THE SECULARIZATION PROBLEMATIC IN THE LATE OTTOMAN CONTEXT

Ziya Gökalp was raised in the provincial capital of Diyarbakır, located in the eastern province of the same name. This province was predominantly Kurdish and had a considerable non-Muslim population. In 1909 Gökalp moved to Salonica, where the İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Young Turk organization of the Committee of Union and Progress; hereafter CUP) had its headquarters. Until the CUP's dissolution in 1918, he served as a permanent member of its central committee, advising its leaders on matters of education, religious reform, and propaganda. In 1912 Gökalp relocated to Istanbul where he became the first professor of sociology at the Darülfünun (later renamed Istanbul University). His writings, both scholarly and popular, were shaped by the view that science has a social purpose.Footnote ² Impacted by French sociology (in particular Durkheim), he believed that sociology and history should play an active role in politics, especially in the formation of what he termed the “national ideal” (mefkure).Footnote ³ Moreover, in his youth Gökalp had become acquainted with traditional Islamic knowledge and was especially drawn to Sufism, which remained an influential source of inspiration for him throughout his life.Footnote ⁴

Andrew Davison has made one of the most productive attempts to interpret Gökalp to date. He argues that Gökalp's views on religion need to be understood within the “secularization problematic of modern political thought.” This problematic reflects a concern about “the place and significance of religion under the changing conditions of modern life.”Footnote ⁵ Gökalp felt that the multifaceted transformations associated with Ottoman reform since the early 19th century, which enacted new ideas about the foundations, rationale, and aims of the Ottoman political system, demanded a reconsideration of the place and purpose of religion in relation to the political.

In light of the economic, military, and political weakening of the empire vis-à-vis the European powers in the modern period, as early as the late 18th century many observers viewed state reform to be indispensable. Beginning in the 1830s, the debate over reform also began to touch on the role of religious institutions in the state and led to a reconceptualization of Ottomanness. The Gülhane Edict of 1839, generally recognized as the beginning of the Tanzimat reform period, prepared the ground for the idea of equality between all Ottoman citizens regardless of their religion, which later found explicit expression in the Hatt-ı Hümayun Edict of 1856.Footnote ⁶

One of the major targets of the Tanzimat reforms, and a fulcrum of late Ottoman debates on the role of religion in the modernizing context, was the legal system. Motivated by the recognition that centralization and rationalization of the political order was necessary, as well as by pressure from the European powers (which increasingly saw themselves as legitimate protectors of the major non-Muslim communities), the Tanzimatists saw the legal system as a major domain for modernizing reform. One aspect of this reorganization concerned authority in matters of shariʿa. In the early modern Ottoman state, this authority was divided into two institutions, namely kaza (Arab. qaḍā, or issuing of legal judgments) and ifta (Arab. iftā, or issuing of fatwas), the highest ranking representatives of which were the kazasker (military judges) of Anatolia and Rumeli and the sheikh ül-Islam, respectively.Footnote ⁷ Although the rank of the kazasker was beneath that of the sheikh ül-Islam within the hierarchy of the Ottoman ulema, in his daily work the kazasker was in fact independent from the sheikh ül-Islam and directly responsible to the central Ottoman administration. This changed in 1836 when the offices of the major kazaskers were moved to the fetvahane, the seat of the sheikh ül-Islam. Two years later, the sheikh ül-Islam gained supreme authority over kaza as well and thus the power to oversee all major aspects of shariʿa affairs.Footnote ⁸

The introduction of new legal councils, courts, and law codes beginning in 1838 was the next step in the centralization of the Ottoman legal system. Concerned primarily with administrative, civil, criminal, and mercantile law, these innovations eventually culminated in the development of the Nizamiye (meaning “orderly”) courts between 1864 and 1879.Footnote ⁹ Traditional scholarship has argued that the foundation of these new courts outside of the Ottoman shariʿa system was indicative of an incomplete Westernization. Accordingly, the parallel existence of modern secular and traditional religious institutions has been seen to reflect an early phase of secularization. Against this modernist interpretation, Avi Rubin has recently claimed that the new judicial configuration should rather be seen in terms of amalgamation, legal pluralism, and legal borrowing. While the introduction of the Nizamiye courts certainly involved limiting the legal authority of the shariʿa courts, interpreting the former as “secular” courts functioning in parallel to “religious” shariʿa courts, Rubin shows, involves a back-reading of later secularization efforts.Footnote ¹⁰ The Nizamiye courts were not purely secular or Western, but rather were a hybrid amalgamation between Islamic and Ottoman legal traditions and borrowings from France. In fact, “the Ottoman reformers themselves never thought of the Nizamiye court system as secular,” a term and concept that was not yet part of the vernacular language.Footnote ¹¹ Ultimately, “from the outset of the tanzimat until the demise of the Ottoman state, the Nizamiye and the Şeriat courts were neither antithetical nor competing ‘legal systems’ . . . but rather two entwined components of a single judicial system converging in some aspects and departing in others.”Footnote ¹² The overlap between the two court systems is further reflected in the fact that shariʿa judges also served in the Nizamiye courts.Footnote ¹³

In the late Young Turk period, the prerogatives of the religious establishment were increasingly challenged, even if the shariʿa itself as a legitimizing framework was not yet questioned (as I will discuss in more detail shortly). During this period, the civil sections of the Nizamiye courts were increasingly staffed by personnel with no Islamic training.Footnote ¹⁴ The question of to what extent this may be interpreted as reflecting a secularization of the courts is, however, a complicated one.

