The state and society in search of "a religion that will serve us"

The search for a religion that will be put to work, used, and obey us, in place of a religion that is listened to, however strange it may sound, is in fact a routine reality in the history of religions. It is one of the universal situations into which man falls the moment he loses his sound standing before God. When man cannot reject religion outright, or when he sees great opportunities for himself in a new religion, he finds a way to take religion into his service, with his own desire for power being what is essential. On the surface there is intense religiosity, even an excessive visibility of religious symbols and practices, but when you dig beneath it you meet man's most worldly motives. Seek secularization and you shall find it, for secularization is lodged at the very bottom of institutionalized religion, that is, man's instrumentalization of everything, religion included, through his desire for power.

In Turkey too the debate on religion has always developed under pressure of such a "religion according to ourselves." Those who acted in the name of the state, from the first years of the republic, imagined for themselves the authority and power to decide what the people's religion would be and how high the level of religiosity would be. Yet the people neither recognized this authority nor was the state's power to determine the people's religion indisputable. Whatever the state did and whatever it wanted, the people formed a religiosity autonomous from the state in determining the limits of their own religion, in the direction of their own demands and desires. And they did this, moreover, in interaction and dialogue with the state's institutions to the extent that democracy functioned.

One thing that certain segments who regarded themselves as more authoritative in the name of the state could not accept was this forbidden relationship that society had somehow managed to establish with the state. One result of the representative democratic process that began to operate from 1950 was the religious services that the people demanded from their representatives, and the representation of their religious demands. As a result, religious education institutions, Imam-Hatip Schools and Faculties of Theology emerged as the outcome of a bargain between the people and the state. Religious publishing and civil organizations recorded a serious increase, and as a result a broad sphere of religious freedom independent of the state formed. This sphere was clearly far greater and more unnecessary than what was written in, and consented to by, the state's first founding program. What the state wanted in that first-founding program was clearly set toward an "end" in which religion would disappear entirely in the direction of positivist predictions.

It is not possible to say that in these first times the state preferred Sunnis over Alevis. The aim was to entirely empty both Sunnism and Alevism of their religious content and to reach the absolute secularity "required by the level of contemporary civilization." Nothing remained for the Directorate of Religious Affairs but the duty of performing the funeral prayer of Sunnism, which was awaited to die, was helped to die, and had been drawn by policies applied to it to the point of being registered for death.

But in the meantime there were also broad debates on what kind of religion society needed. Instead of destroying religion entirely, benefiting from it was also an option. After all, religious belief, even if empty, could make a person a little more honest, hardworking, a citizen who regards paying taxes as sacred and every kind of service, even dying if necessary for the state, as holy. At least the Durkheimian sociological acquis, which was incorporated into the official ideology through Ziya Gökalp, explained this. The appearance of the religion of Islam did not resemble the religions of contemporary civilization.

Perhaps in this state it recalled the backwardness, rurality and peasantry of the Islamic world. Then perhaps a little change of form and appearance could save the appearances. After all, the West, which had advanced in science, technology, art and economics, had a role of its religion in this advance. So just as we imitated everything of theirs, we could imitate their religion too. The content of religion, its claim of truth, was in any case always the same: superstition. Whether we become Christian or Muslim. Once the content is inevitably superstition, what importance is there in which religion it is? But there was of course a difficulty in making the Muslim people accept this. Having just come out of a war, how could we accept the religion of the enemy we had fought? Instead, making Islam resemble Protestantism could achieve the same purpose.

Thus the state, in its search for a religion that would be useful, usable, able to develop us, and highly functional, tried the option of Protestantizing Islam. The religious reform of 1928 was the result of such an attempt and met with a greater reaction than expected. On the occasion of that event, this attempt created an antipathy, which would never disappear in later times, even to the very concept of "reform in religion." Even though many articles of that project were never applied, some articles of it were put into effect in later years. Practices such as the Turkification of the call to prayer, the writing of the Qur'an in Latin letters, the complete closure of the Imam-Hatip schools and faculties of theology on the grounds that they had no students left, and the spread of demeaning discourses against the public manifestations of religion were not practices that preferred this or that interpretation of Islam. They were policies that directly aimed to tear the whole of Islam out of social life.

That a policy of de-Islamization seen in no other society was applied in this way in this society may not even sound believable when looked at today, but that was the fact.