Murat Akan, The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey by Murat Akan Efe Peker Murat Akan. The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. 376 pp. Paper, $28. ISBN: 978-0231181815. For scholars of religion and secularity, why are comparisons between France and Turkey so inviting? Just in the last two decades, the topic has been the principal subject of multiple books,1 doctoral dissertations,2 and edited volumes.3 One reason is historical: It is well known that laïcité, the French conception of secularism, has inspired early Turkish republicans—so much so that they phonetically translated it to make their own version, laiklik, a constitutional principle. Another reason is theoretical: The comparison holds the potential to shed light on what the literature has recognized as more rigid forms of secularism in these countries, as well as on the "travels" of secularity between multiple modernities and geographies. A final reason is the twenty-first-century transformations of laïcité and laiklik, albeit in opposite directions. While France recently mobilized and refashioned laïcité in its encounters with Muslim immigration, Turkey has largely forsaken laiklik as a public discourse in its rapid slide into authoritarian religious nationalism. [End Page 487] Murat Akan's The Politics of Secularism advances the conversation in all three of these dimensions. Following a theoretical introduction in its first two chapters, the book elaborates on the historical institutionalization of laïcité in the fin de siècle French Third Republic (Chapter 3) and of laiklik in the first decades of Republican Turkey (Chapter 5). In two chapters, it also examines the contemporary politics of secularism in these nations (Chapters 4 and 6) to make sense of the evolutions in their state-religion relations up until the early 2010s. Methodologically, the book is based on a rich array of parliamentary records as well as the minutes and reports of relevant governmental commissions. This choice to bring to the fore political deliberations is no coincidence. Akan lets the reader know early on that the clue for his perspective is in the title: He is interested in the politics of secularism, namely the study of the "precise political ends and arguments by various competing political actors" (p. 9), and the open-ended institutional outcomes that follow. To highlight the autonomy of the political field—and the distinctiveness of his approach—Akan places himself firmly against the "ideational" and "sociocultural" accounts of secularism in the existing scholarship. The former explains secular institutional configurations by the prevailing ideologies and "imaginaries"; the latter boils it down to social variables such as religion or culture. Although it is indeed crucial to stress that ideas or societal dynamics do not automatically determine institution-building, the reader gets the impression here that Akan is too quick to create a straw man out of the literature, especially by omission. Since at least the early 2000s, there has been a discernible movement in the social sciences towards "historicizing the secularization debate," which focuses on "sociopolitical conflicts" over religion and secularity that produce institutional arrangements "as a historically variable and contingent outcome."4 Contextualizing his book in this large body of work that also takes political contention seriously would have helped the author fine-tune his theoretical contributions.5 Despite the lack of such engagement, the book offers important takeaways. First of all, at a time when the headscarf question often dominates public debates in the West, Akan's comparison benefits from featuring a wider range of policy areas. Stressing the multidimensional nature of secularism is important to illustrate the seemingly "anomalous" positions that political actors take. [End Page 488] We see, for instance, French deputies who oppose the headscarf simultaneously supporting religion courses in public schools, or anticlerical Turkish statesmen advocating for state-funded religious personnel. Second, and relatedly, Akan assures us that this is exactly the point, because the struggle is not simply between people with clear-cut secularist versus religious ideologies. Instead, ideas and interests are negotiated to engender novel combinations as they enter the messy field of politics. There are, accordingly, political actors who are for "mobilizing...