AKP

My interview with Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol was published today in The Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty quarterly. Our talk focused on the prospects for greater economic and religious liberty in Turkey. Mustafa blogs at The White Path.

Excerpt:

Let’s talk about religious freedom. There’s a great tension between the modern secularist path of Turkey, going back to Ataturk, and the revival of Islam and its influence on politics. Will this be a winner take all battle, or is Turkey working out something a little more complex in the future?

I say there will be room for all of these views, and Turkey will be more pluralistic than it used to be. Actually, right now, the battle is between the people who want to create room for pluralism and those who want to keep it homogeneously secular. Keep in mind that the founding idea of the Turkish Republic was very monolithic. It picked up the narrative of the French Enlightenment in that secularism would make the country safe from religious obscurantism and the forces of darkness. Hence came the closure of old traditional religious institutions while the state took control of religion by establishing the Directorate of Religious Affairs. That way, religion came under the control of the state and it would be permissible only in private sphere or, of course, in the mosques.

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