces, the traditional prerogative of the landowning military elite, and the musketeers continued to serve the Russian army well until the end of the 17th century, but with declining importance.11 The growing size of the Russian military necessitated a more refined and better functioning bureaucracy as the need for finance increased in tandem, the number of clerks increasing from some 1,600 people in the middle of the 17th century to 4,600 by the beginning of the 18th century.12 As the state in Russia transformed along the lines described here, the power balance between the tsar and the nobility shifted favorably toward the former. However, the nobility had not ceased to exist, nor had the nobility’s importance declined. The nobility continued to play critical roles in the Russian political system. The tsar depended on the nobility not only in filling the top positions in the Russian military and central bureaucracy, but also in administering the provinces. As the landowning class, the nobility’s interest was well protected often at the expense of the rest of the Russian population. For example, serfdom was introduced and enforced by the Russian state, which often brought the fugitives back to their lords.13 In the meantime, the church reached the apex of its power. Six years after Michael Romanov became the Russian tsar, his father, Filaret Romanov, was enthroned as the patriarch of Moscow and all Russia. As the father of the tsar, Filaret enjoyed more privileges than any other patriarch: he carried the title “great sovereign,” reserved for the tsar only, and in the next fourteen years he basically ruled the country in the name of his young, inexperienced son.14 It was then a short step to argue that the patriarch and the tsar were corulers of Russia: “Because the patriarch is the guardian of the Christian truth, he should be given equal dignity to the tsar as called for by canon law with the title of Velikii Gosudar’ [great lord].”15 Patriarch Nikon, who served from 1652 to 1666, took this step.16 Signifying the newly elevated status of the church, Nikon carried the title “great sovereign” with Alexis’s (1645–1676) permission. This had previously been used by only one patriarch, Filaret.17 SACRIFICING THE CHURCH UNITY As this account shows, the history of the Russian church in the period spanning from the late 10th century to the early 18th century can be characterized as one of accumulation of great political and economic power. This accumulation coincided with an increasing entrenchment of the church

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hierarchy with the Russian state. However, this achievement came at a great cost: first, it alienated the nobility, and second, the church lost its internal unity. In both cases the church had become increasingly dependent on the support of the tsar, with a resulting loss of autonomy of action. First, the church alienated the nobility. As mentioned before, the church had enjoyed extensive legal and economic privileges, as a result of which it accumulated extensive tracts of land. To have a comparative perspective, in 1678, the patriarchate owned lands with 7,128 peasant households, the six metropolitanates 7,167 households, six archbishoprics 4,494, and monasteries and churches around 100,000 peasant households. In contrast, the total number of households owned by the nobles in the boyar council was 46,771, with the richest layman owning 4,609 households.18 More importantly, the church was instrumental in the creation of autocracy in Russia by elevating the status of the ruling family. Both developments became a cause of envy and hatred for the Russian nobility. A legal code, ratified by the so-called Assembly of the Land convened by the tsar Alexis (1645–1676) in 1649, refl ects the nobility’s discontent with the church. The code’s primary objective was to curtail the economic power of the church.19 The code confiscated some of the urban properties of the church and forbade further land acquisition.20 More importantly, it drastically curtailed the legal privileges of the church. The church continued to be responsible for adjudicated spiritual issues, which involved cases such as blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, family law, inheritance, and divorce, involving all Christians,21 but put “brigands, robbers, thieves, fugitive serfs, and the accomplices of all such persons living on patriarchal, Episcopal and monastic estates”22 under the tsar’s jurisdiction. The code of 1649 also instituted serfdom in Russia. Thereby, the landowners obtained extensive judicial rights over their peasants. The same rule applied to the church as well, which was, after all, the largest landowner. Fortunately for the church, the code proved to be ineffective in creating a change in the fortunes of the church, for the code had not been rigorously implemented. The tsar, Alexis, apparently did not intend to implement the code with full consequences. He even did not follow the prescriptions of the code in bequeathing land to the church: in 1672–1673, for example, he granted huge tracts of land in Ukraine to the patriarchate, the bishoprics, and the monasteries.23 Contrary to the code’s objectives, the church in fact enjoyed an increase in the number of peasant households in its lands between 1653 and 1718—37 percent in patriarchal and Episcopal lands and 36 percent in monastic lands.24 Second, starting in the second half of the 14th century, the church became increasingly subject to intense criticisms raised within its own ranks. Rather than being seriously considered, these criticisms were branded simply as heretical and to be dealt with harshly. A number of church councils, which met in 1488, 1490, 1504, 1525, and 1531, addressed the problem of heresy, signaling the end of the doctrinal unity of the Russian church.25

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In the first serious incident, known as the Strigol’niki heresy, critics accused the church of charging the clerical candidates fees for ordination, something they found un-canonical. Furthermore, they claimed that all sacraments performed by the Russian clergy, who obtained their clerical positions through payment of fees, should be rejected as invalid. In this first instance, the Russian church was lenient, asking the Novgorod and Pskov authorities, then not under the rule of the Muscovite state, to counsel against the heretics, not use force against them.26 In the second incident,27 which also appeared in Novgorod,28 the critics, known as the Judaizers for being accused of spreading Judaism in Russia, raised more serious objections to the church: monasticism and trinity (hence, the divinity of Jesus) were to be rejected, and icons were to be desecrated. This heresy became more threatening when it found support in Moscow: supported by Ivan III, two of the critics became rectors of two important cathedrals in Moscow. As a result the church could not infl ict any serious punishment on the Judaizers for a long time. Only after Ivan III repented for his support did it become possible to punish the heretics. In 1504, with support from Ivan III, a church council met, condemning a few heretics to death and imprisoning several dozen others. In another serious incident,29 the Russian church was shaken by a controversy about the monastic acquisition of land. The critics found extensive landholding, or excessive wealth, and spirituality incompatible. The struggle went on throughout the 1520s and ended in 1531 with a church council condemning two leading critics, Vassian and Maxim, to confinement in a monastery on charge of heresy.30 In the most serious case, however, the church hierarchy itself initiated the great schism. Well until the 17th century, the church could not find the time and did not have the power to standardize its liturgy and regularize its calendar of events. Its liturgy, for example, contained many pagan practices common among the formerly pagan populations in Russia.31 The church hierarchy had also not established a strong infl uence over the monasteries and the parish clergy. Large monasteries were autonomous organizations, having their own economic resources and staff. Small monasteries were even more on their own: without any official control, they mushroomed throughout Russia. Wandering monks and nuns or self-declared priests simply added more chaos to the Russian religious structure.32 The relationship between the church hierarchy and the parish clergy was more distanced. In fact, they constituted two distinct social strata. The church hierarchy, known as the black clergy, was celibate and distant from the people and enjoyed the real fruits of the church’s economic and political power. The parish clergy, known as the white clergy, acquired their positions largely because they were born into clerical families. They were married and lived among the people, like all Russian villagers, tilling the land, charging fees for their religious services, and getting drunk. Their training in the priesthood included only basic reading and writing skills and on-site training in liturgy.

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Starting from the first half of the 17th century, the church hierarchy attempted to assert more control over the monasteries and the parish churches.33 In this vein Patriarch Filaret greatly expanded his office to collect the patriarch’s share in the religious services offered by the bishops and local priests: as a result of expansion, in 1627–1629, the number of patriarchal officers exceeded that of the tsar’s officers. Filaret also attacked the financial and juridical privileges of the monasteries: he set up an office investigating the privileges of the monasteries, most of which were curtailed by the office. All monasteries, but few major ones, were required to pay certain taxes to the patriarchate.34 An important move by the church hierarchy to establish greater control over the parish clergy came with the church council of 1666–1667.35 New bishoprics were established to extend the patriarchate’s control over distant regions and independently functioning monasteries.36 In a similar vein, the council abolished a rule set by Metropolitan Peter in the 14th century: priests were to be suspended from their offices upon the death of their wives, remarriage being possible if the widowed priest left the priestly office and took another occupation. The 1667 council changed this rule: a young widowed priest could marry again, without leaving his employment in the church, if his bishop gave him a special license. The applications for special licenses were interrogated in the Episcopal palaces about their previous experiences, dependents, personal lives, and confessions. More importantly, the licenses were granted for a period of time, after which the priests had to renew them again after going through the same ordeal.37 The establishment of more administrative control over the monasteries and the parish churches was accompanied by an equally powerful drive to reform the church.38 This initiative came from the tsar. Having his own international ambitions, possibly “the eventual unification of all Orthodox peoples under the aegis of the Russian Tsar,”39 Tsar Alexis staged a coup within the church hierarchy and, between 1649 and 1651, brought a group of reformist clergy to the high positions in the church. In the last step of this coup, Nikon was installed as the patriarch in 1652.40 Known as Zealots of Piety, this group had long advocated the regulation of the liturgy and the elimination of moral laxity in the church. When he was metropolitan of Novgorod, Nikon, for example, fought against moral corruption in the Solovki Monastery: in August 1649 he warned monks and priests not to “feed feminine-looking children and keep them in their cells.”41 Patriarch Nikon’s ecclesiastical reform simply aimed at adjusting the liturgy of the Russian church in line with those of other Eastern Orthodox churches. In 1652–1654, he introduced a number of ritualistic changes, such as, among others, in the sign of the cross, in the form of the cross, in the number and manner of prostrations and bows, in the number of Alleluia gratifications, and in the transliteration of Jesus into Slavonic.42 The Printing Office published new liturgical books and a treatise written to justify Nikon’s reforms in 1654 and 1655.

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Nikon’s reforms provoked the great schism of the 17th century. This was partly caused by Nikon’s strategy for dealing with opponents. He convened a series of church councils in 1652–1654 to approve his reforms, but also to have his opponents condemned. For example, two prominent critics of Nikon’s reforms, Ivan Neronov and Archpriest Avvakum, were sent far away from Moscow: the former was excommunicated and jailed in a monastery and the latter was exiled to Siberia. Meanwhile Nikon’s personal relationships with Tsar Alexis deteriorated. In 1658, Nikon withdrew to a monastery without leaving his post as the patriarch. The disagreement between Nikon and Alexis could not be reconciled. Finally, Alexis convened an ecumenical council in 1666–1667 with the participation of the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria. The council deposed Nikon and imprisoned him in a remote monastery. The ecumenical council of 1666–1667 ended Nikon’s career but did not touch his reforms. Instead, the council confirmed that the changes made by Nikon were in accordance with Orthodox teachings. After confirming Nikon’s reforms, the ecumenical council threatened the dissidents with excommunication.43 The council of 1666–1667 thus could not stop, but rather further entrenched, the schism.44 Avvakum and his colleagues continued their virulent attacks, expressed in apocalyptical terms, on the official church: Moscow, the third Rome, accepted the heresy. Therefore, the end of the world should be approaching. Hence, the antichrist was about to come, Nikon and Alexis thus being the precursors of the antichrist. The date of the ecumenical council was even meaningful in this respect: 1666 marked the beginning of the apocalypse, for 666 was the number of the antichrist.45 Worse, the schism spread and turned into an antistate and antichurch movement known as “Old Believers” in order to emphasize their devotion to traditional Russian practices. The Russian state stood behind the church with its full force: neither persecutions and intimidations, nor the burning of Avvakum at the stake in 1682, helped. Old Believers managed to survive, fl eeing to the distant corners of the empire, founding their own communities, and spreading their message. As a result, the Russian Orthodox Church was permanently divided. BUILDING A MODERN SOVEREIGN STATE By the late 17th century, the basic features of the Russian political system, autocracy, serfdom, and Orthodoxy, had already been well established. With the ongoing military and administrative reforms, Russia became a potential European power, able to defeat Poland in the war of 1654–1667 and make territorial gains at her expense in Ukraine, including Kiev. It was Peter the Great who turned that potential into a reality. As that potential turned into

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reality, the imperial Russian state also assumed many critical features of the modern sovereign state and, therefore, become proto-secular. Born in 1672, Peter became the effective ruler of Russia in 1696. In 1697 he set out on a grand tour of Western Europe to study and collect firsthand information on shipbuilding in the Dutch Republic and England. On his return he instigated major military reforms. He introduced a new recruitment system in 1705. In 1699, for example, the army could muster only 32,000 of what was supposed to be around 80,000 men. With the new system, by the end of Peter’s reign Russia could muster about 200,000 men, giving Russia one of the largest armies in Europe. More importantly, perhaps, Peter managed to create internal cohesion, solidarity, and an esprit de corps within the army.46 Peter also reformed the Russian educational system, which had been dominated by the church. The military and other state institutions, which were growing in tandem, needed better trained officers and a more efficient bureaucracy than the church’s school system could produce. Peter established the School of Mathematics in 1701, the Artillery Academy in 1705, the Engineering Academy in 1712, the Naval Academy in 1715, the School of Mines in 1716, and the Academy of Sciences in 1725. To provide students for these schools of higher education, Peter also established elementary “cipher” schools, which were later absorbed by garrison schools, also established by Peter.47 Peter’s reforms brought a process, which had already been in motion, to its natural conclusion by changing the terms of ennoblement. Service to the state had already been an important way into the Russian nobility, but so had family lineage, or heredity. Peter introduced a new ranking system, the Table of Ranks, in 1722, according to which “service to the tsar, not the mere acquisition of noble lands or serfs, constituted the only legitimate source of noble status.”48 However transformative they were, Peter’s reforms nonetheless consolidated the basic Russian social structure and the relationship between the state and the landowning nobility. The lives of the great Russian masses remained largely unaltered.49 Finally, Peter became a conduit of Western culture among the Russian nobility; he forced the nobles, for example, to shave their beards, and he introduced official assemblies to be attended by men and women wearing Western-style tight-fitting dress, rather than loose Muscovite kaftans.50 The thorough Westernization of the Russian elite continued for the rest of the 17th century. This destroyed the cultural similarity between the nobility and the masses as the adoption of much of Western culture gave the Russian nobility “a sense of identity and of separateness from the dependent population.”51 Peter’s reforms paid off and turned Russia into a major European power. Except for some exceptions, such as the defeats in the hands of the Ottomans in 1711 and the War of the Third Coalition in 1805–1807, the Russian

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army emerged victorious from every major confl ict it engaged in between 1709 and 1856. The most prestigious one was undoubtedly the victory over Napoleon’s France, turning the tsar, Alexander, into the savior of Europe as the Russian troops “paraded victoriously down the Champs Elysees in Paris in 1814, champions of what was now seen as the leading continental power.”52 As a result, Russia continuously expanded its territories in the South; took control of an outlet on the Black Sea; made territorial intrusions into the Caucasus, the Balkans, and Central Asia; and expanded further in the West until it neighbored Prussia and Austria-Habsburg. Successive Russian rulers simply built upon the foundation laid down by Peter the Great. Peter’s system of recruitment continued to enable the Russian state to muster bigger armies. The changes in recruitment were mainly related to the terms of service: in 1736, the term of mandatory service for nobles was reduced to twenty-five years, and in 1762 it was abolished, with service to the state becoming voluntary.53 In 1793, the lifetime conscription of soldiers was reduced to twenty-five years. The total size of the army increased from 164,396 in 1725, to 303,529 in 1765, and to 507,538 in 1796. By 1800, the Russian army became the largest in size among the European armies. The army continued to grow in the first half of the 19th century, totaling 779,257 in 1866.54 The Russian state further invested in military and nonmilitary education at all levels. In 1731, the first Cadet Corps school was opened in St. Petersburg, and its graduates were commissioned in the army after nine years of education. The Russian state increased the number of Cadet Corps schools to twenty by the mid-19th century. A military academy, Nikolaevskaia Academy of the General Staff, and the Medical-Surgical Academy were opened in 1832 and 1835 respectively.55 In 1755, Moscow University was founded with three faculties, Law, Medicine, and Philosophy.56 A humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, 1853–1856, against Britain and France was a wake-up call for Russia. Two problems were particularly manifested in the war. First, Russian weapons were outdated. Second, the Russian supply system was not effective. Announced in 1857, a major wave of reform, called the Great Reforms,57 started with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and was extended to state peasants in 1866. The ex-serfs were given land allotments, the size of which varied from region to region, in return for annual dues to be paid to their former masters. In addition to annual payments from their former serfs, the serf owners were also entitled to keep at least one-third of their former land. The ex-serfs did not obtain the right to move freely, however; they still had to get permission from their village communes, which were made self-governing bodies as the reform transferred the former landlords’ authorities to them. In the district and provincial administrative levels, too, the reform created representative governments in regions where the Russians were elites and constituted the majority. Another legislation in 1864 extended the reform to education. Establishing primary and secondary schools was made much easier given that certain

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conditions were met, one of which was equality in admission. The reforms increased literacy levels among the Russian populations. In 1880, for example, the number of pupils in elementary schools was 1,141,000, making up 1.16 percent of the total population. By 1915, that number increased to 8,147,000, now making up 4.93 percent of the total Russian population. According to the census of 1897, 46 percent of the male population and 22 percent of the female population in the age group 10–20 were literate. As the age group increased, the literacy levels in the male and female populations decreased consistently to 15 percent for the male population and 11 percent for the female population over 60 years old.58 The reform also opened the doors of the universities to the former serfs and eased the restrictions on the sons of the clergy. The number of university students increased from around 4,000 in 1854 to 21,000 in 1904 to more than 38,000 by 1909.59 The Great Reforms of Alexander II (r.1855–1881) also opened a new page in Russian industrialization efforts. Under two long-serving ministers of finance, Mikhail Kh. Reutern, from 1862 to 1878, and Sergei Witte, from 1892 to 1903, Russia engaged in intensive railroad construction in order to facilitate internal transportation; pursued monetary policy to attract foreign capital to finance investments in mines, metallurgy, industry, finance, commerce, and transportation; and initiated new industries, which were protected through high tariffs.60 As a result, Russia recorded an average of 5.72 percent growth in industrial output annually throughout 1885–1914, surpassing the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom,61 and maintained its position among the major economic powers of the world.62 Alexander II’s Great Reforms also addressed the military, which in fact drove the whole reform process. One area that needed immediate attention was to improve the Russian supply system, which miserably failed in the Crimean War. In addition to commercial and industrial purposes, railroad construction therefore followed a military logic. Starting with the tenure of Mikhail Kh. Reutern as minister of finance in 1862, railroad construction became a chief priority for the Russian state. Before 1862, a little more than 2,000 kilometers of railroad had been constructed in Russia, half of which came after the Crimean War. In the next fifty years, the Russian state constructed more than 65,000 kilometers of railroad to improve internal transportation.63 The Russian state introduced universal conscription in 1874 according to which all Russian males became subject to military service. The term of service was reduced from twenty-five years to fifteen years: six years in active duty and nine years in the reserve. As a result of universal conscription, the total size of the army increased to 1,100,000 in 1912. The expansion of popular education swelled the ranks of the slowly growing and discontented intelligentsia. This is best refl ected in the tremendous increase in the number of published books, periodicals, and newspapers. The number of books published in Russia increased from 2,085 in 1860 to 32,338 in 1914, while the number of periodicals in Russian increased from 170 in 1860 to 606 in 1900 and further tripled until 1914.64

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Newspaper circulations increased from tens of thousands in the 1870s to hundreds of thousands in the early 1900s.65 The Great Reforms created new opportunities for this growing body of intelligentsia to reach out to the Russian masses. First, the reforms created local representative institutions at district and provincial levels and delegated to them considerable power in education and health. Even though the landowners dominated the local governments at both levels, the local governmental institutions could not have functioned without trained specialists; hence, teachers, doctors, medical orderlies, agronomists, and veterinarians increasingly filled the ranks of the local government institutions. In other words, education and health provided the increasingly discontented intelligentsia invaluable ways of reaching out to the masses and spreading their views among them.66 Second, as industrialization proceeded, the great Russian masses became more accessible to the intelligentsia, for the masses migrated to the industrial centers to find jobs. In the early 19th century, the urban population in Russia constituted around 6 percent of the total population. That percentage increased to 10 percent in 1867 and 14.7 percent in 1914. In absolute numbers, the urban population increased from around 7 million in 1867 to around 23 million in 1914.67 Urbanization and industrialization created a new socioeconomic class, the industrial working class, who found themselves in wretched living and working conditions. Among other factors, long hours of work, low wages, a lack of employment security, and overcrowded and unsanitary housing turned the workers into “a potent revolutionary force.”68 The working class’ discontent became increasingly manifest in the number of strikes and disturbances. The annual average number of strikes increased from 20 in the period from 1870–1885 to 33 in the 1886–1894 period and to 176 in the period from 1895–1904. The strikes peaked in 1903 when more than 130,000 workers stopped work in more than 500 instances.69 Russia also nurtured a rural problem. After emancipation the peasants lost some portion of the land they used to have under serfdom, as their average landholdings decreased by more than 20 percent.70 At the same time, however, the numbers of the rural population increased exponentially from 66 million in 1867 to 101 million in 1897 and rose to 135 million in 1914, making the land problem even more acute.71 In addition to taxes they had to pay to the state, the peasants now had to make redemption payments to their former landlords. Peasant unrest took a variety of forms, including targeting landowners, state officials, police, troops, clergy, and merchants.72 The defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 precipitated the first “simultaneous attack on autocracy from all levels of society.”73 The tsardom was shaken, but not destroyed. Its recovery simply delayed its end, which eventually came in the third year of the First World War as the same forces were unleashed even more forcefully under the great strains of the World War.

