religion & politics

Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, edited by Ahmet T. Kuru and Alfred Stepan (2012)

Columbia University Press is pleased to announce the publication of Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, edited by Ahmet T. Kuru Chair, Religion & Politics Organized Section]  and Alfred Stepan.

"Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey contains some of the best essays on contradictory signs and ambivalence in contemporary Turkish politics. Its chapters, by the most prominent experts on their respective topics, are well written. Reading them together provides a very good sense of the content and the terms of the struggles and conflicts over the soul of Turkish democracy and its international mission."
-Cemil Aydin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought

While Turkey has grown as a world power, promoting the image of a progressive and stable nation, several choices in policy have strained its relationship with the East and the West. Providing historical, social, and religious context for this behavior, the essays in Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey examine issues relevant to Turkish debates and global concerns, from the state's position on religion to its involvement with the European Union.

Written by experts in a range of disciplines, the chapters explore the toleration of diversity during the Ottoman Empire's classical period; the erosion of ethno-religious heterogeneity in modern, pre-democratic times; Kemalism and its role in modernization and nation building; the changing political strategies of the military; and the effect of possible EU membership on domestic reforms. The essays also offer a cross-Continental comparison of "multiple secularisms," as well as political parties, considering especially Turkey's Justice and Development Party in relation to Europe's Christian Democratic parties. Contributors tackle critical research questions, such as the legacy of the Ottoman Empire's ethno-religious plurality and the way in which Turkey's assertive secularism can be softened to allow greater space for religious actors. They address the military's "guardian" role in Turkey's secularism, the implications of recent constitutional amendments for democratization, and the consequences and benefits of Islamic activism's presence within a democratic system. No other collection confronts Turkey's contemporary evolution so vividly and thoroughly or offers such expert analysis of its crucial social and political systems.

Ahmet T. Kuru,  is associate professor of political science at San Diego State University and chair of the Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. He is the author of Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey.

Alfred Stepan is the Wallace Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University and a former Gladstone Professor of Government at All Souls College, Oxford University. His most recent book, with Juan J. Linz and Yogendra Yadav, is Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies, and another book with Linz, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.

This book is part of the esteemed series Religion, Culture, and Public Life, series editors: Alfred Stepan and Mark C. Taylor.

To read an excerpt or find out more about this work go to:
http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15932-6/democracy-islam-and-secularism-in-turkey

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Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey

Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey
(2009)

Ahmet T. Kuru
San Diego State University

Why do secular states pursue different policies toward religion? This book provides a generalizable argument about the impact of ideological struggles on the public policy making process, as well as a state-religion regimes index of 197 countries. More specifically, it analyzes why American state policies are largely tolerant of religion, whereas French and Turkish policies generally prohibit its public visibility, as seen in their bans on Muslim headscarves. In the United States, the dominant ideology is “passive secularism,” which requires the state to play a passive role, by allowing public visibility of religion. Dominant ideology in France and Turkey is “assertive secularism,” which demands that the state play an assertive role in excluding religion from the public sphere. Passive and assertive secularism became dominant in these cases through certain historical processes, particularly the presence or absence of an ancien régime based on the marriage between monarchy and hegemonic religion during state-building periods.

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