LATE OTTOMAN DEBATES ON ISLAMIC INSTITUTIONAL REFORM

Rubin couples his historical analysis of the Nizamiye courts in the late Ottoman Empire with a critical inquiry into the utility of the religious/secular binary for describing late Ottoman institutional changes.Footnote ¹⁵ This criticism should not be understood as an attempt to downplay the importance of debates over the role of religion within the context of a modernizing state and the state's demand for comprehensive, centralized control of its institutions. The legal, political, and socioeconomic transformations that shaped modernization in the late Ottoman period were subject to criticism from all sides, including secularly trained intellectuals and Islamic scholars who argued against what they perceived as illegal European innovations. As for the latter, already in the Tanzimat period a group of critical reformers now known as the Young Ottomans, which included the famous writer and constitutionalist Namık Kemal, directly related political and societal problems to neglect of the shariʿa. Their criticism of the Tanzimat was indicative of an emerging apologetic tradition that rejected assigning any responsibility to Islamic institutions themselves for perceived political decline.Footnote ¹⁶

Attempts to infringe on the authority of religious institutions continued to meet resistance, in particular by the religious establishment. During the late Ottoman period, the ulema were especially critical of an originally European discourse that differentiated between religious and political spheres. They perceived this discourse as a threat to religion in general and to the status of the Islamic establishment in particular.Footnote ¹⁷ It needs to be emphasized that the ulema were a heterogeneous body in terms of religious and political convictions. However, on a basic level they all agreed that the state should play a role in organizing religion, and that religious institutions should be centralized. In general, the concerns of the ulema clearly adjusted to the dynamics of late Ottoman modernization. Amit Bein refers, for instance, to the changing stance of the ulema with regard to the mecelle law code. Installed in the 1870s as a codification of fiqh principles in the form of a positive code of civil law, upon its initiation this ambitious project was subject to intense criticism by many ulema who saw the mecelle as an attempt to secularize Islamic jurisprudence.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1909, however, a traditionalist ʿālim initiated an ultimately unsuccessful plan to preempt looming secularization reforms by extending the domain of the mecelle. The CUP obviously did not support this move, instead enlisting the reform-minded ulema to draw up plans for the reorganization of the Office of the Sheikh ül-Islam (şeyhülislamlık, or meşihat) and other Islamic institutions. Some ulema supported the CUP's reform agenda in principle, whereas their more conservative counterparts were skeptical from the outset about the party's ultimate intentions.Footnote ¹⁹

Also in 1909, the Young Turk Mizancı Murat Bey argued for the “separation of executive and judicial functions from the religious establishment.” He demanded “the concentration of all judicial functions under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice” and the elimination of the sheikh ül-Islam from the cabinet. Although other Young Turks supported such reforms, this support had not yet led to any kind of political initiative.Footnote ²⁰ Still, CUP plans to reform Islamic institutions soon developed in a more radical direction than even many ulema close to the CUP who advocated reform in principle were willing to support. The conflict became more pronounced when, following the outbreak of the Balkan Wars in 1913, the CUP managed to consolidate its power and install an authoritarian regime. With the Ottomanist ideal of the “unity of elements” (ittihad-i anasir) losing its persuasiveness in light of political developments, the CUP adopted a more Islamist policy at its congress in September 1913 to which it would abide during the early years of World War I.Footnote ²¹ However, in the shadow of an outwardly Islamist rhetoric, critical ulema were gradually pushed aside, creating opportunities for secularizing reforms. In 1914, the CUP installed the reformist Mustafa Hayri Efendi as the new sheikh ül-Islam, charging him with the task of restructuring the religious establishment.Footnote ²²

The confrontation between those ulema who supported swift, radical reform and those who sought slow, moderate changes was exacerbated with the creation of the CUP-sponsored journal Islam Mecmuası (Islam Review) in February 1914. Islam Mecmuası encroached directly on the terrain of the influential reformist journal Sebilürreşad (Path of Guidance).Footnote ²³ In the words of Akşin Somel, “the task of Islâm Mecmuası [was] to start an intellectual movement compatible with Islamic principles but at the same time sympathetic to innovation.”Footnote ²⁴ As a consequence, Sebilürreşad began to advance conservative, antireformist positions, while progressive reformers began to write for Islam Mecmuası.Footnote ²⁵ This polarization expressed itself in debates between authors of the two journals over the question of religious reform.