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ABSORBED BY THE SOVEREIGN STATE Starting with Peter the Great, the Russian imperial state had assumed many features of the modern sovereign state. This transition had also transformed the church and its relations with the state and the society. Having been instrumental in transforming the grand prince of the principality of Moscow into the tsar, the Russian Orthodox Church reached the apex of its political and economic power by the late 17th century. It was the largest landowner in Russia after the state, having successfully thwarted all attempts to curtail its economic power. The patriarchs were also politically powerful figures. In the 17th century, two of them carried the title “great sovereign,” a titled previously reserved for the tsar only. However glorious it might seem, the church’s place in the Russian political system was also fragile. Firstly, its wealth in land was attracting too much envy and enmity in a country where the land was in short supply and the state was hungry for revenues to defend its territories. Second, it was overdependent on the support of the tsar to protect its wealth and privileges. Finally, its unity had recently been shattered by the great schism of the 17th century, the Old Believers. The Russian Orthodox Church entered the reign of Peter the Great in a precarious position. In his first years, Peter showed no interest in church affairs, partly because he was preoccupied with the war with the Ottoman Empire and then with his grand tour in Europe. More importantly, perhaps, Peter had to deal with a powerful patriarch, Adrian. Adrian’s view of the relationship between the patriarch and the tsar was essentially Nikonian. Adrian equated the patriarch with the tsar as “two supreme rulers on earth” installed by God. He even argued that “kings, princes, governors, military leaders, and the plain and rich and crippled, men and women of all ages and rank. They are all my sheep and they listen to my arch-pastoral voice.”74 “The voice of the patriarch was that of Jesus, and whoever ignores . . . my words, ignores the words . . . of our Lord God.”75 Fortunately for Peter, Adrian suffered a stroke in 1696, was partially paralyzed, and withdrew to a monastery. Patriarch Adrian had another stroke four years later and died in October 1700. Peter postponed the election of a new patriarch indefinitely and instead appointed an unknown Ukrainian—Stefan Yavorsky, a young professor in the Kiev Academy—as the acting head of the church in December 1700. In January 1701 Peter reestablished the Monastery Office to administer the land and financial affairs of the church, with the extra resources to be transferred to the state. Using different occasions as excuses, Peter also purged potential troublemakers from the top of the hierarchy of the church. In 1702, Bishop Ignati of Tambov was exiled to a monastery for keeping publications presenting Peter as the antichrist; Metropolitan Isaiah of Nizhni-Novgorod was also exiled because of failing to meet the demands of the Monastery Office; Bishop Dosithei of Rostov was sentenced to death for being involved in the conspiracy against Peter; Metropolitan Joasaf of

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Kiev, Metropolitan Ignati of Krutitzk, and Yakov Ignatiev, who was Alexis’s confessor, also suffered from Peter’s rage.76 Peter promoted foreign, mostly Ukrainian, clergy to the positions of Russian hierarchs in the church. It can be readily seen in that out of 44 prelates who were consecrated between 1700 and 1725, 28 were non-Russians.77 Peter was also interested in finding out and promoting clerical figures who could collaborate with him. Firstly, he put trust in Stefan Yavorsky, who proved later to be undependable: he first condemned Peter’s second marriage to Martha Skavronskaya (future tsarina Catherine) while his first wife, Evdokia Lopukhina, was still alive, and then supported Peter’s son, Alexis, presenting him in a sermon in 1712 as “the only hope Russia has.” In the same sermon, Stefan listed Peter’s sins: not observing the fasts, offending the church, and abandoning his first wife. From then on Stefan’s sermons were subjected to censorship.78 Disappointed by Stefan, Peter turned to another candidate, Theodosei Yanovski. Theodosei was first promoted by Peter to be the rector of Alexander Nevsky Monastery, built by Peter in St. Petersburg, and was made responsible for all spiritual affairs in the St. Petersburg region. In 1716 Theodosei became the metropolitan of Novgorod. However, Peter found his real Trojan horse in the personality of Feofan Prokopovich, another Ukrainian and a professor at the Kiev Academy.79 Feofan first gained Peter’s confidence in 1709, when he eulogized Peter after the victory in Poltova against Sweden. In 1711 Feofan participated in the Pruth campaign against the Ottoman Empire as the leading the military chaplain and, after the campaign, became the rector of Kiev-Mogilyanskoi Academy and abbot of Kievo-Brethren Monastery. In 1716 Feofan moved to St. Petersburg on Peter’s orders and became advisor to the tsar on church and educational affairs. In 1718, he was consecrated as the bishop of Pskov and became archbishop in 1920. In return for this meteoric rise in the church hierarchy, Feofan Prokopovich provided an invaluable service to Peter. First, he reversed a theological current getting stronger among the clerical circles that equated the tsar and the patriarch. Prokopovich argued exactly the opposite. The tsar was “the head of the church, which had no authority to dictate to its superior what his obligations were, or to inform him of God’s requirements of him. On the contrary, it was the Church that was subject itself to the understanding of God’s requirements as interpreted by the emperor.”80 From a different angle, Prokopovich in fact reorganized the church hierarchy. Now the tsar was not an outsider to the hierarchy, but was at the top of it. Second, Prokopovich also provided a theological justification, blended with Western political theory, for the supremacy of the tsar and the autocratic nature of his power. Prokopovich argued that autocracy was necessary as, if unrestrained, people would make war with each other. Only autocratic rule could establish peace among the Russian people and maintain Russia’s unity and goodness.81 The practical implications of Feofan Prokopovich’s political theory appeared in “the spiritual regulation,” which was completed in 1718.

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The regulation was finalized jointly by Peter and Prokopovich and read in an ecclesiastical council met in 1720. The most radical change the regulation brought was the dissolution of the patriarchate, which, according the regulation, had become a potential source of political instability: The fatherland need have no fear of revolts and disturbances from a conciliar administration such as would proceed from a single, independent ecclesiastical administrator. For the common people do not understand how spiritual authority is distinguishable from the autocratic, but marveling at the dignity and glory of the Highest Pastor, they imagine that such an administrator is a second sovereign, a power equal to that of the Autocrat, or even greater than he, and that the pastoral office is another, and a better, sovereign authority.82 The regulation left the administration of the church to the newly instituted “the Most Holy All-Ruling Synod,” which was originally proposed as “a College of Spiritual Affairs” under the Senate but became a parallel institution directly under the control of the tsar. The Holy Synod consisted of one metropolitan, two archbishops, three archimandrites, four married archpriests, and one Greek monastic priest. Over time, however, the synod became a body of twelve clerics, all of whom were bishops administered by the chief procurator, a position Peter introduced in 1722 as the representative of the tsar in the council.83 The regulation also specified that an oath of allegiance was to be taken by members of the synod, each member swearing to be “a loyal, true, obedient, and devoted servant of” Peter the First and after him all lawful successors.84 The spiritual regulation turned the lower levels of the church hierarchy, the parish priests, into the state’s local administrators. The priests became responsible for “collecting and compiling statistical information on births, marriages, and deaths, and for reading out newly promulgated legislation to parishioners in church.”85 More controversially, the priests became sort-of-secret police of the state in the parishes. A decree issued in 1722 stated that if someone confessed to the priest of his intention to commit a crime, especially treason or rebellion or “an evil design against the honor or health of the Sovereign and his family,” the confessor was obliged to report to the appropriate authorities.86 Having acquired equal status with the Senate directly under the tsar, the synod pushed for a recovery from the losses incurred under Peter’s previous regulations. Its first priority was to take back the control of its accumulated wealth in land and real estate that had serfs on them. Peter agreed to the Holy Synod’s demands and placed the Monastery Office under the jurisdiction of the Holy Synod. Catherine II (r.1762–1794) took over the church lands again in 1764 and thus made the church financially dependent on the Russian state. However, this situation lasted for only a short period. Paul (r.1796–1801) in 1797 and Nicholas I (r.1825–1855) in 1838 endowed

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every monastery with arable lands to compensate them for their losses under Catherine II. Thereafter the church began to accumulate land and real estate once again. By 1905, the monasteries had accumulated two million acres of land throughout Russia, excluding Siberia, and dioceses and parishes another five million acres.87 Even though not all of them were achieved immediately, Peter’s church reforms set the agenda for and had an impact on the long-term evolution of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Holy Synod continued to administer the church as the highest authority until 1917. In the meantime, in a period spanning almost 200 years, the synod devoted its resources to establish a more effective and centralized control over all aspects of religious life, a process that can be appropriately called “church-building.”88 First, in the 1740s and then in the 1780s, the dioceses were reorganized into much smaller territories with smaller populations. A new administrative organ, the office of superintendent, was established as being directly appointed by the bishop to oversee ten to fifteen parishes. The new institutional structure enabled the bishops to establish stricter control over the parish priests. Taking one step further, the bishops obtained the power to select and remove the priests, which previously had been in the hands of the parishioners. Likewise, the synod developed a much higher capacity to implement empire-wide policies across a better supervised diocesan administration, “mandating approval for diocesan resolutions, requiring annual reports and data, and dealing harshly with obdurate prelates who fl outed its orders or ignored its authority.”89 Effective control over the lower levels of church administration went hand in hand with the increasing “bureaucratization” of the church by adopting various techniques of the modern state, with the church becoming much more like a state90 within a state. The new power of the church became evident in the running of its own court system, which had jurisdiction not only over cases involving the clergy, but also marriages and divorces among the Orthodox populations. As the church developed a larger administrative capacity, it established a vigilant watch over marriages and divorces, bringing, as a result, “a marital order of rigidity unknown elsewhere in Europe.”91 In tandem with this increasing institutional capacity, the Russian church turned its attention to regulating the religious life of the masses and reshaping them in its own image. This was not an easy task, though, for what was to be regulated was a bewildering diversity of religious practices and beliefs. As Gregory Freeze eloquently states: Russian Orthodoxy was Russian Heterodoxy—an aggregate of local Orthodoxies, each with its own cults, rituals and customs. Religion, like other dimensions of life, was intensely particularistic, with kaleidoscopic variations from one parish to the next, not to mention broad regional differences. Each parish had its own traditions (icon processions, special services, favored saints, and the like), icons of particular

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reverence (sometimes with miracle-working properties), and unique forms of religious observance. Even the liturgy itself varied from parish to parish, as local clergy arbitrarily omitted “superfl uous” sections of the full monastic service to reduce it to manageable proportions.92 The Russian church in fact started to clean its own house first by devoting more care and resources to increasing the quality of its own staff. Effective administration and increasing control over the dioceses enabled the church to combat vagrancy in the church more effectively and discipline the clergy. More importantly, the church devoted more resources to and put more emphasis on the education of the clergy. Prior to the 18th century, education was not a prerequisite for a career in the church. The parishioners simply elected their priests, and the bishops usually approved and ordained their choices. This practice was understandable given the broader negativity associated with theological education in Russia: learned monks were identified with Roman Catholicism.93 It was during Peter the Great’s reign that the church began to give importance to clerical education. Even though clerical education started before Peter, it nevertheless remained miniscule in size and encountered great resistance within the church. For example, in 1682 Tsar Feodor allowed Sylvester Medvedev to establish an academy in Moscow, which was shortlived due to the tsar’s unexpected death. Medvedev’s Catholic inclinations gained him enemies within the church, which brought in two Orthodox Greek brothers, Innokenti and Sofronius Likhud, to build an academy in 1686. The academy initially met with great success: however, the issue of translating the Bible into Russian sealed the fate of the Likhud brothers, who were dismissed in 1694. The academy continued to operate with great difficulty in the ensuing years. Only after Peter the Great bestowed his grace upon it did it begin to revitalize. Under Stefan Yavorsky, the Moscow Academy developed along the model of the Kiev-Mogilyanskoi Academy, with Latin replacing Greek as the language of education.94 Despite the boost given by Peter, “seminaries remained miniscule in size, poor in quality, and vulnerable to frequent closings” well into the 1760s.95 In the subsequent decades, thanks to the efforts of prelates such as Platon Levshin and Gavriil Petrov, the number of clerical students in seminaries steadily increased from 4,673 in 1766 to 29,000 in 1808.96 In 1814 a fourtiered system of clerical education was established, involving parish schools, diocesan schools, seminaries, and academies.97 By the 1860s, a seminary degree became a prerequisite for appointment as a priest and an academy degree as a bishop, which was possible in four academies, Kiev, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kazan.98 The emphasis on clerical education paid off: in 1805, only 15 percent of priests had a seminary degree. In 1860, that number rose to 83 percent and further increased to 97 percent in 1880. The church’s role in education did not remain restricted to clerical education only. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the church became

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the primary supplier of primary education through its own parish schools. In fact, the Russian state entered the field of primary education quite late, with a serious drive really only beginning in the 1890s.99 The parish schools joined the Russian three-tiered education system in 1804 as the fourth tier after district schools, provincial schools, and universities. By the end of Alexander III’s (r.1881–1894) reign, the church had 31,835 parish schools with 981,076 students. A decade later, in 1904, the church had 1,909,496 students in its primary school system, compared to 3,360,167 students in the state primary schools administered by the Ministry of Education.100 In tandem with increasing administrative efficiency and expanding outreach through its schools, the church came to pay more attention to the spiritual and material well-being of the parish churches. New churches were built, and old ones were renovated. The newly created office of superintendent ensured the maintenance, cleanliness, and even aesthetics of the parish churches—for example, by removing “ugly” icons from the churches. The church waged an incessant war against the taverns situated close to the churches and against economic activities being conducted on Sundays and religious holidays. The parishioners were required to behave in certain ways that were acceptable to church authorities. For example, entertainments and secular music, noisy talk, and disruption of the liturgy were forbidden inside the churches.101 These measures were in fact part of the church’s broader project, that of reconfiguring the local religious practices and popular piety in line with its own Orthodoxy. The church sought to regularize the religious services undertaken in the churches and, in this vein, supplied them with hundreds of thousands of volumes of proper liturgical books to be followed. The church also attempted to change liturgical music, introducing new musical forms to be performed in religious rituals.102 In addition, the church went beyond the confines of its established authority and attempted to extend its control over the whole spiritual domain. It now required all sacraments and marriages to be performed in parish churches only, rather than in other, more private, gatherings. More ambitiously, the church endeavored to control what the laity venerated as miraculous, such as springs, icons, and saints.103 Peter’s reforms effectively killed some powerful church hierarchs’ dreams of promoting the church, or the patriarch, as being equal to or above the state, or the tsar. But, as the previous discussion shows, the reforms also created new opportunities for the church to exert unprecedented levels of infl uence over the society. Refl ecting this infl uence, the church grew in size. From 1738 to 1915, the number of churches increased from 16,901 in 1738 to 66,000 in 1915. The monasteries also recovered after the assaults of Peter and Catherine. Their numbers were at their lowest, 547, in 1840, but this had risen to 1,025 by 1915.104 The church hierarchy also grew in size from a mere 26 prelates in the early 18th century to 147 by 1917.105 With its growing size, its expanding educational and court system, its ever more pervasive infl uence over the society, its better functioning administration, its extensive lands, and its large bank accounts, the church’s self-confidence also grew

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stronger. By the early 20th century, the clerical establishment began to talk about a possible breakup with the Russian state, with articles appearing in religious press asking for the separation of the state and the church in Russia and the reestablishment of the patriarchate.106 Commenting on an article critical of Peter’s reforms, Metropolitan Antonii Vadkovskii spoke to the tsar of the inevitability of the approaching end: Russian “public opinion would be obliged to declare it shameful and impossible for Holy Rus to live under such an abnormal system of ecclesiastical government.”107 In fact, at the first opportune moment, which came immediately after the fall of Romanov dynasty, the church reestablished the patriarchate. On the negative side, even though homogenized through clerical education, the clergy was transformed into a closed caste in the period concerned and, hence, lost its other societal allies, especially the nobility. In the early 18th century, men of noble origin filled more than half of the church hierarchy, while the clergy’s sons made up 11.5 percent. However, three factors shaped the future social origin of the clergy and the church hierarchy. First, only the sons of the clergy could enter the seminaries. Second, monastic tonsure became inaccessible to the nobility. Finally, endogamous marriage became widespread among the priests. The church practically closed its doors to those with nonclerical origins.108 As a result, throughout the 19th century, more than 90 percent of the bishops had clerical origins. Out of 486 prelates consecrated between 1721 and 1917 whose origins are known, out of a total 731, 420 prelates came from clerical families.109 The same trend can be observed among the parish priests: by 1914 only 3 percent of the white clergy came from nonclerical origins.110 More importantly perhaps, in the post-Petrine period, the church neither could heal the old wounds infecting both its own body and the Orthodox population, nor could it fully contain the newly emerging religious movements under its banner. Despite the persecutions they suffered at the hands of the Russian state, the Old Believers continued to command the loyalty of a sizable portion of the Orthodox population. Splintered into numerous groups,111 the Old Believers were thought to number twenty million by 1900 and were overseen by twenty bishops.112 Even more troubling than the continuing presence of the Old Believers, new and alternative moralspiritual movements, non-Orthodox Christian denominations, and other forms of deviant popular Orthodoxies gained adherents among all segments of Russian society, from intellectuals to peasants to workers, challenging the monopoly of the church in spiritual salvation as Romanov rule in Russia drew to a close. The Orthodox Church “frequently branded these and other movements as sectarian . . . and actively tried to restore its infl uence among the urban population by challenging ‘sectarians’ to debates, attacking them in a fl urry of pamphlets and on occasion (as against the Brethren) anathematizing and excommunicating the most visible leaders.”113 In possibly the most wellknown case, the Holy Synod excommunicated Leo Tolstoy, who was accused

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by the church of heretical views that, Tolstoy himself admitted in his letter to the Holy Synod, had “practically nothing in common with the mystery of Christ, as the Church experiences it and teaches it.”114 In a counter-attack, Tolstoy even wrote, “I believe that God has most clearly made known His will in the teaching of Christ the Man, whom to regard as God, however, and to pray to, I regard as a blasphemy.”115 More consequential to the future fate of the church, the deep rift between the black and the white clergy continued to widen in the post-Petrine period. While the black clergy filled the church hierarchy, seminaries, academies, and monasteries, hence enjoying the prestige and richness of the church, the white clergy populated the parish churches, hence shouldering the difficulties of parish life. The Great Reforms intended, but failed, to help them. Instead, by reducing the available posts through merging parishes and abolishing the sons’ hereditary claims to their fathers’ posts, the reforms aggravated conditions for the white clergy. The reforms also established the parish councils, which further pushed the white clergy away from the black clergy, who then associated themselves more with their parishioners. Refl ecting on the white clergy’s long pent-up discontent, a philosophical current spread among the parish clergy in the 19th century. Known as clerical liberalism, this current was “critical of both ecclesiastical and governmental authority, sympathetic to public needs, and supportive of the parish clergy’s social and economic interests.”116 As Russia plunged into revolutionary turmoil, clerical liberalism created a new schism in the Russian Orthodox Church even more divisive and dangerous than the previous one. NOTES 1. I benefitted from several books in accounting the broader developments in Russian history, such as Perrie (2006a), Shubin (2004a), Martin (1995), Hosking (2001), Longworth (2003), and Ascher (2009). 2. See Kaiser (1992), Pospielovsky (1998), and Ostrowski (1986). 3. Martin (1995:179). 4. Cited in Trepanier (2010:56–57). 5. Ostrowski (2006:2). 6. Cited in Trepanier (2010:51). 7. Paul (2004:17). Ivan IV’s oprichnina terror drastically undermined the power of the nobility vis-à-vis the tsar. See Martin (1995:348–368). 8. For the details of this period, see Perrie (2006). 9. See the discussion in Stevens (2007). 10. See a detailed discussion in Stevens (2007). 11. See Keep (1970:211). 12. Hosking (2001:155). 13. In Kievan Rus there was no serfdom. It started as a restricted ban on the movement of peasants in the 1450s by a few monasteries that asked the government to forbid their peasant debtors to travel except around St. George’s day, November 26. From then on the practice was extended to all peasants and was finalized in the law code of 1648, the Ulozhenie. See Hellie (2009). 14. See Keep (1960).

