religion revisited lecture kandiyoti june2009

8/13/2019 Religion Revisited Lecture Kandiyoti June2009

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rive from specific historical contexts. If we accept these propositions the key questions to pose must

be how , why and by whom are concepts of secularism being appropriated and for what purposes.

Before getting into the main body of my talk, I would like to get one very important issue

out of the way. This concerns the question of the legal status of religion and its implications for

gender equality. The legal separation between religion and the state does not necessarily result in

the relegation of religion to private space nor does it limit its influence on the public sphere. A clear

example is that of the United States, a secular country where the political weight of religion is ar-

guably much larger than in Europe where we find established churches (as in the case of the UK

with the Church of England). Nonetheless, the legal domain still remains an area of active contesta-

tion both by womens rights activists and by their detractors. It is, therefore, possible to concede

that the different paths adopted by states in accommodating religion have significant consequences

for womens rights and for gender equality.

In this respect, Lisa Hajjar proposes a useful tripartite model of state-religion relationships

in relation to predominantly Muslim countries or countries with sizable Muslim minorities. The first

path defined as communalization describes a situation where religious laws, institutions and au-

thorities are accorded semi-autonomy from the state regime. Countries like Israel, India, and Nige-

ria provide examples of this path. One may tentatively add to this category some of the multicul-

turalist policies of liberal democracies in the West. For example, some of you may recall the debate

on Sharia law in Canada and the discussion as to whether Muslim women should be subject to the

laws of the land or to Sharia law. The consequence of this path is, by and large, that women are

deprived of equal citizenship rights in the sense that they do not have equal recourse to the codes

and laws enforced by the state. I will come back to this issue in greater detail when I talk about the

case of India.

The second path, that of nationalization, occurs in contexts where religious laws and juris-

prudence are incorporated into or are influential over the states legal regime. Numerous examples

of nationalization may be found in Arab states (Egypt being a pertinent case). Here you have asituation where secular, modern constitutions that accord men and women equal rights under the

law co-exist with Sharia derived personal status codes that limit this equality in various ways. One

of the most immediate consequences of this path is that there is a great deal of socio-political pres-

sure on states by conservative constituencies that push for more Sharia and less secular state law,

especially when it comes to personal status legislation. The history of personal status legislation in

Egypt is a good example of these pressures since the law has been seesawing between using Sharia

as a source of legislation versus using Sharia as the source of legislation. This has become an en-during stake in the politics of the country. After listening to discussions of the Polish case yester-


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day, it is possible to conclude that Poland, too, could be said to have a nationalized religious regime

whereby it becomes very difficult to separate state law from religious law and doctrine.

The third path, that of theocratization, occurs where the state bases its own authority and

legislation on religious law and jurisprudence, and where the defence of religion and the defence of

state become co-terminous. The two cases that spring to mind are Iran and Pakistan, although they

are extremely different given that theocratization does not necessitate clerical rule. While theocrati-

zation is based on clerical rule in Iran, this is not the case in Pakistan where the army has been the

main enforcer of Islamization policies. The consequence is that public debates on womens rights

are restricted to their rights under the Sharia, with different interpretations of how strictly these

should be understood and enforced. These debates have included reformist elements in the case of

Iran and remained more consistently conservative in the case of Pakistan. In practice, the result is

widespread, state sanctioned gender injustice.

I would now like to turn to a comparison of two secularisms which are purported to be in

crisis, those of India and Turkey. The reason I think the comparison is particularly pertinent is be-

cause these cases seem to represent two opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of their understand-

ing and application of secularism. I have constructed my argument around the key dilemmas that

secularism was trying to address in each context. What became the anti-thesis of secularism? What

was the political response and what categories emerged as dangerous to the political system?

In post-independence India the key dilemma was, clearly, how to devise an integrative na-

tional narrative in a post-colonial society divided by religious and caste cleavages. You have to bear

in mind that this was happening in the context of a very bitter post-partition struggle when Pakistan

separated off as a Muslim state. The result was that in India the anti-thesis of secularism was com-

munalism. It was communalism that represented the retrograde, the atavistic and that which needed

to be combated. The response was a type of pluralism that, paradoxically, managed to accentuate

the role of religion in public life rather than bring about its decline. It became in the words of a col-

league at our workshop, Zoya Hasan, political pluralism or a weak form of secularism where plu-ralism vis--vis the state did not imply building walls of separation between religion and public life.

Moving on to Turkey, the key dilemma here was very different, as was the response. The di-

lemma was how to move from an empire based on a multiethnic, theocratic monarchy to a republi-

can nation state. Attempts to salvage the empire on the basis of a civic Ottomanism had failed mis-

erably as all the Balkan provinces broke away under the sway of nationalist movements. Pan-

Islamism as a rallying ideology also failed as the Arab provinces, likewise, broke off. This was the

background against which the anti-thesis of secularism in Turkey became religious reaction ( irtica ).In what I call the master narrative of Turkish secularism, which I will discuss in greater detail, the


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tions. However, the key transition took place after the 1950s with the shift to multi-party democracy

when there was a more sustained incorporation of religion into politics through a mixture of popu-

list and anticommunist, Cold War policies. For instance, the first Association to Combat Commu-

nism, based on the notion that Islam was an antidote to threat of communism, was founded as early

as 1962 (and received support from Rabitat-ul Islam in Saudi Arabia). There was a consistent am-

bivalence of the state vis--vis religion. It may be instructive to quickly look at a few statistics in

the field of education to illustrate this point. Educational policies since the 1970s resulted in a sys-

tematic increase in state-sponsored religious education at all levels. A noteworthy feature of this

increase is that there is a clear gender disparity in enrolment in religious establishments. Female

student enrolment is much higher than boys, and the same applies to Quranic schools where girls

heavily outnumber boys in the courses. The curricula teach girls that biology is destiny ( fitrat ) and

that traditional roles are religiously ordained.

