In Turkey, any day now, a female university student will mark a dramatic moment in her country’s history. After years of heated debate, culminating in street demonstrations in recent months, she will no longer have to replace her head scarf with a wig or hat before attending her lectures, thanks to a constitutional amendment that received presidential consent last week.
However, she will know that her newly won right is by no means secure; university authorities have been threatening to break the law and enforce the head scarf ban, while legal appeals are likely to end up in the Constitutional Court.
For the group of young women students I met recently in the London School of Economics, there is hope at last. All wore head scarves, all had fled Turkey to study in the UK rather than remove them. Their stand had disrupted their studies, even earned them parental disapproval, and they still faced in their chosen careers — as lawyers and health professionals — plenty more obstacles on account of their covered heads.
To the outsider, the furor around head scarves in Turkey is barely comprehensible; indeed the International Herald Tribune spiffily entitled its leader last week “Much ado about head scarves”, and urged Turkey to get on with sorting out the far more important issue of freedom of expression.
But Turkey’s experience fits into a pattern replicated across Europe, where relatively small issues can unpredictably erupt and engulf countries in passionate controversy. A shocked Denmark is counting the cost of nightly rioting in immigrant neighborhoods after newspapers republished the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Or look at Switzerland, where the recent elections were determined by a proposed constitutional ban on mosques having minarets — a political tactic now being copied by politicians in Germany and Holland. Or the outrage in the British media at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s dense musings on Shariah. Head scarves, cartoons, minarets, religious courts: How did these become the staple of politics?
Their significance lies in being symbols loaded with the freight of a long history of how European states have painfully come to an accommodation with religion. In this respect, Turkey’s experience is undeniably European; its model of the secular state was based on a French import. What Islam is, inadvertently, doing across Europe is exposing the precarious assumptions by which the vast majority of Europeans believed they had dealt with religion — they thought they had got the genie back in the bottle. Throughout Europe, there’s an insecure edginess that talks of “secularism in crisis”; the alarm calls issuing from the UK’s National Secular Society talk of “mounting fears” at a “religious resurgence”.
The first assumption to collapse was that secularization was the necessary corollary of modernization. It was claimed that as countries industrialized and modernized, religious practice would wither away. It proved true of Western Europe as church attendance collapsed. But it is not true of Turkey, where industrialization has brought challenges to the secular Europeanized elite from a new middle class, educated and devout. Nor is it proving true of Europe’s ethnic minorities, both Muslim and African Christian, whose religiosity is becoming more assertive.
The second assumption was that most European countries had arrived at a degree of secularism defined as the separation of state and religion. This was largely a measure of wishful thinking based on “let sleeping dogs lie”, the outcome of a complex trade of privileges and support between church and state through centuries of negotiation. The UK, for instance, does not have a secular state; along with many other European countries, it privileges a particular Christian denomination. Not even France or Turkey — two of the most avowedly secular states in Europe — achieve complete separation of religion and state; the French state is responsible for the upkeep of thousands of churches while Turkey has a Ministry of religious affairs that oversees imams and mosques.
What makes the debate across Europe so complex is that every country’s model of secularism has its own idiosyncrasies. The head scarf ban in Turkey or France seems an astonishing infringement of personal freedom to the British, while the interventionist measures both have taken to regulate Islamic teaching and mosques is regarded by British authorities with a degree of envy (it might make it easier to deal with Islamic extremism) and a historic distaste for getting involved in matters of religious doctrine.
Meanwhile, the UK’s funding of Church of England schools opened the way for Catholics, Jews and now Muslims to insist on equal treatment — an outcome that horrifies many Europeans. The argument in the UK was that the state should offer some measure of even-handedness — an argument now being used to justify the establishment of Shariah courts, to the outrage of many.
The only way out of the UK conundrum would be to embark on constructing a secular British state: disestablish the Church of England and cut funding to all faith schools. There is a lot to be said for this option, but since it involves dumping half a millennium of history and some good schools at a time when national identity and quality education are highly sensitive political battlegrounds, I can’t see any party wanting to take that agenda on.
Increasingly, you hear the exasperated mutter that religion should just go away. Why can’t it just keep out of public life? The problem is that it is not straightforward to separate faith and state. The one always has interests to pursue in the domain of the other; religious organizations are entitled to lobby the political process as any other civic body is. Meanwhile, the state cannot leave the faithful alone if the religious practice is contrary to its own aims. The government is currently embarked on a hearts-and-minds strategy to combat Muslim extremism that takes it a long way away from any notion of a neutral secular state.
Secularism in the UK has its greatest force in describing the character of public life. In the second half of the 20th century, the convention gained ground that faith was like any other hobby — a private choice of leisure time — enthusiasts could talk among themselves but not bore others. Andrew Marr in the New Statesman described this British secular tradition, and concluded of immigrants to the UK: “The real prize is to persuade them just to calm down.” Above all, believers are expected to keep quiet. It’s not just Muslims, a number of different religious communities want no more truck with this privatization — evangelicals, African Pentecostalists, Sikhs, even the Archbishop of Canterbury.
But that doesn’t amount to the crisis of the panic-mongers. Secularism, a cherished principle with as many believers as nonbelievers, does not — should not — preclude the assertion of religious identity. It is a robust enough idea to hold the ring, as a secular state has done in the deeply religious US and India. Secularism can accommodate religious identity, as Turkey is showing by modifying Ataturk’s authoritarian secularism. What remains to be seen across Western Europe is whether secularism is hijacked by a racist far right to become a rallying cry, or whether it can find its own way to adapt and modify its traditions to new identities.