An example of the rising conflict between the reformist wing of the CUP and conservative ulema is the debate started by Gökalp in an essay written for Islam Mecmuası entitled “Fıkıh ve İçtimaiyat” (Fiqh and Sociology). Challenging traditional practices of Islamic jurisprudence, Gökalp argued in favor of strengthening the status of local custom as a legitimate source for the interpretation of the shariʿa. To make this argument, he first described “religious rites” (menâsik-i Islâmiyye) and “religious law” (hukuk-u Islâmiyye) as two branches of fiqh concerned with Islamic ritual and jurisprudence, respectively; only recently, he continued, would the term fiqh have come to stand for Islamic jurisprudence more narrowly.Footnote ²⁶ Gökalp's terminology makes it very clear that he was not yet operating with a homogenous and positivist notion of Islamic law, which was already common among Orientalist scholars of the time and would, in the context of nation-state building, become the norm in Muslim discourse as well.Footnote ²⁷ Rather, for him, shariʿa still reflected the center and focal point of Islamic normativity, governing both social matters under the authority of kaza as well as matters of ritual and belief outside of worldly jurisdiction.

Gökalp's distinction between religious rites and religious law is reminiscent of the distinction between ʿibadāt (worship, or relations between humans and God) and muʿāmalāt (relations between humans) that played an important role within the discourse of Islamic reform. Reformers such as Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) argued that only ʿibadāt can be clearly fixed on the basis of the Qurʾan and sunna. With regard to the muʿāmalāt, Qurʾan and sunna only provide general guidance. Therefore, according to ʿAbduh, ijtihād (independent reasoning, which is a contested source of fiqh since it is not bound to the recognized legal traditions, or madhāhib) is an indispensable means to developing muʿāmalāt based on the common good (maṣlaḥa), which is subject to change depending on historical circumstances.Footnote ²⁸

Gökalp developed an argument that was structurally similar to that of ʿAbduh. He explained that the original methods for the interpretation of the shariʿa considered reliance on custom (örf, Arab. ʿurf) as a legitimate source of fiqh, albeit subordinate to the sacred textual tradition of Islam (nass).Footnote ²⁹ Shariʿa is therefore “both divine (ilâhi) and social (içtimai).”Footnote ³⁰ Elaborating on the differences between the divine and the social pillars of the shariʿa, Gökalp argued that while the textual tradition was absolute and unchangeable, the social tradition of ʿurf adjusted to the particular circumstances of time and place. This argument allowed Gökalp to conceptualize the shariʿa as dynamic, responsive, and in dialogue with changing social environments.Footnote ³¹ He furthered this line of reasoning in “The Social Sources of Islamic Jurisprudence,” where he explored the status of ʿurf in the Islamic legal tradition in order to argue that it could not be dismissed as completely secular in origin.Footnote ³² After first noting that some ulema have suggested that natural laws can be regarded as the sunna of God, he asked:

Through his articles in Islam Mecmuası, Gökalp sought to enhance the legitimacy of ijtihād based on ʿurf as a means of legal reasoning within Islamic jurisprudence. In this way he made a bold intervention in the inner-Islamic debate between conservatives and reformers in the late Ottoman context.Footnote ³⁴ Gökalp drew on the discourse of Islamic reform as well as classical and Islamic authorities and texts to make his case. In particular, his extensive use of ijtihād to respond to changing circumstances echoed a shared demand of reformist and modernist currents in Islam in the last decades of the 19^th century that is closely associated with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani.Footnote ³⁵

It is not surprising that Gökalp's intervention further polarized the debate among the Ottoman ulema over Islamic reform and made him many enemies among conservative Muslim elites. Severe criticism of Gökalp's reinterpretation of uṣūl al-fiqh was voiced in Sebilürreşad, whose authors rejected it as too bold. The traditionalist Islamic scholar İzmirli İsmail Hakkı, for example, dismissed Gökalp's intervention as an amalgam of faulty premises and fabrications that had nothing to do with the traditional Islamic sciences.Footnote ³⁶ In a series of articles, he argued that “Islamic jurisprudence and the study of theology ought to be updated but not reinterpreted on the basis of sociological methodologies.”Footnote ³⁷ İzmirli specifically maintained that “cultural traditions (örf), although indeed regarded as one of the sources [of fiqh], are actually secondary in importance to revelation and prophetic traditions, and therefore cannot be an essential basis for reformed Islamic law.”Footnote ³⁸

Tensions surrounding the speed and direction of reform increased in 1915 when Islam Mecmuası started to call openly for limitations on the authority of the sheikh ül-Islam, including the detachment of his office from executive power.Footnote ³⁹ The editor of Islam Mecmuası, Halim Sabit Efendi, even “advocated placing the Islamic courts of law and the medreses under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Education, respectively,” claiming that this would mark a return to genuine Islamic traditions of government.Footnote ⁴⁰ Other authors in Islam Mecmuası argued that the functions of ifta (issuing fatwas) and kaza (issuing judgments) should again be performed by separate agencies. The sheikh ül-Islam's authority, they argued, should again be restricted to matters of ifta, and not encompass those of kaza, as Bein has described: “his jurisdiction should be centered only on the spiritual and piety-related needs of the people, as well as on setting general guidelines on legal questions.”Footnote ⁴¹ As I will show, Gökalp would soon further develop this argument.

The articles published in Islam Mecmuası prepared the ground for reform of Islamic institutions by justifying it in both Islamic and utilitarian terms.Footnote ⁴² This call for reform would be turned into policy at the CUP's annual congress of 1916.