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15. Cited in Trepanier (2010:93). 16. In some instances Nikon seems arguing for the supremacy of the church over the state: for example, he writes in a letter in 1662, “It is the tsars who are anointed by the priests and not the priests by the tsars. . . . The priesthood does not come from men but from God Himself. The tsar’s authority is derived from the priesthood, as the rites of the tsar’s coronation testify. . . . Priestly authority is superior to civil power as heaven is superior to earth.” Cited in Trepanier (2010:84). 17. Crummey (2006:630–631). 18. The numbers are from Crummey (2006:625). 19. Starting around 1500 repeated attempts were made to stop the growth of the church land. For example, in 1584 the church council was forced to confirm a previous decision forbidding land bequests to monasteries. See Pavlov (2006:272). 20. Hellie (1999:498). 21. Kollmann (2006). 22. Cracraft (1971:101). 23. Cracraft (1971:84). 24. Cited in Cracraft (1971:84). 25. Ostrowski (2006:227). 26. Pospielovsky (1998:51). 27. See Pospielovsky (1998:52–55) and Miller (2006: 348–351). 28. Heresy did not coincidentally emerge in Novgorod. See Denissoff (1950). 29. For the earlier cases, such as the Strigol’niki heresy, see Pospielovsky (1998:51), and for the challenge of the Judaizers, see Miller (2006:348–351). 30. The standard view accepts the existence of two separate parties to the controversy on monastic landholding: the possessors versus the non-possessors. See, for example, Karpovich (1944). For a critique of this view, Ostrowski (1986). 31. See Miller (2006). 32. Michels (1992). 33. See Michels (1992). For an illustrating case, the Solovki Monastery, of how the church attempted to increase its control over the monasteries, see Michels (1992). 34. Keep (1960:340). 35. Zenkovsky (1957:42). 36. The Northern bishoprics were, for example, of this genre. See Michels (1992). 37. Coulter (2002:467–68). 38. It should be noted that the reform of the liturgy in Russia started in the 14th century. See Cherniavsky (1966:6). 39. Zenkovsky (1957:46). 40. For a more detailed account, see Lobachev (2001). 41. Michels (1992:9). 42. Crummey (2006:632). 43. Cited in Trepanier (2010:85). 44. It should be noted that a council of Russian bishops met in 1666 to resolve the confl ict. The council approved Nikon’s reforms but refrained from calling the old rituals heretical. It also asked the critics not to condemn new rituals as heretical. Avvakum and his friends rejected this compromise. See Cherniavsky (1966:8). 45. See the discussion in Cherniavsky (1966:14–15). 46. Hosking (2001:197). 47. Lee (1993:66–67). 48. Wirtschafter (2002:224). 49. Dixon (1999:64).

130 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

From Religious Empires to Secular States Marker (2009). Hosking (2001:205). Hosking (2001:253). It was Ivan IV (1533–1584) who made service to the state mandatory for the landowning elite, which started at the age of fifteen and continued until death. Ray (1961). See Table 5 in Pintner (1984). Ray (1961). Bryner (1955). My discussion of Alexander II’s reforms depends on Hosking (2001), chapter 7. These statistics are from Timasheff (1942). Waldron (1997). Owen (2009). Wade (2000:4). Owen (2009: 219). Calculations are based on Table I and Table II in Ames (1947). Waldron (1997:17), Hosking (2001:382). Ely (2009:232). Polunov (2005:113–115). Spulber (2003). Wade (2000:5). Ascher (2004:6). Ascher (2004:7). Spulber (2003). Perrie (1972) enumerates 7,165 different instances of peasant unrest in 1905– 1907, with these instances being observed in all regions of European Russia except the Baltic and Transcaucasian provinces. See Perrie (1972:123). Cited in Shubin (2004b:170). Cited in Pospielovsky (1998:105). Shubin (2004b), especially Part 6. Plamper (2000:7). Shubin (2004b:179–182). See Cracraft (1978). Shubin (2004b:187). Cited in Pipes (2005:56). Cited in Daniel (2006:17). Pospielovsky (1998:111). From the Oath of the Holy Synod, printed in Cracraft (1993:119). Dixon (1999:140). Hosking (2001:199). Shubin (2005:207). Freeze (2006:285). Freeze (1998:213). Freeze (1985). On the growing power of the church to regulate marriage and divorce in Russia, see Freeze (1990). Freeze (1998:215). Plamper (2000). Shubin (2004b:203–207). Freeze (1998:213). Dixon (2006:328). For an account of clerical education, see Swan (1964). Chulos (2006:353).

Taming the Church 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

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Waldron (1997:95). Seton-Watson (1988:477). Freeze (1998: 215–227). For a more detailed discussion, see Freeze (1998:215–218). On the church’s ambition to establish its authority on icons, see Shevzov (1999). Shubin (2005:208). Christel Lane argues that in 1914 there were 54,174 churches and 23,592 chapels in Russia. Lane (1978:31). Freeze (2006:289). Chulos (2006:351). Cited in Dixon (2006: 341). See Freeze (2006:293–294), Plamper (2000:9). Plamper (2000:9). Freeze (2006:295). See the discussion in Kizenko (2009) and Cunningham (1981:30–40). Cunningham (1981:37). Steinberg (2006:81). Stepun (1960:164). Cited in Stepun (1960:164). Roslof (2002:5).

7

Eradicationist State Secularization in the Soviet Union

This chapter explains why state secularization was eradicationalist in the Soviet Union. The chapter argues that two factors were critical to the outcome: first, the reformers introduced secularizing reforms in the midst of a brutal civil war. Second, religious community had been staunchly opposed to the new regime and was stubborn in its opposition. The chapter starts with an account of how the reformers in Russia came to power, a discussion needed to gain a sense of the strategic context of state secularization. The chapter then describes the participation of the church in the revolutionary upheaval and its opposition to the new regime. The narrative will thus show how and why state secularization was eradicationist. STRATEGIC CONTEXT: THE COMING TO POWER OF VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN1 Already in the beginning of the 20th century, Russia was ripe for a revolution. From workers to peasants, the disappointment and the discontent were running deeper and deeper through all segments of Russian society. The tsarist political system was shaken by the 1905 revolution but could recover from it. This recovery would prove to be temporary, however. As the First World War began to incur heavy human and economic cost, an increasing number of protests, strikes, and mutinies brought down the tsarist system. Nicholas II’s abdication in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, on March 2, 1917, and the latter’s refusal to take the crown meant the end of the 300-year-old rule of the Romanov dynasty. The Provisional Government, formed immediately on the same day, could not address the major concerns of the masses. It showed no intention of stopping the now highly unpopular war, stood neutral on worker-employer relations, and refused to distribute the land the peasants demanded. In reaction, the masses took matters into their own hands. The soldiers and the workers established their self-government committees to run their own affairs, and the peasants began to seize lands from the landowners.2

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In the wake of this total disintegration of the central authority, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin rose to prominence. Born in 1870, Lenin had long been involved in Marxist agitation against the tsarist regime. He was exiled to Siberia in 1897 for his involvement in subversive activities and then lived in Europe, except for a brief period, until he returned to Russia on April 3, 1917, as the leader of the Bolsheviks. In the next six months, Lenin agitated against the Provisional Government in every possible way. For example, he called for an end to the war and demanded the distribution of land from the landlords to the peasants.3 By October 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks were ready for the takeover. On October 25, 1917, the Bolsheviks stormed—rather peacefully—the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government held its meetings. With this coup d’état, Russia withdrew from the First World War by signing an armistice with Germany on December 2, 1917, but plunged into a brutal civil war, a civil war by and large ignited by the Bolsheviks themselves. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, civil war was a means of destroying the enemy,4 namely those who would stand against the Bolsheviks. In order to do this, the Bolsheviks deliberately stirred up the hatred, already unleashed, of the lower classes toward the privileged classes. In Lenin’s popular slogan, the masses were encouraged to “loot the looters.” For example, the Bolsheviks gave official sanction to the ongoing land seizures in the countryside and legalized the de facto workers’ control over “the production, storage, purchase and sale of all products and raw materials . . . in all industrial, commercial, banking, agricultural and other enterprises.”5 The Bolsheviks not only encouraged the masses to plunder the properties of the privileged classes, but also engaged in their own looting. With a series of decrees, the Bolsheviks robbed the former privileged classes. Private individuals’ shares and bonds in factories were annulled; the banks nationalized; the private boxes in the banks emptied; foreign money, gold, silver, and other precious items confiscated; the bourgeoisie taxed heavily; and the former privileged classes forcefully conscripted for manual labor.6 In tandem with this plunder, the Bolsheviks waged a brutal campaign against their opponents, unleashing such terror that touched almost every segment of Russian society. The opponents were randomly arrested, tortured, and, if luck was not on their side, summarily executed. The greatest challenge to Bolshevik rule came from former tsarist generals who raised armed resistance forces, known as the Whites, in different parts of Russia.7 Yet, in the first few months, the White Army was no match against the Bolsheviks in numerical terms: while the Bolsheviks could muster between 100,000 and 150,000 men at the southern frontier, the Whites could barely muster 6,000 men in mid-April 1918. Not surprisingly, the Bolsheviks rather easily extended their rule over most of the imperial territories stretching from Poland to the Pacific. By March 1918 only Transcaucasia, Finland, Ukraine, and South Russia were outside Bolshevik control. The Bolshevik victory was so obvious that in April 1918 Lenin would declare with certainty “the civil war has ended.”8

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But it had not. In May 1918, some 50,000 armed Czech soldiers who had fought in the Russian Army during the war rebelled. Known as the Czechoslovak Legion, the Czechs defeated the Bolsheviks and captured several important cities on the Volga River. By the end of August, the Bolsheviks had already lost the control of the north, the Volga, and Siberia. The ensuing political vacuum gave the Whites a much needed opportunity to organize their resistance armies with the help of the Allies. Even though the Whites grew in size, expanded their territories, and scored critical victories against the Bolsheviks, they could not deal the final blow to Bolshevik rule. There are three main reasons for this failure. First, equally exhausted in the First World War, the Allied countries could not commit as many resources to the Russian civil war as the Whites wished. Second, the Bolsheviks controlled the central Russian territories where the major Russian industries, including arms factories, were situated and where the railroad network was denser. Thus, the Bolsheviks could supply their troops and move them swiftly across the frontiers. Finally, the Whites could not come up with a political program that appealed to the masses. The White Army generals saw their responsibility primarily as defeating the Reds, not solving the perennial problems of the Russian masses. For example, they were not willing to recognize the peasants’ seizure of the land, nor were they inclined to cooperate with the various nationalist movements that emerged in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, the Ukraine, Finland, and Caucasia. Furthermore, the Whites failed miserably to get the Russian masses on their side and, hence, could not achieve numerical superiority over the Reds on any frontier.9 Equally important, the Whites failed to coordinate their military operations against the Bolsheviks. Hence, the Bolsheviks could engage them one by one, their numerical superiority giving them a decisive advantage. The Bolsheviks eventually routed the White Army, with the last formidable force being defeated in November 1920. In the meantime, the Bolshevik government settled their relations with the nationalist governments in Poland and in the Baltics, signing a treaty with Estonia in February 1920, Lithuania in July 1920, Latvia in August 1920, Finland in October 1920, and Poland in March 1921. However, in the east and in the Caucasus, the Bolsheviks pursued a different course, invading Azerbaijan in April 1920, Armenia in December 1920, and Georgia in February 1921. By October 1922 they had extended their control to the Far East after Japan evacuated Vladivostok and to Central Asia after suppressing the Basmachi rebellion. The Bolsheviks then turned their attention to workers and peasants. Their relations with the workers and peasants had been tense since the Bolshevik government introduced food requisitioning and took away the management of the factories from the workers’ committees in 1918. In February 1921 the workers went on strike in massive numbers, first in Moscow and then in Petrograd. Some soldiers mutinied in support of the workers. The Bolsheviks declared martial law in Moscow and Petrograd, arresting hundreds of workers and locking thousands of them in factories to calm the workers’ unrest.10

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The sailors in the naval base of Kronstadt joined the workers on February 28, 1921. The Bolsheviks brought in 60,000 troops to crush the rebellion in the naval base. Thousands of rebel sailors were either executed or sent to the first Soviet concentration camp of Solovki on an island in the White Sea.11 Tension had also been building in the countryside. Former small-scale revolts by the peasants, which had fl ared up sporadically in the previous two years, turned into major peasant rebellions by 1921. The rebellions were massive and widespread, especially in the Black Earth region, in the Volga region, in the Northern Caucasus, and in Western Siberia. In the province of Tambov, for example, up to 50,000 peasants were armed and turned into a disciplined army under the leadership of a former Socialist Revolutionary, Alexander Antonov. In contrast to the White Army forces, which had no strong ties to the local populations, the peasant armies were organically tied to local populations, supported, fed, and equipped by them.12 In addition to their strong ties to local populations, the peasant armies had also superior knowledge of the local terrain, which gave them a decisive advantage in fighting the Bolsheviks. In the summer of 1921, the Bolsheviks adopted a new strategy to combat the peasant armies by swamping the rebellious areas with a large number of troops and initiating a campaign of terror against the peasants. For example, to crush the Antonov rebellion, the Red Army put 100,000 troops into the field and unleashed a systematic regime of terror against the villagers designed to crush their morale and determination. In the ensuing terror, the Bolsheviks jailed or deported 100,000 people and killed 15,000. Implementing the same policy across Russia, the Bolsheviks crushed almost all peasant rebellions by the end of 1921. In the meantime, they eliminated their last rivals, the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, from the political scenes. Accusing them of instigating the peasant rebellions, the Bolsheviks arrested thousands of them in 1921. Thus, by the end of 1921, the Bolsheviks had consolidated their hold on power. It is in this context of a brutal, bloody, and violent social revolution, which held Russia hostage for four years, that we should situate the changing state-church relations in Russia. This is what we turn to next. THE REVOLUTIONARY UPHEAVALS AND THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH By 1917, the Romanov dynasty was so discredited even among the church hierarchy that the latter did not, or chose not to, come to its rescue.13 It soon turned out that the church had lost its safety net with the fall of the monarchy and had become wide open to all sorts of assaults. In the aftermath of the revolution, the socialists began to agitate for changes in state-church relations that were inimical to the church. They demanded that the church be separated from the state, that no state funds be given to the church, and

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that no religious education be taught in state schools or clergy be employed as instructors. In proposing these and similar changes, the socialists used derogatory words, expressing their disdain for the church. For example, the separation of the church and the state would “cleanse the organ of the people.”14 The priests were even banned from participating in the funeral organized by the Petrograd Soviet for the victims of the February Revolution.15 Far worse, the greatest challenge for the church appeared in the countryside. In some cases church lands were seized by the peasants; in others the priests were prevented from performing religious services in their churches or were driven out of their parishes. In some cases even nuns were subject to attacks from the peasants, with their lands also being seized.16 Yet in the most bizarre cases the priests themselves turned against their own bishops, deposing them in diocesan assemblies in places like Tula, Orel, and Tver. Bishop Efrem of Selengina complained about the status of the clergy in those revolutionary days in the following terms: “Storming in their gatherings and congresses, they greeted with telegrams the lay wreckers of the Church [Kerenskij and L’vov], and at the same time with furious rage threw themselves upon the bearers of Church authority—the bishops. . . . And how many religious persons left their service to the Holy Church and went off to the service of the Revolution?”17 In those revolutionary days, the church threw in its lot with the Provisional Government, especially supporting it in the continuation of the now unpopular war.18 In return for this support, the church expected that the Provisional Government would protect its privileges. But the Provisional Government proved utterly powerless and incapable of defending the church’s interests. On the contrary, despite protests from the Church, the government went against the church’s interests by putting the church’s 37,000 parochial schools under the Ministry of Education on June 20, 1917, and introducing exceptions to compulsory religious education in state schools.19 A resolution adopted on July 13, 1917, by the pre-Sobor Council illustrated the concerns of the Church regarding the developments in the country: the Council demanded, for example, that the state recognized the independence of the Church, accepted the enactments of the Church as obligatory for all individuals and institutions belonging to the Church, recognized the internal autonomy of the Church, exempted clergymen, monks, and sacristans from all military service, allowed the Church to organize its own school system for theological and general education, made religious education compulsory in state and private schools for children of Orthodox parents, and continue to grant financial aid to the church.20 Despite the hardships it suffered, the revolution did give the church the opportunity to convene a church council, which was the first to be independent of the state since the 17th century. The church council opened on August 15, 1917, with the participation of 564 members, including both clerical and lay members, elected from all dioceses in Russia. The central issue before the council was the reestablishment of the patriarchate. The imminence of the

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Bolshevik seizure of power simply hastened the progress of the council. The patriarchate was reestablished on October 28, 1917, and Tikhon, by then the metropolitan of Moscow, was elected the new patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church on November 5, 1917. Before the Bolsheviks came to power, the church had already declared its opposition to the Bolsheviks. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik uprising in July 1917, the synod warned of an imminent danger: “A new and evil foe has come amongst us, and has sowed tares in Rus’, which have not failed to send forth leaves, which have stifl ed the shoots of the desired freedom . . . The country has set forth upon the path of ruin, and in future there awaits it that frightful gulf, which is for all of us full of horrifying despair.”21 One church periodical presented the Bolsheviks as German agents: “The work of traitors and betrayers who have received German money and who call themselves Bolsheviks, has borne its fruit . . . Those who promised the people all sorts of blessings and called for peace with the Germans have sold Russia.”22 As expected, the Bolsheviks immediately set out to weaken the church. From November 1917 to January 1918, the Bolsheviks issued three decrees taking away from the church the privileges it had enjoyed for centuries. In response, on January 19, 1918, Patriarch Tikhon excommunicated the Bolsheviks with bitter words and called the faithful to the defense of the church. In his encyclical, Tikhon condemned the Bolsheviks’ policy of civil war and anathematized the Bolsheviks: By the authority given us by God, we forbid you to present yourselves for the sacraments of Christ, and anathematize you, if you still bear the name of Christians, even if merely on account of your baptism you still belong to the Orthodox church. I adjure all of you who are faithful children of the Orthodox church not to commune with such outcasts of the human race in any matter whatsoever”23 Finally, Tikhon called for believers to defend the church: The blessed sacraments, sanctifying the birth of man into the world, or blessing the marital union of the Christian family, have been pronounced unnecessary and superfl uous; the holy churches are subjected either to destruction . . . or to plunder and sacrilegious injury. . . . The saintly monasteries . . . are seized by the atheistic masters of the darkness of this world and are declared to be in some manner national property; schools, supported from the resources of the Orthodox church to train the ministers of churches and teachers of the faithful, are declared superfl uous, and are turned either into training institutes of infidelity or event directly into nurseries of immorality. . . . We appeal to all of you, believing and faithful children of the church: rise up in defense of our injured and oppressed holy Mother!24