Overall, state-sponsored religious education has been instrumental in the creation of cadres

with a religious formation and outlook over a period of at least forty years. Note that these devel-

opments were not necessarily instigated by Islamist parties but by a variety of centre-right parties,

deeply enmeshed in ties of patronage with influential tarikat leaders (Sufi orders) and religious

communities. The role of the Turkish army, that is generally hailed as the bastion of state secular-

ism, deserves scrutiny. After the 1980 military coup, it was the Turkish army that was instrumental

in introducing compulsory religious education in schools and that endorsed a new orientation for

Turkish Islam (or the Turkish-Islam synthesis) based on three main pillars: the family, the military

and the mosque. I apologize to our German audience for whom the words Kinder and Kirche

might have unpleasant associations.

My final point concerns the sacralisation of the secular with the army turning the Kemalist

legacy and the figure of Ataturk into a secular cult. This is where Milan Kunderas inspired phrase

concerning totalitarian kitsch to denote the ritual expressions of state power comes into play.

It is a moot point whether this display takes the form of fountains streaming with the blood of mar-tyrs and commemorations of Karbala in Tehran or whether busts of Ataturk are paraded in Anato-

lian towns like processions of the virgin. The point is that a de-legitimization and devaluation of the

secular and, indeed, of the religious inevitably follow when they are inhabited by projects that are

seen as illiberal.

Where does this bring us in terms of gender equality? What are the paradoxes and dilemmas

that reside in these different paths of secularism? I have selected two examples as object-lessons. In

India, the debates over the Muslim Womens Act versus the Unitary Civil Code best exemplify theconundrums many feminists face. In a nutshell, this debate was triggered in 1985 when the Supreme


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Court passed a landmark judgement when an elderly Muslim widow, a 73 year-old divorcee by the

name of Shah Banu, applied to the court for maintenance from her husband. The Indian court

passed a judgement in her favour and made the mistake of adding that this was not infringing

Quranic dictates. An uproar followed in the Muslim community interpreting this intervention as an

assault against their religion. The Indian government, under Rajiv Ghandi, backed down and passed

a new code, the Muslim Womens Act, in 1986 overriding the courts judgement and excluding

Muslim women from the purview of the Indian Criminal Procedure Code, thereby denying them

equal citizenship rights. The Shah Banu controversy reignited an old debate over a Uniform Civil

Code. The womens movement in India had been demanding a uniform code since the time of inde-

pendence. This debate was intensified when the women who were pushing for a unitary, explicitly

non-sexist code found unwanted companions in their cause in the shape of the Hindu right. The

BJP-RSS and VJP also allied around the Uniform Civil Code, albeit in the service of a most anti-

secular agenda. The Hindu right used the concept of secularism and equality to mount an attack

against minority rights, thus creating a serious conundrum for both Hindu and Muslim feminists.

The headscarf debate in Turkey points to equally intractable dilemmas. Although on the face

of it, the issue appears to revolve around the right of believing Muslim women to veil in state

spaces (such as public universities and offices), the political context in which this debate is unfold-

ing is, in fact, riddled with contradictions. Focusing on the headscarf (rather than, say, targeting

beards) meant that men with Islamist persuasions could come and go to universities as they pleased

while it was the women who were discriminated against, giving the legislation a sexist bias. How-

ever, the way in which the AKP government went about trying to secure Muslim womens right to

veil was to push for a constitutional change and starting to chip away at secular the constitution.

Even more regrettable is the manner in which they went about it. The 1980 constitution penned by

the military was, indeed, seen as illiberal and there was widespread demand for a well thought out

process of comprehensive constitutional reform. However, to remove the ban on veiling the AKP

chose to trade with the right-wing nationalist party MHP over a notorious clause of the Penal Code(Article 301, on insults to Turkishness which has led many writers and journalists to be prose-

cuted). The illiberal and rather manipulative intent of the government became evident in the way

these debates played out in parliament, heightening the concerns of secularist constituencies that

this was not so much about safeguarding the rights of Muslim women as a more insidious policy of

encroachment. The panic among secularists in Turkey was therefore not about Muslim women

choosing to wear what they want, but about fears of a creeping policy of amr bil-maruf (the promo-

tion of virtue in Arabic a concept that is little known among the wider public in Turkey) bystealth. Would giving people freedom to observe their religion imply that it also gives them the


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freedom to become their brothers, and more importantly, their sisters keepers? When would

choosing not to veil become equated with sin? Liberal feminist constituencies were deeply divided

over this issue. The heterogeneous composition of the mass demonstrations in defence of secular-

ism, where ultranationalist militarists parading Turkish flags rubbed shoulders with feminists is an

indication of these divisions. The feminists wanted to adopt a slogan that was unambiguous; nei-

ther the clog (the Islamists) nor the boot (the military). They were attempting to reject both

Islamists and the military in a bid to articulate a liberal, secular voice. The constituency that is ex-

pressing such views currently feels both marginalized and threatened.

I conclude with a question: Is there a principled stand on gender equality between the im-

pulses of illiberal secularisms and various religious dogmas that make bids for social control using

women?

Thank you!

religion revisited lecture kandiyoti june2009

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