Not My Kind of Secularism
Turkey is a weird country. Among Muslim countries, it is the most secular, which is good, but it also enforces it by having the military essentially act as an unelected, unaccountable supra-government who gets to remove/kill political leaders if they don’t match their brand of hard-core, state-enforced secularism. This becomes a problem when the mildly Islamist government wants to remove the head-scarf ban in state schools, and not only does the military oppose it, but the chief prosecutor accuses the ruling party of violating the constitution and wants to remove the prime minister and much of his government from political power – permanently.
It’s really disappointing that this type of blatant illiberalism is not rightly condemned by observers like Anne Appelbaum, who mostly shrug it off and assume that the price of secularism in a Muslim country is having such an overbearing, undemocratic military to enforce it. The thing is that, as far as problems in Muslim countries go, it’s been secular military dictators who have been especially pernicious, while it’s unclear if democratically elected, mildly Islamist parties are at all negative. There’s an obvious trade-off, and since it doesn’t seem likely that Tayip Erdogan is about to be the next Khomeini, people who discuss the middle east should be telling the military to stop interfering in totally legitimate democratic decision making.