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Lenin could have cared less. Four days later, on January 23, 1918, the Bolshevik government issued the famous decree that separated the state and school from the Church, which in essence summed up all the previous decrees issued with regard to the Orthodox Church. Among other things, the decree separated the church from the state, recognized freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, mandated that no state ceremony be accompanied by religious rituals or ceremonies, abolished religious oaths, transferred the registration of births and marriages to state institutions, separated schools from the church, forbade the teaching of religion in public and private schools, abolished the legal privileges of the church, ended the state subsidies to the church, forbade the levying of obligatory collections by the church, forbade the church to own property, abolished its rights as a legal entity, and transferred the ownership of all property of the church to the people.25 Tikhon condemned Lenin even more vehemently in a letter written on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, calling on him to end “the bloodletting, violence, plundering, oppression of the faith; . . . give rest to the nation . . . from the fratricidal war. Otherwise you will be made to pay for the blood of the righteous . . . and you ‘who take the sword will perish by the sword.’ ”26 Tikhon’s warnings fell on deaf ears. Lenin simply did not act to stop the bloodshed, nor did he ever intend to do anything. As discussed before, for him civil war was indispensable to the revolution. He simply followed the same policy with regard to the church. In liquidating the church property, for example, the Bolshevik decrees essentially gave official sanction to an already ongoing process. The decrees simply left the church defenseless against the whims of the local Soviet authorities.27 That is also true about the nature of the Red Terror for the clergy: “There is no solid evidence that the clergy were singled out for execution” by the Red Terror.28 The clergy simply shared the same fate as many others: that is, they were the random victims of the terror. There was no compelling reason for the Bolsheviks to alienate the church, for they were in the midst of an ongoing civil war. It would have been better if they could have simply neutralized the church, rather than pushing it to the other side. In this vein, for example, the separation decree was not strictly enforced, and its implementation was left to the local Soviets. In any case, however, most of the bishops and clergy supported the White Army. In the most explicit case, émigré Russian clergy met in Yugoslavia in 1921 and appealed to Western countries for assistance in restoring the tsarist regime. More importantly, perhaps, the church proved to be capable of mobilizing the faithful to its defense. In February 1918, Tikhon sent out an instruction to all priests, monks, and nuns, asking them to organize local societies and call them “in cases of attack by despoilers or robbers of church property . . . to defense of the Church.”29 And this active resistance paid off. Even the workers fl ooded the government in 1918 and 1919 with requests asking “to lift prohibitions on services, reverse church closures, and release clergy

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from incarceration.”30 In particular, the strength of the church in organizing anti-Bolshevik activity in areas occupied by the White Army forced the Bolsheviks to change their policy toward the church. First, the Bolsheviks decided to rely more on antireligious propaganda and education. The new party program, which was passed by the Eighth Party Congress held in March 1919, aimed to eradicate “religious prejudice” without “offending the religious susceptibilities of believers”31 and rejected more radical proposals such as the closure of the churches and the extermination of the clergy. Second, the Bolsheviks began to look for allies within the church. An historic opportunity arose with a rather unfortunate event, the famine crisis of 1921–1922. Millions of people died in the famine. In some regions worst hit by the famine, some people even turned to cannibalism. For Lenin this was a golden opportunity to hit the church. Even though the church campaigned both in Russia and abroad to raise funds to help the famine victims, the Bolsheviks started a vigorous campaign asking the church to sell all its valuables. Tikhon agreed to the sale of non-consecrated items, but not consecrated ones.32 Tikhon also promised to raise money equivalent to the value of all consecrated items. But Lenin went ahead and sent out a decree in February 1922 to the local Soviets demanding that they confiscate all church valuables, consecrated and non-consecrated. In a top-secret letter written on March 19, 1922, to members of the Politburo, Lenin explained the logic behind confiscation: Precisely at the present moment we are presented with an exceptionally favorable, even unique, opportunity . . . Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition. Now and only now, the vast majority of peasants will . . . be on our side. . . . We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras).33 Contrary to Lenin’s prediction, some peasants, mainly old men and women, rushed to the defense of the church. In 1922–1923, around 1,400 clashes occurred between the Bolsheviks and the parishioners; as a result, 7,100 clergy were killed. But he proved to be right in timing. The local church defense societies were no match for Bolshevik troops with machine guns. The Bolsheviks rounded up thousands of priests to be tried in public, some of whom were sent into exile while others were imprisoned. Even Patriarch Tikhon could not escape punishment and in May 1922 was put under house arrest.34 Adding insult to injury, the Bolsheviks found an ally within the church. A group of priests, who rapidly organized themselves as the Living Church,

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criticized Patriarch Tikhon’s policy on the famine crisis. Immediately after Tikhon’s arrest, a group calling themselves the Progressive Clergy of Petrograd issued a proclamation accusing him and the church hierarchy in the bitterest terms of siding with “the enemies of the people.” The Progressive Clergy called for a church council “for a trial of those who are guilty of the ruin of the church, as well as to order the ecclesiastical government, and to establish normal relations with the Soviet authorities.”35 Thus, the church administration was paralyzed not only by the arrest of the patriarch, but also by the emergence of a great schism. As indicated in previous chapters, this schism was not new.36 Historically, the Russian Orthodox Church had not managed to close the long-standing gap or ameliorate the hostility between the white clergy, with married parish priests, and the black clergy, with monastic unmarried priests.37 In May 1922 the renovationist clergy went further than simply criticizing Tikhon. In a meeting with Tikhon, they persuaded him to appoint Metropolitan Agathangel as the patriarch’s deputy. As Agathangel could not take up the position, the renovationists formed the Provisional Superior Church Administration and declared themselves “the high canonical authority in the Church.”38 More importantly, perhaps, the renovationists secured widespread support from the parishes, partly because of the vigorous support provided by the government. They had governmental permission to maintain a central administration, publish, and have a theological academy. In disputed parishes, the government always sided with the Living Church, sometimes arresting the resistant clergy.39 By the end of 1922, almost all parishes in Moscow and Petrograd belonged to the renovationists. Throughout the country 66 percent of the parishes declared their support for the renovationists.40 The Living Church schism finally brought Tikhon to his knees. Facing two united enemies, Tikhon repented of his former activities against the Bolshevik government in June 1923. In his confession addressed to the Supreme Court, Tikhon wrote: “I declare hereby to the Soviet authorities that henceforth I am no more an enemy to the Soviet government, and that I have completely and resolutely severed all connections with the foreign and domestic monarchists and the counter-revolutionary activity of the White Guards.”41 Tikhon was immediately released, partly to appease the European countries with whom Soviet Russia had developed trade relations, and launched a counter-attack against the renovationists. The fall of the reformist clergy was as swift as their rise. Within a year, for example, they lost control of all but a handful of the parishes in Moscow. By 1927, out of 28,743 parishes in Russia, only 6,245 were under their control, with even fewer numbers of parishioners.42 Tikhon’s death in April 1925 once again left the Orthodox Church in administrative confusion. Metropolitan Peter assumed the role of patriarch locum tenens, but he was soon arrested, choosing Metropolitan Sergii as his successor. Before Sergii assumed the position of patriarch locum tenens, another schism divided the church. Now Archbishop Grigorii led a group of

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bishops to form the Temporary Higher Church Council in late 1925. Seeing in this an opportunity to further weaken the church, the Soviet government immediately granted the council legal recognition. However, Sergii was not deterred and assumed the position. By 1932 some twenty-seven bishops, twelve of whom were consecrated during Tikhon’s reign, sided with Grigorii, bringing with them a considerable number of parishes. By 1938 the Grigorian movement is estimated to have controlled around 5 percent of the churches in Russia.43 Sergii met the same fate as his predecessor and was arrested in early 1926. He was initially against Soviet rule. However, he could not continue this policy and issued a proclamation in June 1927 reversing the church’s policy toward the Soviet state: “We wish to be Orthodox and at the same time to claim the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, the joys and successes of which are our joys and successes, the misfortunes of which are our misfortunes.”44 In order to understand the shift in Sergii’s position, we should note that after his first arrest he was arrested twice more before he made this proclamation and, more importantly, that “the organizational structure of the Church was on the brink of dissolution” as “ten of the eleven designated successors of Patriarch Tikhon were in prison or in exile.”45 As such, Sergii could not resolve the schisms. Even though they had lost their initial impetus, the renovationist clergy still functioned without any hindrance from the Soviet state as they functioned legally under Soviet law. In return for his support, Sergii obtained from the Soviet state the right to convene a Holy Synod and publish a journal.46 Sergii’s decision did not go unchallenged, leading to strong opposition against him within the church. Unable to fend off his opponents, Sergii eventually resorted to his ultimate weapon, banning and excommunication. In his letter to Metropolitan Krill defending the employment of bans and excommunication against his opponents, Sergii hints at the charges raised against him for collaborating with the Soviet regime: “You are deeply grieved that we call them departed ones and schismatics. But they call our Church, led by me, ‘the kingdom of anti-Christ,’ our temples ‘the den of satan,’ us his servants, the Holy Eucharist ‘demon food,’ they spit on our Holy things, and the like.”47 As admitted by Sergii, a number of schismatic movements emerged as a result of Sergii’s proclamation of support for the Soviet state and destroyed the already fragile unity of the church. By 1928 approximately 8–9 percent of the parishes had declared their independence from the patriarchal church.48 What made these schisms particularly troublesome for the church was not their size, but their leadership: unlike the former schisms, such as the Living Church, which remained mostly a movement of white parish clergy, these schisms found strong support among the church hierarchies, too, with a number of infl uential bishops breaking away from the Sergii-led church and going into schism. The most important case of schism was led by Metropolitan Iosif, who was deputy as locum tenens after Sergii was arrested

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in 1926. In December 1927 his diocese, Leningrad (formerly Petrograd), declared its independence from the patriarchate. Originating in Leningrad, the movement then spread to other dioceses, such as Voronezh, Novgorod, Tver, Vologda, and Pskov.49 The first decade of the 1917 Revolution was thus quite detrimental to the Russian Orthodox Church: the church became financially impoverished, losing its extensive lands, some 2 million acres; rich bank accounts and treasury, some 7.2 billion rubles; and shares in 1,112 industries and business.50 It became institutionally weakened, with the number of churches decreasing from 54,000 in 1914 to 39,000 in 1928;51 and it lost its unity, with some 30 percent of the parishes being under the control of schismatic movements. The church also lost a significant number of its human capital, with some joining the schismatic movements, between 5,000 and 10,000 clergy being killed, another tens of thousands being put in prison or sent to exile, and some joining the ranks of the enemy, becoming members of the League of the Militant Godless, whose task was to launch a broad antireligious propaganda campaign.52 IN THE POST-REFORM PERIOD As a result of the reforms in Soviet Union, the Orthodox Church became financially crippled, institutionally weakened, and fully subordinated to the state. As its loyalty had always been questioned by the regime, the church was subjected to periodic attacks by the regime. The attacks in the 1930s were so detrimental to the church that it almost came to total liquidation. In 1930 Metropolitan Sergii claimed that there were 30,000 open churches in Russia and 163 bishops. By the end of the decade, there were just 4,225 churches in Russia and only 4 bishops. But it should be noted that it was the decade of the Stalinist terror that really took its toll on the church. Neither the brutal campaign for rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, which started in 1928, nor the great Stalinist purges, which peaked in 1936–1938, targeted the church per se. In the former, millions of peasants joined the church as the victims of Stalinist terror, and in the latter even the Communist party members suffered the same fate. In the Second World War and afterward, Stalin made peace with the church in return for help in the Soviet war efforts. As a result, the number of churches increased to 13,413, and the number of bishops rose to 80 in 1958. However, under Khrushchev, the church once again became the subject of suppression, as a result of which the number of churches had decreased to 7,500 by 1966.53 Two more features should be mentioned briefl y to complete the picture. First, the church’s sphere of action was severely restricted to purely religious services. The church was forbidden from undertaking any other sort

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of nonreligious activity. By a law issued in April 1929, religious associations were restricted in these ways: Forbidden (a) to found funds for mutual help, cooperative societies, productive associations and generally to employ the property which is in their hands for any other kind of use than the satisfaction of religious services; (b) to give any material support to their members, to organize special meetings for children, youths, women, prayer or anything else; also any common meetings, groups, circles, sections for literature, handiwork, labour, the teaching of religion, etc.; and also to arrange excursions and children’s playgrounds, to open libraries and readingrooms, to organize sanatoria and medical aid.54 Second, the Soviet state took upon itself the task of waging an ideological war on religion. In this vein, in February 1925 the Soviet state gave a free hand to the League of the Godless, later renamed the League of the Militant Godless, to undertake vigorous propaganda against all religions. With active state and party support, the league continuously increased its membership base from 87,000 in 1926 to millions in the 1930s.55 The league published a magazine, titled the Godless, and printed millions of copies; distributed antireligious pamphlets and leafl ets; formed cells of the Godless in factories, villages, and the Red Army; organized antireligious seminars in the universities; and produced antireligious theatrical representations and films. The league also collaborated with the Soviet state in incorporating materialism and atheism into school programs.56 Despite the vigorous support of the Soviet regime, however, atheism never took deep root among the masses. According to the estimates, less than one quarter of Russians declared themselves to be atheist during the Soviet period. And with the collapse of Soviet rule, that number decreased to around 5 percent.57 The eradicationist model of state secularity had survived in the Soviet Union until its collapse. In the concluding chapter, I discuss the fate of eradicationism as a model of state secularity.

NOTES 1. The following account depends heavily on Suny (2006). 2. For a more detailed discussion, see chapter 9 in Figes (1998). 3. See Lenin’s April Theses, first published in Pravda newspaper on April 7, 1917. The English translation is available at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1917/apr/04.htm. 4. See Getzler (1996:465). 5. The Bolsheviks’ legalization of workers’ take over can be found in “Draft Regulations on Workers’ Control available at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1917/oct/26.htm.

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6. See, for example, Lenin’s Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People, published in Pravda on January 4, 1918. The text can be found at www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/DRWP18.html. 7. For a detailed account of the Russian civil war, see Mawdsley (2007) and Bullock (2006). 8. Quoted in Mawdsley (2007:22). 9. See Figes (1990). 10. Figes (1998:760). 11. Bullock (2006:130). 12. Figes (1998:758). 13. See Freeze (1996, 1999). 14. Basil (1979:192). 15. Figes and Kolonitskii (1999:46). 16. Figes (1998:350), Curtiss (1948). 17. Quoted in Curtiss (1948:241–242). 18. For the church’s support for the continuation of the war see Curtiss (1948:242–243). 19. Curtiss (1948:244). 20. The resolution can be found in Browder and Kerensky (1961:818–819). 21. Curtiss (1948:247–248). 22. Curtiss (1948:247–248). 23. The full text can be found in MacLear (1995:329–331). 24. MacLear (1995:329–331). 25. The full text can be found in MacLear (1995:332–333). 26. Quoted in Pospielovsky (1998:210). 27. See, for example, the Instructions of the Justice Commissariat on the separation decree issued on August 24, 1918. Parts of the text can be found in MacLear (1995:337–339). 28. Roslof (2002:27). 29. Parts of the text can be found in MacLear (1995:333–335). 30. Roslof (2002:29). 31. Quoted in Roslof (2002:29). 32. Quoted in Regelson (1991). The book is available at www.apocalyptism.ru/ Tragedy-of-Russian-Church.htm 33. The text is available in English at World War I Document Archive, http://wwi. lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_‘Black_Hundreds’_Anti-Clerical_Campaign_/_ Lenin_to_Molotov 34. Figes (1998:748–749), Regelson (1991, chapters 1–3). 35. The text can be found in MacLear (1995:346–347). 36. See Roslof (2002), also Roslof (1996). 37. Freeze (1995:309). 38. MacLear (1995:348). 39. See the discussion on the rise of the reformist clergy in Fletcher (1971:32–35). 40. Pospielovsky (1998:240). 41. The text of Tikhon’s confession can be found in MacLear (1995:351–352). 42. For an excellent analysis of why the Living Church movement declined, see Freeze (1995). 43. Pospielovsky (1998:248–249), Fletcher (1971:46–49). 44. Quoted in Fletcher (1971:51). 45. Fletcher (1971:52). 46. Fletcher (1971:52). 47. Quoted in Fletcher (1971:62). 48. Shkarovskii (1995:374). 49. For more on the Josephite movement, see Shkarovskii (1995).

Eradicationist State Secularization in the Soviet Union 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Shubin (2005:528). Froese (2004:42). Peris (1995). Davis (1991:614). Klepinin (1930). Froese (2004:38). See the discussion in Klepinin (1930). Froese (2004:48).

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Conclusion The Fates of Three Models of Secular States

The recent Arab revolutions/rebellions/protests have once again raised an old question: What features should the Arab political systems ideally have? Inescapably, Turkey frequently comes up as a model country for the Arab world. One critical achievement attributed to Turkey, and hence its attractiveness as a model, is that it has reconciled—or better put, has come very close to reconciling—Islam with liberal secularism and liberal democracy.1 Turkey, this author also believes, has indeed made great progress in that direction. The critical question is, then, how has Turkey achieved this? Unfortunately, this is too big of a question to tackle within a concluding chapter. Still, I believe this book provides one critical insight into the ongoing debate. This insight might be counterintuitive especially for those individuals who claim that state secularism, as implemented in Turkey, has been a great impediment to further liberalization of democracy in Turkey.2 I agree that state secularity was indeed realized in the first place and then was sustained in Turkey in an authoritarian fashion. Furthermore, the non-neutrality of the Turkish state toward the Alawites and other religions is indeed a major problem. However, this should not lead us to conclude rather too easily on the topic. Accommodationist state secularity in Turkey has made a critical contribution to the progress the country has made toward a possible reconciliation between Islam and liberal secularism and liberal democracy. To see this contribution, one has to acknowledge Turkey’s two other noteworthy achievements. First, the Turkish secular state has long proved to be exceptionally resilient.3 Second, Turkish religious activism has also been far less threatening to the secular state in Turkey4 than activism elsewhere in the Islamic world.5 These two achievements are obviously related: more specifically, they are constitutive of each other. As this book argues, Turkish state secularity has been accommodative of religion. This concluding chapter suggests that such a model of state secularity has deeply affected religious activism in Turkey by making the Turkish religious community more accepting of “secularism” as a condition of modernity. As a result of this acceptance, the secular state in Turkey has not faced the same sort of challenges other countries in the Middle East have faced.

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Both the resiliency of the secular state and the more accepting attitude of religious community toward state secularity are such critical achievements of Turkey that they not only precede, but also precondition, any other achievement attributed to Turkey in reconciling Islam, liberal secularism, and liberal democracy. I suggest that these two achievements are the direct outcome of the accommodative state secularism Turkey adopted in the 1920s and has since then stubbornly protected. This can be better seen if the fates of separationism and eradicationism in Iran and Russia respectively are taken into account. THE STATE AND RELIGION As the respective chapters illustrated, Republican Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, and Soviet Russia undertook extensive state secularizing reforms in the 1920s and 1930s and redefined the relationship of their states to their dominant religions and religious community/institutions. Common to all three cases was that the state unconditionally declared, ambitiously implemented, and jealously guarded its absolute sovereignty, as a result of which religious community/institutions lost almost all their public functions and autonomy of action. This, then, was what constituted “state secularization.” Yet all three cases also differed in one critical way. While the Soviet Russian secular state sought to eradicate religion and religious community/institutions, the Pahlavi Iran secular state let them go their own way. Only the Republican Turkish secular state sought to transform religion and religious community/ institutions in its own image. State secularization in Turkey went beyond just merging religious institutions with the state apparatus and included an ambitious project of shaping religion. As chapter 3 illustrated, the Turkish state incorporated an extensive network of mosques and offices of religious counsels into its apparatus. In order to run these institutions, the state employed former Ottoman religious scholars. Thus, religious services including research, teaching, and publication on religion continued in Turkey, but under state patronage. For example, between 1924 and 1950, the Directorate of Religious Affairs distributed (free of charge) 5,000 Qur’an translations and commentaries (each in nine volumes), 5,000 Buhari Hadith translations and commentaries (each twelve volumes), and 247,000 different religious books all over Turkey.6 As a corollary to this intervention in religious services, the Turkish state was actively involved in crafting a new understanding of religion, an understanding compatible with the secular nature of the state.7 The Turkish state then propagated this new understanding throughout the network of mosques spanning the whole country. In this vein the state even prepared a set of sermons to be preached during Friday prayers.8 The Turkish state also sought to become the sole voice in shaping religion. In large part, the closure of the Sufi orders in 1925 served this purpose.

