Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Historical Tensions
This paper examines the enduring tensions between Islam and the secular Republic of Turkey, tracing their origins to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's post-Ottoman reforms of the 1920s. It explores how Kemalist secularism was never universally embraced, particularly in rural Anatolia, where Islam remains a primary source of political voice and cultural identity. The paper analyzes how geographic, economic, and demographic divides — especially between cosmopolitan cities like Istanbul and the conservative rural majority — have shaped and intensified these tensions over time. It also considers Turkey's geopolitical position as a crossroads between Europe and the Islamic world, and how the unequal economic benefits of westward-oriented policy have deepened religious and political fault lines within Turkish society.
- Introduction: Overview of Islam-state tensions in Turkey
- Brief Historical Overview: Atatürk's secular reforms after Ottoman collapse
- The Secular vs. the Religious: Urban-rural and Kurdish religious divides
- The Crossroads: Turkey's geopolitical and economic balancing act
- Religious Power: Islam as rural political voice against Kemalism
- Conclusions: Secular inequality deepens religious-state conflict
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds the religious-political conflict in concrete historical events — specifically the post-WWI reforms and the 1928 removal of Islam as the state religion — giving the argument a clear chronological foundation.
- The paper moves beyond a simple religion-versus-secularism frame by introducing economic inequality as a structural cause of tension, supported by GDP data from Turkstat.
- It ties the Kurdish minority experience into the broader argument, showing that the Islam-state tension has ethnic and power-distribution dimensions beyond theology.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective multi-causal analysis: rather than attributing Turkish religious tension to a single factor, it layers historical, geographic, economic, and demographic causes. The use of Atatürk's own philosophical position — that dogmatic Islam, not Islam itself, caused Ottoman decline — reframes secularism as a reform movement within Islam rather than a rejection of it, adding analytical nuance.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with context and a thesis statement, then moves through a historical overview, a sociological analysis of the secular-religious divide, a geopolitical framing section, a section on Islam's role as political power in rural areas, and a synthesizing conclusion. Each section builds on the last, moving from history to sociology to economics to political power.
Introduction
Tensions have existed between Islamic powerbrokers and the state of Turkey since the state was founded. While Islam was the state religion of modern Turkey's precursor, the Ottoman Empire, it was not long after the Republic of Turkey was founded that Islam was removed as the state religion in favor of the secular approach championed by the country's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Yet tensions between Islam and the state have persisted ever since. Turkey's demographics — split between a handful of large, secular cities and a more rural, religious majority population — and Turkey's role as a balance of power between East and West are among the chief causes of this tension. This paper examines that tension as it continues to manifest to this day.
Brief Historical Overview
During Ottoman times, religious law co-existed with civil law. After founding the Republic of Turkey, Atatürk denied Islam status as the state religion in 1928, as the culmination of reforms that had begun in 1919 following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. The state is not irreligious, but rather takes a position of religious neutrality. The first two articles of the Turkish Constitution establish the republic as the form of government and declare that "the Republic of Turkey is a democratic, secular and social state governed by rule of law" (Constitution of Turkey). The Constitution has upheld secularism as state policy ever since. That Islam has sought to increase its power in Turkey is nothing new — Reed (1954) wrote about this dynamic — but today the country sits in conservative hands.
Secularism is considered an important element of the identity of the Turkish state, as the state was founded on these principles and worked for several years to establish them. They are a key component of Atatürk's vision for Turkey, closely linked to the country's broader national identity. But this does not mean that all Turkish people agreed with this vision. Atatürk's vision was rooted in his beliefs about the downfall of Islam over the preceding centuries. He viewed this downfall as the result of Muslims themselves — that "the weight of rigid orthodoxy had turned Islam from a reasoned belief to blind faith," and that it was necessary for the advancement of Islam itself to be "cleansed of irrational and inflexible accretions" (Turfan, 2016). Thus, secularism in Turkey was never as much about the rejection of Islam as it was about the rejection of a dogmatic view of Islam. Atatürk envisioned a secular society that remained Islamic but was not beholden to orthodoxy — one that was flexible, capable of learning, and able to remain modern.
The Secular vs. the Religious
Atatürk's vision of a secular Turkey created two main tensions. The first is between the more secular segments of society and the religious. Large cities were more cosmopolitan — before the First World War, Constantinople was half Christian — and less religious than the countryside. While most Turks are nominally Muslim and the cities are full of mosques, urban centers are more modern and progressive in general, and they also happen to dominate political, cultural, and economic life. Much of Turkey remains primarily an agricultural economy. The values of people in the cities and those in the countryside differ substantially, and the differences in power between these areas are symbolized by religion and attitudes toward the West. While Turkey's large cities looked westward, its military aligned with NATO, and its politicians dreamed of European Union membership, most of Turkey remains rural, conservative, and religious (Taspinar, 2012).
The tension also manifests in the situation of the Kurdish minority. Kurds in general are highly religious and rural, and the Turkish government has historically oppressed this group, leading to open rebellion. The Kurdish struggle has taken on an ethnic dimension, of course, but it also reflects the idea that the tensions between Islam and the Republic of Turkey are not solely about the direction of the Islamic faith — they are also about power. One outcome of Kemalism in Turkey is that Islam lacks political power and legal weight. This relative lack of influence over state power is something that neither religious clerics nor their followers are accustomed to, and many may prefer a more prominent role for religion in governance. Secular urban societies take the opposite view, holding that religious influence is already overbearing and that political and military power should align with more progressive outlooks.
References
Constitution of the Republic of Turkey. Retrieved December 19, 2016 from https://global.tbmm.gov.tr/docs/constitution_en.pdf
Jung, D. & Piccoli, W. (2001). Turkey at the Crossroads. Zed Books: New York.
Reed, H. (1954). Revival of Islam in secular Turkey. Middle East Journal, 8(3), 267–282.
Taspinar, O. (2012). Turkey: The new model? Brookings Institute. Retrieved December 19, 2016 from https://www.brookings.edu/research/turkey-the-new-model/
Turfan, M. (2016). Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal. Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World. Retrieved December 19, 2016 from http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/print/opr/t236/e0083
Turkstat (2014). Gross domestic product by provinces, 2004–2014. Turkstat.gov. Retrieved December 19, 2016 from http://www.turkstat.gov.tr/Prehaberbultenleri.do?id=24920
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