THE UNION AND PROGRESS CONGRESS OF 1916

The CUP's annual congress of 1916 convened from 28 September to 3 October in Istanbul. The Ottoman state was involved in World War I, and the expulsion and massacres of the Armenian and Syriac Christians of Anatolia was ongoing. The CUP convention could hardly have been untouched by these events. Accordingly, explanation and justification of war-related policies (including the “resettlement” of the Armenians) constituted a large section of the party's general report, which Talat Paşa read to the general assembly on its first meeting.Footnote ⁴³ After the Balkan Wars, the CUP had embarked on a politics of demographic engineering and ethnocide, which changed the demographic makeup of the state considerably in favor of Muslims. As a consequence, using religion as a rallying cry for uniting the Muslim population became less persuasive.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Arab rebellion also contributed to the sense that Islam had ceased to be the principal tool for creating Ottoman unity.Footnote ⁴⁵ These historical circumstances need to be considered to understand the CUP's decision to use its 1916 general congress as a platform for launching the rearrangement of religious institutions. The ideas the CUP put into practice were not new, and their realization at that historical juncture was probably first of all a matter of opportunity given the far-reaching control of the public sphere that the party had managed to establish.

The general report presented to the CUP assembly argued in a section summarizing necessary program amendments to be discussed during the meeting that the Office of the Sheikh ül-Islam, with its then current structure, was unable to fulfill its duties of religious outreach and education as well as maintenance of religious infrastructure. In order to be able to fully concentrate on these original duties, the office needed to be freed from its judicial as well as other secondary obligations. For this reason, the agenda of the congress included discussions on the transfer of the shariʿa courts to the Ministry of Justice and a redefinition of the objectives and obligations of the Office of the Sheikh ül-Islam. The general report further demanded that the administration of primary education should be transferred from the Ministry of Charitable Foundations to the Ministry of Education.Footnote ⁴⁶ These suggestions were adopted, although not without debate,Footnote ⁴⁷ through the amendments to the party program agreed upon during the fourth day of the congress. Following the congress, in 1916 and 1917, the CUP government carried out a series of structural reforms that limited the authorities of the Office of the Sheikh ül-Islam even further. These reforms entailed the removal of the sheikh ül-Islam from the cabinet; the transfer of the shariʿa courts from the Office of the Sheikh ül-Islam to the Ministry of Justice; the transfer of the administration of pious foundations (awqāf), formerly under the authority of the sheikh ül-Islam, to the Ministry for Charitable Foundations; and the transfer of the administration of madrasas, also formerly under the authority of the sheikh ül-Islam, to the Ministry of Education. Other secularizing reforms carried out in 1917 included the establishment of a family law code, which connected Islamic principles with conventions of European and secular provenance.Footnote ⁴⁸

It comes as no surprise that the ulema, spearheaded by Sebilürreşad, launched severe criticism of the CUP's reform initiative. The sheikh ül-Islam Mustafa Hayri Efendi preemptively resigned from his office when he realized that the CUP planned to bring the Islamic courts under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice.Footnote ⁴⁹ The ulema feared that the reforms were part of a clandestine aim to secularize the state. Unwilling to tolerate the dissent of relatively conservative ulema, in late 1916 the government closed down Sebilürreşad.Footnote ⁵⁰

The CUP put massive effort into justifying the reform of Islamic institutions, which was perceived as secularist by the party's adversaries. Elaborating on this effort, I will draw primarily on a section of a text originally published as an eight-part series in the newspaper Tanin, the semi-official daily of the CUP. The text, which appeared on Tanin's front page column Siyaset (Politics) under the title “The Union and Progress Congress,” functioned as the official CUP report of the congress and included extensive quotations.Footnote ⁵¹ The section of the text that engages with the question of religious reform appeared in Parts 6–8 as published initially in Tanin (12–14 October 1916) and republished identically in İslam Mecmuası,Footnote ⁵² and is henceforward referred to as The Congress.Footnote ⁵³ Its authorship has been a matter of debate. Niyazi Berkes points out that it differs in style from other texts by Gökalp, and that it would not have appeared under his name.Footnote ⁵⁴ The latter claim is not entirely true, however, since the second of the three parts published in İslam Mecmuası is attributed to Gökalp on the front page of the issue. I argue that, regardless of the style (which I do not feel equipped to judge), the content is clearly in line with Gökalp's previous and following articles on the question of Islamic reform published in the same journal. In the literature, the text is generally treated as Gökalp's, and I see no reason to challenge this,Footnote ⁵⁵ even if it is possible that parts of it were coauthored.

The Congress shows considerable overlap with but is not identical to a slightly earlier text (hereafter The Manifesto) that Gökalp prepared and submitted to the CUP congress, where it was also discussed.Footnote ⁵⁶The Manifesto had already advocated the restructuring of religious institutions, with particular attention to the Office of the Sheikh ül-Islam, making it instrumental to moving the CUP assembly toward Islamic institutional reform.Footnote ⁵⁷ The aim of The Congress was apparently to explain and justify this reform to the general public following the CUP congress. The Manifesto and The Congress deserve to be acknowledged as two important texts that reflect the CUP's interest in justifying as Islamic a reform program that would later be recognized as critically important to the history of Turkish secularization.