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Following the same practice, the Turkish state employed most of the Sunni Sufi sheikhs in the state. Those who left Turkey generally belonged to the non-orthodox Bektashi Sufi order.9 The Turkish state has also jealously guarded its monopoly over the interpretation of religion. Numerous individual biographies from the 1920s to 1950s consistently show that the Turkish state infl icted severe hardships on those members of the religious community who did not collaborate with the regime and tried to break the state monopoly over religious teaching and research. Religious figures, such as Said Nursi, Mehmed Esad Erdebili, I˙ skilipli Atı f, Ali Galip Keskin, Abdülhakim Arvasi, Mehmet Vehbi, and Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan, faced severe punishments, ranging from exile to death, due to their continuation of activities that were distasteful to the regime.10 While religious activism outside the state was demanding, time-consuming, and often attracted suspicion and suppression, religious activism within the state proved to be relatively safe and even to an extent rewarding. This became even more true with the transition to multiparty democracy in 1950. We see most of the leading figures of religious revivalism in Turkey, who also happened to come to lead major grassroots religious groups, employed in the Turkish state. Examples are many. The most infl uential religious group in Turkey, the Fethullah Gülen movement, was established and, since its origin, led by Fethullah Gülen, who had been a preacher and a prayer leader for the Directorate of Religious Affairs for more than twenty years. Another infl uential group, a Naqshibandi Sufi order, I˙ skenderpas¸a, is in fact named after a Diyanet mosque where the order’s late sheikh, Mehmed Zahid Kotku, had served as preacher and prayer leader. This order’s sheikh after Mehmed Zahid, Mahmud Esad Cos¸an, was a professor at Ankara University Faculty of Theology. Another Naqshibandi order was also named after a Diyanet mosque, I˙ smail Ag˘ a, for the same reason: its long-time sheikh, Mahmut Osmanog˘ lu, had served as a preacher and prayer leader in that mosque. Tahir Büyükkörükçü, the leader of another religious group, Erenköy, also worked for the Diyanet as a religious counsel and preacher. State secularization in Iran was separationist: it neither incorporated religious institutions into the state nor sought to transform religion. In the face of a state claiming absolute sovereignty, the religious community embarked upon a program of developing their religious school system. The leadership, of first Abdol Karim Haeri-Yazdi and then Husayn Borujerdi, proved to be critical in this development. Haeri-Yazdi moved to Qum in 1922 and brought his many followers, including Ruhollah Khomeini, Reza Golpayegani, and Kazem Shariatmadari, who assumed the highest positions in the Shi’a religious community during the second half of the 20th century. Haeri-Yazdi introduced an order to the religious curriculum, instituted annual examinations, and regulated the stipend system. He renovated some old seminaries in Qum and expanded the libraries available to the seminarians. After Haeri’s death, Qum seminaries improved further under the leadership of Husayn Borujerdi, who came to Qum in 1944 and assumed leadership

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of the Qum seminaries.11 Borujerdi succeeded in halting Iranian students’ migrations to Iraq for religious learning. This is evident in that by the time he came to Qum, the number of students numbered 2,500 at all seminaries in Qum and rose 6,000 by the time of his death in 1962.12 As a result, the city of Qum became the bastion of Islamic learning in Iran13 to the point of competing with two historical Shi’a holy cities, Najaf and Karbala.14 What made this possible was the religious community’s loosely structured internal hierarchy and close ties to the merchant class in Iran. The religious community’s ties with the merchant class continued to develop under the new secular state in Iran: intermarriages between these two urban groups and joint ventures in trade simply solidified this alliance.15 To tap into this resource more effectively, Borujerdi instituted an orderly system of collecting religious taxes and charities. Before him, agents having authorization letters from high-ranking religious scholars had voluntarily collected the religious taxes and charities and forwarded them to Qum. Borujerdi registered all agents, assigned each of them to a clearly delineated district of responsibility, and specified precisely their terms of appointment. He also built a register of correspondence. The religious scholars in Qum thus extended their networks all across the country. This reinstitutionalization and development of financial resources outside the state also helped the religious community in Iran undertake welfareimproving activities. Running through many biographies of prominent Shi’a religious scholars is a constant theme of how they channeled the religious taxes and charities, coming from believers, into activities that improved the lot of the poor, the old, the widows, the orphans, and the needy in society. The narrations give us an image of a grand ayatollah as a “grandfatherly man with a white beard and twinkling eyes”16 to whom visitors come for answers. Some ask for financial help; some ask for religious, legal, or even psychological advice. These activities, in addition to those already existing religious institutions, served as yet another critical channel deeper into Iranian society. State secularization in Russia was eradicationist. It did not pursue a limited objective such as, for example, restricting religion to a private sphere. Rather it sought not only to decapitate religious community/institutions socially, politically, and economically and but also to eradicate religion even from the minds and the hearts of the citizens. Starting in the midst of a civil war, the Soviet state appropriated church lands and buildings, closed down thousands of churches and all monasteries, and jailed or put under house arrest thousands of church elders, priests, and monks. In the late 1920s, the Soviet state banned the church from engaging in any charity activity, thus closing another channel into the masses, and began to actively propagate an antireligious worldview in order to have atheism in place of religion. By 1934, for example, the Soviet state had already introduced atheism in the state school system: the statute on secondary schools set the objective of primary and secondary schools as “anti-religious upbringing of the students”

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and building “instruction and education work upon the basis of an active fight against religion and its infl uence upon the student and adult population.”17 The Soviet state also introduced courses on atheism at higher levels of education, one of which was a compulsory course on scientific atheism. The invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in 1941 brought to the severely crippled church the respite it much needed. The Soviet state not only ended its heavy suppression of the church, but also even allowed the church a certain amount of breathing space. Between 1941 and 1947, the propagation of atheism stopped. Stalin even met with the church elders in 1943 in the Kremlin, listened to their requests, and implemented several of them. For example, the Soviet state released thousands of priests from jail and allowed them to return to their churches. The state also allowed the election of a new patriarch, a position left vacant since the death of the last patriarch, Tikhon, in 1925. The church was allowed to collect donations for the war efforts, publish a journal, organize seminaries, and run theological academies.18 In 1947, Stalin reversed some of his policies regarding the church. The Soviet state retightened its grip over the church, reclosed some churches and some seminaries, and renewed antireligious propaganda. Yet it did not restart an active suppression of the church. Suppression restarted under Stalin’s successor, Nikitai Khrushchev. In a determined effort to root out all of Stalin’s legacy, Khrushchev targeted the church. In 1958, the Soviet state began to wage a second round of suppression on the church; in the next six years, the state closed down at least half of the churches that had been operating in Soviet Russia. The Soviet state not only drastically reduced the number of priests, but also made priesthood a demanding profession. The clergy was overtaxed, and hundreds of them were fired, jailed, sent to camps, or exiled. The Soviet state also began to close down monasteries and appropriated their lands.19 The antireligious propaganda gained a new momentum in the new period, so much so that the 1961 party program even declared a renewed commitment to “free consciousness from religious prejudices and superstitions.” The mission was to construct a full communist society by 1980 in which the church would cease to exist and all Soviet citizens would be atheist.20 The Soviet state did not continue its active suppression of the church under Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982), but rather restricted itself to the propagation of atheism through a variety of means. As the Soviet state had kept the church under heavy state control and did not extend a helping hand, the Orthodox Church had remained by and large a moribund organization in the rest of the Soviet period. On the positive side, though, the victimization of the church at the hands of the Soviet state would prove to be beneficial in the long run. For sure, decades of antireligious propaganda had taken their toll on the believers. According to a major survey conducted in 1996–1997, only 7 percent of Russian society identified themselves as “traditional believers” who regularly attended church services. However,

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the same survey also found that only 5.5 percent of the population identified themselves as “atheists.”21 Even so, according to a national survey, the church was the most trusted organization in Soviet society by the end of 1980s.22 MEETING THE CRISIS Republican Turkey and Pahlavi Iran in the 1970s and Soviet Russia in the 1980s plunged into a crisis. It is beyond the scope of this concluding chapter to detail how the crisis originated, unfolded, and ended in each case. To say the least, however, the crisis was in large part driven by a multitude of problems either aggravated or created by the state-led economic development model each country pursued. The crisis eventually brought down political regimes in Iran and Russia, in 1979 and 1991 respectively, and led to a military coup d’état in Turkey in 1980. Even though the crisis did not have much to do with state-religion relations per se, it affected state-religion relations in each country. To be more specific, while separatist state secularity in Iran and eradicationist state secularity in Soviet Russia did not survive the crisis, Turkey’s accommodative state secularity survived and continues to do so to this day. To start with Iran, the crisis brought down the Pahlavi monarchy through a social revolution.23 Iran was, and still is, blessed (or cursed) by oil. Iran’s oil revenues constituted 45 percent of the government’s total revenues in 1963. From 1963 on, oil revenues increased considerably. By 1977, oil’s share in government revenues increased to 77 percent. Despite the splendid economic growth oil generated in Iran, the Iranian economy simply did not have the infrastructure to absorb that amount of windfall oil income. Neither the agricultural sector nor the construction sector could keep pace with the increasing demands of food and housing in urban areas. Due to the massive migration from rural areas and the lack of government investment, rents and prices of land and property in urban areas skyrocketed. In some parts of Tehran, for example, rents increased tenfold. Shantytowns, lacking basic municipality services such as water, electricity, public transportation, and even garbage collection, mushroomed around big cities. The Iranian state could not respond to the mounting problems of diverse social groups in an effective manner. With increasing oil revenues, the Iranian state was able to establish a brutal and repressive state mechanism. With the confidence of having such a state, the Iranian governments of the period dared to wage a full-scale war against almost all discontented social groups.24 The regime, with its brutal intelligence service and powerful armed forces, could probably have suppressed all these dissident segments of the society if they had surfaced at different times. In Iran, however, thanks to the Iranian state’s efforts, they united in the fall of 1977. Over the next fourteen months, the masses and the regime began to confront each other routinely on the streets.

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State secularization in Iran left a religious community in control of a societal-wide network of religious institutions. As Iran plunged into a crisis in the mid-1970s, the activist members of the religious community utilized that network of religious institutions and unified otherwise disunited societal groups against the state. Thus, the revolution came to Iran in large part thanks to the efforts of the religious community. The face of the revolution was not surprisingly that of a religious scholar, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Born in 1902 in the city of Khomeyn in Iran, this fiery man of religion was politically inactive until 1962. In this year, Grand Ayatollah Husayn Borujerdi, who prohibited members of the religious community to become involved in politics in 1949, died, and Ruhollah Khomeini rose to the top of the Shi’a religious hierarchy as a grand ayatollah in 1962. Because of his bitter criticisms of the shah, he was exiled to Turkey in 1964 and then moved to Iraq in 1965. Even outside Iran, Khomeini continued to conspire against the Pahlavi state. As a grand ayatollah, he had religious students who had been active in Iran, controlling some religious institutions as Khomeini’s representatives. Khomeini’s students, for example, established the Society of Militant Clergy in 1976, which had bases in local mosques “to organize debates, distribute leafl ets, recruit local youth, organize strikes, distribute Khomeini’s tapes and statements, supervise demonstrations and provide their localities with food and fuel during the hard winter days of the revolution.”25 Under a political regime where legitimate ways of expressing discontent were highly restricted, Khomeini’s network in the religious institutions proved to be critical assets for revolutionaries, which helped Khomeini return to Iran on February 1, 1979, as the undisputed leader of the revolution. In his first press conference held on February 5, 1979, he hinted at the character of the upcoming regime in Iran: As a man who, through the guardianship [velayet] that I have from the holy lawgiver, I hereby pronounce Bazargan as the Ruler, and since I have appointed him, he must be obeyed. . . . This is not an ordinary government. It is a government based on the shari’a. Opposing this government means opposing the shari’a of Islam and revolting against the shari’a, and revolt against the government of the shari’a. . . . Revolt against God’s government is a revolt against God. Revolt against God is blasphemy.26 In the succeeding years, Khomeini and his students successfully eliminated all potential contenders for power and consolidated their rule in Iran. Remaining truthful to his own understanding of Shi’a Islam, which specified an extensive role in politics for the Shi’a religious scholars,27 Khomeini and his students changed state-religion relations in Iran and instituted a new political system in which Shi’a religious scholars occupy critical positions.28 A religious scholar, for example, occupies the highest political position,

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called the supreme leader, in the country. First occupied by Ruhollah Khomeini himself, and then his student Ali Khamanei, the supreme leader appoints the head of the judiciary, the commanders of the armed forces, and many other critical positions in the political system. The Guardian Council, which checks the compatibility of bills passed by the parliament with Islamic law and screens candidates for parliamentary and presidential elections, is also formed by the religious scholars. The new regime in Iran also reintroduced Islamic law into the legal system and began to employ the graduates of religious schools in the judiciary. The post-revolution Iranian state is therefore a semi-theocratic state.29 Yet it still acts like a secular state. The Iranian state still claims sovereignty, extensively controlling the provision of such critical public functions as legal and educational services. In the legal system, for example, the religious judges do not interpret religious law and make their judgments, but rather are given precise rules and laws with which they are to make their judgments. In other words, they are no different from modern secular judges in their relations with the laws and therefore do not enjoy the autonomy of the religious judges of premodern states. Even into the purely religious sphere, the Iranian state extended its claim of sovereignty, propagating Khomeini’s particular understanding of Shi’a Islam as the true Shi’a Islam and subjecting those who do not adhere to various difficulties. In other words, in the post-revolution period, Iran has come to adopt certain features of accommodationist state secularity. Let me now turn to Soviet Russia. The crisis had almost unnoticeably evolved in the Soviet Union over several decades preceding the disintegration in 1991. According to a study, the average annual growth rate in Soviet Russia during this time was spectacularly 9.3 percent in the 1950s. The rate decreased to 4.2 percent in the 1960s, 2.1 percent in the 1970s, and 0.6 percent in the 1980s.30 According to another study, the Soviet growth rate for the period of 1960–1989 was in fact the worst in the world if such standard growth determinants as human capital and investment are controlled. The same study also found that “Soviet economic growth was significantly above the world average in the 1950s, and significantly below even the poor world growth of the 1980s.”31 In order to reverse this downturn and rejuvenate the economy, even under Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982), the Soviet state began to introduce some economic reforms. But the most ambitious and serious reforms came later under Michael Gorbachev (1985–1991). Famously known as Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring), Gorbachev’s reforms could not halt the decline. They might even have sped up the meltdown. The growth rates of gross national product were recorded as 4.1 percent in 1986, 1.3 percent in 1987, 2.1 percent in 1988, and 1.5 in 1989. In the last two years of this period, the Soviet economy even recorded negative growth rates: −4.0 percent in 1990 and −13.0 percent in 1991.32

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While the religious community in Iran was organizationally and financially powerful enough to turn the crisis into a revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church was too decapitated to benefit from the unfolding crisis in Soviet Russia. Primarily a victim of the Soviet system, the church had nothing to lose and enthusiastically supported Gorbachev’s reforms. In his first two years in office, Gorbachev did not change the official state policy toward religion and the church. Yet, for reasons we can only speculate on, he would. It might be that Gorbachev saw in the church an ally “to reawaken Russian society, improve its work ethic, and combat demoralizing social issues such as alcoholism.”33 Or Gorbachev might have “co-opted a potential opposition group and made it one of the strongest supporters of his reform initiative.”34 The first signs of the change came in late 1987 when Gorbachev announced the return of two famous monasteries that were closed down in the 1920s. Gorbachev took an even more daring step in April 1988: he met Patriarch Pimen and five other church elders in Kremlin. In the meeting Gorbachev admitted the mistakes the Soviet state had committed in the past to the church and promised to rectify them. The patriarch returned Gorbachev’s gestures with an equally powerful gesture: “I pledge full support to you, the architect of perestroika and the herald of new political thinking. We, the Church people, ardently pray for the success of that process and are seeking to do everything within our power to promote it.”35 Soon after the meeting, the Soviet state returned another famous monastery and made further concessions to the church. It “gave permission to begin new training programs for priests and to open new seminaries . . . revised the laws on regulating churches; authorized a large increase in the publication of Bibles and religious literature.”36 More importantly, the Soviet state permitted the church to engage in charitable work, an activity that had been forbidden since the 1920s, and began to return church buildings and lands that had been confiscated during the Soviet era.37 In June 1988 the Russian Orthodox Church was permitted to celebrate the millennium of Kievan Rus’ adoption of Orthodox Christianity. The celebration turned into a major event for the church as cultural activities, exhibitions, and religious ceremonies lasted for more than a week and reminded the Russian public of the many contributions the church had made to Russia. With the new state toleration, the church grew in size: the number of Orthodox parishes in Soviet Russia increased from 6,742 in 1986 to 10,110 in 1990 and the number of priests from about 6,000 priests to 7,200. There were just six monasteries in the Soviet Union in 1985; that number increased to 25 in 1990.38 With the new Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations passed on October 1, 1990, the Soviet state formally ended eradicationism as a model of state secularity. The law granted to citizens a broad spectrum of religious rights and freedoms, including the right of parents to rear their children in accordance with their personal religious preferences. In Articles 5 and 6 of the law, the state promised not to “assign to religious organizations

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the discharge of any state function” and not to “intervene in the activity of religious organizations if that activity does not contravene legislation.”39 In other words, the Soviet state seemed to have adopted separationism as a model of state secularity. However, this proved to be unsustainable. In a context where almost all Soviet institutions, except maybe the armed forces, lost credit in the eyes of the public, the Russian Orthodox Church came to enjoy ever broadening public support. A survey in 1989, for example, found that the church was the most trusted organization in Soviet Russia, with only the armed forces posing serious competition.40 This public trust, in large part thanks to its troubled relations with the Soviet state, turned the church into a vocal and critical political player.41 The patriarch was present in the inauguration ceremony of Boris Yeltsin in July 1991 as the president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, one of the sixteen autonomous republics comprising the Soviet Union. In the ceremony the patriarch even addressed Yeltsin and blessed him with a sign of the cross.42 In August 1991, the armed forces staged a coup d’état. The Orthodox Church did not remain a bystander and was involved in the crisis as an autonomous actor. The patriarch himself addressed via radio the troops who surrounded the parliament, warning them not to use violence against the unarmed people who gathered to defend the parliament. If anyone did, the patriarch threatened, he would cut himself “off from the Church and God.”43 The coup failed, and thus ended the last chance to keep the Union together. Four months later the Soviet Union dissolved peacefully. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was renamed as the Russian Federation, and its president, Boris Yeltsin, was inaugurated as the president of this newly independent state. In the new period, the Orthodox Church has continued to improve its status and has continued its recovery. The presidents of the Russian Federation have made numerous gestures to the church.44 The strong man of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has definitely raised the banner to new heights in this regard. In the fourth anniversary of Patriarch Krill’s accession to the church leadership, celebrated in the Kremlin in February 2013, Vladimir Putin said: “The Russian Orthodox Church and other traditional religions should get every opportunity to fully serve in such important fields as the support of family and motherhood, the upbringing and education of children, youth, social development and to strengthen the patriotic spirit of the armed forces.”45 More importantly, after years of intense lobbying, the Orthodox Church finally managed to introduce some substantial changes in the Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations in 1997. The new law specified Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism as traditional religions of Russia and afforded special privileges to their representatives. Among the four traditional religions, Orthodox Christianity was afforded a special place. The law recognized the Orthodox Church as the only religious organization eligible to receive state aid for “the restoration, maintenance,

