Berkley Center

Eyebrows raised, with his eyes and mouth wide open, he was absolutely aghast.

I had just told a middle-aged Turkish man that I had no religion. A high school teacher, he was kind enough to invite me to sit with him and share his lahmacun, a dish often referred to as “Turkish pizza,” when he saw me dining alone in a restaurant in Istanbul. I guess the last thing he expected to do on a cool Wednesday night was to dine with an atheist.

“For the sake of yourself,” he said, “I hope that you will find God.”

“Inşallah,” I shrugged.

For all of Turkey’s status as a secular state, one cannot forget that it is still a Muslim country. My encounter with the hospitable yet atheist-fearing Turkish teacher definitely reminded me of that. In fact, the proportion of Muslims in Turkey according to the CIA’s World Factbook is apparently an overwhelming 99.8 percent.

Turkey’s Muslim identity is a unique one because unlike many other Muslim countries, its founder—Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—actively sought to distance his new republic from the Islamic heritage of its Ottoman predecessors. Atatürk was strongly influenced by the French idea of laïcité, which demands that religion be kept separate from state affairs. However, instead of merely separating religion and state, Atatürk put religion under state control. The Directorate of Religious Affairs was established in 1924 to administer mosques and religious schools, as well as to supervise all religious leaders.

Given that Atatürk’s ideological legacy—Kemalism—has been an extremely salient feature of modern Turkish political life, it might be easy to assume that Turks are staunch secularists. Yet, most of them are actually pious Muslims, especially those residing in the country’s heartland. Thus, despite institutional constraints, Islam has always been a significant political force.

After the 1980 coup, the Kemalists actually tried to co-opt Islam in order to combat communism through a policy known as the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis.” As the anthropologist Jenny White described in her book Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, the state expanded Islamic institutions and liberalized Islamic expression under this policy, leading to “an extraordinary explosion of self-consciously Islamic politics and public discourse” subsequently.

The meteoric rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s current president and former prime minister, and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the 2000s probably had its roots in this. After all, Erdoğan himself was one of the many graduates of the religious high schools which were opened under the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis policy.

In October 2013, Erdoğan lifted the headscarf ban in state institutions, building upon an earlier lifting of the headscarf ban in universities in 2010. Not surprisingly, this prompted fears that Erdoğan was attempting to Islamize the country. Anecdotal observations of an increase in the wearing of headscarves probably exaggerated such fears.

Nevertheless, while it is true that the AKP had Islamist origins, it has since expanded its political agenda to appeal to a wider swathe of Turkish society. In eschewing religious references and embracing pragmatic reforms, the AKP was able to win the support of many from the liberal intelligentsia and the business community.

In a similar vein, the supposed clash between secularism and religiosity in Turkey is not so clear-cut. The country is not filled with only staunch secularists and Islamic fundamentalists. The success of the AKP has shown that there is a vast section of the population with more nuanced views of the intersection between religion and the state, beyond the extreme positions espoused by previous Kemalist and Islamist parties.

Indeed, an expression of one’s religious identity need not be an affront against the freedom of religion or other liberal ideals. One can be both religious and secular at the same time. Turkey cannot risk alienating those whose religiosity is not opposed to life in a modern, liberal society. These people, many of them youths, add to the vibrancy of Turkish society and its economy. It would only be Turkey’s loss if a significant portion of its population were denied the opportunity to do so due to myopic ideological sectarianism.

A young man I met in Van told me matter-of-factly: “I am a devout Muslim, but it doesn’t matter to me if you are an atheist.” His tolerance surprised me, especially after my encounter with the teacher in Istanbul. Nonetheless, this is a hopeful sign. If the Turkish youths can adopt such tolerance, they could put an end to the pitched ideological battles that has clouded much of the country’s history.