December 29,
2006
Just like secular Muslims, a secular Muslim state is a twentieth century anomaly. It is a state in which Muslims are a majority, but state and its institutions do not recognize Islam as the source of law and governance. Turkey was the first secular Muslim state to emerge in modern times. The man who orchestrated this drastic change in the centuries-old pattern of Muslim statecraft was Mustafa Kemal, the self-styled father of Turks. At the beginning of 1924, he had gone to Izmir, ostensibly to preside over large-scale military maneuvers, but in reality to prepare for his next move against the Caliph. He stayed in Izmir for two months during which careful planning was done for the abolition of the Caliphate. By the time he opened the new session of the Grand National Assembly on March 1, 1924, he was ready to strike. The death stroke was delivered two days later when a series of resolutions were read to the Assembly which provided for the deposition of the Caliph, the abolition of the Caliphate, and the banishment of all members of the Ottoman house from Turkish territory. The next morning at daybreak, military generals escorted an unhappy Abdulmecid to a small railway station outside Istanbul to board the Orient Express; thus, the last of the Caliphs was sent into exile.
Turkey had already been declared a Republic on November 1, 1922 when Sultan Mehmed VI was deposed by Kemalists. The fundamental principle on which this Republic was established had been borrowed from Europe and expressed in a resolution of the People’s Party founded by Mustafa Kemal in August 1923: Sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the people. This stood in stark contrast to the Islamic principle of statecraft in which Sovereignty belongs to God and a ruler is merely an instrument of that Sovereignty.
But it was not only the theoretical difference between two foundational principles that set Mustafa Kemal’s new Republic apart from the Caliphate however degenerated that Caliphate had become. It was a Republic from which Mustafa Kemal and his colleagues were determined to obliterate all things Islamic. He had already moved the capital of his little Republic to Ankara so that the centuries-old mosques and palaces of Istanbul would not remind him of over five hundred years of Islamic past of an Empire which once ruled over a vast territory and which had now become so weak and corrupt that one of its own generals could destroy it. This was, however, only the beginning.
Between 1922 and his death on November 10, 1938, Mustafa Kemal was to drastically change all institutions of the Republic and father a new generation of Turks who were bereft of even the basic knowledge of Islam. These young children of Kemal’s Republic associated the religion of their forefathers with backwardness and lack of civilization. Quiet early in his iron-fisted rule, lasting sixteen long years, Mustafa Kemal had abolished all state institutions based on Islamic principles: the Sharia courts, the office of the Shaykh al-Islam, the judiciary based on Islamic laws, the awqaf, and the madrassahs. He banned the wearing of hijab by women and the fez by men, which he considered “an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism, and hatred of progress and civilization”. In stead, he forced women to go without head covering and men to wear the hat, “the headgear used by the whole civilized world”. This was his way “to demonstrate that the Turkish nation, in its mentality as in other respects, in no way diverges from civilized social life.”
Civilization, for Kemalists, meant western civilization. They saw nothing worthy in Islamic civilization—neither its arts and crafts, nor its sciences. They were themselves thoroughly uprooted from the spiritual and intellectual soil of Islam and they forced their vision of life on the entire nation while maintaining the sham of democracy. In fact, it was through a most oppressive dictatorship that Kemalists removed, one by one, all expressions of Islam from their Republic. For instance, since its promulgation in 1876 the Turkish constitution had retained the phrase “The religion of the Turkish state is Islam” in one or the other form; on April 5, 1928, Kemal’s People’s Party resolved to delete this from the constitution. Seven months later, the last link with Islam was broken when Mustafa Kemal presented to Turks his new Romanized script for writing their language. “My friends,” he told an assembly of his People’s Party, “our rich and harmonious language will now be able to display itself with new Turkish letters. We must free ourselves from those incomprehensible signs that for centuries have held our minds in an iron vice.”
The “incomprehensible signs” were the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet which had been used for centuries to write Turkish and which had enabled Turks to maintain a fundamental link with Arabic and Persian—a linkage that produced Sufis and poets like Jalal uddin Rumi. Within a generation of this cleavage, a great majority of “educated” Turks were unable to read the Qur’an and they had no familiarity with centuries of Islamic scholarship.
In destroying Islamic foundations, Mustafa Kemal was simply following the recipe which was being used elsewhere in the Muslim world by colonial rulers and their educators. Soon after Kemal’s death, many more Muslim republics emerged on the world scene, all based on secularism and nationalism; Pakistan was an exception. At the dawn of the twentieth century, there was not a single secular Muslim state. By the time this fateful century entered its last quarter, there were some fifty of them! Such has been the scale of change in the misfortune of world’s 1.6 billion Muslims who now live in some fifty secular Muslim states.
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