In his 1964 work, The Development of Secularism in Turkey—the most influential work on the historical formation of Turkish secularism—Berkes connects the reforms of 1916 and 1917 directly to Gökalp's Manifesto. He evaluates them as harbingers of the more radical secularization to follow in the early republic. The reforms constituted an important step toward “separation of religion from the state. Religion was divested of its temporal influence in state, educational, legislational, judicial, and financial affairs. Its powers and functions were confined to the sphere of diyanet (as Gökalp called it), that is, to matters of piety.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The major methodological problem with the interpretations of Berkes and like-minded commentators on late Ottoman modernization politics is that they tend to reduce the historical role of Ottoman reforms to that of a prelude to the secularization program in the early Turkish Republic. While important continuities between late Ottoman and early republican policies certainly exist, there are also important discontinuities that are easily overlooked if one takes secularization as the main lens for interpreting reform politics of that period. The assumption of continuity and the teleology behind the secularization narrative also led to some factual errors in Berkes' account. For example, The Manifesto itself did not exactly argue for the removal of the administration of pious foundations from the authority of the sheikh ül-Islam, as claimed by Berkes.Footnote ⁵⁹ Rather, it demanded that the Ministry for Charitable Foundations should transfer the administration of madrasas and all religious institutions to the Office of the Sheikh ül-Islam.Footnote ⁶⁰ This is also what was agreed upon at the CUP convention and what The Congress would subsequently advocate.Footnote ⁶¹

REFORM OF THE ISLAMIC STATE: SEPARATING IFTA AND KAZA

Published nine days after the conclusion of the convention, The Congress reports that the meeting gave “expression to a sincere contention that Islam can be reconciled with modern civilization.” The introduction draws a picture of deep disagreement on the question of modernization and “contemporary civilization” between those arguing for Westernization and those totally rejecting it for religious reasons. Both the “zealots of Europe” and “the zealots of the madrasa” contended that Islam was irreconcilable with contemporary Western civilization. For Gökalp,

Reconciliation was the first rationale for the article and its reform agenda. The second rationale was the reform of Islamic institutions according to the original aims of the Islamic tradition. In order to make his case, Gökalp situated the need for reform in recent Ottoman history, accusing the Tanzimat reformers of having divested the state of its Islamic form.Footnote ⁶³ In particular, he lamented what he saw as two significant mistakes made by these reformers, both of which concern the correct interpretation of the Islamic political tradition. First, the Tanzimatists advanced the idea that the caliphate existed independent of the Islamic state. Arguing against this idea, Gökalp drew on the medieval state philosopher al-Mawardi (d. 1058) to claim that the sultanate was a function of the caliphate, from which it cannot be separated. In the early Islamic tradition, the grand vizier had been subordinate to the caliph. Therefore, the idea that the sheikh ül-Islam was the deputy of the caliph and the grand vizier the deputy of the sultan, reflecting a differentiated structure with two distinct kinds of authorities, was wrong. “To assume that the sheikh ül-Islam was the unconditional deputy of the caliph, and to compare his office to a spiritual leadership like that of the Catholic Pope,” he pointed out, “is a grave mistake from the viewpoint of the exalted shariʿa.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This argument demonstrates that Gökalp was not interested in introducing a model of separation between political and religious authorities comparable to what had become the norm in the Christian West. In fact, he explicitly rejected the application of the “Catholic” distinction between “worldly” (cismani) and “spiritual” (ruhani) government to Islam.Footnote ⁶⁵

Gökalp's starting point for discussing the legitimate place of religion within and outside the state system reflected a traditional and normative stance according to which the shariʿa governs both the constitution of the state and religiosity outside of the state's domain. This becomes clearer as Gökalp moves on to what he described as the second important mistake of the Tanzimatists. He explained the problem of the role of religion in the state structure to be a result of the Tanzimatists' confusion between two kinds of judiciaries and authorities. In Islam the legislative authority of the state had originally been restricted to kaza (executed by the qadi) and did not extend to matters of ifta (executed by the mufti). The position of the mufti was “rather exalted, so that he would not be the servant of any worldly orders.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Essentially, for Gökalp, the office of kaza needed to be restricted to matters of temporal jurisdiction, whereas the office of ifta needed to be restricted to matters of piety (diyanet) that could not be judged by temporal authorities.