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and protection of buildings and objects which are monuments of history and culture.”46 The news restricted the activities of representatives of all other religions and deprived them of financial and material benefits from the state.47 In the post-Soviet period, the church has also expanded its educational activities. The church focused on its own network of religious education, opening Orthodox gymnasia, theological institutions, and Sunday schools. In the mid-1990s, the church began to lobby for using state school systems for its educational activities. In 1999, the church and the Ministry of Education agreed on a partnership, which three years later materialized into the introduction of a course in Foundations of Orthodox Culture and later into the curriculum of state schools. In 2006, a new law on education introduced a new set of courses in spiritual-moral culture.48 Finally, in January 2013, the Russian state made religious education mandatory in all schools, a law that became effective on September 1, 2013.49 With that, Russia’s separationist state secularity, adopted at the end of the Soviet period, has thus remained largely on paper. Like Iran, Russia has also come to adopt critical features of accommodationist state secularity. Finally, Turkey plunged into its own crisis in the 1970s. Faltering state-led industrialization, unplanned urbanization and the emergence of shantytowns, deteriorating living conditions in them, increasing unemployment rates, soaring infl ation, and widespread bankruptcies in the informal economy all paved the way for this crisis. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 and the United States’ arms embargo only further aggravated the problems. As problems mounted, successive coalition governments could not help and even contributed to the deepening of the crisis. Especially in the second half of the 1970s, Turkey began to witness increasingly deadly street violence between the leftist and the rightist groups. “By 1980, twenty to thirty Turks were being killed every day and the total number of political deaths had reached five thousand.”50 As the elected governments proved incapable of bringing a halt to street violence and the deterioration of the economy, the Turkish army staged a coup d’état in September 1980 and assumed total control over the administration. The parliament and political parties were closed and politicians were arrested; martial law was imposed all over Turkey. The religious community in Turkey did not play a prominent role in the crisis decade of the 1970s. First of all, all religious institutions were owned by the state, and almost all members of the religious community were employed by the state. In other words, state secularization in Turkey had dealt a deadly blow to the religious community’s autonomous and institutional existence in the country. In addition, in the succeeding decades, the religious community could not develop an alternative institutional base outside of the state. Most of the religious figures seemed content with their positions in the state. There were still a few others who wanted to go beyond the confines the Turkish state set regarding religious activism; however, these few religious figures did not have any distinctively religious institution

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under their control. Therefore, those enterprising religious figures had to build their societal networks almost from scratch. This reinstitutionalization of religious activities outside the state proved to be extremely difficult and time-consuming. Two factors contributed to the slow pace of reinstitutionalization of religious activism outside the state. First, as repeatedly mentioned, the Turkish state incorporated an extensive network of mosques and offices of religious counsels into its body. In order to run these institutions, the state employed most of the well-educated former Ottoman religious scholars and sheikhs. Thus, religious services, including research, teaching, and publication on religion, continued in Turkey under the state patronage. However, the entry of the state into the religious market left little space for enterprising religious scholars. Second, in the beginning of the republican period, there was no strong merchant/bourgeoisie class in Turkey.51 The Turkish state set, as its primary economic objective, the creation of a Muslim bourgeoisie. The 1929 global depression further strengthened the state’s pivotal position in the economy. From then on, the Turkish state embarked upon a state-led industrialization program, which continued well until the 1970s. Thus, the state held the key to wealth in Turkey.52 Eventually, a bourgeoisie class emerged in republican Turkey, but this class was totally dependent on the state. The implication is that those enterprising religious scholars who wanted to build up an autonomous network could hardly find an alternative sound financial base within the society. The religious community had to wait until the 1980s for the development of an independent merchant/bourgeoisie class to develop partial autonomy from the state.53 With limited autonomy and institutional capacity, the religious community in Turkey could not channel mounting social problems into a political movement. Furthermore, the religious community in Turkey could not unify different dissident groups in Turkey against the political system. First, even those enterprising religious figures were the employees of the Turkish state. Second, the religious community did not possess the legitimacy to act as a broker among different dissident groups in Turkey. This was because the religious community in Turkey had been a staunch opponent of all groups espousing communist/socialist/leftist ideology.54 In this vein, many leading religious figures spearheaded the formation of hundreds of local organizations to combat communism. The crisis decade ended with the 1980 military coup. The military regime forcefully stopped the street fighting and, more importantly, went after the social networks that sustained it. As the left and right groups lost their social networks, religious groups filled in and built their alternative social networks. The whole episode, therefore, strengthened religious groups in Turkey. The military also initiated economic liberalization in Turkey as a result of which an independent bourgeoisie class in Turkey began to come into being. Religious groups expanded their base among this new class,

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too.55 Because mosques remained closed to any organized religious activity, religious groups, backed now by an independent moneyed class, diverted their activities into education, business, finance, and the media. By the mid-1990s, religious groups had their own newspapers, TV channels, radio stations, private schools, and university and high school dormitories. These new channels into society further helped religious groups expand their societal base. Alarmed by their growing infl uence, from roughly 1997 to 2002, the Turkish military waged a campaign against religious groups. However, this proved to be ineffective. Religious groups have continued to fl ourish, expanding their presence in business, media, and education both at home and abroad. With the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party in 2002—the leaders of which had been affiliated with political Islamic movement in Turkey— religious groups have also expanded their infl uence into domestic politics. In the last decade, Turkey has been transformed, beyond recognition, in large part due to this growing political infl uence of religious groups in the country. But, and this is critical, accommodative state secularity has remained almost intact in Turkey. The Turkish state still runs mosques, offices of religious counsels, Qur’an schools, and schools of theology; it still employs preachers, prayer leaders, and theology professors and funds religious research and publication. The Directorate of Religious Affairs, which controls these religious institutions (except religious schools that are either under Ministry of Education or under the Council of Higher Education), is, not surprisingly, enormous. By 2012, the Directorate employed 128,846 personnel, out of which 117,778 worked in religious services.56 In this regard, the Turkish state is by far the largest provider of religious services in the country. Three models of state secularity have thus met different endings. While separationism and eradicationism failed, accommodationism survived. More interestingly, non-separationist and non-eradicationist cases also moved closer to accommodationism in their state-religion relations. Is accommodationism intrinsically more resilient? I believe it is. As I discussed in chapter 1, building a modern sovereign state inescapably involves the question of religion. Religion and religious community/institutions had served such critical public functions and controlled so much wealth that builders of modern sovereign states could not simply ignore them. As this book illustrates, the builders of modern sovereign states tackled the question of religion in different ways. Hence, we have multiple models of state secularization. On the other hand, however, the modern state assumes so much power, of all kinds, that it cannot be simply ignored by any societal group. To advance their interests and objectives, different societal groups struggle to appropriate all or part of that power. Furthermore, building a modern sovereign state is also a process of redistributing power, of all kinds. Hence, the process inescapably creates losers and winners. For the sake of the process, therefore, it might be prudent for builders of a modern sovereign state to

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create as many winners as possible. Competition over the state, and the losses one might incur, are two sources of instability that can put the project of modern state building into jeopardy. When it comes to tackling the question of religion in the process of modern state building, accommodationism is an intrinsically superior strategy for it addresses the two sources of instability: first, it makes the religious community a partner in the project of modern state building, and second, it compensates their losses in the actual course of modern state building. In doing so, accommodationism can strengthen religious communities’ loyalty to the modern state. Turkey is an excellent case to illustrate these claims. But it must be kept in mind that accommodationism in Turkey has comprised two seemingly contradictory features: the state has guarded itself jealously against any religious infl uence yet, at the same time, has invested heavily in religious services and has been involved actively in the making of religious discourse. Particular institutional arrangements might change. But, if Turkey is to serve as a model to be emulated in the Arab world, it must be emphasized that the Turkish case exemplifies how a delicate balance between religion and the state can be established. To see how delicate this balance has been, we can just mention that the state has not employed any religious justification for its policies. But, at the same time, the state has not remained aloof to the evolving religious discourse in the country, but instead, has participated in actively shaping it. By doing so, the secular state in Turkey has developed the means to shape religious understandings of both the masses and the religious community in the country. This success of accommodationist state secularity in Republican Turkey should not blind our eyes to a critical defect in its nature. As experienced in Turkey, the state picks a religion, most likely to be the majority religion, to heavily invest in this model. The model therefore works to the disadvantage of other religions and sects. The critical question is, then, how do religious minorities do in different models of state secularity? It is a limitation of this book that it does not seek an answer to this question. This limitation is to a certain extent inescapable because the topic is too big and critical to be addressed in a limited space I have here. I hope this book generates a scholarly interest in this topic. NOTES 1. This reconciliation is presumed by some as almost impossible. See, for example, Pipes (1983), Long and Reich (1986), Kedourie (1994), and Huntington (1997). 2. For the elaboration of this argument, see Kuru and Stepan (2012). 3. Kepel (2002). 4. Hashemi (2009).

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5. I argue elsewhere that state secularization in Turkey also affected the relations between religious groups and secular groups. As a result, religious groups in Turkey had more cordial relations than their counterparts in Egypt. See Bas¸kan (2013). 6. Manaz (2005:359). 7. For more on this see Aktay (1999). 8. Usta (2011). 9. Küçük (2007) and Kı lı ç (2009). 10. Yı ldı rı m et al. (2002). 11. Algar (1990), Martin (2000), and Fischer (1980). 12. Algar (2003:377). 13. Algar (1990). 14. Louer (2008). 15. Fischer (1980). 16. Fischer (1980:86). 17. Cited in Marsh (2011:67). 18. Kenworthy (2012:120). 19. By 1930 all monasteries in Russia were already closed. But, during the Second World War, some were reopened, especially in the occupied territories, and some others were in territories that had not been part of Soviet Russia before 1939. See the discussion in Kenworthy (2012). 20. Marsh (2011:75). 21. Cited in Daniel (2006:67). 22. Cited in Daniel (2006:40). 23. For the following discussion, I benefited from Parsa (1989). 24. See Parsa (1989). 25. Moin (1999:181). 26. Cited in Moin (1999:205). 27. Here I refer to Khomeini’s theory of velayet-e-faqih. See Khomeini (No Date). 28. See Buchta (2000) for a more detailed discussion on the Iranian political system. 29. It is not a full theocracy because there are other infl uential positions in the system, especially the office of the president, that lay persons can occupy. 30. Even official statistics, which used to infl ate the growth rates, did not hide the systematic decline in economic growth rates: the average annual growth rate was 10.3 in the 1950s, 7 percent in the 1960s, 4.9 percent in the 1970s, and 3.6 percent in the 1980s. I got these numbers from Gros and Steinherr (1991:1). 31. Easterly and Fischer (1994:7). 32. Fischer (1994: 234). 33. Daniel (2006:36). 34. Marsh (2011:113). 35. Cited in Marsh (2011:116–117). 36. Daniel (2006:36). 37. Daniel (2006:36). 38. Daniel (2006:40–41). 39. The text of the law is available in Codevilla (1991). 40. According to the survey, 64 percent of the respondents said they most trusted the church; 59 percent said the armed forces. See Daniel (2006:40). 41. Daniel (2006). 42. Schmemann (1991). 43. Daniel (2006:54). See also the discussion in Daniel (2006) of the church involvement in the crisis between Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament in 1993. 44. See Knox (2005), especially chapter 4. 45. Grove (2013).

Conclusion 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Cited in Marsh (2011:127). See the discussion in Thomas (2003). Lisovskaya and Karpov (2010:290–291). Zaimov (2013). Richards and Waterbury (1996:270). Keyder (1987). Bug˘ ra (1994). Yavuz (2003). Bora (1998). Yavuz (2003) and Gümüs¸cü (2010). Diyanet I˙ s¸leri Bas¸kanlı g˘ ı (2012:16).

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Appendix

Table A-1 Ottoman Period: The Ulama Served in Secular Schools and Secular Courts Ulama Worked in Secular Schools Name

Origin

Abdullah Edip Abdullah Edip Abdullah Esat Abdullah Munib Abdullah Vahidi

Ankaralı Erbilli Balı kesirli Ermenekli Konyalı

Abdullah Vehbi

Liceli

Ulama Worked in Secular Courts Name Abdullah Hilmi Abdullah Vahidi Abdurrahman Abdurrahman Nesib Abdülcelil

Hacı Hafı z Abdülgafur Abdurrahman Seferihisarlı Abdülkadir Abdurrahman Hilmi Sivaslı Abdülmuti Abdurrahman Hilmi Zileli Hafı z Abidin Abdülcelil Bağdat Kazı miyeli Abidin Abdülgani Mardinli Ahmet Abdülhamit Hamid Liceli Ahmet Hilmi Abdülkadir Malatyalı Ahmet İzzeddin Abdülkerim Üsküplü Ahmet Mazhar Elhac Abdülmecid Şirvanlı Ahmet Müfit Ahmet Feyzi Aksekili Hafı z Ahmet Refik Ahmet Hamdi Arhavili Ahmet Remzi Ahmet Hamdi Kulalı Ahmet Şevki Elhac Ahmet İslam Hemşinli Ahmet Hamdi Ahmet İzzet Silistreli Ahmed Zahid Ahmet Necati İspirli Ali Ağa Şerifoğlu Ahmet Necip Bergamalı Hafı z Ali Cemal Ahmet Nesari Niğdeli Ali Durmuş Ahmet Refi İstanbullu Ali Enver

Origin Halepli Sultaniyeli Trablusgarplı Ergiri-Lihveli Bağdat Kazı miyeli Eğridereli Karahisarişarkili Kudüslü Debrei Balalı Kı rşehirli İstanbullu Bandı rmalı Süleymaniyeli Halepli Kı rşehirli Erzincanlı Kayserili Dehüklü Erbaalı Niğdelli Bayı ndı rlı Vakı fkebirli Aksekili Ünyeli (Continued)

164

Appendix

Table A-1

(Continued)

Ulama Worked in Secular Schools Name Esseyyid Ahmet Şakir Ahmet Şükrü Ahmet Tevfik Ahmet Hamdi Ahmet Hulusi Alaaddin Hafı z Ali Ali Haydar Hafı z Ali Niyazi Ali Nureddin Ali Rı za Ali Riı za Ali Rı za Ali Rı za Ali Rı za Şeyh Ali Vasfı Bekir Enver Kemal Halil Halil Hulusi Hasan Hasan Fehmi Hasan Fehmi İbrahim Hafı z İrahim İbrahim Fevzi İbrahim Hakkı İbrahim Hilmi İbrahim Sı tkı İlyas Vehbi İshak Nuri İsmail İsmail İsmail Hakkı İsmail Hakkı İsmail Sabri Hafı z İsmail Zihni

Origin

Ulama Worked in Secular Courts Name

Origin

Bağdatlı

Ali Haydar

Batumlu

Diyarbakı rlı Uzunköprülü Kı rşehirli Sarayköylü Silivrili Bartı nlı Rizeli Edirneli İstanbullu Bilecikli İbradalı Köstenceli Kuşadalı Serezli İstanbullu Taşköprülü İstanbullu Kı rkkiliseli Hekimhanlı Erzincanlı Boyabatlı İzmitli Hayfalı İstanbullu Manastı rlı Ünyeli Ankaralı İşkodralı Ohrili Rizeli Harputlu Uşaklı Kastamonulu Varnalı Sivaslı İstanbullu

Ali Rı za Hacı Ali Ali Rı za Bekir Bektaş Bekir Sı tkı Çerkez Emin Halil Fevzi Hasan Basri Hasan Atı f Hasan Hakkı İbrahim Şeyh İbrahim İbrahim Hakkı İbrahim Senih İdris Galip İsmail İsmail Hakkı İsmail Hakkı Ali Haydar İbrahim Evliya İbrahim Hakkı Kirameddin Lütfi Mahmut Mahmut Celalettin Mahmut Ferid Mahmut Hamdi Malik Mazhar Mehmet Mehmet Mehmet Mehmet Mehmet Abid Mehmet Ali Mehmet Arif

Aksekili Tavaslı İstanbullu Kı rşehirli Erbaalı Sı ndı rgı lı Antepli Eskişehirli Rizeli Mecitözülü Siirtli Trablusgarplı İstanbullu İstanbullu Ergirili Bağdatlı Çermikli Erzurumlu İstanbullu Maraşlı Metroviçeli İstanbullu Leskovikli Diyarbakı rlı Rizeli Malatyalı Kayserili Yenişehirli Urfalı Edlibli Şamlı Tosyalı Ulukı şlalı İstanbullu Yenişehir-Fenerli İstanbullu

Appendix Ulama Worked in Secular Schools Name

165

Ulama Worked in Secular Courts

Origin

Name

Origin

Şeyh İzzeddin Mahmut Mahmut el Atassi Mahmut Hamdi Mahmut Eş Şihabi Mansur Mehmet Mehmet Mehmet Mehmet Mehmet Mehmet Mehmet Akif Mehmet Ali Mehmet Arif Mehmet Ası m Mehmet Atı f Mehmet Avni Mehmet Celalettin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Esat Mehmet Esat Mehmet Esat Mehmet Fehmi Mehmet Fevzi

Cebeleli Hekimhanlı Humuslu Beyazı tlı Kudüslü Mı sratalı Darendeli Gümüşhacı köylü Kastamonulu Liceli Şarkihisarlı Uşaklı Ardanuçlu Bolulu İstanbullu Balı kesirli İskilipli Ergirili Debreli Ankaralı Bolulu Divriğili İzmitli Karadağlı Revanduzlu Silifkeli Üsküplü İştipli Selanikli Sürmeneli Safranbolulu Kemahlı

İstanbullu İstanbullu Kı rkkiliseli İstanbullu İstanbullu Bağdatlı Bağdatlı Erbilli İbradı lı İbradı lı Kastamonulu Kastamonulu Kaşlı Prizrenli Sandı klı lı Silifkeli Sivaslı Yalvaçlı Yanyalı İstanbullu Cebeleli Arhavili İstanbullu Şamlı İnebolulu Liceli Arapgirli Borlu Gümülçineli Sasonlu Safranbolulu Kudüslü

Mehmet Hazmi Mehmet Hilmi Mehmet Hilmi Mehmet Hilmi Mehmet Hulusi

Arapgirli Borlu İçelli Niğdeli Çorumlu

Mehmet Aziz Mehmet Bahaeddin Mehmet Bahaeddin Mehmet Cemalettin Mehmet Elif Mehmet Emced Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Mehmet Emin Ali Mehmet Feyzullah Mehmet Fevzi Mehmet Fuat Mehmet Hafı z Mehmet Halit Mehmet Halit Mehmet Hamdi Mehmet Hilmi Mehmet Hilmi Mehmet Hilmi Mehmet Kamil Mehmet Kemaleddin Mehmet Memiş Mehmet Muvahib Mehmet Mükerrem Mehmet Münib Mehmet Nuri

Beyşehirli Lazkiyeli Kayserili Nabluslu İstanbullu (Continued)

166

Appendix

Table A-1

(Continued)

Ulama Worked in Secular Schools Name

Origin

Ulama Worked in Secular Courts Name

Origin

Mehmet Hulusi Mehmet Hurşit Mehmet Hüsnü Mehmet İzzet Mehmet Kazim

Karahisarı Şarkili Kalkandereli Yozgatlı Akçabatlı Darendeli

Mehmet Nuri Mehmet Rı fat Mehmet Rı fat Mehmet Rı za Mehmet Sadi

Mehmet Nası h Mehmet Necib Mehmet Neşet Mehmet Niyazi Mehmet Nuri Mehmet Rasih Mehmet Rauf Mehmet Rı za Mehmet Sabit Mehmet Sadı k Mehmet Saib Mehmet Sait Mehmet Sait Mehmet Salih Mehmet Selim Mehmet Şerif Mehmet Şerif Mehmet Taha Mehmet Tayyip Mehmet Tevfik Mehmet Vasfi

Süleymaniyeli Sivaslı İstanbullu Mudanyalı Kı rı mlı Sivaslı Süleymaniyeli Köstenceli Alaiyeli Çallı Tortumlu Maraşlı Şehrizorlu Hanili Saftlı Analı Ispartalı Deyrli Şarki-Karaağaçlı Kilisli Trabzonlu

