Symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 1, 2003 | by Abdulwahab Alkebsi, | Robert Spencer

Ataturk extended his war against Islam down to the most minute details of daily life in Turkey. "The civilized world," he declared, "is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up. It is time to stop nonsense, such as `Should we or should we not wear hats?' We shall adopt hats along with all other works of Western civilization. Uncivilized people are doomed to be trodden under the feet of civilized people." Ataturk labored to establish a strictly secular state with no participation in government from any Muslim group.

The result? The French historian Paul Dumont wrote that Ataturk's reforms created "a shock wave through the country which has not yet died out." Pious Muslim Turks blamed every setback the country suffered on the enforced secularization. According to Ataturk's biographer Andrew Mango, the average Turk believed that "misery was the fruit of impiety, prosperity the reward of obedience to the law of Islam."

Pressure on the regime mounted steadily until by the 1950s Turkish governments started to play up Islamic sentiments in order to maintain their grip on power. The politician Necmettin Erbakan led Islamic opposition to the secular government for more than 30 years, culminating in a year as prime minister in 1996 and 1997, during which then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright wrang her hands about the "drift of Turkey away from secularism." Erbakan was removed by Turkey's military but, in November 2002, Turks again voted Islamists into power. What will come of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's regime remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that if anyone is on the defensive, it is the secularists.

Turkey's experience may be unique, but there is no reason to think that any secular democracy established in an Islamic country will escape pressure from Muslims who want to restore Shariah. None has so far. Even Muslim reformers have recognized that an Islamic democracy would be quite different from the polity designed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The great Muslim thinker Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935), for example, began his career as a disciple of the modernist Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), who attempted to redefine traditional Islamic concepts to make them compatible with secular Western ideas. But after World War I even Rida grew progressively more disenchanted with the West. Ultimately, he insisted that "the affairs of the Islamic state must be conducted within the framework of a constitution that is inspired by the Koran, the Hadith [sayings of the prophet Muhammad] and the experiences of the Rightly Guided Caliphs [the four leaders of the Islamic community after Muhammad]."

This jibes with the assessment of the Tunisian theorist Mohamed Elhachmi Hamdi, author of an intriguing essay entitled "Islam and Liberal Democracy: The Limits of the Western Model." In it, he opines: "The heart of the matter is that no Islamic state can be legitimate in the eyes of its subjects without obeying the main teachings of the Shariah." Rather than looking to Western models, Islamic states should look to their own tradition: "Islam should be the main frame of reference for the constitution and laws of predominantly Muslim countries."