Gökalp had already asserted the necessity of a return to the original “division of labor” between piety (diyanet) and jurisprudence (kaza) in a 1915 article entitled “Diyanet ve Kaza” (Piety and Jurisprudence), which dealt primarily with the low level of religious education among the Muslim population. Such a division, he argued, would benefit the prosperity of the Muslim people. Citing as references the great jurist Abu Hanifa as well as a Qurʾanic verse (S 9,122), he wrote:

It is crucial to understand that Gökalp's application of the idea of division of labor to Islam, and his differentiation between matters of piety (diyanet) and matters of jurisprudence (kaza), were not based on a distinction between a religious and a nonreligious, or “secular,” realm. As Gökalp asserts in The Congress, the offices of both ifta and kaza were governed by the shariʿa. The crucial difference between them, in his view, is that kaza relates to matters of worldly justice (din), to be sanctioned by the authority of the Islamic state (represented by the caliph), while ifta should be restricted to matters of diyanet, that is, matters of correct ritual and belief, which can only be judged by divine authority. Based on this distinction, Gökalp launched his criticism against the legal jurisdiction of the Office of the Sheikh ül-Islam and lamented the consequences of the alleged confusion of the authorities, which would lead to a decline of both Islamic morality and the Islamic state. The following quote further illustrates the implications of this argument for Gökalp's approach to religion in the context of the modern Islamic state:

Gökalp further argued that a consequence of assigning supervision of the shariʿa courts to the Office of the Sheikh ül-Islam was that its authority became connected to worldly (dünyevi) sanctions, and ordinary people therefore began to forget otherworldly (uhrevi) sanctions. He also lamented the severe consequences of the Office of İfta beginning to handle matters of the judiciary (kaza):

In the following pages, Gökalp elaborates on the historical developments that contributed to this entanglement of political and judicial authority. He focuses in particular on the rights that were granted to non-Muslim communities in the Tanzimat period, arguing that this degree of legal and political autonomy is harmful to modernization. The bifurcation of judicial authority—a reference to the recognized non-Muslims' judicial autonomy in internal matters—led to a bifurcation of political authority, contrary to the aims of a modern state, whose power rests on centralized rule. For the Muslim community especially, this bifurcation of power carried negative effects.Footnote ⁷⁰ As Gökalp explained,

Another argument that Gökalp used in favor of a separation between the shariʿa courts and the Office of İfta was that a fatwa, by its nature, could not be legally binding. As a consequence of the confusion created in the Tanzimat period, however, the bab-ı fetva legislated laws and the shariʿa courts drew on them in their judicial practice. In Gökalp's estimation, this judicio-political confusion contradicted the requirements of both a modern state and an Islamic state. He argued that matters of piety should be separated from matters of jurisprudence, and that both should be administered by different ministries. Gökalp further stressed that the restoration of the separation between ifta and kaza would not only lead to better distribution of justice; more importantly, it would benefit piety.Footnote ⁷² The Office of the Sheikh ül-Islam would finally be able to return to its original function, namely, the care of “matters of piety, which are divided into matters of dogma (itikadat) and matters of worship (ibadat).”Footnote ⁷³ It would also supervise the madrasas and the convents, both previously under the authority of the Ministry of Pious Foundations. This would lead to a strengthening of traditional institutions of Islamic knowledge, such as ifta, taṣawwuf, and kalām, each represented by councils of experts within the new administrative structure. Gökalp argued not only that the separation of kaza and ifta, and more broadly of matters of law and religion (din) as well as matters of piety and religiosity (diyanet), is in line with the original Islamic tradition, but also that this division leads to the religious enlightenment of the people, and indeed to the revival of the faith.Footnote ⁷⁴

While Ottoman ulema such as İzmirli İsmail Hakkı disputed the Islamic justifications of the CUP reform project, arguing in particular against the separation of kaza and ifta,Footnote ⁷⁵ there was a certain congruence between Gökalp's position and arguments advanced by prominent Islamic modernists of that period. Rashid Rida argued a few years later, in 1925, that the categories of ʿibadāt and muʿāmalāt correspond to the distinction between dīn and şarʿ, which are not, however, equivalent to the distinction between the religious and the nonreligious. As noted by Abdulkader Tayob, Rida differentiated between different levels of religion: “He defined dīn as something general related to this life and the hereafter, values, and general principles. This was religion at a personal, devotional level. The şarʿ, on the other hand, was also religious but was marked by general values and flexibility.” In other words, dīn referred to the permanent in religion, whereas şarʿ was marked by temporality and change.Footnote ⁷⁶

HISTORICAL TRAJECTORIES OF THE CUP'S REFORM INITIATIVE

Undoubtedly, the late Young Turk project to reform Islamic institutions played an important role in the developments that would lead to the decisively secularist policy of the Turkish Republic, eventually enshrined as the principle of laicism (laiklik) in the constitution of 1937.Footnote ⁷⁷ A central part of this new policy, the newly created Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (Directorate of Affairs of Piety, or Directorate of Religious Affairs; hereafter DRA) did not have the status of an independent ministry, but rather was subordinate to the prime ministry—unlike the proposed status of the Diyanet Nezareti (Ministry of Piety) for which Gökalp called. The DRA was established in 1924 by Law no. 429, which concurrently abolished the Ministry for Shariʿa and Endowments. As the law stated, the DRA was formed “for the implementation of all provisions concerning faith and worship aspects of the religion of Islam, and the administration of religious institutions.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Gökalp belonged to the parliamentary commission that prepared the law.Footnote ⁷⁹ Reducing the responsibilities of the DRA to matters of faith and worship, and subordinating and integrating religion within the state apparatus, the new arrangement followed Gökalp in two crucial matters. However, the rationale behind this subordination and integration has been a matter of debate. Mehmed Akural has argued that the CUP and Gökalp's agenda of restoring the Islamic state by reintegrating Islamic institutions into the state structure was motivated by the goal of increasing the party's control over society, in this case over the religious courts, foundations, and schools.Footnote ⁸⁰ This might be correct. Nonetheless, in Gökalp's vision of the modern Islamic state the validity of the shariʿa as such was not questioned, even if law would be administered by a Ministry of Justice independent of the religious establishment. The new republican order, however, was marked by a direct continuity with the positivist reservations vis-à-vis religion that had been characteristic of the early Young Turk movement.Footnote ⁸¹ In the new republic, the foundation of the state itself was increasingly expressed through an exclusively secularist rationale. The subordination and integration of religious institutions into the state administration was driven by the goal of controlling religion, which was seen as a threat to the centralist Kemalist order.Footnote ⁸²