Mehmet Sait Mehmet Sait Mehmet Sait Molla Mehmet Sadı k Mehmet Selim Mehmet Şemseddin Mehmet Şükrü Mehmet Şükrü Mehmet Tacüddin Mehmet Tevfik Mehmet Tevfik Mehmet Vahyi Mehmet Zeki Mestan Recai Musa Kazı m Musa Kazı m Mustafa Hulusi Mustafa Hulusi Mustafa İzzet Mustafa Nureddin Mustafa Nuri

Mehmet Zahid Mehmet Ziyaüddin Mehmet Tevfik Merkez Fevzi

Düzceli Lefkoşeli Filibepazarcı ğı lı Aydı ncı klı Edincikli Kudüslü Kuşadalı Tortumlu Akçabatlı Karamanlı Lazkiyeli

Mustafa Rasim Mustafa Raşit Mustafa Safvet Mustafa Şevket

Kayserili Ankaralı Safranbolulu Konyalı Ma’retün Numanlı Bağdatlı İstanbullu İstanbullu Mudurnulu Bağdatlı Manisalı İstanbullu Trabzonlu Deyrli İşkodralı Maraşlı İstanbullu Edirneli Gümülçineli İbradı lı Tiranlı Bergamalı Karacasulu Bolulu Bağdatlı KoyulhisarReşadiyeli İstanbullu İstanbullu Urfalı İbradı lı

Mustafa Tevfik Mustafa Vasfi Müslim Nadir Cemil Şeyh Nemer ed Dari Osman Nuri

Köprülü Avanuslu Urfalı Mutlu Nabluslu Balı kesirli

Musa Musa Kazı m Musa Kazı m Mustafa Mustafa Mustafa

Appendix Ulama Worked in Secular Schools Name Mustafa Mustafa Mustafa Mustafa Ası m Mustafa Ası m Mustafa Fehmi Mustafa Fehmi Mustafa Hazmi Mustafa Hikmet Mustafa Lütfi Mustafa Mahfi Mustafa Mestan Mustafa Nazif Mustafa Neşet Mustafa Rasim Hacı Mümin Nazif Nazif Osman Osman Osman Avni Osman Hilmi Osman Lütfü Osman Nuri Osman Nuri Osman Nuri Osman Raşit Ömer Avni Ömer Azmi Ömer Faruk Ömer Hayri Ömer Hulusi Ömer Husameddin Ömer Kaşifi Ömer Lütfi Ömer Lütfi Hafı z Reşit Hafı z Reşit Reşit Vehbi

167

Ulama Worked in Secular Courts

Origin

Name

Origin

Süleymaniyeli Tarsuslu Ürgüplü Anamurlu İstanbullu Konyalı Ordulu Çemişkezekli Buldanlı Akşehirli İzmitli Cumayı Atikli İstanbullu Serezli Tı rnovalı Darendeli Geyveli Hoşaplı Köriçeli Tokatlı Malatyalı Kı rı mlı Sapancalı İstanbullu Rizeli Rusçuklu Tavaslı Harputlu Vanlı Kütahyalı İstanbullu Dağı stanlı Bağdatlı Mardinli Şamlı Tekirdağlı Hemşinli Şamlı Seydalı

Osman Nuri Osman Nuri Osman Zeki Ömer Lütfi Ömer Lütfi Ömer Lütfi Ömer Talat Hacı Rı fat Müftüzade Said Müftüzade Said Süleyman Süleyman Afşar Şefik Hacı Şerif Şerif Mehmet Kamil Üveys Maili Yahya Fehmi Yahya Sezai Hacı Yakub Yakub Hayri Yusuf El Hatib Yusuf Naci Hüseyin Şevket Hasan Hulki Hasan Tahsin Elhac Seyyit İbrahim Hüseyin Şevket Mehmet Celal

Kafkasyalı Kastamonulu Sis-Kozanlı Burdurlu Elmalı lı Kayserili İskilipli Ankaralı Bitlisli Ermenekli Lamalı Niğdeli Nerdeli Rodoslu Bursalı Ergirili Maraşlı Ergirili Burdurlu Akovalı Cebeli Lübnanlı Erbilli Yenişehirli Kayserili Harputlu Diyarbakı rlı Yenişehirli İstanbullu

(Continued)

168

Appendix

Table A-1

(Continued)

Ulama Worked in Secular Schools Name Hafı z Sadullah Salih Salih Kamil Salih Ataullah Seyfeddin Hafiz Süleyman Süleyman Faik Süleyman Hilmi Süleyman Hulusi Süleyman Hulusi Süleyman Necati Süleyman Sı rrı Süleyman Sı rrı Said Kerami Şakir Şakir Şakir Şuayb Tahir Tahir Yunus Bahri Hafı z Yusuf Yusuf Zahir Yusuf Ziya Yusuf Ziya Yusuf Ziyaüddin Yusuf Ziyaüddin Hasan Hasan Hilmi Hasan Nazı m Hayreddin Hüseyin Avni Hüseyin Fevzi Elhac Hüseyin Hüsnü Hüseyin Hüsnü İbrahim Edhem Hasan

Origin İstanbullu İstanbullu Niksarlı Midillili Debrei Balalı Çatalcalı İstanbullu Tirebolulu Uyvarcalı Vidinli Batumlu Ermenekli Sürmeneli Beni Sa'blı Akovalı Mardinli Niksarlı Yanyalı Kesriyeli Uşaklı Geredeli Akhisarlı İstanbullu Batumlu İstanbullu Sivaslı Şirvanlı Uşaklı Pazarlı Ercişli Trablusşamlı Yozgatlı Safranbolulu Filibepazarcı ğı lı Yafalı Ofl u Uşaklı

Appendix

169

Ulama Worked in Secular Schools Name Halit Mehmet Emin Mehmet Fahreddin

Origin İzmitli Dramalı Bayburtlu

Source: Albayrak (1996).

Table A-2 Ottoman Period: The Ulama Served in Professional and Higher Education Schools Name

Origin

School Name

Abdullah Esat

Balı kesirli

Darülmuallimin

Abdurrahman Hilmi Ahmet I˙ zzet Ali Haydar S¸eyh Ali Vasfi Halil Hasan Elhac Hüseyin Hüsnü Hüseyin Hüsnü Elhac Seyyit I˙ brahim I˙ smail Hakkı I˙ smail Hakkı I˙ smail Hakkı I˙ smail Hakkı

Zileli Silistreli Batumlu I˙ stanbullu Kı rkkiliseli Us¸aklı Filibepazarcı g˘ ı lı I˙ stanbullu Diyarbakı rlı I˙ stanbullu I˙ zmirli Kastamonu Manastı rlı

I˙ smail Kemal I˙ smail Sabri I˙ smail S¸ükrü Mahmut Cemal Mehmet Ası m Mehmet Cemil Mehmet Emin Mehmet Esat Mehmet Esat Mehmet Esat Mehmet Fehmi Mehmet Hulusi Mehmet Nesib Mehmet Niyazi Mehmet Rasih

Trabluss¸amlı Sivaslı Afyonlu Ünyeli Balı kesirli Somalı Karadag˘ lı I˙ stanbullu Serezli Sürmeneli Safranbolulu Eg˘ inli Humuslu Mudanyalı Sivaslı

Darülmuallimat Darülmuallimin Mektebi Hukuk Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin Mektebi Hukuk Darülmuallimin Mektebi Hukuk, Mektebi Mülkiye Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin Mektebi Mülkiye, Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin Mektebi Hukuk, Mektebi Mülkiye, Darülfünun Darülfünün Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin Mektebi Hukuk, Darülfünun Darülmuallimat Darülmuallimat Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin, Darülfünun Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin Darülfünun Darülmuallimin Darülfünun Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin (Continued)

170

Appendix

Table A-2

(Continued)

Name

Origin

School Name

Mehmet Sait Mehmet Tahir Mehmet Tevfik Mehmet Tevfik Mehmet Zahid Musa Kazı m Mustafa Ası m

Batumlu Sofyalı Filibepazarcı g˘ ı lı Kilisli Düzceli Tortumlu I˙ stanbullu

Mustafa Ası m Mustafa Fehmi Mustafa Fehmi Mustafa Hayri Osman Ras¸it Ömer Hayri Ömer Lütfi

Giresunlu Konyalı Ödemis¸li Ürgüplü Tavaslı I˙ stanbullu Karahisarı Sahipli Uyvarcalı Ermenekli Niksarlı

Mektebi Mülkiye, Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin Darülfünun Darülmuallimat Darülfünun Mektebi Hukuk, Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin, Darülfünun, Mektebi Mülkiye Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin Mektebi Hukuk Darülfünun Darülmuallimin Darülmuallimin, Darülfünun Darülmuallimin

Süleyman Hulusi Süleyman Sı rrı S¸akir

Darülmuallimat Mektebi Hukuk, Darülfünun Darülmuallimin

Source: Albayrak (1996). Table A-3

Ottoman Period: The Ulama Served in Various Secular State Institutions

Name Bursalı Mehmed Halid Harputi Abdullatif Batumlu Hasan Fehmi Burhaneddin S¸ükrü I˙ smail I˙ smet Mehmet Arif Ef. Mustafa Nesib Kadri Mehmed Vehbi Nevs¸ehirli Hasan Fehmi Eg˘ inli Ali Zühdü Muhyiddin Beyzade Ziyaeddin Hüseyin el Umri Mustafa Ras¸id Mehmed Nuri Ahmed Sı dkı

Institution Ministry of Education University Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Ministry of Education Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Embassy Ministry of Finance Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Ministry of Education

Position Council Member Instructor Judge Clerk NI NI Instructor Clerk Clerk Clerk Prayer Leader Clerk Judge Clerk Clerk Instructor

Appendix Name Kangı nlı Hüseyin Mehmed Mustafa S¸eref El Hac I˙ brahim Eg˘ inli Osman Vehbi Faik Hacı Numan Nas¸id Mehmed Rüs¸tü Aks¸ehirli Mehmed Rüs¸tü Yozgatlı Hafı z Mustafa Ahmed Hulusi Rasul Hakkı S¸eyhli Yusuf Rı za Mehmed S¸efik Mehmed Saadeddin Hafı z Mehmed Tevfik S¸eyh Selim Mehmed Hayreddin Hasan Fehmi Osman Zeki Erzurumi Mehmed Raif Ahmed S¸ükrü Ali Rı za Has¸im Veli Ahmed Mikdad Mehmed Selim Süleyman Arslan Kazı m Çorumlu Ahmed Rüs¸tü Revanduzlu Hasan Bekir Bag˘ dadlı Hmehmed Emin Boyabatlı Hafı z Halil S¸ükrü Tı rnovalı Ali Osman Erzurumi Halil Ankaralı Mehmet Kayserili I˙ brahim Abdülkadir Ali Hilmi Tı rnovalı Mehmed Said

Institution Ministry of Education Ministry of Justice Royal Finance Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Ministry of Education Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Embassy Ministry of Education Ministry of Justice Ministry of Education Ministry of Awqaf Ministry of Interior Royal Finance Municipality Ministry of Justice Parliament Ministry of Justice Parliament Ministry of Education Ministry of Education Embassy Ministry of Education Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military

171

Position Instructor Clerk Clerk Clerk Clerk Clerk Clerk Clerk Clerk Prayer Leader Clerk Clerk Clerk Clerk Local Governor Clerk Mayor Clerk Deputy Clerk Deputy Director Director Prayer Leader Instructor Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Prayer Leader Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel (Continued)

172

Appendix

Table A-3

(Continued)

Name Kastamonulu Mehmed Feyzullah Erzincanlı I˙ brahim Hilmi Giresunlu Mehmed Nazı m Nevs¸ehirli Mustafa Yozgatlı Mehmet Nuri Bag˘ datlı Süleyman S¸amlı Mehmed Salih S¸amlı Yahya Ahmed Ali Rı za Zag˘ feranbolulu Mustafa I˙ smet Hezargradlı I˙ smail S¸amlı Mehmed Rı za Zileli I˙ smail Hüseyin S¸ükrü Revanduzlu Mehmed Emin Yenipazarlı Hasan Osmanpazarlı Ahmed Trabluss¸amlı Mustafa Erbilli Abdülkadir Mehmed Said Tatarpazarcı klı Mustafa Pazarcı klı Halil Hulusi Nebi Osman Fahd Cizreli Hasan Lami

Institution

Position

Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Military Parliament Military Military Military Statistics and File Dept. Parliament

Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Prayer Leader Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Deputy Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Religious Counsel Secretary Secretary

Source: Kahraman (1998). Table A-4

The Ottoman Ulama in Republican Turkey

Name Dürrizade Abdullah Efendi Abdullah Edip Efendi (Ankaralı ) Abdullah Fahri Efendi (Hadimli)

Former Position

Republican Period Position

Former Sheikh al Islam Religious Judge

Among the 150 Exiles Compensation Wage

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Directorate of Religious Affairs

Appendix Name

Former Position

173

Republican Period Position

Abdullah Galip Efendi (Erbaalı ) Abdullah Münip Efendi (Ermenekli) Abdullah Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Abdurrahman Sabit Efendi

Religious Bureaucracy Office of Sheikh al Islam

Compensation Wage Compensation Wage

Religious Judge Religious Judge

S¸eyh Abdülbaki Efendi Abdülfettah Efendi (Dag˘ ı stanlı )

Office of Sheikh al Islam Religious Teacher

Abdülfettah Efendi (Eg˘ ridereli) Abdülkadir Efendi (Aziziyeli) Abdülkadir Efendi (Mekkeli) Abdürrahim Efendi (Serezli) Hafı z Ahmet Efendi (Serezli) Ahmet Cevdet Efendi (Bergamalı ) Hafı z Ahmet Cevdet Efendi (Filibeli) Ahmet Esad Efendi (Tikvesli)

Religious Teacher Office of Sheikh al Islam Ministry of Awkaf Religious Teacher Religious Teacher Religious Teacher

Compensation Wage Directorate of Religious Affairs Istanbul University Sentenced in Independence Courts Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Finance Compensation Wage Ministry of Justice Compensation Wage Istanbul University

Religious Teacher

Ministry of Education

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage

Ahmet Fevzi Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Ahmet Hamdi (Aksekili)

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Hafı z Ahmet Hamdi Efendi (Dadaylı ) Ahmet Hamdi Efendi (Edirneli) Ahmet Hamdi Efendi (Kastamonulu) Ahmet Hilmi Efendi (Eskicumali) Ahmet I˙ smet Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Ahmet I˙ zzet Efendi (Beypazarı lı ) Ahmet Latif Efendi (I˙ stanbullu)

Religious Teacher and Judge

Religious Teacher

—

Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Justice

Religious Counsel

Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage

Religious Counsel

Compensation Wage

Religious Counsel

Compensation Wage

Religious Teacher

Ministry of Education

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Compensation Wage

(Continued)

174

Appendix

Table A-4

(Continued)

Name

Former Position

Republican Period Position

Ahmet Muhtar Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Ahmet Rakim Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Ahmet Refi Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Ahmet Saadettin Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Ahmet Sirani Efendi (Siranlı ) Hafı z Ahmet Tevfik Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Ahmet Zühtü Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Ali Haydar Efendi (Ahı skalı ) Ali Hüsameddin Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Ali Rı za Efendi (Muglali) Ali Rı za Efendi (Atina-Pazarlı ) Ali Tevfik Efendi (Hacı og˘ lupazarcı g˘ ı lı ) Ali Vasfi Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Behcet Efendi (Siirtli)

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Compensation Wage

Religious Teacher

Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Education Compensation Wage

Bekir Haki Efendi (Safiog˘ lu)

Religious Courts

Hafı z Bekir Hazı m Efendi (Midillili) Hafı z Cemal Efendi (Debre-i Balalı ) Hacı Dursun Feyzi Efendi (Güven) Ebu’l Ala Ali Zeynelabidin Ef. (Mardinli) Molla Es¸ref Efendi (Batumlu)

Qur’an Reciter

Ministry of Justice Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage

Teacher

Compensation Wage1

Theology School Inspector Deputy

Compensation Wage

Fakirullah Mollazade Efendi (Cizreli) Halil Efendi (Kayserili) Halil Fevzi Efendi (Antepli) Halil Hilmi Efendi (I˙ zmirli)

Religious Teacher

— Religious Teacher Religious Judge

Ministry of Education Compensation Wage

Religious Courts

Ministry of Justice

Office of Sheikh al Islam Office of Sheikh al Islam

Compensation Wage Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice

Religious Teacher Religious Counsel Religious Judge Religious Courts Religious Judge

Religious Teacher Religious Counsel Office of Sheikh al Islam Office of Sheikh al Islam Religious Teacher

Istanbul University Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Istanbul Municipality Ministry of Treasury Ministry of Education

Appendix Name

Former Position

Halil Vehbi Efendi (Nevs¸ehirli)

Religious Teacher

Halil Zarif Efendi (Çorumlu) Hasan Efendi (Erzincanli) Hasan Fehmi Efendi (Besnili)

Religious Courts Religious Teacher Religious Teacher

Hasan Fehmi Efendi (Seydis¸ehirli) Hasan Fehmi Efendi (Üsküplü) Hasan Zihni Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Hüseyin Efendi (Egridirli)

Religious Teacher Ministry of Justice

— Religious Teacher

175

Republican Period Position Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Justice Ministry of Justice Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage2 Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage

Hüseyin Avni Efendi (Arabkirli) Hüseyin Avni Efendi (Batumlu) Hafı z Hüseyin Hüsnü Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Hüseyin Kamil Efendi (Tireli) Hüseyin Necmeddin Efendi (Prizrenli) Hüseyin Saadettin Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Hüseyin Sem’i Efendi (Demirhisarli) I˙ brahim Ethem Efendi (Gumuscineli) I˙ brahim Ethem Efendi (Kozanlı ) ˙Ibrahim Ethem Efendi (Ofl u) I˙ brahim Hakkı (Metroviçeli)

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Directorate of Religious Affairs Istanbul University

Religious Teacher

Ministry of Justice

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Compensation Wage

Office of Sheikh al Islam Office of Sheikh al Islam

Ministry of Justice Compensation Wage

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Compensation Wage

Religious Teacher

Ministry of Education

Religious Courts

I˙ brahim Hakkı Efendi (Ardamuçlu) ˙Ibrahim Hakkı Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) I˙ brahim Hakkı Efendi (I˙ zmirli) I˙ brahim Hakkı Efendi (Kalkandereli)

Religious Teacher

Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Justice Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Finance

Religious Counsel Religious Bureaucracy Office of Sheikh al Islam

Religious Teacher

Religious Teacher Istanbul University Religious Teacher-Counsel Compensation Wage

(Continued)

176

Appendix

Table A-4

(Continued)

Name

Former Position

Republican Period Position

I˙ brahim Hakkı Efendi (Trabluss¸amli) Kes¸s¸af Efendi (Malatyalı ) Mahmut Kemalettin Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mahmut Nedim Efendi (Kemahli) Mahmut Ziya Efendi (Ürgüplü) Mehmet Ali Efendi (Erbilli)

Religious Teacher

Bureaucracy

Religious Teacher Religious Bureaucracy

Ministry of Education Compensation Wage

Religious Teacher

Compensation Wage

Religious Judge

Ministry of Justice

Religious Counsel

Mehmet Ali Efendi (Ergirili)

Religious Teacher

Mehmet Asaf Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mehmet Atı f Efendi (I˙ skilipli)

Religious Bureaucracy

Sentenced to Death in 1933 Directorate of Religious Affairs State Bureaucracy

Mehmet Besim Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mehmet Burhanettin Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mehmet Cemil Safi Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mehmet Emin Efendi (Aks¸ehirli) Mehmet Emin Efendi (Bahçeli) Mehmet Emin Efendi (Bozdog˘ anlı ) Mehmet Emin Efendi (Kas¸lı )

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Sentenced to Death in 1925 State Bureaucracy

Religious Bureaucracy

Ministry of Justice

Religious Bureaucracy

Ministry of Justice

State Bureaucracy

Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Justice Directorate of Religious Affairs Lawyer Directorate of Religious Affairs Sentenced to Death in 1933 Directorate of Religious Affairs

Religious Teacher

Religious Counsel Religious Teacher Ministry of Justice

Mehmet Emin Efendi (Kulalı ) Mehmet Emin Efendi (Rusçuklu) Mehmet Emin Efendi (Silifkeli) Mehmet Emin Efendi (Cars¸ambalı ) Mehmet Esad Efendi (Erbilli)