Scholars have often argued that for Gökalp religion was subordinated to nationalist concerns.Footnote ⁸³ However, to deduce from Gökalp's nationalism and his criticism of the religious establishment that he was opposed to religion continuing to be an important dimension of national identity—as republican Turkish secularism would demand—is, in my opinion, a secularist fallacy.Footnote ⁸⁴ Gökalp's appreciation of the role of religion in the nation-building process does not fit with the paradigm of secularism, even if for him the domain of the political needed to be in the hands of the institutions of the sovereign state.Footnote ⁸⁵ To paraphrase Hakan Yavuz, a crucial difference between the politics of modernization in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire and that in the early Turkish Republic is that the former acted with Islam while the latter acted against it. Accordingly, Gökalp's quest for reform in the late Young Turk period needs to be understood within the context of the late-Ottoman modernization paradigm, which did not yet regard religion as a force antagonistic to the modernizing project.Footnote ⁸⁶

The tension between the CUP's reformist approach in the late Young Turk period and the early Kemalist secularist approach is epitomized by their respective positions on the question of religious education. In Gökalp's vision, Sufi orders and madrasas, in order to be integrated in and supervised by the envisioned Ministry of Piety, had to be modernized and turned into centers for religious education. In the course of the Turkish secularization process, however, Sufi orders were banned and madrasas closed down. Contrary to Gökalp, who viewed religion as an important and indispensable ingredient in the national self that needed to be cherished and brought into harmony with the aims of the modern state, the early Kemalist republic was highly suspicious of religion and religious institutions, which it perceived as threatening to its political and cultural sovereignty.

CHALLENGING RELIGIO-SECULARISM

Ziya Gökalp is sometimes portrayed as an Islamic modernist and/or revivalist because he argued for the renewal of the Islamic state in line with modern necessities, and against superstition and backward-mindedness.Footnote ⁸⁷ More often, however, his critical stance against clericalism and theocracy, expressed most strongly in his “Türkçülüğün Esasları” (Principles of Turkism) published in 1923,Footnote ⁸⁸ cast him as an unabashed secularist not only to later observersFootnote ⁸⁹ but also to contemporary ulema, who met his ideas with severe polemics.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is obvious that in his publications in the aftermath of the abolition of the sultanate (1922), Gökalp tried to accommodate changing political realities. His opportunism, however, was not without limits and the question of the extent of his approval of the early Kemalist secularization program has remained contested.Footnote ⁹¹

In a recent critical discussion of Gökalp's secularism in relation to the Turkish Republic's politics of laicism, Ayşe Kadıoğlu criticizes the conventional wisdom that Gökalp had cleared the ground for republican laicism. She explains that, in contrast to the homogenizing nationalist project of Kemalism and its subordination of religion to the imperative of modernization, Gökalp's approach to religion was integral to his attempt to create an intellectual synthesis of religion (Islam), (Turkish) nationality and culture, as well as (Western) civilization: “Gökalp's effort to strike a synthesis between culture and civilization, as well as religion and nationalism, represents the logic of the empire, i.e. westernization. . .without denouncing the significance of Islam in the local culture.”Footnote ⁹²

As Davison has shown, “Gökalp's understanding of the relationship between religion and modernity has been judged as inadequate because it deviates from the standards at work in the literature of modernization theory that has dominated the study of politics in Turkey during the 20th century.”Footnote ⁹³ More specifically, Gökalp's ideas are at a remove from modernist discourses, including Kemalism, which intended to restrict the role of religion to the private sphere because it regarded public and political religion as a threat to the sovereignty of the nation-state. Hence, Berkes argued that Gökalp's attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of the sultanate and caliphate with the secular state “were pure fantasies.”Footnote ⁹⁴ However, Berkes' view might be more a reflection of his own secularist premises than a proper assessment of the historical environment within which Gökalp developed his ideas on the role of religion. According to the classical argument of secular liberalism, the modern nation-state requires the removal of religion from the political sphere. This view, however, has by now been deconstructed on both the theoretical and empirical levels.Footnote ⁹⁵ Much recent research on Turkey has likewise gone beyond the explanatory models of the secularization paradigm.Footnote ⁹⁶ Nevertheless, many chapters of late Ottoman and early Turkish republican history have remained under the impact of a modernist metanarrative. A critical rereading of this history requires not only diligent avoidance of liberal presuppositions, but also not succumbing to the temptation of merely switching to a perspective that overemphasizes religious continuity. Otherwise one remains caught within the binary framework of religio-secularism, a notion I use to allude to the manner in which the concepts of religion and the secular have been juxtaposed and intertwined in the modern context, forming a semantic continuum. On the basis of this continuum, the religious and the secular are positioned in relation to each other as opposite poles that cannot be defined independently.Footnote ⁹⁷