Office of Sheikh al Islam Mosque Preacher

Mehmet Esad Efendi (Sürmeneli)

Religious Counsel

Religious Teacher Religious Teacher Office of Sheikh al Islam

Appendix Name

Former Position

177

Republican Period Position

Mehmet Fehmi Efendi

Religious Teacher

Mehmet Feridi Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mehmet Fuat Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Muhammed Hamdi Efendi

Mosque Preacher

Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage

Religious Teacher

Ministry of Justice

Religious Teacher

Religious Teacher

Directorate of Religious Affairs3 Directorate of Religious Affairs State Bureaucracy

Religious Bureaucracy

Compensation Wage4

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Ministry of Justice

Mosque Preacher

Ministry of Justice

Religious Teacher

Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage

Mehmet Hayreddin Efendi (Manisalı ) Mehmet Hazmi Efendi (Arapgirli) Mehmet Hikmet Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mehmet Hikmet Efendi (Mapavrili) Mehmet Hulusi Efendi (Hopalı ) Mehmet Hulusi Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mehmet Hurs¸it Efendi (Kalkandereli) Mehmet Hüsamettin Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mehmet Nuri Efendi (Bag˘ datlı ) Mehmet Nuri Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mehmet Raif Efendi (Erzurumlu) Mehmet Refik Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mehmet Rifat Efendi (Ankaralı ) Mehmet Safvet Efendi (I˙ bradali) Mehmet Said Efendi (Elbistanlı ) Mehmet Salih Efendi (Geredeli)

—

Religious Teacher Religious Bureaucracy Religious Counsel Former Sheikh al Islam Religious Judge Religious Bureaucracy Religious Counsel Religious Bureaucracy Office of Sheikh al Islam Religious Teacher

Directorate of Religious Affairs No Compensation Deputy in the First Parliament Compensation Wage Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Education

(Continued)

178

Appendix

Table A-4

(Continued)

Name

Former Position Sheikh

Republican Period Position

Mehmet Zahid Efendi (Bursalı ) Mehmet Zühdü Efendi (Kalecikli) Muharrem Lütfi Efendi (Rizeli) Mustafa Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mustafa Efendi (Karacabeyli)

Religious Bureaucracy Religious Counsel

Mustafa Efendi (Tekirdag˘ li)

Mosque Preacher

Mustafa Hikmet Efendi (Buldanlı ) Mustafa Hilmi Efendi (Bayı ndı rlı ) Mustafa Hilmi Efendi (Burdurlu) Mustafa Hulusi Efendi (Bergamalı ) Mustafa Naim Efendi (Tarsuslu) Mustafa Rakim Efendi (Aydoslu) Mustafa Sabri Efendi (Develili) Mustafa Sabri Efendi (Tokatlı ) Mustafa Safvet Efendi (Ermenekli) Mustafa Safvet Efendi (Urfalı ) Mustafa Siret Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mustafa Çevket Efendi (Cum’alı ) Mustafa S¸ükrü Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Mustafa Tevfik Efendi (Köprülü) Nasrullah Fahri Efendi (Garzanlı ) Nazif Efendi (Geyveli) Osman Nuri Efendi (Harputlu) Osman Nuri Efendi (Rizeli)

Religious Teacher

Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Justice Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Education

Religious Bureaucracy

Ministry of Justice

Religious Teacher

Compensation Wage

Religious Teacher Religious Teacher

Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Justice

Religious Teacher

Compensation Wage

Religious Teacher

Directorate of Religious Affairs Among the 150 Exiles Compensation Wage

Office of Sheikh al Islam Religious Teacher

Former Sheikh al Islam Religious Bureaucracy Religious Bureaucracy Religious Bureaucracy Office of Sheikh al Islam

Deputy Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage

Religious Bureaucracy

State Bureaucracy

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage Compensation Wage Compensation Wage

Religious Counsel Religious Teacher State Bureaucracy Religious Bureaucracy

Appendix Name

Former Position

Osman Ras¸it Efendi (Tavaslı ) Ömer Ferit Kam (I˙ stanbullu) Ömer Lütfi Efendi (Elmalili)

Religious Teacher Religious Teacher Religious Teacher

Ömer Lütfi Efendi (Kayserili) Ömer Lütfi Efendi (Niksarli)

Religious Counsel Religious Teacher

Ömer Nasuhi Bilmen (Erzurumlu) Ahmet Rasim Efendi (Karahisarı s¸arkili)

Office of Sheikh al Islam

Recep Hilmi Efendi (Kayalarlı ) Molla Res¸it Bey (Süleymaniyeli) Hafı z Res¸it Efendi (S¸amlı ) Ali Rı za Hafı z Sadullah Efendi (I˙ stanbullu) Salih Efendi (I˙ stanbullu)

Religious Judge Religious Teacher Religious Teacher Office of Sheikh al Islam Teacher

Salih Zeki Efendi (Alas¸ehirli) Seyyit Hulusi Efendi (Silistreli)

Religious Teacher Religious Teacher

Süleyman Efendi (Lomalı ) Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan (Silistreli) Süleyman Sami Efendi (Ardanuçlu) Süleyman Sı rrı Efendi (Ermenekli) S¸akir Efendi (Akovalı ) Seyit Taha Efendi (Vanlı )

Religious Teacher Religious Teacher

Religious Teacher

Religious Teacher

179

Republican Period Position Compensation Wage Istanbul University Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Justice Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs Sentenced by the Independence Courts Compensation Wage Compensation Wage Compensation Wage Ministry of Education Teacher

Religious Bureaucracy

Istanbul University Librarian Compensation Wage Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Justice Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage

Religious Teacher

Compensation Wage

Religious Counsel Religious Counsel

Ministry of Education Directorate of Religious Affairs Compensation Wage State Bureaucracy Ministry of Education

Yunus Bahri Efendi (Geredeli) Religious Teacher Yusuf Efendi (Hems¸inli) Religious Bureaucracy Yusuf Ziya Efendi Mosque Preacher Source: Albayrak (1996).

Notes 1. When he became a deputy in Albania, his wage stopped being paid. 2. He was sentenced by the Independence Courts in 1926. 3. He wrote a twelver-volume Qur’an commentary for the Directorate. 4. He refused positions in the state offered to him.

180

Appendix

Name

Former Position

Abdülaziz Mecdi Efendi (Tolun) Seyyid Abdülhakim Arvasi

Sheikh Sheikh

Muhammed Sı ddı k Efendi

Sheikh

Ahmed Remzi Dede Tahir’ül Mevlevi (Olgun) Abdülaziz Bekkine

Sheikh Religious Scholar Sheikh

Ahmed Tahir Memis¸ Efendi

Religious Scholar

Alvarlı Muhammed Lütfi Efendi Ibnülemin Mahmud Kemal Inal Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan

Sheikh Religious Scholar Religious Scholar

Hacı Veyiszade Mustafa Kurucu

Religious Scholar

Said Nursi Ali Haydar Efendi Abdülhay Efendi (Öztoprak)

Religious Scholar Religious Scholar Sheikh

Mahmud Celalettin Ökten Hasan Basri Cantay Alasonyalı Hacı Cemal Ög˘ üt

Religious Scholar Religious Scholar Religious Scholar

Republican Period Position No Official position Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs State Bureuacracy Ministry of Education5 Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs No Official Position6 State Bureaucracy7 Directorate of Religious Affairs Directorate of Religious Affairs No Official Position8 No Offical Position9 Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Education Ministry of Education Ministry of Education

Source: Yı ldı rı m (2002). Notes 5. He was acquitted in the Independence Courts in 1926. 6. He was offered the position of a religious counsel in the Directorate. 7. He assumed variety of positions in state research institutes. 8. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk personally offered him the position of general preacher in East Anatolia. 9. He was acquitted in the Independence Courts and was put under house arrest.

Name Mehmed S¸emseddin Ulusoy Abdülbaki Baykara Ahmet Remiz Akyürek Bozkı rlı Abdullah Efendi Abdülaziz Bekkine

Former Position Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh

Republican Period Position Directorate of Religious Affairs Istanbul University State Bureaucracy State Bureaucracy Directorate of Religious Affairs

Appendix Name

Former Position

Hasan Yavuz

Sheikh

Said Özkök Mehmet Baha Pars Mehmet Ali Ayni Nüzhet Ergün Muhammad Razi Yahya Galip Veled I˙ zbudak Kenan Rifai

Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh Sheikh

Source: Küçük (2007).

181

Republican Period Position Directorate of Religious Affairs Ministry of Education Ministry of Education Ministry of Education Istanbul University Ministry of Finance Deputy Deputy Ministry of Education

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Index

Page numbers in italic format indicate figures and tables. abolition of the caliphate 63, 65, 68 accommodationist state: critical defect in 159; ending of 158; introduction to 12, 51; Mustafa Kemal and 51 – 8; reasons for adopting 65 – 70; state secularization 58 – 65; as a superior strategy 159 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 1, 13 – 15, 51 – 8, 63 atheism 143, 149, 150 ayan families 30 Babi movement 89, 90 Balkan Wars 41, 52, 54, 66 Barro, Robert 11, 12 black clergy 114, 128, 140 Bolsheviks 133 – 5, 137, 139 Brezhnev, Leonid 150, 153 Cadet Corps 118 capitalist economy 66, 67, 91 – 2 catechism 7, 38 Cevdet, Ahmet 39 – 40 civil code 100, 101 civil war 96, 98, 104, 133, 138, 149 clerical education 125, 127 commercial class, dominance of 44 – 5 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) 52, 53 constitutional revolution 96, 97, 105 Cossack Brigade 96, 97, 98, 102 Crimean War 118, 119 Czechoslovak Legion 134 devshirme system 75, 78 Directorate of Religious Affairs 58 – 61, 147, 158

economic integration 44, 45 educational reforms 37, 100, 117, 118, 119 Endowments Law 101 eradicationist state: ending of 158; introduction to 12, 132; revolutionary upheavals and 135 – 42; strategic context 132 – 5; see also Orthodox Church famine crisis 139, 140 February Revolution 136 Fethullah Gülen movement 148 First World War: economic and human costs 66; Iran and 97; Mustafa Kemal and 54; Ottoman Empire and 46 foreign loans 32, 90 foreign trade 43, 45 Formations of the Secular (Asad) 6 Gendarmerie force 86, 96, 97, 98 Gorbachev, Michael 80, 153, 154 Great Reforms 118, 119, 120, 128 guilds 42, 91, 105 heterodox religious movements 88, 89 highway robbery 97, 98 hocas 29, 46 Holy Synod 123, 124, 128 imperial rule 27 – 9, 80 – 3, 110 – 12 industrialization efforts 119, 120, 157 Iran: business concessions in 87 – 8, 91, 92; civil war in 96, 98, 104; constitutional revolution in 96, 97, 105; crisis in 151 – 3; decentralization of power in

200

Index

96 – 7; empire-building journey 18 – 20; First World War and 97; internal security issues 102; introduction to 73 – 4; lack of political competition in 102; landowners in 91; Russia’s war with 85, 97; Safavid Empire and 74 – 7; state-building efforts in 85 – 6, 89 – 91, 100 – 1; state secularization in 99 – 106, 148 – 9; Sufi orders and 77 – 80 Islam: assertions about 64; spread of 27; state secularization and 13 – 16 Islam and Politics (Esposito) 13 Janissary corps 26, 31, 32 Karabekir, Kazim 54, 55, 56 Kemal, Mustafa: achievements of 15; coming to power of 51 – 8; early life of 54 – 5; goal of 13, 14; religious community and 62, 63; speech of 1, 14 Khan, Agha Muhammed 86 – 7, 89 Khomeini, Ruhollah 79, 80, 106, 152, 153 Kievan state 110 landowners: in Iran 91; in Russia 111, 112, 120 Law Concerning the Registration of Documents and Property 101 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations 154, 155 League of the Militant Godless 142, 143 legal reforms 34, 100 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, coming to power of 132 – 5 Living Church 139, 140, 141 loot the looters slogan 133 madrasahs system 27, 59, 68, 81 Mahmud II 31, 33, 38 Majlisi, Muhammed Baqir 79, 83 marja-i-taqlid institution 88, 89, 103 McCleary, Rachel M. 11, 12, 13 merchant class 45, 92, 106, 149, 157 military reforms 31, 85, 111, 117 – 19 modern sovereign state: 19th-century reforms 31 – 3; building 6 – 9, 116 – 20; components of 6 – 7;

Ottoman Empire and 42 – 6; power redistribution issues 158 – 9; Qajar rule and 84 – 92; see also state secularization monasteries 110, 113 – 16, 121 – 8, 154 Muscovites 110, 111, 114 Naqshibandi order 78, 148 neutrality toward religion 3, 7 1917 revolution 142 Nizamiye courts 34, 37, 40 non-Muslims 44 – 5, 67, 69 Nursi, Said 63, 69, 148 oil revenues 102, 103, 151 Old Believers movement 116, 127 Orthodox Church: administration of 124, 125, 140 – 1; Gorbachev’s reforms and 154; hierarchy issues 114 – 15, 126 – 7; imperial state and 110 – 12; introduction to 109; in post-reform period 142 – 3; religious education by 156; revolutionary upheavals and 135 – 42; sovereign state and 121 – 8; spiritual regulation issues 122 – 3; state aid for 155 – 6; suppression of 150; unity issues 112 – 16, 141; see also Russia Ottoman Empire: 19th-century reforms 31 – 3; Ahmet Cevdet and 39 – 41; centralization of 75; CUP’s rule in 53; decline of 30 – 1; hostility toward 45 – 6; imperial institutions and 27 – 9; introduction to 1 – 2, 24; migration of Muslims and 46; as non-secular 27, 28; origin of 25 – 7; Russia’s attack on 41 – 2; Sufi orders and 25 – 7; ulama class in 33 – 9, 163 – 72; violent atmosphere and 41 – 2; wars between Safavids and 77 Pahlavi Iran see Iran parish clergy 114, 115, 128, 141 Pasa, Ahmet Cevdet 39 – 40 patriarchate 113, 115, 127, 137 Patriarch Nikon 115, 116 Patriarch Tikhon 137, 138, 139, 140 peasant unrest 120, 132, 135 Peter the Great 116 – 18, 121 – 5 primary education 38, 126, 149 Progressive Clergy 140

Index Progressivist Republican Party (PRP) 56 Prokopovich, Feofan 122, 123 Provisional Government 132, 133, 136 Provisional Superior Church Administration 140 Public Religions in the Modern World (Casanova) 5 public school system 100 – 1 Putin, Vladimir 155 Qajar rule 84 – 92, 101 Qum seminaries 148, 149 Red Army 135, 143 Red Terror 138 religion: defined 5; hostility toward 19, 20; neutrality toward 3, 7; propaganda against 143, 150 Religion and the Political Imagination (Jones) 11 religious activism 146, 148, 157 religious community: crisis decade of 1970s and 156 – 7; defined 5; financial resources of 105, 149; in Iran 148 – 9, 152; merchant class and 149; Mustafa Kemal and 62 – 3; non-Sufi 27; Orthodox Church and 109; reforms related to 34 – 5, 100 – 1; separationist state and 106; support of 101 – 2; see also state secularization religious courts 34, 36, 100, 101 religious endowments 33, 38, 82, 91 religious groups 89, 148, 157, 158 religious institutions: administration of 28, 29, 103; defined 5; incorporation of 58, 59, 62, 102 – 4; merging of 65, 66; reforms related to 35; Safavid Empire and 82 – 3 religious movements 88, 89, 127 religious scholars: biographies of 59 – 62; hierarchically structured group of 103, 104; role of 36 – 7; state schools and 38 religious schools: control over 100 – 1; primary education in 38; reforms related to 35 religious services: monopoly over 59, 62, 63; Orthodox Church and 126, 136, 142 – 3 religious symbols, use of 8, 18, 64 religious taxes 81, 88, 89, 103, 149

201

renovationist clergy 140, 141 Republican People’s Party (RPP) 56, 57 Republican Turkey: crisis in 156 – 8; empire-building journey 18 – 20; international scrutiny 68; military coup 157 – 8; Mustafa Kemal and 51 – 8; religious composition of 67; statebuilding reforms in 42, 43; state secularization in 58 – 65, 147 – 8; ulama class in 172 – 81; wartime losses in 66 – 7 Rise of Religious Externalism in Safavid Iran, The 79 Romanov, Michael 111, 112 Russia: civil war in 133, 138, 149; crisis in 153 – 6; empire-building journey and 18 – 20; Iran’s war with 85, 97; Orthodox Church and 110 – 16; Ottoman Empire and 41 – 2; state secularization in 149 – 51; Time of Troubles period in 111; Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and 132 – 5; war against Poland 111 Russian Federation 155 Russian nobility 112, 113, 117 Russo-Japanese War 120 Safavid Empire: collapse of 83 – 4; imperial power and 75 – 7; politico-religious context and 74 – 5; Sufi orders and 77 – 80; ulama class and 80 – 3 Safawiyya order 75, 76 sayyids 81, 88 schismatic movements 141, 142 Second World War 142 Secular Age (Taylor) 1 Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion (Kuru) 11 secular state: assertive 12; definitions of 3 – 4; introduction to 1 – 2 separationist state: ending of 158; introduction to 95; religious community and 106; Reza Shah and 95 – 9; state secularization 99 – 106 Serbian revolt of 1804 41 Serbian revolt of 1815 41 Shah Ismail 77, 81 Shah, Reza, coming to power of 95 – 9 Sharia courts 62, 65 sheikh al Islam 28, 34 – 7

202

Index

Shi’a religious scholars 19, 93, 95, 163, 166 Shi’a Sufi orders 78, 79, 81, 82 Shi’a ulama 79, 81 – 4, 88 – 90, 92 Smith, Donald E. 3, 10 social groups, problems of 151 Socialist Revolutionaries 135 Society of Militant Clergy 152 Soviet Union see Russia Stalinist terror 142 State and Business in Turkey 67 state-building reforms: in Iran 85 – 6, 89 – 91, 100 – 1; in Turkey 42, 43; see also modern sovereign state state-religion relations 11, 18, 135 – 6, 147 – 51 state schools 36, 37, 38, 156 state secularization: as a by-product 5 – 9; case histories 17 – 18; conceptual confusion around 2 – 9; defined 5; in Iran 99 – 106, 148 – 9; Islam and 13 – 16; methodology 16 – 17; paths of 9 – 16; politics of 13; in Russia 149 – 51; strategic context of 95 – 9, 132 – 5; in Turkey 58 – 65, 147 – 8; variations of 9 – 12 street violence 156, 157 Sufi orders: autonomy of 27, 29; ban on 62, 147; militant 25 – 6; nonmilitarist 26, 78; Persian Sufism and 74; suppression of 77 – 80; war’s impact on 67 – 8 Sufi sheikhs 25, 62, 74, 148 Sunni Islam 3, 18, 83, 152 Sunni ulama 46, 82, 88 Swiss code 61, 69, 70

tax exemptions 26, 29, 46, 90 Taylor, Charles 1, 6 Temporary Higher Church Council 141 Time of Troubles period 111 tobacco concession of 1891 87, 92 Tolstoy, Leo 127, 128 Treaty of Lausanne 69 Treaty of Westphalia 8 tribal lawlessness 97, 98 Tsar Alexis 113, 115, 116 tsarist political system 132, 133, 138 Turkey see Republican Turkey Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) 55 Turkish Women’s Federation 58 twelver Shi’ism 77, 81 ulama class: in higher education schools 169 – 70; Ottoman Empire decline and 30 – 1; as part of imperial state 27 – 9; reforms’ impact on 33 – 4; in Republican Turkey 172 – 81; Safavid Empire and 80 – 3; secular schools and courts and 163 – 9; sheikh al Islam and 34 – 9; in state institutions 170 – 2 Uniformity of Dress Law 100 Union and Progress Party 54 waqfs 28, 81, 101 War of Independence 55, 57, 62, 66 White Army 133, 134, 135, 138, 139 white clergy 114, 128, 140 workers unrest 132, 134 Yavorsky, Stefan 121, 122, 125 Yeltsin, Boris 155