Over the course of this essay, I have argued that in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire the religio-secularist knowledge regime had not yet established a hegemonic position. Adnan Adıvar (1881–1955), himself a nationalist protagonist who came to prominence during the late Young Turk period, made the following observation about the dispute between advocates of Western political thought and conservative religious circles in that period, and the role of Gökalp therein:

I suggest that the idea of a secularist-Islamist antagonism as a framework for the discussion of Turkish political history begins to make sense historically only with the establishment of Kemalist secularism, and therefore it should not be projected backwards onto contexts not governed by the religio-secular episteme. In his discussion of modernist Islam in Turkey, Philip Dorroll has recently argued that

Analogously, as I have tried to show, Gökalp did not consider Islam as such to be in conflict with the political project of the modern nation-state. Tension between aspects of life governed by religious rationales and others governed by nonreligious rationales—a tension that constitutes the core of the religio-secular binary and the political project of secularism—was not necessarily a part of the political imaginary of late Ottoman Muslim thinkers. Although the transformations of the late Ottoman Empire, driven by practical considerations, provided the background for a process in the course of which, as Brian Silverstein has pointed out, “Islamic knowledge per se came to be differentiated from other knowledges and identified as ‘religion,’”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ this process was not yet complete in that period. Conceptually, religion was not yet clearly separated from notions of social, ethnic, and national community and identity, and in that sense it was not yet secularized.Footnote ¹⁰¹

One should therefore be skeptical of attempts to characterize Gökalp as torn between secular modernity and religious traditionalism. An emblematic example of this widespread interpretation is provided by the historian Kemal Karpat. He presents Gökalp as a victim of ideological confusion between Western and traditional ideas, between modernism, nationalism, and Islamism, and between positivism and religion—a confusion that ostensibly led the young Gökalp to attempt suicide.Footnote ¹⁰² While this interpretation of Gökalp's attempted suicide is very close to Gökalp's firsthand account as narrated by Erişirgil, the latter has himself questioned the evidence for this version and listed a number of other factors that might have contributed to the young Gökalp's depression.Footnote ¹⁰³ Regardless of what the “real” cause may have been, it seems to me that the attempt to read Gökalp as an embodied reflection of the ideological crisis of the late Ottoman Empire fits too squarely and comfortably with a modernist approach to Turkish history. Such an approach necessarily downplays any disruption of modernism's monolinear narrative and regards political orientations still attracted to traditional sensibilities and convictions as in need of explaining. With regard to Gökalp, explaining his politics as the product of a conflicted mind allows one to interpret him as an exception to the norms set by a purist secularist narrative.

One reason for the common misunderstanding of Gökalp is that his ideas were imbued by the Islamic political and philosophical tradition, and drew on a concept of religion that fits uneasily with the modern Western understanding of religion on which the secularization narrative is built. As The Congress shows, Gökalp regarded the distinction between worldly and otherworldly matters (that is, matters of din and diyanet, respectively) as integral to Islam, both domains being governed by the shariʿa. This allowed him to place matters of piety (diyanet) outside of the judicial authority of the state without challenging the authority of the shariʿa and Islam. The state could only judge those aspects of religion that dealt with worldly justice (din). This differentiation was based on the ideal of a modern Islamic state that supported piety without attempting to streamline religion. At the same time, this ideal of the modern Islamic state was connected to a modernist agenda, expressed in the goals of centralization and homogenization of law (kaza).

It can certainly be argued that Gökalp's discussion of jurisprudence shows that his thinking cannot be separated from the “secularization problematic of modern political thought” (Davison), or from what Hussein Agrama has more recently termed the historical “problem-space of secularism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, in Gökalp's lifetime this problem-space was still in the process of formation. It had not yet achieved the character of a foundational and all-encompassing force that shaped political discourse. In light of this insight, the master narrative of the Turkish modernization experience needs to be broadened so that we are able to account for the existence of thought and action that stood aslant to the assumptions of the religio-secular episteme. This creates a conceptual space that allows us to recognize Gökalp as an original thinker of his time, motivated by the vision of an Islamic state in sync with the requirements of the modern nation-state.

Recognizing the confluence of traditionalist, revivalist, and modernist ideas in the Turkish secularization experience can inform not only modern Turkish history, but also discussions of the role of religion in the formation of secular knowledge regimes more broadly. While it points to the active role that religion can play in the modernization process, it also suggests that there might be dimensions of “religion” that, though marginalized, have remained resistant to the secularist episteme and could be described as “asecular” in the sense of not having been defined and subordinated to the logic of religio-secularism.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Gökalp's thought offers us a window into such asecularity. Liberating Gökalp from the constraints of a monodimensional modernist narrative and the binary framework of religio-secularism makes possible new interpretations of his ideas on religion and politics.